72: Occult vs. Kingdom

[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.

Season 1, episode 72. Today we are segwaying from our conversation about the occult into a new little series on the authority of the believer.

Hello, Father.

[00:33] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Yeah, let’s dive into the authority of the believer, shall we? That’s a good topic.

[00:41] Stephanie: I’m excited for it, and I think it does follow well off of our potentially very controversial episode that we just did.

[00:49] Marcus: Yeah. Not everybody’s going to agree with me, and that’s okay. Our motivation here is to get people to think if they haven’t thought about it. So hopefully we did that.

[01:00] Stephanie: And we’ll have some more words in a minute, but first, for today’s icebreaker, it is NaNoWriMo season. So NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, and one of the big things with NaNoWriMo is that you write 50,000 words in a month. So 50,000 words in 30 days. And it’s the challenge that you’re gonna… Can you win this challenge?

[01:28] Marcus: That’s longer than half of my books. I’m just putting it out. Okay.

[01:33] Stephanie: And so I’ve got a bookish, “would you rather”, which I guess I enjoy, but you might not actually enjoy this. Would you rather write or edit fifty K in one project in a month?

[01:46] Marcus: Write. I do not edit. That one was easy. Okay.

[01:54] Stephanie: Yes, I would go write. I am frequently in the editing phase, but when I do NaNoWriMo, I don’t feel as much motivation to edit the words. I enjoy editing, but I want to write them. Anyway, and hey, Lord willing, I will have returned from Scotland.

[02:14] Marcus: We’re still in the future episodes. You’ll have a little brogue going on?

[02:22] Stephanie: See? We shall see. But yay! Huzzah!  All the travels, and I am going to be tackling NaNoWriMo, Lord willing. I already have a schedule for what I can do in the week, how many words that I can get on the weekends versus the weekdays, and it’s going to be great.

All right, we’ll go back to what everybody else actually wants to talk about. I’m sorry, my head is in writing.

We talked a lot last episode, and because it was a special, I let it go a little bit longer. We have more that we could say. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to say a little bit more, and then we’ll dive into defining some terms for the authority of a believer.

[03:10] Marcus: Well, I think we had more conversation afterwards between the two of us than we did on the recording. Whenever you get into topics like this, you automatically get into things that people are not going to agree about.

One of the topics that we did bring up with this was the idea of origins. And you hear a lot of Christians who, if something has an origin that is pagan or that is occult, they immediately label it as a pagan or occult practice.

I personally don’t fall there. Is it actually pagan or is it actually occult today as it is practiced, is what I am more concerned about than what it was like 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago. Classic example, Christmas tree.

Because Christmas takes place near the winter solstice, every pagan religion has a winter solstice holiday. And so it is not uncommon for practices of pagan holidays to get blended in with that.

Similarly, Easter is very near the equinox and the beginning of spring, and every pagan religion has something on the solstices, something on the equinox. What happens is it’s hard sometimes to separate out what is cultural from what is pagan, from what can be redeemed, and what can’t be redeemed.

For example, I’ve had a Christmas tree in my house every year since I was born, probably. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a demon from having a Christmas tree in the house. I wouldn’t classify that as occult just because maybe there’s some back in German Norse tradition, a Yule tree.

In the same way we talked about Halloween. Our approach to it even as a family has changed over the years because early, when you were young, we didn’t do it at all and we came up with Halloween alternatives.

But it was partly because I was working with people who had been abused ritually on Halloween, and I knew people who were in Satanism and this was their high holy day.  I’m very much aware of all the bad, evil things that go on on Halloween.

On the other hand, in our neighborhood, these people don’t think of it that way. And so every one of our neighbors is out and they’re all coming around. It’s an opportunity to build goodwill in the neighborhood. And so I do things that are not occult related to that part of using it as a bridge to connect to communities.

But this, I think, falls into that Romans 15 category of everybody just needs to be fully convinced in their own mind of what they’re doing. My concern is more when people do things out of ignorance and find themselves engaging in things that they haven’t really thought through and don’t understand what they end up promoting.

So I get it. I get why some people would be really like, “Oh, I don’t think you should celebrate Halloween at all.” And I can understand wanting to use it as an evangelistic opportunity. So they both make sense to me. And I’ve actually been on both sides of this at different times in my life.

[06:40] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s helpful. Thank you.

Well, let’s continue the conversation into, I kind of wanted to compare and contrast the occult worldviews of power and authority with the kingdom Christian worldviews of power and authority. So let’s start with definition of terms. What is power? What is authority?

