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The Demonic World
BD21-01© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1971)
The feelers have been coming from all directions this past
week, relative to the subject of demonic activity. We’re getting calls from one of our college
groups that has run into the tongues movement, with the Jesus-people
group, which is often characteristic of doctrinally uninformed disoriented
groups. They heard about one fellow on
the campus who had a leg that was shorter than the other leg. They went to one of the Jesus-people meetings
and they went to one of the healing segments. And as some of the college students stood around, and they prayed over
this leg, they say the leg get longer.
I have sent agents to check on the college campus, whether
he is now walking without a limp, and whether the leg is still
purportedly lengthened. They sat and they
listened to tongues, and they asked me about my advice about a plan to test the
thing. They were going to set one of
their members up to learn some gibberish, and throw in a few Greek
words, and see if someone would stand up and interpret. They looked
around their group to see who was the most ecstatic type,
but his initials are “David Sparks.” They set him up
to pull the thing off, and I suggested to them that they
were already informed enough by the very things they told me to know
that they were dealing with demonic, and when you deal with something demonic,
you want stay clear of it and not play games with it.
I will not regale you examples as we begin this morning the
segment of study concerning the demonic world. We could spend
quite a few Sundays on just the most fantastic examples
of every kind—some within the realm of your own experience. Unless
you’ve been in a Pentecostal meeting,
you don’t quite have a feel of what it is to be in the
presence of real hardcore demonic activity, and you have to understand that we are talking about
realities. You can take a book like that
concerning Bishop Pike…, and there you have a classic
example of the demonic invasion here of a religious leader in the Episcopal Church who had
increasingly rejected Bible doctrine, and who exposed himself to the
most fantastic kind of demonic invasion. On
one occasion while he was preaching in New York, one of the mediums,
another preacher who sat out in the audience, told him afterwards that as he
spoke there appeared on one side of him his suicide son, and on the other
side the son’s maternal grandfather who had psychic powers of one kind
or another.
We’re going to talk about demonic activity. This
morning is going to be introduction, so get your pencil and papers. We’re
going to fly a lot of material at you that’s going to be basic. We
will not delve extensively into illustrations on demonic activity. We
will let you take care of that on your own. We are going to
look into what the Bible has to say concerning the very
real spirit world.
We have already learned that Satan has gone on negative
volition toward the Word of God. A
second will entered the universe, and we had that described in Isaiah
14. He decided to usurp God’s throne and God’s
authority. For him to do this, it was
necessary for Satan to bring the angelic creation under his control,
for Satan is not omnipresent, he is not omnipotent, and in order for him to
control the universe, it is necessary for him to have agents to assist him, under
his control. So, Satan appealed to all of the angels that God had created. He appealed
to them to rebel against the Lord God. Revelation 12:4
indicates to us that a third of the angelic hosts went
negative and accepted Satan’s appeal, and rebelled against God.
Revelation 12:4 speaks about stars. The word
“stars” in Scripture is a symbol for
angels, as in Job 38:7 where the morning “star”
sang at creation, in praise of
what he saw God doing. Thus began what
we call an angelic warfare in the unseen world against God. So
point number one to understand this
morning is that there is an angelic warfare that is invisible to our
natural eyes which is taking place every moment of every day. This
test of volition for the angels apparently
was the point of determining angelic destiny—their salvation,
so to speak. Just as you and I, when we come to a point of
God consciousness, must make a positive or negative reaction toward the
fact that there is a God out there; just as everybody, (even) the most
darkened heathen, comes to a point of God consciousness. That’s
why everybody has a chance to be saved, and always has had a
chance to be saved.
There comes a time in a man’s and a woman’s life, from
sources that God directs toward us, he becomes aware that
there’s a God out there. At that point, he goes negative
or positive to that truth, and then God goes beyond that. If
that person reacts positively to that
awareness that there’s a god out there, then God brings him
the information of the gospel. Once you have the
information of the gospel, you go positive or negative toward that
information, and your destiny is sealed.
