Expelling Demons the Easy Way
A crash course in warfare, Part 2
Angels and men who follow Satan base their existence on three principles and practical rules of life: You can do what you wish, that is, without subjugation to God's laws; you obey no one; and you are the god of yourself. - Father Gabriele Amorth
The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw the satan fall like lightning from heaven.” - Luke 10:17-18
It was one of those excruciating, unproductive, why-is-life-so-hard jobs: There was mold in the walls, bad wiring, everything poisonous and cancer-causing.
We were updating a kitchen. Not quite a remodel, but there were cabinets to install and floors to lay and walls to remove. So we’d planned for some trouble. My buddy Nick was an experienced builder, and he’d budgeted plenty of time. Ten days, he figured, and we’d be done.
Of course it did not go that way.
The black mold needed remediation. The concrete subfloor needed to be repoured. The electrical was trash. All remodelers know the business is full of surprises but as the days wore on we had a growing sense of unease. The materials broke. The tools fouled. Sometimes “nothing is going right” is an exaggeration, but other times it’s an attempt to explain what amounts to insubordination in the world. On that day it felt like we were living against a strong headwind, and we pushed and pushed, until finally, at the end of the first week, Nick came in from the cutting station with an odd look on his face.
“I know this is going to sound funny,” he said, holding a floor plank, “but I know for a fact that I cut this joint the right way, twice. But when I go to install it, the wrong side is cut.”
I tabled my tools. It was a long time past high time we prayed. We went outside.
“Let’s try something,” I said. “We know this house belongs to Jesus—the owner has consecrated the space and prayed through it and everything. But it seems like something spiritual is going on. Let’s listen. Jesus, what claim is the enemy making against this house?”
It’s junk, we heard, immediately and at the same time. It’s a lost cause. A dozen other imprecations tumbled through our minds. Trash. Piece of crap. Dump.
“Ah,” we said, “there it is.”
Because here’s the interesting thing: Neither he nor I nor anyone else we knew had said those things. But apparently some other owner had and we could feel that owner’s presence and discern his evident frustration in half-finished projects and haphazard solutions all over the place.
“OK, Lord,” we prayed, keeping it simple, “we forgive every curse and idle word that has been expressed against this house, and on behalf of its past owners, we repent.” We went on to claim the cross and blood of Jesus to cancel the holds of the kingdom of darkness.
It took maybe ten minutes. By the evening of the following day, we had finished the kitchen.
Familiar, isn’t it?
Everyday life, which is hard.
By now I’ve seen worse—tarot decks and racoon skulls left in the chicken coop, the blood of suicides not wholly washed from the closet floor—but I start with that story for two reasons.
First, it highlights a certain challenge when it comes to spiritual warfare: It’s not the whole problem. There’s the world and the flesh and the devil, there’s death, there's sin, and there are wounds. If you take those powers seriously, which you should, you can wisely attribute hard circumstances to them while depraved spirits apply themselves, imperceptibly, in the background. Fortunately for us, there are ways to proceed in the face of ambiguity.
Second, and more importantly, it outlines the two essential strategies of spiritual warfare: lies and usurpation. When people believe the enemy’s lies and live as if they were true, they sin. When they sin, they open the door to the kingdom of darkness, and the enemy steals and kills and destroys. Those doors stay open until someone finally shuts them.
In the case of that kitchen remodel, it was oh-so-simple. A previous owner had, probably repeatedly, for reasons we’d likely all understand, cursed his own home. This lousy piece of crap. I hate this house. It’s a lost cause. Over time, those curses gave the enemy permission to establish its kingdom. The curses became true. Only through the atoning blood of Jesus were they canceled and cleansed.
The applied work of Jesus Christ reversed the destiny of that home and now it’s a thriving place, with gardens and swingsets and good kids and everything.
This is the second installment in a series on spiritual warfare. If you missed part one, which introduces the unseen realm, its structure, and its inhabitants, you may want to start there.
In the post I’m going to unpack the two fundamental demonic strategies; I’ll also describe how to resist them.
If you’re the kind of person who’d like to partner with Jesus as he actively destroys the works of the devil, this is the post for you.
