The
Key to Defeating Demon Influence: 2 Cor. 10:4-6; Eph. 6:10-18
The Bible says that we are 24/7 soldiers in a spiritual conflict.
Because we deal with an internal enemy known as the sin nature and two external
enemies known as worldliness or cosmic thinking and the devil there is
constantly a battle. The battle rages over everything in our life. There is no
aspect of our life, of our relationships, our thought life, professional life,
or anything that we are involved in that isn’t supposed to be brought under the
authority of the Word of God. That is the challenge for every believer in his
spiritual life after salvation. Even though we are saved and are secure in that
salvation, and we have an eternal destiny that cannot be taken from us, that is
not the end; it is only the beginning. We need to learn. We need to learn about
our new life, what has been done for us as believers, understanding what Christ
did for us on the cross in all of its facets and dimensions; things that we
will be learning about into eternity. There is so much related to it that we
will never exhaust the work of Christ for the gospel in this life. The good
news begins with the fact that Jesus died on the cross and we can have eternal
life by trusting in Him (and Him alone), but also all that that entails in
terms of what was given at the instant of salvation, that God has given us
everything pertaining to life and godliness, and that affects every dimension
of life.
The very creation of man is integral to the resolution of the angelic
conflict, and by resolution is not simply meant that it demonstrates God’s
integrity, God’s grace, though it does that, but it also will bring to a
conclusion the work of divine judgment on evil as it exists in the cosmos—the
evil introduced by Satan and the evil introduced the second time by Adam. This
is all judged in the Tribulation period. So when we come to that seven-year
period of time that culminates in Revelation chapter nineteen with the defeat
of the Antichrist and the false prophet, and the binding of Satan in the abyss
for 1000 years, this is part of that resolution. But it doesn’t just have to do
with this scope of history, it has to do with the place that you and I play in
all of this, our role in the angelic conflict; that we are part of this cosmic
conflict, part of this spiritual warfare. 1 Peter 5 teaches that Satan goes
about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. We have a sin nature that
is inclined toward rebellion against God.
Part of cosmic thinking is thinking that we can deal with issues in
business, our profession, our marriage, our parenting responsibilities, in
education, in our own personal ethics without necessarily being dependent upon
God in every single thing. Yet that is what cosmic thinking is, this sense that
there are areas of our life that we really don’t have to bring into compliance
under the authority of God and His Word. The second aspect of cosmic thinking
has to do with antagonism, for once the creature asserts his independence from
God, his autonomy, it is not long before he begins to resent God and to be
antagonistic to God, His authority, those who teach His Word, those who seek to
apply His Word. So the thinking of the cosmic system is based on these two
foundation stones, as it were, of autonomy and antagonism.
This is the struggle that we face in life, because from the time we were
born we began to operate on our sin nature. We didn’t have any other option so
everything that we did from the very beginning of our life until the time that
we were saved was totally based on our sin nature. During that time the
thinking in our soul like a spiritual vacuum just sucked all the thinking of
the world, much more than we realise—every rationale, every rationalisation,
every justification, that we can to somehow short up our independence from God.
Then we got saved, and now the issue is trying to unlearn all those bad thought
patterns; not just bad overt habits but bad thought habits. Thought precedes
action. The apostle Paul emphasises that this is our struggle, this is our war;
and we never finish this war in this life. We never stop fighting the battle.
2 Corinthians 10:2 NASB “I ask that when I am present I
{need} not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous
against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh.
2 Corinthians 10:5 NASB
“{We are} destroying speculations…” This is the word logismos [logismoj] and it has to do with
thinking. So it is the power of God for the destruction of these entrenched
ways of thinking. So we are destroying these thought forms, these
rationalisations, these speculations. It tells us that the battle in spiritual
warfare is not a battle with external demons or with Satan, but that the
primary battlefield takes place between our ears, in our thinking. Thinking can
either be influenced by all the human viewpoint that it has stored over the
decades or can be influenced by the truth of God’s Word, and we have to
exercise our volition. So Paul says we are destroying these speculations, and
we have to do that a certain way. It is the same thing that he talks about in
Romans 12:2, that we are not to be conformed to the world but transformed by
the renewing of our minds. We are trying to remove human viewpoint thoughts,
philosophies, attitudes and habits and replace them with divine viewpoint,
habits, thoughts, procedures. He recognises that all of the human viewpoint
thought systems are raised up against the knowledge of God. It is either one or
the other, there is no neutral ground. We are either operating in dependence on
God or in independence from God. If we are dependent on God we are operating on
divine viewpoint, we are waking by means of the Spirit, and we are in a
position where God’s power is available to us to deal with any situation and
thought in life. Learning things biblically isn’t something that happens in a
week or a day or a year, it is a lifetime process.
“… and every lofty thing raised
up against the knowledge of God, and {we are} taking every thought captive to
the obedience of Christ.” We are to take every thought, no just some thought.
He is not even talking about the kind of thought, but every thought, and that applies
to every area of intellectual activity. A lot of the things we get exposed to
are not obvious. A lot of ideas are taken from ancient pagan practices and
given new names that have been sterilised and made to sound very technological
and taught in a new package. The only solution to this is when we really know
the truth of God’s Word because we can’t go out there and study every act and
spasm that comes along. But we can understand certain patterns. We have to
develop critical thinking skills, and we don’t do this by always hearing the
same thing the same way. If we don’t ever hear an opposing viewpoint we don’t
necessarily understand the differences and how to think clearly, we just get
indoctrinated and don’t learn how to think. What the Bible teaches us is that
we have to learn how to think and we have to take every thought captive for
Christ. This is just exhausting; it is going to take our whole life. But we do
this just like everything else in the Christian life: one week at a time, one
Bible class at a time, and over the course of time we begin to learn things and
understand things, put things together, and we slowly, gradually, learning
think biblically. Of course, that can’t be done by showing up for Bible class
once every week on Sunday morning. We have been indoctrinated by the cosmic
system 24/7 for x-number of years before we ever knew there was an alternative.
After salvation for many people they are still indoctrinated by the cosmic
system and it takes them even more time before they get any solid biblical
teaching. So to undo all of that mass brainwashing by the cosmic system they
have to go through an intensified course of study for the rest of their lives
in terms of how God thinks. That involves volition, discipline, making priority
decisions on a day-to-day basis as to how we are going to spend time.
2 Corinthians chapter ten puts our focus on thinking: that the objective
is to take every thought captive for Christ. That is an internal operation; it
is what we do internally in terms of our own thought form. We also have some
other things that we do in terms of this spiritual warfare related to spiritual
discipline. Those are outlined under the metaphor of the armour of God in
Ephesians 6:10ff.