Christian, Who is Your Real Enemy?
“Every time you pray you are saying Jesus is Lord and the powers aren’t. Every time you say grace at a meal you are saying Jesus is Lord and the world and all it offers is His and has no independent authority.”
I will admit it. I completely jumped on the Hunger Games bandwagon when the series came out. It wasn’t just me; my whole family read the books, found things to debate, and just enjoyed the writing that dragged us into the wee hours. Like so many things in our home, from the acceptable uses of barbecue sauce to the finer points of theology, it was a source of much discussion for me and my crew.
I have often marveled at how something I have read years ago can pop into my head at random and just won’t leave me alone. It might be a beautifully detailed description of a great hall or an uncomfortable moment from a gritty novel I regret reading or a precious moment from Beatrix Potter.
This time the thought that kept niggling at me like a little badger in my brain was the reminder in Catching Fire from Haymitch, the mentor, to Katniss, the protagonist: “Remember who the real enemy is.”
At this point in the series, Katniss is seething at the Capitol and everything it represents. For her whole life, the Capitol has been an evil and oppressive regime, destroying everything good and lovely in her life. But now there is an underground rebellion fighting to free the people from this bondage. At this point, however, Katniss is still in the dark. (Stick with me, I have a point). Haymitch knows the full picture and he is asking her to trust those whom she has formerly believed to be the enemy with only the hint that maybe they aren’t the real bad guys.
“Remember who the real enemy is.” There it is. That is the little phrase that has become my mantra to keep me sane lately. After two weeks of going back and forth from feeling adrenaline coursing through my body to complete physical fatigue, I realized I had to sort out some of my thinking if I wanted to proceed with my life in an emotionally and spiritually healthy manner. Instead of drooling into a pillow.
The first order of business in ‘operation: mind sort out’ was to think about the root of my angst. In fact, the angst had progressed to a deep heartache. Everywhere I turned from Facebook to Instagram to real-live conversations with actual people, I was bombarded with conflicting ideologies and not-so-passive aggression. It wasn’t even that I was always disagreeing with people. It was that there were so many thoughts and opinions and arguments.
Are people allowed to have opinions? For sure. Debate? Please. Surprisingly, the more I pondered it all, I realized that I really couldn’t blame anyone else. Not even social media. The problem was me. I was taking it all in, unfiltered, and what the collective message started to tell me was “everyone who doesn’t think like me is the enemy.”
The government. That person who votes for the other party. All other church denominations. The vaccinated. The unvaccinated. The person who doesn’t agree with me. The person who seems to be just telling me what I want to hear. The person who doesn’t even like me. My own wild emotions. All of these. As Jackie Hill Perry coined, “the Saints and the Aint’s.” I was aggravated with everyone and getting really discouraged. But if God can use a donkey to get a thick-headed soothsayer to listen, I think He can use a moment in a dystopian novel meant for teens to get my attention.
If I was to remember who the real enemy is, the question became, who actually is the enemy? Before I answered that, I had to focus for a moment on who my enemy isn’t.
My enemy is not the world. Jon Tyson beautifully worded it in a recent sermon from Bridgetown Church: “So many Christians get offended by the world and they get angry at the world. We’re not at war with the world. We’re at war for the world!” We have been called by Christ to pursue the lost and dying, not wag fingers and roll our eyes. He has called us to be salt and light, pointing the way to His kingdom come. This reminder gave me so much freedom to cease from making value judgements or to feel threatened by people who were not operating out of a biblical worldview.
And my enemy is not other Christians who don’t agree with me one hundred percent. There is too much beautiful and rich common ground between my brothers and sisters in Christ for me to lose precious friends over some of these passing arguments. That is all they are. Passing. Fleeting. Temporary. We can disagree as long as we hold all our opinions loosely.
So who is the primary enemy of our souls? At the risk of sounding spooky weird, the bible speaks very openly about Satan. Jesus said that Satan “has come to steal, kill, and destroy.”(John 10:10) Peter says that he is like “a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.”(IPeter 5:8) He is very much interested in our destruction in whatever form that may take: division, disillusionment, brokenness, death.
And the enemy can also be ourselves. Sigh. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:5-6, ESV) When I am spending more time focused on the disagreements, the bad news, and Facebook feed than I am on the beauty of Christ, meditating on His words, and cultivating a love for His people, it is no wonder I am feeling more death than life.
But God. I love that there is always a “but”. He has made it possible for us to defeat any true enemy of our souls. We have not been abandoned. “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” (Romans 8:10-11, ESV)
Christ is the one who conquered death at the cross. Through His death and victorious resurrection He “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:13-14, ESV) In fact, I would highly recommend a read-through of the first chapter of Colossians to remind you who is in charge and that the enemy can do his worst but Christ is Lord over every aspect of our lives and this world. I love N.T. Wright’s comment referring to Colossians and the authority of Jesus: “Every time you pray you are saying Jesus is Lord and the powers aren’t. Every time you say grace at a meal you are saying Jesus is Lord and the world and all it offers is His and has no independent authority.” (from Following Jesus)
No matter what side of all the divides you find yourself right now, I encourage you to remember that, as a follower of Christ, if you are not experiencing life and peace then perhaps you are exalting your ideologies above the One who “holds all things together.”(Colossians 1:17b, ESV) Meditate on the fact that Christ is Lord overall. He is independent of any crazy thing that is going on around you. He is Lord over all the chaos and all the pain in your heart. And as we stand firm in Him, He will take care of the enemy.
