This morning, as I begin, I just want to share that I am really thankful Kenny began last week by sharing on the greatness of Christ—Who He is, our need for Him and Him alone, and our need to keep our eyes upon Jesus.
The reason I am so grateful is that this morning I am going to share on the Antichrist—just the opposite of Christ. My thought, frankly, is not to bring attention to him or to lift him up in any way, for he is the Lord’s adversary, and yours and mine as well.
But it is important, as children of God, that we understand who he is, what he is about, and how he works, lest we be naïve and continually fall under his devices, manipulations, and traps—the things he so diligently and continuously works upon every saint of God.
This matter of spiritual warfare has been on my heart for a while. It was brought to a head when I was at Ann Hill’s mother’s funeral, and on Owen’s father’s gravestone was written, “I have fought the good fight.”
I said, “Lord, I just feel like I need to share on fighting the good fight.” So, if you will bear with me this morning, I will begin with a couple of verses.
In 2 Timothy 4:7, Paul the apostle says:
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith.
And in Revelation 12:9:
And the great dragon was cast out,
the old serpent, he that is called the Devil and Satan,
the deceiver of the whole world;
he was cast out into the earth,
and his angels were cast out with him.
I think it is most interesting that Satan is called the deceiver of the whole world. He has deceived most of the entire world into believing that he does not exist—that he is a fictional character made up in an effort to explain the evil in this world, but certainly not a living personality or being of any sort.
I think that is one of his greatest deceptions: to have us believe that he does not exist. Now, we as Christians—most Christians, I think—do believe he exists. We know the doctrine concerning Satan, and we know the Scriptures concerning him that are in the Word of God.
Yet often, I do not think we consider him as upfront and personal, as a force to be reckoned with. This morning, it is on my heart simply to enlighten us a little concerning the warfare in which we are involved and the one who is against us. Hopefully, in future messages, we will consider the warfare, our weapons, and the use of our armor.
In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. It was the Blitzkrieg, the lightning war. In relatively three months, I think, six other countries had been overtaken.
America looked on at a distance. What was going on was not our war. It was not our enemy. And we looked on.
Germany continued to press its aggression into other European nations. Japan, Italy, and some other nations joined with Germany.
I do not want anyone to take this personally this morning, if you happen to be from Germany. But Hitler was the mastermind—or seemingly the mastermind.
America sat by watching. Very passively, we observed what was going on in the world around us. We could not hear the cries of those who were being killed. We could not hear the bombs being dropped. It was a distant war for us.
This enemy did not seem to be our enemy. Then, on the morning of December 7, 1941, the war became up close and personal.
On December 7, 1941, over three hundred Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. In a couple of hours, eighteen of our most valued ships were destroyed, and thousands of sailors were killed.
All of a sudden, this war that had seemed so distant—this war that had seemed so far away—this enemy that had not seemed like our enemy, was our enemy. We were at war.
We were a stunned nation because we did not recognize what was happening. All of a sudden, we were up against a force determined to dominate the entire world—not just a few European countries, but the entire world.
Not only that, their purpose was to eliminate every Jew in the world. America realized that we were in a war and in a great conflict, brothers and sisters—not just a skirmish somewhere in a foreign nation over issues that we did not understand.
We were brought into a tremendous conflict. In fact, the conflict was not really flesh and blood. The mastermind was not really Hitler; the mastermind was the Antichrist. Think about it: world domination and the elimination of the Jewish nation and every Jew they could get their hands on.
The enemy knows—the Antichrist knows—that he wants to dominate the whole world. Are we not told in Scripture that one day there will arise a world leader who will indeed dominate this whole world? And that there will be a tremendous battle called Armageddon, with a purpose to eliminate the nation of Israel and the Jewish people?
World War II, brothers and sisters, was a preamble to Armageddon—a preamble to what is to come in the future. It was a preview of the Antichrist, his power, and his intention to dominate the world and eliminate every testimony to Jesus Christ.
We are all a part of this tremendous conflict by virtue of the fact that we are Christians, followers of Jesus Christ.
My concern this morning is that America was suddenly awakened to the reality of a great war. They did not understand the spiritual significance behind it, obviously, but they were awakened to the physical significance: here was a power determined to dominate and take over the entire world.
