Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:

Ephesians 2:2 KJV

I WONDER sometimes… this prolly why folks don’t fool with me. My thoughts are quite uncomfortable, even as I scale the walls of my own humanity and dig my way into being myself.

But this IS myself. So it is what it is.

Check this out: Jesus said that He had all power and authority given to Him in heaven and in earth when He GOT UP. Yeah? Yeah. It’s all in His hand. This is what we believe. He took the control from death, hell, and the grave. Sin lost its power—and so did any and everything not in accordance to the divine will of the Father. We good? Good.

Let’s keep following the logic here. Switching lanes, but I promise I’m going somewhere.

The word of God does not say that satan is prince of the air; it says that he is the prince of the POWER of the air—literally the atmosphere, where weather and climate are created. You still with me? He is: Not the prince of seasons and circumstances. Not powerful in his own right, either. But a powerless prince who rides the power of the elements and the times and seasons that God ordained before the foundations. He is literally the prince riding the power of seasons and circumstance.

Which is to say that he has no power of his own. He is a powerless prince. Cuz Jesus already told y’all that ALL POWER AND AUTHORITY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH WAS GIVEN INTO HIS HAND. He has simply mastered the art of sleight of hand by using what is already available to make it “seem like.” Like what? Well. Whatever you think it might be based on the erroneous assumptions you’ve made about God, about yourself, about people based on your experiences and trauma and emotion and just…flesh.

Still tracking? Okay cool. ITS ALSO ALRIGHT IF YOU NEED TO HOP OFF RIGHT HERE. I quite literally think myself into contortions sometimes and the Lord is gracious enough to let me work it out like a puppy with a chew toy.

A little further. Another lane shift but we’ll get off on the exit up ahead, I promise.

The air (whose power satan rides off of) also carries other things on it. It has no voice of its own, no smell, no beginning or end, no starting place or end point. Yet, the right kind of air can do a lot of different things. Air creates just as quickly as destroys. Air moves as much as it can stagnate. Air can give life; air can suffocate. Like literally too much oxygen could kill you in the wrong circumstances. Air creates wind by moving, and in that movement, inside that invisible and intangible yet very much present and known circulating air, we get sounds, shifts, and sensory input. Our voices are air moving in certain ways across a specific region of the body. Our souls are made from God’s own breath. Tornados are born of winds whipping violently in the same direction; clouds cover and pass over vast areas and the wrong kind of air creates pressure and electricity. Air moves storm systems across the country sometimes while also holding massive hurricanes in one spot flooding folks out. Wind wears down mountain ranges and builds up beaches.

Air is power. Wind is powerful. This is what satan works with.

Okay. If you rode this far, I’m so grateful! We are getting off here.

When you put wind and sound together you get suggestions. Assumptions. Thoughts form around the sense and sound, and we interpret them based on who and how we are. When somebody says their name is in the wind, who put it there? Are their ears burning or is their spirit rejoicing? It’s simply a sense, a sound. But it becomes a suggestion, a thought based on how we receive the sound.

I said all that to say that satan’s greatest trick is the casting of sound into the air. He is known to mimic the light; in fact, in the coming age that’s how he gone get over on so many people: by “looking like” the Morning Star that he used to be. And we ain’t never been to heaven so we don’t know how GLORIOUS it must be to have been so close to God for so long that we can mimic the light that emanates from God’s glory. We just get itty bitty flashes of it from time to time. Even Moses, who had regular degular conversations with Elohim only got to see the hind parts. Lucifer was up in the Holy Hill. He got that sauce. The Bible said the VERY ELECT GONE BE DECEIVED AND THE SAVED GONE SCARCELY MAKE IT. That’s a pretty decent disguise. And no, God didn’t take nothing from satan just like God don’t take nothing from us. The gifts and calling are without repentance, BUT SO IS THE WRITTEN JUDGMENT. TUH.

Anyway, back on track. satan drops a sound, the sense of something into the wind. That sound then becomes amplified by the catastrophic impressions already imprinted into us because experience without expression and understanding become traumatic response. Trauma misaligns the ear to hear. Once you hear wrong, you will see wrong because thoughts attached to emotional experiences become systems of belief. And what we believe governs how we perceive. This is where the demonic influence comes in because those hell -bound deserters and castaways now foul spirits ride the sound, amplify it, shape it, land it just so. From these we get the suicidal ideation; depression; rage; envy; fear; wrath; sexual perversion; the feelings of abandonment and worthlessness, guilt and shame. Pride.

And so when the word says we would not be ignorant of his devices (his strategies, for regular English), what’s the strategy?

The strategy is the forming of thought from sense and sound not spoken out of the mouth of God. Air is the conduit of spirit, but there is no cap on what spirit can sit in it. And since satan is the prince of the power of the air, his demonic confederation uses his sleight of hand—the ministry of mimicking the light and misusing what he knows from his time in heaven—to ride the wind right into our emotional centers with thoughts intended to build towering belief systems that would exalt themselves against the knowledge of God.

I believe Paul called that a stronghold.

And yeah. I said confederation. Because those spirits want bodies as of old. The sons of God like the body parts of the men, and will do anything to put your body back on to satisfy themselves. So they use satan’s ability to get what they want—which is his power of persuasion through sound, and satan gets what he wants: the tearing away of God’s presence from your life to bring sorrow to the Father and death to you. Eternal death, not just physical.

Why on earth did I just say all of that?

I dunno. I was just sitting here thinking. And the thought started with how easy it is for us to blame the devil for what we do, when all he has done is sent a sound that pleases our flesh. I was thinking about that whole 1st chapter of James where it says, “Don’t you ever say God tempted you, cuz God don’t tempt people. That’s you. You getting dragged off by your own flesh.” It is the flesh that is continually looking for some wrong thing to come into agreement with, to give a reason for why what is wrong is justified.

Or the part before that in James, which says, “You better ask without doubt. Cuz doubters are double-minded, unstable like ships tossed “baggenforf” in the wind. And if you doubt AT ALL, you minuswell don’t ask because all a doubter can expect is NOTHING from God.” No. Thing. Not because God doesn’t want you to have it, but the problem of unbelief disqualifies us from the promise designed for us in Christ. It’s like unplugging your computer from the wall—no power? No program.

When Jesus said, “Have faith in God,” the real pressure point was to believe in Jesus and sit right there, because it is HIS FAITH that makes manifest to us the promise. You know: buried in Christ, raised in Christ, seated with Christ, mind of Christ, spirit of Christ… all these things are the apostles’ many ways of saying “CHRIST DID IT ALL, Y’all! Rest in that. Work from that.”

Meanwhile? Satan just sends a sound. It’s what we do with what we hear that creates the confusion.

See Eve.

The devil makes suggestions. It’s on you to take ‘em. Or not. But the only way to steer as clear as possible is the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, the Divine Wind of God, who takes the word and turns it into a sword and took the Son of Man and resurrected Him with all power and authority given into His hand. And the more word you have ingested, the sharper the sword that pierces between bone and marrow, separating out what is Spirit from what is soul and sin and death. The more Spirit and Truth to be had, the bigger the walls that fall. The lies formed out of the enemy’s mind and cast into the atmosphere become the houses built on sand that crumble underneath the much greater excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ.