Can any Christian cast out demons?

Question 08072

Whether any Christian can cast out demons is a question that usually arrives with a good deal riding on it. Someone is frightened, or someone has been told they should be able to do this and nothing has happened, or someone has watched a ministry team at work and wondered whether they are missing something.

The answer needs care, because both of the easy positions are wrong. It is not true that this is a special office for anointed specialists, and it is not true that it is standard equipment for every believer to deploy at will.

What Jesus Gave the Twelve and the Seventy-Two

The starting point is a specific commissioning. In Matthew 10:1 Jesus called His twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease. Luke 10 records a similar sending of the seventy-two, who return delighted that even the demons are subject to them in His name.

Two things stand out. The authority is given rather than possessed, and it is given in connection with a mission to announce the kingdom. These men were not issued with a general capability to use as they saw fit. They were sent, and the power accompanied the sending.

Jesus then redirects their excitement in a way that has always struck me. Do not rejoice in this, He says, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. The ability to cast out demons is real, and He immediately tells them it is not the main thing.

Whether Every Believer Can Cast Out Demons

Nowhere does the New Testament say that every Christian can cast out demons, and nowhere does it say that no Christian can. What it does is show us who actually did so, and the list is narrower than the popular claim. The Twelve, the seventy-two, Philip, Paul. That is close to the whole of it.

Set against this, spiritual gift lists in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 never mention this among the gifts distributed to the body. That is a significant omission if the ability to cast out demons were a normal congregational function.

My own conclusion is that a believer confronted by something genuinely demonic is not helpless, because the name of Jesus is not restricted to a clerical class. But there is no warrant for treating this as an ordinary Christian activity, still less as a ministry to advertise.

The Great Commission and What It Includes

Some argue from the Great Commission that whatever the apostles were told to do passes to us. But look at what Matthew 28:19-20 actually commissions. Go, make disciples, baptise, teach them to observe all that I commanded you. Casting out demons is not in the list.

That is not an oversight. The lasting commission is a teaching and discipling one, and the signs that accompanied the apostolic period served to authenticate a message that was still being delivered and had not yet been written down.

This is a point where dispensational care helps. The sending of the Twelve was to Israel, with a specific message and specific signs. Reading that commissioning straight across into the life of a believer today, without noticing the change in programme, produces expectations Scripture never created.

The Longer Ending of Mark

The verse most often quoted here is Mark 16:17, where those who believe will cast out demons in Jesus’ name and will also pick up serpents and drink deadly poison without harm. I want to be honest about this passage rather than lean on it.

The longer ending of Mark is absent from the two oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, and its vocabulary and style differ noticeably from the rest of the Gospel. Most careful evangelical scholars regard it as a later addition, and I share that assessment.

So I would not build a doctrine on it, and I notice that almost nobody who quotes it about demons is willing to apply the same verse to snakes and poison. If a text is authoritative, it is authoritative throughout. If it is not, it should not be carrying the weight of an argument.

Authority Rather Than Technique

Where believers do encounter something real, what operates is authority rather than method. The Greek word is exousia, the right to act, and it belongs to Jesus and is exercised in His name by those who belong to Him.

That means no formula is required and none will help. There is nothing to master, no words of power to learn, no sequence to get right. The person who tries to cast out demons by technique has already misunderstood what is happening, and Luke’s account of the sons of Sceva shows how that ends.

It also means confidence rather than fear. A believer indwelt by the Spirit of God is not in danger in such an encounter. Caution is wise. Terror is unnecessary.

Why Most Christians Never Need To

Here is the pastoral reality. In more than two decades of ministry I have encountered what I take to be genuine demonic presence twice. Twice. Meanwhile I have sat with hundreds of people whose problems were sin, grief, illness, exhaustion, family breakdown or untreated depression, and every one of those was addressed by ordinary means.

That ratio matters, because a person who has been taught to expect the demonic will find it, and the cost of a wrong diagnosis falls on someone who is already suffering. I would rather be slow and occasionally late than quick and frequently wrong.

If you want the related discussion, see whether Christians can have demons cast out of them and what exorcism actually is.

What Every Christian Is Certainly Equipped For

Whatever we conclude about the unusual cases, every believer is fully equipped for the ordinary warfare that Scripture actually describes. Submit to God and resist the devil. Put on the armour. Stand. Pray. Speak the truth. Forgive quickly. Stay in fellowship.

That is not a consolation prize for those without a dramatic gift. It is the front line, and it is where the enemy does most of his damage. A church full of people doing those things faithfully is a far greater obstacle to him than a conference full of people trying to cast out demons.

What Happens When the Teaching Goes Wrong

Two errors follow from getting this question wrong, and they run in opposite directions. The first tells believers that they should routinely cast out demons, which produces an appetite for encounters and a tendency to find the demonic wherever a problem persists. That leads to misdiagnosis, and misdiagnosis in this area falls hardest on the vulnerable.

The second denies the reality of the demonic entirely and leaves a believer with no category for what they are seeing when something genuinely unusual occurs. I have met Christians who were badly shaken by an experience their theology had no room for, and who had nowhere to take it.

Between those errors lies the position I would commend. The demonic is real and occasionally encountered. The believer is safe and not helpless. The name of Jesus is sufficient. And the ordinary business of the Christian life, rather than any attempt to cast out demons, is where nearly all the ground is actually held or lost.

So, now what?

There is also a matter of church order worth mentioning. Anything of this kind should happen under the oversight of a local church rather than through a travelling ministry that arrives, acts and departs. The people who will still be walking with the individual in six months are the ones who should be involved from the start, and they are almost never the ones on the platform.

That is not institutional caution for its own sake. It is because the follow-through matters more than the moment, and follow-through requires people who are staying.

One further thought for anyone weighing this. The apostles who could cast out demons did not build their ministries around it, did not advertise it, and left almost no instruction about it. If those who plainly had the authority treated it as incidental, it is difficult to justify treating it as central.

The letters they did leave us are full of teaching about love, forgiveness, holiness, work, marriage, money and endurance. That tells you where they thought the Christian life was really lived, and Colossians 2:15 tells you why they were so relaxed about the powers: God disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, triumphing over them in Jesus.

If you are facing something you believe to be genuinely demonic, do not handle it alone and do not handle it privately. Go to your church leadership, insist on medical assessment where it is relevant, and keep the gospel at the centre of everything.

If you have been made to feel inadequate because you cannot cast out demons, set that down. The New Testament nowhere makes this a measure of maturity, and the One who could do it at will told His disciples to rejoice about something else entirely.

What would change if you gave the energy you have spent worrying about this to the warfare Scripture actually assigns you?

“Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

Luke 10:20, ESV