Post by Murph on Aug 9, 2023 7:09:51 GMT -6
Do You Know the Enemy?
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is one of the most ancient and most revered military manuals in all of human history. In it, Sun Tzu set out what he believed to be the “essentials of military victory.” He wrote: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”1
Many of the seventeenth-century Puritans also emphasized the importance of knowing the enemy and his tactics when they approached the subject of spiritual warfare. For instance, in his Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks highlighted “the essentials” of spiritual warfare: “Christ, the Scripture, your own hearts, and Satan’s devices, are the four prime things that should be first and most studied and searched. If any cast off the study of these, they cannot be safe here, nor happy hereafter.”2
It is vital that we are aware of the schemes of the enemy. God gives us clear insight into the maneuverings of the evil one, from the opening pages of the Old Testament through the entirety of the New Testament, so that—as the Apostle Paul said—“we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs” (2 Cor. 2:11). It is to this end that we turn to the Scriptures to glean all that we can about the strategies of the devil.
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