by Jacob Ninan
The salvation that Jesus offers us is for a restoration of our relationship and fellowship with God. There is a starting point – a gate, a way to walk in, and a destination – and it is possible for us to go wrong at every step. Salvation begins by giving us forgiveness of our sins. And then it goes on to save us from the power of sin and to transform us into His character in our daily life in an all-pervasive manner. Finally God gives us a sin-free body and perfect fellowship with Him in eternity. Whether we receive the true salvation at all, or how much of it we receive depends on knowing the truth. Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (Jn.8:32). Knowing the truth also implies recognising error.
In this series which I call, "Ideas that mess with salvation', Part 1 addressed 'Nothing we need to do', and Part 2, 'We must have enough faith'. You can read or listen to them on my website or on YouTube. This time I would like to look at 'The battle belongs to the Lord'. Why these ideas catch on is because there is some element of truth in such statements. But the problem is that when they are not understood properly or in the right context, they can become very misleading. One reason I strongly recommend that you read this to the end is that otherwise you might not get the reasoning behind my statements.
Let us first look at the proper understanding that we need to have about this idea, that the battle belongs to the Lord. God gives us assurances like this when we come to situations that we recognise and acknowledge to be impossible for us to handle. Then He steps into the situation and brings about even supernatural turnarounds that cause us to be amazed and to fall down before the Lord in worship. Let us look at three incidents from the Bible where God did miracles for people who looked to Him from their position of utter need.
After God had rescued the people of Israel from Egypt where they had been treated like slaves for about 400 years, they travelled and came in front of the Red Sea which blocked their path. They also saw that the Egyptian army was pursuing them and coming near to attack them. It certainly looked like a hopeless situation where they had no hope, humanly speaking. When they cried out in despair, God told them through Moses that He would handle the situation. "But Moses said to the people, 'Do not fear! Stand by and see the salvation of the LORD which He will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you will never see them again forever. The LORD will fight for you while you keep silent'" (Exo.14:13,14).
When Asa was king of Judah, the Ethiopians came against the nation with an innumerable army. Asa recognised the hopelessness of his situation and cried out to God. "Then Asa called to the LORD his God and said, 'LORD, there is no one besides You to help in the battle between the powerful and those who have no strength; so help us, O LORD our God, for we trust in You, and in Your name have come against this multitude. O LORD, You are our God; let not man prevail against You.' So the LORD routed the Ethiopians before Asa and before Judah, and the Ethiopians fled" (2Chr.14:11,12).
A similar thing happened when Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, faced the combined army of Moabites, Ammonites and Meunites against him. He prayed, "O our God, will You not judge them? For we are powerless before this great multitude who are coming against us; nor do we know what to do, but our eyes are on You" (2Chr.20:12). The Lord answered by granting him a supernatural victory.
The common character of all these incidents is that when people cried out to God in their helplessness He intervened on their behalf and did miracles for them. Of course, there are many other examples in the Bible, and also in many people's lives afterwards.
Now let us look at how this idea has been misapplied in the area of salvation and how many believers have been misled. When we come to salvation by grace under the new covenant, sometimes there is a great misunderstanding of grace. The failure of the old covenant, where obedience to God led to His blessing and disobedience to curses, was that no one was able to be fully obedient at all times to the Law. Anyone who sincerely tried to find acceptance from God through keeping the commandments or doing good deeds would ultimately come to realise that this was never going to be possible for him. Then came the Gospel of grace. God now offers salvation from sin as a gift of unmerited favour from Him on the basis of our trusting in Him. When people understand that there is nothing they can do to earn their salvation, some of them expand it above and beyond the right idea into thinking that therefore, there is nothing they need to do from their part. Now they begin to say that the battle belongs to the Lord and He will do everything for them.
For many people, this translates into thinking that all they have to do is to believe, and there is no need to admit their sins, confess them, turn away from them, etc. God will do everything for them. He will automatically transform them in the twinkling of an eye to become like Jesus when they die, or do that slowly as they read God's word and see the glory of God there! Whenever they face any difficult situation, all they have to do is ask God in prayer, or if they want to go further, fast and pray, and then God will fight their battles for them!
Can you see how all this is actually causing people to disown their responsibility to understand God's will, seek for wisdom and strength to carry it out, discern the danger in front of them and plan their tactics and strategies? This is to imagine that God will always carry them like babies, change their diapers, place the milk bottle into their mouth, give them bath, sing them to sleep, etc. No. After we have been born again as spiritual babies in His family, God wants us to grow up and become mature (1Cor.14:20). And we cannot grow into maturity except through exercising our spiritual senses in the times of trial (Heb.5:14).
We follow Jesus in order to steadily become like Him in His character. "And He was saying to them all, 'If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it'" (Lk.9:23,24). In this context, following Him as the way to become like Him means that we learn to do everything in our life in the way He does. In order to do this, we will have to constantly deny ourselves what our sinful nature tempts us to do. Someone who follows Jesus like this has decided that he is going to die to himself and do what Jesus says. That is the meaning of taking our cross daily, because the end of everyone carrying a cross is to die on it.
So, what will happen to us if we imagine that we don't have to do anything, but God will do everything for us? We will not be becoming mature, or like Jesus, but remain as spiritual babies. But isn't this the way many Christians are thinking?
What must we do when we face difficult situations? Perhaps there are sins we have done or foolish decisions we have made which have led to the situation. Don't we need to confess them to God for forgiveness, and perhaps to the people we have hurt, in order to make things right? Maybe we need to change our ways, attitudes, methods, approach, etc., in order to avoid repeating our folly in the future. Sometimes it may be our unforgiving attitude towards others that needs to be dealt with. Perhaps we need wisdom to deal with the current situations and to get out of our predicament. Of course, we will need to pray and seek God. But what do we pray for? That God will simply remove the problem, change the situation and miraculously set us in an abundant place? No. We need to humble ourselves and own our responsibility for what has happened. We need to set things right. We need to change our ways. For all this, we need wisdom and help from God, for which we pray!
We need salvation. For forgiveness of sins we need to confess our sins, turn away from them and put our entire faith in the sacrifice of Jesus. And then to become like Jesus, we need to take up our cross daily, deny ourselves and follow Jesus. If we think that the battle belongs to the Lord and leave everything to Him, we can now see how that will mess up our salvation.
Many Christians think of the Promised Land as a picture of heaven, and so they think that once they die, God will take us there and suddenly change us to become like Jesus. But what we see in the Old Testament, as a picture of our salvation, is that after the people of Israel were delivered from slavery in Egypt, they came to the Promised Land, and they had to fight with the enemies who lived there, destroy them and then occupy the land. Actually, our Promised Land is to partake of the divine nature (2Pet.1:3,4). How can we partake of the divine nature unless we fight with the lust in our sinful flesh and put them to death?