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Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory (Part Four)
The War Waged Against the Soul
Storming the Gates or Something Clandestine
Fleshly lusts war against the soul of believers (1 Peter 2:11) by invading each soul as a conquering army would . The army storms the gates, enters in a more clandestine manner, or sieges its target of battle. It depends on whatever the most successful art of war.
As an example, consider the “evil communications” (homiloi krakai) of 1 Corinthians 15:33. These evil communications, Paul says, corrupt good manners. The corruption related to the doctrine of bodily resurrection, starting with the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The evil communications invaded the souls of professing Corinthian believers. Paul starts that sentence with the command, “be not deceived.”
The deceit that fooled on the truth about bodily resurrection seemed to enter in a clandestine manner through corrupting good manners. The purveyors of evil Egyptian culture tried to deceive Moses with enjoyment of the pleasures of sin for a season (Hebrews 11:25). Someone need not assert a statement of doctrine to corrupt someone’s doctrine. Instead, he allures someone through the pleasures of sin.
Favoring Lasciviousness
The false doctrine of Corinth influenced through lasciviousness. It could be humor, music, enthusiastic acceptance, entertainment, or drink. These accompanied a perverted view of the body. Libertines denied bodily resurrection, which favored their licentious manner of conduct.
Also, to retain employment in Greek society, employers required Christian employees to ally with their Greek philosophies. Rather than start with your doctrine, they start with acceptability of lifestyle and then the false doctrine follows by conforming to the behavior.
The accompanying false doctrine might sound like the following: “You don’t have to believe in bodily resurrection. You could just believe in a spiritual resurrection, couldn’t you? Isn’t that just a divisive and unnecessary scruple?” By hanging on to this exactness in doctrine, someone could lose his job or the pleasures of Greek society.
The War Against the Entrepreneur’s Soul
People want what they want. This lust wars against the soul, but it doesn’t seem like it wars against success in a business. Someone entrepreneurial sees through his eyegate the success of capitulating to lust. People line up for something that makes them feel good. Using the attraction or allure of the lust is just good business. It must destroy people, because it wars against their souls, as God says, but it helps in the bottom line for business. God wants us to succeed, doesn’t He?
Longstanding victory is not the short term victory of keeping a job in Corinth or succeeding in business. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9:25:
And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.
Everyone must struggle against the corruptible. This is Solomon saying in Ecclesiastes in essence, “Ditch the temporal for the eternal, because the former is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Struggling against the lusts of the flesh is good. Any person’s struggle does not justify lust. It’s a struggle. It’s a fight not to acquiesce to the lust of the flesh.
The crown or success for the short term is what Paul calls, “a corruptible crown.” Someone can succeed and receive the corruptible crown, if that’s what he’s shooting for. He can use fleshly lust to obtain it, which still wars against his soul and that of his adherents or audience. It brings failure and destruction, posing as an award or reward. It looks motivated and ambitious, but it promotes the worst ultimate failure.
The War Against Incorruptible Gain
Someone might call the spoils of fleshly lust a market. Like James says in chapter four of his epistle, he goes, buys, sells, and gets gain. He doesn’t say, “If the Lord wills, I will do this or that.” Does how you get the gain matter? Yes. And it also considers, “Is this really gain?” Is it gain if it is short-term gain that receives the corruptible short term gain? In fact, it’s not gain at all, because, again, it wars against the soul. When the soul takes a hit, everything is taking a hit.
Perhaps you’ve heard the terminology, “Gainfully employed.” Is a casino operator, “gainfully employed”? He’s bringing money home from work, putting it in the bank, and taking care of his family. The United States Mail in part because of the “success” of Amazon, sends drivers delivering packages all day Sunday. That is also “gainful employment” for delivery drivers. What crown would you receive, the temporal one or the eternal one?
It’s easy to confuse the distinctions between liberty and lust. Someone does not have liberty to war against the soul just because a verse doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not own a casino.” I’m just using that as an illustration.
