Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8036. Few questions at the meeting point of theology and pastoral care carry higher stakes than whether demons cause mental illness. Get it wrong in one direction and you tell a person with a treatable condition that they need an exorcism. Get it wrong in the other and you leave someone facing a genuinely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8035. Whether demons can cause physical illness is a question the New Testament answers with more directness than many Christians expect, and with more care than many teachers show. The Gospels do connect certain conditions with demonic activity. They also, in the same breath, refuse to make that connection universal. Getting this right matters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8034. Whether demons can take physical form is a question people usually ask because they have seen something, or because someone they trust has. I want to answer it from Scripture rather than from anecdote, while treating the anecdotes with more respect than they sometimes receive. The biblical evidence is more limited than most…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8033. The bottomless pit turns up at some of the most dramatic moments in Scripture, and it is easy to read past it as atmosphere. It is not atmosphere. The abyss is presented as a real location in the unseen world, a place of restraint for spirit beings, and the demons who met Jesus…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8032. Asking where demons live sounds like an odd question until you notice how much Scripture actually says about it. The Bible is not squeamish on the subject, and the answer turns out to matter for how we think about temptation, about places, and about the limits of the enemy. The short version is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8031. Whether demons are fallen angels is a question the Bible answers by implication rather than by definition, which is why it still gets discussed. Scripture never pauses to say here is where demons came from, and readers have to assemble the picture from a number of passages that were written for other purposes….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8030. Reports of angel encounters during near-death experiences have become a publishing industry of their own, and I am asked about them more often than almost any other question in this area. Someone has read a book, or a relative has described a light and a figure and a sense of overwhelming peace, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8029. The place of angels in evangelism is one of the most encouraging themes in the book of Acts, and one of the most consistently overlooked. Luke keeps showing us angelic activity around the spread of the gospel, and yet he never once has an angel preach it. That combination is deliberate, and once…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8028. The question of angels in worship sounds either startling or sentimental, depending on what you already assume about Sunday mornings. I want to argue that it is neither, and that Scripture treats the presence of the unseen host at our gatherings as a settled fact rather than a special occasion. It is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8027. The connection between angels and answered prayer is one of the quieter themes of Scripture, and it is easy to miss because the Bible almost never draws attention to it. God answers, and sometimes the answer walks in through a locked door wearing the appearance of a man. I want to trace what…