Powers and Principalities

Paul begins this section with these words. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,


What a curious thing for Paul to say! He certainly was in a struggle against flesh and blood. The whole world seemed to be aligned against him and the early church. At least ten of the original twelve disciples died as martyrs. Paul was killed to Nero’s chopping block in 67 A.D. When he wrote these words, he probably under house arrest. Roman guards watched him all the time. If they weren’t flesh and blood, what were they?

Not only was the world against him, but so was his own flesh. Paul mentioned in one of his letters about a “thorn in the flesh”—some kind of recurring illness--that plagued him constantly. Some say it was poor eyesight. Other say he was lame. Whatever it was, it seriously impeded his work.

On top of that, he was in a world where the temptations of he flesh were if anything worse than ours. In his world, the main source of public entertainment was seeing men fight gory battles to the death, or watching prisoners torn apart by wild animals. Sexual temptations were even more out in the open than they are today. Most of the world did not consider prostitution a sin. Slaves did not count, either. We get only hints in the Paul’s letters how prevalent sexual sins were in the church at that time.

The ancient people drank wine all the time. They also had narcotics such as opium. And do not think that all hallucinogenic substances were of modern origin. The stuff they used caused insanity, yet people took it anyway.

Nor can we dismiss the other sins of the flesh—wrath, gluttony, and greed. The grossest sins we have now were all around in the ancient world.

If all this does not mean he was in a struggle against flesh and blood, then what would?

Yet Paul stands by his statement. We do not struggle against flesh and blood.

Think of the struggles of our day—recession, Al Qaeda, politics, cancer, illness, addictions, sexual temptations. These are flesh and blood things. Don’t we struggle against them? Don’t we think that, if these things did not exist, we would live in peace, and the world would be a paradise?

Yet Paul does not worry about any of these things. In fact, he does not even consider them the enemy. He realizes that they can harm us, but Paul realizes that nothing in this world is an enemy of itself.

Suppose you have a gun in your garage. Is that gun your enemy? A gun is an inanimate tool. What matters is in whose hand that gun belongs. The world spirit and the flesh are like that, too. They are not our enemy. Our enemy is the power that lies behind them. They exist, but they do not tempt us. It is not flesh and blood that tempts us, but someone else—Satan and his demons.

Paul does not like to refer to the devil by name. Nevertheless, Paul recognizes the reality of it. Without the devil and his temptation, sin is not a problem.

but against the rulers, against the authorities, Paul tells us two things about our real enemy Satan. First, we learn that he puts on the illusion of authority. He has developed an elaborate system of levels of power, each one having the illusion of legitimacy.

A person does not have to really have authority to have a problem. He simply has to have the illusion of authority. Satan does not have real authority over us. But the illusion of his authority is so widely believe that his pretend authority becomes real authority.

When I was in high school we had a teacher who was the constant brunt of our pranks. One day, a friend of mine got into her classroom before she did. He wrote on the board “Do not turn on light. Signed, the janitor.” She believed it for the three school periods, she never turned on the lights. By the fourth period, they were still off. It was then the person who did it fessed up and told her he had written it on the board. She still didn’t believe it. She kept the lights off all day.

Satan’s favorite trick is to sound authoritative. If we are foolish enough to believe it, then he really does have authority.

Let’s use addictions as an example. Addictions begin as strong cravings. Most of us have learned to resist cravings. The longer we resist a craving the more its power over us subsides.

But addictions are more than a craving, they are a lie. They are the voice which whisper in your ear “you have to have this,” when good sense tells you that you don’t. Addictions authority over us, and we believe it. Sometimes they whisper in our ear so soft that we don’t know they are there. Nevertheless we act on their suggestions. Other times they shout. We know we are addicted, but because we think we cannot stop. The addiction has convinced us that we are under its authority. We believe the lie that says “you can’t stop.” That is when Satan becomes a ruler and an authority in our lives. Just because something sounds authoritative does not mean it has any authority.

The second thing we learn from this is that the Devil’s kingdom its plurality. Paul doesn’t just say “the Devil” or even “the dark kingdom” but he always says “powers, principalities, thrones, and dominions.”

