Can Christians be Demon Possessed?
1 Samuel 16:14–23
We are still in 1 Samuel dealing with this tremendously important issue
related to spiritual warfare, demon possession, demon influence, and this very
unusual situation. This is unique in Scripture, that which is happening with
Saul. We have been going through the doctrine the past few weeks. Tonight we
are going to wrap it up by looking at the question of “Can Christians be Demon
Possessed?”
That is not going to take the whole time. I want to come back and talk
some about what in the world is going on here with this demon and Saul and the
early so-called use of music therapy. We have to analyze music therapy because
there is this big trend in psychotherapy today. I want to address that trend.
We are in 1 Samuel 16:14, the key verse to understanding the dynamic
that is going on here:
“But the Spirit of the LORD
departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the LORD
troubled him.”
The contrast is that the Spirit of the Lord has come upon David, who is
the newly anointed king, but he is not the installed, inaugurated king yet. He
is just the anointed king to replace Saul eventually. He is not the king until
Saul is taken to be with the Lord at the end of 1 Samuel.
The Spirit of the Lord departs from Saul and an evil spirit. … It is not
a distressing spirit. That may be translated that way because that is sort of
the effect of this evil spirit. The word there that we
see in the lower left of the slide is ra‘, a Hebrew word
meaning bad or evil. It indicates that this is a demon that is troubling him,
somewhat of a pusillanimous term for what is going on here.
It has the idea of bā‘at, the word in
the bottom right of the slide. This word bā‘at
has the idea of being overtaken by sudden terror, to be absolutely terrified,
to come under extreme anxiety. It would involve anxiety, fear, paranoia that
would virtually incapacitate somebody. We have to understand how this is taking
place, but that will come at the end of the lesson.
We looked in the previous two lessons at the angelic rebellion as the
foundation for this, that there are angels that follow Satan. We learned that
there are four different categories of fallen angels, one of which is
identified as demons. These demons are active in the world today.
There are two categories that we covered under points 5 and 6:
What does it mean to be nonbiblical?
I have talked to Christian pastors, some doctrinal pastors, and some
people who have sat under solid doctrinal teaching for 30–40–50 years. They
think that if something is biblical it is because it is consistent with the
Bible. A lot of human good is consistent with the Bible. Just because it is
consistent with the Bible does not ever make it biblical. What makes it
biblical is if it is derived from the Bible. It can be shown to have developed
from the text of Scripture. That is what it means to think biblically according
to what the Bible teaches, not just to have a system of morality.
There are a lot of unbelievers who have systems of morality. There are a
lot of unbelievers who understand certain establishment principles related to
authority, related to nationalism, related to marriage and family, but it may
be a part of their puzzle. Remember the illustration I have used of a jigsaw
puzzle?
You can have 20 pieces in one jigsaw puzzle that are identical to pieces
in another jigsaw puzzle. Those pieces in their jigsaw puzzle, let’s say it is
a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Moslem, those pieces may look
identical, but it is the context that defines what the pieces are. It is not
the individual pieces.
When you hear certain non-Christians talking about the importance of
family, what they mean by family is not what you and I should be talking about.
We get our ideas of family directly from the text of Scripture, not from
empirical data, not from sociology, not from the ideas of another religion that
may not be 100% kosher shall we say.
Demon influences are these ideas. That is why you have to develop
discernment to be able to tell the difference using the Bible as a tool for
understanding and discerning the difference between truth and error, because
Satan goes around like an angel of light. His ministers are ministers of
righteousness. They cloak themselves. He is the master counterfeiter. We have
to understand how to tell the difference between counterfeit truth and true truth.
That is demon influence.
We went through the exegetical details of the linguistic studies last
week. This is when a demon, an immaterial being, takes up residence inside the
body of an unbeliever, never a believer, only an unbeliever. This demon can
control the physical actions of the unbeliever. He does not bloat out their
soul though. The individual is still real, even though the soul may be somewhat
covered up, that soul is still in control at some level that can still exercise
positive volition.
The only solution to demon possession is for that person to hear the
gospel and to respond by trusting in Christ. That is the only option today.
There were different options, as we saw, at the time of Christ. He could cast
out a demon. He never exorcised a demon. The Greek word for exorcism, EKSORKIZO, is
only used of the magicians and the sorcerers. The others were trying to do it
through various uses of smells, bells, incantations, and things like that.
Demon influence is very real.
You can come under serious demon influence. You can come under serious
demon influence by becoming anti-Semitic. You can come under serious demon
influence by being anti-Zionistic. You can come under serious demon influence
by subscribing to the various theories of humanistic psychology. That is very
dangerous. That has captured the evangelical church.
