I am sure that nearly all of us are aware that our country, though not in a declared war, is still fighting two campaigns half a world away. What these campaigns have in common is that the enemy, while defeated, is still waging a war of insurgency against our troops and against our country.
Nearly every war I can think of has at some point had an insurgency or what we often call a guerilla war. You find this kind of warfare in situations where the enemy is totally overwhelmed and very often when the enemy is defeated. In cases like this, though the war is over, the battle goes on, sometimes indefinitely.
This topic in our study of 2 Corinthians is, to continue the military metaphor, a minefield. We are talking about spiritual warfare. And the topic may have been written on and talked about more in the last 35 years than in the prior two millennia. The fact that the church is at war against a defeated enemy is not news – the Scriptures make it plain and the reality of the resurrection testifies to the fact that Satan has been defeated. He now wages a war of insurgency – trying to create as much confusion and discouragement as possible. The spiritual warfare we are involved in now is a fight against the last-ditch efforts of a defeated foe. But this contemporary idea of spiritual warfare has introduced us to terms like “prayer walking”, “spiritual mapping”, “territorial spirits”, “generational curses”, “strongholds of darkness”, “binding dark powers” and “pulling down strongholds”. Just what exactly is spiritual warfare all about, and how do we wage this war?
I must confess, it would take perhaps a dozen weeks of preaching and more time for in depth study than this part-time pastor has available to treat the subject fairly. I had it in mind to preach on the first 8 verses and be done with this subject. But the more I studied them, the less I thought I could do that. There might be ten sermons in the first 8 verses, but I’m going to try to get this done in 2 or 3.
An appropriate teaching on the subject of spiritual warfare is a narrow road with deep ditches on either side! So this morning I am going to simply stick to the text at hand as best I can and try to gain some insight on some of the broader issues without falling into one of those ditches!
It is a bit unpopular these days to use military metaphors to describe the Christian life. In fact, a few denominations have carefully excised every hymn from their hymnals that use military terms. Or else they simply change the words. But the Scriptures don’t make any such apology. This is a war we’re engaged in. And you and I don’t have to look far to see that we live in a spiritual battle zone. When we saw those planes crashing into the twin towers barely 50 miles from here, I think we all knew in that moment that we were not simply witnessing an awful tragedy. Evil was at work. Before that day was over, we had started to trace the outlines of a conspiracy that was bent on creating chaos and suffering. We were looking at one face of evil.
On any city street, we can see overt evils in the drug pushers and gangs. It is not hard to spot evil in the displays of pornography, or in the ads that lure people to believe lies of materialism or unrestrained sensuality. But we make a serious mistake in thinking that evil only shows up in these ways. Many Christians ignore the evil that is hidden away inside their own ranks. Perhaps you saw on the news a few weeks ago the testimony of a child in South Jersey against her foster mother who, with her husband, had systematically starved him and his siblings, all the while quoting Bible verses and being model church members. We Christians cheat and steal, we gossip and hate. We live private lives that are inconsistent with what we profess on Sunday mornings. And all of this is the face of evil and it is the battleground of spiritual warfare.
In the midst of his defense of his own ministry, Paul launches into a discussion of the way that we are to engage a defeated enemy who is waging a campaign of insurgency.
He understands that evil is indeed present in this world and it is a force that Christians must understand and deal with every day.
I’ve divided this passage into three points. They are:
1-3 We live and we fight in the world
4-5 We live and we fight with powerful weapons
6-8 We live and we fight as those under authority
This morning we are only going to deal with the first three verses and my first point. The next two points will be left for the next sermon or two. First: We live and we fight in the world
Despite the fact that this passage turns pointed and even threatening, Paul begins with a gentle hand. By the meekness and gentleness of Christ… I beg you… He is deeply concerned for this church. And although he is defending himself here against a minority who were challenging his authority, he is clearly concerned that this cancer not spread to the entire church.
That is the nature of churches… what sometimes starts as an isolated pocket of unbiblical teaching or inappropriate gossip or a lack of submission to authority often infects the entire body. And Paul wants to be sure that these detractors are checked as quickly as possible. He wants the entire church to hear his defense, not because they were all involved in the criticism, but because they soon could be.
I think this is the first reference to spiritual warfare. Even the church can be a battleground. We live in enemy territory. This is not something to be ignored or made light of. There is a great difference between waging war on your own ground and waging war in enemy territory. Even in this sanctuary it is possible that we are engaged in spiritual warfare. The enemy likes to infiltrate the command centers!
The NIV uses the word “world” three times in verses 2-3. But this word literally means, “flesh”. Most other translations render this “walking according to the flesh” and “waging war according to the flesh.”
What is the flesh? It is essentially inherited selfishness. It is what is basically wrong with human nature. It is the flaw in our nature which we all inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve. It is a sinful nature, a nature that pervades everything we are and everything we do. It is not taught or caught – it is a fundamental reality in the lives of human beings.
