Tim Muehlhoff

Introduction

When Your Marriage Is a Target

“He has a fever.”

Unbelievable, I thought to myself as I listened to my wife’s phone message. Last night our middle son felt a little warm, and we hoped it was nothing. No such luck.

“Could you swing by the pharmacy on your way home?”

You could hear the frustration in her voice. Her irritation was spurred on not only by an unexpected health issue but the fact that I was still at the office even though we had yet to pack. In the morning, my wife and I were flying out to speak at a marriage conference. It was an early flight and everything that could go wrong was happening—sick child, last-minute cancelation of a trusted sitter, and a yet-to-be completed deadline at work. The phrase, everything but the kitchen sink didn’t seem so funny when we discovered later that night that our kitchen faucet was leaking again. The tension between us was high as we rode to the airport in silence.

After settling into our hotel room, we headed to the ballroom where the marriage conference was to be held to do a microphone check. We noticed conference volunteers walking up and down the rows pausing at each empty chair.

“What are they doing?” I asked the conference coordinator.

“Praying against spiritual forces,” he responded.

His answer took me by surprise. After years of organizing Christian marriage conferences, the organizer took seriously the reality of spiritual opposition. He explained that the couples who would occupy these chairs have certainly faced many obstacles—sickness, travel delays, luggage lost in transit, unexpected financial pressures, and marital tension are all par for the course.

“Do we really think it’s all coincidental?” he said laughing.

“Satan will do anything to keep us from working on our marriages. After all, a Christian marriage should reflect God’s love. We’d be naive to think Satan isn’t targeting us.”

Walking back to our hotel room I was flooded with thoughts. Is it really possible that Satan is targeting people attending this conference? Could it be that lost luggage or marital disagreements are not as innocent as they seem? And, if Satan is targeting people attending a conference, then certainly he’d attack people speaking at the conference. Right? Was my son’s fever, a leaking kitchen pipe, and the tension between my wife and me Satan’s attempt to discourage us? How can I tell if it’s just a leaky pipe or something more threatening? Doesn’t Satan have better things to do than target my wife and me?

I was determined to get answers.

It is in contemplating these troubling ideas that Defending Your Marriage explores three specific questions. First, why didn’t I connect the dots the way the conference organizer did concerning spiritual battle? To be honest, spiritual battle is simply not on my radar. Am I, a professor with a PhD, embarrassed by the possibility of spiritual oppression? As a modern follower of Christ, might this embarrass you as well? I wonder what Jesus or the apostle Paul would think about our skepticism. Second, what is the purpose of a Christian marriage? If, as Paul suggests in his letter to believers in Ephesus, Christian marriages are to be living metaphors of God’s self-sacrificial love (Eph 5), then is it not prudent to expect and prepare for spiritual battle (Eph 6)? Third, if we do acknowledge spiritual opposition, how can we be balanced? How can we tell if an argument is just a difference of opinion between spouses or something else? And, if the something else turns out to be demonically influenced, how will we know and what we can we do about it?

Thinking biblically entails seeing the world through the eyes of Scripture. Most Christians attempt to order their daily lives to fit the perspectives offered by biblical writers. We acknowledge that God exists, so we pray. We accept that death is not the final act, so we live in light of eternity. We know that God’s love is for all, so we seek ways to share Christ’s message with others. We embrace the Scriptures as God’s communication to us, so we read it regularly. Yet what about the reality of Satan? “On this topic,” suggests New Testament scholar Clint Arnold, “some of us suffer a double-mindedness. Although mental assent is given to the likelihood that evil spirits exist since it is affirmed in the Bible, in reality it makes no practical difference in the way we live our day-to-day lives.”[1]

What would our marriages look like if we regularly sought productive ways to approach conflict, reclaimed our hectic schedules, carved out date nights, managed our finances better, sought to instill biblical values in our children, be Christian witnesses to our neighbors, and embraced the reality that we do all of these things while living in a spiritual war zone? “The Bible teaches not only that evil spirits exist, but also that they are actively hostile to all Christians; their perverse instigations adversely affect our day-to-day life and the lives of those around us” concludes Arnold.[2]

How Will This Book Help?

Defending Your Marriage approaches the topic of spiritual oppression in a balanced and biblical manner. The following features make the book useful and easy to apply:

1. Each chapter introduces readers to what Jesus and biblical authors have to say about Satan and spiritual forces at play today. Jesus did not merely talk abstractly about the reality of the devil; Satan personally tempted him for forty days in a wilderness outside of Jerusalem.
2. Defending Your Marriage helps readers understand why their marriages may invite spiritual opposition. By understanding God’s design for marriage, readers will gain a better understanding of what Satan is so upset about and would want to target.
3. Couples are introduced to practical criteria that can be used to detect if spiritual oppression is at play. What are the most common indicators that Satan may be trying to derail your marriage?
4. Defending Your Marriage isn’t merely a book about Satan. Rather, it’s about how to protect our marriages by utilizing biblical tools such as prayer, meditating on God’s Word, and mobilizing fellow believers.
5. Interspersed throughout the book are short interviews with Christian thinkers who have walked deeply with God. One of the great blessings of teaching at a Christian university is rubbing shoulders with individuals from diverse fields of study who can offer keen insight into spiritual battle.

Finding the Right Balance

In reflecting on his own writings, C. S. Lewis often commented that his exploration of how demons interact with common people was his most important work. As he studied this neglected topic, he became convinced that many of us fall into two errors when it comes to the devil. One obvious error is to disbelieve the existence of Satan and demons altogether. The Bible simply speaks too much of their existence to ignore them. To take the Bible seriously entails opening ourselves to the reality of spiritual opposition to all aspects of our pursuit of Christ—including our marriages. However, an equally erroneous attitude is to “feel an excessive and unhealthy interest” in the demonic realm.[3] Lewis wryly concludes that the devil and his minions are equally pleased by both reactions.

As followers of Christ who seek to have thriving marriages, we must resist attributing every marital disagreement to demonic inducement, and likewise resist neglecting a spiritual reality embraced by Jesus and New Testament writers. After all, the reason we focus on the “schemes” of the devil (2 Cor 2:11) is to better understand how they could disrupt our strategies for cultivating a God-honoring marriage. By remembering and counteracting this forgotten threat, we not only pave the way for intimacy with our spouse, but also draw closer to our ultimate protector—God himself.

[1]Clinton Arnold, Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 148.

[2]Arnold, Powers of Darkness.

[3]C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), ix.