We want him to have a face. The Enemy.
Give a tribe a face to hate and they will love you for it, rally around you, rant and scream in the echo chambers and around the water coolers. And it will feel like progress, achievement. “Down with the Man” or whatever current flavor of tyranny we are opposing today.
Strawman arguments are easy when they wear someone else’s face. We choose our villain by tribe — a Trump or an Obama, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, Christian Nationalism, the Woke Left, Communists, Fascists, the Jews — whichever boogeyman our people have agreed to fear or hate. And we build a moral life out of opposing our named Enemy. And some have done real harm; some were or are truly evil. I am not dismissing or discounting that. But every flesh-and-blood tyrant is in reality a caricature: a mask, worn for a season and then set down. And the man who spends his strength hating a mask has fought only a costume, a façade. The true Enemy, the Strongman is not flesh and blood.
That said, he is not, in himself, actually strong. That is what we cannot see while the mask holds our attention. His nature is parasitic. He has no strength of his own; he leeches it from masses of frightened, grasping people — from tribes fed on fear and hate, from civilizations that heap up power and call the heap progress. Feed him and he grows terrible. Starve him and he is nothing at all. Isaiah saw the last day of him, when every eye finally lands on the Enemy, stripped of his empires: They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms? (Isa. 14:16). The whole creation, staring, unable to believe it was deceived by something so insignificant.
But that day is not this day. In this day he is fed well. The last essay ended at a threshold. The high place came down. The room was swept. And one stands outside it who has no intention of staying outside. So the questions come in order: Who is the strong man that must be displaced? And once displaced, replaced. And if replaced, with what, or with Whom?
Where He Keeps House
Today’s Strongman does not need a crown in a democracy. He has learned to work through the crowd, and it is a more efficient arrangement. Our systems do not reliably reward the wisest ruler; they reward the most convincing performer — the one who can stir fear, flatten what is complicated, manufacture an enemy, and promise certainty, set against the slower voice trying to tell a harder truth. But the demagogue is not the disease. He is the symptom, and the amplifier, and the mirror. What we vote for, election after election, is not the man who sees reality most truly but the man who makes us feel safest, strongest, most seen. He manufactures enemies because a frightened tribe is a worshiping tribe, and a worshiping tribe is food. The parasite found, in the ballot, one more mouth. (That the power is divided at all — that no one owns it permanently — is a real mercy: Babel scattered again. But the seizing heart is patient. It learns the system.)
He was at the first tower. Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name (Gen. 11:4). The whole program of the world in one sentence: strength heaped up by our own hands until it scrapes the sky, so that the name on it will be ours. It is a counterfeit of the only strong tower there is — Turris fortis mihi Deus. The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe (Prov. 18:10) — and the whole Christian life comes down to the choice between those two towers: the one we build to make ourselves a name, and the one we run into because it already bears His. Our Enemy is the spirit of Babel, and he has worn empire after empire like a skin. Babylon, and every Babylon since.
He practices law. The law was given as a servant of shalom — a fence around the vulnerable, a channel cut so that justice could run down like water. But he takes the servant and makes of it a weapon and an altar. He never announces himself when he does it. He comes as competence. He comes as zeal. He comes as winning — being a good steward. A profession ordained to end conflict learns instead to feed on it, billing the very war it exists to heal, and the advocate set at the gate of justice to hand a blessing down learns to stand at that same gate and collect rent. We build high places out of our own excellence and burn incense to them and call it professionalism. I have done it. I have mistaken winning for righteousness more times than I can count, and every time, the mistake felt like virtue.
And he keeps a smaller house than any of these. The tribe, the tower, the practice — those are rooms he furnishes on his way to the one he wants. He does not care about the empire; the empire is scaffolding. What he wants is the small interior seat where I decide for myself what is good and what is evil — the throne of the self, the fruit of the first tree, the original high place from which every other high place is copied. Eden had no Babylon in it, but he was already there.
When I first began to practice law, I was already well-grounded in my faith and in scripture. I thought it was faith and knowledge of the Word that would set me apart from competitors. But I found out — very quickly — that those who did not share my faith were just as effective, competent, and excellent at the work (if not more so!) as I was. I thought my faith would drive high performance, but I was mistaken.
What I learned after years of reconciling that fact is that my faith, my relationship and experience with the Father — understanding what He cares about, the stories He wants me to tell of Him — instead, provided a means by which I could discern the brokenness around me. And not just the brokenness, the idolatry fueling it, and the agreements with lies upon which those idols desperately depended and thrived. Because of my faith and the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit, I could peek behind the curtains of all that animated the vitriol and acrimony behind the disputes I was being brought in to resolve. And that recognition gave me new purpose and new fervor. But God had to ensure that I did not become simply another victim to the Machine of my worldly vocation.
