Devil

When Believers Stumble: Underestimating Satan

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Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
—1 Peter 5:8 ESV

One of my post from last year that generated considerable buzz in the Godblogosphere was “The Chthonic Unmentionable.” Beyond the unusual word that everyone puzzled over, the gist of the post dealt with the odd lack of discussion of the demonic in many Evangelical circles. Considering Peter’s admonition above—and the prevalence of verses referring to demonic activity in the Scriptures—it’s foolish to be silent on this issue. Yet we play dumb and continue to blame ill on chance/fate, rather than on the Enemy of our souls.

Here’s just a few grenades out of Satan’s arsenal:

  • Causing disease—Job 2:7
  • Counterfeiting miracles—2 Thessalonians 2:9
  • Accusing the Righteous—Zechariah 3:1
  • Snatching away the message of God—Matthew 13:19
  • Tempting men to sin—Ephesians 2:1-2
  • Tormenting the saints—2 Corinthians 12:7
  • Mishandling the word of God—Matthew 4:6
  • Disguising himself as an angel of light—2 Corinthians 11:14
  • Opposing believers—Ephesians 6:12

And the list goes on and on.

One of the sad outcomes of scientific rationalism is that Satan has been transmogrified from a real entity into a myth, a psychological malady, or a pointy-tailed object of mirth. Long before Nietzsche announced the death of God, Satan was well on his way to being mentally expunged from his role as ruler of this world, relegated by sections of American pseudo-Christianity to a box in the far corner of the basement. Keith Green, assuming the voice of the Enemy, once sang:

Still my work goes on and on
Always stronger than before
I’m gonna make it dark before the dawn
Since no one believes in me anymore
Well now I used to have to sneak around
But now they just open their doors
You know, no one watches for my tricks
Since no one believes in me anymore
Well I’m gaining power by the hour
They’re falling by the score
You know, it’s getting very easy now
Since no one believes in me anymore
No one believes in me anymore
No one believes in me anymore

With the inroads that modern psychology made in the 20th century, evil had its persona stripped away. Our culture of victimization effectively eliminated the idea of a personal devil even as we chatted up Jesus as our personal Savior. 21st century devil?The language of psychology routed the hellfire and brimstone language of the 19th century Church and Christians bought the lie. Pay no attention to the devil behind the curtain!

The result is that too many of today’s Christians have a pathetically underdeveloped understanding of the Enemy and the strategies he uses to oppose us.

Now yes, there are some parts of the American Church that have elevated the Enemy to a place of importance he does not deserve. As C.S. Lewis once opined, there are two errors: ignoring the demonic and giving it unnecessary attention. I’ve seen both sides. I once visited a church where people carried around copies of This Present Darkness with their Bibles (no joke) and would try to cast demons out of the metal folding chairs set up for use by congregants for the morning’s church service. Stupidity doesn’t file a flightplan.

Still, for every church that shows an unhealthy obsession with the chthonic, there’s a dozen shrugging it off altogether.

Bitterness has derailed more than one Christian, and when it’s directed at God it’s an especially foul misplacement. Satan long ago threw up his hands and said, “Hey, bub, don’t look at me,” so we did. Instead, we made God the culprit when evil creeps into our lives and the seed of bitterness takes root. We’re told that it’s okay to get mad at God. We forget the words of Jesus:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
—John 10:10 ESV

We need to do a better job in the American Church of understanding the opposition of Satan, ascribing the blame to him rather to God. Yes, we know from the Book of Job that Satan has no ability to afflict apart from the sovereignty of God over the affairs of all men, but this does not change the fact that

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
—1 John 3:8b ESV

We don’t take that verse seriously enough. We talk about many reasons for Christ coming, but in too many sectors of the Church today we tend to focus on rainbows and ponies, love and peace, not on the annihilation of the Enemy’s work.

How many instances of what we see every day played out around us are the result of Satan’s handiwork? I would venture to guess a lot more than we usually care to admit.

We all know about the Full Armor of God in Ephesians 6. But do we really believe there’s an enemy to fight, a real “someone” who wants nothing more to crush us out of the sheer joy of seeing us in pain?

When we hear the lion roaring, what do we tell ourselves that sound is?

When I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1980s, free-standing arcade video games were in their Golden Age. I dropped a lot of quarters into a few of them to pass the time, but I was the undisputed champ at one game in particular, Atari Tempest. (In fact, I ran across the Guinness Book of World Records officially sanctioned top score and I had once easily surpassed that in a five hour marathon playing session in Pittsburgh in 1982, quitting only to save my bladder from bursting. One quarter, five hours of play. But I digress.)

The one thing I’d mastered about that game was the perfect timing of the ultimate panic button, the “Superzapper.” With one button push, a Tempest player could wipe out every enemy on the screen (and a handful with a reduced-power semi-zap later in the same round.) You get in deep doo-doo in that game and the Superzapper becomes your ultimate weapon.

God has equipped us with a series of Superzappers for overcoming Satan that never fizzle out during a round. We have the Full Armor, and we also have the Blood of Christ and the word of our testimonies (Revelation 12:10-11)—they are the ultimate arsenal against the enemy.

