SPIRITUAL WARFARE

SPIRITUAL WARFARE

Brian GC Huggett

Satan’s attempts to silence God’s voice in this world.

The Church is God’s voice in the world and Satan’s aim is to destroy that voice so that the billions of earth’s inhabitants will not hear, or if they hear, will not listen to the gospel.  His other goal is to destroy Israel and therefore defeat God’s stated purpose of reinstating her to the land of promise.  If Satan is able to accomplish this it will prove him to be greater than God and therefore qualified to overturn God’s condemnation and judgment of himself.  But that is another story.  

Satan’s war against the Church and against its members comes on two fronts.  There are many battles but all are on one or other of these two fronts.

1. Impugning the character of God.

2. Impugning the Word of God.

By asking Eve “hath God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1), the Devil is not wanting Eve’s account of God’s prohibition but by embellishing God’s words, insinuates that God is unfair in his prohibition.  ‘Is it possible that a God of love would prohibit all fruits to his creatures’, such a prohibition would be ungracious, therefore in prohibiting any fruit God is made to seem ungracious’. 

The Devil is denying the deity and holiness of God.  He is saying in effect that God is not sovereign and does not have the right to set such standards, and that God is not righteous in setting such standards.

By telling Eve “…Ye shall not surely die” (Genesis 3:4), the Devil called God a liar; he impugned the words of God.

Today he continues to call God a liar through his emissaries: those ungodly men and women who have crept into the church unawares (Jude 1:4), those who have taken up positions of authority in the church by stealth.  These people are wolves who have dressed themselves with the trappings of religion and in their pride of academic achievement, are “never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2Timothy 3:7). Their aim is to lead ‘silly’, men as well as women, into the ditch of secular humanism.

Those who have no real knowledge of God’s will and ways; those who are ignorant of Satan’s devices; those who are careless when it comes to listening to God’s word, only these are captivated by the Devil’s philosophies.

Whether Adam was careless in relating God’s prohibition, or whether Eve was disinterested when her husband recalled God’s word is not revealed, but Eve misquoted God’s command.  God had said “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:17), but Eve added, “neither shall ye touch it” (Genesis 3:3), a seemingly insignificant addition yet proof of carelessness in handling the words of God, a careless attitude that ultimately led to disaster.

These emissaries of the Devil, these ungodly men not only misquote, but also blatantly deny the clearest truths of Scripture. These blatant denials create unease among Christians, for if the truths of Scripture are not truths, can God be trusted; can the Bible be depended on in anything it says?

Because of this apostasy, the Church has almost lost her voice in the world.  So much so that the unbelieving world remains ignorant of the truth and is completely at ease in its unbelief and rejection of the Almighty God creator of heaven and earth, for the world generally is not interested in what western ‘holy men’ have to say; there are more than enough ‘holy men’ of other religions who can just as legitimately claim people’s attention.  The world needs to know what the Word of God says and what is more important the Church needs to know, for the Church, you and I, is God’s voice to the world.

Regarding the Bible:

If God cannot oversee and furnish mankind with an infallible, inerrant and unchanging history of his dealings with his creatures he is not sovereign.  If we are to be left in the dark regarding our origin, our reason for living, and our eternal end, God is not a God of love.  If we are to be left to our own devices and philosophies then the liberals are correct and we are of all men ‘most miserable’ (1Corinthians 15:19).  But God’s love is part of his nature (1John 4:8), he has no pleasure in the death of sinners, therefore he has given an infallible, inerrant and unchanging history of his dealings with this world of men, it is the Bible.  It has been given so that all men might know the truth and in knowing the truth have everlasting life.

These wolves, these emissaries of the Devil, these false, these blind leaders of the churches refuse to enter the Kingdom of God by The Way God has ordained; the Way who is also the Truth and the Life; Jesus Christ our Lord, and they teach their congregations to follow their lead rather than the way of the Cross.  Their lead is one of unbelief and because they will not believe God’s word they cannot understand nor accept truth, nor can they have the life that truth brings to a man.

