The Invisible War

Ephesians 6. This is the last chapter in this book. It was written by the Apostle Paul, who was a man, if you’re not familiar with his backstory, he was a man who actually was hostile to Christians. He was not a Christian himself, he was against the whole movement of Christianity early on, and he fought it tooth and nail wanting to extinguish this new religious movement that were followers of this Man named Jesus. Then, he met Jesus Himself. It changed his life. It turned him around. He realized that Jesus was the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the promised Messiah, and it sent his life going in a new direction.

In fact, the story is told in Acts 9, and I’ll just briefly share it with you because it describes what it is that I’m wanting to get across to us as we start this message, that is, that in Acts 9 is the chapter in which Paul got saved, met Jesus. It begins with him breathing out threats and murder against the Christians, not just where he was there in Jerusalem, but he wanted to find them wherever they were. He was going to travel to Damascus to persecute the Christians that were there. It was on that journey that he met Christ and got saved; and before that chapter is over, we find that those who were still in opposition to Christianity now wanted to kill Paul. The chapter begins with Paul wanting to kill Christians; it ends with Paul, the Christian, wanting to be killed by those who were still not Christians.

You see, Paul was a guy that knew both sides of the issue. He knew what it was like to walk in darkness and want to extinguish the light. He also knew what it was like to be walking in the light and have the darkness want to extinguish him. He knew the battle that we face as believers, and so it goes from all of the stories in Scripture on until our day and age, we know that those that choose to follow after the Lord are going to meet resistance.

Moses was a man who chose to follow after the Lord, and his own people tried to depose him. David wanted to worship God with all of his might, with singing and dancing he worshiped, yet his own wife ridiculed him for doing so. Peter healed a lame man and then preached the gospel to the crowd that gathered around, and by the end of that day he was in a prison cell. Those that want to serve the Lord, those that want to follow after the Lord are going to find that they’re going to meet with resistance. They’re going to face opposition.

Many of you have experienced that in your own life. Maybe from the day that you gave your life over to the Lord, you began seeing what it was like to try to walk in the light as the darkness tried to beat you back. Maybe midway in your walk with the Lord you decided to get really serious about your walk—no more playing games, no more just attending church—you wanted to get involved. You wanted to get serious about your walk, and you found that things got really hard after that as parts of your life began to fall apart. You began having difficulties.

When we want to walk in the light, we’re going to meet that kind of resistance. Why? Because when God is doing a work, Satan is going to want to oppose that work. When God’s doing a work in the world, Satan will want to oppose that work that God is doing in the world. When God is doing a work in an individual, Satan will try to disrupt that work that God is doing in that individual. When God is doing a work in a church, he will try to disrupt that work that God is doing in that church.

So it is in this passage that we’re going to be looking at. It’s going to deal with the spiritual battle that every believer is in the midst of. We’re only going to be looking at a few verses here, but it begins in Ephesians 6:10. Follow along with me. It says, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 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. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”

This is the last chapter, as I mentioned, in the book of Ephesians, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Paul is now addressing these types of issues based upon what he has been sharing with them in the last few chapters. Beginning with Ephesians 4, through Ephesians 5 and half of Ephesians 6, Paul has been expressing to those believers in Ephesus how they are to live out their Christianity, the kind of lifestyle they are to live in order to bring glory to God and to walk in God’s ways. He’s been talking to them about how to walk their walk. He’s been talking to them about how to love one another, how to be involved in the work of the ministry, how to lay aside the old life and be living in the new life, how to imitate the character of God, how to be filled with the Spirit, and many, many more things he was expressing to them because he wanted to see their walk with the Lord be a strong walk, a walk that blessed them and glorified God. But he also knew that if they did these things, if they walked in this manner, that they were going to face opposition. Before he finishes up the book, he’s going to talk to them about making a stand against the attacks that were, no doubt, going to come their way.

You see, we have an enemy called the devil, and there are many people that don’t believe that there is an actual devil, that that’s simply something maybe that was made up many, many centuries ago in order to scare people into the church or to make them believe more firmly in the existence of God. Some have thought that the idea of a devil is more of the personification of something that is real; that the devil isn’t real, but he represents something that is actually real. It’s kind of like mother nature represents nature; Uncle Sam represents the United States of America; the devil represents the evil things that are in the world. It’s not that the devil is real, it’s just that evil is real, so this idea, this caricature of a devil, is simply to represent there are bad things that happen in the world.

That’s not the way the Bible describes the devil. The Bible describes and identifies him as a real being. He’s given many names: he is called Satan, which means adversary; he’s called devil, which means accuser; he’s given a multitude of other names, some of which are tempter, liar, god of this age. The Bible describes him as a real being that was created by God but rebelled against God, now hates God, and is going to fight against anything that God is doing in the world, especially among the people of God, those that Jesus has redeemed.