Apparently, with the angels, at the point of their appeal
from Satan to join him in rebellion against God, this was a point of
determining them salvation which placed them in the elect or lost
category. However, we notice in Matthew
25:41 that God indicates to us that He created a place called the lake
of fire. The grammar here is in the Greek perfect
tense, which means got did it out there, way in the past before man was
ever on the scene, and it continues on. We
notice that while God judged these angels who rebelled against him
along with Satan, that the sentence was not executed. The sentence was,
“You are doomed, and you will be placed in the lake of
fire for all eternity.” This was true of
Satan and his angels, the demons. But the sentence was not executed.
As a matter of fact, as you search through the Scriptures
you will discover that it is not until Revelation 20:10, at the end of
the millennium that Satan and his angels are finally put into the lake of
fire. So, here you have the condition that out here God created the angels. They
rebelled against Him. God brought them before Him and passed judgment. They
were doomed to the lake of fire which God created. But
then something happens and they’re not
put into it. Instead, all of the history
of man takes place before the demons are put into the lake of fire. That
raises the question: Why the delay? And
we draw a certain deduction from the delay.
Satan faced God and said, “You mean to tell me that You who
have all the power of the universe, and who have created us, and who is
purportedly in your essence a god of love, and a god of justice, are
going to put your creatures into a place where we will experience conscious fire
torment, night and day, for the rest of all eternity?” And angels
can’t die. What kind of a god of love is that? What kind of a
god of fairness and justice is that? Is that right?
It’s not too hard for us to conclude that Satan would have
said that because he has people saying that today. There
are people everywhere who are constantly saying today (and they get it from the devil),
“That’s not a very loving god. That’s
not very just and fair. That’s kind of horrible, to think
of putting a human being into a lake of fire forever.” If
you’ve ever been to Yellowstone National
Park and stood by one of those hot pools and saw that water bubbling
up, with steam behind them where the things are gushing up and banging, and you
can hear the thundering. Can you imagine
falling into something like that? And
you’re there forever. You can’t die. You’re
fully conscious of every ounce of pain.
It would seem that God says, “I will demonstrate to you and
to all intelligent created beings that I am a god of love and that I am
a god of justice.” So, God moved back into the
earth that Satan had brought into a chaotic condition. God
moved it out from under the ice age. He
recreated it during a six-day period. In
it, he placed a new creature, man, who in
the order of creation was little lower than the angels. God’s
creative order was: Number one, angels; then number two, in
category, was man; and, under man is another group, animals. This
is the order of God’s creation. So
God says, “I’m going to take a creature
who is less than the angels, but he has one thing in common with the
angels—he has volition. He has ability to make
choices. And I’m going to put this man
into a perfect environment.”
In time, as you know, Satan led man into sin. He
led man to exercise negative volition
toward God and toward the command of God, toward the Word of God
concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Consequently, man
fell into sin He came under the control of Satan through the old sin nature. All
of creation which man controlled now fell into Satan’s control. Satan
consequently proceeded to try to create a perfect environment on the earth.
God in grace moved into this disastrous scene. We
saw from Genesis 3:15 that He promised to
send the seed of the woman, who was Jesus Christ, who would give a
mortal blow to Satan’s domination and control over man, and would free us
from the slave market of sin. Jesus Christ came
in and did that. Now, it is possible for a
sinner, of the vilest kind, to enter heaven. How is that
possible? A god of justice says, “I must judge sin. I
can’t excuse sin.” A god of love
cannot say, “I’ll love you in spite of your sin.” That violates the
character of God.
It is because Jesus Christ, in His spiritual death upon the
cross bore our spiritual death, bore our sins, and consequently, the
justice of God has been satisfied. This, you will
recall, from our earliest studies, is the doctrine of
propitiation—the satisfaction of the justice of God and the righteousness of God. Now
God is free to exercise His love toward
anybody who will come along and say, “Yes,” to the
gospel; to anybody who comes
along and says, “I believe it. I
receive that Christ as my savior, as my substitute.” And God can pour
out the infinite love that He has for us, and do
everything that He wants to do for us, and yet He is just—He
is perfectly righteous. It is the great
demonstration to all of the universe of that which Satan challenged in
God—His love and His justice.
