One of my favorite passages is, "Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 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. 13 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 have done everything, to stand." (Eph. 6)
The Christian life is a war zone. Some people preach that all your problems will be solved if you come to Jesus. On the contrary, sometimes they actually get a lot, lot worse. Sometimes when you give Jesus the steering wheel Satan gets extremely angry and scared actually. He puts an evil target on your back. He puts a hit out for you and sends all his best assassins to try their best to shoot you down. I know this first hand, because he has tried to shoot me down a million times. But I'm still goin. lol, I'm not gonna give up. And yes, I still think Jesus is worth it, he's worth every shot I've taken for following him.
Eph. 6:16 says, "In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one." Flaming arrows. Ouch. Not just arrows but flaming arrows. That's aggressive warfare right there lol.
I don't know if you have seen the opening scene to Gladiator, but everyday the spiritual world is like that all around us. We do not see the battle, but I saw a video once where if we could put on special glasses we would see the angels and demons all around us fighting like crazy. My friend had a vision of this recently which, needless to say, caused him to get converted lol. He said, "Lisa let me tell you, if God allowed everyone to see what I saw, churches would be packed!" And yes they would if we all actually realized what is going on all around us, because we would finally be scared enough to run to God. We would realize we cannot by any stretch of the imagination handle this life on our own. We would see we cannot take on demons on our own, and we would crawl with our tail between our legs to God begging him to help us. As it is though, sadly, we think we can handle it on our own. We say to God, "I got this man. I don't need your help." And he's just waiting on the sidelines waiting for us to tag him in like in a basketball game, but we want to play a one man show.
I love the analogy in the book "Waking the Dead" when John Eldridge says on D-Day in Normandy the soldiers would not have looked around at each other and asked, "Why are they shooting at us?!" lol, in the same say we as Christian should not be surprised when hardship or calamity strikes, because we have an enemy, and he hates us, and he hates God.
So why does Paul say "take up the shield of faith?" Why faith? Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." We do not see God. The only proof we have really that he exists is that we exist and that we are breathing. If we do not have faith it can be very easy to loose heart when trials come. Faith that God is good and that he really, really loves us, despite how incredibly hard our life can be sometimes.
About a month before my husband died we had been planning on starting to try to have a child together. I said to him at one point, "You realize Satan is going to try everything he can to oppose this don't you? He doesn't want to two sold out Christian people who actually really love and care about each other to have a child." Ironically then he died a month later. I was afraid, and apparently for good reason, that Satan would try everything he could to oppose what could have been the beginning of an amazing Christian family.
Satan is more powerful then we give him credit for. He is not all powerful. Ultimately God has sovereign control of the world. But he certainly is capable of doing a lot, and we should have a healthy understanding and respect of what he can do. Because if we don't, we will become lazy in our spiritual walks. We will watch movies we shouldn't, such as horror movies which can really open a door to Satan in our lives. We will not be careful to think about what we are thinking about. Do you ever think about what you are thinking? We will hold bitterness and resentment and lash out in anger at people in our family, friends, or at church.
It is interesting what the bible says about anger, “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27 and do not give the devil a foothold" (Eph. 6). Anger is the only thing mentioned as giving Satan a foothold. Why is that? Because anger is the most powerful emotion. It can be like a raging forest fire if we do not reign it in and control it. What was the first sin after the fall? Anger. Murder. "But on Cain and his offering he (God) did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast." (Gen. 4) Cain's anger led him to murder his own brother Able.
Anger is incredibly, unbelievably powerful. It can be used to do great good when we get angry about the right things like injustice or abuse. It is good if someone is abusing us and we stand up for ourselves out of a justified anger. But how many times do we get angry about the stupidest things?
Anger stems mainly from pride. We think we deserve to be angry for whatever reason. But do we really? Most likely not.
2 Cor. 4:4 says, "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers." the God is of this age is not God because he would not want to blind us. This is referring to Satan. Scary thought isn't it, that he is the ruler of this world? When the fall happened Satan was literally placed in charge of the world. So much of people's anger at God would be solved if we just realized that Satan is the one we should be angry at for anything bad that happens. Yes God allows it, for reasons none us can fully understand, but Satan is the active agent in causing us pain, and he loves doing it.
Anger channelled in a good direction would be to be completely irate with Satan and all the pain he is causing you and everyone in your life. And sometimes we really need to yell at him. And he can't read minds like God so you actually have to speak aloud to him. An example would be, "No Satan! I will not let you bring me down! I am a child of God! Step back fool!" lol. Seriously. But we give up the fight. We get tired and depressed and give up, because we don't know who to direct our anger at.
I'll tell you who to be angry at, Satan. Not your husband, not your wife, not your mom or your friend. Satan is the one we should be mad at. But he gets in our thoughts and pits us against each other and sits back and laughs. It's quite disgusting really.
Hell is not going to be some big party. That is the biggest lie of our generation. Hell is going to suck more than anything anyone has ever experienced. For women, that might be child birth. For men, that might be loosing a job. Take your greatest pain you have ever experienced and it will be 100 times more then that. Seriously. Think about it.
May we all see Satan for who he is and run into Jesus' arms, which are always, always open to us, to anyone. Run to him.
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