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Originally Posted by awareness
This explanation of Jezebel in Revelation strikes me as a stretch too far to swallow. The mostly likely explanation is that this was a complete different Jezebel.
The reason this is a stretch, and bothersome to me, is that Hamilton's conjecture presupposes a spirit that gets passed on down the line, a thousand years later. Or maybe a eternal Jezebel spirit flitting and flighting around, jumping into people, all over the place, from generation to generation.
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It's possible she's a demonic principality in which case she'd have many other fallen angels or demons under her command.
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Moreover, if such a spirit of Jezebel is entering into and possessing people, how can God hold the possessed accountable at the judgment seat? After all it's Jezebel doing the bad things. The possessed person is being victimized by a spirit much more powerful than the possessed person could ever dream of being.
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You can't become possessed by a spirit unless you give it authority either by giving it explicit permission or through obeying its temptations. Paul said in Romans 6:16 that we are slaves of the one we obey, in other words we become mastered by whatever we obey. God respects authority and that's why Satan was handed man's God given dominion after Adam listened to the serpent by taking fruit of that other tree. The implication is also that it's very important we make Jesus our master by obeying the Lord and not anything else because Christ says we can only serve one master. If we become mastered by the things of the world, we don't have a legal right to be a part of the Messiah's coming kingdom but we'll be destroyed along with Satan's kingdom when Jesus comes to take his throne here on earth. (Jesus says either you're for me or against me!) Also the eternal fate of the servant cannot exceed that of the master because Jesus taught that a servant is not greater than the master (think of who Jesus says follows Satan to the lake of fire in Matthew).
This has nothing to do with works because we can make Jesus our Lord simply by giving our whole heart to him through faith. We ultimately end up serving the one who has our heart.
Paul tells us to hold every thought captive to the obedient of Christ. I've been practicing this in my mind. Whenever I get a fleshly thought I rebuke it in the name of Jesus. This has done wonders for my spiritual and emotional health, and I rarely get these thoughts anymore. I can testify that it's possible to not lust after a woman in your mind almost indefinitely which is something I never thought was never possible for a man to do. When I see an attractive woman now, the temptation to lust simply doesn't materialize in my head believe it or not and if it does I rebuke it immediately. The less authority you give by not yielding to the desire of your flesh, the less you are susceptible to it. (The difference from asceticism is as Christians we can develop an enormous spiritual hunger from feeding our spirit through prayer, reading bible and doing God's will by loving God and neighbor by which we experience God's presence which is more satisfying than anything we can attain in the flesh - for me to die is gain, to live is Christ - Phil 1:21)
The key was to realize that many of the thoughts we get to sin do not necessarily come from our person but are fiery darts thrown by the enemy (Eph 6:16). With this wisdom, you can quickly disassociate thoughts like this from your identity and by attributing it to the enemy become better equipped to obey your spirit instead which leads to practicing righteousness which leads to holiness which leads to eternal life (Romans 6). In answer to my prayer for God to increase my humility I recently realized I haven't been filtering out temptations leading to spiritual pride which I need to start doing.
If you give any credibility to NDE experiences, here's one by a baptist minister named Howard Pittman who saw demons while he was dead during his NDE which added a lot to my understanding of the spiritual realm:
http://www.near-death.com/forum/nde/000/89.html
Here's a pastor's experience with demonic attack when he was young where he made the revelation that the evil thoughts he had that were driving him crazy were not his and started taking the thoughts captive in obedience to Christ by which he was finally delivered from a spiraling depression that almost ended in suicide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tvgPX73Ooc