What does the Bible say about demonic oppression?

The Son of God in Manhood was a great Deliverer, setting at liberty those who were crushed under the yoke of the law, the dominion of sin and the bondage of Satan. No one would doubt that poor Legion was under Satan’s power: bereft of his senses, without clothes or a home, having self-inflicted wounds, dwelling in the tombs, and often bound by his fellows. He was beyond all human aid, but what a change came over him when he met Jesus! The demons were cast out, and he was found sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind. A man may be respectable and religious, yet under Satan’s power; all the features that marked Legion naturally, being true of him spiritually, if away from God. The good resolves he makes, and the obligations that others impose upon him, will never change him. If he is to be set at liberty, he must come under the power of the Lord Jesus.

In Luke 8 we see in poor Legion one who was under captivity to Satan. Nothing that men could do could free him from the power of the demons that possessed him; but there was One who had come to proclaim liberty to the slaves of Satan, and He set Legion free. It was a demonstration of the divine power in Jesus that evinced He could liberate from Satan's bondage all who would come to Him. The woman whom the Lord liberated from the spirit of infirmity had been bound by Satan for eighteen years (Luke 13:11-16).

There is great care in this Gospel to show the connection of Satan with men, just as we have seen the privilege of the believer in the possession of the Holy Ghost. The Spirit of God is the power of communion for the new man, for those who are born of God. So Satan is pleased to fill with the power of the demon the old nature of man, in certain cases where God permits him; and the Lord shows the link between the demon and the sickness, weakness, or other malady of body or mind, as we find here in the case of the dumb man: "And he was casting out a demon, and it was dumb; and it came to pass, the demon having gone out, the dumb [man] spoke. And the crowds wondered." It is evident from this that what produced the lack of speech was not physical infirmity, but the demon that dwelt in the man. Directly the demon left he that had been dumb spoke. What the Lord was occupied with here below was in giving a specimen of that which will characterise the world to come. The powers that He exercised, as others afterwards in virtue of His name, were "the powers of the world [or age] to come," as they are called in Heb. 6:5. The millennial age will thus afford a full display of the defeat of Satan, to the glory of God, and this in and by man. The Lord's curing of bodily diseases, and casting out of demons, was a partial exhibition of what will be public and universal in that day.

162 There are various forms of disease. In a general way all come from the evil one; but in the sense of "possession," his power cannot be applied to all of them: such diseases may be accompanied by possession or not; and so they are treated in scripture. We find the Lord healing diseases and casting out devils. We find lunatics and demoniacs distinguished in the same phrase.

Now we have another thing, the ministry of Jesus in presence of Satan's power, and the utter confessed weakness and misery of nature. An instructive lesson, indeed, for not only do we see the all-conquering might of Him who was crucified in weakness, but the extent of the deliverance shown forth in him who was both set free from the thraldom of Satan and who afterwards became the active witness to others of the Lord's greatness and power to others. It is not merely sin here, or the lusts of the flesh and the world. We know how continually God does save from human violence and corruption and their consequences. In Legion, however, we have, rather, the direct agency of Satan paramount, if not there. As to this, men ordinarily are incredulous; or, if they admit it ever thus acted, they would limit it to the time of Christ on earth. That there may have been a greater rising up of the enemy's power in opposition to the Son of God when here below is a very different statement, and I believe it; but it is a most erroneous conclusion that his power was then so shattered as a matter of fact that cases of demoniacal possession were never afterward to appear. The New Testament refutes the illusion. After Christ died and rose (and this must have gone in the direction of destroying the energy of Satan further than anything else), He charged His servants to preach the Gospel with this sign accompanying them: "In My name they shall cast out demons." (Mark 16:17) And so, in the Acts of the Apostles, we find the word confirmed thereby. Sick folks were brought, and persons vexed with unclean spirits; "and they were healed every one" (Acts 5:16). This was after the descent of the Holy Ghost, too; so that this mighty event, following redemption, had not of itself extinguished cases of possession. Nor was this confined to Peter or the other Apostles; but similar power accompanied Philip, the evangelist, at Samaria. "For unclean spirits, crying with loud voice, came out of many that were possessed by them; and many that were paralyzed and lame were healed." I need not dwell on such strong cases as the divining damsel of Philippi, nor that at Ephesus (Acts 19), which the seven sons of Sceva proved to be too real to their cost: they are well known.

No doubt this case like others in the Gospels exhibits the aggravated fact of possession. It was not derangement here, but Satan's command of mind and body. Yet it is also observable that what is ordinary and presents none of the humiliating horrors of possession may be really more ruinous eternally. So we may infer from the Gadarenes, who were not drawn to Jesus by the deliverance of him that had the legion, but on the contrary besought Him to depart from their borders. In any way, how awful is the subjection! How gladly should men hail the true tidings God sends of a Deliverer in Jesus! Only believe on Him; believe God about His Son. Do you not need Him desperately? None less, none other, than Jesus can defeat Satan or save your soul.

Think of the fearful identification of the unclean spirit with the man, which his language reveals. "Eh! what have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Didst Thou come to destroy us?" There is no creature in the universe which affords a lair so congenial for a demon as a sinful human heart. As long as you are far from the Lord, you are near and open to the power or wiles of the spirit of evil. He is your great enemy; the Lord Jesus is your greater friend. Reject not the Saviour to your ruin. Be assured that He will receive you; if you cast your soul on Him, He will in no wise reject you. He came to seek and save the lost. If you own yourself lost, as indeed you are, He is just the Saviour for you.

The power of Satan has also to be reckoned with; but the enemy here is one already vanquished, and faith only is needed for full deliverance. Faith, alas, may be lacking so that power which has been given may not be available. The child brought to the Lord has been already in the hands of those who were expressly authorized to cast out demons; yet they have only shown their incompetency in this case to do anything. It is over these He groans as an unbelieving generation, though still there is a resource in Himself, however much disciples fail. Here, as He says to the father of the child, "all things are possible to him that believeth." Mark emphasizes the malignity of the demon and the long time of possession. After he is gone out, the child seems for the moment dead; but Jesus takes him by the hand and he rises up. To His disciples He says that so virulent a case could yield only to prayer and fasting. But how great is the encouragement in such an enemy so certainly to be vanquished. The demand for faith to be in energy is no abate, meat of the blessing.

But let us go on with our chapter. If the Lord takes up into the glory, He comes down into this world, even now in Spirit and in sympathy, and meets the crowd and Satan's power with which we have to do. While the Lord was on the Mount, a poor father had brought to the disciples his son who was a lunatic and possessed by a devil. Here is developed another character of man's unbelief, that even of the believer — inability to make use of the power which is, so to say, at his disposal in the Lord. Christ, Son of God, Messiah, Son of man, had overcome the enemy, had bound the strong man and had a right to cast him out. As man, the obedient One in spite of Satan's temptations, He had overcome him in the wilderness, and had thus a right as man to dispossess him of his dominion over a man as to this world; and this He did. In casting out devils and healing the sick, He delivered man from the power of the enemy. "God," said Peter, "anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power, and he went about doing good and healing all those that were oppressed by the devil." Now this power should have been used by the disciples, who ought to have known how to avail themselves by faith of that which Jesus had thus manifested on earth; but they were not able to do it. Yet what availed it to bring this power down here, if the disciples had not faith to use it? The power was there: man might profit by it for complete deliverance from all the oppression of the enemy; but he had not faith to do so — even believers had not. The presence of Christ on earth was useless, when even His own disciples knew not how to profit by it. There was more faith in the man that brought his child than in them, for felt want brought him to its remedy. All therefore come under the Lord's sentence, "O faithless and perverse generation!" He must leave them, and that which the glory had revealed above, unbelief shall realise below.

The subject of demon possession is too large to be entered upon fully. It must suffice to notice the moral effect this possession had. The man in the synagogue at Capernaum had an unclean spirit (Mark 1:23). Another man had a dumb spirit. Frequently the power of these demons was exerted in leading their victims to injure or even to destroy themselves. The "daughter of Abraham" who had "a spirit of infirmity" (Luke 13:11-16) and thus bound by Satan, was undoubtedly more than sick in the ordinary sense. As the power of the enemy made some dumb, it bound her down. It is difficult to define the relation between our own spirit and the body; it must be more so in the case of demon power. But the power seems to be exerted through the mind. This is evident in the case of the demoniac boy (Matt. 17:15) who was "lunatic and sore vexed" with a demon.

I desire, beloved friends, with the Lord's help, just to bring before our hearts this evening three incidents in this chapter, the power of Christ, His gracious, wonder-working power over demons, disease, and death. And I think you will find as we study it together that there are peculiar voices of God to us of a very practical nature in connection with each case in the chapter. First of all — and I need not dwell long upon this case — we have the demon-possessed man. God only knows whether there is anyone here to-night morally like that, but it is the picture of a person who is entirely and completely under the enslaving power of the enemy. I have no doubt whatever it is the picture of a man who is not merely in his sins, but who in his sins is peculiarly a slave of the devil. Now there are characters of sin amongst men very diverse in nature the one from the other. The leper, for instance, is a type of the sinner in one aspect, the blind man is the type of the sinner in another. We might go through all the various cases that came in contact with the Lord of life and glory in this world, and your feelings would be very differently moved in each case; you would not have the same kind of feeling with regard to a man blind as you would with regard to a leper. But when you come to a case like this, a man that was possessed with demons, a man distinctly under the mastery and dominion of the devil, bound as we would say hand and foot by his power, one shudders with horror at a case of that kind. I believe such cases morally abound: I am not prepared at all, beloved friends, to deny that there is a peculiar power of Satan at the present moment. I see, for instance, in the New Testament scriptures that long after the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and long after the coming down of the Holy Ghost upon the day of Pentecost, there were persons who were distinctly under the blinding, tyrannising power of the devil. If ever there was a time when one would expect to see the power of Satan entirely broken and annulled, so that persons should not be subjected to his thraldom, it would be immediately consequent upon Christ's victory and His resurrection, and the coming down of the Holy Ghost. But you have only to study what is called the Acts of the Apostles (really the Acts of the Spirit through the servants of God), and you will find a very solemn power of the devil in those days. Now observe, I do not speak at all of that power in any other sense save after a moral and spiritual nature; I do not speak now of a person's body being possessed, as we know this poor wretched man was possessed with a legion; I am speaking entirely now, as I have said, of the moral power, or what we might call the spiritual power that Satan exercises; a power that we see is positively in progress to an enormous extent at the present moment. If ever there was a time that was a witness to the tremendous exercise of Satan's virulence, and his hostility both to God and man, the day that we are living in is the witness to it. It is increasing, and it will increase; and persons are now in their souls and in their minds (I have come in contact with them myself) as distinctly devil-possessed as surely as ever they were in their bodies in past days. Now that is a very solemn reflection for us all. You remember how the apostle describes it, for instance, in Ephesians 2, when he says, You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world," — now mark the words according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience." Now that is very striking and very solemn: that is development, beloved friends, and that is the development that we avow. I fully admit development, but development in what way? Development in evil, and in the exercise and display of Satanic power; and that we have all round us. Here is a striking case that comes before the Lord in Mark 5; and all through this chapter, the details which the evangelist presents are positively appalling. This man is described in this way: he "had his dwelling among the tombs;" "no man could bind him, no, not with chains;" and that had not been untried, for that means to restrain, to keep in subjection, a person under this influence had been attempted; "he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him; but always" — not on one isolated occasion, but as the habit of the man's life, the perpetual, dreary, wretched position that this man ever occupied — always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones."