Russell Moore—president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission—says Christians need to recognize the reality of demons and spiritual warfare.
“How do you know if you’re in a time of spiritual warfare?” Moore says in his latest video. “Well, you are. You may not see it. You may not recognize it. But if you’re not dead, then that means that you are in the middle of a fight.”
He says that many Christians only look at biological or physical realities, when they should be looking at the spiritual dimension.
“Often in this sort of secularizing environment, Christians—even very biblically oriented Christians—want to blame biology exclusively without ever thinking about the reality of the demonic,” Moore says. “So someone may talk about temptations that he or she might have, but talk about that only in terms of their genetic predisposition or their psychological background. And often that has … a lot to do with what they’re talking about. But very rarely, in most circles, do we talk about the reality of unseen, invisible beings, when in reality, every culture has recognized the presence of something spiritual that does not have our interests at heart.”
Moore says spiritual warfare often manifests in two ways for Christians: deception and accusation.
“What this deception wants to do is for the human creature to manifest the flesh, to manifest my creatureliness apart from the direction of the Spirit, apart from the self-control and the love that comes from the Spirit,” Moore says. “… The other part is accusation. The way that Satan and the demonic beings work is not just to tempt and to deceive, but also to accuse and to give an indictment.”
He says we can break through these accusations and deceptions by recognizing the truth about who God says we are and finding our identity in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.
However, Moore also notes that sometimes people use spiritual warfare as an excuse to not take accountability for their own actions.
“When it comes to the demonic or with spiritual warfare, [some] will attempt to categorize as spiritual warfare their own lack of self-control or their own points of moral error,” Moore says. “To be able to say, ‘I’m really being directed here’ or ‘I’m being under siege here’ can be a way of evading responsibility. But the opposite I find is usually the problem that we have.”
Watch the full video embedded here. {eoa}
