The Head Already Promised Crushed

A man fights differently when he knows the war is already won. Not carelessly. Harder, actually, and freer, because he is not fighting to see whether good will win, he is fighting on the winning side of a thing that was decided before he was born. And every man in this series needs to know that the crushing of the enemy is not something you are trying to accomplish. It is something that was promised at the beginning and finished at the cross.

Go all the way back, to the first pages, right after everything broke. God is speaking to the serpent, and he makes a promise. "And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel" (Genesis 3:15).

The head. The seed of the woman crushes the serpent on the head. That is the first promise God ever made about the enemy, spoken at the very start, that a son was coming who would crush the serpent's skull. Every page after that is walking toward it. The whole Bible is the story of the head-crusher coming.

The blow already landed

And then he came, and he landed the blow, and it did not look like a victory. It looked like a Roman execution. It looked like the serpent had won.

But look at what Paul says actually happened at that cross. "When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him" (Colossians 2:15). Disarmed them. Made a public display of them. Triumphed. At the exact moment it looked like defeat, the head was being crushed. The powers were stripped of their weapons in the place they thought they were winning. The heel was bruised, Jesus died, and in the dying the serpent's skull was broken, and the promise from the first pages was kept.

So the enemy you are fighting is a disarmed enemy. That does not mean he is harmless, a disarmed enemy can still wound you, still lie to you, still make a lot of noise. But his weapons were taken at the cross. His head is already crushed. The accusation is already answered, the penalty is already paid, the power is already broken, and he is fighting a war he has already, definitively, publicly lost.

Fight from the victory, not toward it

This changes everything about how you fight, and it is the difference between exhaustion and freedom.

You are not fighting to win. You are fighting from a win that is already finished. When the enemy comes at you, you are not facing an open question about who is stronger, that question was settled at a cross where he was disarmed and publicly humiliated. You fight a beaten foe. You resist a serpent whose head is already crushed. And a man who knows that does not fight in terror, wondering if he will lose, he fights in the strength of a settled outcome, and that strength is the thing that finally lets him fight hard, because he is no longer afraid the whole thing rests on him.

It never rested on you. It rested on a son who was promised in the first pages and who landed the blow at the cross. The head is already crushed. Fight like a man on the winning side of a finished war, because that is exactly what you are.