The only way to escape the captivity of evil spirits is to repent and believe the gospel. That is the escape God has provided. No one can bind the demonic forces over a city and set you free or set you partially free. Until a person repents and believes the gospel, He is abiding in God’s wrath (see John 3:36), which includes being held by demonic powers.

That is why there are no measurable changes in the cities where the big spiritual warfare conferences and sessions have taken place, because nothing has happened that has really affected the demonic hierarchies that rule in those areas. Christians can scream at principalities and powers all day and night; they can attempt to torment the devil by so-called “warring tongues”; they can say “I bind you evil spirits over this city” a million times; they can even do all these things up in airplanes and on the top floors of skyscrapers (as some actually do); and the only way the evil spirits will be affected is that they will get a good laugh at the foolish Christians.

Let’s proceed to a sixth modern myth about spiritual warfare.

Satan’s kingdom is referred to in Scripture as the “domain of darkness” (Col. 1:13). Darkness, of course, represents the absence of truth, the absence of light or enlightenment. When you are in darkness, you navigate by your imagination and usually end up being hurt. That is how it is in Satan’s kingdom of darkness. Those who are in it are navigating their lives by their imaginations, and their imaginations have been filled with Satan’s lies. They are in spiritual darkness.

Satan’s kingdom is best defined then, not as a geographical kingdom with clearly defined borders, but as a kingdom of belief—belief, that is, in lies. The kingdom of darkness is located in the same place as the kingdom of light. Those who believe the truth live right among those who believe lies.^[1] Our primary job is to proclaim the truth to people who already believe lies. When someone believes the truth, Satan loses another one of his subjects because he is no longer able to deceive him.

Thus we set unsaved people free from Satan, not by “binding” evil spirits over them but by proclaiming the truth. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32, emphasis added). Spiritual blindness is removed by truth.

Within that same passage of Scripture in John’s Gospel, Jesus said to an unsaved audience:

You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me (John 8:44-45, emphasis added).

Notice the contrast Jesus made between Himself and the devil. He speaks the truth; Satan is the ultimate liar.

Notice also that even though Jesus told His listeners that they were of their father the devil, and even though He exposed Satan as a liar, He still placed responsibility on them to believe the truth He spoke. It was not the devil’s fault that they were blinded—it was their own fault. Jesus held them responsible. Satan assists people who “love darkness” to stay in the darkness by supplying them with lies to believe. But Satan can’t fool anyone who will believe the truth.

All this being so, the primary way we can push back the kingdom of darkness is by spreading the light—the truth of God’s Word. That is why Jesus did not tell us, “Go into all the world and bind the devil” but rather, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel.” Jesus told Paul that the purpose of his preaching would be to open people’s “eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18, emphasis added). This makes it clear that people escape Satan’s dominion when they are exposed to the truth of the gospel and then make a decision to turn from darkness to light, believing the truth rather than a lie. The only strongholds we are “pulling down” are strongholds of lies built in people’s minds.

^[1] It is true, of course, that in various geographical areas, there are greater or lesser percentages of people in either kingdom.

Let’s look further at the immediate context of Jesus’ words about binding and loosing. Note that directly before He mentioned binding and loosing, Jesus said that He would give Peter the “keys to the kingdom of heaven.” Peter was never given any literal keys to heaven’s gates, and so Jesus’ words must be taken as being figurative. What do “keys” represent? Keys represent the means of access to something that is locked. One who has the keys has means that others do not have to open certain doors.

As we consider Peter’s ministry as reported in the book of Acts, what is it that we find him doing that could be considered comparable to opening doors that are locked to others?

Primarily, we find him proclaiming the gospel, the gospel that opens heaven’s doors for all who will believe (and the gospel which shuts the gates of Hades). In that sense, all of us have been given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, as we are all Christ’s ambassadors. The keys to the kingdom of heaven can only be the gospel of Jesus Christ, the message that can open heaven’s gates.

We cannot stop Satan and evil spirits from attacking our minds, but we don’t have to allow their thoughts to become our thoughts. That is, we don’t have to dwell upon demonic ideas and suggestions, taking possession of them. As it has been said, “You can’t keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from making a nest in your hair.”

