Know Your Enemies
In this week’s guest blog, Teaching Pastor, Andrew Wilson, discusses the importance of maintaining a biblical view of who is and is not our enemy in today’s divided world.
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We talk about enemies less than we used to.
It may not feel that way. The amount of infighting, mudslinging, name-calling and downright nastiness in public discourse today, including within the church, is both tragic and self-defeating. Slander and snark have been normalized in many circles. Under cover of social media, professing Christians regularly talk about our brothers and sisters in ways that would embarrass our neighbours. So thinking and talking about enemies, in these fractious and divided times, might sound like the last thing we need.
Yet the opposite is true, and for two reasons. The first is biblical: the Scriptures talk about enemies with robust clarity and remarkable frequency, including in ways that we are explicitly urged to imitate. The second is cultural. Confusion about who exactly the enemies of God are, and how the church should respond to them, makes Christians more likely to attack one another, not less. That is a significant challenge in this generation.
Take the biblical argument first. There are around four hundred references to an “enemy” or “enemies” in Scripture (by way of comparison, that is roughly twice as many occurrences as the words “gracious” and “grace”). Admittedly, plenty of those occurrences relate to political or military opponents of Israel that no longer exist. But plenty of them do not. Some refer to those who love the world, hate the cross and hate the church (Phil 3:18; Jas 4:4; Rev 11:5, 12). Many relate to the work of the Messiah himself, who will “possess the gate of his enemies” (Gen 22:17), whose “hand will be on the neck of [his] enemies” (Gen 49:8), and who—in the biblical text most frequently quoted by Jesus, and by the New Testament as a whole—will sit at the LORD’s right hand “until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Ps 110:1). Apparently, crushing the head of his enemies is a central feature of what Christ came to do. It was the subject of the first ever prophecy about him, way back in the garden (Gen 3:15), and it is prefigured in numerous head-crushing stories in the Hebrew Bible, from Sisera and Abimelech to Dagon and Goliath.
More pointedly, the apostles urge the church to pray and sing the Psalms, which are chock-full of prayers for deliverance from (and the destruction of!) our enemies. Unless we are prepared to cut these all out with scissors, like an updated Jefferson Bible, we will need to find a meaningful way of understanding and praying these; after all, even the most peaceful, pastoral and popular Psalm of all features a table being spread “in the presence of my enemies” (Ps 23:5). We need to ask: what does it look like to pray “break the teeth of the wicked” (Ps 3:7) while continuing to “love your enemies” (Matt 5:44)? Am I asking God to overthrow ISIS, or Vladimir Putin? Crush the devil and all his works? Vindicate Jesus? Destroy my own sin? Remove all evil on the day of judgment? All of the above? (I have found Trevor Laurence’s Cursing With God hugely helpful on this.)
Culturally, our current context makes a biblical view of enmity more important, not less. And there is a curious paradox here. As modern Westerners have become less convinced by the existence of the devil, we have become more inclined to see one another as diabolical. (As various historians have pointed out, we now substitute Hitler/Nazis/Holocaust for Satan/demons/hell, but the effect is much the same.) The two trends are connected. We know in our boots that radical evil exists, so if we don’t know precisely who our enemies are, we don’t see them nowhere; we see them everywhere. Most of us avoid using terms like “enemies” or “the wicked”, of course, preferring a combination of slurs, expletives, spiteful epithets and slanderous generalisations. But even when the language of enmity disappears, the experience of it does not. You will know that if you have ever rejoiced at the fall of someone else, or lamented their success.
One solution to the enmity doom-loop is greater clarity on who our true enemies are (and are not). Sin, Death, the world, the flesh, the devil: these are the foes whom Christ came to crush, and they are at work in us, as well as in the people we dislike. Our real enemies are Sauron and Saruman, not Théoden; indeed loving Théoden requires hating Saruman, and seeking to deliver him from the wizard’s power. Similarly, we love the rich young ruler by hating Mammon. We love the Ephesians—and the Londoners and the New Yorkers—by hating idolatry. For our struggle is against the spiritual forces of evil, not flesh and blood (Eph 6:12).
“Every group has a devil,” I remember a wise pastor saying several years ago. “In which case, ours might as well be the devil.”
[This article was originally published at Christianity Today.]
