Anyone who has served Jesus for any length of time will appreciate the truth of there being an evil entity who is intensely opposed to the reign of Christ. Plans to prayerfully spread the Gospel are met with a myriad of obstacles, and we often experience persecution (Revelation 2:9). Especially, getting the family ready for church on a Sunday morning is often a battle. Why? Because we have an enemy who wants to discourage and stumble us in whatever way he can.

Every Christian faces a three-fold enemy of the world, the flesh and the Devil. Even though Satan has been defeated by the person and work of Jesus (Luke 10:18; John 12:31; 1 John 3:8), the spiritual battle continues. And while it is impossible for someone who has been born again to be possessed by an unclean spirit, there is still a sense in which believers are oppressed by the Devil. This article examines what the Bible says we should expect in this regard.
1 Peter 5:8 tells us we should be self-controlled and alert because our enemy the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. What’s more, we’re told that if we submit ourselves to God and resist the Devil, then he will immediately flee (James 4:7). While we are ultimately kept safe by the sovereign power of God (Jude 1, 24; Phil 1:3-6) this doesn’t mean that there are not real spiritual threats or dangers.
Setbacks and Opposition in Ministry
In 1 Thessalonians 2:18 the apostle Paul says, “We wanted to come to you — certainly I, Paul, did, again and again — but Satan stopped us.” Clearly, the Devil has a certain amount of influence in this present world. Elsewhere, in Ephesians 6, Paul famously writes that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in the heavenly realms.
While within divinely predetermined limits, the experience of Job is also illuminating. In chapters 1 and 2, we are explicitly told how the Devil was the cause of Job’s suffering. Whether it be the theft of oxen and donkeys by the Sabeans, a fire from heaven which destroyed his sheep, three lots of Chaldean raiding parties who carried off his camels, a mighty wind which caused the death of his children, or the personal suffering of physical illness. Each and every one of these things are directly attributable to Satan.
Anyone who has served Jesus for any length of time will appreciate the truth of there being an evil entity who is intensely opposed to the reign of Christ. Plans to prayerfully spread the Gospel are met with a myriad of obstacles, and we often experience persecution (Revelation 2:9). Especially, getting the family ready for church on a Sunday morning is often a battle. Why? Because we have an enemy who wants to discourage and stumble us in whatever way he can.
Unresolved Anger
One of the things which is striking about the work of Satan — particularly in the New Testament epistles — is how ‘ordinary’ it is. Take for instance Paul’s words in Ephesians 4:26-27. “In your anger do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”
Note the logical flow between the two verses. In verse 26 we are told not to allow our anger to be expressed in sinful ways. Being angry in and of itself is not a sin. As with Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Mark 3:1-6, sometimes anger is not only justified, but a godly response. Although, being continually angry all the time doesn’t bring about righteous life which God requires (see James 1:19-20).
The key though is to not let the sun go down while we are still angry about something and we haven’t made an attempt to resolve it. Sweeping our anger under the carpet like that doesn’t solve things, but only makes it worse. Indeed, it gives the Devil a ‘foothold’ in twisting our hearts and driving a wedge between ourselves and the other person.
Unforgiveness and Division
Closely following on from the previous point, is Satan’s strategy to “divide and conquer”. The Lord Jesus says that even the Devil would not drive out a demon from someone because it would destroy what he is doing (i.e. Matthew 12:25-28). Alternatively, though, Satan seeks to divide Christians against each other (contra Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-23).
One of the chief ways in which Devil does this is through division. And the mechanism through which this is achieved is unforgiveness. In 2 Corinthians 2:5-11 the apostle Paul refers to the restoration of an individual who had previously undergone some form of church discipline.
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In all likelihood, the current myth that “Heresy is getting Jesus wrong,” which pops up from time to time, can be traced back to the Second English Act of Supremacy of 1558 (sometimes titled 1559, the year of its approval), which was part of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement under Elizabeth I which reestablished Protestantism as the faith of the Church of England following the reign of Mary I (Bloody Mary). It declared that anyone acting under the authority of the monarch…shall not in any wise have authority or power to order, determine, or adjudge any matter or cause to be heresy, but only such as heretofore have been determined, ordered, or adjudged to be heresy, by the authority of the canonical Scriptures, or by the first four general Councils…or such as hereafter shall be ordered, judged, or determined to be heresy by the High Court of Parliament of this realm, with the assent of the clergy in their Convocation.14

In his 1978 speech, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (who wrote the book that became the movie Blade Runner) wrote, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984.” Forty-five years later we find ourselves living in a world where perhaps most of the conflicts in public discourse are somehow connected to the manipulation of words.
Suddenly, words like “gender,” “racism,” and “equity” don’t mean what they used to mean. Meanwhile, our ears and social media accounts are bombarded by new terms like “microagression,” “intersectionality,” and “cultural appropriation.” If it seems as though other worldviews are wrestling for control of the English language’s steering wheel that’s only because they are.
“Haven’t You Heard It’s a Battle of Words?”
It should come as no surprise that today’s word manipulators gravitate to terms that carry maximum impact on hearts and minds. This is true whether they’re coining new terms or plundering old ones. As Robert J. Lifton explained long ago, people who practice this, whom he called “totalists,” “live in an environment characterized by the thought-terminating cliché.”2 They conscript words and phrases into the service of their ideology, strip them of their former identities, shave their heads, and put them in new ideological uniforms. In the war of ideas, words are the boots on the ground. They must be drilled into disciplined troops.
Does the reigning ideology require that the LGBTQ+ agenda be accepted by Christians? Then positive, inviting words like “affirming” must be drafted into service and applied to those churches who cooperate with that agenda. Those who don’t are obviously “haters” and “bigots.” (These are but early assault troops paving the way for the full-on invasion of elite forces like “gender non-conforming,” “transphobia,” and “lived experience,” thus signaling that the occupation is fully underway.)
But what if the other side mobilizes its own time-tested terminology in defense of its opposing beliefs? For example, how does the ideology defend itself against a word like “heresy?” Obviously, that word must be captured, re-educated, if you will, and assigned to its appropriate place on the battlefield.
“LGBTQ+? Where Do the Early Creeds Even Mention That?”
One of the most common ways of doing that with the word “heresy” is to limit its firepower. To slightly mix metaphors here, throughout church history “heresy” has served as a kind of “military assault weapon,”3 if you will, in theological battles. In a far less tolerant time, countless people were executed, often rather gruesomely, for heresy.
Of course, for the past few centuries the worst thing that can happen to most people accused of heresy is that they might have to find another place to go to church. Even so, that is now considered cruel and unusual punishment in the rhetoric of today’s ideologues (who will gladly “cancel” you out of your career and social circle if you step out of their prescribed verbal line).4
So, in recent years, many have tried to retool the weapon of the word “heresy” to degrade its functionality. They realize they can’t scrap it altogether, so they try to rebuild it with a much shorter range and less ammunition capacity, mainly so that it can’t be effectively used against them.
Perhaps the most popular way of doing this has been to limit the number of doctrines that “heresy” is able to target by insisting that it can only be applied to a limited set of doctrines—specifically, those doctrines that were established within the first half-millennium of the Christian church concerning the Deity of Christ and the Trinity, specifically at early church councils like the one that produced the Nicene Creed, which is still recited in many churches. This way, they can claim that current controversies over issues of sexual morality have nothing to do with heresy.
I once had a pastor in my own denomination tell me, “Heretics deny Nicea, not Westminster,”5 the Westminster Confession of Faith being one of our denominational standards affirming such things as the sole authority of Scripture and justification by faith alone, which are not found in the Nicene Creed. He couldn’t be more wrong.
If they can fool educated, conservative, Bible-believing Christians into accepting this canard, they will have effectively disarmed them of an important weapon in the battle over the teachings of God’s word.
A Recent Example
Several days before I wrote most of this on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, i.e., X, Megan Basham called out LGBTQ+ “affirming” pastor Kevin M. Young for “his heresies regarding sexuality.”6. Two minutes later, Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor Ben Marsh upbraided her, telling her to “get a life.”7 Less than a half-hour later, Basham asked Marsh to tell her “whether what Kevin Young teaches about homosexuality and transgenderism is heresy, which led to the following exchange a few minutes later. 
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Groff, a former mail carrier for the United States Postal Service (USPS) and an observant Evangelical Christian, was subject to progressive discipline over several months because of his commitment to observing the Sunday Sabbath as a day dedicated to worship and rest. He ultimately left his job when it became clear that he would be terminated. His attempt at vindicating his right to a workplace accommodation was unsuccessful in the lower courts, which invoked the old “more than de minimis” standard in ruling that the USPS was permitted to deny Groff’s request to be exempted from Sunday work because of the resulting imposition on his coworkers, disruption to the workplace and its workflow, and diminishment of employee morale. Groff’s case will now return to the lower courts for reassessment under the new, more demanding standard. 

Amid some very high-profile decisions last week, the Supreme Court delivered an important win for religious freedom in the workplace. In Groff v. DeJoy, the Court eased the way for religiously observant employees to obtain accommodations from their employers that are necessary to allow them to live their beliefs. This unanimous decision written by Justice Alito swept aside what the Court characterized as a nearly 50-year-long misunderstanding about the requirements of Title VII and the holding of a 1977 decision called TWA v. Hardison, which lower courts have interpreted to allow employers to deny requests for religious accommodations that would result in any burden on the employer that is “more than … de minimis,” or minimal.
In Groff, the Court says that the reading of its prior holding has been wrong all along. Instead, an employer may deny an employee’s request for a religious accommodation only if “the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business” (emphasis added).
The question presented by this case may seem like the kind of esoteric legal query – complete with obscure Latin terminology – that only a lawyer could love. What does it matter, one might ask, whether Title VII requires that an employer must show a more than de minimis burden or must meet some other standard before denying an employee’s request for a religious accommodation? It turns out it matters a great deal, as the facts of Gerald Groff’s case demonstrate.
Groff, a former mail carrier for the United States Postal Service (USPS) and an observant Evangelical Christian, was subject to progressive discipline over several months because of his commitment to observing the Sunday Sabbath as a day dedicated to worship and rest. He ultimately left his job when it became clear that he would be terminated.
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