Strongholds Strangle

[HKHaugan]

The idea of strongholds needs some comparison so we know what we are talking about. By comparison I mean other words that help us see what strongholds are. Words like fantasy, attitude, imagination, hang-ups, opinionated, pretense, defensiveness, even emotional conditions like neurosis and psychosis, all of these can be summed up by saying ‘when it comes to people and the world my experience is the best authority.’ This is man thinking and acting apart from God.

Strongholds seem to have one thing in common, pain. That is, we will be on guard whenever what caused the heart pain in our past reoccurs in some similar way or at least looks like it might reappear. The defenses we build apart from God to save ourselves from pain are strongholds. Any moment we find ourselves being defensive is the time we need to go back and see the source of that reaction and eliminate it. Then we have to tear down the structure of self-justification we used to react. But you can’t do that alone. You can’t just think your way out of it. That is only half the battle. However, it is where we start. We’ll get to the answer in just a moment.

So say you were rejected by a girlfriend in your youth. The romantic grass was greener when it came to her desire for the captain of the football team. The pain was to your pride and it really did hurt. It’s how you began to think and build a structure of thought to be wary of future encounters. Following that thought, how did you react? Were you more wary? Did you begin to doubt your worth and look at life in terms of popularity and how to get it (another stronghold)? Did you seek to be with others who felt like you or retreat into the comfort of a hobby, a project of some kind that would make you look good and never have to compete with those you believed were the ‘in’ crowd? Or did you just retreat into self-pity or think that all women are the same? Each person will build his own fences according to how he sees himself.

Strongholds also have another similar feature, fear. We don’t only want to eliminate pain we are afraid of it. That is its key ingredient. Fear is the companion of pride. Fear makes us very conscious of the visible environment, the looks people give one another, the clothes they wear, the expressions they use, the physique we couldn’t ever have. We are propelled by the fear of not fitting in, not looking right, not feeling right and all of it based on horizontal comparisons. Our conclusion? It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and I’m just liable to be the one that gets bitten. The method we use to adjust to that is a stronghold, out of which we build attitudes that are like fences, emotional fences, electrified fences powered by fear. They are the inner methods we rely on to be our first line of defense until we get a feel for where we are and what’s happening around us. Strongholds are like antennae that are on constant alert. You might even say they are like radar constantly scanning the social atmosphere to warn us of impending social missiles coming our way.

Oh, so you don’t buy this. Well think for a moment how any of us approach being in any socially demanding situation and I say demanding because there is not any interpersonal situation that does not make us aware of the need to be on our toes.

Another thing common to strongholds is aloneness. It is because we are basically alone in a body with no sure and certain thought and action, no secure guidance, no clear accepted way to be a person that is totally at one with others, the physical world and the society of people around us. It’s a yearning, burning and learning that is unique to each individual. From birth to death there is this insistent internal processing going on and it’s laced with anxiety. In the world we can see, that world we live in from day to day, there is never a moment we are not alone. There is no escape. The realization of it is too much for us humans to handle. And if we dwell on it we find that our feeble attempts at controlling it are fruitless. This leads to anger and depression and strongholds are what we construct to accommodate the inner struggle. We compensate by working harder, being the clown, being the intellectual, being the athlete, the good neighbor, the optimist, the pessimist, hoping we can somehow overcome the inner longing aloneness brings.

Now turning to those comparisons we started with like fantasy, attitude, imagination, hang-ups, opinionated, pretense, neurosis and psychosis, they are just synonyms for our furtive attempts to deal with three things, our aloneness, our pain and our fears. It is not until we actually see ourselves as victims not of outside social influences like someone to blame for all of this, parents, abusive schoolmates, hard nose bosses or just society in general that never ‘gives me a break.’ NO. It is the alone-pain-fear mix that has a source and it is something spiritual called sin. Sin is the isolating alienating separating force within that has yanked us away from the One who created us. So to the unholy trinity of aloneness, pain and fear we add its source, sin, which has placed us in this precarious position.

Another menace lurks deep within a sin besieged heart, the need to control. It is control that drives us into the stronghold business. Strongholds are what we employ to control this alone-pain-fear mix that is always agitating us as we move about in the world. Pride, control and defensive strongholds go hand-in-hand to forage the interpersonal world for acreage to hide in. The answer?

Into this spinning eddy of human tidal forces Jesus came to bear the aloneness, the pain and the fear as He depended on one and only one stronghold, His Father’s will. Moment by moment His only focus was to please His Father not Himself. What He did was to show that pleasing His Father was pleasing Himself. When it came to control it was acting in the power of the Holy Spirit, releasing control to the Spirit which was the Father’s will, which enabled Jesus to model everything human beings were designed to be. When He exposed the devil as the source of sin, fear, aloneness and pain He also introduced faith in Him as the single spiritual factor to offset and defeat within the endless sin-cycle of the aloneness-pain-fear mix. It was and is a faith relationship with Jesus that cancels the power of sin and its unholy trinity. The Cross is not about being a symbol but a reality of sin’s defeat and relational restoration with God. The figure of the Cross, with its vertical beam and horizontal beam, points to the reality of our restored vertical relationship with God and our horizontal relationship with all those others who have been restored as well. The Cross is Jesus’ vertical beam with His Father and His horizontal beam with us. It is a beam of light in a dark confused and alienated world, a light that shines as bright from Heaven as it does in the midst of our world.

It’s interesting that Jesus’ death came by two pieces of wood, three nails and a crown of thorns. The two pieces of wood? Perhaps the two dimensions of the visible and invisible that define ultimate reality. The three nails? Perhaps they are the aloneness, pain and fear that define so clearly the human predicament. The crown of thorns? Perhaps the daily attacks of the evil one. Jesus bore them all for each one of us. One Person for each person. One blood for each death. One faith for each life. One Father, One Lord and Savior, one faith, one baptism, one rescue for one time for all time into eternity.

So if we take up our cross as Jesus commands we understand three things about the three nails, the two beams and the crown of thorns. Jesus’ Cross took all the negative reasons for man’s attempt to shut God out and crushed them by His perfect death in faith and gave them to us a the positive means to experience eternal life now.

The two beams? What was once a physical means of torture, humiliation and death now gives us direct access to the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. This means Jesus is our stronghold replacing the ones we built apart from Him. The power of sin keeping us separated from God is defeated. We have the Spirit to reach out to others around us. Our eyes focused on God and our arms reaching out in the world.

The three nails? Aloneness is replaced with a relationship. Pain is replaced with faith. Fear is replaced by love.

The crown of thorns? We have the Word of God, the sword of the Spirit, Holy Scripture, to deflect the missiles of the devil who lurks in the darkness. It is a lamp for feet and light for our path. We live in world full of thorns and thistles that His Cross overcame. Now we walk in the balanced beams of His life.