The Pain of Jezebel and the Power of Compassion
I have a confession. I have the Jezebel spirit.
Yes. I’m a controller. And I’m not proud of it.
This morning as I walk my way to breakfast, I was worshipping and thanking God. I was so full of joy. Then the Father, came around and smiled. He sat me down and told me, “Ian, you are a Jezebel.”
[more]I answered, “Yeah, how come?”. Then I started reflecting on my life. I check. I reasoned.
It was really so.
Of course, when the Father tells you something bad, it never feels hurtful. It was a soothing fatherly concern. The Father, I assume, has already studied the implications of me learning this truth in my life and decided, “Ian is my son. He is a tiger. He is ready to deal with it.”
What is the Jezebel Spirit?
1 Kings 18:4
“Earlier, when Jezebel had tried to kill off all the prophets of God, Obadiah hid away a hundred of them in two caves, fifty in a cave, then supplied them with food and water.”
Jezebel was a queen in Israel who made his husband, the Israelite king look like a puppet. She was that obsessively controlling and powerful. In this passage we see her killing hundreds of prophets like casually slicing tomatoes on the counter.
There has been many misonceptions about the Jezebel spirit. Our fears has never resolved the problem. Heres the Lies and the Truth:
1. The Jezebel spirit is a psychopath who needs to die in hell. Wrong. The person typically is a good person with very painful past experiences.
The 1 Kings story sounds like Hitler killing the Jews. Yes it is. Is she really a good person? Read on.
2. Jezebel is a woman.
No.
They can be a man or a woman. Wow, now you feel I mixed up the genders too. Read on.
3. Jezebel is a curable condition. There are many ways to heal it.
Having cleared out the generalities, who is a Jezebel?
The Jezebel spirit is a manifestation of an orphan spirit of control, manipulation and witchcraft because of an abuse or abandonment by an authority very early on in childhood.
The abuse or abandonment leads the person to make a vow that “This abuse will never ever happen again.” This vow becomes a wall of the stronghold spirit of Jezebel
To learn more about strongholds, check out the next article about strongholds.
With a nice main house of wrong beliefs built, the person becomes blind to reality and is paranoid about everything. When a lad was raped as a child beside her yellow duck toy. Years later as an adult, she will not work but keep protecting herself from attacks, ducks and everything yellow in color, even when asleep. This saps her energy. She is in the prison of her past.
She starts the brick and concrete construction of structures for controlling situations so that the person will never be hurt again. Unfortunately this positive desire to “not be hurt” is also healthy mechanism to deal with intense hurt designed by the Father. Sadly, it becomes a bondage against her ability to be free.
My Story.
I am what you call a typical christian in a christian home. I grew up in sunday school and bible verses. Nothing unusual with that. During my high school, I was “driven” and full of fear. I was paranoid of everything.
I was afraid to get lost. I was afraid of other people deceiving and stealing from me. I was afraid of authorities: pastors, police, teachers, principals.
Take that 10 years later. I am now a professional. Now consider this, everytime I get a call from a manager to his office, there is an overwhelming panic. I start to make a complete book of reasons that “I am dumb and I am an incompetent idiot.” In my mind, I write a complete novel seeking to understand, “what was my mistake.” The truth is: the manager wants to ask where to go lunch. Call that paranoid but that is how it feels to have the desease. I come to office everyday afraid of what things will go wrong. This is constant in my 20 years of practice. I tell you when you are like this you never get to relax.
I am blessed today to know where it comes from. When I was a baby, I experienced a physical and emotional neglect from my dad.
Let me underline I experienced. It is my own perceptions that poison the good reasons why my dad did what he did. But the situation was also reality.
My dad was the eldest, he is also self employed. As a young boy, he took care of his five siblings. He carried the family the whole time. He made milk for his brothers together with my grandmother. He changed diapers and washed them everyday before and after going to his fourth level elementary school. At lunch, he would go home, cook rice and change diapers again before coming back to class. Today, as a lawyer and accountant, my dad is very successful because he has learned to be competent in taking care of other people. As manager, he works long hours.
Therefore, my dad’s decision to never touch my diapers was a valid one. And his reason was that he had taken care of my aunts and uncles. He wasn’t even entitled to the toys he carved by his hands. As a stepson (by my grandmother, with my remarried grandfather), he too was experiencing being an orphan. That can grow into the gene of Jezebel.
Only now do I understand all my anger against authorities. I see that I am angry that “authorities” (my dad) are perceived to be distancing themselves from being connected to me. My dad on his own part did not deliberately isolate me, he was only thinking of freedom and responsibility. He was responsible for diapers and poop of 5 siblings, therefore he has graduated from taking care of me physically. He chose the freedom not to change diapers and clean poo.
Freedom and Responsibility.
Arthur Burk describes the relationship of freedom and responsibility. Freedom is the autonomy and free will to do what you really want. It is a being, not a doing. It is the ability to stand in dominion over your life. Therefore any peice of control from things, people and situations diminishes that autonomy.
Let me illustrate. A person who can choose to smoke is free. A person who can drink is free. A person who is single is free to date. A person is free to choose not to obey rules.
But.
A person who is smoking is in bondage to smoking. A person who is drinking is in bondage to drinking. A person who is going to church and can’t decide to stop is in bondage to church. A person who can’t keep his sexual urges is in bondage to them. A person who can’t avoid hurting others is in bondage.
