March 21, 2018 Show with Jim Osman on “Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare”

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 21st day of March 2018.

And I'm so delighted that I got recently an email from my friend

Justin Peters, who many of you have heard on this program. Justin Peters of Justin Peters Ministries, who is not only a world -renowned author but a very popular

Bible conference preacher and teacher. Well he highly recommended that I interview his pastor

Jim Osmond, and I would certainly never pass up the opportunity to interview anybody that Justin Peters recommends.

Jim Osmond is the pastor and preaching elder of Kootenai Community Church in Kootenai, Idaho, and today we are going to be addressing his book,

Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Jim Osmond.

Thanks Chris, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it very much. It's an honor to be here. Hey, it's my pleasure brother.

And before we go into your testimony, because as I try to always do, especially when we have a full two -hour program,

I would love to have you give an account of the religious upbringing you experienced as a child, if any, and what were the circumstances that the

Lord providentially used to draw you to himself and save you. And before we do that,

I just want to have our listeners know something about Kootenai Community Church in Kootenai, Kootenai, Idaho.

Yeah, we're closer to, we're probably better known as Sandpoint, Idaho. We're just a little town outside of Sandpoint, right up by the

U .S.-Canadian border. Our church is a non -denominational community church, a small church located here at the foot of a beautiful ski mountain and right on the shore of a beautiful lake in northern

Idaho. It's exquisite up here. So we are a conservative, not fundamentalist, but more of a sort of a

Baptistic or John MacArthur type of a church. We are Calvinistic in our theology, at least our leadership is, and do expository preaching and honor the scripture and all that we do.

Elder -led, that's our congregation. Great. Well, being at the foot of a ski mountain, do you often have unfortunate and perhaps less than skilled skiers crashing through your church windows?

We're at the base of the mountain, so we're not that close. I just kept thinking of the old

Wide World of Sports opening on ABC television with the agony of defeat of the skier crashing down the hill.

And by the way, I heard that he was not very seriously injured after that, just so people don't think

I'm making fun of that. But it looked brutal, didn't it? Yes. Well, now let's hear something about your own personal experience growing up, what religion you were raised in, if any, and how the

Lord saved you. Yeah, I didn't really grow up in what you would call a religious home.

Church was not part of our upbringing at all. I had some great grandparents. One of them was, I think, a believer.

The other one was a Seventh -day Adventist and possibly a believer as well. And that was kind of the religious heritage of my family.

I grew up with a single mom and one sister. And we never went to church, though my mom would read the

Bible to me on occasion. And I never really became interested in the things of God until I was in my early teens, when my sister met a family a couple doors down from where we were living.

And the son of this family had the entire Hardy Boys book collection. And I was a

Hardy Boys fan and loved the mystery series and read them. And I had to go down and see this for myself.

And I went down there and it turned out this was a Christian family and their son was a believer. And he started talking to me and befriending me and witnessing to me about the things of Christ.

And I kind of was trying to lean towards evolution and atheism and a bunch of other different viewpoints myself.

And I started attending Sunday school at the church that I now pastor at Kootenai Community, and attending

Sunday school in youth group. And as a result of the ministry of the church, I heard the gospel. They sent me to a local

Bible camp for a week during the summer months. And my first week at camp, my very first year, 1985,

I heard the gospel in power, as Paul says, in the Holy Spirit, in 1

Thessalonians chapter 1. And that's when the gospel came alive to me. And I believed upon Christ.

And by God's grace, I trusted him. And it was as if my entire world had gone from black and white to technicolor and Dolby surround sound in an instant.

And I knew that forever my life was changed. And I had heard the gospel, I think, probably dozens or hundreds of times at the church in Sunday school and in youth group.

But it wasn't until at that moment, at that appointed time and destiny, that God drew me to himself and regenerated my heart.

And I've been a believer since 1985, and a few years later, after I graduated high school, I went to Bible college in Pembroke, Saskatchewan, for four years.

That's where I met my wife, and we were married after my third year of Bible college. We were married, and then we moved back here to Sandpoint.

And I started pastoring the church that I am now pastor of here in Sandpoint in 1996.

And it was, the church is a small church, and they had basically sent me to Bible college, and with never any expectation that I would turn around to be the pastor here.

That was never their expectation. But it's in the providence of God, that's how it turned out. And so now it's my joy to shepherd the very people that were very instrumental in leading me to the

Lord over 25 years ago. Praise God. Over your journey as a believer, did you go through any major theological and doctrinal transformations?

A few. You know, when I became a believer, and went to Bible college, I never really was intensely discipled here through the church, or the ministry of the church.

And my teenage years in high school were a lot of fluctuation up and down, and back and forth, spiritually speaking.

And that's what convinced me to go to Bible college, to get a grounding underneath of me. But the college that I went to was not a denominational college, and it wasn't what you would call a

Calvinistic college per se. So we, today, Miller College of the Bible kind of attracted people from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different spiritual backgrounds and environments.

There was charismatics, people who thought tongues were okay, Calvinists, non -Calvinists, it was a very broad spectrum.

So as a brand new believer, I was dropped into an environment where I was exposed to all kinds of viewpoints and perspectives and doctrines and theologies, some of which

I adopted and had to later jettison, and some of which shaped me, even today, to who

I am. By the time I left my fourth year of Bible college, I was what I would have called a four -point

Calvinist. Limited at home, it was always one that was very difficult for me to embrace. And it wasn't until after I started preaching, and it was in the book of Ephesians, chapter 1 through chapter 5, that I had a reformation of my own thinking in that regard, and fully embraced all the doctrines of grace as a result of preaching through Scripture.

So when I left Bible college, I was pretty settled in my theology. I didn't really have any major changes that needed to take place, but since then, in 21 years of preaching through Scriptures, I've become more refined in my theology,

I think, but I haven't really had to jettison a whole lot. The view that I critique in truth or territory on spiritual warfare was a view

I had adopted early in my Bible college years, but by the time I was in fourth year, I had totally had a change of perspective on that issue as well.

Well, praise God. Yes, as far as I'm concerned, once you pluck one of the petals off the tulip, the whole flower dies.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Because I don't think that you can be logically consistent. I don't think you can be logically consistent unless you believe all five points.

Yeah, they're all tied together. If you believe one of them, eventually you have to embrace the entire systematic theology of what salvation entails, otherwise you end up just contradicting yourself in so many ways.

And of course, that is not to mean that I am dismissing, as my brothers, folks who are either evangelical

Arminian or even Amaraldian, the commonly called four -point

Calvinists, I am just saying that I think that in order to really be consistent in identifying yourself as a

Calvinist or a theologically reformed Christian in the historic sense, the five points would be required.

But that's another subject for another time. And I want to read to our audience a part of Justin Peters' forward to your book,

Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare, just to whet their appetite on this subject.

In Truth or Territory, Jim Osmond has done the church a great service. He takes the confusing theological cauldron brewed by modern spiritual warfare experts, he puts in quotes, and shatters it against God's word.

With precision and clarity, he demonstrates that true spiritual warfare is not a war fought with mantras and incantations, but rather with biblical truth.

Truth or Territory will be of great benefit to the professor, pastor, and layman alike. A work like this is sorely needed in the body of Christ today, and it is my prayer that your obedient walk with our

King will be both enriched and simplified by its reading. Jim is a personal friend of mine, and one for whom

I have the utmost respect as a pastor, theologian, husband, father, and disciple of our

Lord. I commend this resource to you with great joy and enthusiasm. And that is

Justin Peters from justinpeters .org. By the way, if anybody wants to hear my interviews with Justin Peters, just go to the

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio website and type in Justin Peters in the archive search engine, and you'll have a number of them appear.

But this is an interesting title to begin with, Jim. Truth or Territory?

A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare. Tell us what you mean by territory in this title.

Well, in the book, I try to contrast two perspectives on spiritual warfare, and I'll take the second one first, and that is territory.

There's a territorial view to spiritual warfare, which you'll see evidenced anytime most

Christian authors, most Christian preachers, and certainly everybody, nearly everybody on TVN begins to talk about spiritual warfare.

They speak of it as something where we as Christians are engaged in in order to recapture territory.

So it breaks down into all these practices whereby we plead the blood of Jesus over our children, our house, our church, our city block, our nation, our county, etc.,

or you speak certain incantations or prayer -like mantras about finding

Satan and canceling hexes and generational curses, almost as if the goal of spiritual warfare is to claim back either physical or spiritual territory that's been captured by Satan.

And it's certainly evident, that view is certainly evident in what is sometimes called strategic level spiritual warfare or prayer walks where people will pray around city blocks, or they will try and name demons over certain counties or certain municipalities and begin to bind those demons or to free up that territory for an invasion of the gospel.

So it is the perspective of spiritual warfare, the territory view, that you see most evident in most

Christian circles, and that is that Satan claims these dominions, these places, strongholds, and our job is to break them down.

And at first blush, much of that seems very biblical until you start to examine some of these practices and their proof texts in light of Scripture.

And I contrast the territory view with the truth view, which is that spiritual warfare is indeed a fight against strongholds, but that these strongholds are not physical or territorial, they're truth, they're ideologies, they're worldviews, they're isms, they're theologies, which are militantly set up and opposed to the gospel and to the advance of God's truth.

And so our job in being involved in spiritual warfare is not to bind Satan, to resist him, it's not to cancel generational curses or to pray prayer mantras to claim territory, rather it is to advance the truth by preaching the word, living the word, being obedient, serving the king, and seeking to engage a lost culture with all of their isms and their false theologies and ideologies.

It's a battle for truth, not a battle for territory, and that's thus the name of the book. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of their own for Jim Osman, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Whether you agree with Jim, whether you radically disagree with him, or whether you're just not certain, perhaps you're not even a

Christian, I know that there are folks who are Muslim and atheists and agnostics and people from all different types of background who do listen to this program, so feel free to voice your question and your opinion at chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, otherwise please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Now, how would this view of territorial protection and preservation that many of those who would claim to be spiritual warfare experts engage in, how would that differ from a father with his wife and children gathered around them in their home, and perhaps when they bless the meal or for any other reason that the father is leading the family in prayer, perhaps he even knows that they live in a dangerous neighborhood or something, and he prays for God's protection over that house, that he prays that no evil doers enter through the doors or windows of that home to do harm to any of those living there, and you might even go further and say that the father prays for the school where his children go, etc.

You could go on and on. Those seem like completely normal, acceptable, and even perhaps typical things for Christians to pray about, even if they are far removed from charismatic influence.

So what would be the difference? I would not take exception with any of those kinds of prayers.

I pray the same thing for my own kids and my own family. I think it's legitimate to pray for safety, for security, for God's blessing and his protection to rest upon people who are in dangerous situations.

Even our nation, for instance, is another one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we as my family, we even pray that for our missionaries, that God would keep them safe in the environments that they serve in, etc.,

and I don't take issue with any of that. What I would take issue with, or what

I guess I think is an unbiblical approach, is to think that in order to protect my missionaries,

I need to, say, pray a hedge of thorns around them. As if saying, I pray a hedge of thorns around this missionary, and I plead the blood and claim the blood of Jesus upon this missionary family, as if saying those words themselves somehow builds some sort of spiritual hedge around those people.

What I would argue is that we are looking to God himself as the source of our protection, and we're asking him to be a rock and a deliverer and a fortress and a strong tower for these people.

We're not trusting in some magical hedge, some magical mantra that we speak, or prayer that we utter, or some incantation in order to affect this deliverance or this protection or this provision.

So what you're saying is that many professing Christians treat prayer very often like it is a magical spell of some kind.

Yeah, when I was in my first year of Bible college, I had somebody give me a tape that was a message delivered by somebody,

I don't even know who the name was at the time, but I must have listened to the tape 15 times, because it was about how you can secure the salvation of your unsaved friends and family members.

And I have a lot of unsaved friends and family members who have never made any professional faith in Christ, and what I wanted for them was for them to be saved as well.

So I listened to this tape, and he went through a step -by -step process, and the very first thing you need to do is you need to do a distant exorcism and, you know, exorcise demons and Satan, and then you need to claim them by name and renounce any generational curses that are over top of them, and then you need to pray a hedge of thorns around them, and then you need to plead the blood of Jesus over them, and then you can pray that the gospel would advance.

After you have beat back and pushed back all the demonic powers and the strongholds and the territory that they have taken, then once you've delivered all your family members through these prayers, these incantation -like prayers, then you can have a free reign for the gospel, free access for the gospel.

And I mean, I took notes and made record of everything I was supposed to pray and started doing this for my friends, my family members, and did it for a couple of years until I was exposed to the fact that none of this has any biblical warrant in Scripture.

One thing that you might find fascinating is that I, years ago, at the request of my boss, my general manager at a

Christian radio station where I worked, he urged me to come with him to see firsthand

Rodney Howard Brown speaking at a very large charismatic church on Long Island, New York.

So I went with him to appease him and to be able to discuss the heresies and errors and dangers of the event later on with him.

And one thing that surprised me was that when Rodney Howard Brown walked out, he actually started to mock charismatics who prayed in the fashion that you are discussing.

He actually said that he was sick and tired of Pentecostal and charismatic pastors praying demons out of the room and praying for his protection when he went to those places to speak.

And he boldly and arrogantly and defiantly declared, when I walk into a room, the demons scatter.

And what he appeared to be doing, what I surmised in his speech, which went on, you know, much longer than that, in those regards, he was trying to put the audience at ease to not fear that what they were witnessing was a demonic activity.

That's what I assessed from what he was saying, because right immediately following his speech about that, there were all kinds of very bizarre manifestations occurring.

But isn't that interesting that he was taking a different approach than most in the extreme charismatic circles would take?

Yeah, yeah, that is. Yeah, almost like he was, how would you say, he was sort of setting the table beforehand to remove that objection.

You know, whatever you think this manifestation is, it can't be demons because they don't like me. Right. Well, we have a listener in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania named

Gordy. He asks or says, it seems that a grab -bag hermeneutical approach to Scripture may be to blame for misguided spiritual warfare.

What are your thoughts? Yeah, I would agree with that.

It's a lot of the passages that are quoted for some of these practices, canceling generational curses and binding

Satan and rebuking demons and strategic level spiritual warfare and praying heads of the thorns, these are based on,

I believe, text taken out of their context and misapplied and misused. Sometimes even building entire theologies on individual phrases out of Scripture.

Yeah, and like for instance, I know that sometimes Old Testament events will be cited, you know, marching around the walls of Jericho and things like that.

Yeah. Have you heard that event specifically being used as how doing a physical thing like that was used by God to bring about victory for His people?

Oh yes, yeah. When I was in third year Bible college, we went to a missions conference in Calgary, Alberta, our entire third year class did, and it was required attendance for,

I think, one of our missions classes, and this keynote speaker was Dick Eastman. And Dick Eastman at that conference, and this was in 1992 or 93,

I think, Dick Eastman made the claim that God had revealed to him that if the Berlin Wall was to come down, he needed to fly over to Germany and pray on location at the

Berlin Wall and march seven times around some statue of Lenin or somebody in East Germany.

So he did that and came all the way back. And if memory serves me, in a story, he realized that that wasn't sufficient.

He had to take people with him. So he had a whole group of people go over and do the same thing. And then the Berlin Wall came down.

And I sat there, somebody who grew up in the 80s, being a lover, personally an admirer of Ronald Reagan, and what he did against communism, thinking of myself,

Dick Eastman is claiming responsibility for bringing down the Berlin Wall, because he went over there and prayed for it physically.

And he cited the passages in the book of Joshua about walking around the walls of Jericho, and how the walls came down.

He used that as his proof text for how he brought down the Berlin Wall through his prayers. And why would that be an inappropriate use of something like that, in your opinion?

Well, because what's taught in Joshua there is descriptive and not prescriptive. You don't see any reference in the

New Testament, the book of Acts, of the Apostle Paul walking around the city of Corinth, claiming territory before he went in, or walking through the streets of Athens, binding and demons and casting them out.

The Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and that the Messiah must suffer before he entered into his glory.

That was his pattern. He just went in and engaged people with the truth, took the Word of God and brought it to people. He didn't go into Athens with all of their idols and all of their statues, even the idols of the unknown

God. Paul didn't march around the Areopagus and claim this territory, binding Satan.

He walked in with the truth, and he engaged people with the truth of Scripture. That's what spiritual warfare is. So you can't take just one of those references or some story of what

God prescribed for a group of people in a certain historical situation and make it something that you just jerk out of its context and use for your own purposes to endorse your own method of spiritual warfare.

And by the way, Gordy, in Mechanicsburg, you have won a free copy of Truth or Territory?

A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare by our guest Jim Osmond. Since you live in Mechanicsburg, just swing by the

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com, who is taking care of those books until they are shipped out normally to listeners all over the

United States. But since you're local, they will hold that for you to come by and pick it up. That is if it ever stops snowing here in Carlisle and Mechanicsburg, because we are still having quite heavy snowfall after quite a long period of time, and it's piling up out there.

