This is What Spiritual Warfare Is and Why You Should Be Wary of Satan
This is spiritual warfare and why you should be wary of satan.
What is spiritual warfare? Is spiritual warfare just a concept meant to keep Christians in line, or is there really something more sinister going on that this concept attempts to encapsulate to protect Christians from the reality of our spiritual environment?
If you have spent anytime in Christian circles, then you have likely heard of the phrase “spiritual warfare.”
Have you heard of it?
Anyone can preach about spiritual warfare, and anyone can listen to this preaching and accept it as truth intellectually, but there is something significant that happens when you realize the substance of this truth through firsthand, revelatory experience.
If you have walked with Christ seriously for any given amount of time, you have certainly experienced spiritual warfare.
If you have been living a nonChrisitan lifestyle for any amount of time, you have certainly experienced spiritual warfare.
BUT recognizing the depth of this truth only happens by the Grace of God.
If, by the grace of God, you have had your eyes peeled and experienced the presence of Jesus first hand, then you know quite deeply the reality of spiritual warfare.
Has this happened to you? Have you ever experienced the presence of Jesus and realized that you were deceived, realized the truth of the Gospel, and understood why it is that God hates Satan so much?
Clearly, I know that spiritual warfare is more than just a preaching point. Rather, it has been revealed to me that spiritual warfare is a truth or fact of the reality in which we find ourselves as human beings made in the image of God.
Nevertheless, spiritual warfare can seem like a slippery slope even to self-proclaimed Christian women.
It is not only women outside of the body of Christ who struggle to know the reality of spiritual warfare. For many Christian women, the reality of spiritual warfare is something that has only been recognized rather than something that has been revealed to them and something which, by the Grace of God, they have experienced or seen firsthand the grace of redemption from.
While this post is in no way here to say that you ought to gamble with the devil to have a first-hand, revelatory experience of the truth, of the weight, and of the pure evil of spiritual warfare and thus of the Grace of God and the Love of Jesus, I can personally testify to the reality of the Grace of God opening my eyes to the deception in which I had landed myself and being completely freaked out when the presence of Jesus Himself made itself known to me.
To be clear, I had read the Bible and attended church and intellectually understood very well what this meant, but it lacked substance until Jesus Himself visited me and God opened my eyes to see, which really freaked me out.
Don’t worry, my eyes went back to almost normal after this experience, and I think Jesus knows that the supernatural reality does bewilder me, so the magnitude of his presence is less grand than this experience since.
In this blog post, I want to discuss what spiritual warfare is, share my personal testimony on how I realized the truth of the Gospel and of spiritual warfare, and open up a discussion for you to share your insights should you have any you would like to share.
What is Spiritual Warfare?
To begin, I want to make clear that spiritual warfare is more than a concept and more than an idea.
It is sometimes easy to understand something intellectually or conceptually and to forget that the concept or idea is only a tool to see and to recognize something that is far beyond our human comprehension.
When it comes to spiritual warfare, sometimes talking about it and thinking about it can make it seem less real. When we think about Satan as an idea, we oftentimes forget the substance of his character and he becomes more of a chimera or cartoon-like character whose name we know but whose substance we forget.
BUT, when we have the experience of recognizing evil through our heart, we come to understand the gravity of spiritual warfare and come to be offended at the audacity of the evil to lure us away from God.
While we may certainly use concepts and ideas to recognize something, the concept or idea is at least once removed from the thing it is being used to describe or to bring your awareness to recognize through it.
So, what is spiritual warfare?
Put most simply, spiritual warfare is the truth of the supernatural reality that we oftentimes forget we are in because we are so consumed with the flesh of the world.
What does this truth of the reality in which we find ourselves entail?
The truth of the reality in which we find ourselves includes several components:
the supernatural or invisible underpins the physical
there are two main camps of the supernatural (i.e., God vs. Satan)
Satan tries to deceive the people God made so that they will never know Him
Put in the most simple terms I can think of, spiritual warfare is the battle between God and Satan for souls. Honestly, it is insulting to even say the name of Satan next to that of God because you know he loves it, but it is important to realize that Satan is an incredibly smart, evil, and thus deceptive fallen angel leading the kingdom of darkness. To be honest, I hate Satan. That guy can go f*ck himself.
