Morning, everybody, and very glad to be with you once again.
I would like to read a very well-known passage in the Ephesian letter of the Apostle Paul—the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians. I am going to read from Ephesians 6:10.
Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.
Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil—the stratagems of the devil.
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.
Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand. Stand therefore.
Just a word of prayer. Shall we pray?
Dear Lord, when we come to any ministry of Your Word, we need You. And, Lord, we are so thankful that, for what You command, You provide. You have provided an anointing for our time this morning, and into that anointing, grace, and power, we stand by faith.
Will You give a full portion of it both to the speaking and to the hearing? Help us, Lord. We are living in very dangerous days, with every portent pointing to the fact that it will become more dangerous in the time ahead. We need You, Lord.
And we need You to speak to us in such a way that our hearts are challenged and our lives renewed and revived. And we ask this in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
I think it is quite amazing, the manner in which the Apostle Paul completed this extraordinary letter to the church at Ephesus. By common consent, everybody believes it is the greatest revelation we have of the eternal purpose of God in the Bible.
Those of you who know anything about Ephesians—and most of you will know in this assembly—you know very well that you just take one or two chapters, and it is mind-blowing. How you can somehow get to the bottom of the phrases the apostle uses! They are words that the Holy Spirit taught.
And somehow they spill out of this dear man, filled with the Spirit of God, anointed by the Spirit of God, in such a way that our minds are often bamboozled. We hardly know what he is saying. We take one phrase and we could live on it for a month. We take phrase after phrase after phrase after phrase. It is incredible.
But the way he ends this extraordinary letter to one of the best churches in the New Testament period is in itself extraordinary.
He does not say, “Finally, let us have conferences.” This is nothing against conferences, but he does not say, “Let us have conferences for the deepening of spiritual life, for the formation of spiritual character,” all of which we would have agreed with.
He does not say, “Finally, let us have really serious Bible studies and get down to what really is the mind and heart of God.” We would have agreed with that.
He does not say to us, “Let us have get-togethers where we experience the fullness and power of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.” Again, we would not have had any problem with him if that is the way he ended this letter.
He does not end it in any of these ways. He does not even tell us that we should come together. What he does say is, “Finally,” summing up this extraordinary revelation of the heart and mind of God, “be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might”—not in your own strength, not in your fleshly power, the power of the world’s wisdom, the world’s philosophy, the world’s way of doing things.
But he says, “Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.”
Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles, strategies, stratagems, schemes—different ways this Greek word is translated—of the devil.
Then he goes on:
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places.
Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day; and, having done all, to stand.
And then he goes on: “Stand therefore.” He explains the whole armor, and exhorts us to pray with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit. Then he goes further than that and says, “And pray for me as well.”
It is the most extraordinary way to end this letter. And perhaps the most extraordinary thing, and the most terrible thing, is that the church at Ephesus did not heed the warning.
Within a matter of a generation, they became organized, liturgical, lifeless. We get what the Lord Jesus Himself said in the first chapters of Revelation, the Apocalypse, where He says, “You have left your first love. Repent therefore.”
Something Laodicean had taken over even the church at Ephesus. They had such marvelous teaching. The fact that they were at a certain place spiritually, of depth, meant that the apostle could write to them in the way he wrote this letter. They could take it.
The sadness is, they never heard the warning.
If they had had a modicum of alertness in them, they would have woken up. The very words, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,” which Christians are all the time doing—we are—we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. That is not the battle.
We wrestle against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places.
In other words, that marvelous church, born of the Spirit in Ephesus, was facing—as all real churches, where there is any building up of the Body of Christ and any understanding of the purpose of the Lord—they were facing a hierarchy of evil, powerful spiritual forces.
This is not a fairy tale. It is not Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm’s fairy tales—something very exciting, with hobgoblins and devils and, I do not know what, horned creatures running around with big tails and banging dustbin lids, and so on. I mean, it is not that kind of fairy tale. It is something terribly, unbelievably true.
This world is essentially not a world of flesh and blood, of taste and touch. This world we live in is essentially a spiritual world. And the history of the nations, of empires, of superpowers, is in fact the expression of spiritual forces that you cannot see with these eyes or touch with these hands.
That is really what the apostle was trying to say. Listen, if I may put it in my own words—I do not want to add to what the apostle said—but I would have said something like this: Do you really think that God has shown you so much and brought you into such understanding, and that Satan is going to leave it? He is not going to touch you?
My own words: you can be absolutely sure that Satan will do every single thing to trip you up, to bind you, to bring you into something false, something not of the Lord.
And that is what happened. They did not even heed the Lord’s warning to them: “You have left your first love.” They did not repent, sadly.
And so the story of Ephesus is like the story of all the other six churches to which the risen, glorified Head of the Church spoke at the beginning of the Apocalypse of Revelation.
We need, therefore, I think, to wake up.
Do you think that Satan is going to allow a company like this, or any other company akin to it, that has a history of dealings by the Holy Spirit, of revelation from the Holy Spirit, to just cruise along half asleep, lukewarm, complacent? Of course not.
If he is going to take over the United States, take over Europe and the United Kingdom, and take over every part of the world that he can, his prime thing is the church.
He wants to sidetrack the church, bring it into another dimension, into another sphere, in which they do all the right things outwardly, but inwardly there is the Lord outside of the whole organization, knocking on the door.
I do not know whether I should pursue the matter a little further, but let me just say this: these principalities are very interesting.
I do not want to get you all fixed on spiritual beings, upon angels and so on. But the fact that it is the Word of God, and that it was a warning given and a challenge to one of the best companies of God’s children in the New Testament period, needs to make us sit up and take note.
Here we have it again: principality. The Greek is such an interesting word. For any of you who speak any Greek at all, it is archē. It is the word for chief, beginning, primary.
Oh, this is best of all—put it this way, you will all understand this: supremos.
We have this word in English. Listen: archangel—not just ordinary angels, archangels. We have archbishops. We have archdeacons. We even have it in architects. It is the same word. We have got it again in something to do with architecture: architraves. We have arch-enemies. We have archetypes. Shall I go home?
It is a very interesting word. And what the Apostle Paul is saying by revelation is this: arrayed against this company of God’s children are the supreme, fallen angelic beings.
“The powers” is another interesting word in Greek, exousia, which simply means delegated authority, competency—the ones who take the supremos’ words and push them, take them into action.
“World-rulers of this darkness” hardly need to be explained. But it means every form of darkness, whether it is Darwinianism, whether it is evolutionary teaching, whether it is philosophies or other things such as Marxism, Maoism, the new form of fascism, Nazism—it all is darkness.
The result of this kind of darkness is always the same: human beings die in their millions, savagely murdered. It is always the same.
It is not just human beings. This kind of thing pollutes the earth, pollutes the seas, pollutes the rivers. It is incredible what is done by it. It is death. Darkness.
Religion—do I have to say anything about religion, man? I am not going to go any further on that one, but I mean dead Christianity is a good example of the work of world-rulers of this darkness.
That the so-called church would persecute real believers and murder them, martyr them, is evident. Something is terribly wrong. How could it be possible?
Then you have hosts of wickedness. I think it is best to understand this as hosts of wicked spirits in the heavens. They are Satan’s civil service.
They are minor spirits, but they are in charge of everything—from watching you, watching your family, watching the type of person you are, your personality, what your failings are—everything. They are the small beings in this whole hierarchy of evil, but very, very important and very effective.
Now, I do not want to frighten you to death so you have nightmares. But the fact of the matter is, it is in the Word of God. It is not what I am saying.
Paul says, “We wrestle not.” Now, I notice even Darby translates this, “We struggle not.” Why?
Well, I forgive anyone who thinks that the Apostle Paul must have been suffering from dementia. Some form of Alzheimer’s had come to him. He was not even sixty-six when he died, but some of us get older even much earlier.
Why do I say he was suffering from dementia? Very simple: how can you struggle or wrestle in armor? That is the most extraordinary mixing up of metaphors, of pictures.
I mean, if you are told to stand, stand, stand, and having done all, stand—“Stand therefore”—five times the word comes. How do you stand and wrestle?
Anyone here who has watched a wrestling match? I do not suppose too many of you have, but those who have watched it will know very well it is movement. It is all the time moving—people being thrown out of the ring one way, then they get up and come bowling in under the ropes, and they start off again.
And it is just—you can hardly watch it—the whole time back, forward, back, forward. It does not matter that someone sits on another man. He may be fifteen stone, but the one underneath him sometimes gets up and wins the battle. I mean, it is a contact sport.