Additionally, we should be careful not to subject our minds to ungodly influences whenever it is within our control. When we sit down in front of the television for an hour, or read the newspaper, we are putting out the welcome mat to be influenced with thoughts that may be satanic. Directly after He told the parable of the sower and the soils, Jesus warned, “Take care what you listen to” (Mark 4:24). Jesus knew the destructive effects of listening to lies, allowing Satan to plant his “seeds” in our hearts and minds. Those seeds may grow up into “thorns and thistles” which will ultimately choke the Word of God from our lives (see Mark 4:7, 18-19).

For the most part, the only power that Satan and his demons have is to plant thoughts in people’s hearts and minds (and even that is limited by God; see 1 Cor. 10:13). With that thought in mind, consider the following sampling of scriptures:

But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, and to keep back some of the price of the land?” (Acts 5:3, emphasis added).

And during supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him… (John 13:2, emphasis added).

But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons… (1 Tim. 4:1, emphasis added).

But I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ (2 Cor. 11:3, emphasis added).

Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of self-control (1 Cor. 7:5, emphasis added).

For this reason, when I could endure it no longer, I also sent to find out about your faith, for fear that the tempter might have tempted you, and our labor should be in vain (1 Thes. 3:5, emphasis added).

…in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor. 4:4, emphasis added).

And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him (Rev. 12:9, emphasis added).

You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies (John 8:44, emphasis added).

These scriptures and others make it clear that the primary battleground in biblical spiritual warfare is our hearts and minds. Satan attacks with thoughts—evil suggestions, wrong ideas, false philosophies, temptations, various lies and so on. Our means of defense is knowing, believing, and acting upon God’s Word.

It is vitally important that you understand that every thought you think does not necessarily originate from within yourself. Satan has many spokespersons who help him plant his thoughts in people’s minds. He works to influence us through newspapers, books, television, magazines, radio, through friends and neighbors, and even through preachers. Even the apostle Peter was once unwittingly used as a spokesman for Satan, suggesting to Jesus that it was not God’s will for Him to die (see Matt. 16:23).

But Satan and evil spirits also work directly on human minds, without any human intermediary, and all Christians will at times find themselves under direct assault. That is when the warfare begins.

I remember a dear Christian woman who once came to me to confess a problem. She said that whenever she prayed, she found that blasphemous thoughts and swear words would come to her mind. She was one of the sweetest, kindest, dearest, most dedicated women in my church, yet she had this problem with terrible thoughts.

I explained to her that those thoughts did not originate within her, but that she was being attacked by Satan, who was attempting to ruin her prayer life. She then told me she has stopped praying every day because she was so afraid she might think those thoughts again. Satan had succeeded.

So I told her to start praying again, and if those blasphemous thoughts came to her mind, she should counteract them with truth from God’s Word. If a thought said to her, “Jesus was just a ——-, she should say, “No, Jesus was and is the divine Son of God.” If a thought came that was a swear word, she should replace that thought with a thought of praise for Jesus, and so on.

I also told her that by being afraid that she might think wrong thoughts, she was actually inviting them, as fear is somewhat of a reverse faith—a faith in the devil. By trying not to think about something, we have to think about it in order to try not to think about it.

For example, if I say to you, “Don’t think about your right hand,” you will immediately think about your right hand as you attempt to obey me. The harder you try, the worse it gets. The only way not to think about your right hand is to consciously think about something else, for example, your shoes. Once you have your mind on your shoes, you are not thinking about your hand.

I encouraged that dear woman to “fear not,” just as the Bible commands us. And whenever she recognized a thought that was contrary to God’s Word, she should replace it with one that agreed with God’s Word.

I’m happy to report that she followed my advice, and, although attacked a few more times during her prayer times, she gained complete victory over her problem. She triumphed in biblical spiritual warfare.

It has also been interesting for me to discover, upon taking surveys in a number of churches, that her problem was very common. Usually more than half of the Christians I survey indicate that at one time or another, they have had blasphemous thoughts while praying. Satan is not so original.

