DEMONS

Do you believe in monsters?
You should.

Legion.

That was its name. Except it wasn’t an it. It was a bunch of its. Hence, the name.

They had invaded the man. They had colonized a human host. They were parasites, feeding on human energy. Human suffering. They are the engines of madness.

No one knew how he had come to this. The madness. The voices. The screaming. The strength. The man didn’t stand a chance. How had he allowed them in, these gods of the dead?

The good people of Gergesa, a village resting high on a bluff overlooking the Sea of Galilee, were well aware of the man. And they kept far away from him.

He spent his nights shrieking in the wilderness and his days wandering among the tombs. He haunted the dead, but the dead did not mind.

He was always naked. He kept cutting himself; gashing himself with rocks, leaving trails of blood through the graves.

One day there was a large herd of swine grazing nearby. The pigs did not mind the dead, and the man and his legion did not mind the pigs. The herdsmen kept their animals between themselves and the tombs. The man was trouble.

They had caught him and chained him up several times in an attempt to keep him front hurting himself or others. It was no use. He would break the chains and run screaming back into the arms of the dead. The gods had made him crazy.

And you cannot fight the gods.

On this day, the herdsmen were watching the sea. It was acting strangely. A violent storm had come from nowhere to make the middle of the sea into a whirling tempest. It lasted only a few minutes, then it stopped faster than it started. Now the sea was flat calm.

A small fishing boat was approaching their shore. It must have come right out of the heart of the storm. It was one of the boats of the Jews. That was odd. They never came over to this side. They didn’t like gentiles, or pigs.

A dozen men got out of the boat. They could now see that it was a rabbi and his students. This may be the strangest sight they had ever seen on this side of the lake. Who was this?

Then they heard the screaming. The man. Legion. He was running and screaming at the rabbi and his men. Those silly Jews will be torn apart. This should be entertaining.

But instead of crashing into the small group, the naked man fell at the feet of the teacher. The herdsmen could hear Legion begging for mercy. What the hell is this? Why were the gods begging for mercy from some Jew?

Then the Jew gave a command to the man. To the demons. To the Legion. To the gods. The herdsmen perceived a mist of whispers and voices lift from the man, pass by them, terrifying them, and land among the pigs.

Then their whole herd of two thousand swine began screaming and ran down the hill into the sea. They all died. The gods had killed their pigs. Or was it the Jew? What had just happened?

One man against a legion?

What are demons?

We do not like to ask such things here in the so-called, “enlightened west.” But in most of the rest of the world, and throughout human history, the presence of these creatures is assumed.

Spiritual war is real and it is deadly. Most of us walk through it unarmed and unaware. Even faithful believers live their lives as functional materialists. After all, we don’t wish to sound crazy. Don’t the most educated and the respectable people reject the notion of invisible intelligent entities?

We walk through this world as if all that we see is all that there is. We are fools. We can only see a small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. We cannot perceive most of the reality we inhabit. We dismiss unseen enemies, and friends, to our peril.

Throughout the pages of scripture the existence of other gods is assumed:

“You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20

The Creator would not waste His time carving such a command into stone with His finger if there were no other gods to tempt us.

So what are demons?

There is little consensus, and the biblical evidence of their origin is scant. Many assume they are fallen angels. I do not think so. There are fallen angels; they are the gods of the nations, the “principalities and powers” that we wrestle against. But demons are something else. Something lesser. Something grosser, more loathsome.

The book of Enoch, which is not in our Bible but would have been in the minds of the New Testament authors, and is quoted by at least two of them, gives us a different answer. It describes the fallout of the episode in Genesis 6 when fallen angels, the sons of God, somehow manage to conceive children with human women. These children became the Nephilim.

The Nephilim, and Enoch, and the beginning of Genesis chapter 6, make modern theologians squirm. It’s weird. It’s messy. They have no categories for it. It messes with their tidy systematic theologies. I have been saying for years that reality is far weirder than most of us want to consider.

We worship a man who rose from the dead. Who are we to find anything weird?

Anyway, these hybrid humans would go on to fill the Earth with such violence and corruption that God would flood it to kill them all. Most of their spirits were condemned to the abyss, but a percentage was permitted to wander the earth to test men.

Like I said. Weird.

This would explain the repeated use of the title unclean spirit by the Gospel writers. However we choose to explain their origins, their presence and evil activity is clearly presented in the Bible, in history, and in life. They are monstrous things, and they hate you. They hate children. They hate me.

I hate them back.

They are the cockroaches of the unseen realm. They harass. They afflict. They depress. They menace. They enrage. They are the carnivores of the human psyche. Mental health “experts,” being ignorant of even the possibility of a nonchemical reason for so many afflictions, armed with nothing but a prescription pad, can only medicate us into obedient consumer zombies. Thus, though they mean well, they often do the bidding of the beasts.

They are spirits. They bring spiritual oppression. There is no drug for that.

They cannot see the enemy, so the enemy must not be there. But they are there. And their agenda is anti-human. Think of the orcs of Middle Earth, only they are invisible and smarter.

Humans can get up to plenty of trouble on their own. We do not need demons for that. I am not making excuses for us. But there is a reason we call certain levels of wickedness and pain inhuman.

Walk through Kensington, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, and see the human wreckage. Addiction is demonic. It consumes.

Or consider the rise of the pedophilia cult all over the west. Whatever was going on with Epstein, it is only the foyer of the house of degeneracy that many have moved into.

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So it will be with this evil generation. Matthew 12

This is what is happening to the west. As the church has weakened and receded, and compromised the truth, the creatures that had been forced out, or at least under, have reemerged in plain sight.

There is no spiritually neutral ground anywhere on Earth.

Hallucinogenic drugs are now trendy among the middle and upper class. They are being used to interact with “entities” who are promising all sorts of spiritual enlightenment. We are so easily attracted to that fruit again, are we not? I don’t care how enlightened or generous these beings may seem. They are not your friends.

Demons like technology. There is a lot of buzz today about AI. Perhaps much of it is overblown. I don’t know; we shall see. But when some chat bot convinces young people to kill themselves, do we really believe they were just the victim of some algorithm?

There was an interview not long ago with some tech titan, I cannot remember who, and when the interviewer asked him if he believed there was a God he answered: “Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

Well, ok then. What could go wrong?

The word “disclosure” seems to be everywhere now. Supposedly they are finally going to reveal to us that extra terrestrials are real. In fact, they have been among us for a long time. Hmm. When the people on your screens begin to tell you they now have contact with these wonderful “advanced beings,” and they are just here to help us, believe nothing they say.

Do I sound crazy?

A few weeks ago I wrote about Satan. It was part of a project I assigned myself to write about Satan, demons, angels, heaven, and hell. The day I ended up writing the devil piece I was agitated. I was angry all day and I had no reason to be. I kept asking, “what’s wrong with me?” then I went upstairs and wrote about the enemy just to get him out of my head. When I finished I felt better, no anger.

That night I went for a walk and was almost run down by a car near my house. When I was in the middle of writing the post my computer froze. It never does that. I could do nothing with it and assumed I would lose most of my work. Instead of hitting the power button I closed the lid and waited and prayed. It worked.

The next day I was told I am losing my job of twenty-five years.

I am writing this piece while working out of town. I have become terribly ill. Also Microsoft Word ghosted and crashed several times. It never does that. All the electronics I am working with are misbehaving in various ways. I even changed the name of the document from “demons” to “daisies” in a silly attempt to make it less obvious.

Am I just paranoid?
Maybe.
Yeah.
Sure.
Whatever

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

The herdsmen of Gergesa ran in to town to tell the people about the pigs, the man, and the mysterious Jew. The townspeople came out, saw all the dead floating pigs, and the man they knew to be the naked lunatic filled with gods. He was sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind.

They begged Jesus to leave. They feared Him more than the demons. They had no category for Him.

Demons give us nightmares. But do they have nightmares? The answer is yes. Demons have nightmares about Jesus. I called them cockroaches earlier. They scatter when the light comes on. They hate the light. Jesus is the light.

All through the Gospels they shriek in terror at His approach.

We will continue to be harassed and provoked by these creatures until the Kingdom comes in full and they are cast into the void. Until that day the best advice I have for anyone is to stay in the light. Walk closely with Jesus every day.

And watch the roaches scatter.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil. Ephesians 6