On Demon Possession

Andrew: Jessie Penn-Lewis brings that out, that the two things that the devil attacks most are first of all, prayer, and secondly, Bible study in a believer’s life. Because all that the devil wants to do above all else is to get us out of touch, even a little bit with God.

Well, it’s not all that important, or this is the fight of the devil and his little nagging thoughts of his that I have or that wondering or I’ve got to go ahead and get the thing done, or I’ve got to get to my ministry, it takes a whole form that the devil… He just doesn’t come in broadside to start with, but starts just in one way or another deceitfulness, deception to get it covered over, so that it is not seen for what it is, a direct attack on our relationship with God.

Hannah: If the people that had died could or would have a chance to come back and to decide, the churches would be full, every bench would be full. You wouldn’t have a dry eye, you wouldn’t have an empty bench. Everything would be filled, the mourners’ benches, but the sad part is that there is no coming back. Only one life, which will soon be past. That goes for anyone, because after it’s over, it’s over. We don’t know how many years we have, but we know that what we do, we have to do now, while we have life, while we have the strength to do it, because the day will come when it’s all over. We’ll never have another chance.

And I always, I have said so many times, if you feel one glimmer, or if you have one bit of compunction or anything, take the opportunity and make it right with God while you can. Because as Jessie Penn-Lewis uses so much, the film that gets wrapped around you.

I remember when I was young, my grandparents would say, keep washing yourself well, because if you don’t, the skin grows over, and that dirt can get so underneath. And I saw a little girl like that. She didn’t want to wash, and she lived in our neighborhood, and her skin absolutely got so that she couldn’t get the dirt out. And I remember when we took a boy that used to come to our house and get the food to the apartment. We took him out to the farm and when we first went there, Frank got into the bathroom with him under the shower and scrubbed him with the brush. But the skin, the layers of new skin, had come over that dirt and that grime that was in it, could never be gotten out, and those films that you don’t get clean, and the films just wrap around you, and you just can’t get clean from it because the deception comes.

And you’re under that and it’s just glazed over and to get that unwrapped, it’s just about impossible. So, if we just allow those films to be wrapped around us, we refuse or go on with this dealing to go on with that dealing, keeps on with the films, that’s what she calls it, the films that get wrapped around us. Well, it gets interwoven, ingrained, inside, you can’t get it out then. So the dealing goes off and off and off, and you get colder to it. And I just thought, tonight, somebody had said it, and I remember, I have used it before, where we have had empty benches, the dealings, and saying, if the people could be led out of where they are tonight, and stay with you, they would make for those benches.

They would be there, and there wouldn’t be anything that they wouldn’t do to get right, but too late. The worst words in any language. Too late. And if there’s the least thing that is upon anybody tonight, I believe the Lord has spoken here tonight. The least thing is that you can yield to the Lord—yield to him or call upon him, while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his ways, the unrighteous man his ways, the Lord his God will abundantly pardon.

Andrew: That goes in with demons, too, because the films have wrappings that make it more and more difficult to distinguish between your own personality or your own soul and the demons, so that when the demons are attacked, you feel threatened. It’s not hard for the Lord to distinguish, he’s the wielder of the sharp two-edged sword of the spirit, which divides even between soul and spirit (and joints and marrow).

But the person, and that’s why in dealing with people with demons, it’s not that Jesus is not victor and is not thoroughly able to release the most demon-possessed, it’s that the person himself often decides that he wants whatever that is, because that’s threatened and it’s so long been ingrained, or it’s so long been there, or he may never remember when it wasn’t there, that it’s part of him that is being attacked, he thinks.

And on this whole question, it’s not the right way to put it really to frame the question, can Christians be demon-possessed? Because what that leaves out is every other possible gradation of demon-affliction and difficulty, and what they want to do with it is back you into a corner, so that you have to say that the Spirit of God is co-inhabiting the same tabernacle that some unclean spirit or some evil spirit is, or spirits. Or they say that logically, it’s a contradiction in terms, you can’t have room—both for the Holy Spirit and for any other spirits from beneath, so therefore automatically as a consequence there is no such thing as a Christian who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit according to this doctrine also being indwelt by evil spirits.

To a certain extent, it is a matter of terminology—Jessie Penn-Lewis’s terminology says there’s possession, there’s such a thing as partial possession, and other people use oppression and obsession. And then possession is when it’s total—spirit, soul and body—and where there is absolutely no control over any aspect of the person’s own being. A person who is demon-possessed (which we say), for example, the man in the tombs, he didn’t have control over his own body, he didn’t have control over anything. He was demon-possessed, and that means every aspect of his life was under the direct control of evil spirits. Well, you will hardly ever meet a person in that condition. (They’re locked up.)

Occasionally, there’s one on the street, because they get them locked up, and they only keep them in for so long, and then they let them loose again, but in normal human contact you don’t meet people who are demon-possessed. (That’s why they had the fallout there in the graveyard.) They couldn’t make it, they couldn’t even stand, would rather have him chained, and the chains couldn’t hold them.

But there are all the gradations below that where there can be on the basis of unyieldedness or on the basis of sin in their life, or on the basis of curses, there can be areas of the life which are still under the control of demons though the life as a whole or the life in the center is under the control of the Lord, but the two won’t forever be in conflict. One or the other is going to win out, but most people who have demon problems are not totally demon-possessed, they’re obsessed or oppressed or as Jessie Penn-Lewis puts it, partially possessed.

Hannah: That’s what she brings out: the difference, how she explains it, well, that certain part is possessed, and she makes it very clear it’s not the whole person. Take body, soul and spirit, because demons are lodged in one of the three places or all of the three places or part of the three places.

The demon-possessed, she says, of that certain part, say, the spirit or in the soul or in the mind. For instance, I had an uncle that had epileptic fits, he was born with them and he died with them. And he was wonderfully saved, but he still had the fits, that were in his flesh, his body. The body was possessed, because when that would come, he would just go under, just terrible to see him in a fit. He was possessed because that thing would come after him and throw him on the floor. And the mind is part of the body, the soul which is the body. And there are people that are spiritually-possessed, you can understand that. But what we have believed and say, that when a person is completely possessed, his body, mind, soul and spirit.

The mind and soul are the same as far as body is, but they’re completely possessed, but they’re possessed of different parts. I have seen that, I saw my own uncle, and I know he went to heaven—he was a happy mortal to sing those hymns and rock in the chair and praise God. And yet, possessed, his body, his mind, his soul. You can just understand that when you come to Jesus, you come with the demons or the curses or whatever that is upon you.

You ask the Lord Jesus to forgive you of your sins, your sins are forgiven, but what happens to those demons? You don’t get them washed with the blood. Because no blood can wash them. What happens to the demons that you have had? Well, the Lord takes over, and you leave, as St. Paul said, I’m a new creature, a new creation, but those demons don’t come under any of that. What’s the next step? What do you do about the demons that you had? Something has to be done. And they don’t get washed out, they have to be cast out. Demons are cast out. So how do you get rid of them? They have to be cast out. When were the demons cast out of you? Or of me? Or of… Where were they cast out? When? They have to be cast out.

Jesus only cast them out. It’s not the eradication of sin, the salvation of the soul.

Andrew: And that takes place in one of two ways. Either through immediate, direct working of miracles and discernment of spirits. Exorcism, in other words. Or, through the retaking of the ground by which they took possession in the first place, which is gradual, although no less definite in its results. So it’s not a question that you are forever struggling with the same demons.

In either case, Jessie Penn-Lewis talks about both of them. She says that the danger with the first type is that first of all, it lets the person out, he thinks, in his own mind, that this is all something that happens like that. And many times it does, and there are things that if it doesn’t happen just like that, we would have been sunk, or different ones of us know that if the Lord had not done something just like that, we might not have been able to make it. But, she says, her experience was, for a long-lasting or a long-term deliverance, there had to be the awareness on the part of the person, him or herself, of the ground, a recognition of that ground, and an active willing and willful repossession of the territory, so that the territory which the demons had occupied is fully possessed in the name of the Lord.

The primary Scripture for that is the one demon who was cast out—absolutely cast out, the house cleaned and swept and not filled up with anything else. In other words, the same territory was not possessed by the Holy Spirit. It was not possessed in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (neutral). Therefore, it was open to not only the same demon, but seven other worse than himself. That is a graphic example of the dangers inherent in supernatural deliverance ministry so-called, with quotes. It doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s real deliverance, and that the demons are cast out, but that in the long run, it doesn’t prove to be permanent. As a matter of fact, it proves, it ends up in a worsening of the condition, rather than in a bettering of it.

So often you find, with people who—or at least the ones I have known and had dealing with that bordered on being possessed—the most serious demon cases that I have seen or known anything about first hand, when you got right down to it, there was something in the will which had not yet given up to God and was not about to give up to God. The person himself (wanted), therefore, nothing could be done. The final end result was nothing could be done. You know that it is nothing wrong with God, although if you believe that person’s side of the story, it would sound as if there was something wrong with God, which isn’t and couldn’t be the case. When you have gotten right down to it, there was something in the will which would not yield. Now, that wasn’t necessarily found out one-two-three (it takes years), because the demons are so entrenched, it takes years to get to that point, to find out that much.

Hannah: But she brings out when the thing becomes chronic, keeps on over and over and over, keeps on, you know there are demons lodged there, because you see your need and you see your weakness or you call out. And always going back into it, always the same thing—it’s demons, it’s chronic, demons. You have a chronic case. But those that didn’t get rid of them, or that haven’t gotten rid of them, or won’t get rid of them is what you say—somewhere the will is linked in there. Of course, then there comes as we know the paralysis of the will. I suppose it would have been better if I had known about Jessie Penn-Lewis years and years ago, it just happened that I didn’t.