Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
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 08071 The practice of exorcism carries a great deal of cultural baggage, most of it supplied by films rather than by Scripture, and that makes it difficult to discuss calmly. People arrive at the subject already braced for something lurid. So let me set the films aside and describe what the Bible actually shows,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08070 Deliverance ministry covers a wide range of practice, from careful pastoral work with genuinely troubled people to something closer to a stage act. Because the label is so elastic, I want to describe what it usually involves before saying what I think of it. I write as someone who believes demonic activity is…
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 08084 Satan’s role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything from adultery to a lost temper in traffic. Others speak as though he barely exists and every failure is nothing more than psychology and bad…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08068 Talk of spiritual strongholds has become so common that most believers assume they know what the term means without ever having looked at where it comes from. Conferences are held on breaking them. Prayer initiatives target them over cities. Individuals are told they have personal ones needing specialist attention. The phrase belongs to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08067 The instruction to give no place to the devil is one of those phrases that has floated free of its context and now gets used to mean almost anything. I have heard it applied to house layouts, to music, to hobbies and to whole categories of medicine. Paul had something considerably more specific…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08083 Satan’s release at the end of the thousand years is one of the strangest turns in the whole prophetic landscape, and I understand why people stumble over it. God has bound the enemy. Jesus reigns in person from Jerusalem. The earth has known a thousand years of justice, peace and visible righteousness. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08066 Whether a believer may rebuke Satan directly is one of those questions where practice has run a long way ahead of the text. In some circles you cannot get through a prayer meeting without someone addressing the enemy out loud, binding him, cancelling his assignments and ordering him off the premises. I want…