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How Should Christians Think About Demonic Activity?

Truth in Love 22

The devil is a real foe and he is a defeated foe. We serve a King who is able to keep His people safe.

Nov 2, 2015

Heath Lambert: A common question that many Christians have is about the nature of the devil and demonic activity in the Christian life to help us think through some of the questions that people are asking, Amy Evensen, the producer of Truth in Love, is here to ask some of the questions that are on people’s minds.

Amy Evensen: So in the Christian life, we’re thinking about sin and suffering and different things going on, but demons aren’t always on the forefront of our minds. So, could you talk about whether demons are real and do they pose an actual problem for Christians?

Heath Lambert: Yeah, I think that’s a good question, and I think you’re right. I think that Christians do find it easy to think about threats from the world and sins that they struggle with. And maybe sometimes the spiritual forces of darkness, which are so often invisible, are not something that we think about with a lot of intentionality. And so, just to answer the question, are demons real? Is the devil real? The answer to that question is yes. And the answer to that question is yes because the Bible is so clear that the devil does exist. And the Bible’s clear about this in a lot of places, but one place where the Bible is crystal clear is in 1 Peter 5. And in verse 8 it says, “be sober-minded, be watchful, your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” So the Bible says, the devil is real. And in fact, the Bible compares the devil to a lion and he uses the work of devouring or of a lion consuming his prey to characterize the work of the devil. The devil goes about doing to people, doing to Christians what lions do to the prey that they eat. And so this is meant to be a shocking analogy from the apostle Peter to arrest us and help us think very seriously about the kind of awful, terrible work that the devil is engaged in. And then it doesn’t just say that the devil devours people. It says that he’s prowling around. So the devil—the forces of darkness—is on the move, he is looking for people to attack. He is looking for people to consume and so Christians absolutely need to take this, not just seriously, but deadly serious.

Amy Evensen: So if the devil is so active and deadly, how would you recognize this activity?

Heath Lambert: Well, this question is just as important as the first one, because if the devil is real but misdiagnosed in our lives, then we are not going to be much help. There are errors on both sides. Christians can attribute activity that has nothing to the devil to the devil and then at other times, Christians can fail to see when the devil is active in a situation. And so the only way that we’re going to be able to sort this out is through texts of Scripture. And the Bible actually speaks with a lot of clarity about the manifestations of the devil in this world and in our life. And there are more descriptions in the Bible about this than we have time to talk about in our podcast. But maybe I just talk about a few examples in the Scriptures that we see of demonic activity. So when we see these examples, we would be able to recognize at least a few of the ways that the devil is involved in our lives in a really harmful way.

One example in the Bible is that the devil is active in evangelism. So in Matthew 13:18, Jesus is telling the parable of the sower and he is talking about the seed that is thrown on the hard path. That is, the Gospel is preached and unbelievers don’t hear it. They don’t understand it. It does not affect them. And Jesus tells us what’s going on there in Matthew 13:18 and the following. He says, “hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path.” And so Jesus says that every time we hear the Gospel preached and unbelievers do not hear it—they don’t understand it—that is the work of demonic activity. So we need to see the devil as a real foe in our evangelistic work. That’s one example.

Another example is the activity of the devil in sickness and illness. We see this in Matthew 17, is one example, there are many examples of this in the gospels, but in Matthew 17:14 and following this is what Jesus says, “when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and kneeling before him said, ‘Lord have mercy on my son for he’s an epileptic and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire and often into the water and I brought him to your disciples and they could not heal him.’ And Jesus answered, ‘Oh faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.’ And Jesus rebuked the demon and it came out of him and the boy was healed instantly.” This is a text. Honestly, that could make us feel uncomfortable because what we have here is a demonic activity that only manifests as physical weakness, as illness. There’s no indication, there are no voices, there’s no strange behavior like breaking of chains or anything like that. This is somebody who is having epileptic seizures and we would not know that a demon is involved in this illness if we didn’t see Jesus, right here in the pages of Scripture, exercising the demon. And so this gives us humility here. Let me say what this does not mean, it doesn’t mean that the devil is behind each and every instance of physical illness. It certainly doesn’t mean that the devil is involved in every instance of epilepsy. But what it does mean is that a uniquely Christian view of illness understands that the devil is involved in some of these and we need to trust the Word of God here and go with it.

Another example of demonic activity is the devil’s involvement in marriage. And so in 1 Corinthians 7, which is a passage that is famously about marriage, Paul is talking about rules for marriage. He’s telling the Corinthians that the bodies of husbands don’t belong only to them, but to their wives and the bodies of wives don’t belong only to them, but to their husbands. And he tells them to enjoy the marriage bed with regularity and he says in verse five, “do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” And so this is a place where the Bible is telling us that the devil as he prowls around, is looking to devour marriages. In particular, he is looking for married couples who are not having sex together in a regular way.

Many more examples, but here’s just one more; we see the devil is involved in conflict in churches. So, in 2 Timothy 2:24 to the end it says, “the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness, God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.” So this is an astounding text that tells us that sometimes much of the conflict that we see in our churches is actually driven by the devil. There are people who’ve been captured by the devil to incite a quarrelsome spirit in the church. And so pastors are actually doing battle against the devil in many cases when they respond with gentleness to quarrelsome people in the church. So, those are four categories that Christians are living in all the time—evangelism, illness, marriage, and conflict—where the Bible tells us the devil is often right in the middle of each one of those.

Amy Evensen: How should Christians think about and respond to demons?

Heath Lambert: Yeah, I appreciate the question because it’s not enough to acknowledge that. The devil is real, to see some of the ways that he acts, but then not know how to respond. And so it’s interesting in that first text that I was reading in 1 Peter 5:8, which talks about the devil prowling around like a roaring lion, it goes on to say in verse nine, “resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.” Here, and in Ephesians 6, Christians are encouraged that we defeat the devil through faith, we defeat the devil through trusting the Lord. There is not some special biblical response to the devil that’s different than the biblical response that we have to our sins or to our suffering or to the attacks of the world. We respond to the devil the way we respond to all difficulties, which is by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We trust that in a world where the devil is a real and powerful enemy, he is also a defeated enemy because of the blood of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ defeated the forces of darkness in His work on the cross and so we need to be sobered by the existence of the devil. That’s what first Peter 5:8 tells us to do, we need to be sober-minded. But we should not be scared. We should not believe that the devil is in charge in some meaningful way. He is a real foe, but he is a defeated foe. God has him on a leash and so we can trust that though the devil is a real enemy, a dangerous enemy, we serve a king who has defeated that enemy and who even in the midst of very real dangers is able to keep His people safe forever as we trust in Him.