But thank you very much for contributing your question today, Gordy. We have Joe in Slovenia who says,

Dear Brothers Chris and Jim, Would it be correct to say that, generally speaking, there are two primary errors when it comes to spiritual warfare, one being over -emphasis and the other under -emphasis?

It seems that the common tendency is to blame every sin, every conflict, and every problem on demons that need to be cast out or completely ignore the spiritual realm and the fact that the

Bible tells us our battle is against spiritual powers. How important is finding the right balance in spiritual warfare?

And if so, what is the balance? Thank you for investing your time in God's people today.

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that there are two extremes with this, and I am the first to admit that I think that the circles of fellowship where I spend most of my time, theologically reformed conservative

Christians, we tend to go overboard in under -emphasizing the reality of the demonic realm and that kind of a thing.

And, of course, our charismatic and Pentecostal friends can have a tendency to go overboard in over -emphasizing this issue and finding a demon under every rock, as the old saying goes.

If you could respond to our friend in Slovenia. Yeah, there are two errors.

I deal with that in the book, and I think that Satan delights in either one of those errors. If he can get Christians to ignore the fact that he exists and never give him a single thought throughout the course of the day,

I think he's happy with that. I also think he's happy when people think that he is to blame for everything. I think he's delighted to take credit for anything he can take credit for, and if he can get us off the beam in terms of our spiritual warfare and how we think we should be addressing

Satan or dealing with his attacks or his existence, then he wins that battle as well.

If he can get us distracted, if he can get us thinking that we're accomplishing some advance of the truth by binding him, which is just absurd, or praying hedges of the thorns and protection and pleading the blood of Jesus over things and thinking this is true spiritual warfare, when we neglect the truth war, and if we neglect the truth war, he wins, because all he needs to win that war is for his lies to stand.

And if we're never engaging people with the truth of the gospel, the truth of scripture, and bashing down the false ideologies and theologies that exist, then

Satan is quite delighted to let that happen, because he's fine if people living in error continue to be blinded by error, just so long as Christians think that battling for the truth is a secondary issue or not a necessary issue.

And we are going to our first break right now. Excuse me. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own,

I would do so very quickly, because the questioners are lining up here. There are quite a number of people waiting to have their questions asked and answered by our guest

Jim Osmond, but if you'd like to get in line, our email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. And as I said before, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And by the way,

Joe in Slovenia, thank you for providing an American address where your daughter lives in Georgia for us to ship this book to you, or should

I say have Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, ship this book to you at a much more affordable rate.

And we thank Todd and Patty Jennings at cvbbs .com for always shipping out all of our winners of Bibles, books,

DVDs, CDs, and other items that they win through submitting questions to our guests on Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio.

And so don't go away, God willing, we're going to be right back with more of Jim Osmond and Truth or Territory, A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Pastor Bill Shishko will be back on Iron Sharpens Iron. And we are discussing today,

Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare with our guest, Jim Osmond, pastor and preaching elder of Kootenai Community Church in Kootenai, Idaho.

And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And please always remember to give your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

And we have a pastor in Ohio with a question. I normally only give the first name of listeners when they write in questions, but when a pastor writes in,

I typically like to acknowledge him by the full name that he goes by, and that would be

Pastor T .D. Hale in Gallipolis, Ohio.

And I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that, Pastor Hale. He is a first -time questioner on the program.

And he says, as a pastor, I feel like I'm fighting against it all the time.

What can I do to break the hold that seems to be in this area and has been for years?

Break the hold, I'm sorry. What can I do to break the hold that seems to be in this area and has been for years?

There was a civil war and a battle with Indians. There seems to be among people that thought that Chief Cornstalk left a curse, which

I do not believe, in our area. What can I say or what can I say or biblically,

I guess he left out a word, maybe teach. What can I say or biblically teach to bring a greater light in my area?

Thank you, Pastor Hale. Are you there?

Yeah, I'm here, Ed. You've given us some thought here. Now, let me ask you a question. Is that entirely something that is pure fantasy?

Like, for instance, I have heard, I don't even know if it's historically verifiable or documented, but I have heard, for instance, that one of the reasons that Haiti is in the horrendous state it is in agriculturally and with sin and many other things that are going on there,

AIDS and so on, that a former president of Haiti had sold his soul to the devil and so on.

I mean, do we completely rule out things like that? Well, I don't know if you rule them out.

I guess you could acknowledge that some of these things do happen. I don't doubt that there's demonic worship, false religions, and worship of demons involved in different world religions and cults that have a blinding effect upon people.

I wouldn't even suggest that it cannot be something that you find more intense in some geographic areas than others.

I think if you go to other parts of the world, you find sort of a darker spirit in some climates, some geographical areas than you would find in Kootenai, Idaho or where you're at.

Some of that might have to do with generations of people who have worshipped demons. Some of it might have to do with entrenched false religions of Roman Catholicism or Mormonism or New Age or even some sort of a demonic cult just being entrenched in an area where people believe those lies.

Ultimately, I think we come back to, even if we acknowledge that spiritual forces can have a greater grip on certain geographical locations, the question still remains, how do we deal with that?

And biblically, I would say that the way that we deal with that is to engage them with the truth. And I would go back to what you see the

Apostle Paul doing. When he went into Athens, this was a place that had more idols than there were people in the city of Athens, and he was walking through the streets vexed and grieved over what he saw.

People walking in darkness, living in darkness, and I have no doubt that there are people there in the...that

there were people there in the grip of satanic deception, and Paul was vexed and oppressed in his spirit because of what he saw going on there.

But he understood what the source of that blindness was, and he understood what the holdup was, spiritually speaking, in that area, and he simply went through the streets, reasoning with people in the marketplace and in the

Areopagus, showing them that Jesus was the Christ and they could have forgiveness as a gospel preaching ministry.

So I think that in a situation like my beloved pastor friend says that he's in,

I think the answer to that is you simply have to be strong in the truth, sound in doctrine, engage people in conversation, and do your best to give a defense to everyone who asks your reason for the hope within you.

Show people from Scripture and use Scripture and engage people one by one, train other people to do the same, and begin to penetrate that darkness with the light of truth.

That is the method, that is the tool that God has given to us to fight that warfare. He has not given us tools like casting down curses or praying mantras and things like that.

We are to engage people with the truth and bring every thought captive to obedience to Jesus Christ.

That's the text, 2 Corinthians 10. We're to bring down these mental fortresses, these mental strongholds that hold people in darkness, and they wage war against God, held up in their mental fortresses, and we are to attack the ideologies.

So you could go to somebody who says that while we're in a dark area because so -and -so sold his soul to the devil or put a curse on us, and you would just have to share them.

Look, a curse does nothing. A curse is just words. Jesus Christ is the Lord of light and life, and you can have forgiveness in his name, and you just engage people with the truth.

Well, thank you, Pastor Hale, and you have also won a free copy of Truth or Territory, a

Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare by Jim Osmond, who is our guest today. Please make sure we have your full mailing address in Galapagos or Galapagos, Ohio, however you pronounce that.

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We have Joey in Clifton, New Jersey. Dear Jim, thank you for your important work to expose the errors of territorial spiritual warfare.

As I see it, it literally becomes a different religion if fully embraced.

My question regards what primary New Testament scriptural references territorialists

I didn't think I'd be able to pronounce that, but I did. Territorialists use for their position, and how you would address those.

Could you please elaborate a bit on this? What New Testament scriptural references do they use, if any?

For praying, I address five different practices in the book. For praying ahead of thorns, they go back to Hosea, the book of Hosea, where God threatens the nation of Israel with putting up a hedge of thorns.

God says, I will hedge you in with thorns, and of course that is a promise of judgment for them straying into their adulterous ways.

That's not a promise of protection, so that's quite an abusive scripture to take a promise of judgment for disobedience and flip it around and make it a method by which we protect the obedient people.

The second one that I deal with is hexes and generational curses. They usually quote an Old Testament passage where God says,

I will visit the sins of the fathers on the children of third and fourth generation.

They'll quote that out of context. Binding Satan, they turn to Jesus words in Matthew chapter 12, where he says, unless you first bind the strong man, you can't go in and plunder him.

And of course, that's Jesus describing what he has done to Satan as evidence of his messianic claims.

