Exhortation, March 6

God has enemies. You need only pick up the Psalter to discover this. ?The enemies of Yahweh will be like the glory of the pastures, they vanish ?Elike smoke they vanish away?E(Psalm 37). ?Because of the greatness of Your power Your enemies will give feigned obedience to You?E(Ps 66). ?Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered; and let those who hate Him flee before Him?Eand ?God will shatter the head of His enemies, the hairy crown of him who goes on in his guilty deeds?E(Ps 68).

If God has enemies, so do we. If the world hates our Master, it will hate us too. Becoming a Christian involves taking sides in a war that began in the garden and will continue until the final judgment, the war between the Seed of the Woman and the seed of the serpent. Baptism enlists us in Christ?s army, and all of you who are baptized are called to carry on the war.

One of the great evils of modern Christianity is the belief that we can somehow escape enmity, that we can come to some mutually satisfying compromise with the world, that we can treat enemies as friends without consequence. That is not the message of our sermon text. Ahab fights the Arameans twice and, surprisingly, defeats them. He even captures the Aramean king Ben-Hadad. Instead of taking advantage of his victory by neutralizing Ben-Hadad, however, he forms a covenant with Ben-Hadad and treats him as a brother. It looks like clemency; it is in fact rebellion. Ahab was supposed to wage a war of utter destruction against the Arameans. He treats Ben-Hadad as a brother; but in doing that, he effectively switches sides in the war.

This might seem like the barbaric, take-no-prisoners mentality that Jesus condemned. But that?s not the case. The weapons of our warfare are different now, but Christian warfare is still a warfare of utter destruction. We are not supposed to be satisfied with keeping our enemies away from our borders, nor are we to pursue gentlemanly agreements with them. Paul said our spiritual weapons ?destroy speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.?EWe should not be satisfied until every enemy of Christ has bowed the knee to Him, until ?every thought [is] captive to the obedience of Christ.?E

Enmity is inescapable. We will either battle God?s enemies, or we will become enemies of God by compromise with the world. James writes, ?You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.?E