Today the Lord is calling the church around the world to battle, we need more than ever to understand our enemy and the rules of battle as well as how to fight from a place of safety and protection.
One of the most important things for the Christian today to know is, “How to be protected by Christ or “covered” and how to remain covered as a child of God.” This subject is vastly overlooked by most Christians. That is why there are so many casualties in the work of God, not only among young Christians but among those who are older in the Lord.
This Bible study series teaches about this important matter. In fact there is nothing more important for all of us to grasp once we have become Christians. It doesn’t matter whether you live in a rich nation or a poor one; the enemy has one objective concerning each and every Christian and the Church as a whole. Let no one think they are safe in this matter No one is safe unless they first see the danger.
Satan’s objective is to draw us out of our place of covering, safety, and protection. His whole place and strategy in his war against us as individuals and against the church is to get us exposed and away from our place of safety.
So lets wake up and learn more about the enemies strategy, the spread the word to others, so that there will be fewer causalities in the church and in the nations which we now all face.
At the personal level, let’s wake up to some of the ways in which Satan seeks to destroy our testimony, our walk with Christ, our home and our role in the church.
Yes, we have an enemy! However, he is a defeated enemy! But if are honest many of us are wounded and knocked down in battle often not realizing why this is happening. The bible study series will help us to understand why, and show us what we can do about it.
I by no means profess to understand this subject fully and I am as much a student in these matters as anyone else. Let us learn together and so strengthen the church of Jesus Christ.
How does God intend
for us to be protected?
The protection of God for His people is a theme that runs throughout the bible from Genesis to Revelations it is summed up in Psalm 91:1
He who dwells in the
shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
For anyone who has made the Lord their dwelling place, the Almighty God will be their protection, security, and safety. God will come between him and anything hostile as we see in this Psalm.
The psalm speaks of all kinds of terrors – terrors of the night, diseases, and of war. This psalm tells us of some of the ways in which the enemy comes against the children of God and against the church, ways in which he seeks to destroy. But this is by no means the emphasis of this psalm the focus here is not on the enemy but on the one who has defeated him.
The main emphasis of this psalm is covering I suggest that each one of you take the time to read and study on this most important psalm. For instance we see in verse 4:
He will cover you with
his feathers, and under his wings will you find refuge, his faithfulness will
be your shield and rampart.
In verse 9 and 10
If you make the Most
High your dwelling place – even the Lord, who is my refuge – then no harm will
befall you, no disaster will come near your tent…
It is Gods intent to provide protection for his people these verses show us this without a doubt. There are three Hebrew words that are used in the Old Testament for covering:
-- To Conceal (most commonly used)
-- To enclose or hedge in
-- To protect or overlay
So covering speaks of security, safety and protection.
The Apostle Paul saw this! In his letter to the church at Ephesus, after a revelation of about the eternal purpose of God, Paul comes right back to this whole matter of covering
Eph 6:11 Put on the
full armour of God so you can take your stand against the devils schemes.
Don’t leave a single part uncovered be covered from head to toe. There is something of Christ for every part of your being. See that Christ is your helmet, your breastplate, belt, shoes, shield and sword.
The apostle knew very well that no group or single Christian believer who begins to see something of the eternal purpose of God, who begins to play his part in extending the kingdom of God ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ is safe unless he knows how to put on the whole armour of God.
In New Testament terms to be ‘covered’ means that you are ‘in Christ’. It is as simple as that! This phrase is used over 200 times in the New Testament. The believer has been placed by the sovereign power of God in His Son. Paul, for instance writes, “to all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi…”
That is your position if you are a Child of God. You’re not just His subject, you’re not just a person related to Christ, and your position in the sight of God is in Christ. He is not a Child of God who is not in Christ. To be a Christian it to be in Christ and Christ in you. It is synonymous.
When we believe, we believe into Christ. In the Greek, to believe in Christ involves a verb of action. It is not merely an academic belief. Our faith actually carries us into Him. There is a movement of activity in it. To be in Christ is to be by His holiness, His righteousness, His purity. All that His is before God covers you. Every time we read that we are ‘in Him’, we are reading about being covered. That is our position. God has put us there.
If you are in Him you cannot be seen out of Him. When God looks at you He sees Christ. We are hidden in Him. As Paul said, “You life is now hidden with Christ in God” Col 3:3. If something is hidden it can’t be found, except within its hiding place. It is lost to view. Where is your life? If I want to find you and you are in Christ I have got to find Christ. This is a fundamental and foundational truth.
