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 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 08088 When James tells us to resist the devil, he is not handing us a slogan to shout at the ceiling. He is describing a settled posture that has a great deal more to do with what we submit to than with what we say out loud. Yet in a good many churches the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08068 Talk of spiritual strongholds has become so common that most believers assume they know what the term means without ever having looked at where it comes from. Conferences are held on breaking them. Prayer initiatives target them over cities. Individuals are told they have personal ones needing specialist attention. The phrase belongs to…
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 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 8053. Can Christians be demonically oppressed? I believe they can, and I want to say so carefully, because this is an area where careless answers do real damage in both directions. A believer cannot be owned or inhabited by an unclean spirit. A believer can certainly be harassed, pressed and worn down from outside….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 8050. The phrase snare of the devil comes from Paul’s letters to Timothy, and it is worth noticing how ordinary the context is. He is not describing an exorcism or a supernatural encounter. He is talking about the appointment of church leaders and the handling of people who oppose the truth. A snare is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8049. Of all the titles Scripture gives him, Satan the accuser is the one that touches ordinary Christians most often. We may never face a dramatic temptation or anything resembling a spiritual encounter, and yet most believers I know have spent a bad night under a voice reciting their failures back to them with…