Who Is Our Enemy?

Nearly 85 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy. But I suspect more people know what happened on December 7, 1941, than perhaps know why it happened. About 100 years ago, Japan was modernizing its economy, seeking to build an empire. But as a tiny island nation, they lacked natural resources, especially oil. So they began seizing other territories, including French Indochina, in 1941.

The US responded to that move by freezing all Japanese assets and cutting off 94% of Japan's oil supply. Now, Japan knew that invading and capturing other strategic territories would probably prompt a military response from the US So they decided to launch a preemptive strike in the hopes of crippling America's ability to stand in their way. So, in total secrecy, six Japanese aircraft carriers traveled 3,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean. And on December 7, 1941, at 7:55am 360 Japanese warplanes descended on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack damaged 19American warships, destroyed 300 U.S. aircraft, killed 2,403Americans, and thrust the U.S. into World War II.

And we look back on that and we wonder, how could a small nation like Japan catch America so off guard? Well, because the US had been so focused on the threat posed by Nazi Germany in Europe that they underestimated Japan as an enemy. We're most vulnerable to attack when we don't expect it. Good morning.

My name's Matt, and I'm glad you're with us today. And for the next several weeks, we're going to focus on a powerful text from Ephesians chapter 6 that starts in verse 10. We're going to camp out for the next couple of months. In a short section of Scripture, near the end of his letter to his friends at the church in Ephesus, the Apostle Paul wrote these words. Paul said finally, you know, he's in the process of landing the plane when he begins to use words like that.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. 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. Now, Paul had just written about God's plan of salvation. He had talked about unity between Jews and Gentiles.

He had written about Christian living. He'd given instructions for godly relationships. But he closed his letter with a reminder that we are at war with an unseen spiritual enemy and to find victory in this invisible spiritual war. There are two realities that we have to embrace. The first of those is the strength we need comes from God.

Now, our American values of hard work and achievement and independence have helped to build a strong country that's about to celebrate its 250th birthday. And that's exciting. But these same ideals can also breed arrogance, isolation, and worst of all, a blindness to the fact that God is the source of our blessings. And this is not a new pattern. As Israel prepared to enter the land of Canaan, God reminded them of his provision for them along the way.

And God cautioned them, once their bellies were full, once they were comfortably settled in their homes, once their wealth began to increase, not to forget about him. This is what God said. You may say to yourself, my power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me. But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today. As humans, I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but we sometimes have a tendency to blame God for our struggles and yet take full credit for our successes.

If life goes poorly, it's his fault. And if it goes well, well, we're just hard working people. But our opportunities and our resources and our abilities all come from God, which means our wins do too. King David wrote in Psalm 20, now this I know. The Lord gives victory to his anointed.

He answers him from his heavenly sanctuary with the victorious power of his right hand. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. One of Israel's frequent mistakes. This is a mistake that David himself made while was to assume that military strength alone could protect them. But history is full of examples of mighty empires that collapsed despite their military power.

The Roman Empire had the most disciplined, well armed and experienced military in the ancient world. But it collapsed because the Romans conquered more territories than they could defend. Their economy tanked and their government became fragmented and unstable. The Aztec empire dominated ancient Central America, but it collapsed because the peoples they conquered refused to fight alongside them against the Spanish conquistadors when they arrived. At one time the Soviet Union had the world's largest standing army, a huge nuclear arsenal and a massive military industrial complex.

But its communist ideology failed to deliver on its promises and it was economically crippled by long term war in Afghanistan. And that cycle is predictable. There are many more Examples like those. So God repeatedly warned Israel against over reliance on themselves. The prophet Zechariah lived in the 6th century BC after Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians.

Now, during Zechariah's ministry, a king by the name of Zechariah Zerubbabel, which is really fun to say, God called King Zerubbabel to the huge task of rebuilding the temple. And God told Zerubbabel how this work would be accomplished. Zechariah, chapter 4. Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty. At a human level, it is tempting to measure our church's strength in terms of the square footage of our facilities, or the size of our budget, or the cleverness of our marketing, or the professionalism of our website, or the number of people who attend, or the talent and the charisma and the good looks of our staff.

