Mighty Spiritual Weapons

A man lies awake having the same argument he had last night. He wins it again, in detail, with the good lines in the right order. By breakfast the other side has reset and the same sentence about him is sitting in the same chair.

The objection to a verse like this is reasonable and worth saying plainly: spiritual warfare is where a lot of sensible people get off the bus. It sounds like an excuse to blame invisible forces for ordinary problems, and it has been used that way often enough to earn the suspicion.

But look at what Paul is actually fighting when he writes it. Not demons in the ceiling. He is defending his own ministry against critics in Corinth who were saying that his letters were weighty but his bodily presence was weak and his speech contemptible. The battlefield is arguments about him. And his vocabulary is siege vocabulary: strong holds, pulling down, and then in the next breath the thing being torn down is named, and it is not a spirit. It is imaginations, which is a word for reasonings, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God. He finishes by bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. A stronghold is a fortified idea. It is a position that has been held so long it has stopped presenting itself as an opinion and started presenting itself as a fact about you.

Which is why you cannot win the argument at night. Carnal weapons are the ones you keep reaching for: cleverness, effort, a better case. They do not take a wall down. What takes it down is slower and comes from outside your own head.

May the sentence that has been holding that ground be named for what it is. May you be given words you did not write to answer it with. And may the demolition be slow enough that you can trust it.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 291 is Abundantly Pardon (Isaiah 55:8-9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna