He’s out there

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As Hank neared the main business district he paused on a corner to look up and down the street, watching old cars, new cars, vans and fourby-fours, shoppers, walkers and bicyclers stream in all directions ...

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So where was the evil? How could it be so vivid last night and a distant, dubious memory today? No demons or devils lurked in the office windows or reached out of the storm drains; the people were the same, simple, ordinary folks he had always seen, still ignoring him and passing by ...

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It was amazing how well the demons could hide, even behind the doubts he sometimes felt about their very existence.

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“I know you're out there”, he said quietly, gazing carefully over the blankly staring faces of the buildings, the concrete, the brick, the glass, the trash. The spirits were teasing him. They could descend on him in a moment, terrorize and choke him, and then vanish, slipping back into the hiding places behind the facade of the town, snickering, hide-and-seeking, watching him grope about like a blind fool.

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He sat down on a sidewalk bench feeling miffed.

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“I'm here, Satan”, he said. “I can't see you, and maybe you can move faster than I can, but I'm still here, and by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit I intend to be a thorn in your side until one of us has had enough.”

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This is the startling world of Frank Peretti, author of This Present Darknes and its sequels. It is a world of angels and demons and dramatic spiritual warfare, with humans caught in the middle. It is a world where God's angels are only energised to fight against the forces of Darkness when Christians pray, and where New Age plots mask an evil Satanic conspiracy to enslave the human race. In this world, people are possessed by demons called Rape, Complacency, Deception and Witchcraft, which must be rebuked, bound and driven out in the name of Jesus.

It is a world, or rather a vision of the world, shared by millions of Christians the world over. The last 10-15 years has seen an explosion of interest in angels, demons, deliverance ministries, Satan, and all the related branches of what has become known as ‘spiritual warfare’. The staggering success of Peretti's novel, published in 1986, is an indicator of how widely-held this way of thinking about spiritual warfare and the Christian life is. Peretti's writing, undoubtedly fictional though it is, reflects and expresses a theology which was once the preserve of classic pentecostalism, but is now increasingly accepted in the evangelical mainstream.

How should we think about all this, as biblical Christians? Do we take the Devil and his hosts too lightly? What constitutes the ‘spiritual warfare’ of the Christian? Are we in danger from Satan and his demons, and if so what sort of danger? What should we fear? How can we fight?

We will be addressing these and similar questions over the next few issues of The Briefing. We aren't expecting to cover every base—that would require a weighty book rather than a few brief articles—but we do hope to raise the most important issues, and see what the Bible says about them.

In this issue, we begin by laying out some of the basic biblical material about Satan, courtesy of J. I. Packer. His concise but characteristically readable summary is an excellent starting point, and we saw no point in reinventing the very fine wheel he had already constructed.

In coming Briefings, we will focus on some key passages (like Ephesians 6), as well as dealing with the particular questions raised by the mass of ‘spiritual warfare’ literature currently on the market.

As we do so, let's keep our Bibles open and our hearts ready to be challenged to believe what is real and cast out what is not.