Who Are My Enemies?

For my daily devotion time, I’ve been slowly journaling my way through the Psalms, one or two verses at a time. Since doing this, I have really noticed how often the Psalmists refer to “enemies”:

“Lord, how many are my foes! How many rise up against me!” (Psalm 3:1).

"Lead me, Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies…” (Psalm 5:8).

"Let God arise, may his enemies be scattered; may his foes flee before him.” (Psalm 68:1).

For King David, this was no metaphor. His prayers rose from actual battlefields, surrounded by Saul's army, foreign invaders, and political conspirators. But for us? Assuming we’re not a Christian living in a context with outright religious persecution, we find it hard to name any enemies as such.

So what do we do with the Bible’s enemy language? Skip those verses as irrelevant? Spiritualise them into abstraction? Or might they still speak truth about our world and about the deeper conflicts within our own hearts?

The challenge is more complex than it first appears. Jesus' instruction to "love your enemies" demands we first answer a foundational question: Who, exactly, are my enemies? Without a comprehensive understanding of enmity's various forms—interpersonal, systemic, spiritual, and ideological—we risk either trivialising the command or misapplying it entirely.

The Flesh, the World, and the Devil

In the baptism service from The Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Priest prays for the candidates, “Grant that they may have power and strength, to have victory, and to triumph against the devil, the world, and the flesh.” And this can be our threefold theological framework for "enemy". 

In the Psalms, enemies represent more than human opponents. They embody moral and spiritual realities, everything that threatens God's good order. When David pleads for God to make his path straight "because of my enemies," he's essentially saying: Keep me true when I'm surrounded by distortion.

So the Psalms give us a grammar for living faithfully in a world that bends away from righteousness. We can think of the Psalms as the voice of Christ and the church, not merely Israel's king, but humanity's representative praying through conflict toward communion. When the Psalmist laments his enemies, it is the Body of Christ crying out against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Each of these categories requires careful examination if we are to pray the Psalms with both honesty and discernment.

The Flesh

Paul declares, "For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want." (Galatians 5:17). But this isn't a condemnation of embodied existence. The "flesh" in biblical terms signifies the self curved inward—incurvatus in se, as Luther articulated it. It represents the sinful nature inherent in humanity, the self that seeks autonomy, resists grace, and grasps for control.

So our contemporary enemies are often internal rather than external: the habits of mind that deform our loves. Fear. Vanity. Resentment. Self-justification. These inner adversaries make us sad, give us sorrow, and turn us against our better selves. They include our own unbelief, our doubt that whispers louder than faith, our jealous reactions toward those who flourish where we falter.

The Psalms invite us to bring these forces into speech, to name them honestly before God rather than pretending they don't exist. Every time you pray "Deliver me from my enemies," you're naming the subtle forces within that pull you from trust toward control, from gratitude toward comparison. The Psalms become spiritual warfare through self-examination: honesty as a path to holiness.

This inward battle is perhaps the most difficult to acknowledge. We prefer external villains to internal corruption. Yet until we recognise that we carry enmity within ourselves—that we are, in a sense, our own enemies—we cannot fully grasp what enemy-love requires.

The World

Yet not all enemies are internal. Scripture also speaks of "the world"—not creation itself, but creation disordered. This refers to the system of values and beliefs contrary to God's will, characterised by sin, pride, and rebellion. James warns starkly: those who are "friends of the world" make themselves "enemies of God."

In our era, the enemies are quieter, more sophisticated. They arrive with sleek interfaces and compelling narratives, whispering:

You are what you achieve.

You are what you feel.

You are what you own.

Paul calls this "the pattern of this world" (Romans 12:2). In our secular world, which is sealed off from transcendence, even the concept of enemies becomes incomprehensible because all conflicts are reduced to misunderstandings or competing preferences.

The idols of materialism, affluence, success, pleasure, and personal freedom have been elevated to ultimate goods. They function as enemies not because they are intrinsically evil, but because they cultivate a love for the world that causes us to neglect the Lord. They are seductive precisely because they promise fulfilment while delivering fragmentation.

When you rise to the level of love that Jesus commands, you learn to distinguish between evil systems and the individuals caught within them. This is the crucial difference between hating an ideology and hating a person: between hating gambling and loving the person who trains race horses. Or, in New Testament times, hating the unjust Roman system of taxation but loving Zacchaeus.

