There are two areas of supernaturalism: demon power and God's power. God warns us against all kinds of supernaturalism not of Him. Thus, anything at all related to the devil's power should have no relationship with us.
What say I then ? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing?
But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.
1 Corinthians 10:19,20
The great Apostle Paul says that idols are nothing, and even the offerings to them are nothing. But behind every idol is a demon that craves worship. The idol is only a symbol. Behind that symbol is the devil's power.
You would be astounded to see what our team witnesses when we go out in our public meetings and crusades. Time after time we see terrible manifestations in people who are actually bound by the devil simply because they cherish symbols of demon power. We are seeing more of it in a single three-day meeting now than we once saw over a five-year period! The battle is on for men's immortal souls—and we are ready to do battle with the devil, bringing the power of God and the anointing of the Holy Spirit against any power at Satan's command.
Let me say that symbols are not unusual. God has always had symbols of His power. In the Old Testament, we read about the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was a symbol of God's power, and it was placed in the Holy of Holies. Above the Ark was the Shekinah—a light unlike any human light. There were no electric lights, no candles, no artificial light of any kind in the Holy of Holies; but a glow, a wondrous radiance, shone forth from the Ark of God.
The Ark was a symbol of God's power and presence with His people. Whenever the Shekinah was gone, then God was gone. The Ark was simply a symbol of His power.
The heathen did not understand this. When the Philistines captured the Ark, knowing it was a religious object, they put it in their temple. Next morning, their own god, Dagon, was down on his face, broken in pieces, destroyed. Nothing but the presence of God in the symbolic Ark could do that.
The devil also has symbols of his power. And you had better take notice of them. As Christians, we should not have symbols of the devil's power in our possession. These symbols may have strength you don't know about. So, you should be careful with them and about them.
The heathen have all kinds of symbols of the devil's power. The witch doctors of Haiti have little dolls they have made for themselves—awful-looking little things. By sticking pins through these dolls, they can actually cause injury to people at great distances from themselves. These little dolls become symbols of the power of witchcraft. You might say that these symbols couldn't have any strength or power. You may not understand it at all. But this vicious system does work. It is demon power.
All the voodoo religions have artifacts. They have all kinds of good-luck charms and many different symbols that represent the power of the devil.
When I was in China a number of years ago, I remember visiting a Buddhist temple and allowing the priest there to show me their gods. They had a fantastic array of idol gods—ugly ones, big ones, frightening ones. They even had gods with eight or ten arms.
I looked up at an especially big one that was about sixteen or eighteen feet tall, and I said, "Surely, you know that thing can't do anything for you."
He was very polite. He smiled and said, "You are a foreigner. You just don't understand."
"Well," I said, "tell me how it can do anything."
The priest said, "Of course, we all know that an idol does not have any power. But the spirit that lives in that idol certainly does. The spirit of that idol is off wandering around somewhere right now. If I were to bring some incense and an offering, and place it in front of the idol, something would start happening immediately."
Then he took me around to the back of the idol and showed me a hole cut into its back.
He said, "That is where the spirit goes in and out. When someone comes here to worship the idol, then the spirit runs and get inside, because it wants worship. If people come and kneel here with an offering, burning candles and incense before this idol, then immediately the spirit is here and he does things for people. You are just ignorant of what he can do."
Well, I want you to know I had a pretty strange feeling! Suddenly, I realized that the idol was only the symbol of a demonic spirit. The grotesque-looking face of that idol was something an artisan created under the influence of the devil's power. The idol had become a symbol of the devil's influence and power over the lives of the people in that place.
The devil wants to be worshiped, and he will get into any kind of idol if you will come and worship him there. You wouldn't want one in your house, and I wouldn't want one in mine. Why would we want the symbol of the devil's power around us?
In the Filipino headhunter country where we have helped build churches, there is a village with a special tree. It doesn't have a leaf on it, not one! It makes you feel strange to look at the thing. It is greasy. I suppose that is because so many people have wiped their hands on it for years. When you look at the tree, there is something about it that is odd. Even the boughs are crooked and gnarled. It is an awful-looking thing. It looks as if it is possessed.
That tree is a symbol of demon power. The tribesmen say that spirits are in that tree, so they offer sacrifices and burn incense at the foot of it. They come to meet the devil at this symbol of his evil power. They say things happen at that tree that can happen nowhere else!
In Manila, Philippines, we prayed for a prison girl named Clarita who was being attacked by demons. While we were praying for her, we observed that she had a very strange metal cross hanging around her neck. For her, that cross was a symbol of the devil's power.
