Iain Atkinson

On Evil Spirits

I feel attacked by them this week, I feel the effects of the fact that I, with my church, we are warring against evil spirits this week. I had to face a nearly violent outburst from a coworker after my own rudeness or brusqueness with him. Our staff team discerned this reality over the weekend and prayed about it at length. This morning I was tremoring as family life unfolded around me. Amos asked me how I was and I said I was scared. I called to Maggie for help and she comforted me. I am reminded of some of the more surprising things I have asserted about evil and Satan in my writing and would like to write apologetically about it, that is to be an apologist, and to explain some things in the interest of our spiritual maturity. Let me get right into it with various brazen assertions, to brainstorm the subject and then perhaps approach it more systematically. First from A.I., i.e. Google translate.

Input: Do you consider Lucifer to be a friend?
Outputs:
s and he is a dead enemy, and there will be a bird, and as a feast for the god.
s and he is an enemy who will fly over and as a feast for the priest
s and he is like an enemy, and he is like an enemy, and he is like a heifer
s and he is a dead enemy and a bird is left, and as a holiday for the god
S and he is a red enemy, happiness, a bird, a bird, a bird, and a bird
S and he is red and in happiness to fly here, the spirit of the gaffer of the day
He is red and happy to fly in the morning
He is red and happy to fly in the wind of the day
So red and happy to fly, what a free sulphurous spirit

Lucifer is an enemy spirit who has been overcome. This blog is my place for brainstorming how it is that I assert the end that I have experienced. Lucifer has been overcome. All evil is ended. All around us burns a lake of fire, to be sure, but even the serpent and death itself have been burnt up in it. Lucifer is “a dead enemy”. But since all the world is a lake of fire in which death is burnt up, it is as if our worst fears are realised, and the planet is burning. So in this fire, Lucifer is “red and happy to fly, what a free sulphurous spirit”.

The enemy is enmity. In this apocalyptic pacifism that refuses enmity, wars against it, allows enmity to eat and burn itself up, enmity has been overcome. In the Lamb of God who let himself be led to the cross, the enmity of the human heart was overcome. In Jesus’ flesh the “dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2) was overcome. Since we are no longer enemies, we don’t set our face against the appearance of evil, the spirit of evil, the seeming activity of evil, the presence of fear, the spirit of a light that has been taken from all that is good and mis-used. In other words, Jesus does not slaughter Lucifer. Christ loves Satan. In the A.I. conversation at the top of this essay, the “S” at the beginning of many responses represents a YES. I love snakes. I have made peace with my fleshly fear, my totally understandable mammalian terror of the serpent.

I remember a book I had as a little boy about reptiles. In it was a picture of a two-headed snake. I have overcome that fear, and the doublemindedness of temptation that it represented.

My boy is scared of monsters. He senses the predatory nature around him. He learns that some animals eat others. He plays “can’t catch me” and senses the spirit of the chase. He is exposed to “monsters” and the concepts of fear and terror in books. He is suddenly worried about monsters when the light is low and his parents’ consciousnesses are yielding to sleep. Knowing better than most the spiritual realities, the apparent existence of monsters, the attempts of demons to capture Amos’ imagination, Maggie and I brazenly and correctly and creatively assert in Amos’ presence: no monsters here.

I encountered Satan in Dove Row. We lived with friends having moved back to London for a year. I got drunk one night – I don’t remember why. I don’t think I drank much. But fear of evil, which is evil itself, rose up in me. I was intoxicated late at night, vomited everywhere, and woke everyone with my cries for help. Half-conscious, I was scared of dying. I yelled at Maggie to get her to ask certain people to pray for me. I half recall a moment when she broke and cried, and I said something out loud about that being a good thing and a breakthrough. I half remember thinking to myself “these words come from the throne, I am at the very throne of God”. I think Maggie was recording me say all this. She accused me of being abusive, she took it to my parents. I feel at their feet in apology.

What I couldn’t just say to them, what I tried to say to Maggie but didn’t get anywhere with, is that these thoughts saved my life. To know that my heart and mind are sat at the throne saved me. In Maggie’s tears there was breakthrough, there was a moment of rising consciousness, acceptance and light, that I recall as if in a dream as a saving moment. Yet still I can say truly that in that moment I was possessed by Satan.

I had written my Meditation on Mark. I had understood what I wrote there, that the human being who says they are not God is Satan, that this is Satan speaking. This is the “Anti-Christ”, the “before Christ”, the spirit of just before, just next to Christ. I fully reckoned with it that night in Dove Row in this body. I, Iain Atkinson, overcame Satan in processing that incident in the subsequent months. The truths I had written in my Meditating in Mark became deeply and peacefully embodied in me, fully revealed, in understanding that the spirit that was “on the throne”, that needed to sit beside God, or in anyway to be before Christ, was anti-Christ, was Satan. In this drunken mess and the month or so of fall out, the snake ate its own tail and vanished in this body.

In that time I also remembered a childhood encounter with Satan. This is why I can assert that it was Satan I encountered at Dove Row: In reflecting on the event, in meditating deeply, I kept seeing a book cover I had glanced in the bookstore at Kensington Temple (a Pentecostal church at which my Dad worked until I was 7) when I was 5 or 6. It was called “The Enemy and His Schemes”, and on it was an image of a contorted male face, covered in darkness. Underneath was the author’s name: Colin Dye (The KT lead pastor). I discerned that in that glance, I had gained the fears both that Colin Dye was that scary man, and that I would become that scary man. In this realisation, and in confessing it to my Mum, and in once night of intense prayer as Maggie and I stayed with my parents having been kicked out of Dove Row, that fear was exorcised. The “I” as whom I had spoken much of my life, which doubted God’s good presence at KT or in Colin Dye’s words, and which deep down believed itself to be Satan, was recognized as Satan, and was consciously burnt up.

