We Must Learn Who the Enemy Is. . .

WHAT MUST THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
DO TO BE SAVED? (6)

We’ve all heard those sermons on how the church is like an army, and we teach our kids to sing We’re in the Lords Army. According to this imagery we are all Christian soldiers and Jesus is our Captain. We are to put on “the whole armor of God” which is described in detail in Eph. 6. The warrior’s gear is all there: loins girded with truth; a breastplate of righteousness; feet shod with the gospel; the shield of faith; the helmet of salvation; the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

There is no question but what one is well armed for battle when he has on such an armor. The Bible describes such a one as “a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 2:2). A good soldier is not only properly geared but he has the spirit of a fighter. As Paul looked back over his life he said he had not only kept the faith and finished the race, but “I have fought the good fight” (2 Tim. 4:7).

But who is the enemy? Who is it or what is it that we are to fight?

In this installment I am saying that if the Church of Christ is to be saved it must find out who the real enemy is. One only needs to read our church papers to see that for the most part we are fighting each other. Or if one listens to a lot of our sermons and reads our tracts he may conclude that “the denominations” are the enemy. Or if our argumentative spirit is not satisfied in any other way it is some “straw man” that is the enemy. Then there is the long history of our debates. We started out debating “the sects.” When they would no longer debate us we started debating one another.

The lectureship audience at Abilene Christian University for 1991 was reminded of all this in a discourse by Jim Woodroof of Searcy, Arkansas. He tells of Gayle Erwin, author of The Jesus Style. being a guest in his home. Since Gayle was “not a member of our movement,” as Jim put it, Jim’s wife Louine asked him if he had ever known anyone in the Church of Christ before he met them. His answer was yes, but he said no more. There was a long pause. “Well?,” asked Louine, pressing him to say more. At last he said, a bit embarrassed, “Well, I wondered, ‘What on earth did they put in that water?’ Because, everyone of you I have ever met had always come up out of the water arguing.” Jim added an understatement, “We have not been known as peacemakers.” He could have said that we’ve never known who the real enemy is.

I will be the first to confess that I was sometime learning what the Scriptures clearly taught all along, that “We do not wrestle with flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12). Other people are not the enemy. But I learned from my teachers in Church of Christ colleges that it was the Baptists and Methodists who were the enemy, along with the rest of the denominations. If there was an arch-enemy it was the Roman Catholics, particularly the pope. So, I was well armed for such “wrestling,” or so I supposed, having been taught by no less a luminary than N. B. Hardeman himself, who was president of a college that bore his name.

In those early years brother Hardeman was both my hero and my model, for he was a debater as well as a tabernacle revivalist, probably preaching to more people than any man in the history of the Church of Christ. He both debated and preached before thousands. In his classes we studied his debates, which included skirmishes with Christian Church ministers on instrumental music and with Baptists on baptism and apostasy.

One such book that we studied was the Hardeman-Bogard debate, and with brother Hardeman himself as the teacher I got the distinct impression that our man, who was the true soldier in the contest, got the best of the other guy, who was the enemy. It never occurred to me that Ben Bogard was as much my brother in Christ as was N. B. Hardeman. I sometimes wonder how I would have responded if some wise person, like Hardeman himself, had pointed that out to me.

If N. B. H., as he was often called, had said to us, “Now, boys, you understand that Ben Bogard is also a Christian. We differ on some things, as you can see, but we love and accept each other as brothers in Christ nonetheless.” If he had said that and meant it, I might have been confused for a time, but I believe I would have listened—and how liberating that would have been!

If Hardeman could have said, “Boys, maybe this debate should never have been held, for it set us against each other as enemies when in fact we were brothers. The differences may not be all that important after all,” I am confident it would have changed my life. It would have also changed brother Hardeman’s life!

I recall that it appeared odd to me that Ben Bogard was teaching the same debate book to his students in Arkansas, and he advertised the book with more zeal than did brother Hardeman! And of course at the Baptist school Bogard was the true soldier and Hardeman the enemy!

Our big debates through the years have not been as “our sided” as we suppose, including those that go back to Alexander Campbell himself. I recall one faithful “Campbellite” with a critical eye for distinctions challenging the readers of the Campbell-Rice debate to place what the two men said on the design of baptism side-by-side and identify any significant difference. Rice was a Presbyterian who did quite well for himself in that debate. You might try it for yourself. You may agree that whatever differences there may have been did not call for a big debate where the contestants confronted each other as adversaries instead of brothers in Christ who “love one another fervently from the heart.”

It wasn’t long until I myself was debating Baptists, and afterwards with my own people in the Church of Christ. We all donned the armor of God and took in hand the sword of the Spirit, and came out flaying away at the enemy—each other! We didn’t know who the real enemy was!

