@ Etude - Enmity

@Etude-Enmity

And I will put enmity (open hostility) between you and the woman, and between your seed(offspring) and her Seed; He shall fatally bruise your head, and you shall only bruise His heel.

Genesis 3 v 15

The idea of enmity is born in the heart of mankind soon after we first yielded to temptation or evil. The serpent spirit or satan is declared the ultimate enemy of mankind.
He is the enemy of our souls. He is also the enemy of the Seed of God born of woman – Jesus who becomes one of us in order to redeem all of us. The terrible act of crucifixion is likened from the eternal perspective to only the bruising of the heel of the Son Jesus. That being so, all the suffering the enemy visits us with in our lifetime is only a bruise, too. None of us will come out of this life alive physically but our souls will emerge from this life almost unscathed. This is the victory Christ guarantees and establishes for us in the eternal realm.

The enemy of our souls will also make many who like us are the seed of woman to be our rivals, opponents, enemies. But as the word says, “ If God be for us, who can be against us.” He will vindicate us in due time. Often God raises our enemies to be powerful and formidable in order to give us a testimony of His amazing deliverance and grace. While we are to wary of our spiritual enemy, we need to be forgiving and generous to our earthly ones. We need to understand that we, too lived once like enemies of God and extend the same mercy and grace He received us with when we chose to return to Him.

Jesus said so wisely to His followers, “Be wise or shrewd as the serpent but gentle as the dove.” In other words, we need to know our enemy and His ways, how He would use our earthly enemies to trip us, too. The enemy knows us inside out, having got inside the head of the first couple with just a few verbal suggestions. He uses our strengths, our weaknesses, our own thoughts and even those in our inner circle as he did with Judas. He need not always appear as a vile serpent but can appear as an angel of shining light or in the innocuous words of our companions. We do not have to invite trouble with our own words or actions or behaviour. We need to be wise in our choices. We also need to be proactive, to think ahead of time the moves of our eternal and earthly foes, to thwart these or nip it in the bud at the earliest stage. We should not use such dangerous knowledge of the viles and snares of the enemy to harm others but to prevent harm to ourselves and our loved ones. Prayer and the Word are our best defence, our fence of protection against the works of the enemy of our souls, our shield of faith, our sword of the spirit to strike a mortal wound on the head of the enemy.