I wrote in Meditating on Mark that I had once prayed to Satan. I described it there as a foolish prayer, but I do not doubt that some readers of that, which will one day come along, will discredit everything I write there on that basis. I would like to explain that I confessed this prayer to my family, and later to my pastor at Tab church. I regard it as a genuinely foolish prayer. I regard it as leading to the demonisation I experienced subsequently, culminating in the Dove Row incident described above. However I regard this prayer as totally redeemed in all the spiritual breakthroughs of understanding to which I came, which I have been able to share in writing here and there, and able to embody to many in the light of my face.

Satan is a free sulphurous spirit. He rules the spirit of the air, the earth itself and the human flesh, with the permission and delight of God the Father. Nevertheless he lives in an appearance of existence which is not reality. Satan no longer really exists. I am aware of the falseness of these words. I yearn to find better expression.

An evil spirit is a scared thought. The scared thought is the spirit of the serpent inherent in human flesh. This fear has created the world as we know it. Lucifer was genuinely an angel of worship which fell or was cast out and inhabited a snake and made it talk. His speech has lived in the human nervous system ever since until the Nazarene discerned it as the “strong man”, and in his weakness crushed its head.

What is an evil spirit? It is said in the church that some overly cautious or paranoid Christians see a “demon under every rock”. Where are demons? What are they? They are scared thoughts living in the information of light. They certainly are under every rock and behind every door. This should be no more surprising, scary, or paranoia-inducing than the fact that there are bacteria under every rock and behind every door. A sane, free, and fearless human being takes occasional precaution against bad bacteria, washing their hands after using the toilet for example, but then ignores bacteria 99% of their day. The same is true of mature believers. Some immature believers have OCD about demons, washing their hands in the blood of Jesus with every thought of the day, like Peter asking to be bathed when Jesus was happy to offer a foot-wash. Some immature believers see the OCD actions of others around them and prefer the pendulum swung in what is perceived as the opposite direction, denying the prevalence or even the existence of demons.

Demons exist, Satan exists, but they are dead and defeated. Like a “heifer” in the Google translate results shared above, Lucifer is sacrificed to be a “feast for the priest”. Within the redemptive economy of the kingdom of God, Satan is food for the one who overcomes.

When I say to Amos “no monsters here”, I choose not to say “monsters don’t exist”. All the theology above is felt and confirmed in the fact that such a statement — “monster’s don’t exist” — would be untrue to Amos’ felt experience. Instead, Amos’ felt experience is of the possibility that I will collude with monsters, that I will also embody the predatory spirit of fear. He asks me “are you a monster?” He asks me “Will you as my God on earth right now please confirm whether there are or aren’t any mosters here?”. And everything hangs on my response. I get to decide, or create the reality for Amos, of whether there are monsters.

On a few occasions Amos has told me that there are monsters here. I ask him what they look like and how they feel. I encourage him to perceive and discern them. He hasn’t offered up much without my leading. But I will ask him “is it green? Is it scared?”, and then I ask him if he wants to give it a hug. In him the enmity against demons, the primal fear, is overcome. He would not believe a snake encouraging him to doubt what his Father had told him.

In this day human history ends. In this day Christians are free to love and interact with demons, spirits of all kinds, seeing in all things the joy of the creator. In this free and joyful play, fear is overcome. In this happy banquet of all that God has made, fear is consumed.

I was in the Young V&A kids museum to which Maggie and I often take Amos. I suddenly felt that the whole museum was a cat. I felt the spirit of the place as feline. I talked with it briefly. I was open to such thoughts through noticing the interplay of my sense of “I”, my sense of “God”, and my sense of “place”. In that very moment my friend sent me a reel on Instagram in which a band parodied a worship song by singing “My cat is an awesome cat, He sits on the top of the fridge, and shits in the litterbox my cat is an awesome cat” – or some such. It was what we want when we want confirmation of such things. The spirit of the Young V&A museum can be appropriately seen as a cat. I also saw moments later something that I probably admittedly had seen before, that one of the largest pictures on a certain mural near the museum entrance was of a cat. God appears in that museum in the calm, domesticated but still animal beauty of a cat.

I often experience my reality by means of imaginatively perceiving angels or spirits around me. The confluence of God’s work both within my imagination and in the wider informational world around me is often confirmed back to me by means of signs and wonders, such as my friend sending me “my cat is an awesome cat”. I see now a floor of cockroaches. Many spirits of fear would like to speak or influence us. The solution God offers is pictured to me now as simply laying a plank over the whole sea of insects. We need not touch them with our feet, we can simply walk across it all. Neither is there sin in stamping on them. To step on the snakes head was what was prophesied of Eve’s seed. But we remember that our friend fulfilled that prophesy by letting someone put a nail through his feet! What pacifist, courageous fulfilment.

Now I see an angel holding a large search-light. I see the illuminating spirit of God shining all around. I see that in your and my spirits, light is entering cavernous spaces. I sense that in the very next exhale, Satan is overcome. Perfect love drives out fear. And without the drama of a herd of pigs rushing down the side of a hill into a lake (Mark 5), our demons are exorcised into the lake of fire that is for me, right now, the shining light of the sun descending through the open window of L’Eau A La Bouche on Broadway market, a couple hundred yards from Dove Row, onto my face.