Have you ever been somewhere and felt a dark, oppressive presence? Have you ever visited a house or a church and gotten angry for no apparent reason? Maybe there was just something about this place that felt off to you. Maybe you would go so far as to call it demonic. My wife and I felt this when we visited Las Vegas on the last leg of The Zekey Trip in 2014. I know that Vegas is considered “sin city,” so it has a reputation to uphold, but we had been pretty open-minded about staying the night there. It didn’t take long, however, for us to realize that this was not a place we wanted to be for long. (No doubt that some parts of Vegas are perfectly lovely, but this particular spot felt spiritually dark to us.) We stayed in the RV that night and left as soon as we could the next morning.

The spirit of a place can be dark and oppressive, and ancient Pergamum was such a place. Jesus even called it “the place where Satan has his throne.” That sounds pretty dark to me! Pergamum was a spiritual stronghold in a geographic sense, as the church there could attest, having endured the martyrdom of their bishop, Antipas, shortly before the writing of the book of Revelation. (See this article for more information on Pergamum.) Jesus’s praise of the Christians in Pergamum, “You remain true to my name,” demonstrates the power of their courage and character in the face of violent persecution and severe resistance from the dark spiritual powers who had made their home there.

It’s hard to remain true to Jesus in dark places because dark places are owned by dark spirits. Their presence is often manifested through human beings as false teaching, false religion, or cultic practice. This false teaching spreads from person to person as a majority of the community comes under the sway of the evil spirit. Sometimes evil spirits will possess a particular person in a horrifying way, but I think it’s more often the case that these spirits “hover over” a certain place as if they are governing it. And if you think this sounds a bit like Stranger Things, then you’re getting my point.

These evil spiritual beings are invested in their own power and position, and the last thing they want to do is give any ground, spiritually or physically, to the kingdom of God. Dark spirits resist the presence and spread of Christianity, and will always seek to take out believers and churches who are trying hard to remain true to Jesus. These spirits tend to do this in two ways. The first weapon an evil spirit will use against Christianity is a blunt cudgel — persecution. Violence and oppression are effective means of eliminating a particular belief system or way of living, especially when that system is in its early phases. But as the system gains a foothold in a community, persecution is no longer a viable option. That’s when the second weapon of evil spirits comes out — colonization.

Colonizing a church is a more sophisticated weapon against the spread of Christianity. It’s also much more effective than persecution, even if it takes a lot longer to accomplish. To colonize a church means to take it over from the inside, to convert its leaders to the dark spirit’s preferred ideology or religion, thereby making it a culturally respectable institution of false teaching rather than a spiritually dangerous outpost of Gospel belief and practice. In America, a colonized church is one that teaches political ideology more than the Gospel — and this is true whether that ideology is conservative or progressive. (Christians in America need to wake up to the reality that there are dark spirits and false teaching to the right of us.) A colonized church looks and sounds almost exactly like the other respected institutions of its community. It takes up the same causes and harbors the same prejudices that the evil spirit has led the rest of the community into.

It is not easy to resist the colonizing efforts of the dark spirits in your community, much less to revolt against the presence of these spirits once they have placed their throne in your sanctuary. And that is what every dark spirit is trying to do. It is trying to smother the light of the Gospel and pervert the witness of the saints. It is incumbent upon us, in order to remain true to Jesus, to resist these attacks both in ourselves as individuals, and within our midst as a church body. There are many ways that we can do this, but I want to highlight two that I think are especially important today.

First of all, we must understand what is false about false teaching. We live in a chattering and arguing age, and bad arguments do not help the cause of God’s kingdom. The ignorance of the saints actually empowers the darkness to spread further and thicker over our communities and into our churches. Let me be blunt: Your ignorant social media posts are making things worse. Spreading conspiracy theories is spreading darkness. Insulting other human beings and believing the worst of them is not how we are supposed to fight, because our struggle is not against flesh and blood. We are not fighting people; we are, in a sense, fighting ideas. We are fighting lies. And we need to educate ourselves about these deceptive ideas in order to be victorious over them. You don’t need to know everything about a subject before you speak about it, but you should be able to anticipate some objections and then respond by speaking the truth in love. Being victorious doesn’t mean that we win an argument or make someone else look foolish; it means that we have loved someone out of the darkness of these dark spirits and into the light of Christ.