Think how foolish someone would appear who said, “There must be many smoking spirits over that city, because so many people in that city smoke cigarettes.” What were those “smoking spirits” doing before those cities existed? Where were they then? What were they doing before tobacco was ever used for smoking? Is the reason fewer people are now smoking is because some of those old “smoking demons” are dying off or moving to new territories?

Do you see how foolish it is when we say such things as, “That city is controlled by spirits of lust, which is why there are so many houses of prostitution there”? The truth is that wherever people are not serving Christ, there exists the kingdom of darkness. Many evil spirits operate in that dark realm who entice their subjects to sin and continue in their rebellion against God. Those spirits will tempt people in every area of sin, and in some places, people yield more to one sin than other sins. Their only hope is the gospel that we are called to proclaim.

Even if there were specific kinds of evil spirits who specialized in certain sins and who ruled certain geographical areas, it wouldn’t help us to know about it, because there is nothing we can do to remove them. Our responsibility is to pray (in a scriptural manner) for the people there who are deceived and to preach the gospel to them.

The only good it would do to find out about the most predominate sins in a certain city would be so that we can preach more convicting messages to the unsaved living there—by specifically naming the sins that hold them guilty before God. But there is no need to research a city’s history to determine that. One only needs to visit for a short while and keep his eyes and ears open. The predominant sins will soon become evident.

Finally, there is no example in the New Testament of anyone doing “spiritual mapping” as a means of preparing for spiritual warfare or evangelization. Nor are there any instructions in the epistles to do so. In the New Testament, the apostles followed the Holy Spirit in regard to where they should preach, faithfully proclaimed the gospel and called for people to repent, and relied upon the Lord to confirm the word with signs following. Their method worked quite well.

So we have covered many of the modern myths regarding spiritual warfare. But is there a form of spiritual warfare that is scriptural? Yes, and that will now be our focus.

Perhaps the first thing we need to know about spiritual warfare is that it should not be the focus of our Christian life. We should be focused on Christ, to follow and obey Him, as we progressively grow to be more like Him. Only a small percentage of the New Testament writings address the subject of spiritual warfare, indicating to us that it should be a minor focus in the Christian life.

The second thing we need to know about spiritual warfare is that the Bible tells us what we need to know. We don’t need any special discernment (or a preacher who claims to have special discernment) into the “deep things of Satan.” Biblical spiritual warfare is simple. Satan’s schemes are clearly revealed in Scripture. Our responsibilities are straightforwardly outlined. Once you know and believe what God has said, you are guaranteed to be a winner in this spiritual struggle.

But what about “satanic curses”?

First, there is nothing in the entire Bible that indicates Satan is able to “put a curse” on anyone, nor are there any examples of his doing so. Certainly we find Satan afflicting people in the Bible, but never do we find him “putting a curse” on a family which then results in continual bad luck upon them and their successive generations.

Every Christian is harassed by Satan and evil spirits (to a limited extent) all of his life, but this does not mean that any of us need someone to “break a satanic curse” over us that has been passed down to us from our parents. What we need to do is stand on God’s Word and resist the devil by faith, as we are told to do in the Scriptures (see 1 Pet. 5:8-9).

In the Bible, God is the one who has the power to bless and curse (see Gen. 3:17; 4:11; 5:29; 8:21 ; 12:3; Num. 23:8; Deut. 11:26; 28:20; 29:27; 30:7; 2 Chron. 34:24; Ps. 37:22; Prov. 3:33; 22:14; Lam. 3:65; Mal. 2:2; 4:6). Others may curse us with their mouths, but their curses are powerless to harm us:

Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, so a curse without cause does not alight (Prov. 26:2).

Balaam had it right when, after being hired by Balak to curse the children of Israel, he said, “How shall I curse, whom God has not cursed? And how can I denounce, whom the Lord has not denounced?” (Num. 23:8).

Some Christians have gone overboard on the idea of people placing curses on other people based on Jesus’ words in Mark 11:23: “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it shall be granted him.”

