Spiritual Warfare 03

Don’t be caught in legalism, because that’s just another lie of the Devil.

The bulk of popular mythology about fighting demons stands on a legalistic application of English translations of New Testament events. Without taking the time to understand the context of these events, it becomes mere rote ritualism to insist that all encounters with demons must follow some formula dreamed up by enthusiasts.

Why were there so many demons among the Jewish population in the New Testament? Was this somehow the unadvertised norm that Israel suffered in the Old Testament, too? By no means. There are two basic reasons for Jesus to encounter so many demons.

1. It was for His glory. Jews knew what demons were and how they worked. The Old Testament does provide the bulk of what we know about Satan and his operations. So the Hebrew people had learned to recognize the signature of a specific demonic presence that bound people. They should have known how to deal with this problem, but the meaning of the Covenant had been hidden from everyone. This is the heavy current against which Jesus had to keep wading. What Jesus faced was often a set-up from the Father designed to point out that Jesus was His Son, and to prevent anyone mistaking this. The demons had no choice but to serve the purpose of glorifying the Son.

2. It was contextual to the Covenant Nation alone. These people were bound because the Judean people had lost their way. They could have known they were off track, had they not been so wedded to the fleshly comforts of avoiding the deeper truth of the Covenant. They had drifted into legalism long before the rise of Hellenism among the rabbinical schools; the Aristotelian logic simply offered a better excuse for it.

The kind of demonic problems, the distribution of them in the population, and the remedy were peculiar to the Covenant context. The unique status of Israel before the Lord had a lot to do with what Jesus confronted and how He dealt with it. This means that you need to exercise that “rightly dividing the Word” discernment to know how much of that matches your context today. Blindly seizing upon the words and making it a rule is just the kind of thing the Devil did to deceive Israel in the first place so that he could pepper them with demons.

To a lesser degree, the same could be said of how the Hebrew Apostles handled the demons they encountered in the Gentile world of the Mediterranean Basin. This was an area that Israel should have already evangelized with the Covenant of Moses. They had done a very poor job of that; what little evangelism they performed was for the Talmud, not the Word of God. So the situation we see in Acts, for example, is rather unique to the situation of Hebrew Christians dealing with folks their forefathers left in the lurch.

It’s not that you and I today in the US are facing no demons. The issue is that the types, distribution and solutions are unique to our context. Some of what we see in the Bible does apply. In some places, it’s rather literal in application. In most of it, we are obliged to discern what we individually should do to counteract Darkness in the context.

I have my answer to this. You should develop your own. To the degree we get the same guidance in our hearts, we should endeavor to work together in this mission of cleansing the domain of the Lord — our lives. We hold our feudal domains as vassals of the Lord. When He brings His people to us, we seek to offer as much help, and the right kind of help, for the needs at hand, according to our commission.

There is no obligation that you mimic the dramatic silly posturing of some folks who are just so certain they have this all figured out. You aren’t obliged to denounce the demons aloud. You aren’t obliged to use the popular Charismatic terminology about such things, nor repeat their formulaic ritual denunciations. That’s not the only thing to which demons respond. My experience has been that, the vast majority of the time, all it takes is helping the victim to make the demons unwelcome by their choice to embrace Biblical Law.

You and I are now the Covenant Nation in our hearts. We cannot force the new vintage to fit into old wineskins. While being under a single culture of faith might be convenient, even somewhat of an ideal, it isn’t happening. There is no single rule for Christian religion. There will be cultural variations, and within any particular culture, even more individual variations.

Don’t be discouraged from trying to learn all you can about this. Sift through it and keep what’s appropriate for your commission from God. This is not some game of gotcha where you have to enunciate the proper legal notice for the demons to depart. It’s more a case of providing the guidance and strength for people to leave the demons, however it is they can.