War on Evil, Peace with Men

Somewhere along the way a man got the idea that following Jesus meant going soft. That the goal was to become harmless. Nice. Agreeable. A man who does not make waves, does not raise his voice, does not have a hard edge left anywhere on him. And he wears that like it is holiness.

It is not. It is surrender with a Bible verse taped over it.

Read what Jesus actually said, because it does not sound like the man you have been told to become. "And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force" (Matthew 11:12). Sit in that a second. Violent men. Taking it by force. That is the mouth of the gentlest man who ever lived, and He is not describing a problem. He is describing the kind of man who lays hold of the kingdom.

You have been at war your whole life and mostly refused to fight it. That is what this series is about.

The war you have been losing on purpose

Every man reading this is getting beaten by something. A habit he swore off a hundred times and picked back up a hundred and one. An appetite that runs him instead of the other way around. A bitterness he feeds in the dark. A screen, a bottle, a temper, a secret. He calls it a struggle. Struggle is a soft word for what it actually is, which is a war he keeps agreeing to lose because winning would cost him more than he has wanted to pay.

Here is the thing nobody told him. God never asked him to make peace with that. Not to manage it. Not to keep it to a comfortable size. To kill it. The whole language of the New Testament about a man's sin is violent, and it is violent on purpose, because sin does not respond to negotiation. It responds to force. You put it to death or it puts you to death, and there is no third option where the two of you learn to live together.

A man who understands that stops being surprised by his own life. He stops wondering why the polite approach never worked. You do not politely ask a fire to leave your house. You do not reason with the thing that is trying to kill your marriage. You go at it, hard, with everything you have, and you do not stop when it gets uncomfortable, because uncomfortable was always the price.

This is spiritual violence, and God commands it. Not as a personality type. As a posture toward evil.

The line you do not cross

Now I have to draw a line, and I have to draw it hard, because the second a man hears "be violent" something in him wants to point it at a person.

You are not allowed to. Ever.

Hear the two commands side by side, because Scripture keeps them together on purpose. To evil: total war. To people: "If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men" (Romans 12:18). Same Bible, same page nearly, and they are not in tension. They are aimed at two completely different targets, and a man who confuses the targets becomes the very thing this series is warning him about.

Paul names the target so there is no mistaking it. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). Not against flesh and blood. Read it again slow. Your wife is not the enemy. Your kid is not the enemy. The coworker who took the credit, the man who wronged you, the neighbor with the wrong sign in his yard, none of them are the enemy. They are people, some of them hurting, some of them wrong, and there is a way to deal with people, and the way is peace so far as it depends on you.

The enemy has no face you can punch. That is exactly why men keep swinging at the faces they can, because it feels like doing something. It is not. It is firing at your own side while the real enemy sits back and enjoys the show.

So here is the rule for everything that follows, and if you take nothing else from this series take this: if your violence has a human being on the end of it, you have aimed it at the wrong target, and you have become useful to the darkness you thought you were fighting. War on evil. Peace with men. Get those two backward and every bit of your zeal turns into damage.

What a violent man actually looks like

He is not loud. That is the first surprise. The angriest man in the room is usually the one losing worst, because his violence has slipped off evil and onto people, and rage at people is a symptom of a man who quit fighting the real war.

The man who is genuinely at war with evil is often the calmest man you know, because the fight is aimed where it belongs. He is ruthless with himself and gentle with everyone else. He cuts sin out of his own life with a speed that would scare you if you saw it, and he carries his family and his friends and the man who wronged him with a patience that would also scare you, because most men have those two exactly reversed. They are patient with their sin and violent with their people. God calls a man to flip it.

That man protects. That is what all this force is for. The violence is not about him proving he is hard. It is a wall he throws up between the people he loves and the thing that is coming for them, and the thing that is coming for them comes first through him, through his own unguarded heart, which is why the war starts on the inside before it is any use on the outside.

Where this goes

This is a series about that war. Not a pep talk, not a call to go be aggressive, the opposite of that. A walk through what Scripture actually says about a man taking the fight to evil and keeping the peace with people, one text at a time.

We will name the terms of the war, and it is a war with no ceasefire this side of the grave. We will talk about the command to master the thing crouching at your door before it masters you. About tearing sin out instead of managing it, putting it to death instead of keeping it on life support, and fighting the first half of the battle in the six inches between your ears where you have been losing it. We will pick up the one weapon you have been carrying like a comfort blanket and learn to swing it. We will look hard at holy anger and how to tell it from the temper you keep in the truck. And we will end where the whole thing was always headed, at the strange promise that the God of peace, not the god of war, is the one who crushes the enemy under your feet.

You were not called to be harmless. You were called to be dangerous to the right things and safe for the right people. Most men have it backward. This is about turning it around.

Start with the first post. And before you read another word, answer one question honestly: what have you been at war with that you should have made peace with, and what have you made peace with that you were supposed to be at war against.