The Great Battle

I’m a huge J.R. Tolkien fan. My kids will testify that I have been known to cry at crucial scenes in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had a way of creating fantasy worlds that captured central themes in our real world. He teaches through his fiction, and I love his works because he teaches rich Biblical truth through his epic tales. Tolkien himself described the writer as a “sub-creator”. I think Tolkien would say that fiction is richest when it mirrors reality. The truth is that a great battle began in Genesis 3, where the serpent-dragon vows to take-down the “seed of the woman” … and he is still at it. This past week we say the kingdom of darkness at work, and it’s not fiction. The murderer himself murdered. Now I don’t claim to have any special insight into the invisible realm of spiritual warfare, but I know it to be true (Ephesians 6:12). This is nothing new, it’s simply the ongoing drama of the great battle that began with the fall of man, and it’s all around us. We know how it ends (the great dragon is destroyed and the seed of the woman victorious), but until that final battle, we are living in The Truth that fiction is written about. Here’s my point – We need not be afraid, we need not let anger control us, and we need not turn to any other solution than allegiance to the Ultimate King. I pray our church, and our churches, build and maintain (1) A culture of truth, where the depravity of man doesn’t shock us but drives us to further “take up the full armor of God”, (2) A culture of confidence in King Jesus who orders every atom in the universe, and (3) A culture of grace where we love our enemies, recognize they are our mission field, and forgiveness flows as those who have been forgiven. May this be our epic witness!