Featured Strange things happening

Do they live in an earthquake zone?

 

People tend to think you're crazy if you talk about it, but stuff like this does happen.

There is a sense where you can ask God to sanctify a space for His glory and service, and that may be appropriate.

But the problem is NOT the house.

Someone in the house is being demonically harassed. Someone in your friend's family may be dabbling in demonic things, or - more likely - your friend is ministering to someone who the evil ones do not want to be affected by the gospel. Harassment will sometimes take those forms.

Years ago, some friends of mine and I started very intentionally praying and ministering to a small number of individuals who were involved in self-styled satanism. We didn't expect it to happen, but we can under attack with loud unexplained noises day and night to keep us from resting well, things flying off shelves, pounding noises on the windows and walls, occasional apparitions, etc. They were experienced by all of us and witnessed by a number of people who knew nothing about what was going on.

Fundamentally, none of us were ever harmed since God was protecting us (although He is not required to do so) and we continued ministering to those people for nearly a year when two of them converted and the rest moved away.

If he is bothered too much by it, he has the authority in the name of Jesus to stop it. He simply needs to command the evil ones to stop and go wherever Jesus sends them. It works. No special words or working up to some special plane of "spirituality," although I recommend prayer and fasting (not just going without something, but to seek God's direction) through this phase. No magic involved.

Your friend will discover how powerful and immediate the name of Jesus is.

Oh, one more thing. The purpose of this harassment is to make your friend feel powerless and afraid. There is not reason to be afraid and he is not powerless. He has the authority of Jesus available to keep things manageable. He must not operate out of fear, but out of confidence in Christ. When I say that, I want to emphasize again, he is working in concert with Jesus - a Person - not an inanimate force, and Jesus is not that concerned about getting everything "right", but rather that you trust Him and work with Him. Jesus will teach Him what He needs to know through scripture and experience. His experience will confirm the present reality of the authority of Jesus.

 

Sounds like some input from Calypsis would be appreciated. Maybe send him a PM.

 

Looks like Baptist Believer hit the nail on the head. Please keep us posted on the progress. I will pray for this also.

 

BaptistBeliever has some good insight and probably the key observation.

I completely agree with "Speaking the name of Jesus Christ" in rebuke of Satan and demons is what I've advised people before. There is a warfare beyond the physical world that occurs all around us. Demons and Satan are real.

 

As someone who has been through a similar experience I can say that BB has said it well.

 

The problem with situations like this, is that we don't see them in the Bible outside of when a man of God had faith enough to get rid of it immediately, outside of one failed attempt ("Jesus and Paul I know, but who are you?"). So, we don't have any clear instructions on how to deal with it. I agree with speaking the name of Jesus, and also speaking of the blood of Christ.

One thing that isn't known from the OP is whether the childhood friend is saved or not. If not, he does not have the power to keep things like this away. The Baptist preacher would have the power to expel them, but then they'd have free reign to come back in later, and we know from the Bible how dangerous this can be. Finding the root cause is of utmost importance.

To illustrate, an Army buddy of mine who grew up Baptist and respected me and sort of looked up to me as an unofficial chaplain was having some strange things happening at home. He showed me a video that his wife took of their house while we were deployed. In this video, their dog was barking at something in the corner of the house. The wife videoed that, and while she was videoing, the cable TV went to static (instead of just saying "signal lost"). She thought she heard he daughter run down the hallway (not captured on the video), but when she checked the daughter was sound asleep in her bedroom. She said out loud, "This has got to stop" and immediately the TV came back on.

This friend asked me to help him get rid of whatever was in the house, as he felt that he wasn't right enough with God to do it himself. He still had faith, but was not living a good life. Long story short, I went in and prayed and sang some hymns concerning the blood of Christ. You could literally feel the air getting lighter. And things were good for a while.

A few weeks later, they had some more issues. I began talking to my friend, and while he had not acted upon this, he was emailing a woman behind his wife's back. I urged him to stop, and he did, and I became his accountability partner. The issues with the house went away.

Another instance, my daughter was having nightmares in which she said she saw shadow figures on the walls of her bedroom. My wife and I dismissed this as young imagination at first, but it kept happening over the course of a couple weeks. Eventually, when I went in to the room to tuck my daughter in for the night, I discovered that in her love for books (even though she couldn't read yet) she had been hiding a Quran under her pillow that I had gotten from a Muslim soldier in order to study it and be able to witness to him.

I took the Quran and that night I burned it. The issues with my daughter went away that night.

So, simply getting rid of something is not enough, in my opinion. It is the same as putting on a bandaid, or going on a diet. If you want to truly be healthy, it takes a lifestyle change, not a diet. And if you want to keep Satan's minions at bay, it takes the presence of God.

