David Jeremiah - Spiritual Warfare
It was 10 o'clock on September 15, in 2021, and the town of Denton, North Carolina went dark. More than 1,400 people found themselves without power, which is a big deal in a town with a total population of 1,660. A little later that morning, Denton residents, who still had some charge in their cell phones, were able to read the message on the Facebook page of Duke Energy, the local utility company. Here's what it said, "Major power outage affecting the entire town limits and surrounding Duke power customers. Fire at the Duke substation has been extinguished, but major repairs will be needed to restore power".
So a substation fire had caused the loss of power, but what caused the fire? After a quick and thorough investigation, Duke Energy employees discovered that the source of the fire was not a falling tree branch, which is the most common cause, wasn't a car hitting a utility pole, wasn't a piece of malfunctioning equipment, nor was it some kind of intentional sabotage. No, the culprit behind the Denton power outage was a snake. Apparently, one of those critters had wiggled its way into the substation's inner workings, seeking warmth, and it made contact with something sensitive, frying the snake and sending sparks in all directions, and the fire and the loss of power for thousands of people.
And this is not an uncommon occurrence in North Carolina and around the country. In fact, snakes often make it a point to seek out the covered areas of substations and other electrical buildings. They will do anything to get in, and when they get in, havoc is often the result. I want you to know there's another snake out there that causes Christians to lose spiritual power as well. I'm talking about that old serpent, the devil. He's the snake we should worry about. Like these slithering creatures around Denton, North Carolina, Satan will do anything to get into our church, sever our connection to God, ruin our spiritual power grid, and throw us into the darkness.
Satan is determined to hinder and harm and ruin God's image in you and in me. He is here to kill and destroy and to steal, and the story of our lives as believers is the story of the long and brutal assault of the enemy on your heart and on mine by one who knows what you can be and fears it very deeply. The first thing we need to recognize as we look at this passage of scripture is that spiritual warfare is real. It is real. It's not some figment of the pastor's imagination, nor some drummed-up dramatic presentation.
It says in Ephesians 6, "Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places". Mark it down in your spiritual journal: We live in a spiritual war zone, and this war has been going on in your heart and in mine and continues to escalate as the times around us are changing. And this comes as a great surprise to a lot of people. Maybe it's a surprise to you.
One New Testament scholar said people vaguely recognize the presence of a struggle. But they don't give it much thought. I mean, they think it's difficult sometimes to practice our Christianity. We find it hard to forgive people and to pray regularly, to resist temptation, to learn more about our faith, we struggle. But as far as they're concerned, that's the end of it for so many people. It's just, we have a struggle. They have never thought that their small struggles might be part of a larger campaign to ruin them and everybody around them. Your small struggles aren't just a human condition. You're Christians, you belong to the Lord, and you should be aware of the fact that once you become a Christian, you become a target.
Satan's not gonna mess around with you if you're in his house. But once you become a part of God and become a part of what God is doing, you have a little target on your back because he wants to destroy you, he wants to ruin your influence, and he wants to undercut your testimony so that the people who know you will be able to then blaspheme God. This war is satanic. People don't want to believe in the devil anymore. I've read all the statistics about even evangelical Christians who don't think that Satan is real. They think he is some sort of metaphor of evil, or some sort of figment of evil.
But I'm here to tell you that Satan is a real person. He has numerous names in the Bible. Did you know that? He's called the deceiver, the murderer, the tempter, the destroyer, the liar, the accuser of the brethren, and the evil one, just among many. And Peter says, "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour". No, he's not a figment of your imagination. He's real. "And we do not wrestle," says this scripture, "against flesh and blood, but we wrestle against principalities and powers and rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in high places".
This is nothing less than Satan's organizational chart. Principalities are the head officers, powers describe the staff, rulers are divisional commanders, and spiritual hosts of wickedness are rank and file devils. Our enemies are not people. We need to get over that. You think your enemy's a person. No, your enemy's not a person. Your enemy is the evil behind that person. Your enemy is the one who makes that person do what they do that they shouldn't do. Satan uses people to persecute us and to lie to us and cheat us and hurt us, sometimes even kill us. Our real enemy lurks in the shadows of the unseen world, moving people as pawns on a chessboard of time.
As long as we see people as enemies and wrestle against them, we will spend our life in vain. We're wasting our time. It's not that person that's driving you crazy, it's the force behind that person that's making your life miserable. It's the evil in that person, it's Satan having victory over that person's conduct. So the war is satanic, but notice, secondly, it's strategic. The words in this text are also very important. "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil". What in the world are wiles? The word "wiles" means strategy, plans of war. In Greek, it is the word methodeia.
