PART TWO

THE NATURE OF REJECTION

 III.       WHO IS THIS SPIRIT OF REJECTION?

 But we know about these things because God has sent his Spirit to tell us, and his Spirit searches out and shows us all of God's deepest secrets.(1 Corinthians 2:10 TLB)

There's no captive on earth who doesn't know what rejection is.  Your very life has oozed rejection.  You've seen it on every face.  You've tasted it from every tongue.  Every laugh you've heard on the edge of a crowd - it was meant for you.  You've met rejection where you expected it; you've encountered it where you least expected it.  When you thought you were home, they pulled out the carpet.  When you thought you'd found freedom, they threw you in jail.  And as for true love - well, we all have stories we could tell. 

If there's one thing you understand, it's rejection.  You've been under rejection all your life.  And my life was just like yours; I know rejection inside out.  So I don't have to explain to you what it is.  But God has directed me to tell you what rejection is not:  it's not you.  Of flesh and blood, body and soul, you are a mortal child, unable to recognize that this battle is spiritual.

Rejection is a spirit.  All your life, this spirit has twisted your perceptions to make you feel, on a conscious or an unconscious level, not only that you were rejected, but also that you deserved to be.  It was your own fault that you could not measure up to whatever standards were given to you as normal when you were a child. 

In Proverbs 29:25 it is written:  The fear of man brings bondage (RSV). 

Nowhere else is the purpose and power of rejection so plainly revealed. 

Rejection causes you to fear what man will do to you.  Even more, you fear what man will think of you.  Among the opposing forces at work in the universe, fear and faith are the two most powerful.  Everyone who does not live in faith lives in fear of death.  Faith is the tool of God to work His will through men on the earth.  Fear is the tool of Satan.  Fear is why rejection has so much control over man.

The overwhelming power of the spirit of rejection rests in the fact that it tells the truth while telling lies, because it rules a carnal nature.  Because it sees the animal realities beneath the interactions of this natural world, it sees only dog-eat-dog.  It is a world where power rules, of stand-up challenges where everybody wants to see how far they can "dis" you, or of sly manipulations and jealous stabs in the back.

Rejection sees all human interactions as power encounters.  And that's the background it crafts for you concerning all relationships - as reaffirmations of, or challenges to, your precarious place in the power structure.  In fact, you can't trust anyone in this life.  You either dominate or you'll be dominated.  In each daily interaction, you either lose status or gain it.  If you find someone with whom you're compatible, then you're friends, but you're still suspicious, knowing that with the changing of the wind, you could be cut down.

Each person is susceptible to rejection.  The main job of your own specially assigned spirit of rejection is to point out the challenge to your self-worth behind the most seemingly innocent or casual remarks.  Its job is to remind you of the danger of humiliation that constantly threatens you in a dog-eat-dog world.   Constantly whispering in your ear, this spirit interprets other people's thoughts for you, translating looks and words into rejection.

The danger rejection poses to your identity threatens the very core of what your reality is.  The more fragile your identity, the more formidable the threat.  Something as harmless as an usher asking you to remove your hat when you go into the church can be twisted by rejection into a threat to your entire being.  Certain people have constant confrontations with ushers; others simply remove their hats.

Rejection tells the truth.  But as an elemental spirit, rejection is limited in its perception so that it cannot see the bigger picture.  Locked as Satan is in an eternal power struggle, he uses rejection to constantly prod you, showing you a world where getting power or giving up power becomes total reality.  To the spirits of darkness, good intentions are necessarily false.  They can only see the higher good insofar as it negatively impacts the carnal - the fundamental enemy of which is Jesus, the giver of eternal life, the enemy of death. 

But rejection also lies.  Man is not an animal.  He was not made to die, and he must struggle daily to put beneath him that part of him which accepts death as the natural end - and thus the total meaning - of life.  True, he can play out his life as an animal, denying what his soul, that mysterious entity hung midway between life and death, receives testimony of.  Yet through his will, a function of the soul, man is capable of much which is eternal - either of sin to eternal condemnation or through Christ to eternal glory. 

The by-product of rejection is shame.  And you know what that is also, because dysfunctional families specialize in shame, "toxic shame," as it is aptly named by pop psychologist John Bradshaw.  Many, if not most, families are dysfunctional, to a greater or lesser extent.  That is, they are never totally able to provide the nurture, acceptance, or support needed by and from their members, who instead struggle along in some kind of interlocking, inter-dependent warfare.  Shame and blame, primary characteristics in an unhealthy family system, are why those under rejection function so poorly, doomed throughout their lives to replaying childhood patterns.

But more than that, shame and blame are special properties of the spirit called rejection.  In a healthy family system, everybody makes mistakes, which are admitted, apologized for, learned from.  In a dysfunctional family, you don't admit anything.  If you were to take responsibility for your failures, it would be unbearably painful.  What's more, wrenching you from your comfort zone, responsibility leads to growth.  Satan surely doesn't want you to grow - and outgrow your reliance on rejection to interpret truth for you.  Thus rejection helps you evade responsibility by shaming and blaming others.

A cunning, pernicious, perverse spirit, capable of taping great reservoirs of anger, rejection incubates within dysfunctional households.  It lights the fires of dysfunction, by isolating you, along with every other member of your household, in your own perspective, like wasps walled into your own nests.  Rejection makes loving your brother conditional upon his loving you, while making sure that you never perceive your brother's love.

Although rejection makes its home in abusive households, it camps out in loving households too, for it can twist words of love and affirmation to sound like rejection.  As a function of obsessive love and good intentions, it can crush independence by overprotection, fail to provide guidance through benign neglect, or limit healthy development by affirming what is unhealthy.

Rejection is a sly, smirking spirit, that isolates its victims in a vast loneliness and gives them no yardstick with which to properly measure reality.  In the turmoil of a teenager's hormone-induced confusion, it highlights every difference as failure.  It distorts the image that you see in the mirror.  It sticks by you in your grief, urging you to feel sorry for yourself, to blame others, and to turn inward to yourself instead of seeking solutions to your problems.

Rejection interprets all criticism as attack.  It interprets self-defense as attack.  It interprets nothing as attack.  Thus, you've been constantly under attack.  You have, in your life, met with rejection everywhere.  As though to be right about at least one thing, you've rejected yourself also.

Rejection, the motivator of destructive action, is what inspired you do those weird antisocial things that sometimes made sense to you at the time, but rarely did later.  Because you have always acted in ways wholly rejectable, people actually have rejected you.  You gave them little choice.  Those closest to you, who tried the hardest to stick by you - you had to work extra hard to hurt them the most.  Rejection, the reinterpreter of every motive, makes everybody into somebody who is out to get you.

Trapped in this unrelenting cycle, you have spent your days reacting to misinterpreted impulses.  Many times you have done what was clearly not in your best interest - walked off your job, cut down your best friend, quit school, threw over your lover, or told your therapist to shove it - because you couldn't help it.  It was what you perceived as what you had to do to survive.

Sometimes you wonder if you're completely crazy - and it's true that insanity is the extreme form of mental dysfunction.  But what constitutes an insane act is highly debatable, due to the apparent lucidity of the one who commits it.  It's all a matter of degree.  You've probably been through some insane experiences yourself, reacting to rejection.   Your emotions go haywire; and in the cold rationality that comes after the hotsurge of anger has abated, you deliver the knee-jerk response of rejection.  In this context, there is no insanity.  Murder, rape, suicide, self-mutilation, hysterics:  they all make perfect sense.  Your program is stuck in a loop; no matter what you punch in, you always get the same result.  In reaction to rejection, protection of your most vulnerable self overrides any moral principles - and you wreak destruction to whatever extent the willful surrender to sin has allowed the strongmen of darkness to dictate your actions.  Rejection obliterates all choices but those written into your program by the mastercrafter of darkness.

And yet, certainly, most of us do not slice or burn our flesh, take automatic weapons into the threatening environment of choice to ensure the annihilation of all who have, intentionally or unintentionally, wounded us.  We don't get off on overpowering whimpering victim-lovers who would not have otherwise had us, or take ourselves out in the ugliest way possible to show all those who didn't care that we were really serious.  Instead, we destroy ourselves and those around us in vicious little ways, passing on the curse of dysfunction, that came to us through our parents, to our children.  In actuality, it is only a matter of degree, the difference between insanity and the emotional instability that is the root of any affective disorder.  But the perspective of any such impairment is just as limited.  Rejection is the cause, and rejection is the manipulator.  The destroyer is the beneficiary.

I remember, years ago, back in second grade, the little boy who would not do what the teacher said.  Although the punishment was clearly there for him to choose or reject, he chose to misbehave anyway, to get himself locked in the coatroom.  I can still remember his cries of rage, of hate, of abandonment, as we tried to go on with our lessons.  And yet, can't we all remember coatrooms we were locked in, sobbing ourselves out because, although there must have been a choice in there for us somewhere, we never saw it as a choice.  We were hogtied by rejection, a spirit that takes choices from children.

And from adult children, who maybe have learned about unhappy consequences and gotten tired of coatrooms, jail cells, or rehab centers, rejection takes away all possibility of happiness, replaces it with an unending existence of resentment, hypocrisy, and drudgery, amid people who apparently have no capacity to care or understand.  Survival, that crushing burden of Recovery, has taught you to take it and walk away.  And that was the story of your life, perhaps, until you met Jesus.

In Jesus you found someone who knows you, yet loves you.  Sick of the daily strain of self control, you gladly relinquished control and gave your battle to Him.  And when you came to Christ, you were told that you have been made worthy.   You can accept that you are worthy, because you know you are a new creation, and besides, it feels wonderful to be worthy.  It feels immeasurably right and correct and important to stand before the Throne, clean - and worthy, because He is worthy, and He lives in you. 

Therefore, you feel that it is time for you to go on from the past, with its bitter memories - forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before  (Philippians 3:13).  However, forgetting is not a decision your soul will allow you to make.  I am here to tell you that you cannot go on in the perfect freedom that Christ promises unless you can go back in freedom also.

You cannot simply go on from the past:  it comes right after you and grabs you.  That spirit of rejection, who was with you then, is with you now.  It's waiting for the opportunity to tap you on the shoulder and say, "Look, see.  Here we go again.  As it was, it still is." 

Rejection is a puny spirit.  It does not occupy but only harasses, working not as an assault troop but as an infiltrator around your battlements.  Nevertheless, it has an important part to play in the kingdom of darkness.  It will not let you be at peace with yourself.  It refuses to let you trust anyone.   When things are going well, it will not let you relax and go with the flow.  It makes sure that you know nobody loves you; it makes sure you know why nobody would want to. 

Having been with you since before birth, your spirit of rejection knows where you are coming from.  It doesn't like your spiritual rebirth, but it isn't really threatened by it, because it's got your number.  It simply points out, as it always has, the threatening nature of all your relationships, your fear of exposure and ridicule of your numerous shortcomings.  And it says, "No one understands where you're coming from.  Go ahead and do it; you'll feel better."  You do it, but you don't feel better. 

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Rejection is the spirit that confronts every challenge by saying: "Strike!"  Instantaneously, it points out threats, then pushes your button:  "React!"  There's no thinking things through:  the hurt child in you is knocked down by what you hear.  When rejection speaks, the truth is immaterial - you only have that one perspective.  A spiritual babe, you allow the fiery darts to penetrate your armor.  You thought when you became a Christian, your troubles would be over.  Did God fail you, or did you fail God?  You don't know yet how to trust Him; still less do you know what His Word says you are.  You are a carnal Christian, reborn spirit incased in yesterday's flesh.  So mostly, you just strike, and you react. Then where do you find yourself when the guilt hits:  down on your knees or back on the street?

I'm here to tell you that rejection is a spirit.  It was not you.  Though you have failed, you were never a failure.  Satan plays down and dirty.  God has always loved you, despite your circumstances and your outward condition.  He has always seen the highest good in you.  You have never been able to see it, because you have been in bondage.  It's time to recognize bondage when you see it.  It's time to make some changes. 

TALKING THE TALK AND WALKING THE WALK

Start by deciding to trust God.  Just as your will brought you to Him, you must now trust Him as an act of the will.  He is going to heal your rejection.  But even before He does, you can change your habits of thought by putting on the mind of Christ.  You need to get rid of the rejection-based behavior that you give in to in your daily relationships.  Start by deciding not to strike or react, but to think your challenges through.  Use wisdom instead of your emotions.  When you react to challenges as through they were attacks, you are acting out of fear of man, not faith in God.  You are a new creation.  Where fear of man kept the old you alive, it's faith in God that will preserve and sustain who you are today. 

Do not let rejection interpret people's ignorant or off-hand remarks for you.  Don't you realize that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus?  (Romans 8:1).  We are not to fear what unregenerate men say of us.  God makes that clear when He tells us:  Do not fear the reproach of men or be terrified by their insults.  For the moth will eat them up like a garment; the worm will devour them like wool (Isaiah 51:9 NIV).  We are His righteousness, and we will endure forever.

You need to learn to hold your head high, as befitting a child of the King.  You put on the mind of Christ by discovering who you are in Christ.  Trust God's promises that you are worthy, even if you don't feel worthy.  Make a decision to live your worthiness out in your life.  Do what God tells you:  Fear not, for you will not be put to shame (Isaiah 54:4).

Satan would remind you of your past.  But your sins are as white as snow. Confess that you are spotless.  Say:  I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13)!  Say it again.  Say it till you hear it in your heart.  Then you will come to believe it in your spirit.  So says God:  Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God (Romans 10:17 KJ).  There is something so marvelous and true and eternal in God's Word that in confessing it, you come to believe it.  That was what Jesus meant by the creative power of faith: 

I say unto you that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and be cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.   

                                                                                                                                                                (Mark 11:23 KJ)

When in doubt, pray, and read God's Word looking for answers to your problems.  When you spend time in the Word, it will show in your life.  The Word of God strengthens you to deal with circumstances, and then it changes circumstances.

Above all, listen to what comes out of your mouth.  Is it fear or faith?  Stop apologizing for yourself.  Self-handicapping, as psychologists call it, giving people "legitimate" reasons to expect you to fail, is the ultimate in negative confession.  The more you want to be accepted by people, the more you use it, assuming people need to be aware of all the reasons why you know you won't be able to measure up to their standards.  You've been making excuses for yourself as a technique to avoid the stigma of failure for so long that you probably will find yourself apologizing for yourself to yourself, using bizarre rationalizations no one but you could possibly believe, to cover yourself ahead of time in case you actually do fail.  We all fail at some things sometimes.  There is a secret to learning how to fail gracefully.

The secret is that when you are in Christ, it is impossible for you to fail.  As you stand before God, He sees His Son.   Rejection still has its assignment to whisper in your ear that you can't do it, that you are unworthy.  Circumstances conspire to prove you are a loser.   But now you have the right to say:  "Satan, you're a liar.  I am more than a conqueror through Him who loved me.  And you had better watch out, devil, because you are under my feet.  You know that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."  Say it boldly, since faith comes by hearing, until you believe it.  And then, since you can have whatsoever you saith, you will.

And what about those people who actually do reject you?  Did not Jesus instruct us and show us what to say:  "I forgive you, child of God.  I forgive you because your sin against me came out of ignorance."  Forgiveness, the secret key to freedom from the past, always jolts the kingdom of darkness.  Forgiveness opens the door to the choice for practical survival in this present evil world.  Instead of returning evil for evil, you can say to those who mock you:  "You have no power over me.  How you feel about me does not determine how I feel myself.  What you say to me cannot hurt me.  I am worthy, because I am a child of the King."  Maybe you don't feel what you say at all.  But faith comes by hearing, not by feeling.

Rejection crippled you through your perception of others' opinions of you.  Recognition that you no longer are a cripple needs to become a new pattern of mind; when it takes hold, it becomes a habit of mind, and in the meantime, you have stopped acting like a cripple.  Thus do you begin your forward walk.  Furthermore, by breaking the cycle, by escaping the consequences of returning evil for evil, your walk becomes one of peace instead of war. 

Finally, by demonstrating behavior less rejectable, you actually do draw less rejection.  The world of normal problems (people with Big Problems are always envious of people with normal problems) is within your grasp. 

 GREATER PLANS

 God's will for you as a new creation is that the rejection of the past, the definer of so much of who you were in your old life, is to pass away.  He wants you to recognize the spirit of rejection where you used to see your own inadequacies.  He wants to go to the source of your shame and suffering, to heal it.  In the final chapters of this book, I elaborate on the healing process through which Jesus brought me - and many others much worse off than I ever was - out of rejection.

But healing is not an end in itself.  Most of all, God wants you to see that both your liberation and your healing are only steps in the process that began when you made Jesus the Lord of your life.  The work He wants to do in you is a stepping stone to the work He wants to do through you.

God has greater plans for us than even wholeness.  What God wants to give us is more than a sense of self-worth, as valuable as it is to realize that we are not defined by the actual or perceived condemnation that others - that mainly we ourselves - heaped upon us all our lives.  What He wants to give us is the promise that is reserved for those of us who were of least significance on earth, for those of us who were humbled by life - the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things (1 Corinthians 4:13 Amp)  There is a glory that is reserved for those of us whose early lives forced self-condemnation into our souls.  

God has destined us to do mighty things for the kingdom.  In fact, the blessing we are destined to receive is because God knows what we suffered:   that we were scorned, spitted, used and discarded, ridiculed, derided, discriminated against, passed over, thrown in prison, and beaten at every turn.  We have been lowly, as His Son was lowly.  Because God values lowliness, He makes us this promise, that we, through His Son and through the fruit which we will bear for Him, will inherit the earth.  A broken and a contrite heart always realizes its highest value before His Throne.

No man was more rejected in life than Jesus.  From the first to the last, He met with rejection from all quarters:  from the religious, from the sinners, from the fickle multitudes, from His dearest friends, and, on the cross, from His Father: 

He was despised and rejected
a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
He was despised.
(Isaiah 53:3 RSV)

Down to the present, He is despised and rejected.  Even in our own lives, we rejected Him, the one who died for us:  And we esteemed Him not.  Most of all, we could not accept that He suffered rejection for us.  Willfully, selfishly, we insisted upon taking it back upon ourselves.  Isn't it time to appropriate the true meaning of His sacrifice, that we are in Him and He is in us.

