Month: October 2018

Copyright 2018, 2024 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Eph. 6:12

This verse has the potential to set us free from so much unnecessary human conflict in this life, yet it seems to be one of the hardest realities to receive and act on for Christians. It certainly has been for me.

It is so easy to be attacked by who I see as a purely human “flesh and blood” agent and automatically react with my own hostility in return. In the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek and love our enemies is the truth that those enemies, particularly ones who have no knowledge of God, are not even acting on their own. Rather they are often, perhaps even always, being manipulated to at least some extent by dark spiritual forces of which they are completely unaware. Yet it seems like 99% of the time I do not seek to defend myself from those forces. I seek to defend myself from the people they are manipulating.

This is an area of spiritual growth that is a vital one for me, and I suspect I am not alone. If I can separate the person with whom I am in conflict from the demonic influences upon them, influences of which they are probably not even conscious, then I can love them despite whatever they may be doing or trying to do to me. Meanwhile I can learn to engage in the successful spiritual warfare to which I am called as a Christ-follower. This would be a tremendously freeing way for me to live in this world. I could then see past whatever human provocation to which I am reacting to see the bigger spiritual picture and then act on it in a truly biblical way. This would be a ‘win-win” for me personally and possibly a game-changer in my effectiveness as a witness to the unconditional love of Christ.

This, I suspect, can only happen if I consciously make an effort to remember verses like Ephesians 6:12 and then add to that remembrance all the Bible teaches about how to fight the enemy of every human soul. To do this I must become far more intentional about meditating on those verses and asking the Spirit to both make them personally real to me, and then to equip me with the supernatural weaponry He provides.

Beyond that I must learn to effectively wield this weaponry, particularly the “sword of the Spirit which is the word of God.” As a pastor friend of mine recently said, all the armor of Ephesians 6:16-18 is defensive in nature with the exception of that sword. It is through the words of Scripture, empowered and made real to us by the Holy Spirit, that we can fight the real enemies in our lives while loving those who are tragically unaware of what (or more accurately, who) are driving them to be in conflict with us.

This message from God’s word is a timely one for me. I’m tired of being tempted to hate people instead of hating the evil that is both manipulating and destroying them. I want to love those people and fight to push back the darkness that is keeping them from coming to know the ultimate Lover of their souls.

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The only hope the sincere Christ-follower has of learning the way of submission to God Himself, and any legitimate human authority, must begin with understanding the ultimate submission of God, the Son, to God, the Father. In fact, if it were not for the obedience of Jesus on Earth two-thousand years ago we would not have had a church in which to participate in last Sunday. We also would have no enduring hope for this life or the next.

It is easy to take for granted the idea of our Lord’s earthly walk in perfect submission to His (and our) “Abba.” This becomes less easy to do, however, when we know that He was fully man as well as fully God and then look at our own lives. He had all the natural human weaknesses, grief, trials, and temptations that face any human being living in this fallen world. We use all these challenges, and more, to justify our own sinful responses to them. He never did, not once in 33 years.

Some might object here that since Jesus was God as well as man, and the perfect Man at that, it would have been easy for Him to not sin. However, during Christ’s 40 days in the desert being tempted by Satan, and perhaps even more dramatically in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion, Jesus knew two very human, and also two very difficult to overcome, temptations. In the case of the desert it was extreme hunger tempting Him to end His God-ordained fast, with a little “help” from the Enemy of both His and our own souls. In Gethsemane the temptation was, at the least, even harder to overcome: the fear of a tortuous and humiliating physical death (we will not even consider here the spiritual ramifications of Christ also simultaneously carrying all humankind’s sins throughout all history).

There are those who might argue that the Gospel accounts of the first temptation show a seemingly stoic scriptural response from the Son of Man to the Devil’s blandishments. Those who do probably do not know much of the stress and effects of a prolonged fast on a fully human body in the midst of the hot, dry waste of a Middle Eastern desert. It had to have been almost unbearable to refuse the offer of food after so long a time without any in that environment. It was a temptation that only the believed Word of God could answer effectively, and it must have been incredibly difficult for Jesus to get those words out in His physical condition at that moment.

In the Garden of Gethsemane there is no appearance of stoicism. There is only agony and finally even Hematodrosis, the incredibly rare stress-driven shedding of blood in perspiration. No, the way Jesus asked His Father to allow the cup of death on a cross to pass from Him is clearly desperate. It is a felt fear familiar to any of us who have known something very bad was about to have to be endured, but one unfamiliar to us in its extremity.

Yet the man, Jesus Christ, decided to obey His Father’s will even then.

What we see here in our human Brother is the reality of a true man’s suffering, the suffering somehow integral to remaining in right relationship with, and submission to, the One who is owed perfect obedience because of the very nature of Who He is: God, the Father.

In doing so, all the way to the cross, and beyond, Jesus Christ made it possible for anyone who will sincerely give their life to Him to begin the long journey back to a blessed submission to the only true Lover of our souls. His obedience, as one fully human, is what enables ours,’ and not only to our Father in Heaven but to those has He put in rightful temporal authority over us for our own benefit and protection during our short pilgrimage here on earth.