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 8017. Abaddon and Apollyon are two names for a single figure, and Revelation 9:11 gives us both because John is writing for readers in two languages. He is called the angel of the bottomless pit, and both of his names mean the same thing: Destroyer. That is a rare piece of transparency in a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8009. Can angels and demons read our minds? The question matters more than it might first appear, because a great deal of anxious teaching about spiritual warfare quietly assumes that they can, and builds practices on the assumption. My answer is no. Scripture reserves the knowledge of the human heart to God alone, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8000. Angels and demons are two of the most talked about subjects in our culture and two of the least carefully studied in our churches, which is a strange combination when you think about it. Angelology is the study of angels, and demonology is the study of the fallen angels who followed Satan into…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7076. That demons believe correct theology and remain lost is one of the more unsettling statements in the New Testament, and James makes it deliberately. He is arguing with somebody who thinks that holding the right ideas about God is sufficient, and he produces the most damaging counter example available: the demonic realm is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10195. The judgement of fallen angels does not happen all at once, and that is what makes the question worth asking carefully. Scripture describes some spirits already confined, others still active, a leader bound for a thousand years and then released, and a final sentence carried out at the end. Put the passages in…