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No one in his right mind wants to live in a war zone, as the stories, images, and videos on news reports and social media repeatedly remind us. War devastates cultivated and wild lands alike and reduces villages and cities—even great centers of human achievement—to unlivable wastes. War is violent, brutal, and deadly; its children are chaos, pestilence, and famine.
It is not for nothing that the Christian tradition has long maintained that geopolitical warfare can be morally justified only as a measure of last resort in self-defense—and then only when there is a reasonable chance at success. Our theology does teach us that some causes are worth forfeiting our lives to defend, that warfare is sometimes justified, and that love may even compel us to wage war when it is justified. Yet there is no place in Scripture or sober-minded Reformed theology for romantic fantasies about war.
Therefore, when we come to the many places in Scripture that describe the Christian life in terms of warfare and the ruthlessness that attends warfare, we need to pause and let the reality of this call to wage war sink in. Jesus, who came into the world to be crucified for the salvation of His people, was not naive about the force of the imagery that He employed. On the night that He was betrayed and condemned to be crucified, He told His disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12–13). Jesus knew that securing the victory and accomplishing His mission would cost Him His life, and He knew what He was calling His disciples to endure.
Christlike love and obedience in a fallen, sinful world is costly:
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (vv. 18–19)
Jesus leans into His point: “‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (v. 20). Then He drives it home: “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me” (16:2–3).
We must be as careful here as Christ is clear: His struggle, and ours, is not a political or military or economic quest for superiority. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world; otherwise, His disciples would wage war on worldly terms (18:36). The worldly weapons of power, violence, and money are useless in this warfare because our struggle is not “against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” as Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12.
The Son of God did not come into the world and assume a truly human nature to seize worldly power and wealth—to live in palaces and recline at tables, to be pampered and served by others. He came to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). He came to disarm our oppressor and destroy the works of our tempter and accuser (Heb. 2:14–15; 1 John 3:8). Jesus came to fulfill the promise that God indirectly yet intentionally made to Adam and Eve in Eden when God declared that a son born to a woman would, in effect, crush the serpent’s head under His heel (Gen. 3:15). Jesus came to go to war, but His war was not against Rome but the devil, sin, and death itself.
Satan, who enslaves sinners through the fear of death, knew why the Son of God was in human form and schemed against him from the start. But it is later, as Jesus was beginning His public ministry, that the spiritual nature of this war and the terms on which it must be waged came clearly into view. The Holy Spirit, Mark 1:12 notes, “drove” Jesus “out into the wilderness,” like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, where He was tempted by Satan for forty days.
Satan’s goal was clear: Get Jesus to sin. This is how the accuser ensnares everyone he enslaves. Since he had no claim on Jesus, getting Him to sin was Satan’s primary objective. He did not really care how Jesus sinned; he just needed Him to stumble and fall. That unthinkably dark prospect would be Satan’s triumph.
Satan’s strategy was to challenge Jesus’ identity as the Son of God in the face of the suffering that He was already enduring and that would intensify as His hour approached (John 12:23). While his tactics are subtle and shifting, in each of the three temptations reported in Matthew and Luke, Satan attacked Jesus’ confidence in His Father’s steadfast love, suggesting a twisted application of some promise that the Father had made to the Son to get Jesus to balk before the prospect of the cross by questioning the sufficiency of His Father’s care (Matt. 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). It was an ancient ploy that we first encounter in Eden, where the serpent suggested to Eve that God was withholding something desirable and was thus not entirely trustworthy (Gen. 3:1–7).
Jesus will have none of it. But notice how Jesus overcomes. First, Jesus does not respond with His divine power in some extraordinary way but rather resists the devil by faith, holding fast to the ordinary means of God’s Word rightly interpreted and applied. In this way, Jesus proves Himself to be the Son of God not by turning a stone into bread or hurling Himself off a pinnacle but by loving His Father—and us—more than His life in this world.
Second, Jesus wages His war entirely on spiritual terms. If His mission and kingdom were political—a kingdom “of this world,” as He puts it—then His disciples would have been fighting in the streets. But His kingdom is from above and must be established on spiritual terms (John 18:36–37). Jesus fights temptation and overcomes the world through faith in the Word of God, and the victory He wins is obedience and everything that obedience secures. For Jesus, every step of obedience was a step toward the cross, where the ultimate victory was secured as He was crucified in the nadir of His humility.
Adam and Eve, in the abundance of Eden’s garden, laid hold of the forbidden fruit in a bid to become like God; Jesus Christ, in the wastes of the Judean wilderness, “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” Rather, in an act of unthinkable humility and self-denial, He “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8). This is the mind of Christ and the key to His victory and ours.
In his “struggle against sin,” Adam did not resist “to the point of shedding . . . blood” but followed Eve’s lead with apparent ease (Heb. 12:4). He did not “put on the whole armor of God,” and he was not “able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Eph. 6:11). But Christ does “take up the whole armor of God” and is “able to . . . stand firm . . . , having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness” (vv. 13–14). In the wilderness and throughout His life, we see Jesus “take up the shield of faith, with which [He] can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (v. 16). He even took “the helmet of salvation,” trusting His Father’s promise to “not abandon [His] soul to Sheol, or let [Him] see corruption,” but to raise Him up on the third day and exalt Him to “the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Ps. 16:10; Heb. 1:3). And He skillfully wielded “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication” (Eph. 6:17–18).
Jesus overcame Satan’s temptations in the same way that we can and must overcome temptation: through faith unto obedience—that is, by holding fast to the sufficiency of God for us as proclaimed in every promise and implied in every command of His Word. Jesus did this without fail and was “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore,” Paul declares,
God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:8–11)
Let us, “as shoes for [our] feet, . . . put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace” as we trample the serpent, our tempter and would-be oppressor, under our feet (Eph. 6:15; see Ps. 91:13; Luke 10:19).
The war that we wage is “not . . . against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). The ultimate victory has already been secured by Christ and is realized in our lives each day as we live by the mind of Christ, doing “nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility counting others more significant than” ourselves (Phil. 2:3). Christ’s victory is manifest in the face of our enemies through the freedom and simplicity of our “faith working through love” to obedience (Gal. 5:6).