While he was in the grave, Jesus had the high praises of God in his mouth and a two-edged sword in his hand, to inflict vengeance on the demonic forces and to punish them, to bind the enemy’s rulers and to carry out the judgment written against them (Psa 149:6-9). Through the Holy Spirit he had put on the whole armour of God and he stood in the day of evil. He did not just pray and then wait but actively pursued his enemies with the weapon of the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. This is the way that Jesus laid down as a standard to deal with the enemy (Matt 4:1-11). This was a vital weapon to be used in the war against the powers of hell. When John saw a vision of the resurrected Lord recorded in Revelation chapter one, a sword was coming out of his mouth. This means that every word Jesus spoke was like a deadly weapon which slew the wickedness which he engaged in hell. He went from being oppressed by all of sin, death and hell, to being saved, justified, anointed, regenerated and empowered. Then he marched boldly through the ranks of hell, declaring the truth of God as a two-edged sword in his hand, possibly quoting passages from Psalm 18, Psalm 68 and Psalm 97 that we studied in detail earlier, which we will now change to present tense. Read these, imagining Jesus’ charge against the powers of darkness in his resurrection, victoriously driving out of the prince of this world:
“Though the grave has wrapped its ropes around me, God’s light will shine in the darkness. Death is staring me in the face, but I have called to my God whose lightning scatters my enemies. Shoot your arrows, arise O God. Enemy be scattered! I am surrounded on every side by bulls and dogs but I will run against this troop. I will pursue my enemies and overtake them; I will not turn back again till they are destroyed. I will wound them, so that they cannot rise; They will fall under my feet. For You GOD have armed me with strength for this battle. Fire goes before me and consumes my foes on every side. Through the Sovereign LORD I will escape from death. God will crush the heads of my enemies. Summon your power, O God; show me your strength, O God, as you have done before.” The ultimate charge with the double-edged sword. Double: light against the enemy, prayerful to God.
What happened when he first met the enemy with full force in his wilderness temptations? He was really hungry! Visions of chocolate milkshakes and cheese burgers perhaps would mix in with the heavenly visions his Father was giving him. Suddenly he thought, “I am the Son of God. My forty days of fasting are over now I should test all that power I received in my baptism six weeks ago, practising on some of these rocks around here. I’ll finish my fast here rather than in mum’s house tomorrow. I’ll start with that stone there, it almost looks like a nice pizza… Wait a minute! That’s not me thinking all that, it is not time yet to finish my fast, its tomorrow! I know where those thoughts came from. Hey satan, man cannot survive just on sandwiches alone but on everything that God is saying.” (Mat 4:1-4). He did not cry out to the Father on this occasion saying, “God take away my hunger and help! The enemy is attacking.” God wanted him to deal directly with the onslaught and he did.
We need to do the same. Sometimes we are praying to God to remove an oppression from our lives and God is saying “You remove it!”. We wait for God to deal with our enemy, but he is often waiting for us to deal with him. The battle belongs to the Lord, but like most other things, he shares it with us; how kind! Even in his life Jesus had the practice of driving out demons. He recognised the source of many a problem as coming from the dark kingdom’s realm and each time gave it a decisive blow.
I had a primary school friend whose mum was my mum’s best friend. She went off to America after college and through her mum, we only heard bad stories about her exploits there. After I got saved, I heard that she too had come to the Lord and had returned to England. She came to my house to meet me so that we could discuss our common and newly found faith. As I walked down the stairs to meet her, her face looked like a demon! It was horrible and I was shocked. Although it was the first time I had experienced this, I kind of instinctively knew what it was, although I did not say anything to her at first. That night I had a horrible demonic dream and knew it was because I had laid hands on her in prayer and that God was confirming that she needed deliverance. A little time later, I shared with her that I felt she needed some release from some of the old influences of her previous drug habit which I felt were demonic. She freaked out at the idea that she was ‘demonized’ and would not let me pray for her. One year later she came to me asking for prayer. By then she was really in love with the Lord and had grown strong in faith. However, she told me that every morning she would wake up doubting the existence of God. At first, she thought these were her own thoughts but after she had grown, she realized that these voices were definitely not her own and that she now believed what I had shared with her. I called a friend and we sang and then spoke directly against the hallucinogenic drug demons which were still attacking her mind even though she had stopped the habit more than one year before this. She never again had the morning voices. Are there any problems in your life that may have a demonic source? You can boldly take the word of God and authoritatively yet humbly challenge that evil fallen and defeated foe in the name of Jesus to leave.
