The truth of this statement is a relevant today as it was in the 1500's. A discussion follows, identifying "battlefronts" hot with conflict between the Kingdom and the world spirit, in the late 20^th Century. But first - some definitions.

In James 4:1-5 James calls certain behaviour spiritual "adultery". To understand why he would say this, we need to look at the meaning behind 1 John 5:19. There John states the whole world system (kosmos) lies under the control of the evil one - this is personality - not an abstract principle of evil. This one has been a seducer from the beginning, turning the affection and devotion of God's people away from God to himself. Paul understood this; "I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ." 2 Cor 11:2-3.

What does it mean to be an "adulterer" in God's sight? The word adultery comes from the Latin ad = to, and alter = other. It means specifically "mixture" of a foreign, inferior element into something pure, which results in defilement, or debasement of the original substance. Something, or someone, comes in that has no right to be present.

Once contact has been established with the outside influence, an exchange of intimacy commences - inner thoughts, ideas, secrets, etc, are shared. Ideas are taken on board that appear to be harmless, but are a loaded gun for later on! Emotional bonding occurs at this stage between people.

Exposure to intimacy gives way to stronger desire for attachment, including physical bonding (touching, etc). This involves increased sexual thoughts and ultimately full sexual union. The thought life has gone out of (self) control and the slide down the Proverbs 7:27 "highway to hell" accelerates.

All through Israel's history, spiritual adultery involved turning away from the revealed way of worshiping God to incorporating elements imported from surrounding pagan idolatrous practices; eg. 2 Chron 21:6-11 Exo 20:3-5 Hosea 3:1. It was the final reason for their captivity to Babylon (see 2 Chron 34:24-25).

Nothing changes from Israel to the Church. The Enemy has always sought to weaken the effectiveness of God's people by mixing in "worldly" elements. The world spirit (as in personality, according to John, not as in abstract principle) is unchanged; it's only the current "battle-front" that moves with the times! Luther understood this.

If we struggle with dependability, reliability - do we recognise it may involve spiritual powers, as much as our fallen nature? And that it can be "adultery" - allowing a foreign influence into our inner private life? People unfaithful in their word often become unfaithful in their sexual ethics. Unfaithfulness is a creeping cancer of the soul.

False Intimacy and Business
Billions of dollars are spent projecting false friendliness (eg. the banks, insurance companies, or the cults!). - people who say they are "serving/helping" others, rather than being honest that their primary motive is to expand their business (especially where they have to sign up others, rather than just sell products).

The world spirit is currently on about "networking". Whole denominations have been ruined by leaders allowing their "Fellowships" to become network-marketing centres. Using the relationship the Holy Spirit creates as a contrived means to further business is "adultery" in God's eyes. Look at Jesus' explosive reaction to this in John 2:13-17 (emporium - lit = wholesale market) Mark 11:17 2 Peter 2:3. This is not to say we shouldn't do business with one another, but any financial activity should flow out of the relationship established through our common faith and obedience to Jesus Christ - and the business standards should always reflect the ethics of the Kingdom.

Interestingly, this kind of people often end up in a vague spirituality more at home in New Age Eastern spirituality. Whole books have been written tracing this connection - how Eastern spirituality has seduced sections of the Christian Church through the importing of business practices sourced in Hinduism.

Interestingly, people caught in this world appear to be more susceptible to ungodly sexual behaviour.

Remedy: to someone caught in this adulterous deception, the principle of 2 Tim 2:24-26 applies. Acknowledge the truth so you set yourself free from the deception (see also 1 Tim 6). Keep away from network marketing and get a different kind of permanent, regular job.

Tolerance
The whole world political and ethical/moral system is being forced into line with UN protocols on "tolerance" = including acceptance of practices by others that are morally wrong by external biblical standards. This leaves out God's view - that ALL sin has community ramifications (not just the obvious examples such as "privacy" of porno/violent video viewing having an obvious community effect - eg. the Anita Cobby killer watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre repeatedly before raping, mutilating, and killing her.

It's quite likely the last worldwide persecution of Christians will be on this basis - our refusal to acknowledge other "paths to God" as being equally valid. Jesus "closed" statement, "no man comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6) will become illegal.

Rev 2:18-20 This is not God's idea of being tolerant! Recognise a war is being fought on this front. Homosexuality was criminal activity until 20 years ago. Why? Sexual immorality was wrong but not criminal. The spiritual significance of androgyny must be understood in this change.

Remedy: Confess your sloppy thinking to God; re-establish yourself in the fundamentals of biblical truth; seek God to be really filled with the Spirit; determine then to witness boldly, and without compromise to the uniqueness of Christ.

Confused Sexuality - especially Androgyny
The world spirit is working hard on this one. Androgyny involves unisex - melding of the sexuality of male and female. Man and woman / male and female are not the same thing. We are born man and woman (gender), but we become male and female in our character and sexuality development. The David Bowie look - where it's hard to distinguish if you're looking at a man or woman, is increasingly common - in the use of makeup, hairstyling, clothing fashions, etc. This explains Bible prohibitions (eg. Deut 22:5 transvestism is an abomination; 1 Cor 11:14-15). God hates anything that promotes confusion of gender.