There was an article on American
Thinker a couple of weeks ago called “The
Death of Evangelicalism.” It was absolutely excellent. This writer laid the
beginning of the suicide attempt of the evangelical church at their acceptance
of humanistic psychology in the seminaries back in the 1970s and 1980s. I could
not agree with him more.
The next step in committing suicide was the acceptance of contemporary
Christian music and contemporary Christian worship. Music is a language. It may
not be consistent with a biblical or a theistic worldview. It can communicate a
message that is 180 degrees contrary to the words that you put with that music.
You are giving a mixed message.
We have studied that. You can go back to the Revelation
series I taught seven or eight years ago going through that study, as well
as the 2013
series that Scott Aniol taught at the Chafer
Conference, or you can read his book, Worship
and Music: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship. It is very good. So
many Christians, solid Christian teachers in other areas, such as Chuck Swindoll, I read this quote from him last week:
“Can a Christian be demonized? For a number of years I questioned this,
but now I am convinced it can occur. If a ‘ground of entrance’ has been granted
the power of darkness (such as trafficking in the occult, a continual
unforgiving spirit, a habitual state of carnality, etc.) the demon(s) sees this
as a green light-okay to proceed …” Chuck Swindoll, Demonism
“I have worked personally with troubled, anguished Christians for many
years. On a few occasions I have assisted in the painful process of delivering
them of demons … while present within the body (perhaps in the region of the
soul) that evil force can wreck havoc within the life.” ~Chuck Swindoll
These teachers base their doctrine of demonology not on exegesis in the
Scripture, but on personal experience. This has happened time and time again.
What I want to do now is address this question of “Can a Christian be
Demon Possessed?” How do we understand that, from whence do we get our
information? Always we start with the Bible.
I want to correct something. It is in the book on Spiritual Warfare. I have taught this many times, but we always
have to come back to it.
There is a traditional argument against demon possession of a Christian.
It goes something like this:
Major Premise: The Holy Spirit indwells every believer.
We all believe this. That is a true statement. The Holy Spirit indwells
every believer. We will look at the verses in just a minute.
Minor Premise: A demon and the Holy Spirit cannot be in the same place, the same
location.
That sounds good, but it is fallacious, because, and is often pointed
out, if you go to Job 1–2 there is a convocation of the sons of God, which
includes Satan and the fallen angels. They come before the throne of God in
Heaven. You see the same thing in the passage we studied a couple of weeks ago
in 1 Kings 22. Micah sees this vision of the throne room of God. The sons of
God are gathered before God. He asks for a deceiving spirit to go forth to
deceive Ahab. You have the presence of evil angels in the throne room of God.
They are in the same location as God. The problem is this minor premise.
Conclusion: A Christian therefore cannot have both a demon and the Holy Spirit in
the same place.
It is not that this is not generally true, but it is not specifically
true. We have go get down to the specifics of what the Scripture says. This is
a poorly constructed argument. The problem is not with the conclusion that a
Christian cannot be demon possessed. It is that the argument to get there is
poorly, poorly constructed. We have to understand what the text actually
teaches.
I have seen on the Internet any number of listings of all the different
things that Christ does for us at the instant of salvation. I have seen Lewis
Sperry Chafer’s 32 things revised to 34 things revised to 40 things. I have
seen others list 88 things, some list 100 things, and some list 150 things. If
you look at the way Lewis Sperry Chafer listed them in his Systematic Theology, many said something like the seven things the
Holy Spirit of God does for you. Then it lists those seven things as sub-points.
Other people come along and break them out as main points. It depends on
how you organize the things.
Basically, they are all giving the same list. They just innumerate them
and break the points out differently. That is why I have never tried to come up
with a fixed number on that. There are an innumerable number of things that
were done for every believer at the instant we believed in Christ.
We are told in Ephesians 1 that we have been blessed with every
spiritual blessing. I cannot count those. It is beyond my numerical ability. We are all indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God from the instant of
salvation. This never happened before in history. Never was one single
Old Testament hero indwelt by the Holy Spirit like the Church Age believer is.
The Old Testament believers are endued or empowered by the Spirit for
specific leadership roles. We studied that—the Judges, Moses, those who built
the furniture in the tabernacle. It is all empowerment for specific roles. It
is not for the spiritual life. It is not creating a dwelling place for the Shekinah, the dwelling of the Lord Jesus Christ in every
believer.
The two key verses here are:
“Do you not know?” Paul says
that a lot. The plural use is to talk about the whole congregation. Paul is
talking in the plurality. It is as “don’t you want to be here on Saturday
morning for the men’s prayer breakfast?” When I say this you know that I am not
talking to everyone here. I am just talking to the men who are here. We
understand contexts to what the “you” means, but I am talking to everybody even
though I am using a plural “y’all.” “Don’t y’all want to be here for the men’s
prayer breakfast?” I am speaking to each individual male that is in the room.
