When you turn the page in your Bible from the last chapter of Joshua to the first chapter of Judges, the mood quickly begins to darken. The invincible Israelites, who have been steamrolling every enemy in sight, now start to experience a few hiccups. Although God had charged them to possess the entire land of Canaan, it seems they can’t quite get some of the stubborn old residents to move out. “How about if we share the space?” somebody says. “Let’s both live here—can’t we all just be friends?”
A litany of failures begins in Judges 1:
“The men of Judah … took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains” (v. 19)
“The Benjamites, however, did not drive out the Jebusites, who were living in Jerusalem” (v. 21)
“But Manasseh did not drive out the people of Beth Shan or Taanach or Dor or …” (v. 27)
“Nor did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites living in Gezer, but the Canaanites continued to live there among them” (v. 29) when
The same language appears four more times in this chapter, regarding the tribes of Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and Dan. All over the Promised Land, it seems, various Israelite tribes were making accommodations with the enemy.
This was definitely not what God had in mind. At the beginning of Judges 2, he sends his angel to rebuke them: “I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land that I swore to give your ancestors. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their altars.’ Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this?”(vv. 1–2).
Nobody had a good explanation.
One of the saddest paragraphs in all of Scripture starts in Judges 2:10: “After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals,” the Canaanite gods.
This shows the human tendency to drift, to cool off, to wander from God and his divine plan. Various denominations have started out with fire and zeal to serve God wholeheartedly … only to become something the founders wouldn’t even recognize within two or three generations. The same can be true in local churches, families, and even individuals over the course of a single lifetime. Everything goes downhill when we accommodate—rather than eradicate—the enemy within.
After listing some details about the Israelite slide (vv. 12–14), the text gets to the point of saying that “whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the LORD was against them to defeat them…. They were in great distress”(v. 15). What an odd picture! God was now opposing his own covenant people!
Newspaper editorials of the day would have given geopolitical explanations for what was occurring, but behind the scenes, it was really God’s doing. For any Israelite captain to say, “Come on, let’s resist the enemy” would have done no good. They needed to get right with God, who was desperately trying to get their attention.
Throughout the book of Judges, the text repeatedly points out God’s hand in Israel’s defeats:
“… because they did this evil the LORD gave Eglon king of Moab power over Israel” (3:12)
“So the LORD sold them into the hands of Jabin king of Canaan” (4:2)
“The LORD delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years” (13:1; see also 3:8; 6:1; 10:7)
By the end of the book, things have gotten so crazy that the body of a gang rape victim is chopped into twelve pieces and shipped around the country like FedEx packages. (Read the grisly account in chapter 19, if you have the stomach for it.) The book finishes with this death knell: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit” (21:25). Joshua and Caleb must have been turning over in their graves.
Two Occupants
I see an important spiritual warning here as to what can occur, in miniature, in your life and mine. It takes the form of self-interest and self-gratification, and it is an enemy within.
We know that Jesus saved us to bring us into a new life of freedom and expansion. The Bible calls us “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). God has sent his very presence to live inside of us, the way his majesty once filled the tabernacle in Old Testament times. He is not just somewhere out there in the heavenly realms; he is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27).
That is all rather astounding, I admit, to think that the same God who created the universe now lives inside each Christian. Yet this was God’s plan from the beginning. He always intended to display himself in more than just the starry sky, the rushing waterfall, or the soaring mountain range. He meant to dwell in the hearts of his redeemed people.
Too many of us fail to grasp this. We look in the mirror and see ourselves as terribly ordinary. Yet, because of the Holy Spirit’s presence inside, we are remarkable people. In the workplace, in the supermarket, or on the street, believers in Christ may look like anyone else, but in fact we are living temples of God Almighty.
This is why we have new spiritual instincts after coming to Christ. We may not even be fully aware of them, and yet we catch ourselves spontaneously praising the Lord or longing for closer fellowship with him. This is all the work of God’s Spirit dwelling within us, who “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Rom. 8:16).
The only trouble is … there is another occupant trying to “share the apartment” with God. The Greek name for this unwanted resident is sarx, translated some 150 times in the New Testament as “the flesh.” It indicates our lower nature as carnal men and women who have this lingering fondness for sin. The sarx is what we are apart from the influence of God’s grace. It is the enemy within.
Our sinful nature constantly, even automatically, yearns for self-gratification. It says, “I want everything to be my way. I want what I want, right now.” The result is what the apostle Paul listed in Galatians 5:19–21, a lengthy inventory of sarx behaviors: “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.” And this list was written to born-again believers, no less! Yes, several of these behaviors have to do with sex, but certainly not all. They run quite a gamut of wrong actions and motives. “The flesh” shows itself in many different ways, some large and others small. As Savonarola, the fifteenth-century Italian reformer and martyr, said, “Many have been victorious in great temptations, and ruined by little ones.”1
It would be nice if, at the moment of salvation, God wiped away all traces of these things from our minds and personalities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. We still find it easy to sin, even though we love the LORD. We are locked in a battle with our own negative instincts.
