We pray against the wrong enemy a lot of the time. Why aren’t we praying against Satan and the demons? Just because we can’t see it, and we don’t know much about it, therefore, we think that the battle is entirely in the visual spectrum. But the real battle is a spiritual one. When we see events happening today that we would rather not see, how are we praying?
I’m sure many readers have had the same experience I have had. This experience is to see a well-known doctrine in a new light. Yesterday, I was reading through Deuteronomy, and saw the command to annihilate the inhabitants of the promised land (which, of course, needs to have a post all its own as to why this doesn’t make God into a homicidal, genocidal maniac). The application to the Christian life is through spiritual warfare. It strikes me that the majority of Christians today can’t recognize the true enemy. We think our enemy is the person who wronged us, or called us names. We think the enemy is a political group. We think the enemy is human. We have our sights set on the wrong target, the wrong enemy.
Paul told us who the real enemy is in Ephesians 6. It is the realm of Satan and the demons. None of this should be new to Christians, though it sadly is to many. The thing that hit me, however, was this: we pray against the wrong enemy a lot of the time. Why aren’t we praying against Satan and the demons? Just because we can’t see it, and we don’t know much about it, therefore, we think that the battle is entirely in the visual spectrum. But the real battle is a spiritual one. When we see events happening today that we would rather not see, how are we praying? Are we praying for the simple reversal of Roe V. Wade? How about praying against the demonic influence that made that decision possible, and that continually seeks to deceive people into perpetuating the carnage? We see our freedoms being eroded. We tend to blame only humans. Humans are involved. Of course they are. Most of the time, however, that’s all we see. We are, all too often, more concerned with our eroded freedoms than we are with our eroded faith. The things that erode it are legion in America. And we let it happen.
