It is against the leaders and the powers and the spirits of darkness in this world.”
Sometimes we forget we live in enemy territory.
For us as Christians, this world is not our home. The day we chose to become followers of Jesus Christ, we rejected the confines, authority, and customs of this earthly kingdom in favor of the freedom, power, and lifestyle of heaven.
The trouble is, while we were spiritually renewed and reconnected with the Kingdom of God, physically we didn’t translate from one realm to the other.
We are not suddenly absent in the flesh and present with the Lord.
We have been transformed from being natives of the earth to tourists—but more than that, we have changed our allegiance from being loyalists to resistance fighters.
We are God’s dissidents, and though our activities are not always secretive and classified, we are not welcome members of the one “world party.”
We are now part of God’s underground.
We no longer support the power structure of a corrupt government that preys upon its citizens, but have become spies looking to undermine the current despot—“the god of this world” (see 2 Cor. 4:4)—countering his propaganda and recruiting new assets to join us in the fight.
We seek to free the prisoners, open the eyes of the blind, bring good news to the impoverished, and bind up the wounds of the broken and oppressed.
Some even scorn our activities as subversive and conspiratorial—and indeed, if we are truly doing our jobs as God’s agents on the earth, they are, but they also have a completely different aim.
We aren’t “selling something,” or trying to get someone to buy into our ideologies so we can control them or take advantage of their support…
We are looking to set people free in Christ.
For this is the only true freedom that exists on the earth.
You see, we are not here to live in peace with evil and tolerate an oppressive regime—we are here to throw the powers that be out of high office and establish our King in their place.
Those powers and principalities that rule the atmosphere of this world and poison it with lies, deceptions, jealousies, lust, infidelity, profanity, depravity, vice, manipulation, racism, bigotry, contentiousness, outbursts of rage, selfish ambition, power mongering, cliquishness and divisiveness, abuse, drunkenness, addictions, gluttony, arrogance, and the like, have no patience for the practitioners of “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).
We, in turn, should have no patience at all for them.
Those things that strive to steal life from our children, neighbors, and loved ones should not be allowed any foothold in our jurisdictions.
But such authority and freedom are not won without a fight. Yet the thing is, the fight has already been won. The enemy is already defeated.
When we deal with devils and demons now, we are dealing with cons and charlatans. The only authority they have is what they can trick or intimidate people into believing they have.
That’s why Satan works so hard to spread his propaganda of fear and deception in our movies and media.
The enemy seeks to strangle the voices of our consciences and harden our hearts to the humanity of others.
He has no right to still be in charge, but like syndicated crime, he ekes out control by bullying, corrupting, threatening, scaring, and preying on the basest desires of human beings.
Those motivated by greed, lust, or envy are as easy to manipulate as those high on drugs—their addiction to the pride of life and other lusts of the flesh may not be as easy to recognize, but render them as vulnerable to destruction.
If we never realize the authority God has given us, the enemy has no reason to relinquish his. He is a criminal who takes what doesn’t belong to him and commands those he has no authority over.
Jesus won the victory, but He is not here on earth to enforce it—He has entrusted that to us, His Body.
Have you ever seen a head try to do something without its body?
That sounds like one of those old, second-rate science fiction movies where some guy’s brain is hooked into a supercomputer to run a city. It never works.
Heads only do well if their bodies stay connected to them, and bodies only succeed when they are connected and obedient to the head. If you don’t believe me, try to have your head go to work without your body (or vice versa) and see how it turns out.
Life just doesn’t work that way.
Few ever stop to realize that heaven depends as much, if not more, on us as Christians than we as Christians do on heaven.
The Bible tells us that in Christ “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), but it also tells us:
“So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.”
Ezekiel 22:30
There is a place for each of us in the fight between goodness and darkness on this planet.
If we don’t stand in our places on the battle lines, there will be gaps in our defenses, and all the authority of heaven will mean very little.
Unexercised or unrealized authority is no authority at all.
As Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth,” but he had no place to stand from where he could place his fulcrum and shift the planet.
In the spirit, we are the same: We need the right place to stand and apply God’s Word in order to overturn the systems and syndicates that would keep our generation enslaved, impoverished, and subjugated.
When Jesus came to the earth and announced His mission on the earth, He quoted Isaiah 61. As it is recorded in Luke, He announced:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)
It’s time for us to find our footing and start pushing back for the things Jesus came to this earth to deliver.