"The League of Shadows"

At several points throughout the Batman Trilogy, the League of Shadows - the super-sinister organization bent on purification through destruction - make attempts to wipe Gotham city - Batman's home - from existence. Throughout the movies we witness evil schemes hatched, put into motion, and then thwarted by the Dark Knight in what becomes a colossal clash of good and evil. We don't ever see epic Good versus Evil confrontations in real life...or maybe we do, but we simply don't know what to look for.

I've been studying the book of Daniel in my quiet times lately. Daniel contains many Old Testament stories that I'm sure most of us are familiar with: Daniel's interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow to King Nebuchadnezzar's 90 feet tall golden statue and are thrown into the furnace and live; Daniel prays to God even though it is outlawed, gets thrown into the den of lions, and is protected completely from harm.

These are all stories that we're quite familiar with, but later in Daniel we encounter something only discussed as if it were a fairy tale and nothing more - spiritual warfare. In chapter 9, Daniel prays for the scattered nation of Israel. We see later in chapter 10 that an angel comes 21 days after Daniel prays to bring him God's answer. The angel says that he left the Father's presence as soon as Daniel prayed to God to comfort Daniel, but why did it take him 3 weeks then to arrive? The angel says the "prince of Persia withstood me 21 days". Surely he can't mean a man kept an angel from his duty for 3 weeks? No, "prince" here refers to a fallen angel, one of the angels that rebelled with Lucifer - this is spiritual warfare.

I'll go into detail about my studying Daniel later, but this post is about how this knowledge affects my time here at UT.

In light of the reality of spiritual warfare, I've been trying to see it more than before because rest assured that it's going on whether we're aware of it or not. This past week while sharing the Gospel of Jesus with students on campus, we had one interaction in particular that was clearly spiritual warfare. As we shared the Gospel with this one young man, we could clearly see and even feel him close himself off to us even though he was perfectly open and happy moments earlier talking about faith and spirituality. I've no doubt that this young man has some serious spiritual warfare going on in his life, yet most of us live our lives as though there is no hell, no dark forces, no death in existence. The truth is that those things are real - they're all too real. What do we do about it other than talk, blog, or think on it?

Faith, ladies and gentlemen, without works is no faith at all. If the love of Christ doesn't inspire you to action to tell/show others about THE SON OF GOD who died FREELY for them so that they may have eternal life and be adopted into God's family as righteous sons and daughters then I would take a long, hard look at my relationship with Christ to determine it's legitimacy. If you live your daily life without interaction with the Lord of creation then you probably don't know who He really is because if you did, there's nothing that could keep you away from His throne of grace. "Faith without works is dead." - James 2:14-26

There is absolutely a "League of Shadows" at work in our world, though this league has no purification in mind at all - only destruction; this power is the force of the evil one. But my Abba Father has already won the victory in Christ. So i'm gonna tell people about Him. Will you?