Why does the apostle speak of wrestling? Because the word in Greek, palē, actually is used in classical Greek again and again to do with athletes wrestling in Hellenic or Roman wrestling, or in hand-to-hand combat of soldiers. So we get this word.
But our dear translators have naturally thought, “The Apostle Paul got a bit mixed up here. I mean, you cannot wrestle with people in armor. That is the one thing you do not wear if you have got a wrestling match.”
Have you ever seen a wrestling match in full armor? I do not think so. It would be ridiculous, would it not? Clanking, clanking, clanking. I mean, what would you do in such a wrestling match?
So it is the only natural thing: now, if you are standing, then it must be a struggle, because you can stand and struggle. And the root of this Greek word means to vibrate. That is where they get the idea of struggling.
So, in the modern versions, a number of them say, “We struggle not against flesh and blood.” I think the words, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,” and so on, are much more accurate and to the point.
But then we have a problem. How do you put on the armor of God and wrestle with these figures of darkness, these beings?
Now, I do not know if you are still with me, but if you are, I can take you just a little step further in this thing. Because, I mean, you do not put armor on to cook in the kitchen. You do not put armor on to rock the baby to sleep. It would be weird.
And you do not put armor on to wrestle. So, I do not think the Apostle Paul was suffering dementia. I think he was trying to bring extraordinary matters together and to wake up the church in Ephesus.
They knew very well that when you wrestled, you could not be in full armor. “What is the man talking about? Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles, or schemes, or strategies, of the devil.”
He even talks about an evil day, and every company of God’s children, every true work of the Lord, has at some point an evil day.
When that evil day comes, everything seems to be upside down. It seems as if Satan himself is in charge and the Lord is a million miles away.
He tells us that in that kind of day we have to put on the whole armor of God, and stand, and withstand, and, having done all, stand.
Now, this is an interesting point. Listen carefully to me: you do not go forward, you do not go back, you do not go to the side, you do not go to left or right, you do not go up, you do not go down—you stand. And you withstand, and that is the way you win the battle.
Well then, what is this armor? This armor is nothing other than the Lord Jesus. He is the armor of God.
The Father has not chucked us out into an evil world full of these principalities, fallen angels, supremos, in the work of Satan.
Now, you may think to yourself, “Well, he is getting a bit steamed up, but, I mean, we know that Satan is not going to win.” But he does not know that.
He believes there is still a very big chance that he could unseat the Lord Jesus and foil the whole purpose of God.
When God saved you, whoever you are, whatever nationality you are, ethnic group you come from, when and however sinful you were—when God saved you, a miracle took place.
You were delivered from the power, or domain, of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son.
You were taken from one dimension and placed in another. From then on, the Father sees you only in Christ. If you have been born of God, that is your position. That makes all the difference.
This armor—you are told by Paul that you are in Christ. Make sure that you have got that armor of Christ absolutely on. You are safe in Him. Do not move out.
There is a wonderful old Chinese book from centuries ago called The Art of Warfare. And one of the extraordinary things the author said, which was copied for many hundreds of years in every conflict China had, was: feign a retreat.
Right at the point the enemy thinks they are winning, you feign a retreat, and they will come out of their fortresses and strongholds and high towers. Then you can decapitate a lot of them—kill them all.
That is the enemy’s whole plan: to get you out from covering, to get you out from being in the Lord, to entice you out, to make you think that you can talk with Satan, you can call him names, you can demean him, devalue him.
Even the archangel Michael durst not bring a railing accusation against Satan, but said, “The Lord rebuke thee.”
This is something we have to be very careful of. I am reasonably old now—not as old as Stephen, but I am reasonably old—and I have seen a whole number of people who have taken on Satan, called him names, demeaned him, devalued him, and I have seen what has happened to them.
Not a single one came through unscathed.
The most vivid example I can ever remember was this fellow. We were praying for a girl who was really demon-possessed, and he got up on his hind legs and called the devil every single name imaginable.
He called him, “You slimy serpent, you this and that,” and all the rest of it. And those of us who knew something about spiritual warfare, actually, we felt shocked. And all we could do was plead covering for him.
That night a darkness fell on him, and it never left him for eight years.
You cannot do that kind of thing. How then do we face this huge hierarchy of evil? It is too much for me, let alone you. I mean, I am not being rude, but some of you would feel you are very ordinary little Christians.