It also means that when the enemy looks for you he comes up against Christ. That is your security. Christ is thus your stronghold and fortress, your place of safety against the enemy. That is the rightful position of every child of God. In Christ there is absolute safety, absolute security, and absolute protection.
The hymn writer saw it! What did Augustus Toplady mean in the last verse of the hymn ‘A debtor to mercy alone’, where he wrote:
Yes, I to the end shall endure,
As sure as the earnest is given;
More happy, but not more secure,
The glorified spirits in heaven.
What he saw was that all the people who had died as Christians and where now in glory where not safer or more secure than you and I on earth. If we let that sink in it will change our whole attitude to Satan and to the powers of darkness. You and I are beyond the reach of the enemy if our life is hidden with Christ in God. If you remain under covering you are as secure as those who are already in heaven.
How could the enemy get a hold of you if you are ‘in Christ’? He would have to deal with Christ first. But the truth is that Christ has already dealt with Satan! So the dead in Christ are not more in Christ than we are. There is no difference. The enemy tries to blind us to this and tries to make us think that we are somehow not as good as those that are in the presence of the Lord. Not so! There is only one Church. Part is in the presence of the Lord and the rest is still here on earth. But there is still only one Church.
Satan knows better than us that the overcomer is the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone who is in Him will overcome; everyone who stays in Christ must win. It is a battle already fought and won. So we have scriptures, which Satan can’t bear:
2co 2:14 But thanks be
to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ….
If the Apostle had said, “sometimes leads us in triumphal procession in Christ’, it would have still be marvelous. But he said ‘always’. Christ has won the victory and whilst we are abiding in Him we are part of His victory procession. Another marvelous scripture
1 co 15: But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
58 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.
So we are not only negatively safe in Christ, but also positively victorious, and our work in Him must be fruitful. We are un-attackable when we are in Him. His victory becomes ours and is something which is intensely practical.
Romans 8:37 tells us that ‘ we are more then conquerors through him who loved us.’ In Christ we are more then conquerors, out of Christ we are abject failures. Paul has seen something! He wrote to the believers in Ephesus:
Ephesians 2:6 And God raised us up together, and made us
sit together min the heavenly places in
Christ Jesus,
Paul saw that the weakest believer in Christ, with the most superficial knowledge, but who remained in Christ will be absolutely victorious. However, the person who can write a theological book but who moves out of Christ will be totally paralyzed.
There is only one safe place for us to be and that is seated with Christ in the heavenly places. There we can overcome by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of our testimony, and not loving our lives even to the point of shrinking from death (as in Revelation 12:11). But we are bound to fail if we ‘come down to earth’, descend to moving or responding ‘in the flesh’, and take again our old nature as the basis for our actions. Satan has come down to that realm and everyone found on his turf he will attack and he will win.
Satan’s great objective and strategy for both the child of God and for the Church is to get us ‘uncovered’, that is, out of our place of safety in the Lord. Satan knows that can not do anything against an individual or Church when they are ‘abiding under the shadow of the Almighty’, or, to use New Testament terms, abiding and remaining in Christ (John 14:1-8)
While we are abiding in Christ, Statan can not reach us, He has to meet Christ first. He meets His authority, the righteousness, the power, the mercy, the grace, the work of Christ. He meets it all before he can get to the believer. When we abide in Christ we have wonderful safety.
Therefore his whole plan, design, objective and strategy in his war against the saints is to entice us out from out place of safety, to get us exposed. Then we are in a vulnerable and dangerous position. Therefore he will never give up trying to get believer ‘out’ of Christ, from under covering. How does the enemy know this? Why is he so determines? To get believers ‘uncovered’?
In Ezekiel 28 we have one of the two references in the bible as to Satan’s origins and how sin began. Unfortunately modern translations do not really help us to understand the significance of this vital passage of scripture. So I will post the revised version. In verse 14 we read:
Thou wast the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have
set thee so.
And again in verse 16 (after sin entered)
Therefore have I case thee as profane out of the mountain of God and I have destroyed thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.
So we can see that, before
the fall, the devil, of Lucifer, had a position to do with covering and
worship, something to do with the glory of God. We will go into this in a
latter lesson.
At this point it is
sufficient to say that Satan was the covering cherub and he therefore
understands all about covering and its vital importance to believers His roll
was once to cover. Now it is to expose. Having once been responsible for
covering heaven, he understands better than us just how important it is. So
this was the major area of his attack on people whose stories are recorded for
us in the Old Testament. It was how he tempted the Lord Jesus Christ.
To get us out from a
covering remains the main strategy of the enemy on individual believers and on
the church as a whole to this day.
Join us next week as we
continue this series on Spiritual Protection