18: Can Christians Have Demons?

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 18. Today we are continuing our Defeat Demons series.

Hello, Father.

[00:07] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Back at it.

[00:11] Stephanie: I have to say, I think in Breakthrough, you call it deliver from demons and also defeat demons.

[00:17] Marcus:  And deal with demons. I came up with a bunch of different D words there, but, yeah, I like Defeat Demons.

[00:23] Stephanie: Okay.

[00:25] Marcus: Last week that trumped Ben’s suggestion that we call it Curb Stomping Demons. But we’ll  stick with Defeat Demons.

[00:35] Stephanie: Last week we started setting up sort of a framework, legal principles of spiritual warfare, and what can demons do, and things like that. This week we are gonna look more into permission and authority, especially permission.

Also we’re going to tackle a very hot button topic, not as in depth as we probably could, but hopefully it will give some answers at least to where we stand, which is, “Can a Christian get a demon?”

I think more specifically, the most common question we get is, “Can Christians be possessed?” And that has multiple different things. But, yeah, go for it.

[01:27] Marcus: Yes, we’ve been asked this question since the day the ministry was formed, and honestly, some of our early contributors, Mark Bubeck, Fred Dickason, my father especially, took a lot of heat over this a generation ago when it first came out, because it was just widely taught that Christians don’t have to worry about demons.

Most of the demon stories that you would hear a generation ago were from overseas and they were all missionary stories. And so people kind of got used to the idea, spiritual warfare is something that happens when you’ve got witch doctors, but it’s not something we have to worry about here.

Those early kind of pioneers writing on this took a lot of heat on the subject. But really it’s not because the Bible clearly states that Christians can’t have demons. It’s not like there’s this obvious teaching in here that’s being overwhelmed.

Fred Dickason actually wrote a book, I think, called Can Believers Be Possessed? But he also had a book called Angels, Elect, and Evil. And the conclusion he came to in his research was you can’t actually decide the answer to this question from the Bible alone. It’s like you could take this evidence either way.

If you start with the premise that they can’t have demons, you can probably find a way to support it. If you start with the premise that yes, they can have demons, you can find a way to support it. But there isn’t enough direct teaching on this in the Bible to be conclusive about things.

That’s the conclusion he came to in his writings. For those who don’t know, Fred Dickason, he was the head of the systematic theology department for years at Moody Bible Institute. So that having been said, his conclusion was, this is a question that actually has to be decided by experience.

What he said is that experience is almost completely on the side of, yes, Christians can have demons. In fact, my father’s ministry, my ministry, Mark Bubeck’s ministry, I would say 90% of the people connected to our ministry has all been with Christians.

And so we basically promoted this ministry primarily to help Christians get freedom from things that had them in bondage, not really the non-Christian world so much.

[04:00] Stephanie: So instead of, can Christians be possessed, can Christians give demons access?

[04:06] Marcus: Yes. So let’s talk about the word “possessed” for a minute, because there is no Greek word in the New Testament for possession. That surprises people, because even like the Gadarene demoniac who had a legion living in him, it doesn’t use the word possess anywhere in the text in Greek.

The Greek word there is “daimonizomai.” That almost sounds Korean. Anyway, the idea of a demon is not “daemon.”  When the original English translators came to the word daimon, which is D a i m o n, they just transliterated it as demon.

And so they didn’t really translate the word. They just said, “Let’s just run with demon.” Now, that word in Greek isn’t always evil spirit. That work in Greek actually referred to any kind of spiritual being. It just, over time, came to be associated with wicked spiritual beings.

But in the New Testament Greek, it doesn’t always mean that, it’s just a spiritual, supernatural being. Particularly in Homer and some of the other older Greek authors, it doesn’t always have a negative meaning to it.

However, the verb that is associated with that d a i m o n word is daimonizomai, so my father often made the point that if we had simply transliterated the word the way that we did with the noun, if we had transliterated the verb, it wouldn’t say demon possessed, it would say demonized.

