Our Unseen Battle; The Real Enemy

But this morning we are going to begin a

new sermon series for the next six weeks

um on the sixth chapter from Paul's

letter to the Ephesians. Uh, and Paul

uses here battle imagery, a soldier's

armor, uh, as this larger metaphor for

what it is to live in our broken, fallen

world, um, and still try and remain

victorious, still try and hold fast to

who we are as the people of Christ. Um,

and it's a beloved passage of scripture

for I know probably many of you. And I

think that's because it gives us some

something like conceptually concrete to

grab onto to make sense of what it feels

like to fight our own battles, to

wrestle our own demons. Uh, and so let's

begin this morning by hearing the word

of the Lord from Ephesians 6:es 10- 20.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in

his mighty power. put on the full armor

of God so that you can take your stand

against the devil's schemes. For our

struggle is not against flesh and blood,

but against the rulers, against the

authorities, against the powers of this

dark world and against the spiritual

forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore, put on the full armor of God,

so that when the day of evil comes, you

may be able to stand your ground. And

after you've done everything to stand,

stand firm then with the belt of truth

buckled around your waist and the

breastplate of righteousness in place.

and with your feet fitted with the

readiness that comes from the gospel of

peace. In addition to all this, take up

the shield of faith with which you can

extinguish all the flaming arrows of the

evil one. Take the helmet of salvation

and the sword of the spirit which is the

word of God. And pray in the spirit on

all occasions and with all kinds of

prayers and requests. With this in mind,

be alert and always keep on praying for

all the Lord's people. And pray also for

me that whenever I speak, words may be

given me so that I will fearlessly make

known the mystery of the gospel for

which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray

that I may declare it as declare it

fearlessly as I should. This is the word

of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Now I know for many of you this is a

familiar text. Um, but when you think

about swords and shields and helmets and

battle, um, what comes to mind for you?

I I mean, maybe you grew up in

children's church or went to a vacation

Bible school that was centered around

the armor of God and and you see

something like this.

Maybe it feels a bit charming and

cartoonish for you when you think about

the armor of God. Or or maybe you did a

Bible study in adolescence or a

devotional as an adult on the armor of

God and it's something more like this

that comes to mind.

You're noticing a strong like military

leader who's on the offensive swinging

the giant sword, right? Like out to

fight over the enemy and win the battle.

I mean, countless sermons have been

preached on this text. I mean, maybe you

think of something like this

where it's really the armor is defensive

in nature and so it's really about

protecting you from your enemies.

Now, no matter what your familiarity be

might be, no matter what sort of image

comes to mind for you, um it's really

clear that Paul is trying to be

intentional here when he uses this

metaphor, when he draws on armor to help

make his point. And we're going to spend

the next six weeks unpacking what it is

he's trying to teach us.

But I want to say right up front that

this kind of metaphor may cause us some

discomfort, some distress. A and rightly

so. Rightly so. We live in a world

that's rife with violence and war and

genocide

as Paul and Jesus did too. actually

um the Ephesians probably also felt

pretty uneasy with this metaphor.

But even more, our own country has

become so incredibly divided, so deeply

polarized, so like us versus them that I

think that you can get a little too cozy

with this metaphor. And if you're not

really careful, it can be not just

unhelpful, but wildly dangerous

actually.

Because we can, if we're not

intentional, we can start to believe

that our battle that we're fighting

against those people over there, that

God's on our side in that battle. that,

you know, whoever it is we don't like,

those people who think differently than

us, who vote differently than us, that

God also probably doesn't like them

either.

And so, if we're not careful, we might

believe the lie that our enemies are

also God's enemies.

Countless wars throughout history have

been fought under such an illusion.

So yes, it's a complicated metaphor,

but that is precisely why Paul uses it.

And it's actually why I wanted to preach

through it for the next six weeks.

Because that sort of dangerous thinking,

it's in the cultural water right now in

a really pronounced way.