The second thing we need to do to remain true to Christ is more challenging because it involves confronting people that we know, love, and respect. Jesus was critical of the church in Pergamum because of their tolerance — they let beliefs that were contrary to the Gospel fester in their congregation. We cannot tolerate false teachers, or even people who are invested in these lies, among our church leaders, and that includes pastors, elders, and staff. A church leader who is under the sway of a false teaching will bind that church to the dark spirit rather than to the Lord. Such people should be rebuked, and if they don’t repent, then they must be removed from their positions of authority. Paul warned us that “a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough,” and that’s exactly what happens through people who are under the deception of these lies. An entire church can be colonized by a dark spirit because of the deception of a single, well-placed individual.

But we need to be careful with our accusations. All too often it is the person doing the accusing who is under the sway of the dark spirit, and not the pastor or elder who is being accused. The Bible is clear that an accusation against a church leader should not be entertained unless it is verified by two or more witnesses. You need to check your own heart and mind, first, and the person that you should be most critical of is yourself. Dark spirits have a way of making their darkness look like light to our eyes, which is why they can so easily deceive us. You might be angry at your pastor for preaching the social gospel, but it could be your overly-conservative politics that is the real lie. Or you might think your elders are unloving because of their position on LGBTQ issues, but it could be that you have fallen under the sway of the sexual revolution. Examine yourself first, and be committed to remain true to Jesus in this dark and oppressed world.

There is so much to discuss in Carl Trueman’s latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, that it is hard to know exactly where to begin. I have attempted a proper book review, but the flood of information is worth parsing through slowly. One of the most important concepts of the book is the idea of expressive individualism, a phrase taken from the great philosopher Charles Taylor. Expressive individualism is the idea “that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires.” (46) I can only be an authentic person, and therefore truly flourish as a human being, if I am free to outwardly express what is inside of me, especially my feelings and desires. Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the philosophical groundwork of expressive individualism when he identified the fundamental corrupting influence as society itself, and not, as Augustine and the Church had taught for centuries, the sin and wickedness at the heart of the individual. In other words, I am inherently good, but society has corrupted me, especially by suppressing and repressing the expression of what I feel inside of me with it’s oppressive rules and standards. Trueman summarized Rousseau’s thought this way: “The individual is most authentic when acting out in public those desires and feelings that characterize the inner psychological life.” (125)

According to Rousseau, authenticity is the highest good that any individual can pursue, because it is the only way to guarantee happiness. I will never be happy unless I can freely express myself. Charles Taylor describes this way of thinking like this: “…Each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and…it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.” (46, quoted from Taylor, A Secular Age, 475) I have to be myself! I have to get what’s inside of me out into the world! I can’t be me and live by society’s rules at the same time! External authorities and institutions, especially religious ones, are, by their nature, oppressive to the individual and repressive of his or her expression of their true selves. They are, in a sense, enslavers of the will. To quote Charles Taylor again, “self-determining freedom ‘is the idea that I’m free when I determine the conditions of my own existence.'” (Quoted by O. Carter Snead, What It Means to be Human, p. 81-82) A longer quote from Snead is called for:

I must be free to express myself, or I cannot be authentic. I will live a lie. And if I live a lie it is impossible for me to flourish or ever be truly happy. Social institutions, and especially the Church, force me to repress my inner feelings and desires, and therefore push me into living a lie. The end result is that these institutions make it impossible for me to flourish as a human being. They are, in my lived experience, erasing my existence through their moral oppression of my inner, psychological reality — my truest self.

It’s been said that American evangelicals have a persecution complex, that we are hyper-sensitive to even the smallest slight against our religious beliefs. The accusation is that we are quick to claim that we are being persecuted, even in relatively mundane situations where no violence has occurred. For example, we often equate dismissive comments by atheist professors with persecution, but is it? Granted, the power structure and knowledge differential between teacher and student is significant, and dismissive or incendiary comments from the person at the top of that structure carry a special weight, but we shouldn’t see this as persecution. We tend to view any opposition to our faith as the persecution of the righteous, but maybe we aren’t always being opposed by people because our love for Christ and Christlike behavior are so evident to them. Maybe we’re opposed and “persecuted” because we’re being jerks — because, all too often, we actually fail to be like Christ. We need to be careful with the word persecution.

