Combat Communication
A spirit of illusion can hit the churches to create division. In our striving for oneness, the assault against it was a spirit of illusion, a lying spirit to create division. As you look back on those periods, and periods even before, you can see that things were not at all the way they appeared. The illusions were not the truth at all, but people battled division with their walls up, all based on an illusion.
These were the basic assaults—that satanic deception to divide, to bring contention until you’re too depressed to hang on to the confirmed Words of the Lord.
Satan himself comes with a hypnotic deep despair that hits you. And with this comes a deep depression until the deception is accepted to the point that you actually find yourself losing your grip on the Words that have been confirmed to you, and what you really know to be the will of God.
This is an important sign. The only time that this sign comes is when Satan himself personally hits us in battle. That is the sign of Satan—that hypnotic despair. You feel numb when it hits. That is Satan’s sign. If you stood by a furnace, you’d feel heat upon your skin; you’d feel it physically. When Satan assaults, this hits you—the depressive, hypnotic state.
We exercise Christ’s authority to divide these spirits of division that have warred against us so long. With all of this that Satan was doing, we realize that our answer is to divide his kingdom until it can’t stand.
Our objective is that with divine authority we agree to divide the spirits of division. In other words, when divisive spirits come to divide you, then you agree that those spirits are going to be divided against each other.
If we would point to some of the Judases or Korahs or Balaams that have left, you would notice one thing: They couldn’t tolerate each other. They almost hated each other. Yet now there seems to be a unity among them. This is only because spirits of division and rebellion are uniting. Yet the spirits right within themselves are spirits of division and rebellion! There can be no true unity between these spirits of division.
When we look back we see that every time we’ve had a victory, we had a victory because we divided the enemy’s camp. And it wasn’t that difficult to do. It was an easy thing for us to move in on that assault, and we would separate them and defeat them.
That’s what Jesus said about the kingdom of Satan: “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (Luke 11:17–20). We must break their unity.
This is the next basic tactic by which intercession will be so effective, because this will break the hindering thing that keeps the oneness and unity of the Church from being most effective.
Satan’s kingdom must be divided against itself. The two keys, then, are: One, the Kingdom of God prevails by oneness. Two, Satan’s kingdom is defeated because his rebellious and divisive spirits are susceptible to division themselves. It’s part of their very being.
Satan himself and his spirit is rarely detected and discerned, because he comes under this hypnotic despair, and you don’t readily realize how he’s dividing you against yourself.
Now here’s a prediction: The defeat of this deception will leave us with a fresh awareness of our oneness, and of our commissions, and of the power that we’ll have to confirm and strengthen the Word of God over one another.
Here’s a Kingdom Proverb: All contention springs, to some degree, from satanic deception regarding yourself, personally, and how you feel acceptance or rejection by God or by your brother.
In almost every case, the weakness that defeats us is that we are insecure and we lend ourselves to intimidation. That’s probably the only access Satan could ever use to make headway against us. What happens then is that our contention is not so much from belligerence on our part, as it is our defense against our feeling intimidated and inadequate; and so we lash out. It’s as though we have a big point to prove to ourselves.
Let those who would divide and deceive us become the victims of the same demonic spirits that they use! This is the answer against nephilim. Any persons or spirits that would divide and deceive us can become a victim of the same spirits they use.
Satan wants to beguile us from the simplicity that is in Christ (II Corinthians 11:3) until we won’t see the oneness, see the Word, and cling to its simplicity. Satan always tries to make our relationship to God extremely complicated. That’s the beguiling of Satan. That’s his divisive and deceptive tactic—to draw us away from that simplicity of the Word.
This brings us to the problem of transference: Good transference is based upon a revelation of the Word of God and the simplicity and purity of the channel that gives it. But evil transference is based upon a deceptive transformation of Satan’s agents. Christ said in Matthew 24:24 that if it were possible they would deceive the very elect. That’s why this battle becomes so subtle. We’re going to have to drill our sheep and train them on these tactics of Satan. If we don’t, he may pick them off one by one.
When this divisive deception comes, you would swear that it was the truth, but it’s transference. I can’t believe how many things may seem to be true one day in a battle, and the next day you know them to be absolutely false—that they were not true at all, and that they weren’t based upon any fact at all.
The illusion comes through the transformation of Satan and his agents until they’re like angels of light. Now we’re going to watch this danger above everything else. That’s where the false prophets are.
I think Satan is accomplishing his end when he gets us to be apprehensive about these men like the ones who have denied the Word and who go around phoning the flock to deceive them, but aren’t accomplishing that much for Satan. We should be more concerned about the ones who are in the Body who look like angels of light and “ministers of righteousness.” It appears that they still have a ministry. They’re the ones, by their transformation to appear to be something, who are still able to bring the deadly transference that’s effective. As for these other Korahs, we’ve got our walls up against them. Let’s not be so concerned about them. We’ve broken bonds with them. But the subtle thing is where deception comes as an angel of light and we think, “This could be a Word from God.” Usually it’s, “Hath God said?” or, “Is that really a Word from the Lord?” They’ll throw the questions, throw the division into what needs to be so very strongly affirmed in our mind as being a Word from God that we are not doubting or wavering on it. So this is the tactic to deceive the very elect.
I think that this problem of division during this period of transition from the Church Age to the Kingdom is one of deception. Deception and division is satanic, while the whole thing on our part is revelation and oneness. And we will have revelation from God and will walk as one.
All of these assaults are a form of the war over the Word, because Satan is battling those who are the doers of the Word. When we say, “the doers of the Word,” we don’t mean that they only go through the motions; but they are actually crying to do the will of God, and to put the Word of God into action and bring it forth as a Kingdom reality.
In II Corinthians 11:3 Paul had written to the Corinthians, “I am afraid lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness so your mind should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” These complications make your life full of so many things that you’re doing, so many good things, battling so many good problems that you don’t do the best thing. You never see the principal thing really accomplished. You’re often so busy trying to put out little brush fires that you don’t attain the real oneness of the Kingdom, the relationship that God wanted, that unity of spirit, that revelation of Himself that He was trying to bring to your heart.
The first thing that the workers of Satan do is make themselves more religious than God Himself, or than the servants of God do. They appear transformed into ministers of righteousness. Satan is transformed as an angel of light.
And that transformation makes possible the transference. The most subtle witchcraft doesn’t come from a witch on a broom; it comes from one who looks very much like an apostle, or a prophet, or a handmaiden of the Lord. You see, Satan comes and makes Jesus Christ look like a glutton and a wine bibber. And these that come as “servants of righteousness” will go through the community and say, “Oh, these weak ones sinned. They are the stumbling block.” And yet they are the hypocrites who have been stumbling people with their hypocrisy.
It’s the thing that we see over and over again: “Jesus, You can’t be real because You associate with harlots and publicans.” They push the issue to get the world to stone an adulterous woman, but when it comes right down to their own sin, they slink off, because they’ve got it. These are the ones who are self-righteous, self-deceived, and often satanically possessed.
The whole thing we’re battling, and the confusion and the depression and division, is because we listen for a single moment to these complicating, distracting, involved issues that Satan raises which would take us away from the simplicity and the purity of our devotion to Jesus Christ and of our oneness with one another. But these many issues must not distract us from the one issue: God has spoken a Word to us, in this generation, and together we’re going to walk in it.