In our previous lesson, we examined how the enemy tries to build strongholds that he can latch onto. Now let's look at some of these strongholds.
Let's talk about the stronghold of sexual perversion -- voluntary and involuntary. Some people involved in sexual perversion had no choice. It was forced upon them and some people do it voluntarily. I'm talking about anything that is against God's norm (God's standard). God set up sexuality in such a way that you have a husband and a wife in the context of marriage. People doing anything out of that context would be a perversion.
Homosexuality would be a perversion. Look at the physiological makeup. God didn't make people that way. He made people to fit together -- and that just doesn't happen in homosexuality. You have to violate the physiology for that to come about. Incest is sexual perversion, bestiality, transvestites, the list goes on and on. Anything that is out of God's norm of how He designed you and made you to function in holiness is sexual perversion. Pornography is another way. Whether you are voluntarily or involuntarily participating, the devil will try to get an inroad there. You are your seeking to feed the sex drive outside of holiness as God designed it in marriage. You're feeding your lust, giving ground.
Let's look at pornography. There's usually a distinction betweens men's and women's pornography. There is women's pornography out there; it's a lot different from men's, even though there may be some similarities. If you were to look at the things that men look at, men are very visual. They look at naked women, or sensual women dressed in a way to be seductive and to entice a person to lust. If a man begins to feed himself with that, that is pornography. We can also apply the same standards to women looking at men and lusting, but that's not the normal way most women involve themselves in pornography. Women are enticed through their imagination of romance. Therefore women's pornography would be romance novels, soap operas -- anything that feeds the imagination of romance. Anything that feeds the imagination of romance outside of having this with your husband is pornography. It dilutes the marriage. Women begin thinking, "Why can't my husband be like this?" It's the same thing, so I would also put women in the same category. In other words, if a woman has an addiction to romance novels, she's in the same category as a man who has an addiction to Playboy or Internet pornography. This is because the person is feeding something there that is not met in the holy relationship of marriage. It goes beyond just saying who did what to whom.
The occult is another thing that gives an inroad to darkness, voluntarily and involuntarily. This passage, starting at Exodus 20:3, says: "You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of that which is in heaven or above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the sea. You shall not worship them or serve them. For I the Lord God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers on the children on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me."
You are not to have any other gods. Any time you begin to encounter any spirit besides God's spirit, that would fall into the category of the occult. If you're trying to find out your future by looking at your horoscope, you're trying to find out something that God has not given you information of. Anything that you're trying to find information apart from the Spirit of God would be an occult practice. Leviticus 19:31 says: "Do not turn to mediums or spiritists, do not seek them out to be defiled by them, I am the Lord your God."
So there's the occult. When we become involved in the occult, it removes our protection. Leviticus 20:6 says: "As for the person who turns to mediums or spiritists, I will play the harlot after them, I will also set My face against that person and I will cut them off from among his people." Whenever you involve yourself in the occult, you remove the protection of God.
Witchcraft is a part of it, but our culture is not strong in witchcraft like other cultures. Which is very predominate and ingrained into the fabric of their society. However, there is the occult, and a lot of the occult may not be as extreme as you may see in the movies, but it is still present, still prevalent and still around. Most people who are involved in areas of witchcraft are deceived in thinking that the devil is going to win, because God is some weak deity who is dying off and that someone will have to take over. So they're trying to hop on the winning side.
But, you don't have to join some satanic cult in order to accomplish this. Most people who are involved in the occult don't do that. One of the primary ways that people involve themselves in the occult today would be through games, imagination games where they have to play a particular role. Dungeons And Dragons fits in that category. There are a lot of computer games that fit in that same category. All you have to do is look at the cover at a lot of the computer games and ask , "Does that glorify God, or is it demonic?"
I know some people believe that this sort of thing is no big deal, that it is not that big of a thing. But the devil that we fight against does not play fair. Anywhere he can get in, he will. Children's cartoons are another place. He begins to lower their defenses as children. I'm not saying they're going to get demonized just because they watch certain cartoons. But it does lower the defenses of what they're able to accept and receive. I've done enough deliverance with children; you need to watch these cartoons with them. If they're calling on spirits, this is not a good thing. Back in the 1980s, my kids watched the Smurfs, all of a sudden this guy begins pulling out this magic book and begins saying these magic spells. At that point, I said we're not watching this anymore. People told me that I was overreacting. But I've seen enough darkness to say the devil does not play by fair rules. Anywhere he can get an inroad, he's going to do it. When the inroad happens, there's not usually an immediate attachment. But there is the open door; you participate with that until there is attachment.
