Spiritual Warfare – the enemy’s strategy and tactics part 6 – A Murderer

We continue our look at the enemy and his tactics by considering his character as a murderer as the Lord Jesus describes him in John 8:44. A couple of chapters later, in His discussion of the Good Shepherd and the sheep, the Lord Jesus points out that the thief comes only to steal, and to kill, and to destroy (John 10:10) in contrast to His mission which was that we might have life and have it to the full.

Today we want to explore how the enemy employs this strategy to keep people from the Truth, and tries to prevent believers from entering that fullness of life that Jesus came to bring, while trying to cripple the church from fulfilling her mission. Thankfully, we have the Lord’s promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Ekklesia, but that doesn’t mean that our mission is a walk in the park!

If God creates life, the devil wants to kill it. If Jesus has come to bring us abundant life, the devil wants to make sure that we do not enjoy it. But Jesus now holds the keys of death and of hades (Rev. 1:18), so these things are not in his power. Nevertheless, the devil still uses the fear of death to keep men and women in bondage.

People fear death but are fascinated by it – look at the amount of death that features in popular entertainment, often based around a hero who brings solution to some problem by eliminating a load of baddies without getting a single scratch him or herself! I guess a lot of people will identify with the ‘hero’, as death is always something that happens to other people … until it happens to us!

But Jesus has conquered death! This is the great fact and purpose of the Incarnation, as Heb. 2:14-15 tells us:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

So that death is swallowed up in victory! (1 Cor. 15:54). Jesus has abolished death (2 Tim. 1:10) so that death, for the believer, is not a thing. While the unbeliever may ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’, for the believer, death is but the gateway to glory.

The unbeliever would be well advised to take note of Jesus’ words in Luke 12:4-5

“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”

Why do I say people fear death, when we live in a society that seems to glorify death in its entertainment, and appears to be intent on promoting death at either end of life, by abortion or euthanasia? As we noted earlier, in our own consciousness death is always something that happens to other people. We seem to have an inbuilt aversion to the fact of our own mortality – psychologists and other commentators have noted this. This is from a website about dealing with grief:

Most of us are so busy in our daily lives that we spend very little time thinking about our own mortality. It is often only after a friend or family member dies that we take a moment and reflect on the fact that we will someday die ourselves.

This is even true for those who deal with death on a daily basis. When I was in mortuary school, (yes, there is actually a school for this), one of the instructors asked us in class one day if we were afraid of dying. More than half of my classmates, who were planning to be there for others when they were dealing with a death, were terrified at the thought of dying themselves. Most of them had never thought about it. These were people training to be “death care professionals,” and yet they had never given a thought to their own mortality!

Death is a scary thing! Even if we have a level of faith or personal philosophy that we profess regarding our own death, most of us still have an element of fear attached to dying because we have so much living we want to do first. While we may not be scared of death, we may be fearful of the process that leads to it. There is an element of the unknown, attached to dying, which may bring fear to our hearts.

https://bit.ly/mortality1

The current obsession with ‘experiences’ is an evidence of this – seize the moment! Enjoy life to the full! Do it “your way”! The writer goes on to say:

So we have a choice. We can spend our lives fearing death, or enjoy the “Present Moment”, and not worry about that over which we have no control.

Another website has this comment from someone who narrowly escaped death:

… we are hormonally wired to run away from our death. We have an inborn fight-or-flight-or-freeze response to any threat to our existence. So you can’t just write it off as denial.

But on top of that basic impulse, we have gotten spectacularly removed from all sorts of things in nature, including death, the most natural thing there is. If you think about the last 100 years, as technology has advanced and as [we’ve developed] new ways to push back death and extend life, we’ve gotten very seduced by the idea that, on some level, death is almost optional: Don’t smoke, eat kale, and you’ll live forever.

https://bit.ly/mortality2

An Israeli study confirms this.

“The brain does not accept that death is related to us,” the study’s leader Yair Dor-Ziderman told The Guardian on Saturday. “We have this primal mechanism that means when the brain gets information that links self to death, something tells us it’s not reliable, so we shouldn’t believe it.”

https://bit.ly/mortality3

This from Psychology Today

We live in a culture that denies death. We’re taught that death is something we should shy away from, and try to forget about. If we start contemplating our own mortality – so this traditional wisdom goes – we’ll become anxious and depressed. And there’s no doubt that this is often the case.

