Divine Power to Demolish Strongholds- 2 Corinthians 10:4

In this verse, we find Paul using the language of warfare, serving here to bring to our awareness the fact that life in this fallen world is, by its very nature, a battle. We have learned here that our primary enemy is not other people, but “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against… spiritual forces of evil” (Eph 6:12). Our “warfare” here is not waged with physical weapons, but with spiritual ones, and the question readily arises as to what a spiritual weapon precisely is. Paul here gives us the answer, and he does so by pointing out what these spiritual weapons accomplish, which he refers to here as being able to “demolish strongholds”. The use of this expression serves to identify for us just how the enemies will struggle against wage war upon us, and this revelation also reveals to us how we are to go about waging this war to bring victory. As we may recall from 1 Corinthians 2:10-13, the function of the “spirit” in human beings is to assign meaning to everything we encounter in life, so a spiritual battle is essentially a battle over meaning, over how we “see” and interpret things. Our enemies’ primary means of waging war against us is to deceive us into concluding that something means what a current worldly philosophy or our own “sinful flesh” says it means. These false “meanings” that we assign to things serve, we are told here, to build up strongholds in us, strongholds built upon a foundation of lies told us by our “spiritual” enemies. The Greek word stronghold here is okuroma, and comes from a derivative of the Greek word “echo”, which literally means “to hold”. These “meanings”, which contradict the true Biblical meaning of things, are the means through which our enemies build up strongholds in our lives, strongholds which hold us captive and cause us to think, act and feel in ways which are decidedly unbiblical. How exactly all of this happens will now be set forth, through the use of an example. Let us say that someone had a father with many issues as they grew up. This father repeatedly told them that they were useless and worthless, and their lives would never amount to anything. This “lie” is repeated over and over through the years, and the child concludes that all of this means he is useless and worthless. This lie takes root in his heart, and causes him to think, act and feel as one who is useless and worthless. This “lie” takes him captive and causes him to live out his life like one who is useless and worthless, he is a spiritual prisoner, taken captive by the false meaning he assigned to what his father told him. That is the bad news, but the good news here is that the bible tells us that these strongholds can be destroyed, they no longer can keep us as their captives. The bible also tells us here precisely how to go about destroying these strongholds, using the weapons of “The Spirit”, the truth of the word of God (Eph 6:17). In our example, the truth is not that this person is worthless, but has great worth in the eyes of the only one who ultimately matters, for God has “bought him with a price” (1 Cor 6:20). The truth is that God decided he was worth Jesus coming to die for, that he is not worthless but in fact a great price was paid for him. This stronghold of worthlessness is thus demolished by countering the lie of his worthlessness with the truth that he is worth more than all the treasures of this world to God. It is in this way that the Spirit of God uses the truth to set us free, free from the strongholds which have taken us captive and caused us to behave in ways which are destructive to ourselves and others , for the Word of God has “divine power to demolish strongholds”.