The fact that Jesus could come in and deliver the captives and cast out demons, a sign, a miracle that should have convinced the nation of Israel that he was the

Messiah. They take that reference, that analogy that Jesus uses, and they turn it into something that we are to bind

Satan. And then they'll quote Matthew 16 and Matthew 18, where Jesus says, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, wherever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

And they say that that's talking about Satan and demons, and that we have the power then to bind Satan. They talk about rebuking

Satan and describe how we are supposed to. If you turn into TBN, you'll see this constantly.

They'll be on there. Robert Tilton used to do it almost habitually, bind and rebuke the devil, and he would call the devil names, and they taught evil spirits.

They reproved the devil. They tell the devil how weak and stupid he is, how defeated he is, and they think that this is the way of calling down the power of God.

I'm not sure of any New Testament passages. I would have to double -check, but I'm not sure of any New Testament passages that they use for that.

I can think of one where Peter says that the mark of a false teacher is that they think nothing of speaking disparaging words against angelic authorities.

Peter warns about that in 2 Peter. And then the last practice I talk about is spiritual mapping, and of course they talk about, let's see, what is it that they use for an example of that?

The reference in Daniel where Daniel is in prayer, and he's in prayer for a number of weeks, and the angel comes through and says that he was in fighting with the

Prince of Persia for X number of weeks and finally came through, and then he's going back to fighting against Prince Persia again.

They talk about how that refers to territorial spirits, and that our job is to bind and rebuke and reprove and to bring down these territorial spirits so that we can open up geographical locations to the gospel.

So those are the practices, I think, in a brief overview of some of the passages that they use or that they cite as proof for those practices.

And what about, like, this is not really in regard to the totalitarianism,

I almost said totalitarianism, this is not in regard to territorialism necessarily, but a text that Roman Catholics and Charismatics will on occasion use to legitimize some of their superstitions and even some of their acts of charlatanry, and I don't want to broad brush my

Roman Catholic or Charismatic friends as if I'm accusing all of them of that, but there are certainly those among them that are charlatans who use this kind of superstitious stuff to get money from naive and ignorant individuals, and the

Roman Catholic Church has been doing it for centuries. And Tetzel is a perfect example,

Johann Tetzel, who, with the money that he built out of the populace there in Rome, the

St. Peter's Basilica was built. Actually, Tetzel would have been in Germany, but the money that he raised through less than honorable activity, he was able to bilk people out of enough money to have that basilica built in Rome.

But the text that I'm thinking of is Acts 19, where we have, beginning in verse 11,

God was performing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were even carried from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them, and the evil spirits went out.

So how do you, as a Christian in the 21st century, respond to a

Roman Catholic or a Charismatic? And it might not be exclusively combined to those two groups, but someone who says,

I responded to the televangelist to send money in to get a handkerchief that has been blessed because this is what happened with the

Apostle Paul, why shouldn't I believe it occurs today? Well, again, it goes back to what we see in Scripture as being described rather than prescribed, and I would just point out that Acts 19 says that this was an extraordinary miracle by the hands of Paul, and all the way through both the

Gospels and the Book of Acts, exorcisms are classified as a sign and a wonder, and it is the

Apostles and some very close associates to the Apostles who had the ability to perform signs and wonders. So I don't even believe that exorcisms is something that we should be involved in today.

I don't think there's any biblical warrant to precedent for it, there's no instruction for it in the Epistles. We see it being done by Jesus, and then we see it being done by those who were directly commissioned by Jesus, namely the

Apostles, and in a couple instances, people closely associated with apostolic ministry, and those signs and wonders serve to confirm the word of truth that came through those

Apostles. So this activity here would be, I think, in the same category as the

Apostle Paul healing the sick or raising the dead or performing any of the other miracles that we see him performing in the

Book of Acts. There's no reason for me to think that because I'm a believer 2 ,000 years old that I have the same power, the same authority, or the same gifting as the

Apostle Paul. That is arrogant at the least, I think, and wildly unbiblical at the worst.

So I don't think this is a precedent at all for that activity. I think it's just because you see something happen once in Scripture because the

Apostle Paul did something or something happened to the Apostle Paul. I don't think it becomes a precedent for us.

What biblical instruction in the Epistles would anybody point to to suggest that that's something that was done by elders of any church?

Why did Paul, when Timothy was sick and needed to drink a little wine for his stomach's sake, why didn't

Paul just send him an apron? Why didn't Paul just send him an handkerchief? Why didn't Paul send a handkerchief to Epaphroditus when

Epaphroditus was close even to the point of death in Philippians? You know, Paul never told

Timothy, this is how you deal with sickness. Instead, he wrote to Timothy and said, you need to have the elders of the church come and anoint with oil and pray.

And, you know, these are the... Sorry, that's James. Those are the instructions that we have in the

New Testament, not just anoint an apron with oil or anoint a napkin with oil and send it off to a sick person.

So we have no biblical warrant in terms of instructions given to us. We do have a description that this happened in a unique historical instance, but we have no biblical prescription for this to be duplicated or even imitated today at all.

Yeah, my friend Dr. James R. White actually brought that up in a debate on the perpetuity of signed gifts today.

He wasn't speaking specifically to my recollection about aprons and handkerchiefs, but about the whole concept of modern -day healing, that there's evidence that that was not the norm and even, you know, the example that you gave of Paul telling

Timothy to take wine for his stomach and so on. Well, thank you very much,

Joey in Clifton, New Jersey. And guess what, Joey? You've also won a free copy of Truth or Territory, A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare by Jim Osman.

So please make sure we have your full mailing address and we'll have Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

ship that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Trippin's Iron Radio.

We have Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who says,

What is your guest's view of the process of putting on the full armor of God?

What does this really mean? I remember in the heyday of Frank Peretti -esque spiritual warfare awareness back in the late 1980s and early 90s, many

Christians had a sort of performative view of this process, going through an elaborate, sometimes daily ritual in which they went step by step, making declarations such as,

Lord, I am now putting on the shoes of peace. I did it yesterday, but I'm doing it again today just in case the peace has faded.

Actually, I'm kidding about the last part, but not the rest. It was almost like a preemptive exorcism light.

Could your guest explain, please? Or could your guest comment, please? Yeah, how much time do

I have before you have to take a break? Hold on one second. Let me look. In fact, why don't we take a break now?

We'll take our midway break so I don't have to interrupt you mid -sentence.

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That's also the email address that you can send in a question to our guest today. Our guest is

Jim Osmond and we are discussing his book Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare.

Send us an email as quickly as you can before we run out of time at chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

And as you know Jim, before the break we had a listener in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Ted, and Ted wrote in a question.

I believe that was the last question that we were addressing and you hadn't yet had the time to respond to, am

I right? That's correct, yeah. And let's see, I have to enlarge

Ted's email because I clicked out of it accidentally. Basically he is wondering about the performative way that some with elaborate ritual view the putting on the full armor of God and according to our listener this was something that was promoted in the heyday of Frank Peretti for spiritual warfare.

If you could just comment on what he has brought to mind here. Yeah, any of us who grew up and came of age in the late 80s, early 90s probably were exposed to Piercing the

Darkness, In This Present Darkness, Frank Peretti. Those books, though they were Christian fiction, were treated as far too many

Christians as if they were manuals for spiritual warfare. And one of the things that kind of came out of that whole approach to spiritual warfare was the idea that in appropriating the armor of God mentioned in Ephesians chapter 6 that we have to go through some mental every morning prayer ritual where we embrace the armor and confess the armor and put it on mentally as if we were a

Roman soldier suiting up for battle and we need to, you know, shot our feet with the gospel of peace and we need to put on the breastplate of righteousness in some physical way.

And I've even read some spiritual warfare experts where they will describe the practice of actually praying this.

And so, Mark Bubick in his book on spiritual warfare describes how you would put on the breastplate of righteousness.

And he says something like this. Thank you. This is what you're supposed to pray, for instance. Thank you for the breastplate of righteousness which you offer me.

I eagerly accept it and put it on as my protection. I reject and repudiate all trust in my own righteousness which is filthy rags.

I bring the righteousness of my Lord directly against all of Satan's workings against me. I know that Satan must retreat from before the righteousness of God.

He has a prayer like that, a mantra prayer for every piece of the armor. You're supposed to pray this and somehow exegete each of these pieces as you put it on in your mind and the armor can wear off and so you're supposed to protect yourself by putting it all on.

And every goofy practice in this book that I critique in my book, I at one time fully embraced.

So, this was another practice that I thought I had to do every day is to put on this armor. And if I somehow missed one or forgot to pray the right mantra or confess the right things, then

I would be open to some sort of satanic attack during the day. So, I needed to do this every morning and maybe even throughout the day just kind of re -put on different pieces of the armor.

And that's just, apart from it being some sort of a Gnostic, almost mystical view of Christian experience and Christian doctrine, it becomes a burden to people to tell them something like that.

And that's not what Paul describes in Ephesians chapter 6 at all. Some people exegete

Ephesians 6 as if it's a standalone passage, totally isolated from its context. And understanding

Ephesians 6 in its context, I think, helps us to understand what Paul means by the armor of God. Ephesians 6 is the conclusion to the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians 1 -3 deals with the doctrine, who we are in Christ, what it means for us to be in Christ.

Ephesians 4 -6 talks about what it means for Christ to be in us, living out those doctrines.

So, the first half is doctrine, the second half is practical application. And Paul concludes the epistle by making the analogy of a

Roman soldier with the armor, with all these various pieces and all these different attributes. And so, the attribute of truth, for instance,

Ephesians 6 is not the first place that the truth is mentioned. So, when we talk about the belt of truth, we have to look through the book of Ephesians and say, what does

Paul say about truth in the book of Ephesians? And truth is mentioned on six other occasions. Righteousness is mentioned twice.

Peace is mentioned five other times in Ephesians. Faith is mentioned several times in the book of Ephesians.

So is salvation. In fact, that's the theme of the whole epistle. And then the Spirit and the Word of God is mentioned a number of times in Ephesians.

So, it's as if all of these main themes in the book of Ephesians come to a head at the end of Ephesians in chapter 6, where Paul is basically saying to us, we are to walk in each of these blessed attributes.

We are to walk in righteousness, in truth, in peace, in obedience, in the Spirit of God. And when we do that, when we stand in Christ and we walk in the blessed salvation, which

God has providentially and sovereignly given to his people as a gift of grace, when we stand in that and we walk in that and we apply those things that he's been talking about for five and a half chapters, when we apply those things to our life, we are free from the attacks of Satan.

Satan cannot bring us down. He cannot attack us. We are safe and secure in Christ. And so, in my chapter that I deal with the armor of God in the book, here's how

I sum it up. I say, to put on or take up the whole armor of God is to practically live out the graces of salvation which have been provided in Christ by God's rich blessings.

It's not something we mystically appropriate through a ritualistic prayer mantra. It's not something we speak into reality by a positive confession.

It's not a list of individual pieces which are taken off or put on daily. It is the protection provided by being in God's beloved

Son. In him we stand. We are safe from Satan so long as we walk in him. So, I think that sums up kind of the answer to the question regarding Ephesians 6.

Well, thank you very much Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You have won the final copy of Truth or Territory?

A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare. Please make sure that we have your full mailing address there in Alabama so we can have

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service ship that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Hey Chris? Yes? Hey, one other thing. Frank Reddy actually lives a few hours south of where we're at here in Idaho, at least he did up to a couple years ago, and I heard through the grapevine, though I never saw anything from him in writing,

I heard through the grapevine that he had come to a Biblical understanding of spiritual warfare that kind of repudiated, in a sense, this present darkness.

That is what I heard, so I wanted to, he attends a small church where I think he leads worship in a small town here in northern central

Idaho, so I wanted to, in fairness to him, lest I disparage his name, mention that.

Oh wow, that's very wonderful to hear. Very happy to hear that, and very humble of him doing the right thing, and at the possible financial loss of not having as many book sales, he has come forward with that.

That's great to hear. We have Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York.

Do you think that many Christians unknowingly have been influenced by post -modernism, in which diminishes the spiritual warfare of the believer?

Post -modernism, I guess I would need more clarification on,

I mean, I think that the church in general in our country has bought into a lot of post -modern notions.

The Old Seeker Sensitive Movement is a post -modern movement, and so it is, I guess what the writer is trying to ask there is, post -modernism's view of truth is that truth is subjective, not objective, that truth is what we perceive or what we mean in the moment, it's what, you know, it's our own personal narrative, there's no such thing as objective and eternal truth, or even one who is true, and sometimes we can't even know truth.

So I think that to the degree to which we embrace a post -modern view of truth, yeah, we most certainly would give up on engaging in any kind of spiritual warfare.

If, you know, if you run into somebody at work or out on the street, and you're engaging them in a witnessing encounter, and their view of truth is that the truth is what you make it, that there's no such thing as absolute truth, that's one of the lies of the enemy that you're going to have to bring down with the truth.

You're going to have to point out the ridiculous self -contradictory nature of post -modernism so that they could see that they can't actually live in a world where post -modernism is true.

And if a Christian, somebody who names the name of Christ, embraces a post -modern view of truth, then of course they're going to encounter somebody who doesn't believe the way that they do, and rather than engage their falsehood that they have believed, that Christian is just going to say, well, you know, it's true for me, but Jesus is just my truth, you might have your own truth, and your truth might take you to God.

So I definitely think that post -modernism has probably taken the sword of the

Spirit right out of the hands of many Christians, or many people who claim to be Christians. I don't necessarily think that everybody who says they are is actually one, but it's certainly probably taken the sword of truth out of the hands of people, and made a lot of people who name the name of Christ afraid to use it, lest they be called offensive, or bigoted, or narrow -minded, or some such pejorative.

Well, thank you, Tyler. Although we've run out of copies of Truth or Territory, we will ship out another book by our guest,

Jim Osmond. Just make sure that you give us your full mailing address, and we'll have cvbbs .com

ship that out to you. I hear a lot, and for many years have heard, especially those from among the

Charismatics and Pentecostals, phrases such as that they are binding

Satan, and rebuking Satan. They will use that in prayers or declarations, when they are praying for a healing, perhaps, over somebody, a physical healing.

Could be a number of reasons why they're saying that. What do you make of that, binding

Satan and rebuking Satan from the lips of a Christian? Well, rebuking and reproving a powerful spirit is the mark of a false teacher, 2

Peter says, so just on the face of it, you have to stay away from that practice. Um, second, there's no biblical precedent for rebuking

Satan. I'll get to binding Satan here in just a second, but for rebuking Satan, there's no biblical precedent for that. You never see that taking place from the lips of the

Apostles. You never see it commanded in any of the Epistles. The way of dealing with demonic forces is never said, it's always said to be resist or to stand, never rebuke or reprove evil spirits or name them or exercise them or anything.

We're just not given any of those instructions. We're not given any details on how to do any of that appropriately, and we certainly never see the

Apostles doing that. You never see Paul or Peter binding Satan either. You read through the Book of Acts and you'll look in vain for examples of the

Apostle Paul binding a devil, binding a demon. He did exorcisms, but in terms of thinking that there's some spiritual handcuffs in the armor of God by which we go out and we tie up Satan, that's just not there, and there's no biblical precedent for that.

The passages that deal with binding and loosing in the Book of Matthew, there's three of them which

I alluded to in the last hour. The first one in Matthew 12 has to deal with an analogy that Jesus gives of his own messianic claims, and it's not an instruction, it's not even in the context of spiritual warfare, it's in the context of addressing the

Pharisees who were attributing his works to Satan, and Jesus said, I have to be greater than Satan in order to come in and plunder his goods, and so it was a proof of his own messianic claims.

The other two instances in Matthew 16 and 18 where Jesus says that which is bound in heaven, or that which is bound on earth will be bound in heaven, that which is loose on earth will be loosed in heaven,

Jesus is there using rabbinical language that describes the authority that the Church has to decree on earth what has been decreed already in heaven, and I go into some of the exegetical reasons why those have nothing to do with spiritual warfare in both contexts.

They have to do with the Church. It's the Church that does this in terms of its authority in one instance to exercise

Church discipline, and so that is simply us as a Church when we exercise Church discipline, decreeing what heaven has said concerning this situation, and we are in that sense binding and loosing, and you'll never hear people who use those passages to advocate binding

Satan ever talk about loosing him. If those passages deal with spiritual warfare and binding Satan, then what does the loosing refer to?

Do we loose the devil, and how long does the binding last, and what do we bind him with, and how often is he to be bound?

There's a lot of binding of Satan going on, and yet he seems to be out roaring about like a lion, seeking whom he may devour.

So it's just an unbiblical practice that has crept into our evangelical verbiage and our vernacular, and it's a mystical approach to spiritual warfare that I think the

Church needs to entirely abandon. Now, how would you respond to the person who says, look,

I'm just trying to imitate Jesus Christ, and when Jesus Christ was being tempted by Satan, Jesus Christ rebuked

Satan. He said that you shall not put the Lord thy God to the test, and so why wouldn't it be appropriate for a

Christian to say the same thing to Satan if they feel that they are being overwhelmed by some kind of a temptation or whatever the case is in regard to Satanic harassment that they may believe they are experiencing?

