Your influence in this world is far greater than just the confines of your house, your yard and your little work space at the office.

Actually, if the truth were known, the whole company where you work is dependent upon you, the whole neighborhood where you live is dependent upon you, even the entire nation needs you—if you are fearless and full of faith.

And the reason we can be so influential is because as believers, we are not in this by ourselves.

We are the Body of Christ. We are the Body of God’s anointed ones. Therefore, we are joined together through our connection to Jesus’ anointing.

What’s more, Jesus gave us all authority and dominion in heaven and earth before He returned to the Father (Luke 9:1-2). And He is expecting us to take that authority and cause His enemies to be made His footstool (Hebrews 10:13). The problem is, we have not been using and enforcing that dominion to its fullest.

But that’s all changing, now. And it must change.

A Tale of Two Cities
To give you a sense of the scope of authority you and I have, I want to tell you about two cities as they were back in the days when Jesus walked this earth. One city was run by fear, and the other by faith—they were as different as night and day.

In fact, the atmosphere in each city determined what Jesus could and could not do when he visited them. We read about the city of fear in Mark 5:1-8:

[Jesus and His disciples] came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes. And when [Jesus] was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, and cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not. For [Jesus] said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

Jesus and His disciples had crossed the Sea of Galilee by boat, and when they arrived on the shore in the region called Decapolis, they were met by a demon-possessed man. We know him as the “mad man of Gadera.”

In this passage we learn that Jesus commanded the devil that possessed this man to come out of him. But notice what we discover in verse 9: “And [Jesus] asked [the devil], What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.”

Just how many is many?

Try 6,000.

Legion was a military term in those days that referred to 6,000 soldiers. So this one particular devil to whom Jesus was speaking revealed that there were actually 6,000 devils working in and through this madman’s life—through his spirit, soul and body.

But what I especially want you to see is that these 6,000 devils were not necessarily in this man all at one time. The one devil that Jesus addressed face to face was really the higher ranking devil of the bunch. He was the one that had authority over the entire legion. That is, he was a high-ranking devil who commanded a troop of at least 6,000 devils.

Now at first glance that statement may seem strange. But not when you consider that the “legion” we see in Mark 5 is what the Apostle Paul referred to in Ephesians as “principalities…powers…rulers of the darkness of this world.” In fact Ephesians 6:12 gives us an understanding of the structure of the enemy’s domain. It says, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

The devil with whom Jesus had conversation—the one devil that actually possessed the madman of Gadera—was a ruler over the 6,000 “principalities and powers” that functioned under his command through the man. He was a “ruler of the darkness of this world.”

We can see there is a rank and file throughout the entire kingdom of darkness. There are “low-level devils,” and then there are evil spirits in different ranks or classes. There is a chain of command that even the enemy follows.