Win Your War (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

WIN YOUR WORLDVIEW WAR

The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

2 CORINTHIANS 4:4

SOME YEARS AGO we hosted an ABC Nightline debate about the existence of Satan and demons. There were four of us on the panel. I (Mark) enjoyed going head to head with Deepak Chopra. He is a prolific author heralded by Time magazine as one of the top one hundred heroes and icons of the century. For about an hour we disagreed on virtually everything pertaining to the spirit world. The following is how the show started:

The world is filled with weeping, bleeding, and dying.

Why?

If we were good people getting better, and if history were evolving with us, you would rightly expect things to be trending brighter. Things are trending darker.

Why?

Something has gone terribly wrong. The world is a war zone, and various disciplines from philosophy to psychology and spirituality have attempted to tell us what has gone wrong and how it can be made right. However, only the Word of God gives us help to know the problem and hope to know the solution.

In preparing for this book, we have had numerous discussions. On one occasion our oldest daughter, Ashley, was at home on a holiday break from one of America’s largest universities. She is bombarded continuously in classes, clubs, and conversations with beliefs that are at odds with biblical Christianity. Like most missionaries she enjoys praying with and for folks, having deep discussions about biblical Christianity, and helping people understand the good news of Jesus Christ.

Ashley was home for Thanksgiving, and when family and friends held hands in the kitchen to take turns naming what they were most thankful for in the past year, she said, “The prayer tent.” She was referring to a tent set up by Christian students in the middle of campus where there has been at least one person continually present to pray for the campus day and night for weeks on end.

Ashley is one of the campus leaders, and she has had some amazing experiences in the prayer tent. People from every background and belief have come in for discussion and prayer—from atheists to alien-worshippers, from Muslims to Mormons, and seemingly everyone in between.

Ashley said that in her conversations she discovered four basic beliefs she finds lacking in most people’s understanding. Like four legs on a chair, until she is able to establish these truths for someone to understand, the conversation eventually falls over.

THE FOUR LEGS OF A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW

1. The unseen realm

You cannot believe God’s Word or understand God’s world unless you embrace the supernatural. From beginning to end the Bible is about an unseen realm as real as the visible world. Faith is required to believe in beings as real as we are who live in a world as real as ours and travel between these worlds, impacting and affecting human history and our daily lives. As a result everything is spiritual, and nothing is secular. What happens in the invisible world affects what happens in the visible world and vice versa. Furthermore, everyone is both a physical being with a body that is seen and a spiritual being with a soul that is unseen. Spiritual warfare is like gravity—it exists whether or not you believe in it, and it affects you every moment of every day.

Christianity has largely downplayed if not dismissed this truth for hundreds of years. Other than Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians, many denominations and their seminaries, seeking to win the approval of worldly scholarship, were too influenced by the rationalism, naturalism, and skepticism of modernity that corresponds in large part with the history of America.

Rationalism disbelieved most anything that could not be seen through a telescope or microscope and believed only that which could be proven through the scientific method of testing and retesting. This led to naturalism, a worldview that suggests all we have is the material and not the spiritual. The result was skepticism of anything spiritual, and eventually atheism and the denial of God altogether.

At the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther had a clear belief in the cosmic battle between God and angels and Satan and demons, including speaking against the demonic in a hymn he penned, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” A noted historian on Luther wrote an entire book on Luther’s experience with and teaching about the devil.2 In Table Talk Luther wrote of the devil more times than the Bible, gospel, grace, and prayer.3 Luther also speaks of multiple visits from the devil, including appearing in his room at Wartburg Castle in Germany as Luther sat down to translate the Bible. Startled, Luther grabbed his inkwell and...