Ultimate victory has already been secured by Christ and is realized in our lives each day as we live by the mind of Christ, doing “nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility counting others more significant than” ourselves (Philippians 2:3). Christ’s victory is manifest in the face of our enemies through the freedom and simplicity of our “faith working through love” to obedience (Galatians 5:6).

No one in his right mind wants to live in a war zone, as the stories, images, and videos on news reports and social media repeatedly remind us. War devastates cultivated and wild lands alike and reduces villages and cities—even great centers of human achievement—to unlivable wastes. War is violent, brutal, and deadly; its children are chaos, pestilence, and famine.

It is not for nothing that the Christian tradition has long maintained that geopolitical warfare can be morally justified only as a measure of last resort in self-defense—and then only when there is a reasonable chance at success. Our theology does teach us that some causes are worth forfeiting our lives to defend, that warfare is sometimes justified, and that love may even compel us to wage war when it is justified. Yet there is no place in Scripture or sober-minded Reformed theology for romantic fantasies about war.

Therefore, when we come to the many places in Scripture that describe the Christian life in terms of warfare and the ruthlessness that attends warfare, we need to pause and let the reality of this call to wage war sink in. Jesus, who came into the world to be crucified for the salvation of His people, was not naive about the force of the imagery that He employed. On the night that He was betrayed and condemned to be crucified, He told His disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12–13). Jesus knew that securing the victory and accomplishing His mission would cost Him His life, and He knew what He was calling His disciples to endure.

Christlike love and obedience in a fallen, sinful world is costly:

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
(vv. 18–19)

Jesus leans into His point: “‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (v. 20). Then He drives it home: “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me” (16:2–3).

We must be as careful here as Christ is clear: His struggle, and ours, is not a political or military or economic quest for superiority. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world; otherwise, His disciples would wage war on worldly terms (18:36). The worldly weapons of power, violence, and money are useless in this warfare because our struggle is not “against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” as Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12.

The Son of God did not come into the world and assume a truly human nature to seize worldly power and wealth—to live in palaces and recline at tables, to be pampered and served by others. He came to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). He came to disarm our oppressor and destroy the works of our tempter and accuser (Heb. 2:14–15; 1 John 3:8). Jesus came to fulfill the promise that God indirectly yet intentionally made to Adam and Eve in Eden when God declared that a son born to a woman would, in effect, crush the serpent’s head under His heel (Gen. 3:15). Jesus came to go to war, but His war was not against Rome but the devil, sin, and death itself.

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