LORD OF THE FLIES

"It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beel'zebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?" (Matthew 10:25)

Many will recognize that, "Lord of the Flies" is a novel by William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on a desert island and the social situations and circumstances that play out as a result. It was also made into a film. What you may not realize is that "Lord of the Flies" comes from the Biblical name "Beelzebub" also sometimes rendered as "Baalzebub" or even "Baalzebul" or "Beelzebul". "Beelzebub" means "Lord of the Flies". It is one of many titles of Satan...the devil.

It's pretty universal that most people dislike snakes, but I'd say even more people dislike flies. I think, for example, of videos we have all seen of suffering children in third world countries with flies all around them. It's pretty awful. I have a couple of fly stories for you, if you can handle them:

The first is pretty mild. There was one annoying fly who got into the apartment where I live last week. One fly. One. And it was seemingly everywhere. I'd be in the bathroom taking a shower, and the fly would be flying around the bathroom. I'd be eating breakfast, and there would be the fly. I'd be watching a video, and that pesky fly would be right there in the living room. I'd be laying down to sleep with that one fly buzzing around. This went on for days. On Sunday, the fly was buzzing all over the apartment. It flew into the half bathroom on the first floor and I closed the door, at least trapping the fly in that little room. Now for a little tip about how to kill flying insects successfully. It's water in a spray bottle. I have killed many a pesky yellowjacket that way. You take one of those laundry spray bottles and fill it with water. Spray the yellowjacket or any other insect with the water; keep saturating the thing. Eventually, it will become so waterlogged that it CANNOT fly and will fall to the floor. Then STEP ON IT! I went into that half bath with a spray bottle and soaked that fly. Wherever it went I soaked it. It fell to the floor. I grabbed a hunk of toilet paper, grabbed the fly in the paper, dropped it in the toilet, and VOILA: there was that black fat annoying fly spinning around and flushed!

Now, the next fly story is pretty gross. A few years ago when little First Assembly of God of Framingham was still open, I'd been away for awhile. When I came home, elderly volunteer Secretary Claire Grimes told me she'd found a bunch of little bugs that looked like "brown rice" in one of the bathrooms downstairs. She'd mopped the floor and gotten up as many as she could. That sounded really strange to me. I went to that bathroom, and to my surprise, I also saw perhaps hundreds of what did look like tiny pieces of brown rice moving around. I got some bug killer and sprayed the floor. I got paper towels and cleaned up as many of them as I could. I also found some on the rug and other places and killed them. A couple of weeks later, on Labor Day, I stopped into the church for something. I needed to go downstairs to where our sanctuary was in that little building. I was surprised to find maybe 30 flies buzzing around in the sanctuary. I then went into each bathroom on that level. No kidding. There must have been 300 flies in the little bathrooms...150 in one, and 150 in the other. It looked like something from a bad Alfred Hitchcock movie! This was the LAST thing I wanted to deal with on a Labor Day afternoon! I got my aerosol can of bug killer and sprayed each bathroom heavily. After about five minutes, 99% of the flies were on the floor, dead or dying. I got paper towels and trash bags and cleaned them up. Then I wiped down the floors with water. Over the next few days, I would walk around the church building looking for flies. I killed probably an average of 20 flies a day around the building for each of the next four or five days. Then they were pretty much gone.

It is interesting that Satan is called "Lord of the Flies". You know that old song, "War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" Well, I say, "Flies, what are they good for, absolutely nothing." Obviously, Claire's brown rice were really maggots. Before that, we had smelled a bad smell like a dead animal in the building. There was probably a dead mouse or something, maybe in a wall or under the floor. A fly laid its eggs in there and you know the rest. Demons come in the way flies do. They attach themselves to what is spiritually dead, dying, and disgusting. They seem little, insignificant and annoying AT FIRST. Then one day you look and as the song from Sweeney Todd says, "Demons are prowling everywhere nowadays!" You've got trouble and you need to get right with God, and resist the devil and he will flee as the Scripture says.

Looking back, maybe the flies in that church building were a warning to me. There was a spiritual undercurrent happening that took me and other leaders by surprise, and the next thing you know we were overrun and the church was closed. It's all something to think about. I did not allow ONE fly to last more than a few days in my residence, and frankly even a few days was TOO long. I don't want to put up with any devils and demons of Hell for one split second! And I never want to be clueless and having flies multiplying around a dwelling I inhabit or far worse, to allow the forces of darkness to "come in like a flood". Now, I do know the Lord raises up a standard against them...like my can of Raid. But it should never get that far.

Demons and flies. We can allow no place for them! As Christians, that means 100% commitment to our Lord Jesus Christ and to the Word of God. And, if anyone reading this is not sure where you stand with God, you need to MAKE sure. Don't hesitate to contact me!