In psychology, Terror Management Theory suggests that a large part of all human behaviour is generated by unconscious fear of death. This fear generates a fundamental anxiety and unease, which we try to offset with behaviour such as status-seeking or strongly defending the values of our culture. We feel threatened by death and so seek security and significance to defend ourselves against it.

https://bit.ly/mortality4

Our western society also goes to extreme lengths to hide the reality of death. It’s now got to the point where you don’t even have to be present at any time from the passing of your relative (which you probably won’t be present for anyway) right through to the funeral/cremation – the funeral director takes care of the body, sees to the cremation with no-one else present, and just delivers the urn of ashes to you, so you can celebrate in whatever way you choose.

So that’s the ‘flight’ response. What about the ‘fight’ response? Silicon Valley is trying to merge humans and computers (transhumanism) so that we can live forever. If you can’t wait for that, you can have your body frozen and wait for a cure for whatever it was that took your life away (cryogenics – although they might switch the power off before then because of global warming, as the rest of us don’t want to die!).

Yes, fear of death manifests in a number of different ways. The euthanasia movement is another manifestation – now I can take control (so it is believed) of the time and manner of my own departing – I can indeed be the ‘master of my fate … the captain of my soul.’ I am concerned that there is a movement around which is starting to hail death as a friend, where the Bible describes it as an enemy that Jesus conquered through His resurrection. The Greeks viewed death as something to be welcomed – the soul released from the prison of the flesh into the world of ideas – Platonic thought at the root of Gnosticism, which is very much alive today! The physical reality doesn’t matter, what matters is who you think you are.

And ultimately, evolution teaches that life is nothing more than a biochemical accident, so death brings with it a never-ending state of nothingness, back into the slime from which we came. The most common conclusion drawn from this line of thinking is that there is no God, therefore nothing to fear after death in the way of judgement or reward.

What about the ‘freeze’ response? In other cultures, death is a very present reality. In Africa, people have many children because they know they will bury as many as half of them before they reach the age of 5 (and the West is trying to export abortion as the way to deal with this!). But the fear of death is palpable in those cultures – witness the power of the witch doctor. People who are cursed by them die even though there is nothing medically wrong with them. And the fear of that is a controlling factor in daily existence.

So by paralysing people or getting us to deny the reality of death, or hiding it, our enemy has found multiple ways to blind us to the reality of that which we fear (because of our innate fear of the unknown) and so blind the minds of unbelievers to the reality of the Gospel message and their need for Someone to ‘redeem their souls from the power of the grave’

• What man is he that lives and shall not see death, that shall deliver his soul from the power of the grave? (Psa. 89:48)
• But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me. (Psa. 49:15)

Our enemy is a Murderer (John 8:44). Although he had the power of death prior to the Cross (Heb. 12:14), Jesus now has the keys of death (Rev. 1:18), so the enemy works by blinding people to the reality of it, and so keep them from seeking the true source of life – the tactic he employed right back at the beginning when he said to Eve “you shall not surely die” and tempted her to take the action which made sure that she, and the rest of humanity, would die! As Paul reminds us in Rom. 5:12 “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”. Then v.20-21 “but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”

Strategy: Brings death. Our response: Feet/Gospel (brings life) 2 Cor. 4:3-13; Rev. 12:11

Tactics	Our defence
Keeps people from the truth so that they will perish	John 8:31-32, 51
Brings division and hatred into the church	1 John 3:11-16; Eph. 4:3
Causes the world to hate those who follow Christ	John 17:14-17; 16:33
Their feet are swift to shed blood	Isa. 52:7

** Points to consider – are we doing the devil’s work for him?! Character assassination? Whoever calls his brother a fool … Matt. 5:22

Strategy: Persecution and suffering. Our response: Breastplate of righteousness

Tactics	Our defence
Persecution/violence	Acts 5:41-42; 1 Pet. 4:12; James 1:2-4; 2 Thess. 1:5,6
Suffering	1 Pet. 2:18-25; 3:17-18
Physical & emotional sickness	Luke 13:16; James 5:14-16
Mental and physical oppression	Acts 10:38; 2 Cor. 12:7-9