[07:03] Marcus: All right, so power and authority power is just brute strength. It’s the ability to make things happen. Authority is the right to represent power. For example, the federal government has power because they can make things happen. They can send an army, they can send police with guns, they can send stuff. Power is that thing that is actually dangerous. Right. Whereas authority is the right to represent power.

That’s why when you cross a police officer, if that police officer is operating within the bounds of the law, you’re not just taking on that one person, you’re taking on the government that they represent. The power lies in the government far more than the individual police officer.

In the same way as Christians, demons understand that we represent the power of the kingdom of God and that they are no match for the power of the kingdom of God. They’re also aware that most of us Christians don’t know that and so they’ll want to push back and see, do you really believe in your identity? Do you really believe in the authority that you have? So that’s the difference.

The core idea is that power is the actual ability to make things happen and authority is the right to represent that. I’ll be honest, I’ve been acutely aware of that in many encounters with something demonic, where I am very well aware that I am just saying words. If God doesn’t show up and provide the power, they’re just words.

But I am trusting the fact that God’s power is going to show up, that God is going to show up. So it’s not my power showing up in that moment, but I know that God has delegated authority to me to represent that power.

[09:06] Stephanie: That makes sense. Yes, as you say that maybe this is a random callback, but in the last episode you said that people have accused our ministry before of white magic. Would that be a case of why people might think that? Because it’s like you’re saying words.

[09:27] Marcus: Yeah, basically there’s a theological position that says that if you have the Holy Spirit, you can’t also have demons. And so if we’re telling Christians, guess what? You might have opened up the door to demons and you need to get rid of them, then they will say, “Oh, well, that’s the starting point, then the second point is that you’re counting on they would say the power of words to make things happen, which is characteristic of white witchcraft or black witchcraft, is this idea that my words have power and they can make things happen.”

Well, we’re not saying that. We are not teaching that your words have the power to create reality. Quite the opposite. We’re saying that my words have no power, I have authority and I am representing power. And if God doesn’t show up, my words are just words.

[10:25] Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. So as we are continuing, a few episodes ago we talked about identity statements and I have one for us as we continue into this episode which is,  “We are a people who believe God defines reality.”

I think that’s really important as we’re talking about worldview, that our worldview comes from God, that we are trying to get as in sync with God’s reality as we can because that is the true reality.

So when we talk about occult versus Christian power and authority, we need to address worldview, specifically the worldview involving spirits in the world, like how spirits are involved in the world, I think. Could you talk more about that?

[11:17] Marcus: Well, the idea of spirits in worldview comes up in the simplest way, not necessarily simplest. First thing that pops in my head when I think about this is that when I teach on spiritual warfare in America, I usually have to do some sort of an apologetic like, this really is important, this really does happen, you really ought to pay attention to this.

When I do this overseas, I don’t have to do that. I can skip that part of it because they already know spirits affect them. They already know spirits are saturating their world. They want to know what to do about it.

In America, because we’ve had such a secular worldview taught to us for so long, our Christianity has been highly secularized. And so there are a lot of people who are much more secular in their approach to Christianity than they realize.

They believe in a supernatural God and they believe the demons are real. But it’s sort of like it gets shoved up into the attic of the house and forgotten about. And then functionally we live as if it’s all science and it’s all natural and everything has a natural causation and everything happens for scientific reasons.

But that’s not a biblical worldview. That’s not what we’re talking about. A biblical or a kingdom worldview is teaching that spirits do cause things to happen and that there is a spiritual causation we need to understand. Now, just saying that to somebody who is highly secular in their thinking makes it sound like, what’s the difference between you and witchcraft?

Because there are also animists and witch doctors, and all the rest of them say spirits are highly causative too. What we’re saying is that it all has to be understood from a biblical lens, which is that all of these spirits, from a biblical lens, are under the authority of Jesus Christ and under the authority of a sovereign God.

Whereas you get into paganism and witchcraft, that’s not the case. In fact, they see all of these powers as just constantly battling with one another and there’s a clear question as to who’s going to win in the end.

Biblically speaking, there’s no question about who’s going to win in the end. There’s no question about who’s the ultimate power. There’s no question about how the authority structure plays out.

So you might say that there is a legal and organized view of the spirit world in Christianity that you simply don’t get if it were just paganism and in the occult.

[13:47] Stephanie: Do you have any stories that could help illustrate, I suppose, either perspective, either worldview?

[13:57] Marcus: Your grandfather, my dad was a missionary in Sierra Leone, and he would say, in animistic cultures that have witch doctors and things like this, it’s not uncommon for people to attribute anything you do to spirits.