At the time when everyone in India knew that then President, Bill Clinton (the ‘white man’) had come from the USA to visit, I had an encouraging experience. I was struggling one morning not really getting anywhere with prayer or bible study; there seemed to be lots of dust on my bible and the worship songs were as dry as concrete. I got a call from a pastor who was going to pray for another pastor’s son who had begun to manifest a demon. This usually well behaved, polite young boy was threatening his dad terribly and trying to bang his head against the walls or the windows. He was shouting at his dad that he would not allow him to build the new church building. Although the pastor had prayed, he could not get the demon to leave. In the middle of continuous cursing, the demon would keep saying “Oh no, Clinton’s coming!” His dad was confused as to what it meant. As soon as we walked in, the boy pointed to me (the only white man there) and with disgust and fear said “Clinton!” Afterwards, I was very honoured that a demon was actually afraid of my arrival! As soon as we walked in, I knew we were going to have a definite victory. I usually find the local evangelists and pastors have much greater success in the area of healing and deliverance than myself. I had to hold the boy down with all my might and flowed between worship, tongues and mostly firmly and calmly commanded the fallen defeated foe to leave the boy, declaring lots of truths from the bible that the demon seemed to hate. After an hour he was fully delivered and never had the problem again. (I did not change my name or run for the next presidency.)
One thing we must remember when considering the tactics of the enemy is his severe limitations. Even his activities in the lives of the lost is severely restricted by God. Though he has some authority over the whole world he cannot just do as he pleases, as some people have been deceived to think. They therefore become afraid of the enemy and this fear is an insult to their Creator who is well able to always protect them.
Yes, there are many countries at war because the enemy has sown his tares of hatred. However, most of the countries in the world, during 90% of their histories, were not at war, contrary to the enemy’s desire. There are terrible sicknesses affecting millions, but billions of people are healthy and even those who are sick usually have 95% of their bodies working perfectly. A tiny percentage of children are born dead but the vast majority even of unbeliever’s children are born very healthy and happy! Satan has to work very hard to break through God’s line of defensives and ranks of angels who stand guard over roads, hospitals, schools and houses. As it is written: “The whole earth is full of his glory.” We will appreciate the general grace of God much more when in the last days he begins to remove it and the world descends into greater chaos.
Say someone did witchcraft against a gangster who was riding his motor bike. It would still be virtually impossible for the dispatched demon to loosen the nut securing the wheel of the bike to try to cause a bad accident. The enemy can only get in through divinely ordained entry points such as repeated, deliberate sin. If however, the gangster gave his bike for repair and the mechanic was drunk while refitting the wheel and left it totally loose, then of course an accident could happen. When the disciples were crossing the lake, the enemy could not have flown down and pushed on the boat to try and make it sink. His only entry point in that situation was rain, something ordained by God but corrupted by the enemy into the storm that threatened their lives. God creates and the enemy corrupts as he cannot create. Devils cannot just float by and give us hassle, they can only work through sin and fear and through the obvious real issues in our fallen world like tension, anger, exhaustion, accidents and disease.
The enemy’s main aim is to fire darts of deception and lies which once accepted in the hearts of the victim, lead to fear and doubt. These very fears can create all sorts of problems, miraculously. The mind is powerful. God “made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding” (Jer 51:15). That is quite a lot of work just done by his mind! We are made in his image and so our minds also have the ability to create, whether positively through faith or negatively through fear. “The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace” (Rom 8:6). We can affect our own worlds by the way we think.
Even in the Old Testament the enemy could not attack humanity directly but only through certain doorways like sin and fear. Now even these entry points have been dealt with through Christ, but it only works through faith. If your problem gets worse when someone talks about it you probably have some fear of that problem which may be its source. If you suffer from migraine headaches, you cannot talk about it, since the moment someone talks about headaches you get one! This shows you have absolutely no physical problem but a stronghold in your mind which fears the headache. Admittedly it may take lots of perseverance to clear such strong holds but if you fight the right battle, you will eventually be delivered. We should not fight as one beating the air just doing spiritual warfare against every problem focusing too much on the enemy. The writers of the New Testament give 95% of their focus to dealing with sin and unbelief rather than spiritual warfare. Rebuking and resisting the devil has its place but if we are all the time worried about what the devil is going to do, we are deceived and have the wrong focus. Although if the problem is demonic, hours of counselling may not be as effective as laying on of hands and casting out the devil in Jesus’ name.
If you have a fear of witchcraft or a fear of the devil, the moment these are mentioned, you react. You have been redeemed from all wickedness and should fear no evil, otherwise the resurrection power of Christ will not be able to help you. Often, we should ask the Lord to show us exactly where we have let fear in and find the scripture or truth from the bible which exactly speaks the opposite of how we are feeling. Jesus did not say, “Man shall not live on bread alone,” when the devil tempted him to jump off the temple. That scripture would have had no power then. He had to disarm the lie being used that moment against his mind and emotions. We have to do the same. We must be specific to be most effective.
