Chapter VI, Continued
2. Thus much about the connexion. Think next of the enemies presented to our thought by St. Paul. What are they, who are they? In our Baptism we were dedicated and sealed to a manful warfare against an unholy triple Alliance – “the world, the flesh, and the devil;” and we shall have to deal with all the three even to the end. But the present passage isolates, as it were, the third member of the alliance, and deals with it alone. It presents us with the fact of personal spirits of evil, under their great head and chief, actively at work and at war against us. In one respect, such a view includes within it the remembrance of the world and the flesh. For the personal evil powers, assuredly, to a degree greater than we ever realize, organize and energize the attack, from whatever quarter it comes. Diabolus, in the pages of that wonderful book, Bunyan’s Holy War, knew how to attack from without, both by assault, and by parley with weak or treacherous inmates of the Town of Mansoul. But not to pursue this thought, we have as a fact a host of unseen personal spirits put here before us as our foes. They are indeed real persons, not figures of speech, say the contrary who will. True, they are an awful mystery, but a mystery not greater in kind than is the existence of evil men who live, as many do, to tempt others to evil. In anywise, to the Lord and to His Apostles they were “a living, dark reality.” In the Word of God the Christian’s conflict is seen to be one not merely “with flesh and blood,” that is to say with frail mortal m en, withstanding and tempting, but against this dark throng of unseen assailants, working personally, and working earnestly, in quiet as well as in alarming hours, for his spiritual loss and woe.
3. Observe next the precise and definite aim of these adversaries. It is to dislodge you, Christian, from a point on which you stand, on which you are set and stationed by your Lord. You see yourself here as a soldier, but not as a soldier on the march through a hostile country, nor as running the errands of your Captain, but as posted upon a vantage-ground in the field. The strategy of the enemy aims above all things at getting you to leave it. We all know how the day of Hastings was lost, and the history of England changed for ever, by a failure – not to manoeuvre, to march, to charge, but to stand, having done all to stand, within a vantage-ground. Every day brings for the soul its field of Hastings. Forewarned, let us secure victory. Let us stand, withstand, having done all let us stand.
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