Recognizing the Enemy from the Endgame
It takes God-given wisdom to recognize and divert the plans of the enemy.
As Christians, we face a powerful enemy. Our enemy is not just the multitudes of Christ-haters we see gripping the reins of power across our nation, but undying, intelligent, and malicious beings that utilize earthly servants to fulfill their ends. While the men we fight often blunder, stumble, and work imperfectly towards wicked goals, the principalities and powers that guide them have plans that will not come to fruition in our lifetime, or several lifetimes. They are willing to wait to achieve those goals, and we must use God-given wisdom to discern them, and strangle them in the cradle. Across Christian traditions and denominations, the same ends can often come from very different starting places. These ends, easily shown as contrary to God’s word, are excellent examples of the goals the enemy strives for. Once we recognize these goals, we can strive ourselves to prevent them, and destroy them.
The Roman Catholic Church and the modern American Protestant churches may have thoroughly different theological foundations, but their end state looks similar in many ways. While learning about the denominational distinctions of the Christian faith, I noticed with surprise that the Roman Catholic churches only provide bread to the congregation during communion, with the wine reserved for the priest alone. The precise rationale for denying the laity wine is unclear, as is the exact date the practice became policy, although there is evidence it arose around the 12th century. Rome teaches that both elements of communion become Christ’s body and blood, and that whether you receive wine or bread you are receiving both body and blood. Some speculate that this doctrine, combined with a desire to protect the Eucharist from desecration, and the wish to separate the priests above the laity, were the theological impetus to deny this crucial element of communion. It is enough, they say, for the priest to receive the wine, while the laity receives only bread. This was corrected by the Reformers, citing the perspicuous words of Scripture and the testimony of the church fathers.
Unfortunately, some Protestant churches jumped into the same heterodox pit, albeit from off a different cliff. A movement began in American Protestantism in the 1800s that grew out of the anti-alcohol teetotaler movement. In particular, Methodism preached total abstention from alcohol. As early as 1843, the Wesleyan Methodists required “unfermented wine” to be used in communion. Since grape juices immediately start fermenting upon pressing, the Methodists turned to boiling raisins, or heaping preservatives into the juice to prevent fermentation. But these methods were unstable and unpleasant. In 1869 a Methodist minister named Thomas Welch began experimenting with grapes to determine if he could invent a non-alcoholic wine, and eventually created grape juice. The famous “Welch’s Grape Juice” soon became the preferred “fruit of the vine” in Methodist communion, and its implementation spread among Baptists, Presbyterians, and the Church of Christ.
It is clear to me that the enemy seeks to deny the church catholic the blood of our Lord in the Eucharist. While scripture does not specifically inform us as to the spiritual benefits of receiving one element of communion versus the other, it appears that the enemy is particularly intent on denying the Lord’s people his blood. This is one of his ends that he works to achieve throughout Christendom, regardless of the denomination.
This end has also flourished among heretical sects that diverted from Christianity. The Mormons, strictly outside the church catholic, also refuse their congregants wine in the Lord’s supper. According to a supposed revelation from Joseph Smith in Doctrines and Covenants 27:2, “it mattereth not” what is used in the Eucharist, and as such they exclusively serve water. Seventh-Day Adventists and Holiness Pentecostals teach total abstinence from alcohol, precluding them from receiving Christ’s blood, while the Salvation Army, Quakers, Christian Scientists, and Shakers reject communion altogether.
Even ancient heretics, like the anti-Pauline and vegetarian Ebionites, and the marriage-rejecting Encratites, reduced communion to bread and water. In the 3rd century, Theodosius the Great justly pronounced that anyone who took the Encratite name would be sentenced to death.
The goals of these denominations and sects are different, as is the rationale they used to come to their conclusions, but the end is identical. The people these clerics preach to are not receiving wine, and as such are not receiving the blood of our Lord. Regardless of your view of the Eucharist this pattern should greatly alarm you. The fact that so many Christians are denied the blood of their Lord in the appointed sacramental element of wine is a clear sign of enemy action. Where there is smoke, there is fire.
But there is smoke visible through other areas of Christendom as well. Since the early days after Christ, radical ascetics have convinced Christians to reject God’s design and even their duties to kith and kin. Ascetics organized into monasteries and convents first started emerging around the 4th century. Christian monasticism can be described as a complete focus on spiritual activities to the rejection of temporal responsibilities, especially long term and life-long commitments. This is especially erroneous among the ascetic women called nuns. For nearly every young woman alive today, it is a part of their Christian duty to seek marriage. As Martin Luther rather bluntly states in his Letter to Several Nuns:
“Though womenfolk are ashamed to admit to this, nevertheless Scripture and experience show that among many thousands there is not a one to whom God has given to remain in pure chastity. A woman has no control over herself. God has made her body to be with man, to bear children and to raise them as the words of Genesis 1 clearly state, as is evident by the members of the body ordered by God Himself.”
