Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Ladder Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we're living in.

The last episode was a very positive message for women, in that God is calling many of them to take their places of dominion in the areas to which they've been assigned, and the significance of this movement and what it signals concerning how close we are to the day of the Lord.

Today's message also focuses on women, only this message is one of warning. It's called "The Voice of Your Ancestral Blood." Now don't worry, men, I'm not leaving you out. The following episode will be what the voice of your ancestral blood may be saying to you and why ancestral defilement is something we all need to take to heart seriously, because we are too close to the kingdom to be disqualified.

What inspired these messages is the recent Torah portion we've been studying, which is Numbers 31. This chapter concerns the very last battle that God told Moses to fight before taking him home. Now this is significant because, as we've discussed, the doctrine of our Jewish forefathers teaches that the wilderness journey itself is a picture or tavneet for our journey to the kingdom.

So whatever the last battle was that God had Moses to fight means that battle is what we are going to be engaged in all the way up to the resurrection. So what was that battle? Chapter 31 begins this way.

Guest (Male): The Lord said to Moses, "Avenge the people of Israel on the Midianites. Afterward you shall be gathered to your people."

Candace Long: So the battle they had to fight was against Midian. What does that mean? We're going to look at three things. Number one, what Midian did that was so bad to bring on God's wrath. Number two, why was God so angry with the leaders in this chapter? And number three, how does all this apply to us today?

What did Midian do? Let's look at a little backstory. As you may recall, the countries of Moab and Midian on the east side of the Jordan River were terrified when Israel, who were millions of people, wanted to pass through their territories on the final leg to the Promised Land. So they hired a prophet named Balaam to curse Israel.

Balaam was a genuine prophet, although not a God-worshiper. But because he heard God, he could not deliver a verbal curse against Israel because God had said Israel was blessed. But what he did do was reveal to these heathen nations a demonic strategy designed to defile the people of God to such a degree he would have to destroy them.

Now let me pause a minute and have you picture Israel's encampment in the wilderness. The Tabernacle, representing the place where God chose to dwell in their midst, was surrounded first by the Levites, whose tents were closest to God's presence. They were to function as God's royal guard and protect the holiness of God's altar.

A little further away were all the rest of the tribes, arranged by God this way: three tribes on the east, three on the south, three on the west, and three at the north. All of their tents faced the Tabernacle. So this demonic strategy Balaam recommended is the same strategy that we are facing today. Now keep in mind the Hebrew encampment.

If you want to make God's presence leave, the strategy is to defile the people through immorality and perversion, because God cannot dwell in the midst of defilement. The first target is always to defile the Levites, because they live closest to God. If you can defile them, then you create an open door to then defile the rest of the people. So Balaam's strategy for how to defile them was sexual seduction.

The women of Moab were groomed by their leaders to go out and seduce the Hebrew troops with sexual favors. The bait was offering women who were alluring and promiscuous. The women of Midian, however, received the greatest punishment because they targeted Israel's leaders.

God's men were supposed to direct their testosterone-filled urges in fighting God's war and claiming the inheritance God promised the nation. Instead, they were met with sexually charged sirens who had false gods under their skirts. So when the men approached them and wanted to have sex, the women reached down and pulled out those gods and made the men bow down to them before they would have sex. This is a powerful tavneet showing us the last battle we will fight is the seduction of our leaders through sexual perversion, connected to an archaic idolatrous spirit as old as time: the spirit of Delilah.

Guest (Male): He had sent the nation off to war against Midian, a thousand men from every tribe. The army killed the kings of Midian, burned down their cities, and took all the spoil and returned to the camp and presented everything to Moses. They thought they had done a great job, but Moses was furious. The first thing out of his mouth was, "Did you let every female live?"

Candace Long: Now I have to admit, as a woman, those words stung. But from God's point of view, the actions of these demonically charged women brought about a plague that killed 24,000 men. These women were worthy of death, and Moses was angry with the leaders for not recognizing the seriousness of the occasion. They were about to go into the kingdom, and they did not recognize the danger that these women posed.

Let me say right here that God does not hate women. He loves his women, but he hates the unclean spirits that many women allow to manifest inside of them. And that's what we're going to talk about today because these spirits cry out in the blood of every female. In Genesis 4, the Lord tells Cain, "The voice of your brother's blood cries to me from the ground." The blood of our ancestors literally and spiritually speaks.

In general, if our ancestors loved the Lord and followed his ways, there will be blessing in our lives. The blessing is actually in the blood because that's where the life is. But if our ancestors worshiped not the Lord, that iniquity, that inclination to sin belonging to our ancestors will land on us as a curse down to the third and fourth generations.