This is why the Scriptures tell us that every time a person
is born again, every time a person sits under the hearing of the
gospel, and in the process of hearing that Christ died for him, in his heart, he says,
“I believe that. I accept that;” there’s a great
magnificent cheer (that) goes up from the elect angels, because it is
another demonstration and another proof that God is love, and that God is just.
So, apparently the sentence was delayed in its execution while
the history of man is being carried out, and God’s essence is
being vindicated before all the universe. If you have not
yet, in the process of your witnessing, run into this argument, you
probably will. “How can a god of love, a god of
justice, send people to a place like hell?” He can do it, and
must do it, but He is fair in His doing of that
because there is a way out. If a person
goes there, it is because he has chosen to do so.
So, salvation was provided. Jesus Christ ascended and went back to heaven. Psalm
110:1 tells us that He has been told to
sit at the right hand of God the Father until His enemies are made His
footstool. The enemies of Jesus Christ
are Satan and the demonic hosts, and the Lord is beyond the attack of Satan now.
So, Satan and the demons are confronted with this
situation. There is a man in heaven, a
man-God Jesus Christ, who now sits above the angels. We’re
told He’s above all principalities and
powers. Every believer who is in Christ,
by faith in Christ, now positionally sits above the angels. Someday
we will be in reality above angels. Now we are
positionally above them. Satan is confronted that there is
now a man of the Homosapiens category, that he led into sin in the
first place, who now sits above all of mankind. And
this man is sitting there until such time until Satan and his demons
are brought into a conquered position, and the foot of Jesus Christ stands
on them as conqueror.
Satan says, “We (must) do something about this. We
can’t get at the God-man in heaven, but in
the meantime, there is being formed on earth His body. And
the God-man is going to come back and set
project footstool into motion at the moment that the last believer is
saved. And, we have some reason, perhaps, to believe
that there will be as many believers saved as demons who rebelled
against God, because it is the believers, with the returned Christ, who remove
satanic influence from this earth at the millennium. It would seem,
perhaps, that one believer is going to remove one demon from the planet.
In any event, Satan says, “We will strike at the individual
believer. We will counterfeit everything that God is doing. We will in every
way stifle their witness. We will hold back conversions. We will hold back
Christian activity. We will stifle and discourage
people in their service. We will hold back finances. We will throw
every obstacle we can through every expression of Christian activity, and we
will frustrate the plan of God in project footstool.”
Now you have to understand that this is what is taking place
in the world today in which you move. The (parties) who
are involved in this are the demonic hosts. It
is the demons who are out to get you. It
is Satan who is directing this activity
every moment of your waking hours. At
the Second Advent, we read in Colossians 2:15, Jesus Christ is going to
neutralize the angelic enemies. He’s
going to lead them in triumph, in a triumphal parade. He’s
going to remove them during the millennium period. The church,
therefore, is living in what we can call the intensified period of the
angelic warfare. Time is running out for the
satanic hosts. You and I are living in
the intensified period of the angelic warfare. Satan’s
attack is directed against you.
We have gone for many many weeks explaining your defenses
against it—the spiritual maturity structure of your soul. If
you missed, that we suggest you check up
in the tape room and say, “Get me started on that series of
tapes that explains how to grow to spiritual maturity. That’s
your only defense. You are absolutely nothing. You are
absolutely hopeless in the spiritual life. You will squander
your life. If you can shed tears in
heaven, you will shed more tears over the fact that you neglected
building yourself up into a spiritually mature believer. For all eternity,
you’ll regret that. It directly
affects your rewards in heaven. I would strongly
urge you not to let that slip through your fingers. If you do not
know what constitutes the facets of spiritual maturity, and how to
proceed to develop them, then get those tapes and get yourself briefed. This
is your only defense against the demons who are attacking you. Satan wants to
frustrate the plan of God by neutralizing you who are composing His body.
