Doctrine of Demon Possession

BD22-01

There are now cults and organized religious groups who are devoted to the worship of Satan and even their own satanic bible. Let’s review for a moment what we have learned thus far concerning demon possession. We indicated first of all that a Christian cannot be demon possessed; that is, he cannot be indwelt by a demon. However, a Christian can very subtly and very strongly be influenced by a demon. This is a result of callouses on his soul which are built up by negative volition toward teaching, teacher, or technique.

We found that there are two types of demon possession. One was active submission. This was deliberately seeking to detach the soul from the body. It indicates and results in a loss of individuality. There is another type of submission and this is passive. This is an inadvertent loss of individuality. Idolatry is a means to demon possession. Idols actually represent demons. In the Story of Civilization, Volume II, by Will Durant, I’d like to read a section from ancient Greece, the fountain of western civilization, which was a demon idol-worshipping civilization—a little description concerning the worship of the demon god and the reality of the demon behind the idol.

Page 192 says, “The temple was not for the congregation but for the god. There in his home his statute was erected and a light burned before it which was not allowed to die. Often people identified the god with the statute. They washed, dressed, and tended the image carefully, and sometimes it for its negligence. They told how at various times the statute has sweated or wept or closed its eyes. In the temple records, a history was kept of the festivals of the god and of the major events in the life of the city or group that worshipped him. This was the source and first form of Greek historiography.”

When you read a description like this, you will also notice the overtones of what is found in the expression of Roman Catholicism today, of images that perform in miraculous ways, and the worshipping of the image, the caring for the idol image. Behind all the idols there is a demon reality. So, it is that Christians are warned by the apostle John at the end of the first epistle of John. Christians are warned to avoid idolatry.

Here are believers. It seems rather strange to say to them to keep themselves from idols. 1 John 5, beginning at verse 20, “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true, and the we are in Him who is true, even in His son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.”

Why would John say a thing like this? Well, behind every idol is a demon god, and a Christian can set up his own idolatry through his mental sins—his mental sins which them express themselves in the idol of materialism, the idol of power, the idol of fame, the idol of sex, the idol of prestige, and so on—these things that he himself would pursue and in effect worship. Who’s moving him to such goals? The idol that’s manipulating his old sin nature. So, even we as Christians can be very much influenced and very much directed in idol worship and thus of subjection to demon influence.

Idol worship through sacrifice to that idol is Satan’s counterfeit communion table (1 Corinthians 10:20-21). All the national gods are in reality demons. We pointed out that the satyrs in Leviticus 17:7 were gods as all the gods of mythology. They were gods representing demons. Leviticus 20:27 points out that demonism in Israel was a capital offense that bore the death penalty.

When you find a Christian in your assembly that reflects negative qualities on teaching, teacher, and technique, let that be a signal to you to be very careful in coming under the influence of that person because he’s demon influenced, and he’s playing a demonic game, and it’s extremely contagious. It’s almost impossible, once you start down a negative volition trail, it’s almost impossible to turn back until you have run the full course of disaster. Then you sit there in the wreckage. The fullness of the wreckage never to be realized until you walk into heaven and they open up those books of rewards and you go down the page and then you begin to realize how much wreckage of rewards surrounds you of what could have been that is no longer yours because you let some good Christian hit you with his negative responses and you didn’t say to yourself, “Now just a minute. If this guy is right, then I’m with him. But unless I get full confirmation from almighty God that he’s right, then I’m with a demon, so I’m going to play it real cool and real safe. This would be the smartest thing you could learn as a Christian. I’ll tell you that most Christians that are sitting in most churches this morning are not being warned about other Christians. They’re being given sweetness and light gaffe, and that’s why they’re going to sit in the debris of disaster of what could have been when it comes to the rewards in eternity. So, consider yourself fortunate to have been here this morning.

Demon possession was a capital offense because it inevitably destroys an individual and it inevitably destroys a nation.

We’re going to look at a second way of coming under demon possession. The first way of coming under demon possession, number one, we found was idolatry. Number two is sex—to come under demon possession. Throughout the Old Testament you have the worship of Baal. Baal, sometime under other names—sometimes Moloch is associated with it, variations of the same God. These were worshipped under what were called the phallic cults. These are the sex cults. They are rampant throughout the Old Testament. The land of Canaan was filled with these people. Unless you understand that, it was filled with idolatry, and the core of their idolatry were the phallic cults, the sex worship—unless you understand this, you will not have a proper perspective concerning that which faced the children of Israel as they moved out of Egypt into the land of Canaan.