Well, I would deal with the presupposition behind that argument is that everything Jesus did and everything Jesus said is a model for me, and I don't think that's the case.

There's a lot of things that Jesus said and did that are not to be a model for us. Jesus suffered and died on the cross.

That doesn't mean that we should pursue the same thing. Jesus walked on water doesn't mean that we should duplicate that.

He turned water into wine, and we shouldn't be attempting to do those kinds of miracles. Jesus Christ had something going for him that we don't, and that is that he is

God. So he has a relationship to the devil that is far different than ours. He had an authority and a power that he demonstrated, and the authority and power that he exercised that we simply do not have.

It is not his authority. It is not our authority. We are to resist the devil, that is to stand against him.

We are to oppose his ideologies and his thinking. We are not to be not to be ignorant of his devices and his schemes.

We are not to give him more credit than he deserves, and we're not supposed to ignore him. We're supposed to stand in the truth and wage war against demonic strongholds with the truth of the gospel and the truth of God's word.

That's how we handle the devil. So in a situation where I'm being overwhelmingly tempted or attacked, and I feel oppressed or discouraged or beaten down or opposed in some way, and I think that this is a spiritual attack that's going on,

I think that it is valid for us to use Scripture, to appropriately apply Scripture to our situation, and to meditate upon that truth, to even proclaim that truth to others, to rest and rely upon it, to make that the place where we camp, where we live, where we sit, and to keep that before our eyes constantly, the truth of God's word, it is appropriate to do that.

But if we think that we're just going to be able to utter a few phrases and devil's going to flee from us, we just simply, that is not the model that Jesus gave to us.

That is what he did, and I don't buy into the notion that everything Jesus did is to be a template for us to just go out and duplicate, as if we are little mini -gods running around, little mini -Jesuses incarnate with the same authority that he had.

Well, we have to go to a final break right now. It's going to be a much briefer break than the last one, and if you'd like to join us on the air while we still have time, do so now or forever hold your peace, or at least until we have

Jim Osmond back on the show. But we're running out of time rapidly, so if you have a question, please send it immediately to chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the

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Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio. We are back with our final half hour of our interview today with Jim Osmond of Kootenai Community Church in Kootenai, Idaho.

He is the pastor and preaching elder of Kootenai Community Church. We are discussing

Jim's book, Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare.

And our email address, if you want to join us on the air, is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And we have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, you kept repeating that it is dangerous or unbiblical or heretical or wrong to take a mystic approach to certain things such as spiritual warfare.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by that? Yeah, mystical approach is the territory view.

The idea that my words have some sort of power over the demonic when I utter them in a certain order or in a certain mantra.

So there are spiritual warfare experts, quote -unquote experts, like Mark Bubick and Mark White and Neil T.

Anderson, who will say that, you know, you renounce certain curses by uttering a phrase or a mantra or praying a certain prayer or using certain words.

You have to use words like Lord Jesus Christ and not just Jesus Christ, because there are demons named Jesus Christ.

So you might inadvertently find yourself praying to a demon if you don't use the right language and the right words in the right order.

That's kind of the mystical approach to it. It's something more like a Harry Potter novel baptized with Christian lingo.

That's what we want to stay away from. That's the mystical approach. There's no biblical warrant for that.

Scripture tells us that spiritual warfare is a battle for truth. We are to engage the lies of the enemy in the bold proclamation of the truth.

What we're doing right now on this radio program is spiritual warfare. And yet people say, since you haven't fined

Satan and you didn't do a prayer walk and name a territorial spirit, perform an exorcism, you haven't been involved in any kind of spiritual warfare.

And that's nonsense. That's an unbiblical approach to spiritual warfare. We are involved in spiritual warfare when we share the gospel individually, when we share the gospel in a public venue or a proclamation, when we open air street preach, when we hand out gospel tracts, when we witness to a coworker and answer their objections to the

Christian faith, when we promote gospel materials and we share the truth, we engage with the lies of the enemy, we deny postmodernism.

Those are the things that we do that are engaging in spiritual warfare, not binding demons and rebuking demons and binding

Satan and canceling curses and hexes and praying circles and all that other nonsense. That's a mystical, almost quasi -gnostic view of reality.

It's something, like I said, more akin to a Harry Potter novel than anything you find in Scripture. Thank you,

B .B. We have C .J. from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, and he says, do you think that Matthew chapter 6 verse 7 applies to what you are speaking about right now?

And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words.

I think there's certainly an application there. Some people, you know,

Mark Dubik in his book on spiritual warfare and demonology actually gives you pre -formed, pre -written out prayers that you pray.

And I read one earlier in the last segment about how to put on a piece of the armor. I read that at the top of the hour.

That type, he offers a prayer like that, a quite extensive prayer like that for every piece of the armor, as if praying those words somehow accomplishes something magical or mystical in a spiritual realm.

And that's not what Paul has in mind. So yeah, if you're just praying meaningless repetition phrases like,

I bind you Satan, I rebuke this demon, I rebuke that demon, that is meaningless verbology, or verbiage that we're just using in place of actual meaningful significant prayer for people and for things.

We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania. There seems to be a disagreement amongst

Christians as to whether or not a truly born -again individual can become demon possessed.

What does your guest have to say about this? And if they cannot be possessed, are there ways that a demon could attack a person physically and harass them, perhaps in some way like Job was attacked by Satan in many ways with the permission of God, of course?

Yeah, I think we have the example of Job as being somebody who was afflicted and opposed and oppressed by the devil in a number of ways, physically, obviously, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, financially.

God gave the devil a reign to do that, to the extent that the Lord allowed him to in the life of Job. Can a

Christian be demon possessed? There are some well -meaning Christians who say the answer to that question is yes, and I think biblically we have to say no.

The Bible says, greater is he that is in me than he who is in the world. If a Christian can be demon possessed, that passage would have to say, greater is he that is in me than he that is in me.

And it's just nonsensical. The proof texts that many people use for demon possession don't hold up when they're looked at in light of their context.

A Christian is one who has been delivered from the kingdom of darkness, been delivered from the power of darkness.

We're no longer children or slaves of Satan, and the devil's ability to have anything to do in our lives is limited by the sovereign power of God and the constraints that the

Lord puts on him. And one who is indwelt by the Spirit of God, which I believe is the permanent condition of those who have been sovereignly regenerated by God and given a new heart, new affections, they are part of the

Church, they are indwelt by the Spirit of God. I do not believe it is possible for a demon to indwell or inhabit that same space.

When the Spirit of God takes up residence inside the heart and the life of a believer and we are united in Jesus Christ, demonic possession is no longer possible.

I think it is possible for Satan to deceive us into thinking that people are possessed who are not. I also think it's possible for Satan to oppress and attack

Christians in many ways, and sometimes I think it's even possible for Christians to buy into his lies and even think that they are possessed when in fact they are not.

Well, could you give us some examples of how you think Satan oppresses and attacks

Christians in the 21st century? I think examples of that would be when

Christians believe lies, buy into the spirit of the age, and a mystical approach to spiritual warfare.

I think that Christians can be attacked when they are discouraged, and I think even physically,

I think it's possible for a Christian to be afflicted just as Job was, as a genuine believer, be afflicted physically by the devil for certain purposes.

I don't think that that is to say that every physical affliction is an attack of Satan, I don't think that that's true.

And so physically and spiritually, I think in terms of being depressed, being discouraged, being, sometimes being apathetic,

Satan can work to discourage us in our work so that our prayers become apathetic, and we have to fight for that joy, we have to fight for, fight against believing lies, and fight to meditate upon Scripture and get

God's Word in our hearts and our mind and our soul to keep us in that process of sanctification by God's grace.

So I think there are just a number of ways that that can happen, and I think it's even sometimes unique to every individual.

I'm not somebody who is depressed easily or often at all, but I know that some Christians do.

There's a famous hymn writer, William Cowper, who lived his life under a dark cloud of discouragement and depression, a man who was genuinely saved, he was friends with John Newton, the slave trader, and you know, he lived his life under that constant spiritual darkness of discouragement and depression.

I think that that's one way that a Satanic attack can be manifested. Yeah, he even attempted suicide.

Yeah. And he was a man who loved the Lord, and he was saved, and he had bright spots in his life where he was free from that discouragement and that depression, but for the most part, he lived under that constantly.

