Christians are at war daily, we are challenged and disrupted in our relationship, in our communion with God by the devil, the world and the flesh in us, the three enemies that wage war against the human soul relentlessly. Everyday we feel the intense pressure of the war on our souls. A spiritual assault on our Christian faith. A fight to stay faithful to the teachings of Jesus and to stay sane.
If you think of the sinful world as not your home, then we God’s children are in exile. Exile means “the experience of knowing that one is an alien in a hostile environment where the dominant values run opposite to one’s own”. The reason why we are in exile is because “we are unwilling to conform to the tyranny of majority”. Democracy is tyranny to Christians in an anti-Christian world.
The worldly man who thinks himself being sophisticated as a result of kicking God out of our culture, society and life, believes that we are far too intelligent to be fooled, too enlightened to be confused and that we would never let people in power or media to prey on our emotions and play into our desires and fears to manipulate us to their desired end. The individualistic mindset tells themselves that they would not do things just because everybody else is doing it.
This is a fine example of the postmodern thinking that C. S. Lewis called “Chronological snobbery”, the innate human bias to think that we are smarter than the people who came before us and therefore new ideas are naturally better or useful than the old ones. This is the quasi-religious western dogma that human beings are evolving towards a Utopian future, where we will at long shed the tired shackles of religion and superstition and embrace our destiny as enlightened individuals finally free to enjoy our lives. But if you pause and think objectively, we can see that the reality is opposite. There is mountain of evidence to argue that the postmodern world is descending into chaos and self-destruction and the populace are being deceived daily as they sleep-walk into their own demise.
As Christians we need to know our enemy. We live in a world full of lies and deception, all perpetrated by the devil who play into our disordered desires which are normalised in a sinful society. The goal of every Christian should be to unmask this hidden enemy and develop strategies to fight back because the world around us is descending into more and more chaos and self-destruction. The writers of the new testament weren’t shy to use the language of warfare in advising the Christians about their new life in Christ as they live in a sinful world. As the writer of the Hebrews puts it “In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted it to the point of shedding your blood”. Be mindful of the wording in here, it says about shedding your blood and not someone else’s blood, that is a huge distinction that we need to be aware of. As Christians we follow in the footsteps of King Jesus who gave up his own life voluntarily.
So how we do engage in spiritual warfare?
To be continued…