No Demons, Please…

We’re Evangelical

The Spiritual Roots of Addiction

Bryan Fraser

Copyright © 2013 by Bryan Fraser

All rights reserved solely by the author. The author guarantees all contents are original and do not infringe upon the legal rights of any other person or work. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the author.

Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Also by Bryan Fraser:

The Hidden Life: Living Inside-Out to Release God's Blessing

Winning a Generation Without the Law: How the Apostles Preached the Gospel to the Postmodern Mind

You Can't Start Over, but You Can Start Today: God’s Heart for Men in Recovery

“Tell me I’m a good man.”

Saving Private Ryan

Preface

Imagine you have just arrived from Mars, never read the Bible, and your assignment is to find out what evangelicals believe about the devil by spending a year in a typical evangelical church.  You are not permitted to ask direct questions, nor are you permitted to read what evangelical theologians say evangelicals believe about the devil. But you must simply absorb whatever you hear said about Satan in sermons, Bible studies, conferences, conversation, etc.

You would hear quite a bit about what the devil does (attack, deceive, and tempt us), but very little about how he does it. You would eventually conclude that evangelicals believe in some sort of ‘remote control’ devil whose modus operandi is never really nailed down or discussed. You might suppose that, just as the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat while men slept and went his way, so the evangelical’s devil has somehow ‘trip-wired’ the world with crafty snares and devices to waylay us and then disappeared. Or perhaps Satan is a Sauron-like character holed up in a remote, dark tower somewhere, transmitting global ‘deception’ thoughts that assault us in some indirect manner never quite defined.

WE DON’T “DO” DEMONS

Evangelicalism formally confesses that the devil is not omnipresent, but must roam the earth from place to place. Yet this belief never quite translates into a working appreciation of how he does business in a world populated by seven billion people. (When I was seven years old, one of the first red flags my active little mind spotted regarding this Santa Claus business was the matter of logistics. How did he visit all those rooftops in one night?) Evangelicals tread very softly around the necessary implication that, if Satan is a spatially limited spirit being who can only be in one place at any given moment, he must depend on a vast army of demons to execute his purposes and strategies.

You don’t have to hang around evangelical culture very long to realize we don’t ‘do’ demons.  We have a lot to say about the flesh, the sin nature, and Satan as sources of conflict and spiritual opposition; but demons are ‘out of bounds.’  However, demons definitely ‘do’ us and they have their hooks into many unsuspecting Christians today in your church and in mine.

This book is about how demons ‘did’ me. It is the account of my journey through compulsive addictions, salvation, discipleship, seminary, pastoral ministry, running away from God and myself, and ultimately, deliverance. But it is also evangelicalism’s story, for I could not tell my story apart from the context of the evangelical world I passed through along the way. I discuss here the history, reasons for, and devastating effects of evangelicalism’s reluctance to come to terms with its obligations in spiritual warfare. I do not speculate on whether my story would be different than it is if evangelical culture had been different than it was. Every generation is afforded insights hidden from its fathers and it is not given to us to understand these times. My sins were my own and I have confessed them.

THE SECRETS I WANTED TO TAKE TO MY GRAVE

The men’s Christian recovery group I attend is an amazing group of guys. Most outsiders could not process either the depths of our sins or the extent of our recoveries. The things we tell each other about ourselves are absolutely confidential. Our group coordinator testifies, “In twenty years no one has ever broken that confidence. But it really doesn’t matter because no would believe the things we say anyway!” He likes to recount the story of an addictions recovery speaker who sat in on one of our meetings to see what we were all about. Our coordinator called him later in the week to see if he wanted to visit again. The speaker admitted candidly, “I don’t think I’m ready for you guys right now. You’re too honest!” Our group is not safe. A man who comes in thinking he might perhaps share his ‘little’ sins will find a brotherhood of dead men who have given up any hope of restoring the respectability we tried to prop up before.

My deliverance has also given me a fresh appreciation of Luke 8:35, “Then they went out to see what had happened, and came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.” They were afraid because his deliverance invalidated their excuses for accepting their own status quos of captivity. The delivered demoniac was no longer safe. Seeing him in his right mind demolished their comfortable rationalizations of their own darkness: “It’s just human nature. It’s just the way men are.”

I never seriously considered writing this book anonymously. For me, such a decision would have further enabled the secrecy and calculating truth management that empowered my captivity in the first place.  Exposure of the details of my sins was foundational to my deliverance and ongoing recovery. I could not, in good conscience, then say to other captives, “Confess your sins one to another, (but I’m going to protect my own identity).” I’ve accepted the fact that, like the delivered demoniac, I’m no longer safe. This is not a safe book. I reveal a great deal here about how far I fell and how I came back into my right mind. Most captives probably won’t have to do that, but understand that their deliverance will mean telling the secrets they most want to take to their graves to those they least want to hear them.

I spend little time here contemplating the question of whether my demons were in me, on me, beside me, or whatever other metaphysical relationship we can postulate. We have already spent way too much time on such armchair speculation. Evangelicalism’s house is on fire and the flames are spreading. Put out the fire first; then investigate its cause.

I’ve written this book from the dual perspective of released captive and theologian. I write not as an experienced deliverance minister (which I am not), but from the perspective of being on the receiving end of demonic captivity for a very long time. As such, it is not my intent to add to the rich and growing body of knowledge made available today by deliverance ministries, psychologists, addiction counsellors, and other medical experts. This is my personal testimony of my years of ‘doing time’ in the devil’s prison.

Table of Contents

1. Home Invasion!

2. Forty Years of Running from Myself

3. More Than Temptation

4. Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest

5. Satan Hates You and Has a Horrible Plan for Your Life

6. The Devil According to Hollywood

7. Ten Terrific Excuses for Ignoring Demons

8. One Vine, One Fig Tree, and One Cistern

9. I Guess We’re Just Not That Into Spiritual Gifts

10. Is Evangelical the New Liberal?

1. Home Invasion!

SQUATTERS IN MY DREAM HOME

I had found the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood.  I went through all the steps of viewing the home, submitting an offer to purchase, ordering the house inspection, completing the title search, and qualifying for the mortgage.  Then when everything was ready, I signed all the papers, completed the purchase, and received the deed of title.  I was now the legal owner of the house and, as such, had all the rights afforded to a homeowner under the laws of my jurisdiction.

But on the day I show up to occupy my new dream home I find a rude surprise waiting for me.  There are squatters living in my house.  They have no right to be here and are clearly trespassing, but here they are nonetheless.  They somehow obtained a house key and now come and go as they please.  I introduce myself, show them my deed of title, and ask them politely, but firmly to leave.   They say nothing in reply, but offer no resistance and promptly file out of the house.  “Well, I guess they knew when someone meant business,” I smugly tell myself.  Having satisfied myself that they haven’t damaged my new prize, I settle in to enjoy my first quiet evening at home.

Just as I’m thinking it’s time to get ready for bed, I hear the unmistakeable sound of a key turning the front door latch.  I dash into the living room and find to my dismay that the squatters have returned.  I confront them with significantly more energy than our first encounter, yet they seem completely unimpressed with my demand that they leave.  I even show them my title deed granting me sole ownership and control over the house.

“This is all very impressive.”  They peruse it briefly and hand it back to me.  I stand there dumbfounded and speechless for a moment.

“But you have to go.  It’s the law,” I plead.

“Well, we don’t pay much attention to the law.  We’re outlaws.  Besides, you have no authority to enforce your title.”

It begins to dawn on me that my title rights don’t cause them the least concern.  They don’t dispute my ownership status.  They just don’t plan to allow it to curtail their enjoyment of my house. Without further conversation, the squatters head off to the spare bedroom and close the door after them.

This interchange sets the pattern for the next several weeks as I and the squatters settle into this strange (to me, anyway) cohabitation arrangement.  I don’t see them constantly, but even one or two encounters a day is too many when they’re not supposed to be here at all! I definitely enjoy my new home. The squatters stay out of my way for the most part and allow me a fair amount of privacy, yet they do pop up at the most unexpected (and unwelcome) times.

GETTING USED TO THE DARK

As the weeks become months, I become aware of a strange shift in my attitude toward the squatters.  I have now learned to accommodate my daily routine around their presence and actually find them adding a certain flair to my life I find strangely enjoyable!  I would never indulge in some of their activities on my own, but it seems somehow acceptable to enjoy them when the squatters take the initiative. I gradually come to believe that the squatters are really not such unpleasant people after all.  They seem to be well traveled and are always willing to include me in their enlightening diversions which I never would have discovered by myself.  Their social get-togethers are actually quite enjoyable and always draw many interesting and provocative guests.  Of course, they seem to attract some rather disreputable characters as well.  But one has to take the good with the bad, true?

One day it occurs to me that a year has now passed and the concept of living in my house alone is only a faint memory.  I’m almost completely dependent on the squatters for my entertainment and hardly ever have my own friends over.  Besides, the squatters’ guests have become pretty seedy now and I wouldn’t really want my friends coming around anyway.  I begin to wonder what has really become of my life: how I got to this point, how I could ever change anything, and if I even want to change.  But despite my own inertia and helplessness, change is about to spring upon me.

The squatters decide to throw the party of parties.  Even in my deflated state, I am appalled at the low-life characters that show up on the big night. I stagger through my house, horrified at the noise, debauchery, and indulgence I encounter around every corner. Arguments and fights begin to break out.  The dull thud of bodies crashing against walls, of furniture splintering, of breaking glass fills my senses.  I feel I’m losing track of all reality.  Then I find myself in the living room.  Someone pushes against me violently and my head crashes against the front window.  I take in a view of the street and see… a police car cruising slowly and routinely past my house.

CALLING 9-1-1

“The police! I can call the police!!”  I careen over to the phone and pick it up.  One of the squatters immediately challenges me,

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”  I push him to the floor with unexpected energy and dial 9-1-1.

“9-1-1 emergency.  How can I help you?”

“My home has been invaded by trespassers!  They’re destroying my house!”  Within minutes the police are at my door.  They establish my identity, examine my title deed, and verify that I want the squatters and their entourage removed from my house.

“Yes, get them out of here,” I scream with more conviction than anything I’ve said in a long time.

The police and the squatters seem well acquainted and I notice a few familiar faces leaving in handcuffs as the police herd everybody out the front door.  Finally, my house is quiet.  I take in the damage and can hardly believe the wreckage.

“Well,” I console myself, “at least it’s over now.” After the squatters have been hauled away a police sergeant approaches me.

“Sir, I’m just curious how this party started and how long these hoodlums have been in your house.” I answer him matter-of-factly.

“I bought this house over a year ago and they’ve been hanging out here the whole time.” But instead of the sympathetic consolation I expect from the sergeant, I see his eyes widen in disbelief and he just stares at me for several seconds.

“Why did you put up with them for a year instead of calling us right away?

“Well, it was my house and the law said they had no right to be here.  I showed them my title, but they wouldn’t leave.”

“That kind has no regard for law.  They only know force.  We have to physically evict them.  That’s the only way they’ll ever leave a comfortable place like this.”

“You be sure to change your locks now.”  He touched his hat, walked back to his cruiser shaking his head, and drove off.

*  *  *

Evangelical Christianity is a legal Christianity.  I’m not referring to ‘legalism’ as in ‘salvation by works,’ but to a religion that places primary emphasis on the legal status Christ’s completed work affords the Christian.  Of course, the New ‘Testament,’ by definition, is a legal covenant between God and man.  We find it packed with legal transactions and illustrations: wills, inheritances, debt forgiveness, redemption, adoption, indictments, witnesses, pardon, etc.  Endless amounts of study and debate have surrounded every angle of what Jesus accomplished legally on the cross. A.H. Strong’s systematic theology, for example, discusses six theories of atonement arguing the finest legal nuances of how Christ’s work accomplished our salvation.

A proper understanding of his legal standing before God provides a Christian the assurance and confidence that allows him to live free from fear and condemnation.  It was a legal Christianity that empowered the Protestant reformers to assert every Christian’s full and unconditional sonship. It was this same legal Christianity that liberated the first Protestant denominations from the servant mentality obligating the Christian to go through more sympathetic intermediaries to certify that sonship.

However, as with all biblical truth, we can press this legal aspect of our faith into service for which it is ill suited. We can make the error of thinking that the legal validity of our rights equals the realization of the benefits those rights afford us. My own delusion was that, if I understood and believed a truth correctly, then that truth was automatically a reality in my life. But in the world, we need not only laws, courts, and judges; but also police, weapons of force, and prisons to enforce those laws.  In the both the physical and spiritual worlds, our rights do not convey their benefits without sweat equity.

A PRISON WITH NO LOCKS ON ITS DOORS

It is a fair assessment to say that evangelicalism takes a disproportionately greater interest in our legal deliverance from the forces of darkness than our ongoing obligation to engage those forces in spiritual warfare.  The evangelical would rather take his enemies to court than confront them on the battlefield. But ruthless dictators don’t voluntarily present themselves in the World Court simply because the United Nations issues a resolution of their condemnation. Neither do the forces of darkness withdraw just because Jesus has sealed their certain doom.

I am the man in this parable. For thirty-five years I took my enemy to court and won every case. The devil never once planted a single seed of doubt in my mind regarding the authenticity of my sonship. Nor did he ever contest the legal title of my spiritual house or the validity of my adoption into God’s family. But I was the one who lived in prison while he plundered and wrecked my house. Millions of Christian men find themselves in this same dilemma. They know their rights and their status in Christ backwards and forwards. But their houses are not secure. Demons who have been legally condemned and consigned to the Lake of Fire continue to beat them up nonetheless. This book is for every man who is tired of living in a prison with no locks on its doors and wants to kick the enemy out of his house. “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12).

2. Forty Years of Running from Myself

…and you shall flee when no one pursues you. Leviticus 26:17

SWAYED IN MY MIND

Lord, break and destroy every natural restraint on his heart, in his mind, and on his life.  Loose him from every bond and free him to be accurate, to be sharp in the things of the Spirit.  Take away everything that has swayed this mind too far out of proportion, bring it back into proportion, bring it back into alignment, bring it back into alignment and use him as a fire preacher AHHHHH  PREACH, PREACH, PREACH!!! FIRE……………………..and release him to be a fire preacher.

Alignment with me in your life.

Alignment put me in your life! Alignment!

The Lord says I am giving out fresh revelation. My son, I have called you, I have called you to understand my direction, He says, my son, link up, connect.

Be a part of things that I planted in the earth where fire is.

He says come under submission for I am calling you to call others to submit to the call in their life, but you must come under submission, but you must be under submission, you must be in the fire you must be AGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH SSSSHHHHAH   FIRE

The Lord says I am going to activate you like you’ve never thought before and you will be funny and you will be witty, you will be anointed! He says I am going to make you like a father of love. You will love my children you will reproduce that which has been lost in my children!

For you have been lost and I have found you and I am going to use what you learn to bring others back to the present power of my day and age.

Jesus, Mighty God!  Jesus shak kaa DAH!!!!

AN EVANGELICAL OF EVANGELICALS

I can hardly fathom the course of events that led me from the deliberate, methodical world of evangelicalism to that morning on January 4, 2009, when Michael Christian, a black Pentecostal preacher on San Francisco’s Market Street spoke this prophetic prayer over me.  I had touched all the evangelical bases.  I had preached in Doug Wilson’s church at its inception, argued the finer points of Puritan Christology with J.I. Packer, wrestled through Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy with Klaus Bockmuehl, written my graduate thesis under Bruce Waltke, and done all the Signs and Wonders “stuff” at John Wimber’s Anaheim Vineyard. But Pastor Michael’s word over me was dead on: I was swayed in my mind, out of alignment, and out of submission. I had lost my way. His culture and mine could hardly have been more different, but Michael was the conduit the Spirit used to release me from prison and restore me. It would be another 2½ years before I hit bottom, but this was the birth pangs of my recovery.

I am a third-generation Californian born in the exact center of the baby boom generation in San Jose, California.  We weren’t even agnostics. Mom and Dad had long since abandoned their Presbyterian and Methodist roots and religion simply wasn’t on the agenda of who my family was. Mom had a fairly large extended family of aunts and uncles who were mostly in the northern California area.

Dad had a much smaller family and they were spread up and down the west coast. His parents had divorced when he was growing up (rare in those days) and his father had been committed to an asylum because of a schizophrenic disorder. I only recall seeing my grandfather once or twice when I was a young child. After that, my parents never mentioned him again and, for all practical purposes, he ceased to exist. They, as was typical for their generation, dealt with this family issue by shielding their children from it and dropping the matter from further discussion.

