When we understand that spiritual warfare is more than a metaphor–that it is a fundamental feature of reality–it should cause us to rethink what values we want to cultivate within ourselves and in our communities. One such example is grit. Christians in a spiritual war need to be able to take a punch without losing the will to fight. Grit also encompasses the willingness to “rejoice in our sufferings” as Paul says in Romans 5:3. Gritty Christians rejoice in hardship because they know it’s the trials that produce and reveal true character and that God’s grace is sufficient when they fail. 

Imagine you were tasked with preparing for an impending battle. What would be your strategy? What kind of soldiers would you want?

They’re important questions, but not the first question. Before ever considering how you would win or with whom, first you would have to answer this fundamental question, What kind of war am I fighting? How you answer that question informs your answer for everything else.

The first time that I taught The Gospel of Mark, I had my students take out a piece of paper and answer a single question: What is the Gospel?

This being a class of well-catechized teenagers from Reformed families, the answers were fairly predictable. Words like justification and atonement were ubiquitous. Each student had his or her own unique spin, but they all basically boiled down to a singular theme: Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins so I could have eternal life with him.

Their responses to my prompt were not terribly surprising. In fact, it is a common summary of the Gospel in most evangelical circles today. But, as I did with my class, let’s compare that definition against Jesus’s own words in the early verses of Mark’s Gospel:

“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14-15).

Herman Ridderbos once said that the arrival of the kingdom of God is “the central theme of the whole New Testament revelation of God.” Why then does it so rarely get a passing mention in our Gospel presentations? In a word, our hermeneutics. It is so tempting to make our individual selves the central character of the Bible–as if all roads in Scripture culminate in my personal salvation by my personal Savior.

While the ordo salutis and one’s individual justification are important, reading the Bible through such an individualist lens blinds us from appreciating the kingdom of God as the essential biblical theme that it is. In short, it causes us to misunderstand the kind of battle we’re in, and the second-order effects are enormous.

For example, limiting our conception of the Gospel to the forensic declaration of individual justification produces Christians with values and characteristics to match. The “cage-stage Calvinist” comes to mind who is overly bookish, pedantic, and argumentative largely because his hermeneutic requires him to be.

But what if we understood our individual justification as one piece of a story bigger than ourselves? What if we understood it as one battle in a larger war? How might that change our character?

In his book Creation Regained, Al Wolters rightly expands our horizons to see the cosmic scope of the biblical story. From the Old Adam to the New Adam, the Bible describes an epic contest between two regimes, God and Satan, both of whom “lay claim to the whole of creation.”^[1]

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