I don’t have to think too hard to come up with a personal illustration of this. I will never forget a night on the basketball court during my senior year, after I had transferred from the naval academy to the University of Rhode Island. (Yes, another basketball story—only this time I won’t come out so heroic as in the last chapter.) We were in hot competition to win the Yankee Conference and go to the NCAA tournament. We needed to do our best this night against the University of Connecticut. The game was televised all across New England.
I was our team captain and, as point guard, was matched up against a UConn player I had battled several times before. Suffice it to say we didn’t like each other.
I was also known as a Christian. In fact, several ministers had come to see me play that night. They were thinking about doing a cover story on me for their denominational youth magazine. They may have already started toying with a title along the lines of “Christian Player Comes Up Big for Tiny Rhode Island.” I had been invited to go out to eat with these men after the game.
The game was tight. The home crowd was on edge, including some fraternity guys in the front row who had had a little too much to drink. Since the Connecticut state line was less than twenty miles from our campus, their fans had shown up strong along with ours.
With about two minutes left, we were up by five points. A rebound was tipped toward the sideline. The opposing guard and I raced to get it, elbowing each other for advantage. At the last second, as we were both crashing out of bounds, I managed to slap the ball off his leg, thus saving possession for our side. We then fell into the crowd.
Then, out of nowhere, without saying a word, he sucker-punched me right in the jaw.
A red light went off inside my head. I turned ballistic in one second. Some of the URI fans tried to grab him. I began clawing my way toward him with mayhem on my mind. Both team benches emptied onto the floor, and the referees had a riot on their hands.
Little fights broke out in the stands as well. I was so enraged I just wanted to hit somebody—anybody. I struggled to reach the UConn point guard. I took a wild swing—and connected instead with the side of a referee’s neck. Fortunately, he knew me from previous games. He grabbed me and shouted, “Are you out of your mind?!” The truth is, I was.
State troopers had to come out onto the floor and break up all the fights. My assailant was thrown out of the game. When order was finally restored, I got back into the team huddle, still breathing fire.
“Sit down, Jim,” my coach said. “You can’t play now.”
This upset me even more. Let me back out there! I said to myself. I had turned into some kind of wild beast.
I was forced to sit on the bench and watch as my teammates held the lead for the last two minutes without their captain. The win put us in first place in the conference. My adrenaline gradually subsided. I walked into the locker room, still disoriented, and sat for several minutes in my uniform before going to the showers.
A few minutes later, when I came back with a towel draped around me, a team manager approached. “Hey, Jim,”he said, “there’s some men downstairs waiting to take you out to eat.”
Oh, yes—those ministers who had come to see the wonderful Christian point guard.
The shame of everything settled down over me. I was too embarrassed to look them in the eye.
“Go tell them I can’t make it,” I said to the team manager. “I’m really sorry.”
I sneaked out another exit and walked back to my dorm room that night thinking of little else but the tiger inside me. I hadn’t even known it was there. Did this mean I wasn’t truly a Christian? No, I had committed my life to God, and I knew Jesus Christ had died for my sins. But the “flesh” was still very much alive, too. I had not been promoted into perfect living by any means.
Our “Ugly Baby”
For all of us, this battle is what I call the “other war.” It is not the same as what some Christians today call “spiritual warfare,” meaning combat waged directly against demonic powers. The battle against the flesh is different. It is important to understand this, given that many believers over the past couple of decades have been quick to blame nearly every problem on evil spirits.
I do not minimize that reality. In fact, Ephesians 6:11 urges us to “put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” But the same author (Paul) had in mind something much closer to home when he wrote about the struggle against our own sinful nature: “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out…. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me? … I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature [sarx] a slave to the law of sin” (Rom. 7:18, 24–25).
Like Paul, the apostle James made the source of our trouble crystal clear when he explained to fellow believers, “Each of you is tempted when you are dragged away by your own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:14–15). To put it in other words: We can’t totally blame this “ugly baby” in our life on a mysterious delivery from Satan in the middle of the night. It is the offspring of our own “evil desire.”
Jesus Christ came to earth not only to pay the penalty for our past sins but also to break the stronghold of the flesh over our lives today. This is God’s great salvation. It cracks the grip of sinful, ungodly ways. When the Bible says that “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come” (2 Cor. 5:17), it refers not only to the forgiveness of past sins but also to the dynamic of the Holy Spirit helping us overcome the power of the flesh today. As the Scripture declares, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). This freedom can indeed be ours!