You will not appreciate the kind of people they had to conquer. You will not understand why God was so definitive that they were to be utterly destroyed. The people who lived in Canaan, and who worshipped under the phallic cults were the most degenerative vile bestial type of humanity since Sodom and Gomorrah, or since the time before the flood, the antediluvian age when the human beings and the angels cohabited and produced the hybrid race that had such fantastic expression of violence all over the earth, that God cut them off in the flood.

The worship of Baal, a sex cult worship. This worship was usually set up on a hill or in a grove. Its purpose was to come under demon possession and through demon power and through sexual promiscuity and abandonment. There was set up in the groves or up on the hill the items of the phallic worship. They were three items specifically. One was the statute of a nude woman. Two was the statute of Baal himself, or Moloch, sitting on a furnace—a rather fat Buddha-like character, arms and legs usually folded, and underneath was a furnace. Moloch had several mouths on various parts of his being. All of these mouths were entrances into the furnace which was the means by which sacrifice was fed. The point of the furnace, of course, was sacrifice. And the third item was the phallus which was the male sex organ on display and used for auto-erotism.

So, you had something that was very very degenerative, and something that was very attractive to the bestiality and the degenerate qualities of the old sin nature. The whole point of the Baal worship was an attempt to enter into a frenzied sex experience by coming under the possession of sex demons. This included perversions.

Now some of you may not be acquainted with what the word “perversions” means. The books you read today are consistently avoiding the word “perversions” and “perverts.” Instead, they use a different word. Because society now is trying to justify (these things), you find that the word “deviates” and “homosexuality” and “lesbianism” for which Sodom and Gomorrah received the fantastic judgment of God are now called “deviates” and “deviations” because “perversion makes it sound like what it really is.

Concerning these perversions in sex in the worship of Moloch, Goldberg in his volume Sex and Religion, page 186 says, “When the signal was given, the eunuch priests of marched into the temple and about the radiant figure. They came to serve this cruel relentless god as the priestesses paid homage to a goddess more loving and generous. While the fair sex was excluded, sexual passion persisted and seemed all the more fired because of the absence of women. Beautiful beardless young men, their bodies soft and fragrant from the use of oils and perfumes, sold themselves to the adorers of their gods, depositing on the altar of the idol the money thus earned. Within the temple too there were dogs trained for the same purpose, and the coins received from the rental or sale of these animals, called ‘the price of a dog,’ went to the priests of Moloch.

“The eunuch priests constituted a caste or sect with their own rights of initiation. These were held at night in the depths of the forest. There in the heat of frenzy and stirred by wild music, they gashed their own bodies and ran about with blood streaming from their wounds falling over each other as they did so. Women were excluded from this shear masculine world of Moloch and his tribe, but the wives of the Molochites clamored for a god and for Moloch. The husbands would have none of it, but the high priest of Moloch knew better. He saw additional revenue for the temple with a sect of women doing for themselves what the men had been doing alone. Thus women too came to serve Moloch. They had their priestesses who prostituted themselves to the women worshippers as the eunuch priests did to the males.

“The priestesses dwelled in gay colored tents about the temple of Moloch, burning incense and playing soothing music and preparing love charms and potions. Both men and women danced about the blazing Moloch, two human races with no direct emotional contact, yet not without some influence upon each other. For the frenzied desire of their women for their priestesses reflexively arouse the passion of the men for the objects of their love.”

This is all part of Satan’s attempt to counterfeit a relationship that God has produced. God has a relationship of a right man for a right woman. He has one person for one person. It is part of Satan’s counterfeit to have sexual perversion as a substitute for the great and wonderful thing he has created when he brings a right man and a right woman together in a marriage so that soul and body find maximum fulfillment.

And I remind you again that teenage kids don’t know up from down about recognizing their particular man and particular women. Of course, they don’t know that. They’re so clouded and diluted and uninformed, no much how much IQ they have, that it’s the parents who have to make this decision. Any guidelines a pastor gives you obviously are going to be rejected by teenagers. It’s only if their parents have the spiritual savvy to say, “Yes, sir, that’s right. That rings the bell of the mind of God.” And then they go to their teenager and they say, “This is the mind of God. Here’s how we will act. These are the ground rules under which we shall conduct ourselves.” Blessed is such a teenager.