We need to be careful not really to think too much about him, but not to think too little of him either. That’s a tendency that many Christians fall into. Some really kind of go through their Christianity ignoring his existence, but the Bible tells us that we’re not to be ignorant of his devices, so we can’t ignore him. But neither are we to think too much of him where we are giving him all the credit for all of the bad things that are happening in the world or all the bad things that we are doing.

I remember years ago I was a college student at the time, and I was working part-time at a restaurant. There was an older lady that was a Christian and a waitress in this restaurant. She knew that I was a believer, too, so we had many conversations during those days. I had not known the Lord very long at that particular time. She was a seasoned saint, but she was a little weird, too. I remember one day she came to me in the middle of one of our work shifts and said, “Todd, the tips are terrible today. I can’t believe not many people are tipping me at all. Here, pray with me,” and before I could even think about it, she grabbed my hands and just began to pray. She began to bind the demon of the bad tippers, at which point I opened my eyes a little bit to think, Is she really serious about what she’s praying? She was very serious, and I thought at the end of that prayer, Maybe I should bind the demon of the bad theology.

There are no demons of bad tippers. There’s no demons of flat tires. There’s no demon of food poisoning or anything else that we might face in our life. There are demons. They are real. There is a real devil, and they are at work to disrupt what God may be doing in your life or in my life. We need to understand his motivation is to make us as ineffective as he possibly can. If you are a believer in Christ, if you are born again, he cannot—cannot—take away your salvation. But what he wants to do is make you as ineffective a Christian as he possibly can—that you live a life of defeat, that you live a life where you’re really no impact upon anybody else, that your light is hidden under a basket, and maybe at an extreme that actually you’re a more hindrance to the going forth of the gospel than a help to it. We know that in many lives, he is effective in doing that because we live in a world that looks at the church oftentimes as a place full of hypocrites—they say they believe one thing, but we look at their lives and they’re living a different thing.

We do need to stand strong in the Lord, and part of that strong stand is to stand against our adversary, which we’re going to talk about a little bit tonight.

Now, in the city of Ephesus to which Paul was writing, they were very well acquainted with the demonic realm. You see, the city of Ephesus was known as a place of magic. There were a lot of those that were delving into the occult. When Paul visited the city of Ephesus in Acts 19, one of the things that is spoken about in that chapter is the fact that he was casting out demons from people that were there. But in the process of sharing the gospel, many of them were turning their lives over to Christ, so much so that in Acts 19, those that were giving their lives over to the Lord that had formerly been involved in the occult, in the magic practices, collected all of their books together, brought them to the middle of the city, and began to set them on fire. They decided that they wanted to fully turn away from the old life—that was not going to be a part of them anymore—and as a way of ridding themselves of what they used to be into, they brought their books out and began to burn their books.

It actually tells us that the value of the books that they burned was 50 thousand pieces of silver. I tried to look that up to find out what the equivalent is, and it was kind of all over the map because they don’t know exactly what silver pieces that they were actually referring to. There were several different that were back in that time, but it was anywhere between $40,000 and $6 million. Now, that’s a wide gap, so I’m not going to speculate.

All I’m telling you is that those people had given their lives over to the Lord. They had realized that the life that they used to live offended God, and they wanted to live a life to the glory of God, so they were going to burn the old life so that they could be faithful to Jesus. In Acts 19:20, it says, “So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed.” God was doing a work in the city of Ephesus. People were turning away from the old life. They were giving their lives over to the Lord.

Right after it tells us that the the Word of God was growing mightily and prevailing, it tells us, “And about that time there arose a great commotion about the Way.” The “Way” was a term that they used to describe these Christians. A great commotion arose up in that city. You see, when God begins to do a great work, Satan will try to oppose it. That was played out in their lives prior to the Apostle Paul writing the book of Ephesians to these people.

Now, as Paul is encouraging them to walk a faithful walk, to live out their Christianity, to be a light to the world, he’s preparing them for the battle that they were going to face. I think that this is a passage that we ought to all be familiar with because if you are eager to follow after the Lord, just be prepared that things might get tough. You will face opposition. There will be a battle, and we need to see the battle for what it is.

I know I read from verses 10-13, we’re going to kind of work our way a little bit backwards through these verses. I’m going to begin with verse 12, where it tells us, “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.”