Now Satan is directing this escalated intensified warfare
through the demons. The demons, you understand, are angels. Angels do
exist. Angels never die. There are elect angels and there are evil
angels. Angels have certain qualities of soul. They have minds. They
have wills. They have emotions. They have a certain sense of conscience. They were all
created by Jesus Christ, apparently at one time (Colossians 1:16). Angels have a
form of some kind which you might call a body. It’s
in the form of a light substance. It is real, but it is invisible. They have speech,
and they are not limited by time or spaced. They have
fantastic powers. They have fantastic understand and intelligence. A fantastic
amount of information resides in the demonic realm. As a matter of
fact, the demons have excellent computer systems. They keep extensive records on every
individual believer, and on some of you more than others.
The angels are above man in the order of creation; animals
are below. Christians are now positionally above angels. The reason
angels are invisible to the human eye is because, Colossians 2:18
indicates, if they were seen, we would worship them. You might say,
“Well, I wouldn’t.” But I want to
remind you that the great apostle John, which was the
closest man of all the apostolic group to the Lord Jesus himself, when
he saw an angel (Revelation 22), that’s exactly what he did. He
fell down and started worshipping him.
(Understand that there are angels) in this room now. Elect
angels are here, present in this service because they want to learn things, and that’s how
they learn things, by observing Christians. And maybe they
learn some things they shouldn’t. They’re
learning things. They’re seeking to learn the things that are to the glory of God. And
the demons are here too, elbowing their way around. (But if you were
to see) all the angels that are in this room now, you would be terribly distracted
from listening to what I have to say, among other things. So
they’re not visible to us.
Angels
have various ranks; four or five different specific
ranks—military like ranks of angels (Colossians 1:16,
Ephesians 6:12). Their power is according to their rank. The archangel is
a top category, and (there are) very few (maybe only two) in that category. The
demons, because they are unseen, are a
very difficult enemy to deal with. Though they are
demons, they retain all their ability, their power and
their wisdom that they had before they sinned.
So, the Christian is surrounded every day an every hour by
the demons. Satan is not omnipresent so
he works through demons. We have certain
evidences that we are living in the intensified stage of the angelic
warfare. The evidences of mounting demonic activity:
The first evidence of mounting demonic activity is speaking
in tongues. This is one of the first and
primary evidences that we have entered the intensified stage of this
warfare. Part of the demonic
counterattack in the angelic warfare is to counterfeit all that God is
doing, with the idea of dooming project footstool. Part of the thing
he counterfeits is the gift of tongues. Demons
are trying to frustrate God’s plan
against them by promoting religion. Tongues serves
religion. Remember, religion is not of God. Religion is of
the devil. God produces faith, Christianity. The
participants in tongues are the kind of pathetic people who think
they’re having a rich spiritual experience with God. But the tongues
are always a sign of carnality, and of broken fellowship.
I have been interested to observe that other people who have
attended tongues meetings have so consistently observed a factor that
struck me. That is the quality that almost
permeates the atmosphere of sensual carnality. It is a strange
thing. You can feel it all around you. I was in a
tongues meeting once in Fair Park auditorium. A great
nationally known healer was there. They
were lining up people to heal. Suddenly, right
behind me, a man started spurting blood out of his mouth. He
was having a heart attack. People were
around him, praying, commanding him to be healed. There
he was, nobody making a move to do
anything. So, my wife finally got up and
walked down to the front. Here’s
this place filled with hundreds of people, and she decides to walk down to
the front up onto the platform. She said to the
speaker, “There’s a man here having a heart attack. Unless
you do something soon, you’re going to
have the chance of your lifetime to raise somebody from the dead.”
I saw that fellow walk up to the microphone and say,
“Everybody stand for a word of prayer.” And …
the meeting was hot, and going, and jumping. And
everybody was standing up there, and people
were shouting something in tongues, and somebody here was answering
something. This guy would speak for
three minutes, and this guy would answer in fifteen seconds what the
translation was. Things were popping all
over, and people were coming up, and they were commanding them to be
healed, and everybody was going down believing they were
sealed—usually still with all
their disease, but sometimes not—sometimes healed. We’ll get to that too.
