No Devil. No, Devil.

"Our position must be to belittle him and not to build him up."

JESUS HAD a devil-vision of himself standing atop the temple. He had another devil-given vision of the kingdoms of the world. These are curious things because the Spirit was upon Him in fullness (John 3:34). The Holy Spirit had driven Jesus into the wilderness to start with. He is why Jesus was there (Matthew 4:1). Much is said about spending time in the wilderness, and many analogies are made from it, but what we must see is that Jesus wasn’t deceived by the devil, even in the midst of physical suffering.

God does not give suffering. God sustained Him, and the Word of God, which He represents, put the devil in his place. It did not stop Satan from returning at a later time.

Satan is not omnipresent. He is not omni-anything. He is a fallen angel or unclean spirit, who sinned against God and lost all he had. He is not the king of darkness, nor the ruler, nor a prince. The word used in Greek, where he is called “prince” means “first.” Satan, the adversary, was the first to sin. He has no minions. There are no armies of darkness, nor a social order, nor a ranking system. There are only differing heights of power. We see this stated in Ephesians 6:12 where it is given only to state we are not fighting against people.

The truth is, we are not fighting devils either. Jesus defeated them when He rose from the dead in what was a lopsided battle. Jesus being God and all.

We are supernatural beings – spirit beings with a soul, living in a physical body (1 Thessalonians 5:23). No other being anywhere is like us. We are male and female. All angels, godly or devilish, are masculine. All of them. Woman was made for man (Genesis 3:23). All devils can do is imitate, and its purpose is always deception. They, being deceived, practice deception. Whether they believe they are female, or whether they would speak like many (more than one), or in human accents, it is all a lie. There is no truth in the darkness. And the darkness is the absence of God’s life. He is truth. The beings in darkness tell lies.

Devils have lost their godly form. What they looked like when they were created is gone. Think of the Gadarene demoniac. We know he had at least 2,000 devils, also called unclean spirits, because there were 2,000 pigs. But notice, they had to ask permission to go into the pigs (Luke 8:32). This is how small they have become. Ask yourself this: How much territory would 2,000 angels take up? Yet 2,000 unclean spirits could inhabit one human man.

2,000 unclean spirits broke the chains which bound him. The man was not physically strong enough to do that. At the same time, it took 2,000 to do it. And notice, they could not force him to commit suicide, which is what they wanted the pigs to do. If they couldn’t kill the human, at least they’d kill the pigs.

Why speak about this? There is one important reason – to dispel fear. The devil and devils want men to think they are in control. Another lie. They take control when we give them control and, being frank, sometimes they take it without being given it. We really don’t know what happened to the man of the Gadarenes that put him in that condition. We do know the townspeople ignored him. But God sent Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t afraid of them, or of any others. They all put on some form of a show, then Jesus told them to be quiet and to come out. It is of note that when they came up against Him, they cried out He was the Son of God. Yet, we see Satan in the wilderness again, saying, “IF YOU ARE the Son of God (Matthew 4;6).” He didn’t know for sure, as evidenced by Jesus’ crucifixion. Satan caused people to hang Jesus on the cross, not knowing this was God who he'd faced in Job chapter 1.

We’ve fallen (we, the church) into the habit of saying “the devil said” as if he is in each man’s ear. But he isn’t omnipresent. He isn’t omni-anything. Darkness and sin are in the world, defeat surrounds us, we must walk in the Spirit, listening to His voice, adoring Jesus, in order to change our thinking to be like God’s. We must stop giving the devil credit for anything, and above all things, stop fighting battles in a war that Jesus ended.

God does not give suffering. He did not destroy Job. That is a serious misunderstanding of the nature and character of a loving, generous God. What we read in Job 1 is God’s protection and Job’s refusal to curse God and die. We see Satan, the accuser, come before God to “present” himself as he was commanded to do because God knew what he was thinking. God knows all things. Of humans or unclean spirits, and even the devil himself, the first, or worst, sinner. Our position must be to belittle him and not to build him up.

Ephesians 6 speaks of principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places, not to give them any sort of structure or authority but so that we stop fighting each other. The Word of God tells us strife and confusion are the devil’s work and not God’s (James 3:16). If we are fighting another human or a devil or the devil, in that loser’s eyes, at least we are fighting. We are told to REST (Hebrews 4:3). This means even when we are on the right side with the right reason. Knowing the Word of God backwards and forwards and using it to condemn a man is wrong. Knowing all the ins and out of Scripture and spitting them at the devil instead of leaning not on your own understanding is an exercise in futility.

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5)

We walk through life WITH GOD, the meaning of Emmanuel (Isaiah 7:14). Where He starts and where we end is nonexistent. We are UNITED. We are ONE. When we are stressed and searching for peace, He rises up within us. When we are angry and offended by people, He comforts us. When what we are facing is the work of sin and darkness, we speak through Him and let His power do what our humanness cannot. We can only resist the devil when we submit to God first (James 4:7). We put ourselves under His authority, the meaning of the word “submit,” and He sustains us. Taking another point-of-view, we give the work of darkness no place in us. But we give all of us to Jesus and the Father who knows all of our needs.

“Neither give place to the devil.” (Ephesians 4:27)

God is human. We are spirit. We are made in His image so that He could take on ours and defeat the devil, in a plan that could not fail. Jesus has the keys to death, hell, and the grave. We have the authority of His name BECAUSE HE IS IN US, SUPPORTING US, and WE ARE AT REST, letting Him enforce what He accomplished among us when He died willingly, in what seemed like weakness. And rose again, in what was God, the devil small and far beneath Him, all of us at His side.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ:” (Ephesians 1:3)

“Then Jesus made a public spectacle of all the powers and principalities of darkness, stripping away from them every weapon and all their spiritual authority and power to accuse us. And by the power of the cross, Jesus led them around as prisoners in a procession of triumph. He was not their prisoner; they were his!” (Colossians 2:15 TPT)

“For we which have believed do enter into rest.” (Hebrews 4:3)

Image by Bellinon from Pixabay


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com