Warfare

“It is Satan’s constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin,
and the real issues at stake in the great controversy.
His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin.
At the same time he causes them to cherish false conceptions of God so that they regard Him
with fear and hate rather than with love.
The cruelty inherent in his own character is attributed to the Creator;
it is embodied in systems of religion and expressed in modes of worship.”
Ellen G. White

(image of a replica of a plane similar to the Red Baron’s / The History Channel)

“To KILL and kill and kill was the cry.
To burn, to destroy, to devastate, to lay waste.
Men heard the madness and knew it for madness and embraced it,
some with fear and some with joy.
Kill or be killed.
Survive or perish.”

And so opens the 1927 book The Red Knight Of Germany:
The Story of Baron von Richthofen by Floyd Gibbons.

Today, the Baron is known to most of us simply as the Red Baron.
The famous, or perhaps infamous, WWI German flying ace.

The Red Baron was the name applied to Manfred von Richthofen,
a German fighter pilot who was the deadliest flying ace of World War I.
During a 19-month period between 1916 and 1918,
the Prussian aristocrat shot down 80 Allied aircraft and won widespread fame for
his scarlet-colored airplanes and ruthlessly effective flying style.
Richthofen’s legend only grew after he took command of a German fighter wing known
as the Flying Circus, but his career in the cockpit was cut short in April 1918,
when he was killed in a dogfight over France.
The History Channel

I had been dusting when I noticed the stack of books I’d brought back from Dad’s almost
a year ago.
The tattered and yellow-paged red cardboard backed book seemed to beckon that I pick it up.

There was no mistaking the black imprinted iron cross on the cover.

The first paragraph was definitely an attention-grabbing opener.

I think I will now read the book…

For it speaks of soldiers and war.
It speaks of heroes and death.
as it speaks of victory and loss.

All sad, all fleeting, all madness when the luster fades and the lights run into the shadows.

Our hindsight now gently affords us that bit of understanding.

It is all madness was it not?
Is it not?

Yet the dogfights of those early days of war, being fought high up in the clouds, has
romanticized itself into something almost mystical…

And so it is with this notion of war and of the idea of fighting for what one believes in
which brings my thoughts around to another sort of warfare that is currently being waged
all around us..which is unbeknownst to most.

I caught a brief, 2 minute long, interview yesterday with our friend the Wee Flea
David Robertson.
David is currently on Sabbatical in the land down under but that has in no way quieted his
witness nor his words written or spoken on behalf of the Faith and Faithful.

This short interview David provides for the Forum of Chrisitan Leaders
entitled “How should we use the means of Grace in Evangelism”, touches
on the notion of seeing Jesus in action…
Of which is actually performed by both you and me.

Yet it is how we go about performing such that is key to our witness and earthly battle.
We need to be fed…
Fed by the Bible and by prayer because what we are doing actually boils down to
spiritual warfare.

Because where the word of Christ is proclaimed, Satan works desperately hard, waging war,
in order to silence that Word.

And so it’s the idea of Christians living solely for Jesus and not for self.
For when we allow self to get in the way or even intervene…then that is not Christ.

David touches on this notion of spiritual warfare and that it is the Holy Spirit who
convicts the sin and the righteousness and the judgment…
in order for our ability to go forward and do battle…
not us…
not us alone.