He would say, “If, for example, I happened to do a particularly good job on my sermon tonight, someone might say, ‘well, it’s because the podium you’re standing in front of was full of good spirit power and that spirit power came through and gave you and the ability’.” In other words, they’re looking for a maximum causation.

But perhaps my favorite story on this subject is the missionaries who were in the Amazon jungle region and heard that a measles epidemic was coming up the river, village by village, making its way towards them. The tribal folks who were still animists and very much “spirits cause everything,” but not from a biblical perspective, when they heard about this, they came up with what they thought was the obvious solution to this problem.

And that is they wanted to cut the heads off of every rooster in the village. And we’re sitting here from our American worldview going, what in the world would cutting the heads off of roosters do?

But from their worldview perspective, measles is caused by a spirit. And if the spirit doesn’t hear the roosters crowing, the spirit might not know they’re there and might skip their village and go on to the next one. So it actually makes perfect sense.

This is why worldview is important, because worldview determines possible explanations and possible solutions. If our worldview is off, we’re going to miss the explanation, misdiagnose things, and we’re going to offer bad solutions that aren’t really going to help.

So in this particular case, the missionaries thought, “You know what? I’m going to get out my microscope and show them bacteria in the microscope so they can see that it’s at this level that germs are causing things like measles.”

Well, when the witch doctor looked into the microscope, he screamed and ran out of the hut because he was convinced he had just seen the spirit. So even the attempt to give a scientific explanation to this didn’t really work because the worldview was so deeply entrenched that that was what was going on.

This story also illustrates what my dad liked to kind of harp on, and that is that one of the most secularizing forces of the 20th century was American missionaries who went overseas teaching the Bible, but without this kind of kingdom worldview that understood the reality of the spirit realm.

What they did is, instead of teaching things like, “If we cooperate with God and his design for the world, then we get God’s results,” they simply taught, “Science tells us this.” As a result, science became the authority rather than God and scripture, and that being the authority.

So what we’re looking for is a lens that is completely biblical, that’s very balanced, but that takes spirits as seriously as the Bible takes them.

[17:23] Stephanie: I think we’ve talked about this before, but I feel like this would be a great follow up story to that would be Shoefoot.

[17:31] Marcus: You can still see his testimony on YouTube in a couple of different places. Shoefoot changed his name to Bautista, which means baptized one. He tells the story of becoming a witch doctor of a tribal village in the Amazon jungle that National Geographic called the most Stone Age tribe in existence in the 20th century.

His testimony is called I’ll Never Go Back. And the point of the testimony is how cultural anthropologists love to tell us we should leave these primitive societies alone. “They’re happy the way they are. Bad on you missionaries for going in there and trying to change them.”

And this is the witch doctor basically saying, “That is ridiculous. I hated my life. I was full of fear. Of course we didn’t want to live this way. It was the only way we knew to live. And now that I’ve discovered the truth in Christ, I’ll never go back to that other way.”

[18:32] Stephanie: Tell the story of how he found the truth.

[18:34] Marcus: So he starts his story by telling about what he had to do to become a witch doctor, which in itself is interesting because it involved a whole lot of drugs, a whole lot of hallucinogenic drugs to get himself into that place.

And then the master witch doctor would coach him on what to do and on which spirits were good and which spirits were bad, kind of a white versus black magic idea, and which ones to invite to live in his chest. And which ones not to invite and what they would give him the power to do, and different things.

All that was kind of fascinating too, because from his perspective, he had invited many, many spirits to live in his chest and that he knew of other spirits in the area and which ones he could trust and which ones he couldn’t for different things.

But when he saw the missionaries, he said for the first time he saw the missionaries had something in their chest he had never seen before. It was this white light. He said the missionaries themselves didn’t actually have a warfare worldview.

[19:41] Stephanie: They didn’t see the lights in his chest or anything.

[19:44] Marcus: They didn’t see the light. They didn’t see any of the spirit stuff going on. But they did talk to him about God and he began to take what they were saying about Jesus and creation and God and put it into his worldview and their mythology and whatever.

They would talk about it as elders, like, “What is this babbler saying?” kind of thing. Gradually, though, over time, he came to put his faith in Christ. And when he did, he realized that a war was going to break out if he invited the Spirit of Christ into his chest, so to speak, when he had all these other spirits there.

And he, on his own, without any help from the missionaries because they didn’t have this worldview, went off and he basically began evicting all of the other spirits, because he realized that they shouldn’t be in the same place, but they were.

[20:44] Stephanie: Yeah, it’s a fascinating story. So give us kind of a vision, for we’re not going to take as long on the authority series as we did on the identity series, but we are going to take a couple of episodes and talk about authority. So can you give us just an overview.

