Enemies
What are enemies?
Focusing on these past few chapters in the psalms finds me pondering something I have never taken a closer look at before.
Just a bit of reflection seems to lead naturally to this quandary, this place of bewilderment, wondering genuinely what others in the world and perhaps what different groups or the majority in different cultures, lands and generations understand and experience. Clearly, this is still a modern concept because we have this common word. Yet, reading these Psalms and beginning to look closely at the scriptures, it seems clear that something is different, something changed.
Thank You, JESUS!
The obvious conclusion is simply that JESUS came and changed things. Likely, there are many who live in and have always known a world and an existence in which the word enemy means the same now as it did then.
Only in JESUS is this word, this hateful reality in the world, expunged of all its destructive force. In JESUS, the ubiquitous meaning of enemy has been made defunct. All the hate has been expunged. Enemy has lost its meaning. It has been declawed. It’s death has been sucked out. It’s venom gland removed. It’s hateful fire snuffed out. A life saturated in JESUS has been released from a world in conflict, and neither enemies nor the essence of an enemy have any power or any of their meaning, not even any explanatory power, because JESUS nullified them, disarmed them at the cross.
Similar to other things of this world God removes and destroys, they are no more.
Like when the accuser goes to God with accusations against God’s new creations…
The eternal voice of thunder answers
“Sin, what sin?”
It has been removed, expunged, annihilated, eradicated, vaporized
This is also what happens both to enemies of God and even now with enemies in a world transformed by God.
“Enemies? What enemies?”
Wisdom in the WORD 
And still
“You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”
James 4:4
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It is therefore utterly essential to gain and retain fresh and full understanding of both the old and the new. Forgetting the severity of the old allows it to creep back in.
For example that most well known verse, in light of book 2 of Psalms could equally say
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not [be destroyed with the enemies of God] but have eternal life.
John 3:16
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Powerful!
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