Spiritual Warfare is a State of Mind

As a teenager, I attended a Pentecostal church in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  The pastor of the church was a retired Army officer who had served with distinction during the Second World War.  Understandably, given the pastor’s background, the church placed a lot of emphasis on ‘spiritual warfare.’  Every Friday morning, the ladies of the church would gather for a session of ‘prayer warfare,’ which to the uninitiated, sounded more like a shouting match with the devil.

It is virtually impossible to say how effective this was.  After all, how can you quantify something that is invisible, and is interpreted through the prism of personal experience?

It is like the man who was caught tearing up paper in Hyde Park, and throwing it into the air like confetti.  When asked what he was doing, he said, “Keeping the pink elephants away.” Somewhat bemused, the policeman exclaimed, “But there are no pink elephants here,” to which the man replied, “See, it works!”

Of course, the term ‘spiritual warfare’ does not appear anywhere in the New Testament. The concept is derived from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, in which he declares that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds” (2 Cor 10.4). 

Similarly, in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul asserts that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but 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).

Unfortunately, there has been so much focus on the ‘cosmic’ powers of this dark world, we usually think of the enemy ‘up there’ — that is, in the heavens — rather than the enemy ‘in here’ — that is, within our own hearts and minds.  As the cartoonist, Walt Kelly, famously said in the 1970 Pogo comic strip, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The arena of spiritual warfare

In Paul’s day, the city of Corinth was one of the most important commercial centres of the Mediterranean world.  Located on a narrow neck of land which served as a land bridge between the mainland of Greece and the Peloponnesian peninsula, Corinth controlled much of the shipping between East and West.

It is estimated that at the height of its power, Corinth had a population of approximately 700,000, of which two-thirds were slaves.  Its free population was a cosmopolitan melting pot, consisting of Romans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, and Egyptians.  Corinth was a city of great wealth, shameless indulgence, and rampant immorality.  The term ‘korinthiázomai,’ (to live like a Corinthian), was a byword for profligacy and debauchery.

The city was devoted to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of licentious love.  A temple was built in her honour on the Acrocorinthus, an imposing hill approximately 575 metres high, which overshadowed the main part of the city, including the marketplace, basilica, and agora.  The temple housed approximately 1,000 hierodouloi— priestesses or religious prostitutes — who engaged in sexual rituals with both locals and foreigners.

No doubt, many modern Charismatics would identify the Acrocorinthus as the ‘high place’ of the city of Corinth, and Aphrodite as the ruling spiritual power.  And yet there is no indication in either the Book of Acts or the Corinthian letters that Paul paid any attention to the notorious hill or the infamous cult.  He did not organise ‘Jericho marches’ around the Acrocorinthus, nor did he engage in ‘prayer warfare’ against the powers of darkness.

Rather, Paul concentrated on proclaiming Jesus Christ and the significance of his death on the Cross (1 Cor 2.2).  As far as Paul was concerned, God had disarmed principalities and powers, and triumphed over them through the events of the Cross (Col 2.15).  Satan, in all his forms and manifestations, was a defeated foe (Heb 2.14).

In Second Corinthians chapter ten, Paul depicts spiritual warfare as a battle of thoughts and ideas, truth versus deception, light against darkness — a battle that takes place in the arena of the mind.

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.  For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10.3-5).

The ‘strongholds’ of which Paul speaks had nothing to do with the Acrocorinthus or the temple of Aphrodite; rather, he was referring to the arrogant ideas and rebellious attitudes of the Corinthian believers — ideas and attitudes that reflected the culture of the city in which they lived.  

In his first letter, Paul accused the Corinthians of being “worldly-minded and behaving like the unconverted” (1 Cor 3.3 Berkeley Version).  They were sectarian, litigious, sexually permissive, greedy, and arrogant.  However, Paul was confident that the spiritual weapons God had given him had the power to demolish the Corinthians’ erroneous beliefs and transform their recalcitrant attitudes.    

The pioneering English translator, J. B. Phillips, expressed it this way:

“The truth is that, although we lead normal human lives, the battle we are fighting is on the spiritual level.  The very weapons we use are not human but powerful in God’s warfare for the destruction of the enemy’s strongholds.  Our battle is to break down every deceptive argument and every imposing defence that men erect against the true knowledge of God.  We fight to capture every thought until it acknowledges the authority of Christ” (2 Cor 10.3-5 The New Testament in Modern English).

In essence, spiritual warfare is the struggle to capture every thought until it acknowledges the authority of Christ — until it comes into alignment with God’s revealed truth.  It is the struggle to renew our minds — to adopt new attitudes and embrace new ideals that conform to the will and purpose of God (Rom 12.2).

