If “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh” (Galatians 5:17), then what could be more normal than for Christians to feel divided, split, torn asunder in our inner being—or as Ryle says, to feel that we have “two principles within us, contending for the mastery”? As long as we carry both Spirit and flesh, war will be normal.

“The child of God has two great marks about him…” So writes J.C. Ryle in his classic book Holiness. How would you finish the sentence?
Faith and repentance? Love and hope? Praise and thanksgiving? Humility and joy? I’m not sure what I would have said before reading Ryle, but I know I would not have finished the sentence as he does:
The child of God has two great marks about him…He may be known by his inward warfare, as well as by his inward peace. (72)
Warfare and peace. Combat and rest. The clash of armies and the calm of treaties. The Christian may have more marks about him than these two, but never less. He is a child in the Father’s home, and he is a soldier in the Savior’s war.
That sentence would play no small role in saving me from despair.
Parachuting into War

When I entered the Christian life, I had no idea I was walking into war. I felt, at first, like a man parachuting over the glories of salvation — finally awake to Christ, finally safe from sin, finally headed for heaven. But soon I landed in a country I didn’t recognize, amid a fight I wasn’t ready for.
The conflict, of course, was within me. I had never felt such inner division: my soul, which for a few months had felt like a land of peace, became a field of war — trenches dug, battle lines drawn. I found myself assailed by doubts I hadn’t faced before: How do you know the Bible is true? How do you know God is even real? The more I killed sin, the more I seemed to discover hidden pockets of sin — subtle, camouflaged sins crawling through forests of tangled flesh: self-flattering fantasies, knee-jerk judgments against others, unruly and sometimes wicked thoughts, fickle affections for God. I still enjoyed a measure of peace in Jesus, but it felt now like peace under siege.
“The same gospel that brings peace with God brings war with sin.”
Something must be wrong, I thought. Surely a Christian wouldn’t face darkness this black, division this deep. Surely, then, I’m not a Christian. For a season, I no longer called God Father, fearful of presuming that such an embattled one as I might belong to him.
Christianity Fights

Then came Ryle. In a chapter simply and aptly titled “The Fight,” he proved to me, with arresting intensity, that “true Christianity is a fight” (66), and every saint a soldier. “Where there is grace, there will be conflict,” he wrote with his manly matter-of-factness. “There is no holiness without a warfare. Saved souls will always be found to have fought a fight” (70).
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When someone comes along claiming to be some sort of authority on Scripture, but it is obvious that he knows nothing about it, or worse yet, is quite happy to ignore or reject most of it, then you know you got a real problem on your hands. Sadly there are far too many folks claiming to be believers who think and talk the same way. The biblical advice is to have nothing to do with them, or to rebuke them sharply! 

There’s never a dull moment when you have an interactive blogsite. Every day you get all sorts of folks sending in comments. Often they are terrific comments sent in by terrific people. But nearly as often you will get nutters, trolls, secular lefties, atheists, militants and haters coming along as well. That always make things interesting.
I would have posted thousands of comments from the latter group and tried to interact with them. But many of these comments can only go straight into the bin, given that they fail my commenting rules. But all this keeps me off the streets I guess.
Here I want to speak about those who come seeking to argue about Scripture and theology. Some are well-meaning and care about sound doctrine. I will leave them out of the discussion here. But there are those who come here saying the most ludicrous, brainless and unbiblical stuff.
I am always amazed at how they can manage to get things so very wrong. And over the years I have discovered that there are at least three groups of these folks. Some are just angry atheists who will attack any Christian for any reason. Some are clearly not Christians but they come here pretending to be. But as soon as you see what they have written it is obvious where they are coming from.
And then there is a third group who do indeed appear to be Christians, but they nonetheless are so woefully biblically ignorant and so theologically mixed-up that you do not know if you should laugh or cry when you see their stuff. Sometimes it is not quite clear which of the three groups a person is a part of.
But I sure get lots of these sorts of comments coming in. Let me deal with just one of them that was sent in a while ago. It had to do with a piece I wrote called “Still You Have Not Returned To Me.” That was about how God will often use various means to try to get our attention, to get us to return to him, and so on. That piece is found here: billmuehlenberg.com/2021/09/19/still-you-have-not-returned-to-me/
Some of these divine means include things like plagues or other calamities. I mentioned some biblical examples of this, and asked whether the current covid outbreak might in part be how God is trying to waken a sleeping world and get us to get our priorities right.
Some good comments came in, and helpful discussion ensued. However, one guy sent in a real doozy of a comment. It was so bad that I figured it was worth writing an article about one day. And so here it is. And I still do not know if this is one of the more biblically illiterate Christians around, or just some troll pretending to be a believer. Anyway, this is what he sent in:

It’s a very dangerous belief system that some Christians have, of giving God credit for deaths and disaster. What you’re saying is that some people deserve to be punished and God is causing them pain and death. This not only is in contrast of a God that is defined by love, but it also takes away the power of the Cross. Jesus has paid in full for our sins and has taken on our punishment himself. If we start giving God credit for disasters, what we are saying is that “What Jesus did is not enough, and that God needs to hand out extra punishment”

Oh dear – how can a guy get so much wrong in such a short space? Where does one even begin in trying to reply? Well, let me make that attempt. First, to defend what Scripture clearly and repeatedly teaches is a “dangerous belief system”? Really?
And “some Christians”? I would have thought that all genuine Christians who accept the Bible as the authoritative word of God would of course hold to what it so patently teaches.
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Christian, you represent God in the world. You bear God’s name. Don’t bear it in vain. Bring him honor in how you live. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The good news of the gospel is that God has done everything necessary to bless us through Jesus. Through Jesus we have the blessing we need: protection, God’s smile, and peace. But it also means that God has placed his name upon you. 

One of the most significant events of your life took place without you having much to do about it.
One day, a long time ago, someone gave you a name. You were just lying there. They looked at you and made a decision about what you would be called from that point on. Maybe they’d already decided. Maybe they chose a name that was already meaningful. Maybe you reminded them of a certain name. But on that day, they gave you a name. And, for most of us, that name has shaped our identity from that point on.
Another one of the most significant events of our lives happens as we receive another name.
In Numbers 6, God instructs Aaron, the high priest, to pronounce a blessing on the people. This is a blessing from the heart of God himself. It’s a blessing that conveys his protection, his smile, and peace. It’s a microcosm of the gospel itself. And at the end of it, God says: “So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them” (Numbers 6:27).
In other words, what we have in this passage is not only a blessing but a naming ceremony. As these words from God himself are pronounced on the people, God himself puts his name on the people.
The question is: what does this mean? This is not just something that Israel got to experience; it’s something that we get to experience too. Revelation 22:4 speaks of the new heavens and the new earth: “They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”
God’s name is a precious thing. A name represents the person and the totality of their identity. “Our name is not tangential to our being. It marks us and identifies us. Over time, as people get to know us, our name embodies who we are,” says Kevin DeYoung.
So when God puts his name on his people, it’s deeply personal. God’s name can’t be separated from God himself. This blessing is meant not only to give you God’s blessing, but for God to put his name and his blessing on your life.
But what does that mean? That’s what I want to look at today. It means three things.
One: It Means That God Owns You
When God puts his name on us means so much. It means that he chooses to identify with us. It means that he identifies us as his people, the objects of his blessing. It means that he claims us as his own, that he marks us as his people.
I love books. The first thing that I do when I get a book is to open the cover and put my name on the first page. Why? Because I love books so much that I don’t want other people thinking that my books are their books, and so I put my name upon it and claim it as my own. To put our name on something means that we claim ownership of that item and declare to everyone that we own it; that it belongs to us.
And that’s what God does with his people too. God blesses them. He protects them, smiles upon them, and looks after them, and the whole purpose is this: that they become his. He writes their name on them. He claims them as his own.
It goes with what God said to them earlier in Exodus 19:5-6:
“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.
God has made his people his exclusive possession. God’s people are his royal property. God is so committed to his people that he declares his ownership over them, that they belong to him. God states that everything already belongs to him — all people and people groups. And yet, despite this, his intention is “to bring close to himself a people that will join him for all eternity as adopted members of his family” (Douglas Stuart).
Israel could go through the wilderness and know that they had a unique relationship with God that no other nation had.
Similarly, if you are a follower of Jesus, you can go through your life and know what you also have a unique relationship with God. God has placed his name on you. This is the heart of what God intends for us. It’s why he saves a people: so we can belong to him.
If you have trusted Christ, God wants you to understand that you belong to him. You are not your own. He has written his name on you as one of his people. You are part of his treasured possession.
But this has a flip side. It also means that you don’t own you. The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism says this:

What is your only comfort in life and death?
That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

In his book You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, Alan Noble says:
A proper understanding of our personhood requires we recognize that we are not our own. At our core, we belong to Christ.
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