The challenge intensifies in our politically polarised age. Some Christians treat Muslims and LGBTIQ+ people as their enemies. This is a tragic misapplication of enmity that demonises anybody who is Other.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how quickly we construct enemies from complex situations. Government officials enforcing worship restrictions became not merely wrong-headed authorities to be persuaded or opposed, but enemies to be defeated. This is a category confusion that transforms political disagreement into holy war.

The Devil

The devil appears sparingly in the Bible, yet his fingerprints mark the narrative in lies, accusations, and divisions. Revelation calls him "the accuser of our brothers" who "has been hurled down" (Revelation 12:10). Satan stands as the primary spiritual enemy, the adversary who seeks to deceive and destroy.

Paul clarifies the nature of this conflict: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (Ephesians 6:12). This is the ultimate context for understanding enmity, recognising that behind human opposition often stands a deeper, darker intelligence.

Satan's work is perversion: twisting good into evil, truth into suspicion, and love into manipulation. C.S. Lewis observed that the devil's greatest modern triumph isn't dramatic possession but mundane distraction. His goal is to make you forget there's even a battle underway, to convince you that the category of "spiritual warfare" itself is primitive superstition.

The Psalms teach vigilance against this forgetfulness. "Lead me not into temptation" echoes Psalm 5's plea: "Lead me, Lord, in your righteousness." Every moment you remain awake to goodness, truth, and beauty, you participate in Christ's victory over the deceiver. Every time you resist reducing all conflicts to merely human terms, you acknowledge the spiritual dimension of reality.

Interpersonal Enemies

We cannot spiritualise all enmity away. Jesus speaks concretely about human enemies: those who persecute, hate, curse, or abuse you. Those who seek to defeat you, say evil things about you, misuse you, gossip about you, or spread false rumours about you.

These are the individuals you would rather not invite for coffee or dinner. Your enemy might be the colleague whose jealousy makes them undermine your work, the family member whose constant criticism wears you down, or the former friend who turned their back when you needed them most.

What makes these enemies difficult isn't their power but their proximity. They are neighbours who have become adversaries, which is precisely why Jesus links the two: the command to love enemies forces us to recognise them as neighbours still. The philosopher Carl Schmitt offers a provocative insight by saying that the enemy is the person who defines you. Your enemies reveal who you are—or, more precisely, who you're becoming in response to their opposition.

The Enemies of the Lord

There is another category: God's enemies, those who actively align themselves against the Lord. The Psalms speak of "kings and rulers who take counsel against Him," those who hate God, those whose rebellion is cosmic in scope.

The Bible encourages us to count God's enemies as our enemies, but this is precisely where we must tread carefully. The temptation is to baptise our personal animosities as divine judgment and to confuse those we dislike with those God opposes.

The test is love. If you find yourself unable to pray for someone's redemption, if you hope for their destruction rather than their conversion, you have likely made them your enemy rather than recognising them as God's enemy who remains the object of God's reconciling love. Even God's enemies are those for whom Christ died. The cross reveals that God's way of dealing with His enemies is to die for them.

Enemies in the Story of Scripture

The biblical narrative begins and ends with enmity.

In Genesis 3, after the serpent's deception, God tells Eve: "I will put enmity between you and the serpent." Hostility becomes the context of human history. But embedded within the curse lies a promise: the woman's offspring "will crush your head."

Scripture's entire arc unfolds from this conflict, between the serpent's seed (evil, violence, pride) and the woman's seed (faith, obedience, humility). Cain murders Abel. Pharaoh enslaves Israel. Saul hunts David. Babylon burns Jerusalem. Herod slaughters innocents. The powers crucify Christ.

At each turn, God overcomes evil not by meeting force with force, but by transforming the battlefield through mercy.

At the cross, the pattern reverses:

"For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!" (Romans 5:10).

Karl Barth called this the "great inversion": God takes the place of his enemies so that his enemies may become his friends. The Psalms of lament reach their fulfilment on Golgotha, where Jesus prays, "Father, forgive them."

This is the scandal at the heart of Christianity: we were God's enemies, and He loved us anyway. Any theology of enmity that forgets this becomes toxic, self-righteous, and tribal. We love our enemies not because we are morally superior, but because we were once enemies ourselves and were loved into friendship.

Enemies After the Cross

Post-resurrection, enemy language doesn't vanish; it’s reframed.

