My question is: Has anybody here ever experienced an encounter, face to face, with somebody who is demon possessed ? I will have to agree with Helen on this one, but not the way I understood what she was saying, if I understood it right.
It is the demon possessed who feels uncomfortable around the child of God, even if the Christian is not known to the community, or is low key as to his Christianity, in public.
We had a household help in the Philippines back in the early 80's who stayed with us for less than a month. As soon as she arrived from the barrios, and entered into the house, the first thing she saw was the Bibles on the dining table.
She started acting strange. Eyes darting here and there, and wouldn't look at us straight in the eye. Every evening and early morning my wife and I would have our family devotions along with the kids, and she would be by the outhouse, which was a short walk on boardwalks on stilts on the water, throwing up.
We let her go after about three weeks because we were afraid she was pregnant, with all her throwing up and strange behavior, and we didn't want to take the blame for it. Besides that she was acting really, really weird.
Now she had an uncle and aunt who were members of the same church we went to, and this couple came to us after a week and asked if we could come visit their niece, and we did. They were about a day's journey up into the hills, and when we got there she was sitting on a chair, greeted us with a smile and a hug, but still wouldn't look at us straight in the eye.
She was dressed up, made up, even, but her hair was disheveled somewhat, and her voice seemed to have changed, sometimes high-pitched, sometimes low and rumbling, oftentimes unintelligible in what she was saying.
Her relatives said she had been alternating between lucid, calm, and sweet, which was her, to violent, cursing, and incoherent which wasn't her (she was valedictorian of her high school class).
They have also sent for the pastor at that point, and he was about an hour behind having picked up his wife on the way.
We were talking with the girl and her parents when she suddenly bolted straight out of the chair and to the window and said the Pastor is on his way up the trail now (to get to their house you had to leave your vehicle at the village center, which is normally a meeting hall with a basketball court in front) and walk a mile, or less, up a small, dusty carabao trail.
She got agitated with every minute, until finally, when the pastor and his wife got to the house, we were restraining her. Five burly men. Four of whom were used to heavy labor, were heavily muscled, and one city boy who lifted weights and let me tell you, it was more than we could handle from a 100 lb, five foot two teenager.
To cut to the chase, some kind of "exorcism" happened. No, nobody beat up the girl, nobody tied her up, nobody slapped her around. It was the Bible, prayers, and I would daresay love, but things finally quieted down for that household and that girl.
Now she would probably have been diagnosed as schizophrenic or manic deppresive (sp?) here in the States, or maybe even by doctors in Manila, and placed into a mental institution and a regimen of drugs, which would probably have done her more harm than good.
She's now a grandmother twice over from what we've heard, and a faithful churchgoer. The pastor who visited her had gone on to the Lord, hopefully.
The thing is she could have very well been manic deppresive or schizophrenic if we didn't know the story, but how does one clearly define the boundaries between what seems obvious to the human eyes and what is of the spirit ?
You wonder how many of the "hopeless" mental cases out there are really demonic possessions, and how many of those said to be "demonic" are actually real mental cases.
I wonder about people like Manson, and Richard Speck, or Ted Bundy, Gacy, and even the gangsters of the roaring 20's and 30's. Or cult leaders like Jim Jones and those of Heaven's Gate and others, and even so-called "Christian" leaders of today.
