I was raised in a home where my mother was religioous, my father was not, and my brothers were disrespectful of everything including God. One afternoon my brother brought home a collection of satanic symbols which he wanted my mother, who was a decent artist, to draw for him. She refused because she said those symbols represented witchcraft and satanism, and they were an affront to God. That began an afternoon of my two older brothers making fun of everything holy and laughing at the things in the Bible they believed to be nonsense. When told by my mother that God was real, they demanded that He show Himself, or that the devil show himself, or that any spirit that existed prove itself.
Not wanting to join in to the debate, I withdrew to another room and decided to go to sleep early. An 11 year old needs his sleep if he plans on prevailing against the overbearing will of the school teachers. I missed the first part of the excitement altogether. When they woke me up they were all scared, including my mother. Outside the front porch there was a round circle of light on the ground with no apparent origin. They distinctly heard a train passing between our house and the garage, despite the fact that we were five miles from any tracks. None of the things they reportedly saw made any sense to me. I thought, as my mother did, that they had opened the door for spiritual entities to enter, and apparently they had.
That evening, whils sitting near a doorway in front of a long hall that ran the length of an addition we had added to our home, I noticed two shadows traveling the length of the hallway. The light colored paneling made them plainly visible. They were perhaps three feet tall and looked like any other shadows, except that the lighting was overhead and there was nobody who could have cast the shadows. I knew then I was looking at demons. After making a trip up and down the halway they entered the first bedroom on the right, in which my younger brother lay in his crib. I excitedly told everyone of this, but nobody believed me.
In the interests of time I won't go into all the details of what the baby did over the next couple of weeks. I will say that though he had just said his first words, he was able to whisper what sounded like a long string of profanities. If you put a Bible in his crib he screamed it terror. Finally we had an evangelist my uncle knew perform an exercism. It wasn't a formal affai like you see in the movies. It was more that he put his hands on the baby's head and commanded by the blood of Jesus Christ that the demons release their hold over the baby and that they depart. The profanity stopped, the strange behavior stopped, and once more the bably didn't know the Bible from any other book.
The story is true. While I don't expect many of you to believe it, I offer it as testimonty to three things.
1 As God is real, so is the devil. As angels are real, so are demons. It's easy to open a door and let a demon into your home or your life. It's harder to get them to leave.
2 As Paul writes in Ephesians, we struggle not against people but against principalities. Evil exists and it surrounds us. Only by taking the armor of God are we resistant to its influences. When he let our guard diown, the enemy pounces.
3 Light cannot co-exist with darkness. As powerful as the devil is, God is stronger. When His light enters your life, the darkness is cast away. No matter how strong a grip the devil has on you, God can break that grip and set you free.