And he said, as soon as you talk about demonization, it opens up the door to the idea of a range of activity. Whereas before, when you talk about possessed, it’s like it’s all or nothing, completely. Now related to possession is this idea of inhabiting and we do see in the Bible regularly that demons want to inhabit people.

When they are in people and inhabiting them, they affect their bodies, they affect their minds, they can take control of them, and so the issues here get complicated at multiple levels, just from even the idea of communicating with spirits.

And that is, if I say something, does a demon have ears so that the sound waves from my mouth hit his ears? And does it go through a similar process in a demon brain to turn it into something that it would go through in our brain? How is communication actually happening?

We don’t know. And that’s part of what’s going on with spiritual warfare is a lot of this is just unseen stuff, and we don’t know the final answers to what’s going on in that unseen realm.

[07:19] Stephanie: I’ve heard a lot of people, from just a common person in the church to pastors, say things like, “Oh, well, demons can’t read your mind,” or things like that. Would you touch on that briefly?

[07:35] Marcus: The idea of, can demons read your mind, again, that’s a metaphor. I don’t know exactly how to answer that. That is, do demons need to hear sound waves coming from my mouth? I don’t think so.

There are plenty of stories of people who are literally paralyzed and could not speak, who simply in their heads thought the words, “Jesus, help me,” or “Satan, get out of here in Jesus name,” and it worked. Now, did that work because God heard it and simply enforced it, or were demons able to hear it? I don’t know.

I honestly don’t care so much about some of these questions because, rather than being able to give a definitive theological answer to exactly what is going on in an unseen world that I can’t see, I am much more concerned with, is the person who is in bondage now living in freedom when we’re done.

That’s the main thing we’re looking at. So spiritual warfare ministry generally starts with, there is somebody sitting in front of me who needs help. Does the Bible offer any possible suggestions to what could be wrong? And the answer is yes. The Bible talks about these things called demons.

When we apply that to this person, they have all of the symptoms of somebody who is struggling with demons. So does the Bible give us any guidance on what to do? And the answer is yes, the Bible gives us some guidance.

It talks about the idea of demons needing to get permission to sift people and to harm people. It talks about authority. It talks about various things that while it’s not a 1, 2, 3 process laid out in the Bible, there are things that are helpful. And so you say, “Well, let’s try it and see if it helps.”

And you try it and you find out, “Wow,  that fixed the whole thing right there.” And so you do that a hundred times, a thousand times, and you see this work over and over and over again, and you begin to say, “All right, this is just part of reality. This is how it works.”

The way I look at it is that warfare in this sense is no different than any other counseling where the Bible doesn’t lay out a 1, 2, 3, 4, hey, if you’re dealing with anger, this is how you get rid of it. It says, “Rid yourself of anger, rage, malice and slander.” It doesn’t say how to do that.

But it gives us hints, like, well, maybe you should forgive people. Maybe you should change the way you’re thinking about all of this. In the same way, there are hints in the Bible about what to do when somebody has these issues even though it doesn’t lay out a 1, 2, 3 process.

So what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to say the goal here is to help somebody in bondage to walk in freedom. So let’s make this as simple and transferable as possible. Let’s make sure we’re not violating the scriptures in what we’re doing, and let’s use the best interpretations of Scripture that we can along the way.

That’s how we’ve ended up with the process that we promote here at Deeper Walk.

[10:48] Stephanie: Thank you, that’s helpful.

So let’s get into the practical application here, which is how? If Christians can be demonized, how do we keep that from happening? What are the most common ways that you’ve seen that people give permission to the devil in their lives?

And, not shockingly at all, you have an acrostic for this. And so we’re going to go through it: protect your SOUL-L.

