As it regards the fiery darts of the wicked, first understand that the fiery darts come from the wicked one. They are his missiles, so they are the projections of his thoughts upon your soul.
A fiery dart is based in wickedness. A fiery dart stings you. In fact, the word fiery dart is analogous to the bite of a serpent, the poisonous bite of a serpent. When the poison begins to affect your nerve endings, it is like fire; so the words of the devil attacking your nervous system will bite you like fire. They are so false that they paralyze you, and they force you to turn inwardly upon yourself.
They are fiery because they draw upon the wounds that are already in you. They are fiery because they reopen the wounds that are in you. They sting you all over again. The enemy knows how to torment you with the twisting of things that happened to you to make you feel as though you were the cause. Or even if you know you were not the cause, he wants you to feel naked. He wants you to feel vulnerable. He wants you to do everything that you can to fit in. You will often violate your own standards, and you will not understand why you are violating your own standards in order to fit in, because it comes from a place in you that you have not detected before. But when the circumstance is right, the enemy will sting you again like he did. When he does, it is not as though you are responding with the emotions of where you are at that time. You are responding with the same emotions you had when you were vulnerable, at the age and time when you were vulnerable, because it disconnects the reason and draws up the emotions that you felt. So if you felt vulnerable at that time, you will feel vulnerable again. Even though the situation is vastly different, the connector between the two is the emotion that you feel now that was the emotion that you felt then.
This is a scheme. It is a wicked scheme. It defines you in the present by something that was actually an act of wickedness against you then, but you have come to own it as an identity. That is what he counts on. Whenever you feel this sting, this fiery dart, know and understand, that is the voice of your enemy. When you do, the way you respond to it is to lie down in the reality of who God is. You cover yourself in the sepulcher by the truth that: I cannot answer you. I do not know how to figure this out, but this I do know, that I have died with Christ, and I have been raised with Him, and I am a new creation. Therefore, I cannot be condemned even if I was wrong in the situation.
The shield of faith is the stone at the mouth of the sepulcher that says, “Behind here is a person who died. I may not be able to answer your accusation right now. But I am going to lift up the shield of faith and retreat into the position of rest. I am just going to retreat into the position of rest. This is my safe place, because in here is only the bones of dead men, and you cannot accuse a dead man of anything.” The legal defense is called corpus delicti—the body is missing, or in plain vernacular, “You got the wrong man. You are accusing the wrong man. That man died. Look, he is behind the shield. Come in if you can. You got the wrong man.” God will inevitably stand up in that circumstance.
This teaching may be found within South African Conferences, Expressions 2019, Session 10: Total Victory.