It is not very long before it is quite apparent that we are fundamentally selfish. You do not have to teach a baby to be selfish. You do not have to teach him to disobey his parents. This nature crops up in any individual no matter what kind of a background, exposure, or environment he is subjected to; it is in the bloodstream of humanity.
This is the unpleasant fact which society constantly resists, which man does not want to face, but which the Word of God states bluntly and clearly. We are told in Romans that: “There is no one righteous, not even one. We all fall short of the glory of God”. Jesus said, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” In Ephesians we learn that we are “by nature objects of God’s wrath.” We see in Genesis that “every inclination of the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil all the time.” And, “Every inclination of man’s heart is evil from childhood”. And the list goes on and on.
Then if you put all these flesh-centered, flesh-governed people together into a society, you have what the Bible calls "the world." It is society governed by the flesh; a society with all the power structures built upon self-interest. Just pick up the newspaper. What you see is people contending for their own interests, not those of other people and certainly not those of God. As anyone can see, evil pervades the world of our day; self-interest is at the heart of everything.
And this world of flesh is not simply neutral towards God, it is hostile. It is an enmity towards God. Paul tells us in Romans that
“The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; 7the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.”
That’s not just an issue of what people want to do. It’s a question of what people are ABLE to do. Apart from Christ, people are not able to submit to God or His law. You and I live in a world that is absolutely dead-set against God. The flesh hates God. And the flesh is what dominates our world.
The Apostle Paul is speaking not only for himself, but for all Christians. And he says, first, we live in the world. We don’t run away from it. History is full of men and women who have retreated to a monastic life and tried to shut away the life in the world. And there are people who do this today. What astonishes me is the number of Christians who have this attitude. There has grown up in our time a "holy huddle syndrome," which attempts to create a Christian hothouse, an atmosphere which is thoroughly Christian from the womb to the tomb, and does not permit the invasion of secular ideas or forces. It tries to insulate and isolate the Christian from the world as much as possible.
This is basically unbiblical and sub-Christian. Paul says, "We Christians live right in the midst of the world." That is where we are supposed to be! That is where we are intended to live. We are fundamentally different in our outlook, our standards and the way we deal with the world, but we do live in it.
Jesus himself put it this way: "Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves," It must be a crazy shepherd who would do something like that! Think about it – what chance do sheep have in the midst of wolves? Yet that is how radical is the difference between true Christianity and the false isolationist version that we sometimes see today.
Paul declares the fundamental tension in which a Christian lives. He says, "We live in the flesh, in the world of normal society, but we do not fight on those terms. We are not carrying on a worldly war."
We don’t just live in enemy territory, but we fight a war against a defeated enemy who continues to wage a campaign of insurgency.
I have a good friend who is a lieutenant in the Army, serving in Iraq. We have exchanged a few emails over the last couple of weeks, and since I was working on this sermon I asked him some questions about the insurgents. A couple of interesting things came out of that dialog. Let me read you part of an email that Ryan sent me:
The insurgents use any means necessary to kill Coalition Forces. They like to go out in the dark out night and drop Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs. They are cowards and will not fight us straight up. They are deathly afraid of us, we have had many who were so scared when we caught them that they nearly died of fright. They put these IEDs in garbage, in potholes, buried wherever they can. And they target our troops specifically; the bombs are designed to go after our gunners and they try to find the weaknesses in our vehicles. They lie to everyone. They have no real purpose, in that they do things for money and not for Islam or freedom. They just do it to get cash. They believe the lies that they have heard about Americans. We had one that we caught and he said that he had no idea how nice Americans were, He thought all Americans were murders and rapists. They attack in dark places, where no one can catch them. We are backing them into corners in order to make them come out into the light so we can kill or capture them. They use civilians to camouflage themselves. They will act like everyone else, even those that have killed many and are the responsible for the deaths of far more.
What struck me about Ryan’s email is the tactics that the insurgents use. They try to create disillusionment and disunity among our forces. And these are the same tactics that our enemy, Satan, uses against God’s people today. Let’s look at each of these and the difference between the enemy’s tactics and ours.
Disillusionment:
If an enemy can create an atmosphere of confusion and fear, he has won a real victory. If he can convince his foe that they are losing the fight, he has done more harm than he could do with guns and tanks. He tries to convince his enemy that the fight is hopeless and endless, and he tries to disillusion those who fight him.
In the confusion and frustration that results, he tries to get his enemy to question what the war was all about from the start. Maybe we shouldn’t even be here! And Satan tries to create disillusionment within the church.
What makes me so frustrated with much of what has been written about spiritual warfare is that it plays into the hands of the enemy in this regard.
It seems to me that all of this incessant talk of demon possession, spiritual strongholds and powers of darkness plays into the hands of the insurgency. My friend, Ryan, made it clear that the insurgents in Iraq are terrified of the coalition forces. They are the ones who are running scared. And they should be! They have been overwhelmed by an irresistible force and they have no hope of victory.
Satan has been overwhelmed by an irresistible force and has no hope of victory. The Scriptures tell us that Jesus has put all things under his feet. Satan is defeated, and he is terrified. It is only a matter of time before he is banished once and for all, and he knows that. All he is doing now is fighting a holding action – an insurgency. And it does us no good to fear him or to allow him to create disillusionment.