He just stood up, and he called everybody up there and
silenced that Fair Park auditorium, hundreds of people there. They
had a word of prayer, zapped it down, and closed it down. They grabbed that
fellow and took him out to the car, and I tailed right after them. They
shoved him in the car, and the healer
came and put his hand on his chest and said, “I’m
going to pray for you now. I command you in
the name of Jesus to be healed. I believe your
heart is alright. I believe you’re healed.” This
fellow looked at him, just a groggy and
sick-looking and desperate as he could be, while this joker was telling
him to have faith because he was healed. Well
that broke up the healing meeting in a hurry.
Any association with tongues has upon it this sensual
carnality disassociated from a true expression from the workings of the
spirit of God. Yet the participants think they
are having a great and wonderful rich experience in fellowship with God. It
is strictly of Satan. Any believer or
any unbeliever who is practicing tongues today—which is gibberish and not languages
anyhow—but even if it were true genuine languages, if he’s practicing it
today, he’s a dupe of his majesty the devil. And get that
point straight. It is one of the great
evidences of the intensified stage of this warfare.
Those who are sucked into this are, of course, sincere
people, but you will also find out, as I regularly inquire when I run
into groups that do this, like the “Jesus people,” you
will find out pretty regularly that they are doctrinally disoriented. They
don’t have a modicum of understanding of
Bible doctrine, and this is the prime reason they are patsies for this
kind of delusion on the part of Satan. They are
spiritually neutralized. They are sucked
into the production of human good, which all the world applauds, and
says, “Wonderful.” Through human good actions,
like smiling, and saying nice things, and doing nice things, all the
world applauds it, “Wonderful people.”
If you start playing that kind of a game, dear friend, and
you’re going to become a prime patsy for his majesty the
devil. If there’s anything we need to learn, it is
that doctrine is the starting point of judging experience. We
do not judge the Word of God by our experience. Some of you may
be tempted to come up and share with us the experience of your Uncle Sam or Aunt
Suzie who had a wonderful experience of speaking in tongues, or healing, or
something like that. Well, I know from
doctrine that whatever your friends or relatives experienced, it was of his
majesty the devil. If tongues are associated with it, it is not of God. It is of Satan.
Since August of 70 A.D., when Jerusalem fell and entered the
fifth stage of discipline, (there has been) no genuine expression of
the gift of tongues. The question of attending
tongues meetings came up when some of our college students asked, and
the advice is to stay away. Anytime you are
around something where Satan is working, you are exposing yourself to
trouble. Don’t think you can go in and
con the group because Satan and the demons know what you’re
doing. Some people have tried that, only to discover
that the people stood up and said, “There is an alien spirit
among us tonight.” This made them
think all the more that God was in this. Well, the
devil was going up to the leader and saying, “Hey,
you’ve got one of those smart-alec college students there. He’s
going to try to pull something on you.” And the response
is, “Oh, is that right? Well, OK.” And he gets up
and he announces it. So, don’t kid yourself. When
you’re dealing with tongues, you’re dealing with Satan.
There’s a second evidence that we are in the intensified
stage, and that is miracle healings. God heals. God does not heal
today through your prayer cloth. So, some of you (who)
have been selling prayer cloths, knock it off. And those of you
who have been suggesting to us that we go home and
listen to your favorite healer and put our hands on the radio when he
prays, forget it. That’s what you’re hearing,
aren’t you? (You’re hearing about) the
prayer cloth, the healing, and if you send in five bucks you can get a
little bottle of anointing oil. Now that’s the
best racket yet. I’ve been getting some
whole new concepts on church financing since we had that fair. And
I’ve been thinking about anointing oil too.