Satan has a well-developed strategy, a well-developed method, and he is implementing his strategy day by day, moment by moment. Paul said, "Lest Satan should take advantage of us; for we are not ignorant of his devices". Satan has a lot of devices to try to hurt you and to hurt me. It's interesting that in this text that we're reading today, six times in those verses the word "against" Satan is against us, he's against us. He's not for us. He doesn't want us to succeed. He will tell you you're going to succeed only so that he can get you to fail.
The Bible says that Satan's purpose is to hurt and discourage people who belong to God. He will stop at nothing to disturb the mind and deceive the heart and defeat the life. If you read your Bible carefully, you will see that what he is doing today he has done from the beginning. It was Satan who led Lot into Sodom. It was Satan who got Peter to deny Christ. It was Satan who caused Ananias and Sapphira to lie to the church. It was Satan who even dared to attack the Lord Jesus in the wilderness. The devil has three primary goals, men and women.
Here they are: to destroy the testimony of every Christian individual, to destroy the unity and purity of every Christian home, and to destroy the ministry of every Christian church. If he gets the individual, he's got a shot at the marriage. If he gets the marriage, he gets enough of them, he'll ruin the church. Here is the most frightening thing about spiritual warfare: Most Christians are not serious about it, even if they acknowledge it at all.
One of my favorite writers is a guy named John Eldredge and he has written this. He said, "To live in ignorance of spiritual warfare is the most naive and dangerous thing a person can do. It's like skipping through the worst part of town late at night, waving your billfold above your head. It's like walking into an al-Qaeda training camp wearing, 'I love the United States' T-shirts. It's like swimming with great white sharks, dressed as a wounded sea lion and smeared with blood".
And let me tell you something, you don't escape spiritual warfare simply because you choose not to believe it, or because you refuse to fight it. It's there whether you like it or not. It's there whether you think you believe it or not. It's there whether you attempt to do anything about it or not. Spiritual warfare, the enemy's attack on believers, is a fact. I grew up, as you know, in the home of a college president. My father was the president of Cedarville College for 25 years and the chancellor for 25 more. So, you can imagine some of the conversations we had around the dinner table in our house.
Once in a while, there would be a little place where a bunch of kids would get kicked out of school. I mean, that happens in Christian schools because they have rules, and if you break the rules, you can't stay. And I remember one particular time we had gone through a sort of a tough period when a lot of kids had gotten kicked out of school and we were having this discussion one night. And I said to my father, "Why do you suppose in this place where we have all these Christians that kind of stuff happens? That shouldn't happen with a bunch of Christians". And he said to me this, he said, "David, if you were the devil, who would you pick on? Where would you go to do your best work? Here is a collection of the future leaders of Christianity. Wouldn't that be a target"?
And it was, and you know, that's the truth. In our Christian schools, in our Christian churches, in our Christian colleges, Satan loves to just focus his attention, and it's perfect for him. He's got a whole collection of young Christian leaders in one place. He can go after them, one after the other. We should not be surprised when that happens, but we should also take note that it doesn't have to happen. There is an answer to Satan's attack upon us. The bottom line is, you gotta fight for your heart, and God has given us a strategy to win. So spiritual warfare is real and spiritual weapons are required. God has wonderfully equipped us, if we'll pay attention, to fight against this enemy who is out to get us.
Let me tell you, first of all, that Paul wrote to a Roman world. And so, the language he's gonna use and the illustration he's gonna use was for his world but has application to ours as well. He's gonna use the Roman soldier's armament to help us understand what kind of armament we should have as believers. He starts, first of all, with the belt of truth. He says, "Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth". Paul begins with truth because that is Satan's primary target. From the Garden of Eden to our current culture, Satan traffics in deception and lies. He is a liar from the beginning.
Listen to what Jesus said about him, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it". And Satan's whole mode of operation is built on deception and lying, and his target is the truth. And I don't know what you think about what's going on in our world today, but truth is under assault. Truth used to be something you could find if you looked for it. It was there, always being beaten around, but truth is almost lost.
People can go on television and say whatever they want to say in face of absolute clear evidence that what they're saying is wrong, and they just keep on saying it, and they keep on saying it, and first of all, saying it makes them feel better because their real truth is pretty bad. And they believe that if they say it often enough, people will believe them. And obviously, that's what happens because a lot of people get deceived. He comes after the truth. What is truth? The Word is truth. That's what the Bible says. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," and the Word of God is the truth.
