“"Test the Spirits" (part 4)”

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Last week, we further developed our spiritual discernment, by considering film and TV adaptations of biblical stories. These in no way replace the actual Bible, but dramatic productions feed our imagination, helping us to see biblical figures as real people, with the same daily struggles we endure. Pondering God’s will, and its execution through human beings just as flawed and weak as ourselves, is both humbling, and encouraging. This week, we’ll stay on the theme of spiritual discernment, but in a different area of life.

Spirits in Disguise

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

(2 Corinthians 4.17-18)

One of the central tenets of the faith is that the world we inhabit is not eternal. God created it for a purpose, wrapped up with his plan for mankind. When that is accomplished, it will give way to “the world to come” (He 2.5). At present we are stuck in a realm that is “a shadow of the things to come” (Co 2.17), but in Christ we are enabled to glimpse “the true form of these realities” (He 10.1), which in many cases not only will exist long after the physical creation, but also existed before the foundation of the world, just as its master is “the Alpha and the Omega…who is and who was and who is to come” (Re 1.8).

But our spiritual vision isn’t always clear. Even the Apostle Paul wrote, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1Co 13.12). This universal spiritual astigmatism, so to speak, is why he wrote, earlier in the same letter, “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (8.2). Thus he began a meandering answer to a question “concerning food offered to idols” (v1), which seems like it could have been handled in a very few words—God permits you to eat it, or else God forbids you to eat it. But no, we get three full chapters devoted, not to explaining why it’s permissible or prohibited, but why, even if “all things are lawful,” still “not all things are helpful” (10.23). It had to do with spirit, not flesh.

Five years ago, the world stumbled into a strange pandemic caused by a particular strain of the viruses that cause the common cold. The disease could be so mild as to go unnoticed in one person, and severe enough to kill another. It was new, and most of us felt like we lacked clear answers. Christians struggled to determine what they ought to do, and eventually formulated a wide variety of incompatible opinions. Those who who were wise saw the similarity to the issue in 1 Corinthians 8-10, and tried to adhere to what God told us there, as well as in Romans 14, “not to quarrel over opinions” (Ro 14.1).

But that didn’t satisfy everyone. While the application of these passages has generally been relegated to a nebulous category of so-called matters of indifference, the whole point has always been in the struggle to determine which matters are indifferent in God’s eyes, and which aren’t! If your opinion is that God is indifferent toward eating meat, then you eat what you please; if your opinion is that God will condemn carnivores to hell for all eternity, then you cannot describe it as a matter of indifference! When covid came along, it provided a perfect test for our application of these passages. Many failed.

This issue suddenly superseded everything else, to the point where God’s actual commandments began to be seen more as general guidelines, by some of the most straitlaced and conscientious Christians around. Others scorned brothers and sisters for worrying about trivial matters, or even outright denied that the disease existed. Why did this happen? The answer hides behind another question: whom can we trust? We live in an ideologically divided culture, and the messaging from the two main sides was an expression of different spirits. We’re supposed to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God,” but when we fail to discern, or even to recognize that there are spiritual ramifications to various ideas that swirl about the cultural aether, we leave ourselves open to attack by nefarious forces that emanate from Satan himself.

Five years later, it’s a little easier to discuss the polarizing issues—now that they no longer matter. That is the way of spiritual warfare! Modern Christians often read the book of Exodus and mercilessly mock the Israelites for their complaining, disbelief, and rebellion, without pausing to contemplate for a moment Jesus’ sobering admonition,

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers.”

(Matthew 23.29-32)

It’s easy to look back and pass judgment, when it no longer directly affects us. It was an entirely different matter, when we were in the middle of it! That doesn’t mean there were no right and wrong answers, attitudes, and actions, though. Let us look back to the frustration and uncertainty of covid, not to pass judgment on everyone’s mistakes, but to learn Satan’s tactics, now that the spirits have become a bit easier to identify. Then, prepare to recognize and defeat them through God’s playbook, the next time “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” and tries to deceive us (2Co 11.14).

Jeremy Nettles

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