And so I think that the attacks that we face as Christians are unique to each of us individually.

I'm not somebody who is easily discouraged either by stuff or feel personally attacked, but there are other

Christians who, man, if Satan wants to get at him, he just has to launch some sort of gossip or slander campaign against him, and he can discourage them from the work that they're doing and almost take them out of the fight.

And so he knows how to trip us up. He's crafty, he lies in wait, he knows how to devour us each individually, and we just need to be aware that sometimes when we are facing temptation and attack, it is a spiritual force that's behind us.

We don't wage war in a fleshly sense, but the weapons of warfare are spiritual, and the attacks that we face are spiritual, and we just need to recognize their source and stand in the truth and stand on the truth and then just submerge ourselves in the truth of God's Word in order to fight for that joy and fight for that delight in God and His Word.

We have, let's see, we have Christopher in Suffolk County, New York, who says,

I heard a story recounted by John MacArthur, who is far from being charismatic or Pentecostal, who said that he was present at an exorcism and that he would likely never be involved in one again, but he did say that it was a real phenomenon he was witnessing with a young person,

I believe a girl, who had supernatural strength and was throwing people around in the room. What do you have to say about something like this, which is being told to us by someone who is very condemnatory towards the abuses of supernatural sensationalism?

Well, I'll let John MacArthur answer for John MacArthur. I could deal with the two issues that kind of come up in that question.

The first is, is demonic possession real? I think it is. I think the people who are demonically possessed can have supernatural strength and power, and I think the demons can manifest themselves in the spiritual realm.

I don't doubt that for one moment. Second, what is our responsibility in such a situation?

Should we be involved in exorcisms? And I don't think biblically the case can be made that we as Christians should be involved in doing exorcisms.

There's no instructions in Scripture given to the churches and the epistles on how to do exorcisms. There's no detailed instruction in the

Gospels, even in the places where we see exorcisms taking place in the Gospels and Acts. There's no instructions given to believers there on how to do it, and neither are any of those instances presented to us as things which ought to be ordinary or the regular course for Christians.

Instead, like you mentioned in the last hour, in Acts 19, such exorcisms were termed extraordinary miracles.

Not just miracles, which are themselves extraordinary, but extraordinary miracles. Not just your run -of -the -mill miracle, but an extraordinary one was exorcisms taking place by the hands of the

Apostle Paul. So these things are not presented as normative. I believe that the way that we are to deal with people who are demon -possessed today is with the

Gospel. What is it that a demon -possessed person needs? Does he need an exorcism? No, he needs the Gospel. And I believe that the power of the

Gospel itself is enough to deliver people from the kingdom of darkness. That we present the truth of Scripture, and we present what the

Gospel says, and that if God is going to sovereignly regenerate that heart and bring newness of life to that individual, the

Gospel will set them free from the demonic. And the Spirit of God will come in and reside, and He will push out those demons, and that person will never be subject to demons again.

So what is the answer for a demon -possessed person? Is it to pray ahead to protection, to plead the blood of Jesus, to perform an exorcism, bind and rebuke the devil?

Or is it to present to them the Gospel? I think Scripture presents the Gospel as the answer to demon possession. You pose the question in your book,

Is Christ's Authority Ours? If you could please answer that question. Yeah, we kind of alluded to that a little earlier.

Not everything that Jesus did is to be a model for us. There are certain things that He did do in obeying the

Father, in being submissive to the Father's will, in being righteous, in being compassionate, gracious, loving, and kind, in giving an answer, in dealing with His enemies.

Those are all things that we can model. But there are certain things that are unique to Jesus in His messianic office, which we are not called to pattern our lives after.

There are certain things that He was called to do, certain functions that He had as the unique Son of David, Son of Man, Messiah of Israel, King of Israel, as one who was presenting

Himself to the Jewish nation as their King. There are certain things that He did and He said, and certain miracles that He performed, which were unique to that office and unique to that person, which are not intended for us to duplicate today.

And I would suggest that His miracles fall into that category, His approach to the demonic and what

He did in casting out demons. One of the things that showed He was the Messiah was His ability to control the demonic realm, to cast out demons at a word, from a distance even.

And He had that ability over death, over disease, over the demonic, over weather. These things were evidences of His messianic claims.

Jesus came into the world, not just simply saying, I'm going to show you how to live. He came into the world with unique claims to be the

Son of God, the Son of David, the Messiah, and then the things that He did were intended to be evidences of those claims.

And so a good hermeneutic will recognize when Jesus is doing something that we are to model and when

Jesus is doing something that was uniquely related to His messianic office. So not all authority that Jesus has has been given to us.

I don't have authority to control the weather. That's something that you would see, something like a Word of Faith teacher claim.

I don't have authority to cast out demons. I don't have authority to turn water into wine. I don't have authority to direct the course of events of nations' history.

I don't uphold all things by the word of my power. I'm not an eternal being. So there are limitations upon me and my role in my office as a follower of Christ that did not, were not true of Jesus.

So not all of His authority is ours. What role does sanctification play in spiritual warfare?

Oh, that's a good question, because if you go into the approach of spiritual warfare that says that our goal as believers is to abide

Satan and that every, in other words, if you're in that camp that sees a demon behind every sin and behind every bush, then of course every lustful thought that you have, every vengeful thought that you have, every covetous thought that you have, you're going to see as being prompted by a demon.

It's obviously a demon of lust that's attacking me or I'm having a demon of covetousness or a demon of drunkenness who's tempting me to drink.

If that's how you view sin and our involvement in sin and what creates temptation for the human being, for the believer, then you're going to have a different approach to sanctification.

Your approach to sanctification is going to have to involve somehow coming head -to -head, face -to -face, confronting that demonic power.

Casting out that demon, you're going to think that as a Christian you need to have a demon exorcised. I wouldn't be struggling with lust and pornography so much if I didn't have this demon, so I need to go have an exorcism to be free from this.

I need to plead the blood and find this demon of lust every time I feel tempted to lust. But if your view of sanctification and sin is that I sin because I am in this body of death,

I still have a flesh that is very active, and the flesh is my main enemy. Satan is a defeated enemy.

My flesh is right here. It is active and it tempts me every day. If that's your view, that sin comes because desires concede within the heart and that desire gives birth to sin, and sin is there because I'm in my flesh and I have a fleshly enemy that I'm waging war against, then sanctification is going to look a lot different.

Sanctification is going to involve mortifying my flesh and putting to death the deeds of the body and setting and fixing my heart and mind on things of heaven and putting on the new man in Christ and assaulting those temptations with the truth and going to war against sin on a daily basis and denying myself and denying my flesh and taking up my cross and following Christ.

That's what sanctification is going to look like. And unfortunately, the unbiblical view of spiritual warfare also promises an unbiblical view or promotes an unbiblical view of sanctification as well, a view of sanctification that is,

I think, entirely misguided. Think about the commands in Scripture of how we are to pursue holiness. We are told to put off the deeds of the flesh.

We're told to deny ourselves. We're told to take up our cross. We're told to walk in holiness and to live in obedience and to submit ourselves to righteousness and become slaves of righteousness.

The epistles do not instruct us to get exorcisms, to cast out demons, to build hedges, to pray thorns, etc.,

in order to be sanctified or grow in holiness. We are to simply walk in who we are in Christ, and we are to train ourselves to become slaves of obedience and slaves of Christ instead of slaves of unrighteousness and disobedience.

That's the method of sanctification the Scripture lies out, not some sort of a direct confrontation with the demonic.

We have an anonymous listener who says, let's say you're right and none of these mantras will produce anything.

They will not chase demons away. They will not have the effect that the one participating in these things intends them to have.

But what harm will it do? Well, I'll answer that anonymously.

Anonymously, I would say... Sorry about that.

Well, the person might be anonymous because maybe his own church is doing something. I understand, and I totally understand.

The question really is not what harm can it do, but what good could it do? And do we base our theology and our practice on the question of what harm could this do?

If we are not commissioned to do it, if we're not called to do it, and Scripture doesn't tell us that this is what we should be doing, then we shouldn't be doing it.

And it would be like a general giving orders to his troops and saying, I want you to attack this hill at such and such time of day.

I want you to call in these instructions and send one unit around the back side, and you come up the front side, and he gives specific details.

And then the guy who is immediately in charge of that group of troops says, well, we're going to do it a little bit differently.

And then he might ask, well, what harm is it going to do if we just do this differently? Really, the issue is, are we following what our commander in chief has told us to do, or are we not doing it?

