Hello and welcome back. This is Session Three of the class on Spiritual Warfare, and in this one, you’ll notice that we’re going to look at a worldview.

Now, a couple of caveats before we begin this session. One is: this one’s going to be mostly kind of philosophical—kind of background. And the idea is, we want to look at why do we ignore—especially we in the Western world?

Now, I know that many of you are in different countries around the world. My reality is reflected in North America and the state of Michigan. I’m somebody who’s lived in the United States all my life, and I’ve had the privilege of visiting many other cultures in the world during my lifetime.

But just to let you know where I’m coming from—and what I want to come to understand—is: how did we in Western culture get to downplay the idea of spiritual warfare? Because we do.

And so we’re going to look at that in this session.

Now, if philosophy is not your thing—hang on. We’re going to get to the really good stuff, and we’re going to be looking at that more effectively next time, as we look at the battle being engaged on earth.

But in this session, we’re going to look at worldview—and how your worldview impacts how you see the subject of spiritual warfare.

So—where do you get a worldview?

Well, it depends on what your experience is. You may have heard the old story about the five guys with blindfolds who were asked to tell you what an elephant is. And so each one of them comes with a different perspective.

One, in the front, touches the tusk and says, “It’s like a spear. That’s what an elephant is like.”

The one who touches the trunk says, “It’s a snake.”

The one is around the leg and says, “It’s a tree. That’s what it’s like.”

And the one up by the ears says, “It’s a fan.”

The one on the side and ladder says, “No, the elephant’s like a wall.”

And the one on the back, with the tail, says, “No, it’s a rope.”

Each one is accurate. They’re accurate in their understanding, in their experience. And so they immediately extrapolate their experience to reality.

Now the truth is, the elephant is all of those things. It’s like all of those things—if you take only a small part. But altogether, their realities come together to develop the truth of: yes, this is what an elephant is like.

Now, I’ve been reading—in fact, one of the books I’ve been reading is this one. I’m going to read from it today. It’s The Handbook for Spiritual Warfare. And I don’t know if you can see how big this thing is—but this is by Dr. Ed Murphy.

And he quotes a man in here—Bryant Myers, who’s a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California—as well as other people.

Here’s one of the people he quotes. It’s a man named Paul Hebert of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He talks about his struggle—his struggle as a missionary in India—because his perspective was so limited that he didn’t understand spiritual warfare.

He says:

John’s disciples asked, “Are you the coming one, or do we look for another?”
(Luke 7:20)
And Jesus answered, not with logical proofs, but by a demonstration of power in the curing of the sick and casting out of evil spirits.

So much is clear. Yet, when I read the passage as a missionary in India and sought to apply it to missions in our day, I had a sense of uneasiness.

As a Westerner, I was used to presenting Christ on the basis of rational arguments—not by evidences of His power in the lives of people who were sick, possessed, and destitute.

In particular, the confrontation with spirits that appeared so natural—a part of Christ’s ministry—belonged, in my mind, to a separate world of the miraculous, far from ordinary, everyday experience.

And then Hebert developed this graph, which he says represents a two-tiered world of reality.

You’ll note that religion is the world that includes the idea of faith and occasional, maybe rare, miracles and some sacred stuff.

And then he’s got science down on the bottom, which is, you know, what is our sight and our experience—especially of the physical things like taste and touch and hearing and smell and sight.

And so, he says, this is the Western view of reality—that there’s something in the middle there that’s excluded.

What is that?

This is how he puts it:

The reasons for my uneasiness with the biblical and Indian worldviews should now be clear: I had excluded the middle of supernatural—but this-worldly—beings and forces from my own worldview. As a scientist, I had been trained to deal with the empirical world in natural terms. As a theologian, I was taught to answer ultimate questions in theistic terms. For me, the middle zone did not really exist.

Unlike Indian villagers, I had given little thought to spirits of this world, to local ancestors and ghosts, or to the souls of animals. For me, these belonged to the realm of fairies, trolls, and other mythical beings. Consequently, I had no answers to the questions that they raised.

Well, the man I showed you a moment ago—Myers—took that article written by Hebert and expanded on the idea of a two-tiered world.

He says: What’s missing in the excluded middle is this—spiritual spirits, witchcraft, curses, etc.—the evil of the world.

He said, this is the major difference when we compare the Western worldview to how traditional folk understand their world.

Most traditional religions believe the world is a continuum between those two elements of the world—those which are mostly spiritual in nature and those which are mostly material. There is no gap between the two worlds. The spiritual and the physical coexist together—inseparable parts of each other.

So he says, there’s this middle part that we just can’t ignore—you know, the evil eye, the idea of a curse—that these are things that are real. They’re real, and we just can’t ignore them.