That is how language works.
When Paul says “do y’all”, talking to the Corinthians, do y’all not know
he is talking to the group, so he uses a plural but he means every individual
in that congregation. The reason I say that is because there are some people
who use this verse to say that the church, the body, is the dwelling place of
the Holy Spirit, not the individual. That is a misunderstanding, a misexegesis.
I think it is Romans 8, 9, 10 that makes the same point. Paul says if
the Spirit of God dwells in you. This is speaking about the facts assuming that
the Spirit of God would dwell within every believer. This is clear that this is
a doctrine for every single believer from the instant of salvation.
The word that is translated “temple” here is the important word. I have
two different words that are Greek words in the bottom panel that are used and
translated “temple”:
NAOS
refers to the inner sanctum, the holiest, and the Holy of Holies. It is the
most sanctified location. This is where the Shekinah
dwelt in the Temple in the Old Testament.
HIERON is
a much broader term. This includes the courtyard where the laver and the brazen
altar were located. It goes out to the courtyard of the women and even the
courtyard of the Gentiles. It would talk about the entire Temple complex, the outer
courtyards and the external grounds.
Slide 14: I have shown the differences in this slide. NAOS: Holy of Holies,
which is inside the Holy Place where the presence of God dwelt. Everything else
is the HIEROS, the outer Temple. Herod’s Temple is depicted in the slide.
Slide 15: This is another schematic. We have the Holy of Holies on the left, NAOS.
It referred to the Holy Place, the Holy of Holies specifically. You could not
go in there at all unless you were cleansed as a priest. You could not go in to
do the altar of incense or change the bread or any of those things. Only the
priests who sanctified themselves could go in there.
HIEROS is
the outer Temple.
Slide 16: You see the same thing here with the tabernacle. The tabernacle itself
would be the NAOS, and the outer areas would all be the HIEROS.
1 Corinthians 3:16, “Do you not
know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
You, as an individual believer, you are the place where this dwelling of
the Holy Spirit created through the Son of God, Christ in you the hope of glory, Colossians 1:27. It is created. It
is special. It is not that the Holy Spirit just dwells in you, but it is the
significance of that dwelling making you a NAOS temple, not a HIEROS
temple. In a NAOS temple nothing unsanctified can enter. That is what defines and
clarifies that particular argument.
1 Corinthians 6:19, “Or do you not
know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you
have from God, and you are not your own?”
Both these 1 Corinthians verses emphasize the fact that it is a NAOS
temple. Therefore, nothing, no one unclean can go in. Nothing evil can go into
that especially sanctified area. That relates to our positional sanctification.
We can wrap it up by refining the argument this way:
Argument against demon possession of a Christian
Major Premise: Every believer is a set apart sanctuary (by the Holy Spirit) for the
indwelling Jesus Christ. We are a NAOS sanctuary.
Minor Premise: Unsanctified creatures (including demons) cannot enter into this kind
of set-apart sanctuary. It is very distinct. The word “temple” is very
important.
Conclusion: Demons cannot enter into the set-apart sanctuaries of the believer’s
body. Our body has been set apart to God as a NAOS temple for the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is why John can say in 1 John 4:4, “Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world.”
That is the theological argument as it is derived from the text of
Scripture.
We have another place in the Gospels where Jesus uses an illustration
that is very similar. It is in relation to Israel and casting out demons.
This is a situation in Matthew 12 about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus illustrates this because the Pharisees have said that He was casting out
demons by the power of Beelzebub, which is another title for Satan. Jesus said:
Matthew 12:28, “But if I cast out
demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”
What we saw there is that this does not mean that the Kingdom of God has
been inaugurated or that it started or any of that. What it means is that the
Kingdom of God is being offered and it is present in the person of the King,
who is offering the Kingdom.
The other night at the Israel conference Andy Woods gave an excellent
presentation on Why
Christians Should Support Israel. He had copies of his new book, The
Coming Kingdom: What is the Kingdom and How is Kingdom Now Theology Changing
the Focus of the Church? This is an excellent book. It goes through all
of these different issues. If you want to get a good book detailing and going
through all the different passages on how the “Kingdom of God” is used then you
need to get that book.
You may not realize it, but at the core of progressive politics is the
idea that was borrowed from liberal Christianity at the end of the 19th
century, because they were post-millennial. We are going to be better and
better in every way. They co-opted the word “Kingdom of God” and that the
Kingdom of God was being manifested through progressive political theory. We
are going to make everything better and better and better.
Of course, that was slaughtered on the fields of Flanders in WWI.
This perverted heretical idea of the kingdom is at very core of liberal
progressive politics. They have secularized it and destroyed it. That is part
of the abuse of that whole term.