The curse is carried in our blood, and it will speak to us in countless ways. One of the most important spiritual disciplines today is learning to recognize the voice of our ancestral blood and cleanse it from everything impure and unholy. This is our final battle before we arrive at the kingdom.

Guest (Female): In this final section of application, I want to acquaint you women with four of the six female ancestral constructs or strongholds that I have identified, so you can recognize them. Along the way, I'll share some of my own journey into generational cleansing and inner healing. These strongholds that try to defile women are not pretty, but they are alive and well in every woman. The goal of this teaching is to help you recognize which ones you or your family struggles with, and in a few moments, I'll share how I have learned to deal with them.

Number one on the list is Jezebel, the controller. This ancestral stronghold loves to manipulate people like pawns on a chessboard. She needs to create total dependency on her from everybody around her and often triangulates one person against another. She'll say one thing to you in order to create the illusion of closeness, only to turn around and say something bad about you to someone else with whom she needs to bond.

Now she may throw a fit when her man doesn't do what he's supposed to do, and then gloat with a martyr's pride that it's up to her to care for the entire family. They would all fall apart without her. If she starts to lose control over a situation, watch out. She will spend hours coming up with ways to turn the situation around to her favor.

Rather than wait upon the Lord and give a situation to him, the Jezebel stronghold is compelled to manipulate the circumstances so she can get back in control. Her strategies are endless. She may come across as coy and flattering, but when that doesn't work, she morphs into a tyrant. Jezebel is front and center in many of our churches and ministry groups. She finds it very difficult to submit to anyone else. She is convinced that the Lord has spoken, and what he said to her far outweighs what he may have said to someone else.

Number two on our list is Delilah, the seductress. The name Delilah means coquette and languishing. In other words, she appears helpless. In our immoral permissive culture, our churches are filled with Delilahs, and I would venture to say that it was those with a Delilah spirit who seduced the fallen watcher angels.

A Delilah spirit seduces with her attire, with eyes that steal glances at a man in another pew, who sprinkles her conversations with helplessness or flattery and often dishes out sexual favors because of what she believes she's going to get in return.

Guest (Male): In Judges 16, we read, "She, Delilah, made him, Samson, sleep upon her knees."

Guest (Female): The word for sleep in Hebrew is yashen, which means to be slack or languid. This is a demonically charged sexual lure that powerful men fall into time and time again. This is not a God-induced sleep; it is bewitching. When in the presence of a Delilah spirit, the man is literally under her spell and will leave his family and ruin his reputation believing he has found his soulmate. That is the power of Delilah at work.

This type of seduction is rampant today, and we'll talk more about it next time, but every powerful government leader who has fallen, such as former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has encountered a woman with a Delilah spirit. This spirit is archaic. It is a stronghold, a principality. We first see it in Genesis 6, and as we read these verses again, I want you to imagine what these women were like who were such easy prey for the fallen watcher angels.

Guest (Male): And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God, that is the fallen angels, saw that the daughters of men were fair, meaning they were anatomically suited to bear their children. So the angels took wives of all whom they chose, and they bore children to them, and they became giants who in the olden days were mighty men of renown. These are the Nephilim, the fallen ones.

Guest (Female): I do not believe that these daughters of men were innocent victims of demonic perversion. The fallen angels were huge, strong, and handsome. More than that, they possessed secret powers and promised to share this hidden knowledge with the women: various potions to draw people to them or how to cast spells on ones they were angry with.

This type of knowledge of being able to control others was extremely seductive. These beings taught them to manufacture dyes and create flashy clothing, how to adorn their eyes with pigments, all to appear more alluring to unsuspecting males that were the targets of their affections. Yes, the watchers lured these women with witchcraft-type power that God forbade his children from embracing. But these women knew that by having sex with them, their children would be bigger and badder than every other kid in the neighborhood.

Now whenever a woman pretends any sort of behavior, helpless, needy, flirtatious, pretending to be interested because of what she might get from him, these behaviors find their root in the guile and deceit of the Delilah spirit. With these women, there is always an agenda.

The third female construct I want to talk about is Eve, the deceiver. The mother of us all opened a floodgate that fights to grab hold of us day in and day out. Her great sin was that she assumed she knew what God had said, that she could actually hold court with the enemy of our souls and prevail, that the feelings of delight she experienced when she saw something forbidden was so strong that reason or a simple check in her spirit was not yet on her radar. And then she could pull her husband into complicity by batting her eyelashes.

Guest (Male): The Lord decreed Eve's punishment in Genesis 3. To the woman, he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain and your conception. In pain, you shall bring forth children, and you shall be dependent on your husband, and he shall rule over you."

