The Warfare of the Soul: Practical Studies in the Life of Temptation. Shirley Carter Hughson
of Peace was to be founded only by conflict. Those whom He sent forth to found His Church understood this principle, and everywhere in the accounts of their journeys and labours, as well as in the words of counsel they give their converts, there is the sound of warfare, "the voice of them that shout for mastery."[2]
Everything indicates that the battle is fierce and desperate. Our Lord sends His message to the Seven Churches, and to each the reward is only "to him that overcometh."[3] We are warned of foes without and of traitors in the inmost citadel of our souls; of the "lusts which war against the soul";[4] "the law in our members warring against the law of our mind."[5]
St. Paul exhorts us repeatedly to "put on the whole armour of God."[6] He sends his counsel to his son in the faith in order that he "war a good warfare";[7] he pleads with him "to fight the good fight of faith,"[8] and to "endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ";[9] and in his last days he bases his own hope of the crown of life upon the assurance of his conscience that he himself had "fought a good fight."[10]
So everywhere the New Testament rings with the sound of warfare, the shock and onset of battle. Everywhere we hear of foes and fighting, armour and rewards, life and death. We are told of the subtilty and ferocity of the Adversary, of the ranks and power of his evil angels.[11]
We are sent into the world just that we might spend our life in a state of warfare, and in so far as this condition is absent from any life, just so far is that life a failure. To have a knowledge of the force and resources of the enemy is as necessary to the waging of a successful war as it is to have one's own training and equipment complete; and he who enters upon the struggle is well armed beforehand if he has realized the seriousness of the conflict in which he is about to engage.
Every baptized soul is a member of the army of the living God. Have we grasped the truth that this is no light undertaking; that in this warfare there are no quiet winter quarters into which we may retire, no light summer campaigns to be gaily prosecuted against a foe who flees at our first approach; but that the struggle is inevitable, that it is real, that our enemy is powerful, sleepless, and relentless; and above all, that we are in the thick of the conflict as long as life endures?
Even the tenderest consolations that God gives His children concerning the warfare never lose sight of the inevitableness of it. We are given no false encouragement that would arouse a hope of escape. The very name by which the Body of Christ on earth is called,—the Church Militant,—is a standing witness of what the life of her members must be.
When St. Paul comforts the Corinthians with the assurance that the struggle they are enduring is common to man, that God has not given them more to endure than that which is coming upon all their brethren, the Holy Ghost inspires him to guard this point carefully.[12] He assures them that God Who is faithful to His word, "not slack concerning His promise,"[13] "will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able." The very fact of the approach of a trial or temptation is in itself the irrefutable proof that we are strong enough to conquer it, if only we use faithfully what we have, and what will be given. He then goes on to say that God "will, with the temptation also make a way to escape"; but the escape is not to be from temptation. He promises indeed to "make a way to escape," but only in order "that ye may be able to bear it,"—the escape is to be from the failure, from sin, never from the conflict so long as life endures. "There is no discharge in that war."[14]
This is the condition under which life in this world exists; the only escape from it lies in base surrender to the enemy of God and man. If we face this condition, and accept it without flinching, we are then in the position of a soldier who, having weighed well the purpose and significance of his enlistment, is ready with generous spirit to submit to all that it involves. No surprises or disheartening revelations of the nature of the struggle will meet us, because we shall have understood well in the beginning what we are undertaking and what we must expect.
III. The Terms of the Warfare
Let us in the beginning set clearly before ourselves a few simple facts, facts with which we have been conversant all our lives, but which our lifelong course shows us to have taken too little into account. These we must regard in a very personal way, for our study will be worse than futile if it be not intensely personal.
Let each one of us, therefore, set clearly before himself these fundamental propositions:
(1) Our Leader is our Lord Jesus Christ, fighting now, as He fought when He was on earth, in the perfect powers of His Sacred Humanity. We must for our own encouragement remember that though He is perfect God as well as perfect Man, yet it was not by means of His divine power alone that He fought His own battle against temptation and conquered. He won the victory by the use of His human will, fortified by His divinity. It was as Man, not as God, that He fought and conquered. Had he contended against Satan in His God-nature only, there would have been no real struggle, for even the slightest exercise of His divine power must have crushed the enemy in a single moment of time. It was just because He did fight as Man, in the power of His finite and created nature, that there could be a real conflict.
(2) As baptized Christians we are His soldiers, fighting with the powers and faculties of His perfect Humanity, which were given us when we were baptized. If we are indeed, as the Apostle declares, "members of His Body, of His flesh, and of His bones,"[15] then we fight with His human powers. No longer have we to use our own, but His perfect human faculties. No longer have we to plan with our weak minds; we have at our command the perfect intelligence of the Man Jesus, for "we have the mind of Christ."[16] No longer does the battle depend on our vacillating wills, for His perfect human will is so bound up with ours that it is not possible for us to be overcome except in so far as we fall away from this union with Him. And His love is our love, going out to God and to our fellow-man.
(3) The enemy is Satan, the prince of this world and of the hosts of hell; whose purpose in the warfare is the dishonour of God, and who fights against us just because we are the children of God.
(4) His chief mode of attack is what is commonly called Temptation, the alluring of the soul to some thought, word, or deed that is contrary to the will of God.
(5) The successful resistance of temptation is a victory for our souls to the honour of our King. The battle is His; and the victory is won when we so yield ourselves to Him that He can employ us as instruments of His warfare.
(6) The entrance of any sin is defeat for our souls to our King's dishonour, and no sin can enter save in so far as we become partakers of the Satanic purpose and will.
(7) The entrance of serious wilful sin is a yielding of ourselves as Satan's captives.
(8) Such captivity means not an idle, passive confinement in some spiritual prison, but an active enlistment in the armies of hell to fight against our Lord Jesus Christ.
Let us keep these considerations before us; let us ask the Holy Spirit to give us a right understanding of these truths; and our study of the Christian warfare will not be in vain.