Notice, however, that there is no power in just speaking words, but rather in speaking words that are believed from the heart. There is no way a person could have faith that his curse against someone could actually bring harm to that person, because faith is a confident assurance (Heb. 11:1), and faith only comes from hearing God’s Word (Rom. 10:17). A person might hope his curse against someone will bring misfortune, but he could never believe it, because God has given no faith-supplying promise about cursing people.

The only exception to this would be if God gave someone “the gift of faith” along with a “gift of prophecy” (two of the nine gifts of the Spirit), that would be spoken in the form of a blessing or curse, as we see He occasionally did in the lives of some Old Testament characters (see Gen. 27:27-29, 38-41; 49:1-27; Josh. 6:26 with 1 Kin. 16:34; Judg. 9:7-20, 57; 2 Kin. 2:23-24). Even in those cases, the blessings or curses originated from God, not man. Thus, the whole idea of someone being able to “place a curse” on another person is just a superstition. This is why Jesus did not instruct us to “break curses that have been spoken against us,” but rather to simply “bless those who curse us.” We do not need to be afraid of any person’s curses. To be afraid of someone’s curse is to display a lack of faith in God. Unfortunately, I meet pastors all the time who seemingly have more faith in the power of Satan than the power of God. Although I travel to different countries every month doing a lot of damage to Satan’s kingdom, I am not the least bit afraid of Satan or any curses being placed on me. There is no reason to be afraid.

So we understand at least one reason why the devil and his rebel army are permitted to work on this planet: for the purpose of deceiving those who love darkness.

This truth is further validated when we consider that according to the book of Revelation, Satan will one day be bound by an angel and incarcerated for a thousand years. The reason for his incarceration? “That he should not deceive the nations any longer” (Rev. 20:3). During that Millennium, Jesus will personally rule the world from Jerusalem.

But after those thousand years, Satan will be released for a short period of time. The result? He “will come out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth” (Rev. 20:8).

If God doesn’t want Satan to deceive people at that time, why will He release him? Especially in light of the fact that God originally incarcerated Satan “that he should not deceive the nations any longer”?

God, of course, would prefer that Satan never deceive anyone. But He knows that the only people whom Satan can deceive are those who don’t believe what He Himself has said. Satan can only deceive those who reject the truth, and that is why God permits him to operate now, and why He will permit Satan to operate then. As Satan deceives people, the condition of people’s hearts is made apparent, and then God can sort the “wheat from the tares” (see Matt. 13:24-30).

This is exactly what will happen at the end of the Millennium when Satan is released. He will deceive all those who love darkness, and they will then gather their armies around Jerusalem in an attempt to overthrow Christ’s rule. God will know exactly who loves Him and who hates Him, and thus He will immediately send “fire from heaven” that will “devour them” (Rev. 20:9). Satan will serve God’s purposes then just as he does now. For this reason among others, it is foolish to think that we can “pull down territorial spirits.” God allows them to operate for His own reasons.

The apostle Peter understood true, biblical spiritual warfare. Never in his epistles did he instruct Christians to pull down principalities and powers over cities. He did, however, instruct them to resist Satan’s attacks against their personal lives, and he told them exactly how they should resist:

Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world (1 Pet. 5:8-9).

Notice first that Peter indicated our position is one of defense, not offense. Satan is the one who is prowling around, not us. He is looking for us; we’re not looking for him. Our job is not to attack but to resist.

Second, notice that Satan, like a lion, is seeking someone to devour. How could he possibly devour Christians? Did Peter mean that Satan could literally eat their flesh like a lion would? Obviously not. The only way Satan could devour a Christian is to deceive him into believing a lie that destroys his faith.

Third, notice Peter tells us to resist the devil through our faith. Our struggle is not a physical battle, and we can’t fight Satan by swinging our fists in the air. He attacks us with lies, and we resist those lies by standing firm in our faith in God’s Word. That, again, is scriptural spiritual warfare.

The Christians to whom Peter was writing were suffering some severe persecution, and thus were being tempted to renounce their faith in Christ. It is often when we are in the midst of adverse circumstances that Satan will attack with his doubts and lies. That is the time to stand firm in your faith. That is the “evil day” of which Paul wrote when you need to “put on the full armor of God, that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil (Eph. 6:11, emphasis added).