Who is Your Enemy?

In life, all of our conflict comes from our enemy. Every trouble, every angst, each and every assault on our soul, all from the same enemy. Yet, people remain unclear that they are even in a fight, let alone who it is they are actually contending with. Remember the movie, “The Usual Suspects” and the famous line? “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.” People not only doubt his existence, but are woefully unaware of the actual source of every negative, painful thing that ever happened in their lives. In not being able to properly discern the spiritual, folks are left guessing and assigning meaning to things that have no meaning. Almost as if one got out of life what they put into it with good results favoring those doing right and bad results happening to those that got it wrong. In a perfect world absent evil maybe, but that isn’t how things happen in our world. The Devil, that does exist, is the source of your problems and the source of all of our problems. Yet he hides out in your thinking and dutifully and relentlessly convinces you that the problem is always you. You are doing something wrong. You and your bad behavior are bringing about all this trouble you are facing. You are not worthy and on… Or, categorically worse, the message changes to God being the one bringing about this pain to teach you a lesson or humble you or some other godawful thing to say about God. God is never your enemy. God never brings darkness or pain or suffering ever. “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” But, my friends you do have an enemy working tirelessly to keep you away from the true God and working tirelessly to convince you he (the devil) doesn’t even exist or is just part of man’s mental construct in an attempt to assign meaning or something. If you are ever going to win the fight, assuming you know you are in a fight, you have to know who your enemy is and how to beat him. Oh, he’s out there whether you ever acknowledge it or not. But, if you want to win, you have to know who your enemy is.

The whole ’cause and effect’ is a beautiful thing when it happens absent hidden causes. People don’t just fail because they are weak or lazy or are somehow morally inferior. People are attacked by an enemy they cannot see. Some more than others. People who love God and stand for God become prime targets. “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” You can’t judge a man because he is “going through it” if you know what I mean. Neither can you assume someone has a good life because of where they live or what they own. The Devil, the adversary, the enemy of mankind and his evil host are the true cause of every negative effect you have ever experienced. Every sickness, every disease, every heartache, every loss, every life-sucking dilemma that ever held you and I captive, for an hour, for a day, for a year, for a lifetime, all was initiated by him, in darkness, all in opposition to God. Sometimes you are not getting the right effects (results) because you are still unaware of the cause. “Be not ignorant of Satan’s devices.” You have been fighting with the wrong enemy, people, who are not your real enemy. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood…but against spirits…” Your beef is not with your wife or some guy at work or a relative that drives you nuts. Your beef is with what is behind it. OMG the irritating people don’t know it or what is behind it either. They just repeated what popped up. Life starts to make a lot more sense when you realize what is really going on. You no longer have to fit God and His ever-present goodness into some terrible thing that happened to you. You no longer have to take full blame for every bad thing you endured. You no longer have to question why a good God “let” something happen. And, for once maybe, you can know why bad things happen to any people! You have to know who your enemy is in order to defeat him.

The fight we are in, yes including you, is the spiritual competition. It is classic good vs. evil and it is very real. The battle takes place in your mind, chiefly via the thoughts you choose and the thoughts you refuse. What you think about does matter as much as any fighter must, “Protect yourself at all times.” Some thoughts are designed to hurt you. They carry a heavy dose of bad intentions. Some thoughts attack your worthiness before God and convict you over and over of sin. Some thoughts seek to make you question, then doubt, then worry ending always in fear. These thoughts with almost unlimited disguises are your enemy. If indulged they lead only to more of the same. They are indiscoverable because they originate in another realm, the spirit realm. You win or lose right between your ears. You receive the fruit of what you believe (or have been talked into believing) both good and bad. How many poor souls live under the mighty rule of fear? If you are ever going to win this spiritual fight, you have to learn God’s Word and get born again. In that light and by that Light you can win. You can learn to replace those wrong thoughts with thoughts that are true, not because the world said so, but because God said so. “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” Know who your real enemy is so you can fight to win.

Just some good thoughts…