Overcoming Adversity

The Christian Struggle with Evil
(1 John 2:12-17)

The gulf between people's everyday experience in today's permissive global culture and the outlook encouraged by the Bible is perhaps most acute in the area of personal moral struggle. In contrast to our self-indulgence, the New Testament calls us to a life of resisting temptation and overcoming evil. In this fourth message on 1 John, presented at Greyfriars' Classical Service on 16 July 2006, Rob Yule explains what it means to 'overcome' the seductions of 'the world, the flesh and the devil'.

What’s in a word?

There's a characteristic word in John's first letter, which is hardly ever used in New Zealand speech. It's the word 'overcome'. John says the Christian is someone who has 'overcome the evil one' (1 John 2:13, 14) or who 'overcomes the world' (1 John 5:4).

The Christian life is not a passive affair; enjoying God’s forgiveness and grace, but doing nothing about it. Rather, the Christian is someone who actively defeats the forces of evil - whether they be temptations that beset our own life, or difficulties that harm the lives of others.

There's another word with the same meaning as 'overcome' which is widely used in the United States, but rarely heard in New Zealand. It's the word 'prevail' or 'prevailing.' You often hear American motivational speakers using it. Its prevalence in American speech and absence from our own says a lot about the difference between our two cultures.

America is a gung-ho, success-oriented culture, full of self-made people. New Zealand is a country that dislikes 'tall poppies' - cutting people down to size and only wearing poppies on ANZAC Day, in memory of a great defeat. I recall a Presbyterian minister once saying to me that if he had to choose, he would prefer the American success ethic to our Kiwi failure one.

Our Christian faith calls us to a life, not of defeatism and small-mindedness, but of confidence, overcoming and prevailing.

Terms like 'overcoming' and 'prevailing' indicate that the Christian life is not a push over, but a struggle. It's a conflict with a real enemy, over real territory, really affecting our personal integrity. The enemy is the devil. The territory is the world. The struggle for personal integrity is what the Bible calls the flesh. This is the threefold adversary we must overcome: the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The enemy: the devil

The Bible calls the author of this conflict 'the devil' or 'Satan'. The devil is a sinister secret agent who is always working to harm our faith and lure us away from God. He is an invisible spiritual personality, given over to evil. John calls him 'the evil one' (1 John 2:13,14). Though he may promise alluring and attractive things, his goal is always evil - to lure people away from God, to bring harm to God's creatures, to damage God's good creation.

The devil is the malignant spirit who entices or seduces us away from God, the fountain of goodness and the source of life, damaging ourselves and others in the process.

The devil's strategy is to appeal to our desires and our pride - what John calls 'the lust of our eyes' and 'the boasting of what we have and do' (1 John 2:16). It is the devil who makes our battle with sinful desires and pride such an intense inner struggle. The devil is always trying to deceive us that yielding to sinful desires will be exciting and fulfilling, whereas in reality the promised enjoyment is short-lived and illusory. Yielding to these sinful enticements leads to disappointment, shame, regret, hurt, and bitterness. The prodigal thinks life in a far country will be the cat's pyjamas. It turns out to be pig's tucker.

Depending how far people give in to the devil, they expose themselves to degrees of occult involvement. The resulting bondage ranges from harassment, though affliction and oppression, to the extreme of outright possession - the overriding of our personality by Satan or evil spirits. The devil promises us freedom but ends up enslaving us.

The territory: the world

The territory where this conflict takes place is the world. The term 'world', in English translations of the Bible, refers to several different things: the earth or created universe, the people who live on the earth, the sinful behaviour of fallen human beings, this passing age in contrast to eternity or the age to come, and what we today would call the secular as opposed to the religious.

Because of these different meanings, the Bible can say both that God loved the world (John 3:16) and that Christians must not love the world (1 John 2:15). God created the world good, but the devil has led a rebellion against God, so now 'the whole world lies under the control of the evil one' (1 John 5:19). John teaches that human beings, until they are redeemed or delivered from the devil by Christ, are 'of the world'. They are ruled by the devil, opposed to God.

The 'world' in John's writings means all our social relations apart from or opposed to God. It is the territory that Satan has usurped. New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd describes 'the world' as 'the life of human society as organised under the power of evil'.

To love the world is to pursue values that take you away from God and brings you under the influence of the evil one. John says:

'Do not love the world, or anything in the world. If you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you. For everything in the world - the cravings of sinful people, the lust of their eyes and the boasting of what they have and do - comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives for ever.'(1 John 2:15-17).

John contrasts love for the world with love for God. Love for God leads to eternal life. But love for the world and following the sinful behaviour of those around you will deprive you of God’s reward of eternal life. So the person who loves God must struggle to ‘overcome’ the world. The struggle: the flesh If the devil is who we fight, and the world is where we fight, then ‘the flesh’ is what we fight for. The battle for the flesh is the battle for personal purity and integrity. The flesh is our lower nature – our sinful desires, our impure, lustful thoughts. John says it includes ‘the lust of the flesh’ (our sinful inner cravings), ‘the lust of the eyes’ (the attraction of external things), and ‘the pride of life’ (a proud or boastful attitude) (1John 2:16). Each of these drives is a distortion of a genuine God-given desire. Indulging worldly desires turns legitimate human desires into illicit or fleshly lusts. The genuine pleasure involved in eating becomes gluttony, the proper place of sexual desire in married love becomes furtive or illicit sex, the legitimate use and appreciation of things becomes greed or covetousness, a proper desire to do well or succeed becomes vanity or pride. The world and the flesh take something essentially good, and turn it into something devalued, depraved and evil. Today we are surrounded by inducements on every side to yield to the desires of the flesh. Television images, advertising, glossy magazines commend worldliness and pride - encouraging us to do the very things the Bible warns us to be on our guard against.

I remember when this social revolution happened. I recall how hard it was to keep sexually pure during the summer of 1971, at the height of the sexual revolution, while living in Britain. The lurid and seductive advertising that lined the escalators on the London underground - with much more blatant nudity than would be acceptable now in public - seemed to bombard me from all sides. I remember the struggle to keep pure, crying out to God to help me overcome the flesh.

Overcoming adversity

Let me use a computer analogy. There are a lot of 'nasties' out there now on the internet. What began in the early nineties as a good thing, threatens to be overwhelmed by evil people who are devising viruses, trojans, and illicit programs that will monitor your activity, spy on your privacy, mail you unsolicited material, and even hijack your computer to let others to make free calls to expensive porn sites and the like. You need a good firewall to protect your computer, from receiving or sending unauthorised or harmful material.

The same is necessary for our spiritual protection. You need a personal firewall against these nasties on the 'spiritnet'.

John says, 'Do not love the world' (2:15). This doesn't mean withdrawing from the world, or abandoning your friends. It means living in the world without submitting to the evil one, being friends with non-Christians without going along with the sinful behaviour they encourage you to indulge in.

God wants you to be in the world but not of the world. You are to live in the world, but in a way that pleases God - witnessing to non-Christians, resisting the devil, defeating the world's temptations, overcoming lustful thoughts and desires.

Rob Yule, 16 July 2006
© 2006, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church