The Forgery
God set three offices in a man: the priest, who stands between and carries others in; the prophet, who tells the truth in the light; and the king, who rules under the only High King there is. The Strongman forges all three, and the forgery is so hard to detect. He builds an altar and calls it a temple — priests to the wrong god. He speaks the invented word that flatters the crowd and calls it truth — prophets of the lie. He annexes ground, holds it by force, and calls the holding order — king of a stolen kingdom. Strip the polished appearance and expensive suits and there is nothing underneath but Self, enthroned as god.
He is hard to see because we are hunting a monster. The monster is the outlier, the exception — that is not me; I would never — and the exception is how he keeps the seat. He does not come as a monster. He is competent. He is often sincere about order, admirable at a distance, impressive up close, and he keeps the law ninety-seven times in a hundred. But the other three tell you everything about who he truly is: he breaks the law at the one moment keeping it would cost him, breaks it where no one is looking, and files the breaking under prudence, self-protection, the end that justifies the means. And what is a little compromise, anyway, when everyone else is engaged in the same patterns of performance?
He is not the man who was never offered the true office. He is the man who seized it rather than received it — and what any of us becomes by small decisions, repeated. The way of Jacob before he was Israel: fight and maneuver for whatever it is I want. Take, don’t wait. God helps those who help themselves . . .
And I’ve often noticed with curiosity: in all his empires there is one thing he has never done. He has never sat down. He cannot rest, cannot enter Sabbath.
Scripture runs the order seat-first — God hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6) — before we can walk, we must be seated in Jesus. And we must then learn to walk (by faith, not by sight) before we can ever stand. And once we learn to stand, we do so not in our strength but in Christ Jesus who strengthens me. Because the work has been finished only by the Son. The work was never ours to finish.
And that is the one confession the Strongman will not make. He must be in charge. So he is always on his feet: prowling about, seizing, grasping, holding, patrolling his own walls, because the moment he stops holding, everything he has taken for himself unravels and falls apart. There is a counterfeit of this pattern described in the first Psalm — walking in the counsel of the ungodly, standing in the way of sinners, and at last sitting in the seat of the scornful (Ps. 1:1) — the scorner’s chair, where an ungodly and unsanctified man finally rests because he has called evil good so long the lie feels like a finished work and he is content to mock others. That seat is the only false-sabbath the Strongman will ever know. One born of arrogance and pride, who has gone unchallenged and undisturbed for so long he forgets he is nothing but a usurper, a parasite that needs a host to survive. Sadly, many thinking to save their lives have laid them down to serve as his host.
Twelve Legions
From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force (Matt. 11:12). Underneath every other question I have about my vocation as a Christian lawyer sits this one: what does the Son do about violent men? Does He rage against the dying of the light? Does He fight when no one else can or will? Does He sit in resignation, a good God allowing evil to win?
He is the one man in history with the raw power to out-strong every strongman at once, and He tells us plainly what He is holding back: Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? (Matt. 26:53). Twelve legions, standing by. And the order He gives is Put up again thy sword into his place (Matt. 26:52) — spoken to the one friend who drew steel for Him. Then He stretches out His arms for my hammer and my nails. That is the picture of the Son.
That is His answer, and there is no other. The violent take the kingdom by force, and the King takes it back by being taken. He does not out-seize the seizer. He receives the worst the Strongman can do — receives it into His own body — and in the receiving breaks the strong man’s actual power, which was never armies. It was the lie that seizing is the only way to hold anything. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5) — inherit, not take; the meek receive the earth precisely because they would not draw a sword for it. And His people overcome the same way He did, in the same three refusals: they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death (Rev. 12:11). Not by seizing — by a blood already shed, a victory received. Not by the invented, flattering word — by testimony to what God has done. Not by clutching their best lives now — by holding them loose enough to spend. The Way of the Son is the Strongman run backward.
And what should this son do about all of this? That is the question swirling in my heart.
I know my options; I have exercised them all. I can chase shadows and windmills — appoint myself to a mission He never gave and call the self-appointment zeal. I can keep my head down and accumulate — money, position, reputation — until I have gathered enough to force my opinion on the room, which is only the seizing heart being patient: force in slow motion, wearing better manners. I can applaud the man in the arena from a safe seat and call the applause engagement, support, encouragement, honor. I can spend my whole strength bailing water out of my own sinking boat, telling myself it is so that soon I will be able to rescue others sinking around me — forgetting I was never told to make the boat seaworthy; I was told to step out of it. Or I can sigh, and call the sigh pragmatism, objectivity, realism.
Underneath all five runs the same instinct: meet strength with strength, answer his seizure with a better one. Out-chess the Chessmaster. And that is the trap. The day opposing counsel stops being a man and becomes the enemy, I have already lost — I said as much at the beginning of all this, and it is truer here than it was there. No man binds his own strong man. Strength against strength, self against self, is the strong man fighting himself, changing shirts, retaking the same throne in a more acceptable, Good Christian manner.
Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me (Ps. 35:1). When the meek man is dragged into the rigged court — and you can be sure that the court is rigged; the evidence bent, the verdict drafted before he walked in — he does not reach for a weapon of the same make. He hands the contention up. He appeals past the bought judge to the Holy Judge who cannot be bought, and then he turns and does the small assigned thing in front of him: this client, this file, this hour, the small meal God actually said to multiply today — a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, manna for today. The fifteenth Psalm draws that man whole. LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? — and the answer is a portrait made almost entirely of refusals to grasp, down to the hardest of them: He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not (Ps. 15:4). A man who makes a promise, watches the promise turn expensive, and keeps it. He can afford to lose the moment; his seat is not in the outcome of his work. The Strongman, on the other hand, cannot afford to lose anything at all, because his seat is secured only by toil.
The Seven Who Return
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself... and the last state of that man is worse than the first (Matt. 12:43–45). Sweeping is not dispossession — I teed this up in the last essay and here is the rest. I used to read more wicked than himself as a change of degree: the same sins, grown stronger. It is worse than that. It is a change of kind. The first occupant was loud — the bottle, the rage, the appetite. Loud sins announce themselves, and a man can fight what he is ashamed of. These seven come back refined.
Self-righteousness is seven times stronger than hate and lust and gluttony, because lust knows it is sick and self-righteousness is certain it is well. It moves into the swept house and compliments the housekeeping. It thanks God, right out loud, that this house is not as other houses are. And its twin comes with it — the old monks called it acedia — wearing two masks that look nothing alike: the frenzy and the sigh. Frenetic activism, workaholism, committees and causes and a calendar with no white space — motion as the counterfeit of obedience. Then the other mask: the long exhale of the man who has concluded that nothing he does matters, the sins of omission stacking up like unopened mail. Both masks are one refusal — the refusal to sit still in the cell with God until He opens it. Given the choice, I would rather battle addiction than apathy or my good opinion of myself. Addiction knows it needs rescue, and cries out. The refined seven cry out for nothing. They are comfortable in the cell, papering the walls with velvet, serving lavish dinners inside the prison and calling it the work of God. This is most fearsome; the camouflage most difficult to detect. And the predator — the serpent — that wears it is most deadly.
Bind, Then Fill
One verse before the swept house, Jesus gives the only sequence that works. When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils (Luke 11:21–22). If there is any formula it is this. The strong man is not reformed, not negotiated with, not tolerated, not out-argued, not gradually improved. He is overcome — by a stronger than he — and the Stronger One is not me. Not by might, nor by power, [not by my intellect and ability, not by my education or experience, not by manipulation or reason] but [ONLY] by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zech. 4:6). GOD binds the strong man; I do not. My part is the part I have hated my whole striving life: to stop generating strength long enough to be dispossessed of myself — the man drowning who needs to come nearest to death before he can be saved —and then to stay empty no longer than it takes to be filled.
Because the house must not stay empty. Empty, swept, and garnished is exactly the condition the seven are looking for. The room where the idol stood is not meant to be a museum of the victory; it is meant to be occupied. A guarded house he can wait out. An occupied house he cannot enter. Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you? (1 Cor. 6:19). Pray the Holy Spirit takes His place in the temple of your house — pray it today, pray it before the coal of repentance is cool to the touch — lest your last state be worse than your first. Bind, cast out, remove, then fill. Dispossession of the idol, of Mammon, of Self, then residence of His Presence. There is no third condition of the house. It is his, or it is His.
And I hear the question that comes next. If the counterfeits are this good — if self-righteousness can move into a swept house and pass for sanctification this easily, if a man can mistake winning for righteousness for years and feel virtuous the whole way — then am I even saved? Are any of us?
Sit with that question; do not rush to dismiss it too quickly. The Pharisee never asked it. Ananias never asked it. Jeroboam never asked it. Saul never asked it. The ones who do, in sincerity, ask cannot so much as lift their eyes — they stand far off, beat their chest, and fall to their knees: O God! be merciful to me a sinner — and Jesus says that man, that woman, that child of the King, went out justified (Luke 18:13–14). The terror of being grouped with the “Depart from me I never knew you” is nearer to grace than the calm, contented, pleased-with-himself Good Christian would ever be. And the assurance, when it comes, will not come from your certainty, your record, or your housekeeping — those would only be one more thing grasped. It rests where everything else in this matter rests. You did not seize your own salvation, and you cannot seize your own keeping. Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand... no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand (John 10:28–29). His grip. Not mine. Received, not grasped, not taken, like fruit from a tree — all the way down, even this.
And the man with the strong one bound and the Spirit in residence — the man who has finally sat down in Christ, the throne of his heart occupied by the Eternal Living Yahweh — is free for the first time to walk by faith and not by what his eyes, his education, his experience, his profession tell him. And then, he can stand. Not in his own strength, but the strength of the One who has truly saved him from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. And he who the Son has set free is free indeed. Free to stand in gaps, to stand between justice and mercy, stand between giants and children, stand between life and death. And to carry others in. What that man is, and what his work becomes when the temple of his life is occupied by the presence of his God, is the last of these essays. He has a name older than the profession. He is a priest.
Turris fortis mihi Deus.
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Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.
This is the sixth essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.