God showed me, in Isaiah 53 and 54, His promise to us, the children of desolation.  The devastation of our lives mirrored our separation from God.  Drunkenness, dissipation, adultery, witchcraft, deceit, pride, murder, and every kind of rebellion - wasn't His wrath, as against all things that debase and destroy, richly deserved?  And yet, the Lord our Redeemer tells us:     

For a brief moment I forsook you
but with great compassion I will gather you.
In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you. But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you
(Isaiah 54:7-8 RSV)

Today, there is something miraculous happening in the body of Christ.  Those who were life's rejects are now experiencing the power of God's love.    No one can attend a prison service, a spiritual substance abuse support group, a fellowship of ex-gays, or a church of "derelicts" without an awareness of it.  It is more than the flush of first love and gratitude.  It's the tension of growth produced by people who are determined to get their lives in line with the Word of God, knowing that the alternative is death.  Growth takes a determination to grow; nothing produces a clarity of vision like being dead and then being brought back to life.  In America the endtime Church will be a church of prodigals.  This God has promised, that the redeemed children of desolation will bear more fruit than the Church that was His bride in the former days:

Sing, O barren one that did not bear;
break forth into singing, and cry aloud,
you that did not travail with child:
for the children of the desolate one will be more
than the children of her that is married, says the Lord.
Enlarge the place of your tent, and let
the curtains of your habitations be stretched out: 
hold not back, lengthen your cords,
and strengthen your stakes;
for you will spread abroad to the right and the left;
and your descendants will possess the nations,
and will people the desolate cities.
Fear not, for you will not be ashamed;
be not confounded, for you will not be put to shame,
for you will forget the shame of your youth,
and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.
For your Maker is your husband;
the Lord of hosts is His name;
and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
The God of the whole earth shall He be called.
(Isaiah 54:1-4)

In tent meeting imagery, Isaiah is speaking of Revival.  The Church has been praying for Revival for years.  But it should be abundantly clear that such a Revival, as is necessary for this last great move of God, can't come from "within" the Church - or it would have come long ago.  For a Revival, you need fire. 

Where is the fire in today's churches, that are caving in under spiritual attack from within and without.  There's no fire in most of them but a reflection of a society sleeping through its own inward decay.  The fire you do find comes from those churches which appear increasingly radical, alarmingly political, and at times, even dangerous.  The faithful few are mocked and made to look ridiculous.  And yet most churches today are harmless and ineffective.  They meet in endless committees and wrangle endlessly about the budget.  They preach a lukewarm gospel to slumbering congregations.  Surely there's no fire in the compromises that the liberal denominations blindly make with evil, to appeal to those whose compromised lifestyles require justification; no more than there's fire in the churches of the righteous right, who stifle the Anointing with doom and gloom sermons against the demon democrats.   Everyone claims to believe in God, but no one takes time to seek Him out.  Earnestness requires commitment, which is always inconvenient.  No earnestness, no fire, no Revival.

The mighty end-time Revival will come, must come, not from complacent pew-sitters, but from those who were once cast off but are now delivered from shame.  That's what God has promised: that the children of desolation will be more than those born through the long, liturgical history of the Church.  Enlarge the place of your tent, He says.  Get ready!  Hold not back.  It's Revival!  No tent now spread can hold it.  Lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes, says the Lord (Isaiah 54:2).  It's showtime.

 REJECTION:  THE FEAR OF MAN

 The fear of man brings bondage - or as the Old Testament word m�q�sh also translates, "a snare."   You know what the snare is.  It's everything you did to compensate for this fear that ran your life.  It's everything you did to get power or control over a situation, to give you an illusion of power or control, or to obliterate the lack of power or control.   

I know fear had a stronghold in my life.  I was raised to be afraid.  Not that I really feared my father, for I had come to realize his powerlessness at an early age.  But he implanted terror in me.  And because he worked to systematically destroy any shred of self-confidence that I might have needed to accomplish the routines of life, fear was the result.  As an adult I was a complete introvert and a bumbler.  I couldn't look anybody in the eye or drive a car over 40 miles an hour.  That all changed, of course, when I became a drunk - snared, maybe, but it was a welcome relief.

In November 1991, under circumstances of extreme duress, God showed me how the spirit of rejection works.  Further, He revealed to me the enormity of the power rejection has over mankind, not in and of itself, but by reason of its capacity to elicit sin to compensate for this unreasonable, unrelenting fear.

Our first few months after moving to Michigan were a very stressful time for my husband.  Our financial situation was critical.  It had not helped that I had had to leave him alone in Florida for a month, only shortly after he had come to know the Lord (a miracle against all odds).  Satan came in like a flood.  Unable to deal with stress any way but self-destructively, intent that everyone should suffer along with him, he found money to drink, and when he couldn't find it, would sit at home in a black stew.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to what was going on with my husband.  Maybe I could have been more supportive.  But I was under a lot of pressure myself, working temporary jobs, so far behind on the bills that I had started throwing them away.  When he began getting into fights in the neighborhood bars, he got very insistent about the need for a gun so he could compete as an equal, while I was equally adamant that we would never get one.  But, of course, I could not see behind what I was going through to the spiritual forces at work. 

If I had known the ways of rejection, which were soon to be revealed to me, I would have known that to argue with him was to fuel the very force that pushes the slaves of rejection beyond endurance.  I would have realized that he was all tied up in what the people thought of him, backing down from fights, even though he was outnumbered.  To me, it seemed sensible not to want a gun in the house; to him, I was the enemy, bent on his humiliation.  Plainly, acting self-righteous is no way to diffuse rejection. 

One night in late November, after the kids were in bed and I was doing dishes, my husband came in, obviously having crossed that line of drunkenness which turned him into a very dangerous individual.  And yet, lulled into security by the relative calm of the newly "saved" person, I continued babbling on in blindness about how, although that may have been the way he was raised, my children were not going to grow up to learn how to fight to survive.

"Well," he said, "maybe I should just pack my bags and get out of your lives for good.  I could go back to Florida where I can make more money.  I'll go.  I'll send you money.  I think it would be best."

If only he meant it!  I would miss him and all, but hey, whatever he thought was best was fine with me - that is to say, living with him was a continual strain, especially lately.  So, hardly daring to hope it was true, I said:  "OK."

The next thing I knew I was reeling up against the wall, doubled over by a blow to the ribs.  Then God said to me:  "Now, that's the spirit of rejection."

Instantly I understood.  Rejection is a spirit.  It was not that I had rejected him.  It was the spirit that had turned my words, which were essentially words of agreement, into rejection.  The spirit had not lied; for I obviously did hope he would go away.  Though I was agreeing with him, my husband heard only rejection.  And the spirit said, "Strike."

I went through quite a beating that night, the worst in years.  Yet throughout, it was God, not my husband, who got my attention.  He told me, loudly and clearly, three things about rejection:  "It's everywhere.  It stocks the prisons.  Hitler had it."  As I sat afterward in the corner by the door, shaken, bruised, and relieved that I had survived, I saw, in a sweeping picture of the failure of human relationships, what God meant. 

First, the spirit of rejection was everywhere.  I later attempted to explain this to a pastor, who countered:  "Well, not everywhere."  But it is everywhere, though not all people listen to it.  The healthier the family system, the greater the probability that rejection will have no influence.  But everywhere you're likely to find people like my husband, you'll find the air thick with rejection. 

Secondly, rejection stocks the prisons.  Many of those who are incarcerated, in the bleak, deadend human warehouses that make up the prison system, got themselves there because they lashed out in anger whenever rejection spoke a word, or because they became involved in plans they knew were destined to fail since backing out was not an option rejection allowed.  Most likely they'd been in trouble all their lives because rejection was always pushing them to take what they wanted, to get what they were entitled to, or to get even.  Or they'd met the fate of those who have to work full-time at staying high, because rejection had shown them that was the only way to feel good about themselves.  Many had been locked up before, and most were in prison before they were ever locked up.

Like us.  Not all of what holds us in bondage is visible to the eye.  There are many kinds of prisons.  Rejection holds the door to all of them.  Rejection is the doorman that lets the devil get the foothold in your life.  It opens the doorway to bondage.  So strong is the impulse to strike out - to get even, to gain power over apparent rejecters, or to escape from the pain of rejection - that the door to sin swings wide open.  And witness the doorman:  through rejection are summoned into a person all those possessing spirits that enslave and oppress, the angry spirits of prejudice, rage, destruction, murder; the irresistible, addictive spirits of alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, pornography, perversion; and even those subtle spirits of compulsive but acceptable behaviors, like spending money, workaholism or perfectionism.  Rejection stocks all prisons.

And finally, God showed me Hitler.  Rejection drove a failed, part Jewish painter, from a region imbued with spiritualism, to become possessed by a powerful arch-demon.  Occultic spirits of racial purity fed the strength of this high prince of darkness.  In ritual ceremonies throughout the land, the German people, driven by rejection, sought power to rise above the crushing iniquities of an unjust peace.  This fervor of black hatred soon became openly menacing as a remilitarized Germany thundered across the plain of postwar uncertainty, propelled and illuminated by an unholy claim to racial dominance.^[i]  Rejection opened the door that led Hitler to sell his soul, as the German people sold theirs, for revenge, for power. 

This vision was overwhelming.  The panoramic revelation showed, by its extremism, how those who fall into satanism and other occultic traps do so to get power and to maintain power over those whom they believe have rejected them.

THE IMPULSES OF FEAR 

 Not all the snares rejection brings have to be negative.  Perfectionism is one of those bondages that can make an artist's or a craftsman's work superior.  Success can be achieved through spite.  And where would we get art, if sensitive, suffering humans were not compelled to bring forth beauty from the pain driven deep within their souls?  The fear of man may indeed drive its victims to spectacular achievement - but bondage is still bondage.

  If the opposite of fear is faith, the opposite of rejection is adoption.  In Romans, we read that rejection is not God's will for us:  For you have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15).  The overabiding characteristics of a dysfunctional family, lack of support and affirmation, disappear with adoption by the Father God.  David tells us:  My father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up (Psalm 27:10).  Such bonding, long overdue, enables you to stand as David did, not only against the natural world - with those addictions you dove into to escape dealing with impulses of fear which you could not handle - but also against the spiritual world, the impulses themselves.

Fear is built into most dysfunctional family systems.  Though fear often centers around an individual, such as an abusive parent, a sick child, a rebellious teen, or an unmanageable spouse, the individual is but a scapegoat on which to blame the entire cluster of other unhealthy characteristics built into relationships within the family.  From the point of view of a child growing up in a dysfunctional family, fear stems from rejection; you cannot get your needs met by the ones you need, whose love you seek the most.  And you are never capable, barring a miracle, of seeing the great love they have for you.

Sometimes the rejection is accidental.  It's no one's fault that the child growing up with a terminally ill family member has difficulty getting needs fulfilled.  In other cases, rejection is simply generational.  You do what you learn to do and pass it on.  Rejection comes in assorted varieties, in all human relationships wherever Satan can get a foothold.

In any case, codependency grows, the foremost symptom and the earmark of rejection.  An obsessive need for input, for stimulation from an outside source to make you feel good about being who you are, codependency is a need forever unfilled.  And as you expand your horizons, codependency goes with you, its ever-changing behavior patterns always pointing to rejection.

My relationship with my father is an example.  Compared to my husband's life, my upbringing was fairly stable.  We were never beaten or physically abused, but my father was angry all of them time - and mostly at me, the oldest and most strong-willed.  My life at home was one continuous battle.  Craving affection, I started falling in love early, had heartbreak after heartbreak.  I was accepted nowhere, and with good reason, because I was a mess.

My father was himself a victim of rejection.  He could not cope with children but assumed that every act of childish irresponsibility was an attack upon himself.  My mother, raised by a kind and gentle perfectionist, was also in those days a victim of rejection, who believed she could never possibly do all that was required of her.  She suffered, also, from an inability to please my father.

My father terrorized us all with his temper.  Discipline to him meant attack, and he went right for the jugular:  self-worth.  Any little thing would throw him into a rage.  Gritting his teeth, he would snarl:  "How can you be so stupid!  Can't you ever do anything right?  Dad-burned bumblehead.  You just try to make people mad!"   Though such "cursing" may seem rather trifling, to a child it is beyond terrifying.  It enters the spirit as a curse waiting to be fulfilled.  We dreaded every moment he was in the house. 

In fact, it was impossible to please my father.  I pretty much gave up trying.  My one sister tried extra hard, studying and practicing.  She had inherited the family trait of perfectionism, but she managed to come across as a bumblehead too.  My other sister, cushioned as she was in that secure haven reserved for a youngest child, believed we'd had a happy childhood.  She quietly kept out of the way, worked steadily at tasks, and got pleasure from simple achievements that brought her closer to my mother.  My poor mother.  She mostly just cried, and managed to give us things from the generosity of her great heart.  She too was a victim, with no control over her life and no one to talk to, unable to provide the emotional support that might have been a buffer against my father's emotional blitzkrieg.

In addition, my parents imparted few social skills to us.  Their social life was a retreat into books.  I also found most of the pleasure in my young life in books.  Furthermore, as children do, I imitated the only behaviors that were modeled for me:  not only was I dictatorial, bossy, and controlling, but I also cried whenever I was frustrated - a delightful child.  Then add to that chubbiness, since food, chocolate especially, was how I pampered myself.  And I played the violin, though never ably enough to compensate for that distinctive ridicule reserved for people who lug uncool instruments to and from school.

