Colossians 3:2 “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
The War on Reality is a brutal war between God and His truth, and satan and his lies. This war has no conventions or rules of engagement. There are no battle lines. The battle is everywhere. The bottom line is simply this: the essence of spiritual warfare is in who will define what reality is: the Word of God, or the illusions of this present age.
What is reality? According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, it defines reality as “the quality or state of being actual or true; the totality of all things possessing actuality, existence, or essence.” This is known as objective analysis. But reality is not just objective, it is also subjective. There is a personal side to reality that is based in our feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. In this regard, according to the Thesaurus, “it is all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you.”
In this personal side of reality, what seems real to one is very unreal to another. The real warfare contained within this line of reasoning is this; the devil wants to convince both us, as individuals, and us, as a society, that certain things are real, when in fact they are not, according to the Word of God. This brings us to an important principle: whatever a society agrees on and establishes through consent, compromise and constant use will ultimately define reality to them.
In this regard, we can look at this battle as either; “The War Over Reality,” or “Truth vs. Perception.”
The phrase “perception is reality” has been attributed to political strategist Lee Atwater. However, the phrase is absolutely inaccurate: Your perception can never be better than your biases. Your perception can be changed by circumstances, situations, and distractions. Your perception is the worst possible evidence of reality.
Perception is what you interpret. It’s your understanding of a given situation, person, or object. It’s the meaning you assign to any given stimulus.
Each individual has their own perception towards things, towards situations. The most important thing to make note of is that perception is self, or human defined or proclaimed, which may be based on various inputs one has been exposed to over the time. Hence it is very human in nature. Thus, perception is diluted and is far from the actual truth or reality.
Reality by definition is, “The Truth” that has existence from the past till now. To know the actual truth, God's Truth, you need to keep your own views/perspective/perception aside. Unless you remove the sunglasses off your eyes, you will fail to see the true colors of the nature around you. Similarly we need to keep our views aside and start trusting, and believing, God's Truth.
According to YourDictionary.com, “Perception is the ability to see beneath the outward form to the underlying, often hidden, reality.” According to them, perception is in some ways more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it can actually be more important to them than if it is in fact true.
The truth is, your perception is your reality!
This is why the enemy of our souls works so hard to convince us that we don't have the victory, why we don't get healed, why the world will never get better, and why the Church will never be better than it is right now. He tries to develop within us a spiritual impotency. He doesn't want our agreement to be with God's plan established within the Word for our lives, but rather the story that he tries to write for us through lies and deceit. He tries to change our reality by attempting to create a new reality for the Body of Christ within the Church, and he tries to establish a reality of there being no hope for the world.
Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
This beautiful verse is almost like saying “As a man thinks, so he is,” If we fill our minds with things that are lovely, pure, and honorable, then that’s where our minds will be. Perception can seem like reality, but tell that to the people who thought the earth was once flat. Their perception to the naked eye was that if you went too far out in the oceans, you’d drop off the earth and into the abyss. Of course their perception is wrong
To change a person’s perception, we need to change what a person thinks of, and if we’re setting our minds on things that are below, here on earth, we’ll not see the things that God is doing through us and in us by what we are going through here on earth. In other words, let our heavenly thinking overshadow those things on earth; let the eternal things of God dominate our thinking over the present, evil world we live in today.
In Revelation 3:17, Christ rebukes the Church of Laodicea because its perception of reality-particularly about themselves-bore no resemblance to His own. Their spiritual blindness was self-imposed, especially given the fact that members of Christ's church have access to His Spirit-His mind, His heart, His perspective-and so should know better than to believe the perceptions of the flesh and the world rather than God's truth.
Now, getting back to the actual “war” over reality and perceptions, let's look at a passage of Scripture that actually talks about this war:
"Then war broke out in Heaven; Michael and his angels went forth to battle with the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought. But they were defeated, and there was no room found for them in Heaven any longer" (Revelation 12:7-8 AMP).
Notice the phrase, "there was no room...for them in Heaven." The war against principalities involves displacement: Christ filling the spiritual territories once held by satan. When it comes to angelic and demonic warfare, the battle rests not in physical weaponry but in the power of agreement between mankind and the spirit realm.
When the Church on earth is aggressive in its agreement with the will and Word of God, then the presence of God increases in the spiritual realm, proportionally displacing the influence of hell on earth. But, when the Church is passive, indifferent or carnal, the powers of hell increase their rule over the affairs of men. We must see that our prayers, attitudes, and agreement with God are an integral part of establishing the reality of the Kingdom of God on earth!
Satan is unmasked in Scripture as "a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44). His realm of operation is the spirit world that immediately surrounds and blankets the consciousness/mind/thought-patterns of mankind. From this spiritual realm satan works to corrupt and control the mind of man through illusions built from mankind's carnal desires and fears. But the power of the lie is not merely the speaking of falsehoods, nor is it that this world is an illusion. The lie of the enemy appears most powerfully when men believe that this world, as it is, is the only world we can live in. The truth is, of course, that God is establishing His Kingdom, and ultimately, every other reality will submit to and be ruled by that Kingdom! (See Hebrews 12:26-28; Revelation 11:15.)
The weapon God has given us to combat the lies of the enemy is the Word of God, which the Scriptures refer to as the "sword of the Spirit" (Ephesians 6:17). Jesus said His words "are spirit and are life" (John 6:63), which is to say that the substance or meaning in Christ's words represents an actual reality: the living Spirit of the Kingdom of God.
In our war over who controls man's world, the singular weapon God has given the Church is His Spirit-empowered Word. The living Word of the Spirit is the truth.
Paul taught that spiritual warfare deals specifically with the "pulling down of strongholds." But what are those strongholds? They are lies the devil has sown into our thought-processes which, as we accepted and believed them, became reality to us. We do not fall in sin as much as we are seduced by it; every sin is cloaked in some measure of deception. But as these lies are uncovered and destroyed, as our thought-processes are freed from illusions, we will discover the truth of Christ in us, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).
To be successful in battle, we must know the Word of God frontwards, backwards and every which way in between. The Word of God must flow out of us like a fountain to wash away all the filth of the lies of the enemy. When engaging in spiritual warfare over which reality will guide us, we must know how to fight for God's reality, and what we are actually fighting for.
“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” (II Cor. 10:4-5 NASB)
Within the Bible, strongholds are referred to as:
1. Arguments raised against the knowledge of God
2. Lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God
3. Thoughts (or ideas) that would lead someone away from obeying Christ
4. Fortresses with difficult access
5. Old, difficult, discouraging challenges
In battling strongholds over what “reality” is, we must understand that the enemy has erected strongly fortified garrisons to resist the Truth. There are 3 that I want to bring out here:
- There is the fortress of human reasoning, reinforced with many subtle arguments and the pretense of logic.
- There is the castle of passion, with flaming battlements defended by lust, pleasure, and greed.
- And there is the pinnacle of pride, in which the human heart sits enthroned and revels in thoughts of its own excellence and sufficiency.
The enemy is firmly entrenched; these strongholds have been guarded for thousands of years, presenting a great wall of resistance to the Truth. None of this deters the Christian warrior, however. Using the weapons of God’s choosing, he attacks the strongholds, and by the miraculous power of Christ, the walls are breached, and the bastions of sin and error are battered down. The victorious Christian enters the ruins and leads captive, as it were, every false theory and every human philosophy that had once proudly tried to force the world's reality upon us.
Victory is ours when we trust God's Truth and not the perceptions that the enemy wants us to see!