We’ve made it to the last section of our series on spiritual warfare. Our prayer is that it’s been helpful for you in being equipped to be able to fight the unseen battle. As we begin this last section, let’s look at an interesting statement that Jesus makes in the Gospel of John:
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10
There seems to be a connection between these two claims that Jesus makes. On one hand, He is saying that He has come so that we can experience and enjoy life as it was intended to be. On the other hand, though, He makes another claim about the reality of spiritual evil. The question is why?
The connection that seems to be between these two claims is that being appropriately aware of and equipped for spiritual evil helps us better enjoy the full life that Jesus offers us. The follow-up question then becomes this: What does it look like to be appropriately aware of and equipped for spiritual evil?
Really, that’s the question we’ve been trying to answer through this whole series. But now, let’s sketch an outline of this by showing what it looks like to not be appropriately aware of and equipped for spiritual evil. This will make the answer to our question crystal clear.
In one of his works, The Screwtape Letters, 20th-century Cambridge author and scholar C. S. Lewis discusses two errors that we can tend to make regarding spiritual evil. Let’s unpack exactly why these are errors and what the result of them might be in our lives.
The first error is to disbelieve in the existence of demons altogether. If you don’t believe in demons, you disregard the idea of spiritual realities altogether, meaning that you also don’t believe in God. So, when you commit to this belief, you only continue to separate yourself from God and bring about your own ruin.
Pastor and author Eugene Peterson wrote about the spiritual life using the metaphor of a garden. It can be beautiful, but it can also be messy, and you ultimately have no control over how the plants grow. You can’t make yourself more loving or more patient. But what you can do is create the proper conditions for growth. Tending to your own spiritual life (your garden) is the only way to grow in Christlike qualities. With that in mind, here’s an important thing to remember:
Denying spiritual evil is like denying the presence of destructive parasites in your garden. If you ignore the reality of destructive parasites in an actual garden, they kill and destroy everything. The same is true if we deny the reality of destructive parasites and spiritual evil in our inner world. They kill and destroy everything.
There are many ways we can see this play out in a practical way. Take the man who deep down feels like he isn’t enough, but for some reason believes that if this person can know him and find him attractive and respectable and even want him, then that will mean that he matters. Or take the woman who never feels like her life is enough. That all she is a worn out, weary, and bleary-eyed mom with no beauty left for the world. These thoughts are both weeds planted in their respective gardens by the enemy whose only goal is to destroy.
Here's another example: sometimes our gardens have a difficult time growing to begin with, even without the outside influence of spiritual evil. Sometimes we struggle with anxiety or depression. In this state, you can be particularly vulnerable to the weed in your garden that says it would be better if you just ended it all. When Jesus says the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, those words are not chosen haphazardly. We have a spiritual enemy whose goal is to ruin you in the most significant way that he can. So, how do you guard against that? The first boundary is to remember that spiritual evil is real.
Now, let’s take a look at the second error, and that is to feed an excessive and unhealthy interest in spiritual evil. There’s a fascinating account in the book of Acts that records some interesting things that took place in the city of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. Here’s what it says:
13 “Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, ‘In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.’ 14 Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. 15 One day the evil spirit answered them, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?’ 16 Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. 17 When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor. 18 Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done. 19 A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. 20 In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.” Acts 19:13-20
One interesting thing to note here is that a day’s wage was one drachma, so this works out to be 140 years’ worth of wages. There’s a lot that happens here. These men who aren’t Christians are going around trying to exorcise demons. And even though they don’t believe in Jesus, they seem to be guessing that there has to be some authority out there that they can latch onto, and it goes really badly for them. Here’s a key takeaway from this story:
Apart from allegiance to Jesus, there is no sharing Jesus’ authority. The demon in this story knows Jesus and knows who He is, but he also knows that the guys in the story have nothing to do with Him. We can see after this event that the word spreads and there is a widespread recognition of Jesus. Even the guys in the story cleanse themselves and renounce their mystic ways. This was a culture that had previously fed an excessive and unhealthy interest in spiritual evil. But where does this hunger come from? Well, the interesting thing is that the hunger itself isn’t necessarily bad.
We are created with an appetite for holiness. The problem here is that we have so misunderstood holiness that we misunderstand the object of our desire. God is holy. Because we were created for God, we desire holiness. But here’s the trouble with this:
We believed the lie that God is boring and alternative spirituality is thrilling. This is why we exchange our understanding of God for cheap spirituality. It’s fool’s gold, a shiny imposter that promises to be the real thing, but in the end is bent on your destruction. The reason we fall for it is because our vision of God is anemic.
We can tend to think of Jesus in a very surface-level way, when instead we could be thinking of God as the infinite, powerful, and majestic creator that He is.
At the same time, that being is the one who, in the person of Jesus, took on your humanity, lived the perfect life you never could, and then offered Himself on the cross, to overcome our enemies and secure our redemption. To invite us back into the relationship with Him that we were made for, a relationship with a God so holy that He can only be described as infinite. Despite all of this, we’re bored, so we choose to play with crystals, cards, and whatever else is out there, and it’s all to our own ruin. This is why the second boundary is to recognize your appetite for holiness, rather than its counterfeits.
Now, this might leave you with a couple of lingering questions. Where’s the boundary? What’s okay to dabble in, and what’s not? To answer those questions, here are some helpful guidelines for spiritual practices:
1. The boundaries can be a matter of conscience. Some of us have a greater sensitivity to these things than others.
2. The boundaries can be a matter of wisdom. Trying to get as close as you can to something that is trying to destroy you just isn’t wise.
3. The boundaries can be far clearer than what we want them to be. Anything that leads you to trust something other than Jesus for security, for satisfaction, or for significance is dangerous.
Jesus is infinitely more satisfying than any alternative, because He is infinitely holy and good. He is the only one who can combat spiritual evil, and He is the only one who satisfies our appetite for holiness.
The unseen battle is what surrounds us. Over the course of this series, we’ve discussed the plausibility of spiritual evil, we’ve discussed how to be appropriately aware of it, and we’ve covered how to equip ourselves to resist its influence within our lives. Now, may you find victory in overcoming the power of darkness with the power of Jesus.
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