I was a complete reject, and there was nowhere I could go that I could find acceptance.  I was hounded at every turn.  I adopted a very critical attitude toward myself - at least I knew I was right about that.  I had brief, painful relationships with a succession of equally troubled boys, and long, monotonous relationships with other girls like myself (outcasts from the mainstream, who didn't have much affection for each other but hung together for self-defense).  Though I had potential, got good grades without effort, and understood a lot about life, literature, and things in general, whenever I was under pressure, I cracked.  I learned to avoid confrontation and readily gave up to avoid the humiliation of defeat when I couldn't handle things.  I could not face people, could not bear their judgment, was destroyed daily by their laughter and derision. 

Not surprisingly, I was snared by drugs.  My soul became psychedelicized.  With drugs I moved into a society of outcasts, the radical fringe of the Vietnam era university society, sharing the trappings and ideas of the counterculture, too incumbered to be able to love one another.  Then came alcoholism.  Alcohol really made a big difference in my life, actually enabling me, or so I thought, to function as a halfway normal person.  For the first time in my life I could interact with people, get to know them, give of myself.  I actually saw affection, acceptance, and even admiration reflecting out from the eyes of those whom I liked, accepted, and admired.  My personality definitely changed for the better.  And I'd be a drunk today, if being drunk all the time didn't have such considerable and debilitating drawbacks attached to it. 

Maybe this story sounds familiar to you, only to a greater or lesser degree.  How subtly the actual rejection a person undergoes as a child becomes woven into spiritual rejection; how cleverly this oppression springs the trap.   

A WOUNDED SPIRIT WHO CAN BEAR?

 Proverbs 18:8 reads:  The words of the whisperer (RSV) are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly (KJ).  The words whispered by the spirit of rejection move through the soul into the spirit, the belly or the heart of man.

Even though the spirit of rejection is everywhere, spiritual oppression doesn't have to follow rejection, either actual or spiritual.  Look at Joseph:  though rejected, he never paid any attention to the spirit of rejection's well-directed whispers but, by leaning on the Lord, remained strong.  What was the difference between Joseph and David, who never found enough women to compensate for the lack of love that brought rejection into his young life? 

We further read in Proverbs:  The spirit of man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear (Proverbs 18:14).

A wounded spirit is what makes the difference.   A firm foundation of love and acceptance, that begins with conception, makes all the difference in a child's early life.  Love and security and a good example bring forth reasonable but challenging expectations.  When accompanied by fair, consistent discipline and an explanation that relates the behavior to moral laws, the spirit will not be wounded, and the child will mature.  But the rejected do not mature.  Instead, those unsatisfied children within are always wanting more, are always craving instant gratification.  The Bible shows this.  Joseph, the son of Jacob and his beloved Rachel, had a firm foundation of love in their household.  But David, the last and least of Jesse's sons, exiled to the company of sheep, intimate with only God, always cried out for more.

Joseph's spirit was not wounded.  The strength of God within sustained him throughout all his afflictions, enabling him to have faith in the fulfillment of his special destiny.  On the other hand, David's rejection, which manifested in the suffering and the conquests of his life, remained a factor inseparable from the strength of his relationship to God.  Unlike Joseph's steady assurance and patience in exile, David's suffering is naked before us.  David's triumphs, born of travail, prayer, and revelation, are our own.  David was a man after God's Own Heart.  Though he had a spirit of rejection in him that never shut up, that brought him into sin and error time after time, despite this - or maybe because of it - his special destiny was fulfilled.

But don't all children of God have this special destiny?  Though sometimes twisted and bent by the tumult of the passage, though wounded in spirit, we are still continually pulled by God with His Mighty Hand to fulfill that which He has intended.  We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, who are the called according to His purposes (Romans 8:28 KJ).  This thought has done much to sustain me through the trials and tribulations of life with my husband.  Not only was I spared death, which I so earnestly sought and richly deserved, for a purpose that I could not have discovered without this tragic and beautiful and aggravating man, but my husband also has been spared, many times over, because God has plans for him.

Do you know why you were spared?  Believe that it's because God has a plan and a destiny for you.  When you were very young, you sustained a wounding in your innermost being, as the spirit of rejection came into your life by exploiting a weakness.  When you root out the source of rejection, you gain power over the whisperer.  Until you do, you are going to remain wounded, though positive confessions to the contrary do much to renew the mind, cleanse the soul, restore the heart. 

The spirit of rejection has a much better grasp on the situation than you do, since it can see into the spirit realm where you cannot see.  Rejection knows that your spirit will cling, against your will, to that capacity to be wounded by rejection.  Indeed, that child inside your soul can never really begin to mature until the source of your childhood rejection has been removed - until your wounded spirit is healed.  Therefore, the Holy Spirit, who can see where you can't, will take charge to guide your healing.

Contrary to deliverance theory, rejection is not a spirit that you can speak to in Jesus' name and it will get out and you will be free.  If you think about it, you will realize that the spirit is not the problem.  The rejection is the problem, while the whispering spirit has simply floated on the surface of that stinking, steaming black stream of abuse, neglect, ridicule, or deprivation that has run through your life since its beginning.

You're the one who has got to deal with the stream.  The journey forward into freedom begins with a journey backward into the roots of your bondage, where the poisoned water bubbled up out of the earth.  The joy of the Lord that has entered you can cover up the twisted black stream, but the Holy Spirit could better wash it out for good.  If you ask Him to, He will; but you must first trust Him to help you face the pain at the source of the rejection.

THE JOURNEY OF THE SPIRIT MAN

 I thank God for my husband.  First and foremost, were it not for him, I would never have gained that precious relationship with Jesus that brought me to salvation and then on to healing.  Also, my husband provided the impetus for my faith to be tested, growing me up, through reluctant perseverance.  As James put it:  Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (James 1:2 NIV).  Living under unrelenting pressure from Satan means you must use your faith or go under.

Finally, my husband has been my avenue for personal confirmation of many of the spiritual truths of the Bible, bringing me to a deeper understanding of the war in the spirit realm.  For some reason, the wounded spirit lies very near the surface.  The humiliation and anger that attend the physical abuse a person undergoes can strip off the outer surface of the soul, leaving the spirit visible to those with eyes to see.

What is the human spirit?  Paul tells us that the spirit has a form, a shape, corresponding to the physical body:  There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body  (I Corinthians 15:44).  We also know that man is a three part being:  body, soul, and spirit.  We know this from Paul's letter to the Thessalonians: 

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  (I Thessalonians 5:23 KJ)

The soul includes the mind, the will, and the emotions.  Paul teaches us that the soul, the body, and even the spirit must be kept clean and blameless until Jesus returns, meaning that the spirit, though a spirit, can be polluted.  Spirit, soul, and body, consequently, must each be fed and cared for properly.

We tend to think of our spirits as being these nebulous things within us.  It is hard to grasp that the spirit man is the real us, since we were created in God's image and God is a spirit.  The body that encases the spirit is bound by time.  It is the ever-forming soul, driven by, hungering for escape from, this time-bound outer layer, that determines the spirit's eternal destiny.  The spirit is freed from death by an act of the will.  And the spirit grows - or does not grow - as it is fed by worship and spiritual truths.  Meanwhile, who you are is engaged in battle, contesting inescapably with pressures faced by body and soul, alive in a particular time, in unique circumstances.  At the same time, behind the scenes, unseen eternal beings of both light and darkness shape our destiny according to God's eternal plan.

A wounded spirit who can bear?  It is quite clear that no one can.  The raging intensity of the insane man - as the spirit within, propelled by demons, flings all imagined attackers from his path - is just the extreme manifestation of the pressure we all feel sometimes when life seems to be slipping out of control.  "I can't take it anymore!"  the wounded spirit cries.  "Let me out!"

What is a wounded spirit?  My observations of my husband revealed to me that it is the spiritual equivalent of that little boy or girl inside of you who has been crushed by life, yet is forced to continue on with it anyway.  And furthermore, a wounded spirit is violated, as a translation of the original word "wicked" from this passage in Isaiah show

Cain did not have to get angry.  He, too, could have done well, by giving God the blood sacrifice He required.  Then everything would have been fine.  But rejection played instantly and decisively into everything that happened to Cain: jealousy of his younger brother whose offering was accepted; guilt at presenting something less than what was acceptable; anger and the desire to strike back, to inflict hurt as hurt had been inflicted on him.  Cain had no inclination to listen to reason or warning from the Authority Figure.  If God wanted blood, Cain would give Him blood.  He surrendered to the murderous spirit waiting outside the door.

Cain did not suddenly develop these unacceptable behavior patterns, manifesting jealousy, striking out, and chafing under criticism.  What we see in the murder of Abel is simply the culmination of what had been going on for a long time, the result of pain surging forth from a man's wounded spirit.  How do I know that?  I know how rejection works.

When children are too young to have any self control, that's when rejection starts whispering in their ear.  Many parents, knowing nothing about positively reinforcing desired conduct, harp on negative things instead of molding behavior, intensifying the child's sense of isolation.  An increasing number of adults are rejection's victims and puppets themselves, as we know from the rising the rates of divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, and poverty in today's families.

Addiction counselors estimate that one out of every four students in the schools today has an alcoholic parent.  Today's parents seem to be increasingly unhappy.  They are increasingly the product of unhappy homes, bad choices, pharmacological crutches, and desolate lifestyles, increasingly passing their inability to cope with life on to their children, who in turn become parents.

Parents who are bound by rejection are pitted against the children who appear to deliberately make their lives miserable.  Locked in seemingly endless conflict, unable to compel obedience or even peace and quiet, angry parents echo sentiments of rejection, spitting at their equally angry children whatever they can think of to hurt them, telling them that they are useless, they can never do anything right, they are bad, and they will undoubtedly end up in jail.  Or buried under the jail, as my husband's mother used to tell him. 

Consequently, many of you may have never known anything but failure from childhood.  Far from speaking any words of affirmation and encouragement, maybe your parents never even told you what they expected of you.  Or worse, maybe they punished you for things which were wrong only because they could not cope with them.  Children are at the bottom of life's pecking order.  Maybe in the pain of their lives, in the bondage of their soul, your parents beat you, raped you, tortured you, or destroyed everything you loved before your eyes.  It was for a purpose, though the purpose was not your parents' but Satan's.

Despising their innocence and fearing their potential, Satan, the destroyer of life, invests heavily of the resources of his kingdom into corrupting children.  It's an investment that pays off.  Your parents were payoffs.  In relationships where there is abuse, the parent was first the victim, who is replaying in the present the negative patterns of the rejection lived in the past, replaying rejection's fateful heritage of a life out of control. 

The unhealthy family system provides no background of conflict resolution, no ability to communicate deep feelings, no objective way to view the unreasonable expectations that were set early in life, except the inevitable striking out at those less powerful.  And adult children, still feeling their powerlessness, strike out in rejection at the next generation.

Of course, in God's kingdom, there are no acceptable excuses for sin.  It's not the devil that makes you do what is wrong, not your heritage, your environment, or your genetic predisposition.  From the choices you perceive, with the free will God gave you, you choose the actions you are to take.  Rejection explains the reaction, but it does not excuse the action.  Reactions are conditioned by the slavemaster; actions are still the responsibility of the slave.  God is no respecter of persons.  All actions have consequences.  And for actions He holds every slave accountable.

What do you think?  Was it pleasant growing up in Adam and Eve's household after the Fall?  To me it sounds very familiar:  the conflicting signals, never finding out what your parents wanted from you until you'd done it wrong, and, most of all, never being able to please them, no matter how you tried.  And maybe you had a your puny little brother, always meek and obedient, who learned to live within the rules that made no sense to you, who was always doing everything right. 

I know I could never seem to please my parents.  Why couldn't I obey simply to obey, like my sister, who never got yelled at or made my mother cry.  I obeyed only under threat of punishment, and then not without friction and a backward shot.  My home was just like yours in many ways, just like Cain's - a regular breeding ground for rejection.

I know how Cain felt.  And I don't blame him.  He wanted his own first fruits to pamper himself.  Sensory gratification, while it does not compensate for this habitual failure to ever measure up, makes the pain go away.  Adam and Eve had a lot of bitterness to spread around - no better recipient than the child of wrath for a stirred up situation.

