Spiritual warfare is a topic that is rarely addressed correctly. It is often either over-emphasized or under-emphasized. But it is a reality. My upcoming novel Call to Arms has spiritual warfare as its central theme. It is written in the style of Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, and I can easily say that Peretti’s book had a profound influence on my life, even before I read it. What really triggered my sense of the spiritual reality came all the way back in elementary school when I was on the mission field. Several of the short-term mission teams put on a skit about spiritual warfare going on behind the practice of witnessing to a lost soul, and the skit has an angel and a demon engaged in a sword fight. This was clearly influenced by Peretti, and needless to say, that left a seed in my heart. I have been interested in sword fighting ever since (I now have 24 years involvement in the sport of fencing). I have also had a spiritual sense, a level of discernment that many tend to have academically shoved out. I am not going to proclaim to be a spiritual warfare guru or anything like that, but I am a veteran in the battle. And I have joined a ministry in which this war is our focus, hence the name Worldview Warriors. We are in a battle, and this blog post is about that war.
As Christians, we face three major enemies that war against us and seek to derail our faith. Those three enemies are the world, the flesh, and the devil. The world is the culture of sinful man in its rebellion against God. It is the general mindset of society as a whole. Only for a brief time in American history did any culture actually have a general favor towards genuine Christianity, and now that is most certainly gone. It is not just fading but gone. The United States today hates true Christianity. Don’t believe me? Try speaking about 6-day creation or a global flood in public. Try proclaiming that God created people male and female. Try proclaiming that that marriage is to only be between one man and one woman and that sex is only for the marriage bed and not to be defiled. If you want to be “counter-cultural” today, be a vocal conservative Christian. You will see that you are indeed in a spiritual battle against the world. You are also going to find that the world’s culture has so deeply entrenched itself in the church that your greatest foes on these issues will be from within the Christian community. The ones I have had the fiercest fights over are those who profess to be Christians.
The second enemy our sinful nature – the flesh, the old self. This is typically our biggest and our most difficult enemy that we face because that old self doesn’t like being put to death. The way we battle the flesh is through our three major enemies: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. I don’t have the space to cover this in detail, but do a study on the three temptations of Jesus. Those are the categories of temptations that man faces and all of them appeal to “health, popularity, and wealth” – temporal things that will come and go. All of them are aimed at taking trust off God.
The third enemy is the devil and his demonic minions. Because my novel Call to Arms deals with this theme, I am going to focus on it. I will be up front in that my personal theology has changed and matured since I wrote this book initially 15 years ago (see last week’s post for more on that history). At the time, the church I went to was rather charismatic with relatively strong Word of Faith leanings (but not to the point of calling it heretical). I had previously been to a Christian Reformed church, but we didn’t agree with their doctrines enough to become member. Now, I am much more “reformed” in my theology. I bring this up for a reason. The charismatics go overboard with experiences and frequently throw out concrete, sound doctrine as they do so. But the Reformed tend to do the opposite and be so academic that they fail to address very real situations dealing with the spiritual realm. When it comes to the demonic, we are dealing with spiritual entities. Now, we aren’t dealing with “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” stuff that is just hyped-up junk, nor are we talking about some of the crazy people that think they can go to a mountain top and pray away the demons of that realm. But the demonic realm is most certainly a real thing that cannot be ignored. It should never be put in the spotlight too much, but never ignored.
One of the things that drove a key plot point in Call to Arms is an encounter I had with a co-worker during my final few weeks of working at a grocery store. The story would take me an hour to tell in person, but the key thing was that as I witnessed to this guy, I ended up stirring up a demonic stronghold that had been lying hidden in his life. I witnessed to him and gave him the Gospel, but in the end, I could not drive it out, nor did he desire to seek and follow Christ. The whole encounter would have impressed Stephen King, so I used it as a key plot point for my book. I am a firm believer of a T-shirt I have that says, “Be careful what you say or you might find yourself in my next novel.”
That said, the battle with the demonic needs to be exposed, but also not glorified. The occult is real, and demons are indeed real. They only need just enough light to expose them, but not put on a pedestal. Where they primarily work is not through occultic practices, but most successfully through ideas and philosophies, especially in academia. Many people will confuse this with the world. But it is actually both. Satan is the god of this world. He directs the philosophies and the mindsets of the institutions and the arts so that they influence the majority of the population. He was known to be the minister of music before the throne of God, so it would be no surprise for him to use music as a major means of getting ideas through a culture. And then the flesh, desiring the things of the world, takes the bait – hook, line, and sinker.
I will close this post with this point: the BEST way to battle all three of these foes all at once is to seek and pursue God to live a holy lifestyle. If we put “self” to death on a daily basis, then the flesh will not be “alive” to desire the temptations of the world. If the flesh does not take the bait of the world, then Satan does not catch us as his fish. He’ll still make war against us. He can cause some very annoying things to happen. But be careful about blaming him for every inconvenience. He is still God’s “messenger boy” and can’t do anything beyond what he has permission to do. So instead of blaming the devil for our problems, if we instead ask God what we need to learn in such a situation, suddenly the power of temptation disappears.
Call to Arms releases in just over two weeks. Please check it out and get your copy on September 12 in paperback, hardcover, or Kindle. The story is engaging and compelling, and you will not want to put it down.
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