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OUR ENEMY We are tempted to look for
adversaries at any mention of our enemy.
It is easier to blame someone else or some evil conspiracy for our
troubles than to blame ourselves. It
is common in our society to construct some enemy in order to focus our
discontentment away from our own culpability.
Our favorite game is to kick blame up the ladder of authority. It is our parents fault, it is our boss’
fault, it is the President’s fault, and most often, we blame our troubles on
a fantasy named Satan for our troubles.
The reason we avoid looking too close at ourselves is that this makes
us feel guilty, sad, or uncomfortable. The scriptures provide an enormous
amount of evidence to help us to define our enemy. Throughout the Bible
there are stories about how various people tried to hide from their troubles,
to escape the consequences of their actions, to judge others rather than
themselves, and to suffer because of circumstances. These accounts offer examples of how
experiences in the past are very similar to our experiences today. The scriptures give us insight into a
consistent pattern into the nature of all these people and this helps us,
thereby, to see these same characteristics in our nature. These Biblical individuals suffered from discontentment,
as we do; these individuals of old were deceived by others, as we are;
these people in the past suffered because they were diluted in their own
minds about the facts, as we are; these stories tell us about how so many
reacted against God in a defiant manner, as we do. These four characteristics in the human
nature are found throughout history and all are present in our lives and in
our world. The consistent pattern in human
reactions to the world’s environment must be due to an inherent
proclivity. The pattern is so
unfailing it can be predictably found in every culture, every group, and
every person. This pattern must be
indicative of a design characteristic in the human nature. The Bible calls this characteristic the
sinful nature. It can be unequivocally
stated that if there is a human nature then there is a sinful nature. Since God created the human, it follows
then that He designed the human with this propensities to suffer from the
influence of this sinful nature. Jesus
was born with this nature, inherited from Mary, and He suffered because of it
[Matthew 4:1-11]. Without the power of
God’s Spirit, we all inherently succumb to the influence of this nature and
sin. Our sinful nature is our
enemy. Our sinful nature is at the
center of all our troubles. God uses
this nature to get our attention and cause us to turn to Him. Even though we try to play our games in
avoiding this reality, God’s Spirit over time teaches us about the influence
of this inherent nature. These lessons
can be painful; these lessons usually take a lot of time to learn; and these
lessons change our lives.
We can reduce a lot of the pain and our confusion if we learn that our
real enemy is our sinful nature. We
need to learn to ignore all the atheistic fantasies about how Satan is
conspiring against the believer. We
need to take hold of the promise that nothing can separate us from the love
of God in Christ Jesus [Romans |