Believers captivated by the devil

The other day I was talking to a friend from church about how some true Believers, while certainly not satanically possessed, are satanically oppressed. She said, “I wonder what that entails exactly.”

Paul writes to Timothy in II Timothy 2:26, “And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.”

“A snare is a trap used to hold somebody so they can’t get away; it doesn’t kill you, it just holds you,” explains Richard Jordan in a Bible study, confirming that a Believer today can be “demon or devil-influenced, and even demon or devil-captured.”

“There’s the old joke from years ago about the two raccoons who got caught in a trap; it snapped and clenched their rights paws. They realized that if they were still in their predicament come morning when the trapper arrived, they’d be dead meat.

“The female raccoon says, ‘Well, the only option we have is just to gnaw our leg off and live with three legs and not be killed.’ The male raccoon agrees, ‘Okay, I can see that.’

“So, she gnawed her leg off and went on about her business and came back a half-hour later to find the male still in the trap.

“She says, ‘Well, I thought we agreed we’d gnaw our leg off and be free?!’ He answered, ‘Well, I’ve gnawed three of them off and I’m still in the trap!’

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“Satan can’t kill you as a Believer, but he sure can snare you. He can cause you to be entrapped by error. Notice he takes you captive by ‘his will.’ Satan has a will for Believers.

“His opposing will for the Body of Christ is to neutralize you so you can’t effectively function as a member of the Body; you can’t function in the identity God’s given you. You get your mind off who you are in Christ, vacillate and move away.

“When Paul talks about ‘instructing those that oppose themselves,’ that’s the condition of a Believer under satanic influence. What does it mean when he says ‘oppose yourself’?

“It means you are one way—you’re a saint of the most high God—but you’re living another way as if you’re not. You live in opposition to who you really are. You’re saved but you’re living like you’re really lost. You’re living in the Spirit but walking in the flesh.”

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Satan is the great tempter and two times in Paul’s epistles he warns against falling for “enticing words.”

He writes in I Corinthians 2:4, “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

In Colossians 2:4, he stresses, “And this I say, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words.”

Jordan explains, “That idea of enticing words—it’s words that are really enticements, where you’re trying to entice somebody into doing something for some other reason than what the real issue is.

“If you were in the commerce world, they’d call it ‘bait and switch.’ Entice them to come in and then switch them to the thing you really wanted all along to do with them.

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Paul writes in I Corinthians 1:17, “For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.”

Jordan explains, “That ‘wisdom of words’; that’s talking about making your own way, giving your own explanation. It’s human viewpoint; man’s plan to do things. And what it does is make the gospel ‘of none effect.’ Galatians 6 is another explanation of that. When Paul talks about ‘fleshly wisdom,’ he’s talking about religious show.

“Galatians 6:12 says, ‘As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ.’

“They just really want to make a ‘fair show of your flesh.’ They got a system they’re promoting. And it gets to be this big fleshly operation. Paul talks about the Corinthians ‘being corrupted from the simplicity that’s in Christ.’

“He starts out II Corinthians 11 by saying, ‘For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.’

 “That word conversation--look at I Peter 3. Sometimes you hear that word conversation, and oftentimes it’s chaffed at because it’s an Old English word that has more meanings to it than what we generally talk about.

“We usually mean our speech. You know, sit around and have a conversation, discussing things with people. But a conversation is more than just a conversational chat; it’s an entering into an inner play.

“Your conversation is not simply something that you hear with your ear; it’s something you can see with the eye. It’s more than just words. It’s something literally that you can see in someone. It’s the way they converse with life; it’s the way they interplay with life. It has to do with who you are and the whole circuit; the whole of what your life is about.

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Paul writes in II Corinthians 4:1-2, “But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.’

“I’ve learned for years that the truth will commend itself to a man’s conscience that wants the truth, and when it doesn’t commend itself to someone, you know why it isn’t? Because what they’re looking for is something different."

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In his 2005 book, The Apostasy of the Christian Church, Bible scholar R. Dawson Barlow writes, “But just to make sure we are not deceived by the niceties of some people and human ‘sweetness,’ it is at this point we must be very clear about the nature of apostasy. Apostasy does not usually deny the existence of God. It does not behave itself unseemly and cry out that it hates God.