[11:19] Marcus: Protect your soul. Right. Battle for your soul. So we’re going to use SOUL-L and it starts with Sin. The idea here is that sin has consequences. The Bible tells us that sin creates slavery, and slavery is bondage. It’s where the idea of bondage comes from.

I am not walking in freedom. I am walking in slavery. So if sin can cause slavery in our lives as a consequence, then we go, okay, so what happens if, as a Christian, I sin but I keep it secret and I don’t actually repent of it or I justify it and I’m not repenting of my sin?

Is it possible that one of the consequences is that it opens the door to a demon? Well, Ephesians 4: 26, 27 says, “In your anger, do not sin,” and then it makes it very clear one of the consequences is, if you let the sun go down on your anger,  if in your anger you sin, you’re going to be giving the devil a foothold.

The Greek word was tapas. You’re going to be giving him a place in your life. So that seems pretty cut and dry. Sin is one of those things that if you’re not dealing with it properly, you’re going to open a door to the enemy.

Now, does that mean that you are possessed every time you sin? No. First, the word “possess” we need to rethink. Secondly, we’re talking about something that can open up doors, and we don’t know exactly how this works. It’s not like at what point this happens always along the way.

Again, our main goal here is getting people free who are presenting with problems. But sin is the first one and all the rest of these, to some extent, are offshoots of the idea that sin is the permission.

The second one, the “O” of the acrostic, is Occult, and the occult is sin, but this is sin in which you are engaging with demons as you sin. So if regular sin, so to speak, opens up doors to the demons, then if you are actually participating with the demons while you’re sinning, then imagine how much bigger of a door you’re opening.

[13:27] Stephanie: The occult is writing a handwritten invitation that says, “Hello, you can come into my house now. Thank you.”

[13:32] Marcus: Exactly. So I will also say that most of the things that people associate with possession, most of the things that people associate with being really heavily demonized or having a demon in somebody are almost always associated with occult behavior.

Folks who are manifesting in such a way where they lose control of their ability to speak, they lose control of their body, they levitate, they have things happening. All of that stuff, I have never seen that happen for any other reason other than occult participation.

I think it’s because they were participating with demons in what they were doing. So if you’re doing Ouija boards and tarot cards and going to seances and stuff like that, the odds of you having to deal with overt demonic manifestations in your life go up significantly, as opposed to, “I am feeling bitter towards somebody I need to forgive.”

[14:32] Stephanie: Where do things like curses come to play?

[14:35] Marcus: So curses are verbal permissions, or if not permissions outright, they are verbal requests for demons to be active. And so if somebody curses you, they are actively inviting a demon to affect your life. Now, the Bible’s very clear about this, that an undeserved curse does not land.

But it doesn’t mean that there won’t be any impact or any effect of that curse.

And so the first story I almost always think about when this happens is of a missionary who was on his way to a village, and the witch doctor in the village put a curse on that missionary to kill him so he couldn’t come preach the Gospel.

He’s literally riding his bike through the jungle on his way there, and the bike burst into flames, but he left his bike there and he walked the rest of the way. And the witch doctor, when he saw the missionary, converted because he had never sent a curse to kill somebody that didn’t work before.

And he’s like, “How are you still here? What is this power that is protecting you?” And so even though he was protected from that curse, it’s not like nothing happened, right? There was still this explosion, and there was still this fiery thing that happened to him.

I think that sometimes there are things that we have to deal with in our lives that are related to curses, that even though we ourselves aren’t being inhabited by a demon because of it or something like that, it doesn’t mean that it’s having no impact on our life.

And so that’s why we teach people how to break curses, too. And that’s something that you occasionally have to do to minimize those effects as much as possible. That’s a big topic.

[16:21] Stephanie: It is a very big topic. I was also just trying to decide if I should press into the RED acrostic, or we should probably just finish the soul acrostic.

[16:31] Marcus: Well, now that you’ve brought it up: RED. The way we renounce occult things, I use RED. “R” is Renounce the activity that you engaged in. See if I can remember this. It’s been a minute. “E” is End any memberships. Like if you became a member of an occult organization, ending the membership and then “D” is Destroying actual occult paraphernalia.

