There was always a war going on ‘in the heavenlies’. If there was no war, then God must have deserted us and we needed to repent or the devil had already won the war.

Yes, I am talking about ’spiritual warfare’. A very controversial subject indeed. From Ephesians 6:12 and the rest of that chapter, we have clearly seen extrabiblical things added to the concept, gross and bizarre methodologies within the concept, and bizarre and strange manifestations occur from a result of spiritual warfare.

Walt Kelly is famous for the quote “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us” that appeared on a poster for Earth Day in 1970. However, in the penteparanoia scheme of things, the pentecostals and charismatics believe that the enemy is never them, but those who disagree, who are more liberal, those who disdain the pentecostal movement, etc.

The extremes started manifesting in the early 1960’s and 1970’s when many pentecostal and charismatic churches were beginning to teach that Christians could be demon possessed. It was a very common thing in many of these fellowships to have extensive all-night warfare sessions where paper bags were given out (like an air-sickness bag on an airplane) and the warfare would get so ‘intense’ that some people vomited. The vomiting was seen as the manifestation of the demon leaving them. In fact, this strange phenomeon occurs in some extreme places today where warfare is preached to an extreme and people vomit and the vomit seen as the demon leaving.

It progressed in the 1980’s where we saw more spiritual warfare fads such as people renting airplanes to fly around in and warring to ‘break the power of the prince of the power of the air’. People showing up to church in army fatigues claiming to stomp the devil. People taking Isaiah 43:6 to the point where people would face true north and pray for souls and then turn true south and repeat the prayers. We even saw the beginning of ‘territorial spirits’ being discussed as the ‘chief demon over the city of (fill in the blank)”. We even started hearing about ‘the demon of (fill in the blank)’ and the Jesebel, Saul, Achan, Judas ‘Spirits’. We saw books such as Pigs In The Parlor become warfare field manuals to near equivalency with the Bible. We even started hearing about people who disagreed and were viewed as witches based on 1 Samuel 15:23 because disagreement was seen as rebellion.

In the 1990’s, we saw this go into a downward spiral. We saw spiritual mapping come into the forefront. We saw the Global Warfare center. We saw the ‘prayer poles’ of people writing bible verses on stakes and hammering them down at the borders of their cities. We saw people call out the ‘the demon of (fill in the blank) manifesting on main street’ and call out ‘the demon of (fill in the blank) that harasses third street.’

If one thought that the unbiblical spiritual warfare practiced by the church was ‘creepy’, many of the ’spiritual warfare experts’ looked creepy when they talked about the subject. Everything was the ‘big battle’. My kid stumped his toe on the way to church. My wife would not get out of the bed this morning……. There are demons everywhere in the schools, the public library, the mall, the grocery store, etc.

Everything bad was blamed on the devil and was the ‘grand attack’ because Satan was out to get us and only us. Not the Baptists down the street but only the pentecostals and charismatics. Our laziness, the six year old 250,000 mile car broke down, the fifteen year old rebellious child that they never disciplined, the feedback in the sound system, the wrinkle in our shirt that the iron would not solve, the power failure, turning the clocks one hour back or forward for daylight savings time, the stoplight that took forever to change from red to green, the rain storm on homecoming Sunday. It’s the devil….. just like what the Helen ‘Mama’ Boucher character in ‘The Waterboy’ movie used to say.

If no war in the heavenlies was taking place, we creatred a war. We had to fight something. We had to fight someone. Not fighting was considered as being lazy and compromising. We went outside to fight the war. From the ACLU, the ‘librall-sheckuler-news-medieeerr’, the ‘DEMONcrats’, the compromising mainline churches, the antichrist, etc. there was some enemy to fight, defeat, and to take their spoils. If there were no wars to fight on the outside, the fighting turned inward as we started to look for the Judas, Saul, and Achan in our midst. Disagreement on the inside was seen as ‘the potential next Judas’ in our midst. There had to be a grand internal conspiracy at work within the church that needed to be exposed and defeated.

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