But we had been passive, thinking it had little or nothing to do with us. Brothers and sisters, we live in an age and an hour when our Lord Jesus is preparing to come back. We cannot afford to be passive about this matter of spiritual warfare. We have to be knowledgeable concerning the great war in which we are involved.
In World War II, sixteen million soldiers were killed all over the world. That does not include all the civilians and Jews who were exterminated. What a war. What destruction it was.
But December 7, 1941, was our awakening day. It was the hour in which we were awakened to the warfare in which we were involved. My heart is that today we would be awakened to this great warfare.
It is not my heart in any way to frighten anyone here, but the warfare is real. The enemy’s intention is the destruction of every Christian, every testimony to Jesus Christ, and everything that would in any way lift up Jesus. He is out to destroy.
If you take a group of Christians who love the Lord and want to be a testimony to Him, his efforts are doubled, tripled, tenfold, a thousandfold.
It is important that this enemy be known to you as a personality, upfront and personal, because he cloaks himself so well.
In 1 Timothy, Paul exhorted Timothy to fight the good fight. He exhorted Timothy to be a good soldier and to war a good warfare.
In Ephesians 6, Paul encourages us. In fact, we are called to be soldiers of Jesus Christ, and he says:
Put on the whole armor of God,
that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
If you do not put on the whole armor of God, you will be wounded.
In Matthew 26:41, the Lord said:
Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.
Why the armor? Why the encouragement to be a good soldier? Why the encouragement to fight a good fight? Why the encouragement to watch and pray? Because we have an enemy, and we are in a state of war.
Who is our enemy? In 1 Peter 5:8, the Scripture says:
Be sober, be watchful:
your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
Be sober-minded—aware, understanding, on the watch. Be vigilant. He does not say, “My adversary.” He says, “Your adversary.” And he does not say the devil seeks whom he may merely hurt or wound, but whom he may devour. That is his purpose.
As we read in Revelation 12:9, he is the great dragon, the old serpent called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. This is our enemy, and whether you realize it or not, we are in a state of war.
Ephesians 6:12 says:
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood,
but against the principalities,
against the powers,
against the world-rulers of this darkness,
against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
He does not say that our struggle is against people, difficult circumstances, difficult bosses, difficult husbands or wives, difficult children, or difficult parents. Sometimes they are extremely difficult. But all we see as Christians is one another.
The enemy has won the battle when he makes us destroy one another, because we do not see what is behind it. Brothers and sisters, it is of little avail to fight the outward. We have to learn spiritually to lay hold of what lies behind these things in our lives.
Sometimes things are simply natural consequences of what we go through in life. But you know what? The enemy is always saying, “Everything you come up against is just natural. It is just to be expected in this world.”
He cloaks himself so well. Behind it, there is an energy, there is a power, and there is a force—Satan and all his powers.
He had a third of the angels who went with him in rebellion, so he has quite a force. He has quite an intelligent agency. The CIA, the SS, the FBI—all the intelligence agencies with sophisticated equipment—are nothing compared to his chain of command and his intelligence agency.
He has powers of darkness assigned to figure us out, to know what our weaknesses are, to know what our strengths are, and to know how to get to us. He has quite an intelligence agency under his command.
He is not omnipresent like our Lord Jesus Christ, but he has representatives around the world. The Scripture says he walks to and fro throughout the earth.
What is on my heart this morning is that we need to realize Satan is not a fictitious character. He is not merely a Christian doctrine or Christian dogma. He is a personality. He is spirit, with power.
There is no way that this little plumber from Germany could have risen to such power and might except that a spiritual force stood behind him.
The spirit of the Antichrist was behind World War II. As a matter of fact, it was the spirit of Antichrist that generated World War I. Many scholars say that the twenty years between World War I and World War II were merely a rest period before the next war.
We are in a period now in which there have been various skirmishes and wars, but there will come a great war yet to come. The same spirit will be behind that: the spirit of the Antichrist. He is the mastermind.
As I said in the beginning, it is not my heart in any way to lift Satan up, but only to make us aware. We cannot afford to be naïve. He is determined to destroy you and me and every testimony to Jesus.
He works on us all, and we will get into that in a moment. He has different ways of dealing with each one of us. He knows each weakness. He knows how to get to you.
