27: Spiritual Warfare Basics (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail Podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting the Spiritual Warfare Basics series.

Father, Jesus talks about the devil plainly in many places. I’m thinking about John 8:44, which comes to mind. What does it mean to be a child of the devil? What is he talking about?

[00:22] Marcus: Yes, there are a couple of times when Jesus refers to people. He says, “You are not children of my Father in heaven, you’re children of the devil.” I’m like, wow, that’s a pretty provocative statement.

[00:34] Stephanie: Let’s just go ahead and read it. I’ve pulled it up from the NASB: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.”

[00:56] Marcus: So let’s first of all identify the audience in a text like that. He’s not saying all of humanity, you’re all children of the devil. He’s talking specifically to the Pharisees and the religious leaders who are actively having conversations about killing him. So the idea here is that murder originated with the devil. That’s what Jesus is saying here.

Not only murder, but then deception. And one of the things I often tell people about warfare is that warfare requires propaganda. Warfare requires a deception campaign. I often think about World War II, where they actually got the Germans to believe that Patton had a fictional army that was ready to invade. They went to great lengths to deceive the people.

Deception is a monumental part of warfare. The devil is this liar and deceiver who wants to kill. Well, here are these people and they want to kill the Son of God. Is that more like your Father in heaven or is that more like the devil?

They are lying to people. They are deceiving people away from following. God’s Son, the Messiah. And so he’s like, “Hey guys, you need to wake up and smell the coffee,” so to speak. And that is, you’re being children of the devil.

This is not the only passage where we find this stuff. Throughout scripture, we have this warning about falseness. In fact, the Apostle Paul, in Acts chapter 20, his last encounter with the elders of the church of Ephesus, they’re in Miletus on the shores of Turkey, and he says to them, his last warning is, “Beware. Wolves are coming.”

What does he mean by these wolves? He says at this point, “There are going to be false teachers, false prophets, false apostles, false brothers, and these false people are gonna come in like wolves and they are not gonna spare the flock.” So his main charge to leaders in the church, like me, was. “You’ve got to protect the flock from the stuff that’s gonna damage them, because that’s how the devil works.”

He told a parable about this too. There are weeds that get sown in there, and these weeds are not just ideas, these weeds are people who are planted by the enemy to bring division and disruption and to keep the harvest from growing and maturing properly. So, it’s a fairly large topic in the Bible, this idea of children of the devil.

[03:39] Stephanie: Jumping right out of that is, just a little bit later in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came so that they would have life and have it abundantly.” So we end with hope there, but so often people use this verse talking about Satan, and like we already mentioned with John 8, this is actually in a context where he’s talking about the Pharisees. So why do we so often use it to talk about Satan?

[04:10] Marcus: When it says that the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, his context there, you’re right, he’s talking about the Pharisees, and he’s contrasting their spiritual leadership versus his spiritual leadership.

He’s saying, “I’m the gate. The sheep pass in and out safely through me.” He said,  “You don’t even use the gate. You’re ignoring this. You’re the thieves who climb over the walls and you’re raiding the sheep. You are not doing what is good for them. You’re doing what’s good for you at the expense of the sheep”

That’s what he’s specifically saying about the Pharisees here. “You are devouring the sheep, you’re harming the sheep, and you’re doing only what is good for yourself and not what is really good for them.”

In contrast to this, he’s setting it up that he is the good shepherd, he is the gate, he is, the giver of life for the sheep, and he is actually, rather than using the sheep for his own gain, he is laying down his life for the sheep.

So there’s this huge contrast being set up here in John 10:10 between the thief, in this case the Pharisees who steal, kill, and destroy , and Jesus, who comes to lay down his own life for the good of the sheep. The connection here is that it was only a chapter and a half earlier that he called these same people. “You are children of your father the devil, and you’re doing what your father wants.”

This is yet another example of them doing what their father wanted. This is demonic behavior. This is not godly behavior. What happens is, we all recognize that in their capacity as thief in this situation, they are emulating a larger archetype, if you will, of the thief, the ultimate thief. And that this ultimate thief, the devil, is one whose task is primarily to steal, kill, and destroy.

[06:11] Stephanie: I was just going to say that those are some foundational things: steal, kill and destroy. I thought we could move into talking about what does it practically look like? What are the foundational things about spiritual warfare that everyone should know?

[06:27] Marcus: Yes, we’re talking about, first of all, that these things are quite literal: stealing. He wants to steal the good things that God gives us.In the bible, the term “blessing” means that God gives us something good.That’s a blessing. It’s a good gift from God. So Satan wants that turned into a curse by stealing the good blessing that God has for us. He is actively working to rob us of things that are our birthright, that belong to us.

He is also literally trying to kill people. One of the things that we see a lot of is demonic activity and suicide. A lot of people who become suicidal and actually go through with it, but from the ones who didn’t go through with it and survive, we find out a lot of them are having this barrage in their mind. It’s like, there’s a voice inside telling them that they need to do this.

And then even with a lot of these shooters who have killed a lot of people, if you press into the interviews with them, most of them have something in there where they talk about the voices in their head, telling them to do bad things to people, telling them to kill.

So it’s not just a metaphor. He wants to rob what you’ve got going on in your life and he wants to kill your dreams. That’s clearly a part of it, this can be quite literal. And in Jesus’ case, they were about to kill him.  This is what they’re coming to do: to steal the sheep from the true shepherd and to kill the shepherd.

This idea of destruction: what is counterfeit about Satan’s work is that he promises life, but he offers destruction. One of the pictures that has helped me to think about this is in 1 John 2:15, where it says, “Do not love the world or the things of the world.”

It sometimes helps me to think of the world as the devil’s mistress, sort of like the devil’s girlfriend. The world is like this attractive, seductive, “Hey, I’ve got what you want. Don’t you want to hang out with me a little bit?” John is warning us not to fall for it. Don’t fall for that tempting thing being thrown out there by the world saying,  “I’ve got what you really want. I’ve got the good thing here,” because it’s like flirting with the devil’s girlfriend.