So, behind the trends, fashion emphases, etc, lies an evil personality, dedicated in its opposition to everything that is godly, and brings blessing, including gender differentiation.

The Church opposes this gender confusion ia. by assisting young men and women in developing their maleness and femaleness! Alan Woodcock's quote - "a woman can take a baby boy and develop him into an adolescent, but it takes a man's influence to develop an adolescent into a young adult male" (and ditto for women). The Church's extended family can really help solo mothers here, by exposing their sons to male godly men in an ongoing way.

Androgyny also leads to tolerance of homosexuality (where a man uses another man as a woman. And to….

Attack on Male Authority
Confusion of the roles is chronic here - men are being expected to act like women and vice versa (it's called political correctness!). The next generation loses its "natural God-given" reference points and all hell breaks loose! Where women rule the house and men abdicate their rôle of provider and protector, it’s the kids who pay the ultimate price - loss of rôle modelling, sexual identity, purpose in life (especially in development of true masculinity and femininity), decision making and initiative development.

Leadership is male (see David Pawson's book of the same name). The very Hebrew word God used to describe "male" amplifies this (zawkar = be memorable, noteworthy - idea of standing out). God designed male men to lovingly, carefully, and prayerfully LEAD (cf. Isa 3:12 & c). When women rule, youths will oppress society! And everyone will bear the tension. NOTE: this area should not be oversimplified. It needs to be examined in detail, as the Scriptures speak of both sexes leading and taking responsibility. It's the fields of responsibility that must be defined.

One Australian Church is a textbook case - it has lost its edge on several related issues. "Tolerating" such situations as an unrepentant lesbian (ex-leader, still ordained) leads to a loss of spiritual power and influence (so the Church ends up as a secular arm of government welfare agencies). Death of evangelism follows - and the group have then been rendered ineffective in countering the world spirit - becoming even more prone to the seduction of spiritual adultery.

Vague Non-Biblical Spirituality
Share the Spirit! Our numberplates tell us! But it’s the Olympics they're talking about now! THE Spirit can only be defined from the written Scriptures. There's a growing spirituality that has little, or no, biblical content. People talk about being religious, even "Christian" without a commitment to the basics outlined in the Bible. They see themselves as fellow travellers - without conviction of sin, application of Christ's blood, public profession of Jesus Christ as the only way to come to the Father, regular practice of fellowship, instruction, prayer, giving, serving in ministry, etc, etc.

Remedy: Know the Scriptures! Be biblical in your spiritual values!

We are answerable for our own lives, and leaders are answerable for the life and conduct and standard of the House of God (which is the Kingdom prototype on Earth 1 Cor 5:9-13). Paul fought ceaselessly to keep the world spirit out of the Church - ia. because it empties the Church of power of God, forcing it to employ substitutes! The word of God is reduced in its effectiveness by spiritual adultery (mixture). When the Church surrenders to the world spirit, and incorporates it into its worship and practice, it opens itself to,

False teaching, including an excessive emphasis on endtimes. Fee's description of the Corinthian Church's problem with over-realised eschatology highlights this - including some of the women denying their husbands conjugal rights, esoteric ideas (including the role of angels and believers' interaction with them, etc), and difficulties with God's established natural order of relationship and authority between the sexes, especially in marriage.

Invasion by deceiving religious spirits. These delight in furthering the work of gender confusion (New Age is full of androgyny). Further deterioration develops in the area of mental confusion, including an inability to read / study / understand / recall the Scriptures. Religious spirits attack systematic study of the Faith. They seek to include an unhealthy excess of emotional baggage with the objective truth of God's Word.

Ongoing difficulty in the area of improper sexual relations. A Church seduced by the world spirit will struggle to maintain sexual integrity and purity. People will battle with lust, pornography, homosexual thoughts, even child molestation, and not know why they can't get victory.

Serious deception, including real but counterfeit ecstatic spiritual experiences. The ultimate apostasy, immediately prior to the Lord Jesus' Second Coming, will be loaded with this (2 Thess 2:1-17).

Luther's quote takes on fresh potency. If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I am professing Him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proven.

It has been said that everything will be done to keep the true nature of the battle from the saints' understanding. This statement relates to the subject of "cosmology" - the study of the structure of the universe as a whole; ie. including the true nature of the real unseen spiritual realm, as well as the seen natural realm, and their inter-relationship.

Modern Western thought has an inbuilt emphasis on the seen (physical) part of the cosmos. This creates a tendency to explain overall reality in excessively naturalistic terms. (An interesting follow-on from this conditioning is the Western Christian’s tendency to read the word "spirit" as an attitude in places where Scripture is referring to a demonic influence; eg. Rom 8:15 1 Cor 2:12 2 Cor 11:4.).

Similarly, Western culture's "filtration" system subtly reworks John's greatly significant declaration, "the whole world ("cosmos") is under the control of the evil one" [1 Jn 5:19] into an expression of the principle of evil in our seen world (of government, natural order, etc). In fact, John was stating that both the seen and unseen realm of reality, surrounding our (fallen) world (system) lie under the control of an ordered hierarchical system of demonic power that heads up under Satan himself, the evil one^. (Similarly, the Lord's Prayer is traditionally repeated as, "deliver us from evil" (ie. a principle), rather than the more accurate, "evil one" (personality)!). This is, of course, under the permitted will of God, the ultimate source of all authority and power, who reigns over all from heaven's throne.