I have always thought he is like a fire inspector who is also a firebug. Think about it. He sets the fires, gets to enjoy them, then investigates his own fire and says, “Oh, natural causes.”
That is what he is. He always cloaks himself behind a façade of natural causes, behind the façade of an unreasonable brother or sister, or an unreasonable situation. He does not want you dealing with the principalities and forces behind the situation.
He knows that if he can keep us picking at the symptoms, he can keep the disease hidden. I do not know how else to say it. He does not want us to get at the disease.
Brothers and sisters, let us not lose sight of what we are up against. This is the day, I hope, of awakening to see who we are dealing with.
As the Lord makes clear in the Word of God, we first need to be awakened to our adversary. But when we are awakened, we discover that we have a responsibility.
If we are not awakened, the enemy will work on us. He will crush us. He will get us out of the race, and we will never realize it was the enemy at all. We will think it was merely all these circumstances continually being piled one upon another until finally we could not take it anymore and dropped out.
What we do not see is what lies behind all of this. This is not a time to be passive. We need to be active.
Ephesians 6 says:
Put on the whole armor of God.
Do you know what the armor is? God has provided spiritual equipment for spiritual warfare. Do we know what the armor is? It is in Ephesians 6.
I do not have time to go into the armor today, but I hope to do that later, because it is important. It is pretty hard to fight a battle if you do not have any armor or if you do not have a weapon.
Part of the enemy’s great deception is that we as Christians never really learn what our armor is, what our weapons are, or how to use them. We never truly become soldiers of Jesus Christ.
Our greatest weapon is prayer. Prayer activates the power of God in a situation.
His greatest device, his greatest deception, his greatest trick, is to keep you from praying. Without prayer, the power of God is not activated in your life. The victory of Christ is not made manifest in the situation, and he can go on pressing and pressing and pressing.
Do we know the armor? Do we know how to use it? Do we know what it is for? Paul says that we may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Do we know what his wiles are? Do we recognize them?
Then he goes on to say, “Withstand, and having done all, to stand.” Do we know how to withstand? After we put on all this armor, do we really know how to withstand the enemy? Do we know how to withstand and stand, and what that means?
James 4:7 says:
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Is that not marvelous? The Lord has given you and me a simple word: “Resist the devil, and he will flee.” But do we know how to resist?
Pardon me for this, but grunting and groaning is not resisting. Complaining is not resisting. Accusation is not resisting. “Woe is me” is not resisting.
Do we know how to resist so that he will flee? Do we know what these words mean?
And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb,
and because of the word of their testimony;
and they loved not their life even unto death.
Before we learn our weaponry, before we learn about our armor and how to use it effectively in resisting the enemy, we first have to learn to discern him. The first lesson in discernment is to be awakened to the reality of him and his activity in our lives, both personally and corporately.
I do not want anyone thinking that I am off on some foreign doctrine here. The battle has been won. The war has been won by Jesus Christ. He has crushed the head of Satan.
In Genesis, it says Satan would bruise His heel, which he did at Calvary’s cross. Others think the bruising of the heel refers to the church itself, and he has attacked the church as well. But his head has been crushed, though he is still active today.
The victory has been secured in Jesus Christ. We can believe that fairly easily when things are going well and when we pray a simple prayer and it is immediately answered. We say, “Yes, Jesus is the victor.”
But what happens when the pressure goes on? What happens when you come to the place of Paul the apostle, who said he was pressed beyond measure, even to the point that he thought he would die?
Paul was a tremendous warrior. Much of what we learn about spiritual warfare comes from the apostle Paul. Yet he said, “I have been pressed in my circumstances, in my situations, in my care for the churches, in the beatings I had to endure, and in being put in prison.”
Does that look like someone who is victorious? He said he was pressed beyond measure, even thinking he would probably lose his life under the oppression of the adversary. But he said he trusted in Jesus Christ, Who is able to raise us from the dead.
Paul was willing to be pressed even beyond that, knowing that Jesus Christ would raise him up. And He did raise him up.
Some of the greatest works that we as Christians owe to Paul the apostle were written when he was in prison, seemingly under the power of the adversary. But Paul was free, brothers and sisters. He was free in Jesus Christ.