College students and their coaches and staff travel all over the country on Sundays for basketball and their future bright shining moment. The bright shining moment is when the confetti falls in a basketball arena, not at the Bema seat of Jesus Christ (this might represent one shining moment as good as anything). One should consider the incongruity of these two crowns, just like Paul did, and judge whether the lust for short term earthly gain wars against the eternal value to the soul.
More to Come
Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory (Part Three)
War Against the Soul
A non-stop, real war exists through the history of the world between light and darkness. As a part of that war, Peter expresses an unstoppable advantage for guaranteed longstanding victory. He says in 1 Peter 2:11:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
The appropriate part of the verse to declare an aspect of war and victory is at the end: “which war against the soul.” What wars against the soul? “Fleshly lusts” do. Abstinence from fleshly lusts eliminates a crucial component for losing this war with darkness. .
A question might and should arise, “How do fleshly lusts war against the soul of a person?” Fleshly lusts cause spiritual and psychological disadvantages in the war against the soul. You need your soul and spirit operating in an optimal way and fleshly lusts wound them.
Confidence in Christ
Confidence in Christ functions within the soul and spirit, not the flesh. Six different thoughts come to my mind on this, not necessarily in this order.
Persuasion
First, confidence is persuasion (peitho). You can behave with strength, because you have confidence, confidence in the Lord (2 Thess 3:4) and not in the flesh (Philip 3:3-4). Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you alway” (Matt 28:20). Jesus is sanctified in your heart, so you’re ready to give an answer of the hope within you (1 Pet 3:15). Readiness comes by fortifying the soul.
Uppermost Affections
Second, you can please God by faith because God abides in the uppermost of your affections (Heb 11:6). You live like He’s your Judge and He does not lie. This rest in Him provides a settled peace that isn’t moved.
Thinking on These Things
Third, anxiety comes not from victimhood, but from not thinking on what is true, honest, just, etc. (Philip 4:8). You’ll remain anxious if you adopt victim status. You’re not one. The peace of God keeps you through Christ Jesus, but only by thinking on it. That’s in your soul.
Sidelining Deflation
Fourth, Satan wants you a casualty, someone out of the fight. He uses those fiery darts that penetrate the heart, not in a deadly manner, but in an injurious or incapacitating way. The Apostle Paul had an open door in Troas, but because he had no rest in his spirit (2 Corinthians 2:13), he missed an opportunity. People become incapable of fulfilling God’s will because they subject themselves to fear and discouragement. Their deflation keeps them sidelined.
Boldness
Fifth, Paul twice asked church saints, once of Ephesus and once of Colossi, to pray that he would have boldness. Boldness comes when the Spirit fills a believer in his inner man. He speaks the truth in love and the Spirit encourages him.
Filled with the Knowledge of God’s Will
Sixth, Paul prayed that the knowledge of God’s will would fill the saints of the church in Colossi (Col 1:9). Furthermore, he says this knowledge of God’s will is in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. God’s will is not arbitrary. It is based on wisdom and understanding and not a feeling proceeding from the flesh.
Fleshly lusts debilitate everyone, both believers and unbelievers. It is a very sad tale when they strafe the souls of believers. They bring this on themselves. Believers have all the resources in the grace of God to abstain. They just won’t. The worst thing very often that you can do to one of these professing believers is exhort or admonish them about it. They are quick to speak, slow to hear, and quick to wrath.
Beach Heads or Gates
John Bunyan clued true believers to the methodology of fleshly lusts. Before him in Pilgrim’s Progress, it was James 1:13-16. The gates through which fleshly lusts pass are akin to the allies taking the beaches in the South Pacific and at Normandy. The flesh forms a beach head through the eye gate, the ear gate, and the three other lesser senses: touch, taste, and smell. Abstaining from fleshly lusts means guarding those gates, stewarding them.
The Nazis had deadly holds on the Beaches of Northern France. Those required removing for victory to occur. Allied soldiers eliminated them at great cost. Professing believers instead contribute to the fleshly strongholds in many different ways. They talk like God gives them liberty to keep those deadly beach heads.
More to Come
Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory (Part Two)
Fleshly Lust and Priesthood
Peter commands his readers (1 Peter 2:11): “Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.” It is a crucial or key verse in 1 Peter as Peter moves into the primary message of his epistle. It’s also a mandate or instruction, or at least similar one, as in other passages and from other authors.
In the Old Testament, being a priest was a privilege. The priest could go directly to God unlike an average Israelite. Jesus, however, makes every believer a priest, as seen in 1 Peter 2:5:
Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.
You can see in that very verse: the New Testament priest “offer[s] up spiritual sacrifices,” ones that are “acceptable to God.” The priesthood requires responsibility. The sacrifices are a sacrifice. And the sacrifices are spiritual and acceptable unto God. The priest can’t give to God just any old thing.
If the priest must offer spiritual sacrifices, then he must abstain from fleshly lusts. Fleshly lusts run in absolute contradiction to spiritual sacrifices. God will reject a fleshly sacrifice. Evangelicalism offers non-stop fleshly sacrifices to God. He rejects those offerings. Yet, evangelicals will count them as accepted because of their feelings. What they feel, they feel is acceptable to Him. They even very often think they feel the Holy Spirit in an ecstatic experience produced out of their passions.
Deprivation of the Soul and Idolatry
Posing as Worship
What does rejected worship do for someone’s soul? It deprives the soul. Fleshly lust hollows out a professing priest of God, leaving him spiritually famished. In the realm of spiritual warfare, this fleshly lust wars against his soul.
Professing Christians pose as worshipers. Like the priests of Baal with Elijah (1 Kings 18), they major on their expression of worship. It originates from their own passion, just like sin arises from their lust (James 1:14). True worship humbles itself before God, subjecting to the truth, which is only His truth. That is authentic worship, not the unique expressions of ones own feelings, but that proceeding from Words of God.
Fleshly lust parallels with idolatry, as revealed by Paul in Colossians 3:5, when he writes:
Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
Mortification
Mortify your members, Paul writes. The members are body parts. Passions arise from body parts. Fleshly lust abides in body parts, as does indwelling sin. Body parts must be brought under subjection. Then they become instruments of righteousness unto God.
The first falling domino that ends in fornication is idolatry. Next is covetousness. Functioning in the realm of fleshly lust betrays fruit of the Spirit. It’s why Paul also commanded in Romans 13:14: “make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.”
“Abstain from fleshly lusts” and “make not provision for the flesh” relate to idolatry. Both result in not offering spiritual sacrifices unto God. God doesn’t accept worldly and fleshly worship, which also means the perpetual offering of a person as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2).
Soundtrack for a Life
Commands and Disobedience to Them
Christians walk according to the soundtracks of their lives, what they might call their playlist. The reformed theologian and author, Douglas Wilson, who wears the mantel of father of modern classical education, wrote this:
While working on this post, to take a snippet of my playlist at random, I have listened to “Feelin’ Alright” by Joe Cocker, “Rivers of Babylon” by the Melodians, “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians, “Lonestar” by Norah Jones, “Almost Hear You Sigh” by the Stones, “Watching the River Flow” by Dylan, “Motherless Child” by Clapton, and you get the picture. Now here is a quick quiz. Get out your Bibles, everybody. Is that playlist worldly?
Not too classical. Education, probably not either. That playlist disobeys two commands: “abstain from fleshly lusts” and “make not provision for the flesh.” And actually many others in the New Testament.
Internal Procession of Unrighteousness
Paul writes in Galatians 5:19, “Now the works of the flesh are manifest.” The works of the flesh are evidence. Like faith is evidence, the works of the flesh are evidence. One of those works is “lasciviousness,” which means “sensuality.” The soundtrack of a genuine Christian is not sensuality.
The viewpoint of “abstain from fleshly lusts” corresponds to the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. God’s righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees (Matt 5:20). The examples or illustrations of Jesus (Matt 5:21-48) then deal with the internal procession of unrighteousness. It’s not just murder, but hate. It’s not just physical acts, but the lack of abstinence from fleshly lusts. This clashes with the nature of God, the true identify of the believer, the light of the world and the salt of the earth. Fleshly lusts do not retard corruption. They speed it up.
