The churches face this problem. There are bound to be people among us – however carefully we interview friends for membership and listen to their testimonies; we are not infallible – who have never been saved, but who think they are. Their tastes and their attitudes are really in accordance with the unregenerate, unconverted person. Actually they are under the direction of Satan. Maybe they don't know it, but they are difficult and obstructive. The apostle Paul had this constantly he is speaking about it. Speaking of the Judaisers who came into the young church and tried to persuade impressionable young converts to adopt Jewish ways and to turn away from evangelical truth, he says in the words of the King James Version, ‘they came in privily’. They came in secretly, ‘to spy out our liberty in Christ.’ His language means not that they knowingly came in under false pretences. They may have thought they were converted, but they weren't. But it is as if they are consciously planted as spies coming in among the believers. A lot of the troubles in the New Testament churches, the apostle Paul puts down to that. The fact that there are unconverted people and they take up doctrines invented by demons, and they demoralise and upset and so on.
Years and years ago in the 1970s we had a big touch of this in the Tabernacle. We had a family who got a ring of young people round them. We had students and young people coming in and people converted, but there was a family – and they seemed to be Christian; they seemed to be keen – and suddenly you are aware that they have got a group of people round them who they entertain and take off to this and to that. They are making all sorts of criticisms and unpleasant jokes about the elders and pastors, and others. This is a sort of secret off-site thing. Then you learn that an entirely different lifestyle to the Christian lifestyle, that we scripturally advocate and teach, is being brought into young lives. This is exactly what's happening here in this verse. It is as though, just as Satan hired civil servants in the regime in Jerusalem, so the devil inspires people who are not truly saved in the church. From time to time you have to be on your guard; you have to watch out. But it happens on a massive scale in the churches generally. That's how all the worldliness has come into the churches. People here and there have brought it in with great enthusiasm, and then weaker people adopt it, and are persuaded by it. So you have got it all played out here in this passage. Councillors are hired to frustrate their purpose all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius, king of Persia. So for something like sixteen years, this hostility went on and the building of the temple was bought completely to a standstill.