For the most part, Dad avoided a lot of contact with Mom’s relatives, so I grew up hearing their names, but not really getting to know who they were.  In 1961 Dad was getting restless and talked about moving away from the Bay area. He was not getting along well in his teaching work and wanted to get away from his in-laws on both sides.  Early in 1962, Mom and Dad went down to the Long Beach area to look into jobs and housing.  They returned and announced that we would be moving to Lakewood in southern Los Angeles County.  So that March Dad loaded everything into a rental truck and we drove down to our new house. The isolation Dad sought was made nearly complete after we moved to southern California.  Many relatives I had met once or twice as a child I never saw again. I can now see what a profound effect this had on my social development and how it made it easier for me to flee when my opportunity came. Lakewood was “Tomorrow’s City Today.” It was literally built overnight in 1950 and it seemed like every young family came from another part of the country. It was a place and a time to get a new start and leave the past behind.

When I was in grade school at James Monroe Elementary the district had to move in portable bungalow classrooms to accommodate our swelling numbers.  From kindergarten through seminary all the schools I attended were at the height of their attendance levels while I was there.  My class in forestry school was the largest in the history of the college.  Four years before I received my degree, there were three jobs for every graduate.  But after the first Earth Day event in 1970, enrolments in forestry programs exploded.  When I emerged onto the job market, that job-to-graduate ratio had inverted.  We were each going to be the exception to the rule, of course. I’ve spent my life trying to figure out a way to escape from this upward bulge in the bell curve ever since, but haven’t found a solution yet.

THE TRAP IS SPRUNG

My transition into puberty coincided with my discovery of erotic magazines beside Dad’s easy chair. I once heard an alcoholic testify that she became completely hooked upon her first drink. She knew immediately that this was ‘her world’ and that she didn’t want to live anywhere else. My experience with the pictures of undressed women in these magazines was exactly like this. I was hooked immediately. All teenage boys are fascinated to some degree with such material, but I was distinctly aware that I had immediately shifted into a different world. And I knew deep down it was a dark and ugly one. The normal friendships and relationships I should have developed with girls during my adolescence and young adulthood were consumed by my lurid preoccupation with Playboy magazines and similar material. My parents had problems of their own and largely left me alone during those years to settle into my deep isolation. I hated who I was, but could never get enough exposure to those images.

ONCE I STARTED RUNNING…

In the summer of 1972 two buddies and I hiked the John Muir Trail.  This is a 212-mile trail over the spine of the Sierra Nevada.  It was a spectacular project and we completed the trail in eighteen days. I loved hiking in the mountains and found backpacking a ready vehicle for pursuing the isolation I found increasingly comfortable. Largely as a result of my fondness of mountains and hiking, I started thinking about studying forestry.  I really didn’t know much of anything about what forestry was, but felt that whatever I was looking for was not to be found in southern California.  I decided to attend the University of Idaho, primarily because I sensed that northern Idaho was the most remote area I could find and held the greatest adventure for me. In early September of 1973, Mom drove me to the Long Beach Airport for the flight to Moscow, Idaho.  It was my turn to leave my past behind. I began an entirely new chapter of my life and would never view California as my home again.

1973 also marked the beginning of a pattern that has characterized my life ever since: movement.  As I write forty years later, I suppose I have had more than twenty-five places of residence.  I was driven to adventure, isolation, and flight from intimacy with anyone or anything. At a time when I should have been growing into manhood, I instead regressed back to childhood. Some of my moves were because it was time to try something new, some were because opportunities had dried up where I was, a few times I was going to a new opportunity, but for the most part I was running from a part of myself that terrified me.

I pursued the most dangerous, strenuous, and remote outdoor activities wherever I could find them. I threw myself into high-risk ice climbing and mountaineering where I was nearly killed several times. I hiked for days in the High Sierra alone. I fell into the spring-swollen Little Salmon River and had to ride my backpack like a surfboard for 200 yards until the foaming rapids (or the hand of God) pushed me to the bank where I could grab some branches. I reached the summit of Mount Rainier in mid-winter and survived a 500-foot fall on the descent. I was stalked by a cougar and had to fire my .44 to stop its advance fifteen feet away from me. (I had only started packing that weapon a week before.) Working as a timber faller, I once had to dive beneath a tree I had just felled in order to avoid being crushed by another tree that crashed over me.

MY SEARCH FOR EDEN

I worked alone in the most remote wilderness areas of southeast Alaska, central Idaho, Vancouver Island, northeast British Columbia, and Haida Gwaii. My life revolved around helicopters, float planes, logging camps, crew houses, hotel rooms, and caulked boots—and I couldn’t get enough of it. When I first saw Apocalypse Now in 1979 I was mesmerized by the misanthropic Captain Willard’s desperate reflection on how his first Viet Nam tour had completely swallowed up his former life: “When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there...all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.” I remember leaving the theatre almost in a trance, feeling like ‘something’ finally resonated with my drivenness in a way no living person ever had. Like Willard, when I was home with my wife and family I couldn’t wait to get back into the forest—especially the virgin old growth. It seemed that only there, momentarily buffered from all trace of human imprint, was my drive to escape from myself calmed for those few hours. I was searching for Eden—the former state of innocence—when I should have been looking toward heaven. My pilgrimage eventually led me to become the planning forester for the most isolated, western-most logging camp in Canada—ironically named Eden Lake.

As much as I sought my wholeness in the untouched forests, my very presence there was the harbinger of their own imminent loss of innocence, of the road construction and logging that my arrival heralded. ‘My’ pristine forests were not places I could tarry, for they would soon be overrun with invaders: road builders, fallers, logging crews, and tree planters. I had to keep moving. Stopping too long would confront me with unpleasant realities I didn’t care to face.

JESUS INTERCEPTS ME

I believed in Jesus in 1976 when I was twenty-three years old.  At that point in my life, I was a fairly civilized pagan, having no church background and having expended no energy considering spiritual things.  I had an isolated job in my final summer in forestry school in 1975 and I picked up a Good News New Testament that a campus ministry had left in a student lounge.  I remember thinking at the time that I had no idea what was in the Bible and that, as a college graduate, I should gain some level of familiarity with it.

So in the evenings, I sat at the campfire with a Bible in one hand, smoking a joint with the other.  I read about this guy Jesus who kept arguing with everybody about truth, reality, hypocrisy, how good people should live, and how he could give people eternal life.  It couldn’t figure out why these guys were so ticked off at him for saying all these things that seemed ‘right on’ to me.  What really impressed me about Jesus was that he always won.  No matter how they tried to trick or trap him, he always had the perfect answer that stopped them in their tracks.  I thought, “Wow, this guy is awesome!”

It was at some point in my reading the following summer that something (I know now to be the Holy Spirit) turned me from fascination to conviction; not conviction of sin to the best of my memory, but a conviction that I needed to be on this guy’s team.  I was certain that no one ever could or ever would get the better of him, so the best thing I could do would be to join up. I know I believed in Jesus that summer, although I couldn’t tell you what day or what language I used.  It was some time later that I hooked up with other Christians and churches and began learning about what had happened.

After forestry school I was still hanging around Moscow without a job, so I began my discipleship in Doug Wilson’s church there.  In fact, I actually attended there before Doug did.  He was just discharging from the Navy and came back to Moscow shortly after I graduated. For a while we worked together hand-peeling lodgepole pine logs for a log cabin builder while we each waited for bigger and better things to kick into gear.  He’s fairly well known now as an outspoken Reformed pastor, but in those days Doug was simply a faithful Bible preacher who was just discovering that ‘evangelical’ and ‘premillennial’ weren’t synonymous terms. (He’s still a faithful Bible preacher as far as I know, but I do find his priorities the other 6½ days of the week perplexing!) I got a tremendous start in my faith under the ministries of Doug and his father, Jim. I never heard either of them teach anything that was inconsistent with their own personal walks.

After a couple years, I moved up to Coeur d’Alene to a logging job where a Baptist pastor decided I should attend Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland. I accepted this call to ministry, spent a year in Portland, and became pretty well oriented to the Moody Bible College/Dallas Theological Seminary world of dispensational theology. I didn’t finish my studies there for I found I couldn’t abide with a number of its conclusions.  Yet dispensationalism instilled in me one discipline for which I will always be grateful and which I have often found wanting in other traditions.  It is the discipline of asking to what category of people a particular biblical promise, obligation, commitment, blessing, curse, inheritance, or capacity applies.

After a year in Portland, I decided to transfer up to Regent College, an interdenominational seminary in Vancouver and began my exposure to British/Continental evangelicalism. I studied there under J.I. Packer, Bruce Waltke, Michael Green, and other well-known personalities of the InterVarsity Press genre. I wrote my thesis under Dr. Waltke and then stayed on and took a Master of Divinity degree.

It was in Vancouver in 1984 that I gained my first exposure to the ‘Signs and Wonders’ culture of John Wimber and the Vineyard. For the next ten years (during which I also served a two-year pastorate), I circulated through many Vineyard conferences and sat under several Vineyard pastors: John Wimber in Anaheim, Lee Bennett in Seattle, and Arlan Askew in Portland. Of course, the Vineyard’s theme then (as it is today) was the charismatic experience without the Pentecostal theology.

Everything about the Vineyard was exciting in those days and its churches attracted a huge influx of middle-aged evangelicals who were hungry for a more experiential, hands-on spirituality.  These ‘converts’ brought with them deep resources of biblical knowledge and spiritual disciplines from their parent traditions and provided a ready-made stability to the Vineyard movement.  The Vineyard also attracted a generation of church-planting pastors who had been discipled in evangelical churches and trained in evangelical seminaries.  These human resources allowed the Vineyard to focus on its trademark ministries of healing, prophecy, and contemporary worship expression without having to build a workforce from scratch. It was a heady time of aggressive church planting, mega-conferences, music recording, and a constant inflow of inquirers.

MY DOUBLE LIFE

Through all this period following my conversion, I was a closet pornography addict and had also developed the eating disorder of bulimia. I had acquired the devious capacity to abstain when circumstances were not conducive to indulging these addictions, sometimes for months at a time. But ‘the machine’ was always humming, monitoring my surroundings for the next opportunity.  Absolute secrecy was my top priority since, after all, I was a ‘man of God’ to my family and parishioners. Like all addicts, I believed I just had some bad habits. Every indulgence was ‘just this once’ and I would put this all behind me when the time was right.

It was in 1995 that I went ‘underground,’ so to speak. Prophet Don Pirozok visited our church in Portland and spent several evenings ministering over people individually.  He spent an unusually long time with my wife and I and prophesied over our callings in a way that amazed the others listening.  He also spoke some strong words of correction over me that were somewhat general and non-specific.  At least they were to everyone but me! I knew what they meant and I knew it was time to come clean with everything. Had I confessed my secrets then and there I wonder how much of the dislocation and wandering over the following sixteen years I could have avoided. Don prophesied these words:

There is a new move upon the face of the earth. You haven’t missed it by your sin and your shortcomings. You just didn’t miss it because I was able to maintain your heart. I had to correct you. I had to reprove you. I had to chastise you and move you back into a proper order. I don’t want you brooding too long. I want you to rise up, for whom the Lord loves he chastises and scourges. I’ve done a good thing. I know that all discipline seems for the moment not joyful, but sorrowful. But the outcome is the nature and character of the fruit of righteousness. You didn’t fail in your shortcomings. I just had to straighten out some things. The Lord wants you to know you didn’t fail. It was just part of the training. I had to break all the shame and reproach that you had to carry for my name’s sake.

From a very early age the enemy has sought to bring this design of warfare against you. You felt very small within yourself, very limited. And you cried out for me and you’ve wondered where I’ve been in times of great need. This has all been my fashioning hand upon your life to conform you to my character; that it’s through suffering.

You would often want to be in flight to relieve yourself of the agonies, the suffering of the lack of fulfillment, and the despair and the depression that will try to rest upon you. There is a healing issue regarding loneliness in your life. It’s not meant to be in that dimension. We can be alone, but loneliness is a different issue. It’s a healing issue. In the wilderness experience you’ll break open and God will reach you. The woundedness we carry is often dealt with in the wilderness.

As I reflect on these words now, I believe much of their working out was yet future, as is often the case with prophecy. But I did not confess my secrets then. I instead chose the pleasures of sin and took refuge in my fear and pride. I ran. I did take to flight. I did a ‘Jonah’ and took a forestry job on the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii), the most isolated setting imaginable sixty miles off the British Columbia coast, and then continued to circulate through many small Canadian timber towns as one job led to another.

As I disappeared into my private world, my wife found me increasingly gloomy and oppressive. She eventually began taking travel nursing assignments in California. These were ostensibly to pay for our kids’ tuition costs, but she really needed time off from me. She began attending a multicultural Pentecostal church in San Francisco that really pulled out all the stops.  I attended there when I travelled down on visits, but it was way over the top for me. I found Pastor Michael’s bombastic preaching style, the women’s shimmering worship gowns, the authoritarian tone of their prayers, and the falling on the floor all very quaint and way off my radar. My wife eventually joined this church and it became her spiritual anchor to offset the isolation I had dragged her into.

MY HOUSE OF CARDS COLLAPSES

But the day came after decades of secrecy and cowardice that the Lord acted on my behalf. I went home for lunch one day in 2011 and told my wife I had a heavy spiritual oppression on me like nothing I’d ever known.  I could hardly think or function at work. She tried to intercede for me, but the Lord told her to stop. He said, “This is Bryan’s issue and you can’t help him.” It was God’s pronouncement of Jeremiah 11:14 upon me, “So do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer for them; for I will not hear them in the time that they cry out to me because of their trouble.”

The next day my wife discovered the pornographic files on my laptop. I confessed my longstanding compulsive addictions and begin my slow and arduous road to recovery. Almost immediately, I knew that I had to go see Pastor Michael.   We saw him three weeks later and he ministered to me in his California home for two days.  He interviewed me about everything I had done, about my parents and their background, my childhood, and my growing up.  Then he called me to repent of all my sins, which I did.  He then called forth all the demons he had discerned by name, demons who had attached to me through my permission and my father’s. He banished them from any further tormenting of me.  There were no fireworks or manifestations.  In fact, Michael displayed none of his typical exuberant public presentation during these sessions.  He just told them very plainly and directly to go and not come back.

I must include one other element of my wife’s role in my deliverance. For a couple years leading up to my exposure, that Spirit had impressed upon her the account of Zipporah in Exodus 4:24-26, although she didn’t know why:

And it came to pass on the way, at the encampment, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at Moses’ feet, and said, “Surely you are a husband of blood to me!” So He let him go. Then she said, “You are a husband of blood!”—because of the circumcision.

The Lord sought to kill Moses for his disobedience, but still held out the opportunity for intercession. This Zipporah provided. My wife’s instinctive reaction upon seeing the files on my laptop was to immediately throw it on the floor and trample it to pieces. She cast it at my feet. Like Zipporah, she averted the Lord’s wrath from her husband by doing what I had long neglected. I have no doubt today that the Lord sought to kill me, and my wife’s many years of intercession moved God to grant my repentance. (I note soberly that Nadab, Abihu, Uzzah, Ananias, and Sapphira had no such opportunity when they transgressed.) In his own counsels the Lord determines when our hearts are hardened beyond repentance. Don Pirozok’s prophecy over me sixteen years earlier testifies to God’s unfathomable mercy: “I was able to maintain your heart.” When Michael cast out my demons he warned me, “You can never, ever go back to these things again.” God gave me this opportunity, but I don’t believe there would be another if I returned to my sin.

From the time of my deliverance until now the compulsions and delusions that held me in bondage my whole life have left me.  I have been clean and sober since this deliverance. I also have a tremendous amount of personal recovery work to do even as I write these words. I ran the wrong way for a long time and it will be a long road back. But I am on the way back. And I’m no longer running from myself.

3. More Than Temptation

…God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will. 2 Timothy 2:25, 26

WHAT IS DELIVERANCE?

What is deliverance? Within evangelical culture, it is a term of suspicion and avoidance. It evokes images of unsavoury emotionalism, simple-minded ministers, and every unscriptural excess. But deliverance, using our house invasion analogy, is simply the forcible eviction of unclean spirits who have no legal right to live where they’re living.  It is critical to understand that deliverance means denying these spirits practical access, not legal access.  They never had legal access to begin with.  They simply moved in because someone left the doors and windows open. Deliverance is the spiritual process of kicking them out and locking the doors and windows after them.

During my early Christian years I did go to my pastors and confess the difficulty I was having with compulsive behavior (not that I called it that in those days). I received what I would consider the standard evangelical three-point response: (1) all men have this problem, (2) Jesus has provided all the resources you need, therefore (3) repent and resist the temptations. But I was like the man who feels terrible and goes to his doctor.  The doctor puts him through a regime of tests, examines the results, and confidently declares, “There’s not a thing wrong with you.” But the patient still feels horrible and knows he is far from well.  So a Christian man goes to his pastor and pleads that he is under attack and can’t function normally.  The pastor dutifully takes him through all the scriptures declaring all that Christ has secured for him and explains why the forces of darkness have no legal access to him and can’t possibly be afflicting him.

