17: What Can Demons Do?

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 17. Today we are continuing with our  Breakthrough Series, and we are entering a new topic on defeating demons.

Hello, Father.

[00:11] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. What better topic for a father-daughter conversation?

[00:15] Stephanie: Hey, I mean, spiritual warfare has always been quite a reality in the Warner household.

[00:22] Marcus: This is true. You’ve probably never lived without being conscious of the fact that it was out there..

[00:34] Stephanie: And that’s great news because I’ve always just understood that we live in a fallen world of war, and that there are things you have to do to protect yourself and fight and have discernment. It’s a very important part of our worldview that does not have to be as scary as sometimes people don’t like to touch the topic.

I know you’ve known people, I think I’ve known people who think that if they talk about demons, things are going to start happening and they just don’t want to touch it and kind of have Satan as a bumblebee, “If I don’t bother him, he won’t bother me,” mindset, which is just a fallacy. I’m sorry.

[01:18] Marcus: It’d be nice if it worked that way, but it’s not an elective that you can opt out of.

[01:25] Stephanie: We’re hoping with this new topic that we’re in, that we can give some of that equipping, and some of that confidence in how we deal with the unseen world, especially with the scarier parts of it.

On that note, we are in the umbrella of the Breakthrough Series, so there’s lots we could say about spiritual warfare. There’s lots we have said about spiritual warfare. So I encourage people to go check out our podcast archive for those.

And obviously, Deeper Walk just has tons of materials, but for we’re talking about breakthrough, and finding emotional breakthrough. So could you unpack the BUILD acrostic in terms of where defeating demons fits into that?

[02:14] Marcus: Yes. The whole conversation that led to writing BUILD came with talking to an addiction recovery counselor who was wondering if their model was lacking a spiritual warfare element and he wanted to know how significant I thought spiritual warfare was to addiction recovery.

And I was like, “Well, I’ve seen it completely resolve addiction before.” So, yeah, it can be a very important part of addiction recovery. It doesn’t mean that all addiction is nothing but spiritual warfare, but it’s certainly one of the things that have to be addressed.

This whole concept of “one of the things that need to be addressed” is what leads us to the “Build Maturity Model.” And the idea here is that the breakthroughs that we’re looking for, really the ultimate breakthrough we’re looking for, is leveling up our maturity to a higher level of capacity to not be overwhelmed by things.

Along the way, there are five engines that need to get addressed. They all take different strategies. We have to be aware of our Bodies. We have to Unleash our beliefs. We have to Increase. Yeah, it’s increase. I forgot my own acrostic for a second. Yeah, Increase our joy bonds and then we Listen to the spirit and finally Defeat demons.

And so this is where we get to that. The original question that started all of this is, does spiritual warfare play a role in addiction recovery? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’ve actually seen addictions end in one session before, when the demon that was behind it got taken care of.

[03:57] Stephanie: A lot of times people come in hoping they have a demon because it’ll get resolved so fast.

[04:01] Marcus: It’s true.

[04:02] Stephanie: It’s not always the case.

[04:02] Marcus: Not always the case.

[04:03] Stephanie: But we have this holistic model, but, if you have a spiritual warfare issue, only a spiritual warfare solution is going to.

[04:11] Marcus: Yes. One example that comes to mind is a young lady who’d been through all kinds of counseling for her eating disorder and finally met with somebody who treated the eating disorder as something demonic. A demon manifested, and they got rid of it, and she was done. Her disorder was gone.

I’ve actually heard stories like that dozens and dozens of times. I had one friend in Texas years ago who said he felt like he single handedly put a ministry out of business because he was helping so many people find freedom along these lines.

And I say that partly because it’s often the last thing people address, and I’ve often wondered if it was the first thing we addressed, how much faster would progress be for people?

[05:07] Stephanie: Because if that’s not the issue, then you move on to what the issues actually are. But if it is the issue, you’re not going to solve it with exactly what you’re trying.

[05:15] Marcus: And it feels like getting free from the demonic element is just going to make everything else you do easier to do because they won’t be fighting you so hard on it.

[05:25] Stephanie: Yes. We talk about getting freedom from the rocks and the ropes or the baggage you’re carrying and the ropes that are entangling you. It’s a lot easier to get free from the baggage if you are not tied up.

Yes, that’s one of the things that we’re wanting to do with this topic here is look at how dealing with spiritual warfare can help us with our breakthroughs. So on that note, I want you to set up a nice little framework of what is a warfare worldview and some of the legal principles.

