Have We a Distorted View of Demons?

To understand whether there are less demons in Twenty First Century western civilization, we need first to consider if we should expect the biblical record to detail average examples or bypass the usual to feature spectacular instances of demonic activity.

John 20:30-31 Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God . . .

To say nothing of the expense of copying Scripture by hand with painstaking accuracy, the cost of writing materials in the First Century was so exorbitant that it would take the average person very many years of sacrificial saving to scrounge enough money for just the paper (papyrus) for one gospel (Source). Add to this the fact that very many copies of the gospels and Acts were to be made, and it is hardly surprising that, relative to the immensity of Jesus’ ministry, they were kept brief. In the light of that brevity and of our need to know that Jesus can handle extreme cases, the focus of the gospels would necessarily be on the dramatic, like “Legion” and the raising of the dead, rather than mild cases of demonic oppression or sickness.

The gospels were written not so that we would know about demons or sickness but so that we would know that Jesus is the Son of God. There is a glorious reason for this priority: when we begin to yield to the full implications of who Jesus is, we will receive the Spirit of God, who will then commence leading us into all truth (John 14:26; 16:13), including all the spiritual understanding we need about demons or sickness. Even for Christians, spiritual revelation on any topic is not automatic. Given Jesus’ emphasis on prayer and seeking, we would expect that spiritual insight into the demonic would depend on us seeking the truth with sufficient faith and passion, but the needed understanding is nevertheless available to those who have made the wondrous discovery that Jesus is the Son of God to whom we must yield our entire destiny and daily lives.

Despite the promise of such revelation, however, I get nervous when we stray from the bedrock of the written Word of God. So let’s return to the Bible and see what we can glean. We’ll start with a Bible-based analogy.

In every reliable, up-to-date Bible Dictionary I know of, you will find scholars insisting that many cases of Bible leprosy were physically much milder than most of us imagine. Many cases were not what modern medical science has chosen to call leprosy – not the deadly disease that prior to better treatment was characterized by lost fingers or having one’s flesh eaten away. So different is the Bible’s conception of leprosy that only people partly covered with leprosy were unclean (Leviticus 13:8,12,13). When this disease covered their entire body, they were pronounced clean! Jesus’ healings of biblical leprosy were indeed miracles that dramatically restored people from an appalling predicament. The Bible refers, however, to diseases dreaded not so much for their medical consequences as for their horrific social and religious consequences.

Just as we can get an exaggerated view of the physical symptoms of biblical leprosy, so we could get an exaggerated view of the symptoms of demonic oppression.

Since the goal of the gospels is not to teach us how to recognize disease or demons, but how to recognize that Jesus is the Son of God, much is brushed aside in such verses as, “So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons” (Mark 1:39) and “When evening came, people brought to Jesus many who had demons in them. Jesus drove out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick” (Matthew 8:16 – GNB).

Rather than detailing all cases, or even giving a representative sample of deliverances from demons and healings, the gospels provide a divinely inspired selection of those instances most likely to generate faith. Consequently, it would be a mistake to suppose that just because there is no specific mention of healing minor ailments such as headaches that Jesus was not moved to heal them or that such sicknesses did not exist in the First Century. In the same way, we could be mistaken to presume that common instances of the demonic are nearly as dramatic as those Scripture cites to highlight Jesus’ power. It could therefore be a mistake to suppose that only the deranged or depraved could have their God-given potential hindered by evil spirits.