Satan is using this healing business as another
counterattack. God does not heal through
any man putting his hands on you and commanding you to be healed. It’s
another visible manifestations of the
warfare that is invisible to our eyes. Demons are trying
to counterfeit again what God has done. Behind
every healer, there is a satanic and
demonic force. The cures that are being
performed are being performed on people who are doctrinally ignorant. Any
genuine healing that was experienced in
the New Testament served the purpose of attesting to the divine
authority of the witnesses—that these were men of God, that they spoke for
God, and that they were in the tradition of the Lord Jesus Christ who himself healed. Healing
was an attestation to the authority and the genuineness of the healers.
But the time came, when this authority was established, that
healing began to be phased out. I remind
you that later in Paul’s ministry, Paul who had the gift of
healing, could not heal. He could pray for one of his
friends who was sick, and he had to leave another one behind on one his
tours. Paul could not heal later in his
ministry but he could at first, because the healing gift began to be
phased out. Its purpose had been served.
And you understand that the gift of healing means that
anybody, anytime, anywhere in all of the world, no matter what the
disease is, can walk up to you and say, “I want to be healed.” And
you can say, “OK, I’m going to heal
you.” Now that’s the gift of
healing. The gift of healing has nothing
to do with a sometimes thing. The
healing is, “I perform it, if I have the power, and if I am
in the proper relationship to God for functioning. When I am a
spiritual Christian, I can exercise my spiritual gift.” Of
course, this is not characteristic of the healing movements today.
Now there may come a time when you may be confronted with a
desperate need for healing, or someone in your family may be confronted
with a desperate need for healing. You better
think this through before you are tempted at some situation when you
think there is no hope now, and maybe there is none, for physical healing,
and you say, “I must do something desperate, whatever I must do. I’ll
go to the healer and I’ll try.” A
large number of people who come to the healers do it on this account.
But God has a purpose for you. When His plan for
you is finished, He will take you home to heaven. If he gives you
a terminal and incurable disease, this is not the time to press the
panic button. This is the time to accept the
fact that your death is a new beginning, and that God’s plan
is right, relative to what is happening to you. And that
you proceed on the basis of your faith rest in Him to resolve this
matter according to doctrinal principals. And
you don’t go banging on the door of some healer as a
bewildered doctrinally disoriented nincompoop. God has given us
grace for living. He has given us
grace for salvation. And He will give
you grace for dying when the time comes that you need that. He
does not make a mistake, and what comes
upon us physically has His purposes. Healers are a fraud.
Now I want you to understand, and we’re going to get back to
this, but we haven’t really said anything about tongues or
healing yet. This is introduction. But I do want to
make it clear that healers do heal. These people who
set up tents and hire auditoriums and are healing, they do heal. You
must understand that Satan has the power to heal. His demons have
the power to heal. So, there is healing. Stay away from healing meetings too.
The third evidence that we are in the intensified stage of
the spiritual warfare is occultism. There
is a widespread interest and participation in contacts with the world. It’s
called spiritism. This is expressed in séances, for example,
the attempts to contact the dead. A classic example is Bishop Pike. Other
expressions are the Ouija Board, astrology, and tarot cards. I
saw a set of these for sale out in Plymouth
Park in one of the bookstores now. There
are also horoscopes. Some of you are
going to run home and check in the Sunday paper this afternoon to see
how things are going to go for you. There are
also: black and white magic; fortune
telling; predicting the future; levitation—things floating in
the air without any visible means of support; telekinesis—things moving
around without any natural means to explain their motion; haunted houses filled with
noises and moaning (and I’m not talking about the house of horrors built by the
Berean Youth Clubs, although they must have had some inside information from
someplace to have done as good a job as they did with that. I’ve
been wondering about that. It just
doesn’t seem natural.); the devil’s mass, and, the
worship of Satan. All of these things are
occultism, fooling around with the spirit world.
