“Enemy at the Gates” starring Jude Law and Ed Harris is perhaps one of the most visually stunning war movies available. From the opening scenes showing the pristine clean countryside that quickly transitioned into the dirty dismal war torn city of Stalingrad, to the mud and blood of daily life for the soldiers and civilians stuck in the city, it hides very little of the reality of war. Not even the brutal orders to shoot their own Russian soldiers who turned back from the deadly German gunfire. It was terrible. But perhaps the most gut wrenching scene was when the German sniper (Ed Harris) tried to trap the Russian sniper (Jude Law) by hanging a teenaged boy who was spying for the Russians. While much of the plot was fictionalized the war was real, as was the hanging of 17 year old Sasha Fillipov.

Sometimes here in America we sanitize things so much that we lose touch with reality. People are so accustomed to getting their meat at the market, cleanly wrapped, that they’re offended when they actually see an animal die. We hide the reality of death by cleaning up the mess and removing the bodies so quickly that it’s as if it didn’t really happen. The result is that, even for adults, war and death don’t seem real, so we often react like children when confronted with it, or calloused to it when it’s not in our back yard. The reality of war, and life for that matter, is that people die violently, including children.

Another reality of war is that children often act as spies because the adults mistakenly overlook them. In the process of fleeing Jerusalem, David left Hushai behind to give bad advice to Absalom and to act as a spy. Two boys, Ahimaz and Jonathan, were left in place to relay messages to David (2 Samuel 15:36). However, when they got their message from Hushai and tried to slip out of Jerusalem they were spotted by another boy who hurried to tell Absalom. They escaped discovery by hiding in a well that a supporter covered with straw or they likely would have died like Sasha in Stalingrad. (2 Samuel 17:15-20).

If we consider ourselves soldiers in the Lord’s army, fighting a spiritual war, we certainly realize the enemy is at the gates. The question for us is this: are we hiding like those boys or are we boldly meeting the enemy with an open declaration of our allegiance to Christ? If we hide because we’re afraid then we’re already dead.