Posted on 09/05/2010 4:02:11 PM PDT by rosettasister
IMHO, there isn’t any need to associate such behavior with ‘macho’. Rather, even from the Garden of Eden, when God disciplined man, Adam, Eve, and the Adversary, as a punishment for Lucifer attempting to distract humans from God and seek their worship of Him, vice God, God placed it in our hearts to naturally, from then on out, to have enmity for the serpent.
Today, whenever a believer or unbeliever alike encounters the Adversary, it is not a natural reaction to seek the Adversary, rather such is a trained behavior from degenerate thinking.
People naturally hate the devil. We have an old sin nature, and those who are not yet believers are still condemned and might seek any counterfeit substitution for God, but they still naturally hate Satan.
The macho behavior, isn’t so much as a manly behavior, as it is a manifestation of our old sin nature repulsion of the Adversary. The believer simply places faith in Christ and dwells through Bible doctrine in their thinking processes in handling any adversity.
There may also be some confusion here between sin and immoral thinking.
Sin, or missing the target, is simply any thinking in our soul which is performed independent of God and what He provides. He allows us to exercise our volition, but not all our acts and decisions are performed though faith in Him.
Those which are NOT through faith in Him, are sinful. Not to be confused with immorality. (Immorality is indeed sinful, but not all sin is immoral. Many sins are very very, very good, but still not performed through faith in Christ, thereby missing the target He provides.)
yes.
Gen 3:15
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Just remember, one has to be in fellowship with God through faith in Christ to have that power. It’s very easy for a young believer to slip into religious arrogance, thinking they are protected, when they might have slipped out of fellowship frequently.
The best spiritual warriors I’ve encountered place it in His hands first, and remain in fellowship regardless the consequence, and frequently the consequences can be very devastating in a worldly sense. Nevertheless, God provides and will also logistically provide for the believer by His pace.
Daniel wasn’t born again.
Jesus himself that the the same works he did AND GREATER would be done by those who would believe on him.
Nobody rises to the top without spiritual help from one source or the other. Nobody. The higher one goes the more powerful the evil spiritual influence.
If you don’t think that Peter and Paul battled the spiritual realm at the highest levels you don’t understand the opposition at all.
immorality in the greek is only used in conjunction with sexual sin.
correct, not all sin is immoral but a mindset outside Christ is not faith and cannot please God.
I think he is busy looking for some scripture verse that isn’t there.
Satan is still the god of this world. He still owns the systems of this world and that is one reason believers are admonished to not be “of” this world.
In Jesus’ day, he called the religious leaders sons of the devil. Who really thinks things have changed?
Again, no one can rise to the top in this world without spiritual help one way or another.
I couldn’t agree more.
Do you understand why you cannot separate the “greater works” part of what He said from “because He must go to the Father”?
I'll tell you.
It's the same reason that Jesus said that “greater is the faith of those who HAVE NOT SEEN HIM yet still believe”.
Jesus was talking about greater works of FAITH for those of us who are NOT disciples and did NOT see Him in his earthly ministry and yet we still believe.
Please, I've heard every crazy charismatic argument known to man at this point.
Don't pull out that “greater works” canard on me. It means exactly what Jesus said it to mean. Because He must go to the Father... because we can't see Him physically like the disciples, our faith is a greater work already.
Get it? Got it? Good.
The opposition that seemed to occupy the minds of Peter and Paul was the problem of oh... say Alexander the Coppersmith... who did the work of the Gospel much harm.
Or Simon Magus.
Or of course how Jesus Himself warned that the problem of the End Time would be deception in the church by false teaching/false prophets/and counterfeit Christians, which is why I am posting on this thread.
here is the scripture that you take out of context.
Matt 26:53
Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels ?
if you read a little further JESUS gives the answer as to why He wouldn’t resist being taken prisoner...
Matt 26:54
But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?
So, even though it sounded good, Jesus wasn’t teaching us a lesson on how NOT to fight the enemy. IT WAS ABOUT HIM FULFILLING SCRIPTURE!
Specifically - Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53
I now release you from the whipping post.
Okay.
It’s like this. We already went to trial. We were all guilty. Those of us who believe in Jesus have Jesus as our lawyer. Jesus says to the Father, who is the judge, they are guilty, but I’m paying the price for them. I will go to jail for them and take the punishment for them and die for them.
So we have been declared free of the punishment we deserve for our sins because of what Jesus did on the Cross...
BUT...
The devil was also at court.
