IGNORANCE-MONGER

“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5

          Would you just look at that again, please?  There is a strong kernel of truth hiding in the midst of this passage that up until now has escaped my attention.  There’s just so many important messages here that every time I think I have it all contained once and for all in my brain, I look again, and lo!  There is still something I had missed.

          [And right here I need to stop and make a confession.  (I know this is awful, but I am secretly hoping that somebody reading this will nod and know what I mean so I won’t have to feel like such a desperately lonely heathen in this regard.) Sometimes when someone starts talking about, or writing about, or teaching or preaching or singing about a certain scripture— one of those pet ones of mine that I have spent lots of time in— there is a haughtiness that swells up in my head.  I notice that this attitude always causes my mouth to tighten into a lopsided, sideways pose that is punctuated by a dimple on one side of my chin— and not the CUTE kind, but the KNOW-IT-ALL kind. I seem to believe in those moments that I am wasting my time listening because there is no way that I am going to learn anything here.  I have studied this thing out, and there is certainly nothing anybody can tell me about it that will be new. What a terrible confession to have to make, but I hope by making it, I will go some distance in disarming whatever this horrid thing is that sells me such a dastardly dangerous lie.]

          But this morning, I told my very own self this lie as I read this scripture again.  And again, as is usually true when I fall prey to this conceit, I was wrong. (How long you reckon it’ll take me to figure this out and quit this attitude?) I have always been so shot in the head with the message about taking our thoughts captive that I have missed it.  I think this is one of those examples of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

          The trees are all worth focusing on in this forest, and I am not sorry that I have done so.  However, I think maybe the forest here is really all about verse 5:  those “arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.”  I think I have looked closely at the arguments and pretensions before, but I am not so sure that I have paid enough attention to the wording of what the arguments and pretensions are really trying to do to us. The arguments and lies we are trying to demolish are setting themselves up against our knowledge of God!

The Enemy who is sending out all this propaganda is not just trying to get us to bungle up a sacred relationship or slander someone’s honorable name or misuse our body and mind so that we give a leg up to evil. No. As infernal as all these deeds are that he might love watching us perform, He is up to something worse than even these. Our archenemy, Satan, has his hat set on destroying our knowledge of God.

          The scripture uses language to indicate that he is gathering weaponry to arm himself and his troops for all-out brutal warfare to wipe our minds’ slates clean of our knowledge of the God who will save us.

He wants us to be ignorant about what really matters. Satan wants to erase what we have learned about God

This is a stark way to end today’s thoughts, but maybe coming face-to-face with such an alarming truth will motivate us all to be vigilant to keep arming ourselves sufficiently to win the battle our enemy is waging against us.  After all, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power…” !