We saw it play out again this week in

Minneapolis, didn't we?

when an ICE agent shot and killed Renee

Good.

And and no matter what it is you think

about immigration reform, that's not

even why I bring it up. Why I bring it

up is because what we saw happen

immediately afterwards

was that everybody declared the enemy on

either side.

And so you had half half the news

outlets declaring that Renee good, she

was the bad guy. And then you had half

the news outlets saying ICE and

immigration and everybody else, they're

the bad guy.

There's just really no denying that in

our culture, we have decided it's okay

to villainize and dehumanize the people

we don't agree with.

We name who we're against. We name the

bad guy. And then we're allowed to do

whatever we want in the name of

conquering our enemies.

Now friends, this is not just like a

problem out there. It's also seeped into

American Christianity into the larger

religious landscape in a really

pronounced way.

Um I find it deeply concerning.

And here's just like one subtle way you

can see it playing out. Um, and maybe

you've noticed this in the last 10 to 15

years, so much of like the worship

music, hymns, and liturgy that have been

written have become increasingly more

and more violent.

More and more about conquering our

enemies,

it's absolutely skyrocketed. I'll give

you just a couple examples. Here's a few

lines from a super popular song written

in 2018 called Raise a Hallelujah. You

you might know it.

I raise a hallelujah in the presence of

my enemies. I raise a hallelujah louder

than my unbelief. I raise a hallelujah.

My weapon is a melody. I raise a

hallelujah. Heaven comes to fight for

me.

It's subtle, but can you see it?

Let me give you another one. This is

just written in 2023 by Elevation called

Praise. I'll praise in the valley,

praise on the mountain. I'll praise when

I'm sure, praise when I'm doubting. I'll

praise when outnumbered, praise when

surrounded, because praise is the waters

my enemies drown in.

Now, you may not have heard these songs,

especially if you've come here for

worship, and that's because we're quite

careful about the lyrics we sing at

First Press.

Um, in our particular moment in time

when folks are not just attacking each

other with lyrics, but actually shooting

each other,

I'm just not sure it's helpful to sing

songs that sound like battlecries.

I'm just not sure our worship ought to

be glorifying in the drowning of our

enemies.

Now, thankfully, more and more people

are coming to recognize this trend. In

an article about the rise of this

violent imagery in liturgy, Dr. Perigo,

a professor of theology and worship,

writes that in many of these songs, it's

often not clear who the enemy really is.

Who are we fighting against? Who's

drowning?

Are we talking about making our enemies

God's enemies?

Confusion about who exactly God's

enemies are and how the church should

respond to them? That makes Christians

more likely to attack one another. Not

less.

Not less.

And this is the point of this whole

sermon series.

This is why I wanted to talk about this

because the truth is that as people and

Christians included, it is really

tempting to want to turn the folks that

we don't agree with into our enemies.

We all feel that pressure.

It's too tempting to want to attack each

other, to judge, to criticize, to cut

off, to cancel.

But it is ruining us.

It's ruining us. It's tearing apart our

families. It's literally destroying

democracy.

Wars are being started.

It feels to me like a pastoral

emergency. like truly.

And as important as it will be

to sort of

address the outrage

and the hostility that we see out there

with practices from Christ on loving and

forgiving each other, on reconciliation.

Spoiler alert, that's what all those

pieces of armor are actually all about.

We'll get there. We'll get there

starting next week.

The first

I think the most important thing we have

to do before we even go there is I think

we have to unmask like the real enemy.

I have I have to figure out how to see

this unseen battle

that's happening around us.

Because according to Jesus, according to

Paul in Ephesians 6, there is a battle

being fought.

There is absolutely a fight to be had.

But but what is the battle?

Who's the enemy?

Because as you probably suspect I'm

going to say already,

it is not ever

one another.

Not ever one another.

Our enemy is never our fellow human

beings who are made in the image of God

who are at their core unshakably good.

