Paul Thigpen [Thigpen - Manual for Spiritual Warfare

Be sober, be watchful! For your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith...

P ETER 5:89

L ike it or not, you are at war.

No matter who you arewhether or not you know ityou have a mortal enemy who wants to destroy you, not just in this life, but in the next.

No matter where you live on this planetwhether or not you can see ityou live on a hotly contested battlefield, and you cant escape the conflict.

Its a spiritual war with crucial consequences in your everyday life. And the outcome of that war will determine your eternal destiny.

The first rule of any type of warfare is to know your enemy. How can you fight an adversary you cant identify? Worse yet, how can you avoid being a casualty in a battle going on all around you if you dont even recognize that youre in danger?

Your adversary is the Devil, with his army of demons. Your battle with him rages not only all around you, but also within you, a fierce conflict for control of your mind, your heart, and your ultimate destiny.

The world may scoff and tell you there is no Devil and no battle. But the world has been blinded to these realities by the Enemy himself. Its skepticism is part of his stealth strategy: Those who deny his existence are an easy prey.

H ow do we know that demons are real? Consider first the accumulated evidence of confirming testimony. Throughout all history, peoples of vastly different cultures around the globe have affirmed the reality of evil spiritseven when they have disagreed about most other spiritual realities. Many of our contemporaries as well, who by any reasonable standard are intelligent and in their right mind, have testified to having encounters with demonic powers.

No doubt, some types of mental and physical illness have been wrongly attributed to demons, today as in the past. Nor can we deny that superstitions and legends about evil spirits abound. But these misguided ideas about the Devil dont in themselves prove that he doesnt exist, just as age-old beliefs about a flat earth dont prove that our planet doesnt exist.

Skeptics may demand scientific evidence. But what kind of relevant evidence would scientists be capable of measuring? The natural sciences measure time, matter, energy, and motion; the social sciences analyze human behavior. Demons have no physical bodies, and they arent human. We cant put them in test tubes or subject them to psychoanalysis.

The most, then, that scientists can do is to observe the effects of demons on the physical world or on human behavior. But the prevailing mentality among scientists will press them to seek other explanations for such phenomena, even when these explanations are utterly inadequate.

In any case, for Catholics and other Christians the issue should be settled. A number of passages in the Bible testify to the existence of the Devil and his evil allies. (See chapter 8, .) The Gospel accounts in particular record that Jesus Christ Himself conversed with Satan. Our Lords debate with the Devil in the wilderness was not simply some inner dialogue with Himself about temptation.