What is a person who is in bondage then? A person in bondage is one who has no influence over his situation. He has no choice. Freedom and responsibility has a close relationship.
Mcdonald’s has the freedom to receive my money and my order. Mcdonald’s also has a responsibility to deliver that burger. I as a customer have the freedom to choose where to eat and free to buy a Mcdonald’s cheeseburger meal. I also have the responsibility to pay for it. If Mcdonald’s took my money and my order but did not give me my my cheeseburger, they are totally free to do that. They are also liable to authorities if I take the freedom to report the problem. It is also my freedom to report the incident and I am responsible and free with how I respond whether I report it or not.
Where we miss life.
When we live life as a practice solely of responsibility, we miss the beauty and the colors of freedom. If we are afraid of making mistakes, we limit our freedom to hurt somebody, to learn how to make adjustments, gain wisdom, and enjoy life.
My dad, because of his choice to use his freedom, to not play an active role in my “infanthood” resulted in my orphan spirit and my wrong responses to life now. Today I have full responsibility over my life. Yet because of certain emotional handicaps I am not aware of, I have practically limited freedom to act in areas I am supposedly free to do.
An example is a rape victim. After the incident, the person continues to have full freedom to pursue healthy relationships. But because of trauma she is limited emotionally to pursue healthy relationships unless she unlearns the lies she learned.
Causes of Jezebel Spirit.
In homes, there are many ways children can be hurt. Children can be manipulated to work (take part of the responsibility away from the parents) to provide resources to the family. Making children work from a young age is healthy. But making them take more responsibility than they can handle can be emotional abuse on their young emotions.
Children who suffer violence from authority – parents, teachers and guardians become broken.
Children who were molested, raped or deceived by authorities have a high chance of having a Jezebel spirit.
Children who are kidnapped, held up, offered to satanism, brainwashed in communism or Islamic extremism, ritual offering abuse or hypnotized can also experience devastation.
Men and women with unstable emotions who experience a painful past are prone. They develop self protection “I will never allow myself to be hurt again.” That is the seed for the Jezebel spirit in action. Build a few brick per day and we have a castle in a few years.
The children who experienced deep pain and abuse from authority typically respond in two ways, the Jezebel spirit or the Ahab Spirit.
The Ahab spirit comes from the description of King Ahab in Israel. He was king, but it was his controlling wife who was taking charge of the kingdom. Violence can frighten a manor woman’s spirit so that he becomes handicapped: unable to take healthy risks and losses.
That is my experience. Because of an orphan spirit, it takes more effort to make risks and choices that will allow me to learn. I shortcircuit my learning so that I only make “safe” choices. I am certainly not happy about it.
A century ago an evil dictator was born. It is not clear how he was hurt, but the hurt was evident when he came to power.
The spirit of Jezebel is present in all of us but it becomes evident when a person gains authority and power. The dictator vented his anger on peole who he think hurt him when perhaps only one did.
At the end of World War II, the world still has not learned its lesson. We put effort in in protecting ourselves from extremists and terrorists instead of taking positive action to prevent “orphaned spirit” into spreading enough that statistically one of them comes to power.
A century ago, many orphaned peacekeepers (political leaders of France, US and England) had the Ahab spirit. They didn’t act at a crucial time against Germany because they were afraid of taking expensive risks. What happened was an unrestrained exercise by Adolf Hitler to invade all of Europe while the allied powers remained paralyzed to step in and say, I have moral authority. We care for you but this is as far as you can go.
The experience of freedom is not measured by the money you have, your level of success or power, or your abundance of knowledge. If you need to be a lawyer or doctor to be a worthy person, that can be measured as negative 50 units of freedom. If you need to kill people to prove your value, that is probably a negative 70 units of freedom. We all have areas of bondage or negative freedom to some extent, especially if we measure our worth by these metrics. Cute or not we are all our own little Jezebels or Ahabs in different areas of our lives.
Now that we know what insecurity looks like, what does freedom feels like? Do you know it can be measured too?
If insecurity can be measured by the amount of dependence on money, power, success and knowledge, what is the measure for freedom?
Freedom is measured by the ability you can receive love from the Father and the ability to receive and give love to other people. This is the foundation of security. This is what you call perfection.
Imagine for a moment a recession. Imagine that while the world suffers fear of failure and loss, you are free. You are not dependent on the economy as your source. You are aware that the Father takes care of you even in desperate situations.
This does not mean that bad or painful things don’t happen. It does. It only means that in spite of situations you have full freedom.
You are free to enjoy life with or without money. You have freedom to accept you are in a recession. If you need to give up your car, you can do so without emotional baggage.
That is just 30 units of freedom. If you can celebrate while giving to those in need, that is higher authority. that is probably 60 units of freedom.
If that counts as 60 units, what counts as a hundred?
It is deliberately giving your life for people who are Jezebels, Ahabs and cowards. Jesus was the first person to love completely and committed suicide. He chose to die, out of love. Now that’s Jesus, you are not God. As God, He was free to give all. Like Him, you can increase freedom Too.
There was a group discussion last night about the definition of freedom. I gave an answer that is not actually mine. I learned it from Arthur Burke. He said that “Freedom is when there is nothing left to lose.”