…
Read the Bible and you’ll see that spirits can do some remarkable things. They can influence material bodies (I can’t pick a verse—look at any exorcism in the New Testament). They can deposit images, emotions, and even thoughts into the unsuspecting mind (1 Kings 22:16-22—the case here is the false prophets and it’s a faithful spirit that does it. All that takes some unpacking. Lord willing we’ll get to it later). They can turn a petty argument into a roaring conflagration (1 Samuel 19:9-10), turn the tides of a battle (2 Kings 3:27), foment war (Daniel 10:20), and empower sorcerers. Remember the magicians of Egypt?
The enemy still does those things and if you ask the Church about her history (or, honestly, a decent scholar) you’ll see those tricks on full display.
“That same night while I was sleeping,” wrote Saint Patrick, “Satan strongly put me to the test–I will remember it as long as I live! It was as if an enormous rock fell on me, and I lost all power in my limbs.”
“Now I proclaimed the truth and I was opposed,” said Duncan Campbell, “and the opposition was so successful that only seven from this community came near the meetings in the Parish Church. At the close of one meeting the session-clerk of this particular congregation in which I was ministering came to me and said, ‘Mr. Campbell—these go not out but by prayer and fasting.’”
“Of the many cases I have seen,” wrote the psychiatrist Richard Gallagher, “I highlight the following: A housewife whose hearing was blocked whenever anyone mentioned anything related to religion and who uttered vile blasphemies during recurring trancelike possessed states” and “A professional woman who suffered from unexplained bruises, spoke several languages completely unknown to her, and during her states of possession periodically ran amok, potentially wreaking havoc on herself and her reputation” (from Demonic Foes, there are others in Gallagher’s list).
That said, those tactics are not the enemy’s main thing.
1. Lies
The enemy’s main thing is to lie.
Frankly, that still surprises me because if I were to extract a lesson from the ministry of Jesus, it would be that the enemy afflicts. In Luke 9:39, a spirit throws a child into violent convulsions. In Matthew 15:22, a spirit torments a little girl with excruciating pain. In Mark 5, the demons of the Gerasene demoniac cause him to cut himself. In fact, in the Gospels, illness is often accompanied by some element of demonic oppression. As the Oxford scholar (and contemporary of C.S. Lewis) Derek Prince observed, “One remarkable characteristic of Jesus' ministry, from beginning to end, is that He never made a hard and fast distinction between healing people's sicknesses and delivering them from demons.”
Even so, it doesn’t start there. Affliction is what the enemy brings; deception is how the enemy gets in. Otherwise put, to steal and kill and destroy is the what. Lies is the how.
In John 8:42-44, Jesus gives a masterclass on the spirit realm. It goes like this:
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
That is a rhetorical tour-de-force and it is impossible to miss Jesus’s point: The enemy lies.
You see that on display in Genesis 3, in which (as Dallas Willard noted) the enemy hits Eve not with a stick but with an idea, and you see it in the temptation in the wilderness, in which, incredibly, the enemy uses scripture to lie. “It is written,” the enemy loves to begin.
But the problem is not with the lies themselves. It’s that we incarnate them.
“The problem isn’t so much that we tell lies,” observed psychologist David Benner, “but that we live them.”
“We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it,” wrote Dallas Willard, “or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.”
I knew a man who, in a moment of extraordinary emotional pain, went to his Bible study for help. He was a teen at the time, and he told them, through tears, about his life.
I’ll bet you can guess what they said.
Nothing.
They said nothing.
And at that moment the thought appeared, like a voice interpreting history, or the answer to a difficult problem: If I speak, particularly to the Church, I’ll be rejected.
He left that room and—for a long time—left the Church. It seemed like the only thing to do, though there were consequences he could not have predicted.
And it’s not just people. Cultures, cities, nations, and even civilizations can be deceived. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard mentions a prophetic insight from the intellectual John Maynard Keynes:
Keynes, who was perhaps an even more profound social observer than economist, remarks at the end of his best-known book that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’”
I am sure,” Keynes concludes, “that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas."
“The killing fields of Cambodia,” says Willard, “come from philosophical discussions in Paris.”
I have to say, though this kind of cultural deception is easy to see in the extreme cases (invariably, your opponent’s extreme cases), the deeper deceptions remain invisible. For example, in the epigraph to this post I quoted Father Gabriele Amorth, a Roman Catholic priest who was influential in returning the ministry of exorcism to the Church: “Angels and men who follow Satan base their existence on three principles and practical rules of life: You can do what you wish, that is, without subjugation to God's laws; you obey no one; and you are the god of yourself.”
