Our enemies exist, and have no interest in the church or righteousness or truth or beauty. Their vision of the world was as Orwell foretold: a boot, crushing, forever. So why are we told to pray for such? Their thoughts are not for our benefit.
Our prayers are for their conversion and salvation, for miracles do happen. The enemy is turned, not by his will but by the will of God. Ananias knew of Paul before his conversion, and his fears of seeing him were reasonable.
For Paul was a rabbi, trained by a rabbi, and he knew that the teaching of Christ destroyed that of the rabbinical schools.
10Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” 11The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, 12and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” 13But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; 14and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” 15But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; 16I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” 17So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, 19and after taking some food, he regained his strength.
If we did not pray for those who persecute us, they would not turn. This does not mean that we will not fear, and we will not protect, and when necessary flee. We have to accept that this world is fallen and that we do have people who will persecute us.
Some of whom are not in Human Resources, but in the church.
But at this time we do need to pray for those who oppose us, persecute us, and would indeed kill us. We need to pray for those who woould cause scandal among us, and destroy the faith of the little ones.
That the Holy Spirit will intervene, and revival come. Historically, the pagans have failed. But this requires revival, and a remnant that is faithful, so God can add pull the West from its converged death spiral.
No one deserves that fate. Pray for our enemies.
Over the last couple of days this site has been hit with DNS attacks leading to the site being throttled. I have taken steps to minimise this: cloudflare is now installed, and a couple of the low traffic blogs are being reconstructed from scratch.
I expect such to increase over the next weeks. The soft war on the internet is now spilling into real life.