Anyway, that which makes spiritual warfare so sinister and so ensnaring is that it involves deception. More specifically, spiritual warfare involves the deception of Satan. I like to compare Satan to an abusive ex-boyfriend who not only knows where you are most wounded but also takes a knife, sticks it into this wound, twists it, and convinces you that this is love.
You are so deceived that you are unable to recognize that you are deceived and that you are being abused.
This is oftentimes because a) Satan is incredibly intelligent and can trick you to think you are on the right path when you are not and b) because Satan can give you things that you deeply desire, which is what makes making a deal with him so enticing.
How Spiritual Warfare Happens
Ultimately, spiritual warfare happens because Satan hates God and is prideful and thus wants to steal souls away from their Creator. More pragmatically, spiritual warfare happens because of a spiritual wound and/or because of an unGodly desire that is in connection with your flesh or the world.
This is in no way to say that all pleasure and/or desire is bad, but as you continue your walk with Christ, you will learn to feel the difference between the pleasure that comes from knowing God through walking with Jesus and the pleasure that is fleshly and thus demonic in its essence.
While it is true that some people make a deal with the devil due to pure pleasure alone, I think that even these “pleasurable” deals are related to a spiritual wound in some sense. Hence, I think that spiritual warfare happens due to spiritual wounds, and Satan capitalizes on these wounds by offering you something superficially pleasurable but which you recognize as the “answer to your prayers,” as “loving,” as “spreading light” among other gold-crusted lies.
Think about, for example, someone who sells their soul to the devil to be famous, have money, and/or to marry the person that they most desire. They may not even realize what they have done. However, if these people knew God through Christ, they would not have these gaping holes within them nor would they be desiring these things. The reason that anyone desires these things is to fill themselves in a way that they need to be filled yet that they are unaware that only God through Christ can fill.
Hence, they have something within them that needs Love and Care and are grasping at what they think will heal it.
The truth is that when you know God through Christ, you will be granted the desires of your heart in a way that is most beneficial and fulfilling to you. While sometimes the answer to your prayers may be “no,” you can rest assured when you know God through Christ that this no is to help you. However, you can rest assured that when you stop walking with God through Christ that you may be given a lot of “yeses” in response to your desires because Satan does not care about you and wants to keep you chained to your flesh thinking that you don’t need God and that God is only here to hurt and punish you rather than lead and Love you through Christ.
My Personal Testimony of Spiritual Warfare
As mentioned above, I had heard of spiritual warfare, had read the Bible, had been to church, and had understood and examined many theological points pertaining to Christianity. I understood Christianity principally and intellectually through conceptual recognition.
Nevertheless, I also fell into the ensnarement of Satan through a spiritual wound unknowingly and using Christian points to justify my new-founded, “spiritual” beliefs.
How it All Started
On a personal note, one of my deepest if not my deepest spiritual wound is the spiritual wound of my mom leaving my life when I was two. She was in and out a handful of times throughout my life, but it was usually after being beat up by one of her boyfriends, and she rarely stayed for longer than six months.
However, my grandma on my mom’s side was a spiritual person. She had several angel statues. She had oracle cards. She loved the crystal amethyst, and I remember reading first about astrology in her studio apartment.
As you can imagine, I have a deep rooted, heart-felt sentiment to spirituality because I feel like it connects me with my mom.
While my dad was a provider in my life, we never had a close relationship and there was much violence, abuse, and drug use in my house growing up, so I never trusted my dad for much else outside of violation, abuse, and a lack of leadership.
Nevertheless, I needed leadership. I needed provision. I needed someone in my life to guide me in more than giving me a room to sleep in and food, when it wasn’t forgotten or being yelled over, but this is a different story.
As it turns out this need for leadership coupled with this heart-felt sentimentality would have lead to my detriment if it were not for the Grace of God.
Anyway, I had been attending a Baptist church and a Catholic church as I was undecided on which one was “right.” At the Baptist church, the “worship” music was worshiping the self. At the Catholic church, one of the church leaders was bitching about Donald Trump on stage. It all seemed so fake and like no one was following Christ principally.
Since I understood the principles so well, I decided that I would okay on my own, so I stopped going to church.
Have you ever decided to go off on your own thinking your own intellect would offer you provision? Yeah, dumb idea, but bear with me because it lead to a substance in Christ that I was yet to know.