 

I saw it. He needs to find a pastor that understands what it is and not afraid to take on the task of removing the evil spirits from the house by using God's Word.

 

Wow. Sounds like something straight out of Crossway's This Present Darkness/Piercing the Darkness.

 

Don't you mean Frank Peretti?

 

The problem is NOT the house. The evil one cares nothing about houses. The whole haunted house/ghost lore is designed to pull Christians into magical thinking and away from Christ.

 

When I was dealing with all that stuff, people who observed the harassment gave me lots of unsolicited advice and wanted me to see charismatic faith healers, told me to "plead the blood", gave me advice on commanding angels, wanted me to speak in tongues, and subscribe to the Peretti model of spiritual warfare. The Peretti books are entertaining stories, but they are not God's word and they should not be taken seriously as any kind of guide to the demonic realm.

DON'T waste time with the Peretti books or any other type of purported guide to these things. We stand with Jesus and you don't have to speak in tongues, "plead the blood" (whatever that's supposed to mean), pray in a certain way, read from the King James Bible, or have any personal power whatsoever. A Christian has no power in and of themselves to deal with these things. Everything is from God and is amazingly at one's disposal when we are operating in concert with God's will.

Also, don't let anyone tell you that you should attempt to command angels. They are not your servants to command. Through nearly 20 months of this stuff, I am only aware of one incident where I know an angel was involved - and that angel was probably only seen by the ones practicing evil. He apparently appeared as a protector of my Greek professor who ended up in a confrontation with a large group of people who were considering attacking him. They were terrified of the angel and my professor was rather cryptic about whether or not her saw it - "It doesn't surprise me that they saw the one who was with me." I did not witness the incident, but I heard about if from multiple sources who ran. I was not present for that incident.

 

Not necessarily. Houses that we cleansed by God's power had BOTH the devils of some of the individuals who presently lived there because of sinful attitudes and behavior AND curses that came down from people who had previously lived there and had practiced the dark arts, i.e. Ouija boards, animal sacrifice, oracles, tarot cards, and other occult related paraphenalia. Such curses can come down to the third and fourth generation. (Exodus 20:4-5). Each of them had to be found and destroyed.(Acts 19:11-19) Doing so sent those devils to hell...sometimes screaming was heard as they went down.

Example: set the timer at about 50 seconds. Forget the commentary on the video because they did not know what they were dealing with. It wasn't 'ghosts'.

 

Sorry, I respectfully disagree. That's magical thinking.

I fully believe in the active work of the evil one and his minions - I have had to deal with it before for an extended period - but I don't buy the popular culture ideas of talismans, crucifixes, ghosts, etc.

There is a sense in which material objects can be symbols of our faith (bronze serpent, the shadow of Peter, cloths associate with Paul, for instance), but they have no power apart from God.

The curses are not magical things. They are curses from God - not the evil one or his minions. You are giving too much power to the enemies of God.

The passage you cite does not actually support your assertion. You are reading things into it. It says NOTHING about the objects being cursed. It says nothing about the objects having to be destroyed to break their power. Destroying the objects of the evil arts is a symbol of repentance and making a break from the old life and practices. The objects themselves do not actually have power. The objects associated with God's work do not actually have power in themselves either. God elected to use them to make a point. God is at work with each person who comes in contact with the object.

Who gave you authority to consign the demons to the lake of fire? Where do you find anyone in scripture explicitly exercising that authority?

I'm on a break at work and I don't have time to watch your video. I may look at it later. I need to warn you, I am NOT intrigued by things like this and I find it about as glamorous as cleaning the toilet or taking out the trash. I know there are Christians who think quite a bit about themselves because they think they have been used of God in deliverance ministry - and they might be right - but the person who is used of God is incredibly insignificant. That person does not even have to be a mature Christian by any means. It is like the story of the elephant who rocked a suspension bridge as he bounded across. The flea on the elephant's back, bragging to his friends about the way "they" rocked the bridge...

Anyone who brags about being used in these sorts of areas must not be taken seriously. If you really know what is going on, you know that you have no power in yourself to effect anything.

 

Against by better judgement I went to the moment in the video that you suggested. IF it is real - and I suspect it is not - what is that supposed to prove? Obviously it is not "ghosts." But that doesn't not make it demons going into the lake of fire or anything else. All you have there is a mix of elephant-type trumpeting and human screams.

Friend, indulge yourself in scripture and the fellowship of Christ and do not seek out this garbage.

 

I don't intend to argue with you, friend...but please regard me as a friend and not an enemy. Had you been there with us in the fall of 2006 and heard the screams of those devils we heard on several occasions then you would not have said that.

