Spiritual Battle, Protection, and Safety

September 29th is the Feast of St Michael Archangel, Prince of the Heavenly Host and Commander in the war against evil in State and Society.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By David Deavel, PhD

There is too much despair in the world. Yet Christ bids us be of good cheer, for he says that he has “overcome the world.” Because he has won the war, we can be confident in fighting the battle of our lives so that we and those we love can find salvation.

This Lenten season we are more aware that the world is a dangerous place. It always has been, but for many years Americans were shielded from that fact by our power and our wealth. Many of us were—and still are—pretty secure in many ways. But even for those who have not been affected by war or crime or severe illness, we all know that there are deep sicknesses in our societies and in our lives.

Suicide, drug overdoses, lots of people—especially children—who think that the beautiful and wonderful way God made them as a male or a female is wrong or bad.

The lies and hatreds that seem to dominate so much of our public life.

We often say that we feel “as though” we are in a battle.

We are.

Even when there is no bloodshed, we are indeed involved in a battle. As St. Paul writes in Ephesians 6, verses 11 and 12, “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

This is an important point. A lot of people in the modern world have said that we need to get “beyond” such views.

Some say that there is such a thing as evil but that the depiction of real supernatural agents is just mythology.

Christians of an orthodox stripe cannot agree. We understand this every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer (or Our Father, as Catholics call it). Remember that last petition: Deliver us from Evil!

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches on this passage the following, which reflects the teaching of the prayer in the Gospels: “In this petition, evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. the devil (dia-bolos) is the one who ‘throws himself across’ God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ” (paragraph 2851).

We need to know about Satan, the Devil—at least enough to be able to resist him. As C. S. Lewis put it: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. 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 at least that this figure is the one who tempted the first man and woman to disbelieve God and seek to know good and evil apart from him. We need to know that this creature continues to tempt us to reject the source of our life and happiness in favor of doing our own will—and thereby securing our own demise.

We need to know that this devil was a good creature made by God and originally known as Lucifer—the light bearer. He is powerful but not as powerful as God. We don’t believe that good and evil are equal—there is no dark and light side of the Force forever warring against each other. Instead, we believe that God is the origin of everything—God who is good and light.

Evil and badness are only kinks in the will of the creatures God made to be good. And the one called Satan or the Devil is just a very large creature whose power is not infinite. He is allowed to injure us spiritually and even, indirectly, physically. But whatever evil he does is subject to the fact that his Creator can still deliver us from it and even turn it toward good ends, for “we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.”

And God has shown that he has defeated the Devil.

What, after all, are many of the miracles done by Jesus? Exorcisms—the driving out of demons—to show that he is the master of the world and they are subject to him..

In fact, his dying on the cross is the ultimate defeat of the demons. How?

If the goal of Satan is the destruction of the human race by tempting us all to disobey God and stop following the way that God has laid out for us, then that goal has been thwarted by Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ’s entire life is a sacrifice, which is to say that his entire life was set apart to do God’s will no matter how hard that was. In Hebrews 10:9, he prays to his Father in Heaven, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.”

And even though he is divine, when he walked on earth he had all the frailties of a human nature apart from sin. Think about the evening after the Last Supper and before he was arrested. He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup, meaning the fate of suffering, would be taken from him. Yet he also prayed, “But not my will but thine.” Not his will but the Father’s.

He found safety in the Father and being in the Father’s will.

Indeed, we only find safety, protection, and victory in God and his will. We might call it spiritual protection because we are never given complete and utter protection from physical injury or death—in the long run, the mortality rate is 100%. We are never given complete and utter protection from having bad finances or losing friends or suffering personal attacks. We have no protection from what Shakespeare called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

The only full and final protection or safety we can receive in this life is spiritual. And we need to seek that out above all things. Nor do we achieve victory in the game of life by collecting toys, awards, sexual experiences, money, or worldly power. They do not protect us from physical death or other forms of suffering. They cannot give us the peace of security amidst those slings and arrows either. They cannot be held as trophies of victory.

We only win the game of life by imitating Christ, who was faithful to the end. This has to become our first and controlling priority in life.

So how do we do that? Let’s take a look at another passage of Scripture that talks about our Lord’s own victory over Satan: Hebrews 5: 7-10.

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.

Marvelous, isn’t it? The Son of God who came down from heaven “learned obedience” and “became perfect.” Obviously it wasn’t his divine nature that needed perfection but his human nature like ours. The battle against Satan, against the heavenly powers, is really a battle for our own souls. If we are to battle Satan the way the Lord did, this passage offers us three points on how to do it. These three points are:

1. The Spiritual Battle is a battle of prayer.
2. The Spiritual Battle involves suffering.
3. The Spiritual Battle involves protecting others and helping others to salvation.

Let’s start with the first point. The ultimate weapon we have to win our battles is prayer. St. Paul says the goal of life is to “pray unceasingly.” We are to turn our entire life into a dialogue with God. And how do we do that?

I’m going to say something obvious, but I think one answer is that we just do it. We turn our attention to the fact that we are in God’s presence who made us and is all good. We thank him for our existence and for the wonder of being alive. We meditate—or think about in his presence—truths he has given us. We confess when we have been acting, thinking, or speaking in ways that displease him. We pour out our hearts to him and express our difficulties. We ask him for his help in our lives and the lives of others. We can even ask for the help of his angels.

How do we develop this heart for prayer? I knew a priest who said that you can change your life simply by turning your attention to the Lord six times a day. This may not be dogma, but it seems like pretty good logic. We set times for prayer so that we will actually do it. Everything that is important to us is planned for. The good thing is that Christian tradition has particular prayers designated for different times of the day—prayers that we can memorize and do over and over. Just for Catholics there are: the morning offering at the beginning of the day; the Angelus prayer at 6 AM, Noon, and 6 PM; prayers before and after meals; an examination of conscience before bed. There are various devotions such as the Rosary or the Jesus Prayer that can be prayed anytime. And the Church’s official prayer—the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Office—is available in various forms depending upon how much time you have. Other Christians have forms of the Liturgy of the Hours and countless devotional forms. Most of them involve the recitation or the reading of Scripture, thus feeding our words to God with the Word of God. So many riches are available to us and, if we are faithful to doing them—and really doing them, putting our hearts and minds into them, not just muttering words—they will start to form in us a heart for prayer.

We have to remember that this is possible because God has acted on us already. While some Christians believe the real action is in our reception of grace through some form of original surrender to God, Catholics, Orthodox, and many Protestants believe that God’s definitive work in claiming us is sacramentally accomplished by God’s power through earthly things in our Baptism. He has claimed us and put his Spirit in us so that we can hear him when we are being tempted by the Devil to ignore him. Because the Spirit is in us, we have faith, the power to believe God’s word; we have hope, the power to desire and long for what he promises; and we have love, the power to will what he wills and follow up on it. It’s easy to forget that we bless ourselves with the holy water as we enter a church in order that we might remind ourselves of our baptism—remind ourselves who we are and whose we are.

Because we are baptized, we can experience God’s forgiveness and we can see the barriers to our prayer come down. And this is the most important point about our battle: we fight against sin because sin keeps us from God. Our word “sin” comes from the German word for “sundering,” tearing apart. We don’t fight sin just to have good self-esteem or to have a good record. We fight sin in order that we can pray and hear God. The Devil does not need to get us to commit large, bold sins—sometimes less dramatic sins will do if they keep us from God and put in us a habit of thought that does not allow us to hear God’s voice.

Many people say the Church and Christians focus too much on sexual sins. I don’t think so, for these sins make us callous toward others and toward ourselves. But it is true that the Scriptures talk a lot about other sins: “Let us have no self-conceit, no provoking of one another, no envy of one another” (Galatians 5:26). Perhaps the greatest sin is the lack of forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” we pray, showing that our ability to receive forgiveness depends upon our forgiving others.

That is what the battle is all about—forgiveness of others, getting rid of envy, malice, slander, and other evils that lurk in our hearts so that we can be in God’s will and not feel the ache. Sacraments will help us, but we also must take action: we must pray specifically about those sins that keep us down and we must make plans to change our behavior with God’s help. We must sacrifice things we watch or look at or listen to that shape our hearts in the wrong way.

Catholic, Orthodox, and many other Christians hold that though we are not going to be perfect in this life, we who are baptized can draw strength from the most important form of prayer—that of the Church in the eucharistic liturgy, which is the representation of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on this earth and the participation in his life in heaven where he continually offers himself to the Father and asks the Father to pour out his Spirit on us. And we can take that strength with us into our life outside the liturgy and continuously build up the ability to turn to God at all times for help, for strength, and for healing.

But here’s an irritating thing: we generally think, even if we know better, that if we start living a life in which we are in contact with God and attempting to defeat sin in our lives, that we will not suffer. And yet, our second point is that, as the passage from Hebrews notes, Christ himself learned obedience through suffering and our spiritual battle involves suffering.

What’s worse: it will generally involve more suffering. Sometimes physical but often other kinds of suffering, that which comes from being abandoned, ignored, shunned, and hated for doing what God wants. Sometimes this is within our own families. Jesus himself encountered opposition within his family at times. Suffering isn’t a good in itself, but in the context of a fallen world it is the key opportunity. Suffering is the tool by which God perfects us and gives us power in prayer to overcome temptations if we will only let him. For it is when we are weak that we can turn things over to God who is strong and our final end.

It is when things are bad and we praise God that we defeat the devil.

It is when we are suffering and yet we turn to God first and not to things of this world or to sin for comfort.

It is when we are suffering and we offer our lives, filled with suffering, to God yet again that the Devil is defeated. It is then that we are imitating Christ.

This brings us to a final point. Christ was “made perfect” and “became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.” Christ’s obedience to the Father and not the Father of Lies made him the source of life. When we fight against the Devil, we too can bring life to others. When we live the life of spiritual battle, we will find protection and safety for ourselves and we will be able to extend that protection to others by our prayer.

The Devil wants us to be obsessed with ourselves.

Christ wants us to be thinking about him and about others. We can see, as we noted at the beginning, that the real problems are spiritual and rooted in that false self-obsession. They are summed up as the forgetting of God, which leads human beings not to understand their own place in the world and not to value it.

This is why our age is an age of self-destruction.

When we fight against the Devil’s temptations and keep ourselves remembering God and connected to him, we will certainly suffer. Indeed, we will suffer more, not least because we will love others more and see their own struggles and feel their pain in a deeper and more profound way. But we will also know that the best thing we can do for them is to pray for them and act in ways that help them see the furious love of God that wants their good, too. That acting might well simply involve the response to our suffering—that we turn to God and that we do not become bitter and despairing.

There is too much despair in the world. Yet Christ bids us be of good cheer, for he says that he has “overcome the world.” Because he has won the war, we can be confident in fighting the battle of our lives so that we and those we love can find salvation.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.