Here’s an analogy that just came to me: The attacks of the devil are like script-kiddie denial of service attacks against Livejournal that happened recently. Knocknocknocknockknock (It kind of helps if you visualize Miles imitating the devil’s ceaseless knocking) Yeah, the attacks kind of suck, we’re all sitting here in withdrawal for a day or two cuz we can’t hardly get to the site cuz they’re just hammering the site so badly.
But a couple days later, when Brad and the development team came out victoriously, Brad had only surprisingly good things to say about the attack. He was like “thank you script-kiddie, cuz thanks to your attack efforts, not only did the site become more robust against that kind of attack in the future, but it also tested the load-capacity (testing…like a “refiners fire”) in ways they hadn’t really tested before so they were able to greatly reduce some bottlenecks they didn’t even realize they had, making the overall performance of the site more robust.
Is spiritual attack not the same way? If the evil one doesn’t win, don’t you come out stronger than you thought possible after the brief period of suffering and troubles? “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” Ha. Take that. Whack.