Spiritual Warfare in the Kingdom

One of my favorite movies as a kid was a made-for-TV Disney movie called Night Crossing.  It was the story of two families living in East Germany in the late 1970s who desperately wanted to escape into West Germany.  You may recall that at this time in history, there was a barrier erected between the East and West.  It was called the Inner German border and it ran for approximately 900 miles between the Baltic Sea and Czechoslovakia.

This border represented the formal occupation boundary between the Western and Soviet  blocs –one could say that it was the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain of the Cold War era.   It was heavily fortified, with high metal fences, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, minefields, and more.  It was quite the obstacles for people who wanted to get out of East Germany.

Nevertheless, there were some who tried.  And the movie Night Crossing was about two families who tried just that.  Cognizant that it was almost nearly impossible to cross through this fortified border, they came up with a plan to cross over it. Now, it sounds like a crazy plan, but what they decided to do was to build a hot-air balloon and to cross over the border in the dark.    So they bought the necessary materials and a lot of fabric and began sewing.

As you can imagine, building a balloon was easier said then done, and it took many attempts for them to just build a working hot air balloon.  Finally, they succeeded and they attempted to cross the border one night, but unfortunately, they were spotted by guards, the balloon crashed, and they were forced to abandon the balloon.  Fortunately, they were not hurt and they were able to return home without being discovered.

Now, you might think at this point that they might have given up, but unfazed by their failure, these two families set out to build a new balloon.  Although, now that the East German government knew that someone was trying to escape by balloon, the families had to be careful and thus they bought small sections of material over a long period of time so as not to alert others of their activity. Finally, they completed it and once again they set out one night to try to cross the border.  And those of us watching the movie wondered in great anticipation, “Would they make it this time?”

Well as they crossed over the border, they were spotted by a guard, a helicopter was sent after them, they ran out of propane, and they landed in a field. There they were greeted by a police officer.  At this point in time, those of us watching the movie felt our hearts sink.

But then one of men who had made the balloon asked the police officer if they were in West Germany, and the officer confusedly said, “Of course you are.”. And at that moment, we knew that these two families had made it.  And we rejoiced because they were finally free.  Their patience and determination had paid off.

Now I don’t know about you, but I personally love movies like this one because they tap into a deep human desire for freedom.  I think all us at some level or another long to be free of the people and things that entrap us, and we when see people breaking free of the things that oppress them, whether that is tyrannical governments, abusive family members, addictive behaviors, false thinking, or sinful behaviors, we rejoice.

And I believe we rejoice because God has set this desire in our hearts.  In fact, it is something that God desires for us.  Galatians 5:1 tells us that “It is for freedom that God set us free.”

And then there is the fact that in the passage we explored last week in Luke, we saw that Jesus announced that the Day of the Lord had arrived, and among many things, what this meant was that Jesus would now proclaim freedom for the captives as part of his ministry.  Why?  Because it is God’s heart.  And guess what?  After Jesus announced this in the synagogue, he did just that.

In today’s passage, as Jesus went throughout Capernaum, he healed and delivered people from evil spirits, and in this healing and deliverance, these people found freedom.   Just think of Simon’s mother-in-law.   As soon as she was healed, she was free to respond in love to Jesus through her acts of service.   For that is what the Kingdom of God does – it brings freedom. This is the good news of the Kingdom, and Jesus’ healings and deliverances were signs that this Kingdom had now broken into the world.  And as we continue to read through the Gospel of Luke, we will see these signs over and over again.  Thank goodness for this good news.

Of course, good news points to the fact that there is prior bad news, and as readers of these Scriptures and followers of Christ, we have to wrestle with this reality for it is only in understanding the bad news that we can fully come to appreciate the good news.

And one of the pieces of bad news of this world is that there are evil spirits who oppose the work of God and who work to entrap us in various ways – they work to take away our freedom.  In fact, we encountered several examples of these spirits in today’s Scripture passage in Luke as Jesus came across several people who were possessed in Capernaum.

Now, I don’t know what your church background has taught you about evil spirits, but I can tell you that there have been two common and mistaken responses that people have often had to the notion of evil spirits, and C.S. Lewis got at this point rather nicely in his famous “Screwtape Letters.”

Lewis said, “There are two equal and opposite errors . . .. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They [and Lewis here is referring to the spirits] themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

So, in the Western world, the common response in the last couple of centuries has been the materialist one and that has led to disbelief of evil spirits.  There is God and there is the material world and there is nothing else.  And of course, for some people, that has been taken further – there is only the material world and nothing else.  In this worldview, there is always a rational and materialist explanation to every happening in one’s life.

In contrast, much of the non-Western world and pockets of the Western world where Neopaganism exists, the response is to have an excessive interest in spirits – to seek things like knowledge of the future, healing, and power from these spirits or to try to be in conversation with these spirits.   Or for some Christians who fall in this camp, they may not seek out such things from spirits (because they know they shouldn’t), but they so-to-speak see a devil behind every corner.  Every negative happening in life is linked directly to evil or demonic activity.

