People who have aligned themselves with Satan think his kingdom is not divided against itself and won’t turn on itself.

“Satan’s kingdom is no homogenous, congealed, smooth-running operation because it’s based on greed and avarice, pride and covetousness,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) . “No sinful situation is without strife. Oh, I know they try to make you think it is. But you get out of the will of God and you’re always going to have unrest and turmoil and heartache and difficulty. The wages of sin is always that way. ‘The way of the transgressor is hard,’ that Book says. Strife and contention are always there because of sin.”

Jordan says that in Satan’s kingdom one faction fights and seeks mastery over another faction, and you’ll always find representatives from one camp warring against representatives of another camp.

“I’ve had people tell me, ‘Well, some of Satan’s demons wouldn’t make a guy sick and others heal him—they wouldn’t cast each other out,’ ” says Jordan. “Listen, they’re working against each other for the mastery. You forget pride and greed is the whole basis of Satan’s operation!”

Just the other weekend I attended a Bible study in which I was confronted by almost all in attendance (at least 10 adults) who believed certain Christians were given by God the “gift of healing.” I even had one woman swear to me she was given the call “to minister by laying on of hands.”

What these people refuse to accept is that God doesn’t work by any “sign gifts” in this “dispensation of grace,” laid out by Paul throughout his epistles.

As I reminded them, just because someone apparently gets a “miraculous healing” from an illness, that doesn’t mean it came from God.

“People say, ‘Why would the devil heal somebody?’ and the answer is, ‘Why not? Why not make him more of a servant?’, ” says Jordan. “My dear friend, there are counterfeit preachers, counterfeit signs and counterfeit wonders done in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. A miraculous demonstration is no guarantee that it’s God at work, for there are counterfeit Christs coming in the name of Christ, producing great miraculous signs and wonders and Christ said, ‘They’re false; they’re not real.”

These same people at the Bible study believed in speaking in tongues. I’m sorry, but there’s no logic at all to that one! It’s so completely Looney Toons!

Just last week I had a friend tell me he attended a Roman Catholic Church event here in Manhattan and they were even speaking in tongues! He said it sounded like they were trying to mimic Jews speaking Hebrew, but were using nonsensical words and it sounded like gibberish.

Jordan says, “All this attempt you see around you today to reclaim the Pentecostal sign gifts and all—that’s just evidence of babies being enamored with childish toys; it’s not maturity and it’s not spiritual growth. The purpose of the ‘sign gifts’ in the early church was to show Israel that God was at work. The ‘tongues’ among the Corinthians was a sign to the Hebrew nation out there that the judgment of God had fallen upon them. . .

“Now I know there are people who are going to listen to what I say and they’re going to argue, ‘I don’t believe that, I will not acknowledge that and I refuse to submit to the fact that what Paul says is God’s commandment for today.’ And they’re going to say tongues do work. You know what Paul said about you, though? He said, ‘If any man be ignorant let him be ignorant.’

“You’re going to meet people along the way who are absolutely going to refuse to acknowledge Paul’s authority and Paul’s ministry, and they’re going to go on in spite of it, and Paul’s saying, ‘Well, just don’t worry about it; just let them go on. There isn’t anything you can do for them.’

“The reality is God’s going to read your meter and see whether you’re trusting Him or whether you’re trusting men. Deuteronomy 13:3 says, ‘The LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.’

“You know what I know about people who are following miraculous signs and wonders in the Charismatic Movement is that they don’t give a flip about what God’s Word says. They don’t care what God says about it. They just know what they’ve seen and experienced.

“I know, No. 1, they don’t love God, and, No. 2, they love themselves. They love their emotions, they love the high, they love their feelings, and they don’t care anything about God. God said, ‘I’m going to try them out and I’m going to demonstrate whether they love me or not.’ Jesus said, ‘If you love me, keep my words.’

“If you can be called to disobey God’s Word on the basis of some demonstrable thing—some miraculous sign or wonder—you don’t love God and you might as well quit running around trying to convince people you do—you don’t! This might sound a little hard, but this is not an issue you can be easy about.

“You understand, folks, I Corinthians 13 (which includes the statement, ‘whether there be tongues, they shall cease’) presents a real problem for the modern Pentecostal Charismatic Movement. Because you’re taught on every hand today that in order to have a real true experience in the Christian life, you need to talk in tongues—you need to have some special gift, whether its wisdom, helps, tongues. And that chapter says that’s all nonsense! That chapter says, ‘Though I’ve got all these gifts in my life, I can still be out of the will of God, and they can all be completely valueless in my life.’ The presence of the gifts was absolutely no proof that a person was in the will of God.”

In Jordan’s sermon just last Sunday, he said, “Don’t ever think that just because something appears to be a supernatural operation—a supernatural demonstration, miraculous event—that it had to by nature be God. There are some demonic devil spirits; spirits of devils working miracles.

“The only way you’re going to know if it’s God doing it, is if you can find a verse in the Bible that says God did it. That’s how you authenticate God doing it. Otherwise, you won’t know if it’s these ‘false Christs’ doing it or not.

“Now, I understand if you go into the average church today, or the average Christian bookstore, or turn on the average TV or radio program in Christendom today—

in fact, talk to the average Christian today—and the standard for authenticity in the Christian life is your experience.

“There’s a bumper sticker that says, ‘My God is not dead. I talked to Him this morning.’ I used to see that and say, ‘Man, that’s terrible! Every Muslim you know says that! Every Hindu you know talked to 15-20 of his gods this morning.’

“Your experience is only as good as somebody else’s experience. It’s no authority. We have a song in our song book, ‘He lives, I know He lives because He lives in my heart,’ but that’s apparently not good enough.”