For the past few posts I’ve been talking about the first spiritual battle between Adam and the devil. We saw that Adam was given all the authority he needed to defeat the enemy. Instead, he allowed the devil to use words in order to deceive him into disobeying God’s Word.
In that defeat, there were some important changes that happened. First and foremost, Satan became the legal owner of planet earth and everything in it. Mankind became slaves.
There was another event that most people don’t realize. If you remember, Adam was given a bow and arrows as his spiritual weaponry (Revelation 6:1-2). When he was defeated by the enemy, he was stripped of these weapons. It’s clear from Scripture that they are now in the enemy’s hands.
In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.
Ephesians 6:16
This verse is especially important knowing that these arrows originally belonged to Adam.
That tells me that in the garden, when Adam fell, mankind was stripped of all spiritual armor and weapons. Humanity was defenseless against the spiritual forces of evil.
A third result of Adam’s defeat was the entrance of sin into the world system. When Adam knowingly chose to disobey God, he picked that which was imperfect. At that moment he stepped out of God’s perfect will for his life.
In both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible the word, sin, literally means to miss the mark. Perfection, what we were created for, is the bullseye. No matter how hard we try, we miss the target. That’s the word picture of what sin is. It’s missing the mark of God’s will.
That brings me to the start of the ongoing spiritual war that we find ourselves in. Our number one battle is not against the enemy, even though that’s a part of it. The toughest battle we face is within our own being.
In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
Hebrews 12:4
The writer of Hebrews tells us that we’re at war against sin. It’s that part of human nature that wants to do something other than God’s will. Our flesh always seems to want to choose the imperfect.
This explains a lot about the Old Testament. People often ask why there were so many sins that had the death penalty attached. The answer is simple. With no spiritual weapons, the only way to fight sin was in the natural.
How do you stop the spirit of adultery from spreading? Under the Old Testament we would have no way to combat it in the spiritual realm. The only way to stop the spirit of adultery was to put to death the adulterer.
That also explains why whole nations had to be totally destroyed. The nation of Amalek, for example, had sold itself out to the enemy. In that case, their sin had to be eradicated by a physical war.
This is why we have to be careful in how we apply Old Testament Scriptures. Things have changed since then. That’s why I feel that God is leading me to talk about the history of spiritual warfare.
We need to understand where we are today. There are some principles that we can learn from the Old Testament, but our battle is on a different level.
Over the next few posts I hope to explain not only where we’ve come from, but how we can walk in the victory Christ has won for us.
Question: What is your biggest difficulty in your battle against sin?
© 2019 Nick Zaccardi
The Spirit and the Word 