Knowing the Enemy
Having lived in a military community for the past 20 years, the idea of going to battle has taken on new meaning for me. The church that was in Mainz, Germany, in the early 2000’s had several members who were deployed to Iraq in 2003. One of the brethren returned home for R&R and spoke about his experiences in Baghdad. He commented that the biggest problem was the difficulty in knowing who the enemy was. Being able to distinguish between the people who were loyal to Sadam versus those who welcomed the US military was complicated at best and hopeless at worst.
It seems to me that the same can be said for the enemy we fight daily as Christians. Satan is wily by nature - the father of lies (John 8:44) - and finding him and getting him out of our lives, heads, and homes can be tricky. The battle we fight is not of this earthly realm - we fight principalities and powers from the spiritual realm (Eph. 6:12) - and yet, the threats take on very real forms. It is our responsibility to recognize the enemy and drive him back. We must maintain our ground; we do not have the luxury of not being able to distinguish him in our lives, and if we are mothers, we also have to recognize him in our children’s lives and teach them how to see and conquer the evil one as well.
So how do we identify the battle? How do we know the enemy? At Satan’s introduction in Genesis, we see him deceiving Eve with the lie that what God said wasn’t accurate and didn’t really apply to her. He tells her what she wants to hear and convinces her that what God said wasn’t really what He meant. Sound familiar?
It’s so easy to see Satan’s deception when we see it with Eve, but his tricks haven’t changed, and he does the same thing to us. He whispers to us, too, that God doesn’t really expect us to be anything other than what we are by nature, and that what God said couldn’t possibly be what He really meant. Satan fills our heads with the world’s nonsense. He has us surrounded and bombards us daily with his lies.
Our modern culture is no different from any other culture throughout the history of the world. In all civilizations, sin is not only normalized, it is celebrated. The corrupt are hailed as heroes who are brave for embracing their wicked lifestyles, and the righteous are seen as outdated, stupid, and afraid. It has never been easy to live as a godly person among the unrighteous. However, our historical backdrop cannot define our discipleship. I’ve lived in many places and raised a child in a very liberal European culture, and what I know is that God’s expectations of righteousness are not unreasonable or unrealistic for any of us. The expectation that we live righteously extends beyond the timeframe or geographical area we live in because it isn’t really about the outward landscape. Certainly, the culture we live in impacts our lives, but it shouldn’t define who we are. If we aren’t careful, we focus so intently on what is going on around us, that we miss what is going on within us, which is where the real battle rages.
In Philippians, Paul writes that through prayer, we receive the peace that passes understanding which will guard our hearts and minds (4:7). The phrase he uses, “to guard”, is a military term. It indicates that we are to set up military boundaries around our hearts and minds. I think of a wall set around a city. It keeps the enemy out and the citizens safe within. The Devil wants to infiltrate the wall around our hearts and minds. That’s the real battlefield. If we can’t get our minds and hearts set on God, then it doesn’t matter what the world around us is doing; we can’t help anyone around us, and the battle is lost. The battle with ourselves is the first battle we must fight. If we can’t win our inward battle, then we cannot successfully win the outward battle. We will never really know who we are.
Jesus didn’t come to reform the world around Him; His message isn’t about social reform - it’s about personal reform, which, by the way, is immensely more challenging. Our inner landscape is more complicated than our cultural landscape. In order to transform ourselves, we first have to know ourselves. Truly seeing ourselves for who we are is what humbles us. It is what will make us poor in spirit so that we hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt. 5:1-12). We are stripped of our excuses and rationalizations and laid bare for who we are, and our only rational, reasonable response is to sacrifice ourselves daily in order to please God (Rom. 12:4).
How do we do that? Those are the elements that we hope to discuss during the year. We put on the whole armor of God. That’s why getting ourselves sorted out and ready for the battle at hand is the critical first step. We defend our hearts and minds through prayer and study. If we aren’t filling our minds with the gospel, then Satan will fill them with foolishness. He wants us distracted, and he doesn’t care what we are distracted by: our culture, our educational pursuits, our businesses, our families...none of which are inherently evil...Satan doesn’t care. He will be perfectly happy if we are whitewashed graves - white and neat on the outside but full of death and decay (Matt 23:27).
He doesn’t need us all to be prostitutes and junkies. He just needs us to be preoccupied and take our heads out of the battle, to forget that he’s there, and to assume that since we aren’t prostitutes and junkies, then we are doing ok, that as long as we aren’t overtly “bad”, then we are fine. He’s counting on us being like the Pharisees and ignoring the “weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith” - those conditions of the heart (Matt 23:23).
The world is loud and demanding of our time and attention, and it is only through a concentrated effort that we tear ourselves away from the noise of the world to read and meditate on the word of God. It is only then, through God’s word, that our hearts can be pricked and that we can see ourselves as we truly are in the face of God - spiritually bankrupt and lost without Him. If we can’t see ourselves, we won’t see the enemy.
The enemy camp surrounds us, but the battle is within - it’s a battle of the heart. It is only with Jesus that the victory can be won. Through His mercy and might, we are supplied with armor that will help us to “stand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (Eph 6:13).