More to Come
Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory
Supply Chains and Tripping Hazards
Something I never heard before 2020 were the two words, “supply chain.” I looked into those two words and didn’t find them used together before the last half of the twentieth century. Google books gives just one page of examples for the whole century and none in the nineteenth century. Examples explode in the last twenty years.
Now that people use “supply chain,” historians provide supply chain advantage as the primary reason for victory in World War Two. It was easier for the United States to get its supplies in Europe than for Germany to get theirs. The Americans, over two thousand miles from home, had more and better supplies than the Germans, only hundreds of miles away.
The success of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War were short supply chains, essentially tunnels, jungle trails, and near limitless volunteers. Among an assortment of lesser causes, this led to their victory over a superior foe.
To achieve success in life requires eliminating as many possible factors that impede that success. Next week Monday, I’m supposed to have a hip replacement. The booklet to prepare for it explains certain fundamentals like removing threats of tripping from the walking surface of your floors. As you read that, it seems a bit of a “duh” moment. And yet, people leave tripping hazards all over their lives.
Supply Chain Dysfunction
Life became more difficult for many people beginning in 2020 because of “supply chain” dysfunction. The price of homes increased because it’s harder to get the supplies. It’s also more difficult to find the people to build the homes.
God in scripture points out factors comparable to a broken supply chain and a tripping hazard. Peter expresses one in 1 Peter 2:11:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
Paul begs and commands those traversing their life’s path on earth, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.” He didn’t say, “Stop sinning.” Saying “stop sinning” is like saying, “Win the war.” You want to win the war, but more basic than that is “build and sustain a supply chain.” Remove tripping hazards.
Professing Christianity today acts like an industrial complex for fleshly lusts. It isn’t abstaining. It riddles the floor with tripping hazards. If the goal is winning the war, not abstaining is a losing strategy. It creates a disadvantage so large that it guarantees failure. Fleshly lusts destroy the supply chain.
Winning the War
People might say they want to win the war. They might publish multitudes of magnificent war victory posters. Until they want to abstain from fleshly lusts and then abstain, they won’t. In fact, professing Christianity today campaigns for feeding fleshly lusts. It thinks its worst enemy is the command. Professing Christianity reacts most harsh to the threat of abstaining from fleshly lusts than the fleshly lusts.
A popular phrase, reaching cliche status, I will still use because of its appropriateness. Professing Christians shoot themselves in the foot when they do not abstain from fleshly lusts. They might not like the idea, but they are in a war, a war they should desire to win. Instead, they provide the way for their own defeat. They have multiple bullet holes in both feet. I think we should say that they want to lose. Losing must in fact be their goal. They are going to get tired of losing, they’ll lose so much.
“Dearly beloved” or “strangers and pilgrims” in this world find their interests in the world to come, not this one. They instead plan their lives around a future kingdom and a heavenly city. They invest for eternity.
Still, 1 Peter 2:11 expresses a command to believers, an unpopular mode of communication. True Christians still participate in fleshly lusts, so Peter commands them to abstain from them. Commands are not options. He also provides the consequence of not abstaining. Psychological problems, soul problems, are the worst ones people have. They obliterate people and families like Sherman’s march tore through the South at the end of the Civil War.
Fleshly Lusts and True Christianity
Fleshly lusts cannot characterize true Christianity. If fleshly lusts do, it isn’t Christianity. It’s something else, not Christianity. Someone who laps up fleshly lusts is not a Christian.
Biblical Christianity, true Christianity, is more than just a series of things someone doesn’t get to do that he might want to do. It is wanting to do what Christ wants Him to do and liking it. Loving it.
The soul that will operate in a godly manner will unhitch itself from fleshly lusts. A soul that continues in its pursuit of worldly pleasure is not “converted” or “restored” (Psalms 19:7, 23:3). God does not possess that soul. It remains in the realm of the wicked one. This is not a person who has lost his life (psuche, his soul) for Christ’s sake. He still loves the world and the love of the Father is not in Him.
More to Come
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