His rage we can not endure if our strategy is just to disregard him. Over and over, the Bible warns us not not play games with this devouring, roaring beast of a being. Satan wants nothing more than for you to forget who you are in Christ. There’s nothing Satan wants more than to eat away your faith in Jesus. 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. From the very beginning, Satan has twisted and contorted the truth of God into a lie (Genesis 3:1). Satan is a “liar, and the father of lies” (John 8:44). Speaking of himself in the third person, Luther says that the one simple proclamation that defeats Satan is the simple verdict “Liar.” Luther sings so proudly and boldly in those words of his hymn, “One little word shall fell him.” (“Against Hanswurst”) Martin Luther actually identified the word he had in mind, the one little word to fell our foe: “His rage we can endure” now, before his destruction, by another word. Even while Satan prowls this earth like a lion (1 Peter 5:8), we are not at the mercy of our supernatural foe. Ultimately, our hope of victory against Satan’s schemes is secured by his final destruction, but more than that, we have hope now. 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). 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. Perhaps Luther meant the Word, Jesus himself (John 1:1). Jesus’s name is not a magic spell used to take down evil spirits. It is clearly not the mere sound of those two syllables that commands Satan, but the authority from God that lies behind them (Mark 1:25–27). Some “itinerant exorcists” adopted this verbal formula of simply citing Jesus’s name only to be driven out by the evil spirit “naked and wounded!” (Acts 19:13–16). It is repeated in a well-known worship song: “The Enemy, he has to flee at the sound of your great name.”īut we know from the Bible itself that demons feel no fear simply at the sound of Jesus’s name. 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” (Mark 9:38 Acts 16:18). The demons themselves are not afraid to say Jesus’s name - they even talked directly to Jesus, knowing exactly who he was (Matthew 8:29 Mark 5:7). While it may be a popular and catchy idea to mention “Jesus” for protection against Satan, the Bible doesn’t specifically commend that approach. Maybe Luther’s one little word was “Jesus”? When I was a little kid, the only act of spiritual warfare I knew was simply to say out loud the word “Jesus.” Somewhere, I picked up the idea that demons scatter when you mention Jesus’s name. So, what word might Luther have in mind? “Jesus”? 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. Most Protestant churches still sing this “Battle Hymn of the Reformation” regularly in worship. The identity of this word should matter to us.
Somehow it took me about twenty years to realize that I had no idea what Martin Luther was talking about in this line in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Now, a confession: I am a Baptist, not Lutheran - I’m willing to admit there may be a real, mystical meaning of the “one little word” that only Lutherans can understand. What is that “one little word” that will fell Satan?
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