And the test of what is true is not what harm does it do. I would suggest it's not doing any good.

You're actually missing the battle. That is not the battle. That's not spiritual warfare. That's just mantras.

That's just phrases. It's not doing any good. You're not accomplishing anything, because these things are meaningless. These things don't do anything at all.

They're not biblical. And we're actually missing what the real battle is. And unfortunately, a lot of Christians are doing that, just thinking, well,

I pray hedge thorns because it makes me feel good. Well, the test of truth is not what makes me feel good. The test of truth is what's biblical.

And I assume that the bad that could be done is that those that know you or witness these bindings and loosings and declarations that are declared with confidence and certainty, when they don't work, people are going to doubt

Christianity as being authentic. Yeah, it communicates a view of spiritual realities that's not true.

That's a harm, and I think that that's a very real harm. If we are communicating to people that our words have power to affect things in the spiritual realm and to do things to the devil, that's what we're communicating by our words, and that's not truth, and that's doing a very real harm.

It's actually teaching a false doctrine, a false theology of angels and of demons and spiritual warfare to people who are listening to those words and those phrases.

Yeah, and of course, another vivid and dangerous and deadly way this can have a bad effect is if you are convincing someone or yourself that you have been healed of an illness and you don't seek medical attention or anything.

I have even had, I can vividly remember, a Word of Faith practitioner, a woman who was involved in that theology.

In fact, her husband was a Word of Faith pastor, if I'm not mistaken. This was many years ago in the late 1980s,

I believe. She rebuked me and said I was guilty of sin because when

I had pneumonia, I still told her I was going back to the doctor for a checkup after she had already declared that I was healed.

So, I mean, obviously, that could be a very, very dangerous thing to be doing to people because people do die, and people have died as a result of these kinds of false healings and false promises to people.

Yeah. Well, I'd like you to conclude the program today with the posture of a soldier and the protection for a soldier.

Yeah, I described that, how I end the book, Truth of Territory, the protection of a soldier.

I just described there what the spiritual armor is in Ephesians 6, which we talked about. In terms of the posture of a soldier, the

Bible repeatedly, in the book of James, in the book of Ephesians, in 1 Peter, tells us that our approach to the demonic is to stand.

We are to resist him in the evil day. We are to resist and to stand. So our job is not to take territory.

My perspective is that all of the nations, all of creation belongs to Jesus Christ already, and when he comes back, he's going to take all that territory when he comes back to rule and to reign.

So that's not my job. My job right now is to occupy until he comes, and so my posture is one of standing in the truth.

I don't need to go out and break down the gates of hell, storm the gates of hell, and trying to release captives.

My job is to stand in the truth, to proclaim the truth, to advance the truth, and do what I can to just simply promote

God's truth everywhere. It is a truth war that we're involved in. So my posture is not an aggressive posture.

I think our posture is simply we are standing and occupying the space that Christ has won until he comes back.

And that, I think, perfectly captures the difference between a truth perspective of spiritual warfare and a territory perspective of spiritual warfare.

My job is not to claim nations, counties, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, or buildings for the

Lord. My job is to proclaim the gospel, and that's the job of every listener who's faithful to the truth.

Now, if you could just summarize in about five minutes' time what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today before we go off the air.

We live in an age of darkness, I think, and I think wherever you're at listening around the world, you just seem to feel as if darkness is advancing everywhere.

We live in a time when truth is denied. I think one of the greatest advances the enemy has ever made is to deny objective truth.

Postmodernism is one of the most insidious lies that Satan has ever come up with, and it is ruling in our day.

And it is the denial of truth, and as faithful followers of Christ, we love the one who is the truth, the way, the truth, and the life.

We love the one who is the spirit of truth, who is the God of truth, who has given us truth in his word. And so our job and our calling and commission as believers in Christ should be to advance his great name and to make his name great everywhere we go.

And that involves preaching the truth. If you're a pastor and your job is to stand in the pulpit every

Sunday and faithfully exposit and exegete scripture and to teach your people the truth in the deepest and most profound and most

God -honoring way that you possibly can, to eschew all of the gimmicks and the ideologies of our day and the fashions and trends of our day, and to just simply stand as God's spokesmen and explain the text of scripture.

Read the text, explain the text, and then repeat. And that's our job as pastors. Our job is, as salt and light in this world as Christians, if you're in any workspace or job or neighborhood in the world, is share the gospel with your neighbors.

Get out and hand out gospel tracts. Be a beacon of truth and light in your neighborhood and share the gospel with your friends, with your family, with your coworkers.

Be faithful to do it. Do it in the spirit of love and graciousness. Do it with an attitude of meekness and gentleness.

And adorn the gospel with your lifestyle and your behavior as you adorn the truth. And let truth be what it is that you proclaim and what it is what you share.

Make the word of God central to all that you do as a church, all that you do as a follower of Christ and everything that you say.

That is spiritual warfare. That is how we beat back the advances of the enemy. We have to get out and proclaim the truth and share it and stand in the truth and then rest in a sovereign

God who will use that faithful service and that faithful life to advance his cause as he sees fit and to grow his church as he is the head of the church.

Amen. That would be my encouragement. Can you tell our listeners about some of the other books you've written that,

God willing, we will have you back on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to discuss? Yeah.

The first book is Truth or Territory, which we've been discussing. And all of these are available on Amazon and Kindle or in print.

And you mentioned earlier, Christy, you ran out of books to give away to people. I'll send you as many as you need to give away to the people who emailed in for however many you want.

The second book I wrote is called Selling the Stairway to Heaven. It deals with the heaven tourists, the

Todd Burpos and the Don Pipers who say that they spend 90 minutes in heaven or visited heaven and have come back to tell us what they saw.

I critique each of their books in light of Scripture and in light of their own claims. And I critique the book of a man named

Ethan Alexander, who is an unbeliever who says that he went and experienced the heaven visitation as well. And I compare the stories of those three and then show why it is that Scripture, these things are a distraction from Scripture rather than something that proves

Scripture to be true. And then the third book I wrote is an exposition of Psalm 73 dealing with the prosperity of the wicked.

And that's the title of the book, The Prosperity of the Wicked. And it kind of walks through Asaph's struggle of faith regarding why it is that the wicked always seem to prosper.

Why is it that those who oppose God and hate his truth always seem to have the most of this world's good? What is

God doing in the midst of that? And what should be our real perspective on prosperity that is enjoyed by those who hate

God? Is God blessing them or is it in fact a judgment and a curse upon them for their rebellion?

And I think it'll help your readers and listeners understand what it is that God is doing when he seems to be blessing those who oppose him the hardest.

Well, fantastic. And I'm sure that our listeners who wrote in questions will be thrilled to know those that were writing in after we had exhausted our supply of your book,

Truth or Territory? A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to know that we will be receiving more copies to have shipped out to them.

I want to thank you so much for being on the air today with me. I want to make sure that we have given all of your contact information.

I know that one of your websites is truthorterritory .com, truthorterritory .com.

And I know that the Kootenai Community Church website there in Kootenai, Idaho has a website that is kootenachurch .org,

kootenachurch .org, and that is spelled K -O -O -T -E -N -A -I church .org.

It's spelled in a way that you would not guess it would be spelled by the pronunciation. K -O -O -T -E -N -A -I church .org.

Do you have any other contact information that you care to share? No, I'm on Facebook.

I'm on Twitter. I think Truth or Territory is kind of the hub for the books, and there's contact information there.

There's a link there to the books on Amazon, as well as a link to the church website. So if Truth or Territory is easier for people to remember, you can go there and find links to everything else.

Thanks, Chris. Terrific. If you could remain on the air so I could say a proper goodbye to you when we go off the air, that'd be great.

Sure. And I also want to make sure that I plug our mutual friend,

Justin Peters' website, justinpeters .org. justinpeters .org.

He is a member of the Kootenai Community Church there in Kootenai, Idaho. I want you all to mark on your calendars a reminder that tomorrow

I'm having my dear friend Stephen Atkinson, who is the

North American director of A Christian Witness to Israel. He is going to be my guest in studio,

God willing, if he can trudge through the mountain of snow and get here. We intend to have

Stephen Atkinson talk about the providence of God in bringing the

Jewish people to the United States. And if you want more information about Stephen Atkinson, you can go to CWINA .org,

CWI, which stands for Christian Witness to Israel, NA for North America .org.

Again, I want to thank Jim Osmond for being our guest today. I want to thank all of you who wrote in questions today, especially the first time questioner that we had today, the pastor.

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater