Put On Spiritual Armor – Part 2

17 Oct Put On Spiritual Armor – Part 2

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

Currently in our series on five steps to unleashing the power of an eternal perspective, we’re looking at Step 4: You Must Fight the Invisible and the need to Put on Spiritual Armor.

Today, we explore the need to Trust God’s Power to Protect Us.

There are three categories of spiritual war:

1. Dirty Tricks
2. Mind Games
3. Hand to Hand Combat

Each of these categories will overwhelm us if we try to fight them with hard work, or human intelligence or good luck. Rather, we will see how the spiritual armor alone will protect us.

Dirty Tricks

One level of spiritual warfare can be called “Dirty Tricks.” This is circumstantial opposition of evil spirits to God’s people and will. It could be a level of circumstantial opposition that we might not even know is satanic in origin.

For example, in the first chapter of Job, we see Job’s life being devastated. One day, he was walking the earth with fabulous wealth, good health, and a large family. Virtually overnight, he lost it all. The Sabeans attacked and took his oxen and donkeys, which were being used to farm his land, and killed the servants. Next, lightning killed his sheep and shepherds. The Chaldeans rustled his camels and killed the camel keepers. A tornado (or other great wind) destroyed the house where his children were, and killed them all. Finally, Job lost his health, and ended up sitting in a garbage dump with his body covered from head to toe with boils.

Job had no way of knowing why the tragedies befell him. They all had a natural explanation. However, the curtain of heaven is pulled back for those of us who read the account in the Bible, and we learn that all of the incidences were a result of spiritual warfare.

The dirty tricks against us are not likely to be anywhere close to Job’s, but it is likely that we will experience them. Good things we try to do inexplicably fall apart. We get so busy that we don’t have time to do something that needs to be done. We plan to invite someone to an event to influence them for Christ, and the person gets sick and cannot go.

These, of course, are hypothetical possibilities, and the variants are endless. But you get the idea. And they can be difficult to spot because we live in a fallen world in which bad things happen to good people, as a natural course of events. But when things get extreme, or bizarre or relentless, it is reasonable to suspect the possibility of spiritual warfare.

 Mind Games

A second level of spiritual warfare is “Mind Games.” Mind Games are the strategy of deception used by the devil to deceive and defeat Christians. Satan’s name means “deceiver.” Deception is a primary strategy. He is the great trickster, the great illusionist, the great con-artist, the great liar. Jesus said, in John 8:44: “[The devil] was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Satan plays games with our minds to get us to believe that…

1. that which is false is true,
2. that which is bad is good
3. that which is wrong is right.

Don’t underestimate these mind games because the category may seem so simple and obvious to you. The devil is very good at them. If you are not careful, you will find yourself believing something is true that isn’t, or something that seems good but is actually bad, or something is right when it is actually wrong.

His strategy is the same with us as it was in the Garden of Eden: 1) to deceive us into doubting God’s character and love for us, and 2) to prompt us to take control over our own lives. If we know Satan’s mind games, we can be prepared to resist them.

Hand-to-Hand Combat

Occasionally, the enemy comes out from behind his Dirty Tricks and Mind Games, and engages God’s people directly in “Hand-to-Hand Combat.” This is direct opposition by evil spirits to God’s will and God’s people. We see an example of this when Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness when Satan spoke directly to Jesus and tried to deceive Him and tempt Him into sinning (Matthew 4).

In another example in Acts 16, a demon-possessed girl who could tell fortunes followed the apostle Paul around for days, interfering with him as he ministered. Paul finally turned to the demon and commanded it to come out of her, which it did, destroying the girl’s ability to tell fortunes.

In Acts 19, some Jewish exorcists were going around attempting to cast demons out of people “in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches.” In one instance, an evil spirit said, “I recognize Jesus, and I know about Paul, but who are you?” (verse 15). Then the man assaulted the ones trying to cast the demon out, having extraordinary physical power because of the demon.

Most Christians are not called on to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. Some are, but one of the most frequent sources of such reports comes from missionaries, often in very primitive cultures, who tell stories of direct demonic confrontations.

We may not be sure, especially with Dirty Tricks and Mind Games, when something is spiritual warfare or when it may be accounted for by other means. In the Bible we see spiritual warfare being behind a number of life problems:

1. Circumstantial upheaval, as in the book of Job
2. Physical maladies, with people being doubled over (Luke 13:11), mute (Matthew 9:32), deaf (Mark 9:25), having seizures (Matthew 17:15), manifesting extreme violence (Mark 5:3-5), etc.
3. Mental instability, as in the life of King Saul (1 Samuel 16)
4. Faulty thinking causing conflict & disorder (2 Timothy 2:24–26, James 3:18)
5. Thoughts raised up against God (2 Corinthians 10:4–5)

This is not a complete list, but is a list of examples from Scripture of the kinds of things the enemy does to wreak havoc in the lives of people. The tricky thing is that it may not be obvious that something is spiritual warfare. So, we must be alert to spiritual warfare and we must put on God’s spiritual armor. The spiritual armor is adequate under any circumstances.

Conclusion

Satan and his minions are more powerful than we are, have more information than we do, and are invisible! There is no possibility that human effort can surmount their schemes. Only as we abandon ourselves to God’s truth and strategies can we succeed in spiritual warfare.

In our fight against the invisible, as we saw last week, we must choose spiritual weapons over natural weapons for a spiritual conflict. Being diligent to keeping our spiritual armor in place, it is our

• commitment to the truth of Scripture (belt of truth),
• readiness to not harbor known sin and to strive to be like Christ (breastplate of righteousness),
• trust in the promises of God (shoes of peace),
• obedience to God when we feel like doubting or sinning or quitting (shield of faith),
• hope in the future (helmet of salvation),
• our readiness to use the Scripture to fend off attacks of the enemy and advance the cause of Christ (sword of the Spirit)

that will allow us to be successful in the spiritual war. We must trust God’s power to protect. It is His power that wins the war. Not our own.

In addition to being alert to spiritual warfare and putting on spiritual armor in our fight against the invisible, there is one more thing we need to understand in God’s strategy for spiritual warfare: we are to resist the enemy – again, in God’s power, not our own. We’ll look at that next week.  

Get a Moving from Checkers to Chess At-a-Glance-Overview: Click Here

As we have been studying these concepts for quite some time (including in some prior blog series), and I am excited to now be connecting all the “moving parts” from those posts and combining them into a “spiritual game plan” in this “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective” series.

For an overview of the game plan, so you can see at a glance where we begin and where we’re headed, I’ve created an overview/outline you can download for free: Click Here

For the full discussion of each of the steps, begin with the first post in this series, Moving from Checkers to Chess, and then continue with the following posts thereafter.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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