It’s like flirting with the mob boss’s mistress. It’s not going to be worth it. It’s kind of the idea that whatever good might be there, this is going to end up really, really bad. So there is this kind of warning that goes on when he says, “The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.”

No matter what good thing they put out there, the good thing that is being put out there is not for your good. It is bait. He is hunting you. Bait only works when it’s attractive and that’s a lot of how this works. The enemy is out hunting us like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.

And so he puts bait out there. And a lot of times the bait is to try to seduce us with things that look attractive, that promise to give us good things. But in the end, they don’t give what is good. They end up in bondage and they end up in destruction. So to steal, to kill and to destroy, I kind of wrap that up that way.

[10:12] Stephanie: Yes, and so often he does that through lying.

[10:15] Marcus: Yes. That’s the essence of bait and hunting, isn’t it? You’re lying to the rabbit when you stick the carrot in the trap, you’re lying to the rabbit and you’re saying, “Hey, this is good. Yeah, you want this? This’ll be good for you.”

It’s the same thing he did in the garden. “You see, it’s good. It’s obvious. Let’s eat this.”

That hunting element always starts with deception. I often tell people the deception always has a kernel of truth to it. I sometimes look at it as an illusionist trick, where the magician or the illusionist will say, “Look, I just made the Statue of Liberty disappear.”

You’re like, well, how did they do that? And the answer is that they show you certain things that are true, but they hide from you other things that are true. And so the illusions only work because they get you to focus only on a few true things and not on other true things. And the result is you believe a lie.

So let’s take, for example, somebody who hates themselves. “I hate myself. I’m worthless. I’m no good. I don’t know why anybody would ever care about me.” Let’s just say that that’s a fairly common attack from the enemy. Those people can almost always point to evidence that what they believe is true, and that is there are people who have told them that, there are people who have rejected them. There are people who’ve treated them like that. They know that they have messed up. They know that they have done bad things. They have some evidence there.

And so what the devil does to deceive us is to get us to only focus on those pieces of truth or those pieces of evidence that support the lie and to get us to overlook and ignore other pieces of truth that would refute the lie. This is common to all propaganda. Propaganda starts by saying some things that are true about somebody, but then it turns that thing into a straw man that you can attack and you can beat up.

There’s a few little things that are true about it, but by the time you get to the straw man that you’re attacking, there’s almost nothing true about that straw man. That happens in warfare all the time, and it is what Satan tries to do to us. He gets us to focus on a problem, view true things, but build a straw man out of it. In our case, it’s our view of ourself as a straw man.

We start beating ourselves up and we start hammering on ourselves. Whenever you find yourself doing that, you have fallen into the devil’s snare because it is never God’s will for us to beat ourselves up. It’s never God’s will for us to hate people. It’s never God’s will for us to do these things.

So if we fall into that, we can recognize, “Okay, I have fallen into the devil’s snare.There may be some true things that I’m believing, but at some point that true thing turned into a deception. It turned into a straw man. And I am now pounding on that straw man and something needs to change here.” Usually, I’ve got to undo that deceptive web.

[13:12] Stephanie: So what are a few things that you wish that everybody would know?

[13:18] Marcus: Some things I wish everybody knew about this? Well, the first thing is that not every thought that comes into your head is yours. That’s one of the first things I wish everybody knew, because there’s a lot of us who spend our lives down on ourselves, feeling like we’ve disappointed God, feeling like he can’t possibly love us as much as people say he does, believing these things. They don’t understand that those thoughts aren’t originating with them. They’re coming from the enemy. If we don’t understand that these thoughts come from the enemy, then we end up beating ourselves up instead of beating up the enemy.

My favorite example of this comes from Neil Anderson years ago. I heard him use this example: if I have a house with a backyard and a fence around the yard, and my neighbor has a really mean, vicious dog. And so I’m always careful to keep the gate closed because I don’t want the dog to come bite me. He said, “But suppose one day you’re careless and you leave the door open (just like we might open up a door for the devil, or his demons to, attack us). So in comes this dog and sure enough, he ate us. He bites us. Bites on us. He’s chewing on our leg. We’re in great pain.”

He goes, “Would it make any sense then to respond by hitting yourself in the head repeatedly? Like, ‘I’m such an idiot. What a moron. I can’t believe I left that gate open! I’m such an idiot’.”

[14:50] Stephanie: No, get rid of the dog

[14:52] Marcus: Right. Beat on the dog, if you will. Get this thing out of here. Make this, you know, make the attack stop. Get it out there and shut the fence. That’s a pretty good picture of a lot of what happens in this battle for the mind and spiritual warfare.

Satan gets us to beat ourselves up instead of actually attacking the real adversary. So we actually talk about it, “Attack the actual adversary,” is one of the points that we often teach when it comes to spiritual warfare in the family. Because a lot of us, we attack our kids, or our spouse, or a sister or a brother, an aunt or uncle, whatever. And realizing that while there may be truth that casts them into the role of enemy, our true enemy is the devil and we need to look for how to attack him in this.

It applies not only to the way we beat ourselves up, but oftentimes the way we look at other people.

[15:49] Stephanie: That is a good word.

We’re flying through this episode. We’re coming to the top. We’re definitely going to continue the discussion next week because I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface. Do you want to give final thoughts for the episode or can I ask one more question?

[16:09] Marcus: I’ll answer your question for my final thoughts.

[16:15] Stephanie: You’re talking about taking our thoughts captive, what are some other kinds of attacks that people have to deal with?

[16:29] Marcus: The devil can attack us physically. The Bible is filled with people who had physical problems that were resolved by Jesus casting out a demon from someone not being able to speak, someone not being able to hear, somebody being hunched over, even a fever and other things.

He can attack us physically, and so it’s important for us, I think, when we come under physical attack, one of the things we do, just like we would look for a physical root cause, we sometimes have to look for a spiritual root cause as well and say, “Did a door get opened? Is there something here that needs to be renounced and gotten rid of?”

My mind goes specifically to the stories of people who have taken short term mission trips, been exposed to something occult, brought it back home with them, and some new physical ailment began when they got back. They don’t put together that there’s a spiritual root to this that needs to get dealt with. So there could be physical attacks.

There are mental attacks, and sometimes it’s like, “Did a door get opened that allowed this mental attack to begin? Am I justifying something I shouldn’t be doing?” So you pray and you say, “God, show me, is there a spiritual root to this thing that I’m going through?” Whether it’s a mental torment, whether it’s a physical attack, whether there’s been some relational breakdown – I’m not saying that it explains all of it or that it’s the only thing that causes these things, but I think it is a component that is often missed.

So, asking God to show us what that spiritual root is and then we deal with it. We confess whatever opened the door. We cancel the permission of opening the door, renounce what we did, and we command the wicked spirits to leave and commit that part of our life to Christ.

[18:23] Stephanie: The three C’s plus the committing to Christ.That’s Karl Payne, and I keep wanting to say acrostic. It’s not an acrostic.

[18:34] Marcus: It’s some kind of memory device. We call it the three C’s plus one.

[18:44] Stephanie: Can you just explain those C’s one more time really clearly?

[18:50] Marcus: Yes, The idea is I Confess. Whatever gave permission to the adversary to be tormenting me in some way: it might be something I did, but it might also be something generational. It might be when we go into a hotel room, “ I confess that sin may have occurred in this hotel room.” but I’m confessing whatever the open door was.

And if I don’t know what that is, I use an “if” prayer: “If this door got opened by my ancestors, by something that happened on this property, by something I unknowingly did, then I confess that.”

Then you go to the next one, “I Cancel it. I renounce doing that. I repent of that. I forgive that person. I want to tear up that agreement. I want to cancel the permission that was given there.”

And then thirdly you say, “I now Command, in the name of Jesus, as a child of God, you’ve got no more permission to be here. I command you to leave.”

Those are the three C’s: confess, cancel, command. What gave permission, cancel the permission, and then use your authority to command the enemy to leave. And then I say, “God, I now commit this over to you. Grant me your peace, grant me your protection. And, forward in that confidence.

[20:11] Stephanie: There are some various approaches when you say spiritual warfare or spiritual warfare ministry. A lot of people can get a variety of different ideas of what that looks like. You tend to approach spiritual warfare from a legal standpoint, which we’ll get into more, but I thought maybe you could talk about some of the other approaches to spiritual warfare that people may have seen.

[20:35] Marcus: Well, I would say there are four classic approaches to spiritual warfare. There’s the very charismatic side, which says you can’t really do this without speaking in tongues. There are some people who I have heard teach that the only protection we have is this spiritual prayer language. I haven’t personally found that to be true, but there are plenty of stories of people who found that helpful in whatever they were going through. We also teach that we need to test tongues, so it becomes a double-edged sword on that point.

The second approach is what we call a power approach to spiritual warfare. The power approach is the idea that this is primarily about insisting upon your authority as a believer, and the power approach tends to create a lot of overt reactions where people are rolling around on the floor, they’re vomiting, there’s a lot of stuff. Back when my dad, your grandfather, first got in this, he didn’t have anybody mentoring him and he kind of started off with that power approach. The idea was to pray something that if there was a demon present, it would trigger the demon and you get a reaction in the person. I was there, more than once, when somebody went from sitting calmly on the couch to rolling around on the floor because the prayer had successfully triggered something.

At that point it was considered, “Okay, we can relax. Now we know what to do. We have identified a wicked spirit. We can get rid of this thing now.” The power approach is more of that direct confrontational thing.

Then, Neil Anderson coined the phrase, a truth encounter, to be different than a power encounter. The idea here was, let’s really get at the root issues of what’s going on. Let’s bind the enemy, keep them from acting out so much, keep them from being so active. Let’s get at the root cause issues, which are, a lot of times, lies that we’re believing, so he sort of coined that idea that, let’s truth encounter.

What I’m trying to do with what I call the legal approach, is saying all of these things play their role. They all coalesce together in a model I call the legal model, and that legal model has to do with the fact that God is king. He has a court. There are laws that run the universe. It all starts there, so we can unpack that here a bit today.

[23:15] Stephanie: Very good. While we’re at it, can you just speak to the Holy Spirit’s role in all of this?

[23:23] Marcus: Yes. How do I start? The Holy Spirit’s role in this is kind of the same as it is in the entire Christian life. And that is, some things you do just because you know to do them and you may not be all that aware of the Holy Spirit’s role in what you’re doing, but you are cooperating with the Spirit without necessarily hearing His voice, or being obviously led by what he’s telling you.

There are other times when the Holy Spirit gives you exactly what you need in order to know where to press into. This often has to do with root issues. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to help identify root issues. I’ll give you an example:

One time, your grandfather was meeting with a seminary student who had a rage compulsion. When he got triggered, he would literally destroy things, and scared his wife, scared his kids. So he came to see my dad for that rage compulsion. But as they were dealing with that, my dad had this thought in his head that there’s something else. And so he asked the guy, “Is there any other area where you feel completely out of control like you do with rage?” And the guy hung his head and admitted to a porn addiction. This is way before the internet, so he was going out looking for it in places.

So sometimes that’s what I mean by the Holy Spirit can be the prompter that leads you to the root issue you need to be going after. Or you need to be looking for another root issue.

Also, when we invoke our authority as a believer, I’m often very well aware of the fact that I’m just saying words, that the power is the Holy Spirit power. So I will sometimes even pray in the midst of a warfare intervention, “God, would you please supply the power to back up the authority I am invoking.”

Let me distinguish between authority and power, because that gets confusing too. Power is the ability to force something to happen, and authority is the right to represent power. So, if I hold up a gun, that’s power; if I have the right to hold up a gun, that’s authority. And so, for a police officer, it’s not normally just the power of that individual police officer that’s the issue. It’s the power of the government that that police officer represents. We talk about an officer having authority because he has the right to represent the power of the government.

And that’s the same thing as a Christian. When we talk about having authority, it’s not that I am stronger than the demons or more powerful than them, it’s that I represent a power that is vastly superior to theirs. And that’s what authority is all about.

[26:25] Stephanie: Yes, and we can get more into that in just a little bit  if you think that is better, but my next question is, I’m thinking about evangelism too. The power encounter that you described was triggering the demon, now we can get it. But usually when I hear about power encounter, I also am thinking in terms of missionaries or people who are going to a different region or a different place, and there is kind of like a standoff that happens. Do you know what I am trying to say? Maybe we want to save this part for permission.

[27:16] Marcus: Well, no, that’s fine. So I think one of the reasons that there’s often a missionary connection to that, especially in our family, is that when your grandfather taught the course at Trinity, it was called Power Encounters in the Mission Field, so most of his stories were in that context of power encounters in the mission field.

But a lot of people in the counseling area as well use more of a power encounter approach. I would say in general, the more you lean on the charismatic side, the more likely you are to take a power approach. The more evangelical you lean, the more you tend to go toward a truth encounter or legal encounter. I think legal encounter brings them both together.

But for example, I’ll give you a missionary story that my dad used to tell.  A missionary was on his way through the jungle on a bicycle to go bring the gospel to a remote village. And the shaman in that village put a curse on the missionary to kill him before he could get there. The missionary didn’t know this, but as he’s riding his bike through the jungle it spontaneously burst into flames. The bike did. But he survived and he made it there. When the shaman saw him walking into the village, he was like, “Okay. I have for the first time in my life encountered a power that is greater than mine.” And he listened to what he had to say and he converted. The conversion of the shaman led to the conversion of a whole lot of other people in the village.

And so a power encounter in that regard is actually a missionary strategy. Some sort of demonstration that the power that we represent in Christ is greater than the power that the shamans themselves represent, and I could give you dozens of those stories.

[29:10] Stephanie: That makes a lot of sense of why my brain goes there. I’m also thinking, I had a professor who was definitely on the more charismatic side and he would talk about, I can’t remember if it was him or if it was his friend he was with, being at a conference and just sensing that somebody would need deliverance and going up and just touching them on the chest and they’d be free. There seemed to be actual fruit from that. And at the time, I only knew the legal approach, or the missionary power encounters. And I was just like, “Can you do that? Is there an anointing for that?”

[29:53] Marcus: I do tend to put some of that into the category of miracle. That is, you bypass all the other things and you just touch a person, say the word, and something miraculous happens. And I do believe in miracles. I do believe that God still does miracles today. There are people who have an anointing in the realm of the miraculous. And so I do think that that’s probably where I would put that sort of an experience.

One of the more dramatic stories I heard was from a charismatic practitioner of spiritual warfare who was over in Africa. He was preaching to a large gathering, and four of the most powerful witch doctors in the area came in full regalia with all of their incantations and stuff to the meeting. Everybody froze in fear because they were like, ,”These are the four most powerful people in the region.” And he said they started walking systematically up towards the platform where he was. He was in the middle and they were coming from all four sides. They got halfway down there and the spirit of God just fell on the place, and those guys found themselves flat on the floor. Pressed down by the power of God, kneeling before Him. All of them ended up converting. They all ended up going through deliverance. A couple of them had to stay for some extra deliverance. So we talk about, there is a power that is happening here.

Now, when we talk about the legal approach, what we’re emphasizing is that you don’t have to be operating in that kind of power in order to engage in spiritual warfare. Because legally, we still have the authority to represent power. Now, there are levels of extremes here where you ought to have more experience, or to have something before you just dive into it.

Unless God drops you in. Sometimes that happens where God just drops people into the deep end of the pool. He does it to show, for his own glory, to show that we’re just clay pots and the power is with him.

[32:09] Stephanie: Last week we talked about the 3C’s: confess, cancel, commit. With that mind, why does that work? Let’s talk more about your approach, the legal approach, and permission and authority. What is permission?

[32:29] Marcus: The idea of permission starts with the idea that God is king, and thus God is sovereign, and thus demons can only do what they have permission to do. Well, why would God give demons permission to do anything? This brings us all the way back to creation, to the fall of man, and to what the Apostle Paul refers to as “this present evil age”.

When Adam and Eve, our first parents sinned, it gave permission to the demons to have a greater role in the world. There are some people who believe what happened in Genesis 6, with the sons of God marrying the daughters of men and having Nephilim, that that created another level of permission, and so on. This idea is that, in this present evil age, the enemy is not bound. He is not cast into the [abyss], he’s not been judged for all of eternity yet. So he is free to do stuff.

What happens then, when I think about this from a legal perspective, I picture it like a trial up in the courtroom of heaven where Jesus is the defense attorney and Satan is the prosecuting attorney, and Satan’s basically saying, “Well, because of what they have done, I have permission to do this.”

There are limits to what he’s got permission to do. So what he can’t do is, he can’t snatch them away from Jesus and say, “No longer your child, they now belong to me.” He can’t snatch us out of the Father’s hand. He can’t steal us away and take our salvation away.

But just like with Job, God gave him, the devil, permission to do a little bit more and then a little bit more with him. What we’re talking about is how much permission, or what is classically called, how much legal ground does the enemy have?

What we’re trying to do is find out what gave them permission to do this. What is the legal ground that is allowing them to do this to us? Specifically, when I’m a Christian, and I’m finding myself dealing with tormenting thoughts, or doors opening and slamming in the house, or a weight on my chest at 3:00 in the morning, what in the world is going on?

One of the things I’ve got to deal with is, what would have given permission to the enemy to do this? How do we remove that permission? And then, we use our authority to make them leave. So permission is very pervasive. It’s the foundation of the legal approach and it’s this idea that demons can only do what they have permission to do. So it’s a big topic. Obviously we could take a long time on that.

[35:18] Stephanie: Yes, and you will be talking a bit more at the conference about permission and authority. At least as I have seen from your notes.

