Hello again everyone! I hope these articles speak to you, but at a minimum I hope they at least move you to take a look at the scriptural references I provide and come to your own conclusions.
This article is kind of a continuation of The Fourth (Us) and The First (In the Beginning). In those I wrote about spirits: our spirits and God's Spirit. It's important to understand that those are not the only spirits in existence. We know there are also angels, both on God's side and Satan's side, but what this email is about is the spirits that do Satan's dirty work: demons. Satan's "henchmen" if you will. This is quite a big topic, so this is going to span across multiple articles. If you want to be ahead of the game, you can get an excellent book on this subject here: https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Expel-Demons-Invisible/dp/0800792602 It's how I learned so much about demons, and is what much of my writing will be based on.
I know some of you out there likely have read the word "demons" in scripture and dismissed it as an ancient word used because they didn't understand all the things we know today. But remember, 1) all scripture is "God breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16) and He had it written exactly how He wanted it to, and 2) Jesus was God's Son, filled with the Holy Spirit, so He would have known if these demons were just mental or physical ailments and He would not have cast them out, or even spoken to them (Luke 8:30). There's nothing to indicate that demons somehow stopped existing after the New Testament and they definitely were still around after Jesus was crucified. Paul cast out a spirit of divination that was bothering him while he was spreading the gospel (Acts 16:16-18). However, it seems to me the subject of demons is a bit taboo and is not spoken of much, if at all, in most churches these days. But how can we fight or expel them if we ignore their existence? We essentially are fighting blindfolded against an unknown enemy.
So what are they? Demons are spirits that desire to take up residence in physical bodies. There are multiple references to these spirits in scripture, and the example I listed above from Luke 8 (vs 27-36) is a good one. The man was tormented by demons (or unclean spirits as they are described in this passage) for a long time, and as a result when Jesus came upon him he was naked, living in the tombs, because the spirits drove him there after people tried to keep him bound in chains. These spirits knew Jesus and knew the authority He had over them. They knew what He could do, so they begged Him to send them into a nearby herd of swine. So by this example, we know that they can reside in humans or animals.
What else can we learn about demons from scripture? Well they're a lot more like us than we'd like to admit. They have will: the description of Matthew 12:43-45 shows that unclean spirits come back to those they are expelled from, meaning they make decisions and carry out actions based on those decisions. They have emotions: James 2:19 shows "the devils," (as they're called in many locations including in Luke 8) tremble, a sign of the emotion of fear. They have intellect: the first demon Jesus encountered, written of in Mark 1:24, stated that it knew who Jesus was even when all the rest of those in the synagogue had no idea (not even his disciples knew who He was yet). They are self-aware: one of the demons of Luke 8, the leader of the many demons infesting the man, called itself "Legion." They are able to speak: Luke 8 again, is a good example, as well as the Acts 16 verses where the spirit of divination was yelling to everyone that Paul and the other apostles were from God and were showing everyone the way to salvation.
What I'll end this article with is where these spirits came from. The short story is we can't really say for sure if we base our determination on scripture alone. Some believe that they are fallen angels, but I can't say that I agree with that. All the references to angels in scripture show that their normal dwelling is heavenly and they make "trips" to earth to perform certain tasks (Rev 5:11,12, Matt 18:10, Heb 1:14, Dan 10:5-14). This is also true for fallen angels, as Ephesians 6:12 states. Matthew 12:43-45 tells us that demons roam the earth until they come to a suitable host, or back to their original one. If they had the ability to go to the heavenlies, why would they hang out on earth? My personal belief is that they are the spirits of the offspring of fallen angels and women. Gen 6:1-4 tells us that "sons of God" (angels, in this case fallen since they were doing something God didn't want them to) had children with the "daughters of men" (human women). This was before the flood. If you're so inclined, and open to the words of a book not normally included in the bible (although it is included in the Ethiopian bible), you can see in the book of Enoch that God destroyed this offspring and made their fallen angel fathers watch as a part of their punishment. In that destruction, the offspring, called the Nephilim, were sentenced to have their souls wander the earth as wandering spirits. I believe that is who the demons are. As a side note, some other interesting things from the book of Enoch on the subject of fallen angels is that they taught mankind a lot of things they wouldn't have necessarily discovered at the time, like metallurgy, enchantments, meteorology, constellations, astrology, astronomy, etc.
Regardless of the origin of demons, the bible clearly tells us they exist. In the coming weeks we'll talk about what they do and what we can do about them. Thanks for reading!
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