He was fighting the battle in the unseen world. His imprisonment became a means by which we today, as Christians in the Lord, receive tremendous encouragement and instruction from the Lord through our brother Paul.
We cannot simply judge by the surface. We have to know what is going on in the spiritual realm. Jesus Christ has won the victory.
We have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. He is the One Who strengthens us in the inner man. He is the One Who encourages us. He is the One Who instructs us in Christ—not men, not me. It is the Holy Spirit.
When you leave today, the only thing you will remember is what the Holy Spirit has been able to impress into your heart. It takes the work of the Holy Spirit.
We have the Holy Spirit. We have the Spirit of the Victorious One in us. That is what overcomes the enemy. We have to learn to live by that Spirit.
But, brothers and sisters, we also have an unholy spirit. He is external to us, but continually assaults us, continually tries to oppress us, and continually works on us.
Our responsibility is to take the victory Jesus Christ secured on Calvary’s cross and apply it to every situation we come against, every oppression, and every avenue through which the enemy is trying to work in our lives.
Our place is to say, “Jesus Christ was victorious over this thing on Calvary’s cross.” But before we do that, do we not have to know that it is a battle in the unseen? Otherwise, we will simply take it. We will just take it.
I have used this illustration before, but it really struck me hard the first time. This was probably twenty-five years ago. I was trying to prepare a message, and I was struggling. Everything was going wrong.
The last straw was that I had to get the yard cut that Saturday. I had no choice. I was out there running the mower, had it in high gear, and was whipping around everything. Then all of a sudden, wham, the belt blew.
I got down there, lying on the ground and looking at the belt. A voice spoke to me and said, “Jerry, what are you doing lying on the ground? The enemy has done this. Now get up and stand in the name of Jesus Christ.”
And I did. I stood. Thank the Lord, someone came and cut the grass. The Lord made provision. But there had to be a stand taken in the name of Christ.
Now, not everything that goes wrong in our lives is because of Satan. I do not want us looking for him behind every bush. I do not want us to become Satan-conscious.
We need only to be aware that he is there and that he is working. Spiritually, we have to be alive and alert to his workings in our lives, but our eyes have to be constantly on Christ.
Let me read a few Scriptures concerning what the Word says about Satan.
He is referred to as an angel of light in 2 Corinthians 11:14. That should say a great deal to us. He is not easily discerned because he appears to be an angel of light. He appears to be righteous. He just has a little flaw somewhere—a great flaw, but a little flaw to us.
If you came up and struck me in the mouth, I would be surprised. I would be taken aback, perhaps stumble back a couple of steps, and if you struck me again, I would begin to realize somebody was trying to take me out. By the third time, hopefully I would be prepared to defend myself.
But the enemy does not usually work that way. Sometimes he does, and the assault is so obvious that you do not have to think about it. But that is rare.
Most of the time, what he likes to do is put a little arsenic in your coffee or tea—whatever you drink. Just a little bit. Just enough to make you a little under the weather, a little sick, a little depressed.
Then he comes along and says, “Let me help you out here. I see you are not feeling well. I have some chicken soup here.” You do not know it has a little more arsenic in it, but he says, “Here, I want you to take this. I am going to pray for you that you get better.”
He puts a little more arsenic in there, and in about twelve months, you have passed away. He slowly poisoned you—slowly, hidden, and seemingly praying for you. That is the way he works: very hidden.
In 1 Peter 5:8, he is called an adversary—not one of your pals. We hang out with him all the time and do not realize it. We even make him a pal sometimes, but he is an adversary.
He is the tempter, according to 1 Thessalonians 3:5. We all understand the temptations he brings to us. In 2 Corinthians 11:3, he is called a deceiver.
I told you he has the greatest intelligence network in the universe other than Christ Himself. He has every means in order to deceive us.
In 1 Thessalonians 2:18, he is a hinderer. He is not always able to stop you, but he can hinder the work of God in your life. He is constantly doing that.
In Revelation 19:19, he is referred to as a beast. In 1 Peter 5:8, he is a devouring lion. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, he is the god of this world, and he uses the world against us.
In Ephesians 2:2, he is the prince of the power of the air. The enemy and all his forces are located in the air that surrounds us.
When we begin praying about a conference, you may hear prayers that the enemy would be driven from the air over the campus. That is because we know where he dwells and operates. When we take a stand to clear the air of our adversary, it allows the power and light of God to come.