If the enemy cannot push you off one side of the narrow path of life, he will try to push you off the other. He has deceived most people in the world that he does not exist and to those who know the truth of his existence he tries to make them think too much about him.
Throwing Knives At The Moon
I once went through a stage of this imbalance in my ministry. Whenever I went to a city for a meeting, I felt that I had to war constantly and directly with the main powers over that city. If my meeting was in one small church, why was I shouting for hours at the rulers over the whole city? I was deceived to think that if I just prayed to God that would be less powerful. Whichever way the Spirit leads us to pray, is the most powerful prayer, whether it is a cry or petition or a small thank you. He knows what is most effective in any particular situation. On the second day of the meetings, I was very sick and my assistant had to take over. We do not have authority to rebuke celestial powers.
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and power…” What types of spiritual warfare are authorized? Do we ever see the rebuke of satan over whole regions? This verse does not answer that question. Throughout the gospels we see Jesus driving spirits out of people and in Matthew chapter four, we see him speaking directly against the enemy in the middle of personal temptation. These are the only two types of examples of wrestling against principalities and powers. We never see Jesus binding the powers of darkness controlling the pharisees or the high priest. We never see the apostle Paul taking authority over the rulers of darkness over the pagan cities where he evangelized. When Jesus gave instruction to the 12 apostles on their mission, it was comprehensive, but he never mandated the binding of the strong man over the village before beginning. When he taught about the strong man it was in context of deliverance for one blind and mute person, not a geographical area (Mat 12:22-29). Trying to bind principalities over a region is as foolish as trying to throw axes and knives up at the moon; it won’t work and it would be very dangerous when they fall back down. That is unauthorized spiritual warfare. Jesus said that we bind things on earth and things in heaven are not bound by us, but others. (Mat 18:18)
I made this mistake many times in my early ministry and so did my pastor friends. We all came together to study and discuss the issue after reading the book: ‘Needless Casualties of War’ by John Paul Jackson and decided that we were going beyond the biblical limits of spiritual warfare. There is a wise holy ordained fear / respect of God's authority even that which is given to the enemy: “This is especially true of those who follow the corrupt desire of the sinful nature and despise authority. Bold and arrogant, these men are not afraid to slander celestial beings; (11) yet even angels, although they are stronger and more powerful, do not bring slanderous accusations against such beings in the presence of the Lord. (12) But these men blaspheme in matters they do not understand. They are like brute beasts, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like beasts they too will perish” (2Pe 2:10-12). Some shout and scream at principalities for which no biblical precedent is given but only warnings: “But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him, but said, "The Lord rebuke you!"” (Jud 1:9). If you are shocked by this, I strongly suggest that you purchase John Paul Jackson’s book!
We are to be like Jesus. The enemy would always like to hit us but he is very limited and unable to simply take revenge. The safest place in the universe to be is in the centre of God’s will. If it is for God’s will for us to advance and attack, then that will be a place of the greatest protection from the enemy. We are not more vulnerable when we advance or attack, that is a lie that leads many to fear. We are always in the midst of the battle and therefore the safest thing is to drive the enemy away with our sword. When people say, “Oh I witnessed to my friend yesterday, that’s why this problem is happening.” They are wrong. If that was the truth then why are the unbelievers’ lives in such a mess? It was when David did not go to war that he was hit with adultery and had his downfall into sin, not when he went to war. Of course, the enemy will fully exploit opportunities that he gets to hinder a believer, as he fears them so much. However, he can only work through our sin, not our acts of righteousness. No wonder poor believers are sometimes apprehensive of moving forward, since testimonies like this which we constantly hear, sow fear into their minds and glorifies the enemy.
However, it is true that as we grow in great maturity and anointing, God gives us greater challenges and trials as opportunities to grow more, to stretch our faith, our peace, our perseverance. Before Paul could be entrusted to write half the books of the New Testament, he had some serious trials and testing.
The sword of the spirit is not to be used against God! It is not dangerous to use it within the biblical limits against the enemy, but wise and very safe, as we (1) fight off personal demonic temptation and (2) minister to individuals in deliverance. However, our focus in prayer is on the LORD and his Son. Even when David went into war, he always kept the Lord before him. We should do the same. When we fight demons in prayer through the name of Jesus, our heart, even at that time, should be seeing the awesome Son of God releasing his resurrection power through us against his enemies. “We see Jesus” as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us.
This Article is an extract from 'Mr Resurrection' available from this site.