Columns
| Homosexuality Part 2 |
| Written by Deacon Ralph |
| Monday, 01 March 2010 |
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The Influence of the Demonic Realm (This article is a follow up to "What's the deal with homosexuality". I'd encourage you to read it before reading this article) Thank you for all those who posted responses to the first article. I have made it my practice to read and pray through the responses but not reply in that venue. There is simply not enough time in my day to get to everyone. I really do appreciate the dialogue and struggle exemplified within that discussion. I want to make sure that I reiterate that while this is a huge topic, with so many directions to discuss, my major focus is to represent God, to the best of my limited ability, so that HE remains at the center of the discussion. My mission is to present the Truth and let those who read it use their free will to agree or disagree. As my “foundation illustration” pointed out, we live in a world that is working in overdrive to remove anything about God and his word. While I respect the comments posted and agree with much of what was said, I am going to use scripture and God as the foundation for my comments. I am aware that these comments, spoken to a world that immediately dismisses them because their source is God, can appear to be less effective. However, my experience in ministry and particularly, spiritual warfare, have convinced me of the tremendous need for us not only to understand the Word of God but actually live by and on it. John Paul II gave the world a tremendous gift in Theology of the body. While I don’t profess to be a professional on his writings, I can assert that his profound anthropology was the result of meditation on the word of God. He gleaned from the Word, the amazing insights of the value of our sexuality and how in its proper context, images the living God. With this said let me move forward to the demonic realm and their influence on our culture. I believe it is safe to say that very few believers really understand and even possibly believe in the existence of fallen angels and their efforts among the world. By way of establishing a launching point, let us recognize that the scriptures speak of a third of the angels in the sky who fell from grace. (Rev. 12.1-4) Out of pride and jealousy, they have made it their goal to destroy Man. There are two key questions are that must be answered within our conversation. I am sure that we could fill this entire website with questions and answers but within this particular article, I wish to focus primarily on these. The first question is. Why do they want to destroy Humanity? The second is. How are they going to attempt to destroy us? All of this will be seen within the scope of homosexuality. The reason we need to understand their motive for our destruction is because of the very fact that Man was created in the image of God. (Gen. 1:26) This is critical because not only are we created to exist for eternity (from conception on), have a free will to choose to love, and are spiritual beings like angels and demons, but we also have a body that occupies time and space. John Paul II, in his Theology of the body, goes to great lengths to explain how our (Man and Woman) physical bodies image the living God. We give witness to the Trinity. In this we have the capability to baring light, as Lucifer (Light Bearer) turned into Satan once could do. Satan’s great hatred for Humanity stems from this jealousy of his toward our amazing creation. For God to have gone to such lengths to save Humanity, He must have loved us so. Satan, unable to defeat God the Father, now goes after his children. Now that his attention is turned toward us, he has set about a plan for our destruction – to separate us from the love of God. Satan, known as the great deceiver of Humanity (Rev. 12:9), has used this deception to entrap humanity from the beginning. Having lost the war at the cross, Satan and his minions have only one recourse left toward their attempt to separate Humanity from God. He must get us to reject God. His methods are seen in the Book of Genesis where the serpents convinced to Adam and Eve to rebel from God and disobeyed by eat the fruit. (Gen. 2) This particular strategy should be well known by every follower of Christ. Satan understands something about us better than we know ourselves. WE WERE CREATED TO LIVE RIGHTEOSLY IN THE TRUTH! While most people might say “well yeah, duh”, they may not understand the implications of this fact. You see, being created for the Beatific Vision, we only live the truth. You might be sitting there saying, well that can’t be accurate, I know plenty of people who don’t. This observation really speaks to the success of Satan’s efforts, not the Principle. Satan seeks to use this knowledge to get us to enact our free will to say no to God. Whether it was Eve disobeying God, or you saying you don’t have time for praying to God, the key is to get us to reject God, his love, and his life. So how does he do it? How does Satan’s knowledge of our creation help him to get us to reject God? By using deception in a way that gets us to live lies. There are two major ways in which we live lies, and we would be wise to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us ways in which we do. The first trick of Satan is to get us to live lies thinking they are truth. When I was sexually abused as a kid, I went down to the basement to play army. I didn’t realize that a visiting relative was downstairs in his room. I found him in his room looking at a Playboy and masturbating. He invited me in and the rest was history. While the damage was done, the trap was not set. As I was going up stairs to take a shower, I remembered saying to myself (or at least I thought I said it to myself) that if I had not been playing army, this would have never happened. To an eight year old boy this made perfect sense. After every incident (traumatic or not) we make an interpretation