Fighting the Noble War, Part 1 B

Satan attacks the church and he attacks the church because he wants to attack the work of God because he hates God. And that is why when Jesus goes into the temple and makes a whip and cleans out the place, he says that I am doing this because you have made my father's house a den of thieves and he is defending the glory of God. That's what we're called to do. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Modern religious thought leaves little, if any, room for a real devil. Then again, there are those who not only say the devil is real, but he's someone you need to hunt down and control before he controls you.

Those are two extreme views. The question is, which view is closer to the truth or are they both completely off target? What does God's Word say about Satan, how he attacks, and whom he attacks? You'll find biblical answers to those questions today on Grace to You as John MacArthur continues a study that's all about preparing you for spiritual warfare.

That's the title of the study, Spiritual Warfare. If you have your Bible, turn to 1 Timothy and here's John now with the lesson. Let's open our Bibles to 1 Timothy chapter 1, 1 Timothy chapter 1.

Let's look to verse 18. This command I entrust unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which pointed to thee, that thou by them mightest fight a noble warfare, holding faith and a good conscience, which some, having put away, have made shipwreck concerning the faith, of whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. Now let me just say at the beginning that the warfare of which Paul speaks has at its highest level a tremendous conflict between God and Satan. That is the primary level of the warfare.

Everything else, in a sense, comes under that. It is a war of the Lord God Jehovah and His truth against Satan and his lies. It is a war between God and His will and Satan and His will. And such a war is not only fought between God and Satan, but between demons and holy angels and between ungodly men and godly men, so that this cosmic warfare at the level of God and the highest creature He ever made, Lucifer, filters all the way down to involve every human being, including us. Now for us to understand this warfare, we need to take a look at its elements. You remember in Luke chapter 14 and verse 31, Jesus laid down a very obvious principle in another context, but the principle applies. He said, what king going to make war against another king sits not down first and consults whether he's able with 10,000 to meet him that comes against him with 20,000? In other words, Jesus is saying no king goes to war unless he understands the terms of battle, unless he understands the power of his enemy, unless he understands that which is at stake in the warfare. And we are engaged in a spiritual warfare. Now listen very carefully to what I say. Satan is not particularly interested in you as an individual.

May I say that? He is not specifically interested in you as an individual because of you. Who he is after is God. Do we understand that? Satan hates God. You're incidental and so am I. Only as we somehow impact God for his own glory is he interested in us.

We are not the issue. He would destroy us and defeat us not because he hates us, but because he hates God whom we serve and represent. So what you have to understand, beloved, is that in your warfare, your victory and your defeat reflect on God. When we are defeated, it is in a sense in which Satan has effectively attacked God. When we are victorious, it is a sense in which he has been defeated in his attack against God. Isn't it interesting that God himself allows the battle against him to be fought at our level so that he is victorious or he is in some way defeated, although not ultimately defeated, by whether we are victorious or defeated.

Does that sound strange to you? And think again of the words of the apostle Paul, he that is joined to the harlot joins Christ to the harlot, 1 Corinthians 6. So Satan attacks the church and he attacks the church because he wants to attack the work of God because he hates God. And that is why when Jesus goes into the temple and makes a whip and cleans out the place, he says that I am doing this because you have made my father's house a den of thieves and he is defending the glory of God, right? He is defending the glory of God.

That's what we're called to do. And some of you are saying, well, I don't even see a battle. That's because you went AWOL. And the only thing we can hope is that you won't stay AWOL so long that it will take you to heaven, which in military terms would be a dishonorable discharge. But it's appalling how many Christian people live in a trivia-oriented life who have no idea of a warfare because they haven't been in the battle. They're non-courageous soldiers.

They do not war a noble warfare. Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy and he says in chapter 2, words that all of us should remember, thou therefore suffer hardship along with me as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, no man that fights in a war entangles himself with the affairs of this life that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier. We expect to suffer hardship. We expect to be cut off from the affairs of this world and this life. We expect to do what we do for the sake of the one who called us to be a soldier. So, beloved, we are in a spiritual war.

I mean, I see it. I trust you do. I can go back to the day in which I went into a room where a demon-possessed girl was and the voices out of her screamed, get him out of here, get him out of here, not him, not him, get him out of here. And I realized that they knew who I was and they knew whose side I was on. And then in an instant that became a terrorizing realization to me, which was in a few more moments replaced by a calm, settled feeling of confidence because it was wonderful to know that the demons knew whose side I was on and that they were afraid of that.

Credible. I'm aware of a warfare. I spent six to eight months with a man who wanted me to disciple him at the end of which time he went away, went to a church that doesn't teach the Scriptures, wound up in an apostate seminary and the battle wasn't with his intellectual mind. It was not a battle on a superficial level.

It was a much deeper one. I spent a year praying with a man, six o'clock in the morning at the end of which time he abandoned the faith. This is a warfare. Now how does Satan attack the church?

Let me give you some insight into this. How does he attack the advance of God's kingdom? First of all, 2 Corinthians 4, 4, and I'm going to give you some examples of this, not necessarily an exhaustive list. In 2 Corinthians 4, 3, if our gospel is hidden, it is hidden to them that are lost. If the gospel is hidden, if it is dishonestly presented as verse 2 says, if the Word of God is handled deceitfully, if the truth is held back, the ones who suffer are the lost. Verse 4, in whom the God of this age, that's Satan, has blinded the minds of them who believe not lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ who is the image of God should shine unto them.

You know what? He does not want the gospel to shine unto them because it is the gospel of Christ who is the image of God. It is the glorious revelation of God and he does not want God's glory to be seen. So he blinds the minds of people. And the ungodly who are blinded are blinded by Satan. They are blinded by his hosts. And he draws those blinds over their eyes in many, many ways. He can blind them through ignorance. He can blind them through unbelief. He can blind them through the bad testimony of those who call themselves Christians. He can blind them with lies and false religion. He can blind them with a love of sin. He can blind them with fleshly gratification which seems to satisfy. But he blinds them not because he particularly hates them, but he hates that the glory of God would be made manifest in the face of Jesus Christ.

That's what he hates. Because, you see, he is set to be more glorious than God. And so he seeks to blind the minds.

In spite of that, God by his grace gives light and sight. But that doesn't mean Satan ceases. What does he do to those who believe? Let me share Luke 22 with you. Luke 22 verse 31. You remember this account, Jesus and Peter. And Luke 22 31, very important, the Lord said, Simon, Simon.

Now listen. Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has desired you. Why do you think Satan wanted him? Satan wanted to sift him as wheat.

Satan wanted to destroy him, to shake him up and make that which was genuine about him blow away in the wind. But I prayed for you that your faith fail not. And when you're converted, strengthen your brethren. You see, Satan wants to take Christians and destroy them. But isn't it wonderful that when he comes with that destructive power, the Lord holds us up?

The interceding high priestly work of Jesus Christ prays for us and our faith will not fail. But mark it, beloved, Satan wants to tear you up. He wants to send your life fragmented into the air and have your confidence in God blow away. He wants to destroy you.

Peter, probably reflecting on some of his own experience in 1 Peter 5 and 8, put it this way. Be sober. Know your priorities.

Get your life ordered. Be vigilant. Have your eyes opened. Be aware. Because your adversary, the devil, like a roaring lion walks about seeking whom he may what?

Devour. He's after you. He wants to take bites out of you. He wants to devour you into sin. So first of all, the strategy of Satan then is to blind the minds of people. Even when their eyes are opened, they see and they believe and receive Christ. He comes back like a roaring lion and he wants to disintegrate those people, tear them to shreds, destroy their confidence, destroy their usefulness, destroy their trust in God.

That's how he attacks. And remember, beloved, when things come to you that do that, remember the source of those things. Let me show you another way, 1 Corinthians chapter 7. 1 Corinthians chapter 7. What is the unit that God has designed to pass righteousness from one generation to the next?

What is it? It's the family. So you know that Satan will attack the family and we get an insight into that here. It says in verse 3, let the husband render unto the wife her due and likewise also the wife unto her husband. Now what that means is what is due in a conjugal relationship.

In other words, husband and wife are to render each other that physical satisfaction which is part of a marriage relationship. To further emphasize that, in verse 4 he says, the wife has not power of her own body. She does not control her own body for its own desires.

Rather her husband does. And likewise the husband does not have power over his own body but the wife. That is to say, in the conjugal relationship, the one person's body belongs to the other person for the satisfaction of that person's needs and that is by the design of God.

There should be a fulfilling physical relationship as a part of the love commitment in a marriage. Now verse 5, don't hold this back from one another. Don't do that unless it is with agreement for a brief time so that you can give yourself to fasting and prayer. In other words, you're not supposed to use the withholding of sexual favors as leverage against your partner or as a way to express your anger or your indifference. But rather only by common consent in fasting and prayer then come together, watch this, that Satan tempt you not because of your drawing apart, your incontinency.

The point is this. Satan is right there doing everything he can to destroy Christian marriage. And so Satan will attack in a marriage and this attacking because of the withholding of physical desires is only an emblem of his attacking the marriage of Christians which is the source of passing righteousness on to the next generation.

So what is the warfare as it filters down to us? Satan wants to thwart the work of God. He wants to destroy the church, not because he hates the church, although he does hate the church, but primarily because he hates the God who is the author of the church. The issue is God. We're simply instruments by which he can get at God.

Think of it. When you fail to be what God would have you to be, you become a tool by which Satan strikes a blow at God. When you and I live as we ought to be, we defend God against that attack. So we are in a warfare and he seeks to blind, but those who come to sight, he will seek to devour and destroy and disintegrate and ruin their usefulness and shred their lives so that losing their confidence and trust, they become of little help in the battle. And then he will attack invariably, he will attack the family.

Let me show you another one. 1 Timothy, right where we are, chapter 3. And again, we're talking about this warfare so we know what it is we're to fight. 1 Timothy 3, it's talking about spiritual leadership, a bishop or an elder or a pastor. It describes a pastor here. A pastor is to be a blameless one-woman man and all of that in verse 2. It comes down to verse 6 and says he's not to be a novice.

That is a new convert, someone who's not skilled in the things of the Word of God, someone who's not mature. Lest being lifted up with pride, he fall into the condemnation of the devil. The devil was condemned with pride and so will someone who's lifted up too fast to a place of spiritual leadership and prominence. The point I want you to note is in verse 7, he must have a good report also of the people outside the church lest he fall into the reproach and the snare of the devil.

Let me tell you something. There's nobody in the church the devil would rather catch in his trap than the pastors, right? We notice that he is being very successful today in doing that. The church is absolutely without excuse because of its ignorance of these areas of spiritual warfare. He blinds minds and we somehow don't see that. And even those who see feel they can play around with Satan's domain and they find that he devours them, he sifts them out, shredding their lives as it were.

They blow away in terms of any strength or usefulness. And then he comes at their marriages and then he comes at the church in the devastation of spiritual leadership who fall into his traps by immorality, by pride, by dictatorial authoritarianism, whatever else. Then there's one other pervasive aspect that you need to note and we could look at a lot of Scripture, but let me just take you to 2 Corinthians 11, 2 Corinthians 11, and we draw this together. Notice what it says in verse 13. Paul mentions false apostles. He's been talking about true apostles and false ones since back in chapter 10, sort of defending himself against some attacks. Here he says, these who attack me in a sense are false apostles. They are deceitful workers and they transform themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel, no wonder, for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light, therefore it's no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness whose end shall be according to their works. Now what he says is this, another way Satan attacks, and you know it as well as I do, is he designs false religious systems, is that not so? And sucks people off into them.

And they're worldwide. Every time you see a person in a liberal church who's hearing someone preach who denies the deity of Christ or denies the lostness of man, and I was just reading a series of articles recently about a man who believes, he says he's an evangelical and believes that everybody's automatically saved, that Christ dwells in the life of everyone. Anyone who teaches error like that, of course, just damns people to hell because they're not responsible for coming to Christ. So Satan then comes against us with false teaching. This is rampant.

This is absolutely rampant. I shiver sometimes when I see the things that are being taught in the name of biblical truth. And I could go through illustration after illustration.

I just read a little booklet somebody gave me. I went to hell. I went to hell. And this man talks about how he went to hell three times. It isn't true. It's lies, just lies.

And yet the man is held up as an astute teacher and bearer of the truth. Recently I've been receiving phone calls and letters from people in Argentina who've asked for me to come down there because there is an encroaching doctrine of error coming against the church. And they have asked if I would come. And the last call said they would like to rent the largest place in Buenos Aires and they have four thousand pastors who want to come and be taught the Word of God in reference to this error. Four thousand pastors who are in need of understanding the deceitfulness of Satan. I said, you must have somebody there who can do that. They said, we want you to come. God's laid you on our hearts.

So it looks like one of these days I'm off to Argentina. And that's a privilege for me to talk to four thousand pastors about the truth of God if they're being attacked by the lies of Satan. It isn't that they don't know what to believe. It's that they want to know how to answer this and they want to know how to arm their people so their people are not sucked in. This is a war. This is a battle.

It's going on all over the place. And if you don't know it, it's I said, but you went AWOL sometime. You say, well, how do we effectively fight? Let's look back at chapter 10 for a moment. Second Corinthians 10, verse 4. And with this we'll draw it to a conclusion. For the weapons of our warfare are not what?

Fleshy. You can't use your own intellect. You can't use your own wisdom, your own natural talents. The weapons of our warfare are not fleshy, but they are mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. Man, we can topple the kingdoms of Satan. We can cast down his imaginations. Every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God can be torn down. We can bring into captivity, here's the key, every thought to the what?

To the what? Obedience of Christ. Would you underline that in your Bible? To the obedience of Christ. And Paul says I have a readiness, in verse 6, to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.

