Each of the threshold spirits has a different approach to truth. Python doesn’t mangle the truth, but hides it in a riddle or ambiguity. Ziz tears truth apart with false accusation or memory reframing. Leviathan distorts and twists the truth in varying degrees, sometimes out of all recognition. Belial inverts and perverts the truth, so evil is paraded as good, and good is denounced as evil. Rachab persuades us that truth is relative, not absolute. Azazel promotes the idea that there are more important ideals than truth, such as tolerance or peace. Lilith, on the other hand, weaponises truth.
She pays particular and peculiar attention to weaponising the truth of God’s Word. Now God’s Word is, in fact, meant to be a weapon: it’s the sword of the Spirit and there to defend us against the attacks of threshold spirits just like Lilith. It’s meant to be deployed for us, not against us.
One way Lilith weaponises God’s Word is by giving it out of season. God’s Word is always true but, when it is delivered in an untimely way, it can raise our hopes high, and so our hearts grow sick with dismay and disillusionment when that hope is too-long deferred.
Another way Lilith weaponises God’s Word is by giving us half a quote or one verse without its complement. We all know John 3:16, but what about the next verse but one?
Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
John 3:18 NIV
Or what about the verse, Galatians 6:2, all too often used to guilt mercy-gifted people into saying ‘yes’ and putting the needs of others above their own: ‘Bear one another’s burdens’? Just three verses further along, there’s: ‘Each shall bear his own load.’ We are deprived of balance when we hear God’s Word out of context.
Another way Lilith can weaponise truth is by encouraging our hearts to misinterpret it: surrender to Jesus is always wise advice. But that can flip easy-over into simply giving up. Lilith’s constant whispering temptation is: ‘Just surrender. No need to involve Jesus in it all. You and I both know you don’t fully trust Him. But you don’t need to. You can make it across the threshold on your own. Just a small sacrifice is needed. I’ll help you.’
Our complicity with Lilith always comes down to this: no need to involve Jesus.
How often do we hear of healing teams going into the streets—but never speaking the name of Lord Jesus—the One whose blood is the power behind the miracles? We not only hear of such silence—it’s often recommended in training. ‘But people will know,’ it’s claimed. How will they know unless we tell them? There are many healing modalities in the world—how will anyone know unless we proclaim the Name of Jesus?
This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May Jesus of Nazareth be first in your life.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.
Understanding false refuges is the single most important step towards dealing with the obstacles barring you from coming into your calling. Hidden in the Cleft explains false refuges in more detail and is available as a paperback or an ebook.
Anne, can you please expand on what you mean by Lilith giving a word from God out of season? If God has given a word, how can it be out of season?
A word “out of season” is a true promise that is given in such a way that it produces the expectation that the fulfillment of the promise is imminent or very “soon”. When God’s timing is twenty years away, all that expectation does is cause hope to dwindle. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Hope too long deferred crushes faith and causes some people to lose trust in God and thus be unready and unable to take up the promise when its time of fulfillment arrives. In extreme cases, people give up their job waiting for the promise to be fulfilled and then lose everything. It’s not that the promise is invalid or that it will not come to pass, it’s that our reaction to the word means that we are unable to take hold of the promise when it arrives.