[21:08] Marcus: When I was seven, I’ve told this story many, many times, but when I was seven, a demon showed up in our living room and my dad had a decision to make. And that is I’ve either got to get out of spiritual warfare ministry or I’ve got to teach my kids how to fight. And so from age seven, I was taught about my authority as a Christian.

I remember my dad very clearly saying, “If something like this ever shows up again, this is what you need to do. You just say, ‘in the name of Jesus, I command you to leave. And I pray for the blood of Jesus to come between me and whatever this thing is.’”

Sure enough, something did show up. And I got halfway through that prayer and it left. And all of a sudden from that point on, I was like, “Okay, spiritual warfare is real, and authority is real and it doesn’t matter.” I was seven, right? I wasn’t exactly a seasoned theologian or a seasoned spiritual warfare practitioner.

One of the things that I remember my dad saying on a regular basis was, a police officer coming out of the academy has the same authority as a police officer who’s been a veteran for 20 years. It’s not a question of who has authority. The question is the wisdom and discernment you learn in using that authority over time.

And so I tell people that you don’t have to have somebody special do this for you. If you’re a Christian, you do have authority. Which, of course, brings us to the classic debate that people have had throughout this. I remember several years ago, somebody gave me a pamphlet  and a book in the same week.

One of them was from a kind of word of faith, prosperity, gospel person who was saying that as a Christian, I have all authority and that when I speak, Jesus is speaking.  No, no. Jesus has all authority, and he has granted to me authentic authority, delegated authority, but limited authority.

I don’t have all authority, and certainly not the same way that Jesus does. And it is limited because if I had unlimited authority, then I could do things like say, “Oh, in the name of Jesus, all false religions, every demon related, every false religion in the world must go.” Now, that would be unlimited authority. Can’t do that.

There are clearly limits to this. So then it raises the question of, well, what are those limits or where do they come from? And that’s what led to the whole idea of a legal approach to understanding warfare in the first place.

The other pamphlet I was given was from a secessionist teacher who was saying that Christians have no authority. So in the same week, I’m getting one that says Christians have all authority and one that says Christians have no authority. And I’m like, this is not correct. So I’m happy to dive into this more.

[24:17] Stephanie: Yeah, next episode we’re going to dive more into those debates.

[24:21] Marcus: All right, for now, let me just say I don’t agree with either of them. Christians have authority. It’s delegated, it’s limited, but it’s very real and it’s the right to represent power.

[24:32] Stephanie: Awesome. There’s a sneak peek of what is to come.

I’m going to grab a note from one of our listeners, and this person says, “I so appreciate your podcasts. Our church staff all have your book, and we’ll be discussing it in six weeks.”

At this point, maybe they’re already discussing it. I don’t remember when this note came in, but they said the goal is to get all our home groups reading the book. And you have many books, so I also don’t know which one it is.

[25:03] Marcus: But I assume that’s A Deeper Walk.

[25:05] Stephanie: I’m assuming it’s A Deeper Walk. Whatever the case, that’s very encouraging. We’ve heard from a couple of different church staffs, staves, multiple staffs.

[25:21] Marcus: Yes.

[25:22] Stephanie: From a couple of different churches that their staffs listen to the podcast together. And I think that’s really wow.

[25:30] Marcus: Yeah, it’s pretty cool, isn’t it? I’ve heard from several groups that are saying that we listen to the podcast as a group and discuss it. So I think that’s pretty neat.

[25:38] Stephanie: Yeah. So thank you all. But hey, we’re at the end of the episode. Any closing thoughts for this episode?

[25:46] Marcus: Well, as we started pointing out, it’s very important for believers to understand that they do have authority when it comes to this. The danger, I think, is going to extremes, which is why we’ve always tried to have a biblically balanced approach to this.

Those extremes are kind of like I’ve known people who are what I call “warfare cowboys”. It’s like, “Yeeha, let’s go get us a demon!” And they don’t take it seriously in a sense and they think, “Oh, I’ve got nothing to fear. Let’s just go do this!”

And then there are other Christians who are so afraid of the topic, they don’t even want to hear the word demon because they just like, “Oh, let’s just leave the devil alone and he’ll leave you alone,” like that’s in the Bible somewhere.

[26:31] Stephanie: That’s not a bumblebee.

[26:32] Marcus: Yeah. So we don’t want to go to these extremes, but we want to have a balanced perspective on this, which is why we’re going to be talking about the legal authority of the believer and how that’s used and what that means.

[26:45] Stephanie: Very good.

All right, thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk exists to make heart focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. If you’d like to support this cause, you can become a Deeper Walk Trailblazer with your monthly donation of $25 or more.

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