He is in the peanut gallery. He’s got no power at all, because we have been declared clean and righteous before God.
He stands there, behind the gates, and rails against us with false accusations, lies, temptations — all sorts of egregious bile comes out of his mouth.
And we have to walk by him on our way. We are subjected to listening to him, every day.
If we decide to sin, and it is a decision, then we willingly put ourselves in his domain.
All of the above is a bad analogy but the best I’ve heard yet.
The Devil has no power over us unless we give it to him by sinning. And remember, false teaching is a sin, too, because it is not faith.
Power to bind and loose has been given to believers through faith in Him. There are lots of different spiritual gifts, and IMHO, most believers don’t or rarely recognize what theirs actually are.
IMHO, especially in the US, we are likely to encounter more and more actual fallen angelic encounters in real world situations. The study of spiritual warfare probably isn’t as lacking in being germane as many past generations have been fortunate not to be as so directly attacked.
IMHO, those attacks are probably linked to believers backsliding and those who have degenerated into witchcraft and other orders separated from Christ. IMHO, those numbers have been increasing exponentially since WWII.
TwoLegsGood is lying again!
you said,
It’s the same reason that Jesus said that “greater is the faith of those who HAVE NOT SEEN HIM yet still believe”.
where is this in the Bible? You keep twisting the scriptures! And the very WORDS of Christ to boot.
It is this violent confrontation in Gethsemane that Jesus spoke about calling down angels. Jesus knew that as God, He alone could command angels, but He was made as mortal man “lower than the angels” just like you and me. We are LOWER THAN THE ANGELS or lower than principalities.
So later, in the same story but in John, Jesus answered Pilate about the circumstances of His arrest and said:
“My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.”
If Jesus’ kingdom were of this world, He would also have gladly called down angels to fight for Him.
But it is not. As He was made a little lower than the angels, you and I are also lower than the angels. It is NOT our fight to fight principalities or concern ourselves with “warring with angels” or “warring directly against principalities” as some crackpots teach.
Oh, it's those same crackpots who take the metaphor of the “strongest man” or the mightiest man in the house” and make up a new Christianese word of “strongman” when they describe what they believe is a particularly tough demon they imagine they are fighting.
What foolishness.
So what the hell is GRIN technology???? Geez, information please!
Do I get this at Radio Shack?
Hey, wwcj. “Lying”?
Quit baiting me.
Here is your scripture. When Jesus let Thomas put his fingers in Jesus’ wounds.
Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Sorry that my paraphrase was not exact. However it is the exact same topic of the always taken out of context “greater works” idea.
So we are more Blessed and we do a Greater work when we believe in Jesus but have NOT SEEN HIM.
End of story. Greater are our works done in faith now because Jesus has gone to the Father. Blessed are we now because we believe in Him and yet have not seen Him.
Your knowledge of the Word is lacking.
you wrote,
“It’s the same reason that Jesus said that “greater is the faith of those who HAVE NOT SEEN HIM yet still believe”.
Check your words before you put words into THE LORDS mouth.
John 20
Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
One can DEDUCE that it takes faith to believe and not see, but you have a gift of QUOTING words of Jesus that He never spoke.
And remember Job? The WORD says he was a PERFECT and UPRIGHT man that feared GOD. Yet, he was attacked by the enemy beyond anything you or I have ever seen.
So, is it always our sin that opens us up? NO!
It has nothing to do with demons.
Look it up.
I've been on this topic for years now with people. Figure it out yourself.
Jesus never “bound” a demon.
The only time binding and loosing is mentioned (it is a Jewish term for Rabbis) is when discipline in the church is needed in Matthew 18 or when Jesus told Peter that upon this rock of revelatory faith the church would be built and gave Peter the power to loose and bind or authority to build the church on the truths that were in Heaven as well as in the church.
Solomon was ‘binding and loosing” in authority when he decided between the two women who said the baby was both theirs.
MOses bound and loosed when he judged doctrinal and everyday issues of the Jews and got so tired out.
But binding and loosing has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH DEMONS.
I've got to bow out of this thread. This charismatic crazy metaphor praying stuff has got such a foothold in the church it is always like digging yourself out of a pit when this issue comes up.
Sorry I got on this thread. But do your homework on binding and loosing.
Whatever. Can we hit the bored with this button yet? What I wrote was the context, have fun baiting me for daring to teach by paraphrase and proper context.
As to Job, FYI, Job considered the attack on him by his “well meaning friends” worse than the attack by Satan. Look it up.
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