It can begin very young, even in the womb with words spoken over the child in the womb. We looked at the passage of the boy who was demonized, foaming at the mouth. What in the world did that boy do that would cause him to be demonized? The child hadn't lived long enough to be engaged in that major of a sin. There had to be another inroad into that child's life -- and it came through the generation, or some opening. Demons just can't attach without having a right to do so. They have to have a crack, something has to be stuck in there. They just can't go attach because they feel like it. They have to have a right to do so. And if a child is demonized, somewhere the devil says, "I have a right to attach myself to that child."
Anything that is not Christian can serve as an inroad for the enemy. The cult involvement voluntary or involuntary would be things that are "not Christian." Anything in your life that is not Christian fits in this category -- Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Islam, Hinduism, all of those things regardless of how close they say they are to Jesus, and how they say "Jesus was a nice guy," that doesn't cut it.
Drugs is another one. Demons even help people find drugs. We had a guy working in the church, he was struggling with drugs and getting off of them. He came here and we put him to work for a month or two. He was working around the church grounds. He walked around the front and he found some drugs. I've walked around here before, other staff members had walked around the church, a lot of people work here, a lot of people walk around, but he is the only one who found the drugs. He quickly found those and brought them to me shaking saying, "Please take these." They happened to be the drugs he liked. It's an inroad and the spirits of darkness are very tuned into this. People who take drugs are opening themselves up to demonic spirits. The reason is because you're losing control of your mind and your body, you're opening yourself up. That is one of the reasons the Scripture says, "Do not get drunk with wine." Why not get drunk? Because you are losing control, you are giving control over to a foreign substance.
Violence is another thing that gives the enemy an inroad. I'm talking about giving honor to violence, such as when a person has an addiction to slasher movies, violent movies, or horror movies. Psalm 11:5 says, "The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked and the one who loves violence his soul hates." This is the person who is consumed with violence, loves violence, dominated by violence. Psalms 74:20 says, "Consider the covenant for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence."
The dark places are filled with the habitations of violence. I have to exercise wisdom. When God made the male, he made the male to be the protector. He put within the man a warring spirit. That is why your little boy whom you don't want to play with guns gets his tinker toys out and makes one. You get so upset and wonder why your child is doing that. We need to have balance in this. It's very normal and natural for young boys to play army, or to go out for war. When I'm talking about this area of violence, I'm not talking about that type of thing. God put that in their nature, that protective part within them, that shepherding part of their nature. I'm talking about the person who is addicted to it, consumed by it. The person who sees it, there is a thrill that rushes within him whenever he sees it. When that happens you know there is darkness there.
2 Peter 2:19 says: "Promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption for what a man has overcome, by this he is enslaved." If you are consumed by it, dominated by it, ruled by it -- then you are enslaved by it. This is a general verse that would fit across the board in any category.
Curses are another area that give the enemy an inroad. Curses can be words spoken over us by our parents, teachers, by other people. We simply received those words, they have power, we can't brush them off. Or they can be vows that we have made, vows that said, "I can't" or "I will never." Words that were spoken over you, self-inflicted, especially when it comes into areas of fear, where you continue to reemphasize with yourself. There are also generational curses. We talked about the generational sin that comes down from the family line. There is also the generational curse that comes down. People excuse it, and they say, "I know he has a bad temper, but he's an O'Malley; all the O'Malley's have a bad temper."
Another inroad comes from trauma. This is a cheap shot by the enemy. You encounter a trauma and the enemy tries to squeak in there some way. Trauma could be a long-term sickness, a traumatic auto accident, or other accident. He goes for people who have been victims of violence or rape or who have been traumatized. The enemy will try to get in there if he can.
Someone asked me if the events of Sept 11, 2001, where the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were attacked by terrorists crashing hijacked planes into them, could lead to the United States being traumatized and demonized. It's always possible that people who have watched the events of that week can allow fear to come in and eventually become traumatized by it and give ground over to that. I would say the people who are more subject to it are those people who actually encountered the event. Usually the devil doesn't say, "Because you have had an accident," or "Something's happened to you," or, "You have experienced a trauma, I have a right." Instead, he whispers into the ears of the people to be afraid. He tells them that they are going to be harmed again. They begin to dwell on all these things that are not of the Lord. They begin to entertain these thoughts to the place where that gives ground. Or they may convince themselves that nobody loves them, or "nobody cares" or "God isn't there for me." They may ask, "Why did He allow this thing to happen?" They begin to entertain these things. Children can be traumatized by watching television, giving into an area of fear.
Enemy Strongholds and In-Roads
Part 2
Another stronghold or inroad is ancestral. We call this a familiar spirit. Exodus 20:5 puts it this way, "You shall not worship them or serve them for I the Lord your God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me." This is something that God gets, the enemy who does play by fair rules understands that this is an inroad, an avenue that he can travel down. There's judgment that may come from generation to generation, but the devil says, "This is a road that I can go down too," so he will inflict something from generation to generation. My spirit of rage was an ancestral sin. I was born with this; all my life I had this. It came from my mother's side; my grandfather, Joe Howard, had a spirit of rage. It was so consuming, so dominating, his son, Joe Howard Jr., also had it. He had three sons and two daughters, only one of them had the spirit of rage. It was the one that had the family name. Joe Howard and he had it. My uncle Joe was so consumed with rage, that the family even had a plan to deal with his rage. My grandpa would be out in the field, my mother, who was the oldest, would take the little children and hide them, my Aunt Mary would go out into the field and get my grandpa. He would come in to try to settle him down. In the latter times it would get so severe that he could not settle him down. The only way to settle him was for grandpa to take his fist and to physically knock him out.
They committed uncle Joe to a hospital. He asked the Lord to deliver him. The Lord came and delivered him divinely of the spirit of rage. He told my grandparents, "God has delivered me of the spirit of rage, so you can come get me." And they said, "No way, the way our history is with you." They changed their minds only when my two aunts who prayed sent them a letter without any knowledge of what Joe had said. The letter said, "Go pick up Joe, God has told us that He has delivered him of this rage." So they went and picked him up.
My mom didn't have the spirit of rage; how come I got it? Well, my name is Rodney Howard Hogue. My grandfather's name was Joe Howard, his son was Joe Howard Jr. So who got the family name? I also got the family demon. That was one birthright I didn't care to have. This thing was no respecter, it came down the generational line. When I named my children, I made sure they had no name that was connected with the Howard family. They travel down from generation to generation. We're going to break off some of the generational things that have come down from generation to generation. A lot of times the things that we have is the fertile ground that has come to that generation. We are prone to it, we can give in to it. I don't think I was born with that demon as much as I just gave in to it. I don't know. But this thing was strong within me; there wasn't anything in my life we could point to why this thing was there.
I remember ministering to a man one time who had a spirit of rage in the early 1980s. At that time I did a lot more talking to demons than I do now. Nobody was there to teach me what to do, so far as getting information and speaking to demons. I commanded the demons to tell me whey they came in; they gave me a year and a situation so specific. I said, "You are lying to me because this person isn't that old. This was like 10 years before this person was born. I brought this to the judgment seat of Christ, and said, "You are lying to me, you can't do this, you must tell me the truth." But I was still getting this thing. The Spirit of the Lord spoke to me and said, "It came in through the father." So I asked it if it came in through the father, and it said, "Yes." When we pulled up that ground, that spirit left. When we got rid of that, then the ground was given up and then we were able to minister deliverance to this man. We had two or three things that came in that occasion. This is why you find children being demonized -- it comes in through an ancestral spirit.
Empowered objects are another inroad. People can have an item in their possession and not be aware of it. Just because you have an article in your house, do not automatically assume that you have demons in your house. But those are inroads that we need to understand.
Empowered objects are items that are used in cultic or that are cultic in practice. Demons can attach to them. They can be things like articles of jewelry, statues, masks, etc. When I travel to foreign countries I do not bring anything home that would represent some foreign god or deity. I don't have any Buddhas in my house. Some people argue that the item was given to them by someone who was very close to them who died, and that it is all they have to remember the person by. I would say that they need to get rid of the stuff and find another way to remember them.
If you have anything that can be used by darkness, representative of darkness, throw it out, especially if you have received it as a gift. A woman had inherited some jewelry from an aunt involved in witchcraft. For example, she got the kitchen table from her aunt, and the kitchen table moved. It bounced. She decided she didn't want it anymore. She threw it away. This same woman had some jewelry her aunt had given her. These were very valuable pieces -- gold and great value to this jewelry. She had received some of this jewelry as gifts and the rest of it as inheritance. Her aunt, the one who practiced witchcraft, had been very dear to her. She wanted to keep the jewelry, but there were demons attached to it from the witchcraft, so she asked me what to do. The Lord had her bring it up in the conversation, and my response was, "If the Lord brought it up, then He wants you to get rid of it." So she called her husband, told him where it was, and I went over to pick it up. I brought it to her, gave it to her, and she gave it to me. And I received it, which was a dumb thing for me to do because then I had the harassment because I still had these articles of jewelry with me. I had some very physical things going on. It was weird stuff, things were flying and stuff like that. I got rid of them, the Lord told me, "You received these and you shouldn't have." So I got them and said, "I reject these!" Then I drove across the bridge, throwing them into Lake Washington because I did not want anyone else to get these empowered objects.
Anything that is given, people may not know what they have, the Holy Spirit will begin to guide you to those things. He will show you what to get rid of. I do get rid of the obvious, and then I also get rid of whatever else the Holy Spirit leads me to get rid of.
And keep in mind that even though some of the people involved in those kinds of things may think they are actually giving a blessing of some sort, still the enemy does not play by fair rules and puts a curse because they received something that did not come from God. So, those things like that -- there are certain things like that, that I just don't hang onto. We need to be real discerning with that. Some things, no doubt, are neutral. Others are empowered.
Of course, you do have to be a bit careful about getting rid of other people's things. If you are in a household where you don't have authority to get rid of it, you can't just throw an empowered object away because you don't have the authority to do so. In that type of situation I would recognize that this thing is in the house. I believe there is a grace of God to cover and protect. God will understand that you are not hanging onto another's property out of rebellion. If you have the authority to get rid of it, do so. But if you don't have that authority, don't get rid of it. Just go and pray and cover it and ask God to protect it. The same holds when you are visiting someone's house and they have something that makes you uncomfortable. I pray a brief covering prayer while I am there. I don't just go throw other people's things away.
The next stronghold we will look at is involuntary exposure to evil. That would be like exposing children to pornography or exposing children to sexual acts or even movies that may create fear. Let me share an example. There was a woman named Sharon who had a 4- year-old son. And the father worked on a submarine and would be away at sea for long periods of time and then home for a while. One time he was home, he watched the movie "Poltergeist" with his 4-year-old son. He shouldn't have been watching a show like that with a young child, but for some reason that thought did not cross his mind. He had had a relationship with God and just kind of poo-pooed that kind of stuff. He thought that it was not a big deal and his little son watched it with him.
He went back to sea as submariners do. While he was gone, the son just would not sleep by himself. He was in such great fear that he always had to sleep with his mother. She said this became very annoying. So, one night before she went to bed, he was crying and said, "I want to come sleep with you." She said, "No, you've got to sleep here tonight." Finally, she began to think this might be something of darkness, it might be the devil doing this. The Lord brought an incident to her memory. She remembered all the times that she was driving down the road and she was singing and worshiping the Lord. Her little 4-year-old boy would reach over and put his hand over her mouth and say, "Don't sing about Jesus. Don't sing about Jesus." She began to realize that something spiritual was going on and that was probably related to the fear her son was experiencing.
So she just began to rebuke the fear and all of a sudden the boy looked around and said, "Mommy, I can't see." Now, the light was on. There's nothing as fierce in the world as an angry mamma whose baby has been touched. That protective thing that kind of rises up and she decides the danger is not going to touch her baby anymore. So, she just went after this thing. She said, "You let go of my baby in the name of Jesus. I rebuke you. I send you to hell." The wrath of God and the fury of mommy rose up in this woman.
After a little bit, he said, "I can see you, Mommy." And a smile came on his face. He was able from then on to sleep through the night in his own bed. He didn't have the fear and he never went back and slept in her bed. The only thing she can point it to (and she felt like the Lord told her this) is that she remembers coming in the house one day and saw her little 4-year-old watching "Poltergeist" with the dad. So that was one of those involuntary things. It was involuntary exposure to some evil.