No Power or Principality Can Stand Against the True Church – The Bride of Christ

Sep 15

It seems to me that a tidal wave of despair is sweeping over the relatively prosperous parts of our world, drowning many in spirits of hopelessness and powerlessness. The antidote to this is, in my opinion, for the Church to engage the powers of darkness, defeating them in the name of Jesus, and praying for revival. The next three posts – “Be Healed in Jesus Name – Part 1 and 2”; and “When Doing God Is Not Good Enough” – are my plea to the Church today to recover the ancient mandate given to the early Church to release the Kingdom of God into the kingdom of the world, to subdue and defeat the powers of evil “on earth at it is in heaven”, and to make disciples of all nations.

This post is an introduction to those 3 posts and summarizes many of the ideas contained in them.

The ancient mandate that God gave to the Church was to “exercise dominion over all the earth” in Genesis 1:26, and then to “go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation” and “make disciples of all nations” (Mark 16: 15; Matthew 28: 19). According to Jesus, the good news is the good news of the Kingdom of God. What is this good news of the Kingdom of God? Paul tells us:

“And joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the Kingdom of light. For He has rescued us from the dominion (power) of darkness and brought us into the Kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1: 11 – 14 NIV).

In other words, the mandate is to rescue the earth and mankind from the powers of darkness and bring all creation into the Kingdom of God now – “on earth as it is in heaven”. A disciple is, first and foremost, a Kingdom man or woman. The good news, according to Jesus, is that the Kingdom of God is here. This is good news because it means that the dominion of darkness and slavery to satan are both, at the same time, ended and coming to an end, or as Churchill said, speaking about Britain’s victory at El Alamein in WW 2, “It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is . . . the end of the beginning.”

This mandate was accompanied by power, the Dunamis that Paul writes about, described in Ephesians 1 as “the incomparably great power for us who believe” (Ephesians 1: 19) and Colossians 1 as “being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might” (Colossians 1: 11).

God gave the mandate and power to the Church and to all Kingdom men and women in the Body of Christ to defeat the power of evil and to recover the ‘territory’ claimed by satan. This ‘territory’ is both geography –regions of the earth such as towns, cities, nations, and locations like parks and work places claimed by satan – and human hearts and minds. By taking back the ‘human territory’, the Church is called to restore human beings spiritually, emotionally, and physically back to God’s original purpose, function, and condition for each one of them. This restoration is also known as healing.

Together, the work of recovering geography and human hearts for God can be called revival. Or maybe I should say the work of recovery or restoration produces revival.

My plea in these three posts is not only for the Church to recover the mandate of defeating satan, but also to recover the power needed to accomplish this objective. This power is the indwelling Holy Spirit that believers receive when they are baptized in the Holy Spirit, which is part of being born again. Jesus tells Nicodemus that, “No one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again . . . no one can enter the Kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” Jesus is reiterating what John the Baptist preached when John said “I baptize with water . . . He will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”

A war is being fought today on every continent. The powers of good are battling the powers and principalities of evil much as our fathers and grandfathers fought and defeated the physical manifestations of darkness in WW 2. The obvious battles are being fought with guns and bombs, like WW 2. But the war is also being fought in media and social media to the extent they align themselves with darkness and promote lifestyles of chaos and confusion antithetical to life in Christ.

But the real war, as always, is being waged in the supernatural realm. It is in this realm that the Church has always been called to fight, because victory on earth cannot be won until victory in the supernatural is secured. My plea in these posts is for the Church to awake to its ancient calling and mission. To do good deeds on earth, for sure; but more fundamentally to bring creation – all creation – from the supernatural dominion of darkness into the Kingdom of light, first in the supernatural and then in the natural. And only the Church can do this, because only the Church has been given power and authority over the powers of darkness.

The Church does this by:

Preaching, which is proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom of God
Praise and worship
Calling men and women to repentance, which means denying themselves, picking up their crosses, and following Jesus
Living not just with faith in Jesus but the faith of Jesus
Living lives of obedience to Jesus’ commands
Healing the sick and casting out demons
Performing and witnessing signs and wonders that demonstrate to the world the power and presence of God
Carrying the Light into the darkness in geographical places like homes, neighborhoods, cities, and nations as well as human hearts
Releasing the power and presence of God through effective and expectant prayer

All of this is done in the context of the agape love of Jesus, not the world’s distorted type of love. All of this is done through the power of the risen Jesus and the indwelling Holy Spirit, alive and moving in us and through us. And all of this involves personal day-to-day encounters with Jesus as we walk in intimacy with Him. Finally, all of this is done by transformed men and women, new creations, and members of the Church.

None of these efforts stand alone; they are all interrelated. But the tip of the spear is spiritual deliverance and emotional and physical healing (and for some, healing of the land, which is another way of taking back the territory), which we do, but do in partnership with the Holy Spirit. Most fundamentally, delivering people from the dominion of darkness and bringing them into the Kingdom of light or Kingdom of the Son means setting people free from demonic possession or influence, emotional pain and trauma, and physical diseases in the name of Jesus. Through deliverance and healing, we remove them from the grip of satan and place them in the arms of Jesus where they are transformed and given life. When we do this the kingdom of the world shrinks, the Kingdom of God grows, and we are one day closer to the return of Jesus. These ideas are expanded in three posts. They are: