15: FISH: Freedom & Spiritual Warfare (Part 9)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father- daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. It is episode 15 in the 9th part of our FISH series. We’re continuing to look at the “F” of FISH-Freedom. Today we’re approaching it from the spiritual warfare angle, specifically looking at the role of permission and authority, and also just a lot of things.

So first. Hello, Father.

[00:39] Marcus: Hello again. Here we are one more time. This is number 15, did you say?

[00:43] Stephanie: Yeah, well, 15 of the whole podcast.

[00:46] Marcus: Okay.

[00:47] Stephanie: Yeah, part nine of the series.

[00:49] Marcus: Yeah, it’s going by fast.

[00:51] Stephanie: It is. I feel like I say this every episode, or at least I want to, but our topic today really could be its own series.

[00:58] Marcus: Yeah, it’ll be its own series at some point, no question.

[01:01] Stephanie: But we want to start addressing it now. So in chapter five of A Deeper Walk, you make the statement, “We live in a world that often treats demons like metaphors, without any concept that demons are actual entities.” So let’s talk briefly about the reality of demons, and while we’re at it, let’s address the spookiness and fear that many feel about the topic.

[01:22] Marcus: So you just want me to freak people out real fast, is that the goal? I actually had a good friend one time who told me once, “Every time I hear the word demon, I freak out a little bit, and I don’t even like to hear the word.” And unfortunately that’s a problem, right? Because my father used to say, “That after knowing God, the next most important thing a believer needs is to understand their enemy.” We live in a world at war and it makes no sense to be at war and say, “I am afraid of my enemy so I don’t want to learn anything about him.” That’s just kind of foolish when you get right down to it.

I even had a theology professor who told me he never taught on spiritual warfare, or he had stopped, because every time he did weird things happened around his house. And again the problem is that what you’re essentially saying is this is “secondary information.” In other places I put it this way, it’s like in the worldview of most christians, we stick spiritual warfare up in the attic. We’re like, “I’ll go and I’ll access it if I have to, but until then I’m just going to leave it up there and ignore it.” But the Bible never says ignore the devil and he will leave you alone, does it? It says, “Resist the devil and he’ll flee from you.”

[02:46] Stephanie: I want t- shirts that say, “The devil is not a bumblebee”.

[02:48] Marcus: Yeah the devil’s not a bumblebee, you don’t just ignore him and he’ll leave you alone. So a fundamental part of discipleship has to be helping people understand their enemy. And part of understanding our enemy is that demons didn’t just disappear after the first century. When Jesus was casting out demons left and right, he didn’t get rid of all of them, so that there’s nothing left on the planet. They’re still around and they still affect things.

Now, I do also understand that sometimes demons get blamed for things that they are  not actually causing, that’s a whole other issue. But for right now our point here is that there is a reality to this that the Bible teaches. The Bible makes it fairly fundamental to the Christian life, I mean we run into the devil and demons a lot in the New Testament. You think about the book of Revelation, the Gospels, the book of Acts, and even Paul’s letters. Hardly any of them can you read without some reference to the work of the devil. So clearly it was a fundamental part of what they taught the early church.

[03:52] Stephanie: So how does spiritual warfare work?

[03:55] Marcus: How does it work? Well you mentioned even in the intro these two principles, permission and authority. Somebody once asked me, “Are you a truth encounter guy or a power encounter guy?” (Which is it’s own subject that we would probably have to introduce.) But I said, “I’m actually kind of legal encounter guy.” And the idea is that spiritual warfare is built on some legal principles. And the first one is that demons have to have permission to do what they do. Because God is sovereign, he is king, he still runs the universe, and they answer to him. And so because of that they have to get permission.

Now here’s the thing, they have a certain amount of permission just because of what happened to the Garden of Eden. Then they got more permission as people seek them out and they say, “We’re going to do things your way, not God’s way.” And even if people don’t know that they’re doing it the devil’s way, anytime that you reject God’s path and you go your own path, you are opening the door. Demons don’t just say, “Well they’re in enough trouble, I’ll stay out of it.” Right. You’re opening a door when you do that.

