Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08095 The idea that a third of the angelic host became fallen angels is so widely repeated that most Christians assume it is stated somewhere in plain terms. It is not. It rests on a single symbolic image in Revelation 12, and the inference drawn from it is reasonable without being certain. I hold…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08078 The prayer of Jabez occupies two verses buried in a genealogy, and for a few years around the turn of the century it was among the best known passages in the English-speaking church. A short book sold many millions of copies and turned these lines into a daily formula for a great many…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08094 The covering cherub of Ezekiel 28 is one of the most discussed and most disputed figures in the Old Testament. For centuries readers have found in these verses a description of Satan before his fall, and for almost as long other readers have insisted the passage is about a Phoenician king and nothing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08077 Binding and loosing has become one of the most quoted and least examined phrases in contemporary Christian speech. It is used to bind demons, bind sickness, bind circumstances and loose blessing, favour and finances, often within a single sentence. The phrase occurs twice in the New Testament, both times in Matthew, and in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08093 Satan’s authority is the subject of the strange title Paul gives him in Ephesians 2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” It is a phrase people quote without ever quite deciding what it means, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08076 The question of whether praying against principalities over cities is a legitimate Christian practice sounds technical, but a great deal hangs on it. Entire prayer movements have been built on the assumption that it is, and many believers have been made to feel unspiritual for hesitating. I do hesitate, and I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08092 Spiritual blindness is the whole point of the verse where Paul calls Satan the god of this world, and if we miss that we will misunderstand the title badly. The phrase sounds at first like a rival deity with a throne of his own. It is not that at all. Paul writes, “In…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08075 Spiritual mapping is the practice of researching the history, religion and moral record of a place in order to identify the demonic powers believed to control it, so that intercessors can then target those powers in prayer. It grew up alongside territorial warfare and is usually presented as its research arm. I have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08091 The phrase powers and principalities has become one of those bits of church vocabulary that everyone recognises and few can define. It sounds impressive from a pulpit, it turns up in hymns and prayers, and if you stopped ten believers on a Sunday morning and asked what it meant you would probably get…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08074 The phrase territorial spirits refers to fallen angelic beings thought to exercise influence over particular nations, regions or cities. The idea has become so embedded in some circles that it is assumed rather than argued, and so foreign to others that it is dismissed without a hearing. I sit between the two. I…