Identify the Enemy

"Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." -1 Peter 5.8

The first step to any battle is to know who your enemy is; you have to know who are you fighting against. Here the Bible tells us that our enemy is the devil, Satan is the one we are at war with. He is our opponent, and he is the real enemy. Peter doesn't seek to sugarcoat anything, he is direct and tells it like it is, the enemy we face is the devil himself.

One of the key things the devil tries to do is convince us that he doesn't exist. We must make sure that we don't deny that he is real. Ignoring the devil and pretending he isn't real is like a cancer patient ignoring the fact that there are malignant tumors growing inside their body, they will destroy silently from within until it is too late to do anything about it.

As we go through life it is easy to get distracted, the devil is a master of deception, the father of lies according to Jesus (John 8.44) and his goal is to cause chaos so that we fight against other things, ignoring him. Even as I try to write this I'm finding it difficult to focus, it could be the fact that it's late, I'm tired, and there are 11 other things on my mind (I stopped and counted and that is the number I came up with), but it could also be an attempt of the enemy to keep me from saying what I need to say in this post.

We have a real enemy, the devil. He exists, and he seeks to steal, kill, and destroy, (John 10.10) all that is good, true, and beautiful. Let us never make the mistake of denying his existence or his ambition. Ignoring the lion doesn't make it any less dangerous. His claws aren't filed down when we close our eyes, and his teeth aren't removed when we cover our ears, we simply become a blind and deaf target that is easy prey for a 500 pound carnivore.

Let us identify the enemy, never denying the reality of his existence.


Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11

TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!