So, what would you expect him to be doing today? Undermining the truth of the Word of God. Having leaders say that what they used to believe about the Word of God, they don't believe anymore, they've changed their understanding of the Word of God. They have lowered the standard of the Word of God to meet the lower standards of their congregation. And instead of standing up for the truth and bringing people up to the truth, they lower their concept of the truth and make everybody feel happy. Unfortunately, that is a disastrous thing to do and destroys people and destroys churches, and Satan wins if you let him do that.
If somebody comes along and says, "Yeah, but I don't believe the Bible," let me tell you something. Just because somebody doesn't believe the Bible doesn't mean the Bible is not true. You cannot make the Bible untrue because you don't believe it. This is God's Word. This is God's truth. I better be careful as a pastor that I deliver this truth to you every week with all my heart because this is the best thing I can do to help you not be victimized by the error of Satan. You don't stop error by dealing with the error. You stop error by teaching the truth, and when you see the truth, error becomes apparent to you.
But so often what's happening in our churches today, we've pushed the Bible aside for positive motivational messages, we've shut down our attempt to try to teach people the Word of God, we don't memorize the Bible. We don't read the Bible, we don't study the Bible, and half the time when we come to church, we don't hear the Bible. And if that's gonna keep going on, Satan is just winning war after war after war against the people of God. The piece of armor that deflects Satan's lies is the belt of truth. And let me tell you what the belt of truth was for the Roman soldier. It was kind of a wide belt that went around here and it held everything together. It was kind of like a girdle.
The truth belt held everything else together. It held the breastplate in the right place, kept everything the way it should be. Truth is everything. Truth holds it together. If you're losing it in your faith, it's because truth has gotten marginalized. Make sure you don't give up the truth, because if you give up the truth, there's nothing left for you to fight for. And Satan says, "I don't believe your truth. I have another truth". And we need to say, "Get you behind me, Satan, for I have this book, and this is the truth".
The next thing he tells us is you have to have the breastplate of righteousness. The Roman soldiers had a breastplate. It went from your neck to your waist, and it symbolizes Christ's righteousness, which is given to the believer at salvation and it pictures our daily walk with God. This vest is God's protection of our heart, of all the vital organs of our spiritual being.
And here's the beauty of this. Where do we get this breastplate of righteousness? We got it at the cross. We got it at the moment we were saved. When we were saved, God took our sin upon himself and gave us his righteousness, and His righteousness is our breastplate. It's what protects us. When Satan comes to accuse us, he can say whatever he wants to say, but here I am. I'm standing in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I know David Jeremiah fails, but Jesus Christ never does. So, if you want to attack me, you gotta get through Jesus, and Jesus is my protection.
My friend Erwin Lutzer used to tell this story to help people understand what I'm telling you today. He said there are two books. One of them is your book of sins, and the other is the book of Christ's attributes, his righteousness. In the book of your sins are all the things you've ever done wrong. Please don't think about it very long or it'll depress you. All the things you thought wrong, all the things you did wrong, all the things you know you should have done that you didn't do, and the things you should have done, all of those things are in your book of sins, okay? You got that one?
Over here is Christ's book of righteousness and in this book are all the righteous acts of Jesus Christ, all of the things he did while he was on this earth, his perfection, his righteousness, his total absolute holiness. And Erwin says when you become a Christian, God takes the cover off of this book and he puts it on this book, and he takes the cover off of this book, and he puts it on this book. He takes his righteousness and puts it on the cover of your sin, and he takes your sin, and he puts it on Jesus Christ, who hung on the cross to pay the penalty for it all and make us righteous.
So when Satan comes after you, don't let him get to your heart. You know that you're not righteous in yourself, but you are righteous in Christ, and he can't penetrate that if you understand that. You know, one of the things that Christians suffer with a lot, and I've been doing this for a long time, so I can tell you, it's pretty obvious, low self-esteem, low sense of worthiness, low sense of being not a good Christian, all of that disappears when you realize it's not about you, it's about Jesus and his righteousness is on you. You are righteous in Christ.
And so, when the enemy comes with all this garbage to try to cut you down, you stand up straight and show him your breastplate. I'm righteous in Jesus Christ. He took my sin, but he gave me his righteousness. That's the only way I could ever stand before a holy God. And then he talks about the shoes of the gospel of peace. Roman soldiers wore sandals with hobnails in the soles to give them footing for the battle. If we're going to stand and withstand, then we need the shoes of the gospel.
Now, let me just remind you of something. This is not a strategy for Christians to go after the devil. It's not that at all. We are not to get up every morning and say, "Okay, I'm gonna go get the devil". Now, I hear people say this all the time. "I'm gonna go make that devil", and they talk all about how they're gonna, no, we're not called to do that. We're not called to attack the devil. We're called to stand our ground that was given to us by the Lord Jesus. He gave us the ground we stand on. Now he says to you, "Stand the ground and don't let Satan come anywhere near who you are in Christ".