Kind of like what we see happening in Acts 19 when they were destroying the scrolls and the other things that they had that related to the occult. So Renounce, End, and Destroy. Kind of dealing with the occult.

[17:08] Stephanie: One, two, three. Very good. All right, let’s move along to the “U”, which is Unforgiveness.

[17:14] Marcus: Unforgiveness is this idea that, again, bitterness enslaves people, and we want to be free from that. And so while most people aren’t going to have these overt manifestations from bitterness, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t living at a level of bondage that is affecting their Christian walk and affecting their ability to experience the fruit of the Spirit.

And so by forgiving, you are canceling the permission that is being given to demons to affect you. Neil Anderson once said that he thought bitterness was the biggest open door being offered to demons in the church. So it’s pretty big. I talked to Karl Payne about that, and he said he thinks it’s fear, that fear is the number one open door.

[17:58] Stephanie: I’ve always resonated with the quote that you’ve said about bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. And I can think of several testimonies of people who, the number one thing that was giving the devil a foothold in their lives was their bitterness, was their unforgiveness, and their body was literally toxic from it.

[18:25] Marcus: Yes.

[18:26] Stephanie: And when they dealt with all of that, some of that toxicity went away.

[18:33] Marcus: It’s a real thing. It’s a real thing.

[18:35] Stephanie: Okay. Gotta keep us moving. Lies we believe is our next one.

[18:38] Marcus: I have Lies we believe. Just so I’m not talking about telling lies, which obviously is in the category of sin, but the idea of Lies we believe means that I’ve entered into an agreement with the devil. And I’ve said, “Your version of truth is correct and God’s version of truth is incorrect. So I’m agreeing with you and not God.”

That’s entering into an agreement that gives permission to the enemy. And so a lot of what we talk about with the belief engine and with wounds, lies, vows and such, are related to this idea of common ways that the devil gets a foothold in our life by getting us to believe lies. And since he’s the father of lies, again, it puts us in sync with him.

And then there is one more big one, so we just double up the “L” and say there’s a second “L” on soul, so this is SOUL-L, and it’s Lineage, which is also in its own right, the most controversial one. I don’t have time to unpack all of it, but you hear a lot of people talk about generational curses. When I’m talking about Lineage, curses can be part of it, but that’s not really what the main focus is on.

The main focus here is on generational iniquity. And iniquity is the idea that something has gotten twisted and deformed over time. And so if my family, in which I was raised, became twisted or deformed in some way, I want to confess that I want to cancel any permission that it gave.

I want to command anything that needs to leave to get out of here, and I want to commit this over to Jesus. So I look at this as, I may not have been the one who opened the door to demonic activity, but someone in my family did, and it has never been made to leave.

So that’s what we’re trying to do now is close the doors that have been opened in my family as far as they affect me and any future generations from me. I can’t do it for my ancestors. I can’t do it for other people, but I can do it as far as it affects me and as far as it affects future generations coming from me.

[20:49] Stephanie: Could you give one example?

[20:51] Marcus: Yes. I know a man who committed adultery, left his wife and four kids, and ran off with the other woman. And it turned out that his father was a man who had committed adultery and left his wife and kids for the other woman. And his grandfather was a man who had committed adultery, ran off.

There’s now a third generation. Not only that, but all three of these men were pastors. And so you look at that and you go, well, that could just be coincidence. It could just be culture, like the culture they were raised in.

But there’s also a demonic element here, that something demonic was invited in that was never resolved and never gotten rid of, and it continued to influence the next generation.

I’ve seen this happen with fear. I’ve seen it happen with depression, seen it happen with eating disorders, seen it happen with all kinds of bondage issues that passed down generationally in families.