“In fact, apostates are pretty nice people whose life philosophy is to get along with everybody, offend no one and attempt to make the world a better place.

“Apostasy pursues to serve a ‘god of his/her own imagination’ and serve ‘he, she, or even it’ through a form of religion whose foundation of authority is the subjective feelings they have on a certain matter.

“It matters not what the revelation of God says; the final, ultimate authority is, ‘How I feel about any issue in my heart!’ It rejects the objective authority of the Word of God as the final court of appeal, and, in the process of this rejection, embraces the deceitful, subjective message of the human heart and misinterprets it as God’s authoritative message.

“The buzz word of this growing number of people is, ‘Well, you have to do whatever is right for you.’ The conclusion is that nothing is really right or wrong, but what is right and wrong for me! This is nothing but a denial of any absolute truths.”

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In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck reasons, “It don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.”

The conscience either “accuses or excuses,” and people who continuously violate their system of norms and standards learn to excuse sin. The thinking becomes, “Well, everybody else is doing it, so what difference does it make?”

Paul writes in Titus 1:15-16, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled.
[16] They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.”

Southern California preacher John Verstegen explains, “Because individuals are unsaved and operate in the ‘vanity of their mind’ on the basis of false doctrine—the satanic doctrine of this world—what happens over time is they then change that system in their inner man and their conscience goes along with it.

“Sometimes you ask the question how a person could do such a heinous sin and so forth. It’s because, over time, they have been taught that those things are acceptable and they justify it. That’s what Paul says in Romans 2.

“Why would someone do such a thing as murder someone? Well, because they’ve been taught that in certain circumstances it’s okay to murder and that they’re doing it for their god who approves of that type of thing, etc. 

“So they adjust and change that system of norms and standards they were born with and replace it with a wrong system. Even though their conscience initially questioned, ‘Well, is this right?’ it’s now said to be defiled.

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Because a newly saved person’s conscience is said to be “weak,” needing to be fortified through a steady diet of biblical truth, as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 8, it can be in a mixed state of confusion.

“On the one hand, it’s recognizing, ‘Hey, this is right and that’s wrong,’ but like this guy (in I Corinthians 8), he still thinks an idol is something real,” explains Verstegen. “So because his conscience previously bore witness to that thing and sacrificed to idols, now that he’s a Believer—and has a little bit of sound doctrine in his inner man—his conscience is kind of thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I belong to Christ now so this idol is nothing.’

“Now, what’s interesting is that a weak conscience can become defiled again. It can go back to what it was before the guy got saved. That’s the real issue here."

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The other thing that is true for an errant Believer is that his conscience can become “seared with a hot iron,” as Paul writes in I Timothy 2:4.

Verstegen explains, “You ever burnt yourself? When you sear something it’s lost its sensitivity to pain because you’ve actually burned the nerve endings and that’s why you can’t feel it anymore. You actually fried it. It’s a conscience that has been so affected it doesn’t bear proper witness anymore because it’s totally lost its sensitivity to bear proper witness to what’s right and wrong.

“In the context in I Timothy, this actually is talking about a Believer; somebody who was in the truth but then departed from the faith and their conscience has become seared.”

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Paul reminds the Corinthians in I Corinthians 12:2, “Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as ye were led.”

Jordan explains, “You know it’s very important that you understand that idolatry is more than just a man taking something and bowing down to it. There is a spirit in this world that leads men to worship idols. My friend, there is a satanic, demonic spirit that works in unsaved people and operates in them and it leads them around and it led these Corinthians to worship idols.

“Of that satanic spirit, Paul says in Ephesians 2:2, ‘Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’

“That’s the prince of the invisible realm. It has to do with Satan and his combined host of subordinate demonic cohorts and their activities in the world. And you listen to me; the very creative genius of unsaved people is satanically inspired.

“People are led by this spirit and Satan’s object is to blind men’s minds to the truth and divert their worship from God Almighty unto himself and his cohorts. It’s religious kind of stuff a lot of times, but a lot of time its other stuff, too. It’s anything that diverts a man’s attention—his worship and his honor and what he concentrates on—away from Almighty God unto the god of this world.

“In the case of the Ephesians, they were religious. They went to church all the time and they prayed and they had a personal relationship with their god and they did all the rest.”

(new article tomorrow)