When you're standing against somebody, you gotta have good traction. You gotta be able to put your feet down in the ground and hold. And so, Paul is using that to remind us that the thing that gives us the strategy for the incoming attacks of the enemy is the strength of the gospel. We are strong because we are a part of the gospel narrative. Christ has come and he saved us. We stand in the strength of the gospel. We have our gospel shoes on and they're sunk down deep into the ground, and Satan, you can't move us because we know who we are. We know what we were, and we know what the difference is. It's the gospel of Jesus Christ. He has made us who we are.
The gospel of peace is the wonderful truth that in Christ, we are no longer enemies with God. We stand in the confidence of God's love for us and we stand in the power of the Lord and we resist the evil one who comes after us. Can't get us because of who we were, because the breast of righteousness is on us. Can't take us away from what we believe because the truth is around us. Can't take over our territory because we've sunk our feet down deep into the gospel soil and holding fast. And then he talks about the shield of faith. This may be my favorite piece of armor. "Above all, taking the shield of faith by which you will be able to quench all of the fiery darts of the wicked one".
Now, the Roman shield was usually about 4 feet of wood covered with tough leather and the soldier held it before him. You've seen sometimes, you see police shows where they go in with these big shields. They're gonna go in and make a bust or something, and all of the soldiers have these big shields and they're walking behind them, that was kind of like what we're talking about here. They had these shields. They didn't have metal and deflecting material like we have, but they had strong leather. And oftentimes, when people would come against these soldiers, they would do so by dipping the tip of their arrows into fluid and setting them on fire, and then they would shoot these fiery arrows at the enemy.
Well, the shield of faith was built to quench those darts so that they couldn't hurt you. Proverbs 30, verse 5 says, "Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him". Psalm 18:30 says, "As for God, His way is perfect; the word of the Lord is proven; He is a shield to all who trust in Him". We're gonna talk about this in just a moment, but God has given us the way that we don't ever have to be hurt by any of the enemy's fiery darts, any of the things he tries to shoot at us to wound us. Before we get there, though, there's one other piece of armament we need to talk about, and that's the helmet of salvation.
"And take the helmet of salvation..." The helmet of salvation in the Roman armament was to put on your head to protect you so that your brain would not be injured in any kind of incident, because your brain is the whole deal, right? Your brain goes, you're dead. And so, the helmet of salvation was a picture of protecting your mind, protecting your brain. Satan is after your mind, he's after my mind. He wants to divert us from the simplicity of the gospel and the truth. When God controls the mind, Satan can't get to you because your mind is the entryway into your spirit.
How do you get corrupted? You get corrupted, for instance, through pornography. Pornography comes into your mind and then it corrupts your whole being. Your mind is so critical and... could I just say to you, take an inventory of how you're doing with your mind, what you're watching on the internet, what you're watching on television, what you're reading, what you're filling your mind with because, sooner or later, if you let your mind get corrupted, it'll corrupt the whole you and you will be a ruined person. Your mind is worth protecting.
I'm very interested in what's going on, as some of you know, in our culture today where they're trying to decide whether or not we should set limits for how early kids could get involved with the internet. And in some countries, you can't get on the internet until you're a certain age. I would be favorable to that because right now the internet is destroying many of our young people, destroying some of our kids. It's occupying them with nonsense when they should be learning reading and writing and arithmetic, and they're learning all this other stuff that's meaningless. It's a waste of time and it's corrupting them.
The minds of our kids are important. Your mind is important, my mind is important. I need to make sure that I fill my mind with the right sort of things so that evil has no place to exist when it knocks on the door. You don't get rid of evil in your mind by bucking up and saying, "I will not let that happen to me". No, you take care of that by making sure you're constantly having an inflow of truth into your mind, and truth will dispense the evil for you. But if you don't do that, you're gonna be looking back and wish you had. If you look at all these pieces of implementation in the Roman armor, all of them up to this point are defensive, things you put on to keep from something happening to you.
But there is one offensive weapon, and it's my joy to be telling you about that because it's a really great tool, "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God". "Oh," you say, "Pastor, that must be the Bible". No, it's not the Bible. The sword of the Spirit are the sayings from the Bible that are directed to a specific target, or something that's happening in your mind, in your heart. When you wield the sword of the Spirit, it's because you have learned some of the scripture, and when these moments come, when you're under attack, you know where to go to get the right sword. So, you go into the arsenal, which is this book, and you pull out a sword, and you use that sword against the enemy. We need to brush up on our sword inventory. What kind of swords do we have in our arsenal that we can use?
