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International School of The Bible

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Kingdom of God

Chapter 17

Rejection - Beelzebub

Rejection is perhaps the most common and serious wound that a human being can suffer. It is the most common and deepest wound. It is extremely difficult to diagnose, as it is beyond the mind. The memory has wounds that you are not conscious of. It is down in the subconscious mind. The mind refuses to acknowledge it. Rejection is something in the heart and emotions, an attitude. It is caused by a failure in relationships. The opposite is acceptance.

The following is quoted from the book Inner Healing. Used by permission.

Rejection and the fear of rejection play a major part in the development of the character of every human being.

Proverbs 15:13: "A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, but when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken.” One of the products of rejection is a broken spirit.

Proverbs 17:22: "A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones." A broken spirit, brought about by rejection is capable of "drying up," or taking away the desire for life.

Proverbs 18:14: “The spirit of a man can endure his sickness, but a broken spirit who can bear?" If the desire for life has gone, there is no chance for healing to take place.

The most powerful positive force in the universe is the love of God. 1 John 4:8, 16: "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love and the one who abides in love abides in God, God abides in him, and he in God. " God is love; therefore, love is God's most powerful force.

If love is the most powerful positive force in creation, it follows that lack of love is the most powerful negative force in creation.

Rejection is the denial of love and acceptance in our lives. It is probably the most painful, the most neglected, yet one of the most common emotional wounds from which we suffer.

Some of the forms of rejection are denial, refusal, and rebuff, slighting, shunning, spurning, ignoring, neglecting, avoiding and disapproving. It becomes obvious that rejection is not always physical. Nor is it always recognizable.

God designed us in such a way that we cannot function properly without love. Our survival in life depends upon it. It is the one ingredient each of us needs in order to grow, to flourish, and to become the people we need to be, to fulfill our destiny in life. Love is to us as water and sunshine is to a flower. It is essential to our growth. If we don't understand that each of us needs to be loved, we walk on dangerous ground. Because each of us needs it, we each desire it strongly. We need to be loved and accepted.

God created us to fellowship with Him, to worship Him, and to have a relationship with Him. Love is the primary ingredient in that relationship. Love is God's motive, and it should be our motive as well. Throughout the Bible, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, God's love is always evident. Whether we realize it or not, God loves us.

When we function in harmony with God, His love for us generates within us an ability to love one another. According to Jesus, the two greatest commandments are to love God, and to love one another. Love is the fuel that makes us function. It nourishes us and gives us meaning in life. Without love, we develop serious problems. When we are denied the love and attention we need, we experience internal affliction.

As we mature, especially as we grow spiritually, most of us can handle rejection better than we could when we were young children. We are similar to the palm tree in that respect. If we plant a small palm tree, it needs a lot of water, sun and fertilizer. It must have more attention while it is growing than after it has grown to maturity. Once it has grown, it can withstand the cold and the storms, but when it is young it cannot handle the abuse. We are pretty much the same.

Many of us today react out of the wounds of rejection we received early in our lives. We find that we still can't handle rejection. This is because we were wounded at an early age, and we have been reacting through those wounds ever since.

Emotional wounds are very painful. Nothing hurts quite like being rejected. When we are not accepted, when we are disapproved or shunned, we experience emotional pain. Once we have experienced rejection, we react by building walls. We begin to lead a life that guards against the possibility of being rejected again.

We can parallel our reaction to the way we react when we hurt ourselves physically. Everything we do revolves around that injury. For example, if we have a sprained ankle, everything we do revolves around that sprained ankle. We don't want to hurt it again and feel that pain once more. This form of self-protection is a natural reaction to any kind of physical injury.

Emotional wounds from rejection affect us the same way. Every response in every relationship revolves around our past emotional wounds in a way that protects us from experiencing the hurts again. The result is that, as a wounded person, we behave in a dysfunctional manner. We become unstable in our attitudes and out of harmony in all our relationships.

Most deep wounds of this type take place during our childhood. Children often misinterpret correction or lack of attention as rejection. It may not have been intended as rejection, but that doesn't matter. If that is how we perceived it, that is how we reacted to it.

Even today, many of us cannot distinguish between correction and rejection. We take correction as rejection, because that is the way we perceive it Whether or not rejection actually exists doesn't matter. What matters is that we think it does, and we react as if it is rejection.

