I heard a story where a brother and his sister were
riding in the back seat of the family car when all of a sudden the little girl
blurted out, “Shut up devil!” Mom turned around and asked, “Why did you say
that?” The little girl answered, “Because the devil told me I should break
John's leg.”
We all need to do more of what that little girl did
and tell the devil to shut up and go back down where he belongs.
When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, Matthew
tells us Jesus responded with: “Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Matt 4:10).
Notice that Jesus didn't pray about it. He didn't ask God to get Satan away
from him. He spoke directly to the spirit and “then the devil leaveth him”
(vs.11). Throughout Jesus' walk on the earth we see that He speaks directly to
that which is destructive and tells it to stop or depart. We can do the same.
I looked up the Greek translation for “get thee hence”
from Matthew 4:10. It is hupago which comes from ago, which is to
go, and hupo which is under, beneath, below, to an inferior position. So
hupago is to go below. Jesus commanded Satan to back down.
Before I came to this revelation of sending evil
deeply under and beneath, I would cast out devil spirits, but I only cast them away,
not under. Demanding that evil take itself below is a much stronger
image and agrees with many other passages we find in the Bible. For example
there is the record of when Jesus cast the devil spirits out of the man of the
Gadarenes. The evil spirits went into the pigs. And then what did they do? They
jumped from a higher position on the cliffs to the water below and drowned:
And
all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter
into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And
the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran
violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand) and
were choked in the sea. (Mark 5:12-13 AMP)
When Jesus allowed himself to be crucified, He allowed
for every evil that possibly could be inflicted on a man or woman to be
inflicted upon himself. That would include any sickness, disease, oppression,
worry, guilt, lack, and anything you or I can possibly think of that is
destructive to the body, soul, or spirit. Jesus took it all upon Himself. He
also was buried with it. And all of that evil and sickness was taken to Hell
with Him.
It took tremendous power for God to raise Jesus up out
of that filth, every bit of slimy, clawing, insidious evil wanting to pull him
back down, or hitch a ride up. The Devil thought he'd destroyed Jesus; he
certainly would fight to keep him down there, but he couldn't. When God raised Jesus,
all evil was left behind, dropped away, and Jesus was raised as the victorious
Christ.
Without oppression, there could be freedom. Without
sickness and disease, there could be health. Without the wretchedness of
poverty, there could be abundance and generous overflow. Without the claw of
addiction there could be the joy of liberty. Without the strain of jealousy,
there could be the comfort of love. Jesus took all evil to Hell, left it there
and was raised all the way up to Heaven to enjoy the full, unimpaired blessing
of God.
The rightful position of believers is above with
Christ, and without any of things Jesus took with Him to the grave and to Hell.
Because
of “his great love wherewith he loved us,” God “hath raised us up together, and
made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:4 and 6), “far
above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that
is named” (Eph 1: 21).
Romans 6:4 tells us “that like
as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we
also should walk in newness of life.” Truthfully, any of the things that Jesus
took to the grave and left deep in Hell, should not be in our lives. If they
have deceitfully become a part of our lives, we have the perfect right to send
them right back down to where they came from. We can walk in the new freedom we
have.
God's given us victory and authority in Christ. If
devil spirits try to talk us into things that are not the best for us, we can
say, like the little girl in the back seat, “Shut up devil!” Or we can say,
like Jesus, “Go back below, where you belong! You don't have any right to be
here with me!”
Love, Carolyn
Look for the next free download on Thursday: Sample
book E – Bible Studies – more exciting than you might think, it includes
chapters such as “The Missing Manual,” “Why the Devil Has No Authority,” and
“History told in the Heavenlies.” Also a good one on what we can gain from
knowing about the O.T. festivals in the chapter on Father’s Day. Available from
Amazon.
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