Why the Devil Shakes in His Boots When we Become Christians

Just how defeated is the enemy?

This defeated. 

We know he's defeated because of Jesus' victory on the cross. Christ paid for our sins, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him (Matthew 28:18), and anyone who confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in their heart that God raised Him from the dead will be saved (Romans 8:9). In addition, we have armor (Ephesians 6), binding and loosing (Matthew 16:19), scripture quotations, resistance, prayer, praise and worship, and the name and blood of Jesus Himself with which to fight him. 

But the scripture that sticks with me today is Revelation 12:11a. "They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony" (NIV). 

Two ways. The blood of the Lamb, which we know. There is no victory unless we are in Christ. And the second way is the word of our testimony. How do we get a testimony? By having a story to tell of what Jesus has done for us. In other words, by going through some stuff.  

We can go through stuff for several reasons: because we live in a fallen world, because we're under God's discipline, because we've made poor decisions. Another big reason is that we unfortunately have a spiritual enemy who hates us, and the more we do or are called to do for the Kingdom, the more he has it in for us.

People who don't know Christ have no victory over the enemy, because they have no means to fight a spiritual battle and because hell is the default afterlife. But when they come to know Jesus, they satisfy the first condition of Revelation 12:11--they have the blood of the Lamb. What the devil hopes they never realize is that, because of the blood, they now have the power to also satisfy the second condition. They are in a position to take the very ammunition he lobbed against them and fashion it into a weapon with which to turn around and defeat him: a testimony. He fears us, as he should, as sleeping giants, and he hopes we never fully awake.

Meditate on this: when the devil messes with us, he's throwing raw material at us out of which we can build the weapon to defeat him. He is so beaten, defeated, and lost that he can't even come against us without putting himself in a losing position. All we have to do is see our testimony for what it is: the crud he himself supplied, assembled into brilliant artillery that we can use to strike him down. 

He's that defeated.