But while I endured the temptations common to ‘every man,’ I also had my own unique afflictions which I was not to discover until years later. Every believer has to deal with both the flesh and the devil and the problems each one brings are not the same. The temptations common to all men arise not from our fallen nature, but from our physical nature. They arise from our desires which may in themselves be holy and proper. The problem comes when our desires control us instead of us controlling them. We tend to blend resisting the devil and resisting temptation into an undifferentiated process, but we make such an oversimplification to our own hurt. We see Satan’s vendetta against Christians in Revelation 12:4, 7:

And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born. …. And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

This is a description of Satan’s murderous rage calculated to destroy Jesus upon his birth. It also gives us insight into his hatred of all new birth whereby believers are freed from his dark dominion.

A FIRE ALARM IN HELL

Understand that your conversion not only caused your flesh to declare war against your spirit. It also set off alarms in Satan’s throne room. Whatever slumbering demonic permissions lay dormant in your account prior to your second birth were immediately plugged in and set to ‘HIGH.’ During the three years between when I left home for university and when I became a Christian, my pornography addiction was largely in abeyance. The geographic change combined with my busy life at school pushed it to the back of the table. It seemed that I had turned a corner and left this childish preoccupation behind me. But the year I believed in Jesus it came on me again with a renewed energy and brought with it a second addiction—bulimia. Now where did bulimia come from? I had never heard of such a practice and I was a fit, muscular mountain climber. It was a suggestion from the pit of hell and I naively took it into my heart and ran with it.

Countless Christian men floundering around in compulsive addictions are doing the right things to resist the temptations of the flesh, but are consisting failing because they have not come to terms with the “second front” set against them. Like our forlorn homeowner in Chapter 1, they are hopelessly waiting for the lawless one to respect their legal rights when they need to get up and give him a swift kick in the seat of his pants! A Christian taken captive by a deceiving spirit can walk into freedom at any time, but he doesn’t believe he can.

Early in my Christian walk I received plenty of sound teaching on temptation. Doug Wilson presented one of the first and best lessons on temptation I’ve heard: that of spiritual tennis. Temptation, he said, is like playing tennis with the enemy. The flesh serves a temptation (for example, a lustful thought) into your court and you have to hit back. As long as you swing, God empowers you to hit the temptation back into the enemy’s court.  You haven’t sinned by recognizing the lustful thought for what it is.  You only sin if you catch the ball and examine it instead of swinging your racquet.

God’s promise for victory over temptation is in 1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” But when I had a deceiving spirit I didn’t see just one temptation; I saw a hundred waiting in line to assault me.  The spirit told me, “Look, we both know God will provide a way of escape for the first one just like he promised.  But you can’t withstand a hundred. You never have. You may as well just submit to the first one and spare yourself the false hope of victory.”

I BELIEVED THE TRUTH WAS A LIE

This is not rational denial of the promise, but a spiritual deception that the promise can’t apply to my false reality. Just as Caleb had a different spirit that made God’s promise his reality, I had a deceiving spirit that distorted and compromised the promise. I was truly double minded. My mind abstractly believed God’s promise to be true, but the deceiving spirit persuaded me that in my case the lie was true. I acted in accordance with the reality I allowed the spirit to paint for me. Now the reality is that God provides a way of escape one swing at a time (and only as we swing!). But the demonized Christian can’t perceive this. His dominating reality is the false perspective of the deceiving spirit.  We see here the difference between a spirit of deception and a spirit of error. This is not a spirit of error, because the demonized Christian doesn’t cognitively deny God’s promise. The problem is not cognitive error, but spiritual deception.  His heart receives something other than his eye sees and his ear hears.

So what is the status of the demon-delivered Christian? What is the difference between the ‘pre-deliverance’ Bryan and the ‘post-deliverance’ Bryan?  I still have the ‘sin’ button on my dashboard ready to activate my addictions.  It will remain ‘fully armed’ for the rest of my life.  I also retain my appetites for those addictions and the memories of the pleasures they provided. I’m still subject to the temptations common to all men. I still have the memory tracks, the desire, and the appetite to re-engage with my former compulsive behavior.  The carnal nature is alive and well and fully functional in all the ways I so aptly trained it.

The difference in my life today is that I don’t have to return to my sins and I know I don’t! In my former state, the first temptation, the first illicit glance, or the first lurid thought was the end of the story. I was completely deluded that the first invitation was already the inevitable consummation of my sin. What has changed is that my house is now secured. The demons no longer have their hooks in me, following me into every room, speaking their lies directly into my ear:

         “You have no real power to resist your temptations.”

         “Confessing your sins would ruin your life.”

         “You deserve to sin.”

         “You may as well indulge in your addictions because God can’t heal you at this point.”

         “Just give in this once and we’ll leave.”

They can still stand outside on the street and shout these lies, but I can pray, sing, or worship and drown out their voices quite easily. Most important, I now know and believe I have this authority.

4. Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest

ALL DEMONIC ACTIVITY IS PERMISSIVE

“But how can I have a demon?” you ask. “There’s no history of satanic worship in my family.  I’ve had no involvement with Ouija boards, tarot cards, or any other ‘foothold’ activities.” Let’s consider first how demons gain access to their hosts. One way or another, all demonic activity is permissive. This permission can come from God:

         “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person.’” (Job 1:12)

         “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat.” Luke 22:31

         “A thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.’” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9)

         “And they were not given authority to kill them, but to torment them for five months.” (Revelation 9:5)

         “So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” (Revelation 12:9)

         “Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth.” (Revelation 20:7-8)

Or we can give the devil permission ourselves:

         “Be angry, and do not sin”: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.” (Ephesians 4:26, 27)

         “Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons.” (1 Timothy 4:1)

         “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

These afflictions of the enemy are not based on any legal right of occupancy, but on permissive access granted at the owner’s discretion.

Now let’s note further that this permission can be one of three kinds: active, passive, or hereditary. Active permission is typically given through volitional sin. Ananias and Sapphira actively granted Satan permission to enter their hearts through their sin of lying to the Holy Spirit. Passive permission is described in Matthew 12:44 where a habitable house is swept clean, but not occupied. A Christian who believes in Jesus, is forgiven and cleansed from his former sins, and then allows his discipleship to fall into neglect is pictured here. He has left a comfortable and attractive habitation abandoned and thereby granted passive permission for demons to take up occupation there.

WE MUST DRIVE DEMONS OUT

Hereditary permission is the visitation of the fathers’ iniquity on the children (Numbers 14:18), whereby the fathers’ sins grant demons a practical means of access to remain in the generational line. Paul explains in Romans 5:14 that, “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam.” In the same way, I was born into the iniquity of the immediately preceding generations of my family line even though I hadn’t personally sinned according to the likeness of their transgressions. The demons my predecessors had allowed to take up residence had two things that allowed them to remain: (1) practical access and (2) the absence of any forcible eviction. When we receive the Holy Spirit through our conversion we are given authority to evict family demons, but they don’t leave simply because we have that authority. It is a major miscalculation of evangelicalism regarding our ‘family demons’ that Christian conversion will evict them. We must drive them out. Evil must always be forcibly evicted. It does not leave simply because it has no legal right to stay.

Hereditary permission is obviously a very sinister and dangerous access mode because none of us has sufficient knowledge of all that has gone on in our families before we arrived on the scene.  Four generations of fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers total fifteen men, any of whom could have given permissive access to demons into the family line! They must be discerned using the gifts the Holy Spirit distributes to the church precisely for this purpose.

The Bible reveals three basics types of demonic activity: (1) spiritual deception or delusion, (2) physical or mental torment, and (3) supernatural empowerment. We find the second type especially common during Jesus’ ministry, but rarely occurring in the Old Testament or in the letters to the churches. We will get a somewhat skewed view of demonic activity by focusing too closely on their behavior when Jesus confronted them in the Gospels. His appearance created a “DEFCON 1” conditions for demons and they were flushed into the open where they would have preferred to stay comfortably hidden. It would seem that Jesus’ presence provoked the demons to compromise their preferred invisibility and uncharacteristically manifest themselves (Mark 3:11), but we don’t have enough information to confirm this. Similarly, we don’t see much evidence of the second type of activity in Western culture (in my personal view, because such visible manifestations would serve to awaken the ‘sleeping giant’ of evangelicalism).

JUST BECAUSE WE CAN’T SEE THEM…

We are greatly mistaken, however, when we assume that a scarcity of visible manifestations means demons are less active among us. The Spirit distributes the gift of discerning of spirits because our natural faculties can’t detect the presence of invisible dominions, principalities, and powers (Colossians 1:16). In this book I deal only with the first type of activity—spiritual deception and delusion—because this was my affliction. A number of scriptures describe the work of demons in spiritual deception and delusion:

         “But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him.” (1 Samuel 16:14)

         “Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, and said, ‘I will persuade him.’ The Lord said to him, ‘In what way?’ So he said, ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And the Lord said, ‘You shall persuade him, and also prevail. Go out and do so.’” (1 Kings 22:21, 22)

         The princes of Zoan have become fools;

The princes of Noph are deceived;

They have also deluded Egypt,

Those who are the mainstay of its tribes.

The Lord has mingled a perverse spirit in her midst;

And they have caused Egypt to err in all her work,

As a drunken man staggers in his vomit. (Isaiah 19:13, 14)

         “Surely I will send a spirit upon him, and he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.” (Isaiah 37:7)

         “Just as it is written: “God has given them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear, to this very day.” (Rom 11:8)

         “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1 John 4:1)

         “We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” (1 John 4:6)

We Westerners are a cognitive, intellectual people who place the highest reliance on our mental faculties to inform our decision making and perception of reality. Our baseline of reality is the assumption that our reason and intelligence enable us to see, assess, and perceive the world correctly. Yet these demons have the capacity to warp and skew these very faculties we imagine to be insulated from the spirit realm! A person under the influence of such a spirit will think he is making his own independent, rational choices when his thought processes have been spiritually distorted.

THE MOB DOESN’T WANT TO SHUT DOWN YOUR BUSINESS

As an example, let’s consider David’s numbering of Israel in 1 Chronicles 21:1: “Now Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel.” This word for ‘moved’ is variously translated ‘incite,’ ‘allure,’ ‘instigate, and ‘entice’ in the Old Testament. It describes a spiritual undermining of David’s thinking that ‘allured’ him away from the decision he should have reached. David did not have bad information, nor did he have poor counsel. David knew the law, that it was the Lord’s prerogative rather than the king’s to authorize a census (Numbers 1:1; 26:1). David also loved the law (Psalm 19:7-9). David even had an accountability partner who pleaded with him to relent from his intention: “And Joab answered, ‘May the Lord make His people a hundred times more than they are. But, my lord the king, are they not all my lord’s servants? Why then does my lord require this thing? Why should he be a cause of guilt in Israel?’” (1 Chronicles 21:3). But “the king’s word prevailed” despite the good information and wisdom available to him.

We must understand that this was not a general failure of David’s rational faculties. He was still capable of rendering sound, judicious decisions on other matters affecting his kingdom. But it was a spiritual distortion of this one particular decision. Under Satan’s delusion he believed it was the right and necessary choice. Demons can similarly “move” us to irrational, self-destructive choices through planting rumor, misperception, delusion, persuasion, and error in our minds. We think these perceptions and thoughts are ours. But they are like a computer worm that has slipped by the antivirus programming. My mind, like the computer, is no longer functioning normally even though I think it is. Just as David was still functioning in many aspects of his kingship, so my calling and spiritual giftings were still operating (although very imperfectly) while I was in captivity for they really are “without repentance” (Romans 11:29).

During my decades of sexual addiction, I had no lack of information or training on how destructive my secret sins were to me and my family. But because of my deceiving spirits, my decisions were distorted.  Like David, I thought my perception of reality was sound when it actually contradicted the facts before me. As Pastor Michael prophesied, my mind was swayed far out of proportion. I was swayed by rumor: “I could escape my addictions through geographic solutions.” I was swayed by misperception: “My temptations had become more powerful than God.” I was swayed by delusion: “My addictive behavior was not really who I was.” I was swayed by persuasion: “I deserved to indulge in my sins.” I was swayed by error: “The demonic enticements to indulge in my sins were my own thoughts.”

Now someone might argue at this point, “Wait a minute, Bryan. You’re just using this ‘devil made me do it’ approach as an excuse. You’re ignoring the fact that you hid your sin all those years. If you had simply confessed everything early on your problems could have been addressed much more easily.” I have two responses to this argument. First, while it is true that confession would have been the ideal solution, I didn’t perceive that it was in my deluded state.  My essential and most powerful delusion was that obedience was no longer a viable option. Obedience would have been too impractical, too costly, too painful, too demeaning, too inadequate, and too late. Such was the power of my demonic stupor. Second, demonic delusion was not and never is an excuse for sin. David did not duck his full responsibility for what he did, but subsequently confessed, “I have sinned greatly.” Despite the enticing power of deceiving spirits, they can’t press the red button. Only we can do that. So while my confession was absolutely necessary to release me from my compulsions, it was my deliverance that freed me to embrace that reality.

5. Satan Hates You and Has a Horrible Plan for Your Life

Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. 1 Peter 2:11

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” 1 Peter 5:8

A ONE-VOTE ELECTION

The New Testament makes it explicitly clear that the Christian man is a battleground. There is a war being waged inside him.  Before a man becomes a Christian and receives the Holy Spirit, he is in every respect a slave of the kingdom of darkness.  He is corrupted by sin, his spirit is dead, and he has been thoroughly deceived into believing his condition is normal.

There is no conflict in this unregenerate man because he has only one nature.  We often wonder why so many Christian men fall into sin and hypocrisy while many fairly upright, moral unbelievers go through life in cruise control.  The answer is that the unbeliever only has one nature.  He is an enslaved, occupied country, but he is internally at peace.  (Iraq suffered no civil unrest under Saddam Hussein, but only after there were two powers competing for control of one country.)  All the unbeliever’s energy is oriented in the same direction. He is only concerned with his own desires, not the Lord’s. He only wants to maximize his own enjoyment of this life, not the next one. He only cares to march to his own standards, not God’s law.  He only has one nature voting on his decisions, not the flesh and the Holy Spirit, leaving him as the tiebreaker.

When the Spirit moves into a man, it would be nice if he just bumped the old nature out of the way altogether. But that’s not the way it works. There are now two captains and each of them wants to steer the ship. The war the forces of sin wage against the Christian’s soul is strategic, meticulously planned, and unrelenting. The Greek word for ‘wage war’ is strateuo, from which we derive ‘strategy.’ In Ephesians 2:10 we find God’s opposing strategy, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”  God has a strategy, or a destiny if you will, for every Christian’s life.

GIVING DEMONS PERMISSION TO TAKE YOU CAPTIVE

But there is yet another strategy on file in the kingdom of darkness to ruin your life. The enemy has also devised works of iniquity prepared beforehand that you should walk in them. As we saw in the previous chapter, your generational demons have been waiting in the wings for you to arrive. Now note the permissive element of 1 Peter 5:8, “whom he may devour.” There is a necessary interactive element between you and your family demons. They require your permission to take you captive. Some Christians have never ‘activated’ these demons by submitting to their suggestions. This may have been the case with Obadiah, “But I your servant have feared the Lord from my youth” (1 Kings 18:12). But Christians who have walked in these demonic invitations—whether before or after they believed—have given the devil exactly what he seeks: “a place” (Ephesian 4:27), permission to enter and remain until he is evicted.

The Christian who has given his generational demons permissive place now faces much more than the fleshly lusts that war against the soul. While the Bible doesn’t describe exactly how this spiritual captivity occurs, these spirits are now able to bombard him with deceptions and delusions custom-designed for him. His temptations will not be just random events that occur whenever for no particular reason. He will be severely tempted to sin specifically where the opportunity to commit that sin is present and where his circumstances offer the promise of secrecy and anonymity. He will be assailed with doubt and fear when the opportunities the Lord has prepared for him are almost upon him but still below his visible horizon.

The enemy’s best case scenario is to take men prisoner without them realizing he has done so. He wants to take as many men captive as he can and then conceal the fact that they don’t have to remain incarcerated.  In fact, he’s more than happy to issue captive men day passes so they can visit the kingdom of God now and again, as long as they come home to prison every night. The devil would much rather see a captive pastor remain impotently active with a small, sickly harvest of fruit than have him bring his sins into the light and move out of the prison permanently. We can walk out of captivity whenever we want, but the devil wants to convince us we must stay there.

Here are six indicators you have been taken captive:

SCORING YOUR CAPTIVITY QUOTIENT

The first indicator is a lack of practical awareness that demons are waging a strategic war against you. If an enemy is systematically sabotaging a city’s infrastructure and its residents believe all his attacks are natural, random events, his job is made much easier. If a man is unaware, or only remotely conscious of the family demons scheming against him, he is almost certainly not well defended against them.

The second indicator is a recurring domination by a particular sin or compulsive behavior. Proverbs 25:28 describes this man: “Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls.” Such a city can function normally 90% of the time.  During peaceful conditions walls are actually an inconvenience, forcing all commerce and activity through the available gates.  It is only during enemy attacks that the walls are required for protection. The city without walls cannot defend itself and capitulates quickly without a fight.  The man who goes weeks at a time without indulging in his compulsive behavior, but then falls immediately and predictably when its temptation comes has been taken captive. This is such a serious condition that failure on this indicator outweighs a good score on every other one.

The third indicator is a lack of fruit. There are many varieties of fruit, as I indicated in The Hidden Life.  The one common attribute of fruit is that people are being influenced for God because I am around.  The lost believe, the sick are healed, the downcast are lifted up, the ignorant are taught. Jesus promises a harvest of thirty, sixty, or one hundred fold. If fruit is not forthcoming, that is a strong indicator that my life is being controlled by something other than the Spirit.

The fourth indicator is a loss of appetite for Christian fellowship. John tells us, “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” The Spirit in a man gives him a longing to be around his brothers and sisters in Christ.  He loves to work with them, play with them, and worship with them.  He wants to be with them when they rejoice and when they mourn.  He loves the strong, the bold, the timid, and the weak alike.  But the captured man sees only the faults and failures in other churches and Christians. He is offended by their inconsistencies, their childlikeness, their quirks, and their inexactness.  They are not nearly as insightful, as practical, as realistic, or as intellectually precise as he is. They fall short of his standards, so he prefers isolation and his private spiritual perfection.

The fifth indicator is a rationalization of prayer. Prayer is the most powerful tool we have, so it follows that the enemy’s strategy will work hard to disable it. He plants many suggestive lies in our minds about prayer: that God will do his own thing anyway, that I am unworthy to pray boldly, that once is enough.  In one way or another, the enemy exploits our Western, rationalistic mindset and tries to convince us that prayer is an irrational activity (which it is) and therefore useless (which it’s not).

The sixth indicator is a delusion that we are holding steady when we are steadily sliding downward into a pattern of iniquity. The devil’s lies resemble truth until we examine them closely. In their early stages of growth, the weeds he planted in the wheat field can only be distinguished from genuine wheat by an expert.  We fall into many sins very gradually through submitting to Satan’s cleverly disguised lies. He can entice captive men into sin through many small steps where we would never jump in all at once. His snares do not necessarily yank us upside down with a loud, dramatic ‘twang.’

DEVELOPING A WAR CONSCIOUSNESS

During World War II, the ‘war effort’ permeated every component of American society.  We were a culture at war and that consciousness drew in nearly everyone in one way or another.  In contrast, the Vietnam War was an ‘invisible’ war.  It was a war we didn’t want to admit was happening.  While it was possible to intentionally keep current through the newspapers or nightly news, it was also relatively easy to filter that war out of one’s daily horizons and pretend it wasn’t there.

Christians are to have a war consciousness.  We are to walk in daily awareness of Satan’s devices and recognize when they are deployed against us to take us captive. If a Christian can’t rattle off a half-dozen ways the devil has tried to take him captive in the past year, it’s very likely he’s already in prison.

6. The Devil According to Hollywood

We’re immersed in a pop-culture theology of Satan and demons today that has arisen out of countless literary legends, ‘B’ horror movies, and society’s current infatuation with vampires and zombies. Some of these beliefs are so prevalent that many Christians lose track of what’s actually in the Bible and what they watched on television last night. So here goes: a few myths we can bust and strike off the list.

SATAN HAS NO RIGHTS

1. Satan and his demons have a right (as opposed to permission) to enter people. The legal definition of a right is, “a power, privilege, immunity, or capacity the enjoyment of which is secured to a person by law.” The forces of darkness enjoy no such status. In this current age, God has given them permission to go about their business on earth just as a farmer might temporarily allow a hunter to shoot crows on his land. This permission can be withdrawn at any time and does not convey any rights to the hunter. Satan prowls about seeking whom he may devour. He seeks for any foothold of access the negligent might Christian may allow him. An unclean spirit travels about seeking a place to rest. All these descriptions speak of opportune access, not right of occupancy. These foul beings enter in wherever they find the doors and windows unlocked and the accommodations to their liking.

2. Demons “possess” people. The Greek term daimonizomai has traditionally been translated “demon possessed” even though the verb ktaomai, “possess,” never appears in this context.  The problem with this rendering is that the English word ‘possess’ is primarily a descriptor of legal ownership, not a description of occupancy. A house buyer ‘takes possession’ of a house on the date specified in the sales agreement, but he may or may not occupy it on that date. Conversely, a person who occupies a house may or may not have a legal right to do so. So while daimonizomai describes a condition of demonic control, occupancy, and torment; it does not speak to any right of possession.

We tend to make a great distinction between possession (where the demon is inside a person) and affliction (where the demon is outside a person). But in practical terms, we understand very little about the metaphysical, spiritual, or spatial relations existing between demons and the people they afflict.

3. Christian conversion automatically casts out any demons occupying the believer prior to faith. This is a deductive conclusion unsupported by any Scripture explicitly stating this to be the case. Many evangelical theologians forcefully insist a believer cannot have a generational demon, citing Ezekiel 18:20, “The son shall not bear the guilt of the father…” But just as Romans 5 sets forth the imputation of Adam’s sin to all humanity, so Numbers 14:18 describes the “visiting” of the fathers’ sins upon the children, “The Lord is longsuffering and abundant in mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He by no means clears the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation.” The Federal view of imputation is that Adam alone sinned, but the whole human race was affected. The Augustinian view of imputation is that the whole human race sinned in Adam. But regardless of which legal formula we prefer, they both point to the reality that Adam’s sin had the practical effect of leaving the door open and “sin entered” (Romans 5:12).

The principle of imputed guilt does not sit well with our Western concept of individual self-determination, but it accurately portrays the infectious nature and awful forward momentum of sin that spreads along generational lines until it is eradicated. Every unclean visitor my fathers welcomed into their houses becomes my visitor as well. These unwelcome visitors do not leave until they are forcibly evicted. Throughout the Bible we find the principle that God’s people must violently expel the present occupants from the territory he grants them. The Canaanites did not leave just because Israel moved in.  Israel had to drive them out with force.

GOD DOESN’T OWE SATAN A THING

4. In his work of redemption, Jesus purchased us from Satan. Scripture offers no indication that the price for our redemption was payable to Satan. Satan has no claim to ownership over mankind. He did not create mankind, nor has he done anything to gain any form of ownership or title over mankind. When Jesus refers to Satan as the “ruler of this world,” he does not mean the earth and its inhabitants. He refers to that meaning of ‘the world’ which is the realm of evil hostile to God (See John 7:7, 8:23, 12:31, 14:30, 15:18, and 17:9). The legal transaction of redemption is a transaction exclusively between the Son as the Lamb of God and his just and holy Father.  Satan was not a legal party to mankind’s redemption in any way. Satan is the accuser (Revelation 12:10) who correctly argued that a holy God could not overlook our sins without violating his perfect justice (Zechariah 3:1-5).  Before Christ offered his perfect sacrifice, God was constrained from reconciling man to himself by his own justice, not because Satan had any right of ownership over fallen humanity.

5. We have authority to ‘bind’ Satan. The binding of the strong man prior to plundering his goods (Matthew 12:29) refers to the unique work of Christ on the cross that disarmed Satan (Colossians 2:15) and effected our redemption. To bind something means to prevent its occurrence before it can happen. While the church is given authority to cast out demons, there is no sense in which it is to ‘bind’ Satan; nor any indication of what such binding would entail or accomplish. God has prepared an everlasting fire for the devil (Matthew 25:41), but in this present age he has allowed Satan a certain level of freedom. God has ‘loosed’ Satan in accordance with his purposes and he has not commissioned us to ‘bind’ him. Accordingly, when Jesus cast out demons he did not ‘bind’ them from moving on and finding new hosts to inhabit. We have authority to cast out Satan where we encounter his works, but we do not have authority to bind him from doing his work in the first place. Or to use an analogy of spiritual warfare, we have authority to quench the fiery darts of the enemy, but not to ‘bind’ the enemy from launching them (Ephesians 6:16).

6. Deliverance is a ‘shortcut’ that exempts a Christian from the many obligation of discipleship necessary to put the flesh to death. Deliverance is not freedom from the liability to sin; it is freedom from the necessity of sin. Deliverance is not a lessening of the power of the flesh; it is the freedom to put the flesh to death through the discipline of obedience. Deliverance does not mean my demons can no longer tell me lies; it means I don’t have to listen to them. Deliverance is not exemption from the possibility of improvement; it is freedom from the impossibility of improvement. Deliverance, in itself, will not make me a nicer, more humble, or more pleasant person. If I was a jerk when I had my demons I will just be a delivered jerk until I face up to the personality changes I need to make.

THE DEVIL DIDN’T MAKE ME DO IT

7. Demons take over a person’s will. Exactly what was the relation of my deceiving spirit to my free will? We have no scriptural basis to assert that an evil spirit can deactivate a Christian’s free will and take over his decision-making.  (For if this was the case the demonized Christian would no longer be accountable for his sins.)   But to the extent that I “gave heed to a deceiving spirit” (1 Timothy 4:1) I was progressively “shaken in mind by the spirit” (2 Thessalonians 2:2). I still controlled my mind, but I had surrendered my decisions to increasingly distorted input. It was like driving a car in an unfamiliar city and getting my directions from the deceiving spirit riding shotgun. I still controlled the steering wheel, but the spirit told me where I needed to go. At every turn I still had to grant permission to the spirit to delude me. There eventually came a point where I didn’t know where I was and saw no possibility of disobeying him.

8. Demonization always exhibits a visible physical, mental, or psychological manifestation. If this this was the case, God would not have distributed the gift of discerning spirits to his church. The fact is that some demonization afflicts the victim with physical or mental disease, while other demonic activity presents no naturally observable phenomena at all. (And of course, much physical and mental disease occurs independent of demonic activity.) During Jesus’ ministry on earth, we see a preponderance of demonization that visibly manifested. People were able to identify the demonized by natural means and bring them to Jesus (Matthew 4:24). Perhaps a particular class of demons was especially active at this time. We just don’t know.

But we see other forms of demonization elsewhere in the Bible that are unseen by the natural eye. Our enemy is wily and cunning and deploys his servants where they will best serve his purposes. We too easily assume they’re not afflicting us if we can’t see them.

GOD IS WAITING FOR US TO GO TO WAR

9. Since Jesus has delivered Christians from the power of darkness, demons can’t attack them. This is an error of Western or ‘Greek’ thinking. A very important and often misapplied verse in Western theological thought is Colossians 1:13, “He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” It is sometimes supposed that Christ’s finished work on the cross has quarantined the Christian from demonic affliction. But this is a Western understanding of completed action and does not take into account the different perspective of Hebrew thought. When the biblical writers speak of what God has done, the emphasis is often not on the historical timeframe of the action, but on the certainty of God accomplishing what he promises. Emil Kautzsch explains this aspect of eastern thinking.

The Hebrew (Semitic) perfect denotes in general that which is concluded, completed, and past, that which has happened and has come into effect; but at the same time, also that which is represented as accomplished, even though it be continued into the present time or even be actually still future…. The Indo-Germanic scheme of three periods of time (past, present, and future) is entirely foreign to the Semitic tense-idea which regards an occurrence only from the point of view of completed or incomplete action (Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar).

This Semitic outlook colors the entire Bible, even though the New Testament is written in Greek. Countless well-intended preachers over the centuries have hammered away at the past and completed action of our deliverance from the power of darkness when the proper emphasis is on the certainty of Christ accomplishing what he promises. This latter understanding provides that we are often to participate in God’s ongoing works of deliverance. We see the obligation of God’s people to secure God’s deliverance in a number of Old Testament promises.

         “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Do not fear him, for I have delivered him into your hand, with all his people and his land; and you shall do to him as you did to Sihon king of the Amorites, who dwelt at Heshbon’” (Numbers 21:34).

         “And the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not fear them, for I have delivered them into your hand; not a man of them shall stand before you” (Joshua 10:8).

         “It happened on the same night that the Lord said to him, “Arise, go down against the camp, for I have delivered it into your hand” (Judges 7:9).

In each of these examples, we see the Lord representing something as accomplished when its historical completion is still future.

7. Ten Terrific Excuses for Ignoring Demons

As I’ve already stated, evangelicals will readily discuss the objectives and strategies of Satan, but shy away from ‘demon’ talk. This despite the fact that Jesus regularly used Satan’s name to refer to spirits aligned with his purposes. “How can Satan cast out Satan?” Mark 3:23. “And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bent over and could in no way raise herself up…. So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound—think of it—for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath?” Luke 13:14, 16). Let’s look at some reasons for evangelicalism’s disdain of exercising its authority over demons.

BUT THEY’LL THINK I’M A FANATIC

1. Pride. Evangelicals hate demons. But we don’t hate them for the reasons we should hate them. We hate them because affirming their existence (which we accept) would compromise the kind of intellectual respectability we wish to characterize our spirituality. We tolerate their activity in our midst because confronting them with authority would lump us in with the ‘extremists’ we find so detestable and unpalatable. Demonic deception and captivity is a very real and destructive problem for Christian men and the battle is heating up. Evangelicalism is far past the point where it can afford to relegate spiritual warfare to the ‘odd’ church down the street.

Above all, we want to somehow convince unbelievers that Christianity is intellectually cool when Paul confesses it to be utter foolishness. We prefer a Christianity that began with a supernatural event, will culminate in a supernatural event, but in the interim is completely compatible with natural perception and Western reasoning. In this vein, we can tolerate a devil who made a mess of things at the beginning, will make a real mess of things at the end, but doesn’t really have any day-to-day visibility.

But the reality of dealing with demons in the here-and-now upsets the whole apple cart. “What will they think of us if we start calling out demons and expelling them?” Well, they’ll think you’re a fool. Isn’t that what you signed up for? Our fundamental error here is in thinking that other supernatural aspects of our faith are somehow more acceptable to the Western mind than demons are. This in turn points to the common Western assumption that the gospel was somehow easier to believe for ancient man than it is for postmodern man. The 21st-century unbeliever supposedly is too scientific, too rational, too sophisticated, and too logical to buy into the ‘spooky’ parts of our faith. Any mentions of demons will surely push him over the edge.

We need to always remember that people believe the gospel because they are hungry, not because they find it reasonable. In our gospel work we must keep central the principle that the hearer either brings a hunger for eternal life to the table or he does not. Proverbs 16:26 reminds us that, “The person who labors, labors for himself, for his hungry mouth drives him on.” We cannot create an appetite for life where it is absent.  Evangelicals sometimes labor under the misconception that additional information about the mechanics and legalities of salvation will motivate the hesitant candidate to believe.

But a man only enters a restaurant when he is hungry.  “His hungry mouth drives him on.”  If he has no appetite, no additional information will create one.  He will not become hungry through learning how hard the farmers and ranchers have slaved to grow their products.  Neither will he care how many distributors and grocers have worked diligently to keep the restaurant pantry stocked, or how early the chef had to get up this morning.  He is either hungry or he is not.

We can similarly go into great detail providing background information about the gospel that is not the gospel.  We can put forward a full menu of reasons for believing the gospel such as the fall of man, the incarnation, the Son’s obedience to the Father, justification, redemption, sacrificial atonement, etc.  But if the hearer has no appetite for the offer of life in the face of certain death, the argument for believing the gospel is over before it begins.

Our commission is to spread the gospel.  It is not to create appetites for believing it, for “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). The churches that are growing in the world today are not the ones trying to convince the unregenerated rational mind how reasonable it is to believe in Jesus. They are the ones following Jesus as hard as they can and trampling their pride of life in the dust.

2. Fear. It is no small problem that, when Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official worldview of Western civilization, the church believed him. Reading a recent CNN commentary, Preachers Confront 'Last Taboo': Condemning Greed Amid Great Recession, I was painfully reminded again of the unspoken, but ever-present ecclesiology that pervades the popular American psyche: that we are, after all, just one big congregation.  Quote after quote (I offer three examples below) drove home the conviction that American pastors are to be prophets to the nation—castigating political and financial institutions alike for their moral failings.