The Greeks had a festival called the Dionysian Festival, the Dionysian Mysteries. It was an orgy of sex worship that went on for days. The records that we have of the Dionysian worship show that there were Lesbian and homosexual demons who led and were appealed to, to lead in sex orgies and promiscuity. Demons on a widespread scale that could lead a nation to promiscuity and thus to national destruction. When a nation becomes demon possessed as a result of most of its citizens being demon possessed or demon influenced, that nation goes down to destruction.

The only protection a nation has is to have a maximum number of people who are not demon possessed and demon influenced. When you have a nation like that, which is what you have when you have the right man married to the right woman, you don’t have very much appeal for the sex demons. They’re comparatively out of business.

I want to read to you again a little bit about the Dionysian Festival from The Record of Civilization by Will Durant. This was also associated with the god of wine, and is sometimes called the Bacchanalian Festival. The writer says, “We have left for the last the most troublesome, the most popular, the most difficult to classify of all the Greek gods (And I want you to know we’re talking about the Greeks from whom we inherited our western civilization that we hold in such high esteem).

“Only late in his career was Dionysian received into Olympus. In Thrace which gave him as a Greek gift to Greece, he was the god of liquor brewed from barley, and was known as Sebaceous. In Greece he became a god of wine, the nourisher and guardian of the vine. He began as a goddess of fertility, became a god of intoxication, and ended as a son of god dying to save mankind.” Now note the counterfeit of Satan in the Dionysian Festival with the reality of what Christ has done as one who came to die for our sins.

“Mourning for Dionysius’ death and joyful celebration of his resurrection formed the basis of a ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In springtime when the vine was bursting in the blossom, Greek women went up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without restraint, and like our less religious Bacchanalians considered him witless who would not lose his wits. They marched in wild procession led by Maenads, or mad women, devoted to Dionysus. They listened tensely to the story they knew so well of the suffering, death, and resurrection of their god. As they drank and danced, they fell into a frenzy in which all bonds were loosed.

“The height and center of their ceremony was to seize upon a goat, a bull, sometimes a man (human sacrifice again), seeing in them incarnations of the god, to tear the live victim to pieces in commemoration of Dionysius’ dismemberment. Then to drink the blood and eat the flesh in the sacred communion whereby as they thought the god would enter them and possess their souls in that live enthusiasm.” (And by the word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek word “entheos” which means “god within.” Originally, enthusiasm meant to be possessed by the demon God.”

“In that divine enthusiasm, they were convinced that they and the god became one in a mystic and triumphant union. They took his name, called themselves after one of his titles…, and knew that now they would never die, for they termed their state an ‘ecstasis.’” When you’re in demon possession, you go into ecstasies, as evident today in the tongues movement, the ecstatics of coming under tongues. This is exactly what the ancient Dionysian Festival worshippers sought to reproduce, a state of ecstatics.

“A going out of their souls to meet and be one with Dionysus. Thus they felt freed from the burden of the flesh. They acquired divine insight. They were able to prophesy. They were gods. Such was the passionate cult that came down from Thrace into Greece like a medieval epidemic of religion, dragging one region after another from the cold and clear Olympians of the state worship into a faith and ritual that satisfied the craving for excitement and release. The longing for enthusiasm and possession, mysticism, and mystery. The Canaanite nations were destroyed because of the demon activity in the phallic cults.”

Take your Bibles please and turn to Deuteronomy 18, beginning at verse 9. This is long before the time of ancient Greece. That ancient Greece was simply expressing what she herself had inherited from previous civilizations. Deuteronomy 18, beginning at verse 9. Because of the phallic cults which sought to become demon possessed through sexual perversions, Israel was cautioned severely against these cults and the demonism which was associated with it, so we have Moses’ warning here in Deuteronomy. “When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.” The abominations here refers to the demonism of those nations.

