The Unseen Kingdom Part 1 by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: Sermon Notes

How Did Satan Get in Charge?

The serpent comes to Eve and says, "Did God say you cannot eat of every tree in the garden?" She said, "Every tree in the garden we might eat, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we must not eat and we must not touch, otherwise we surely die." And then he says, "You shall not surely die. For God knows that the day you eat of it, you will be as gods, knowing good and evil."

In doing it, they disobeyed God. They sinned against God. But how did doing that put Satan in charge? Maybe you've never asked yourself that question. And because we've never asked ourselves that question, a lot of people have fallen into that same trap.

What is it about a contrary ideology to the dictate of God that puts you under Satan? By the time the devil is tempting Jesus, he says, "All the kingdoms of this world belong to me." Between Genesis and Matthew, a lot has changed. Just by what happened there in the garden, Satan is now in charge.

This is where Jesus — the final Adam — got what the first Adam missed, because it was the same thing. What the devil was advising didn't seem like it benefited him in any way. "You're hungry. Turn stone to bread." And Jesus's response: it is written, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word."

Not everybody sells their soul to the devil deliberately. The moment your ultimate allegiance is not to God, you are under Satan. A life without boundaries is a life without logic.

Colossians 1:12-13 — Delivered and Conveyed

Colossians 1:12-13 — "Giving thanks to the father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the son of his love."

A lot of people don't understand that salvation in and of itself is a deliverance. The moment you confess your allegiance to Christ, the hold that Satan had over you and over your family is expired. Many times we have to do special prayers for people who are ignorant of these facts. It is the ignorance that gives the devil a loophole in the first place.

For most of us, the reason we gave our lives to Christ is because someone preached to us that the bad things we do will take us to hell. That's true in a sense. But understand this — it turns out that it is not because I stole that I'm a thief. It is because I'm a thief that I stole. It is not because I lied that I'm a liar. I am a liar first before I lie. We didn't understand the kingdom dynamic. We just gave our hearts to Christ to escape hell. We didn't know we belong to any kingdom.

You can be influenced by the devil and not know it.

You Were Dead But Walking

Ephesians 2:1 — "And you hath he made alive." All I did was come out for an altar call and confess my faith in Jesus. And now I'm discovering that all this while I was dead. How was I dead? I didn't know I was dead. "You hath he made alive" — at what point was I dead?

He continues — you were dead in trespasses and sins. He says, "Wherein in time past you walked." So you were dead but you were walking. His description of death is not immobility. His description of death is that you were animated by a foreign spirit, a foreign influence. You were walking dead. Walking dead, talking dead, acting dead, had a job as a dead man.

This phenomenon is not known to many people until they're out of it. There can be symptoms — like anger, like infidelity, like your attitude towards money, in different things. These things are but the fruits. At the core there is something wrong.

Ephesians 2:2 — "In time past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air." There is a cause of this world. There is a prince behind that cause. Not everybody who stands up with a hot take online is doing so of their own accord — there is a prince. Behind the culture is a spirit. Behind the spirit is a prince.

The Illustration — You Don't Have to Be Possessed

Let me demonstrate something. I asked four guys to stand in a line, three of them with eyes closed, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. When the one at the front walks, they follow. When he stops, they stop — with eyes closed. What I just described is what is happening to many people and they don't know it.

There is a previously established pattern of doing marriage, of doing career, of doing life. You did not know that the person who started it and normalized it in culture was influenced by the devil. You don't have to be possessed to be controlled.

You walked according to the course. There is a cause, a way they do things, a way they do marriage, a way they do life, a way they view relationships. And that cause of the world is according to the prince of the power of the air — a spirit, and then a prince operating in people of disobedience.

Now let me explain why sometimes you have to do deliverance more than once. The spirit influence has gone. But the system that the spirit put in place is still there. And because there is no discipleship, the person is still following the old pattern. Because like programming — when you create a system in your life conducive for the spirit to operate, they will operate. That's why you can be born again, speaking in tongues, and still find the same thing that happened to your grandparents' marriage happening in your life — because you have not divorced yourself from the system.

Three Things Jesus Said About the Two Kingdoms

1. You cannot belong to both kingdoms at the same time. Matthew 6:24 — "No man can serve two masters." And it's interesting that the second master he was talking about in this context is money. Money can be a spirit entity. Money is not just something you can have — it's something that can have you. There are people who have pocketed money and there are people that money has pocketed. You can't serve God and Mammon.
2. You can be a churchgoer and not belong to the kingdom of God. Jesus looks at religious leaders in John 8:44 and says, "You are of your father the devil." These were religious men — men who knew the scriptures, men who attended worship. The devil doesn't have to step into some churches. He has people there. It was religious men that accused Jesus constantly, got him arrested, got him killed. Never forget that.
3. Your character reveals your citizenship. It is true that by grace are you saved through faith, not of yourselves — it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. Ephesians 2:8-9. But in verse 10 he says, "You are his workmanship." You are not saved by works, but those who are saved by grace will have workmanship. Created in Christ Jesus to do good works. Even though the works is not what makes you who you are, you cannot be who you are without works. John 8:44 — "You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own — for he is a liar and the father of it."

Your character reveals your citizenship. So you can know: there are two ways the devil controls people — either by demonic possession or by a mindset that makes you act in a manner consistent with the dictates of the kingdom of darkness.

Two Seeds — The Foundational Division

Genesis 3:15 — one of the most important verses in the Bible. Theologians call this the protoevangelion — the first declaration of the gospel. A summary of the entire Bible. When he says, "I will put enmity between you that is the serpent and the woman, and between her seed and your seed" — in procreation women don't have seed, it is men who produce it. So when he says "her seed," it was a spiritual prophetic intimation that a virgin one day will conceive.

The seed of the woman will bruise the head of the serpent. Golgotha was called the place of the skull. And it was there, at the cross, that it was fulfilled.

This text divides the whole world into two races — not white or black, that's just skin deep. The two main races in the entire world: the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. There are people walking around with a different seed operating in them. The world is divided into two.

He has translated us — all this while there were two kingdoms — from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his dear son.

John 8:32 — "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." The Jews said, "We've never been in bondage." He said, "What? Anyone who commits sin is a slave to sin."