That is what the Word says about him. But what about his ways? What about his methods? What about his works in our lives?
First of all, our mind is his great battlefield. Satan’s great battlefield is the mind.
He cannot force us against our will. Satan cannot force you against your will. He can influence you, tempt you, trip you up, and take you down, but he cannot force himself upon your will. It is a choice that you finally have to make. You make the choice; that is your will.
But he has access to your mind. He can put thoughts there. He can flash thoughts into your mind.
Have you ever been riding down the road, seen a car off to the side, and suddenly had the thought flash through your mind, “What if I ran into that car?” That has happened to me.
That is from the enemy. He would love nothing better than for you to have a wreck, particularly if you wipe somebody else out. We may laugh about that, but we need to reject thoughts that are obviously from the enemy. Usually they are simply flashes in our minds.
However, there are thoughts he plants as seeds. He loves to do this. I think the greatest example in the Bible is Eve.
The enemy is tremendously deceptive and knows everybody’s weaknesses and strengths. He knew Adam had received direct revelation from God, while Eve had received it through Adam.
He knew that if he went after Adam first, he probably would not succeed in deceiving Adam, because Adam had received direct revelation. So he went after Eve.
He said, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” Eve began thinking. It is all right to think, but you have to watch what you think about.
Eve responded that God had not said they could not eat of every tree, but only of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Soon that tree became preeminent in her mind: “What is this? Why cannot I eat of this tree? It looks good. The fruit looks good.”
Then she said, “God has said, ‘If I eat of that tree, I will die.’” And the enemy said, “You shall not surely die.” A lie.
He began with a question about the trees of the garden that was not correct. He let Eve correct him, as if she were in charge of the conversation and knew more than he did. She was completely taken off guard.
Then he planted a seed. Brothers and sisters, this little seed he planted not only with Eve but with all of us has more power and strength than all the hydrogen bombs ever made. It is a seed of doubt—a seed of doubt about God.
“Do you know why God does not want you to eat of that tree?” Is that not doubt? Does it not bring you to begin doubting God? “I thought God was good, but it seems like He is trying to hold something back from me.”
That little seed of doubt swept her whole body and soul. He said, “If you eat of the tree, you will have the knowledge of good and evil. That is one thing you do not have, Eve. You only know what is good. You do not know evil. But if you knew what evil was, you would be like God.”
He was working on her mind, his great battlefield. She succumbed to that doubt about God. Seeing that the tree was desirable, and believing God was hiding something from her, she took of it.
Then she took it to Adam. This is a great manipulation of the enemy. He knew he could not directly get to Adam. He got to Eve through her mind and thought process.
He got to Adam through his affections, through his emotions. You have to remember, brothers and sisters, Adam loved Eve.
The Lord had Adam name every animal that existed at that time. I do not know how long that process took, but he looked at a lot of animals and saw none that he wanted as a companion. He was a lonely man.
As Adam saw the animals with their mates, I think he began to realize something was incomplete in himself. He desired a helpmeet.
God brought Eve to Adam. Adam said:
This is now bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh.
He recognized immediately that with Eve he had become complete. Adam realized he was complete when he found his wife. That is true. It was the way God designed things. He made man male and female.
God sees man—male and female—as one. That is another story, but it was tremendously important.
Can you imagine the affections Adam must have had for Eve, the only other creature in the whole world to whom he could relate and who could relate to him? He could not give her up. His affections were too tied to Eve.
I am not saying Adam’s affection for Eve was wrong. But his affection for Eve became greater than his affection for God. That was wrong.
So the enemy got our first parents: one through deception in the mind, through a little thought and a little doubt about God; and the other through his affections and love for his wife. Amazing. It seems very simple, does it not? He is such a deceptive enemy.
Sometimes, brothers and sisters, he attacks our body. In Luke 4:39, Peter’s mother-in-law became ill with a fever. The Lord went in and rebuked the fever. It does not simply say He healed her; it says He rebuked the fever.
In Matthew 20, there is the account of two blind men who came to the Lord Jesus asking for sight. The Lord had compassion on them, touched their eyes, and they received their sight.