“There shall not be found among you anyone who maketh his son or his daughter pass through the fire.” Now that’s a euphemistic translation for taking a child and throwing him into the furnace of Baal as an act of human sacrifice. When you read this expression “passing through the fire,” this is human sacrifice, usually of infants and children to Baal or Moloch. “There shall not be found among you anyone who maketh his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or who uses divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch.” The screams of the children were an attempt to stimulate, as they died in the flames, the ecstasy and the frenzy in the phallic cults.

In a little volume called Sex and Religion, I’d like to read to you about this god Moloch so that you’ll have a little better appreciation of what it was that the people who had the Old Testament scripture, the Word of God, were doing. I remind you again that everything that happened in the Old Testament was an example to us. So, if you are still sitting here thinking that you have no problem with demon influence because you are a Christian and you are in grace and you are in Christ, then you are mistaken. Because these were the believers of the Old Testament. How could they come to the place where they would take their precious sons and daughters, and in a moment of madness and frenzy, offer them into a flaming furnace, with the scream of those infants on their ears being a delight and a stimulation to the worship of the God?

In the description of Moloch, page, we read, “Moloch was the mighty gluttonous god. He bestowed his bounty upon mankind. (He was a variation of Baal.) But he wished to taste of all that he gave. Moloch gave only to be gifted in return.”

This is a rather interesting remark, “Moloch gave only to be gifted in return.” Do you know that Satan can never be faithful to his worshippers and followers because he is not immutable? Do you know that Satan never gives unless there’s something in it for him? When you find a human being who never gives until there is something in it for him, do you realize with a demon influenced person, Christian or otherwise? The quality of greed as the motivation. “I do because I’ve got a vested interest.” This is Satan. When you get powers from Satan, there’s a law of compensation that comes into effect, and you have to pay for it elsewhere. Satan never gives unless there’s something in it for him. That’s why he cannot be true, he cannot be self-sacrificing, because he does not have the character of God. His idol gods reflect that quality about himself.

“Moloch gave only to be gifted in return. There was no altruistic hypocrisy in his little divine circle. He was not saving the world. He was not serving mankind. He cared for neither the praise nor the glory that others might give him. Moloch was a fierce self-satisfied masculine god. He defied the weaker sex even in love. He had no women himself. He did not wish his worshippers coming to his temple to trail their women along. He wanted none of their weakness, gentleness, delicacy, or romanticism. He was the god of muscle and belly. If cannibals were looking for a god, none could please them so much as Moloch, and Moloch could wish himself no better class of worshipper.

“His temple was out in the open far from city or village with their polished ways of living. It was an immense low structure with an enormous figure of Moloch at its end. Like the modern industrial plant with its towering chimneys rising to the clouds, the god himself appeared before his worshippers, a colossal giant of a man with a bull’s head and a tremendous viral power. His arms he held outstretched as if he were forever demanding sacrifices.

“There were seven huge mouths to his belly, all appropriate receptacles for the offerings which might be brought to him. The figure of Moloch was cast in bronze and merged with a large furnace that served as its pedestal. Whatever was fed to the god immediately landed in the fiery oven. Moloch the glutton could take no chances with his priests who might put away a sacrifice for themselves or share with him the fat of the land.

“As the sun was setting, the worshippers left their homes and wives and loaded with sacrifices they betook themselves to the warm abode of their god. While they were on their way, a huge fire was being prepared in the pit of the furnace. As they entered the temple, flames reflected through the bronze figure of the divinity. Cold cruel and metallic Moloch had become incandescent, a flame with the fire of life. Moloch was the fire that does burn the bush and everything else. He was the fire that devours. As the tongues of flames shot through the monstrous figure, the worshippers yelled for joy. They danced about it, emitting terrific cries, and in frenzy hurled whatever they had into the mouths of the fiery god.

“There may have been products of the soil, fruits of the farm, a calf or a sheep, even a cat or a dog. One may have thrown his own cloak into the gaping mouth when he had nothing else to give. When the women came to offer their sacrifices, they cast into the devouring belly of Moloch whatever there was upon them or within their arms. The greater the sacrifice, the more exaltation the devotee derived. In the heat of her ever-increasing passion, she brought the greatest sacrifice a mother could offer. It was then that Moloch first tasted the flesh and blood of the infants thrown within him by mothers gone mad with desire.”

