Real Spiritual Warfare

The real spiritual warfare

Some years ago, psychiatrist and author Dr John White, gave an address in Perth regarding the connection between spiritual warfare and sexuality. He was trying to alert his listeners to the true nature of spiritual warfare, which was commonly viewed in more ‘otherworldly’, even supernaturalist terms. Dr White presented the reality of the battle being fought in the trenches of everyday living.

This is so true when you consider the ultimate example of spiritual warfare, Jesus’ testing in the wilderness (Matt 4: 1-11). What was it that Jesus faced here? In line with John’s comments about ‘all that is in the world’ (1 John 2: 15-17), and the record of the first temptation and fall in Genesis 3, Jesus’ ‘warfare’ centred around core issues of power, ambition, lust and self-focus. This is the real ground of spiritual warfare.

When St Paul declared that 'we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against cosmic powers in heavenly places' (Eph 6: 12), we are tempted to look into another realm for our sphere of battle and consequently miss Paul’s meaning altogether. Paul was trying to show that behind the world’s system and culture there exists ‘powers’ which influence everything. Consequently, it is in cultural trends and streams that we find our battle grounds.

Coupled with the world’s system and its trends is the weakness of our human nature in its present fallen state which finds itself too easily aligned with culture and trends. Hence, as Dr White pointed out, the deification of sex in our modern culture and its easy appeal to our human nature, is where we find a common field of battle. But there are many other such examples in our culture.

For instance, the exaltation of image, muscular power, and power of various kinds, the emphasis on materialism, the focus on the self, a craving for constant amusement, thirst for ultimate pleasure and experience, and so on, are all potent influences in our culture which the enemy uses, inspires and manipulates, and which even reach right into contemporary church life. This doesn’t mean, of course, that behind every temptation or trend there is a demonic being trying to make us succumb, but that the enemy influences cultural trends which find a ready receptor in human nature. As John writes in 1 John 2: 16, ‘For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.’

In this regard, it is crucial that we recognise our status as pilgrims in an alien culture; we are citizens of heaven (Eph 2: 19; Heb 11: 14), and not of this world (the world’s system). Accordingly, we live in a 'wilderness', a foreign culture that constantly tries to ‘press us into its mould’ (Rom 12: 1-2). Unfortunately, in many instances the church has foolishly and unwittingly, in its noble attempts to reach society, taken on a great deal of its culture to ‘speak its language’ and try to win it. Image, high excitement, amusement and information saturation, human power and charisma abound and we have thus ‘allowed the enemy into the temple’ to ‘wield its axes’ (Psa 74) and cut down the pillars so that we, the church, at times look no different from the culture we are trying to reach; rather, it has ‘reached’ us.

Accordingly, our battleground is found in everyday situations. For example, as Paul warned Timothy, he was not to appoint a novice to leadership in case the person became inflated with pride and fell into the ‘condemnation of the devil’ (1 Tim 3: 6-7). Ambition and pride, so commonly exalted in our culture, were the pitfalls here so Paul, ever alert to spiritual warfare, took wise precautions to guard against such an eventuality. Notice he didn’t summon Timothy to conduct a spiritual warfare crusade, but to take prudent decisions to avoid the potential and a fall.

Similarly, Paul called upon the church, obviously through the grace of God and the supply of the Spirit, to make sure there was heartfelt unity and that all differences were settled because failing to do so would ‘give the enemy a foothold’ (Eph 4: 1-6, 25-27). Paul also advised husbands and wives to maintain regular marital relationships, in other words, to have a healthy sex life, otherwise the ‘enemy’ would take advantage, leading to temptation outside marriage and possible sin (1 Cor 7: 1-7). Here again, Paul recognised the influence of cosmic forces in everyday life via the conditioning of culture.

The above leads us to the major themes of the Epistles and why they are so. If spiritual warfare is at the everyday level of temptation, which is so strongly intensified by cultural trends, then we understand why Paul and other NT writers constantly exhorted readers to ‘walk in the Spirit’ (Gal 5: 16, 25), to ‘live humbly’ (Eph 4: 2), to ‘pursue holiness’ (2 Cor 7: 1; Heb 12: 14), to ‘maintain the unity of the faith’ (Eph 4: 1-6), to ‘consider others better than oneself’, to ‘have the same mind as Christ’ (Phil 2: 1-5), to ‘think soberly’ (Rom 12: 3), to ‘avoid every appearance of evil’ (1 Thess 5: 22), to not fail to meet together and to exhort each other (Heb 10: 24-26), and to be constantly in prayer (1 Thess 5: 17). In other words, the Early Church was engaged in spiritual warfare through a very practical Christianity, empowered by the Spirit and dependant on the grace of God, for its life and holiness.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the exhortation to ‘be constantly in prayer’. Prayer, of course, is how we access our spiritual strength through dependence on the grace of Christ. Conversely, all that is in the world and therefore leavened with and thus influenced by Satan, militates against prayer, which is everything that the values of the world are not. Consider such things as intense excitement, self-focus, oversaturated information transmission, amusement and powerful, attractive imagery and here you have everything that prayer is not! On the other hand, prayer, which is absolutely necessary for us to live the way Jesus has provided for us to live, is the most neglected feature of our contemporary Christianity and no wonder. It is the most countercultural activity. Such has been the ‘success’ of the cosmic powers against which we wrestle!

Consequently, if we are to ‘stand’ against the powers of this world (Eph 6: 10-11), we need to be totally counter-cultural and ‘pray with all kinds of prayer, at all times, for all the saints’ (Eph 6: 18). We will need to be ‘devoted to prayer’ (Acts 2: 42; Col 4: 2), to ‘pray one for another’ and ‘pray for each other that our sicknesses will be healed’ and our sins forgiven (James 5: 16). Thus a primary weapon of our warfare is prayer, or as Bunyan put it, ‘All-prayer’ (Pilgrim’s Progress, pt. 1, s. 4). The other primary weapons are the preaching of the gospel and living the gospel. This is what Paul meant in Ephesians 6: 13-17 when he said to ‘put on the whole armour of God’, not some weirdly wonderful ‘battling in the heavenlies’ - which, by the way, was already completed when Christ ‘spoiled principalities, making an open show of them’ (Eph 1: 20-23; Col 2: 15). Even when Paul spoke about the ‘weapons of our warfare not being carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds’ (2 Cor 10: 3-6), he meant the proclamation of the gospel which will bring down arguments and ungodly opposition.

Thus with Dr John White we agree; real spiritual warfare is found in everyday events where we perpetually encounter a foreign culture as pilgrims travelling to a heavenly destination. Of course we need to have contact with the world and deal with it to work, eat and live our lives, as well as to serve the people in it. But may we do so in a way that befits pilgrims who do not in any way belong to this present system. Let us take Peter’s advice, then, to ‘save ourselves [and each other] from this present evil generation’ (Acts 2: 40) and stop being friends with the world (1 John 2: 15) other than to exist within it, preserve the planet that contains it, and love the people that inhabit it.