God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
The notion that spiritual warfare involves direct confrontation with demons is foreign to Scripture. Christians who verbally confront demons waste energy and demonstrate ignorance of the real war. We are not called to convert demons, but sinners. The battle is rather with the false ideologies men and demons propagate so that the world believes them. Doomed souls are inside their fortresses of ideas, which become their prisons and eventually their tombs – unless they are delivered from them by belief in the truth.
We believe that the Scriptures distinguish between a general work of conviction by the Spirit – such as may make an Esau weep and a Felix tremble – and the special, life-conferring call, given by the grace of a sovereign God to those whom He has chosen. Only those who are predestinated receive this call and it is clearly stated not to follow justifying faith but to precede it (Rom. 8:30; Acts 13:48, etc.) and to secure the consent of those to whom it is given (John 6:36, 37; Eph. 2:1-8). It is those who are born again who “see the kingdom of God” and thus believe the gospel.