Clarita often acted just like an animal. One day during questioning in the office of the Chief of Police, she fell to the floor and crawled under the desk.
The chief kicked her and said, "Come out from under there!"
She crawled out and began to whine, "I've lost my cross."
He told her he didn't know anything about her cross. He even turned his pockets inside out and said, "You see, I don't have it."
She looked at him with a strange look and said, "Look again."
Disgusted, he plunged his hand back into his pocket. The metal cross was there! It almost scared him to death. Less than thirty seconds after he had his hands in those pockets, and even had them wrong-side out shaking them, the cross appeared inside!
While in Indonesia, we stayed in the home of a witch doctor. He wasn't an important witch doctor; he only had seven devils. Most of them have many more than that. While he was at work one day, his wife said she would show us how he communicated with his spirits. The spirits he worshiped were so wicked they wouldn't even let her stay in the same room with him. She had to sleep in another room. When she tried to sleep with her husband, these spirits violently threw her onto the floor. She had black and blue marks all over her body.
You may not understand things like that, but a lot of people in America are beginning to see things about the devil's power they never understood before.
When we entered the witch doctor's room, I saw a fine wire, possibly made of silver or gold, hanging from the ceiling. Suspended at the end of this wire was a beautiful dagger, which slowly moved back and forth. The woman told me that when her husband came here to worship, he knelt on a raised place in the floor, like a low altar, and burned incense. As the smoke rose up and around this dagger, all the spirits he worshiped came around him.
She said, "You ought to hear it. Sometimes all of them are talking at the same time, and it sounds like a whole congregation chattering away. We can hardly stay in the house when they are having a conference in that room."
This witch doctor contacted the demons through the dagger. That was the symbol of the devil's power.
Clairvoyants may use other symbols of the devil's power, such as a crystal ball or a deck of cards, to tell a person about his life and his future.
I must warn you that you may have in your own home emblems of the devil's power. Perhaps you don't understand why certain things are happening to you there. Maybe you need to have a "housecleaning."
You say, "Well, what could we have?" It might be that you have a Ouija board. If you do, take it out and burn it in Jesus' name. It is a symbol of Satan's power.
It may be that you have some professional playing cards. Almost every witch doctor and fortune-teller in the whole world uses them. They help them in their business. If that be true, you have no business with them in your house!
Maybe you have a crystal ball. It might be a toy or a plaything, but it shouldn't be in your home. You ought to destroy it!
On the whatnot shelf you may have some little idols. You can buy almost any heathen idol in the department stores in America today. Our country has been flooded with all kinds of idol dolls, Buddhas, etc. I had one in my office, and we took a picture of that thing getting its head smashed. That little statue had been sent to us by a Full Gospel Christian. We appreciated the person's thinking that we would like it and sending it all the way from Hong Kong, but we don't want an idol sitting around in our office. We destroyed it!
You may have some curios that you brought from foreign lands, and have them sitting around your house. In many homes I have seen Buddhas, Confucius dolls, and different heathen idols. I don't believe they should be in the home of a Christian. I believe we should clean them out, in the name of Jesus.
In the Old Testament the people were very careful about pictures, images, and such things. In some parts of the world people are still careful about pictures. For example, an Orthodox Jew does not like to have his picture taken. If you want to start a quarrel in Jerusalem, find an Orthodox Jew with his long beard and traditional clothes, and try to photograph him. You will have trouble on your hands. He believes it is a sin to have that symbol or image of him in your camera or in your hands.
As you know, the Amish people in this country also do not want their pictures taken and do not allow pictures in their homes. They do not want any symbol around that could cause people to move into idolatry or that would give the devil any chance to move into their homes.
Let us look at Acts 19:19:
Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
At that time, 30 pieces of silver was the price of a slave. One piece of silver was a full day's wage for a craftsman. This means that with 50,000 pieces of silver one could have purchased 1,666 2/3 slaves. There was no man in the empire wealthy enough to own that many slaves.
If one piece of silver was a craftsman's pay for one day, then there were represented here a total of 50,000 days, or 137 years, of work.
Now you begin to realize the magnitude and the significance of what these people did. They brought untold wealth into the streets and burned it. They destroyed it publicly, so that nothing was left. Why? Because these books represented the devil's power, and the people wanted to rid themselves of any trace of contamination by demonic forces.
If destroying the symbols of the devil's power was so important and necessary then, I believe it is no less important now. We must learn to recognize all symbols of demon power and be sure to give them no place in our lives.
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