You may not have thought about it, but when a bird flaps its
wings, it is pushing against the substance of the air to gain flight; likewise,
an airplane uses the magic of aerodynamic lift to soar through the sky. Air is
a fluid much like the water we are familiar with. It too can be friend or foe.
We kick against it and swing our arms to swim through it. You have probably
seen the devastation a tsunami wreaks when it comes crashing ashore. The wind
and the waves have incredible power even though it may not be immediately
evident.
You may be asking how this matters to heaven. Look at Genesis
One and see how God separated the “waters” below from the “waters” above.
Change “waters” to “fluids” and you see what I am getting at. You will also
notice that the Spirit is said to have hovered over the waters at creation.
Curiously, both in Hebrew and Greek, there is only one word for “spirit” and
for “wind.” You must use the context to discern which meaning is intended.
Jesus played on this duality when He told Nicodemus about the workings of the
Holy Spirit. It is like the wind, He said. You feel its effects, but you don’t
know where it comes from or where it goes.
Expand that thought. We know that God
is spirit, and we know that He
is everywhere present in His creation. Many times, we see the effects of
His Spirit working, but we don’t consider where it comes from or where it goes.
Now you are saying, for goodness’ sake, Clair, what is your point. It is this: spiritual
forces are at work all around us, some working for good and some for not-good.
Even though the Bible Old and New Testaments have much to say about the
presence of evil spirits, we moderns don’t often consider them relevant to our
lives. We dismiss them at our peril.
I began to consider this when reading the account of Ezra’s
return to Jerusalem after Judah’s seventy-year captivity. He was among the
second wave of returnees, and he encountered those who had come before him to
rebuild the city and its temple. What he found upset him so that he tore his
robes and fell
on his face in mourning. The most egregious fault he discovered was that
the earlier returnees, even the priests, had begun to intermarry with the
multi-ethnic people who had been left in the land after the Jews were taken
captive to Babylon. This practice was explicitly forbidden in the law of Moses.
The reason God gave for this restriction was that
intermarriage would lead to idolatrous worship of the indigenous gods – gods
who were outright enemies of Yahweh God. Of course, God was correct; the
history of Israel is one of continual disobedience and serial idolatry of the
worst kinds. Perhaps the saddest example is Solomon who had hundreds of wives
and concubines who led him astray. His descendants, David’s line, had only a
few kings who tried to remain faithful to Yahweh. Most worshipped other gods
following Solomon’s bad example.
The Bible is clear that the power behind
the gods (small g) that troubled Israel came from demonic forces –
invisible but for their effects on the people of God. We can easily understand
why God wanted the idol worshippers removed. But some people wonder why God
often ordered the slaughter of the animals belonging to a conquered people. The
answer may lie in
the account of the Gadarene demoniac encountered by Jesus. When the Lord
cast the many demons out, they begged to be sent into a nearby herd of pigs.
Jesus consented. The pigs were then driven madly over a cliff to their death.
The demons may have hoped for safety in their porcine hosts, but they most
likely ended up where Jesus was going to send them in the first place. In any
case, this account proves that demons can inhabit animals. God ordered the
destruction of animals to rid the land of demonic hosts.
Just because we can’t see them does not mean that demons
don’t still trouble us. When James
says resist the devil, and he will flee from you, I suspect his advice
applies to the devil’s minions as well. Peter’s
warning that the devil is seeking to devour us likewise implies that
sinister forces are at work to do us harm whether in the form of Satan himself
or his host of evil spirits. Jesus
warned His listeners that while demons might be swept out of a house, they
could also return if adequate measures were not taken to protect it. Much of
the church today has fallen prey to the atheistic thinking of the scientific
age; we don’t consider how very present spiritual forces are in our daily
lives.
We live in a spirit-filled world, and we are in the midst of
a cosmic battle for control of this world. The spiritual wickedness “in the
heavenlies” Paul warned against doesn’t stay in the heavenlies; it frequently
visits us here on earth. Otherwise, Paul would not have admonished us to keepour guard up.
When Jesus gave His disciples His
model prayer, He recommended asking for deliverance from “the evil one.” An
important feature of His earthly ministry was delivering people from demon
possession. Jesus saw the evil around us all for what it truly is: evil spirits
bent on our destruction. Matthew Henry
once said, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” Our failure to
recognize this fact of life is worse than ignorance; it is dangerous. We are
surrounded by invisible forces of evil; the sooner we wake up to that fact and
take a stand as Paul recommends, the sooner we will begin to see the answer
to our prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” That force will be visible.
Related Posts: About the battle we are in: Who Are
the Other Gods? Also: Living
in Zerubbabel’s Day
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