There are four things in this verse that I want us to see that is going to give us insight into how we are to engage in this spiritual battle. The first thing is that we need to recognize that the battle is supernatural. The battle is supernatural. It tells us that this battle is, “ . . . not . . . against flesh and blood.” In other words, the battle we are facing is not really the battle that we see, it is the battle that we don’t see. Now, we all see the things that we face in our lives in the things that go wrong, the things that create struggle for us, the temptations that we face and so forth, but the text is telling us that the real battle is not those physical things, the real battle is a spiritual battle that is behind it.

Paul begins to describe it a bit by calling out the, “ . . . principalities . . . powers,” behind what we see. These are really descriptive words of the demonic realm, and some believe that the categories here that Paul is bringing out are actually different ranks in the demonic realm. We don’t know that for sure, that is definitely a possibility. It may just simply be different terms that he uses to describe the demonic realm, “ . . . principalities . . . rulers of darkness . . . spiritual hosts of wickedness.”

Earlier in this book, in Ephesians 2:2, Paul makes a reference to Satan himself saying that Satan is the one that has really set “ . . . the course of this world,” in which we live in. It is why the world does not value the things that God values, that the set of values that our world puts forward are oftentimes the exact opposite of the things that God says that we are to value. The battle that we are in is a spiritual battle, the first thing that we need to understand. The second thing is that the battle is also a personal battle. It tells us that “ . . . we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” but we do wrestle.

The word “wrestle” was a term which indicated hand-to-hand combat, like a wrestling match actually is. It’s two wrestlers pitted against each other, both trying to get the upper hand, both trying to pin the other down to the mat. It is this one-on-one combat. So, when we are in a spiritual battle, we need to understand that not only is it in the spiritual realm, but oftentimes it is a very personal battle. Why is it personal? Because each of us has different things that we struggle with. Not all temptation is the same in each person’s life. Some of us are tempted by certain things that others of us are not tempted by at all. All of us have certain things that tempt us.

The book of James tells us that we are, “ . . . drawn away by his own desires and enticed.” It’s interesting, that word “enticed” was a term which also made reference to bait. Those of you that are fishermen can understand the correlation because if you’re going fishing, first of all you need to figure out what fish am I trying to catch because the kind of fish that you want to catch is going to determine the bait that you want to use. Not all fish are going to go for the same type of bait. Some fish are very particular about the bait that they are after, so you have to use the bait that the fish wants, if you want to catch that kind of fish.

When Satan is tempting us, it is a very personal thing in that he is trying to find what is going to make you fall. What is your weakness? Are you a person that struggles with your pride? Are you a person that struggles with your lust? Are you a person that struggles with greed? What is it that is your weakness because he knows that will be the bait to use. So, it’s a spiritual battle. It’s also a very personal battle.

The third thing that we need to see is that it is a battle that is experienced in the flesh. Even though we are not wrestling against flesh and blood, it is experienced against flesh and blood. Let me explain what I mean by that. When you consider the battle that Job faced during his lifetime, it, without a doubt, was a spiritual battle, but he was facing it in the physical realm: He lost all of his kids, he had arguments with his wife, he had physical ailments that persisted, he had friends that he argued with. All of these were battles with flesh and blood that he had to deal with, and so it is in our own life. That is the battle that we see. The battle that we see is the battle with the flesh and blood: We see the argument that we are having with our spouse, we see the battle that we are having with our kids, we see the things that are going wrong with our car’s engine or our air conditioning unit or what have you. Those are the physical things, but oftentimes there’s a spiritual reason behind it. The battle is a spiritual battle, but we’re going to wrestle with it in the physical world.

Fourthly, we need to understand that the battle, though it is in the physical realm, it is not going to be won in our flesh. We experience it in the flesh, but we will not win it in the flesh. Why? Because we’re just simply not strong enough. I want you to realize that this passage is not telling us to stand on our own two feet, we’ll get more into that later, but we need to realize that the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, they are not carnal. In 2 Corinthians 10:3-4, it tells us, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. 4 For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God . . . .” What that means is that we need to fight this earthly battle in the spiritual realm. If we’re going to have victory in the earthly battles that we face, we need to face it in the spiritual realm. In other words, we need to recognize how our enemy works so that we know how to overcome him so that he does not take us down.

Jump up to verse 11 where it tells us, “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” The “wiles of the devil” are indicating to us that Satan is a deceiver. It was a word that described craftiness or deception. In some of your Bibles it may use the word “schemes” rather than “wiles,” that we are to stand against the scheming, the scheming or the wiles, of the devil. It was actually a word that described a wild animal that stalked its prey, which is interesting because Peter, when he wrote his book, 1 Peter 5:8 tells us that we are to “ . . . be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Peter wasn’t just speaking hypothetically, he had experienced that himself. He had been devoured in the past.

