The Right Questions

 April 20, 2023

Sometimes we ask the wrong questions, which means we get the wrong answers. When I was a teenager, our church sponsored Christian Service Brigade, an evangelical version of the Boy Scouts. One summer, our troop went canoeing and camping in the Adirondacks, and the first night out, we camped next to a Boy Scout troop that was coming back in from a week in the wilderness. The next morning was a Sunday, and since one of the tenets of the Boy Scouts is “a scout is reverent,” the leader of the troop gave a “sermon” to his boys, while we listened in. 

He was speaking on the Feeding of the 5,000, but with a decidedly different twist than that to which I was accustomed. According to this scoutmaster, when the people saw the boy give his lunch to Jesus, they were so ashamed at their own stinginess that one by one, they began to bring out their own lunches which previously they had hidden because they were unwilling to share out of fear there wouldn’t be enough. There was no miracle; Jesus didn’t multiply anything. It was all an exercise in psychology with a moral at the end: “Be generous.” 

Human reason, the gift and curse of the Enlightenment, was in full blossom that Sunday morning. Years later when I was in seminary, I discovered it wasn’t just the Boy Scouts. It was fashionable to look at the Bible through an Enlightenment, or scientific lens. Whenever the miraculous appeared, scholars looked for a rational scientific explanation of the occurrence. The many accounts of demon possession were dismissed as everything from psychotic episodes to epilepsy, or even worse, hysteria on the part of the Gospel writers. The questions that were asked were, “How do we explain in modern terminology what is recorded in Scripture?” Everything was seen through this critical, “scientific” lens. We asked questions accordingly, and got “scientific,” Enlightenment kinds of answers.

So what if we asked different questions? What if instead of asking how we can interpret the Bible in light of scientific and humanistic paradigms, we asked how we can describe what we see happening in our lives in strictly Biblical terminology? What if the sociopath is in reality acting out of demonic influence? What if the barbarity we see unfolding in North Korea, China, Nigeria, and our urban ghettos are the result of people and systems controlled by demonic beings? What if our lethargy when we read the Bible or hear a sermon is the result of demons  doing everything they can to keep us from a Spirit-filled life? What if the struggles we have against addictions and behaviors we can’t seem to control are spiritual battles against what Paul calls the “principalities, [the] powers, the rulers of the darkness of this age, [the] spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places?” —Ephesians 6:12 

What if the reason we seem so powerless to deal with the intractable problems of our age is because we don’t recognize them for what they are, and are essentially bringing knives to a spiritual gunfight? 

I don’t believe there is a demon under every rock or that every problem we encounter is the work of the devil. We have plenty to keep ourselves busy merely fighting the world and the flesh, let alone the devil. But we ignore the latter at our peril. 

One last question: What if we simply asked the right question, which is, “Lord Jesus, what am I facing right now? You said one of the gifts of the Spirit is the ability to discern spirits. I need to know whether I’m facing a character flaw or one of the spiritual armies of wickedness. Please give me discernment so I can bring the right tools to bear on the problem. Reveal to me what I am dealing with today.” We might be surprised at what God shows us.