Real persecution is a program to exterminate a group of people because of their religious or ethnic identity. It involves violence (though it is not always murderous), oppression, and subjugation. In the case of religious persecution, the goal is for the religious person to renounce his beliefs and adopt whatever beliefs his persecutors think he should have. If the believer refuses to recant, then the penalty is either death or imprisonment. Persecutors operate with the power and permission of the state (or, at least, enact their violence while the state looks the other way) because the aim of persecution is the extermination of a particular group or belief. Many Christians around the world are experiencing this right now, perhaps more than ever before. You can learn more about what the violence and oppression that our brothers and sisters in Christ are experiencing today at The Voice of the Martyrs.

Understanding the Times

Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John all told us that we should expect to suffer for our faith, but not all suffering is equal. It dishonors the real suffering and martyrdom of these saints when we call what we experience in America persecution. The devil and the world have many ways to achieve their goal of seeing Christians renounce their faith. Sometimes they use violence. Other times they use intimidation or opposition. Other times they use seduction. American Christians are far more likely to be seduced away from the faith than intimidated or oppressed out of it.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been learning a lot about the spiritual realm, that place within creation that is inhabited by spiritual beings. Of course, we humans live in the physical realm, the creation of which is described in Genesis 1, but we are unique among physical creatures because we have a spiritual element — something that we have come to call a spirit. (We’re so creative!) The Bible tells us that, because of this, we have a certain amount of access to the spiritual world. In fact, it seems as though God’s plan was, and still is, for humans to be the link between, and even the rulers of, a new, combined spiritual and physical universe. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I strongly recommend you check out the work of Dr. Michael Heiser. You can read my review of his book The Unseen Realm here.

Not all of the spiritual beings liked God’s plan to make human beings the rulers of both realms (ruling alongside God himself, of course), and so they sought to corrupt humans. I think that these spiritual beings wanted to both prove our unworthiness for the role, while at the same time showing how strong, wise, and qualified they were to rule the universe. Regardless of their intentions, their plan succeeded, and we have all lived in what the Bible calls sin ever since. Humans are in an interesting position here, because we are both actors in a spiritual war and the objects of that war. We are both soldiers and the battleground, and because of this sin, we don’t fight on the side of the good guys nearly often enough. Fortunately for us, God has fought back against these dark spiritual beings to redeem and reclaim us, which is what the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were all about. Now that these forces of evil know that God will ultimately win, their goal is to bring as many of us into their condemnation as possible.

Do you remember when you first became a Christian? Or, if you’re like me and were raised in a Christian home, can you recall that time in your life when you made the faith your own? For many of us, those are the moments of the birth of new life in our souls, of freshness and forgiveness, of a passionate love for Jesus burning in our hearts. It’s the moment of first love, when God reveals himself to us with grace and clarity, and we finally understand how deeply loved we are by our Creator — that is when our love for God explodes out of our hearts and flows out into the world around us through our words and actions. We love God so much that we just can’t hide it!

Let’s be honest: It’s hard to stay in that place. It’s difficult to maintain that level of passion and emotion over the course of our lives. I told Jesus this in prayer the other day. I said, “Look, it’s hard to love you when you’re not physically present on the earth. I don’t mean that you’re hard to love, because your character and the things you’ve done for me — how can I not love you? I’m just saying that it’s difficult to maintain this love in your absence.” I’m not trying to make excuses for myself, I’m just trying to guilt Jesus into returning right now! (It’s not working.) I recognize that I was speaking purely from an emotional level (frustration, disappointment) in that prayer, and that Jesus’s absence is no excuse to not be present to the passion of our love for him. After all, he has given us the Holy Spirit to be with us, and he is always urging us back to our first love.

But the world tends to distract us from our love for Jesus. The tedium and monotony of our daily routines, the triviality of consumerism, and the banality of entertainment have a way of dulling the senses — especially our deepest feelings for our Savior. The more that our love for God is at the surface of our souls and not buried beneath the anxieties and distractions of modern life, the more we will feel a passionate love for him. I am not as passionate about God when I spend a lot of time on my phone. There’s something about that screen that can pull me away from the One I’m supposed to feel most passionately about. Love isn’t a feeling, of course, but we do feel love. We have an emotional response to love and our presence to it, and the more in touch with that love we are, the more we will feel it on an emotional level. Love is like heat, and the closer we get to it the more it triggers our spiritual senses.

What Jesus is after from the Church in Ephesus, and from us, is that they become present to the passion of their love for him. It’s not that they don’t love; it’s that they have grown cold to love. Their souls have become distant from their first love, and a great chasm of fear and rule-keeping has opened up between them and Jesus. They didn’t fall off the path, necessarily, they just forgot why they were walking on it and who they were following.