You would say, “Well, so-and-so, Stephen, something—you know, they are sort of big people in the work of the Lord, and they are going to be protected,” and so on. No, no, not at all. All of us are small fry when it comes to the enemy.
The only safety you have got is in Christ. That is putting on the Lord Jesus.
Did not the Lord Jesus Himself say it in John 15?
I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman.
Abide in Me, and I in you.
As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in Me.
Apart from Me ye can do nothing.
Has anyone learnt that lesson? Apart from Me, you can do nothing. You can preach, you can work your fingers to the bone, you can organize things, you can do a thousand and one things. It means nothing—absolutely nothing.
The only thing is when it is in Christ and through Christ that it is done, in the armor that is ours.
This standing is very interesting. Why stand? After all, the New Testament talks a lot about running, and quite a lot about fighting, a lot about possessing. Why does the apostle end with this word, “stand”?
“Stand, withstand, and having done all, stand. Stand therefore.”
It means that in Christ you are absolutely safe, absolutely secure. When you speak of the Lord Jesus enthroned at the right hand of God, that is like putting a missile into the heart of the enemy.
From that place of absolute safety, you can praise the Lord, worship the Lord, and in so doing you overcome. You gain the victory. So it is very simple.
But in some manner, I do not know how it happened, they did not hear what the Apostle Paul was saying. They never caught the real message, the real warning, and the challenge.
Maybe they did what many of us do to one another when we hear each other preaching. You know, “Oh, well, good.” That is it. No more. We are not challenged. We do not wake up. We do not feel it is a warning to us.
It is interesting, is it not?
I do not have any doubt that we are moving into incredibly dark days. Those of you who know me, you know I have been warning for the last five years that the States is heading for judgment.
I have been in meetings, prayer times, in different places here in the States as well as elsewhere, praying that Obama would not be re-elected. But in my heart, I felt he was going to be re-elected.
It is all to do with the judgment of God upon this nation, this superpower. And it has not ended.
There was a little phrase in a very small psalm, Psalm 11:3, and this is what it says. I am going to quote, firstly, the King James, the older English version, and then my own American Standard of 1901. Then I will say something more about what its meaning, I think, is.
If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
That is both the King James and my version. It is also the Revised Standard Version, English of 1881. It is actually Darby as well. So it is the same thing: if the foundation is gone, what can the righteous do?
But the Hebrew is very, very interesting. My version has a marginal alternative, and it says this:
If the foundations be destroyed, what have the righteous done?
If you look up Young’s Literal Translation, it is exactly what it says:
If the foundations be destroyed, what have the righteous done?
It seems that you can translate it in two ways: “What shall the righteous do?” and, “What have the righteous done?”
The Jewish Publication Society translation of the Old Testament in English puts it this way:
If the foundations are destroyed, what hath the righteous wrought?
In other words, it suggests that if the foundation of a nation is destroyed—its biblical foundation—it has something to do with the apostasy of the church.
The church is meant to be light in darkness, a city set on a hill that can be seen by everybody. It is meant to hold the testimony of Jesus in the midst of gathering darkness. It is meant to overcome the darkness.
It is salt that halts corruption.
But when the church becomes Laodicean—and I am talking not just about a false church; I am talking about a real church when it becomes Laodicean, complacent—the whole foundation upon which a nation was built can be destroyed without a whimper from the church.
Have you heard anyone say anything anywhere? I have not heard the moderator of the Presbyterians say a single word. I have not heard the moderator of the Methodists say a single word. I have not heard the archbishop of the Episcopalians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, say a single word.
The only person, incredibly, that has spoken up has been the pope. And that upsets the evangelicals everywhere. “Well, how can he say something?” But he is the only one who has spoken up on these things. Nobody else has said a word.
One leading evangelical has even written a marriage service for same-sex couples. That is a leading evangelical spokesman in the Evangelical Alliance. It is unbelievable.
Remember the days when Dr. Lloyd-Jones used to fulminate against any possible moving away from the truth? I think he is in glory. I think he would have been shocked to the foundations now, to think that there could be people saying the kind of things they are saying.
The danger is very simple. The danger is that the educational system of our nations will now be in control of people who will slowly but surely form the minds of a new generation.
And then you will say to me, “Ah, yes, but we believe in homeschooling.” But for how long?
This matter is not a small matter, what I am talking about. You see, let me put it another way. This may seem to some of you a bit fanciful, but I am coming to an end, so do not worry.
