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‘Mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.’
2Co_10:4
I. All the military language St. Paul here uses was his own choice.—It was not that these disobedient and self-willed Corinthians challenged him as from the battlements of a fortress high up on some precipitous rock. In their own judgment they needed no stronghold against him. They despised him as a weak, wellnigh solitary man. Nothing is commoner than to mistake gentleness for weakness. The forces of Christianity are always despised by those who do not understand them. We must not mind being despised and ridiculed in attacking great evils. Goliath laughed at the stripling who came against him with a sling and a stone. One deep, intelligent, loving conviction in your heart is worth all the strength of the other side.
II. Victory may be certain, but that does not make it easy.—Give what the Apostle calls its full force. The things that have to be pulled down are indeed strongholds. A first principle in all warfare is not to undervalue the enemy. It is the folly of the world that it despises the Church militant; let it be the wisdom of the Church militant that it does not despise the world. These two letters of St. Paul are full of agonising struggle. He does not trifle through them. No consideration is left unemployed. The great fortress of worldliness is citadel within citadel, and the outward may be broken down while the inward remains without a breach. What a gigantic task to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ! We may be more or less captive to something that looks like Christ and yet is not Christ. The unsubdued can only come under the real dominion of Christ by a hearty and unremitting employment of all our spiritual resources.
III. It is not enough to expel them that hold; that which they hold must be utterly destroyed. The end of war is peace; nothing else can justify war. All those separations and hostilities which the Gospel of Christ has produced, which Christ foresaw would be produced, are to end in a deeper, holier peace than mere natural associations can ever afford.
Illustration
‘War, it has been said of the Romans by Montesquieu, was their only art, and they gave all the energy of their intellect to perfect it. Not only in the camp and on the march did they exercise themselves, but in Rome itself there was a Campus Martius, a field of Mars. Everything was subservient to war. And so with us, conflict, unceasing conflict, is the condition of spiritual success. The brave old hero, Bernal Diaz, who fought in the conquest of Mexico, wore his armour so long and so constantly that afterwards he could not sleep comfortably without it. And in like manner our armour is to become part of ourselves.’