Straight to the Heart

In three weeks’ time, the first copies of “Straight to the Heart of Genesis” and “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Corinthians” will hit the bookshelves. I’m really excited about volumes 4 and 5 of the series and can’t wait to share them, so I’m blogging one of the chapters here to give you a preview. It is the chapter on 1 Corinthians 2:2, and it is called LESSONS FROM A MONGOOSE.

“For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Less than a teaspoonful. That’s how little venom a cobra needs to inject to kill an elephant, let alone a little mongoose. Yet, as any fan of the Rudyard Kipling story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” knows, mongooses normally win in a fight against a cobra. They have learned to focus on the one place where they know that a cobra is vulnerable. “‘If I don’t break his back at the first jump,’ said Rikki, ‘he can still fight. And if he fights – O Rikki! … It must be the head,’ he said at last, ‘the head above the hood. And when I am once there, I must not let go.’” 

Paul didn’t underestimate the danger which Satan posed to the church which he had planted in Corinth. In his second letter he warned them about Satan “the serpent” who was out to deceive and poison them. He took the form of a snake to trick Eve in the first book of the Bible, and is still described as “that ancient serpent” in the last book of the Bible. He is as deadly a foe towards unsuspecting Christians as any cobra is to a mongoose. Therefore Paul kept his focus razor-sharp in both Athens and Corinth: “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Satan managed to ‘bite’ Eve when he tempted her in the Garden of Eden. He infected the human race with his venom, and Paul tells us that “in this way death came to all men.”The third chapter of the Bible finds Adam and Eve hiding from God and nursing the fatal snakebite of sin, until the Lord arrives to preach the first Gospel sermon in human history. He announces that one of Eve’s descendants will conquer the Devil and rescue mankind, just as Rikki-Tikki-Tavi rescues the English family in Rudyard Kipling’s story. “He will crush your head,” God promises the Devil, “and you will crush his heel.”  

Thousands of years later, this prophecy came true. A mongoose knows that a cobra bite means death, but it also knows how to kill the cobra first by biting the base of its head and crushing its skull. On a Roman cross outside the city of Jerusalem in 30AD, Jesus of Nazareth confronted the great serpent Satan and both accepted a bite and delivered one of his own. He let the Devil bite him on the heel when he bore the lethal venom of sin in his crucified body, dying the slow and painful death which Eve and the human race deserved. Then he returned from the grave in a surprise manoeuvre, which outflanked the Devil and broke his unsuspecting neck and head. Jesus is the great Rikki-Tikki-Tavi of mankind. That’s what Paul resolved to preach in Corinth, and what he calls every believer to remember with the unflinching focus of a mongoose.

Satan remains as wily as a cobra in blinding human eyes to the importance of this Gospel. Paul tells us in 1:23 that this message about Jesus the Rescuer seems utterly ridiculous to most non-Christians. Satan has fooled them that there is no such thing as sin and certainly no God who is committed to judging it. Although they bear the symptoms of their snakebite all over their bodies, he manages to lull them into a false sense of security so that they pay no attention to the serum of the Gospel. Another group of non-Christians – Paul mentions Jews here but might just as easily include Muslims today – believe in sin but are repulsed by the idea of a crucified Messiah. “What kind of God do you believe in, who would allow sinful people to murder his Messiah?” asked one of my Muslim friends recently. A Rikki-Tikki-Tavi kind of God, that’s who. 

If Satan cannot stop us from responding to the Gospel and being saved, he redoubles his efforts to distract us from the cross of Jesus. Like a cobra which rears up its body and expands its hood to mesmerise a mongoose, he tries to make Christians more aware of his strength than they are of his defeat. Many Christians still struggle to accept that they have truly been forgiven. They are paralysed by Satan’s loud hissing and limp through life under a cloud of condemnation. Whole churches can even become corporately mesmerised, convinced that they are merely sinners holding out for the moment when Jesus returns. The cobra’s neurotoxic venom paralyses its prey, and when Christians lose sight of the Gospel which saved them, they quickly find themselves paralysed too.

That’s why Jerry Bridges reminds us that “The gospel is not only the most important message in all of history; it is the only essential message in all of history. Yet we allow thousands of professing Christians to live their entire lives without clearly understanding it and experiencing the joy of living by it … Every day of our Christian experience should be a day of relating to God on the basis of His grace alone. We are not only saved by grace, but we also live by grace every day.” The message of the cross is not merely the gate through which we enter into salvation. It is also the sally port through which we launch forays against the defeated snake Satan and rescue unbelievers from his venomous clutches.  

The Devil is petrified of Christians and of churches who focus on this message of the cross and believe that through it Jesus has won the victory. Rudyard Kipling describes the moment when Rikki-Tikki-Tavi finally faces the cobra in battle: “He was afraid for a minute, but it is impossible for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, his mother had fed him on dead ones, and he knew that all a grown mongoose’s business in life was to fight and eat snakes. [The cobra] knew that too and, at the bottom of his cold heart, he was afraid.”

 Satan is afraid, very afraid, because he knows that he cannot hold ground against believers who believe that Jesus’ victory is bigger than their sin. In fact, since Paul uses a past tense verb here, Satan is not just afraid of people who believe in Jesus Christ crucified, but in Jesus Christ having-been-crucified. Satan bit Jesus’ heel on the cross, but Jesus isn’t on the cross any more. He has his teeth buried deep into the base of Satan’s skull and he has crushed the Devil’s head through his resurrection and ascension.  

Don’t be fooled by the Snake that you can play around with sin, and don’t be fooled by him either into focusing more on your sin than you do on Jesus’ victory. How did Paul plant a church from scratch during eighteen months in Corinth? How did that church affect the whole of Greece with the Gospel in spite of sin and compromise in its veins? Because they resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. That made them into Rikki-Tikki-Tavi believers. The kind of believers God can use.