Answering the “Exorcist”
The film of Blatty’s “The Exorcist” has planted the idea of exorcism and devil possession in the minds of millions of Americans practically overnight. As few as eight years ago, anyone who had declared an interest in, or a belief in, these things would have been regarded as hopelessly out of date.
They are no surprise at all to the Biblically-informed, since the Scriptures teach plainly, and without superstition, about them. Even Blatty’s distorted and faulty account is, for all its peculiarities, rooted in fact.
The media have reported the devastating effects the film has had on some members of its audience, and the offices of psychologists, psychiatrists and religious counselors have felt its aftershock. It is undoubtedly a great deal better to gain a knowledge of the supernatural realm from the Bible than from the latest six-reeler at the Bijou or the Orpheum.
The term demons or devils is very foreign to the modern American consciousness. We have preferred to think that there are no such beings as devils. Yet there is no more terrible reality confronting human existence.
Scripture Tells About Evil Spirits
The Scriptures tell us that, just as God has angels who do His will, there are hosts of angels—fallen angels—who follow Satan and do his will. The Bible calls them evil spirits. It also calls them demons and devils.
In giving His commission to the disciples, Jesus said, “These signs shall follow them that believe: In my name they shall cast out devils…” (Mark 16:17).
Another passage records that “When the evening was come, they brought to Jesus many who were possessed with devils, and he cast out the spirits with his word” (Matthew 8:16).
Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, recognized devils, identified them, and ordered them to leave their victims. There are men and women among His followers today who do exactly this—in His name.
The leaders of ancient Israel knew about demons. In his song to the assembly of Israel, Moses lamented men who “sacrificed to demons which were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come in of late, whom their fathers had never dreaded.” See Deuteronomy 32:17.
One of the foremost desires of Satan is to take worship away from the living God and to direct it toward anything else. The demons are massively engaged in promoting false, delusive and idolatrous religious practices that direct worship to objects or to men or to spirit gods, which are only devils posing as gods. The supernatural aspects that sometimes attend these practices, as in those encouraging the veneration of certain gurus, are produced by demons.
The Book of Revelation tells of “demonic spirits performing signs” who will go forth to deceive men.
What Satan does, and how he does it, are the concealed factors behind many present eruptions of evil in the world. We are warned in the Scriptures that these evils will increase greatly in their intensity and in scope at the point in history when the Jews seek once again to secure themselves in their ancient homeland—to which point the world has come in your lifetime.
Disbelieving in Satan does not banish him; it merely gives him the immense advantage of concealment in his operations.
Disbelieving in Satan does not banish him; it merely gives him the immense advantage of concealment in his operations.
Satan is a living creature, but he is not corporeal. He is a spirit being, a fact that does not make him any less real. The Bible calls Satan “the spirit that is now at work in the children of disobedience.”
In that statement we glimpse the active relationship of an unseen evil spirit to human beings. Satan is “at work in” human individuals.
He directs the activities of invisible agents numbering in the millions called demons. The Scriptures speak, in Matthew 25:41, of “the devil and his angels.”
All of the angels were servants of God until Lucifer, “the son of the morning,” rebelled and caused a great split among them. The demons are reprobate angels who followed Satan and who now do his will.
The Work of Evil Spirits
The work of evil spirits is to do whatever they can to ruin men morally, spiritually, physically and mentally. They depend for success on ignorance of who they are, what they do, and how they do it.
Demonic spirits inhabiting the air come to a man and stand, as it were, at the gates of his consciousness. In this way they can tempt a man or seek to introduce their evil thoughts and lies into his mind.
Temptation is Satan’s opening wedge into a man’s being. The man can resist. But if he obeys demonic promptings to do evil, Satan will do worse with him by far than merely to tempt him.
In the work of soliciting men to do their master’s will, demons are not content to work outside of a man. They prefer, if possible, to enter into a man and to work from inside his body. That is demonic possession.
In this way, evil spirits occupy a human body and use it as a vehicle for carrying out their own depraved intentions. They cannot, of course, do this merely at will. They must be given a basis for occupation by voluntary acts of human compliance with the evil will of Satan.
Participation in acts of occultism and witchcraft is one means by which humans can be so victimized, but not the only one.
When they succeed in entering a human being, evil spirits become inseparably identified with the individual in whom they dwell. They may at times speak directly and audibly through the lips of that individual.
Evil spirits reproduce their own character, or rather express it, through human beings they have entered. They will continue to do so unless they are exposed, identified and cast out. This is what exorcism attempts to do, with real success only if it is carried out in full accordance with the method revealed in the Scriptures.
True Exorcism
True exorcism is neither a ritual nor an act of magic; it is an act of spiritual authority done in the name of Jesus Christ. When it is rightly applied, it is unfailingly successful. The demons hidden in the victim must depart, and they do.
Evil spirits are not all alike in the particular expression of their depravity. There are evil spirits who specialize in lying, in hatred, in filthy thinking, in various delusions, in depression, in fear, in inferiority. There are evil spirits of self-destruction, of religious fanaticism, of sadism and various perversions.
An article of this length can discuss this subject in only the briefest of terms. For those who desire it, more can be learned by reading such books as The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews or The Spirit World by McCandlish Phillips; Blumhardt’s Battle: A Conflict With Satan, a documented account of demon possession by a Lutheran minister, translated from German by Frank S. Boshold; or Demon Experiences in Many Lands—all available at the Co-op or from The Yale Standard.