Now these, dear friends, were the phallic cults to which God led the people of Israel. These were the gods possessed by demon realities whom these people worshipped. These were the gods who destroyed the Canaanite nations, who created sexual abandonment for what? For happiness. Fun through sex for demon possession. It was a magnified form of auto-erotism. It is especially pursued today when the wrong man is married to the wrong woman. A generation of people who should be married to each other is the defense to this sort of thing.

The order of the Baal worship went in this procession: The offering of possessions to the Venus figure. The next step was the offering of children to Baal. The third was the giving of self to the phallus. The steps were in degeneration with straight down-the-middle sex, group orgies, and then auto-erotism.

Now if something like this sounds familiar to you, if this begins to sound under the cult of hippie-dom, for example, you’re right. There’s a great deal of question whether some of the deaths that are reported among hippie groups and communes may not in reality be murders. This desire for blood and human sacrifice which is so consistently found in the demonic cults finds strange reflection in hippie-dom today. The perversions, the sensuality, the spirit of rebellion.

I am surprised how often people who think there is something good about hippie-dom. It is the rottenest evil that is on this nation today and there is nothing good about it. And it is high time that some Christians discovered that. In all that hippie-dom stands for, you have a splendid summary right here in these phallic cults, and all the things that stem from it.

So, don’t kid yourself that if you walk around aping the styles of the hippies, that you can say, “Oh, I don’t really believe in all that.” Maybe you don’t. But when you go around with the styles, you are also saying, “I approve what these people stand for.”

Coming back to Deuteronomy, chapter 19, “divination” in verse 10 was methods of signs and messages through a medium for guidance from demons. “Observer of times” was astrology to guide, which is so popular today. The “enchanter” was the user of incantations, magic formulas to which demons respond. A “witch” was a female fortune teller. In verse 11, in God’s warning his people before they came kingdom of the land, a “charmer” was a caster of spells, a consulter of mediums--contact with the spirit world. Or a “wizard,” a male fortune teller. Or a “necromancer,” one seeking to contact the dead, and we’re going to look at that in some detail later. In verse 12, “for all that do these things are an abomination unto the lord. And because of these abominations, the Lord thy God thus drive them out from before thee.” God destroyed the Canaanite nations for the phallic cult worships. “Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God, for these nations whom thou shalt possess harken unto the observers of times and unto diviners, but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not permitted thee to do so.”

You cannot go to a fortune teller as a Christian. You cannot go to a séance as a Christian. You cannot have any contact with the demonic world or the spirit world as a Christian, or you come under the sever judgment and discipline of God. And Bishop Pike seems to be a modern-day prime example of that.

In verse 15, “The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee (Jesus Christ), of thy brethren, like unto Me, unto Him ye shall harken.” You listen to the Lord through His word, and you appeal to Him through prayer.

The Jews were also involved in this phase of demon activity. Turn to Psalm 106, where we have a record, again, of a people, that you would think, of all people, these would not do it. These who stood on the shores of the Red Sea and saw God act in their behalf. And what had happened to them throughout the wilderness experience. These people would not walk into the land of Canaan and see this vile worship of the phallic cults taking place, and jump into it. You have to ask yourself, “How can this be?” Well, it can be because, while Moses was instructing them in the Word of God, they were saying, “Well, yeah, that’s your opinion, Moses. Maybe it is. I’ll have to think about that.” God says, “If you’re not for me, you are against me.” Negative volition brought the whole nation to this degraded position.

Psalm 106, beginning to read at verse 34, “They did not destroy the nations concerning whom the Lord commanded them.” When the Jews entered Canaan, God said, “There is a contaminating influence because of the idolatry and demonism that is involved in the life of those people who reside in the land that I’m giving you. Therefore, you are to go in and you are to exterminate.” And unless you understand demonism, you’re going to be one of these bleeding-heart do-gooders who is going to look at the commands of God to exterminate a group of people and say, “How can that be a god of love? Isn’t that terribly brutal to walk in and kill every baby, every child, every man, and every woman, and all their cattle and all their possessions?” You won’t ask that when you finally enter into what it meant to be in touch with the people of that degraded quality of the nations that existed in Canaan.

The Jews were negative to God’s command to destroy these demon-worshipping nations, which was God’s discipline upon those nations. Instead, the stop-the-killing type rose up and prevailed. This is such as we are hearing a great deal about in our day. “Stop the killing” of the people who are at the very core of the threat to our national life, and who are the source that makes it necessary to go to war in the first place.