Occultism is now openly practiced. It’s
popularized. It is given respectability. The information
media are pouring forth insights concerning the spirit world. Even good movies
are being produced which glamorize witches. Television
programs are delving into the sixth sense. This is the
occult world. It is a sign, again, of a
doctrinally disoriented society. There
are vast segments of mankind who are under the demonic influence of the
occult world which is going to come to a climax in the tribulation period in
the practices of the harlot ecumenical church. Stay away from
occult practices because you’ll find it leaves a trail of
emotional, mental, and physical breakdowns. It is not cute to
read your horoscope. Whether you like
it or not, you tend to subconsciously accept the fact
that here is what is guidance for you, instead of from God the Holy Spirit.
1 Timothy 4:1
Now the Bible predicts to us that there’s going to be a
tremendous escalation of the angelic warfare in the last days of the
church. In 1 Timothy 4:1, we read, “Now
the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall
depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of
demons.” Christians need to have a clear understanding
of demon influence and of demon expressions. A Christian
cannot be possessed by a demon. But a Christian
can be fantastically influenced and controlled through one thing, and that is his mind.
The only way a demon can get at a Christian is through his
mentality. A demon has to get to your
mind, just as he had to get to Eve’s mind. He has to put
false ideas into your mind. Then he can
direct your will. Then he can
direct your emotions. But until he can
control your mind through
what you read, through what you hear, and through what you see, he
cannot influence you. A Christian can
be demon-influenced when he is in a carnal state from callouses up on the
facets of his soul. And the more callouses have
built up on the facets of your soul, the more of a prime target you are
for demon influence, I’ll guarantee you. One
demon-influenced Christian of that kind can wreak havoc on other
Christians. A demon-influenced Christian
will make the most amazing decisions, and you will notice something
about those decisions. They are destructive to where
God’s work is effectively being done.
The reason we recoil from this is that some of our best
Christian friends give evidence of demon influence. And
we can just hardly believe that this
person that we like is playing a demonic game, and is being used to
dissuade, to discourage, and to undermine the very thing that God is for. The
body of Christ, you and I, form the temple of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians
6:19 tells us that. Therefore, we cannot
be indwelt by a demon spirit, but we can be influenced.
So, 1 Timothy 4:1 says, “Now the Spirit (that is, God the
Holy Spirit) speaketh expressly that in the latter times (this is at
the end of the church age) some (that is, some Christians) shall depart from the
faith (that is, the realm of sound Bible doctrine), giving heed (This is
present tense, a continual practice) to seducing spirits (demons) and doctrines
of demons (a system of pseudo spirituality expressed in such things as
tongues, healing, and the occult cults).”
What’s your defense against this? Look at the end
of the chapter. Verse 16 says, “Take heed unto thyself…” That
is, be spiritual. Stay in temporal fellowship. “…
and unto the doctrine…” This
is all that the Bible teaches. Take heed unto
that, through doctrine, through a genuine pastor-teacher who lays it on the line and is not
impressed with fakes, in or outside of the congregation or the Christian
community. “… Continue in them (the summaries of doctrinal
truth), for in doing this, thou shalt both save thyself (preserve
yourself from demon influence through demonic ideas) and them that hear thee (those
who listen to your instruction and are positive to the Word.”
This is the greatest thing you can do for a person. If
you are on sound doctrine, you will be a
great influence for good upon those who are positive to it, and you
will be a source of irritation, exasperation, and spiritual death in temporal
separation upon those who are negative to your sound doctrine.
Now the further our society moves from morality and sound
doctrine, the more open we are going to be to demonic control. The
American newsmen, I noticed, were amused
as they reported from Peking, China about the fact that there is a
sense of morality there. Now understand
what China is. Here is a great Buddhist,
oriental, heathen culture worshipping demon gods. As
we shall see later, behind every idol is a
demon god. When you go to Sunday school
you get the idea that, “Here’s this piece of wood
that people worship.” You’re
a kid in Sunday school and you say, “What
kind of a dummy is that, worshipping a piece of wood or a carved
stone?” He’s not such a dummy. Behind it is an idol god, a demon god.
