The Exorcist's Bestiary

I have had to deal with a fair amount of Christian demons while doing deliverance, in which the stronghold of a participant’s life is built up primarily around Christian belief. As you might imagine, this dynamic is very odd because I have to address the participant’s doctrine to get the demon out. In most cases, the demon has twisted something that was initially good into something bad.

For example, the prophets in the Bible are good and their words are inspired, but one of my demonic struggles was that I could not read the prophets without feeling severely judged by every comment they made, causing me to spiral into a deep shame. The Bible became a tool of the demon to keep me paralyzed in guilt, and I might have been better off skipping the prophets at that time. Some have been instilled with demonic fear around the topic of Hell while others have developed twisted ideas about God that needed to be fixed.

There are two takeaways I’d like to highlight here. First off, you do not get rid of demons that capitalize on Christianity by repenting of Christianity, changing your religion, or tossing out the Bible. Instead, you simply repair the twistedness. This is important to note because when people find demons in a topic, they often times demonize the whole topic. “Sex is bad! Alcohol is evil! Never play a video game!” This is not the right angle. Where has God’s good creation of sex gone wrong? When did the alcohol shift into a dangerous lane, and why? What theme was connected to the video game or the person’s life while they were playing it? Address the twist. There’s not a demon hiding behind every bush, but there is potential for all things to be twisted.

The second takeaway is this: it’s not always our fault when our good intentions go sideways. If Jesus can preach about Hell and judgment, but it can get twisted by a demon into something Jesus didn’t intend, then pastors have to face the same scenario when they preach. This isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card—a pastor must be careful with their words and humble enough to realize when they’ve said something dumb. But it is an added dynamic to our preaching that we have to deal with.

While fasting in the wilderness for forty days, Jesus learned what it sounds like to have Satan wield the Scriptures at him in a twisted way. May we also stay aware of the ways demons try to Christianize themselves to us.