All of the engines play a role in it. Some of its DNA and physical, some of its beliefs, some of its bonding. But there is a demonic element to some of this. And so what we’re saying is let’s deal with that.

Probably the most dramatic example I heard early on that kind of confirmed this for me was a story of a family that had adopted a child from another culture. This kid just had all kinds of behavioral and emotional issues.

And one night, they walked into his bedroom while he was asleep and just said, “We, as his adoptive parents, cut off the lineage of his birth parents spiritually.  And so if any spirits are laying claim to our son, our adopted son, because of things that happened in his family line ahead of this, we cut that off now, in Jesus’ name, we command them to leave.”

And as they prayed that prayer, the kid literally flew out of the bed and landed on the floor and woke up, was like, what’s going on? They’re like, “Oh, just praying for you. Don’t worry about it. You can go back to sleep.”

And the next morning, that kid was different, noticeably different. So that by the end of the week, the teacher sent a note home with him to the parents saying, “I don’t know what you’re doing different, but keep it up. He’s like a changed kid.”

That story, I think, really kind of summed it up for me in terms of how important it can be to deal with the lineage issues. And again, people like Fred Dickason have said they have never met a demonized person who did not have lineage issues that needed to be resolved.

[23:40] Stephanie: Well, we’re going to talk more about how to resolve things next week. We’re going to talk about authority and how to use our authority in Christ to evict demons.

And for now, this is my chance to give our final shout out, for on the Ides of March here, on March 15, we have a marriage event in the afternoon. Name your own price, online. It will be a great event to invite some friends.

Do you want to give a quick snapshot?

[24:18] Marcus: We’re doing a marriage event on the Ides of March. We should have found a way to work the word assassination into here somehow. Like, assassinate the adversary that’s killing your marriage.

[24:29] Stephanie: All right, moving along.

[24:31] Marcus: Moving along. Okay.

[24:35] Stephanie: It’s a fresh start.

[24:36] Marcus: It’s a fresh START for marriage.

[24:38] Stephanie: The idea you’re gonna work through the acrostic START.

[24:41] Marcus: Yes, we are going to be working through the acrostic START. And it’s this idea that in every marriage, we can either do it in the flesh or do it in the Spirit. And a lot of us don’t even understand what the difference is between living in the flesh and living in the Spirit. So we’re going to talk about that. That’s the “S”.

“T” is Taking thoughts captive. And that’s the idea that I don’t actually interact with people as they are. I interact with them as I imagine them to be. And so we have all these ideas about what our husband or our wife is like. And oftentimes we are interacting with our beliefs about them and not the reality about them. So taking thoughts captive.

“A” is attack the actual adversary. Assassinate the actual adversary is the thing here. It’s the idea that instead of warring with each other, what do we need to do to put the focus of the war in our home on the enemy? And how do we do that?

And then there’s Resentment that builds up over time. How do I resolve resentment, what I need to do, because it’s impossible to be in long term relationships and not have some resentment build up.

And then on the positive end of it, it’s Training ourselves to generate more joy in our marriage. And so how do we do that?

So that’s the START acrostic. That’s what we’re going to be talking about. And I think it will be helpful both to people who are struggling in their marriage and to people who are thinking about getting married and to people who are just wanting a fresh start and see some good things happen.

[26:15] Stephanie: Awesome. Well, I’m looking forward to it.

Would you give us just a brief final thought for today’s episode?

[26:22] Marcus: Yes, and that is that every Christian has to deal with demons. When you’re a Christian, you have a target on your back and demons don’t go, “Oh, there’s a Christian. I’ll leave them alone.”

No. They go, “Oh, there’s a Christian. I need to neutralize them.” You’re a threat in a way that other people aren’t. My dad used to say, “Apart from knowing God, probably the second most important thing is to know your enemy.”

And so I would just say that it is worth taking the time to get to know your enemy, to get to know how spiritual warfare works so that you can live with greater victory.

[27:01] 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.