Naming the Enemy
Setting our sights on the true enemies of our souls
A video transcript of this article is available on YouTube.
The following is a draft of the first chapter of a forthcoming League of Believers eBook titled Outwitted: How Christians Have Been Duped by the Enemy and What We Can Do to Wise Up.
“I have done this so that we should not be outwitted by Satan. For we are not ignorant of his schemes.”
—Paul, 2 Corinthians 2:11
“Si vis pacem, para bellum”
“If you want peace, prepare for war.”
—Vegetius, Concerning Military Matters, 4th/5th c. AD
The argument
Because we modern American Christians have taken our sights off of the true enemies of our souls and are largely unaware of their tactics, we continually fall for their deceitful ploys, swallowing the bait hook, line, and sinker (James 1:14). It is only by calling out our adversaries by name and wising up to their schemes that we will be able to overcome them as conquerors through Christ Jesus (Romans 8:37).
That is the basic argument of this book. In what follows we will elaborate on each aspect of this thesis from the scriptures, applying the principles we uncover there to our everyday lives as Christians. We begin by identifying the nature and names of our true spiritual enemies.
Know your enemy
In his oft quoted book of military proverbs The Art of War, the Chinese philosopher-general Sun Tzu famously admonishes his reader to “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”1 Expanding on this concept, he notes that just as “Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows,” so too “the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.”2 In other words, our battle plans must be shaped by the nature of our enemy and the terrain on which we meet him.
Indeed, if we remain ignorant of our enemy and his plans, then we are in a sense defeated before we ever set foot on the battlefield. Again, from Sun Tzu: “Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”3
Christians are tasked with waging war against enemies without (that is, outside of us) and enemies within, on terrains as imposing as the gates of hades (Matthew 16:18) and as treacherous as the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9). If we remain uninformed and unequipped regarding the nature of the conflicts we are engaged in, then we are doomed to fail.
It is only by the wisdom and power of God almighty and His unfailing word that we can prevail over the foes who oppose us as Christians, for they are far too strong for us on our own (Psalm 18:17).
The enemies without
For the Christian, the enemies without are primarily spiritual in nature, rather than physical. This is a critical, yet often missed, point and one of which we need constant reminding.
Simply put, the Christian’s warfare is first and foremost waged in the spiritual realm, fighting by the Spirit of God against spirits that are not from God (1 John 4:1).
The locus classicus of this Biblical teaching is found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (6:12, emphasis mine):
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Although it is popular of late for Christians to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the cultural and political enemies of this passing age, such a focus misses Paul’s point here entirely. While such efforts do have their place, and not an unimportant one, the efforts we make in the spiritual dimension—which lies upstream of culture, politics, and everything else—must take priority over efforts pertaining to mere earthly affairs, lest our energies be invested with minimal return.4
If we want our punches to truly land, and with an eternal impact that will outlast even the most resounding temporal victories, then we must take aim at the spiritual animus behind our earthly opponents, fighting hell fire with the fire of the Spirit. The first step toward doing this is identifying the spirits we are contending with.
For the Christian, it is Satan and his dreary band of fallen angels (aka, “demons”), in cahoots with the fallen systems of this present evil age (aka, “the world”), that are our real spiritual enemies “out there.” The mundane, flesh-and-blood enemies we so frequently focus on are but pawns of these more sinister, shadowy forces.
If we do not keep these spiritual enemies in the forefront of our minds, all our culture warring and politicking will amount to little more than fading noise (1 Corinthians 13:1), an ephemeral flailing at the wind (1 Corinthians 9:26; cf. Ecclesiastes 1:14).
The enemy within
We have identified the enemies without, but what about the enemy within?
Christian Soviet dissident and author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” adding poignantly, “And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”5 The Bible refers to this dark reality within each of us as “the flesh,”6 the sinful, unregenerate human nature that represents our default, factory setting as members of Adam’s fallen race (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12). As such, and in spite of its literal meaning,7 the internal flesh, like the external entities listed above, is a spiritual enemy, and one that we are only all too familiar with.