This tendency also subtly reworks the Western perception of the nature of the individual enslavement of fallen people to powers of darkness, as expressed in Ephesians 2:1-3. It downplays the nature of the mighty deliverance ('rescue mission') that Jesus Christ has accomplished for us individually too; eg. Col 1:13. Jesus, Paul, and other NT ministers regularly saw this place of transition from being under the control of one 'lord', to a new 'lord' involving the renouncing / loosing / breaking of demonic chains of control / influence (Early church history records that in the water baptism of new converts, a declaration was made of submission to the authority of Christ's lordship. This included a formal renunciation of Satan and demonic ties). It was not unusual for this to be accompanied by observable manifestations [eg. Acts 8:5-7].

Furthermore, modern Western evangelism places strong emphasis on the ability to mentally persuade non-believers to the intellectual / rational truth of the claims of the gospel. This is true, but it's not the whole truth. An over-emphasis in Western cosmology on the natural/mental processes will limit the nature of the battle to, primarily, a clash of intellect and will.

The reason then that first century evangelism, as practised by both Jesus and the early church, differed so greatly from common Western church evangelism today cannot be because of a change in the true nature of cosmology, because that, by very definition, cannot, and does not, change! As they say, "guess who moved?" The seen world has changed tremendously. First century believers would not recognise our material, social, and technological world. Their methods of evangelism would be different, but their understanding of the inter-relationship between the spiritual and natural realm would be unaltered; they would still view the seen world as operating under the control of the unseen (spirit) realm.

And they would still understand the necessity of "binding the strong man" before dispossessing him of the people under his control [Mat 12:22-9]! Jesus Christ tied up the strong man at Calvary and the empty tomb; this mighty victory had to be applied before the "captives" could be loosed. Hence, John writes many years after Calvary and the resurrection, "We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one" [1 John 5:19].

Jesus was referred to, in Mat 12:18-21, as the "servant" of Isaiah 42:1-4. The early church, in the power of the Holy Spirit, undertook to extend the authority of Jesus Christ over the strong man's "goods", dispossessing Satan's system of territorial authority, and plundering his kingdom for converts!

They paid a terrible price for this up-front view of the cosmos. Powers of darkness raged against them - especially the "sent ones" such as Paul [Acts 26:15-8 9:16 2 Cor 6:3-10]. But while they were active, things happened in the invisible realm [eg. Luke 10:1-3, 17-20] that reminded the "world-rulers" of Eph 6:12 of their inevitable downfall before the advancing Kingdom of God! (see footnote).

As we look ahead to fresh activities of evangelism in our modern society today, we too need to be aware of the unchanging nature of our (fallen) seen and unseen cosmos! Unchanged, at least, until Jesus comes!

Human nature being what it is (Jer 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?), God has deliberately placed checks and balances within the body of Christ to curb the tendency of sinful nature to be corrupted. One of the main elements of this is indicated in;

Prov 29:18 Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint; but blessed is he who keeps the law. Revelation = 2377. khaw-zone'; from H2372; a sight (mentally) i.e. a dream, revelation, or oracle..

Note the balance here between the prophetic and written, legal emphases - dreams, revelations, uttered inspired words and the keeping of the law. Both are necessary. The warning here is that a loss of vision, revelation, sense of godly direction, etc, will lead to God's people going wild.

The consequence of their lack of worshipping God according to His prescribed precepts was a degeneration of behaviour - revelry (Heb = caressing, sexual connotation), shouting, singing, dancing, running wild, out of control [32:25]. The Heb. verb used in v25 underlies the verb used in Prov 29:18 = cast off restraint.

Having smashed the stone tablets, and ordered execution of the offenders at the hand of the Levites, Moses then turned around and began to intercede for the Israelites! What a heart he showed!

Soon afterwards, he pitched his "tent of intimacy" outside the camp, where he regularly met with God face to face [Exo 33:7-11], in devotion and received direction for his leadership commitments.

Both the priests and prophets were responsible for the presentation of God's word to His people. Broadly speaking, the priests present the 'law' element of Prov 29:18, and the prophets present the 'revelation' element. Both had failed, and the people of Ezekiel's day had "cast off restraint", thinking their way of worshipping God was acceptable to Him, just as the Israelites had done while dancing around a golden calf!

They were worshiping not in accordance with the written scriptures (in this case, concerning honouring one's parents). So their worship was in vain! (Any movement today, especially where it emphasises worship, must be judged by the same criteria).

Jesus added to this "in vain" worship by telling the Samaritan woman that it wasn't enough to worship God, but His Father sought people to worship Him "in spirit and in truth" [John 4:23-24]

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

In the restored temple Ezekiel saw, all the precincts (outer court, holy place, as well as the most holy place) were surrounded by a wall, and were most holy (qodesh qodesh Eze 43:12) unto the LORD. May it be so among us today.