Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08084 Satan’s role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything from adultery to a lost temper in traffic. Others speak as though he barely exists and every failure is nothing more than psychology and bad…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08067 The instruction to give no place to the devil is one of those phrases that has floated free of its context and now gets used to mean almost anything. I have heard it applied to house layouts, to music, to hobbies and to whole categories of medicine. Paul had something considerably more specific…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08083 Satan’s release at the end of the thousand years is one of the strangest turns in the whole prophetic landscape, and I understand why people stumble over it. God has bound the enemy. Jesus reigns in person from Jerusalem. The earth has known a thousand years of justice, peace and visible righteousness. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08066 Whether a believer may rebuke Satan directly is one of those questions where practice has run a long way ahead of the text. In some circles you cannot get through a prayer meeting without someone addressing the enemy out loud, binding him, cancelling his assignments and ordering him off the premises. I want…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08064 Telling temptation from Satan apart from the ordinary pull of your own flesh is harder in practice than most teaching admits, and I think we should say so at the start. When you are actually in the moment, the experience does not usually arrive with a label attached. Even so, Scripture does distinguish…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08063 Whether spoken curses can affect a Christian is a question I have been asked in quiet voices more than once, usually after something unpleasant has happened. Someone has cursed a believer to their face, or a relative involved in witchcraft has made a threat, or a stranger online has pronounced something ugly over…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08062 The question of whether generational curses are real comes to me most often from people carrying something heavy. There is alcoholism in three generations of the family, or a pattern of broken marriages, or a history of depression that seems to travel down the line, and someone at a conference has told them…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08061 I get asked about reading horoscopes more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has done it for years without thinking twice and has suddenly started to wonder whether it matters. The question behind the question is nearly always the same. Is this a harmless bit of fun tucked between the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8060. Tarot cards have moved a long way from the fairground. They are sold in high street shops, recommended as tools for self-reflection, and used by people who would be offended at the suggestion that anything occult is involved. That shift in packaging is the first thing worth noticing. Scripture forbids fortune-telling in every…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8059. Ouija boards are sold in toy shops and used at sleepovers, and that is precisely what makes them worth talking about. A thing packaged as a game is a thing nobody examines, and what this particular game attempts is the one activity Scripture singles out with the sharpest possible language. The danger is…