You want to know something, people? You know what the weapons of our warfare are? I'm going to give it to you straight as Paul gave it. The weapons of our warfare are not human intellect, human prowess, human ability, human skill, human ingenuity. The weapons of our warfare are reduced to obedience. When you put on the armor of God, you start with a belt of truthfulness, a commitment to fight on the basis of God's revealed truth. You put on the breastplate of righteousness, which is His revealed righteousness. Your feet are shod with the gospel of the preparation of peace revealed in His word. Your helmet is the helmet of the hope of eternal salvation and your sword is the word of what?

Of God. The only weapon we have is the word of God. The word of God is not a fleshy weapon.

When I go out and try to attack the kingdom of darkness with my own opinion, I get no place. When I go out with the word of God, things start falling. The word of God has tremendous power, and that is the weapon of our warfare. Not just the word of God, but what Paul says in 2 Corinthians, obedience to the word of God. As we wield the sword of the Spirit in an obedient life, a life covered with righteousness as our breastplate, holding up the shield of confidence and faith in God, we're going to be victorious. I don't believe in any little formulas. I don't believe you can go off to camp and get a zap that will last all your life. Spirituality is not related to zaps.

It's not related to formulas. It's not related to little formula prayers and little ditties. Spirituality is nothing more and nothing less than learning the life of obedience to the word of God so that you really wield the sword, and that's how you carve a swath through the kingdom of darkness. And that's how you win the spiritual warfare. And somewhere along the line, you start by making a commitment to be obedient, and that's how you start to fight a noble warfare. That's why Jesus said, teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you, because life and victory is inextricably connected to obedience. So what God wants in this noble warfare out of Timothy and what He wants out of us is that we should fight a noble war in a noble way, which means with obedient lives, and that we get our lives down to obeying the word of God.

It's that simple. Many of you have fought a noble war, and God has given us great victory to His glory for which we praise Him. But if you're not there and you're not in the battle and you're not a part of that nobility that fights as they ought to fight, may God help you this day to be where you should be.

That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today he showed you that obedience to God's word is the key to fighting the good fight of faith and standing firm against your very real spiritual enemy. John's current study on grace to you is an in-depth look at spiritual warfare.

John, I want to come back to a point you made today, and I'll paraphrase it. You said when Christians fail to be what God wants us to be, we become tools that Satan uses to strike a blow at God. So if there's anything we need to keep in mind in this lifelong spiritual warfare, it's that we need to stay vigilant.

Yeah, and the great illustration of that is beloved Peter. You know, Peter thinks he's the Lord's protector, right? He's going to protect the Lord. Jesus says, I'm going to die, and he says, no, no, no, you're not going to die, Lord. We're not going to let that happen. And Jesus says to him, get behind me, Satan.

How fast did he change teams? How thoughtless was what he said. He thought he had a better plan than God. He had a better idea than the Son of God. It's pretty frightening to think that any of us as a believer could be that close to doing the enemy's work.

You know, it's just one short step out of the will of God into the will of Satan that works against God. And that calls for a tremendous amount of thoughtful vigilance. I want to help you with that, and that's why we're doing this series. But I want to mention a book that I think will be a real encouragement to you. It's a new book. Its title is Stand Firm, and the subtitle is Living in a Post-Christian Culture. I told somebody the other day, I think we're coming out of postmodernism, but we're coming into downright paganism.

This is a post-Christian culture. So the book is Stand Firm. It's a book about the spiritual fight that every Christian faces. It'll help you to be vigilant.

It'll help you not change teams in the middle of the battle because of some foolishness on your part. It's a primmer on how to hold your ground against a culture that's hostile to the Word of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. And since the Lord has transformed your life, you want to make sure that you are valuable to Him in the spiritual battle by being faithful. It's a hardcover book, 150 pages, affordably priced from grace to you.

The title again, Stand Firm. And again, all of our books are at 25% discount. That is right, friend, and I highly recommend this book.

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During our current sale, Stand Firm costs $7.50 and shipping is free. To get this helpful book, call 800-55-GRACE or go to GTY.org. The title again to ask for, Stand Firm. Now, just a quick word about a listener we heard from named Terri. Recently she wrote and told us that she was going through severe trials dealing with anxiety. But then she started listening to Grace To You throughout the day, and it focused her mind on God and on biblical truth, and that changed her.

It helped her have the strength she needed by God's grace. Friend, when you support Grace To You, you help us minister to Christians facing trials and hardships in your community and throughout the world. To partner with us, mail your tax-deductible gift to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. You can also make a donation at GTY.org or call us at 800-55-GRACE. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be here tomorrow when John continues his study on spiritual warfare with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.