The word enemy is not new in the
vocabulary of anyone reading this at this stage. It is so widely used, but I
have just discovered that it is one of the mostly abused words in the world
right now, mostly because people do not know their enemy.
For the purpose of this
discussion, I will choose to define an enemy as someone who wishes another
person bad luck, and is ready to do anything bad to the other particular
person.
It is not so surprising nowadays
to see somebody call another person a hater or an enemy, terms whish bear no
difference to me as they all bear and element, not of love but of something
more than the opposite of love-hatred for one another. People have grown to
live with the belief that they have enemies; other people who they mostly
believe are bad or evil. They have ended up fighting their so called enemies,
bringing others down in the course of the action and affecting many innocent
souls just because of one thing, not knowing their enemy.
The Bible in
the first letter of Peter, on chapter 5 verse 8 says, “Be alert, be on watch!
Your enemy, the Devil, roams around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to
devour.” Peter, when writing his first letter to all of us tells us that our
enemy is the Devil. He did not talk of any person or group of people being an
enemy to anyone of the Christian community. Not even the ones that do not wish
us well. It is so unfortunate however that hated and enmities exist, sometimes
even within and between various denominations, all of which preach the same
name of Christ, which raises so many questions considering that our only enemy
is the Devil.
Why then, do
we still have enmities between people and among groups of people? Simple as the
answer to the question may seem, it has caused a lot of havoc, and a lot of
people have fallen from the heavenly places they were supposed to operate from,
just because of this. It is simply the work of the Devil that causes these
divisions and sprees of hatred feelings among people. Being clever, He makes it
all look as if He is not behind it and we can hardly notice it.
I will take a
simple example of a situation in which someone insults you, or maybe slaps you.
Most of us typically rush to act on the person by fighting back physically. One
thing we forget is that there is something or some force behind, that propelled
the person to do whatever he or she has done to us. We forget that the actions
of the person have actually originated somewhere far beyond the mind of the
person.
Genesis 1:27
says that God created man in His own image. By being created in God’s own
image, one of the attributes of man, that all other creatures do not have, is
the capability to produce the very same good fruits God can produce, and the
capacity to be what God can be-LOVE. God created man to love, but when man
sinned and lost his authority to the Devil, hatred was born on Earth, spreading
out its consequences around. Jesus
Christ came to restore that image of God that we were created in, and by his
death, the image of God was restored to those who are of the kingdom, those who
are in Him. It is by this fact that all of us Christians need to have true love
for all mankind. The Devil however, influences some actions in our
surroundings, mostly through people around us, hiding behind them just to lead
us into thinking that they are our enemies.
If for
example, the Devil tempts someone into stealing from your possessions, mostly
we tend to have negative feelings and intentions on whoever is responsible for
the action. We, most of the times opt to deal with the person physically by
inflicting all sorts of pain on others, as a mode of punishing or just out of
the hatred that comes as a consequence of the bad action directed towards us.
Some of us, for the fear of not appearing as bad and unforgiving people do not
take action physically but we go on to pray that ad things should happen to
someone who has done us something bad. One thing we need to understand now is
that by just wishing somebody bad luck or by inflicting any sort of pain on
someone, be it physically or spiritually out of hatred because of what the
person has done to us, we are making the Devil accelerate in fulfilling his
mission of taking with him as many souls as he can to hell. By the time we get
to do something bad to a person, who happens to have done something bad to us,
we should know that the Devil’s action has already caused one person to sin,
against God through doing us wrong, and that when we revenge the wrongdoing we
are the second victim of the Devil’s temptation, which was originally targeted
at one person. When we revenge, however, we trigger an endless cascade of
events which tend to affect more people, instilling even more hatred in even
more people.
We as
Christians need to control things by making sure that we are the stopping
points for hatred. When someone does us something bad, we should not go on our
knees, praying and fasting that he or she gets hurt. Those are some of the
“spiritual” mistakes that we make as Christians. We should, as real followers of
Christ, strive to live by the words Jesus himself said, in a very clear way
that need no complex interpretation mechanism. In the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 6
verse 27 says,” But I say unto you that hear,
Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you”. Jesus commands us to love
those who do not wish us well, no matter how they may hate us. He tells us to
do good to them! Just imagine what you would feel if someone you hurt had done
you the best thing in your life! I do not know how you would feel, but for me,
I would never feel like repeating the thing again. Verse 28 says,” bless them that curse you, pray for them that
despitefully use you”. Blessing them that cure you and praying for those who do
you bad things has one big purpose of making them realise how good God is and
what His love, that should be in all of us is all about. This is why when we
take those that have trespassed against us to God in prayer we should always be
mindful of what we say about them. Binding them does not do anyone good. It just
worsens the situation. Pray for them that they may realise the way of truth and
that they should never succumb to the Devil’s temptation enough to hurt us
again.
When we take
things in our own hands in dealing with our ‘enemies’, what we do is just nothing
less than serving as the Devil’s instruments of bringing disorder on Earth. I
strongly believe that if Christians are to view the root cause of the bad
things that happen on Earth with this viewpoint, there would be love
flourishing, and that the world would be a better place to live on. I also
believe that there wouldn’t be any rivalries between any religious groupings
which lead to the downfall of many Christians.
I finish this
with a plea. As we live and see people do all sorts of bad things to us or even
people around us, let us not rush to condemning them. We should look at the
root cause of the problem and pray that they may be freed from the Devil,
because no human being is our enemy, but our enemy is the Devil. Let us also
learn to be good to others so that we can portray a good image to others,
making them lead a righteous life by not leading them into sin with our
provocative actions.
Christianity
involves a lot of battles, so KNOW YOUR ENEMY.