I have a friend that used to come to church here years ago. He was a really big dude, his name was Swen Nater and he used to play basketball in the NBA. He was one of my best friends, and still is, in my estimation. But we used to get together once in a while in a restaurant and sit down and talk about the things that we were dealing with that were troublesome to us and try to find all the verses in the Bible that dealt with that particular problem, and we made a little catalog. And we still have that catalog. We've upgraded it and made it into a little booklet.
So, okay, I'm having trouble not telling the truth. Well, here's all the verses in the Bible that you can find that will help you do that. These are the swords. Or, I'm having trouble with temptation, sexually. Here's all the verses that tell you what you need to know so you can combat that. So you pull out the sword and you use the sword against the enemy. "Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. And when the tempter," Satan, "came to Him, he said, 'If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.'"
In other words, "Jesus, I know you're hungry. You're the Creator. You don't have to go look for food. There's no 7-Elevens around here. Just say, 'Stones, become bread.'" "And Jesus said: It is written," here it is. "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.'" There, take that. So Satan backs up, but he doesn't give up. Did you know that Satan is not a one-time accuser? He keeps after you, and he keeps after you. So the story goes on. "And the devil took Him up to the holy city and put Him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written: 'He shall give His angels charge over you.'"
In other words, "Jesus, put on a show. Put on a show for everybody. Jump off the top of the temple building, and when you land you'll be safe, and everybody will say, 'Oh, look at what a great person that is.'" And Jesus said, "It is written". He just pulled out another sword. And Jesus said to him, "It is written again, 'You shall not tempt the Lord your God.'"
Every time Satan tempted Jesus, what did Jesus do? He pulled out a saying from the Bible. He didn't just throw the whole Bible at him. He knew where the sayings were that would be devastating to Satan's attack, and he kept pulling out these swords. And here's the amazing thing, this will kill you, all of these swords are from the book of Deuteronomy. Who reads Deuteronomy? Jesus read Deuteronomy. And do you know there's swords in Deuteronomy? There's swords in every book in this Bible. And when you read the Bible, you start getting swords. And once in a while, you'll be going along and something will come at you and a verse of Scripture will flash into your mind.
You haven't thought of it maybe in years, but it's a verse that's somehow in the back of your memory, and God uses that verse to help you overcome a temptation, or to have the right answer to an accusation. The Bible says if you want to be strong in your attempt to overcome the enemy, you gotta be a good swordsman. You have to learn how to use the Word of God. Hebrews says, "The word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, it pierces even to the division of soul and spirit, and joints and marrow, and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart".
This is God's Word, and in God's Word there are many swords. Do you know any of them? Have you built up your arsenal, your own personal, and, you know, you say, "Well, which ones should I use"? Don't ask me that question. You already know. You know how Satan comes after you. You do, don't you? What he does most often to discourage you, to threaten you, to belittle you, whatever it is he does, in the sword arena, you will find something specifically for you. You don't have to look very hard, and you might even find one in Deuteronomy. You never know.
So, what I want to say to you is this. You have within your power everything you need to be victorious against the enemy. You don't have to be a victim. You can be a victor. You don't have to be defeated. You can be victorious in your war. But it takes a little effort on your part, and you can't go along, ignoring it like it's not there, saying, "Well, I don't happen to believe in that part of the Bible". Well, that's really sad.
I remember hearing a story about Napoleon during his attempt to conquer every civilization in the known world. He was meeting one day with his various lieutenants and he spread out a large map of the world and he pointed to a single spot and he said, "Sirs, if it were not for that red spot, I could conquer the world". And that red spot represented Great Britain, the same nation whose armies ultimately defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.
In a similar way, I can imagine Satan surrounded by his minions and talking about his plans for spiritual domination. And I can see our enemy pointing to the hilltop of Calvary where Jesus's blood was spilled and I can hear him say, "If it were not for that red spot, I could rule the world". That red spot is what has made all the difference in our spiritual struggle against evil.
The truth is that we don't have to live in fear of Satan, our enemy, nor do we have to be afraid of the demons at his command. But we must take on serious attitudes about the armor of the believer. Oh, what a wonderful thing it is to be a warrior. More than ever before, I believe that what God has called me to do is to be a soldier. I'm a soldier in Jesus Christ and I need to keep soldiering on and keep doing what God has called me to do, obey the orders, get up every day and go to war, and know that God is with you and what he's called me to do, He's called you to do.