[06:13] Marcus: So, it helps me to think about spiritual warfare in legal terms, and that is, in terms of the courtroom of heaven and the idea that God is sovereign, God is king, therefore, demons have to have permission to do what they do.

At a very basic level, God has taken permission from some demons away, and it’s that we’re told in the New Testament that they are bound up in Tartarus even now, and God did not give them permission to be out roaming the earth.

So just from that standpoint, it’s like not all demons have full permission to do everything that they want to do. Some are literally tied up in Tartarus. We have other spirits, and again, we tend to use “demon” for anything that is in the kingdom of darkness, that is a spiritual being.

All of these spirits in the kingdom of darkness are involved in some way or another in trying to frustrate God’s work in the world. And so what we’re looking at here is that they all have to get permission to do what they do. Some of it they’re just granted because we live in what Paul called “a present evil age”, and some of it is given by humans by the choices that we make.

One of the examples I’ve used for years is, if you think about the ancient kingdom of Moab. Moab is directly across the Dead Sea from Israel, and it’s full of these mountains. What happened is, at the top of each peak of each mountain, they built an altar to a wicked spirit named Chemos.

Even though they don’t know he’s a wicked spirit, they think he’s a god, they’re now inviting Chemos to meet with them at this high place. And then they make another high place, and they make another one. And there are more and more places in Moab that are dedicated to this wicked spirit who is literally invited to be present there.

Then they start doing it in the palace, and then the people do it in their homes, and then before long, this demon spirit that they are worshiping as a god has now literally been invited to almost every part of the country. That has consequences.

If you’re inviting wicked spirits to inhabit a territory that comes with consequences. If you’re dedicating that territory to these wicked spirits, it has consequences in the same way we’re talking about it, some of those consequences start at the legal level.

And that is that God says, “Well, because of what you’ve done, I’m going to give them permission to move in. I’m going to give them permission to affect you.”And it doesn’t mean everybody in Moab is demonized, but it means everybody in Moab is living in an environment where demons are much more free to be active.

And so I kind of look at it this way. This starts with this legal foundation. And so the solutions are legal. I think of this first as the work of a lawyer and then the work of a police officer. Work of a lawyer is kind of like going to the courtroom and dealing with the contracts and getting rid of permissions.

And then the work of the police officer is now enforcing what has taken place in the courtroom and using authority to make that happen. So permission is the realm of the lawyer, and authority is the realm of the police officer.

[09:43] Stephanie: So what does that look like for a Christian? We do have episodes I could point people to where we literally talk through all of that. But what does it mean? Is it every Christian or is it if you are the head of state? How do you have that permission and authority represented?

[10:04] Marcus: Right. So we don’t have universal authority. We have derived authority. We have limited authority. And there is something. As soon as you get into the realm of permission, you’re getting to the idea of jurisdiction.

For example, I, as the head of this home, have more jurisdiction in my home than I do in somebody else’s home. As a pastor, I have more jurisdiction in the church where I’m a pastor than somebody else’s church. And so you can begin thinking about it that way. As an American, there are things I can do in America that I can’t do in some other country.

But also, I’m not the mayor of the town. I’m not the governor of the state. There are levels of authority that do come with position. And so what we do is we use all of the authority that we can in the battles that we face for our churches, for our culture, for our families, and for our hearts.

[11:09] Stephanie: Very good. So let’s move in a little bit to what can demons do?

[11:15] Marcus: What can demons do?

[11:16] Stephanie: There are a lot of different thoughts out there. I don’t know if you want to start with what they can’t do or if you want to start with what they can do. We’ll get to how they affect Christians specifically next episode. But just like in general.

[11:32] Marcus: Sure, so if you just think about the engines, we have the three physical engines, the body, beliefs, and bonding. Demons can affect all three things. We see that a lot of the miracles that Jesus performed that healed people’s bodies involved casting out a demon.

So he cast out a demon from someone who’s mute and they could talk. He cast out a demon, someone who’s deaf and they could hear. Someone who was bent over and hunched over, cast out a demon and that was cured. So we know demons can affect bodies.

We have dozens and dozens of stories at Deeper Walk of people who’ve gone through our training, meeting with people, confronting and casting out demons, and having physical problems get cured, so we know that happens.

I’ve also seen this in temporary things. Sometimes in the middle of a session, somebody will suddenly get a headache and you have to bind. And when you bind demons, the headaches go away.

