Are Our Enemies Spiritual, Human, or Both?

00:00:04.000 | Well, working at DG comes with a wonderful fringe benefit.

00:00:07.000 | I get to take in a lot of devotionals led by you, Pastor John.

00:00:11.000 | These are off-air, private devotionals created as preludes to DG staff meetings and leadership team meetings.

00:00:19.000 | A lot of these devotional times together are an overflow from your huge investment in "Look at the Book,"

00:00:24.000 | your video series doodling on Bible texts.

00:00:27.000 | And one of those recent DG devotionals struck me.

00:00:31.000 | You were leading us on spiritual warfare and taking us through the armor of God in Ephesians chapter 6.

00:00:37.000 | And you stopped at Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12, where Paul reminds us that our enemies are not flesh and blood.

00:00:43.000 | Our enemy is a spiritual being, the devil and his forces.

00:00:48.000 | That is our true enemy. And yet our enemy strikes at us through flesh and blood,

00:00:53.000 | a point that you made from Ephesians 4, verse 14.

00:00:57.000 | So can you walk us through the logical connections that you made that our enemy is not flesh and blood,

00:01:02.000 | but he works through flesh and blood? Explain that.

00:01:06.000 | So I was working my way through Ephesians 6 with "Look at the Book," and I got to chapter 6, verses 10 through 12.

00:01:14.000 | And what stopped me, puzzled me, at least at first, was not the affirmation that we have supernatural adversaries,

00:01:25.000 | but the apparent denial that we have human adversaries.

00:01:30.000 | Yeah, yeah.

00:01:31.000 | That was the "What?"

00:01:34.000 | Here's what he says.

00:01:35.000 | "Finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God,

00:01:43.000 | that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil."

00:01:49.000 | And then comes the denial.

00:01:51.000 | "For we do not wrestle against blood and flesh."

00:01:57.000 | And by the way, that is the right order. It's usually translated in English versions "flesh and blood,"

00:02:04.000 | but there are two places, one in Hebrews and one here, where it's reversed.

00:02:07.000 | Blood and flesh. And I'll come back to that. I think it's significant.

00:02:11.000 | "We do not wrestle against blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities,

00:02:17.000 | against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

00:02:25.000 | So for me, the question is not, do we have a supernatural demonic adversary?

00:02:31.000 | We certainly do. But what does Paul mean when he says, "We do not wrestle against blood and flesh"?

00:02:42.000 | And ordinarily, those two words, blood and flesh or flesh and blood, simply mean human, just human reality,

00:02:50.000 | considered apart from any special work of God's saving grace, just what we are by fallen nature.

00:02:57.000 | That's flesh and blood or blood and flesh.

00:02:59.000 | So it sounds like Paul is saying, "We don't wrestle against ordinary fallen humans."

00:03:04.000 | And the problem is that Paul himself, even in the same book, describes such human adversaries.

00:03:13.000 | Chapter 4, verse 13, he tells us, "Don't be children tossed to and fro by human cunning,

00:03:24.000 | by craftiness in deceitful schemes."

00:03:28.000 | So you almost have the exact same words, you know, demonic schemes and this human cunning

00:03:34.000 | in the craftiness of deceitful schemes.

00:03:38.000 | And so what in the world is going on?

00:03:41.000 | In 6.12, he says, "We don't wrestle against blood and flesh, but against the schemes of the devil."

00:03:48.000 | And in 4.14, he says, "Don't be carried about by human cunning or deceitful schemes."

00:03:55.000 | Now, Paul is a lot smarter than I am.

00:03:59.000 | That's an understatement.

00:04:01.000 | And he is inspired by the Holy Spirit in what he says.

00:04:06.000 | And so I am getting low here and assuming that these two texts from the inspired apostle

00:04:14.000 | do not contradict each other.

00:04:17.000 | And he means for us to figure out how they fit together.

00:04:20.000 | So here are some relevant texts that inform my solution.

00:04:27.000 | Ephesians 2, 1 following, "You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked,

00:04:35.000 | according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air,

00:04:44.000 | the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience,

00:04:50.000 | among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh,

00:04:55.000 | carrying out the desires of the body and the mind,

00:05:00.000 | and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

00:05:05.000 | So all fallen, unregenerate humans walk or live, quote, "according to,

00:05:15.000 | in step with the prince of the power of the air, Satan."

00:05:21.000 | But that reality of being in step with the devil, all of us, before we're set free by the gospel,

00:05:30.000 | that reality of walking in step with, in sync with, on the frequency of the devil as sons of disobedience

00:05:40.000 | does not mean we are pawns who have no accountability.

00:05:46.000 | Because he says we are walking in sins and trespasses that we are committing

00:05:53.000 | and that we are children of wrath.

00:05:56.000 | In other words, we are blameworthy. We deserve judgment, God's holy wrath.

00:06:01.000 | So I take this to mean that the devil taps into our natural sinfulness

00:06:09.000 | in a way that influences us profoundly, but does so in a way that does not take away

00:06:18.000 | our accountability or our guilt before God.

00:06:22.000 | Paul describes human sinfulness in chapter 4 of Ephesians, verse 18, like this.

