Spiritual Wickedness In High Places

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ's teaching of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew chapter 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting scripture, but scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today's focused discussion will be spiritual wickedness in high places. Spiritual wickedness in high places, in heavenly places, is how verse twelve ends, high places meaning the spiritual dimension, above and beyond us, outside the dimensions of our world. So we need to be aware of the fact that we are dealing with a very, very powerful spiritual system, run, or at least attempted to be run, by the most powerful of all fallen angels, Lucifer himself, who was formerly the Son of the Morning, the anointed cherub. You might have called him the worship leader of heaven. We should not think that we can resist this kind of power in our own flesh. Pitted against the powers of darkness in high places, in heavenly places, pitted against this hierarchy of wicked demons who ply their trade by crafting a world culture that is anti-God, it is not always blatantly anti-God, it may be religiously anti-God. It may be, if I can coin a word, Christianly anti-God. It may talk about Jesus and it may talk about the Bible in a positive way, but it is still anti-God. Or, it may damn Jesus and damn the Bible, and it is still the same system. Satan is crafty. The Bible refers to the wiles of the devil. It refers to the schemes of the devil as we have read in verse 11 here in Ephesians 6. It strikes me as beyond comprehension in one sense that understanding this, the church can act as if this does not even exist. There is a certain frivolity in the church. There is a certain superficiality in the church. There's a certain silliness in the church. Pastors are turned in to stand-up comics more times than I would like to think. This must be approached with a great deal of seriousness. This is a grim power. And in order for us to deal with it, verse 13 gets us into the discussion that we're going to look at in the armor. We have to take up the full armor of God. Now, we already said that in verse 11. Put on the full armor of God. Like the soldier who got up every morning and put it on to go to battle, you get up every morning to put it on again. You take it up, you take it up, you take it up, you keep taking it up, because it is the only way that you will be able to resist in the evil day. What is the evil day? The day that evil dominates the world. What day is that? This day, and this day lasts until Christ takes over the world, until the millennial kingdom. We want to be able, in this era of dominating satanic evil, to be able to resist is the NAS in the evil day, and, having done everything to stand firm, the word resist is in the NAS. Some translations have the word stand there. Either way, in fact, it is the exact same Greek word as used in, for example, James 4.7, resist the devil and he will flee from you. It is the exact same verb used in 1 Peter 5 9, resist him, firm in your faith. So here's the third time that verse is used to resist Satan. And the only way that we can resist, that is, stop his advances into our lives through the system in which we live, the world system, the ordered evil, wicked cosmos, is to have the armor on. And if we have the armor on, we will be able to resist in the evil day, and we will be able, everything said and done, to stand firm, to be strong. This is what we're talking about. Obviously, this is serious to the writer. This is serious to the author behind the writer, who is none other than the Holy Spirit, and it needs to be taken very seriously to us. It is why we are told, for example, in 1 Corinthians, a very simple command is given in chapter 16 of 1 Corinthians verse 13. Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men. How do men act? Be strong. Be strong. Do all of it in love, in love, but be strong, be firm, act like men, which, if you borrow that concept and take it back in the Old Testament, would be translated, be courageous. This is a time to take a stand against a very sophisticated evil system. We have to be strong to be victorious. We are warned by Peter several times, and Peter is a good one to warn us, isn't he? Because if I remember right, he lost the battle a lot. A lot. On one night, on three separate occasions, and if you total them up, maybe as many as six times, he lost the battle and denied Jesus Christ. Maybe that's why he reminds us so very often that we need to stand firm, that we need to resist the onslaught of Satan. Listen to his words in 1 Peter 1 13. Gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the holy one who called you, be holy yourselves, also in all your behavior. Chapter 2 He says, Putting aside all evil, all guile, all hypocrisy, all envy. He repeats these injunctions even in his second epistle, warning us in what I think is one that we all would take to heart. 2 Peter 3 17. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard, lest being carried away by the error of unprincipled men, you fall from your own steadfastness. Boy, he knew that, he lived that, he lived that. The real reward eternally is earned by those who stand, who resist. The real testimony to the honor of Christ is given by those who stand, who resist. The real usefulness belongs to those who stand and who resist. When I was a student many years ago, I was part of a small group of men who went out to preach. There were five of us, at least three of them were better preachers than I was, but the three that were better preachers than I was, that I would far rather have listened to than listened to me, didn't resist, and in a terrible moral collapse went out of the ministry many years ago. Are they Christians? Sure. Are they useful? No. So Paul is telling us that we have to be on the defense. Okay, that's the main thrust here. We have to be on the defense. There is, however, an offensive side to it, and it is this. The reason we have to be on the defense is because we're also on the offense. What do I mean by that? I mean if you're not doing anything, you're not going to have a big battle on your hands, if you live every day for yourself. But if you are engaged in assaulting the kingdom of darkness, you're going to have to go on defense because you're essentially on offense, and the more effective your offense, the more necessary your defense. Paul understood that he was invading the territory which is the devil's. He was snatching brands out of the burning, to borrow the words of Jude. He made these incursions every single day of his life into hostile enemy territory, which of course made his enemy furious, and his enemy ramped up the opposition. Why did he do this? Why did the Apostle Paul go on offense, and therefore have to resist? Because he cared about the souls of those who were captive to Satan. He understood what he wrote in 2 Corinthians 10 about storming fortresses to rescue the prisoners, smashing fortresses which he describes as ideologies, any idea raised up against the knowledge of God, any ungodly idea, any untrue idea, any satanic idea, whether it's a religious idea or an irreligious idea, Paul is storming the fortresses, the ideological fortresses that hold people prisoner for the sake of freeing them, as he puts it in 2 Corinthians 10, and leading everyone captive to Christ. Paul wanted them for God, yearned for them to be rescued out of the kingdom of darkness and brought into the kingdom of God's dear Son. So while the armor is defensive so that we can stand and resist, the battle is formidable because we are on the offense. I would dare say, if you're doing absolutely nothing, you might be scratching your head saying, What is he talking about? But if you're at all engaged in the battle, you understand what it means to have to stand against the onslaught that comes as you make the incursions into the darkness. Well, having said that, we get a little bit of an idea what we're talking about in general, but let's go to the specifics and look at the first element in the armor. Verse 14 again begins the way verse 13 ended, reiterating that this is about standing firm and not being left in the dust. To borrow the language, I might add here as a footnote, of 1 Corinthians 9, what was Paul's great fear? That in preaching to others, verse 27, I myself might be a dochimos. My great fear is that in preaching to others, I might become disqualified by some sin. And so he says, I beat my body to bring it into subjection, so that in preaching to others I'm not disqualified. So stand firm, having girded your loins with truth. The devil is a liar from the beginning. His whole system is a system of lies. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie or a half truth, and therefore we would understand that the first line of defense is the truth. Let me dig a little deeper into this. It's very likely that Paul was familiar, very familiar with the Roman soldier. They were everywhere. They were everywhere in Israel when he was there. They were everywhere in his hometown when he was there, Tarsus. The Romans dominated the world at that time. That world, they were everywhere that Paul travelled, and he would see Roman soldiers all the time, and he would take note of how they were dressed. And the first thing that you would notice about a Roman soldier when he prepared for battle is that he put on a belt or a sash. The idea was this a Roman soldier wore a tunic. A tunic was a dress for men, basically, had two holes for arms and a hole for the head. You put it on and it went down around your knees. If you were going to go to battle, you would pull your tunic together with a sash. Typically, they wore an undergarment, so they would pull up the corners of the tunic, the long hem of the tunic, and tuck it into the sash, pull it as tight as they could. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of spiritual wickedness in high places. Until next time, remember to keep the faith. Stay strong and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way.