It Starts Small

Martin Luther was a German theologian and religious reformer who was the catalyst of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Through his words and actions, Luther precipitated a movement that reformulated certain basic tenets of Christian belief and resulted in the division of Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and the new Protestant traditions, mainly Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, the Anabaptists, and the anti-Trinitarians. He was an author and sogn writer. One of His hymns he wrote was A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Luther wrote that there was one little word that fell Satan.

The Prince of Darkness grim,
We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
For lo! His doom is sure.
One little word shall fell him.

What is that “one little word” that will fell Satan?

I am not a Lutheran or even a Baptist but I believe the identity of this word matters to all of those who have recieved Christ and follow Him. Most Protestant churches still sing this “Battle Hymn of the Reformation” regularly in worship. It does little good to know that a single word will take down the raging Prince of Darkness if we have no idea what that word is. So, what word might Luther have in mind?

“Jesus”?

I was raised in legalism, and rarely – if ever – was spiritual warefare preached about. You would think the church would want to arm its fellow believers with everything in God’s Word to be ready for spiritual battle. But first, they would have to acknowledge that the spiritual realm is real, that we battle in it every moment of every day, and that the Holy Spirit is key to the fight.

Over this journey of Jesus awakening my spirit, I came to understand early on to just say out loud the word “Jesus.” Somewhere, I picked up the idea that demons scatter when you mention Jesus’s name. It got me to thinking that maybe Luther’s one little word was “Jesus”?

While it may be a popular and catchy idea to mention “Jesus” for protection against Satan, the Bible doesn’t specifically commend that approach. The demons themselves are not afraid to say Jesus’s name — they even talked directly to Jesus, knowing exactly who he is.

²⁹ Suddenly they shouted, “What do you have to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”

Matthew 8:29

⁷ And he cried out with a loud voice, “What do you have to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you before God, don’t torment me!”

Mark 5:7

The common idea that “Satan flees at Jesus’s name” may come from the narratives in the Gospels and Acts where demons are cast out “in the name of Jesus.”

³⁸ John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.”

Mark 9:38

¹⁸ She did this for many days.

Paul was greatly annoyed. Turning to the spirit, he said, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out right away.

Acts 16:18

WE also know from scripture that demons are not afraid or fear at the sound of Jesus’ name. Some so-called exorsists adopted this verbal phrase of citing Jesus’ name onlt to be themselves driven out by evil spirits naked and wounded.

¹³ Now some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists also attempted to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I command you by the Jesus that Paul preaches!” ¹⁴ Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish high priest, were doing this. ¹⁵ The evil spirit answered them, “I know Jesus, and I recognize Paul—but who are you?” ¹⁶ Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them, overpowered them all, and prevailed against them, so that they ran out of that house naked and wounded.

Acts 19:13-16

It is clearly not the mere sound of those two syllables that commands Satan, but the authority from God that lies behind them.

²⁵ Jesus rebuked him saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” ²⁶ And the unclean spirit threw him into convulsions, shouted with a loud voice, and came out of him.

²⁷ They were all amazed, and so they began to ask each other, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

Mark 1:25-27

Jesus’ name is not some magic spell used to take down evil.

Jesus, the Word of God?

SO is it possible Luther meant the Word, Jesus himself. This is our scripture for today found in John. While it is certainly true biblically that Jesus will be the one to finally destroy the devil in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10), it’s probably not what Luther refers to here.

It is unlikely that Luther would refer to Jesus, the ascended King reigning now over every name in heaven and on earth, as a little word (in Luther’s German, wörtlein). Indeed, “the Word was God.”

Ultimately, our hope of victory against Satan’s schemes is secured by his final destruction, but more than that, we have hope now. Even while Satan prowls this earth like a lion (1 Peter 5:8), we are not at the mercy of our supernatural foe. “His rage we can endure” now, before his destruction, by another word.

That Little Word

Martin Luther actually identified the word he had in mind, the one little word to fell our foe:

“Devil, you lie,” . . . Dr. Luther sings so proudly and boldly in those words of his hymn, “One little word shall fell him.” (“Against Hanswurst”)

Speaking of himself in the third person, Luther says that the one simple proclamation that defeats Satan is the simple verdict “Liar.”

⁴⁴ You are of your father the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.

John 8:44

Satan is a “liar, and the father of lies”. From the very beginning, Satan has twisted and contorted the truth of God into a lie (Genesis 3:1). And from the very beginning, Satan’s favorite lie has been to declare “unclean” what God has made clean, to declare “guilty” those whose sins God has covered.

There’s nothing Satan wants more than to eat away your faith in Jesus. Satan wants nothing more than for you to forget who you are in Christ. Over and over, the Bible warns us not not play games with this devouring, roaring beast of a being. His rage we cannot endure if our strategy is just to disregard him.

The Word of Faith

The text Luther most likely had in mind was Revelation 12:10:

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say,

The salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God
and the authority of his Christ
have now come,
because the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them
before our God day and night,
has been thrown down.

Revelation 12:10

John writes that “the accuser of our brothers [who is Satan; 12:9] has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.” So there is an accusation, a lie — Satan speaks “guilty” against the ones God has redeemed. It’s the same lie that Satan always speaks to God’s people.

Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, with Satan standing at his right side to accuse him.

Zecheriah 3:1

The answer to this age-old lie is not to repeat Jesus’s name like a mantra. Nor is it simply to remind ourselves that Satan’s days are numbered. The answer, for Luther and in the Bible, is to believe the truth, the gospel. The answer is to believe the promises of God, that in Christ you are justified (Romans 5:1), clean (1 Corinthians 6:11), holy and blameless (Ephesians 1:4), loved by God (Colossians 3:12), a branch saved from the fire (Zechariah 3:2).

The one, little word against Satan — “Liar!” — is the word of faith. When we take all of Satan’s lies, his accusations, his reminders of our sins and place them in the blood-sealed file marked “Lies,” it is a profession of our faith in Christ’s promises over against Satan’s accusations.

because everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. This is the victory that has conquered the world: our faith.

1 John 5:4

This word is: “the victory that has overcome” not only the world, but Satan himself.

We Tremble Not for Him

Satan is the grim Prince. He is deadly. He is a devouring, fearsome dragon (Revelation 12:9). But he is nothing against “the victory that has overcome the world — our faith” (1 John 5:4). We tremble not for him because every one of his accusations — “guilty,” “condemned,” “unrighteous” — are shown to be nothing but lies before Christ.