[35:26] Marcus: Yes, it’s in there, but even there, I won’t have the time to unpack it as if it was a whole class just by itself. Now, one of the things I am hoping to do later this year is record a new course on spiritual warfare that dives into some of these more foundational theological concepts in more detail for the people who really want to understand this and not just know the basics of how to put it into practice.

[35:49] Stephanie: That would be awesome.

[35:50] Marcus: So that’s a spoiler. I’m hoping to get to that this year. It’s on the to do list, but a little bit down the way. So we’ll see.

[36:01] Stephanie: So, permission. I think a lot of what I see, whether it’s people taking a power encounter approach or some sort of hybrid of things, people often will skip the permission and just go straight to the authority, and that’s where you get into the screaming matches or the long dragged out stuff. Can you talk about it more from that angle?

[36:26] Marcus: Sure. Karl Payne, in his book, Spiritual Warfare, Christians, Demonization and Deliverance, tells a story about the six hour shouting match, commanding this demon to leave this person. At the end, everybody’s wiped out. They’re all tired. And as the person is leaving, he gets this sneer across his face that  looks like,  “You didn’t get me,”

This is the challenge. And when stories like that, people who’ve been shouting and singing and reading scripture and commanding and doing everything they know to do for hours and hours and hours, and when it’s all done, there’s still no sense that they really accomplished anything. That’s because they’re relying completely on power and they have not dealt with permission. And so Karl makes that point pretty clearly in his book. I found that to be true.

[37:21] Stephanie: Once you deal with the permission, then you have the authority. Unless God is working a miracle to overact.

[37:27] Marcus: Well, Karl’s got the opposite extreme of that. Karl’s got a story of dealing with permission with one of the people who came to see him. By the time they were done dealing with the permission, the demon was like, “Just get it over with.” There was no fight left because he knew they knew what they were doing.

[37:51] Stephanie: So let’s move into authority more again, and then we could look at the whole picture, if you wanted to talk about your rest in peace, regions, institutes or institutions, people. But let’s cap it off with authority first. Is that okay?

[38:05] Marcus: Yes, so authority, as we’ve defined already, is the right to represent power, and the power that we as Christians represent is the power of the kingdom of God. You look at that, and there are limits on that authority, so we tend to call the limits on authority, jurisdiction. Where do I have jurisdiction? Where don’t I have jurisdiction?

For example, when I’m a parent, I have jurisdiction over my home. Even if my kids are doing things to invite demons in, as a parent, I can make them leave. They can’t be in my house. So I have jurisdiction there. What I don’t have jurisdiction over is my neighbor’s house. I can’t walk into my neighbor’s house and do that unless they invite me in to do it, unless they are giving me that authority and extending my jurisdiction.

I don’t have the authority to go and do that down at the state house for the state of wherever I happen to live. I can’t do that for another country or something. I can’t go to another country and say, “I hereby cast out all the demons who live in this country.” That’s because I don’t have authority to do that. There are limits on it.

And so what I’m looking at here is that. But if a demonic spirit has permission to be someplace, and that permission is removed, I now have authority to make them leave. That’s kind of what we’re talking about.

If I’m getting interference while we’re trying to get rid of the permission, I have the authority to bind those demons and keep them from interfering so that we can make them leave.

Just to illustrate this, to bring this together, I remember getting a phone call from a pastor several years ago, and he literally had a client in his office. I could hear this person rolling around on the floor and breaking things in the background. And so I asked him,  “How long have you been doing this?

He’s like, “We’ve been at this for over an hour.

I asked, “What have you tried so far? “

And he’s like, “You know, I tried reading the Bible. I tried commanding it to leave. I just don’t know what to do.”

And I said, “All right, it sounds like you need a crash course in spiritual warfare. Here’s where we start. We’re gonna start with binding. So just repeat after me for right now and say. ‘As a child of the King, in the name of the Lord Jesus, I command this demon to be quiet and to stop interfering with my ability to speak to this person’.” He repeated it and it got quiet, instantly silent.

And he’s like, “Oh, wow. You know, all the thrashing around stopped. She’s sitting there.” and he began pushing in and they got a little more interference. And he did it again. He said, “No, you cannot.” He just insisted on, “No, you cannot interfere with my right to speak to this person.”

And so I said, “Just to jumpstart this, outbursts like this don’t usually happen because of unforgiveness. They usually happen because there’s a cult going on in the person’s family and in their background. Why don’t you just ask?”

He said, “Well, I already know the answer to that.” Turned out this was a relative and he knew the person’s story and that they had grown up in a home that practiced a lot of the occult.

And so we walked him through a generic break-the-permission prayer, which was, “In the name of Jesus, I renounce Satan and all of his works.” That got a big reaction out of the demons, but again, he just bound them, commanded them to be still, not to interfere. And the person continued through there, and then said, “I confess that I have engaged in these things. I cancel the permission that that gave, and I now command you to leave in Jesus name.”

And he would walk the person through praying these prayers and making these commands. They got through the first one. I said, “Okay, now ask her,” I said, “Let’s invite the Holy Spirit now to show her, are there specific root things, are there specific issues here that we need to renounce and just deal with them one at a time?”

And so the first one that came up was a seance and then a ouija board and then some other stuff. And after we went through about three of these, he’s like, “Oh, I think I see how this works now.” Because he was learning the legal approach- deal with the permission, find out what the permission is, cancel that permission, command him to leave. And then he said, “I’ll call you back if I need help.”

Well, a few days later, he said, “It took us two sessions, but I think we got through everything. And she is a totally different person now.”

So that’s kind of a summary of what the legal approach to spiritual warfare looks like.

[42:39] Stephanie: It’s a very, instructive story. Thank you. So let’s go back to the idea you approached from the authority angle. Like you can’t just go to another country. You can’t just go to your next door neighbor or whatever. You don’t have the authority there. So from the flip side of permission, regions, countries can give permission, institutions could give permission, people can give permission. So can you talk more about that process, if a country has given permission for demonic presence, what can be done? Or how does the permission even get there?

[43:27] Marcus: I usually say if you go to a country and their official religion is the worship of idols, and every family has a shrine in their home where they’re worshiping idols, and there are temples on every street in which you’re gonna find idols, does all of that idol worship give permission to the wicked spirits behind those idols? And the answer is obviously, yes. They’re getting permission left and right all over the place in that region to live there.

And so if I, for instance, as a missionary or somebody on a short term mission trip enter into a region that is heavily populated by demonic spirits because they’ve been given so much permission for so many generations through so many rituals and so many prayers, that’s going to have an effect.

It doesn’t mean I’m going to get demonized, but it means I’m going to have a different kind of battle on my hands than I would if I was in a place that had not given that kind of permission. So we talk about  regionally, it can vary. How much permission and what kinds of spirits have permission to be active in various regions can change depending on what doors have been opened.

First of all, at the governmental level, is there an official policy that is allowing demons to come in? Secondly, at just the cultural level, have the institutions of the culture brought them in the schools, the families, the church, the religious systems. All of those things are forms of giving permission to demons to have greater access and thus be more active. And I think it’s one of the reasons why a lot of missionaries will tell you stories of coming under demonic attack when they enter into regions and not having been prepared for it because nobody had taught them about this.

So that’s the regional one. The institutional one is similar in its idea if a business dedicates itself to a particular god or goddess, if a business dedicates itself to some sort of spiritual power. If a church is opening doors, like there’s things going on in the church that are actually occult as well as things going on in the church that are Christian. You can get this influx of things taking place, whether it’s a family institution, the arts, the media, government. The institutions can do this too when the decision makers, especially, are opening up doors to things they shouldn’t be opening up.

[45:57] Stephanie: So then the decision makers would need to be the ones who would remove the permission because they would be the ones with the authority there.

[46:06] Marcus: Yes. So as culture changes – and that’s kind of what revival is all about – revival is always characterized by people getting rid of their idols. You go through the Bible and that’s the first characteristic of revival. If you are truly turning back to God with all your heart, get rid of your idols. Let’s shut the door to all this permission you’re giving to the enemy in your life. That’s a key part of what that’s all about.

[46:34] Stephanie: Ah, it’s so huge and we can just keep talking and talking, but we are definitely at the top of our time. I always say that wrong, we’re definitely out of time, we’re at the end of the episode.

Can you give us some final thoughts? We’ll keep talking next week about it, but for this episode, any final thoughts?

[46:54] Marcus: Yes, I find that most Christians are either immersed in spiritual warfare or they know almost nothing about it. And so part of what we’re trying to do is help people understand and normalize the experience of the spiritual realm as a Christian. Because the Bible talks a ton about the unseen world, a ton about spirits, a ton about the spiritual realities and the power that is there and all that.

Yet, some of us either become infatuated with it and we’re absorbed in it, or we are scared of it and we avoid it. What we’re trying to do here is normalize this and understand hey, you know what? Demons exist in the world just like snakes exist in the world. It’s probably a good idea to know about how they operate and what to do. Have some basics down here about how we interact with and deal with these things.

So that’s what we’re trying to do, especially at Deeper Walk, is help people learn to think about this biblically and learn some basic practices, so they’re not caught unawares.

[48:03] Stephanie: I thought today we could continue the discussion and look more at authority. I’ve heard you say that there are two errors Christians will often fall into in regard to authority in Christ: that Christians have no authority, or that Christians have all authority. So let’s speak to those two things. First, no authority. Why do people say we don’t have authority?

[48:25] Marcus: I think that this comes from, in some ways, it’s almost reactionary against people like me, who practice spiritual warfare and say that Christians actually know and need to know how to do this for themselves. There’s a group of theologians out there who say Christ has all the authority, and I don’t share that with him. But it takes a little explanation. There isn’t a verse in the Bible you can point to that says anything about Christians having authority. There’s not a specific verse in the Bible, so we’ll talk about that.

On the other extreme are the people who say we actually have all authority, that when I speak Christ is speaking. If I say something in the name of Jesus, Jesus himself may as well be speaking. And literally, I remember, there was a time several years ago when I got handed two different books by two different people. One of them was from a theologian making the case Christians have no authority, and one was from a theologian, actually not really a theologian, just a well known pastor. They are both just well known pastors, to be honest. The one was very charismatic, and kind of that word of faith branch of charismatics circle that says, basically, your words participate in creating reality. And I’m like, we don’t go there. So as I look at this, I think there are errors on both sides, and we can explain why here.

[49:53] Stephanie: Awesome. So I know, particularly the no authority crowd often points straight to Michael and Satan wrestling for Moses’s body in Jude, and Michael saying, “The Lord rebuke you!” and so they say, if Michael can’t, then…

[50:08] Marcus: That is the classic verse. Good job remembering that. It is an unusual verse. Why are Michael and Lucifer fighting over the body of Moses in the first place? And then secondly, if Michael, the archangel over the people of Israel can’t just say, “You have to go in the name of Jesus, why can we?”

I’ll try to answer both those since we’re right here. So let’s start with the authority question, which in some ways is the easier one because we are children of God in Christ, the basis of our authority in Christ is that we are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. So to be seated is to be enthroned.  It’s like we share access to the throne. Well, the throne is authority. There’s some level of authority there. So what I like to specify about authority, is that we don’t have unlimited authority, in the same way that a police officer doesn’t have unlimited authority, A police officer can’t just tell you whatever they want.

[51:13] Stephanie: “I’m sorry sir, I don’t like the color of your shirt, I’m going to give you a ticket.”

[51:16] Marcus: Exactly. They don’t have that right. They can try, and I’m sure they have tried throughout the years. I mean, there have been bad police officers throughout the years, but their authority is limited by law. In the same way, we don’t have unlimited authority. We have limited authority that is limited by the laws governing the kingdom of God. But the basis of our authority is that we are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms.

When I look at the people who say that we don’t have any authority at all, and we look at this debate between Lucifer and Michael, what I would say is that we actually outrank Michael on the flow chart of the kingdom, if you will. It’s not that I have authority over Michael. I can’t, I don’t, order him around. I’ve heard some people do stuff like that, they order angels around, but I think that’s a misuse of authority.