And while those things may not be things that are completely inconsequential, Scripture reminds us that our strength comes from God. Paul urged the Ephesians and us to be strong, but not just in our own discipline, not just in our own intelligence or strength or creativity, but in the Lord and in his mighty power. In that verse in the Greek, it literally says, be empowered. This is the Greek word dunamos. It's where we get our word dynamite.

It says, be empowered in the Lord and. And in the might of his strength. The strength we need is found not in the gym or in a bank account or in a gun cabinet, but in the Lord. Without the empowerment of His Holy Spirit, we do not have what it takes to win at life. So Paul urged us, put on the full armor of God and we're gonna spend the next several weeks unpacking the full armor of God.

But before Paul started explaining what the armor of God is, he first explained why we need it. Verse 11, Ephesians 6. Paul said, so that here's why we need the armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. We have an enemy, the devil, who is plotting against us, and he is a formidable adversary. We need God's armor so that we can stand strong against the devil and not give up ground to him.

Without God's armor, we are powerless and vulnerable. Can you imagine playing in the NFL without pads or a helmet? Somebody thought that would be a good idea, and a sport called Run it was born. Have you heard about this? In Run it, two players without any pads or helmets.

One is a ball carrier, one is a defender. They randomly draw those roles. They Run full speed at each other until they collide violently. Knockouts are common. And a 19 year old from New Zealand recently died after playing a homegrown version of this game with friends.

Terrible idea. Can you imagine going into combat without so much as a weapon? I mean, that would be crazy, right? We won't defeat our enemy alone. We certainly won't defeat him unprepared.

We need God's help. And I believe Paul identified our enemy before he went into how we fight him. Because our enemy is often not who we think. Years ago we took a group of middle schoolers to Camp Allendale for a retreat and I got to try out a prank that, that I had heard. Mike Iaconelli, Mike Yaccinelli was one of my youth ministry heroes.

I'd heard him talk about this and I thought, we're going to try this out. So about 2am on a Friday night, we woke up all the boys and said, let's sneak over to the girl's cabin and just pelt it with water balloons. They needed no convincing, so we quietly carried buckets of water balloons across the grass. And on my signal, we unleashed our entire aquatic arsenal. And you know what happened?

Nothing. No lights, no screams. None of the reaction the boys had expected. So they kind of looked at each other and shrugged and began trudging back to our cabin. And that's when the girls who I'd tipped off ahead of time, emerged from the trees armed with water balloons of their own and ambushed the boys.

And suddenly the guys were no longer confused, they were now confused and wet. The guys thought the girls were the enemy, but they weren't. I was the enemy. He was a great trust builder for our youth group. See, we're often confused about who our enemy is.

So Paul identified the devil as our enemy, the one that we need to stand against. And then he emphasized this in verse 12. Paul said, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood because we often mistakenly assume that our primary enemy is other people. I mean, fans of the opposing team may be obnoxious, but they're not our enemies. The people who litter in our neighborhood annoy me, but they're not my enemies.

Our current political climate urges us to see those who vote differently or think differently than we do as our enemies. But globally and historically speaking, have you noticed how often the identity of the enemy changes? Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, Russia, Iran. You know, England, whom We fought 250 years ago for our independence, is now our ally. So is Japan.

Our battle is not physical, so it's not against other people. It's against the devil. But the Bible was written to help us know God and not primarily to promote knowledge of Satan. So the Bible leaves many of our questions about the Devil unanswered. In his clever little book called the Screwtape letter, C.S.

lewis wrote, There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall. About the devils, meaning the. The demonic world. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.

We need to know our enemy. But if our curiosity about the devil and his activities exceeds our attentiveness to God, we are in a dangerous place. So, without taking an unhealthy interest in the devil, what do we need to know about him? Well, several things. Let's start with this one.

The devil is real. People sometimes think of the devil not as an actual being, but as just a metaphor for evil. But Jesus spoke repeatedly some 25 times of Satan's existence. Jesus spoke directly to both Satan and demons. And every New Testament writer referenced the devil.

So we know he's real. The devil is referred to often in scripture by a variety of different names. He's called Satan, he's called accuser. The Greek word here is diabolu. It's where we get our word.