Demons in the desert

Around 270 C.E., a man left his home in Lower Egypt and headed out into the Western Desert to live a life of solitude as a Christian monk.  After 15 years, he moved to an even more remote location at Pispir, east of the Nile River.  His name was Anthony.

Whilst he was not the first ascetic hermit, Anthony is widely considered to be the “Father of Christian Monasticism.”  Inspired by his growing reputation, an increasing number of people followed Anthony into the desert, wanting to emulate his life of ascetism.  Eventually, around 305, Anthony yielded to the repeated requests of his would-be disciples, and emerged from his retreat to instruct and organise this fledgling monastic community.

Anthony’s battles with demons were documented by his contemporary, Athanasius of Alexandria, and have become the stuff of legends.  Indeed, “encountering demons in the desert” is a recurring theme in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, recalling the experience of Jesus who was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Mat 4.1).

The question is, how do demons attack people, and what is their aim?  According to the Desert Fathers, the principal way in which demons attack people is in their minds — bombarding them with thoughts that are designed to distract them from the business of prayer. This echoes the Parable of the Sower in which Jesus describes the seed of God’s word being choked by the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things (Mark 4.19).

Thoughts such as:

“No one loves me”

“I can’t do anything right”

“I was born to be a loser”

“The world would be better off without me”

“My mother died from cancer and I will too”

“I’ll end up old and lonely with no one to care for me”

are nothing less than demonic voices seeking to stoke our fears, expose our shame, and augment our sense of despair.

One of Satan’s secret weapons in his arsenal of deception is exaggeration.  He magnifies circumstances and events out of all proportion in our minds, hoping that we will just give up and lay down and die, both literally and figuratively.  For example, after the prophet Elijah had confronted and destroyed the prophets of Baal, the evil Queen Jezebel threatened to kill him.  As he sheltered in a cave on Mount Horeb, the word of the Lord came to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  Elijah replied,

“I have been very zealous for the Lord God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they seek to take my life” (1 Kings 19.10).

However, the Lord put things in perspective: “You feel like you’re all alone, but the fact is, I have reserved an army of seven thousand people in Israel, whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and whose mouths have not kissed his image.”  Sometimes we need the Lord to lift us up out of the slough of self-pity and depression, and help us see the bigger picture of what He is doing in the world!

Winning the battle of the mind

A brother once said to the renowned Desert Father, Arsenius, “My thoughts trouble me, saying, ‘You don’t have the ability either to fast or to do your work; at least go and visit the sick, for that is also an act of love.’”  But the old man, recognising the suggestions of the demons, said to him, “Go, eat, drink, sleep, do no work, only do not leave your cell.”  For he knew that the patient endurance of the cell brings a monk to a place where he can keep his monastic rule.

But after three days, the monk lost patience and became discouraged. Finding a few palm-leaves, he split them and the following day began braiding them.  When he got hungry, he said, “Here are a few more palm leaves, I’ll braid them and I will eat.”  When he had worked the palm leaves, he said, “I’ll read a little and then eat.”  When he had finished reading, he said, “I’m going to recite a few psalms, and then eat without concern.”

And so, with God’s help, he began to make progress little by little, until he returned to the monastic rule.  And so, gaining confidence against his thoughts, he overcame them.

(The Sayings of Abba Arsenius 11. [VII.34; AnonAP 195]. 

The moral of this quaint story is that winning the battle of the mind is an extended process, not a singular event.  It takes time, perseverance, and discipline to silence the demons in one’s head and to overcome entrenched patterns of negative thinking.  The key phrase is “little by little.” 

The good news is that God has provided the means for us to win the battle of the mind.  The prophet Isaiah declared: “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You” (Isa 26.3).  The Hebrew word ‘yetser’ is not the usual word for ‘mind;’ rather, it denotes creative imagination.  The Hebrew word ‘camak,’ translated ‘stayed,’ means to lean on or take hold of.

In effect, Isaiah is telling us to fix our attention on and visualise the Lord, and thereby attach ourselves to Him and lean on Him for support. Similarly, the writer to the Hebrews admonishes us to fix our gaze on Jesus in order that we might overcome disappointment and discouragement (Heb 12.2-3).

This is what Father Arsenius was alluding to when he told the monk not to leave his cell. For the ‘cell’ is the place of spiritual contemplation, the place of intimacy and worship, where we behold the glory of the Lord and are transformed into His image.  Jesus called it ‘the secret place’ — the place that we share with our Heavenly Father (Mat 6.6).   

The battle of the mind is not won by following carefully constructed formulas or by utilising cutting-edge behavioural techniques.  It is won by meeting God face to face in the secret place of prayer.  As the patriarch Jacob declared, “I have seen God face to face, and my life has been transformed” (Gen 32.30).