As someone who is seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, as humans we have a unique relationship to Jesus that is different than even the angels. The author of Hebrews refers to angels as ministering spirits sent to serve. And so in this sense, I think that Michael and Lucifer were more like peers, and so he couldn’t just take authority over him, whereas I don’t speak to demons as peers. I speak down to them as those who are beneath me on the flow chart, if you will, of the authority structure of the kingdom of God.

[52:38] Stephanie: Now I just have Karl Payne’s voice in my head right now. If you didn’t come to the conference, go get the recordings and listen to Karl Payne. He will teach you how to talk down to demons.

[52:48] Marcus: He’s very good, that’s true. Karl and I have taught together on many occasions, and he’s very blunt with them.

[52:58] Stephanie: Okay, so give us your theory for why they are wrestling over the body of Moses.

[53:04] Marcus: You know my theory on this is: there is something in the Old Testament called “nehushtan”. And I’m sure everybody uses nehushtan in a sentence every week. Nehushtan is the Hebrew word for the bronze serpent. When Jesus references it, “So just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness…” In the original story, there were snakes coming in and biting people and they were dying. God told Moses, “Make this bronze serpent, when people look at it, they’ll live. They’ll be saved from these snake bites.”

So we learn later, in the time of the kings, that this bronze pole became an idol, and that a cult had started up around the idol, and people were worshiping it. You can understand why, because they thought, “Oh, this must have magical powers to heal, and so we all want healing, so let’s do that.” Well, I thought if they made a cult out of the bronze serpent, imagine what they would have done if they would have had Moses’s tomb. I’m just thinking that it would have become a place of pilgrimage unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

[54:13] Stephanie: And go back because we didn’t mention the tomb part. We just mentioned the body.

[54:20] Marcus: Yes, it was about the body. If Lucifer got the body, he could, I don’t know what all the rest of the implications there are, but I do think that he would have been able to point people to it.

[54:33] Stephanie: Because when Moses died, no one knew where he was. And so I guess that’s the point I was going toward, that some people might not realize that they did not know where his body was. He went on a walk with God and didn’t come back.

[54:49] Marcus: That’s a good point. Wow! That sounded very mafia-like (laughter).

But I do think that you’re right. God said, “This is it,” and it was time to go, and he did not let people know where Moses’s body was buried. I think part of the reason for that was they wanted to avoid the whole cult thing that would follow out of that. So that’s my theory. I can’t prove it. That’s just kind of my working hypothesis on why this happened.

[55:15] Stephanie: It makes the most sense to me of anything I’ve ever heard. So then can we go back to the all-authority advocates and why people think that.

[55:24] Marcus: All authority again, comes from the idea that Jesus says things like, “Ask for anything in my name and I will do it.”  And it’s a fairly short step from a statement like that to “Well, if I say anything in the name of Jesus, then I can speak with the same authority as Jesus.” But anybody who’s been in authority structures knows that’s not the case. I can represent the king and speak with authority on behalf of the king. It does not mean that I share the king’s level of authority. And so I think that’s just a gross misunderstanding that in some ways is understandable, if you don’t look at it too closely. But once you do, it’s really hard to land there.

[56:06] Stephanie: I don’t have anyone in mind particularly, I’m just saying I’m about to ask maybe a controversial question. I don’t have anyone in particular in my head when I’m asking this, but it struck me when you said earlier that you can just speak reality into existence. That’s very occultic. That’s a very witchcraft sort of mindset. And so I’m just wondering.

I guess that’s just an observation. I don’t know if you have anything to say about that.

[56:37] Marcus: Well, it’s one of the reasons why Deeper Walk has always rejected that worldview, because it smacks more of the occult than Christianity. The idea is that God can speak things into existence, but I can’t. I can’t speak things into existence just because I say them. Now that’s different than saying my self-talk is not important. Or it’s not the same thing as saying that it doesn’t matter whether I’m constantly berating myself or berating other people. That’s bad for completely different reasons that have nothing to do with creating reality.

There’s a classic book by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich, and it’s been read by success people, teachers throughout decades. A lot of people, I don’t think, read the end of the book, because he’s basically having seances in his attic, where he gets the information for this stuff. And part of his theory is, visualize what you want, believe it’s going to happen, speak it out.

So there’s this New Age concept. that if you believe it you can believe things into existence, which sounds a lot like when the scriptures are talking about your faith has healed you. And so I think what happens is that people, too many people, are taking that step from the occult side of creating the reality that I want, because that’s really what the occult is about. I know the reality that I want, and I’m going to use this power to get what I want.

That’s not how Christianity works. I want God’s will to be done. I submit myself. I surrender my will to him. I don’t use God to get what I want. And that’s why a lot of people misunderstand prayer, because they think that prayer doesn’t work because I don’t get what I want. That’s not how Christianity works. That’s not what it’s for.

[58:21] Stephanie: Okay, so I’m going to kind of pause this here, even though it’s a little off topic. I think it’s really important. I run into this all the time on social media and even in conversation with especially my age demographic, where people do have the self-talk that borders on, or just straight up claims, manifesting reality. I do think self-talk is important, and there is this idea of self fulfilling prophecy, where if you say this is going to happen, a lot of times it happens because you just put yourself on that path to make it happen or not happen or whatever, whether that’s positive or negative.

Part of the deception is that there is some truth in it. Could you speak more to how to differentiate between some positive self-talk, and some making plans.

[59:13] Marcus: It’s a good question, because what I think the difference here is that one is psychological and emotional and the other is spiritual. What I mean is the difference here is one thing is counting on it creating reality with spiritual force. If I believe the right things, if I say the right things, I can make this happen, versus simply the lack of wisdom, or the folly, shall we say, of constantly putting yourself down or seeing things that are not true.

For example, I was an athlete for a lot of years. I can’t say, “ We’re going to win this week, we’re going to win this week. We’re going to win this week,” and make it make us win. Now, I can picture myself shooting correctly in my head, versus being sloppy in my thinking, and it’s going to make a difference. I can go into a game thinking that we’ve got no chance, and that’s going to have an effect on my performance, but it’s strictly an emotional, psychological level. I’m not creating that reality with any kind of spiritual force. So there’s a difference between something being wise or foolish and something being powerful.

[01:00:21] Stephanie: Thank you. That’s good. All right, I could ask more questions on that topic, but that would be a different episode.

So, shall we move on to Christus Victor? I want to look at the connection between authority and victory and all of that. And it’s Holy Week. So like the crucifixion and the resurrection and such.

[01:00:44] Marcus: Absolutely. Christus Victor is the view of the Atonement that was most popular back when the early church fathers, folks like Irenaeus and others, tended to present what happened at the cross in terms of this cosmic battle between the forces of darkness and the kingdom of God.

At the cross, the devil thought he won, only to find out he actually got completely disarmed. So you have this classic text, Colossians 2:15, which says that Jesus disarmed the principalities and powers at the cross. Well, what does that mean? The verse before that points us to the fact that, prior to the cross, Satan had a claim on us.

There was a certificate of debt, it’s called in Colossians 2:14. This idea is that as long as that certificate of debt existed, Satan could go to the courtroom of heaven and have a claim on us, and God had to grant, sort of, his request.

But at the cross, what we’re told Paul says in Colossians 2:14 & 15, is he erased it. In John, when one of his last words on the cross was “tetelestai”, which is that Greek word that means: it is finished. And that is actually the word they used to stamp on these certificates of debt, to cancel them, to erase them, if you will, to bring them to an end.

And so what happens is like, if you owe somebody a debt and he gets paid, I don’t owe a debt anymore. And so in that way, he has disarmed the enemy against us. There is also this, what we talk in Kingdom terms of, an already / not yet theology of the kingdom, which says that Christ defeated Satan totally in regard to that debt that we owed and removing the claim against us. But his final victory over Satan is a not yet thing that is waiting to happen.

So in the meantime, though, because we have been seated with Christ through the resurrection, and because we have had the claims against us taken away by the cross, we are in a position to live in freedom as Christians that did not exist before the cross. And that’s why, when we talk about the cross, we tend to talk about two things, primarily, and one is about Christ’s victory over the enemy at the cross, and also about the cancellation of our debt against us at the cross.

[01:03:08] Stephanie: As you were talking, I just kept seeing Chronicles of Narnia and Aslan and Wow! I mean, obviously we know what that analogy is on the stone table.

[01:03:20] Marcus: Stone table. Yeah, like an altar.

[01:03:22] Stephanie: I’ve never actually thought of that, and had the thought of Christus Victor in my head.

[01:03:28] Marcus: Well, and this is part of the genius of C.S. Lewis and writing The Chronicles of Narnia. In fact, when we did our 2012 national conference, we brought down all the house lights. We opened with that scene, that exact scene of Susan and Lucy mourning at the stone table because Aslan was just killed the night before by the White Witch, who represents the devil. Aslan represents Christ. And here is this battle of cosmic warfare. And it looks like Satan or the witch has won, but the stone table cracks. And this cracking of the stone table is just genius to me. It’s so significant because it illustrates this idea that the charges against us have been broken.

The foundation for the charges against us have been broken. We’ve been set free from the law, Romans 7 says, we’ve been set free, therefore, from sin, both Romans 6 & 7 says. We have been set free from all of these things because of what Christ did on the cross. That’s the foundation of our victory, the foundation of our freedom, and also the foundation that gradually is the idea of our authority. Because of his victory, and also, because the penalty was paid, and it is complete.

[01:04:44] Stephanie: And just to complete that story, you commissioned an actual cracked table for the stage. I was still in undergrad at Taylor at the time, and had connections at the theater, and we got a table, a full size table that I think actually a high school used in a production of Chronicles of Narnia as their set piece. Yes, so as the lights were coming down, that was up there, and it was so epic as this symbol.

[01:05:14] Marcus: Yeah, it was pretty cool. We had that broken stone table up on the stage for the whole conference. To me, that was just the clearest picture of grace I could think of to lay out for people, to keep it in front of them for the conference on grace.

[01:05:27] Stephanie: Grace. John Lynch was at that conference.

[01:05:29] Marcus: He was. For that reason. He’s very good at talking about Grace.

[01:05:34] Stephanie: Oh, okay, now I’m all wrapped up in memory, and I’m losing track of my train of thought.

[01:05:39] Marcus: Right, we probably need to wrap up.

[01:05:41] Stephanie: We do. Okay, wrapping up, any final thoughts.

[01:05:46] Marcus: So again, if you haven’t heard of Christus Victor, that is a view of the Atonement that focuses specifically on the idea that Satan thought he had defeated Christ at the cross, only to find out later that he had been completely disarmed, that his claims against us had been broken, the law had come to an end. When you combine the resurrection with that, you have this complete reversal of the legal situation on which Christians live. That’s why we say that spiritual warfare is a legal thing, primarily because of what happened at the cross and the resurrection completely changed the legal landscape.

We need to, as part of our theology, understand what our legal rights are as we go into these battles, and when we understand our legal rights and we enforce those, the demons know when they’ve been beat. I don’t come into something like that knowing that I’m stronger than them, that I’m smarter than them, that I’m even more powerful than them. I come into a conflict like that knowing that this has already been legally decided, and as long as we can get people to deal with the permission involved, then they have no legal right to be there. That’s why we spend so much time talking about permission.

Authority is the right to represent power, and we represent the kingdom, the power of the kingdom of God. I will sometimes pray at the end of something like this, “God, now that I’ve made this command, would you please use your power to enforce it?” And he has never let me down.

[01:07:18] Stephanie: Amen. Hallelujah! Usually if you have a contract, you can’t just tear it up, but we can tear this contract up because of what he did at the cross, because he did fulfill it. So hallelujah!

[01:07:28] Marcus: Yep, he’s been canceled.

[01:07:29] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.