The tendency in Tempest was to forget that the Superzapper was available, and I believe that too many of us forget about the weapons God has made available to overcome the Enemy. We fail to discern demonic activity, too, ascribing it to bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so on. We should not be surprised, then, when some Christians flail uselessly against problems that have their source in forces of darkness, fighting them with earthly weapons. Too often, we’re prescribing an aspirin for a case of flesh-eating bacteria.

Which of us would want to confront Satan and have him say to us:

Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?
—Acts 19:15b ESV

The Chthonic Unmentionable

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Demonic stareThe Evangelical branch of the Church today has one biblical issue it doesn’t want to discuss much anymore. Charismatics can’t seem to shut up about this for even one second, but Evangelicals—perhaps put-off by their charismatic brethren—can’t bring themselves to preach or teach about it at all. I know that in the last ten years this rarely mentioned topic has become to Evangelicals what the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is to the swamps of Arkansas: You knew it’s there, and while people want to see it, those who have seen it can’t reveal it lest some yahoo take a potshot at it.

I’m talking about demons.

I can’t remember the last time I sat in a non-charismatic church and heard someone speaking forthrightly about the demonic. I side with C.S. Lewis’s thinking that too much talk about them is not healthy, nor is too little. It’s that “too little” part in Evangelical churches that has me bothered.

Evangelicals simply do not take the issue of demons seriously enough. In a time that can be categorized by its unrelenting dereliction of truth, sources of deception and darkness must be exposed for what they are. Failure to shine the light on this infernal darkness means that it will necessarily increase in boldness.

Folks, I read the Book, too. I know how it all ends. But this doesn’t give us a pass on confronting evil. To ignore it imperils even those in the Church, because while Christians possessed of the Holy Spirit cannot be simultaneously possessed by unholy spirits, demons still oppose Christians. There are reasons why Paul wrote about the weapons available to Christians in our battle, just as there are reasons why our fight is not merely against flesh and blood.

The man I consider my spiritual mentor took me to a revival meeting out of town many years ago. During the speaker’s message, my mentor dropped a bomb on the young, impressionable Dan. “See that woman in the second row, the one in the red dress?” he said casually, his head nodding that direction. “She has a demon.” He turned back to his bulletin as if he’d said there was a great old Andy Griffith Show episode on the local UHF channel that evening, leaving me staring. He didn’t know her; we weren’t from around there. So how did he know? After a few minutes, I also sensed something in the room—and it came from that woman. For all appearances she remained calm and collected, but the second the speaker stopped speaking, she lunged for his throat. It took eight men to wrestle her to the ground. Trembling, I accompanied my mentor when he went up to pray over her. I heard her speaking in a disembodied man’s voice. I witnessed her fingers and limbs moving in directions even a first year med student could tell you were physically impossible. I felt the coldness in the air. And the sense that there was something horribly, awfully awry right in front of me was unshakable.

Through all that I learned something: They are out there and they have a signature stench that the Spirit readily reveals to those fully attuned to what He is saying.

We are doing a great injustice to folks in the Church when we shy away from talking about demons. Again, an unhealthy preoccupation is wrong, but so is leaving the chthonic unmentioned. We have too often treated the demonic like bogeymen, thinking that if we ignore them they’ll leave us alone. But rest assured of this one thing: they do not exist to leave us alone. And for this reason, we ignore them at our peril.

Since that day in that little rural church in Nowheresville, OH, I’ve had numerous run-ins with demonic powers. A friend and I praying in my car outside a psychic’s parlor experienced the chill of a demonic force that finally let loose with a moan when its power was broken. The psychic, who had been in that location for as long as I could remember, closed up shop less than a week later. Beyond personal accounts like that, I’ve heard several stories from friends who have served overseas as missionaries, telling of encounters that left former naysayers hospitalized when they casually took on what was ultimately a demonized individual.

As the time nears for their end, the demonic powers and principalities out there will grow increasingly desperate. We American Christians, who so easily live off our cultivated scientific rationalism, need to be diligent. Christians are coming under increasing attack and either don’t realize the true source for their problems or are lacking in the wisdom needed to confront real demonic oppression when it occurs.

If you never hear messages and teachings on how to deal with the demonic, ask your pastor why not. More to the point, ask him about his own personal encounters with the demonic. Truthfully, if he claims he’s never had any, then something’s wrong. Christians will be opposed. Demons hate it when we take back what they’ve stolen, expose their practices, or reveal their lurking about.

Along with the weapons of the Spirit in Ephesians 6:10-18, we also must know the saints of God

…have conquered [the accuser of the brethren] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.
—Revelation 12:11 ESV

Adhering to the truth of the Gospel not only defensively prevents the Enemy from piercing the chinks in our spiritual armor, but it has offensive power as well. Therefore, we stray from the truth or use it carelessly to our own disadvantage. To our persecutors, the very human tools of the demonic, bearing that Gospel truth to our own deaths is their ultimate defeat.

Yet too many of us aren’t fighting the battle wisely or even at all. Nor do we cover each other’s backs as effectively as we could. Pray for the defeat of the demonic forces that may plague people in your church. Learn the signature of the demonic in people’s lives. Make certain the Lord’s revealed the chinks in your own armor and let Him patch them before you do serious battle against the demonic; they never abide by the rules and are far more vicious than we can understand this side of heaven.

As the world heats up, it will be demons stoking that fire. Our confidence despite that flame is that the Lord has already overcome them. Remember that, abide in Christ Jesus, and deal with the demonic soberly.