“
Mr. Gazowsky and his wife were in a season of fasting and were praying on a beach in California. His wife had apparently walked a little farther down the beach and began praying for a woman they knew who was being tempted into adultery. The moment she spoke the woman’s name out loud, “a swarm of flies ascended from the ocean surface, as if orchestrated by an invisible conductor, and swept like a blanket across the water and onto the beach.”1 He rushed over to see if his wife was OK. When she told him she’d been praying for their friend, the Lord revealed what Gazowsky referred to as a “vulnerability in Satan’s kingdom,” that being the flies.2 When I read that, I immediately thought of Matthew 12:24, “Now when the Pharisees heard it they said, ‘This fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.’” They were accusing Jesus of operating with the power of Satan, or as they called him, Beelzebub, which means, “lord of the flies.” How interesting that during prayer for someone being tempted by demons, a horde of flies came out of nowhere and descended on this woman. As Gazowsky found, the “weakness” relates to the life span of flies. You can study just about any of the species and you’ll find their reproductive cycles can range from a day to as many as forty days. That is why, in order to exterminate an infestation of flies from a crop, for example, you have to spray pesticides for forty consecutive days in order to utterly destroy them. If you stop short of the full forty days, you will destroy only the existing generation, but the next generation will live on. Just as spraying pesticides for a full forty days wipes out an infestation of flies, when we enter into a season of forty days of fasting and prayer, we can break free of the bondages in our own lives and in the lives of the next generation. As Gazowsky noted, “The devil is a short-term skirmisher.”3
”
”
Jentezen Franklin (Fasting: Opening the Door to a Deeper, More Intimate, More Powerful Relationship With God)