Regardless of how they behave,

regardless of how they think, no matter

how different they are than us,

people are not our enemy.

Which is why Paul says here, our battle,

it is not against flesh and blood. We

aren't fighting each other.

No, our real enemy, the real war we're

in, it is against evil

and darkness.

It's against all the evil and spiritual

forces at work

that cause us to destroy and dehumanize

one another.

Over these next six weeks, we're going

to talk about God's armor,

what it's for. We'll get there. But

before we do, we're going to have to

talk about evil.

We're gonna have to talk about Satan.

We're going to have to talk about here

what Paul calls the power of this dark

world and the spiritual spiritual forces

of evil. The powers for short.

It's what Jesus and the disciples often

call Satan, demons. It's what the early

church called sin, death, and the devil.

But as we do that and as we head into

this this series, I need you to know

four things, okay? Right off the top,

and I need you to pay attention, and

they're important.

Number one,

evil, spiritual darkness, Satan, demons,

whatever you want to call it,

it is all real.

It's real.

And it doesn't matter if you can see it.

Evil exists. I think we all know that.

But this force of evil at work in the

world, it is real. And you can turn on

the news and see it. Or you can look at

your own painful family history. Or like

me, you can look in the mirror.

Right? We all, if we slow down and think

about it, can recognize that evil is

real.

Even if we can't see it, even if there's

an unseen enemy that we can't quite

figure out, evil is real and it is a

problem. So that's number one. Number

two is defining and understanding evil

is very complicated and very difficult.

So I want to just name that right off

the bat. And part of that is because the

biblical waters, they're just muddy.

They're muddy.

It's really true that there's not clear

definitions for any of this in

scripture. And if any pastor has told

you otherwise, they're full of it.

There's not clear definitions. I want to

remind you that this Bible we have, it's

a library of story and history and

allegory and prophecy and poetry. And

nowhere in that library do we get a

dictionary.

It's a real bummer. I wish we had one. I

do.

But nowhere do you find a clear

definition of what evil is, a clear

systematic explanation of what Satan is.

You don't.

You don't. And so, let me break this

down a little bit for you. I'm actually

going to host a class with Jared, not

today after church, but next week after

church to talk a little bit more about

this for those of you that are after

this sermon going to be nerding up about

it. Um, we'll talk about it in in more

detail. But throughout the Old

Testament, throughout the Hebrew

scriptures, you need to know that evil

is often it's characterized in images,

in pictures. And so you get a snake in

the garden or you get a dragon or a

Leviathan, a sea monster in the prophets

in the poetry. You get a fallen angel of

God who is part of the heavenly court

and at least in the book of Job seems to

act like a district attorney accusing

God's people.

But whether you're you're talking about

a serpent or an angel, the Hebrew

scriptures, they refer to this imagery

as Satan, which comes right from the

Hebrew word Satan. We've just changed

its pronunciation.

But here's what I need you to know.

Every single time the word Satan in

Hebrew is in your scriptures, it is not

just Satan on its own like a proper name

as if we were talking about a character,

you know, pitchfork, horns, red leather.

No,

every single time Satan is used, you

have ha satan.

And ha is the definite article. It's the

an A.

And so it's a term that means the

adversary or an accuser. It's not a

proper name. It's a title or a function.

It's the one who opposes.

The one who accuses,

not some evil character that rules the

underworld or that's out on a mission to

attack God. Not in the Hebrew

scriptures.

In fact, there's even a passage in the

book of Numbers where Yahweh, the angel

of the Lord, is opposing one of his own

prophets who's gone astray. And it says

that Yahweh, the Lord, stood in the

prophet's way as an adversary. That

Yahweh was ha Satan,

the Lord,

because the Lord was literally acting as

the opposer in the situation.

Now, by the time you get to the New

Testament, that's the Hebrew scriptures.

Now, by the time you get to the Greek

New Testament,

you do and and that's like 500 plus

years later than the Old Testament

scriptures have been written. A lot of

Hebrew ideas are getting mixed in with a

lot of Greek ideas. And so, this Greco

Roman sort of cosmology has infiltrated

both the Hebrew understanding of the

world and the Christian what would

become the Christian understanding. So

emerging in the New Testament

narratives, you do start to see this

like Satan devil character arise in a

more pronounced way where we're naming

this character. We're talking about

Satan. We're talking about Satan and

then his lesser powerful but still evil

demons.

And these characters, they are at work

in the world

causing chaos, pain, and suffering

either by tormenting people. That's what

we often see in the New Testament

stories, or by tempting people to

participate in evil, to participate with

evil.

But even still, this is like something

has happened between the Hebrew

scriptures being written and the Greek

scriptures being written that the whole

idea and conceptual understanding and

framework for what evil looks like has

shifted in the narrative.

Which is why when you start to really

dig into it, understanding the devil,

understanding Satan is a little more

complicated than you might think. It

really is.

it's probably not what you first assume.

So that's the second thing. The third

thing is that the cosmology, the context

is really, really important here. The

other reason this is so complicated, it

has to do with how vastly different our

cosmology is than the folks that were

living at this time. And so how they

understood how the world was made, the

difference between good and evil and the

fight between them, all of that is

really different. They had a whole lot

more room for mystery and imagery than

we do in our own understanding of of the

cosmos of good versus evil.

It's it's why Jesus can go around and

reference Satan and talk about demons

and he just assumes everybody knows what

he means. He he casts out demons and no

one's like, "Wait, Jesus, can you tell

us what a demon is?"

They all know it's part of their

cosmology. It's part of their

understanding and framing of the world.

It's why Peter, when he's talking about

suffering of all things, says this. He

says, "Be al be alert and of sober mind.

Your enemy, the devil, prowls around

like a roaring lion, looking for someone

to devour. Resist him, standing firm in

the faith because you know that the

family of believers throughout the world

is undergoing the same kind of

sufferings."

Friends, we do not think like this.

We don't. Our cosmology is different. We

don't explain suffering by like a

prowling lion.

We explain it materially,

physically, scientifically.

We rely on things like DNA and trauma

history and social influences and mental

health and medical diagnosis to make

sense of our own experiences of

suffering in the world. And as advanced

and helpful as our own cosmology is, and

it is, I would argue that it doesn't

always have enough room,

enough imagination, enough mystery to

help us make sense of a fuller picture

of what evil means in this world.

And unless you read a lot of Lewis and

Tolken,

it can be really hard in our own limited

cosmology.

Now, okay. Fourth and finally, and you

need to, this is the most important

thing as we head into this series.

I need you to know that Satan and evil,

sin, death, the devil, they have already

ultimately been defeated in the death

and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We

just sang about it and declared it over

and over for the first half of our

service.

This battle has already been fought and

won.

That is what Christ came to do actually

to come and let evil do its very worst

and then to conquer over it in death and

resurrection to defeat it once and for

all so that it will not have a final

victory over humanity. It will not get

the last word. The battle has already

been won in Christ. But of course, look

around. Look in your own life. We know

that our world is still mired in

darkness.

That much is clear. So even if evil has

ultimately lost the war, it sure hasn't

been eradicated yet. Not in my life and

probably not in yours.

Paul tries to explain this period

between

a victory being declared and realized in

1 Corinthians 15. He says that all will

be made alive and free in Christ. The

end will come when Jesus hands over the

kingdom to God the Father after he has

destroyed all dominion, authority, and

power. For he must reign until he has

put all his enemies under his feet.

We're promised over and over in

scripture that the victory is assured.

That that is what happened on the cross

and in the resurrection.

But Christ is still actively destroying

evil, putting all the enemies under his

feet because not every enemy has

surrendered yet. And not everyone has

heard the news that the battle has been

won.

It made me think of Junth in Texas.

If you guys don't know the history of

Junth, on June 19th, 1865, US soldiers

had to arrive in Gavston

to announce to enslaved folks that they

were free.

But they'd actually been freed two and a

half years before that

in the Emancipation Proclamation.

But no one told them.

No one set them free.

The evil power that is slavery went on

for years, holding on tight until news

of the victory was finally communicated

and enforced,

effectively won. Finally.

And so, friends, evil has been defeated,

but we are still in that time of putting

everything under Christ's feet. And even

more, here is the thing that we are to

be doing in the world. Our call

is to go and be the people that go to

all the places in this world that don't

yet know that the battle has been won

and announce that they actually are

free.

That love has indeed conquered death,

no matter what anybody else has told

them. That they actually don't have to

be captives to sin and evil anymore.

But friends, we're never going to be

able. Never. Hear me. This is like why

I'm preaching this. We're never going to

be able to announce that freedom and

we're never going to be able to live in

it ourselves

if we take all the people that we

disagree with and make them our enemies.

It won't work. We can't turn on one

another.

Here

in Ephesians 6, Paul tells us that the

real enemy never people, no matter how

much we disagree with them, no matter

how much we may despise their actions,

even when they're deeply evil actions.

He's basically saying, I mean, think

about their own context being occupied

by Rome. He's basically saying, guys,

guys, I hear you. Rome is a problem, but

Rome is not the big real problem.

All the folks that are persecuting you,

it's a problem, but it's not the real

problem.

No.

And if you start to think that human

beings are the real problem, if you make

them your enemy and then treat them like

they are the problem, well then you will

always end up colluding with evil, not

unmasking it.

You will end up participating with evil.

Scholar Entr uses a slightly different

metaphor. He says, "We need to see the

difference between the dangerous puppet

master and all the puppets who are

having their strings pulled.

We're up against the puppet master

who animates and dehumanizes all the

lesser puppets.

We don't fight against the puppets.

Actually, our job is to free the

puppets.

But if we keep all our attention focused

on those puppets, we miss the puppet

master. We pay attention to the smoke

instead of the fire and we end up

colluding with evil.

And so friends, this is why Paul says to

the Ephesians,

put on the armor of God

so that you can stand, so that you can

remember who your real enemy is. and

even more so you can go out and free all

the people still stuck who haven't heard

the good news that the war has already

been win.

Which is why sometimes it's appropriate

to sing songs in worship about battles

about conquering the enemy. It's not

that the metaphor is bad. It's how we

use it because there is an enemy.

Who we declare is being put beneath the

feet of Christ matters. And when our

liturgy, when our worship reminds us

this battle we're in, it's already been

won and declared

that the real foe is not each other or

anybody out there, but is evil itself.

Well, then it becomes a song worth

singing. Especially

for all of us who might be feeling

really battle weary.

I don't know about you, but I am battle

weary

because we are still living in dark and

violent days

even if we know the war has been won.

It's why songs like we will overcome and

of mighty fortresses our God have

endured all these years

because they announce to our world

desperate to hear it that God's love is

stronger

than whatever evil it is we face out

there

or as Paul so beautifully put it

can separate us from the love of Christ

shall trouble or hardship or persecution

or famine or nakedness or danger or

sword

No,

in all these things we are more than

conquerors through him who loved us. For

I am convinced that neither death nor

life, nor angels, nor demons, neither

the present nor the future, nor any

powers, neither height nor depth nor

anything else in all of creation will be

able to separate us from the love of God

that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And so friends, we will get into some of

the practicalities of this armor in

coming weeks, but for today, may you

recognize the real enemy.

May you refuse to attack one another.

May you remember that in Christ, this

battle has already been won. Love has

already conquered over evil. And may you

spend all your best energy announcing

that,

shouting that good news from the

rooftops.

Amen.