Jesus said that he had come to give life so that we might have life more abundantly (John 10:10).  In his great prayer found in John 17, Jesus said, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).  It is by knowing God and Jesus Christ as the Son of the God, that men and women have eternal life.  It is not just knowing of God, but knowing him in a real way.

The word know which John uses here is from the Gk ginōskō, which Vine’s has as “taking in knowledge; to come to know, to recognize, to understand”, it often suggests inception or the beginning of and progress to knowledge.  It is not as strong as epi-gnosis or oida; they suggest ‘fullness of knowledge’.  Oida is an expression that John uses of himself in John 8:55b; “Yet you have not known (ginōskō) begun to know him; but I know (oida) him perfectly:”

Such usage shows there is a growth in knowledge and a resultant deepening of one’s experience of eternal life, a life that can be experienced while we are in our bodies and on the earth.

We can only have this knowledge and the eternal life it brings when we have God’s Spirit within 

“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man, which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit, which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”  

What more needs to be said, these inspired words of God are found in Paul’s 1^st letter to the Corinthians chapter 2 vss 9-14.

But what are these ‘deep things of God’?  Propitiation is one and it is the foremost of all for it is the reason for the Cross.  To begin to understand propitiation however, we must first of all understand the Holiness of God, that attribute of God which is the reason for so much of the Devil’s (and his emissaries’) rebellion. 

Holiness is the absolute perfection of all that constitutes ‘being’.  What do I mean by ‘being’?  ‘Being’ is personal consciousness and will.  There are angels, spirit beings that do not have ‘bodies’ as we do (their ‘bodies’ are probably made of light) but are nevertheless created, and with personal consciousness and will.  We are human ‘beings’ with a physical body, but who also have personal consciousness and will.  It is in our personal consciousness and will that we are made in the image of God, for though God is Spirit (John 4:24), he also has personal consciousness and will only infinitely so.  It is the perfection of God’s consciousness and will that constitutes his holiness.

What has this to do with propitiation and the Cross? 

That which is perfect cannot be diluted or polluted by imperfection without ceasing to be perfect; therefore God cannot accept imperfection without ceasing to be God.  Those who expect God to accept them for what they are, are asking the impossible; God cannot be less than infinitely perfect.  We imperfect and sinful creatures are therefore lost to God unless he brings about a solution to propitiate, to satisfy the demands essential to the safeguarding of perfection.  That solution is found in the Cross of Calvary.

The essential, the fundamental means of safeguarding God’s holiness is separating sin from himself, and the separation of a sinful or imperfect ‘being’ from God is said to be death. 

God warned Adam: ‘The day you eat of the forbidden fruit you will surely die’ with the phrase ‘surely die’ literally meaning dying you shall die.  Since Adam did not drop dead the day he ate of that fruit, but lived for another nine hundred years or so, and since on that the same day Adam and his wife were separated from God and driven from paradise, it can be seen that Adam experienced two deaths, a death the very day he ate of the fruit (separation from God), and an eventual physical death.  Separation from God must equate with spiritual death.

(Those of you who have been brought up on a diet of evolution will probably deride such childish beliefs as a literal Adam and Eve, yet your derision is ill advised.  There is a great deal of damning evidence against evolution.)   

Spiritual death is not cessation of being, it is not obliteration; it is separation from God.  The ungodly might scoff at this as being of little consequence but in the eternity to come (an eternity that all mankind must face), the place of separation will be a literal Hell.  

Jesus’ teaching on Hell is that it is a place of everlasting fire, specially prepared for the incarceration of the Devil, his angels (demons), and those human beings who side with them. “Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:” Matthew 25:41. 

It is also a place of darkness and of emotional and ‘physical’ torment as you will see if you read Jesus’ words in Matthew 8:12, 13:42, 22:13, 25:30; Luke 16:24, etc. 

Weeping describes sorrow, the reaction of those who wish they had listened to the claims of Christ; wailing is the reaction of those who blame God for their predicament; and gnashing of teeth describes continuous and bitter anger and rebellion.

The propitiation required by perfection is not satisfaction in the sense of pleasure, but in redress, remedy or restoration.