That, friends, sounds alarmingly like the founding doctrine of the West. “Liberty is the power to do everything that does not interfere with the rights of others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every individual has no limits save those that assure to other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights,” said Thomas Paine.
No limits? Those are not the words of Jesus. It is disturbing to think that when we in the West declare, “You can’t tell me what to do!”, we are, perhaps, echoing a demonic mantra.
When we believe lies, we sin. When we sin, we open the door to the kingdom of darkness. And that takes us to the second strategy.
2. Usurpation
In the temptation in the wilderness as recounted in Luke 4, the enemy makes an interesting claim: “All this,” it says, concerning the kingdoms of the world, “has been delivered to me, and I can give it to whom I please.”
The word delivered is, if not revelatory, at least instructive. It is “paradidómi.” It can mean handed over or betrayed or seized or surrendered. It’s very strong legal jargon. In Matthew 4:12, it’s what happens when Herod arrests John the Forerunner; in Matthew 10:4, it’s what happens when Judas betrays Jesus; in Matthew 10:17, it’s what Jesus predicts will happen to his disciples in the court system: “Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues.”
Though the paradigm here is legal and a lot of the language used to describe the enemy is in fact judicial (the enemy is “the satan,” meaning, “the accuser or prosecuting attorney”, as well as “the antidikos” (1 Peter 5:8), meaning “the one who holds a legal claim against you”), the judicial view of the Bible is not the abstract view of the Modern Period. In the Modern Period there is no intrinsic connection between the offense and the punishment. That’s not true in the Bible. Instead, the legal paradigm of the scriptures is very matter-of-fact: Break a treaty, and you’re going to get invaded. Drink bad water, and you’re going to get sick. Collude with the devil, and you’re going to be tainted by the devil. That’s why Paul describes sin as “fellowship with demons” (1 Corinthians 10:14-22) and Jesus says that when we lie we become like “our father the devil” (John 8:44).
It is disturbing that, though death entered the world through one man’s sin (look at Romans 5), there is no indication that the transgression of Genesis 3 handed the kingdoms of the world to the evil one en masse. Original sin does not—in most of its articulations—work that way. Moreover, in Genesis 11 (at Babel) there is an event called “the dispossession of the nations” in which God hands over the governance of the nations to subordinate spirits. But even then there’s no solid indication that the representative rebellion at Babel surrendered all kingdoms. It’s far more likely that the kingdoms of the world handed themselves over to the evil one, one at a time, like the Domino Effect of the Cold War.
But let’s say how that happens.
Remember the last post, where I said that the unseen realm is hierarchical? That hierarchy is the key to understanding this whole usurpation thing. When we sin, we give the enemy permission to make its will done everywhere our will is done.
The sin of a mother or father can compromise a household (look at Eli in 1 Samuel 2).
The sin of a king can compromise a kingdom (look at Ahab in 1 Kings 18 or at Manasseh in 2 Kings 21).
The sin of an emperor can compromise an empire (look at Daniel 5 or Revelation 13).
In other words, when we sin we open our place in God’s administration to the influence of the kingdom of darkness and boy howdy does the enemy work that for all it’s worth.
Remember my friend from earlier in this post, the one who left the Church (for a while)? It cost him belonging, and it cost him his voice.
The enemy had a certain permission to make that unbelonging real in many ways: by pushing other people to react to him such that his conclusions were reinforced, by making him seem invisible, by afflicting his body directly, by confusing his thoughts. There are more extreme possibilities.
(Note: We’ll get to this later, but this is how witchcraft and magic, which are umbrella terms and not specific practices, work: People open the door to the kingdom of darkness, and because they do that effectively—in ritual, always with some kind of sacrifice, even if the sacrifice is time, always with some kind of covenant—those doors are often hard to shut.)
I should say, too, that there is a connection between sin and warfare and brokenness, and because it’s a strong connection, some people foreground one of those elements at the expense of the others.
The enemy doesn’t lie when you’re strong and the enemy doesn’t need you to sin to win a claim. Another person’s sin will do.