When the world was young, Satan convinced the world to build the tower of Babel--a great one-world government. One day he will try this again. But in the meantime, he is following another, more deadly strategy of divide and conquer. Rather than establishing one principality, he has established a thousand. Every kingdom that now exists or ever existed is in essence his, because it was started and maintained by fallen, sinful people. Even if that organization is created in the name of Jesus, it can still be hijacked and turned into wicked principality of Satan.

This strategy has some definite advantages. For one thing, it doesn’t depend upon a single dictatorial power, but every demon can run one portion of it. For another, it enables the prince of darkness to maintain control by playing one group off another. Whenever few begin to resist one of false principalities, we can be persuaded that the authority we create on the other side is righteous, and soon we believe the lie that or organization, country, church, or political party is not one of the principalities that Satan controls.

Take our current political situation—left wingers against right wingers, big government advocates versus little government advocates. Who is right? The Devil doesn’t care. To him there is no right or wrong politics, only conditions of the heart that lead us farther from God or closer to Him. All that matters to him is how he can use our loyalty to an ideology to justify sin. If we are a left-winger, he creates in us an entirely erroneous portrait of right-wingers as being evil, violent racists. We then believe we have permission to lie about them, snub them, or even ban them from meeting. We can lie about them, hate them, even kill them if necessary to accomplish what we think is “God’s work,”--meaning our own political philosophy.

Right wingers have their own stereotypes against left-wingers as being politically correct nutcases. It doesn’t matter whether they are or not, just so long as All he cares about is getting us to hurt others. If he can get us to believe that our side is righteous, and the other side is an evil conspiracy, we will be willing to lie, cheat, or go to war against to. He has us. We are taking orders from one of those Satanic principalities.

Paul talked about this in Ephesians 2. He declares joyfully and boldly that the great religious and political division of his day is over.

In Paul’s day, the greatest division in his community were among Jews and Gentiles. Paul said that Jesus had made them one in Christ. Does that mean there are no differences between Jew and Gentile? Not at all. It simply means that in Christ, we no longer take orders from the powers and principalities that pretend to rule us. The philosophical divisions still exist--we just learn to love each other in Christ. Whenever our politics, race, or denominational allegiances overshadow our commitment to Christ, then Satan is commanding our allegiance.

The difference between Christians--whether racial, ethnic, economic, temperamental, or political--do not diminish us. When we learn to like new kind of food, does that take away our taste for the old? It’s boring to have only one flavor. So it is boring to have only one kind of Christian in our churches.

“Against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Paul tells us something else about our enemy. He is a spiritual.

When you say the “spiritual” most people are instantly lost. We don’t understand it. How many of us would take our salary in “spiritual blessings.”

Our spiritual side is the way we answer the ultimate questions of life. Why are we here? Why do we keep going? The believer we are here “to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” Everything we say or do is based on that. We would die for Jesus, or we would live for Him.

Let’s imagine someone invented a new kind of bomb--a spiritual bomb. This bomb left the flesh untouched but destroyed the spirit of the enemy. How long could the enemy keep going if they had no spirit to fight? What would we do if we had nothing to live for? The enemy would either kill themselves or surrender immediately.

The Devil is the destroyer of the Spirit. If he can destroy our body, he will, but if he takes away Spirit, Satan has won the day. Satan uses all kinds of methods to do this—temptations, addictions, deceptions, persecutions, and so on. He sends false prophets into our midst to take away the joy of the Lord and replace it with legalism and extremism.

But cheer up! There is an answer. As Martin Luther said.“Although this world with devils filled may threaten to undo us,/We will not fear for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.” The power of Christ takes away all despair, all discouragement, all addictions. All of you who have called upon the name of the Lord are saved. But many of you are still in bondage to the powers and principalities Satan has loosed upon the world. While running from one kind of sin, you have fallen into another. But there is hope. God has given us his armor, the protection of Christ and the powcr of His blood, to overcome the fiercest Devil.

Christian, be free. Don’t believe the lies. Christ has set you free.