So permission is this idea that we are giving ground to the enemy and we sometimes call it legal ground, so they actually have a right to be there. And we see a couple of examples of where this is very explicit in scripture. In Job Satan asked for permission to do things to him. At the last Supper Jesus tells Peter, “Satan asked permission to sift him like wheat.”

In Ephesians 4:27, Paul talks about don’t give ground to the devil, don’t give him a place in your life. So there’s a lot of places that are explicit about this but that’s the key of concept, permission.

The second concept is authority. Because I’m seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, I’m actually in a position of authority above these demons. I can speak to them as a representative of the kingdom of God, representing the power of the kingdom of God. So that it isn’t a contest between me and the demon. It is a contest between the kingdom of God and the demon. I’m not stupid enough to say to a demon, “You and me, let’s have at it, let’s see who’s stronger.” That’s stupid. I am saying, “I represent the kingdom of God and you have to deal with Jesus.”

So the problem most people make in spiritual warfare is they only do one or the other. Right. So some people’s concept of spiritual warfare ends with well, let’s deal with permission, let’s confess the sins, and let’s forgive. And they leave it there. Sometimes that’s adequate but not always. And then there’s other people who only do the authority. They don’t deal with the permission that’s giving the ground, that is giving demons permission to be there. So they just get louder and louder and shout more and more. Right. And they’re trying to figure out why this doesn’t seem to be working. So both of those things are important, permission and authority.

[06:47] Stephanie: We’re bringing up so many things, I’m like, “Reign it in.”  We’ll have to do a full series someday.

[06:55] Marcus: Yeah. It’s hard to summarize everything we’ve learned about spiritual warfare in one podcast, but here we go.

[07:00] Stephanie: Let’s continue on and we can circle back if need be. What are some ways that people give ground to the enemy?

[07:06] Marcus: So I actually use the acrostic SOULL on this. If I was going to change it, I would find a way to add the word fear, because I do think that fear is a form of worship. That’s why I say the fear of the Lord is a way of saying I worship the Lord. So demons like to make people fear them because they receive it as worship. Without being explicit about that, I use SOULL. “S” is the sin that we don’t confess and we either justify it or just ignore it. So I’m either hiding it and I don’t ever deal with it, or I am justifying it in some way. It’s not that every time I sin, I get a demon. But if I do sin and I don’t deal with it, then I’m opening the door to something demonic.

“O” is the occult, which is a specific kind of sin. It’s a sin in which I’m basically having a party with the demon. Of course they’re going to come in and say, “Yeah I’ll accept that invitation”. “U”  is unforgiveness. We talked about this in the last podcast. When I have bitterness towards somebody and I don’t forgive them, then I’m giving ground to the enemy. We see this clearly in Matthew 18 laid out with the one who didn’t forgive and they were sent over to the jailers and the tormentors.

And then the first “L” is lies we believe. This goes back to the last podcast on WLVS, wounds, lies, vows and strongholds. So if I make an agreement with the devil and I say, “You are right and God is wrong,” then I’m giving him permission to a place in my life. I would also say that’s usually where fear comes in. Fear is usually a result of a lie that I have agreed to that is making me afraid.

And then the second “L” is lineage. And lineage has to do with if someone in my family opened a door to the enemy and nobody ever evicted that wicked spirit, then he still has permission to be affecting my family. So some of us are born into families that already have demons present in them, right? It’s not that we’re born possessed, but we are born already in the environment. So that has to be dealt with as well. And for people for whom that’s a new idea, we do have quite a bit of teaching on this available. I would just point out that the Bible is actually quite full of the idea that there are generational consequences to sin.

And what we’re talking about with spiritual warfare too is this idea that sin has consequences. I don’t think there’s anybody who would say that if a Christian sins there’s no consequences. But there are people who say those consequences do not include opening the door to demons. And I’m like, why? Where do you see that in scripture? Where does it say that you can sin as much as you want and you’re not going to get any demons?

[09:53] Stephanie: So maybe now would be a good time to kind of sit on demonization. What is it and what is it not?

