Spiritual Warfare #1 - Know Your Enemy

Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.

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   Welcome everyone to Fire and Grace School of Ministry this morning. Our students here and watching live this morning, of course some will be watching later, but excited to start the second semester this morning. Of course, the second semester our first block on Tuesdays will be spiritual warfare. So today is spiritual warfare class one. We've entitled this know your enemy first day of semester two of our first year excited about getting into this. Now as we get into this this morning, again I want you to take good notes. I haven't decided on an assignment for this class. Maybe we'll know when we get toward the end. But you know it's important, I'm just going to say this, I can't believe that there are actually churches, seminaries, Bible schools that do not teach on spiritual warfare at all. They don't talk about it, they don't touch it. There's even a demonic belief, I believe just put out there by demons, that if you talk about the devil you're giving glory to the devil. And that's about one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard in my life. God put a lot of stuff in the Bible about Satan and his angels and demon spirits because he wants us to know how they work. Because he wants us to be wise to their ways and their craftiness and everything else. And he wants us to know how to fight them, how to resist them, how to discern them, how to bind them, and all those things. So we're going to cover all that. Plus, of course, we'll get into the deliverance issue in this semester in this class. But anyway, know your enemy. Now before we get into the scriptures on this, this is a very, very famous book going back centuries. I don't even know how old it is, I don't remember. But anyway, it's a famous book. It's read and quoted and used often because of this Chinese general, Sun Tzu. That's how you say it, Sun Tzu. And this is the book, The Art of War. And of course, he just, again, I think President Trump quoted from it in his State of the Union speech the other night. It's a well-known book, well-quoted book. But he has a lot about military strategy in this book and fighting the enemy. One of the things, and this is one of the famous quotes from The Art of War by Sun Tzu. He says this, he says, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles. He said, if you know yourself but not the enemy for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. Isn't that interesting? If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. So very important to know yourself,

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   your strengths, your weaknesses, your place, your position, your gifts, your talents, you know, especially it's to be honest about where you have weak spots. Because you know, if you have a weak spot, that's where the enemy is going to want to attack. So that's why he's talking about know yourself. Be honest. See, there's a lot of people that are not honest with themselves. You got to be honest with yourself. Know and understand your weaknesses and your strengths and your gifts and abilities. But the main point here, I want to point out with Sun Tzu here in this quote, know your enemy. Okay, know your enemy. So if this great Chinese general said, know your enemy, and the Bible says things like this, let's look at this verse. Bible says, Isaiah four, six, my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with Satan, the dragon, the serpent, the devil, the fallen angels, the demon spirits, the enemies of Jesus Christ and true born again Christians. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance will get you hurt. It will get you killed sometimes. It is never good to be ignorant of your enemy. All right, now let's, let's see. Does this verse apply? Well, let's read the whole verse first here. This is, uh, Hosea four, six. Oh, that's not good up there. Looks better up there, but not here. Anyway, says my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because thou has rejected knowledge. I will also reject thee that thou shalt be no priest to me. Seeing thou has forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. So he's saying here is two ways you can not have knowledge. You can reject knowledge. You can, or just not have it. And then someone can bring it to you and you can reject it. Uh, either way, it's not a good thing for you to do. Um, but let's keep going here. That's Hosea four, six. So my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. And then this one, this passage, and we're not going to get into the, of course, in this passage here in second Corinthians two, he's talking about the church forgiving someone who had really, you know, sin bad and caused a big problem in the church. And he was talking about the issue of forgiveness and the need to forgive. But he made this statement in the midst of that discussion about the need to forgive. And he says here, lest Satan should get an advantage of us, for we are not ignorant of his devices. Now that verse is so, so very important to this discussion, this teaching, this understanding of knowing your enemy. Why? Because what is it saying here? Paul's saying

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   to the Corinthians, look, you're not ignorant to his devices. So he should, he shouldn't get an advantage over you. But what is the flip side of the coin? If you're ignorant to the devil's devices, then he will get an advantage over you. Now, do you want to give the devil any more of an advantage in your life than you need to? No. Right. So ignorance of the devil's devices, not good, never good. Ignorance is never the way. All right. Especially when it comes to spiritual warfare. Very important to understand that. Now let's keep going here. Let's look at this. Here's the definition of Satan. Now, listen, Satan, our enemy, has many names. As we're going to see, we'll look at Revelation 12 and it calls him that old serpent, the devil, Satan. He's accepted the name Lucifer. That really wasn't one of his original names, but he's accepted that as people have called him that. But in the Bible, he's called the deceiver. He's called the tempter. He's called the liar. He's called the father of lies, the murderer. He's got a lot of names. Satan is one of the primary names that he goes by. But let's, so let's look at what Satan means here. The word Satan simply means an adversary. This is the blue letter Bible, the outline of the biblical usage. It says an adversary, one who withstands an adversary in general, superhuman adversary, Satan, the arch enemy of good, adversary, Satan, adversary as in, what is this one? I like the gensinius, hebrew, calvi, lexicon. He says here an adversary as in war, an enemy. So this is an enemy, an adversary. He's the adversary. He's the enemy of God. He's the enemy of humanity, and he's especially the enemy of the people of God. So this is very important to understand as well. Plus here, the way the Hebrew letters, I want you to notice this, and we're going to look at this. But of course, as it says down here, the angel of Jehovah, he also started out as an angel of God, and we're going to talk about that too. But let's look at this because to me, this is very interesting. Now remember, the Hebrew language changed after the Babylonian captivity. Before that, they used the paleo Hebrew letters and language. This right here is the post Babylonian, but just so you know these letters here, this is, and of course,

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   Hebrews read from right to left. So it looks like a w, that's a shin, right? And this is tet in the middle here, and this is nun. So Satan is shin, tet, nun, which is basically an s, a t, and an n. That's where you get it, Satan from. All right? Now, these letters also have meaning. All right? That's another thing. Just so you know, we go to the paleo Hebrew, and you see that shin or shin, as it can mean, either way, it can be said either way. Here's the ancient, kind of the ancient. Looks like it just looks like our w, very similar, but it's to portray teeth in the sense, or fire, in the sense of consuming. Seeing the 21st letter of the Hebrew alphabet, it's a tooth here, means sharp. But anyway, the pictograph of teeth symbolizes to devour, to consume, to destroy something sharp. Like for instance, the Bible in Hebrews chapter 12 says our God is a consuming fire, right? One of God's names is El Shaddai, right? El, and then you have the Shaddai, the Shin, the Shin, the consuming one, right? All right? This is what you have here. So you see, you have the consuming, or the devouring, where the teeth is the first letter in Satan's name here, because these meanings can have both positive and negative. So let's keep going, just so you see that. See, shin or sheen, either way, to consume, to destroy, sharp, to press the one letter that God used to identify himself, God's signature. So it's also refers to the Lord. But again, it's used in many words, the letter is. So like, you know, letter, first letter of my name, D, well, yeah, I could just say sign D-O, my initials, and you know, most people, if anybody knew me, or if I had a situation, all the people know who that was, but D is used in a lot of words, right? So it's not, it's not a bad thing that it's used both in, with the Lord's, some of his names, and Satan, some of his names, but I wanted you to see that. So you have shin or sheen, first letter, and tet is the middle letter for Satan. And notice what it says, that a twisting, a snake. Isn't that interesting? So here's the, here's the, the present Hebrew letter, the way it looks now,

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