Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: Jean, you're on the air. How can I help?

Jean: Yes, thank you for taking my call. Can you hear me?

Pastor Mike: I can hear you just fine.

Jean: Okay. My question is there's a passage in the Bible—I'm sorry I didn't look it up to see where in the Bible it's found—but it's about where two or three of Jesus's disciples were trying to... it was someone that was possessed by demonic spirits. And the disciples tried to deliver the person to set them free, and they were unable to do so. Later, Jesus was able to deliver or set the person free from the demonic spirits.

When the disciples asked Jesus why they weren't able to do it, I know in the King James Bible it says that Jesus said that this kind takes prayer and fasting, but in the NIV Bible, it omits the fasting part. My main question is when someone is possessed by demonic spirits, does that mean that they are unable to be cleansed or delivered on their own? That someone that's filled with the Holy Spirit has to intervene on their behalf to set them free? Is that right or not?

Pastor Mike: Say that last line again.

Jean: My main question is when someone is possessed by demonic spirits, I'm thinking that they can't be delivered, they cannot be set free unless someone that's filled with the Holy Spirit intervenes on their behalf to deliver them or cleanse them from the demonic spirit.

Pastor Mike: I've got what you're saying. This is a good question because the way that we see the most extreme examples of demonization in Jesus's day, and even in the early parts of the Apostles' day in the book of Acts, the agency of deliverance comes through either Christ or his apostles. That would seem to set up a pattern.

Yet the reality of the work of Satan in an individual is varied. The kind of attacks upon people that get a foothold in people's lives—there are often times people throwing themselves on the mercy of God. God gives them deliverance as they put into action the truth of God's word. I see that in a lot of situations because there are all kinds of sins that Satan is enslaving people to as they sin.

I know many people that without the intervention of a third person have been set free from those sins. So I don't think it's an absolute. Although I think the demon activity during the time of Christ and the Apostles was so severe, some people were so severely overcome by demonic spirits—which I always think is starting with an open door usually in most cases by the person themselves—that they needed a person to intervene.

In that intervention, those are the examples we see that are highlighted in Christ's ministry and in the Apostles' ministry. I would say they're so badly given over to the demons they're just completely passive, which is actually what the word that we often translate "demon possession" literally means: having a demon-caused passivity.

If you're so passive that the demons are saying, "We are Legion, and I'm living among the tombs and I'm cutting myself and I'm not in my right mind," then we can't sit down with an open Bible and reason with that person. So I can say there may be, just by way of example and reasoning through the scriptures, that there is a kind of passivity where Satan has become so dominant that it would take an outside individual to be an agent of God's deliverance if that was going to come.

But that in part was to show us that Christ and the Apostles were speaking for heaven, and you and I are not speaking for heaven. We're not writing scripture. So I don't know if that's going to be something that we're able to do. I don't even see the kinds of outbreak of demonization at least in our country right now the way that I see it and read about it in the gospels and the book of Acts.

But I can say if it were in that situation, perhaps God would be gracious because, as it says in Jude about Michael and Satan, we're not really exercising any power in and of ourselves. We don't have any power. Any power we have is a derivative power, and all we're doing is trusting that God will answer our prayer to deliver someone.

Usually, the normative situation is someone is delivered when they themselves engage their volition, their decision-making power, to say, "God, please deliver me. God, please help me. God, please, I'll stop, I repent of my sin. I'll stop doing what's gotten me into this mess and I want to follow you," and Christ gives them the power to overcome that.

So that's a hard question you ask because I think there are some very unique situations in the gospels where the kind of demonization is so severe the person can't even reason with you. As opposed to most people today that I talk to who have very clearly demonic issues going on of enslavement to particular sins, but they can still have a conversation with me.

Usually what happens is they sit there and say, "I don't want to. I don't want to give up my sin, and I don't want to follow Christ." I realize they're enslaved and they're blinded as Second Corinthians 4:4 says: Satan is blinding their eyes. I can have a conversation. They seem like they're in their right mind, but in fact, all I can do is pray for them.

If God delivers them, great, but I don't see the kind of "let me just sit down and pray" or, if you were to take the textual variant there, "and I'll fast for a week and it'll come out." I don't know. Although I do know the prayer of a righteous person accomplishes much, so we ought to be praying for people like that. There are people I know addicted to gambling. They can't stop giving their paycheck away to the casinos. That's terrible. Satan is out to steal and kill and destroy, and that's exactly what this gambling addiction does.

I want them to be free. They don't want to stop. Well, I pray for them and I get people to pray for them. And in God's grace, maybe at times we see people turn aside from all of that, but at times we don't. So I'm always going to call the person who's engaged in something that is clearly demonic because it wraps them up in perpetual sin, I'm going to tell them to exercise their volition and to do what's right.

Because that is the normative experience of everyone who's in sin. They're supposed to call out to God and say like that parable Jesus told, that tax collector: "Have mercy on me a sinner." That's what I want to hear from people that are in the hands of the evil one. And if they can't say that, of course I want to pray for them. If they're so illogical, of course I want to pray that. But I don't know that I have any guarantee that I can effectuate that, even if I fast all week and pray every hour.

But I think if it's a loved one for sure, we find ourselves doing that without even trying. We pray incessantly, don't we Jean, that someone could be free from that problem? So that's an answer that may not be as clear as you wanted, but that is what I'm finding as I look at the differences between what I normally deal with today and what Jesus and the Apostles were dealing with in that period of time.