Now, in the primitive world—in a primitive culture—that’s the way they think. It’s their experience.

You know, I read a book years ago. It was given to me by a missionary in Africa—a friend of mine at the time—and she had said, “This is what we’re facing in Africa.” And it was a terrifying story. It was about primitive cultures and how they interact with each other and how they’re battling.

And the cultures were—the people were—at war with each other almost constantly. And so people lived in fear. And they were in fear that at night, somebody would come and attack them and steal. Sometimes they would steal, like, your wife. They would steal your wife and take her to be their wife.

And she said it was a culture of terror and fear all the time.

They said when missionaries finally came there, they began to talk with these people to try to understand their culture—their perspective—that everything is related to the spiritual. Everything.

And so if it rained, well—a god or a spirit sent the rain. If a storm comes in and destroys your home, well—the god must be angry, or the gods must be angry. If you got sick, the gods must be at work. And so you react spiritually.

And in one powerful telling—and now I have to just share with you, as kind of an aside—that friend of mine, I lent this book to another friend. I don’t remember the author, and so I’ve tried to get it back. My friend lost it somewhere, and I’ve never been able to get it back.

But the part that was really telling to me was that when the missionaries got to know these people well enough to learn more about their culture and their worldview—the worldview that’s full of evil and spirits, good and bad—they said the people shared with them that:

When the white people came—as they called the missionaries—they were surprised, because when they looked at other people, they could see—they could see inside them—the spirits at work in them.

And you can interpret that as demons, he said.

But when they looked at the Christian white people, they were surprised because they couldn’t see—there was nothingthere. And so they called them something like “men without spirits.”

That’s the primitive culture.

Now my world—you may live in that world yet—but in my world, we don’t look at it that way, right?

We understand that the storm came? Well, it’s because there were these, you know, movements of the jet stream. And there—right now—we’re talking about climate change a great deal. And how, in my country, we’re having floods, and we’re having a record number of tornadoes, and we’re having fires, and we’re having extreme heat, etc., etc.

Yeah, but we understand some of the movements of that, and we understand that some of it—climate change—is coming because we’ve put too much CO₂ into the atmosphere. And we’re trying to find ways to lessen the impact of that and change it, and etc., etc.

That’s how I look at it. I don’t think of a spirit every time.

So how did we get there?

Now, I’m going to talk about Western culture. So, if you’re in Europe, this is what you believe. This is your experience. This is the part of the elephant that you see. If you live in the United States, this is the part of the elephant that you see. If you live in some of the more primitive parts of the world, you may see the more primitive culture.

So let’s look at that a little bit. How did we get to the fact—the way we are in the Western world—that we just don’t accept this stuff? We don’t act as if there are, indeed, two realities.

Well, to understand this, you have to go back to the 16th century.

Copernicus, in 1543, wrote an article that he called The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres.

Now—you have to understand something in order to understand the reaction to this.

This was the first time that someone had suggested that the earth was not the center of the universe, and not even the center of our solar system—the sun was.

The idea at the time was that God created the Earth—this was a special place. But Copernicus began to study the movements of the planets, and he began to study the movement of the sun, and he came to the conclusion that the understanding of that time was not accurate.

And so he published this, in 1543—The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres.

Now, he knew at the time that the Roman Catholic Church—which was in Europe and which controlled basically everything—was going to react negatively, because the teaching, the official teaching of the Church at that time, was that the Earth was the center of the universe, and everything else revolved around the Earth.

And so—he published it. But he published it under a pseudonym, so it wouldn’t be traced back to him.

And it wasn’t until he was on his deathbed that he admitted he had written that article—1543, The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres.
And of course, the Roman Catholic Church at that time condemned his writing.

Okay, that’s the first person. And it was a challenge to the typical understanding of the world—that the Earth is the center, everything else revolves around it. There’s the heavens above—and you’ll notice the delineation of heavens until you get to the seventh heaven, which they identified as Saturn. And then there’s below the earth, where hell is. And in the middle is the Earth—and everything else revolves around the Earth. That was the ancient cosmology of that day.

Copernicus was the first one to challenge that. But he didn’t do it well—didn’t do it thoroughly. And as a result, the culture continued to say, “No, that’s not accurate.”

Now, the next person in this process of changing worldview—from understanding everything as a result of the work of spirits and God and angels—was Galileo.

Galileo wrote in 1613 an article called Letters on Sunspots. In that, Galileo had taken the work of Copernicus and built on it. He said, “Yeah, you know, I think he’s making a point.”

Now, Copernicus—you have to know—did his study in a very advanced way for his time. Most telescopes at the time had a power of six—they could magnify things six times. So Galileo invented his own telescope, which multiplied that by five—to thirty times. It could magnify things 30 times.

