It seems that people have read a lot of Frank Peretti and come up with these ideas of spiritual warfare that look like scenes from the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. The thing is, you don’t see scenes like this in the bible and Jesus doesn’t talk about life like this. When I was first saved, I was around people at college that seemed like they read more Frank than Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.
The thing is, in the Gospels, you never see Jesus fight with demons. All of the events go something like this: Somebody is possessed by a demon, Jesus shows up, the demon begs for mercy, Jesus tells it to get lost, it gets lost without arguing or needing to be told a second time.
They know authority when they see it.
And where do we come in?
“For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.”
(Col 2:9-10 NIV)
We have been given fullness by being inside the One who is over every power and authority. He is also in us, so we have the same spiritual authority that we saw Him have in the Gospels.
Even when Jesus is face to face with Satan in the wilderness, there are three point-counter point statements and then Satan flees. No swords, no grunting in a fight, no screaming bad guys getting destroyed.
And then in the book of Revelation, when we do see a really big fight, it may be too disturbing to see who gets cut up with Jesus’ sword. It isn’t armies of demons with wings and horns.
It’s people.
The Devil gets cast down into a lake of fire and burns and burns and burns, but the fighting and killing is a real thing between Men.
Let’s cast down our imaginations that try to make this Christian life exciting and focus on Jesus. Let’s criticize and test all books equally. The Present Darkness books should be examined as closely as the Davinci Code. Just because it’s by a christian publisher doesn’t mean it’s true. Jesus is the only One that’s true. Spend some time reading HIM and leave the ‘Christian Fiction’ on your shelf.
here here, my good man, i say again, here here…and well said.
You have a great point there about spiritual warfare. There are huge differences between biblical spiritual warfare and spiritual warfare in Christian fiction. Some of Frank Peretti’s books can get awfully weird such as his book The Visitation or his new book House. This reminds me of the debate on gay marriage. A writer in the Evansville Courier and Press wrote a piece saying that we shouldn’t oppose gay marriage because marriage is really under attack from heterosexuals who don’t respect marital covenants. I think that we should oppose gay marriage but this fellow has a point. If we want to oppose gay marriage we should clean up our act and respect marriage ourselves. How are we going to convince others to respect marriage if we don’t respect it ourselves?