Maybe we should
The southern TV preacher always starts the verse “…For we wrassle not aginst flesh ‘n blood…” I’m not even going to give you the book, chapter and verse because I don’t remember the book, chapter and verse and I don’t feel like looking it up. If you want to read it, it’s in the New Testament in one of St. Paul’s letters. The coordinates of the verse don’t matter. It’s our understanding of it and how we conduct ourselves as a result of that understanding that I am challenging.
The enemy we are dealing with isn’t the politicians and their millions of minions but is the demonic hierarchy working through them. The next step in the syllogism is that if we just pray and fast and bind the strongman eventually those politicians and minions will be set free of evil and will begin to do good and all the world’s problems will go away. Now that is a tongue-in-cheek, deliberate, oversimplification but it is essentially what happens in many people’s minds.
These are the kinds of conclusions people are led to when they looking through rose-colored stained glass windows at the life of Christ. Jesus was more than just the godly man who had humbled himself and submitted to an execution on trumpeted up charges. I really think people get Jesus confused with Ghandi or something. Yes he cast out demons from possessed people. He also braided a rope together and used it as a whip on the corrupt religious bankers who were running the world’s first vending machine, selling lambs and doves for sacrifice. In the first case he was wrestling against the demons in the second he was wrestling against flesh and blood.
While the Devil might be behind what’s going on in the world, he isn’t writing the legislation. He isn’t signing legislation. He isn’t issuing corrupt directives to police or excusing corruption when it happens. The Devil isn’t picking up the pen to write the software that miscounts votes in these overgrown PDAs around the country. We cannot engage in unilateral spiritual warfare and ignore the flesh. There are people who need to be restrained in addition to the “enemy.” And thinking that human beings can have no evil of their own separate from a demonic force is a mistaken and dangerous reading of scripture.
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 14:43 and is filed under Politics, Religion, RogueSun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