And so he’s studying sunspots on the sun. He’s studying the movement of the planets. He’s studying the movement of the galaxies as he was beginning to understand them.

And as a result, he wrote Letters on Sunspots, which said that the Earth was not the center of the universe, that the planets revolved around the sun, and so on—challenging the teaching of the Church.

And of course, the Church reacted. The Church reacted powerfully.

So this was one more step in trying to change the understanding of the world to what is a more rational understanding—and one that begins to negate the idea of a God who is directly involved, or spirits that are directly involved.

Now, the next person in this process—stay with me—is Isaac Newton.

Now, you may—if you grew up in any Western culture—you heard the myth about Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree, and the apple falls on his head, and he discovers gravity, and he writes about gravity.

That’s not quite accurate—but he’s somebody who looked at gravity, and he’s known as the father of modern science.

In 1686, he wrote Principia Mathematica, in which he proposed that all the planets move, that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that the Sun is the center of the solar system, and that everything moves by a principle of mathematics.

And now, this was really challenging.

Galileo, by the way, was told by the Church that he had to stop teaching—and he did, for many years. He was put under house arrest when he resumed teaching on this subject.

Isaac Newton was the further check on it, and his views became more and more accepted—this idea that we’re not the center of the universe, and that things don’t happen only because of the work of demons, or the work of angels, or the work of God or the devil.

So this is developing—this idea. And so he begins to look at things. The key question he asked was, “Why are things happening?”

And he invented calculus and physics while on vacation from college—can you imagine?

His three laws of motion, together with the law of universal gravitation, explain all of Kepler’s laws—and more. Those are just some things about Isaac Newton.

Now the next question is: How did this come to America?

And I’m reflecting the American culture.

It came by Thomas Jefferson.

Now, there are those within the Church who want to go back to the Christian foundation of the United States—but the reality is, Jefferson—Thomas Jefferson—was not a Christian. He was, in fact, a Deist.

Now I’m going to define a Deist in just a moment. But Jefferson, in fact, was so much non-Christian that there is a thing in the National Library here in the United States called the Jefferson Bible—where he went through the Bible and he cut out anything in the New Testament, anything in the Old Testament, that looked miraculous.

Because—everything functions by mathematics, right?

And so his reflections that are written in our founding documents here in the United States are not by a Christian.

And then Benjamin Franklin is another one.

Now—they are Deists.

The definition of Deism is: the philosophical idea of God as a first cause of the universe, who lays down the laws of nature and lets them run like clockwork, indifferent to the fate of people subject to them.

In other words: God created it, and then He let it be.

Now, as a result, we’ve so often fallen into what I’m calling functional atheism.
Deism removes God from the equation.
It certainly removes spirits from the equation.

And so, when we in the Western world look at how the world functions, we see it as the result of predictable forces, and miracles are then sometimes so very rare now that we don’t believe in them.

Now, one of the professors at Fuller Seminary is Charles Kraft. Another professor at Fuller—where I got my doctorate degree—is Charles Kraft.

Charles Kraft was for many years a missionary in Africa. And when he came back, he joined the faculty at Fuller, and he began writing books. One of them—which I have on my desk—is called Christianity with Power.

And one of the things he says—that’s shocking—is this:
When he went to Africa as a missionary, he was the most secularizing force that had ever existed there.

What do I mean by that?

Well, he said what happened was—he was there among people who believed that the spirits caused everything, right?

So you get sick—spirits are at work.
And we’ve got to appease God, or we’ve got to fight the demons that are here.

And he said he came in with his Western viewpoint and would tell them, “No, no, no—it’s not spirits. Let me just give you the shot and you’ll get better. Let me give you this medication. Take this medication.”

He says he taught people to believe not in the spirit world.

And he said it’s so very different—because when Jesus came, as I read earlier, into the world, and people said:

“Are you the one?” (Those messengers from John the Baptist.)
“Are you the one who’s coming—or should we look for another?”

What did Jesus point to?

He pointed to power.

So Charles Kraft began to advocate that we look at approaching the world—and our mission enterprise—and building the Kingdom—as a power enterprise, not just a logical one, where you accept these truths about Jesus Christ.

And so, this is where we are in our world.

That’s one of the reasons why we can so often deny this.

And so, you know, next time, we’re going to look at where the battle began, and then we’re going to look at the battle coming to earth, and what we can learn from that.

So let’s close with prayer:

Lord God, again we pray that You’ll open our eyes so that we see and recognize that this is not just some things going on, but it’s a story of Your power. And teach us to be able to see it and to access it as we go through this class. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

I’ll see you next time.

கடைசியாக மாற்றப்பட்டது: வியாழன், 29 மே 2025, 6:08 AM