The Necessary Adversary
By John Gavazzoni

Few things introduce confusion into the mind of a person reflecting on the existence of God, the nature of God, the activity of God, the relationship of God to His creation, as does the biblical claim that there exists an adversary of cunning opposition, of fierce enmity toward God, firstly, and to God's people, secondly. The idea, by the way... based on a faulty and immature understanding of the sovereignty of God... that we ought not think of the devil (meaning the adversary) as being the enemy of God, but only as the enemy of God's people, is unthinking at best, and full of confusion at worst. Clearly there is such a thing as opposition to God, and that by what, or who, the Bible calls "the enemy," for we have the apostle Paul declaring that "the carnal mind is enmity AGAINST GOD." Enmity is, after all, what makes an enemy an enemy. An enemy is constituted as an enemy by the enmity within his/her/its heart.

To oppose the people of God is to oppose God especially relative to His purpose for His people. You can't have one without the other. To be sure, a successful adversary toward God does not exist (operative word, "successful") but an adversary with the intention to oppose God, albeit insanely so, does exist, who at no point should be understood as even penultimately successful, and certainly not ultimately so. A dear friend of mine, relatively well-grounded in the absoluteness of God's sovereignty, once questioned why Paul would write re: the imperative of the believer to wrestle against (summarily) "wickedness in high places." (KJV)

I answered by pointing out that Paul wrote of that wrestling, not in the language of an imperative, but rather as a fact of life, a fact of life particularly integral to the life of a believer in this world. Fact: "we wrestle against..wickedness in high places." Some folk's wrestling amounts to trying to wrestle such a conundrum out of their thinking. We wrestle; yes indeed, we wrestle. We're granted a respite from that certainty of wrestling at times, as in the gospel story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness ending with "the devil departed from Him for a season." We, as it were, catch our breath in such seasons, only to have the wrestling begin again. There have been times in my life personally when having passed through an intense time of oppositional temptation, and barely given time to catch my breath, I was hit... admittedly to my surprise...by an onslaught of such oppositional ferocity that nearly paralyzed my soul.

That there exists an adversarial component at the heart of the human condition, cannot be disputed. It exists! And it exists of necessity....the necessary adversary. Explanation: God is passionate about man coming to know Him as "the God of all grace," to the point of experiencing "the glory of His grace/the riches of His grace." God wants us to know Him as love, a love that comes to us freely given as grace. Grace is love freely given without any strings attached. To that end, an enemy of grace was deliberately interjected into the stream of human consciousness, i.e., the law in its subjective form, the result of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then reinforced by its objective form, i.e., the law that came (from God) through Moses. That law, according to Paul, is the power of sin: "The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law."

Why? So that grace may abound! "For where sin abounds, grace does much more abound." The law was interposed or interjected, made to come between, so that the trespass may abound, so that sin might become exceedingly sinful, so that GRACE MAY ABOUND. There is an underlying principle that helps one understand such a seemingly strange complexity re: God's way with man. It involves a divine paradox, first, that we can only become what we are, and we can only become what we are by having to endure... for a season.... being who/what we are not.

Yeah! It actually works that way. Having to endure what we are not, what is alien to the being we have in the Being of God, serves as a kind of spring action that catapults us into the love/grace of God's heart. There's a kind of spring element in the composition of our souls. Envision, if you will, a giant coil spring. That's our soul. The contrarian force I've described above pushes down on our soul until so much pressure, so much tension, builds up against the downward pressure, so that an opposing energy builds up against the adversarial opposition to the point that the upward push of the spring overcomes the downward pressure and off we go into the wild, blue yonder of God's love and grace!

I am not offering that as some orthodox creedal confession, but if you will consider it as something of an explanation of what Jesus went through on the cross, inclusive of us all, I think you might gain some deeper insight into the how "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," and "Father, into Your hands, I commit my spirit," worked together in the necessary process of death to resurrection. By the downward pressure of the former, a build-up of energy against that pressure built up, until our Lord's consciousness was reversed to become the latter, resulting...if I may dare to put it thusly...in Him being catapulted back the glory He shared with the Father before the world began.