"There are two ways to use military force to impose our will on an enemy. The first is to make the enemy helpless to resist us by physically destroying their military capabilities.This has historically been called a strategy of annihilation.
The second approach is to convince the enemy that accepting our terms will be less painful than continuing to resist. This is a strategy of erosion, using military force to erode the enemy leadership’s will. In such a strategy, we use military force to raise the costs of resistance higher than the enemy is willing to pay."
You can destroy an enemy's weapons or you can destroy your enemy's faith in their weapons. Achieving either of these objectives will help you win the war.
God has given us many weapons with which to fight and defend ourselves: His Son, His Spirit, His Word, prayer, baptism, communion, your neighbor, the local church, etc... Any of these, when wielded well, can do great damage to the darkness and the temptations it hurls in our direction.
The enemy, therefore, seeks to cut us off from them by making us too busy to read or pray, too resentful to forgive, too nervous to get baptized, too sensitive to take communion, to picky to pick a local church, too depressed or too proud to reach out, etc...
If the enemy cannot keep us from these weapons, he will attempt to keep us from using them by eroding our faith in them.
What good is the Bible against current affairs? What can an old book say about modern problems? Why should I pray if God is just going to do what He wants anyways? Why go to church when I could just as easily listen to spiritual music or a podcast at home? Why confess my sins when it only makes me feel worse?
If the enemy can erode your confidence in the weapons you have, it is the functional equivalent of disarming you. And all the while ammunition is being smuggled away from the guns we no longer believe to be firing properly or effectively.
2 Corinthians 2:10-11
Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, 11 so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.
We know what Satan is up to. This does not need to catch us off guard.
And let us not forget, these strategies can be employed by us as well. We can diffuse the devil's bombs by refusing to believe in them. We can disarm his arsenal by cutting their power out of our lives. We can annihilate the sinful habits of lying and hiding sin by dragging them into the day light of confession, faith and forgiveness. We can watch them shrivel up and see the life go out of them. We can cut out sinful eyes, cut off sinful hands and enter eternal life. We can wear away the success of his schemes against us by standing firm in Christ. And rather than being wore down, we can be sharpened to a point in the process.
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