00:06:29.000 | "They are," meaning they, Gentiles, humans, "they are darkened in their understanding,

00:06:37.000 | alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them,

00:06:43.000 | and the bottom is here, due to the hardness of their heart."

00:06:49.000 | In other words, he traces the problem of our guilt and our sin down to the hardness of our own heart.

00:06:58.000 | No mention of the devil. None. We are our own condemning problem.

00:07:04.000 | Then, when you watch Paul seek to save and sanctify sinful people in Ephesians,

00:07:13.000 | you don't see any exorcisms, no power encounters. What you see is he speaks straight to us

00:07:22.000 | with gospel implications. "Let the thief no longer steal, but let him labor,

00:07:29.000 | doing honest work with his own hands so that he can have something to give.

00:07:33.000 | Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God

00:07:39.000 | by which you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath

00:07:44.000 | and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you." And he goes on and on,

00:07:49.000 | just speaking directly to us, to our minds, to our hearts, to our wills.

00:07:53.000 | In fact, he says the great challenge for Christians is that we are new creatures

00:07:59.000 | in Christ by faith, and we need to put off the old self and put on the new self.

00:08:05.000 | Paul's whole approach to helping Christians fight for holiness

00:08:14.000 | almost never mentions the devil. Not surprising, since three of the six pieces of spiritual armor

00:08:25.000 | are truth, gospel, and word of God. And those are all things that Paul speaks

00:08:33.000 | directly into the human mind and the human heart. He doesn't speak those things

00:08:37.000 | to the devil, he speaks them to people. In 2 Corinthians 5.11, Paul says,

00:08:43.000 | "Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men." That's what he did.

00:08:49.000 | He went around the world persuading human beings. He didn't have this excessive

00:08:55.000 | demon orientation. He didn't walk into synagogues and cast out demons.

00:09:00.000 | He walked into synagogues and argued about the Old Testament.

00:09:04.000 | We speak directly to men. We don't do an end run around human mind or human heart

00:09:13.000 | to try to attack the devil. The warfare for the souls of men is fought with truth

00:09:21.000 | and gospel and word of God, speaking directly to men, not Satan,

00:09:26.000 | all the while praying in the spirit for supernatural power.

00:09:32.000 | Now, even though Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4.4, "The God of this world has blinded

00:09:40.000 | the minds of unbelievers," nevertheless, Paul's response to satanic blinding

00:09:48.000 | is not to speak to Satan, but to speak directly to responsible, guilty,

00:09:56.000 | blinded human beings with the gospel while praying down the power of God.

00:10:02.000 | For example, in Acts 26.17, Jesus says to Paul, "I am sending you to open their eyes."

00:10:11.000 | You, Paul. "I'm sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness

00:10:17.000 | to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins."

00:10:24.000 | Paul preaches the gospel straight to humans, and God uses the gospel

00:10:30.000 | in the power of the Holy Spirit to set people free from satanic blindness.

00:10:36.000 | Same thing in 2 Timothy 2.26. Paul teaches the truth to people,

00:10:42.000 | and then it says, "God may perhaps grant them repentance and escape from the snare of the devil."

00:10:51.000 | So here's my conclusion about what Paul means when he says,

00:10:56.000 | "We don't wrestle with blood and flesh." Two things.

00:11:01.000 | Number one, he means there is no such thing as a merely human adversary of the gospel.

00:11:09.000 | They don't exist. While this world is under the sway of the evil one, 1 John 5.19,

00:11:15.000 | the whole world lies under the evil one. While that's the case, unbelieving humans

00:11:22.000 | are always influenced by and in step with the devil.

00:11:30.000 | We don't wrestle against mere human forces because there aren't any.

00:11:38.000 | Number two, I think he mentions blood first in the pair.

00:11:44.000 | We don't wrestle against blood and flesh because he's drawing our attention to the fact

00:11:52.000 | that this warfare is not like the ordinary battlefield of warfare among people marked by blood and gore.

00:12:02.000 | That's not what he's talking about, in other words. We don't fight like that.

00:12:09.000 | It's not a matter of chopping off arms or heads and blood and flesh.

00:12:16.000 | Our warfare is always fought at a level that includes the supernatural.

00:12:24.000 | Yeah, amen. Very insightful. Thank you for leading us through that, Pastor John.

00:12:28.000 | And thank you for your look at the book videos. It's a wonderful teaching resource.

00:12:33.000 | Really appreciate it. And thanks for your DG devotionals as well.

00:12:36.000 | Thank you for listening today. You can ask a question of your own.

00:12:39.000 | You can search our growing archive or subscribe to the podcast.

00:12:41.000 | You can do all that at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:12:47.000 | Well, Monday, we are back to hear from a disabled mother to two small kids.

00:12:52.000 | She reads Proverbs 31, the valiant woman, the diligent wife, up early, late to bed,

00:12:58.000 | endlessly busy inside and outside the house, and she physically can't do it.

00:13:02.000 | So how can she be a faithful mother when Proverbs 31 is so far beyond what she can achieve

00:13:08.000 | due to her physical limitations? You do not want to miss this one.

00:13:12.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, Pastor John, and I will see you back here on Monday.

00:13:17.000 | Have a great weekend.

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