Reading Tom Wright’s little commentary on Ephesians 6 (the chapter on spiritual warfare) the other morning, I was struck by his down-to-earth perspective—“For some reason, almost whenever I write about passages like this one, dealing with spiritual warfare, I run into problems. One time a workman outside the house drove a nail through a main electricity cable, and I lost half an hour’s writing on the word processor. Sometimes domestic crises suddenly arise and distract me. Today the computer jammed completely just when I was about to begin writing. I have come to accept this as normal – and be grateful that this is all that has happened. So far . . . I have noticed, over the years, that the topic of spiritual warfare is itself a subject of spiritual warfare. It is as though certain hidden forces would much rather we don’t talk about it, or that we sweep it under the carpet.”
Two things that came to my attention yesterday highlight the fact that “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” (Ephesians 6:12).
One was a brief article in The Times newspaper titled “Evangelists hacked off” – “Computer hackers have disrupted the IT system at a global conference of Christian evangelists in Cape Town who are using the internet to send their message to countries where it may not be welcome. Organizers of the Lausanne Movement meeting, attended by about 4,500 people from 200 countries said yesterday attacks ‘from several locations’ had slowed computer systems to a crawl for three days and temporarily scuppered plans to beam proceedings to computers around the world. They said that some of the attacks had originated in the Middle East and others in China, which barred about 230 of its citizens from attending the Cape Town meeting.”
The second example of “spiritual warfare” came in an email from the mother of a missionary friend of ours who is serving, with her family, amongst an unreached people group in Irian Jaya—“ Here is the latest news about Debbie, who phoned me this morning. Debs and Andrew are in Jakarta as Debbie needed to have an MRI – after experiencing blinding headaches and poor vision for weeks . . . What they discovered is that she has Optical Neuritis – a type of fibromyalgia in her head, and she is on very strong medication . . . Andrew is not well either – he has gone almost totally deaf in both ears and is bleeding from both his ears. He is seeing a specialist today. All this at a time when they are making such inroads with the Gospel – it makes sense that Satan does not want them to succeed. However, we know that greater is He who is in them than he that is in the world. Please let’s keep trusting and praying for them both.”
In his introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, C. S Lewis says, “The general public prefers either to ignore the forces of evil altogether – to pretend they don’t exist and to use cartoon images of a ‘devil’ with horns and hoofs as an argument to that effect (‘You can’t believe in that nonsense, so you can’t believe in a devil at all, can you?’) – or to take an unhealthy interest in everything demonic, which can be just as bad in the long run.”
So, next time you have a flat tyre, or fail to get a parking near the door at Woolies, don’t blame the poor devil! On the other hand, let us not be ignorant of his schemes and activities.