Oh, we should be cautious and we should respect the fact that Satan is dangerous. The Scriptures tell us that he is still a threat and that he prowls like a roaring lion, seeking people to devour. But make no mistake, he is defeated. And although it is a mistake to pay him too little mind, I believe it is also a mistake to fear him. God is sovereign and God allows Satan a measure of activity on this planet, but he is not in charge and he cannot defeat God’s people or God’s purposes! The Scriptures make a promise in James 4: “Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Why would he flee from Believers? Because he is defeated and because he is more scared of us than we should be scared of him!
Jesus has won the victory. We have nothing to be disillusioned about. There is no question about the worth of the battle and there is no question about the final score.
Disunity:
The other thing that the insurgents try to do is create disunity. We see this all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every tape from Osama Bin Laden is designed to turn those who support the coalition forces against their own armies. The confusion that the insurgents create by attacking in the dark places causes a lack of confidence in our army’s command structure. And by hiding among civilians and by using terror tactics they create an atmosphere of distrust and disunity.
Disunity can kill a church quicker than anything. It is Satan’s primary tactic. If we don’t trust each other and if we don’t trust those in authority, the ensuing confusion makes it impossible for us to wage war against our real enemy. We end up shooting each other instead.
I saw a video clip last week of an infantry officer who had been deployed to Iraq. He was attending a town meeting held by a congressman in his district, a congressman who had been critical of the war in Iraq and who had been telling his constituents that even our own armed forces are discouraged and have no hope of victory. This officer stood up and began to talk passionately of the positive morale amongst the troops. He lambasted the congressman for creating disunity between the US citizens and the armed forces. He said that he and many men in his unit had requested deployment in Iraq after having served a term in Afghanistan. They believe so deeply in what we are doing and the war we are fighting that they volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way again rather than being sent home.
The reason for this unity is the fact that they believe in what they are fighting for and they are fighting a common enemy. When you know what you are fighting for, you whom you are fighting, you know the danger and you know that you need each other to be victorious, you are unified.
How about us? I think the reason why the church so often lacks unity is the fact that we are so often unappreciative of the importance of the battle we are waging and we forget who our enemy really is. If we realized the fact that we are living in enemy territory and waging a war against an insurgency, it seems that we’d have little time to criticize each other! As a church, we need each other and we simply cannot allow ourselves to be distracted from the opportunities that the Lord has given us.
So what does this have to do with us? I think there is a tendency to see this as sort of a cosmic reality – a battle being played out between God and Satan. And perhaps we think that this battle has little to do with us. But I think not. I think are practical applications for us. Several, in fact.
First, we should take note of Jesus’ and Paul’s emphasis that we are living in the world by God’s design. As Jesus would say, as sheep among wolves. As Paul would say, in enemy territory. We did not send American troops to Iraq and Afghanistan because they were bored and had nothing else to do. We sent them into harm’s way to accomplish a mission. And so it is with us! You and I have the opportunity to participate in what God is doing as He redeems this world through the ministry of Jesus Christ. Being involved in this war against Satan’s insurgency requires that we listen for our orders and take advantage of every opportunity we have to accomplish the mission.
Second, we should do everything in our power to ensure the success of the mission. That includes maintaining our unity and each other’s morale. We really are responsible for each other. What Christians do makes a difference to the church as a whole. I would hope and pray that you and I would take every opportunity to encourage one another, just as the Scriptures admonish us to do.
We’re told in Hebrews, “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”, and, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
I think we get the idea that if we would just refrain from gossip and division, that’s enough. No, the Scriptures make it plain that just as in a battle, we need to bear each other up and be prepared to sacrifice for one another. What would that mean for you today and this week? Where might God be calling you to lift up a brother or sister this week?
Lastly, we should realize that we are living for something larger than ourselves and our own self-interest. That’s a big part of the reason that I believe God left us here to begin with. It is said that the armed forces make ordinary people into better men and women. The army says, “Be all that you can be.” The Marines are looking for “A few good men.” Fighting shoulder to shoulder for a righteous cause makes us all better. It helps mold us into the people that we were meant to be.
It is both an adventure and a privilege to be counted worthy to be left here to defend the cause of Christ against Satan’s insurgency.
If you do not have a relationship with Christ, this morning’s message might be either a discouragement or an encouragement. Make no mistake, siding with Christ is the more difficult path. Living only for yourself is easy. It comes naturally, doesn’t it? But the rewards are fleeting and they are few. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained?” There are few people who, when they look honestly at their lives, don’t want live for something more. If you find yourself living for nothing beyond yourself, you are invited to join the Marines. The training is intense, the battle will be tough, but we already know the outcome and we know that we share the victory with Christ. Wouldn’t you like to live for more than yourself?
Jesus invites all of us into an adventure. He invites you, whether you have known him for many years or whether you are just getting to know him this morning, into a cause that lasts for eternity. Let’s live that adventure faithfully, and let’s live that adventure together.