Maybe your house, like mine, like my husband's, was a far more peaceful place to live when you finally got out of it.  Both my husband and I might have profited immensely by listening to the advice of our earthly fathers, who after all wanted the best for us, wanted us not to have to make the mistakes we claimed the right to make for ourselves.  But it wasn't so much what they told us as the way they told us that made their advice so futile.  We had to learn the hard way, proving the Proverb:  He who is often reproved, yet stiffens his neck, will suddenly be broken beyond healing (Proverbs 29:1).  It's easy to see what we should have done to save ourselves these years of pain.  But as usual in a dysfunctional household, rejection obscures the choices.

It's also easy to see what Cain should have done and should not have done, how he was broken finally beyond healing.  Rejection had him all his life; when his parents nagged him or his goody-goody brother bugged him, the spirit was there to whisper:  "Strike back.  As you have been hurt, get even."  A wounded child always strikes back. 

It's true, I know, we always do have choices. But by the time the wounded children are adults, these choices are no longer apparent.  Negative behaviors left over from childhood are repeated.  The black anger that comes when rejection opens its nasty mouth by then has been fed by other spirits.  You don't suddenly give in to anger; you're conditioned to giving in to it.  Rejection opens the door:  angry spirits have mastered you.  The neck is long since stiffened; suddenly, the deed from which there is no turning back is done. 

Cain did not slay Abel through a logical choice, but because Satan had turned logic inside out.  Abel stood for everything he could not be.  To one who walks in the darkness of rejection, those who walk in the light are insufferable; as the Proverb reads:  He whose way is straight is an abomination to the wicked (Proverbs 29:27).  Does one who is wicked, who has been violated by abuse, unfairness, and spiritual harassment, even possess the eyes to see the right path?  He does have a choice, way back where the roadway begins; it's after he has committed his feet to it that turning back becomes increasingly less possible.  For this reason God tells us to guard our hearts, so that we can remain in that place where we have absolute control over them.  

Take Judas Iscariot, for example.  People are always trying to make out what his motivation might have been for betraying Jesus.  Was it the money he was stealing, or was he from this zealot group who thought that Jesus planned to sell out the revolution.  True or no, these outward circumstances weren't the reason for the betrayal of his Friend and Master.  Those reasons are flesh and blood - this battle is spiritual.

Judas sold out the Lord because the spirit of rejection was working on him.  Judas was a thief.  When you find a child who steals, you always find a child who considers he's been ripped off.  Only wounded people, who have grown up under rejection, steal.  They do it to get what they're entitled to, to fill in the hollows.  Jesus saw his wounded spirit right from the start, saw rejection hovering over him - that's why He picked him.  After all, He did need a betrayer, He knew how rejection worked, and He knew from the moment He saw Judas that Judas was the one. 

 Jesus loved Judas just as much as He loved the others, possibly more, though distantly.  Although His greatest compassion was always for sinners, difficult people, who cannot be trusted, are invariably a trial to those about them. 

At different times you feel that Jesus would have preferred by nature and temperament to do things differently than He did by doing, in total submission, what the Father directed; for instance, you recall how moved He was by Lazarus' death and the sorrow that his sisters were obliged to endure because He was not permitted to arrive sooner.  So He probably would not have chosen to condemn Judas to his eternal punishment, at the same time setting Himself up for the pain of being sold to His death by the kiss of a friend, if it wasn't necessary for prophesy to be fulfilled.  Yet Judas too had a choice.  Though susceptible to the words of the whisperer, though conditioned to sneak and get even for perceived rejection, he was still responsible for his behavior, as action is always of the will.  Jesus said:  The Son of Man goes as it is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! (Matthew 26:24).

As the final scenes play out, we can see Jesus, though perhaps prevented the foreknowledge of the exact time and circumstances that the scriptures would be fulfilled, acting in full realization of what was happening, speaking the words He was required by the nature of the situation to say to bring about His betrayal.  In the scene, in the house of Simon the leper, a woman approached Jesus with an alabaster jar, who then proceeded to break the vessel of precious perfume and pour the contents over the Master.  What a commotion that must have caused.  How moved Jesus, so close to the shadow of the cross, must have been.  Mark recounts: 

But there were some who were moved with indignation and said to themselves, To what purpose was the ointment, the perfume, thus wasted?

For it was possible to have sold this perfume for more than three hundred denarii - a laboring man's wages for a year - and to have given them to the poor.  And they censured and reproved her. (Mark 14:4-5 Amp)

 Jesus had a duty to speak, to make the disciples aware that hers was a divine appointment.   He gently rebuked the mutterers: 

But Jesus said, Let her alone; why are you troubling her?  She has done a good and beautiful thing to Me - praiseworthy and noble.

For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you wish you can do good to them; but you will not always have Me.

She has done what she could; she came beforehand to anoint My body for the burial.

And surely, I tell you, wherever the good news of the Gospel is proclaimed in the entire world, what she has done will be told for a memorial of her.  (Mark 14:5-9 Amp)

 Judas heard these words as a man under rejection.  Interpreted by a spirit who wanted him to feel them like a slap in the face, Judas would have heard Jesus say:

"This woman is not wrong.  As always, you are wrong.  I know that the work we do among the poor is the focal point of our ministry, but why are you bothering with the money we are throwing away that might go to the poor now - isn't it apparent that the poor will always be with us.  I've been telling you and telling you, and although nothing has ever come of it, doesn't it seem as though it should have had time to sink in to your thick heads, that I won't always be with you.  This woman is generous and sensitive.  She will be remembered wherever the good news is published, but of course none of you will be, especially not you, Judas.  All you think about is money."

Action followed as an immediate response.  The spirit whispered, "The Master has humiliated you for the last time!  Strike!"  Rising blindly to his feet, the betrayer struck:  Then Judas Iscariot went off to the chief priests in order to betray and hand Him over to them (Mark 14:10 Amp).

A classic case of rejection, this scene was engineered by Satan as his part in God's plan to bring Jesus to the cross.  Where did that lady come from anyway; how did she know to anoint the Lord for burial?  She most assuredly had a pivotal part in the unfolding plot.  Of course, the merely human disciples could not discern her purpose, except that she came to make their life more difficult, squandering what might easily have been used for the work of the ministry - and certainly smelling up the place. 

Satan must have believed he had masterminded her purpose.  He knew how the disciples would react.  He knew what Jesus would say.  He knew how Judas would take it - and that the Son of Man would be given up to be betrayed.  And so it went:  the disciples reproved the woman and would have sent her on her way.  Jesus, walking more and more in the Spirit as His time to die drew near, and now standing before them a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God (Philippians 4:18 RSV), rose to her defense.  And kicked off the final round.