         “Though millions of Americans are angry over the economy, little moral outrage seems to be coming from the nation’s pulpit…”

         “…much of the church is too captive to greed to address the moral challenges of the nation’s economic problems.”

         “There just aren’t that many prophets left,” he said. “A prophet is someone who is willing to tell us the unpleasant truth about ourselves. If we can’t bring unpopular messages, who will?”

Evangelical Christianity loves the “…greetings in the marketplaces, the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts” (Luke 20:46) it receives from the business, academic, social, and political cultures in our society. To be blunt, these long-standing alliances could not bear the strain of too much demon bashing. We understand what our full engagement in spiritual warfare would cost us and we greatly fear losing our status in America’s ‘royal courts.’

Parallel passages in Deuteronomy and 1 Peter set forth the distinctive trilateral relationship we are to maintain among (1) God’s covenant people, (2) those outside the covenant, and (3) the law.

         “Therefore be careful to observe them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” (Deuteronomy 4:6)

         “Have your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation.” (1 Peter 2:12)

The law is given exclusively to the covenant people that they should observe and keep it.  Outsiders are then able to observe their obedience to the law and the blessings that follow.   This principle applied to ancient Israel in the land and to the body of Christ in the world today.  In neither case are God’s prophets called to preach covenant ethics outside the covenant community.  God’s covenant people are not to commend the law to society-at-large, but to live out the law in its sight.

There are a variety of secular prophetic voices fully capable of addressing the ethical failings of American business and this they will do.   But the world will only receive the law from its own.  When the body of Christ abandons its spiritual warfare to usurp this duty, we will only see the promised result: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces” (Matthew 7:6).

3. Mistrust of Spiritual Gifts.  Spiritual gifts are… well, spiritual. We can’t use our rational powers to analyze and assess them the way we can break down a sermon and determine if it’s theologically sound.  The primacy of teaching and pastoral ministries is foundational to evangelical culture.  We observe candidates’ character, intelligence, and aptitude for these callings.  We send them to seminaries where they are further assessed and deemed suitable for the pastoral work.  We then interview them and ordain them as being competent to preach sound and verifiable Christian doctrine.

But the gifts active in spiritual warfare can’t be vetted in the same way. This is not to say that those who operate in them aren’t subject to testing and discipline. They are.  But God doesn’t choose the most intelligent or the most educated or the most socially skilled people for these callings.  Their theological expertise and vocabulary are not as precise as the formally trained. They often lack refined speaking, presentation, or leadership skills. It is a huge stretch for many professional, formally trained evangelical leaders to submit to prophecies, words, and discernments they cannot lay on the table for academic dissection. They must trust those who have a lower worldly status to spiritually discern things they can’t discern for themselves. Even though this dynamic is the very essence of body life it can still be a very uncomfortable threshold to cross.

IS THE CAR RED OR IS IT A CHEVROLET?

4. Either/Or Thinking. We can fall into the error of thinking that someone’s problem must be either demonic and nothing but demonic or natural and nothing but natural. Is it a demon or a physical disease? Is it a demon or a psychological disorder? Is it a demon or a physical addiction? Is it a demon or mental illness? Is it a demon or just an accident? But such thinking creates illegitimate divisions and is like asking, “Is the car red or is it a Chevrolet?” The forces of darkness can afflict Christians using any of these means or none of them. The final test is whether demonic activity is discerned using spiritual means.

We are sometimes concerned that spiritual warfare will push medical care, counselling, addiction treatment, etc. out of their proper domains. But it is never wise (and hardly ever correct) to surmise that demonization is the only problem facing a person. In fact, casting out a demon is often only the first (and easiest!) step to wholeness. Most seminaries now offer counselling and psychology training as a component of their pastoral care programs. Any perceived conflict between spiritual warfare and these helping disciplines lies only in our preconceptions and should be discarded.

5. Cultural Prejudice. Many of us just can’t get past the stereotypes of how we perceive deliverance ministries: the perfect hair, regional accents, predictable dramatics, the absolutist and over-simplified doctrines. Very little cross-pollination occurs between evangelicalism and Pentecostalism (where most deliverance ministry occurs). For many evangelicals, deliverance ministry and Pentecostalism are one and the same and they’re just not interested in going there.

My appeal on this point is simple: Get over it! How is it that we can freely draw on the resources and scholarship of liberal theologians who would deny the most basic fundamentals of evangelical doctrine? Somehow we can summon the wisdom and discipline to separate the meat from the gristle and take away what is valuable. Yet most evangelicals would not think of crossing the street to receive the wisdom and experience of their Pentecostal brothers in matters of spiritual warfare.  This grieves God’s heart and my long-standing prayer is to see a resolution to this separation in my lifetime.

6. Destination Evangelism. As I stated in Gospel Without Law, evangelicalism generally sees 11:00 Sunday morning as the primary venue for proclaiming the gospel to outsiders.  This expectation understandably shapes the content and character of the ministry that occurs in our meetings. Many churches strive to design a ‘seeker-friendly’ service—whatever that is. So we generally assume that any teaching on or casting out of demons does not make the list of acceptable activities unbelievers can be expected to digest. Somehow we have decided that the prospect of a man who died 2,000 years ago returning in the clouds to right all the wrongs in the world is a more reasonable proposition to the Western mind than the reality of demons living among us today.

My daughter related to me a recent conversation she had with an atheist friend regarding her Christian faith.  Their topics were those common to such interchanges: the atheist’s unwavering commitment to materialism and rational empiricism—and his incredulity that any intelligent person could believe in anything not subject to verification through sensorial perception of the physical universe.

But what especially struck me in her account was that it was him—not her—who drove the conversation.  It was the atheist who couldn’t let the matter rest and find satisfaction in his own convictions.  I picked up on the same energy in a MacLean’s article a couple of years ago exploring secular scholarship’s search for the historical Jesus.  I was fascinated by the incredible amount of energy these unbelieving researchers devoted to pursuing the historical reality behind a faith they had long ago rejected.

As Christians, we often fail to appreciate this spiritual dynamic.  The most aggressive critics of the gospel will sometimes provide the most compelling testimony of its drawing power.  They just can’t let it go!  Having connected all the dots in their airtight rejection of the historic Christian faith, they are unsettled.  They can’t dismiss the peace, assurance, and joy they observe in their crazy, irrational Christian friends.

We are, as the New Testament concludes, living letters.  The world will reject our arguments, but it cannot ignore the Spirit within us.  We must never underestimate his power and influence.  He will draw people to Jesus in ways a thousand times more powerful than our best intellectual defenses.

I think (no, I know) 21st-century society is much more tuned in to spiritual oppression than we imagine and we would be surprised at the positive response we would get by ‘telling it like it is.’ Instead of tripping over ourselves to protect the poor unbeliever from the spiritual realities of this age, we would do well to follow Goethe’s advice, “Give me the benefit of your convictions, if you have any; but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own.”

SO YOU THINK IT’S HARD FOR PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN DEMONS?

7. Intellectualism. We assume we must make the gospel intellectually satisfactory to the unregenerated rational mind before it will believe. For some reason, we think it is a shorter intellectual leap to accept the existence of God than the existence of demons. God has given his church some marvellous Christian thinkers, writers, and apologists who are very adept in engaging postmodern secular culture. Their work is one way people come to believe, but it is not the way. Peter describes how husbands will be won by the conduct of their wives without a word. The woman at the well was unmoved by conviction of sin, but believed because Jesus prophesied about her sin. The Spirit did an end run around Peter’s rational faculties in impressing upon him that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. The disciples believed in Jesus as a result of water becoming wine. The nobleman believed at the healing of his son. Many in Joppa believed upon Tabitha’s resurrection. The proconsul believed because Paul blinded the sorcerer Bar-Jesus.

We need to accept once and for all that the propositions set forth in our Christian faith are incredible, preposterous, and irreconcilable with everything the natural man knows and relies on. They say it takes a pastor seven years to get over seminary. What this means is that it takes a pastor that long to learn that the rest of the human race doesn’t do summersaults over all the logical, rationally compelling reasons for faith he learned there. I begin with this observation because, when the church is asked the question, “What is the gospel?” it is generally the seminary trained who respond.  And their answer inevitably zeros in on those ‘essential’ components of soteriology one who would believe in Jesus must first understand and confess.

But believing in Jesus is God’s voting booth.  No one outside is privy to what actually happens in there.  The two greatest events of history—the resurrection of Jesus and the quickening of the believer’s spirit—are without human witness.  Those who came to the empty tomb found only the evidence: the dislodged stone, the grave wrappings, and the angel.  In the same way, we only see the fruit that follows the mystery of conversion: peace, love, joy and thanksgiving.

I was present at the birth of each of my three children and I can tell you that birth is a messy and unpredictable affair.  In each case, the poor child hadn’t done it before—hadn’t even practiced it.  Still, each one managed to pull it off.  They’re doing quite well today, so they must have gotten it right. I marvel sometimes at how precisely Christians delineate the necessary details of spiritual birth.  We insist that a person cannot possibly be spiritually born unless he has a certain perspective, a particular attitude, a proper determination; fully understands what is happening to him, the nature of the state he is leaving, the nature of the state he is entering, how he came into his present state in the first place, why he must be born, how his birth is possible, and what matters he must immediately address upon his birth. All this from someone who hasn’t done it before—hasn’t even practiced it.

What I am getting at is that we cannot see, measure, or verify the actual event of conversion.  This should lead us to a humble openness about how belief occurs.  Scripture informs us that one believes with the heart—the seat of the will—but what portion of man’s being impresses the reality of the gospel on the will?  Is it spiritual man, cognitive man, physical man, or emotional man that leads the will to a confession of faith?   Through what part of man does the Spirit inform belief? Or is there any part of man he doesn’t use?

Since the Spirit disperses his gifts so diversely after conversion, it would stand to reason that he would draw people to Jesus using the same variability of approach.  In fact, we find this to be precisely the case in the New Testament.  Some indeed come to faith after the pattern of evangelicalism’s familiar ‘legal separation’ scenario: they hear the message of Christ’s substitutionary death offered in payment for their due condemnation under the law and believe in Jesus to bridge the gap between a holy God and sinful man.  But we see several other avenues to belief outside of hearing this legal reconciliation formula that are equally valid:

         Physical healing.

         Casting out of spirits.

         Miraculous signs.

         Prophetic utterances

         The resurrection of the dead

         Revelation apart from rational assessment: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”

         The spiritual force of Jesus’ words: “No man ever spoke like this Man.”

These various approach patterns to belief show us that God uses the body and the spirit as well as the mind to bring people to certainty about Jesus, and often entirely apart from the ‘salvation formula.’

When we speak of these various components of man, we need to be reminded that such fragmentation is a distinctly Western perspective. The ancient oriental worldview did not subdivide man into isolated modules in which the spirit, emotions, mind, will, and body each go about their own affairs, taking no responsibility for the actions of another department down the hall.  For the Hebrew, the ‘soul’ was the whole man, who was to devote himself to God in his unified entirety. In this respect, we must pay close attention to the fact that Jesus called people to believe in him, not simply to cognitively believe his words.  Regardless of how the Spirit leads one to Jesus, the whole man believes.

We must understand that the theologian outlines the doctrines of salvation in objective retrospect.  He tells us what happened.  His task is a necessary one, but it is not the essential perspective of what the gospel is.  Ask any new Christian to describe how he reached his conviction about Jesus and he will probably confess something like, “One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see.”  The war historian and the foot soldier will give two very different accountings of a campaign.  Both perspectives are true, but the sources of fact are entirely different.  The historian gathers his materials, conducts his interviews and verifies his sources.  He presents a penetrating analysis of the historical roots of the conflict, the political prelude to war; the battlefield strategies, and the behind-the-scenes drama that guided the politicians.  But the foot soldier resorts to no such intricacies.  His reality is personal: what he saw, felt, heard, and smelled within the limited range of each of his senses.  He needs no historian to confirm it to him.

I once heard a pastor preach, “When you introduce the gospel to an unbeliever, you don’t begin with the subjects of demons, do you?” Let’s be careful about assuming that ‘demon stuff’ is outside the unbeliever’s intellectual comfort zone. God mysteriously draws people to certainty that Jesus is the resurrection and the life in ways we can never fully understand.  We need therefore to be careful not to exalt one approach over any other, for “His secret counsel is with the upright.”

8. Resentment. This may seem like an odd objection, but I’ve heard Christians voice resentment that deliverance is just too easy. “Salvation may be by grace, but Christians who color outside the lines need to claw their way back by the sweat of their own brow.” I call this the stinkin’ thinkin’ of the ninety-nine: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?” (Luke 15:4). The ninety-nine sometimes get their shorts in a knot about being left in the wilderness. Even though the shepherd has provided for all their needs while he is away, they want his constant his attention. That stupid lost sheep gets a free ride back into fellowship, all that personal time with the shepherd, all the attention, the celebrity status, the speaking engagements. Meanwhile we who had the discipline and good sense to keep our noses clean in the first place just get ignored. The ninety-nine think deliverance has a ring of phoniness to it. “How can someone who spent so long in all those secret addictions get reset to zero in one zap? It’s just not right.”

But the delivered Christian has anything but a free ride back. He still has miles to go in recovery. He will have long labors cleaning and repairing the wreckage of his ruined house. His deliverance is not an easy shortcut to all the ninety-nine achieved and never lost. It is only the potential of a new beginning.

THE PROBLEM WITH A ‘PERSONAL’ LORD AND SAVIOR

9.  Individualism. Evangelical religion not only a legal religion, but it is a personal religion. It had to be in breaking away from Roman Catholicism. The evangelical’s faith constantly reinforces the fact that Jesus has provided to him personally all he needs to understand the Bible, to pray, to confess his sin, etc. He is a self-contained spiritual module. The Sunday sermon’s purpose is to deploy him into his week with instructions for living out this personal religion. He even has a personal Lord and Savior.

The dictionary definition of ‘evangelical’ is,

Belonging to or designating the Christian churches that emphasize the teachings and authority of the Scriptures, especially of the New Testament, in opposition to the institutional authority of the church itself, and that stress as paramount the tenet that salvation is achieved by personal conversion to faith in the atonement of Christ.

Let’s consider two elements of this definition: the authority of the Scriptures and personal conversion.  The first in itself does not define evangelicalism because many traditions confess this authority.  But the essential evangelical identity revolves around the sanctity of the individual consciousness as opposed to the collective consciousness. In no other Protestant stream is this single value held in such esteem—not in Pentecostal Christianity and not in liberal Christianity.  Pentecostal theology does not encourage the same level of personal discretion in doctrinal matters and the Pentecostal does not seek it. Liberalism stresses the universal inclusion of all people in God’s family and avoids any emphasis on the individual’s personal responsibility to believe.

But all too often accepting Christ as my ‘personal’ Lord and Savior improperly leads to a life of walking in my own ‘personal’ discipleship. Evangelicalism has a very poorly developed concept of personal belief ushering the Christian into corporate spiritual life.  The evangelical is told repeatedly how Christ is all-sufficient to address all his spiritual needs directly. The individual evangelical effectively functions as a closed system, spiritually speaking.  He attends church not to engage in spiritual communion with his brothers and sisters, but to gather information, to learn how he can better function as an individual disciple. The essential function of the gathered body is teaching and the dissemination of instructions for Christian living. Even when he does engage with other Christians, ‘fellowship’ consists of the exchange of testimonies and experiences—information—that will better prepare him to live out his individual discipleship. The evangelical is quite comfortable with one-on-one interactions with the Holy Spirit.  He reads his Bible and believes the Spirit opens up God’s word to him. He prays and believes the Spirit hears him.  He accepts the discipline that through obedience and resisting temptation he is conformed to the image of Christ and is putting to death the old man.

But the gifts of the spirit which necessarily make him dependent on others pull against this self-oriented spirituality. These gifts provide elements of spiritual formation that the individual can’t provide to himself. He is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of the Spirit using another member of the body as the primary conduit to accomplish some aspect of spiritual growth, guidance, or correction. This is way too invasive and grates against his well-developed individualistic consciousness. It is outside his rational control and authentication.

I have no idea how many kinds of demons there are and all the things they do. I have to depend on other members of the body who can discern these things by the Spirit. Incorporating this reality into my consciousness was a huge leap for me given my Scottish-German heritage and my formal theological training. Just as I used to carry everything I needed in my backpack, I was conditioned to the culture of the all-sufficient evangelical who carried inside him everything necessary for complete discipleship.

