The king that was appointed to rule, to bring peace and prosperity to the nation, but his heart has swerved aside. He's come into an alliance with a particular woman, but it's the spirit behind that woman that is the thing we are concerned with. In the Old Testament, you see stories of people having encounters with God, and people having conflicts, but behind that, there is an invisible realm that influences it. The stories in the Old Testament are given to help unveil that spirit world.
The person that's involved in the Old Testament, by the name of Jezebel - that same name turns up with a different person, in the Book of Revelation. In the Book of Revelation, it's right there in the church, being tolerated, and bringing corruption - bringing defilement and causing people to be seduced away from God. It's not the same person; but it's the same spirit, doing the same kind of work - and God wants us to revolt against it.
His complaint in Revelations 2:20 is that we ‘tolerate’ this thing to operate. Tolerate means we're just passive, and compliant, and let it happen. His complaint with the church was not that they weren't zealous, not that they weren't hardworking, but they tolerated something that God found intolerable… and the consequence was disastrous for them!
Mostly, the reason the spirit operates is because: (1) it's incredibly deceptive; and (2) people become passive, and tolerate it operating, because they don't recognise its operation.
They become entangled with it. They become entwined in it, they come under its influence, then wonder: why have I got no power? Why does the church have no power? Why are we lacking in the supernatural? There's a very good reason - if you want to move in the supernatural, you have an enemy that is committed to oppose your operation in the supernatural. Every person who steps up, and wants to move in the supernatural, will engage a different kind of warfare they've never had before.
You might say: oh well, I just don't like the idea of that, so just leave me alone - my life is hard enough as it is. Yeah, it's hard enough, because you are tolerating things to operate, that God gave you authority and a mandate to overcome.
He said in Luke 10:19 - I give you authority. I won it on the cross. I won it for you. I have won the authority over demons. They have no power to rule you. I have paid a price on the cross to gain authority for you, to reposition you with authority, so you will trample underfoot serpents, scorpions, all the power of the enemy, nothing will harm you.
You need to believe, and stand up, and learn how to fight! But if you don't know where the war is, and how to fight... we just pray in tongues, but don't know what to do, so I want to help you with that.
Let's just look at this person here... The word ‘Sidonian’ means literally ‘to catch someone in a snare’, so the Sidonians, literally their whole nature was to catch people in a snare. The Sidonians, literally, are a picture, prophetically, of demonic spirits - assigned to catch us, snare us.
The snare of the devil - Timothy talks about it. Their whole plan is to catch you in a snare, and there's many pictures of this in the Bible, many operations of the spirit, right through from one end of the Bible to the other. This is just one glimpse into it, but you can find it at work in many different parts of the Bible. Let me give you one major example...
When the people of Israel were walking in blessing, and could not be overcome, their enemy hired a prophet, but even he couldn't prophesy against them. He said: there's only one way you can deal with this - you've got to seduce them away from God. It tells us that they then sent in women to sleep with the men, and then, as a result of that, to bring them into union with them, and with their gods.
They moved away from God and began to worship idols. That is the same spirit at work, seducing people away from the Lord through sexual sin - into immorality, and then into the worship of idols, or substitutes for God. This is an old story. It says that 25,000 men perished at that time. That's a lot of sleeping around, by many, many women.
It's actually an invasion, by the women, against a culture, intentionally set on seducing these men. Young women, married women, they sent them all in, to sleep with the men, and 25,000 died. Now these things are written for a lesson, that the spiritual conflict is real - this conflict happened, and it was blatant, it was done in front of everyone. One man was highly commended, because he wouldn't stand for it. He wouldn't tolerate it. He stood up and confronted the thing. God said: I will make that man; I will give him honour all his life.