16.3 Spiritual Warfare
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4-5).
Later, after considering the heart of God in us, the heart of the Kingdom, we will spend a session on the weapons of our warfare as related to the entirety of the curse. After that comes three sessions in which we will attempt to know how we defeat each part of that curse and cast it off of this earth. Now …the kingdom of our God, and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser… has been cast down (Revelation 12:10).
Military Strategy
In this lesson I want to counter our understanding of the kingdoms of darkness by considering how we defeat angelic darkness coming against our lives as members and as a body.
But let’s understand something very basic first. Jesus is the greatest military strategist in human history, combining in Himself the wisdom of the most victorious of military generals. I watched War and Peace, the wonderful 2007 version with Clemence Poesy, again recently. At the battle of Austerlitz, the Austrian general said, “Napoleon has made a mistake.” The Russian general, Kutuzov, rejected any such thought, but was ordered to commit his forces to the Austrian defeat.
Using Vanity
No victorious general ever says, “The enemy made a mistake.” A victorious general always asks two questions. First, what does the enemy want me to do? And second, what do I want the enemy to do? A victorious general never counters his moves against the enemy’s moves, tit for tat, but rather approaches the battle from a perspective unknown to the enemy. When the winner wins, the defeated enemy has no idea what on earth just happened. The Mongol general, Subodai, studied primarily the core vanity of the heart of the commander of the enemy forces, and then used that vanity to lead the enemy to their own defeat.
The Fear of Loss
The core vanity of the human heart is the fear of loss, which we will develop further in the next session by dissecting Cain against Abel. Our enemy does not know that his center core value is the terror of losing what he considers to be his own, a value he shares fully with his human masters.
Now, we can see each of the five strategies of the evil one as I listed in the last lesson, and we can see how the wondrous reality of the ten most important verses in the Bible, as we studied in Symmorphy I: Purpose, gives full answer against each one of those five. But God does not win by countering the direct attack of the enemy; He wins by something the enemy never expects.
Laying Down His Life
To this day, Satan has no real idea as to how or why Jesus defeated him; neither does he know the extent to which he is defeated now and by which he will be enchained. Satan’s one big plus in the present time is that his opponents, the church of Christ, have no real idea either.
Jesus defeated the evil one by laying down His life for us, by submitting Himself to the “brilliant” strategy of the evil one, luring his vanity, and by suffering the loss of all things. The serpent, incapable of letting go of anything, still does not understand how a Man laying down His life put him and all that was old to death, or how a new creation arises out of death and into life inside of Jesus.
Tithemi Psuche
Here, then, is our greatest weapon. I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him (Philippians 3:8-9a).
And thus the most important chapter of this course, the center, the pivot point of the Kingdom of God, is Chapter 22: Life Laid Down, tithemi psuche. It is this one strategic move, then, laying down our lives, suffering the loss of all things, that the enemy still does not consider or know and out from which proceeds all the other elements of our warfare defeating the enemy at every point.
The Heart of God
The heart of the evil one is to possess, to seize for himself, to steal, to claim all as his own. And if the evil one cannot possess something, his only desire is to destroy it. The heart of God is to set free, to release into joy, to allow others to be different, to think more highly of others than He does of Himself.
The evil one does not understand Christians who actually love one another or a God with a meek and lowly heart. It is from this heart of God that we proceed, a heart that neither humans nor angels know, moving out from the Mercy Seat in our use of all the weapons of our warfare to cast down the accuser of our brethren.
Refusing the Accuser
Here, I would recommend that you read back through Symmorphy I: Purpose, Chapter 11 – lessons 11.1 and 11.2 – to refresh your present strength against the accuser. The accuser has very little success in getting you and me to hear his accusations any more. But what little success he might have is his accusations in our face against our brethren. You see, it is quite normal to agree with the accuser regarding all those “Christians out there” who just don’t see the truth “like we do.” But it is the “accuser of our brethren” that we cast down by laying down our lives for their sakes.
However, in the remainder of this lesson, let’s defeat the accuser regarding ourselves – later in the course we will do so in the church and in the world.
Change Our Definition of God
The primary work of the evil one is to persuade humans to see and to define God through his own likeness. My primary work is to change your definition of God, that is, to teach you to see God through the eyes of a very human Jesus stumbling under a cross He cannot carry – because you ARE inside of Him.