10. Abuse of Deliverance. Are there deliverance ministers out there who cast out non-existent demons? Of course! Do we stop teaching because we see false teachers on television? Do we stop counselling because we are aware of simplistic, controlling counsellors? Do we stop pastoring because authoritarian shepherding movements exist?  Do we stop praying because of name-it-and-claim-it distortions of praying in Jesus’ name? I have little patience for Christians who shy away from doing something at all just because someone else does it poorly. This simply won’t do. The best antidote for curing aberrant practices in spiritual warfare is to bring them back under proper discipline in the church body.

8. One Vine, One Fig Tree, and One Cistern

Ask of Me, and I will give You

The nations for Your inheritance,

And the ends of the earth for Your possession. Psalm 2:8

Make peace with me by a present and come out to me; and every one of you eat from his own vine and every one from his own fig tree, and every one of you drink the waters of his own cistern. Isaiah 36:16

WHEN THE DEVIL PLAYS ‘GOOD COP’

Satan is quite adept at the ‘good cop’ angle. His primary lieutenant in carrying out this assignment is the spirit of fear. The second verse above is an appeal from the Assyrian King Sennacharib’s mouthpiece Rabshakeh, a type of the spirit of fear. The spirit of fear’s objective is to convince us to lay down our arms without fighting. He will soft-talk us into believing we’re beaten, anemic, and out of options. Then—better yet—he will tell us what a stable, secure life we can have if we stop this foolish resistance that can only end in our defeat and humiliation. God offers us the ends of the earth as our possession, while the spirit of fear ‘graciously’ offers us—one vine, one fig tree, and one cistern.

The spirit of fear will come knocking on the door of any church that decides to start taking demons seriously. His sales pitch will go something like this:

“Look folks, you’ve got a nice little operation going here. Attendance is up. You’re going to remodel the sanctuary next year. You’ve got a nice little vine, a nice little fig tree, and a nice little cistern. Now what do you think is going to happen if you go messing with demons? I’ll tell you what will happen.

1.        Your church will shrink. Your best people will leave. You will become a little backwater church of eccentrics. Attendance and offerings will fall off and you won’t even be able to finance the good things you’re doing now.

2.       All the seekers, new families, and potential converts you have in your orbit will disappear and head over to the “normal” churches.

3.       You will attract every kind of unstable fanatic (not the kind of people you want in your church).

So take my advice. Just stick with being thoughtful, intelligent, reasonable evangelicals. Drop this anti-demon campaign and you’ll have a nice, prosperous little ministry here with your vine, your fig tree, and your cistern.”

Fear can be a legitimate defense mechanism when it warns us against real dangers that can harm us. But the spirit of fear is something entirely different. It creates imaginary monsters and causes us to doubt God: his character, his promises, and his power. When the Lord God interviewed Adam as to why he was hiding in the garden, Adam replied, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid.” When a Christian prepares his offering to the Lord the spirit of fear will whisper in his ear that he will not have enough left over for his own needs. When a Christian turns away from a pattern of sin the spirit of fear will plead that God cannot satisfy the desire that indulgence gratified.  In fact, when we step out in any act of obedient faith, the spirit of fear will be there to cast doubt and uncertainty, telling us that all that spiritual stuff is fine, but this is the real world and you had better look out for Number One.

CASTING OUT THE SPIRIT OF FEAR

King Hezekiah’s life provides a model for casting out the spirit of fear and walking in God’s promise: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). Hezekiah was one of the three great kings of Jerusalem alongside David and Solomon. David, Solomon, and Hezekiah are types of the three kinds of relationships we have with the world at different times and in different situations. David was a king of war, Solomon was a king of peace, but Hezekiah's calling was to coexist with his enemies. The Lord’s commission to David was to conquer his enemies; the Lord’s commission to Solomon was that he would have rest from his enemies; the Lord’s commission to Hezekiah was to occupy the land in the midst of his enemies. Sometimes we are at war, sometimes God gives us peace, but very often we are simply to occupy the land and coexist with our enemies.

King Hezekiah’s reign parallels the life of the Christian in the world in several respects: he had committed himself to submit to God’s laws, he had to fulfill this commission in a fallen, imperfect world, and he was surrounded by forces more powerful and sophisticated than he was. In this present age, we are not given authority to destroy demons or to drive them from the land. Our authority rests in evicting them from specific situations God gives us to liberate.  Deuteronomy 7:22 prefigures this temporary co-occupation, “And the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you.” The spirit of fear will argue that:

         You’ve got a business to run and you had better keep your feet on solid ground,

         You need to keep people coming through the front door on Sunday morning to meet your monthly budget, and

         You need to limit yourself to giving people solid counsel and guidance to deal with their problems in the real world.

The truth is that the Lord calls us to be wise and responsible in running our business our affairs.  He also sets clear lines of demarcation where me must put fear to death and obey him. One of the fear’s subtle lies is the proverb claiming, “God helps those who help themselves.”  This idea turns faith on its head.  God helps those who give top priority to his priorities.  Hezezkiah’s life illustrates this.

Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. Then the king of Assyria sent the Rabshakeh with a great army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. And he stood by the aqueduct from the upper pool, on the highway to the Fuller's Field. And Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, came out to him. Then the Rabshakeh said to them, "Say now to Hezekiah, "Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: "What confidence is this in which you trust? I say you speak of having plans and power for war; but they are mere words. Now in whom do you trust, that you rebel against me? Look! You are trusting in the staff of this broken reed, Egypt, on which if a man leans, it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him. "But if you say to me, "We trust in the Lord our God,' is it not He whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away, and said to Judah and Jerusalem, "You shall worship before this altar'?"' Now therefore, I urge you, give a pledge to my master the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses--if you are able on your part to put riders on them! How then will you repel one captain of the least of my master's servants, and put your trust in Egypt for chariots and horsemen? Have I now come up without the Lord against this land to destroy it? The Lord said to me, "Go up against this land, and destroy it."' Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, "Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do not speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people who are on the wall." But the Rabshakeh said, "Has my master sent me to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, who will eat and drink their own waste with you?" Then the Rabshakeh stood and called out with a loud voice in Hebrew, and said, "Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! Thus says the king: "Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you; nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, "The Lord will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria."' Do not listen to Hezekiah; for thus says the king of Assyria: "Make peace with me by a present and come out to me; and every one of you eat from his own vine and every one from his own fig tree, and every one of you drink the waters of his own cistern; until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, "The Lord will deliver us." Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered its land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Indeed, have they delivered Samaria from my hand? Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their countries from my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem from my hand?"' But they held their peace and answered him not a word; for the king's commandment was, "Do not answer him." Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn, and told him the words of the Rabshakeh.

And so it was, when King Hezekiah heard it, that he tore his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the Lord.

Then Hezekiah prayed to the Lord, saying: "O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, the One who dwells between the cherubim, You are God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Incline Your ear, O Lord, and hear; open Your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to reproach the living God. Now therefore, O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You are the Lord, You alone."

Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, "Thus says the Lord God of Israel, "Because you have prayed to Me against Sennacherib king of Assyria, this is the word which the Lord has spoken concerning him:

"He shall not come into this city,

Nor shoot an arrow there,

Nor come before it with shield,

Nor build a siege mound against it.

By the way that he came,

By the same shall he return;

And he shall not come into this city,'

Says the Lord.

"For I will defend this city, to save it

For My own sake and for My servant David's sake."'

Then the angel of the Lord went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and went away, returned home, and remained at Nineveh. Now it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, that his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword; and they escaped into the land of Ararat. Then Esarhaddon his son reigned in his place. (Isaiah 36:1-22; 37:1, 15-17, 20-22, 33b-38).

A DIFFERENT SET OF RULES

‘Rabshakeh’ is not this man’s name, but it is his title and basically means ambassador or Secretary of State.  This confrontation between Rabshakeh and Hezekiah is a type of the conflict between the spirit of fear and the Christian.   Like us, Hezekiah must relate to two worlds.  He has a business to manage in the real world just like churches have monthly expenses, payroll obligations, and income projections. Hezekiah must schedule municipal projects and expenses, pay bills, and make business decisions like any other king.  But he is not any other king.  He is the Lord’s anointed servant and he confesses a God in heaven who provides for all his needs according to a different set of rules.  He testifies that all of his material needs are supplied by his God who is not material but Spirit.

From fear’s perspective, this is all nonsense.  Fear knows that power and shrewd calculation are necessary for survival.  Rabshakeh has all of these things.  He knows the strength of his opponents as well as his own.  Hezekiah has shown great daring in declaring Judah's independence from Assyria, but he has nothing to back it up.  Hezekiah has devoted his energy to spiritual reform instead of foreign policy.  He has repaired the Lord’s temple which was desecrated by his father Ahaz.  He re-established the priesthood, the Levitical sacrifices and the Passover.  He has destroyed the pagan altars and high places instead of raising the tribute money required by Assyria.

From a secular standpoint, Rabshakeh analyzes Hezekiah's situation perfectly, “I say you speak of having plans and power for war; but they are mere words. Now in whom do you trust, that you rebel against me?” Hezekiah has no alliances, no power: only empty words. Rabshakeh charges Hezekiah’s with three “mistakes:”

      Hezekiah has applied real resources (time/money) to spiritual priorities,

      Hezekiah has been politically incorrect in matters of religion, and

      Hezekiah has applied spiritual solutions to practical problems.

In fact, the one attempt Hezekiah made at foreign negotiations backfired. In a moment of weakness, Hezekiah struck an alliance he should never have made.  He turned to Egypt for help just before Egypt suffered a major defeat. Rabshakeh taunts Hezekiah for this political miscalculation. Strategically speaking, Hezekiah chose the wrong ally at the wrong time. From fear’s viewpoint, Hezekiah is a poor politician.

Rabshakeh goes on to criticize Hezekiah's approach to religion itself. Hezekiah has been far too concerned with spiritual truth. He has shown no willingness to compromise in order to build a broad support base. He insists that everyone must worship at the altar of God's temple. Hezekiah has apparently not understood the political importance of recognizing all religions as being equally valid.

Charles Colson related how effectively this strategy was used when he was in the White House serving Nixon administration. Whenever the administration needed backing to push through a major policy package, it was necessary to win the support of conservative religion. Nixon and his aides would spare no effort to court these leaders. They would be wined and dined in the most luxurious fashion. Nixon’s objective was to convince these evangelical leaders that he stood for the same things they stood for. And according to Colson, Nixon was a master at it. This is the time-tested political use of religion. The politician tries to satisfy as many people as possible. Nixon understood this. But Hezekiah rejected this strategy. Instead of playing his political cards wisely, Hezekiah concerned himself with revealed truth and inner convictions.

LET’S GO OVERBOARD!

Rabshakeh also ridiculed Hezekiah’s appeal to God in the face of real, material disaster. Fear ridicules us when we try to bring our God to bear on the affairs of real life. Power, wealth, influence, connections: these are the things fear knows bring deliverance. Religion is nice as long as it’s kept in its place away from things that matter, as long as one doesn’t go overboard, as long as one doesn't appeal to the Bible or Jesus when the chips are really down.

The spirit of fear will do its best to try to draw the believing Christian away from faith in God’s deliverance. The call to surrender and compromise is a timeless argument. Make peace with me. Relax your standards and convictions. Stop being so concerned about theology. Come over to our side and you will be well taken care of. Rabshakeh expresses fear’s appeal precisely. The spirit of fear reduces Christian faith to the level of just another religion. “First make sure the church is full and the bills are paid. People in this town depend on your church for so many things. Let that high-energy rock‘n’roll church that can afford the risk take on the devil.”

Hezekiah sat helplessly trapped in Jerusalem with nothing to do and nowhere to go. He had no strategy of his own and no answer for Rabshakeh’s taunts. From fear’s perspective they were all true. Hezekiah had no political leverage. His effort at foreign diplomacy had failed. His faithfulness in the religion had brought no answers.

Hezekiah's situation reminds us of Christ’s humiliation before Pilate. The Scripture says of Jesus that, “he answered him not one word.” From a human perspective, Jesus could say nothing that would explain why everything had turned against him. As Jesus was brought to trial, it appeared that everything he had believed in had collapsed upon him.

Every disciple of Jesus Christ will occasionally be brought to this place of humility where fear ridicules the choices he has made and the things he has trusted. Very often, as with Hezekiah (and with Jesus), there will be no answer to give. It does us more good than we know to be in a position where no answer will have meaning for our accuser. Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time to be silent and a time to speak. The human ego does not like the time of silence. Being the prideful creatures we are we want our faith in God to be justified at all times. But God allows us to be humiliated for our own good.

After I graduated from seminary, I had a very difficult time finding placement. For a while I was peeling vegetables in a kitchen about a quarter mile from the college. That was a humiliating time for me. I had three college degrees. I had boasted about how God had led me here and led me there. And yet I had no answer for the world concerning my ‘dismal’ situation. I didn’t really want to see my friends or write to my relatives. There was nothing I could have answered that would have had any meaning for fear.

KNOWING WHAT TO GET UPSET ABOUT

But Hezekiah's response to Rabshakeh shatters fear with its boldness, “O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You are the Lord, You alone.” Hezekiah’s greatness as a king is seen in the fact that he knew what to get upset about. He understood that now God's honor was at stake. Rabshakeh’s blasphemous speech gave a whole new perspective to this struggle. Sennacharib had insulted the living God. God’s name must be vindicated. Too often, we are more concerned about our own honor and welfare. We are more worried about what people will think of us than what they will think of God. God is not especially concerned about your honor or mine, but he is very jealous over his own honor. When we pray for God’s name to be lifted up we always know we are praying in his will.

We also see Hezekiah’s greatness in that he knew the limits of his abilities. He knew he was powerless to defend God’s honor. “God, you’ve got a problem!” Only God could give an answer to Sennacharib. This was the right time for the king to go to the temple rather than the war room. Hezekiah does not pray for deliverance so that his own reputation and kingdom will be saved, but in order that God’s honor will be upheld before the nations.

How quickly we forget this priority in our prayers! We are desperate to vindicate ourselves, but not nearly so eager to see God’s name honored.  Look at God’s motivation for answering Hezekiah’s prayer:

“For I will defend this city, to save it

For My own sake and for My servant David's sake.”

I really believe that if we always prayed contending for God’s name to be lifted up that our prayers would be a lot more powerful than they are.

Finally, we see the hand of God in deliverance, “Then the angel of the Lord went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead.” Here is God’s judgment on the spirit of fear that has measured its power to the man.  Sennacherib, who has taken every material precaution for victory, is defeated even as he reaches out for his prize.  Hezekiah, who has devoted his energies to God, is delivered. In the final analysis, it was Hezekiah who paid attention to the things that mattered.  Rabshakeh, who laughed at Hezekiah’s naïve approach to real-world affairs, saw his own hopes crushed.  All the things he considered so sure and solid crumbled in a single night.

The spirit of fear, like Rabshakeh, will try to convince the church how similar it is to any other organization.  It will argue that we will succeed or fail like any other business succeeds or fails. It will coax us to make peace with it, in return for which its master will grant us an allowance of security and predictability. We therefore need to know what to expect ahead of time and not be ignorant of the devil’s devices (2 Corinthians 2:11). When we hear the mocking voice of Rabshakeh drifting over our wall let’s make sure we don’t mistake it for prudent wisdom. But, like Hezekiah, let’s make sure we answer it “not a word.”  For if we focus on God’s honor rather than our own welfare and reputation, he will act to honor himself.

9. I Guess We’re Just Not That Into Spiritual Gifts

‘You see, we lost the Entwives.’ ‘How very sad!’ said Pippin. ‘How was it that that they all died?’ ‘They did not die!’ said Treebeard. ‘I never said died. We lost them, I said. We lost them and we cannot find them.’ He sighed. ‘I thought most folk knew that.’ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

JUST WHERE DID WE PUT THOSE GIFTS?

If you search the website of just about any evangelical denomination in North America you will find a statement affirming that all the spiritual gifts continue today.  On the other hand, if you assembled 100 evangelical Christians and polled them by a show of hands regarding their own spiritual gifts, the variety would be limited to maybe about six: pastor, teacher, administration, service, mercy, and helps. And these would largely correspond to their natural skills and attributes. You will not find many evangelicals today who out-and-out deny the legitimacy of the rest of the gifts. It’s just that nobody seems to know where they are. And quite frankly, we’re just not that into them. The issue is not one of theology, but of desire.

While the practical aspect of earnestly desiring spiritual gifts is that we need them to do God’s business, the more fundamental issue is one of relationship to him. They are gifts. They are the bridegroom’s presents to his precious bride. The study of spiritual gifts rightly belongs to the study of grace: “Having then gifts (charismata) differing according to the grace (charis) that is given to us…” (Romans 12:6). They are expressions of grace in every sense: God’s unconditional blessing upon us, unencumbered by any human merit, performance, faithfulness, or failure. But instead of receiving spiritual gifts in thanksgiving, evangelicals dislike them only slightly less than demons!

There is a hardness that comes upon one who refuses grace. It is a fearful act of hubris to spurn God’s grace. “Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10:29). I’ve grieved over too much evangelical teaching improperly elevating the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ above the ‘gifts of the Spirit’ in an attempt to soft pedal God’s instructions to earnestly desire, stir up, not despise, and not neglect his gifts.

The basic reason we see the gifts more operative in charismatic/Pentecostal communities is not that they have a better spiritual gifts theology. It’s because they have a childlike expectation that evangelical churches just don’t (I realize I’m painting with a very broad brush here). They earnestly desire them! Paul conceded that spiritual gifts are difficult to manage and subject to abuse by the immature. But having said that, he still commanded us to earnestly desire them!  Instead, some denominations earnestly desire that they never show up here!  They confess the biblical validity of spiritual gifts, but they certainly don’t want them: “If people want that stuff they can go to the church down the road.” After years of frustration over this contradiction, the Spirit finally released me to pursue the company of those who desire spiritual gifts over those who hold an ‘orthodox’ view of them.

So what’s the root of our psychology of ambivalence (fancy phrase)? Why is it we just can’t be bothered (unfancy phrase)? Some reasons we are uncomfortable with spiritual gifts:

1. The gifts are not given as rewards for faithful service.  We bear spiritual fruit through perseverance and patient, diligent service. But God doesn’t distribute spiritual gifts this way. This can generate resentment when the upstart church meeting in the high school gym starts growing ten times faster than we are. In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the first workers who went out in the morning were very grateful for the work.  But by the end of the day, they were griping and complaining that the owner of the vineyard was not fair and they weren’t receiving their due.

The owner did not force these workers into his vineyard.  They accepted his invitation and were happy to be chosen.  It was only after they compared their workday to the other laborers that they complained.  “I have worked harder and longer than him.  I have given up more than her.”  All such comparison is evil.  Proverbs 28:22 calls it the evil eye when we measure ourselves against our brothers and sisters: “A man with an evil eye hastens after riches, and does not consider that poverty will come upon him.”  The person with an evil eye is not content with God’s means and schedule of blessing.  He hastens after riches. The first group expected to receive more than the laborers who started later in the day.  This was a reasonable expectation because it is the way of this world.  A man who works two hours will receive twice as much as the one who works one hour.  But the owner of the vineyard did the unexpected: he paid them all the same.

There are two lessons we need to see here. First, we see that God is not bound by this world’s concept of fairness.  The owner of the vineyard rightly asks, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things?”  God distributes his blessings as he wills.  It is not our part to question how the Lord distributes his blessings.  See that at every point where the owner deviates from what is fair, he exceeds what was expected.  Is this not always the Lord’s way?  Can we not look back at our lives and see how the Lord has made more out of us than we ever expected at the beginning?  If you want what is fair join the union.  If you want the abundance of blessing that flows from the heart of God, take up with Jesus.

2. The gifts are not given to those who earnestly desire them ‘the best.’ Even though we are to seek them, we can’t earn them by seeking them well. They remain gifts of grace. God does not place the burden of performance on us; that they would come if we ‘just got it right.’ The Book of Acts is the story of the unexpected and the unpredictable.  We are intuitively uncomfortable with whatever we can’t control and schedule, so this is another potential source of impatience with spiritual gifts.

3. The gifts are not given to those who have the “right” baptism-in-the-Holy-Spirit formula. We just about always get God’s formulas wrong. Pentecostals believe in the two-experience package of conversion plus baptism in the Holy Spirit. Non-Pentecostals believe in the one-experience package of an initial Spirit baptism becoming the basis of subsequent fillings.  While I have my own convictions in these matters, my interested in nailing down the color of the gift-wrapping paper has waned. (In fact, I’ve generally received the most powerful ministry in the Spirit from those who have a different theology of the Spirit than I do!) Wherever I find God’s blessing raining down I hold my cup out.

A Christian’s position is most often determined by his theological environment.  He knows he has had or desires a powerful experience with the Holy Spirit, so he adopts the view that is closest at hand. Let’s not get more focused on the gift-wrapping than the gifts. Is it really that important to get everyone lined up on one side or the other?  Both trails get to the top of the mountain.  So let’s just come before God as little children and receive his gifts however he chooses to wrap them.

GIFTS VS. OFFICES

4. The Gifts of Leadership Often Conflict with the Offices of Leadership.  God leads his church through the distribution of both spiritual gifts and spiritual offices and they exercise a corrective function toward each other. The gifts appoint the offices (Acts 13:1-3) and the offices test the gifts (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21). Because of the flesh, this ‘checks and balances’ arrangement is necessary. No other Protestant community exalts and monitors the pastor as does evangelicalism. In many mainline denominations, ordination defines who can distribute communion. In evangelicalism, it defines who can enter the pulpit. We ‘ordain’ pastors while all other ministries receive much less scrutiny. But the offices don’t distribute the gifts, God does. Therefore, the manifestation of spiritual gifts has been more of a people movement than an office movement.

When the Spirit desires to go to war he often uses the gifts rather than the offices to chart the course. I used to find it somewhat curious that theological work and publishing continued during the two world wars. But then it occurred to me that these pastors were doing exactly what God called them to do. They were not prophets called to understand and declare the times. They were pastors called to shepherd the flock at all times.

Evangelical seminaries train pastors to be lawyers, not soldiers. The seminary student learns to take other theologians to court, not to wage war against the forces of darkness. This is not a criticism of the seminary system because the church needs pastors who can think biblically, refute error, and rightly divide the word of truth. But it is the nature of pastors to arrange and systematize the things of God. Because we are more comfortable with the stability pastors provide, we tend to resist the spiritual gifts the Spirit uses to change course outside those systems. From the viewpoint of the offices, the Spirit often seems to empower all the wrong people at all the wrong times in all the wrong places to declare a change of focus.

5. The gifts are not given to the spiritually mature (the problem in Corinth). Essentially, God gives spiritual gifts because he wants to bless his church and through his church bless the world.  So spiritual gifts are the ‘equipment’ of grace, that grace might flow through the church and into the world.  God always gives grace to us that grace might flow through us.  Spiritual gifts are given so that healing, knowledge, encouragement, wisdom, guidance, and deliverance might overflow and benefit as many as possible.

Spiritual gifts are not always permanent endowments like the diplomas we hang on our walls.  The traditional view teaches that every member of the body “possesses” one or more spiritual gifts that he needs to nurture and develop.  But once again, the implication of this position is that the manifestation of spiritual gifts is the result of maturity and discipline.  What we end up with is churches full of Christians who haven’t the faintest idea how to ‘discover’ or ‘develop’ their spiritual gift.  They then feel guilty about not bringing forth what they are told is inside them.

In the community of the church body, it is of little importance who receives a particular manifestation of a spiritual gift.  For example, if a prophecy is given, the prophet is blessed as God uses him, the subject of the prophecy is blessed as he sees God’s specific concern for his life, and the rest of the body is blessed as they witness God's presence among them. Thus the exhortation to “eagerly desire the gift of prophecy” (1 Corinthians. 14:1) is best understood as a corporate prayer for the church.

In the whole context of Paul’s spiritual gift discussion, we should not understand him to be encouraging each individual to hope that he is the one who manifests gift ‘X.’  The same applies to the full range of spiritual gifts, as in verse 7: “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good."  This understanding frees us up to receive and enjoy spiritual gifts for a number of reasons:

         It recognizes spiritual gifts as the grace of God rather than the works of man.

         It releases us from the obligation of finding and developing our “spiritual gift.”

         It leaves the timing and mixing of spiritual gifts up to God.

         It frees us from worrying about which members of the body the Spirit is using.

6. The gifts force us to face up to the prophetic component of leadership. In the Bible, spiritual gifts are bestowed through joint commissioning by the prophetic and administrative leadership of the body, who are sometimes mistrustful of each other. But spiritual gifts come through the laying on of hands and engage the whole body in ushering them in. (Acts 9:7, 1 Timothy 4:14, 2 Timothy 1:6).

Evangelical churches have formal ceremonies for ordaining and laying hands on those called to pastoral office. But it was Timothy’s gift, not his office which was given “by prophecy with the laying on of the hands of the eldership.” This would indicate that we should hold such a service for every Christian to confer and ordain spiritual gifts. These ‘giftings’ should be solemnized just as formally as marriage and baptism.

The fact that the Spirit confers gifts through the leadership’s hands also makes the church body central to their manifestation. It is often necessary for gift-hungry evangelicals to attend conferences to benefit from the manifestation of spiritual gifts, only to return to their own congregations where they are not activated.

7. The gifts come through exercise (2 Timothy 1:7). The Spirit tends to give gifts as we take risks and are willing to fail. He tends to distribute more gifts in the laboratory than the lecture hall. The timid, the proud, and the perfectionist will not see gifts manifest. Unless we are willing to see beginners stumble and skin their knees as they stir up their gifts we will probably not see much happen.

I’VE GOT A SECRET

8. The gifts will expose the secrets of our hearts (1 Corinthians 14:25). I can tell you from personal experience that Christians with secrets to hide don’t want revelatory gifts going off when they’re least expected! I can recall at least four incidents when a prophet fingered me as being out of line and in need of repentance. I don’t know how much detail of my sin the Spirit gave the prophet or how much the prophet knew that he held back. But I was squirming (to use a theological term). Churches where the gifts are operating are not secret-friendly places!

9. The gifts allow everyone to be equal. If we have been in the church for any length of time at all, we have heard this principle taught: God appoints leadership in the church not to do the ministry, but to equip the people so they can do ministry. Yet in spite of this revealed pattern for ministry, it has been accurately stated that the church often resembles a professional football game: 80,000 people desperately in need of exercise cheering on 22 men desperately in need of rest (OK, 24 in Canada).

Why does this happen? Why does evangelicalism grant pastor-teachers a professional, ordained status distinct from the other gifts of the Spirit? The simple answer is that we are more comfortable confirming people’s callings when we can assess their attributes using our natural faculties.  But we object to callings we can’t control and assess in the same way. In order to see this misperception illustrated we’re going to take a look at Numbers 11:

Now when the people complained, it displeased the Lord; for the Lord heard it, and His anger was aroused. So the fire of the Lord burned among them, and consumed some in the outskirts of the camp. Then the people cried out to Moses, and when Moses prayed to the Lord, the fire was quenched. So he called the name of the place Taberah, because the fire of the Lord had burned among them. Now the mixed multitude who were among them yielded to intense craving; so the children of Israel also wept again and said: “Who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our whole being is dried up; there is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes!” Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its color like the color of bdellium. The people went about and gathered it, ground it on millstones or beat it in the mortar, cooked it in pans, and made cakes of it; and its taste was like the taste of pastry prepared with oil. And when the dew fell on the camp in the night, the manna fell on it. Then Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, everyone at the door of his tent; and the anger of the Lord was greatly aroused; Moses also was displeased. So Moses said to the Lord, “Why have You afflicted Your servant? And why have I not found favor in Your sight, that You have laid the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I beget them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a guardian carries a nursing child,’ to the land which You swore to their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all these people? For they weep all over me, saying, ‘Give us meat, that we may eat.’ I am not able to bear all these people alone, because the burden is too heavy for me. If You treat me like this, please kill me here and now—if I have found favor in Your sight—and do not let me see my wretchedness!” (Numbers 11:1-15)

Here’s Moses leading the children of Israel through the desert. And Moses has been Mr. Everything.  He gets all the directions from God, he prays for the people when they need it, he sends out for pizza. If they want pepperoni instead of anchovy Moses takes it back and exchanges it. He’s doing everything.  And finally, Moses gives out. He breaks down. “God, is this your idea of fun: to send me out here with these losers who can’t tie their own shoelaces? I didn’t beget this crowd. You take care of them yourself. I want out. You can just beam me up right now. I’m through with this turkey outfit.”

What caused Moses to blow his cool? If we say he was trying to carry the whole load himself, that’s really only half true. Moses had already farmed out a lot of the administration of leadership (Exodus 18:13-24). Moses had already restructured Israel so that he was not carrying the whole load so why did he burn out here? What we need to see is that, even though he had distributed the administrative load, he had kept the spiritual load all to himself. It was Moses who prayed for water and manna and quail. It was Moses who always interceded in prayer for Israel. Spiritual labor is much more taxing, draining, and exhausting than administration.

This is a common affliction of pastors and leaders in the church. They let a few administrative duties go, but carry the spiritual ministry of the church themselves. A seminary registrar once told me they were quite alarmed over the number of graduates dropping out of pastoral ministry after one or two years. They were all coming down with Moses’ disease: “Mosaisis:” “I am not able to bear these people alone because the burden is too heavy for me.” I wanted to tell him (but didn’t) that the whole philosophy and structure of that seminary was geared to creating an attitude in young pastors that was going to lead to Mosaic burnout: the view that the people were not capable of real ministry.

There is often the attitude that the ministry of the church is like a fine piece of china. You can’t let too many people handle it or its going to end up shattered on the floor.  Do you remember what the Lord said to Peter about the church? “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”  We believe the church can withstand the forces of hell, but somehow it can’t withstand its own people doing spiritual ministry.

“So the Lord said to Moses: ‘Gather to Me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tabernacle of meeting, that they may stand there with you’” (verse16). There are a few principles we need to see here. First, we need to understand that God is not changing strategies. We might get the impression that God has finally realized this job is too big for one man, so now he is switching over to corporate leadership. No, what’s happened is that Moses has arrived at a teachable moment. He has reached a point of such desperate need that he is now ready to learn something he wasn’t ready for earlier.

God uses teachable moments in our lives. Very often, we are not that interested in learning something new until a crisis makes us cry out for change. “God, I can’t take this anymore!” “OK, now it’s time for the lesson.  You’re ready.”  Remember that Moses was the guy who was going to overthrow Egypt all by himself. He has prone carrying the whole burden on his own.  God was waiting for that teachable moment.

“Then I will come down and talk with you there. I will take of the Spirit that is upon you and will put the same upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it yourself alone” (verse17). When Moses looked at these elders of Israel he saw capable administrators and maintenance workers, but he had not seen spiritual ministers. But God says, “I can put my Spirit on these just like I did with you.” Sometimes we get the idea that spiritual ministry can’t be done by anybody else. It forgets that the function of leadership is to equip the saints for ministry because God has ordained the saints for ministry.

Then you shall say to the people, ‘Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat; for you have wept in the hearing of the Lord, saying, “Who will give us meat to eat? For it was well with us in Egypt.” Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you shall eat. You shall eat, not one day, nor two days, nor five days, nor ten days, nor twenty days, but for a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you, because you have despised the Lord who is among you, and have wept before Him, saying, “Why did we ever come up out of Egypt?”’” And Moses said, “The people whom I am among are six hundred thousand men on foot; yet You have said, ‘I will give them meat, that they may eat for a whole month.’ Shall flocks and herds be slaughtered for them, to provide enough for them? Or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, to provide enough for them?” (verses 18-22).

We just want to note in passing here the cynical attitude of Moses at this point. Overwork and exhaustion leads to cynicism. Because Moses was frustrated and had seen his own limitations, he transferred those on to God.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Has the Lord’s arm been shortened? Now you shall see whether what I say will happen to you or not.” So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered the seventy men of the elders of the people and placed them around the tabernacle. Then the Lord came down in the cloud, and spoke to him, and took of the Spirit that was upon him, and placed the same upon the seventy elders; and it happened, when the Spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied, although they never did so again. But two men had remained in the camp: the name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad. And the Spirit rested upon them. Now they were among those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, and said, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” So Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, one of his choice men, answered and said, “Moses my lord, forbid them!” (verses 23-28).

We always have to be careful of the choice men. I mean the second generation who follow the great, visionary leaders. It is the second generation of any great movement of God that becomes zealous to lock up the ministry away from the people. These are the ones who want to enshrine the methods of their mentors and prevent any further development. Joshua forgot that the Spirit comes from the Lord, not from Moses.

“Then Moses said to him, ‘Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!’” (verse 29).

I think God Gave this word through Moses to be the pastor’s prayer. This is the goal: that all of the saints be equipped for the ministry and be operating in the spirit. The offices of leadership need to be aware of the Joshua syndrome: of thinking that their church’s ministry is such an exclusive and sophisticated business that only a select few can do real spiritual ministry.

JEALOUSY OVER GIFTS

10. The gifts prevent everyone from being equal. If we continue on to Numbers 12, we see our final objection to spiritual gifts: The second reason why God’s pattern for ministry is not followed relates to Paul’s observation of the jealousy among different parts of the body (1 Corinthians 12).

“Then Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married; for he had married an Ethiopian woman. So they said, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has He not spoken through us also?” And the Lord heard it.” (verses 1,2).

