On the one hand, this series is finished. On the other hand, the Spiritual Warfare metaphor remains the fundamental image of every day Christian living.
What did we cover? Without a valid community covenant of faith, you have no covering against demons. Biblical Law is binding on Satan, and it requires a feudal covenant community as the starting point. Even a virtual covenant parish is better than nothing. If you embrace any valid biblical covenant, you are not alone, even if you never meet a covenant brother or sister face to face. This is where your covering starts. Then again, it’s impossible to live in this fallen mortal flesh without having some demonic presence in your life.
Satan serves God as His Punisher. The Devil is not God’s enemy, but ours. Satan is not now in rebellion against God, but he has been confined to a job that really sucks, especially compared to what he lost. Everyone in the world is born into darkness. Every soul whom God has elected was chosen before the world was created, so the issue is not spiritual birth. Nobody can do anything at all to gain election. It’s absolutely and entirely God’s initiative. Satan is not involved in that in any way, either. The issue is becoming aware of your spiritual birth, and the seizing your divine birthright.
So Satan’s whole job is challenging you in that process. He is supposed to strive to deceive people about spiritual birth, and then deceive them about what God has granted in this world under Biblical Law. Satan tries to keep you away from a clear understanding of covenants, feudalism and the nature of faith. That’s his job. You know what’s crazy about that? It’s really very easy to stay out of the Devil’s hands.
People do not sell their souls to the Devil. He has all souls by default already. There’s nothing he can do about their status, and he doesn’t really care. He may choose to torment some of them in special ways, but even that is mostly a matter of using those people as weapons to keep the Elect from becoming aware of their election, and to keep those who are aware of election from their promised blessings.
So the whole mission of Spiritual Warfare is to push the demons back out of your life. By extension, that means pushing them out of your covenant feudal domain that God has granted you. Your spiritual authority is limited to that domain, and only your convictions can show you where the boundaries are. There is no objective truth about this; you have to learn what God has given you specifically. It’s a matter of gaining a spiritual discernment about the unseen Realm of the Spirit. That requires being heart-led (AKA conviction led), where the heart is the center of our conscious awareness instead of the fallen intellect. No two of us will have exactly the same experience in these things.
The biggest barrier to believers prospering in this invisible Covenant Kingdom is the mass of deception built into cultural mythology. American Christians are weighed down with a huge mass of lies about Satan and the Spirit Realm. Most popular teaching about Spiritual Warfare is woefully misguided. The biggest lie is that America can and should be a Christian nation.
There is nothing at all we can do about the political situation in the US. All the claims to being a Christian nation are a joke; it was never true. This has never been a covenant nation, and the mass of humanity outside any valid covenant have no clue what God is about. It is impossible for the US to obey Biblical Law because it is impossible for the US at large to even comprehend God’s will. In effect, He has precious few covenant sheep in His pasture, and the US is like the rest of the world; it’s like cattle with no clue what’s going on. Most of His prodding and herding of cattle is done through a mixture of demons and angels.
There is no way for anyone outside of a valid covenant to please God, to participate in shalom. There is nothing blessed in America to save. The entire nation is serving Satan’s purpose, with precious few exceptions. Any effort to make the world a better place is doomed. Christ is coming back to destroy everything mankind has done, and it won’t be remembered. The only thing that God keeps before Him are the moments when you walked in the otherworldly purpose of His Word.
Worst of all is the American obsession with the modern State of Israel and political Zionism. It’s all one big lie; Israel’s god is Satan. The whole purpose of Israel is to deceive believers. Parallel to the political Zionism is religious Judaism. Judaism is the single greatest body of Antichristian activity on this earth. It is directly opposed to divine revelation, hiding it from themselves and as many others as they can possibly influence. But any hatred for them is also a part of Satan’s work. They are our biggest single problem on this earth, with all their infiltration and espionage into every human activity, but they have no power to stop the gospel message when God’s people obey Biblical Law.
So, in Spiritual Warfare, our battlefield is our own souls. We must turn the Flaming Sword of Truth on our own fleshly nature; we must nail our fleshly nature to the Cross and keep nailing it back on there all day long. We must embrace the whole of Biblical Law, and strive to form feudal covenant communities of faith. We must exercise dominion according to the Word. There is nothing to accomplish except learning more about it and getting stronger in faith. We live for the invisible Spirit Kingdom in the hearts of people. That’s our whole mission.
This life is not precious. It’s a prison; God put us here because of the Fall. This is not reality; it’s just a place of shadows and deception. We shine the light of glory by walking in ultimate truth. When we get that job done, we celebrate going Home to be with Him.
So we obey Biblical Law and we form covenant communities, and then we harvest shalom. Nothing else we might do could possibly matter. Indeed, everything we do must feed into that divine purpose. We show forth the glory of the Lord to a fallen world. Biblical Law is a privilege; we are permitted to understand it and walk in, and keep the Devil out of everything God puts in our hands. We have nothing to do with choosing who will respond to our message, but the sacrifice of Christ lives in us as we touch everyone, regardless of their eternal fate.
If I understand correctly then, “getting people saved” is not a proper goal of the church. Planting, watering and discipleship (and being disciples) are all proper goals, or maybe more correctly proper activities, but “saving” them is not remotely part of our job. And we’ve all probably heard pastors say that it’s God who saves people, but some of them will still have a drawn out altar call, and mood music, and final appeals, etc. to try to convince people to make a public commitment to follow Christ , but I think you would say all of that is 100% unnecessary and furthermore wrongheaded. Would I be describing your position correctly? Not trying to put words in your mouth. Maybe more so just trying to say the same thing in my own words.
P.S. thanks for the whole series on spiritual warfare.
That last might have been longer-winded than necessary. Maybe at a deeper level I’m wondering if you would say that evangelism, as it is popularly understood, is not what the church should be spending time and effort on. E.g door-knocking, special services, “revivals”, etc.
Correct. It’s all based on the methods of salesmanship. It assumes that spiritual birth is a decision; thus the term “Decision Theology.” I’ve known that was the wrong approach way before I understood why.