You remember when Jesus was about to go to the cross that He had a conversation with Peter and told Peter, “ . . . Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat.” Would that freak you out to find out that Satan was asking for you by name? Well, that’s what Jesus told Peter. Jesus went on to say, “But I have prayed for you . . . and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.” “What do You mean, ‘return to You’? I’m never going to leave You. I’m not going to deny You. These other guys might deny You, but I won’t deny You.” You know how that story ended, Peter got devoured that night because he thought much of himself. He tried to stand on his own.

Satan can be very deceptive. He is very crafty, and that’s what this word is really describing to us. In fact, the Greek word for “wiles” gives us an English word “method,” so in a sense what it is describing is that we need to be careful about the method that Satan uses. What are the methods that he used, that he will use? You know, you would think that he would be pretty innovative over time, he’s been around for a while, but the reality is he keeps using the same method over and over and over again going far back to the beginning. Why does he do so? Because it works. It has worked on so many, and if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it.

If you can consider the way that he worked way back in the Garden of Eden, you’ll understand what I’m talking about because there was a distinct method that he used on Eve when they were in the Garden that he is still using today. When we’re told that we are to stand against the scheming—the wiles, the method—of Satan, it’s good for us to understand exactly what that method is. I’m not going to have you turn there, but I do want to refer back to Genesis 3 where we find the serpent having a conversation with Eve.

There’s four things that he does there, four points to his method, the same method that he is still using today. The first is that he questions the truth of God’s Word. You remember in his conversation with Eve he said, “Did God really say that you can’t eat from all of the trees in the Garden?” He questioned the Word of God, and that’s what he will do. He will cause you to question whether God’s Word is actually telling you the truth or not. Is this something that I should believe? Is this something that I should obey?

The first is the question, the second is to substitute his own lie, “You will not die, for God knows that in the day that you eat of it, you will become like God, knowing good and evil.” He first gets her to question what God said, and then he substitutes God’s truth with his own lie. “It’s not gonna happen like God told you it’s gonna happen.” In other words, what God is doing is He’s withholding something good from you.

That brings us to the third point, that is, he entices. He began to present the fruit as good and pleasurable and desirable and harmless so that she would, of her own freewill, take from that tree and eat of it; which brings us to the fourth, that is, he blames. What was the first thing that Adam and Eve did after they had eaten of the tree that they were forbidden to eat from? They became aware that they were naked. That speaks of shame, and they sowed fig leaves together to try and cover themselves.

The Bible tells us that Satan is the accuser of the brethren meaning that he accuses us to our face as well as before the throne of God. He tells God how bad we are, and he tells us how bad we are. If you look at the progression of those four steps of his method, it’s really mastery—question what God said; believe what I’m telling you; look how good sin is; look what you just did, I can’t believe it. I know every one of us can relate to that because we have gone ourselves through that progression many, many times where he comes to us and causes us to doubt God’s Word, believe his word, make sin look so pleasurable, and then when we fall, he throws it back in our face, “I can’t believe you say that you’re a Christian. You think that God is going to forgive you now? You fully knew that you were not to do that, and you did it anyway. He’s probably given up on you by now.” Every one of us have probably gone through that four-step process that Satan takes us through.

We’re not to be ignorant of that scheme. But what are we to do when that happens? Verse 10, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.” I want you to first notice where the strength does not lie. It’s not telling us to be strong in ourselves, “You just need to be a stronger person. When you’re tempted, you just need to stand strong in yourself. You just need to say, ‘No.’” It’s not telling us to be strong in ourselves. The truth of the matter is we cannot be strong enough in ourselves. We have an adversary who is very strong himself. He’s actually stronger and smarter than we are.

Martin Luther, five hundred years ago, wrote a hymn that is still sung sometimes today, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” but in that hymn he speaks about Satan and says, For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe; His craft and pow’r are great, and, armed with cruel hate, On earth is not his equal. Martin Luther understood that Satan is a powerful adversary, and we’re not able to resist him ourselves. That is why the text does not tell us to be strong in yourself. It doesn’t tell us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Our strength is to be in the Lord, “ . . . greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” It is the Spirit of God within us, it is not us, that is more powerful than the temptations that Satan might bring our way.

What does it really mean to be strong in the Lord? How are we to be strong in the Lord? Let’s take a step back and remind ourselves of the method that Satan is using because it is going to give us what we need to know to be strong in the Lord. Remember that he questions God’s truth, he substitutes his own lie, he then entices us to sin, and then he blames us when we fall into that very sin that he enticed us with.

