Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more useful. There is no diagnostic checklist in the Bible, no set of symptoms that appears only when the enemy is at work. What Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08095 The idea that a third of the angelic host became fallen angels is so widely repeated that most Christians assume it is stated somewhere in plain terms. It is not. It rests on a single symbolic image in Revelation 12, and the inference drawn from it is reasonable without being certain. I hold…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08091 The phrase powers and principalities has become one of those bits of church vocabulary that everyone recognises and few can define. It sounds impressive from a pulpit, it turns up in hymns and prayers, and if you stopped ten believers on a Sunday morning and asked what it meant you would probably get…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08087 The question of Jesus preaching to demons between his death and resurrection comes up more often than you might expect, usually after somebody has read 1 Peter 3 or recited the line in the Apostles’ Creed about descending to the dead. It sounds strange to modern ears, and it has been used to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08085 Demonic judgement is a subject Scripture treats with more restraint than most of us would like. We are told plainly that fallen angels face a reckoning, and we are told a good deal about Satan’s end, but the fine detail of how the two relate is sketched rather than spelled out. That should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8040. When Jesus cast out demons the Gospels almost never tell us where they went, and the silence is consistent enough to look deliberate. Luke records crowds of deliverances in a single sentence and moves straight on to the preaching. There are a few hints, and they are worth gathering. But I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8039. The question of demons and animals arises from one specific incident in the Gospels, and it is worth examining that incident carefully rather than speculating around it. A herd of pigs on a hillside near the Sea of Galilee is the whole biblical evidence, and a great deal has been built on rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8038. Lying spirits are not an occasional tactic of the enemy but the whole shape of his operation. Jesus said of the devil that when he lies he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Everything else he does runs downstream of that. Scripture uses…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8037. The phrase unclean spirits runs right through the Synoptic Gospels and the book of Acts, and most readers slide past it as a synonym for demons. It is a synonym, but it is not an accidental one. The word chosen tells us how Scripture wants us to think about these beings, and the…
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…