I think, in my own personal opinion, that when the Lord Jesus, according to His own promise, said:
I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
Every time He has seen the church going off the rails, becoming something other, He has launched something new—a new initiative by the Holy Spirit—which has resulted, of course, in time, in a whole number of different denominations.
But the beginning of those things were real, marvelous things. Human society was changed. There were huge awakenings that swept through whole nations. Take Holland, take the Netherlands, take some of the Scandinavian nations, take Britain.
The Evangelical Awakening—the first evangelical awakening—was so colossal that nearly literally the king, who did not even like Wesley, decreed that there should be three days of mourning when he died and that he should be buried in Westminster Abbey.
It was so colossal. And as a result of that awakening, and thousands upon thousands of people coming into a relationship with the Lord Jesus, biblical truths were placed at the heart of national life—at the heart of education, the heart of social life, of national life.
Now, I know there was a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of other things with it, but it happened.
It seems to me that unfallen archangels were designated to watch over those great movements of the Spirit of the Lord. Well, what is happening now? The exact opposite.
Fallen archangels—these supremos, I call them—have dislodged them. Well, you say, “I have never heard such a thing.” Well, what do you think about Daniel? What do you think about the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece?
And then Michael got into a fight with them, and so great was the fight that Gabriel, who had been sent, commanded to go to Daniel immediately, got caught in the fight and said, “I had to stay with your prince, Michael, to support him.”
Well, what is this? A fairy tale? Or is it what happened, is happening?
I think that some angel that watched over the whole growth of the United States has been dislodged. And certainly Britain—I never thought I would live to see a Conservative leader of the British, the Prime Minister at present, David Cameron, rooting for same-sex marriage.
Now it has passed by the British Parliament and by the Lords. And the bishops, many of them, were instructed either to abstain, not show up, or to vote for it—not by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but by other top officials in the Church of England, the Episcopalian Church.
Anyway, what I am saying is very simple: we have ourselves to blame that this has happened under our nose.
We shall suffer as a result.
Take the first rendering of the Authorized Version, the King James, and my version, and the English Revised, and some of the others: “If the foundations are destroyed, what shall we do?”
Shall I tell you? Put on the whole armor of God and stand. And learn how to withstand in the evil day. And, having done all, stand.
Do not panic. Do not let fear seize you, especially those of you with young children. Do not let fear panic you.
Stand in the Lord. Stand for the Lord. Do not let the enemy pull you out from your place of protection and security.
Wherever you turn in the Old Testament, you will find that the Lord is described in many wonderful ways that all add up to the same meaning: He is our refuge. He is our stronghold. He is our fortress. He is our shelter in the time of storm. He is the secret place of the Most High.
That secret place was where, in the tent, they used to have one secret place covered by carpets, where they used to put precious jewelry or other things, money and so on.
And there the psalmist says:
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress.
All these terms are Old Testament terms of a New Testament truth. The New Testament truth is: you have been placed by the Father, when you were saved, in Christ.
He, then, is your refuge. He is your fortress. He is your high tower. He is your shelter. He is everything you need. Take the New Testament: He is your armor.
Stand, and withstand in Him.
And may the Lord help us, that we may hold the testimony of Jesus right through to the coming of the Lord, to the rapture of the Lord. May He help us to be faithful in holding it, whatever the cost—to hold that testimony and not to deny the Lord Jesus.
Only the Lord can give us the grace and help to do it. We are in a slide. The incredible speed with which paganization is taking place is a sign of demonic beings being involved.
I remember years ago, a very beloved Danish Bible teacher said to me—he married a Swedish lady—and he said to me, when I was talking about Sweden and how Sweden always believed that it was the finest civilization in the world, that it had the highest standard of living, which was very true.
It was very moral, very ethical, a center for missionary activity, for gospel activity, all over the world—the Swedes. And in ten years, they fell from the top to the bottom.
Every single thing that is anti-biblical, they accepted it. Ten years. We are witnessing the same thing.
It is easier to put up a totem pole than to put up a cross. It is easier to put up something to do with spirits of the past than to have the two tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments—not them.
And all this has happened without a whimper from the believing church.
May the Lord help us, and may He enable us to stand firmly and be faithful to the Lord Jesus.
The Lord said one wonderful little word. He said this:
Them that honor Me I will honor.
And He will do it. May the Lord help us. Thank you.