Devils are expelled into the pit by the power of Jesus Christ and calling upon His name just as the disciples did so in the gospels and in Acts. You said you had a 20 month experience in spiritual battle with evil. Well, without boasting, I have had 28 years experience and I have seen the Holy Spirit deliver countless people from spiritual evil and I've been called in to help in four different haunted houses. The one I spoke of was filled with poltergeist (demonic) activity in the extreme but today it stands quiet and the renters do not even know the place was ever so horribly haunted. The poor terrified family that lived through all that terror is doing very well and serving the Lord. That's the power of God at work.

I wish you well.

 

I do not regard you as an enemy at all. I simply see in you what I have seen in several other people who served with me when I we were first faced with these things. I believe you have fallen into the trap of magical thinking.

I have seen and experienced many things too, but I am not going to give glory to the evil forces, nor assume that I completely understand every experience I had.

I have encountered physical, auditory and visual phenomena - with lots of witnesses - but I also know that I am dealing with deceivers who want me to trust in my own strength, some mechanizations that I can devise (special commands/methods/books) instead of trusting Jesus. The Spirit is not like the inpersonal Force of Star Wars. We are dealing with Persons, not inanimate objects that are cursed, haunted or whatever.

Yes. That is my pattern to follow. Nothing flashy. Not seeking anything out. Not playing “demon buster.” Giving all glory to God and not reading our contemporary ghost/horror movie culture into the scriptures.

The 20 month experience was a time of extremely explicit struggle. However, I have been doing spiritual battle for 30 years (since 1986) if we are going to play that game. “Spiritual battle” is rarely casting out demons, but is much more often quieter work expanding the Kingdom of God.

Yes, same here.

Where do we see a biblical example of someone going to help at a “haunted house?” The theology of a haunted house is far outside of the biblical standard. In our culture, it has to do with the spirits of those who allegedly died. I don’t think you actually believe in ghosts, but it sounds like you’ve just substituted “demons” for “ghosts” and have essentially paganized your theology.

I don’t think the place was ever haunted. Was their malevolent spiritual activity occurring in the premises? Possibly. What the issue the house/location? I don’t think so. The evil one is concerned about persons, not inanimate objects.

That’s good.

Perhaps. But the HOUSE did not need to be free of the demonic. The persons who lived in the house needed to be free of the demonic. Would there be demonic activity there if there was no person to experience it? I sincerely doubt it.

I don’t place that much faith in my own experience being a guide to follow, but demonic harassment follows persons, because that’s the whole point. When I was being explicitly being demonically harassed, things would happen around me at my home, in other people’s cars (For instance, the cars were buffered back and forth while the other person was driving and they had to maintain control) when they had no idea what was going on. It happened when I was out of state, when I was walking in broad daylight outside, and in the dead of night. I had more than one person tell me that the big problem with their “alignment or tires” went away after I got out of the car.

I don’t count that as an authoritative word, but it simply seems to make sense. The evil forces did not want me praying and ministering to certain people and were trying to get me to give up by disrupting my life. Weirdly enough, I got used to it and it eventually stopped because it was pointless.

I wish you well also. Please examine what I have said in light of the scriptures

 

Why do you make that assumption?

One of the things that was actually quite helpful to me at the time I first encountered this stuff was that I had come out of agnosticism only a year or two before and I was well aware of what I didn't know. During my agnostic phase, when I was studying various religions - especially Christianity - I determined that I wasn't going to hold any opinions that I could not explicitly back up with scripture, because I had fallen into agnosticism because I discovered that much of the "Christian" teaching I had believed prior to that time was false - the produce of a Southern populist anti-Catholic culture.

So when it came to this explicit spiritual warfare and dealing with the demonic, I simply looked at the examples in the scriptures of Jesus and the apostles as my guide. I looked at some other references, but my critical eye was finely tuned to weeding out opinion and traditions from what was actually taught, so I realized that much of even the more "scholarly" thinking was extra-biblical speculation.

So if I were to heard screams, I would simply take it as screams... not imagine that demons were being thrust into the lake of fire. Moreover, several times I ran into authors advising me to send the demons into "the pit," but I found no biblical evidence for me to send demons to any specific place. Jesus sent demons into a heard of pigs once, but that's His business. When dealing with such things, I usually say something like, "go where Jesus sends you," since I know what Jesus is really the One Who is acting. I am merely a participant in His work borrowing His authority to do His will.

Being able to case out demons in the power of the name of Jesus is not a spiritual virtue. Having experience doing it for the better part of three decades does not indicate spiritual maturity, correctness, authority in scriptural matters, or personal morality. God acts through you and me because of the needs of others, not because we are special.