to that event. It is at this moment that they, your demon assigned to you, use one of their abilities and insert a thought into your mind. They offer a suggestion to you that sound logical with the hope that you will buy it. They will even make it sound like your own conscience to make you believe it is coming from you. Once you buy into the lie, you have to take all the rest of false logic that comes with it. Once I bought that the suggestion that this would never have happened to me then the next lie was that the abuse was, therefore, my fault. Thus the sin, shame, guilt, filth, self hatred, and belief that I had done something wrong were now fully entrenched in my belief system. I then sought to begin to protect myself from the possible damage to me if this information should ever get out. Therefore, I vowed that I would never let anyone know what happened to me. I began to put on the mask that the world trains us to develop and wear. Any adult would be able to tell you that an eight year old little boy would never be responsible for the sexual abuse of an adult. Yet that was what I believed about that experience. The lies I bought into were that it was my fault because I was down there playing army when I shouldn’t have been. From this point on, I began to build my entire life around this belief. Why? We all collect “truths” from our past experiences that define what we do in the future. The problem is that if those “truths” are not really true, then we begin to live in lies fully certain that they are true. Even though God’s word tells me that I am good and made in God’s image, I believed I was worthless and a piece of refuse. You can imagine what a little boy, broken and alone, might think about himself after that event. What we also need to imagine, is how would he then define future incidents? Now that he looks at himself as broken and worthy of nothing but disdain from others, he will interpret future rejections, pain and loneliness as inevitable. From the simple story of Adam and Eve, we see that pain enters humanity's existence after sin. Why? Pain enables us to recognize that something is wrong. We have nerves in our hands that scream at us if we cut our palm. In the same way, we experience emotional pain when we are not “living right.” Yet if we believe that the pain is present because it is our fault or there is something wrong with us, then we have to cope with it. Here is where the demonic influences (which use the culture we live in, to achieve their goals) are prepared to help us with the pain. They want us to begin to embrace behaviors that are wrong because of their value to medicate our pain. For my story, that was the development of an addiction to porn. I walked into my brother’s closet and found a stack of Playboy and Penthouse Magazines. When I saw the cover of that magazine I had two competing feelings. (Gal. 5:16-21) The first was the feeling of doing something wrong and not wanting to get caught. The second feeling was curiosity. It is here that I bought into the second demonic method of living a lie. I learned how to create a “rational lie.” I rationalized that it was OK to look at the magazine because I wasn’t hurting anyone, and I was just looking at pictures. To do something we know is wrong, we have to create a rationale for excusing the behavior and then simply go and do the right thing. In God’s eyes, these actions remain a sin and a rejection of Him and His life. Having gone through this experience and seeing firsthand how my logical mind could be manipulated has helped me come to realize that true evangelization is not complete with just knowledge of God. The goal of Evangelization is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, to have the Holy Spirit living and actively guiding us into the truth of our lives. When Jesus declares himself as the Truth (John 14:6), he is not only saying that he tells the truth, but that He IS the truth. Therefore, we need HIS word of truth spoken to our broken past to understand what is right and true. We also need his word to help us clearly define what behaviors are morally correct. Through prayer and the grace of the Holy Spirit leading me, I was led to that painful basement and the Lord appeared to me in prayer. He informed me that what happened there was not my fault; I was simply being a kid. When Jesus said that to me, all the feelings of shame, guilt, filth, self hatred, and belief that I had done something wrong was gone. I couldn’t see how the emotions that plagued me and affirmed that my self-belief was false. They are so real and so haunting. The voices of condemnation were relentless and all the while I had no clue that they were not my voices. Even though I studied Scripture, it was ineffective because I would not allow the Holy Spirit to penetrate beyond my defenses and bring His healing truth. Now that we can see that demonic influences have the ability to distort our perception of truth, we can begin to see why people participate in strange behaviors. What is it that makes a young girl believe that she needs to cut herself to feel as though she has atoned for her sin? What makes a man believe he has to rape a woman to restore his masculinity? The list of questions is endless as we spiral farther and farther away from God and his word. All the while creating the rational lies needed to ignore the reality of God and His Truth. Next installment, I will attempt to show how the demonic realm has systematically removed God from our very eyes and left for us images that give no honor or glory nor relevance to our creator. In do this; they have opened the door for Humanity to create a wide variety of rationales for why Homosexuality should be an acceptable behavior.
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Thanks for your honesty -- I'm just not sure how this article is about homosexuality. Some of those
clicking on it might be looking for suggestions on how to get out of homosexuality, which is not what you're
offering.
Peace,
Matt