Jean: Okay. I have a comment if you have time. One is I think it's interesting that as I said earlier, in the King James version of the Bible, in the one specific passage that I'm thinking of—and as I said, I'm sorry I didn't look to see where it's found in the Bible...

Pastor Mike: Mark chapter 9 verse 29 is the passage you're thinking of, but go ahead.

Jean: Okay, that's the one where Jesus is telling his disciples that this kind comes by fasting and prayer, but the NIV Bible omits the fasting part. I just think that's interesting too.

Pastor Mike: I can explain that, but which is nothing nefarious, there's nothing evil going on there. There's definitely a textual variant there, and the later manuscripts will deal with that addition of fasting which in this case, if fasting were a part of really what Mark wrote there, it'd be pretty hard for them to walk into a town and have any period of fasting. All they can do at that particular time is prayer.

But it seems like because the fasting conversation was had elsewhere, that the transcribers of this by hand added the phrase "and fasting." So I don't think it's an easy decision for textual translators to translate it, but it is interesting that even in the context, it'd be hard for them to be accused of not fasting when they had just come upon this man that was terribly convulsing and they couldn't cast it out.

But go ahead. It's not because the NIV says, "Well we don't like the fasting part so we're leaving it out." There's good textual evidence for leaving it out. That's all I'm saying. Maybe that is not what Mark wrote. And if Mark didn't really write that, then we don't want that in our Bibles. The Bible talks elsewhere about fasting, but I'm not sure it really does in Mark 9:29. But anyway, go ahead.

Jean: The other thing that I wanted to mention: I have a loved one that's diagnosed with mental illness, and I have seen the loved one speaking to someone when he's in a room by himself. He'll be having a conversation with someone. There was several occasions, actually, when I would ask them who they are speaking with, and one specific incident where the person told me the name of this person that they were speaking with.

Anyway, as I said, this happened on more than one occasion when they would be having a conversation with someone that nobody else could see. When I would ask them what the person was telling them, they would always say the voices that they were hearing would always tell them to do something that was bad for them—like, "I need to smoke more," or whatever. Something to that effect.

Anyway, there are several situations where I didn't experience this myself, but I was told that this same loved one, that someone heard numerous different, totally different sounding voices coming out of this person's mouth. That's why I asked that question about whether someone, if they are really possessed by demons, whether they are able to accept Jesus and be delivered on their own or whether they are helpless and they have to have someone that's filled with the Holy Spirit to intervene on their behalf.

Pastor Mike: Well, I always think it's a good thing when they do. Jean, this is a great question and I have some experience with this. I used to run a worship service in a nursing home in the south side of Chicago, and a lot of people were just dumped there who had all kinds of mental disorders, as the nurses there might call it. Not that they were the best nurses in the industry.

But as I dealt with these people every Sunday and got to know them, I realized that some of them just had issues of dementia and Alzheimer's, as we would call it now, and they could have a real medical diagnosis of something in their brain that didn't allow them to have the cognitive functions.

But then I had other people that maybe a doctor would say, "I don't see much wrong with this person at all," but they were very hostile when we came to sing songs to Jesus and talk about the Bible. That's when this one man would go off and scream profanity the whole time. We literally had to roll him in his wheelchair into another room and face him in a corner because he was that way until we left.

Some of the older ladies that would come to our service would say, "He's not like that until you guys come." Well, we've never done anything wrong to this guy. We're just preaching Jesus and singing about Jesus and the guy goes nuts. In that case I say, okay, yeah, I can see where you'll know them by their fruits.

Sometimes the fruit is not just someone who can't make sense of a sentence or does things that are inappropriate, but they're doing things that clearly, as you said in the one case you gave me the example of, they're hearing voices that are telling them to do things that are always destructive. There's a consistency to it. It's never "go worship" or "never go serve someone," it's always destructive.

That's where I think you can know them by their fruits. At some point we recognize sin and Satan—and it's really his demons because Satan can only pay attention to one thing at a time. But the demons that go out around the world to do their work, I do think have an effect on some people that maybe they are beyond solving the problem themselves, which is really what you're asking.

And I would agree with that. But what I would never say, even though I want to be that person and I felt like I tried to be that particularly when I had that assignment of leading this service in this very run-down nursing home in the south side of Chicago, I recognize that no one gets there on their own. In other words, no one's taken there by the demon. Always there seems to be some on-ramps to what they end up being overcome by because they've made moral decisions about their own lives giving themselves to sin and then God, as it says in Romans 1, gives them over.

So I'm never going to sit there and say, "Oh poor you, you can't get out of this on your own." I do feel bad and I get mad because Satan is the destroyer. But I realize it's not as though they're morally neutral or morally innocent. Because these people that act that way or hear voices that tell them to do only terrible things or people that curse when the Christians show up, these are people that have made decisions throughout their lives and Satan has found a very willing home for them to work through.

But yes, I would love for you and I when we see people that seem to be beyond the ability to help themselves, to help them. And I do think the thing about fasting—and maybe the reason even it was a discussion elsewhere in the gospels—is because that puts our focus on doing what we should be doing, and that is relying on the Lord, praying to the Lord, beseeching the Lord, even as Jesus did with loud cries to say, "God we need you, and we can't do this without you."

And even as Michael said to Satan, "The Lord rebuke you. I'm not going to rebuke you, but I need God involved in this," because he's the only power ultimately that can deliver from the strong arm of demonic work. And I do think that is a helpful perspective.