Pride, Jezebel, and Leviathan
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedEverything we do in the life of discipleship
is spiritual warfare.
And if you want to overcome in the spiritual battles we face
you need to be on God’s side.
The heart of all spiritual warfare is this:
God opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.
A lot of people dealing with spiritual warfare
are fighting God,
and their resistance to God
opens them up to demonic influence.
At the heart of all spiritual warfare is the root of pride.
Pride is the heart of rebellion.
Pride is the core of resistance.
Pride is the engine of the demonic world.
Pride is the first of the seven deadly sins:
Pride,
Greed,
Lust,
Envy,
Gluttony,
Wrath,
and
Sloth.
Pride is the root sin
of all the others.
Pride is the most dangerous of all sins.
Pride makes you believe the root lie:
I will be like God without God.
I will be exalted above God.
Pride is what defines the Anti-Christ spirit.
We do not need Jesus,
we can do it all ourselves.
As Milton put into the mouth of Lucifer in
Paradise Lost,
“it is better to reign in hell
than to serve in heaven.”
As we saw in today’s gospel,
the Pharisee could not see himself honestly,
because he was blinded by pride.
Pride is dangerous
because
your beliefs in your own rightness and superiority
prevent you from being honest
and seeing the truth.
Religious pride double blinds you
because you think you are right,
and then you think that your actions
make you superior to others.
This was the heart of the Pharisees.
It is unfortunate that Jesus talks about the Pharisees,
because then we judge them.
It would have been much more helpful
to say the evangelicals,
the traditional catholics,
the gospel centered churches,
the progressives,
or the orthobros.
Any person
who looks at their label
and their grid
and says “I am fine
and everyone else is wrong”
is deluded by pride.
This is why I talk in my latest book
about why it is not about you.
A lot of people in the arts,
and especially in the prophetic arts world,
are all about them.
Artists by nature
are designed to serve others
and to serve the culture.
It’s not about you.
A person under the deception of pride
will never be able to repent,
but will always either find fault with someone else,
or they will justify themselves
based on their own “superior” beliefs
or their religious performance.
And this tendency shifts the focus
from God and others
to me.
Everything becomes food for narcissism.
And when this begins to happen,
the door is opened to the demonic,
and this is how we get people who operate
in what is called the Jezebel spirit
and Leviathan.
Many people miss the heart of the book of Job.
Job begins with a prosperous man
who loses everything
because the accuser has come and attacked him.
God lets this happen.
And then Job’s friends
chastise him
for about 35 chapters
with conventional religious ideas,
about how Job must have some sin
because he is suffering.
And then,
at the end,
God appears
and for two chapters
talks to Job about Leviathan.
The Lord’s speech ends with this line:
“Leviathan is the king of pride,
and prince over every high thing.”
And in the end,
Job forgives and prays for his friends
and his wealth is restored.
Job is about religious pride.
So when we talk about spiritual pride,
we open the door to “a leviathan spirit.”
It is very dangerous
to go around labeling demonic things,
because people then start to label other people.
The spirit over greater Boston
is a Leviathan spirit,
and many of the things I am going to describe
happen regularly in New England.
We see it in the church,
and in the dysfunctional politics,
and it is why Harvard keeps appearing in the news.
When you deal with lots of people in a particular sin,
you will deal with a spiritual power.
Leviathan is the spirit of pride.
It is the ancient symbol of chaos and confusion.
Leviathan
manifests in confused communication,
where you say something
and someone hears something else.
You will also see people who hard hearted,
ungrateful, and not generous.
Wherever this spirit manifests
you will see spiritual dryness.
And you will see people embracing
completely non-sensical ideas as truth,
and they will get aggressive if you challenge them.
Both willful ignorance and intellectualism
are the fruit of pride.
Leviathan is exhausting.
When you deal with this,
you feel like something is sitting on top of you
draining your strength.
The second spiritual force rooted in pride
is the Jezebel spirit.
This is the spirit of witchcraft,
and it operates in both men and women.
The core earmark of this spiritual force
is the use of manipulation and control
in order to dominate.
And just like Jezebel who opposed Elijah in the books of Kings,
Jezebel appears and tries to silence the true prophetic.
Someone operating in a Jezebel spirit will target
true apostolic and prophetic ministries
and try to get them to either be silent
or stop following the direction of the Lord.
A person who operates in this
will first try to ingratiate themselves to you,
in order to gain favor or control.
If this doesn’t work,
they will then go behind your back to others,
and try to undermine
you through half truths and innuendo,
in order to create a power block against you.
They will try to divide and conquer your community,
and they will either use intimidation
or sickness
to gain dominance.
A person who uses sickness is often the most dangerous,
because they will use sympathy to gain control.
The person operating in this spirit will be weaving a web
in the hope of strangling you and controlling you.
And eventually they will come right out
and try to control or curse you to your face.
And because these things get into the church
and often operate through Christians who are prideful,
you have to handle them very carefully.
You cannot confront or face them directly.
If you say “no” to someone operating in a Jezebel spirit,
they will go into “kill mode” and try to destroy you.
The cure for all of these situations is the same.
Humble yourself and the Lord will lift you up.
Go low.
Empty yourself.
And the heart of humbling yourself
is listening to the Lord and doing what he tells you.
If you listen to God and do what God says,
you are essentially saying,
“Lord, you know better than me,
and I am going to let go of my will and my control
and I am going to listen for your solution.”
Whenever I come into a difficult situation
with people tapped into spiritual forces,
I begin there.
I sit with the Lord.
I fast.
And I wait.
And God will give you the direction.
The enemy depends on you trying to attack and get the upper hand
and then you are wrestling with the leviathan serpent
or you are facing off with a bunch of Jezebels accusing you
or playing the “he said, she said” game.
The core of all spiritual warfare
is humbling yourself.
It is not about praying a particular prayer
or learning a particular method.
It is about living a life of repentance.
Overcoming in life
happens by having your mind transformed
day by day
by the word of God.
And when you do this,
you give God the ability to fight for you,
and to heal you,
and for you to receive grace.
And when you look at God
day by day,
the Lord gets bigger
and your enemy gets smaller.
The most powerful thing you can do
in spiritual warfare is to look at Jesus.
And as you ignore the demonic
that is feeding on your attention
and your rebellion,
the demonic realm begins to get starved
for attention
and just goes away.
The most powerful thing you can do
is not lose the plot.
This is humility.
God opposes the proud.
But gives grace to the Humble.
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