Angelic
Conflict: Influenced by Demons
We are looking at the indirect attacks of Satan, often referred to as
demon influence. Remember Satan’s ultimate and over-arching goal is to
demonstrate that he can rule the creation as well as God can, if not better. So
he has designed his objectives in time and in relation to the human race to
discredit God on the one hand and to demonstrate his own capabilities on the
other hand. In terms of discrediting God Satan attempts to prevent God from
accomplishing His particular goal. He wants to keep God in the Old Testament
from ruling the planet through His designated servant Adam. God created Adam as
a vassal to serve Him and to be His vicegerent to rule over creation. So Satan
wants to prevent God from accomplishing His end through mankind so his
objective was to usurp the rule of the planet. This occurred in the dynamics of
the temptation and the fall. He was victorious in that. He is referred to in
the Scriptures as the god of this age, he is the prince of the power of the
air, he is the god of this world. He is the one who empowers fallen mankind in
his rebellion against God. So his initial objective was accomplished in the
fall.
Following that he goes on to have subsequent objectives. One is to
distract mankind and to blind mankind from the truth, 2 Corinthians 4:4. How
does he do that? Furthermore, if Satan is the one who is blinding people to the
truth of the gospel then what about the impact of their own sin nature? Doesn’t
that have a role to play? We will see that these things work together in
tandem. One of the ways to distract from the truth is to trot out a whole array
of competing truths, competing truths that are complete with their own
rationales, their own philosophical or religious support systems, very
sophisticated systems that can engage at every point that which God reveals to
be true. Satan is devising thought systems, religious systems and philosophical
systems, that easily deceive and entrap mankind into false ways of looking at
reality and understanding who he is and understanding the world around him. The
three major elements that we look at in any of these is how any system of
thought views God, how that system of thought views man, and how that system of
thought views nature or creation. Then in the Old Testament his objective was
to prevent the seed of the woman arriving and accomplishing God’s strategic
objective. In that he failed.
In the New Testament we see a shift in his tactical objective. He has
lost the major strategic objective at the cross but he still has a last chance.
He is going to try to attack both the church and
In terms of the church age he continues to blind unbelievers to the
truth. This leads to what we often hear today when people talk about the fact
that we are in a culture war. Well Christians have always been involved in a
culture war which involves capital T truth that is revealed in the Word of God,
sometimes referred to as Bible doctrine, other times as divine viewpoint, but
is what Jesus referred to as truth in John 17. In His prayer to the Father
regarding believers He prays, “Sanctify them by means of truth, thy Word is
truth.” It is a truth that incorporates and encapsulates every dimension of
life. It is in and of itself a truth that is sufficient. Does that mean it
answers every question we have? No. But it gives us the framework through which
we understand God, man, and creation. In going to the Word of God we have the
starting point, the framework, the platform, on which to build our
understanding of God’s creation and mankind. So there is this truth war that
leads to a culture war.
A second objective that Satan has is to attempt to prevent God from
fulfilling His promises, specifically the promises he made in the Old Testament
to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their progeny the Jewish people. He is seeking
to ultimately prevent God from bringing them to this piece of real estate in
the Middle East, described in Genesis 15 as being bounded by the river of Egypt
in the south, the river Euphrates to the north and northwest and the
Mediterranean. If Satan can prevent the Jews from ever occupying the land then
he has demonstrated that God can’t control His creation either, so he wins by
default. I tis no coincidence that we are engaged in wars in recent years in
the Middle East, that there is so much turmoil in the Middle East. There is and
will continue to be turmoil in the Middle East because once Israel returned and
established itself as a nation in the Middle East in 1948 then this is getting
too close to the fulfilment of those promises that God made. So Satan is going
to pull out the stops to do everything he can to try to destroy that particular
nation and to distract Christians from supporting that nation. One of Satan’s
tools down through history is anti-Semitism and he has come into various
systems of thought both outside the church and inside the church to try to
develop theologies that Christians would buy into that are inherently
anti-Semitic.
Then there is the insidious danger of demon influence. The reason demon
influence is so insidious is because we think in terms of demon influence a lot
more than we think we do. What determines the difference is how much of the
Word of God we have learned and are applying in our thinking.
James is contrasting the wisdom that comes from the Scriptures and the
wisdom that comes from society and from culture around them. Remember James was
living is a world where wisdom had a particular significance and nuance in
Greek culture. It is philosophical, intellectual; it has to do with a body of
thought that had sought to understand and organise the creation and nature, how
we know what we know, trying to pierce the realities of the universe to come up
with ultimate realities. All of this intellectual activity is designed to try
to understand creation, ultimate reality, and mankind from a non-biblical
viewpoint. However, when we get into the Bible the concept of wisdom in the
Bible doesn’t have to do with abstract thought. Wisdom in the Bible, based on
Old Testament usage, was something that was very practical, down to earth, and
we would just call it the application of God’s eternal truth to the every-day
problems, issues, challenges of life, so that as we apply these eternal truths
of Scripture to what we are doing then we produce something in our lives, a
testimony to God that has beauty, value and eternal significance. It is skilful
living in terms of the application of Bible doctrine.
