Understanding Spiritual Warfare

Four Views

Beilby, James K., Eddy, Paul Rhodes

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441240132
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

The topic of spiritual warfare is an issue of ongoing interest in a number of sectors of the contemporary church. This four-view work brings together leading theologians and ministry leaders to present major views on spiritual warfare in dialogical fashion--all authors present their views and then respond to each of the other views. Contributors include: • Walter Wink with Gareth Higgins and Michael Hardin
• David Powlison
• Gregory Boyd
• C. Peter Wagner and Rebecca Greenwood This volume provides a balanced, irenic approach to a much-discussed and often controversial topic. Offering a model of critical thinking and respectful dialogue, it highlights the differences between contributors, discusses a full range of important topics on the subject, and deploys biblical as well as theological arguments.

1

The World Systems Model

WALTER WINK, EDITED BY GARETH HIGGINS

Nothing commends Satan to the modern mind. It is bad enough that Satan is spirit, when our worldview has banned spirit from discourse and belief. But worse, he is evil, and our culture resolutely refuses to believe in the real existence of evil, preferring to regard it as a matter of systems breakdown that can be fixed with enough tinkering. Worse yet, Satan is not a very good intellectual idea. Once theology lost its character as reflection on the experience of knowing God and became a second-level exercise in “knowing about,” the experiential ground of theology began to erode away. “Although mythologically true,” Morton Kelsey writes, “the devil is intellectually indefensible, and once it was realized that the conception of the powers of evil was ‘only’ a representation of peoples’ experience, no matter how accurate, the devil began to fade.”[163]

The Satan image, even where it lingers on, has been whittled down to the stature of a personal being whose sole obsessions seem to be with sexuality, adolescent rebellion, crime, passion, and greed. While not themselves trivial, these preoccupations altogether obscure the massive satanic evils that plunge and drive our times like a trawler before an angry sea. Not that we have progressed beyond evil. On the contrary, the evil of our time has become so gigantic that it has virtually outstripped the symbol and become autonomous, unrepresentable, beyond comprehension.

While the symbol may have fallen on hard times, the reality to which it gave expression has become all the more virulent. Satan did not begin life as an idea but as an experience. The issue is not whether one “believes” in Satan but whether one is able to identify the actual events of life in that dimension of experience the ancients called “Satan.” Nor is the metaphysical question, does Satan really exist?, of any real urgency, unless the question is asked in the context of an actual encounter with something or someone that leads one to posit Satan’s existence.

Without a means of symbolization, however, evil cannot come to conscious awareness and thus be consciously resisted. Like an undiagnosed disease, it rages through society, and we are helpless to produce a cure. Evil must be symbolized precisely because it cannot be thought. Is there any way we can resymbolize evil? Thought cannot resuscitate Satan, but only committed persons consciously making choices for God, as we will see. But thought can perhaps roll away the stone. Then, perhaps, if we can live through that dark interval between Satan’s death and resurrection, we may yet see Satan functioning again—as a servant of the living God!

Satan as a Servant of God

We are not accustomed to thinking of Satan as God’s servant. But when Satan makes his late appearance in the Old Testament, that is precisely who he is—a servant of the Lord.

The faith of early Israel actually had no place for Satan. God alone was Lord, and thus whatever happened, for good or ill, was ascribed to God. “I kill and I make alive,” says the Lord, “I wound and I heal” (Deut. 32:39 NRSV).

So it was not inconsistent to believe that Yahweh might call Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt and then, on the way, attempt to murder him. The text, much neglected by preachers, is Exodus 4:24–26a. “On the journey, when Moses had halted for the night, Yahweh came to meet him and tried to kill him. At once Zipporah, taking up a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin and with it she touched the genitals of Moses. ‘Truly, you are the bridegroom of blood to me!’ she said. And Yahweh let him live” (Jerusalem Bible). Perhaps Moses had fallen critically ill; or had almost been killed by an attack, fall, or avalanche; or had somatized his terror at the enormity of his task. In any case, the attack was ascribed not to natural causes but to God.

The God who led Israel out of Egypt, however, was a God of justice. How then could God demand justice, be just, and still cause evil? Had not Abraham challenged God with the question, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25 KJV). This problem was the terrible price Israel had been forced to pay for its belief that Yahweh was the primary cause of all that happens. Morally, the cost was unbearable. Gradually Yahweh became differentiated into a “light” and a “dark” side, both integral to the Godhead, with Yahweh transcending both as the unity that encompasses multiplicity. The bright side came to be represented by the angels, the dark side by Satan and his demons. Yet this process of differentiation was completed so late that Satan makes only three appearances in the Old Testament.

In 2 Samuel 24:1 Yahweh, in anger against Israel, had incited David to carry out a census (the basis of taxation and military conscription). But in Chronicles, a postcaptivity revision of Samuel and Kings, this same passage is changed to read, “Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to number Israel” (1 Chron. 21:1 RSV). The adversary has assumed the function of executor of God’s wrath. He does not represent disorder, chaos, or rebellion here, but rather the imposition of a suffocating bureaucratic order (the census). Satan furthers God’s will by visiting wrath on disobedient mortals, and in so doing carries out the will of God.

