This is Faith in Play #93: The Enemy, for August 2025.
After the resurrection, Jesus met two of His followers on a road leading from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus. Not having recognized Him, one of them made the comment that they thought He might be the one to deliver Israel. Jesus took the time to explain to them from scripture why the anticipated deliverer had to die the way He did. What strikes me about that is they were looking for deliverance, but were staring at the wrong enemy.
We have something of the same point when He is hanging on the cross and the priests and Pharisees mock Him, saying that if He would come down off the cross they would believe. In fact, He could have done that. He could have performed the miracle of wrenching Himself from from those nails and healing His own wounds, and so demonstrating Who He is. We almost wonder why He didn’t. Some would say that was not something He could do, but I don’t believe that. Rather, He was on that cross so that He could defeat the greater enemy, death and the grave and the devil. Everyone in Jerusalem thought that the Romans were the enemy. The Romans were not the enemy; death was the enemy. Jesus didn’t come to beat the Romans; He came to save the Jews, and the Romans, and everyone else, from their greater common enemy.
I’m afraid the rest of this article will be a bit anticlimactic. After all, the greatest victory in history is, and will always be, the conquest of death by Jesus. I almost feel like I’m belittling that by drawing anything from it–but it struck me as a point worth making. Many times in life we are looking at the wrong enemy. We want to be delivered from something that is ultimately inconsequential. God, save us from this–but this is not the problem; that is the problem. We’re looking in the wrong place.
I recently heard a recording of a Dungeons & Dragons game (in the Min/Max Podcast) in which the heroes were asked by villagers to find the magic stone that had been stolen from them. The stone had been the equivalent of a tourist attraction, bringing pilgrims to the town who reportedly benefited from the magic, and who incidentally benefited the town with their coin. Having undergone a challenging adventure, they found the stone and discovered that its magic was inherently evil and being used by men who wanted power for themselves. They abandoned their objective of retrieving the stone and instead destroyed it. In a sense, the villagers had failed to recognize that the stone itself was their enemy, not the people who stole it.
This misdirection can be very interesting in games. One referee told about a character he had in his superheroes game who was a wealthy patron of heroes. He would support them, work with them, encourage them–and in the process learn their weaknesses, which information he would provide to the villains who worked for him so that they could defeat the heroes. Again, the heroes failed to recognize their true enemy, and it cost them.
The greatest enemy is death–and it has been defeated. If we forget that, we’re looking in the wrong place.
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