Stop Looking "Up There" For Spiritual Warfare

No.106: May 6, 2022

Dear Friends,

On Wednesday I sent out an issue of The Quarter Inch, reacting to the leaked draft of Justice Alito’s opinion striking down Roe v. Wade.

At the very end of that little essay I referred to “Moloch’s reign of terror.” And it strikes me in retrospect that readers might think that is just a kind of poetry. Sort of a metaphorical way of describing the effects of a legal document.

Let me clear that up. It was not meant to be a metaphor.

Moloch is an ancient Canaanite deity, and his business is child sacrifice. Please notice my use of the present tense. Far too many people think that the old gods of polytheism were just superstitions and figments of the imagination and that we are all grown up now. But the thing is, the old gods grow up, too. They adapt and change with the times. Their appointed doom has not yet arrived. Moloch has had many names. He held court at the trash heaps of Sparta and Rome, where people discarded their unwanted babies. He once had vast temples among the Aztecs where they slaughtered millions of children. And for the past fifty years he has enjoyed unfettered freedom in the fluorescent glow of the American abortion clinic, where he has accepted our own slaughter of millions of children. He goes by many names, but it seems his favorite is “Choice.” Americans like freedom, so why not sell child sacrifice as, well, freedom? Like I say, old gods adapt. If you have a strong constitution, just click on this video and you can hear it for yourself:

Delano Squires @DelanoSquires

“My name is Legion, for we are many.”

You should really deeply pity that woman; she is giving thanks and praise to her god (“Bodily Autonomy”) for all the blessings she has received in exchange for … the life of her child. And we thought we were all grown up and sophisticated, unlike those ancient barbarians.

So am I saying the legalized abortion regime is literally demonic? Yes.

The Apostle Paul is pretty clear on this: “No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons” (1 Cor. 10:20). Got that? Pagan polytheists were not sacrificing to figments of their imagination; they were sacrificing to demons.

I think we like to quote another passage from Paul, but don’t really grapple with its astounding implications: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).

“Spiritual warfare” is a topic usually front and center in some pretty wild and weird Pentecostal circles, and that is really unfortunate. Because the Pentecostals largely get it wrong, and it is a travesty that the abuse of a truth would lead sounder churches to neglect the truth altogether.

It seems to me there are a number of reasons we misunderstand the nature of “spiritual warfare.” The first is a deeply embedded notion of a strict separation between the material and spiritual realms, a dualism between the “natural” and “supernatural” that has been latent in a lot of theology for many centuries. We think of “nature” or the material realm, our place “down here” in the mundane, as, well, mundane. Of less importance. And we think of the “spiritual” or “supernatural” realm as the exciting place where all the action is. People are constantly wanting to “tap into” the spiritual world, to peer behind the veil or curtain to see what’s really going on. The spiritual “war,” in other words, is happening up there, and we, down here, are on the sidelines, more or less watching and waiting.

It has been decades since I’ve read him, but Frank Peretti might bear some blame for our confusion. I happened to really enjoy his at-one-time incredibly popular novels, This Present Darkness and Piercing The Darkness, but on the whole his stories, as I recall, had a distinctly “heavenly” rather than “earthly” focus. The angelic forces were duking it out with demons “up there,” and the believers here in the material world were just the supporting cast: “powering up” the angels through prayer. The reality is quite different: angels are the supporting cast. We are the ones duking it out with demonic forces. That’s what Paul says! Our struggle is not with flesh and blood.

Notice a detail in Paul’s description: these demonic forces are “powers of this dark world.” This world. The “war” is happening here, not up there. This is the field of battle. We are not on the sidelines; we are in the thick of it. That’s why we need, as Paul immediately goes on to say, armor. In Revelation 12, when the veil actually is pulled back for us to see, John paints a vivid picture: “The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” Where was he hurled? To the earth. This is where the “action” is.

We are always wanting to peer behind the veil, to look upward into the heavenly realms to see what is really going on. All the while the angels are looking down here. 1 Peter 1:12: “Even angels long to look into these things.”

Our fascination and preoccupation with a mistaken notion of “spiritual warfare” leads to misguided expectations. Many think spiritual warfare looks like (has to look like) paranormal or “supernatural” phenomena, “signs and wonders.” Stuff from The Exorcist.

I have a friend who spent many years with an elite unit fighting a war in Afghanistan. He once confided to me that he’d been places where he could feel the spiritual oppression. He felt demonic powers. And I have no doubt he did. But how did those demonic powers manifest themselves? Not in paranormal, spectacular ways, but in mundane, all-too-normal ways. The warlord with a harem of boys to rape. Bloodthirsty fanatics who came into a village where they’d just established a school for girls and then left, leaving behind the new teacher’s head on a pike. Bloody. Fleshly. Material. That’s what spiritual warfare looks like.

Well, maybe that strikes you as pretty spectacular. But evil is pretty mundane. In her reporting on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase, the “banality of evil.” Eichmann was a moral monster, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. But what struck her is how ordinary he seemed. In 1971 she wrote:

I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.

And so it might not have seemed particularly demonic in 1973 when Justice Harry Blackmun—probably a normal, good-humored, well-educated, well-heeled lawyer— signed his name to his majority opinion. It’s just a legal document. A routine, everyday matter for a Supreme Court Justice. But, make no mistake: that mundane, this-worldly legal document opened the sluice gates and handed over millions of human beings as prey to an ancient demon.

That is what I meant by “Moloch’s reign of terror.”

And overruling that legal document, although it looks for all the world like an ordinary “earthly matter,” will likewise be an act of spiritual warfare.

Pray that it happens. Pray that at least five this-worldly, ordinary, flesh-and-blood people, put by God’s Providence in seats of authority, have the courage to strike that blow and end Moloch’s fifty-year uncontested reign of terror.

And we must then continue to proclaim that God has “rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col.1:13-14). That woman in the video is so bent on posing with her self-righteousness and pride as a (fairly obvious) cover for her deep sense of shame and guilt. And that is the good news that she, along with everyone else enslaved by Moloch, needs to hear. Forgiveness of sins. There’s nothing else like it, and it is only found in “the Son he loves.”

Kyrie Eileson