We are wounded by what is said, even though it may be constructive criticism. We may find ourselves to be particularly sensitive in a rehabilitation program. As someone corrects us, we may be devastated because we take it as rejection.

If we have accepted this wound of rejection into our lives it generates one of two things. The first is a fear of further rejection. Once we are wounded, we recoil at the prospect of being wounded again. For instance, if someone who is an authority figure in our lives has wounded us through rejection, our natural reaction is to fear authority and to guard ourselves when we are around authority figures.

For example, our incorrect concept of God almost always comes from the relationship we had with an authority figure in our lives, such as our father or our church. If we are not given the opportunity to break through that barrier, we will carry that wrong concept throughout our lives.

The fear of additional hurt causes us to put up defense mechanisms. We begin to ask, "Whom can I trust? Will the one who caused me to suffer in the past hurt me again? Will other persons also inflict wounds upon me?" We develop a distrust of everyone's motives.

The word for such feeling is paranoia. We feel that everyone is out to hurt us. We can't trust anyone. The root behind paranoia is the fear of rejection. It is the fear of not being accepted, not being a part, not being loved. The paranoid person lives in torment. Paranoia is active within the person 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He always reacts based upon his paranoia.

The other path that occurs is self-rejection. After we have accepted rejection in our lives for an extended period of time, we begin to reject ourselves. We actually believe we are unworthy and unacceptable by others. We are convinced we don't fit in or measure up, that we are not a legitimate part of society. This belief causes us to reject ourselves. Very often this will manifest itself in our relationship with God.

The more rejection we receive, the more rejected we feel, and the more apt we are to believe we deserve to be rejected. We begin to ask ourselves what it is about us that repels others. Rejection from a loved one will make us think we are unacceptable or unqualified or unworthy. We can handle being spurned by someone we don't know, but when we receive rejection from someone we love, the knife goes deep. This helps convince us we are unacceptable failures.

A situation of this type occurs often in father /son relationships. If we see ourselves as failures we try desperately to change. We try to become someone acceptable, someone other than who we really are. We think if we were different, or even if we were someone else, we would be loved and accepted.

After concluding that the key to enjoying acceptance by others is to become different from our actual selves, we seek to change our personality and become someone different, so we can have the love and acceptance we need. We may begin to pattern ourselves after a fantasy of our own mind.

We may try to pattern ourselves after someone we have read about in a book, or have seen on television. We will certainly pattern ourselves after someone whom we have observed as being loved by others. Through this process, we try to reconnect a broken relationship.

Without exception, everyone attempts to recover the peace, love, affirmation, confirmation and acceptance that were lost in a broken relationship.

Rejection in a marriage relationship.

Often rejection causes deep wounds during our childhood. However rejection in the potentially most intimate relationship, marriage, can and does cause deep wounds. Millions of men and women suffer a deserted feeling. Inexpressible agony.

God's remedy.

“Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed; Neither be disgraced, for you will not be put to shame; For you will forget the shame of your youth, And will not remember the reproach of your widowhood anymore. For your Maker is your husband, The LORD of hosts is His name; And your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel; He is called the God of the whole earth. For the LORD has called you Like a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, Like a youthful wife when you were refused, Says your God” (Isaiah 54:4-6).

Satan is known as Beelzebub, Lord of the flies.

“But He, knowing their thoughts, said to them: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and a house divided against a house falls. “If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? Because you say I cast out demons by Beelzebub. “And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. “But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:17-20).

The nature of flies is to swarm around a wound, or something that was alive and is dying.

You may have seen it. When one has an open wound, especially an animal that cannot swat flies like a human, often you will notice that a group of flies swarm around that wound. Rejection is the root of most of the worst and evil fruit that we can see in our lives. It produces all sorts of negative results in the lives of many.

Demons swarm around the wound of rejection in people and bring all kinds of evil fruit as we have described in this chapter. Rejection attracts demons. Healing is a critical issue if one is to be free!

Bullies swarm like flies around people who have been wounded. You see it often in young people in school. The bullies just know who to pick on, who have been wounded. I know a person whose father died at an early age. The bullies attacked this person because they sensed the wound. Most bullies are satanically controlled.

Most fears are caused by rejection. Why? The antidote for fear is perfect love (1 John 4:18). Rejection is the opposite of perfect love. Often, when one is healed from the wound of rejection, the fear leaves.

To give yourself to another person and then to discover they have rejected you, brings open shame and humiliation. The fear of that being repeated is fierce!

How to recognize rejection.

1. Since the opposite is acceptance, the feeling of lack of acceptance by God, lack of acceptance by others should be a major sign.

2. The inability to receive or communicate love. You cannot give out what you don't have. “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). This becomes generational, a vicious cycle.

3. Relationships are surface only. There is no intimacy with God and others.

4. A person who gives in. "I just can't take this, there is nothing I can do." Results are loneliness, misery, self-pity, depression, despair, death or suicide.

6. A person who holds out. They build a defense, a cover up. There is indifference, superficial happiness. They are talkative, but mechanical in their relationships. They overdue it with lots of make up, a loud voice, trying to look and sound happy. This is an outer defense. "I will never be hurt again." Often in church settings these are the people that get lost in fellowship, but it is superficial.

7. The person who fights back. The manifestations are resentment, hatred, and rebellion. Often they become involved in occult witchcraft. This was a major move in the United States in the 1960s. Perhaps they were from wealthy families, but their parents did not demonstrate love.

8. Anger. We may be angry with ourselves, at other people, or at God. Anger always follows closely behind fear. We can become very dependent upon anger, because it becomes an excellent barrier to protect us from others

9. Hardness. This is another defense mechanism that keeps people away.

10.Bitterness. Bitterness about the situation or condition in which we were wounded generates a dangerous root. Anger, left unattended, will eventually generate a root of bitterness.

11. Rebellion. An outward expression caused by an inner feeling of rejection. It has been said that the called leaders of God are Satan's targets when they have been rejected. This is the source of most rebellion. Rebellion says, "Nobody loves me, so I'm going to do what I want to do, regardless! Other people don't care about me, so I don't care about other people!" "I was wounded by an authority figure, so now I don't respect or trust any authority."

The Cross is the remedy.

An exchange took place at the Cross. Jesus took evil so that we could receive the good. He was rejected on our behalf, so that we could be accepted.

Identify with Jesus.

He was rejected by God at the Cross, then He was accepted by God at the resurrection.

Jesus was rejected by man and by God.

“He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11).

“He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him” (Isaiah 53:3).

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' that is, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'” (Matthew 27:46). His heart broken evidenced by the water and blood that flowed out of it. The curtain in the Temple was torn in two, opening of the way to access God.

Jesus was raised from the dead and again accepted by God.

“For to which of the angels did He ever say: 'You are My Son, Today I have begotten You'? And again: 'I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son'? But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: 'Let all the angels of God worship Him'” (Hebrews 1:5, 6).

That wasn't just Jesus that God said these things to. He says them to you. You are his child, you are accepted and loved by Him. Jesus bore your rejection and suffered it for you. You do not have to continue to suffer the fruits of rejection. Appropriate you freedom by the Word of God now! God does not lie.

Practical steps to enter into your healing:

1. Forgive every person who has rejected or harmed you. Mark 11:25. See Jesus as being in-between you and the perpetrator. Honor and forgive your father and mother. Enjoy long life.

2. Lay down the things that rejection has brought, depression, etc. Say it, "Bitterness, hatred, rebellion, resentment, I lay you down."

3. By an act of faith, believe what God said, that you are accepted in Christ. Ephesians 1:4-7 says, “just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He has madeusaccepted in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.”

4. Stand on the Word. Meditate on the above Scripture, speak it out several times daily until it gets down into your heart and renews your mind to the truth. The truth will make you free. Your mind will attempt to believe the strong lie, but meditate upon the truth!

5. Accept yourself. This can be the most difficult thing. We look back at failures. But God labels you "My child." Accept that. You are a New Creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Ephesians 2:10 says that you are God's workmanship, poema, His master piece, don’t criticize God's artwork.

“For we are His workmanship [poema], created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

6. Seek a place in God's family otherwise your acceptance will not be fulfilled.

As you do this, be prepared to meet satanic opposition, because church people are not perfect. However, if you persevere and continue to seek the Lord's guidance in your search, you will find your church family and experience acceptance.

Beelzebub Baal-zebub = "lord of the fly"1) a Philistine deity worshipped at Ekron