In Zechariah 3:1–5 (RSV) we find a second appearance of Satan; here “the satan” is in the role of accuser or prosecuting attorney.

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan [ha satan] standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the LORD said to Satan, “The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was standing before the angel clothed in filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with rich apparel.” And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments; and the angel of the LORD was standing by.

The scene is set in the heavenly council, with the accuser at the right of the accused, Joshua. The high priest (Joshua), representing the whole people of Israel, is dressed in filthy garments, symbolic of the sins that Israel’s prophets had identified as the cause of Israel’s exile in Babylon. The vision is dated around 520 BCE; this means that upward of three generations of Jews had lived with the belief that they had gone into captivity in 585 as punishment for their infidelity to Yahweh. Joshua bears all that collective guilt. The adversary merely reiterates what the accusing conscience of the people has been affirming all along. The guilt is real, and it is deserved. Only God’s undeserved grace causes the case to be quashed.

Satan is clearly not demonic here. If anything, Satan echoes what everyone knows to be the attitude of God toward Israel, prior to God’s unexpected reversal of the judgment. Satan merely repeats what the prophets had been saying all along! Nevertheless God intervenes. Israel is “a brand plucked from the fire” and will be consumed by guilt and succumb to hopelessness unless it experiences forgiveness soon. Satan is thus not merely a mythological character invented out of whole cloth; the “adversary” is that actual inner or collective voice of condemnation that any sensitive person hears tirelessly repeating accusations of guilt or inferiority. And indeed, there is a degree of truth in the charges. But Satan’s demand for strict justice, untempered by mercy, can crush the spirit of a person or a people. This “voice” is a phenomenological fact; its mythic conceptualization allows the people of Israel to isolate it, lift it to consciousness, and ask whether it is indeed the voice of God in a judgmental mode.

The final Old Testament reference to Satan is in the prologue to Job: “Now there was a day when the sons of God [bene elohim] came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan [ha satan] also came among them.” Here again, Satan is not a fallen angel but a fully credentialed member of the heavenly court. “The LORD said to Satan, ‘Whence have you come?’ Satan answered the LORD, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.’ ” His role is somewhat like that of a district attorney, zealously seeking out lawbreakers to bring before the bar of divine justice. “And the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?’ ” Satan has indeed considered him well: “Then Satan answered the LORD, ‘Does Job fear God for naught? Hast thou not put a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has and he will curse thee to thy face.’ And the LORD said to Satan, ‘Behold, all that he has is in your power; only upon himself do not put forth your hand.’ So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD” (Job 1:6–12 RSV). This is more than simply prosecution, however. It is entrapment. Not content merely to uncover injustice, Satan is here, as in 1 Chronicles 21:1, an agent provocateur, actively striving to coax people into crimes for which they can then be punished. Excessive zeal for justice always becomes satanic. All Job’s oxen, asses, camels, sheep, and servants are slain; then finally all his sons and daughters. Yet Job holds piously to his faith (1:21).

When next they meet, God chides Satan for his failure: Job “still holds fast his integrity, although you moved me against him, to destroy him without cause” (2:3 RSV). What kind of God is this, that trifles with the lives and flesh of humans in order to win a bet? This God seems too bent on sheer power to mark the sufferings of mere people. The author seems to deliberately ridicule the God of a degenerate Deuteronomic theology. That God (represented by Job’s three “comforters”), who rewards the wealthy, landed aristocrats with riches and long life and who curses the poor, is mercilessly lampooned by an outraged writer who has acutely observed the oppressed and infirm suffer undeserved evil at the hands of the powerful and rich. Those listeners, whom God had not blessed and who had no such vast herds and spacious houses but who barely subsisted on the land, must have relished seeing this rich man stripped of his props and reduced to their level. And they must have chuckled with delight at the storyteller’s artful repetition in 2:1–3, where God behaves like a forgetful potentate unable to recall the job description of his own appointee!

Job’s Satan, in short, is no friend of Job’s, but he is in fact humanity’s best friend because he lures God into a contest that will end by stripping God of the projections of the oppressors. Satan has already persuaded God to act arbitrarily (“to destroy him without cause,” 2:3 RSV). Now Satan compounds the murder of Job’s children with the torture of Job’s own body: “ ‘Put forth thy hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.’ And the LORD said to Satan, ‘Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life’ ” (2:5–6 RSV). In all this Satan manifests no power independent of God. Even when Satan slays, it is not Satan who does so, but God who slays through Satan (“the fire of God,” 1:16; “you moved me against him,” 2:3; “put forth thy hand,” 2:5 RSV). God alone is supreme; Satan is thoroughly integrated into the Godhead in a wholly nondualistic fashion. Satan is not evil, or demonic, or fallen, or God’s enemy. This adversary is merely a faithful, if overzealous, servant of God, entrusted with quality control and testing. Satan in fact prompts God and humanity (in the person of Job) to explore the problem of evil and righteousness at a depth never before plumbed—and seldom since.

