Chapter 1: The Three Key Truths (Spiritual Warfare Made Simple)
Spiritual warfare is simple.
We often over-complicate it with hierarchies of demons, elaborate rituals, and Hollywood-soaked drama. But spiritual warfare in the Bible is simple.
Three key truths undergird all spiritual warfare. If you grasp these three truths, you can make sense of even the wildest-seeming spiritual warfare situations.
The three key truths are these:
1. God is sovereign.
2. You have dominion.
3. The devil lies.
These might seem overly simple. But they explain everything. Let’s walk through Genesis 1-3 to see them in action.
First, God is sovereign.
The Bible opens with these words: “In the beginning, God” (Genesis 1:1 ESV).
Even if those words are familiar to you, stop and think again about what they mean.
They mean that God has all power. God is not competing with the devil. God is not worried about the devil.
In the beginning, there was only God — not God and the devil. This is not a cosmic battle where the forces of light are equally matched by the forces of darkness, where nobody knows who will win.
God wields all power to accomplish all things. God alone created all of reality. God reigns secure in all His power. No one can challenge Him. No one can knock Him off His Throne. God is fully in charge, now and forever. God is not fighting to reclaim power. God has never lost power.
God created everything that is not Him: galaxies, stars, planets, plants, animals, people. This means that God created the devil, as well. It also means that the devil belongs to God, just as all the creation does.
The devil thinks he’s rebelling against God. He thinks he is thwarting God’s plans.
But God is too masterful a strategist for that.
God turns all things around for good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28). God can take everything meant for evil and use it for good (Genesis 50:20).
God can do this because He has all the power. Everything the devil does, God can turn around and use for good. The crowning example of this is the Cross. Jesus, who is God in flesh, lived perfectly, but died horrifically. It was the evilest event in all history: the most perfect Person brutally killed for crimes He never committed.
Yet God used the evilest event to accomplish the greatest good: saving billions of His children’s soul. Killing Jesus was horribly evil, yet His death paid the price for humanity’s sin. Because of it, we can now be cleansed of sin, born anew into God’s family, and spend all of life with God, beginning now and on into eternity.
If God can use the evilest act to accomplish the greatest good, He can do it with any evil act. He can do it because God has all the power. God is sovereign.
Second, you have dominion.
God wields all power. So what does God choose to do with His power?
He chooses to give dominion to you.
After establishing that God possesses all power, Genesis 1 continues:
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion” (Genesis 1:26 NRSV).
Those four words are critical: “let them have dominion.”
God wields all power, exercising supreme control of the universe. God then chooses to use His power to give us power. God gives us the dominion to rule this planet that He made for us. God gives humanity the responsibility to rule over every living thing on this planet, including ourselves. God gives us the dominion to lead our own lives.
To be human is to possess dominion over this world and over your life.
You have dominion.
Which means the devil does not.
The devil cannot force you to do anything. The devil cannot force himself upon you. Demons cannot exert their will upon humanity. The devil can never make you do anything. You always retain the ability to make your own choices.
You have dominion.
Third, the devil lies.
Lying is the devil’s only real weapon. If he can deceive you, he can control you. If he can deceive you, he can trick you into choosing to do what he wants.
But if he can’t deceive you, he can’t do anything to you.
In Genesis 3, the devil appeared to the first two humans in the guise of a serpent. But he held no forceful ability. He could not force himself on them and make them sin. He could not overpower them and make them disobey God. The devil could not do anything to them.
Except lie.
The devil said to the woman, “Did God really say…?” (Genesis 3:1 BSB).
The man and the woman held dominion. They had to make the operative choice to sin. The devil could not force them to sin — but he could trick them. He deceived them into thinking that what would destroy them would save them. It’s the same lie he perpetuates today.
The devil lied, questioning God’s goodness, portraying the Giver of Everything Good as someone who was withholding good:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’”
The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You must not eat of it or touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not surely die,” the serpent told her. “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1-5 BSB).
The devil’s deception worked. The woman now saw God as someone holding back. She believed the devil’s lies about the tree and its fruit:
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. (Genesis 3:6 BSB).
Eve wanted wisdom. She believed the lie that the fruit would give her wisdom. She then used her God-given dominion to choose to eat the fruit that God told her to ignore.
In Genesis 3, the devil appeared as a friend, offering a hidden chance at wisdom. Other times, he presents himself as a menacing terror hiding in shadows, an unstoppable force of evil, a spirit who can overwhelm your dominion, or a rival to God Himself. All of these are lies. The devil will say whatever lie he has to say to get you to do anything except obey God.
The devil has no dominion of his own. To get us to disobey God, the devil must lie, deceiving us into seeing the God who loves us as anything else.
But if we know the truth, it sets us free. If we know the truth, the devil can’t deceive us. And if the devil can’t deceive us, he can’t do anything to us.
The devil lies. It’s all he can do.
These are the three basic truths that make sense of all spiritual warfare.
1. God is sovereign, wielding all power.
2. God uses His power to give us dominion.
3. The devil lies, about this and everything else.
You may still have questions about these truths. Objections might rise immediately in your mind. That’s natural. A lot of confusion and questions swirl around spiritual warfare. The devil has been lying for a long time.
In the next three chapters, we’ll trace these three truths throughout Scripture. They will cut through a mess of confusion, revealing how simple spiritual warfare is to understand.
Confusion helps the enemy. It’s easier to lie to people when they don’t understand what’s going on. But when the clear truth of God’s Word cuts through the confusion, the enemy lays exposed and powerless.
This book won’t teach you everything about spiritual warfare. But it will give you a framework so you can understand everything about spiritual warfare. This book will show you the simple truths of the Bible.
The truth will set you free.
This post comprises Chapter 1 of my book Spiritual Warfare Made Simple. We’ll cover the entire book in this series of blog posts, along with additional content and Q&A. If you’d like a permanent copy for yourself, you can grab the ebook or paperback here.
