GOD on Your iPOD: "Know Your Enemy" by Green Day

The newest offering by California-based punk rock band Green Day is 21st Century Breakdown. "Know Your Enemy," the first single released from the album came out in April of this year.

The repeated tagline of the song is "Do you know the enemy? Do you know your enemy? Well, gotta know the enemy, wah hey." The song is actually about anarchy, common fodder for the antiestablisment tendencies of punk. Other lines in the song that further the anarchic theme are: "Violence is an energy against the enemy," "Revolt against the honor to obey," "Overthrow the effigy, the vast majority," "Silence is the enemy against your urgency, so rally up the demons in your soul."

So, seen through the lenses of punk, the song sounds a common call to rise against the status quo, against the control of restrictive government or any other system that seeks conformity.

But, if you look with God lenses, there's much more that can be gleaned. The basic question is a vital one: "Do you know the enemy?" Let's make this simple. Far too few people really understand who the enemy is in life. We spend our days fighting with other people, fighting with traffic, fighting with our government, fighting with our finances, fighting with worries and stresses. And as a result, we lose sight of the real enemy, Satan.

And the refusal to acknowledge his reality, his activity, and his presence, is exactly what he wants. If we do not recognize him, we get caught up in things that don't matter. We make other people, people created in God's image, the object of our hatred and anger. We get frustrated over things that we aren't supposed to try to handle in the first place. We allow little goadings by the devil to "spur us on to hate and evil deeds." We spend our time on things that don't matter. We listen to lies that he tells us to discourage us, to keep us silent, to keep us from taking action, to keep us from following our God-given dreams.

It is vitally important that we know our enemy. Who is he? A few things the Bible tells us about him. He is the father of lies and everything that comes from his mouth is a lie. He is the accuser of the saints, standing before God always making accusations against God's people. He is a deceiver. He makes evil look attractive. He is a serpent and a dragon, but he masquerades in resplendent beauty as an angel of light. He has set himself against God and God's people and seeks to devour us like a lion on the prowl.

From the punk rock standpoint, the anarchy encouraged in the song is certainly a tool that our enemy loves to use. But, I think you can probably make something else out of the song, turning it on it's head entirely if you see Satan as the real enemy instead of an ordered society. I'll leave it to you to make the rest of the applications from the song. Let me know what you get.