In addition to this, around this same time, I decided to leave a job that I loved working at because I was not fitting in with my coworkers, and it was proving to be a problem with management. Ironically, as I left, I wrote a message to my coworkers that I was leaving to follow Jesus.
Without this job, I was unable to pay my bills, so I had to move out of my apartment. I was fortunate enough to stay with some family for a short time, but there were serious differences between us that I saw as being detrimental to my faith, so I decided to move into my car, which I stayed in for awhile and stayed close to God for awhile through Jesus. In fact, one of my deepest Christian insights came while sleeping in a hospital parking lot, but, as time went on, I realized that I wasn’t making enough money to have a place to live, and instead of continuing to make Christian content like I had been doing before deciding to sleep in my car, I started consuming spiritual and manifestation content.
In case you are unaware, this kind of content promises you that you can quickly and without much effort manifest anything you desire. I was hooked, and suddenly my Christian content was replaced with spirituality and manifestation content creation. I threw away my Bible. I bought an amethyst crystal. I bought tarot cards. I even told the devil explicitly that if he would give me money/a place to live, that I was his.
Yeah, so I was desperate, and the ironic and somewhat embarrassing thing about my testimony is that I got NOTHING and did not get very far. I only used the tarot cards a handful of times before I got a very clear message to throw them away. To which I responded with questioning (i.e., “are you f*cking kidding me? Throw away the cards? Really?”) rather than obedience.
Some people sell their soul to Satan, and they get money, women, the man of their dreams, a yacht flying in the sky! I got nothing. I lost $54.00, had God open my eyes, and Jesus visited me and scared the crap out of me.
In fact, before God opened my eyes and Jesus visited me, I was even selling my spirituality manifestation perspective using Christian principles to support it because a part of me knew that I was in the wrong, but is all seemed so right, and I felt so forsaken. The message seemed so loving. It seemed like the right thing. I mean, why would God want me sleeping on the side of the road? If Jesus was real, why would I have had so much suffering in my life.
To be honest, I still do not understand the reality of the problem of evil, and to be honest, none of us ever will.
Nevertheless, with the insight that God provided me and with the Love felt and Known through the presence of Jesus, I realized the truth of deception. I realized how sinister Satan actually is, and I got offended because how dare you?
Important Things to Note about This Testimony
One of the most important aspects of my testimony is that I was lead to a path other than God through Jesus through something that is sentimental to me and that touches a spiritual wound that I have.
Not only have I always been in financial struggle, but the absence of my mom has been a deep point of pain throughout my entire life.
Had I been someone else with a different upbringing, Satan would have worked to deceive me through a different route, but since spirituality is my weakness due to it reminding me of my mom and money being something that I needed, Satan took these two shortcomings of mine and deceived me to make me think that things were better when really it was just blinding me to the truth of spiritual warfare.
Another important thing to note about this testimony is that I was attacked when I was alone. While I do still think it was a good idea to leave my family, it was prideful to leave the church because no one was “doing it right.” The truth about Satan is that he is much more intelligent than we give him credit for being. He was an angel after all, and the top angel at that. He knows us better than we know ourselves.
Finally, a third point to note is that the mercy of God and the Love of Jesus is greater than we can conceive or receive. I felt scared when Jesus showed up not because He is scary but because He is so Pure and real. When we are dealing with others who are living less than a Christian life, it is important to see them as caught in the snares of Satan. When someone does not know Christ, it is a sad thing not something to think they are bad or less than for because they do not know the error of their ways.
While we must keep ourselves safe as we are vulnerable to their influence, we also have a duty to help them come back home, too. The truth is that there is only one Perfect Christian, and He died and rose some 2 thousand years ago.
“... Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”
The Truth of Spiritual Warfare
The truth of spiritual warfare is that it oftentimes evades our understanding. It is one thing to say that Satan is evil. It is quite another to recognize this evil through our own experience.
While many Christians would like to dismiss the reality of the binary, the truth is that you have to choose, and if you choose anything other than Christ, you are in the territory of Satan basically asking him to deceive you and lead you away from God.
Thanks for reading. I hope that this article has provided you with some value and insight pertaining to spiritual warfare.
If you have a testimony of your own or have any additional insight into spiritual warfare, please share it in the comments.
I would love to hear your testimony and read your perspective on spiritual warfare.
Hannah
Founder of HannahProsperity.com