Well friends, neither camp is adequate.  As Christians, we must acknowledge that evil spirits exist, we must know a bit about how they work and how they try to entrap us, and we must work to resist them. However, we must not overly focus on them.  Nor should we fear them and I want to specifically emphasize this latter point.

We need not fear.  For the Good News we hear in today’s passage in Luke is not only that Jesus desires our freedom, but that Jesus has absolute authority and power over evil spirits who try to take away this freedom.  As we saw in our passage today, all Jesus needed to say, was “Come out of him” and the spirits immediately complied with his commands.  There was no struggle; they just retreated because there was no competition.  Jesus had absolute power and authority over them. So we need not fear.

We also need not fear because the other part of the Good News is that the evil spirits’ days are numbered.  Even if they cut up for awhile as they oppose God and His plans, they will not last forever. The one spirit in today’s passage even asked Jesus “Have you come to destroy us?”  It asked this question because it knew deep down that at the end of time, God would completely put down all evil resistance.  So again, we need not fear.

Yet, there is something we must do.  We must resist these spirits.  At this time in history, we live in a space where the Kingdom is “here but not yet”. It means that when Jesus came, the Kingdom of God broke into our reality but the Kingdom in all its fullness will not be experienced until the end of time.

So while the war against evil and the evil spirits has been won in Christ through his birth, life, death, and resurrection, ensuring that at the end of time evil, sickness, and death will be completely crushed, there are nevertheless small squirmishes with the spiritual world that need to be fought until Jesus returns.

So the questions we must ask ourselves are who exactly are these spirits, how do they interact with us, and how do we resist them?

So let’s start with who they are.  The following Scriptures shed some light.   2 Peter 2:4 tells us there were angels that sinned and that God cast them into hell.  Later on in Luke 10, Luke speaks of Satan’s fall.  Revelation 12 also tells us of a battle that rages between Michael and his angels and Satan and his angels.

So from these passages, we know then that evil spirits are creatures that God created but who rebelled and continue to rebel against him, waging a battle against God has His angels.

And then in our passage from Luke today, we find out something else interesting about these spirits.

What we come to understand is thatevil spirits know exactly who Jesus is.   Remember all the spirits that Jesus exorcised from people, well they cried out something like “We know who you are – the Son of the God, the Holy One of God.

So what this shows us is that evil spirits know who God is – they know and believe the exact right things about God, yet they nevertheless choose to oppose Him, and they do this in a number of ways.  One way they do this is by taking aim at those who God has created in His own image – that is of course humankind – and in particular, they like to take aim at those who have come to put their trust in Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

How do they do this?

Well, in the case of the people Jesus encountered in Capernaum in today’s passage, the evil spirits actually possessed them, so in some way, they took over these people’s bodies, leaving them completely entrapped until Jesus freed them.  Now this weird reality does happen from time to time, but for a good majority of people, in fact for all the people I know, this is not an occurrence that they have experienced or even worry about experiencing in their lives.

So I don’t want to focus here on possession, but on oppression – and that is when spirits have some influence over our lives and entrap us in some way or resist the work of God in our lives and in our world.  Often this influence is very subtle and sometimes it piggybacks on our own addictions, idols and choices to go against God’s will, taking us further away from God’s desires for us.  Sometimes it comes in direct reaction to us obeying God and proclaiming the Kingdom through our words and actions.

Various ways that evil spirits work include making us question our identity in Christ as beloved children; making us mistrust God and question His goodness and his faithfulness towards us; and making us apathetic to the things of God and creating actual resistance in us to do a whole host of things from Bible study to prayer to attending church to loving our neighbor to you name it.  Remember, the spirits know and believe who Jesus is, yet they choose to disobey, so they are likely to try to move us into a similar posture of believing without actually following Jesus, without actually working towards obedience to God’s commands and desires.

Evil spirits can also bring great discouragement, confusion, anxiety, or discord from time-to-time as we are making progress in carrying forth some ministry.  Occasionally, they can put up both physical and spiritual obstacles in our way to try to prevent us from doing some important Kingdom work, to keep us from fully living into our gifts and call.

So for example, Jake was sharing with our preaching team this week that on the day he was supposed to go over to Walnut Hills High School back in February to meet some boys and to try to recruit them into a young life basketball team, he felt tremendous anxiety and actually felt sick to his stomach.  He almost didn’t want to leave the house.  However, he recognized that this was highly unusual – he is not one to feel such high anxiety, so he made himself leave the house and go to school. You’ll need to ask Jake for the details, but the long and short of it is that once he did go, he ended up recruiting a lot of boys, way more than he expected.  His ministry that day was very fruitful, and he almost missed it.