I can’t blame my early teachers for all this, for I was responsible to think for myself. I have only myself to blame for the years that I was a sectarian. My teachers in those early days did me far more good than they did harm, and I’ve always loved them for that. Beside, now and again they pointed in a different direction, if I had only known how to follow through. Brother Hardeman, for example, told us in class one day that he believed that his pious Methodist mother died a Christian and that he expected to see her in heaven. “She followed Christ the best she knew how,” he told us.

We preacher boys were not into it enough to ask, “Then, brother Hardeman, all those who are following Christ the best they know how are Christians even if they are mistaken about baptism?” If brother Hardeman could have himself followed through on that and made it clear to us that it is not the Methodists that we were to fight when we departed from the sacred confines of his college, it would have made a difference in the kind of preachers we all became.

I would one day learn that the definition Hardeman gave for a Christian—one who is following Christ the best she knows how—is almost word-for-word the definition Alexander Campbell gave over a century before, and that our pioneers were not confused as to who the enemy is, like we are in the Church of Christ. I came to appreciate that old motto that our pioneers handed down to us, “We are Christians only, but not the only Christians.” But at Freed-Hardeman College I learned it the other way, that we in the Church of Christ are the only Christians—except for brother Hardeman’s mother! All others are the enemy!

The good news in all this is that not only I but thousands of others in the Church of Christ are discovering who the real enemy is. But we yet have a long way to go.

We are learning who the real enemy is because he has captured our kids with drugs and poisoned their minds with pornography. He gets them drunk and slaughters them on our highways. He kills millions of them before they are ever born. He wrecks their homes and breaks up their marriages. He gets us into wars that should never have been fought. He blights our minds with ignorance, racism, pride, and all sorts of godless philosophies, from New Ageism and Occultism to scientism or consumerism.

Tragedy around the world makes it clear who the enemy is. There is civil war in Afghanistan, mass starvation in Ethiopia and Bangledash, and terrorism in South Africa. In Yugoslavia Serbs and Croates are fighting each other, in India it is Muslims and Hindus, and in North Ireland it is Catholics and Protestants. In Third World nations most people live below the poverty line and suffer gross inequities. We all have a common enemy, whom Luther described as “armed with cruel hate,” who is at work the world over seeking to do us in.

When we recognize our common enemy we can rejoice when he suffers a major defeat as in the demise of atheistic Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Millions of Christians were persecuted by the atheistic regime in the Soviet Union, Bibles were outlawed, and thousands of churches closed. Today we have a Church of Christ in Moscow distributing Bibles and the old Orthodox churches are reopening. But it is Communism that was the enemy, not our sisters and brothers in other churches who had to suffer for their faith.

I am well aware that our enemy, whom Rev. 12:10 describes as “the accuser of our brethren” (and that is not just Church of Christ folk!) is at work among all the churches as well as in all the world. He in fact disguises himself as “an angel of light” and invades our pulpits, board rooms, classrooms, and even the editor’s desk. He is pictured in the Bible as a roaring lion seeking to devour whom he may. But let all believers unite their energies and fight “the Adversary ,” and cease fighting one another.

If we are confused as to who the enemy is and start taking it out on each other, it helps some to realize that our Lord’s own disciples had the same problem. They came upon someone who was casting out demons in the name of Christ “who does not follow us,” and so they forbade him. When they told Jesus about this, he did not approve of their action, saying to them, “He who is not against us is on our side” (Mk. 9:38-40). The disciples didn’t know who the enemy was, but Jesus made it clear for them and for us all. The enemy is anyone or any thing that is against Christ and opposes his work. This does not include other believers who are simply mistaken on some points of doctrine or practice. Such ones often love Jesus more than we do and make great sacrifices to support his cause. They certainly are not against him.

So Jesus tells us what I John 4:3 tells us: the enemy is “the spirit of Antichrist,” all those people, things, and forces that are against Christ and his church. And we are told that there are many anti-christs in the world (l Jn. 2:18). So we have plenty of enemies to fight without fighting each other. In fact, once we tangle with the real enemy, such as racial injustice, the party spirit, or drug addiction we are grateful to get all the help we can, even if they are “not of us.”

Once we see that we are at war with the anti-christs and not with each other or our neighbors who are “following Christ the best they know how,” to quote brother Hardeman again, some great things will begin to happen. Our wrestling is “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12).

When we in Churches of Christ realize the enormity of our warfare, that we are in a crucible with cosmic evil, and overcome the mentality that fellow believers are enemies because they are “not of us,” we will be saved for a glorious and fruitful ministry.—the Editor