Have you ever heard someone pray, “Satan, I bind you!”? If you’ve spent any time in modern church circles, it’s a phrase that probably sounds quite familiar. Books on “spiritual warfare” are bestsellers, teaching us that we can use our words to tie up demonic forces or “loose” blessings like money and health into our lives. It sounds like a powerful spiritual technology, but if we take a step back and look at the actual history of these words, we find a story that is even more grounded and encouraging than the modern versions.
What Did Jesus Really Mean?
To understand what Jesus meant when He spoke about “binding and loosing,” we have to look through the eyes of His first-century listeners. In the Jewish culture of that time, these were technical legal terms used by rabbis. To “bind” simply meant to forbid a certain behavior or declare it improper under the Law, while to “loose” meant to permit it.
Think of it like a doctrinal decision. For example, the famous schools of Hillel and Shammai were constantly “binding” things the other “loosed”. When Jesus gave this authority to His disciples, He wasn’t giving them a magic spell to use against spirits; He was giving them the authority to govern the church and interpret how His teachings should be applied to daily life.
A Reflection of Heaven
One of the most beautiful—and often missed—parts of this teaching is the Greek grammar Jesus used. Most scholars point out that the phrases usually translated as “shall be bound” actually mean “shall have already been bound” in heaven.
This tells us that the church doesn’t “force” God to do something by shouting a command. Instead, when the church acts in line with God’s Word, it is simply echoing on earth what God has already decided in the heavenly realm. We are acting as faithful stewards, not as independent law-makers.
Keeping the Family Together: Church Discipline
Jesus specifically applied this concept to how we treat one another in Matthew 18. He wasn’t talking about demons here; He was talking about a “sinning brother”. The process—going to someone privately, then with witnesses, and finally to the church—is a way of using the “keys of the kingdom”.
• Binding in this context means declaring that a person’s unrepentant behavior has effectively separated them from the community (excommunication).
• Loosing means joyfully declaring them restored when they repent.
We see this in action in Acts 15, when the early apostles met to decide if Gentile Christians had to follow the Law of Moses. They decided it was not “binding” on them, “loosing” them from those old obligations so they could follow Christ in freedom.
The Strong Man and the Cross
But what about the “strong man” mentioned in Matthew 12? Modern warfare teachers often link this to binding Satan verbally so we can “plunder his goods” (often interpreted as money or political power). However, the sources remind us that Jesus was using a metaphor for His own mission.
Jesus is the “Stronger Man” who bound Satan, not with a verbal formula, but through His substitutionary death on the cross. By paying our debt, He stripped Satan of his legal right to hold us captive. The “plundering” happens whenever the Gospel is preached and a person is moved from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God.
Avoiding the “Star Wars” Theology
It can be tempting to get caught up in what some call “Star Wars theology“—the idea that we need to fly into the heavenly realms and “duke it out” with territorial spirits. But the New Testament apostles never did this. When Paul was in Ephesus—a city famous for its demonic idols—he didn’t spend his time shouting at the “spirit of Diana”. Instead, he spent two years simply teaching the Word of God.
The result? The Gospel was so powerful that the idols were “dethroned” because people stopped believing the lies and started following the Truth.
Staying Grounded in the Truth
Today, we see “false binding” in many forms—from excessive religious oaths to movements that try to bind us back to the Old Covenant Law. We also see “false loosing,” where some try to loose us from the clear moral teachings of the Bible.
The goal of our faith isn’t to master a “spiritual technology” to manipulate the unseen world. It’s about a relationship. We have victory because we are “seated with Christ”. As we submit to God and share the message of the cross, we find that Satan’s kingdom is plundered naturally—one changed life at a time.
Instead of spending our energy speaking to the shadows, let’s spend it speaking to our Father and sharing the wonderful news of the Cross with the world.