So, what should be our response? First of all we need to stand strong on the Word of God. If he is going to cause us to question the Word of God, we need to have such a firm stance upon the Word of God that that is just simply not going to work. When he comes to us and says, “Did God really mean that? Do you think that’s really what that means there? That was written a long time ago, times have changed.” If you have a firm stance on the Word of God, you know that the Word of God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Heaven and earth will pass away before the Word of God passes away. Jesus Himself used the Word of God as His defense when Satan came to Him in Matthew 4 to tempt Him in the wilderness. We need, if we’re going to make a stand against his attack getting you to question the Word of God, we need to firmly stand on the Word of God.

Secondly, we need to stand in our faith. What do I mean by that? You need to actually believe what God has said—God said it, I believe it, that settles it. Sometimes we can know what Scripture says, but we’re not actually placing our faith in what it’s telling us. That has not become our firm foundation. We not only need to stand on the Word of God, we need to stand in faith. Peter in his book, 1 Peter 5, right after he had talked about Satan being a roaring lion, he said, “Resist him, steadfast in the faith.”

So, you need to stand on God’s Word; you need to stand in faith; thirdly, you need to feed your Spirit and not your flesh. In Galatians 5:16, we’re told to, “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh,” because there is a battle going on between the flesh and the spirit in each of our lives. The spirit is the part of you that is wanting to follow after the Lord, serve the Lord with all of your heart, walk in His ways. The flesh is the old life, the old person that you used to be that you still carry around. It still wants to have itself gratified, so we wrestle between those two of either satisfying our spirit or satisfying our fleshly nature.

Whether we win or lose those battles is going to have a lot to do with the environment that we place ourselves in, so we need to surround ourselves with the right people, the right things, the right habits that are actually going to feed and strengthen our spirit rather than feed and strengthen our flesh. When you surround yourself with the wrong environment, you’re setting yourself up for a disaster. It’s going to weaken your spirit. It’s going to make you more prone to fall into that temptation, listening to the voice of Satan, when he is showing you the forbidden fruit of whatever the world has to offer, telling you, “Look how sweet it looks. I bet you it would taste good, if you just took one bite.”

Fourthly, we need to trust in the Cross because inevitably there are going to be times that we fall. First John 2 tells us, “ . . . I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate . . . Jesus Christ the righteous.” There will be times that we do fall, and we need to remind ourselves of what Jesus did for us on the cross. We need to be strong in grace and understand that if Jesus died for me, He gave His life for me and the sin that I just committed; and rather than allowing Satan to heap condemnation on me, as he’s so good at doing, we need to remind ourselves of Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.”

So, when he tries to get you to question God’s Word, you respond with a firm stance on God’s Word. When he tries to get you to believe his lies, you recognize that it’s a lie because you know God’s Word. You trust Him by faith, you walk in the Spirit, and you keep your eyes upon the Cross. That’s really what it means to stand “ . . . strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.”

What’s interesting about what I just shared with you, you may know this, but the passage is going to go on and he’s going to talk about the armor of God. It’s the famous “Armor of God” passage, “ . . . having girded your waist with truth . . . having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace.” “ . . . having put on the breastplate of righteousness . . . the sword of the Spirit.” “ . . . the helmet of salvation . . . .” So many of those elements of the armor of God are actually what we just talked about here in how we stand strong in the Lord. It is standing strong in His Word so that we know the truth and can detect a lie, and it’s keeping our eyes upon the Cross because when we do fall, we need to know that we have our Lord and Savior Jesus, the Advocate, at the right hand of God the Father interceding for us, “Father forgive them because I paid for that sin when I gave My life for them.”

I want to finish up by looking at verse 13, and we’ll close with this, “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” It’s interesting that in this passage there are three times that we are told to stand, verses 11, 13, and 14. Then, on top of that, we’re once told to withstand in verse 13. We are to stand; we are to stand; we are to stand; we are to withstand. That was a word that was often used in a military context which talked about holding an important position while you are under attack. What is that important position that we are to hold? We are not to stand in our own strength, we are to stand in the strength that God has given us, but that strength that God gives us is that we stand on His Word and we stand on what Jesus did for us on the cross. It is only in that that we are going to be able to withstand the onslaught of what Satan is going to dish our way.

I would imagine that in a crowd this size there’s a good number of us right now that have been in a wrestling match. You’re in the midst of the warfare. Satan is wanting to nullify you. He’s wanting to make your witness ineffective. He’s wanting to make you live in defeat. We just simply can’t let that happen. We need to stand “ . . . strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.” The battle that you’re facing, it may seem physical, it’s what you are facing right now in your life, but it’s a spiritual battle; and if we’re going to win the spiritual battle, we need to fight that battle in the spiritual realm. Amen? Let’s pray.