Over the years, in waging the “other war” in my own life as well as counseling people in my church, I have learned a couple of tactics that don’t work. One is to spend time analyzing the enemy. The more you think about the flesh, trying to figure out its strategies and processes, the stronger it seems to get. Yes, it is real—but you don’t need to strive for a master’s degree in “flesh methodology.” You are far better off focusing on God’s power and presence in your life. This is the road to victory.
A worse waste of time is to seek to improve the flesh, to make it try to behave better and not be so rebellious. Some Christians think that if they could just try harder and muster up a little more willpower, they could train the flesh to be less nasty. That’s what the Israelites apparently thought. The Baal-worshipers could be “managed.”
This approach is useless. You will never change your flesh! It is completely incorrigible. You may coax it into line for a day or two, but by the next weekend it will be “acting out” once again in all its original selfishness. You will be dismayed to hear yourself moaning, “There I go again!” Your most earnest wishes for self-renovation will be dashed.
Nowhere in the New Testament does it say God will “work with” our flesh. He only speaks about killing it (for example, Col. 3:5). The only hope for dealing with the inside enemy is to abandon ourselves to the leadership of the Holy Spirit. That is what Paul meant when he wrote, “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature [sarx]” (Gal. 5:16). This is the point of his bold statements in Romans 8:6 and 13: “The mind controlled by the sinful nature is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace… . If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.”
Let me give you an extreme example of the sinful nature’s power that happened back in the 1970s, when heroin was the drug of choice around our neighborhood. Back then, if an addict overdosed and died, it actually created a buzz on the street among his friends. “Wow—where can we get some more of that stuff? That dope must really be awesome, man!” Of course, they didn’t intend to push themselves completely over the edge, but only as close as possible. Talk about the sarx leading a person straight to death—apparently the apostle Paul knew what he was talking about.
In this environment, a young junkie checked himself into a Christian drug treatment ministry on Clinton Avenue called Teen Challenge. “I want to get free,” he told the intake counselor. “I’m tired of shooting dope. I’ve had enough of this life.” He made it clear that he didn’t want to go on the government’s methadone program, because that would simply lead to a substitute addiction. He wanted whatever these religious people had to offer in its place.
During the first day and night at the center, the junkie began hearing pieces of the gospel, of course. He heard others say that Jesus Christ could deliver him. Interesting, he thought to himself … but foremost in his mind at this still early stage was I’m gonna beat this demon! I’m gonna get this monster off my back one way or another. I don’t care how hard it is, how sick I feel, how many times I throw up. If I try hard enough, I can do this!
Twenty-four hours passed, then thirty-six. The young man began to feel truly wretched. His cravings were almost overpowering. His whole body ached for a fresh fix. How would he ever make it through this second night?
“Okay, you guys,” he said to the other young men on his third-floor hallway. “I’m going in my room and lock the door. Don’t anybody come near me. Leave me alone! I’m kicking this thing ‘cold turkey,’ and if any of you stick your head in my room, I might break down and beg you to go get me some stuff. So stay away, even if you hear me crying, screaming, or whatever.”
As a further measure, the young man talked one of the guys into chaining him to the heavy old-fashioned floor radiator made of iron that brought steam heat into the room. That way, if his will grew weak during the night, he would be physically restrained from running down to Fulton Street and finding a heroin dealer to fix him up. “This will do the trick,” he told himself. Now for sure he could not escape.
It was a fall night with outdoor temperatures still in the pleasant range, so no steam was yet being delivered through the plumbing of the old brownstone. Hours passed. The building grew quiet. The young man tried to sleep, but with his hands tied up, he couldn’t get into a comfortable position.
He found himself in the battle of his life. He truly wanted to be free from heroin. He had taken all the precautions he could think of….
When the sun came up the next morning, the young man was nowhere to be found. The Teen Challenge staff began scouring the building. They couldn’t find him anywhere. His room was empty; in fact, the door was standing open. And the radiator… was missing! Entirely gone, jerked out of the floor.
Within a few hours they found the man out in the neighborhood, high on dope—with a radiator in his lap, still chained to his wrists. The call of the drug had been so strong that he simply couldn’t keep holding out. The dealers, of course, had been glad to accept his business no matter how weird he looked.
What a tragic picture of the craving of the sinful nature! It says, “Satisfy me! Give me what I want! I won’t stop screaming until I get it!” To fulfill this appetite, whether for drugs or for revenge, sex, control of others, or any other addiction, it will go to incredible and shameful lengths, even to the point of full-scale embarrassment.
How many people today are walking through life with an invisible radiator chained to their arm? How many of us have ended up in a ridiculous situation that destroyed all chance of normalcy? That is what the sarx does to us.