Or sometimes they literally will fall asleep on you right in the middle of a session and you’re like, you bind the demon and they wake up. They can affect our bodies sometimes on a long term basis, sometimes on a short term basis.

They definitely affect our beliefs. The devil is called the father of lies. What that means is that all lies that we believe ultimately find their source in him. Doesn’t mean that he’s the one personally standing next to me, whispering in my ear. But they all ultimately find their source in him.

And so deceptive worldviews, deceptive belief systems, just random deceptive thoughts, tapes that play over and over again in our head, those aren’t all necessarily demons speaking to us, but all of them, as we agree with those thoughts, put us in agreement with the demonic realm rather than the Spirit of truth. So they definitely affect our beliefs.

And then thirdly, they can affect our bonding and our attachments. And that is that they can affect our emotions. I think that there’s something that in spiritual warfare circles people often refer to soul ties. A soul tie basically means that I have been bonded to somebody else by sin.

One of the most common soul ties is having sex with somebody that you weren’t supposed to have sex with, and you are now bonded to them by sin. And so in part of breaking that, you repent of the sin, you forgive the other person, but you also break anything demonic that is keeping you connected to them.

I talked to a husband once who had trouble not thinking about an old girlfriend when he was with his wife because he had been sexually active with that girlfriend. Once he broke the demonic things that were still binding them together, that stopped.

There are other ways in which we can share and sin. Sometimes this can happen even when somebody has sinned against me. So perhaps I was abused and I am now bonded to an abuser I don’t really want to be bonded to. And so the idea is, breaking whatever is demonic that has us connected is also something that needs to be done.

I can break the demonic part of the bond and it doesn’t cancel everything. This is confusing for people, because let’s just say that my father is the one who sinned against me and I don’t want to end my relationship with my father. I don’t want to end that. But I do want to end whatever is demonic in that relationship.

I want to break off anything that is demonic that is involved in that. A lot of times, breaking that off or cutting that soul tie off is key to helping our emotions about that person, key to giving us a level of freedom to begin engaging with them in a different way. And so that’s all part of that as well.

So they can affect our bonding and our attachment. They can affect our beliefs. All these things affect our emotions. We call them the engines that drive our emotions. So they can clearly affect our emotions. They can also affect our environment.

I talked to a guy once who found himself suddenly really struggling with pornographic thoughts and that was unusual for him. And then he realized that he was standing in an airport magazine store and thought, “Oh, well, how much porn do they sell in this magazine store? There are probably spirits related to that here.”

And as soon as he just said, “I renounce this thought, I command this thing to go,” it stopped instantly because it was just a spiritual attack on him.

And so the other thing that they can do is they can have an undue impact on us, especially if we have entered into their territory, so to speak, if we have gone onto their turf.

[16:47] Stephanie: I remember back in high school, being in Borders, and I was just kind of going up and down aisles and I walked into I think it was a music section or something that I entered. And I’ve been through plenty of places that you could feel darkness or that you should have been able to feel darkness or whatever.

But I walked into this aisle and I just felt like an oppressiveness. And I was like, “Nope!” There are things where you’re just like, no, something’s not right here.

[17:26] Marcus: I’m not called to be here right now.

[17:28] Stephanie: Yeah, I’m not sure what is going on right here, but there’s something outside of me. Yeah. Anyway, it definitely happens.

So let’s kind of merge. Last episode, we were talking about listening to the Spirit and discernment, and we didn’t get as much into testing the spirits as I wanted. So this would be a great opportunity to just maybe give a couple principles for how to test spirits.

[17:57] Marcus: Sure. So let me give you an example of times you would want to test spirits. And that is, if you have had a supernatural experience and you’re wanting to know if a demon gave you this experience or if it was the Holy Spirit.

For example, let’s say that you’re someplace and a person lays hands on you, and you’re slain in the spirit, and you have a vision while you’re slain in the spirit. And now you want to know, “Hey, was that really the Holy Spirit or was that demonic?”

How do you test that? And so we teach people, use an “if” prayer. By “if” prayer, it’s “If that was the Holy Spirit, then thank you for the experience. May it produce fruit in my life, and may it produce glory to God moving forward.”

And then you say, “But if I was deceived and that was actually a demonic counterfeit and not the true Holy Spirit, then I renounce it in Jesus name. I command anything that came to me to get out of here. Take all of your works and effects with you. Go where the Lord Jesus sends you.”

