Essays in Ephesians #9
This Essay on Ephesians 2:1-3 is more lively than most because I share a few personal eye-opening encounters with the “prince of the power of the air.” It’s long, but alive.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Ephesians 2: 1-3 NEB
The prince of the power of the air is tricky and deceptive. He wants us to think that he is merely an old-fashioned mythical idea and not a reality. Discovering his invisible influences and finding freedom from the entangling snares of the “course of this world.” has been an ongoing adventure in my Christian life.
Like many others, I grew up in a nominally Christian home. I was taught God’s Commandments, but raised with many worldly values. My parents sent me to Sunday School, but they were C&E or Christmas and Easter Christians. Our holy day celebrations centered in food, presents from Santa Claus and baskets from the Easter Bunny, not in God or Jesus. When I was twelve years old and Jesus became real to me, I’d no grid for understanding the differences between the kingdoms of this world and the Kingdom of God. The idea of realities beyond the “course of this world” was strange. Years later, I was still puzzled by “a prince of the power of the air, a spirit at work in sons of disobedience.
I learned the truth of God’s word by experience. I recall one unforgettable prayer meeting when the invisible deceiver came out of hiding. I’d been a burr under the saddle of a highly antagonist Christian man who clearly disliked me. We skirted each other socially. I tried to love my enemy and avoid confrontations, but one night at a small weekly prayer meeting baseball came up, he played foul, driving one participant to tears and me to head on engagement. He was a serious White Sox fan and I was from a Chicago Cubs family. The Cubs were stuck in the bottom of the division that year and he delighted in rubbing Cub fans raw. The conversation got sticky and hot. Discussion led to prayer. By midnight, the Holy Spirit had pressed us to repentance, not of our team loyalties, but of idolatrous allegiances to our favorites.
At the end of the meeting he said, “You know, I’ve got to tell you the truth. For the first time, I actually like you. I feel different. I feel affection, real affection, in my heart for you.” I felt the same way toward him.
What changed our hearts was huge, immediate and clean. Someone at the meeting suggested that our idolatrous preferences had opened our spirits up to be influenced by a divisive principality or power over the town, a familiar spirit that had divided our city into Eastside and Westside for generations. I drove home wondering if a baseball rivalry might piggyback on old dissensions that had been working to divide the Christians in our city for years.
Later that night, telling my husband why the meeting had taken so long, he said, “I think you’re onto something. Last Sunday, leaving church, I smiled at George and said, ‘It’s a great day for a Cubs victory.’ His smile turned to a scowl and he said, “Unless you’re a White Sox’s fan.”
I wouldn’t put it past old slick, the prince of the power of the air, to hide behind innocuous MLB scoreboards and use them divide the church. He slips in wherever sin gives entry.
Years earlier, the “prince of the power of the air” seemed involved in a similar sudden heart cleansing from sin. At the time, I was in Eastern Europe on a ministry team for a Christian conference near the borders of three countries. I was warmly drawn toward people from two countries, but felt repelled by a surprising and unwanted antipathy toward people from the third nation. Ungodly divisive pressures stirred inside of me, pushing to get out.
Because I’d lived without bigotry in an ethnically diverse part of Chicago, such strong favoritism and gut rejection of an entire group of pleasant people who had never harmed me was unfamiliar. I didn’t like it. I felt emotionally manipulated. God wants His children to love one another, and my feelings were not God’s love.
Fearing my conflict might erupt and disrupt the ministry team, I asked others to pray for me. While praying, the team and I got the surprising thought that I was linked to ethnic bias from the ruling principalities over the area because of the prejudices of my own ancestors.
In the late 1870’s one set of my great-great grandparents had sailed to North America from this part of Europe. Could their old regional rivalries live on in my DNA? Were seeds of ethnic pain, superiority and inferiority buried in my family line? Could they be dormant for generations, just like the good seeds of viable prairie grasses wait for favorable growing conditions under chemically controlled croplands?
Not knowing, I confessed my ancestors’ prejudices as sin and repented of them anyway. I told any invisible spirits behind this animosity to get away. I asked God to forgive my family’s pride and failures to love and heal us. Immediately my heart softened, the antipathies and favoritisms melted away, and I began to warmly connect with the lovely people around me.
Since the hostile preferential emotions trying to control my soul felt foreign and disturbingly unpleasant, it was almost automatic to engage my will to resist and repel them. Prayer, repentance and faith were weapons that worked. I was fortunate. It’s often difficult to recognize the influences around us. It’s easy to forget that our world is a battleground, that our very own souls can turn into war zones between the prince of the power of the air and the Holy Spirit. But discerned or not, invisible influences are constantly at work—some encouraging us to depend on God and nurture loving kindness and charity and others tempting us feed pride, covetousness, enmity and independence from God.
Fortunately, we do not battle alone. God helps us. In my collision with ethnic divisiveness, I wanted to love, but I couldn’t. My own love wasn’t enough. I needed others to pray and we all needed the Holy Spirit’s wisdom and power. He was and is always more than able. Interestingly, quite often our personal battles are minuscule segments of God’s large Kingdom plans. A day or two after I’d repented of my unloving ethnic bias, church leaders from a denomination fractured by the same ethnic animosity met together for reconciliation and repented their bias. The leaders said they’d never before known such love, such unity and such a sense of oneness between the two ethnicities in that part of Christ’s body.
Another engagement with the prince of the power of the air terrified me. This time I was sightseeing with a friend at a deteriorating amphitheater in one of the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire. We’d investigated the amphitheater’s lower stories. We’d smelled the dank old underground walls of the holding tanks for hungry lions and shuddered at the places where the gladiators entered the arena. We’d sat quietly, hushed, where the martyred Christians had waited and prayed before being thrust to battle and death.
