One of the most vivid memories from my childhood is the Persian Gulf War. I’ll never forget watching the evening news as Peter Jennings described the events as the United States lit up the skies above Baghdad. Our military reigned explosive missiles and smart bombs on key Iraqi communication and military targets in order to knock out their ability to communicate and defend themselves. We did this for weeks and when we finally sent our infantry in, we won the ground war in four days.
Christians could learn a lesson from the Persian Gulf War. Too often we engage in hand to hand combat with the enemy when we should reign the weapons of mass destruction on him in the form of prayer to weaken his defenses. Ephesians 6:12 confirms this. It says:
12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Many times the problems we face have a spiritual source. Problems manifest in the natural through sickness, poverty, rejection, depression, and so on and often we try to fix these issues without first evicting the demonic source out of the situation. Jesus described this in Matthew 12:28 right after he cast a demon out of a man and healed him:
28 But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. 29 Or how can one enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house.
The demonic spirit that was in the man held him captive to blindness and being deaf. The spirit was the root and blindness and deafness were the fruit of demonic presence. When Jesus cast the demon out of the man, he was set free. Jesus took air superiority and won the victory.
This story makes me wonder how many of us deal with the fruit of a demonic spirit instead of evicting it from our presence. The biblical fruit of a demonic spirit includes sickness, poverty, depression, confusion, and destruction. The negative fruit causes us have to see doctors for years, run up credit card debt, and do everything we can to make relationships work only to see them destroyed.
It seems that we would be wise to take a lesson from Jesus and take air superiority over our enemy by commanding him to flee and then speaking God’s promises over our lives. God’s promises are weapons of mass destruction He gave to us to destroy Satan’s work and establish God’s will in the earth.
I hope this article has both enlightened and encouraged you. If you’d like to learn more, check out this message I recently taught at Grace Life Church.
