In Luke 11 the chronicle of this war continues. Jesus is described as demonstrating the coming of God’s kingdom on earth by driving out demons by the finger of God. He is displaying his divine might in a cosmic battle of healing and exorcism. To explain the significance of what he is doing Jesus tells a parable. “When a strong man, fully armed guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up the spoils.” (Luke 11:21,22)

Not only is there the armor of God, there is also the armor of Satan. The task of Jesus and his kingdom, and those who follow him, is to attack and overpower Satan, and to take away his armor. Jesus is demonstrating his authority over Satan, and proving that his kingdom will prevail. He is the stronger one. He has superior strength over Satan. The forces of evil that plague human beings are overcome in Jesus. This is the greatest spiritual battle of all time. There are two sides in the battle, and we must choose between.

This is all very dramatic stuff, rich in imagery. Artists have painted great canvasses of such a spiritual war detailing angels and demons contesting for the souls of humanity. But what does it come down to on a daily basis. What does spiritual warfare mean to you and to me, 24/7 in the humdrum of daily life? How are we attacked, and how do we drive out the demons and take away the armor of Satan?

The most down to earth description of this spiritual warfare is to be found in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Published in 1942 it was reprinted eight times during that year. It consists of letters from a senior to a junior devil, who has been assigned to a young man as his tempter. He is to wage war on the psychology of the man in order to separate him from God. Lewis believed that there are “two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

I have extracted from the book what I consider some of the chief temptations by which the junior devil wages war on his subject, and how he can be driven out.

1. The temptation is to believe that “real life” is to be found in “the stream of immediate sense experiences,” the familiar, the ordinary, what grabs the headlines in the news. We are pressured to believe that it is in the concrete, and the material that real life is to be experienced, and not in the issues of the Spirit, of faith and of the eternal. We drive out demons and take away the armor of Satan when we grapple with difficult issues, and can separate out the ephemeral, the passing, the temporary from the substantial, the lasting and the permanent. We must not avoid thinking because it is too demanding. Instead we overcome Satan when we learn to value reflection for ourselves and meditation on the Word of God instead of being bullied by secular skeptics, and cynics.

2. The temptation is to judge others in the church by their appearances, and be critical of them for their obvious faults and failings, while minimizing one’s own. In that way we fall into thinking that they are poor advertisements for Christianity. We often have unrealistic expectations of other Christians. Satan wants to encourage a critical attitude in us so that he can divide believers. We drive that attitude out when we note the plank in our own eye rather than the speck in our brother’s eye. (q.v. Luke 6:41,42)

3. The temptation is to be irritated with our relatives because we dislike their habits and personalities. We are tempted to adopt an attitude of mutual annoyance. There is the tendency to maximize the pinpricks of others and to minimize one’s own. The tempter focuses on tones of voice and expressions which are unendurably irritating. Tones of voice and facial expressions can be misinterpreted to provoke defensive behavior. Our own utterances are never subjected to the scrutiny we give to those of others with whom we live or visit. We judge the words of others with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and context and the suspected intention, while absolving ourselves of any such failure of charity. We drive out demons when we realize how hypocritical we are, and how we need to learn generosity and charity to others. “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” (Colossians 3:13)

4. Every attempt is made by the tempter to keep the believer from the serious intention of praying. Organized times of daily prayer are discouraged. Instead we are tempted to believe that as long as we have feelings of prayer that is enough. There is the tendency to encourage trying to produce spiritual feelings rather than praying for what we need: charity, courage, forgiveness. There is the deception of trying to imagine our idea of God rather than accepting the real presence of God with us. The war will not be won without regular prayer.

5. The temptation is to make us so contented in this world that we want to live as long as possible and deny the reality of death, rather than be prepared for eternity. Increasing prosperity knits a man to the world – so that he feels really at home in this world. The task of the tempter is to build up a firm attachment to the earth, so that he will not be prepared to leave it for the next world. That is why Lewis said, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, that it was more likely that people were prepared to die in war than in peacetime. He has Screwtape write: “How much better for us [the devils] if all humans dies in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray the sick man his true condition! And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.” (p.39) We drive out demons and take away Satan’s armor when we prepare ourselves for death and beyond.

6. We are attacked by the creation of suspense and anxiety about the future, about what might happen to us. Our fear of catastrophe wars with the call to pray “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We drive out demons by concentrating on the Lord, on patience and submission to his will, instead of our own fears. We take away Satan’s armor when we live in the present, in the Presence of God, who gives us his armor to protect us from fear of the future.

7. All extremes are encouraged by the tempter: extreme patriotism and extreme pacifism, but not extreme devotion to the Lord. We are tempted to make our “Cause” more important than our faith; to make the world an end, and faith a means; to make meetings, policies, movements, causes and crusades matter more than prayers, worship, and charity. Satan wants either to inflame factions, or to soothe people to sleep, so that we are distracted from the main task of the kingdom. We drive out demons when we seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, by setting our priorities by the guidance of the Word and the Spirit of God.

8. The subtle temptation to waste the time we are given on earth. As Lewis makes one person say when he arrives in Hell: “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” He calls this spending life doing Nothing. “And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them…. the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” We drive out demons and take away the armor of Satan when we make the most of every opportunity God gives us to do good, and we consecrate every hour of every day in his service. (Ephesians 5:16)

9. The tempter encourages “moderation in all things”, or the feeling that “religion is all very well up to a point.” He knows that a moderated religion is as good as no religion at all. He wants us to believe that all people go through religious phases and intelligent people progress to a more educated point of view. We drive out demons when we recognize this as a form of intellectual snobbery that wants to avoid the antithesis of true and false. Jesus demands us to choose and not sit on the fence: “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters.” (Luke 11:23) The only way we can overcome the strong man is in the power of Christ. If we want to be victorious in this cosmic battle, we have to be with Jesus.

In the letters to the churches in Revelation we are told that “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” (Revelation 2:7)

The Rev. Ted Schroder is the pastor of Amelia Island Plantation