In verse 35, “but were mingled among the nations and learned their works.” This is the very thing that God wanted to prevent from happening to them, that they should mingle with these demon idolaters and learn their ways. Since they did not exterminate the nations, they did mingle with them and they did learn their ways.

In verse 36, “and they served their idols (that was the next step) which were a snare unto them. The Jews began worshipping idols and thus worshipping demons. They took part in Satan’s communion table. This prevailed in the nation. The nation never really got over worshipping idols until after the Babylonian captivity. That 70-year discipline upon the nation finally brought them to the point where they had enough of worshipping idols. They resisted it thereafter.

Verse 37, just to show you now, how they stepped down. The more they got into the idol-worshipping qualities of the heathen nations, the more unbelievable became their conduct. “Yeah, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto demons.” They took their little children, then took their babies, they took their infants, and the offered them as human sacrifices. Now we are not talking about some wild gang from Sodom and Gomorrah. We are talking about the people who possessed the Word of God. The people who were the personal choice and selection of the living God. We are talking about people who knew doctrine and had insights. But they went off and got involved into the world about them, and who now came to the place where they were taking their children and throwing them screaming into the burning furnaces of Baal. “And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood. The Canaanites were a vile and degenerate people, and the Jews followed right after them and took their pattern.

I want to read you another paragraph from the volume Sex and Religion by Goldberg that gives us a little historical record concerning the Dionysian mystery. Here’s what took place as part of this idol worship, the festival practice of worshipping this god. It is characteristic of what the Jews were doing in the land of Canaan as a result of their contact with the nations about them.

“In the Dionysian mystery, man sought to reach the state of ecstasy.” Demons are always trying to bring people to the state of ecstasy, to make people happy. That’s why the tongues movement is such a popular tool for demons, because it plays unto ecstatics. “It was the only way one could attain communion with his god. For some, the mere state of ecstasy was sufficient. Having been freed from the chains of man, they no longer needed the god. For others, these mysteries were only the beginning of an even greater experience. Separating themselves from the crowd, they gathered in a room and partook of a sacramental meal. Food in mystic forms was eaten out of the sacred drums, and more wine was drunk, but this time out of the cymbal which making sacred music to the god.

“Then an animal was driven into the room, and all fell upon it in savage attack. Whether it was a lamb, calf, or steer, it was torn to pieces and eaten while its hot streaming blood was drunk in great passion. The animal was supposed to incarnate the god. By tearing it, one was tearing his way into the very being of his divinity. And by eating the meat of the animal and drinking its blood, he was assimilating the body of the deity of his own flesh and blood.”

Does this sound a little like a hippie happening to you? As a matter of fact, as we go through this, I want you to observe for yourself how much of demonism that we find reflected in Scripture is reflected in the hippie culture, and all that stems from the hippie culture, in styles, manners, language, and dress—everything with it, how much of this is reflected in the demon worship of Scripture.

“In the frenzy of religious and sexual passion, even a human might be taken for the god and be torn to pieces, especially when there were captives or slaves about. Hysterical parents might throw their own infants into the affray, they themselves fighting in the general skirmish for a piece of their child’s flesh.”

The Jews walked in and said, “Oh, we can’t kill a people like that. After all, all they do is tear their children apart and eat them. I mean, in our enlightened day, things have got to change and move ahead, right? We’re going to let everybody pursue his own freedom.” So, the land, the Scripture says, was polluted with blood because demons desire human sacrifice. This was no doubt what was in part behind Hitler’s slaughter of six million Jews. It is no doubt what was behind the Communist purges. It was what was behind the hand that shook the hand of President Nixon at the airport, the hand that was responsible for killing more Christians than Hitler killed Jews. Because the demonic orientation and influence of Communism is reflected in its desire and its passion for blood purges. The Charlie Manson killings were an example of the demonic desire for blood sacrifice. I read recently that the person that the assassins purportedly were going to the Tate household in order to kill, said, “They knew I wasn’t there that night. Those people knew very well where I was and that I wasn’t there.” This again substantiates the fact that these people were driven for a blood sacrifice offering because of the demonism that possessed them.