But with Peter’s mother-in-law, the fever had a force behind it. There was a spiritual force behind it. The Lord recognized that, and that is why He rebuked it. You cannot rebuke a disease; you can only rebuke a personality.
Satan has personality. The Lord knew what was behind that particular situation. Peter’s mother-in-law immediately rose up and ministered to them. The Lord’s rebuke had taken the fever away.
So he can attack our bodies. But not every sickness is an attack of the enemy. We have natural sickness. Sometimes it is because we do not take care of ourselves.
If you never brush your teeth, you know what to expect. If you lie out in the sun for four or five hours in June without sunscreen, you know what to expect. There are natural causes. Do not think every illness we encounter is from the enemy. However, he can attack in that way.
He attacked Job’s family and Job’s body with boils. So he has quite a bit of power, and we need to know how to deal with such things.
He attacks our conscience. In Revelation, he is called the accuser of the brethren. The reason he likes to attack your conscience is that, if your conscience is uneasy and not clear before the Lord, it becomes very difficult to pray and almost impossible to worship.
Your conscience is defiled. There is something between you and the Lord, and it takes you right out of the fellowship.
The thing about Satan is that he will accuse you whether you have done something wrong or not. Some of you have experienced this: you come under accusation about something when you have done nothing wrong at all.
But because you accept his accusations, they become real to you. You take that thing on as being you: “I am really like that. That is me.” It becomes a stronghold within you and is very difficult to break down.
This happens because we do not take up the blood of the Lamb, which answers every accusation of the enemy.
He is terrible. That is not a sufficient word for it. He is evil, evil, evil, evil. First, he tempts you to sin. Then, after you sin, he hammers you: “You sinned. You sinned. You sinned. How can you approach God? This is the hundredth time you have done the same thing. There is no way you can ever come back before God.”
Brothers and sisters, the only approach we ever have to God is by the blood of the Lamb. The blood of the Lamb is always victorious. The enemy cannot answer that accusation cannot answer the blood.
But we so often feel we have to go through weeks of penance before we can come back to the Lord. We wait for a good feeling to come along, and the enemy sees to it that we never have it.
The Holy Spirit will touch your conscience to convict you. But when you confess something that the Holy Spirit is touching, it sets you free.
Once you confess before the Lord Jesus Christ and take His blood as sufficient, it is over. The Lord may choose to discipline you in some way because of it, but you are forgiven. It is gone.
Though our sins be as scarlet, we shall be white as snow. Once sin has been dealt with by the blood of the Lamb, it is gone. It has disappeared from the universe, from God’s records, and from His mind. It is as if it never happened.
Brothers and sisters, it is amazing—the power of the blood. But the enemy wants to continue to oppress us and keep us out of fellowship.
Let me stop here for today, but I want to mention that he uses our strengths against us, not only our spiritual weaknesses.
The things at which we are so strong—whether it is your prayer life, your knowledge of the Word, or whatever it may be—he will use those things against you to divide and conquer you.
He is a judo expert. In my day, which was fairly long ago now, the big thing was judo. Judo is purely defensive. It is not an offensive weapon at all.
The way judo works is that it uses the strength of your adversary against him. If he charges you, you step aside and flip him over your shoulder. It is his own weight and strength that carry him on.
The enemy is a judo expert. He will use even the things in which you are spiritually strong against you.
A tremendous example was how he divided the brethren in the 1800s. The brethren were people who loved the Lord and simply gathered together around the Lord Jesus Christ. Their basis of fellowship was love and the unity we have in Jesus Christ.
B. W. Newton, J. N. Darby, and George Müller were among this group.
One day, B. W. Newton was in the church at Plymouth and gave a message that, unfortunately, was not accurate. It came to J. N. Darby’s attention.
J. N. Darby was a tremendously gifted man in the Word. If you have ever read his Synopsis, you know it can be difficult to understand because he was so intelligent. But it is tremendous. His writings and his Bible translation have much to offer.
Darby knew the Word. He knew the Lord Jesus Christ. He understood the character and nature of the Lord. When he recognized what Newton had taught, he realized it was heresy, because it involved the humanity of our Lord Jesus being flawed in some way.
Darby challenged Newton, and Newton at first did not respond to the challenge. Unfortunately, Darby then concluded that anyone still in the assembly at Plymouth who had heard that teaching was defiled and could not be fellowshipped with.