For example, when my friend Garrett died suddenly, I was devastated. Garrett was my partner in crime for 25 years: We climbed, camped, fished, ran from the police, got caught by the police, shared our woes and debriefed our first kisses. We rode horses, rode motorcycles, read Dostoevsky, prayed, and talked about the Bible. I felt like a part of me had been carved out and destroyed, and while I was driving, the thought occurred to me, “I’ll never have a friend like that again.” It seemed like a fact, given life stages and the time involved. You can’t do adolescence again, and you can’t call your friend when your first baby is born twice. So I believed it and what happened next was predictable: My friendships suffered. Slowly at first, then significantly. I felt less understood. My friends forgot our plans and never showed up. We felt at odds.
Mercifully, Emilie saw what was happening and got my attention. In that case I needed to repent in order to be healed. For that reason, I strongly dislike therapeutic postures that deny sin because they deny the will and in fact infantilize humanity.
Another example: Remember that woman from the first post, the one who saw her deceased grandfather in a mirror? In the end she uncovered one of those generational curses we’ve heard so much about. It was sin, sure, but it had nothing to do with her. Even so, it gave the enemy a certain claim.
But enough. By now we are sufficiently well-oriented and I can tell you the good news: Jesus is Lord. He can deal with this stuff.
So what do you do?
Repent and follow Jesus is be the first thing: Find a church, do life confession, get baptized, embark upon your journey.
In fact, you can’t appropriate any of what follows if you have not surrendered your life to Christ. Remember the Sons of Sceva from Acts 19?
But I’m assuming most of you have done those things: At this point, you’re earnestly seeking to follow Jesus.
In that case the work is simple: Fight lies with truth and you undo the usurpation of the devil by applying the work of Christ.
The benefits of the work of Jesus are multitudinous and the atonement is wonderful and complex—it is, in fact, far beyond the scope of this post. But you don’t have to know how the victory of Jesus works in detail to receive it.
Here’s how you proceed: You repent (or forgive, as the case may be). You ask the Lord Jesus to cleanse you again with his blood. You claim his cross to cut off the permission your sin gave to the kingdom of darkness (or someone else’s). Then you pick up a practice or memorize a verse or some such thing that retrains your mind and cultivates the presence of God in your kingdom.
As an easy point of entry, you can ask the Holy Spirit to show you lies you’ve been believing and living. Try it now! Wait til later is another quintessential demonic strategy, though you may want to step outside if you’re at work, because you have to pray these prayers out loud. The enemy cannot read your thoughts, remember? Contemplation works with Jesus but not, fortunately, with the devil.
(Note: My friends use these guides, or something similar, on a regular basis. For that reason, I’m including a PDF cheat sheet here. If it’s helpful, you may want to download “A Guide to Deal With Lies” and “A Guide to Break the Enemy’s Claims” and keep them on your phone. You never know when they’ll come in handy.)
1. Ask. “Holy Spirit, would you search me and show me the lies I’ve been believing and living?” (Psalm 139:23-24).
2. Listen. Write them down.
3. Repent and receive forgiveness. “Lord Jesus, I ask your forgiveness for believing ____.” (What is it? That it’s too late? That your coworker’s an SOB? That your life isn’t getting anywhere? That God doesn’t care about your dreams?) “I renounce it as a lie. I ask you to cleanse me with your blood, and I now claim the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ to disarm the hold that I gave to the kingdom of darkness. I thank you, Lord, that ‘you made me alive together with Jesus, having forgiven me all my trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against me with its legal demands. This you set aside, nailing it to the cross. You disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them’” (Colossians 2:13-15).
4. Deal with the spirits! In different cases you pray different things. Most of the time it’s one of these: “In the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ I send all spirits related to ____ to the feet of Jesus to receive his righteous judgement. Go now.” OR “Holy Spirit, please burn back to their sources all demonic spirits that have been operating here and causing ____.”
Pro tip: After you pray these things, ask the Holy Spirit if the problem has been addressed. If He says “No,” ask why, and then pray as He leads you. Sometimes there are more claims to disarm, and sometimes you need to ask Jesus to immediately destroy the disobedient spirits. It is interesting that, in the case of the Gerasene demoniac, the demon had a Roman name (Legion) and was connected to a Roman industry (pig farming); it was by cleansing the land of the pigs and plunging the spirits into the chaos waters that the man and the land were redeemed. I mean, do you think those spirits wanted to drown the pigs?
