40: Spiritual Warfare Basics (Part 2)

[00:00:00] 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.

Episode 40. Today we are continuing our look at some spiritual warfare basics.

[00:00:27] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back together.

[00:00:30] Stephanie: Always. We release new episodes on Mondays every week, and this episode should be airing on March 27th, but today we’re recording and it’s St. Patrick’s Day. So, my question for you, Father, is are you wearing green?

[00:00:45] Marcus: absolutely.

[00:00:46] Marcus: I have a very bright green pullover on.

[00:00:48] Stephanie: I’m so proud of you.

[00:00:49] Marcus: No, I set it out yesterday, so it was ready.

[00:00:52] Stephanie: Oh, wow. The forethought! This has been the ultimate nerdom week because it starts with Pi Day and then we have the Ides of March in the middle, and then we have St. Patrick’s Day. So Ben and I have been very happy.

[00:01:07] Marcus: I don’t know how you celebrate the Ides of March. Do you hoard knives? I’m not sure what you do with that, but we definitely celebrated Pi Day. I will say that. That was huge.

[00:01:15] Stephanie: I don’t know. We talked about celebrating Pi Day, but I

[00:01:23] Marcus: Oh, no. We had pizza and pie for lunch on 3:14. Yep.

[00:01:28] Stephanie: Very good. Well, happy St. Patrick’s Day. And for all of you who are joining us as we air on the 27th, Hi.

As of airing this episode, we have a conference happening this week. What Every Family Should Know About Spiritual Warfare. Karl Payne, Dean Vander Mey, Judy Dunnigan, and Dad are coming together to talk about how to deal with spiritual warfare issues in your family.

And then of course, Junie and Nik will be helping guide us through the event. So, anything you want to add about this conference?

[00:01:59] Marcus: Yes. We’ve done a lot of spiritual warfare training things through the years. I don’t think we’ve ever done one just specifically for family.

When we’re talking about family, we’re talking about marriage. We’re talking about parenting. We’re talking about living in this culture that is becoming increasingly occult in its worldview and what that all looks like, and what are the tools that people need in order to be able to be both on a defensive and offensive side.

What can we do in praying offensively? What can we do in protecting? So there’s a lot of good stuff here and we thought it was important to do something specifically for the family.

[00:02:36] Stephanie: Yes, indeed. With that in mind, we’re talking about spiritual warfare on the podcast right now. I thought today it would be good to back out and look at 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.

[00:03:09] 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 would 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.

[00:05:24] Stephanie: Very good. While we’re at it, can you just speak to the Holy Spirit’s role in all of this?

[00:05:32] 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.

[00:08:24] 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 wanna save this part.

[00:09:13] 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 bursts 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.

[00:11:06] 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?”

[00:11:48] 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.

[00:14:04] 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?

[00:14:24] 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.

[00:17:07] 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.

[00:17:14] 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.

[00:17:37] Stephanie: That would be awesome.

[00:17:39] Marcus: Yeah. 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.

[00:17:50] 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?

[00:18:14] 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.

[00:19:08] Stephanie: Once you deal with the permission, then you have the authority. Unless God is working a miracle to overact.

[00:19:15] 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.

[00:19:35] 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?

[00:19:50] 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.

[00:24:24] 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?

[00:25:11] 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.

[00:27:40] 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.

[00:27:49] 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.

[00:28:16] 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?

[00:28:36] 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.

[00:29:40] Stephanie: Yes. We’re in Christ. You are in Christ. You do not need to be afraid. We want to equip you.

On that note, don’t forget to check out the Spiritual Warfare Conference. Details are at our website.

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