Problems are for Solving

…able to stand against the wiles of the devil. (Ephesians 6:11b)

When I was younger I used to watch a lot of cartoons. I like the road runner. Once, though, WB did some character swapping and the Coyote turned up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In this one he talked. He introduced himself as Wle E. Coyote, emphasis on the “E”.

He was supposed to be wily but not as sharp as Bugs. Just like in his attempts against the road runner, he was frustrated at every attempt. Because Bugs Bunny knows how to recognize and anticipate crafty methods.

Our enemy is artful and sly in his methods. Today I want to talk about one of them: conspiracy.

He plans against our welfare. He does not want us to grow.

Consider the following quotes from C.S. Lewis’
The Screwtape Letters (letters #6 and 7):

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.

Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

These are letters from a demon to his apprentice, and the Enemy named is Christ. Christ is our enemy’s Enemy as He is our Friend and General.

The foe, Satan, wants to confuse us and direct us away from our mission. The more passionately he can direct us away from the Commission our General has left for us, the more effective his methods. He loves to stir up differences among us and we are to pursue the unity of His Body in the Spirit of Peace, rather than allowing our differences to divide Christ. Yes, they are there, and many of them are heartfelt and important. But are they more important than the unity of Christ’s Body? May it never be! So, my fellow soldiers do not let spite and passion rise up among us that divide us from one another. We are all fighting in the same war, on the same side if we are Christ’s. If we fail to recognize the wily methods of the Devil, we will fall into his traps.