2 Corinthians 10 • Grasping Truth Protects You from Captivity

Do you recognize a current situation in your life where you’re trying to fight a spiritual battle with worldly weapons such as deception, manipulation, and intimidation? Do you know someone who has been taken captive away from Christ by a worldly stronghold? How do you respond to either situation? This is post #9 in the God-Dependent Woman blog series. In the last post, we learned how we can trust God’s purposes for His provision to us. In this post, we will look at 2 Corinthians 10 and see the importance of grasping truth to protect yourself from captivity.

Listen to this post as a similar podcast from The God-Dependent Woman Bible Study covering 2 Corinthians in the New Testament. (11 lessons)

Recognizing the Attack

At this point in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul begins to hit hard at the charges made against him by his opponents in Corinth. We don’t know who they are except that they are Jews (2 Corinthians 11:22). Whatever the false teachers in Corinth were teaching, we can infer from 2 Corinthians that they were attacking Paul and his companions in order to gain prestige and power for themselves away from any influence that Paul had in the Corinthian church.

Their attack included false accusations against Paul.. When we are falsely accused, we have a choice. We can choose to get sidetracked by copying the bad behavior of the accusers. Or we can stay on course by continuing to walk faithfully in dependence on God to avenge us and tear down the walls for us. That is dependent living and what Paul teaches us in 2 Corinthians chapter 10.

Responding to the Attack

With humility and gentleness of Christ

By the humility and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you—I, Paul, who am “timid” when face to face with you, but “bold” toward you when away! I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be toward some people who think that we live by the standards of this world. (2 Corinthians 10:1-2)

Paul addresses accusations made against him that he is “timid” in person and only bold by letter. He responds with truth that his actions are according to the humility and gentleness of Christ. He is imitating Christ in his use of authority over the Corinthians.

Humility and gentleness were characteristics of our Lord Jesus. Humility recognizes God as one’s authority and takes a servant attitude toward people. Gentleness refers to strength under control and is expressed through fairness and graciousness to others. Both are available to us under the control of Christ who is in us. Both are evidence of dependent living.

Paul has repeatedly recognized Christ’s authority over himself and the Corinthians. That church belonged to Christ not to the Corinthians or even to Paul. The same is true of every local church today. Paul continually calls himself a servant of the Lord and stays Christ-focused.

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. (2 Corinthians 4:5)

Paul’s writing is strong but loving. It is not harsh or unkind (2 Corinthians 1:24). He does not write anything that they cannot read or understand (2 Corinthians 1:13). He considers what is best and beneficial for them as he uses his Christ-given authority.

So even if I boast somewhat freely about the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than tearing you down, I will not be ashamed of it. (2 Corinthians 10:8)

Likewise, we are to use our authority for building up those in our sphere of influence and not tearing them down. If you struggle with being bossy and bearing down on others, ask the Lord to teach you graciousness and gentleness.

With recognizing the spiritual battle

Since the fall of humanity in the garden (Genesis 3), there has been a spiritual war raging in our world concerning God’s truth versus the lies being disseminated through human reasoning and demonic influence. One leads to overflowing joy and dependent living on God. The other leads to self-dependence and rebellion against God. This spiritual warfare takes captives.

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

Strongholds. Arguments. Pretensions. This is what we are fighting against. But the weapons we are to use are not those of the world around us. We can rely on God’s power, ways, and truth to overcome the enemy.

Truth #1: We have God’s power and ways to fight the war effectively.

Weapons such as intimidation, manipulation, trickery, double-talk, rumor, and hypocritical behavior are not from the Spirit of God and are not acceptable weapons for the believer to use in spiritual warfare. Victory comes from approaching life (and battles) God’s way and relying on His power to overcome the enemy.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul has already taught them and us how to respond to spiritual attacks without using the weapons of the world:

• 1:12—Not with human wisdom but with godly sincerity and purity
• 4:2—Set forth the truth plainly, focusing on Jesus
• 4:5—Preach Christ as Lord and ourselves as His servants
• 5:16—regarding everyone from God’s point of view as someone whom He loves
• 6:6-7—By purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, sincere love, the word of truth, by God’s power and His righteousness
• 7:2—wrong no one, corrupt no one, take advantage of no one, make room for loving them
• 10:1—With Christ’s gentleness and humility

Do you recognize a current situation in your life where you are trying to fight a spiritual battle with worldly weapons such as deception, manipulation, and intimidation? Replace those weapons with anything that has its source in God-dependence and is Spirit-driven rather than imitating the ways of this world.

Truth #2: We have God’s power to demolish strongholds.

Strongholds are…

Strongholds are anything upon which one relies for security and survival. Think “castle” or “fortress.” But these are not good castles. They are anything that takes captive the minds of believers away from depending on God and pure devotion to Christ. Paul references arguments and pretensions raised up against the knowledge of God.

Satan’s strategy uses speculations (theories) and incorrect information that contradict God’s revealed truth. When approaching Bible Study, beware of speculating just to derive an answer. That would include reading into Scripture what we want it to say to match what our culture is teaching us. God has revealed much for us to know. Some things He has reserved for Himself (Deut. 29:29).

Demolishing them

To demolish strongholds takes force and power. God’s power. Like what we learned in 2 Corinthians 8:5, give yourself first to the Lord and His will through prayer. Respond by doing whatever He leads you to do His way, Trust Him to work alongside what you are doing to make things happen His way. Consistently apply truth from God’s Word.

Strongholds are not just thoughts but can be associated with people who have influence over you. To tear down those strongholds requires separating yourself from them. Unfollow them. Don’t read their books, blogs, or social media posts. Don’t listen to their podcasts unless you are really good at discerning truth from error.

Based on 2 Corinthians 10:2 and 6, the Corinthians needed to make a clean break from the rebels in their midst. Paul needed the church to stand firm with him in disciplining his unrepentant opponents and removing themselves from that influence.

To complete tearing down these walls (v. 5), means you must take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ who is the truth (a continuous action).

Truth #3: We have God’s truth to free us from captivity.

God and the devil agree on one thing: Both want to capture your mind, because whoever captures your mind will direct the course of your life. Believers can be taken captive by bad teaching.

To protect yourself from being captured by the enemy, renew your mind through knowing the Bible, which is God’s truth and through letting the Holy Spirit implant that truth in your mind so you can understand it. Then, you can diffuse arguments against the knowledge of God that are influencing you, and you can take captive your thoughts, making them obedient to Christ.

The writings of the New Testament are the work of the Holy Spirit revealing himself to the apostles and other disciples of Jesus. The historical reliability of the Scriptures is an important issue, and they (the Scriptures) can be investigated to show that the biblical records are trustworthy. We can know that God’s Word is true and reliable. Your response is to grasp it—hold onto it tightly and let it guide you.

Grasping truth has three parts:

Dwell in the truth of God you can know.

God gives us plenty of truth in the Bible that we can know and trust. God wants us to know the truth He has revealed to us, to make our home in that truth. Each passage of Scripture we read or study has plenty of truth that we can know with certainty and allow to govern our lives.

Humbly accept what you don’t know or understand.

Perhaps you don’t understand something you’ve read now, but you might understand it in the future as you learn more through Bible study and as you hear great teaching that helps you to understand it. But there are things we will never know or understand (Deuteronomy 29:29). Don’t let that shake your confidence in understanding God’s truth. When you run across something that you can’t seem to understand from a Bible passage, make the choice to humbly accept what you don’t know or understand and be satisfied with it.

Discern any teaching that you read or hear through the complete revelation of God’s Word.

Evaluate what you read and hear by comparing it with the whole Bible. Avoid the “look-imagine-see dragon” when viewing any verse. That happens when you look at a verse or passage, imagine what you want it to say, then let your mind see what you have imagined through twisting word meanings and interpretations. The result feels more comfortable with what the culture says but is intellectually dishonest.

The way to take every thought captive to Christ is to dwell in truth you can know, humbly accept what you don’t know or understand, and discern all teaching through the complete revelation of God’s Word.

For a more complete discussion of these three parts for grasping truth, read “TRUTH Is the Prescription for Healthy Living.”

Recognizing Someone Who Is Taken Captive Away from Christ

So how do you recognize when someone has been taken captive away from Christ?

The captives

One summer, we were in Colorado conducting summer camps for our wilderness-based camp ministry. A church youth group rented our camp facility for a week. I was in charge of providing meals. As my husband Ron was about to leave town, he said to me, “This group is not your typical church youth group.” Hmmm. What does that mean?I knew that our senior staff members were on 21-day backpacking trips in the nearby mountains. They would not be around to assist. I sent up a quick prayer, “Lord, please help us!”

The group that came looked like typical high school kids and adult counselors but were very different from the usual youth groups that came to our camp. We welcomed and served them. During that week, I realized that we served prisoners, people who had been taken captive.

