Satan's Best Weapon Against the Church Is You

Every pastor dreams of serving a church whose people work together and care for each other in unity and peace; where grumbling, complaining, backbiting, and vitriolic banter is non-existent. And…then he wakes up to find out that reality isn’t the same as fantasy. Lest I paint too bleak a picture of the Church, let me say that many churches enjoy great unity and peace in the pursuit of their common missio dei (mission given by God). Even in the most harmonious and unified churches, Satan still works to destroy the work of God among them and defame the name of Jesus because of them. It’s our Enemy’s age-old tactic; as old as the Church herself.

Attacks from Without

A study of the Book of Acts reveals that Satan did not spend a great amount of energy coordinating external attacks against the infant Church, though he does like to persecute us. The Church, birthed in Acts 2 at Pentecost, witnessed a fair amount of initial external persecution. Acts 3, Peter heals a lame beggar sitting outside the Temple courts. This sparks great interest on the part of the people and causes Peter and John to be ushered before the Sanhedrin (Acts 4). Having been threatened, they were released. Perhaps the Sanhedrin assumed they could bully the believers and apostles into backing down; seeing what they’d done to their Master, Jesus, not too long before. They were wrong. The Church grew exponentially. After this the Books of Acts records that the apostles returned to the same spot they had been preaching before they were threatened to preach again. Once again, they are arrested and imprisoned by the Sadducees (5:17-26). Released by an angelic messenger from God, they were found back in the Temple at dawn preaching the gospel of Jesus. The Sanhedrin arrests them, beats them, and threatens them with death. They leave rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer for Christ (5:40-41).  In Acts 6-7 Stephen is arrested and executed; becoming the first martyr of the Church. Acts 8, a great persecution arises in Jerusalem; scattering all except the apostles to the four corners of the Roman Empire. Everywhere they went, they preached the gospel of Jesus. In Acts 9 we find that Saul of Tarsus has been commissioned by the Sanhedrin to go to Damascus to find Christians and bring them back to Jerusalem for trial and execution, but he’s converted along the way and becomes one of the greatest apostles and authors of Scripture in the Church, the apostle Paul.

Jewish persecution of the Church was not the only suffering endured from without in her life. Satan, thwarted by the expansion of the gospel outside of Palestine, was forced to move the Romans to persecute the Church from without. In the lifetime of the Church from the first Roman persecution by Nero (AD 64) until the Edict of Milan (AD 313) there were 10 major persecutions totaling 129 years of persecution with 120 years of toleration and peace. Of the 54 emperors who ruled Rome between AD 30 and AD 313, only about 12 went out of their way to persecute Christians.

1.       Nero – 64-68

2.       Domitian – 81-96

3.       Trajan – 112-117

4.       Marcus Aurelius – 161-180

5.       Septimus Severus – 202-210

6.       Decius – 250-251

7.       Valerian – 257-259

8.       Maximinus the Thracian – 235-238

9.       Aurelian – 270-275

10.   Diocletian and Galerius – 303-324

I’m not minimizing any of these persecutions, nor any which have and continue to follow them. But, our Enemy has also employed a much more effective tactic throughout the Church’s history as well.

 

Attacks from Within

Sandwiched between the initial arrests and threatening of Acts 4 and the arrest and beating of Acts 5 is a short account that clues us in to a new weapon in Satan’s arsenal; one that will prove to be his greatest weapon ever. Satan, in his maniacal methodology, added another tactic to his assault against the fledgling Church…internal division. Ananias and Sapphira lie to the Holy Spirit and to the apostles concerning the sale of a piece of property the proceeds of which was to be given wholly to Church. God kills them for doing so and fear falls on the entire Church and everyone who heard about what happened. While I chalk this attempt up to a loss for Satan, it begins the onslaught of an internal dissension campaign that has yet to stop. Acts 6, grumbling and infighting between the Hellenistic Jewish Christians and the Hebraic Jewish Christians breaks out over whose widows were being neglected and whose were being preferred in the daily distribution of food (6:1). The dissension becomes so great that the apostles have to get involved. Another successful thwarting of Satan’s attack, but an attack nonetheless. Acts 10-11 witness the beginning of a very problematic stage of the early Church’s growth. The gospel, via Peter and many others, has made its way to Gentiles. Peter ends up in Antioch with Saul (Paul) and Barnabas. There, he sees how the gospel has affected the Gentiles and rejoices; eating and fellowshipping with them. When a Jerusalem delegation sent from James arrives and sees Peter eating Gentile food and fellowshipping with them, he shamefully withdraws. Peter’s hypocrisy even leads Barnabas to withdraw from these new Gentile converts. Saul/Paul gets so angry he publicly confronts Peter (Gal. 2:12-21). This incident, and the rapid spread of the gospel among the Gentiles, leads the Jerusalem church to hold a council to discuss the matter of Gentile inclusion within the Church (Acts 15). Added to this were the Judaizers who followed Paul during his first journeys; teaching the newly converted Gentiles that they had to become essentially Jewish if salvation was going to be theirs.

