The Most Important Battle

What was the most important battle in history?  The Battle of Stalingrad in WW2? Operation Overlord in Normandy, France in WW2? The Battle of Yorktown in the American Revolution?  Waterloo? Thermopylae?

There are many battles that historians have argued to be the most important battle.  But the greatest battle is often ignored in these debates.  At first glance, it doesn’t even appear to be a battle.  Some guy was crucified along with 2 thieves.  Big deal, right?  The Romans crucified a lot of people.  But, THE most important battle was fought at the Cross.  God died to redeem fallen man and to conquer evil.

Two Commanders

Welcome to week three of our series entitled “The War.”  Tim asked us last week whether or not we felt like we were in a war.  I have to confess that I kind of half raised my arm.  I only half raised my arm because I would say that I feel like I face spiritual battles, but if I am honest with myself, I don’t often think of myself being in a war. 

Carl talked a couple of weeks back about what war is like, and it’s not good.  War is terrible.  And so, I think I am predisposed to not think about being in a war just because it is unpleasant to think in those terms.  If you’re in a war, even if you’re not part of the active front line, war affects you.

Two Armies

How many of you feel like you are engaged in a war right now? There are the literal wars that America is involved in, like the one in Afghanistan, which I follow closely because I have friends who live there. We have the War on Terror and the ongoing War on Drugs. The language of warfare is used in so many ways, isn’t it? Sporting events are all about defense and offense. We speak of battling cancer or depression. Maybe you feel like you are “fighting a bug” right now. Millions of people around the world are trying to defend themselves against the recent onslaught of natural disasters, such as in Florida even today. Some people find family relationships to be like warfare, with attacks and defenses and allies and verbal ammunition.

Playground or Battlefield?

Welcome! Today we begin a new series that will take us through most of the rest of this year, a series called “The War” that focuses in on spiritual warfare. Before jumping in, I want to just say a little about the series title. If you look at secular publications and websites, the longest wars in the world include some you may have heard of and some you haven’t; multiple sites list the Reconquista as the longest war, at about 774 years. The Reconquista is a name given to war that took place on the Iberian Peninsula (what today is largely Spain and Portugal), which fell to Islamic rule in the 700s and what was not recaptured (reconquered) until 1492, a year known to Americans for something else. Also high on the lists are the Roman-Germanic wars which went on nearly continuously from 113 BC to 596 AD, and the Roman-Persian wars from 54 BC to 628 AD. Later were the Ottoman wars against the Byantine Empire, the Bulgarian Empire, and the Serbian Empire – as a whole these went from 1265 AD to 1918 AD. None of these, however, were really just called “The War” – they were more a seemingly unending series of conflicts, each with their own names. Now World War I, which took place from 1914 to 1918, was called the Great War and the War to End all Wars – they were a little off with that last name, wouldn’t you say? That war involved 70 million military personnel, and 16 million people (combatants and civilians) perished. World War II, which took place from 1939 to 1945 (although related conflicts began earlier) was simply called The War, at least in England, until the late 1940s, after it was all over. Roosevelt in the US called it the Survival War, but that name never caught on. I believe the British called it simply The War because, for them, it was so all-encompassing, so affecting of all of life, that no further description was necessary. World War II directly involved more than 100 million people from 30 countries. The number of fatalities in this war, depending on what you count as part of the war or as something else, was between 50 and 85 million people.