Later, he contacted other assemblies and said that if they received anyone from the Plymouth church, they too were defiled and condoning what had been said. Eventually, this forced people to take sides.
The issue itself was heresy and needed to be dealt with. Newton later publicly recanted what he had said and acknowledged that it was incorrect.
But Darby felt Newton had not truly repented and could not break through on that issue. It was unfortunate.
Do not stop reading Darby’s writings or his Bible interpretation. They are tremendous. He has much to offer the church in our age, and I consider him a dear and precious brother.
But the point I am making is that he was unwittingly used by the adversary. The enemy used Darby’s strength—his knowledge of the Word and his personal knowledge of the character and nature of Jesus Christ.
The issue he took up was correct, but it ended up forcing people to take sides. That was the danger.
There is more I want to share. He attacks us through the environment. He can oppress us. I mentioned that Paul was oppressed. He can use other brothers and sisters.
Remember how he used Peter? The Lord told the disciples that He was going to Calvary and to the cross. Peter rebuked the Lord, saying, “No, You cannot do this.”
What did the Lord say? “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Interestingly, He did not say, “Get behind me, Peter.” He did not rebuke Peter. He rebuked Satan.
The Lord knew the enemy was using Peter’s natural and legitimate affection for Him. In this case, Peter allowed that affection to get in the way of God’s purpose and what God was doing. The enemy tried to use Peter against the Lord.
It is a very important point: Peter was treated as a third party. It was not flesh and blood. The Lord recognized that it was not Peter He was up against; it was the enemy. So He rebuked Satan.
Remember that, particularly in conflicts with brothers and sisters in Christ.
We will go through more of these things next time. He divides, as in the division between Paul and Barnabas. He injects fear into our hearts. He wears us out.
Daniel 7:25 says:
And he shall speak words against the Most High,
and shall wear out the saints of the Most High.
He did that mentally to Job, physically to Paul through a thorn in the flesh, and he does it to our hearts. In Hebrews, we are warned not to faint or be dismayed.
He steals our consecration, as Delilah did with Samson. He attacks our prayer life because he knows that prayer is the means by which we bring the victory of Christ to bear upon a situation.
Let me end there. Have you recognized something of the significance of the warfare you are in? Have you had your Pearl Harbor experience? Have you come up against the enemy and realized that he is personal, he is real, and he is out to destroy?
The Allied powers eventually won that war. There is no doubt in my heart that God had mercy.
From an outward standpoint, the reason we were able to win that war was that we mobilized as a nation. We came together as a nation. The nation was united in a way it had never been united before, and its purpose was to prepare itself for warfare against this adversary.
We became the most mechanized nation in the world. We turned automobile plants into plants that made tanks. We began to build airplanes as we had never built before. The men were sent to war, and the women became welders and plumbers.
But we were united—all right, all together—against our adversary. We prepared our armor, developed strategies, and utilized the weapons we had at that time.
Again, I think it was the mercy of God. Germany was rushing to build an atomic bomb as we were, and we beat them to it by a little bit. I do not advocate nuclear weapons, but I do know that the dropping of those two bombs stopped the war.
We have a tremendous adversary. We have to be aware. We do not have to wait for a Pearl Harbor in our own lives to be awakened to it.
May the Lord have mercy on us. I do not want us to leave depressed. We have a great Victor in Jesus Christ. May we learn how to use our armor. May we learn how to use our weapons. May we learn how to stand and withstand. May we learn how to stand together, united in Christ, against the adversary who wants to destroy you, me, and His testimony.
Lord, we come today. You told Adam that he needed to take dominion, and he failed. You told the church to take dominion, and we have failed. In this last hour, You are calling us to overcome:
Because of the blood of the Lamb,
and because of the word of our testimony;
and because we love not our lives even unto death.
Lord, in these days ahead, do not allow us to be passive. Wake us up. Let us not be naïve concerning what we are dealing with here—the greatest destructive force in the universe.
Lord, we want to bind up every spirit of fear. I do not want anybody to go away from here fearful today, because You are the great Victor. The outcome is sure and has already been accomplished in the heavenlies.
I thank You for that today, Lord, and we stand on that. Lord Jesus, we stand against everything that stands against us individually and corporately. In Jesus’ name, amen.