• They were taken captive by the philosophy that God is an impersonal energy field, an “it”—something that binds the universe together. They sought God while staring at a candle for an hour.
• They were taken captive by the concept that good and bad are relative. Since each person is part of the god-force of the universe, each one determines what is good or bad.
• They meditated upon the god being created in each of them. The message portrayed was this: salvation comes through uniting one’s personal spiritual energy with the other-god-energy of the universe.

Though this group came from what was called a church, they had rejected Jesus Christ as their head and substituted other things for Him. We prayed for protection and guidance as we recognized how much these youth and adults were in the devil’s deceitful stronghold. Sadly, most of them were females—either as teenage girls or as adult counselors. What made them susceptible to such captivity?

The captors

In 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul told us how influential fakers get women to follow them. This still applies today.

[They] gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. (2 Timothy 3:6-7)

Notice what made the women especially gullible—being loaded down with guilt from their sins plus the constant search for the latest new thing to satisfy the restlessness in their hearts. Various lusts fed their discontentment. Out of a so-called openness to learn, they embraced whatever flashy teachings that came along rather than going to the source of established truth. I call this the “Manipulation by Guilt Infection.”

Women who never recognize and grasp biblical truth will be taken captive by whatever flashy teachings that come along and live unsatisfied, unstable lives. We see this in our world today.

Relief from being unstable

In Ephesians chapter 4, Paul wrote about how grasping the truth protects us,

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. (Ephesians 4:14)

We as women need to not only be exposed to truth but to grasp it and hold vigorously to it so we won’t be taken captive by the enemy’s schemes.

Applying this to your life

How do you recognize and demolish any strongholds in your reasoning and thoughts?

• Ask God to help you identify the toxic thought patterns you have been building in your mind that work against the knowledge of God and your dependency on Him.
• Give those to God and ask Him to help you knock them down with truth.
• Trust God to help you destroy the stronghold by consistently applying that truth.

To get help recognizing cultural strongholds that affect you or your children, check out the podcasts on mamabearapologetics.com.

Does God help those who help themselves?

That is the subject of our saying to evaluate in this post, “God helps those who help themselves. Our safety and survival in life do not depend on direct divine intervention, but on our ability to see and willingness to seize opportunities to save ourselves.” True or false?

Where did the saying that God helps those who help themselves originate? It is not in the Bible. The phrase originated in the ancient Greek Aesop’s Fables. Because Benjamin Franklin quoted it in his writings, the saying has been added to popular culture. Something similar can also be found in the Quran.

This thinking is very humanistic, saying basically you can do this if you are smart enough to seize opportunities to save yourself. It promotes self-sufficiency. As we have studied in 2 Corinthians, the Bible teaches that we are to depend on God. That does not mean He is going to always intervene to change a situation.

• Sometimes He changes us and our perspective toward a situation. That is in 2 Corinthians chapter 4.
• Sometimes He gives us the wisdom to handle the situation according to His way of approaching life. That is in 2 Corinthians chapters 2 and 6.
• Yet, sometimes He directly intervenes as we have seen in 2 Corinthians 1.

Remember that relying on God means that we are supposed to grow and mature in our thinking and behavior. It means that we are to be wise and proactive in our dealings with everyone—whether in the church or outside of it—for our own good as well as for the good of others. It means giving back to God all the skills, talents, advantages, and opportunities He gave us and using them for His glory. That involves following His leading and guidance. He still uses the natural and spiritual gifts that He has given to us for our safety and survival in life. God helps those who trust in Him and sometimes uses people as His helpers. We see that in 2 Corinthians chapter 11. So that is another saying to delete from your mental Wikipedia.

Reasons why God wants us to depend on Him more than on ourselves

From our passage, here are some reasons why God wants us to depend on Him more than on ourselves:

• So we can treat others with the humility and gentleness of Christ. (10:1)
• We need His power to demolish strongholds holding us captive. (10:3-4)
• We need His power to take captive our thoughts for Him. (10:5)
• So we use our authority to build others up and not tear them down. (10:8)
• To find our sphere of service He has assigned to us. (10:13)
• To confine our boasting to the Lord in the sphere of service He has assigned to us. (10:13)
• So we will seek our approval and commendation from Him rather than others. (10:17)

In the next post, we will see that our response to hardships reveals whom we follow.

Let Jesus satisfy your heart with confidence that you can depend on Him. Then, live each day as a God-dependent woman!

All of the above information is covered in The God-Dependent Woman Bible Study of 2 Corinthians.

AI was not use to generate this post.