Why Does the Opposition Get Worse Right When Things Finally Go Right?

By Angela D. Thomas, DrPH, MPH, MBA

Because greater assignments come with greater opposition. When you level up, the enemy levels up too, and he stops attacking you where you're weak and starts appealing to what you love most. The blessing didn't invite the attack by accident. They travel together.

Let me tell you about the night the whole world watched a good man make a five-second decision, because it's the clearest picture of this I have ever seen.

Will Smith had leveled all the way up. This wasn't a struggling actor hungry for a break. This was a man at the very top of his career. He had won a Golden Globe, he had written a best-selling book about his own life, and that night he was minutes away from winning his first Oscar for King Richard, a role where he played a father who was a protector of his family at all cost. He had spent months embodying a protector. He gets to the mountaintop he'd been climbing his whole life, and right there at the peak, a joke gets made about his wife, a GI Jane joke about her shaved head. And Will Smith gets up out of his seat, walks onto that stage, and smacks Chris Rock across the face on live television, at the highest moment of his professional life.

Then a few minutes later, holding the Oscar, in tears, he starts talking about being a protector and a defender of his family. The very character he had just played. Sit with how precise that is. The enemy didn't come at his weakness. He came dressed as his assignment.

Denzel said something to him that night that I cannot shake. He said, "at your highest moment, be careful. That's when the devil comes for you."

Why Would the Enemy Wait Until You're Winning?

Because a bigger you is a bigger target. New level, new devil. That's not scripture, but it's true, and if you've ever been blessed and blindsided in the same season, you already know it. When your assignment grows, the enemy doesn't recycle the same tired temptation he used on you five years ago. He studies your new season, he finds the thing you now care about most, and he appeals to that.

Look at how the machinery actually works. James 1:14-15 (NKJV) says, "But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death." Follow the order. It starts with your own desire. It gets drawn out and enticed. The desire conceives. And what it eventually gives birth to is death. And here's the part that should get your attention. The desire itself isn't even evil. Will's desire to protect his wife was good. But the enemy took a good desire, at a high moment, and used it to draw him out into a decision that overshadowed everything he had worked his whole life to build. One night. Five seconds. And for a lot of people it's now the first thing they think of when they hear his name.

And here's something Will himself said about this line of work, long before any of this ever happened. He said you have to be able to take abuse, you have to be able to have people talk crazy about you, and you have to smile and pretend like it's okay. He knew the assignment came with abuse. He said it out loud. And still, on the one night it counted the most, the pressure of the moment got past everything he already knew. That's how subtle this thing is. You can understand the principle completely and still get caught, which is exactly why understanding it is not enough. You need the Holy Spirit holding the wheel, not just good information sitting in your head.

And notice what he did afterward. He apologized. He owned it. Which tells you something too, that even when you handle a moment wrong, grace is still available and repentance is still real. But wouldn't you rather not spend your highest night apologizing for your lowest five seconds? The goal isn't to be perfect under pressure. The goal is to be surrendered before the pressure ever shows up.

Drop the "I Would Never"

I already know what some of us are doing while we read this. We're sitting up in the seat of judgment, saying what we would never do. Let me stop you right there. You have your own equivalent Will Smith moment sitting out in your future somewhere, and it is not going to show up wearing an obvious disguise. It's going to wear the face of somebody you love and a situation where you feel completely and totally justified. Shed the arrogance of what you won't do, because not one of us handles this in our own strength, and the second you think you're the exception is the second you're the most exposed.

That is the whole reason we cannot do this alone. When your own good desires can be turned against you at your very best moment, you need Somebody stronger than your feelings driving the car. We need the Holy Spirit, and we need Him most in the seasons when everything is finally going right, not just the seasons when everything is falling apart.

What This Means for You

What good desire in your life, to protect, to provide, to finally be respected, could the enemy use at a high moment to draw you out into a decision you would regret?

Yesterday we saw that opposition comes with the assignment. Today we learned it grows as you grow. Next up, the reason God may be holding you at your current level a little longer than you'd like.

I teach God's Word weekly inside the SheShed Community, and this is exactly the kind of teaching that hits different when you're in the room for it. The replay of this teaching, "Why THEY Mad," is available inside the community as well. Come sit with us.