[10:06] Marcus: So the Greek word for demon, is daimon. We didn’t actually translate it or we would have called it wicked spirits or something. But when it came to the verb instead of daimonízomai or saying demonize, we translated it and we inserted demon-possession. So what’s interesting here is that the word “possessed” never actually occurs in Greek. So when people have this debate about is this “oppression” or is it “possession,” it’s actually a non-argument. It’s about the English language and not about Greek at all.

So my dad was the first one I heard talk about the idea that we need to think in terms of demonization as a scale from one to ten. And that is how demonized is this person in the idea of, is someone just being harassed, or really under the control of something that they need delivered from? So that’s demonization in a nutshell. It’s just on a scale of one to ten, how much influence and control has been given to the enemy?

[11:14] Stephanie: So our friend Dr. Karl Payne developed a super helpful model for evicting demons called CCC. With his input we have added a fourth “C” to that. What is CCC-C and how can it help?

[11:30] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. So the three “C” model that Karl teaches in his book Spiritual Warfare: Christians, Demonization, and Deliverance, is confess, cancel, and command. Right? So the idea here is it’s a permission-based model. So I confess whatever I gave permission to the enemy,  I admit that. I sinned and didn’t confess it. I admit my bitterness, I admit this ancestral sin, right? So I’m confessing it.

Secondly, I’m canceling it. So I cancel it by saying, “I now repent of that. I now forgive this person and I renounce that lie, and break any agreement that I made because of that lie.” So I’m breaking agreements. I will then ask. “I ask that in the courtroom of heaven this  permission be granted and the enemy now be canceled.”  I think the biblical word for this would be to loose, right? I confess, I loose, and then I command. And so now that they have lost the permission to be there, now I can evict them much more easily.

In fact, Karl tells the story of dealing with one demonized person who when he got to this point, and they had dealt with all the legal ground, the demons spoke up and said, “Oh, just get it over with.” They knew they were done. So those are the three “C’s”. The fourth one was actually added by some people down in Kentucky who are working on this. They added commit to it. I was down there visiting one time and they told me, “Yeah, we’ve added commit to that.” And I’m like, “Well that’s a great idea.” So when they’re all done, they now commit any empty space back to God to be filled with the Holy Spirit. So we don’t leave the house empty kind of idea. And I thought you know, that’s good. So we just recommit ourselves to the Lordship of Christ.

[13:25] Stephanie: Yeah. Good. You mentioned “house.” Do you want to give the analogy of either like, the apartments that he does or the temple?

[13:36] Marcus: I’ll do the temple. I was reading in Ezekiel eight through ten. It was interesting because I think that we as humans are replicas of the temple, because we are designed to be something for God to inhabit. And so we have a holy of holies which would be like the heart, our innermost person. And then we have the holy place which I think is like our mind. And then we have the outer court which is our body. I think it is possible for the Holy Spirit to live in the innermost part of me the holy of holies, and still give permission to the demons to be present in my body, to affect my mind. Those two things are not incompatible.

In Ezekiel 8:10 we see an example of this. The shekinah glory of God is the presence of God, it is actively in the holy of holies, but in the outer court there are occult rituals going on. And in the inner court the priests are doing occult activities which summon demons. And yet God has not departed. And so there is a time and a place where both demons and the Holy Spirit are present in the temple.

Now God didn’t put up with that for long. If you want to get an analogy of this, I think of the videos on YouTube, where this Amazonian witch doctor Shaman became a Christian. But when he became a Christian, a war broke out because he had invited all these demons to live inside of him, and then he invited the Holy Spirit to live inside of him. And now all of a sudden he’s got the Holy Spirit and demons and that’s when his world started going crazy.

The missionaries who led him to Christ did not have a spiritual warfare worldview and they didn’t know what to do to help him. So he actually went off on his own just instinctively and prayed to get rid of all of the other demons, so that the Holy Spirit could have complete control. And I think this is a good example because, a lot of people say, “Well the Holy Spirit’s there so demons can’t be there.” I’m like, “Based on what?” Because the Bible says, “You shouldn’t be able to get salt water and fresh water from the same spring.” But the point is it happens, right? Christ and Beelzebub don’t have anything in common. So why is it happening?