Now we were higher up, reaching toward a cloudless blue Mediterranean sky, climbing under the warming midday sun, carefully watching our steps up through the deserted, weedy, weathered tiers of crumbling stone seats. I stopped and gazed around me. I could see the sea, the impoverished city beneath me and the endless sky.
I surrendered to the moment and a surge of worship filled my chest, it about took my breath away—but my worship wasn’t to Jehovah, it wasn’t to Jesus, it wasn’t to the Holy Spirit. It had nothing to do with Judeo-Christian faith. It had nothing to do with any of my non-Christian mystical experiences either. It was unlike anything I’d read of or touched on as a younger woman searching for meaning in the Tao, the Bhagavad Gita or Buddhism. It was unlike my ventures into Yoga as a spiritual discipline. This surge was filled with triumphalism, with victory, with the worship of the creature. It was not about any human religious search for meaning or peace or any transcendence or oneness with the universe; it was totally unlike being found and met by Jesus Christ and Father or His Holy Spirit.
This surge joined me to an ecstatic crowd calling out “Hail Caesar!” Uuuhgghnhh! In me? How could it be? But for the choice of birth and decisions of time and place beyond my control, would I have worshipped Caesar? Might I have bowed to Hirohito? Or raised my arm to say, “Heil Hitler?” Could I have worshipped Amenhotep? Or Frank Sinatra? Or Elvis? Oh, God have mercy! Could I have worshipped frogs and lice and cats like the Egyptians? I felt leveled. My heart screamed to God for help. The surge subsided, never to return. Oh, God don’t let my heart become foolish or darkened, don’t let me be ruled by the prince of the power of the air. Help me never to
exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Romans 1: 22
I had glimpsed my own vulnerability. In the ebb and flow of daily decisions and reactions, how often do we stop to ask, “Who am I following? Why did I laugh at that joke? Like that song? Dislike that hairstyle? Get upset over missing refrigerator dish covers?”
I don’t know where all my reactions come from—from my ancestral DNA? From subconscious programming? From my rebellious flesh and soul? Or from the principalities, powers, and ruling spirits that report to the prince of the air? Whether we sense it or not, we are all influenced—for better or for worse—by the invisible world around us. Examples are obvious.In some sections of the USA, homogeneity rules. Once I was the only woman I saw in a large grocery store in Southern Indiana not wearing blue jeans. Why? Eccentricities and differences are more valued in England than here. Why? Why do so many of us find our creative juices begin to run on visits to Nashville. Have you noticed how parts of New England spawn writers? Personally, I find it far easier to sing in South Central Indiana (near of I U’s marvelous Jacobs School of Music and Bill Monroe’s Bean Blossom Festival site) than in the Chicago suburbs.
Paul points out the truth: without Jesus we can unknowingly follow along with the prevailing currents that dominate this world. This zeitgeist or “spirit of the age” includes all the “floating mass of thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims and aspirations . . . current in the world . . .the moral or immoral atmosphere . . .which we inhale and exhale” (Trench quoted in Wuest).
Whether our impulsive reactions come from within or without, we are responsible for our choices to act on them or reject them. Checking our impulses and automatic reactions with the character of God and His Word is imperative, but despite Socrates injunction to “Know Thyself,” the quest for full self-knowledge, can derail us. Full self knowledge is impossible. Only God is all knowing about us and only He knows all His plans for us. Getting to know Him and His Word taps us into His wisdom and sensitizes us to recognize if invisible forces are guiding us wisely or seducing us toward destruction.
I don’t know what I’d do without the indwelling life of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. He alone has wisdom to check my spirit, to open my eyes, to direct my choices. He does not ever follow the prince of the power of the air. Jesus, alive in us, loves to obey the Father’s love. He was and is God and is fully alive in God. He was not dead in the trespasses and sins of this world. He was led by the Holy Spirit, not by the prince of the power of the air. Dying in obedience to His Father at the hands of the sons of disobedience, He over came them. He died to give us His Holy Spirit. Will we receive Him? The price is great. It takes humility to let go of our independence from God and to receive His love. It takes Holy Spirit grace to obey God’s word. It takes the power of God’s love in Jesus Christ to free us from anti-Godly programming, to create in us tender consciences and new, clean hearts, filled with love for others. God alone can fully take us out of the dark kingdoms of this world and establish the Kingdom of God within us so that His Spirit will influence the atmosphere around us. It’s a life long journey and I’m still on my way.
On the cross, Jesus Christ defeated the dark powers ruling over our planet. He made a way for dim sighted human beings like you and me to see the true nature of God’s mercy. He brought God’s Kingdom to earth. He made His Life available to you and me. He was crucified by men who were ruled by the passions of their flesh and by the desires of their own minds. As believers continue to follow Jesus, His Spirit continues to dislodge the ungodly powers ruling over this planet with Kingdom breakthroughs of His powerful love.
Father, forgive us for our pride, for wanting to live independently of You. Give us the humble, obedient love of Jesus and help us trust in Him. Free us from the influence of the prince of the power of the air. Help us overcome the passions of the flesh that once ruled us. Give us the joy of blessing and not cursing, of laughter not complaint, of mercy not judgment, of peace not anger and turmoil. Give us love beyond measure rather than feelings of isolation, rejection and abandonment. Give us comfort for our pain. Give us life in Your Son. Influence us. Rule us. Join us to You alone.