When James is writing he asks a rhetorical question of this somewhat
confused and carnal audience. James 3:13-16 NASB “Who among you
is [claiming to be] wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior
[application] his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom.
He uses the word “earthly” because it is showing that this is something
that is time-bound, it doesn’t get out of the boundaries of space and time. It
emphasises the finitude of all other competing systems of truth; they are based
on the finite, they come out of rationalism, empiricism or mysticism and are
the products of the finite mind of man. Human wisdom, no matter what the system
is, is finite. That means there is always a whole host of data beyond their
limit that can change whatever they come up with on the basis of their finite
thinking. The second word he uses is translated in most Bible, “natural,” but
this is a poor translation. It is the Greek word psuchikos [yuxikoj] based on the noun psuche [yuxh], meaning soul.
The “natural” man is the soulish man who doesn’t have that spirit component,
that regenerative component that allows him to understand the things of God. So
this wisdom is the product of fallen human beings who have no clue what divine
viewpoint truth is. It is the best man can do and it doesn’t even come close to
truly explaining, and organising the data of creation. Then the last part: it
is demonic. To the degree that something is not biblical it is demonic. That is
what this passage is saying. Human philosophies, human religions, are all
demonic. What that means is that it partakes of the same basic core element of
the thinking of Satan. You are either going to think like God or you are going
to think like Satan. That’s it; that is the black and white issue. You are going
to think like God on the basis of divine revelation or you are going to think
like Satan.
The indirect attacks of Satan occur through thought systems. In
religion: the overt idolatry of idols of wood and stone all the way through to
the contemporary sophisticated intellectual idols of modern man. Philosophical
systems, whatever they are, if the starting point is inside creation it is
idolatry because it is taking some element within creation and exploding it up
so big that it will then explain everything that is in creation. All
philosophical systems are built upon a presupposition that man apart from God
can understand reality. That is what Satan is saying: you don’t need God, you
just need your own innate abilities and you can come to truth apart from God.
Part of what demon influence does is provide a rationale and a support system
for our sin nature. Satan knows all about the corruption in the soul and he
wants to generate things that appeal to it and attract it like a magnet so that
you are going to want to go in that direction, the area that is going to feel
good and comfortable and the way you think life is going to work.
Two things that characterise Satan’s thinking. The first is autonomy.
Satan is his rebellion thought that he could make it independently of God. That
is what autonomy is: the creature is going to become a law unto himself and he
is going to be able to make life work apart from God. He is going to find
happiness, peace and stability without having to take God or the Bible very
seriously. This is the basic orientation of the sin nature. The second
orientation is antagonism. When we look at Genesis chapter three and see God
come into the garden the basic thing that happens is that Adam and the woman
are afraid, and they run from God. The basic orientation of our heart toward
God is fear. We try to run from Him; we think that he is out to make our life
miserable, that God just wants to judge us and punish us and is out to destroy
us, and our heart is antagonistic to God because we basically fear Him because
we know in our heart of hearts we know we are corrupt, condemned and fallen
sinners. That doesn’t mean that we can’t exercise positive volition.
We need to think about the example of the apostle Paul. None of us would
say that Paul had negative volition at God-consciousness. He is positive to
God, but what happens to him? Paul gets immersed in religion—demon influence.
He gets immersed in the rigorous legalistic system of Pharisaism and he is out
attacking and persecuting Christ, the body of Christ. Jesus Christ met him and
said: “Why are you kicking against the goads? He was kicking against the goads
because he feared God at the core of his soul orientation. We don’t want God;
he didn’t want God. There was an element that was positive but there is this
other element in the soul that just hates and fears God. So that part of the
sin nature gets attracted to the thinking of the cosmic system, which is what
happened to Paul. He got attracted to the rigorous legalism and
self-righteousness of the Pharisaic system.
The only solution to all of this is to have our thinking overhauled by
the Word of God. That is what Paul says in Romans 12:2. We are not to be
conformed to the world system but we are to be transformed by the renovation of
our mind. Now if we are not supposed to be conformed to the world system then
we had better understand how the world system is influencing us, or we won’t
spot how we are being conformed. We are so close to who we are and to our
cultural upbringing that it is hard for us to distance ourselves, to have the
objectivity to see how we are influenced by the idolatry and the demon
influence of our own culture. The only way that can be exposed is by the Spirit
of God and the Word of God and to be taught in such a way that helps us to
understand how we are being eaten up by our own sin nature and our own desire
to restructure so much of the Word of God into our own comfort zone.