G. K. Chesterton famously observed that original sin8 is the only Christian doctrine that can be proven empirically, given that the evidence for it is all around, and indeed within, us.9 We are all more or less acquainted with that side of us that tends toward selfishness and vice, the proverbial “devil on the shoulder”10 vying for our allegiance over the “better angels of our nature.”11 Our flesh is the self-justifying, self-preserving part of us that rises up with clenched-fisted defiance of God and His ways—and it does not just roll over and die the moment we are converted.
For even the saintliest of Christians, the flesh is the ever-present spoiler that keeps us from fully conforming to the law we both love and loathe (Romans 7:14–25). It is altogether evil and incorrigible (Romans 7:18, 8:7). It must die if we are to live, but it does not back down without a fight.
Worst of all, the flesh is our most dependable internal ally of Satan and the world, forming the original “axis of evil”: “the world, the flesh, and the devil” (Ephesians 2:1–3). Not only does our flesh wage war against our souls by enticing us to sin (James 1:14; 1 Peter 2:11), Satan and the worldly enterprise he oversees (1 John 5:19) send a constant barrage of temptations our way each day, aiming them squarely at our sin nature’s most vulnerable soft spots (1 John 2:16).
They say “When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.”12 But the bad new is, this side of glory, the Christian will never have this luxury. In this life, our enemies outside of us will always have a willing accomplice inside of us.
This is why we must always be on watch. We can never let our guard down. The threats in our three-front holy war are always present and may come at any time and from any direction.
Hope for victory
Are you starting to sense the gravity of the dangers we face in this protracted war we call the Christian life?
Miserable wretches that we are! What hope is there for us against such formidable opposition?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
He is greater than all who trouble us (2 Thessalonians 1:6; 1 John 3:20, 4:4) and His victory can become ours by faith (Romans 7:24, 25, 16:20; 1 Corinthians 15:57; 1 John 5:4, 5).
Despair not, good Christian soldier (2 Timothy 2:3). The Captain of our salvation (Hebrews 2:10) has overcome the world (John 16:33), crucified the flesh (Galatians 5:24), and crushed the devil’s flat head (Genesis 3:15).
“What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).
Facing evil head-on
We have identified our enemies and the primary realm in which we face them. In the coming installment of the League of Believers, we will take a long, hard look at each member of the unholy alliance of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” a task as unenviable as it is essential. Don’t miss it.
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The Art of War. The full quote often reads something like: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Ibid.
Ibid.
As we will see, spiritual warfare lies logically upstream of earthly warfare, such that time spent engaging in the former serves both the former and the latter. In other words, given the nature of how the spiritual and physical realms interact both causally and ontologically, Christians need not view the relationship between fighting “the good fight of faith” (1 Timothy 6:12) and everyday skirmishes against tangible enemies as a zero sum game. According to scripture, dichotomies pitting “heavenly mindedness” against “earthly good” are profoundly false.
The Gulag Archipelago.
Although the root word for this term in Greek is sarx (σάρξ), and can refer to literal bodily flesh, the term as it is used here, as well as in numerous places in the New Testament, refers metaphorically to fallen human nature, rather than to physical skin, muscle, and fat tissue.
See previous footnote.
Not the original sin committed in the Garden of Eden per se, but rather the guilty, corrupt human condition we inherit from Adam and Eve after their fall from the original state of innocence and goodness at creation.
This argument is found in chapter 2 of his classic work Orthodoxy.
Of course, our fallen nature is our fallen nature, and not an angelic one outside of us. The “shoulder angel” metaphor is not a strictly scriptural one, but is mentioned here as a familiar cultural analog for the Biblical concept of “the flesh.”
Abraham Lincoln used this phrase in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861.
This saying is attributed to an ancient African proverb and sometimes also to Winston Churchill.