We Have Identified the Enemy

The spiritual battle we are fighting in the Santa Maria valley is against a religious spirit. It would be a good idea then to understand the manifestations of a religious spirit so we can recognize them. Before we get ahead of ourselves, there are probably those of you out there wondering how we know it is a religious spirit at all. That is a totally fair question. The answer is really twofold because we know spirits by witnessing their manifestations and understanding what we are seeing. We also know spirits by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us to lead us into all truth. The Holy Spirit, witnessing to our own spirit has made it clear we are indeed battling a religious spirit. It was one of those aha moments when that happened. We had been seeing the manifestations of the religious spirit for years, but had not understood that what we were seeing were in fact those manifestations. Let me explain further.

It was a religious spirit that Jesus confronted in his dealings with the church authorities during his earthly ministry. The Pharisees and the Sadducee's had become the religious authority at the time. Although the two groups disagreed on some doctrinal issues they nevertheless created a closed fellowship of religious leaders. While we could give detailed accounts from the Gospels of the kind of things they did, it would not be an efficient use of time and space to go into many of those here. To cite just two examples of what was going on let us remember the man who was born blind whom Jesus healed, and from Luke 13, the woman who had a spirit of infirmity for 18 years and could not stand up straight. In the first example from John chapter 9, Jesus healed a man who was blind from birth. Jesus violated the religious rules because he performed that healing on the Sabbath. Note these were rules made by man, well intentioned, but misguided. The parents of the formerly blind man would not talk to the religious leaders about the healing because the religious leaders believed Jesus to be a fraud. The parents were afraid if they challenged the powers that be, they would be put out of the synagogue. We see the religious leaders caring more about the observance of the Sabbath than about a blind man being healed. We also see people being afraid to speak out against the religious leaders for fear of being removed from fellowship. In the second example we also see a healing done on the Sabbath. The synagogue ruler objected saying there were six days to be healed, and the Sabbath was for rest. Jesus called this man a hypocrite for taking care of his animals on the Sabbath and trying to prevent a woman being healed simply because it was the Sabbath. It is doubtful this man considered the possibility he was being a hypocrite since he was following the religious law as he understood it. Could this be anything other than the deception of a religious spirit?


Admittedly there is some difference between Jesus and us, but when we deal with spiritual beings, the same rules apply as they did for Jesus during his earthly pilgrimage. He came to earth to be the perfect example of a man. In his life and in his ministry he showed us exactly how to live and work the works of God on earth. In our current situation, we have a direct example of what we should be doing. This is where it gets a little tricky. Jesus confronted the religious spirit by continuing with the works God had given him to do in spite of the preconceptions and misconceptions of the religious leaders. He literally demonstrated for them how things were supposed to work. When they balked, he then taught them the truth. Being under the influence of a deceiving spirit, they were not always able to understand what they were seeing or hearing. Some of them did understand and one of them, Nicodemus, sought Jesus out for more teaching. Some will listen, some will not. Some will hear. Some can not. Our only responsibility it to continue doing the work we are given to do day by day.

We cannot possibly say it often enough, "...we do not wrestle against flesh and blood..." (Ephesians 6:12) We will have more to say about this in the next post. If we allow this battle to become personal, against individuals, we lose our ability to walk in love toward that person. To be certain, they will make it personal. This is yet another indication they are operating under the influence of the religious spirit. The spirit will convince them we are the enemy and/or that we are of no importance whatsoever. Here again the soul deceived by this spirit is 180 degrees off truth. Everyone is important to God and should be to us as well.

The famous atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair is often credited with the saying, "The church is the only army that shoots it's wounded." If she did indeed coin the phrase, how sad that it was someone far outside The Church who had to show us the error of our ways. Perhaps because she was an atheist or perhaps simply due to our own sinful nature, her words most often fall on deaf ears as we forget the admonition of Galatians 5:15, "But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another!" Please let us not do that. Rather let us walk in love toward one another, bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ.