Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle! (Psalm 24:8, ESV)
As a sport, it’s easy to assume golf is always a boatload of fun. There are seasons when everything clicks! Our driver consistently finds the fairway, our irons find the green, and our putts drop. In those moments, it’s tempting to think, “I found ‘Hogan’s secret.’”
Then, the capital “R” Reality appears: we are at war with our swing mechanics! We fight to “take every thought captive!” We work to subdue our emotions. When our irons are persistently a groove low, we start looking for new weapons. Yep! Golf is often a battle.
C.S. Lewis consistently aimed to awaken the church to the reality of spiritual battle. In Mere Christianity, he writes, “Enemy-occupied territory- that is what the world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”
You might put it this way: if we see life as a cruise ship, our naivety will eventually be exposed as just a fairytale. When we realize the world is a war zone, we’re ready to stand firm when “all hell breaks loose.”
We live in a world created as “good and very good,” but one that has gone terribly wrong. At creation, God’s vice-regents were commanded to “rule and subdue” the world for His glory. Tragically, these “gardeners” chose to misdirect God’s plans for selfish ends.
Since then, humanity has lived in a world haunted by sinister “principalities and powers.” Many choose to close their eyes and pretend this isn’t true. Ironically, when we do, the enemy’s main weapon, deception, succeeds.
That’s the bad news! Here’s the good news! The Lord who created the world “good and very good” will not allow his creation to remain under the curse of darkness forever.
Just as the first Adam threw the world into chaos, the last Adam, Jesus Christ, has come to reconcile his creatures and restore his world to his original purposes.
To accomplish this, the Father sent His Warrior-King to overthrow the forces of darkness. The apostle John writes, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).
In the beginning, God describes how history will unfold: he announces that the seed of the woman [Messiah] will crush the head of the serpent [Satan] while his heel is crushed (Genesis 3:15).
Known as the ‘protoevangelium’—the first mention of the gospel—God reveals the Messiah as a Warrior who will reverse the curse by waging war with the enemy and emerging victorious; counterintuitively, though, through the Messiah’s suffering!
As we follow this unfolding story in Scripture, we see foreshadowings in the Old Testament (e.g., David as warrior-king) that indicate the ‘Coming One’ will conquer the citadels of darkness and defeat the empire of evil.
With Jesus’ arrival, the Spirit of God immediately sends the Son of God into combat against the devil. In the wilderness, the enemy unleashed hell to halt the advance of righteousness. Failing miserably, Satan retreats to fight another day.
For the next three years, the enemy was on the run until he launched his final campaign to destroy God’s Anointed One!
Lacking knowledge of God’s wisdom [war plans], the “deep magic,” as Lewis called it, Satan had the Son of God crucified by unrighteous men.
There, in his final battle, on Golgotha’s hill, the Messiah defeated Satan and his evil forces by dismantling all their nefarious strategies. Through Christ’s death, death is destroyed!
May we, along with Lewis, acknowledge that life is about following our Warrior-King in a “cosmic resistance movement”—the ultimate “mop-up” operation!
Do you know the Lord as the Warrior-King?
Prayer: Jesus! Thank you for leading us in your triumph.