As another example, a couple years back when I was church planting, I felt a tremendous wall to moving forward in my ministry.  In this circumstance, I couldn’t really identify the exact nature or identity of the wall or barriers; I could just sense it and when I brought my situation to prayer and to spiritual direction, the image I kept on getting was of an invisible wall.

In my mind’s eye, I could actually see the good things that God had for me and my ministry, but as soon as I moved forward, I hit a glass wall.   In this image, I couldn’t ever reach my goal no matter how much I tried or saw the good future that God had in store for me because of the existence of this wall.  This unfortunately lasted for months so what did I do?. I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed some more.  And eventually (in a much slower timeframe than I would have preferred), the wall went away and that led me to a place where I could accept the call I have here in Cincinnati.

So what I see from my own experience and from Jake’s is that that spirits sometimes try to put up walls of resistance to the work of God in our lives

The challenge of course comes from the fact that we are dealing with unseen forces – unseen walls, traps, and lies.  When we think back to the story I shared at the beginning of the sermon of the two German families trapped inside East Germany, they knew who was denying their freedom and they could physically see the border with all its entrapments which prevented them was easily crossing it.  Finding a way to overcome that border wall and to resist the East German government was not easy, but at least they saw what they were up against and they persisted until they succeeded.

In the case of spiritual walls and traps, we don’t see. Nevertheless, we can persist and succeed in overcoming these oppositional forces.  Again, the good news of today’s passage is that Jesus desires our freedom and He has complete power and authority over the spiritual world.

So as we live in relationship with Jesus, we can resist these evil spirits by discerning when they are trying to entrap us and create walls of opposition, and then we can call on Jesus’ power and authority through the act of prayer.

So we can resist them through two steps – discernment and prayer and really these two go hand-in-hand and are often indistinguishable.

We must discern though because as I mentioned earlier in the sermon, people tend to make two mistakes with the spiritual world – to think it doesn’t exist or to overemphasize it.

So one thing I want to make clear here – in case it is not clear to you – is that just because we are feeling ill, discouraged, anxious, depressed, at odds with others, etc., etc. doesn’t necessarily mean that we are being negatively influenced by spirits.  Natural causes may explain what is happening.

Some Christians have done great harm by assuming that there is a demon behind every physical and mental ailment.   That’s an over-simplication.

I also want to make clear that if we find ourselves in sin, we can’t just pass off the blame on evil spirits – like the old joke “the devil made me do it”, which may seem to be the easy way out.  We have responsibility in the sinful choices we make and God asks us to own up to that.

But there are indeed times when evil spirits are exacerbating whatever difficult situations in which we find ourselves.

So we must discern when we are facing spiritual opposition and that may take praying with others, especially those who seem to be more sensitive to these realities.

And when we do recognize spiritual realities at play, we must pray for Jesus’ protection and power to resist and overcome them.   As in the case of me and my spiritual wall that I mentioned a few minutes ago, I had to pray for months before the wall came down, so sometimes, we may need to pray consistently about something over an extended period of time, even if we get fatigued from it.

So friends, we resist spiritual forces opposed to God and fight for freedom in our lives and in the lives of others and the world by discerning and praying.

This prayer and discernment, however, should not just be reactive, our prayers should be proactive. In all reality, we should regularly be praying the Lord’s Prayer, asking God that His Kingdom would indeed come and His will would indeed be done, trusting that as we pray this prayer that God is doing battle and pushing back the spiritual world that opposes Him.

And we should regularly be praying for all in ministry who are proclaiming God’s Kingdom, for their protection and for their guidance, and presumably that includes all of us.  For evil spirits do not want to see this Kingdom go forward for it means their eventual destruction.

And then we should be cultivating a habit of daily prayer and time with God because the more we know Him and His truth, the more we are able to recognize and discern those things that are opposite to His character, His desires, and His work in our lives and in our world – and that includes the work of evil spirits.  And of course, the opposite is true is well.  The more we know Him, the more we can know what God loves, desires, and asks of us, and then the Kingdom of can go forward little by little and freedom can break forth in our lives and in the lives of others.

So friends, as we come to the end of our time together today, let me ask a few simple questions.

First:  Are there areas in our lives where we feel entrapped or enslaved in some way?  Regardless of whether that is because of our sin, the sin of another, or the work of evil spirits, can we give those areas over to God, trusting that God desires to set us free and knowing that Jesus working in our lives has the power and authority to overcome sickness, evil, and even death?

Second:  Are there areas in our walk with Christ where we feel inner resistance or walls?   Again, whether that is because of our own sin or evil influence, can we take those things to the Lord consistently in prayer, trusting that God has the power and authority to overcome them?

Finally:  Do we regularly pray that the Kingdom of God would come and that God’s will would be done in our life; in the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors, and in the life of the world?  Are there specific ways now that we could pray for this Kingdom of freedom to come.

So why don’t we close out our time by praying the Lord’s Prayer again.