A darker world lies behind this one...

One of my favorite bands is Five Iron Frenzy, with front man Reese Roper. For me, "good music" is an harmonious blend of sound and words - bold, thought-provoking lyrics that wax poetic, complemented by catchy beats appropriate to each song's topic. In my eyes, FIF is just one of those bands.

They wrote a song a long time ago about the Columbine shootings, called "A New Hope." At one point in the song, Reese addresses the core issue - that there are demonic forces at play that have set themselves against the God who reigns. In the song, he says, "A darker world lies behind this one. Cryptic it hides beneath perception." I think this captures the spirit of what the apostle is saying to the Ephesian church. Paul tells them, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12).


Meredith Kline also takes a moment to speak on this issue when addressing the topic of the "Common Grace City" - 

Abuses of the city result in urban malformations, like the slum, the ghetto, the gulag. But beyond the city's malaise of social-economic-political injustice is an evil more central to the concerns of biblical revelation. There is in the city a spiritual malignancy, the fatal consequence of the usurpation of the world kingdom by Satan and the prostitution of the city to demonic service. In the lurid expose found in the apocalyptic mode of Scripture, the satanically perverted urban power structure is seen as a beast savagely turned against the citizens of the city who refuse its mark. The conflict thus depicted is not that of class struggle or racial strife. The victims are not those disadvantaged in things temporal. It is rather a matter of religious antithesis, an ancient diabolical enmity. It is against the redeemed of the Lamb that the controlling powers of the world kingdom direct their hellish hostility.(1)

Reese closes the song with these vivifying words: "Peace floods us. By hope we steer. Our dark hearts salvaged, we live without fear."

(1) Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview. Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006, pg. 168.

Also, for further reading, I have previously written about this idea of "ancient diabolical enmity" in a post titled, "The Enmity between the Woman's Seed and the Serpent's Seed."