A few things we want to note here. First Aaron and Miriam chose a smoke screen issue to cover their dirty work. Moses’ wife had nothing to do with anything, but they dressed up this issue to cover up their real motive: jealousy. Second, who was it that objected to Moses’ unique role in leadership?  It wasn’t Joe Israelite, with no ministry experience. It was the inner circle: leaders who already had a taste of notoriety. Miriam was a prophetess and Aaron was a spokesman for Moses. Third, their complaint had a sliver of truth. Moses was not the only one God had spoken through. So because God had used them in ministry as well, they looked at Moses and asked, “What’s he got that we haven’t got? Why should he have this special calling?”

Their implied argument here was that everyone should be equal: equal ministries, equal gifting—equal. They didn’t want to get rid of Moses. They didn’t want to take him out and drop him in a hole somewhere. They just wanted to make sure he didn’t have some special status they couldn’t have also. Ephesians 4:11 says. “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” What does it say Christ gave for the equipping of the saints?  Did he give an equipping team of non-descript equals? No! He gave leaders divinely ordained to specific spiritual ministries; ministries that are inaccessible to anyone not appointed to them because Christ only gave some to be serve in those roles.

In Numbers 11 we see the equality of ministry.  In Numbers 12 we see the inequality of ministry. I wonder how many of us can hold these two concepts in tension and paradox. Unless we can think in terms of tension and paradox, then we will never comprehend God’s revealed will in Scripture. The human tendency is always to embrace one side or the other. We may get all excited about equality in ministry.  We may talk about the fact that everybody gets a spiritual gift and about the priesthood of all believers. That’s good Numbers 11 theology.  “Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and the Lord would put his Spirit on them.” Great Stuff! But in affirming that truth, we must not neglect the principle taught in the next chapter, that, even though the Spirit was poured out on the multitude, Moses still had a unique office. It doesn’t say that a bunch of equally-appointed saints just sort of mutually equip each other. It is necessary to recognize who the “some” are that Christ has given. A church can’t grow up to maturity on equality alone. We are to hold up Numbers 11 and Numbers 12 together: The Spirit resting on everyone, but some appointed to unique offices.

11. The gifts are not the same as our innate talents and aptitudes. Every spiritual gift is supernatural. The gift of teaching, for example, is not simply the skill to interpret the Bible and apply it to Christian living. It is the Spirit-led awareness of when, where, and how God wants his word taught.  It is that mysterious appointment where God moves a preacher to teach a truth which may seem very ordinary to him, but is life changing for a certain hearer at that moment. Preachers will testify how they were compelled to bring a certain message (or even a last minute switch) to a service. They have no idea why, but God had prepared someone who needed to hear it. “When He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth” (John 3:16). The Spirit did not simply give us a map of the Christian faith and then leave.  He guides us himself and the gift of teaching is one of the ways he does this.

10. Is Evangelical the New Liberal?

The path of error is always downward. We have taken one step in the wrong direction; God knows where we shall stop. Charles Spurgeon

Of the three main streams of Protestantism Christianity (liberalism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism), it can be argued that only liberalism and Pentecostalism live consistently with their respective confessions. Liberal Christianity conducts its affairs in accordance with its conviction that the Bible is an out-dated historical relic skewed by primitive anthropological superstitions modern man must spit out like seeds from a watermelon (I actually remember when watermelons had seeds).  Pentecostals confess a spiritual world characterized by ecstatic spiritual manifestations, prophetic words, absolute Bible promises, and direct confrontation with demonic powers. They likewise live out these beliefs, heedless of the often derogatory labels society pastes on them. But evangelicalism’s identity crisis lies in the fact that it formally professes the same spiritual reality as its Pentecostal brethren, yet largely refuses to come to terms with its implications.

This leads me to ask the unsettling question: Is evangelicalism the new liberalism? I ask this because I’ve logged enough time among the liberals to observe their sequential steps into heresy. I spent 2½ years in a small mainline church on Haida Gwaii that was off the left side of the scale even for that liberal denomination (A story in itself I can’t go into here). I learned something then that surprised me and made me adjust my understanding of how theological liberalism works. It is the fact that the liberal apparatus does not jettison inconvenient articles of faith because it finds them offensive (although offense ultimately follows). But it discards them because in the moment there seems to be no value in retaining them any longer. It becomes convinced it can do everything it needs to do without this sentimental, old albatross that seems to be more of a drag than a benefit. But every disobedience immediately causes a number of trains to leave the station whose destinations we will only discover upon our arrival. During a period running roughly from 1850 to 1950, the mainline streams of Protestant Christianity gradually rejected the doctrine of biblical inspiration.  The inevitable consequence of this departure was the elevation of human reason in the church’s thinking.  The church’s priorities increasingly took their bearings not from revealed truth, but from contemporary social opinion.

WATER REALLY DOES FLOW DOWNHILL

It is critical to point out that the fathers of liberal Protestant theology could not foresee 21st-century society’s dark descent into moral chaos. They would be aghast. They would condemn the concessions of today’s mainline denominations to postmodern thought. Yet their condemnations would fall upon themselves. For once we plant the seed in the garden, we no longer control what kind of plant springs up. Once the floodgate is opened high up on the slopes, the stream runs down its predetermined course to the waiting valley below. In their own time, these men did not see the necessity of retaining the doctrine of inspiration delivered to them.  They were blinded by their confidence that the tent of Christian morality would somehow stay up after the poles and stakes of its fundamental doctrines were discarded.

These men were not outwardly evil.  They were not trying to destroy Christianity, but to save it. They believed Western society would reject Christianity unless the church abandoned its teaching of verbal inspiration; that the historic faith was about to be swallowed up by modern philosophy and science.  Jesus declared, “Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”  But unbelief does not give God credit for being able to preserve his church. Every generation, in one form or another, is tempted to distort some element of the faith in order to save it.

And so, having cut its anchor line to the Holy Spirit, the church drifted further and further into the waters of human opinion and speculation.  When it did speak out on moral issues, it was simply to concede what society in its own imagination was demanding. For as liberal theology is pressured by social opinion in any particular area, it naturally bends in that direction and regards any biblical contradictions as out-dated customs from an irrelevant bygone culture.  The one shallow protest came from the neo-orthodox theologians in the first half of the twentieth century.  They wrote in that brief moment of exhilarating twilight following liberalism’s flight from the light of biblical inspiration.  They took no little comfort in remaining within the lengthening shadow of the orthodox faith they had abandoned, like small children in the marketplace: full of boldness, confidence, and excitement as long as mother remained in full view.  Their failing, of course, was in the imaginary bridge they tried to construct between “salvation history” and real history. And so we come down to the present day.  Society demands that God adjust his worldview to its own and liberal Christianity is only too happy to oblige.

SOCIETY ALWAYS SEEKS THE CHURCH’S BLESSING FOR SIN

We often tell ourselves society ignores our spiritual convictions.  But exactly the opposite is true.  Society is always a mirror of God’s people.  Behind every trend in society is the church’s blessing.  Every people is governed by what is going on in the church, by what is going on among the people of God. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” In the same way, Paul says of the church, “You are the pillar and ground of the truth.” In all of its groping for what is right and wrong, society begins with what the church has ‘loosed.’ Never allow anyone to belittle the church’s teaching ministry. Young people will tend to get impatient with their elders: the routine, the predictability, the year in/year out pattern of preaching and teaching.  When are they going to get excited?  When will they get radical?  When will they rise up and change society, they ask?  But in their faithfulness lies the hope of the world!

Is God angry with today’s lawless, self-determining culture?  Yes, I would daresay he is.  But if I understand Scripture rightly, God has reserved a harsher judgement for the ministers of his church whose unbelief has led to this present situation.  Luke 17:1 says, “It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” It is a fearful thing when we lead others astray through our own unbelief.

What distresses you most about our present age?  What immoral behavior causes you to wring your hands in anguish?  Whatever neglect, distortion or unfaithfulness is found in the church; the same error seeps out and poisons society’s waters.  The church’s ‘small’ sins today become the greenhouse for society’s ‘big’ sins tomorrow.  For this reason Paul chastised the church in Rome, declaring: “For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”

But we are conservatives. We are evangelicals.  We are those who profess to hold to the inerrant inspiration of the Bible.  What is in this warning for us?  The lesson is precisely this: that it is one thing to confess we believe the whole Bible.  It is another thing to actually obey those teachings we find unreasonable.  For in whatever particular we fall short, there lies our unbelief.  We all face the temptation to disregard certain difficult Bible teachings.  There are some teachings that fall out easily to us in their appeal, their logic, and their immediate benefits.  We find obedience to these teachings satisfying to the soul and pleasing to the mind.  But there are other commands of God that strike us as being offensive, irrational, unrealistic, inconvenient, impractical, or humiliating.

WHAT CAN IT HURT?

It is an easy thing for us to criticize the mainline churches for their doctrinal lapses. 100 years ago the liberal churches rejected the authority of the Bible because they did not see the harm in doing so.  Instead of remaining faithful to the doctrines of the deity of the Son of God, his atoning death, and justifying righteousness, the reality of human depravity, the need for spiritual rebirth, and the necessity for the Holy Spirit's gracious work; they were content to preach the moral teachings of the New Testament and the sufficiency of human will to attain them. But a hypocrite is someone who harshly judges those who took an earlier train to the same destination he is bound for. Are we any better if we turn away from the teachings we find unreasonable?  How often do we avoid certain difficult teachings of the Bible because we do not see the harm in doing so?  Unbelief always starts us on a path where the end cannot be seen from the beginning.

THREE KINDS OF UNBELIEF

The sin of unbelief is not restricted to those who commit it outwardly.  The pagan has the luxury of rejecting the authority of the Bible without contradiction.  The evangelical must find more discreet ways to do it.  Unbelief among God’s people takes on many subtle forms. Three three forms of unbelief we especially need to guard against are avoidance, indifference, and rationalizing.

Avoidance is the practice of skirting around teachings that we find especially difficult to apply.  We don’t dispute the existence or truthfulness of these teachings.  We just don’t go there very often.  We take the attitude that we will leave them alone if they leave us alone.  A good example of avoidance is our attitude toward Scriptures that prohibit the hoarding of wealth and riches.  Many Christians manage their finances exactly the way the pagans around them do and choose to ignore the biblical warnings against hoarding.  It is an uncomfortable thing to come upon these Scriptures for our intent is to avoid them and to surround ourselves with those more conducive to our practices.   A common strategy of avoidance is to stack up verses that support the road we want to take and turn away from the troublesome verses.  But the Holy Spirit is very faithful in this regard.  If we find certain teachings weighing heavily on our consciences, we can be assured he is beckoning us to obedience, and that we would do well to submit to his visitation.

A second form of unbelief is indifference.  Indifference is the sin of having no regard for the things of God.  As with avoidance, the truthfulness of the teaching is not denied. We just brush it off with a, “No, thank you” and hope it goes away quietly. This was the sin of Capernaum.  They did not deny who Jesus was.  They just wanted him to be who he was somewhere else.  They didn’t want the things he brought into their district.  They were too messy.  They upset the city’s order and stability.

It is a tremendous affront to God when his people are indifferent to his visitation. When the world rejects the things of God we understand that it is because the god of this age has blinded their minds to his mercy.  But when the church is indifferent to the table the Lord has set before it, it is a sign of spiritual illness.  In the natural world we observe that a person with no appetite is sick; and that if this condition continues he will draw near to death.  So it is with God’s people, that if they have no desire to receive the gifts of Jesus, they take on the condemnation of Capernaum who, “when they saw Him, they begged Him to depart from their region.”

Third, rationalizing is the practice of explaining away teachings of the Bible that we find irrational, inconvenient or impractical.  You can generally recognize rationalizing by the argument of the need to be sensible, realistic, or responsible. “Sure, we know what the Bible says, but just think of the consequences if we applied that literally.”  For example, the Bible teaches many principles of church discipline that can seem overly harsh.  Far too many churches use rationalizing in appointing leaders who are biblically disqualified.  “Oh, but he has so many wonderful qualities. His ministry bears so much fruit. The problems really aren’t his fault.  But we prayed about it.”  This is an old story and many churches have paid a high price later on for rationalizing away God’s requirements for leadership.

Rationalizing also can be a particular hazard for the mature Christian who brings his failures, his disappointments, and his mistakes to his spiritual walk. The experience of years can sometimes bring undue caution and doubt to bear against the promises of God.  The mature Christian may mistake the genuine faith of the young Christian for naiveté and immaturity.  For this reason, the mature Christian must realize that unbelief often masquerades as wisdom.

All three of these errors—avoidance, indifference and rationalizing—are, in essence, unbelief.  They are subtle acts of rebellion we commit while professing outwardly to accept the whole counsel of God.  We make our covenants with these compromises because they seem insignificant at the time and we don’t see the harm in doing so.  But we can never see the harm in doing so.  That is always the relationship of the present to the future.  Capernaum did not understand the implications of asking Jesus to leave, but they knew it was wrong.  100 years ago the church could not foresee today’s moral crisis, but it knew better than to reject the authority of the Bible.  We can always find plenty of justification for unbelief.  Obedience is impractical, it brings too many risks, it conflicts with our plans, it will cost money, or it will upset the people we want to attract.

Our Lord’s condemnation of Capernaum’s unbelief shows us that we need to consider carefully the intents of our hearts. For when we examine ourselves we have a natural tendency to focus primarily on the sensual sins that arise from our physical appetites and temptations.  And if the Spirit does not reveal any acts of lust, envy, pride, anger, or greed in our hearts, we can easily suppose we have passed the test. But it is exactly at this point that Capernaum fell short and earned its condemnation.  For it is true that, in the onslaught of temptation, a man may impulsively fall into sensual sins that have their own consequences and prices.  Who among us is so strong he can guarantee he will never submit to the attraction of the moment?

BEWARE THE SIN OF THE HIGH HAND

But there is a second man who controls his passions out of self-interest, in whom there is no outward flaw or blemish, yet in his heart he has measured out his unbelief deliberately through cold calculation.  This second man is in much greater danger from that hardening of heart from which he may not have a chance to repent.  For there is a dreadful finality in the sin of high-handed unbelief.  God’s pronouncement over Capernaum shows that it had failed in this higher obligation. And in this failure we see why it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the Day of Judgment than for Capernaum.

Obedience doesn’t mean taking the ninety-nine steps we find comfortable, familiar, and where we clearly discern the rationale behind the command. It means taking the one step we find most unreasonable. The doorway to God’s blessing is always through that one step of obedience our natural sensibilities find most unnecessary.  And if we turn away in unbelief from that one step what profit is there in the ninety-nine acts of submission?  What credit is there in obeying the things of God that are reasonable and obvious to us?  Even the pagan does that.

THE PROPHET WILL FINISH WHAT THE KING NEGLECTS

The thinking of 20th-century liberal Christianity was, “If we do enough other things well and faithfully, what harm will there be in abandoning the doctrine of the atonement?” How different is that from today’s evangelical mindset that hides its commission to engage in spiritual warfare under layers of other ‘good and profitable’ ministries? Martin Luther wryly observed, “We love nothing more ardently than our own feelings, judgment, purpose, and will; especially when they seem to be good.” This sentiment well characterized King Saul who proudly boasted to the prophet Samuel, “I have performed the commandment of the Lord;” to which Samuel soberly inquired, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?” (1 Samuel 15:14). It fell to the prophetic leadership to hack Agag in pieces because the office of leadership rationalized away the command to do so.

My concluding plea is for evangelicalism to recognize that faithfulness in the ninety-nine things we do well will no longer stem our enemy’s advance into our midst. Our churches are not the secure fortresses we wish they were. My testimony of how the enemy took me captive is not unique. Demons have breached our walls and taken down our men by the millions. Joel’s depiction of the marauding Assyrian hordes well describes their infiltration:

Before them the people writhe in pain;

All faces are drained of color.

They run like mighty men,

They climb the wall like men of war;

Every one marches in formation,

And they do not break ranks.

They do not push one another;

Every one marches in his own column.

Though they lunge between the weapons,

They are not cut down.

They run to and fro in the city,

They run on the wall;

They climb into the houses,

They enter at the windows like a thief. (2:6-9).

We must take up our authority to kick them out of our house.

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Table of Contents

1. Home Invasion!

2. Forty Years of Running from Myself

3. More Than Temptation

4. Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest

5. Satan Hates You and Has a Horrible Plan for Your Life

6. The Devil According to Hollywood

7. Ten Terrific Excuses for Ignoring Demons

8. One Vine, One Fig Tree, and One Cistern

9. I Guess We’re Just Not That Into Spiritual Gifts

10. Is Evangelical the New Liberal?