Paul still speaks of "the last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26): death itself. But every enemy now stands defeated. The victory has been secured, though skirmishes continue. We live in the tension between the "already" of Christ's triumph and the "not yet" of its full manifestation.

Bonhoeffer, writing from his Nazi prison cell, insisted that following Christ means living "in the midst of enemies." Yet instead of hatred, Christians embody cruciform love: Bonhoeffer said that we are not simply victims of evil, but bearers of the victory of Christ into the midst of the world.

This is where enemy-love becomes concrete and costly. When you encounter hostility, misunderstanding, or injustice, you're not called to destroy your enemies; you’re invited to love them in the power of the Crucified. This doesn't mean passivity or acceptance of evil. It means opposing evil systems while loving persons, resisting injustice while praying for antagonists, maintaining boundaries while keeping hearts open.

The Heart of Enemy-Love

Realising that somehow we are all to blame is the heart of enemy-love, rather than the stance that labels the enemy as solely "to blame."

This is not moral relativism or both-sides-ism. Some actions are genuinely evil, and some systems are truly oppressive. Rather, it's recognition of our shared fallenness, our mutual implication in systems of sin. It's the humility that remembers: "There but for the grace of God go I."

When you can look at your enemy and see not a monster but a human being caught in the same web of sin, suffering, and distortion that catches you, when you can recognise that under different circumstances, you might have become what they have become, then you begin to understand what Jesus meant by enemy-love.

This doesn't eliminate the category of enemy. Some people will remain opposed to you, will seek your harm, and will stand against what you love. But it transforms how you hold that category, preventing it from hardening into hate.

Forgetfulness

In our secular age, the greatest enemy may be forgetfulness. Not aggressive atheism, but comfortable distraction. Not persecution, but drift.

We forget we're in a story at all. We forget that love is a battle. We forget that holiness has opposition.

The terrorist-enemy represents this complexity—a figure who embodies a complex world of extremism that resists simple categorisation. How do you love someone who seeks to destroy you and everything you hold sacred? How do you maintain the distinction between person and ideology when they have fused their identity with violence?

These are not theoretical questions for many Christians around the world. They are daily realities requiring wisdom, courage, and grace.

This is why we still need the Psalms: to wake us and remind us that life with God isn't neutral territory. "Awake, my soul!" (Psalm 57:8) isn't merely poetry; it's a summons to attention, to spiritual alertness that recognises both the reality of enemies and the call to love them.

Praying Psalm 5:8 Anew

So, when you come to verses like Psalm 5:8 and pray, "Lead me, Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies," you might be saying:

Lead me because my heart wanders.

Lead me because the world seduces.

Lead me because the liar still whispers.

Lead me because I forget.

Lead me because I would rather hate than love.

Lead me because I confuse my enemies with Yours.

Lead me because I see monsters where You see wounded image-bearers.

Lead me because righteousness requires I love what I would rather destroy.

The good news? You don't walk that path alone. The Shepherd who leads you has already faced every enemy and triumphed. The One who cried out in the Psalms has prayed them into resurrection. The One who commands enemy-love modelled it from the cross.

So you can pray the enemy Psalms without fear, because the battle belongs to the Lord, and His way of winning is love.

Faith in a Time of Hidden War

To claim you have no enemies isn't a sign of peace. It’s evidence of unawareness or privilege. The Christian life isn't a tranquil garden but contested ground where love, truth, and hope must be chosen daily against real opposition.

The Psalms remind us that enemies are real—interpersonal antagonists, spiritual adversaries, systemic evil, ideological deception, and the darkness within our own hearts. They are persons who persecute you, systems that crush human flourishing, demons who accuse, and the world's seductive alternatives to God's kingdom.

But the Psalms also point to a deeper reality: "The Lord is my shield" (Psalm 3:3). And the Lord who shields you is the same Lord who died for His enemies, who absorbed their violence and returned love, who proved that the only force more powerful than enmity is enemy-love.

The question "Who are my enemies?" therefore leads inevitably to a second question: "How shall I love them?" And the answer is always the same: as Christ loved me when I was His enemy.

And so we pray:

Lord, make your way straight before me, because the world bends crooked. Teach me to see my enemies clearly, neither demonising nor dismissing them, and to love them as You loved me. When I was your enemy, you made me your friend. Let every enemy be turned friend in the light of Your resurrection. Amen