Guest (Male): In other translations, it reads: "Your desire shall be for your husband." The word desire in Hebrew means to run after, to chase, to be desperate for. It is the same Hebrew word that is used in Genesis 4 as the Lord speaks to Cain, saying, "Sin lies at the door and its desire is for you."

Guest (Female): Now you may disagree with me, but I believe scripture teaches that sin desired to run after and rule over Cain in the same way that woman's desire is to run after and rule over her husband. Every married woman knows what a curse this is. Deep in our hearts, we want our man to be the leader, but the reality of the fall remains. A woman's default programming is domination, and man's default programming is passivity. God help us.

I only have time to share one more ancestral stronghold, but I close with this one because this was the one that showed up most in my ancestral bloodline, and I will pass on ways I learned to cleanse myself from this iniquity. Number four, we see this one manifested in Queen Athaliah, the emasculator. This woman was generally regarded to be the daughter of King Ahab and Jezebel. They were notoriously evil. They were used to being in power.

What we know about this woman is that after Athaliah's son, Ahaziah, reigned as king for one year, he was killed by divine determination because he was wicked.

Guest (Male): In 2 Chronicles 22, we read, "When Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the king's sons of the house of Judah."

Guest (Female): Now had it not been for her sister rescuing young Joash, she would have killed him too. A woman with an Athaliah spirit or stronghold has little regard for the leadership destiny of the men in her family. She takes every opportunity to minimize them, put them down, mock them, or make fun of how useless they are.

This is a very subtle spirit for it can manifest in many a church. With God calling women to serve him in these days, it's easy for a woman to conclude, even subconsciously, that God is displeased with men who just sit in the pew to please their wives but who manifest little zeal for the Lord. A woman can easily look down her spiritual nose at her husband and decide to help God out and take over the ministry herself. This does not please the Lord. This spirit operated strongly in my family, and I have spent much time repenting for it. A passage from Jeremiah 33 really spoke to me.

Guest (Male): Thus says the Lord: "If they can break my ordinances of the day and my ordinances of the night, so that there should not be day or night in their appointed time, then may also my covenant which I made with David, my servant, be broken, so that he should not have an heir to reign upon his throne, and my covenant with the priests and the Levites, my ministers."

Guest (Female): I was convicted by these three words: priests, Levites, ministers. These were men, not women. God made a covenant with David that he will always have men to serve him as priests and ministers and Levites. He did not decree that men would flake out and not come to their assignment, and God would then have to give that assignment to women. No, God has a preordained position of ministerial leadership for his men. It is his plumb line covenant with them. As women, we should long for them to take their places and pray expectantly for them to come forward.

When Holy Spirit convicted me, I prayed, "Father, I confess and renounce the emasculating spirit of my female ancestors." Here is a prayer that I offer to you as something I prayed when I was dealing with this Athaliah stronghold.

Lord, search me and know my thoughts and align me with the proper regard for the males in my family. I recognize, confess, and renounce the iniquity of Athaliah that I see in myself. Then stop and name the negative attitudes you have harbored and any critical words spoken against your husband, your sons, your father, or any other male figure in your life. Lord, let my speech be flavored with encouragement. Let my heart be filled with your love and understanding as these men in my life become all that you ordained them to be. In Jesus' name, Amen.

If you want to read about all six of the female ancestral strongholds that I have identified and have access to suggested prayers in how to deal with them before the Lord, I will put a couple of resources in the description notes to this episode. I hope you'll find helpful.

I believe this area to be our last major battle the enemy will wage before the day of the Lord arrives. What I'm sharing with you are spiritual warfare tactics and strategies that I have found helpful because the enemy's goal is to defile you and pollute your soul to such a degree that the Lord turns you over to that stronghold.

Before we close, there is a popular teaching I need to warn you about that says that once you are saved, all of your sins are wiped clean and removed. Now I don't have time to fully develop this doctrine, but the Lord has given us three housings: a body, a soul, and a spirit. A person's salvation has to do with the spirit of a person coming alive, being born again when we accept Jesus personally. The soul is another part altogether. It is a daily process of yielding ourselves to walk out our salvation. We may have to do this on a daily basis. That's why it's called a spiritual discipline.

Next time we'll look at ancestral strongholds that men struggle with. This was the final battle Moses had to lead his people through. The Lord needs both men and women to serve him in the kingdom.

Candace Long: Thank you for being with me today. You'll find this episode, The Voice of Your Ancestral Blood, at CandaceLong.com/podcast, as well as links to the resources in the description notes. I hope you join me again next time for lessons in the ladder days. God bless.