In fact, a study of the New Testament epistolary literature reveals that internal strife, and the problems Satan stirred up creating it, was something the Church dealt with regularly. The members of the Body of Christ are expected to have and develop interdependence with one another. Paul extensively used the body metaphor to explain how the church is to promote its own unity and meet its own needs as the Holy Spirit gifts individuals to that end. Not only does Paul use the metaphor of the body, but also calls the Church the family of God. The term brothers is used 98 times to refer to Christians in the Church. Every epistolary author (Paul, the author of Hebrews, James, Peter, and John) use the term identically; establishing the concept that Christians share a familial bond. Since Christians share a familial bond with God, Christ, and one another, it is expected that the Church function, in part, as a family functions. The removal of the negative influences of fear, bigotry, loneliness and the provision of a positive trajectory for partnership, fellowship, and accountability are all integral to family life resulting from the familial bond that exists among Christians. Healthy families function within a community of interdependence and mutual responsibility. Some of the most extensive instruction related to Church unity is found in what has anecdotally been called the “one-another passages”. No less than 36 one-another passages exist in the epistles. They can be listed as follows:

1.       prefer one another (Rom. 12:10)

2.               be devoted to one another (Rom. 12:10)

3.               be of the same mind toward one another (Rom. 12:16)

4.               don’t judge one another (Rom. 14:13)

5.               build one another up (Rom. 14:19)

6.               accept one another (Rom. 15:7)

7.               admonish one another (Rom. 15:14)

8.               don’t sue one another (1 Cor. 6:7)

9.               care for one another (1 Cor. 12:25)

10.         don’t challenge one another (Gal. 5:26)

11.         don’t envy one another (Gal. 5:26)

12.         speak truthfully to one another (Eph. 4:25; 5:19)

13.         be kind to one another (Eph. 4:32)

14.   be subject to one another (Eph. 5:21)

15.         regard one another (Phil. 2:3)

16.   don’t lie to one another (Col. 3:9)

17.   bear with one another (Col. 3:13)

18.         teach one another (Col. 3:16)

19.   love one another (1 Thess. 3:12)

20.         comfort one another (1 Thess. 4:18)

21.         encourage one another (1 Thess. 5:11)

22.   be at peace with one another (1 Thess. 5:13)

23.         seek one another’s good (1 Thess. 5:15)

24.         pray for one another (1 Tim. 2:1)

25.   stimulate one another (Heb. 10:24)

26.         don’t speak against one another (Jas. 4:11)

27.         don’t complain about one another (Jas. 5:9)

28.         confess to one another (Jas. 5:16)

29.   be hospitable to one another (1 Pet. 4:9)

30.   serve one another (1 Pet. 4:10)

31.   be humble toward one another (1 Pet. 5:5)

32.         greet one another (1 Pet. 5:14)

33.         fellowship with one another (1 John 1:7)

34.   wait for one another (1 Cor. 11:33)

35.         bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2)

36.   forgive one another (Eph. 4:32; Col. 3:13)

       

Obviously apparent from these texts, and others which mandate unity within the Church’s ranks (e.g. Eph. 4:1-6), is the truth that God intends the church to function as much as a community as a body. American culture is marked by a narcissistic individualism that tends toward self-isolationism and the attempt to meet one’s own emotional, psychological, physical, economic, and spiritual needs apart from a larger community. The church is intended by God to be a community through which man’s basic needs may be met in the context of a common faith relationship with Jesus Christ. The church is intended to function in an interdependent relationship.

CONCLUSION

The Church is intended by God to function as a cohesive unit, the body of Christ on earth, a united family of God in which every member has been gifted by the Spirit and desires to use those gifts and abilities to benefit the whole rather than pursue his or her personal agenda. Because we still live in a sinful world and our Enemy still hates God, His plan, and His people this will never be perfectly realized in this life. But that’s no excuse to allow Satan to use us as fodder for his favorite attack – to disrupt the harmony of the Body of Christ, of the family of God, by tricking us and tempting us toward bitterness, anger, hatred, gossip, lying, unloving behavior, etc., ad infinitum. I am passionate about helping the Church of Jesus Christ be as healthy as she can be, and that means functioning and relating to one another biblically. So, what is Satan’s greatest weapon against the Church? Is it external physical or financial persecution? No, I don’t believe so. Satan’s greatest weapon he’s ever used against the Church is the Church; her members and unsaved infiltrators who seek to realize a personal agenda at the expense of the mission dei and Body/family unity. May God help us to get past personal agendas and get on mission as a unit, a body, a family; dealing with our differences biblically – with love and grace.