Utumishi Blog

Just in the last week I think God’s been teaching me a number of things in a number of ways from different directions: a) that death can come very quickly and violently and horribly; b) that the world and its values are sick; c) that the evil spiritual realm is very real and very dangerous and very scary (and very hard to distinguish and disentangle from sin and weakness); d) that I am full of uncleanness and contradictions; e) that the Bible does speak of a God of wrath and an unimaginably terrible alternative to his grace.

Which is why the gospel of deliverance is such good news.  Ephesians 2 is brilliant on this. Writing to people who were far from the true God and wrapped up in all sorts of occult practice, Paul says they needed delivering from five things:

1. Death – “you were dead”
2. The world – “following the course of this world” (v2)
3. The devil – “following the prince of the power of the air” (v2)
4. The flesh – “in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind” (v3)
5. The wrath of God – “by nature children of wrath” (v3) – this is the Big One.

The Deliverance:

• Who?  “But God” (v4) – not a pastor, not by my prayer and fasting
• Why?  “because of the great love with which he loved us” (v4)
• How?  “together with Christ” (v5) – union with Jesus
• When?  “raised us up with him” (v6) – it’s wonderfully historic

What happens if we forget…

• …deliverance from death (“alive” v5)? We will still be scared (Heb. 2:15).
• …deliverance from the world (“among whom we all once lived” v3)? We will either separate from the world and have no unbelieving friends or we’ll conform – in both cases failing to see that we have already been separated – a holy people, citizens of heaven, in the world but no longer of it.
• …deliverance from the devil (“all things under his feet… seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ” Eph. 2:22; 3:6)? We will continue to fear the devil and his demons and we will seek continual deliverances – failing to see that the great deliverance has already happened (Col. 1:13), the great victory has been accomplished at the Cross (Col. 2:15).
• …deliverance from the flesh (“once lived.. in the flesh” v3)? We will repeatedly seek an elusive ‘total consecration’, complete surrender, exhaustive confession, ‘final’ victory over the sinful nature – failing to see that our sinful nature has already been crucified in Christ, dead and buried (Rom. 6:3-6; Gal. 2:20; Col. 2:12).
• …deliverance from the wrath of God (“you have been saved” v8)? We’ll never really understand what it means to ‘be saved’ – what our big problem is – we’ll think it’s about a boost of grace to fight sin rather than a gracious rescue from the blazing anger of God through the Son of God being burnt up in our place (Lev. 9:24; Rom. 3:25) – and we’ll think that every time we sin God’s anger needs a fresh propitiation – failing to rejoice that there is now no condemnation (Rom. 8:1).

But don’t we still sin and suffer and slide? Don’t we still feel the pull of the world, the flesh and the devil? Don’t we need to keep fighting the unholy trinity? Yes, absolutely – but the answer is not a new ‘deliverance’. The answer is to ‘know’, ‘remember’, ‘stand in’, ‘put on’ THE Gospel Deliverance (Eph. 2:18; 3:19; 4:32-5:2; 6:10-11).