5. Change. If it’s a lie, ask for the Scripture that speaks the truth. Memorize it. If it’s an interpersonal sin, seek reconciliation. If it’s present somewhere else in your life, ask the Spirit what He would like you to do. Ask for the promotion? Take your wife on a date? Take up the practice of worship again? Do as He tells you. You’re going to receive so much life and grace and peace, even if it’s just by bringing the story or sin into the light!
But what if it’s not a lie? Not all warfare is (though it does start that way). What if it’s thwarting at work, or conflict with your friend, or trouble with your kid?
As I said before, warfare is not the whole problem. It’s part of the problem, and it’s usually the easiest part to address. The good news is you do essentially the same thing. It looks like this:
1. Ask. Holy Spirit, what claims is the enemy making to or against ____. (Your house? Your child? Your church retreat? Your evangelism?)
2. Listen. Write them down.
3. Repent and receive forgiveness. “Lord Jesus, I ask your forgiveness for ____.” (What is it? Neglect? Anger? When I pray over my kids, the first accusation is always neglect, which makes sense, because I’m always behind the ball somewhere. I just pray, “Yup, I’m behind. Father, forgive me.”)
3b. Alternatively, if you need to forgive, pray. “Jesus, I forgive ____ for ____. I repent for holding unforgiveness and for making judgments against ___. I ask your forgiveness, Jesus. I release them from all indebtedness to me.”
Then:
“I ask you to cleanse me with your blood, and I now claim the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ to disarm the hold that I gave to the kingdom of darkness. I thank you, Lord, that you ‘made me alive together with Jesus, having forgiven me all my trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against me with its legal demands. This you set aside, nailing it to the cross. You disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them’” (Colossians 2:13-15).
4. Deal with the spirits! “In the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ I send all spirits related to ____ to the feet of Jesus to receive his righteous judgement.” OR “I ask you Jesus to immediately judge all rebellious spirits that have been operating here.” OR “Holy Spirit, please burn back to their sources all demonic spirits that have been operating here and causing ____.”
5. Change. Ask the Holy Spirit what He would like you to do to enact the resurrection of Jesus in the given domain. Do as He tells you.
A Guide to Cancel the Enemy’s Claims
Probably you’re noticing that there is no deliverance without repentance, and that’s true: There is no lasting deliverance without repentance. Remember Matthew 12:43-45?
In fact, the centrality of repentance helps to explain the Church’s long-term warfare strategy, which is discipleship. Discipleship is spiritual warfare.
The enemy has a hold in every person and that is the unsurrendered self, that part in all of us that is quick to take offense, to notice when other people get more than us, to want what we want. In the lexicon of the Bible, the unsurrendered self is called the flesh.
To avoid colluding with demons, we crucify the flesh, deliberately and over time, by following Jesus. We become the kind of people who honestly prefer to say to Jesus, “Your will be done.” We do that by following Jesus as his disciples.
That said, it’s important to be clear that while discipleship is spiritual warfare in the broadest sense, warfare prayer is also a spiritual practice.
It is an essential and essentially Christian skill.
In his book on warfare prayer, the aforementioned Derek Prince offers the following rationale: evangelism. You learn this stuff so that, in the end, you can expel demons from other people and from other places:
The New Testament provides one clear example of a disciple who patterned himself on the ministry of Jesus: Philip. He is the only person in the New Testament specifically described as an "evangelist" (see Acts 21:8), and his ministry, described in Acts 8:5-13 and 26-40, is the pattern for New Testament evangelism. Philip's message was refreshingly simple. In Samaria it was “Christ.” To the Ethiopian eunuch it was “Jesus.”
Philip needed no organizing committee, no trained choir, no rented auditorium. The crowds gathered to hear him for one reason only: the dramatic demonstration of God's supernatural power. “And the multitudes with one accord heeded the things spoken by Philip, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did. For unclean spirits, crying with a loud voice, came out of many who were possessed [demonized]; and many who were paralyzed and lame were healed” (Acts 8:6-7).
This is New Testament evangelism: The Gospel is preached and the multitudes hear; they see the miracles and casting out of demons and they believe; they are baptized and the Church is established. A central element is the expelling of demons, which is often accompanied by noisy and disorderly manifestations. Other features of evangelism vary, but this element is central to evangelism as practiced in the New Testament, first by Jesus, then by His disciples.
And so that’s where we’ll go next.
Love the instruction. You’re a great thinker and writer. Couldn’t download the second guide - seems a broken link? Thanks!!
Powerful- thank you