These three passages exhaust the references to Satan in the Old Testament, and even in these passages Satan is more a function (“the adversary”) than a personality. It is only in the period between the Testaments, and even more in the period of the New Testament and early church, that Satan gains recognition. Soon he will become known as the enemy of God, the father of lies, the black one, the archfiend, and assume the stature of a virtual rival to God. We will come to all that. But first we must do justice to those passages in the New Testament where Satan continues to function as a servant of God. So accustomed are most of us to thinking of Satan as purely evil that we tend to read this interpretation into passages where it does not exist. If we suspend that bias, the evidence points to a strikingly different picture that Jesus presents.

Luke 22:31–34. Jesus is speaking: “ ‘Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you [plural], that he might sift you [plural] like wheat, but I have prayed for you [singular] that your [singular] faith may not fail; and when you [singular] have turned again, strengthen our brethren.’ And he said to him, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.’ He said, ‘I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, until you three times deny that you know me’ ” (RSV). Satan is God’s sifter, the left hand of God, whose task is to strain out the impurities in the disciples’ commitment to God. Had Peter been fully conscious of his frailty and flightiness, he never would have responded with such bravado. Had he been able to say, “Yes, Lord, I am weak and impulsive; pray for me to stand through this trial,” perhaps such sifting would not have been necessary. But it is clear that nothing Jesus has been able to do has weaned him or the rest from egocentricity. Satan has made a legitimate request; they deserve to be put to the test. Jesus has to grant Satan’s request. He does not pray that they will be delivered from the test but only that their faith will not fail through it. Satan is depicted here as able to accomplish something that Jesus had himself been unable to achieve during his ministry. If we refuse to face our own evil, but take refuge, like Peter, in claims to righteousness, our own evil will meet us in the events triggered by our very own unconsciousness. Satan is not then a mere idea invented to “explain” the problem of evil but is rather the distillate precipitated by the actual existential experience of being sifted. When God cannot reach us through our conscious commitment, sometimes there is no other way to get our attention than to use the momentum of our unconsciousness to slam us up against the wall. This is heavenly jujitsu practiced by God’s “enforcer,” this meat-fisted, soul-sifting Satan—servant of the living God!

1 Corinthians 5:1–5. A man in the Corinthian church is sleeping with his stepmother. Paul writes:

Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body I am present in spirit, and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing. When you are assembled, and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. (RSV)

This reads uncomfortably like a text from the Spanish Inquisition. Is the man to be ritually murdered? The language is extreme, but apparently Paul means only that he should be excommunicated (5:2, 13), thus forcing him to choose between his sexual preoccupation and his faith in Christ. Destruction of the “flesh” would then refer, not to his body, but, as is usual in Paul, to the spirit: a shrunken spirit focused only on sensual gratification. Satan is to punish him through ceremonial exclusion (and possibly shunning), “that his spirit might be saved”—at least on Christ’s return, but possibly immediately, through Satan’s good offices.

Apparently the man did repent, for 2 Corinthians 2:5–11 seems to relate the outcome of the punishment. Ironically, however, the very congregation that had tolerated his sin as an expression of Christian freedom from the law now refuses to forgive him and receive him back. And the same Paul who chastised them with the full force of his spiritual authority now must plead with the congregation to forgive and comfort him lest he be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow.

Such self-righteous, judgmental behavior manifests the very qualities we saw associated with Satan in Zechariah 3:1–5. Their newfound zeal for justice is as overweening and one-sided as their previous indifference. Paul wants to “keep Satan from gaining the advantage over” them (2 Cor. 2:11 RSV), an advantage that would be won, not through their tolerance of sin, but by their refusal to forgive!

Satan’s role here is remarkably fluid. Satan is again God’s holy sifter. Using the momentum of the man’s sin, Satan casts him into the annealing fire of solitude in which he is given precisely what he thought he wanted—and absolutely nothing else. But the choice could have gone either way. Had the man chosen the woman and not the church, Satan would have appeared to be the instrument of his damnation.

Again, if the church had refused to tender its forgiveness to the man, Satan would have caught them in a charade of self-righteousness, thus “gaining the advantage over us” (2 Cor. 2:11 RSV). By refusing to forgive, the church plays the role of Satan in Zechariah 3, who reiterates an accusation that God is prepared to drop. Satan is thus not an independent operative but rather the inner and actual spirit of the congregation itself when it falls into the accusatory mode. So Satan cannot be described as “good” or “evil.” It is our choices that cause him to crystallize as the one or the other. And most astonishing of all, Paul does not say that Satan enticed this man to sin; rather, Satan is the means of his deliverance! This understanding of Satan has little in common with the irremediably evil Satan of popular Christian thought.

1 Timothy 1:20. The writer of 1 Timothy says (in the name of Paul) that he has delivered the heretics Hymanaeus and Alexander “to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.” Apparently the writer does not mean th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The World Systems Model
• 2 The Classical Model
• 3 The Ground-Level Deliverance Model
• 4 The Strategic-Level Deliverance Model
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index of Authors and Subjects
• Index of Scripture
• Back Cover