Why, we may ask, do leading peace advocates such as Martin Luther King, Ghandi and Jesus get murdered? Why, from the earliest days of Christianity, has the same fate befallen countless others who were simply committed to peace and doing good to everyone?
The simple answer is that in a world such as ours, peace means war. This was obvious to the early church. They saw their martyrdom as part of a great cosmic conflict with Satan.
Well-known, for example, is the story of a young noblewoman named Perpetua. While waiting to be thrown to wild beasts in the arena she writes of her passionate love for Jesus and her refusal to deny him even though she had a nursing baby. Her heartbroken father begged her to recant and at one point he rolls on the ground and plucks out his beard with grief. Yet Perpetua remains strong as we see from her diary:
“Father,” said I, “do you see this vase here, for example?”
“Yes, I do,” said he.
And I told him: “Could it be called by any other name than what it is?”
And he said: “No.”
“Well, so too I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.”
With Perpetua is her slave, Felicity, who is pregnant and gives birth while in prison. Felicity too refuses to deny her Lord and they are both martyred for their faith in A.D. 203 in Carthage, North Africa.
The night before she was to be executed Perpetua has a vision of herself fighting with a terrifying Egyptian warrior. The vision teaches her that she is embroiled in a spiritual war and that the real enemy she fights with is Satan. In her vision the warrior strikes at her heal, but she treads on his head and is victorious.
The editor who continued Perpetua’s diary after she was taken by the guards describes her’s and Felicity’s end:
The day of their victory dawned, and they marched from the prison to the amphitheater joyfully as though they were going to heaven, with calm faces, trembling, if at all, with joy rather than fear. Perpetua went along with shining countenance and calm step, as the beloved of God, as a wife of Christ, putting down everyone’s stare by her own intense gaze.
That Christians are in a war with a vicious, invisible enemy has always been the church’s understanding. As Greg Boyd writes in God at War, much of the New Testament does not make sense without understanding the reality of the dark forces coming against us.
“Jesus’ teaching, His exorcisms, His healings and other miracles, as well as His work on the cross, all remain, to some extent, incoherent and unrelated to one another until we interpret them within this apocalyptic context—until we interpret them as acts of war. . . . Jesus never once appeals to a mysterious divine will to explain why a person is sick, maimed or deceased.
In every instance, He comes against such things as the by-products of a creation that has gone berserk through the evil influence of a satanic army. Many times, he attributes sicknesses to direct demonic involvement.”
Jesus leaves us in no doubt concerning the reality of this war, but also the weapons he uses to defeat the powers. He destroys the work of the devil (1 John 3:8) by healing and doing good (Acts 10:38). Similarly, Paul informs us that we do battle with darkness by being kind to our enemies, giving them food and drink if necessary. In so doing we “overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:17-21).
A life committed to peace is anyting but mamby pamby, wishy-washy Christianity. As we see from Perpetua, Felicity, a host of other martyrs and Jesus himself, this war takes great courage!
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