Reminder: It is impossible to offer a clinical discussion of Spiritual Warfare. We are talking about the Spirit Realm; it’s the unseen and inexplicable realm of what we face every day that we live in a mortal frame. It is the ultimate reality, and it dominates everything we experience.
You could as easily discuss it in terms of good spirits and bad spirits. We are obliged to use parabolic language, and what matters most is that we gain a means internally to handle this essential element of serving the Lord in this world. Again, Spiritual Warfare is the quintessence of who we are as Children of the Lord. In parabolic terms, Scripture indicates that the good spirits (AKA angels) outnumber the bad spirits (AKA demons) two to one.
But even that isn’t as simple as it seems. As you personally experience it in your daily encounters, the difference between an angel and a demon may be nothing more than the context. The whole issue is what God wants from you and for you in that moment. Trying to nail anything down as objectively good or evil is chasing the wind. This is why I keep harping on there being no objective reality in the first place. When an angel deploys his sword of truth in your life, the issue is not some much the truth itself but your moral composition at that moment. How much of you is wedded to the lies of Satan? The same experience brings joy to some and sorrow to others.
The human demand for an objective and clinical frame of reference is rooted in the Fall itself. It is the quintessential expression of fallen fleshly nature. You must come to understand that faith is a divine capability that is typically the enemy of your fleshly nature, and that faith is inherently unreasonable, illogical. You simply are not ready to get very far with following Christ if you cannot employ the spiritual grasp that faith gives you.
And faith will tell you: A biblical covenant is the foundation for everything God does on this earth. Without a conscious commitment to a valid covenant, you have very little covering from Satan and his demons. It’s hard to imagine just how much trouble this causes. Most of it is unseen by human capabilities. The reason we have so much to say about demons, and not so much about angels, is that the vast majority of human perception is controlled by the former. If the fundamental task of Satan is keeping the Lord’s Children deceived, then it’s no wonder we are inundated with a vast idiotic mythology about the whole business of angels, demons and Spiritual Warfare. By faith, we simply must form covenant communities or we morally perish.
There is no objective truth about the spirit beings we encounter. There is only the lore of the Bible, your personal experience, your calling and mission, and the covenant community among whom you share your faith.
If there is any one thing that is most destructive to a community, or even a whole country, it is mishandling human sexuality. Nothing can cleanse or defile the ground on which you stand like sex. This more than any other human activity turns into a major battlefield for spiritual warfare. There is no middle ground; there is no such thing as harmless sex. You are either blessing the world around you with covenant sex, or you are cursing everything you touch with sexual activity that does not build up shalom.
And that cursing is more real than “reality,” and so very hard for us to see clearly with spiritual eyes. It calls to us on a level that nothing else can. This is why Scripture says such polarizing things about it. It’s the one issue on which the Bible comes so close to making hard, fast rules; it’s one of the few things in Moses that carries a death penalty. It requires the strongest level of moral discipline because the defilement is so virulent in the covenant community. At the same time, it is the one part of our human existence that offers such potent redemption.
Human sexuality is not merely a matter of Lust of the Flesh, but it sweeps in the Lust of the Eyes and the Boastful Pride of Mortal Life.
But there are other areas of our human existence that offer active battle grounds. How about music? Unless you are tone deaf, few things in this life will stir you to holiness or defilement like music. I often resort to a session of worship from a collection of music I keep on hand. It clears my mind, helping me to subject it to my heart. It drives the demons out of the nooks and crannies of my soul, and brings in the angels to guard my awareness.
I can’t tell you that this or that form of entertainment is inherently evil. There are examples of specific performances that are plainly good or evil, but the underlying thing itself is not so simple. It depends on your mission and calling, along with your talents from God. For example, I am always uncomfortable in any place where a TV is running. It’s much worse if I can hear it. You may be able to tune it out with ease. But no one should be able to deny the moral conditioning that comes from various forms of entertainment.
We can dispute whether this or that performer, or style of entertainment, tickles our interest, but it’s too easy to see the broader social effect of demons working through stuff that was consciously designed to destroy good moral values. Most of it has some drawing power, because God’s gifts can be abused. The people involved in producing some art hate the gospel. And everywhere we go, it’s become a part of the ambience that we cannot escape.
Finally, each of us is by mission and calling stronger at resisting evil in particular forms, and weaker at others. Another personal example: I have zero fear of haunted places. It’s in part because of my conviction that there is no such thing as human or animal spirits roaming this world. There are no ghosts, in that sense. Whatever is haunting a place, it’s always angelic or demonic. Those spirit beings may have a task keeping alive the memories of creatures whose lives were lost in various tragedies, for example, but no “ghost” can do anything to me. It’s always a demon or angel at work.
This is part of what I meant when I wrote in a previous lesson that Satan is bound by your mission and calling. He cannot do to you something that Christ does not allow. His mission is to confuse you about what God offers to His children, but there are limits, and they will not be the same for any two of us.
Again, your experience boils down to conviction. No two of us can possibly have identical experiences in this world. Reality is a person who knows each of us individually, and treats no two of us just alike. There is a vast range of things we all tend to experience the same; this is why I say the reality is a person. We all know the same reality, but we don’t experience it precisely the same. Around the edges of that common experience will always be unexplainable differences in clinical terms. God does not treat us all the same, because He did not make us all the same.
Yet by the same token, we can find ourselves in the midst of a defiled nation, and it will certainly constrain us in various ways. The best defense against that is a strong covenant community of faith to push back. We must carve a blessed reality by shared faith.
We all have demons in our lives. Some people we encounter will suffer that presence more strongly. A few will appear to be virtually without any personal control at all. There is no clinical explanation for the underlying problem, only clinical assessments of the effects. They may or may not resist clinical treatments. But the unseen truth of this world remains a matter of demons and angels doing what God has assigned them to do. So the issue is to work through faith to develop a spiritual awareness that stands on our calling and mission.
