The Casting Down

Three Greek words from Colossians 2 do more work than entire libraries of spiritual-warfare literature: apekdysamenos, edeigmatisen, thriambeusas. Stripped, displayed, triumphed. The previous book walked the cross from the angle of the veil and the open way. This book walks it from the angle of the figure who has been on the leash the whole time, and what the cross-event actually did to him. Two clauses in Colossians 2:14–15 say it; an apocalyptic vision in Revelation 12 says it in another idiom; a sentence in Hebrews 2:14 says it in a third. All three are describing the same event in three vocabularies.

Start with Paul. Colossians 2:13–15: “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in Him.” Read carefully. The forgiveness language and the cosmic-victory language are in the same sentence. They are not two separate things the cross accomplished. They are one event in two aspects, named in three Greek words that do specific work.

LOOK CLOSER · Colossians 2:14–15 — the four words

Cheirographon is the legal term for a handwritten signed document, especially a promissory note or a record of debt. It is the bond by which a creditor holds a debtor. Paul says the cheirographon was canceled — exaleipsas, “wiped out, blotted out, erased.” Then he says God “set it aside” — ērken, the verb for taking away or removing. Then “nailing it to the cross” — proselōsas auto tō staurō, the physical image of a document fastened to wood by a nail. The legal indictment that stood against us is removed by a documented completion. The cross is the place the document is nailed up; the nailing is the proof of completion.

Apekdysamenos (from ekdyō, “to strip off”) is the verb for stripping armor and weapons from a defeated enemy after a battle. It is military-victory vocabulary — though the participle is middle-voice, and a minority hear it as the Son stripping the powers off Himself, shedding their grip like a cast-off garment; either way, the two verbs that follow, displayed and paraded, fix the direction: the rulers and authorities are the ones stripped, shamed, and led behind the chariot. “He stripped the rulers and authorities.” The rulers and authorities — the archai and exousiai, the “principalities and powers” of the older English — are the ranked spiritual authorities that make up the figure's apparatus, the cosmic chain of command Paul names again and again (Ephesians 1:21; 6:12; Colossians 1:16; 2:15; Romans 8:38); the same vocabulary Ephesians 6 uses of the powers the believer wrestles. They are disarmed. The weapons are taken off them. The aorist tense is decisive: completed action. Not being disarmed; have been disarmed.

Edeigmatisen (from deigmatizō, “to make a public example, to display”) is the Roman vocabulary for putting a defeated enemy on public display after the victory. “He made a public spectacle of them.” The display is part of the victory — not just that they are defeated, but that the defeat is visible, recognized, public.

Thriambeusas (from thriambeuō) is the most specific word in the line. It is the Greek for the Roman triumph — the formal victory procession of a conquering general, with the captives paraded behind his chariot through the streets of Rome. “Triumphing over them in Him.” Paul is using the precise Roman political-military vocabulary that any first-century reader would have recognized. The cross is the triumphal procession. The captives paraded are the rulers and authorities the figure commands. The general at the head of the procession is the One on the cross. The image is not subtle. It is shocking and deliberate — what looked, from outside, like the execution of a defeated provincial teacher was, from inside, the Roman triumph of the eternal King over the cosmic apparatus that thought it had won.

WALK ON

Then Hebrews 2:14, in a different idiom, names the same event in life-and-death vocabulary. “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy (katargēsē) the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” The verb katargeō does not always mean total annihilation; it covers the range of “making ineffective, nullifying, rendering powerless.” The diabolos still exists after the cross — the next movement will walk what he does in the in-between — but his primary lever has been broken. The lever was the power of death; the lever has been rendered powerless by the One who walked through death and came out. The fear of death that kept the entire human population in lifelong slavery has had its mechanism removed. The slavery is broken. The fear has nothing to leverage against the believer who is in Him, because the worst thing the figure can threaten is the thing the One the believer is in has already walked through.

And now the strangest one. Revelation 12 contains the most-misread chapter in the entire discussion of the satan-figure. Read in the popular tradition as a description of the primordial fall — a backstory chapter, a flashback to before time — it is, on its own terms, a vision of the cross-event in apocalyptic idiom. The whole misreading depends on missing two temporal markers in the chapter itself. Carry the markers out of the LOOK CLOSER and the chapter will read differently for the rest of your life.