The tradition of nuns in Roman Catholic and other liturgical churches is in direct opposition to the commands of scripture and the natural order of women. It is the practice of nuns to cloister themselves within a convent of other nuns under the headship of an abbess or prioress. These women have in essence removed themselves from the male headship that characterizes Christian families, both of their fathers and potential husbands. They are under the authority of a woman; an inherently disordered practice. Convents maintain some male authority within the church, being under Bishops and receiving the sacraments from priests, but nuns are unable to learn by asking their husbands, as women are taught to in 1 Corinthians 14:35. Due to their vows of celibacy, they are also unable to be sanctified through childbearing as instructed in 1 Timothy 2:15. John Calvin puts it particularly well in his commentary on this verse:
“To censorious men it might appear absurd, for an Apostle of Christ not only to exhort women to give attention to the birth of offspring, but to press this work as religious and holy to such an extent as to represent it in the light of the means of procuring salvation. Nay, we even see with what reproaches the conjugal bed has been slandered by hypocrites, who wished to be thought more holy than all other men. But there is no difficulty in replying to these sneers of the ungodly. First, here the Apostle does not speak merely about having children, but about enduring all the distresses, which are manifold and severe, both in the birth and in the rearing of children. Secondly, whatever hypocrites or wise men of the world may think of it, when a woman, considering to what she has been called, submits to the condition which God has assigned to her, and does not refuse to endure the pains, or rather the fearful anguish, of parturition, or anxiety about her offspring, or anything else that belongs to her duty, God values this obedience more highly than if, in some other manner, she made a great display of heroic virtues, while she refused to obey the calling of God. To this must be added, that no consolation could be more appropriate or more efficacious then to shew that the very means (so to speak) of procuring salvation are found in the punishment itself.”
In short, the nuns who reject these instructions are intentionally spiritually crippled, following a similarly crippled blind guide. It is no wonder that the words “convent” and “coven” originated as alternate spellings of the same root.
A nun who has secluded herself from the rest of society cannot honor her father and mother, cannot love the neighbors whom she has left, and cannot fulfill the commission to be fruitful and multiply. Scripture teaches that women were created for man, but nuns have deliberately prevented themselves from becoming a husband’s helpmeet. Nuns have taken the talent that God gave them and buried it deep, opting to be diligent with what they have not been given, rather than what they have. The most egregious part of this deception is that it specifically targets the most pious young women by telling them that the true way to please the Lord is to reject the talents He gave them. In this way, the enemy removes what could have been the most faithful wives and mothers before they even had a chance to prosper.
It is no surprise that he attempts the same ploy among other congregations through the modern missionary movement. According to John Piper, about 80-85% of single missionaries are women, making up nearly a third of the total missionary workforce. The rationale that causes single women to go out from the headship of their father into the mission field comes from a very different theology than nuns, but fundamentally, ostensibly, it stems from the desire to serve the Lord the best way possible. The fruit is also ultimately the same: an old single woman, bereft of husband and children, with a single talent long lost in the dirt. The signs of a nun and a missionary woman are the same: the most pious are targeted, they are removed from their natural headship, and they are often unable to have families of their own.
As shown in the Piper article, the promise given to these young women is often that a godly man will present himself to her in the mission field, and that is where a truly pious husband can be found. Listen to this story about a lonely female missionary to China named Gladys Aylward:
“Miss Aylward talked to the Lord about her singleness. She was a no-nonsense woman in very direct and straightforward ways and she asked God to call a man from England, send him straight out to China, straight to where she was, and have him propose to me.” I can’t forget the next line. Elisabeth Elliot said, “With a look of even deeper intensity, she shook her little bony finger in my face and said, ‘Elisabeth, I believe God answers prayer. And he called him.’” And here there was a brief pause of intense whisper. She said, “‘He called him, and he never came.’”
According to this spinster she did everything that she was supposed to, but was failed by a man who refused to minister to the people of China. Many women fall along the same path, and grow resentful of the men of their own nation who they see as less faithful to the Lord than them. And as in any longhouse, it is always the fault of the man and never the woman. The headship they receive in the mission field is often their own, from another woman, or a foreigner. In many cases these women end up wed to a new alien convert, or die as an old maid. Perhaps Miss Aylward was told that the only place to find a truly pious Englishman was mainland China, or maybe her arrogance led her to demand God provide one for her there while she rejected his commands. Regardless, the end result was the same. The enemy seeks to turn godly young women wayward, wasting their talents and youth. With both nuns and missionaries, he succeeds.
In Ephesians 5, Paul states: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” Our enemy is shrewd, his plans unfold over thousands of years, and it takes God-given wisdom to recognize and divert those plans. Even the smallest deviation can lead a ship off course over a thousand miles, and a minute change can apostatize a church over a few centuries. If you can’t determine if good or evil is producing a change in your church, look to the end result. The devil’s work always leads towards the same direction.
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