[15:59] Stephanie: So right.

[16:01] Marcus: In that same context  Corinthians Paul says, “I don’t want you Christians to have koinonia with demons.” Well koinonia is fellowship. So if I can have fellowship with a demon, what exactly does that look like? And I think that that probably looks like what we’re calling influence or control or demonization. And specifically the problem there is the occult and occult practices, we’re opening that door.

[16:24] Stephanie: Right. And sin gives them permission to access you, but the occult is like sending an invitation to say, “Hey, come, please move in.”

So next episode we’re going to be wrapping up this whole series. Wow. Before we close out this episode I’d love for you to touch on the importance of testing the spirits, and then any final thoughts for the episode?

[16:51] Marcus: So I came across the idea of testing spirits honestly, when people had counterfeit religious experiences. In the early days back when I was in my twenties and thirties, it was not uncommon for people who went to someplace where someone laid hands on them. And when that person laid hands on them they had a dramatic spiritual experience. It was sometimes euphoric, it was sometimes healing, and it sometimes gave them the gift of tongues. You know, it sometimes did all kinds of things. But from the point that they had that experience on, they also developed a problem they did not have before. Sometimes it was depression, sometimes it was anxiety. All right? Sometimes it was just a feeling of random panic attacks.

And so we would test, and we would test with what we call, “If prayer.” Like, “If that was from you God and that was the Holy Spirit, then thank you for it. I ask that I can use it to bear fruit for your kingdom.” “But if I was deceived and that was a counterfeit religious experience then I renounce it in Jesus name.” And I would say that the first 20 or so of those that I ever did were all demonic. They were all counterfeit. Every gift of tongues, every gift of healing, and everything that I ran into was counterfeit.

So I started off on the idea that well, they must all be counterfeit. But I eventually started testing some that turned out to be true and these people weren’t having the symptoms, and they were bearing fruit for the kingdom. I do believe that God can give people any gift he wants to and God can do these things. But too many of us don’t understand the importance of testing. And that’s why John even said, “Test every spirit and hold on to what’s good, and get rid of what isn’t.” So that’s where I learned testing and that’s kind of what we do. The “If prayer” is the core tool we use.

[18:45] Stephanie: You can still give a final thought. It also strikes me that this is such a vast topic and we actually have so many resources on it, Deeper Walk’s general conferences, Mark Bubeck, and Judy Dunagan’s new book. Do you want to narrow the playing field to a couple key resources if they want more.

[19:09] Marcus: So if you want more you can go to the Deeper Walk website. We have a free video conference there on spiritual warfare with Neil Anderson, Karl Payne, and myself. If you want something free, go watch that and you’re going to get a lot of helpful things. Go to our bookstore and you’re going to see a lot of books by the people you mentioned. Judy Dunagan’s got a brand new one out in September, The Loudest Roar.

I haven’t fully read that yet so I’m looking forward to it. I read an early copy to give it an endorsement. It’s great and it’s about living from our victory. She tells a lot of her own story, of overcoming some of the battles in her life and how understanding the victory that we have in Christ, was so fundamental and helpful for her. So yeah, it kind of depends on where you’re at in the struggle and what you need, and whether you’re helping other people or looking for something for yourself. But hopefully you’ll find some tools at the Deeper Walk website.

[20:02] Stephanie: Yes. And Judy is the daughter of the founder of Deeper Walk, Dr. Mark Bubeck, back when it was ICBC. He has The Adversary and Overcoming the Adversary.

[20:11] Marcus: Yes, and we sell Karl’s book on spiritual warfare, and I think one by my dad and Neil Anderson that they wrote together.

[20:19] Stephanie: There is one called, What Every Believer Should Know about Spiritual Warfare, which is very helpful. So anyway yes, we have lots of resources. If you need more right now and you’re like, 20 minutes on this topic is not enough, we have more for you. So any final thoughts?

[20:33] Marcus: No, let’s just wrap it up.

[20:34] Stephanie: All right. Thank you all for being here and joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find out more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.