Human sacrifice was even among the Greeks. We don’t like to think about this too much because we got our heritage from the Greeks. But the Greeks were great ones for human sacrifice in a part of their history as well. I’d like to read to you from The Story of Civilization, Volume II by Durant, on page 193, a little bit about what our Greek heritage has to offer. The writer says, “Having reached the altar, usually in front of the temple, the worshippers sought with sacrifice and prayer to avert the wrath or win the aid of their gods.” Mind you, these idol gods were demons. “As individuals, they might offer almost anything of value: statutes, reliefs, furniture, weapons, caldrons, tripods, garments, pottery. When the gods could make no use of such articles, the priest could.” (A good business on the side.)

“Armies might offer part of their spoil, as Xenophon's Ten Thousand did in their retreat. Groups would offer the fruits of the field, the vines or the trees. More often, an animal (was sacrificed). Appetizing to the god, sometimes on occasions of great need, even a human being. Agamemnon offered Iphigenia his daughter for a wind. Achilles slaughtered twelve Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus. Human victims were hurled from the cliffs of Cypress and Leucas to satiate Apollo. Others were presented to Dionysius in Chios and Tenedos. Themistocles is said to have sacrificed Persians captives to Dionysius at the Battle of Salamis.

“The Spartans celebrated the festival of Artimus Orthis by flogging youths, sometimes to death, at her altar. In Arcadia, Zeus received human sacrifice until the second century A.D. In Massalia, in a time of pestilence, one of the poorer citizens was fed at public expense, clad in holy garments, decorated with sacred boughs, and cast over a cliff to death with prayers that he might bear punishment for the sins of his people.

Now you can read on and on in history books of the human sacrifices that were involved as part of the mythology that we learn in school—the Greek and Roman mythology. Well the Jews played a very horrible role. Psalm 106:39 says, “Thus were they defiled with their own works, and played the harlot in their doings.” They result was that they engaged in illicit sex as worship to the demons, and then there was no end to their degeneracy.

One other incident that I know you’re familiar with, that maybe we ought to touch on, is Exodus 32. (This is) where you have the account of the creation of the golden calf idol. In Exodus 32, Moses is up on the Mount receiving the Ten Commandments. He has been gone for a 40-day period. So the people, because he is delayed, come to Aaron and they ask him to make them a god. Aaron asks them for their gold. So, he presents to him this god, and in verse 4, he says, “These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.”

Now here’s Aaron, destined to be the high priest. He’s a brother of the leader. The leader is up on the mountain to talking to God. The people say, “We don’t know what happened to Moses. Give us an idol god.” They had picked this up from Egypt. Aaron creates a god for them and says, “Here, Israel, this is your god. This is Jehovah God that led you out of Egypt.” (This) was pure idol worship, and behind it was demonism, because you notice in verse 6 that is says, “And they rose up early on the next day and offered burnt offerings to this idol and brought peace offerings, and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.” That’s a nice way of saying that they rose up and had a mass group sex orgy in the camp of the children of Israel.

Group sex, communal living, promiscuity on a widespread scale indicates that a nation is on the verge of demon possession. That’s what we are confronted with in this nation today. Demons are perhaps frustrated by the fact that they were cut off from this relationship with human beings after the incident in Genesis 6. One way of coming under demon possession is idolatry. A second way is sex which has a multiple variety of expressions in our day. But anything which is out of the scriptural order of guidelines, anything that violates the moral code of God in this respect is a demon influence. You can’t attend movies today, you can’t watch programs, and there’s very little that you can read that does not dignify the violation of the standards of God relative to sexual morality.

Somebody gave me a whole article concerning our newsmen and their observance of the rather puritan-like standards demanded and imposed upon Chinese communist youth. The writer of the article, being a sophisticated American who has come to these broad new eras of sexual toleration, headed his article, “Romance is Dead in Red China.” When I read that, I knew a lot about the writer because a man oriented to divine viewpoint would have said, “Sexual Immorality is Dead in Red China,” which of course it is not, but that was the point of his article. As you read through it, this is what he was observing and what he was smiling at in his article, the Puritan-like qualities.

Well it’s interesting that even Satan tries to keep those who are on his team in restraint in this respect. Satan has seen what God has done again and again through the centuries over those who have come under demon possession and influence through the phallic cults.

Next week we’ll take up a third way of coming under demon possession, one of the most popular ways in our day.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1971

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