Twenty years after this bizarre incident, the 1990s arrived, bringing with them a cheaper replacement for heroin: crack cocaine. We were shocked to read one day in the papers about a man on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who stabbed his mother in the back because she wouldn’t give him ten dollars for an envelope of crack. She didn’t die from the bloody attack, but she was seriously wounded.
On the street, they say about crack, “It has a voice. And when it calls you, you will come.” The dealers tell their customers, “It’s not a question of whether you’ll be back. It’s only a question of where you’ll get the money to come back.”
While these examples may seem outlandish, think of all the ways the flesh nature has worked throughout the years to destroy ordinary believers and even prominent ministers of the gospel. This is why the Bible boldly states not even to try to clean up our misdeeds, reprogram them, finesse them, or sweet-talk them into some kind of truce—we must put them to death by the Spirit! If this sounds harsh, let me put it another way: The Holy Spirit is a person, our guide, our leader. When we let him control our lives, he arranges for a lot of negative things to fall by the wayside.
Thomas Chalmers was a brilliant Scottish preacher in the first half of the 1800s. Perhaps his best-known sermon is entitled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.”2 He talks about a somewhat rambunctious young man falling in love with a girl and really wanting to impress her. Some of his rough conduct quickly drops away. He cleans up his manners, his language, and his choice of leisure activities. Why? Because there is a “new affection” in his life.
So it is with us and God. When we truly fall in love with him, we want to please him more than we want to keep indulging the old sarx. The Holy Spirit draws us in a new direction. We make decisions on a different basis now.
“Help, Holy Spirit!”
Your battle may not be the siren call of illegal drugs. It may instead be “road rage,” or Internet pornography, or simple laziness when responsibility calls. The truth is, all such things will keep you from experiencing God’s best in your life. They are those stubborn enemies on the road to your Promised Land.
When we are in the heat of battle, we need to look up to heaven and say, “Holy Spirit, help me right now! Lead me in the ways of righteousness. I need you this very moment.”
Cultivating a victorious life means developing a consciousness of what feeds the spirit versus what feeds the flesh—and then asking God for grace and wisdom. Many of us need to start asking ourselves, “This article I’m about to read—will it enrich me spiritually, or will it simply pamper my flesh and give it what it wants? What about this television show? This movie? Will this strengthen me in a godly manner, or the opposite?”
It is easy to make the excuse that “Well, everybody else does this … everybody watches that… .” But real Christianity has never been about going with the crowd. It has instead been about going against the flow. It is about walking in the light in a world that lies in darkness. Jesus said his disciples needed to be those who would “deny themselves” (Matt. 16:24). They would have the determination, through the power of the Spirit, to tell themselves no! If that sounds hard, it is. But what is much harder is to reap the results of hours and days with the flesh in control. Remember that victory comes only from the Spirit’s work, not from any external law or regulation.
Andrew Murray once said, “No tree can grow except on the root from which sprang.”3 A quality apple tree does not suddenly develop an offshoot branch that produces tangerines. The nature of the root is consistent with the fruit on the other end. Similarly, if we are connected to the divine root, its character will show in our visible lives. But without the Holy Spirit as our source, the flesh will have a heyday. That is why Paul said to the Christians in Galatia, “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by human effort?” (3:3).
The flesh is ever lurking. But as the Spirit was the one who gave us our new birth in Christ, likewise he will keep us safe.
Every day—and throughout the day—we have a choice. Will we accommodate the flesh, or will we draw near to God in full dependence on his power to keep us? If we take this second option, we will find that our words and actions will be different. We will crave times of meditating on the Word of God, seeking a closer relationship with him. We will sense urgings to serve others and help them in their spiritual battles. These will not feel like obligations but instead like opportunities. The source of these positive, holy cravings is not us. Rather, it is a case of “God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose”(Phil. 2:13).
The way out of anger is to be led by God’s love. The way out of sexual temptation is to have the Holy Spirit’s purity repel it. When we live by the Spirit, he comes to our aid by deadening the flesh. Meanwhile, we are acutely conscious of the Lord’s presence. Our hearts and minds are open for his promptings to do what is right. And we receive the strength we need to deny the flesh and its unholy desires.
The Word of God makes it clear: “Sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace” (Rom. 6:14). The Law of God tells us what is sinful, but it is powerless to give us victory. That is why the Israelites drifted away from God and struggled against his representative, Moses, throughout their journey in the desert. And that is why Christ came with his ministry of grace that lifts us up beyond the cravings of our lower nature. He who promised us mastery over the flesh will also fulfill it through his indwelling Spirit.
That is the only way to win the “other war” and defeat the enemy within.