There is a resident atmosphere or spiritual power operating; but they don't just operate from the spirit realm - they find expression through the lives of people. When you look at the woman Jezebel, there was an invisible spiritual power - but it found an expression through a person who had yielded to that.
2 Corinthians 10:4 it tells us that there are ‘strongholds’. Strongholds are positions in our life that allow demonic powers to influence how we think, how we behave, how we act, even how we view life. They gain access if your life is broken and damaged. That's why people need deliverance - to get your life cleaned up of demonic influence. Why do you need restoration and healing? To close the doors in your heart and soul, so they don't operate any more.
Spiritual powers gain their influence by seducing people to believe a lie, and begin to yield to them. In this particular nation, at this time, there was like a spiritual heaviness, a lack of the flow of the prophetic, a lack of the miraculous, a lack of the supernatural. A spiritual power was resident, operating in the nation, through people.
God hates that spirit operating. He hates it because it destroys the identity of His people, it destroys who the people of God are - it shuts down the church from being supernatural. It comes as heaviness, an oppression; that causes loss of destiny, purpose, identity, and strength.
I want to show you three portions of the Bible - three distinct, separate, situations - where this spirit gained access to a man of God, or a group of people, and it shut them down from operating supernaturally, and began to draw them away from what God had called them to do. I want you to learn from it. In each of these situations the same thing happened - there was a different doorway of entry; but in each of these situations, God intervened - to help that person step back up into the place of identity, positioning that God wanted them to flow in.
What a wonderful thing! It may be, as we read this, that you discover – I’ve opened my life, I've opened my inner man; I've allowed control to operate around my life, and shut down the anointing, shut down the flow of the spirit of God. In that case, I've got good news - God gets you out of it, if you respond to Him.
I didn't finish explaining what I meant by the ‘Slumber of Jezebel’, so let me explain it...
Jezebel was a person who introduced a spiritual power into a nation. The word ‘slumber’ means: to be dormant; to be in a state of inactivity; or passive. When you're slumbering, you're sleeping - you're unaware of what's happening around you. You're not doing anything, so a spiritual slumber means spiritually you're just unaware. You haven't got a clue what spiritual influences are operating. You can't see what's happening, you can't hear what is going on, you can't understand. You're living in a state of confusion, and lack of awareness of the spiritual powers afflicting your situation.
Because you're unaware of it, you can't do anything about it. It's like what I'd call living in a trance. You think you're living life, but actually this stuff has shut you down, and you don't even know it. You're not operating like you ought to operate, so ultimately it leads to a loss of hope and destiny. So that's slumber - a spirit of slumber is a spiritual fall.
The ‘Slumber of Jezebel’ is simply a spiritual power of witchcraft operating, that causes you to become unaware of spiritual operations, to shut down prophetically - shut down in the flow of the Holy Ghost - and not see what God is doing, or hear what God is saying. You actually shut down. You're no longer standing where God wanted you to stand, functioning like God wanted you to function. You no longer have strength, you become quite weak.