Jesus said that when our eye is single, our whole body is full of light. As we see Him as He is, we are just like Him. We do not “win” light by getting rid of darkness; we see Jesus as He is and all darkness vanishes as if it never was.
Thus the mightiest weapon of our warfare for ourselves is to see Jesus as He is IN us, and that means we INSIDE of Him.
Know Our Enemy
Now, this serpent seeking to be the lens through which Christians see God is first subtle. In other words, his greatest strategy is to become impersonal, in the background, a “force” or a “mindset,” a theology. He wants no one to think that he is a person sustained good every moment by Jesus and that he, as a person, willfully thinks, says, and does wrong things against that good speaking.
We do not disrespect the serpent, for God’s original calling upon him remains, but we see him also as he is, with all his demons – a servant who has no place in us. Refusal is a gift of God and it goes both ways.
Be Silent Before God
The second work of the evil one is to distract Christians away from the tree of life. The greatest and most reasonable distraction is self-righteousness, getting Christians into the program of “pleasing” God, and thus always falling short, and thus always “in trouble” with God – and never eating of life.
Here is where our absolute failure to be pleasing to God is so important to us, that is, our complete silence before God regarding ourselves. The cross – “I am dead,” then, is our second mighty weapon. You see, when we do everything we might do as humans in the knowing that Father is doing this with us as part of us, we cannot ever “fall short” of Him.
Speak Christ Our Only Life
The third work of the evil one is to cast a veil of unbelief over the most important verses in the Bible. The second and third work of the evil one go hand in hand. Making eating of the tree of life to be dangerous heresy in the mind of the Christian is the flip side of distracting them with programs of self-made righteousness.
Here is where the powerful weapon of our voice box comes into play. First we ask that the big verses be fulfilled in us, then we believe that we have received what we have asked. And then we speak Christ: I am filled with all the fullness of God. Jesus is IN me and I am IN Him. I am symmorphosed together with Jesus as the revelation of Father.
Give Thanks
The fourth work of the evil one is to desecrate the flesh by getting the Christian to attack themselves. Again, the cross is our weapon. We cannot subdue our own flesh for we are dead and have no flesh. Our flesh is the present flesh of Christ, and He does all things well. Our flesh is what Father looks like in creation.
Yet our weapon here goes deeper, for it is the weapon of God’s ignorance, His complete inability to know what “flesh” not filled with Himself might be. And in that ignorance, we, together with Father, turn everything meant for evil into goodness by giving thanks, by speaking good grace, and by expecting God to arise in all things.
For the Sake of Our Brethren
The fifth work of the evil one is to silence any believer in Jesus who stands forth as the revelation of Father. It is on this point that the kingdom of darkness most colludes with the mystery of iniquity among men. And it is at this same point that laying down our lives for the sake of our brethren wins the day.
You see, we know the strategy of the evil one. Our brethren, whom he is successfully accusing, turn and accuse us of blasphemy against God. To overcome the accuser of our brethren means to lay down our lives for those who are accusing us. And again, our weapon has two parts, the first being God’s ignorance.
Father, Forgive Them
You see, there is no such thing as “the world” or “the beast” or “the government” except in the imagination of self bubbles manipulating self bubbles. That may be a group of men beneath the foot of the cross, but Jesus sees only one and one and one. They might represent all in this world that hates God, all human power, all violence and pretending, but God, and thus Jesus, knows none of that. All Jesus sees is this one, hurting, blind, lonely, confused.
And against this one he strikes with the most powerful weapon in God, the sword of His mouth – Father forgive this one for he does not know what he is doing.
Our Confidence
I have never seen the weapons of our warfare matched against the works of the evil one as I have in this session. I realize that I could find a comparison between these things I have laid out and Paul’s armor in Ephesians 6, but I will not attempt to do that. The thing I see the most is the absolute power of our stand inside our armor and weaponry against the almost meaningless stance of an enemy who has already lost everything.
But our real task is not to defeat the enemy, but to open the doors of Tabernacles for many, to carry all upon our hearts, the Mercy Seat of heaven, and to show Father to all.
Our CONFIDENCE is our victory.