What the Bible teaches about angels, demons, Satan, and spiritual warfare.
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08059 The Ouija board occupies a peculiar place in Western culture. It is sold as a board game, marketed to teenagers, and stocked alongside Monopoly and Scrabble in high-street shops. At the same time, almost everyone who has used one reports an experience that unsettled them, and many people, Christians and non-Christians alike, sense…
Reading Time: 2 minutesQuestion 08089 Not all demonic activity is the same, and the failure to distinguish between different forms of it leads to both unnecessary panic and unhelpful pastoral counsel. The two categories most commonly discussed are possession and oppression, and they describe genuinely different conditions. What Possession Involves Possession, in its full biblical sense, describes a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08057 Sleep paralysis is a deeply unsettling experience. The person wakes, or appears to wake, but finds themselves completely unable to move or speak. The episode is often accompanied by a crushing pressure on the chest, a sense of a malevolent presence in the room, and vivid, frightening hallucinations. Accounts of this experience are…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08058 The relationship between occult practices and demonic activity is one of the most clearly addressed subjects in Scripture, and yet it remains one of the areas where Christians are most uncertain. Some believers dismiss the entire category as superstition, while others live in exaggerated fear of accidental demonic contamination. The biblical position is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 08055 Stories of haunted houses have been part of human culture for millennia, and they are not confined to superstitious pre-modern societies. Many people, including some Christians, report experiencing unexplained phenomena in certain buildings: strange noises, objects moving, oppressive atmospheres, and the sense of a presence that should not be there. Can a house…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08056 Ghost stories are among the oldest forms of human storytelling, and belief in ghosts remains remarkably persistent even in secular societies. Surveys consistently show that a significant proportion of the population in the Western world believes in ghosts or claims to have experienced a ghostly encounter. For the Christian, the question is not…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 08054 The idea that demons can attach themselves to physical objects or locations is widespread in popular culture and not uncommon in certain Christian traditions. Some believers will not bring second-hand items into their homes without praying over them. Others feel a palpable spiritual unease in certain places and attribute it to demonic presence….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08053 If every genuine believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit from the moment of conversion, the question of whether Christians can experience demonic oppression is not a minor pastoral curiosity. It touches directly on the nature of the Spirit’s indwelling, the reality of ongoing spiritual warfare, and the practical experience of believers who…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08051 Paul makes a startling claim in 2 Corinthians 4:4: “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” This is not a metaphor for general ignorance…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08052 When Christians talk about demonic activity, terms like “possession,” “oppression,” and “influence” are used regularly, sometimes interchangeably and often without much precision. Understanding what Scripture actually describes, and what distinctions are warranted by the biblical text, matters enormously for pastoral care. A person struggling with spiritual attack needs accurate diagnosis, not borrowed terminology…