Diabolical. The prince of demons, the prince of this world, the God of this age, Tempter, serpent, the evil one. The devil is real. Second, the devil is a created being. God is the creator of all that exists, including Satan.

So Satan is not God's equal. God cannot create evil. So like all of creation, Satan was good to begin with. He became corrupt sometime before. He appears as a serpent in Genesis chapter three.

But we don't know exactly for certain when. But we do know the devil is arrogant. You know, many people believe it's commonly believed that Satan was once an angel who grew jealous and rebelled against God. The prophet Isaiah taunted the ancient king of Babylon with words that some scholars believe are also a reference to Satan. This is what Isaiah said.

How you have fallen from heaven. Morning star, son of the dawn. You have been cast down to the earth. You, who once laid low the nations you said in your heart, I will ascend to the heavens. I will raise my throne above the stars of God.

I will sit enthrone on the mount of assembly. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds. I will make myself like the Most High. Similarly, the prophet Ezekiel's words to the King of Tyre are also believed by Some to refer to Satan. Ezekiel said you were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

You were in Eden, the garden of God. You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. You were on the holy Mount of God. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God and I expelled you, guardian cherub.

Your heart became proud and you corrupted your wisdom. So I threw you to the earth. I made a spectacle of you. Now, those biblical texts may or may not be about Satan, but these certainly are. The Apostle Paul wrote to church leaders that an elder must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil.

The Book of Revelation records this vision. The great dragon was hurled down that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth and his angels with him. So whatever Satan's backstory, whether he envied God's love for people or whether he resented God's supremacy and decided to make a power grab, God defeated him and put an end to his arrogance. We know that the devil opposes God's purposes.

Scripture may not pinpoint Satan's exact origin in the way that we might like, but it's clear about his agenda. The Apostle John wrote, the devil has been sinning from the beginning and he wants others to join him in that rebellion. The Gospels tell us that right before Jesus began his public meeting ministry, the devil went after him. Jesus went for a time of spiritual retreat in the wilderness, and the devil went after him, urging Jesus to use his power selfishly, urging Jesus to take risks, foolish risks, just to show off his connection with God. Urging Jesus to avoid the cross by pledging allegiance to Satan instead.

Jesus said this about Satan's character. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth. For there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. And as a liar, Satan tries to appear good and trustworthy and convincing.

Paul wrote that Satan masquerades as an angel of light. He may look good, but his motives are evil. The Apostle Peter wrote, your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Satan lurks and he stalks, intent on destroying lives. And because Satan was defeated and cast out of heaven, Revelation says this woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to You.

He is filled with fury because he knows that his time is short. Satan's destruction is absolutely certain. So like a caged animal, he is furious and desperate and violent. But we also know that the devil doesn't work alone. Remember what Paul wrote here in Ephesians chapter 6.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood. Our primary enemy is not other human beings. Our battle as followers of Jesus is not against other people, 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. Just as Jesus spoke often about Satan and about demons, Paul wrote of this unseen spiritual realm, a ranked, ordered hierarchy of demonic forces that oppose God's work in our world and in our lives. So God arms us for that battle.

And next week we're gonna begin exploring that armor. But before we go there, I have two challenges for all of us. And here is the first one. Our focus today is simply to know who our enemy is. Is.

It's so critical that we know who our enemy is so we know who it is that we're fighting. As Satan manipulates and deceives, one of his favorite lies is that other people are our main enemy. If Satan can convince us that the greatest threat against us is a difficult boss or an annoying neighbor or a selfish ex or an estranged family member, or people who hold different political views than we do, or other Christians who interpret scripture differently, or people of other nations or cultures or ethnicities, if Satan can convince us that those people are our enemies, he can keep us too distracted to notice his destructive influence in our lives and too preoccupied to turn to God for the help we need in defeating him. We are most vulnerable to attack when we don't expect it. So God identifies our enemy for us and he warns us to be ready.

So knowing who our enemy is is a critical first step in our ability to win in this battle. But it doesn't stop there. Number two, we have to know where our victory comes from. Paul stressed in Ephesians 6, verse 12 that our struggle is. We've read this a couple of times already.

Against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil. In the heavenly realm, Satan is a serious adversary. But because Satan opposes Almighty God, Satan is also destined to lose. So the message of Scripture to every Jesus follower is, when you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of Our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us.

He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by the cross. Spiritual forces of evil are arrayed against us, and Jesus has already defeated them. He's already won the battle. That means you and I don't have to beat Satan ourselves.

We have to trust the one who has. Hollywood tends to suggest that we overcome Satan through rituals and incantations and exorcisms. But our strength is in the Lord, who died in our place for our sins and who rose from the grave to break death's curse. God provides the armor we need to stand against the enemy's attacks. And we wear that armor when we put on Jesus, when we accept his victory at the cross for ourselves.

So we exist as a church to help all of us to trust and follow. Here's the bottom line. We find victory in trusting Jesus, who has already defeated our greatest enemy. Would you say that with me? We find victory in trusting Jesus, who has already defeated our greatest enemy.

I want to close this morning by sharing a prayer. I'm going to read a prayer. I'd like to pray this over us. It was written by a fellow by the name of Mark Bubeck. It's a prayer that Craig introduced our preaching team to.

Craig's done a little bit of adaptation on, but I want to pray these words over. So whatever posture that looks like for you, if that's to close your eyes, that's great. If that's to bow your head, if that's to stretch your hands out, whatever that is, let me pray these words over us. Mighty God, I praise you and honor you as Lord and King. You are holy, all powerful and perfect in every way.

You love me. You are with me. And Father, you have promised to never leave me or forsake me. Holy Spirit, I experience this reality in you and through you. You are my comforter, my advocate, my helper, and the powerful, sustaining one that Jesus promised.

You are doing a renewing work in me and in the lives of disciples throughout the world. Jesus, you are not only my Savior, but you are the way, the truth and the life. I only come to the Father through you. You are my teacher and rabbi. You show me how to live.

May I walk obediently. Help me to choose to love your ways. More than anything, God, I know that there is a powerful yet defeated enemy that works alongside his army of demons to wage war against you. Your purposes and your people. I know that he wages war against me.

Lord of hosts, God of angel armies, I ask in and through the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead and defeated the spiritual forces of evil, that you would cast out Satan and his spiritual forces from me. Protect my mind and heart from the assaults, intrusive thoughts and deceptive schemes. Grant me your resolve and resilience. God, I choose to believe your truth. I know that you will lead me and sustain me and use me as I abide in you and live according to your word.

Father, I take my stand today and every day against Satan and command him and his evil spirits to depart from me. I choose to put on the full armor of God that I might prevail against the enemy's schemes. In the mighty and victorious name of Jesus, we pray. And all God's people say Amen.

Friends, if being with us today, if today's service or anything that we've talked about, sung about, been encouraged about, has made you realize that you need to take your next step with Jesus, we just want you to know before we go this morning that we're here to help. Every month we offer a series of classes we call Next Steps. It just so happens that our Next Steps Baptism class happens today at the 11 o' clock service. So about 30 minutes from now, there's an opportunity. If baptism is a step that you've been contemplating, we've got an opportunity for you to go and get some specific instruction and have some questions answered along those lines.

We'd love for you to be a part of that next Sunday at 11am our next steps cycle will start all over. Next Steps Discover will happen at 11am next Sunday. We would love for you to be a part of that at any time. This is true for all of us in the room, but I especially want to speak to our friends online. Just text the word next to 317-707-9997.

That will let us know what's on your heart so that we can reach back out to you. We'd love to begin that conversation and I want to invite our Next Steps team to go ahead and make their way down here to the front. Because every Sunday, every service, there are several of us down here at the front of the room who would love to talk with you. We'd love to hear your story. We would love to pray with you.

We'd love to help you discern whatever next step God is calling you to, this battle that God calls us into, this battle that we become a part of when we choose to follow Jesus is not something that we want to fight alone. And so sometimes the way we ensure that we're not isolated in this battle is by reaching out to someone just to talk about things we might be struggling with. It's always a blessing to be with you all excited that we get to serve Jesus together here in this place. And I'm excited that as we go, even though a battle awaits us out there, we already know the outcome of it. And we are armed, we are prepared, we are equipped, we are empowered to win this battle because of what Jesus has already done for us.

Us. Thanks for being with us today. Love you gcc. God bless.