And I have done that with numerous people and seen that it was actually counterfeit, that what happened was not the Holy Spirit. Because there’s this feeling that if it’s a Christian doing it, or if it is happening in a church, that it must be good. And that’s just not the case.

And so because the only spirit that somebody can pass on to you is whatever spirit they’ve received, and it’s possible to have mixed. I’ll give you one example. I talked to one person who literally had three gifts of tongues. They had three different tongues, and they started testing those, and the first two turned out to be very demonic. The demons manifested, had to be gotten rid of, the whole thing. The third one appeared to be legitimate.

What has happened in some circles is people are like, “Well, all tongues are always demonic,” and I understand how they got there, because everybody they ever tested, it turned out to be demonic. But I do believe that there’s a legitimate [experience]. If something’s being counterfeited, it’s because there’s something real.

[20:10] Stephanie: Right. Well, if you just look at the pool of people who are getting tested are usually the people who are coming in because they have issues that they’re wanting to test or resolve.

[20:23] Marcus: The “if” prayer is a classic test of how I can tell if this was God or not in this thing that happened to me. And I’ve even heard of miraculous healings that have been reversed. I’ve heard of all kinds of things that ended up having to get resolved because they turned out not to be from God.

[20:44] Stephanie: Well, and on that note, I was thinking about this throughout. our episode here, like the story of the man whose leg had withered. Yeah. He had a withered leg and it was healed. And you’re like, “Well, healing is healing. Why do we care where it came from?”

But he was extremely depressed, and the depression came after that healing. And when he came in and tested that spirit and the healing reversed, he also got emotional healing.

[21:14] Marcus: Right.

[21:15] Stephanie: So again, the devil is going to trick.

[21:19] Marcus: And on the other hand, I can tell you a story of a friend who was working in Africa, and one of the men he was with got his leg trapped in a weird position and it snapped.

They’re in the middle of nowhere and they’ve got nowhere to go. He prays for this guy’s healing. The guy stands up, stomps on the ground with his leg, feels fine, and moves forward the next week.

He went to the hospital, got an X ray. And the doctor says, “Well, it looks like your leg broke when you were a kid, years and years ago.” He goes, “No, that happened last Tuesday.”

And so it’s not that God can’t heal, that’s why we test, though, because almost anything supernatural can be counterfeited and that’s why we have to test and not just take things for granted.

[22:07] Stephanie: Well, that’s good. I want to encourage everybody. We’re gonna keep talking about demonization in Christians. We’re gonna talk about more on how we give permission and how we can evict and all of that moving forward.

And if people are like, “Yes, I need this, and I need it now, and I don’t want to wait for next week,” we have multiple, so many resources on spiritual warfare at Deeper Walk, including a free spiritual warfare conference. And there’s What Every Believer Should Know about Spiritual Warfare, a book by Marcus Warner here.

[22:45] Marcus: And we actually have a lot of books on spiritual warfare that have been very helpful through the years. A lot of people may not know that our original name was ICBC International and we were known for our spiritual warfare counseling ministry.

We were founded on books like Mark Bubeck, The Adversary and Mark Bubeck, Overcoming the Adversary and Jim Logan, Reclaiming Surrendered Ground. Fred Dickason, Angels, Elect and Evil. My father and Neil Anderson wrote The Essential Guide to Spiritual Warfare together.

So we have a lot of resources still available that are very helpful. And so somebody’s like, “Well, I already read Marcus’s book.” My book was meant to be a very short, simple introduction to all these things because we had so many books.

People would come up to the table and get a little overwhelmed, like, “Where do I start?” And so I wrote one just to be an intro thing. But if you’re looking for more, I encourage you to check out some of these other books.

[23:47] Stephanie: Yeah, just go to our website and type in Spiritual Warfare in the search engine. Lots of things will come up.

And while you’re at the website, go register for the marriage event happening March 15. It’s a name your own price online event. Dad is going to be spending the afternoon helping with marriage and family related topics. And that will be great.

We’re out of time. So one, quick final thought.

[24:18] Marcus: Well, I guess the final thought is don’t avoid studying spiritual warfare just because you think you’re going to stir something up that you don’t want to stir up. Chances are it’s already stirred up.

What you’re trying to do is learn what you need to learn to walk in victory. I would just encourage you, that is a worthwhile investment of your time.

[24:45] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.

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Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.