LOOK CLOSER · Revelation 12 — not primordial; cross-event in apocalyptic vision

Revelation 12 opens with two great signs in heaven — a woman clothed with the sun, about to give birth, and a great red dragon waiting to devour her child. The child is born; the dragon fails to devour Him; the child is “caught up to God and to His throne” (12:5) — language that names the ascension, the conclusion of the cross-and-resurrection sequence. Then verses 7–9: “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”

The first temporal marker. The casting-down in 12:7–9 happens AFTER the catching-up of the child to the throne in 12:5. The chapter's own narrative sequence places the war after the ascension, not before creation. If the chapter were a flashback to a primordial event, the child of 12:5 would have to be a flashback character; he is not. He is the one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron (12:5 — the messianic-king vocabulary of Psalm 2). The chapter is showing what happens in heaven as a result of what happened on earth in the cross-and-ascension. It is the heavenly side of the cross.

The second temporal marker. Verse 10–11: “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.’” Now — nyn, again, the same word as John 12:31. The casting-down is contemporaneous with the salvation, the power, the kingdom, and the authority of His Christ “having come.” And the means of the conquering is named outright: the blood of the Lamb. Not a primordial event. The cross.

Read the chapter on its own temporal terms and the picture is this. The woman represents the people of God through whom the Messiah comes; the dragon is the figure the road has been tracing; the child is Yeshua, ascended; the war in heaven and the casting-down of the dragon are what happens in the heavenly realm as a consequence of the cross; the means of the casting-down is the blood of the Lamb. The chapter is not a flashback. It is a vision of what the cross did at the cosmic level, told in the apocalyptic idiom Revelation uses throughout. The pre-creation rebellion narrative the popular tradition reads into Revelation 12 is not in the chapter. The chapter is showing you the casting-down that happened at the cross.

WALK ON

Three angles, then, on one event. Colossians 2 names it in Roman-military vocabulary: the indictment canceled, the powers stripped, displayed, paraded in the triumphal procession. Hebrews 2 names it in life-and-death vocabulary: the one with the power of death rendered powerless, the slavery of fear broken, the death-mechanism walked through. Revelation 12 names it in apocalyptic-vision idiom: the dragon cast down, the accuser thrown out of the court, conquered by the blood of the Lamb. The same event in three idioms. The cross. And John names the purpose under all three in a single clause: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8) — not to manage them, not to contain them, to undo them.

And one more passage worth standing under for a moment, because it has, like Revelation 12, been pulled into the primordial-fall framework by readers who flatten the temporal markers. Luke 10:18, Yeshua's word to the seventy when they return rejoicing that the demons are subject to them in His name: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” The Greek is decisive. Etheoroun is imperfect of theoreō, “I was beholding,” the verb for sustained watching of a present scene; piptonta is the present active participle of piptō, “falling” — ongoing, in progress, in front of His eyes as He speaks. Yeshua is not narrating a memory of a primordial event. He is describing what He sees happening in the moment the seventy report their authority over demons. The kingdom-incursion has begun; the strong man is being bound; what is being shown to Yeshua in the spirit is the cosmic dimension of what they have just done in the field. He saw the falling because the falling was happening, in real time, as the kingdom advanced. The chapter says so. The verb tenses say so. The popular reading of Luke 10:18 as a glimpse back at creation is a flattening; the verse is a glimpse of the in-progress casting-down, the same event Revelation 12 describes in vision and Colossians 2 in triumph-imagery.

Pull it all together. The cross is the moment the cheirographon was nailed up, the rulers and authorities were stripped and paraded, the one with the power of death was rendered powerless, the slavery to fear was broken, and the accuser was thrown down out of the heavenly court. The whole apparatus the figure has used since Job is, on the cross, taken apart and put on display — not in pieces, but in one event, one Friday afternoon, one execution that looked like a defeat and was, in heaven's reading, the triumphal procession of the King over the cosmic powers. And the believer on the other side of that event is the believer the previous movement described: sealed, indwelt, transferred, made a temple, the figure who is structurally outside kept structurally outside. The cross did this. It is done. The verbs are aorist.

Which raises the only question that still has to be answered. If the casting-down has happened, why is the figure still active? Why does the New Testament have the believer told to watch and resist and stand against schemes? Why is the lion still prowling, after the lion's house has been plundered and his weapons stripped? The answer is the next movement, because the answer is the in-between. The cross-event has ended the case against the figure. The final disposition has not yet been carried out. He is operating, the rest of the New Testament will say, on a leash that has been shortened to a known length and for a known time. Between the casting-down and the lake of fire, the believer is living.