Questions and Problems
One of the biggest problems we face in seeking a biblical understanding of Spiritual Warfare is the mythology of our pagan Western culture piled on top of the truth. The truth is still there, but it’s buried under a lot of trash. The bedrock of who you are supposed to be in Christ is shaped and placed by God. Each of us has a unique cornerstone upon which to rest the foundations of our existence. So the single biggest task up front is to discover what it is about your individual divine calling that Satan wants to hide from you.
This is behind my comment about demons being bound by your individual convictions. This is a major choke point in redemption. Our human reflex is to assume that humanity is more uniform in essence, and only superficially unique. This is the most dangerous kind of lie, because it’s a half-truth. Granted, there is a commonality in being born fallen and damned. And there is a commonality of experience necessary for us to communicate the truth of divine revelation. But human reasoning draws the boundaries in all the wrong places when it comes to where the departure points are between what’s common to us all and what God built into us uniquely.
This is why we have these massive, repressive systems of religion that crimp off the uniqueness way far down too low on the stem of life. It’s a human fleshly instinct to keep things convenient, and the greater the uniformity, the greater the convenience for those who run things. It makes it easier to pick out just a few highly talented individuals to herd massive numbers, because it can all be done in the flesh. There’s no need to sweat over the conflicts that naturally arise; you just pretend they shouldn’t exist.
Let me lower the boom on that: Human conflict is hard-wired into our existence. It is not a sin to fight; it is endemic to living in the flesh. Conflict is a given in Biblical Law. The only question is to observe all the revealed protocols for making conflict work to your spiritual advantage. Some tension you accommodate, and some signals the point of separation. And this thing is dynamic, so that it flexes with the context. The amount of energy and resources you spend handling that is a major element in our testimony to the world as a community of faith. Being able to bear with some tension and remain a community is a critical part of the witness. The business of bearing the tension is all part of the vast, unexplored legacy of faith within the covenant community imagery. Handling internal conflicts is a major element in what the Body of Christ does in the local setting of each church, and we should get comfortable with that.
It’s a lie of Satan that conflict should never arise. This is part of how he keeps us under his control. You as a unique servant of God must be strong in your convictions, but you must also recognize a conviction that makes peaceful coexistence a major element in communion. It’s not squelching differences, but becoming hardened to the friction. Being sensitive to conflict is what Satan wants for us. God wants us to learn how to do conflict properly, because that’s a major load of unclaimed blessings, so that conflict becomes merely accommodation of uniqueness.
I’ve said several times in the past that I cannot explain how it is that Satan profits from holding back our blessings. All I can do is place it back in the imagery used in Scripture. The primary source is the story of Joseph’s time in Egypt, because it is so typical of the entire ANE. Upon arrival in Egypt, Joseph was sold to a particular nobleman. His status as a slave meant that he held no property at all. His very clothing was provided by his master, along with everything else he used in his service.
The point here is that all the profit from his labor went back to his master. This is the image of what Satan does to us. We are born under his ownership. Keep in mind that the difference between slavery and prison is insignificant in the Ancient Near East. Going to prison meant becoming a slave for a period of time. If you borrowed too much and couldn’t pay it back, then you were a bond-slave who had to work off the repayment, but it was the same deal if you destroyed too much, even accidentally.
But you need not become the slave of the one you owe. It was common in the ANE to farm that out. If you were in debt to a lord, he always had someone on staff, a high-ranking noble, who took care of this for him. This is where the image of the sheikh’s left-hand man comes from: It’s the noble appointed to run the debt farm. During the time Joseph was in prison, he was a slave for the left-hand duke, the highest ranking non-heir under the pharaonic household.
This is the place Satan holds now. The Old Testament parables of him starting out as the “Covering Cherub” indicates that his current position was a demotion from all the fun Lucifer had handing the traffic between God and Creation. Now he’s forced to do something that isn’t fun at all. We cannot possibly understand how Satan gains profit from keeping us imprisoned/enslaved, but we know that whatever profit he does have comes from that. It is Satan’s job now to keep you from your inheritance, to keep sucking down your blessings.
The image is that God is pumping out those blessings whether you get them or not. It’s up to you to find the path that puts you under the showerhead of God’s provision meant for you. This is all parabolic, not a description. Description is impossible, but offering metaphors that give you a feel for things is how the Bible teaches in the first place. This is what Christ did throughout His ministry. Within this imagery, we can get an orientation, not a map. The details are there to experience, but not drawn out for us.
At least one way that Satan profits is rather clear: If he keeps you all tied up in knots not claiming your inheritance, it serves to keep others around you blind to the things you are commissioned to reveal. There’s a portion of God’s glory that is hidden by your failure to be all God intended for you to be. God portrays Himself as a nomad sheikh, the kind of ruler whose greatest treasure is His people. If you are hindering others because of your enslavement, that means the Father Sheikh is kept from full use of His own children’s talents to enhance His glory. It’s not that God doesn’t suffer, but it’s a price He’s willing to pay to keep things working as He designed them (this is the hardest mystery for us to absorb). Satan uses your failure to keep others in their failure.
This is why I hammer on the issue that “salvation” in the biblical sense is not spiritual birth itself — that’s ineffable — but your discovery, the recognition in this life that you have a divine heritage, that another better life is coming. The Fruit of the Spirit is not more souls added to your religious community; more souls is properly a complement to a good witness. Spiritual fruit begins with your victory over Satan’s efforts to keep you bound. The division between your individual progress and the effect it has on others is false; it’s all one thing in glorifying God. Drawing more people without that grand spiritual awareness is not the Fruit of the Spirit; it is not the glory of God.
This, in turn, is why I make so much of living your witness, but I offer nothing in the way of training to go out “soul-winning.” Soul-winning is patently fleshly and it’s no victory over Satan. It’s a psychological experience that bears very little correlation to actually discovering your divine heritage. Discovering your divine heritage is a miracle that no man can conjure. Getting you to join my church is actually a lot easier, and is part of the whole package of churchianity, and no threat at all to Satan. Churches are filled with people who have no spiritual identity at all, just a fleshly, psychological one. The presence of spirit-born people there is often despite their programs for adding numbers to the church roll. Living your witness is God’s plan for setting others free, regardless whether they join your church.
So, human perception is the field of battle. And it’s no surprise that this business of teaching a heart-led perception is the single biggest factor in seizing your divine heritage. The mind alone cannot perceive the spiritual realm. It will come up with all kinds of nonsense based on individual experience, particularly within a cultural milieu. This is why you should reject the vast majority of cultural fiction and entertainment, because it builds on all kinds of nonsense. It creates a false world that obscures spiritual reality.
You and I should be able to discern the hearts of others. This is part of the standard equipment, but the weight of a cultural background that militates against the whole business of heart-led living keeps us from doing this. It’s not a question of knowing the ultimate truth about someone, but whether we can do anything with what we discern. What does God want us to do with that person? We have a ton of church-based rules that interfere with that process.
This ANE imagery chokes our Western minds. We have to plow up paths that have been long stomped down hard in our souls running differently from the pavements of divine truth. We recoil at the idea of a God who commissions Satan to use trickery. It feels like our notions of fairness are hard-wired; the logic about that is compelling. They aren’t hard-wired, but it feels that way. It’s a hard thing to embrace a spiritual reality that hits our mental perception the wrong way. But the burden of changing is on our backs, to bring our thinking in line with reality as God designed it. It requires unleashing the power of the heart in ruling over the flesh, to include the intellect. This is the real battlefield of Spiritual Warfare.
