Resisting Sin
“You have not yet resisted to the point of bloodshed in your struggle against sin,” said the writer of Hebrews (12:4).
You are the battlefield. Spiritual warfare takes place inside you. There will always be repercussions external to you, but the struggle is within. Resistance to your own temptations comes at the price of blood, though sometimes only figuratively. You shouldn’t hesitate even when it also means others may shed blood.
Fallen mankind doesn’t hesitate to externalize the costs of self-indulgence at every chance. The sin is in the self-indulgence, not doing things that affect others. It’s virtually impossible to do anything that doesn’t somehow touch another life. Of course, the writer of Hebrews used the plural “you” because his readers were already at some risk of harassment from the Roman government as a community of faith. What one did as a member of the group affected everyone in the group sooner or later.
Our world seeks excuses to condemn us. Lumping us together under the actions of anyone who failed to resist sin is a favorite tactic. We should never expect the world to understand divine morality, much less how we interrelate. The conflict between our higher reality and human fallen nature is apparent to us internally, as well as how we deal with each other. How can it not be worse when we start bouncing it off those spiritually dead? We hold one expectation for ourselves internally, a different but similar expectation for other believers, but something entirely different with the outside world.
Jesus knew His actions would result in the Cross. His experience in the Garden of Gethsemane made it obvious the human element was horrific, but He was resolute of spirit. Arguing with God over the worldly consequences for divine obedience is a sin. He is God and is accountable to His own character, as it were, but not to our conceptions of that character or our ideas about justice. The airy-fairy mythology of sacred human rights does more to destroy our gospel witness than almost any other single problem with Christian faith in our times. God did not sponsor our Western mythology of human rights; it was a lie of Satan from the very start.
The mental frame of reference for understanding the conflict between God’s justice and human sin is that of the Bible. We seek to understand how God tends to act. It’s not as if we are going to understand all He does. We seek to eliminate the confusion caused by an entire civilization that is hostile to His truth. Ancient civilizations were far less confused about God’s divine character; His whims were less perplexing to them in part because they were closer in time and space to His revelation. In our minds, we should separate between the routine operations of His character pre-programmed into Creation versus His sovereign whims arising from His personal involvement. We could eventually struggle to some approximation of the latter, but the former is a fundamental requirement of all humanity.
We suffer far too much from confusion about the programming. We should expect the world to ignore the whole thing, but we have no excuse. Any current conflicts that bring Christian bloodshed are almost entirely the result of that confusion on our part, not walking where the routine protection of God can aid us in this world. Western Christians fail to understand that divine routine individually. It affects all our actions together as the family of God, and it makes the world a far worse place than it has to be. If we could simply conquer the demons in our own souls, God’s moral principle automatically makes things better for us. If we could build that same understanding in a faith community, the leverage against evil is geometrically expanded. It works every time automatically, and we have seen God add a generous helping of His personal support with miracles not written into the routine.
God sponsors His own revelation with lavish investment.
But we have to start where we are. Today you will confront evil. As you weave more of your life into the moral fabric of the universe, you will face resistance. The Devil prefers to keep you in his service, and will surely notice when assets are slipping from his fingers. However, his only real leverage is other people working on your feelings. Most of it is easily defeated when you simply apply the otherworldly focus of letting a lot of things go as inconsequential. What happens when an evil government reaches out to take your children into custody?
On the one hand, God’s Word bluntly states no civil authority can justify taking any child from any family ever, much less the child of a Christian family. On the other hand, it has happened many times and will continue to happen. What is God going to do about that? Can you somehow compel Him to honor that principle of His revealed laws? Can you pray down His wrath in the moment of your confrontation with the armed thugs of the state?
Western cultural Christianity is entirely confused about this. We can’t imagine Abraham’s choice to sacrifice Isaac because our intellectual prejudices won’t accept the notion God could propose such a test. Sorry, but God doesn’t fit into your Aristotelian box. If you close yourself off from His prerogatives, you exclude yourself from His blessings. You can’t even begin to understand what is right and wrong in any situation. Abraham reckoned God could restore life to Isaac. Can He bring your children back from Child Welfare custody? We can’t begin to untangle this horror until we make room for God’s routine principles. If you are obtuse, it leaves you in an entirely random frame of mind for His divine whims. He might bring them back, but you would have no solid faith on which to stand when you ask for it.
We can point out how, under the Law of Noah, you would be authorized to resist a custody battle with violent force. It might be unwise, but it would not be contrary to God’s routine justice. It’s one thing to understand how Noah’s Covenant binds human civil governments; we already have a huge problem with that in Western Christianity. It’s another thing to explain how your personal faith interaction with God can guide you in very specific ways in the heat of such a terrifying moment. By our failure to understand His moral character through our Western blindness, we make an individual understanding far more random that it has to be. The randomness is not on God’s end; it’s on your end. If your mind is untrained in the ways of holiness, your convictions have little enough to work with, and your mind will be confused by the messages. Your conscience will be a mess. On top of that, you will struggle with God’s personal involvement.
You should be morally prepared for the full range of response. Maybe it’s okay to tearfully wave your children goodbye. It’s certainly righteous to flee civil enforcement, but you’d better be as worldly wise as possible about any such action before you consider it. God can guide you that way if you are prepared with a proper moral understanding. A more strenuous resistance requires even more preparation. Surely you realize any resistance to any police activity is a virtual death warrant these days. That’s not a reason to hesitate, but you must consider that resisting sin unto the shedding of blood might not be your own blood until later in the game. You might not get divine guidance until the moment itself springs on you, but if you aren’t fully attuned to the divine order as revealed in the Bible, your emotions will be in riot mode you’ll struggle with a vast layer of confusion that isn’t necessary.
All of us together as God’s people are not His enforcement arm on the earth among men. The moment we lay our hands to civil government, we are serving Satan. We are God’s enforcement arms in the Spirit Realm internally, individually and within the limits of our roles with each other. That is the limits of our spiritual authority in this realm of existence. Only when men stray into the domain of authority God has given us can we even consider any action against their sin. We dare not act with force on the basis of some imaginary human principles of right and wrong. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but Satan and his domain.
You cannot resist the Devil if you don’t understand his authority and constraints.