During the war when I was in Peking, another Marine officer
and I were visiting Peking under the guidance of a rickshaw boy called
Buddha, and he took us into various temples. In
one temple that he led us into, it was very very dark. It
took my eyes a little while to get acclimated,
and I saw two pillars in front of me. Then
as I got used to the darkness, I looked up and I realized that these
were the legs of a huge Buddha standing. Our
guide said, “This is the Buddha of long life.” There were
candles out in front. He walked up and
he took a paper and he lit it. He handed it to
us and said, “Light a candle to the Buddha of long life, and you’ll have long
life.” He handed it to me, and I said, “No.” He
handed it to the other officer, and he took it. He lit a candle. I
wonder what ever happened to him. Do you think he’ll have a long life? If
that demon comes through from behind that idol, he will, within the regulations of the hand of God. Demons
can do great things for you from a human viewpoint.
Our American newsmen who were in this kind of a culture were
amused by the fact that they observed sexual abstinence in Chinese
youth before marriage. You know, “That’s way
out. Who does that in the American culture?” They were just
amused. Here they sat, these guys whose networks had
spent thousands and thousands of dollars to send them over there to
give news reports. And we heard some of the idiotic
analyses that they’ve been giving us of the China trip. Here
they were amused by this. They
don’t understand that communist philosophy
has joined Freud. Freud says that
the drive for creating and maintaining civilization is the sex drive, and
sexual abandonment outside of the restraints and restrictions of a monogamous
marriage dissipates the capacities for building civilization.
Many Americans have fallen under the guidance of Herbert
Marcuse, the professor at the University of San Diego in California who
was such an Angela Davis. Marcuse came
along and said, “We will teach American youth the abandonment of
pleasure. They will be so dissipated that capitalism
will fall because there will be, in time, nobody to maintain the
structure of the society, and it will have no thrust. Its creative forces will be drained.
Well, this is why the communists impose such a Victorian
puritanical climate on their young people, and they do it in Russia too. These
idiotic newsmen don’t understand enough
about communism. They don’t take it
seriously enough to know what’s behind what they’re
observing so they can interpret it. But Satan is the
moving force behind communism, and he knows how to protect his domain.
The cry of the liberal preacher today is that there is no
personal devil, and there are no demons. They’re
a figment of the imagination. All of this makes
it very easy for Satan. Even Bible Christians have very defective
concepts concerning the power and the operation of Satan—some
kind of vague channels of influence. They love to say
Jesus Christ defeated Satan on the cross, and they think that’s it.
Well, we close this morning by reminding you that apart from
Bible doctrine, we would not know that the phenomena of tongues, the
phenomena of miracle healings, and the phenomena of the occult world are
originating with Satan and his demons. They’re
a part of the angelic warfare against God designed to deceive people in order to
frustrate the plan of God toward project footstool. We
will continue with this next Sunday morning. We are going to
spell out to you several things in detail, including what it is to be demon
possessed, how to identify demon possession, and how to become demon possessed,
actively or passively.
I think that before we are through, if you take time to
study some of the basics that we have put out this morning and in the
weeks which follow, you will be a very informed believer concerning demonic
and satanic activity. As I talk to people,
and the questions people ask me, and the contacts I’ve been
getting just this past week, people are bewildered by things they are coming against that
they cannot explain, and they’re tempted to feel is of God. If
Satan can kid you into the fact, like the
liberal idiotic preacher can kid, that there is no real devil, that
there are no real demons out there, and that there is not really a warfare,
he’s got you. You are vulnerable if you don’t
know how he functions and if you don’t know some of the
things that you can do that expose you to demon influence.
Now you as a Christian are safe from demon possession, but
demon influence can be just as bad. There are certain
things that you can do that just open the door to
demonic influence, and you won’t even know it. Pretty soon you
will be championing causes, and you’ll be carrying the
flag, and you’ll be calling for things, and you’ll
be moving in directions. That’s why we say that a
demon influenced believer, who knows something about doctrine, and
carries some weight of prestige is a very very dangerous person. A
demon influenced believer in a local church
is a very dangerous person. Satan knows
how to manipulate and work, so you had better be careful. You
are not as immune because you are a
believer that you might think you are. Stay with us.
Dr. John E. Danish, 1971
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