Jesus says that this is evidence that He has cast, EKBALLO,
out a demon, and the Kingdom of God is present among them in the person of the
King. Then He gives an illustration. He says:
Matthew 12:29, “Or how can anyone
enter the strong man’s house and carry off his property, unless he first binds
the strong man? And then he will plunder his house.”
Jesus is using the illustration that if you have got a thief coming into
your house and he gets to you before you get to your .45, then he ties you up,
then only after he has tied you up can he then plunder the house. He applies
that general illustration.
Matthew 12:43, “Now when the
unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking
rest, and does not find it. Then it
says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’; and when it comes, it
finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order.”
The house is unoccupied because the demon was taken out, bound, and
removed. He finds moral, ethical cleansing or cleaning of the house, spring cleaning. This is what the Pharisees were doing in
legalism. They were just doing spring cleaning.
Matthew 12:45, “Then it goes and
takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in
and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.
That is the way it will also be with this evil generation.”
Then the demon comes back and says, oh, they have cleaned up their life.
Then the demon goes and gets all his buddies. They come back and the whole gang
takes up residence there. They live there because it has not been sanctified.
It has only been morally cleansed. That is the point of that illustration. Only
if there is true spiritual sanctification that takes place is it going to be
prevented from coming back.
1 John 4:4, “Greater is He that is
in you, than he that is in the world.”
John 17:15, “I do not pray that
You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the
evil one.”
Jesus’ high priestly prayer I think is an extremely strong argument
against demon possession. The night before Jesus goes to the cross Jesus prays
for the church. That is why it is called the high priestly prayer. This is the
“Lord’s Prayer,” not Matthew 6. This is the Lord’s prayer
here. He is praying for His disciples. He is praying to God, the Father. He
says that He does not pray that You should take them
out of the world. The world is Satan’s cosmic thinking. That is demon
influence. Do not take them out of the world, but keep them from the evil one.
In both places this same Greek word is translated:
The word is the Greek preposition EK, which indicates severance or
separation for the grammatical explanation. He is not going to separate us from
the world, but Jesus is praying that we should be kept separated from the evil
one.
Jesus, who is our High Priest, who is always in fellowship and has
perfect harmony with God, the Father, knows how to pray and gets His prayers
answered. If Jesus is praying that God is going to keep us from the evil one,
then guess what? We are going to be kept from the evil one. That is going to
keep us from any kind of demon possession.
The grammatical explanation here indicates severance or separation.
Whatever else the Lord intended by saying this, would certainly exclude at the
minimum the invasion of a believer’s body by unholy demons. Since we know that
the Father has heard and is fulfilling Christ’s request, this must at least
include protection for all believers, obedient and disobedient, from demon
possession. Jesus is praying for the body of Christ. At any moment we can be
out of fellowship. That does not expose us to demon possession. God is the one
who is always protecting us.
Another great promise:
1 John 5:18, “We know that whoever
is born of God does not sin; but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and
the wicked one does not touch him.”
“Wicked one” is a reference to Satan or the demons. He cannot touch the
believer.
1 John 5:19, “We know that we are
of God and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.”
This is another way that John takes what Jesus prayed in the high
priestly prayer and writing it in his own words.
Paul does the same thing in 2 Thessalonians 3:3, “The Lord is faithful, and He will strengthen and protect you from the
evil one.”
Paul does not say that the Lord might, on occasion, on the condition
that you are in fellowship, on the condition that you have not done certain
sins. Paul says, “He will strengthen and
protect you from the evil one.” Our protection is totally on the basis of
the power of God and our position in Christ, and the fact that we are a sanctified temple for the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Last but not least we have the promise:
2 Peter 1:3–4, “as His divine
power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through
the knowledge of Him who calls us by glory and virtue, by which have been given
to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers
of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world
through lust.”
What is left out of the word “all things”, everything? Is anything? No,
everything is everything. The point of this is that the Epistles in the New
Testament, Romans to Jude, are written to Church Age believers to teach us how
to handle everything we are going to face pertaining to the spiritual life of
the Church Age believer. That is the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.
That is what 2 Peter 1:3 emphasizes. The Scripture is sufficient because God
has given us everything.
Where between Romans and Jude do you find anything about demon
possession at all? Not one place. The silence is thundering. It is so obvious.
There is not only no mention of demon possession, but there is no mention of a
solution to demon possession. You do not have anybody casting out any demons or
anything from Romans to Jude. It is not mentioned at all.
Major Premise is that the Word of God is sufficient.
Minor Premise is that nowhere in the Epistles addressed to Church Age believers is
there a mention of a problem of demon possession or the solution to demon
possession.
Conclusion: Demon possession is not an issue for the Church Age believer. If it was, it would be mentioned.
Some people are going to say that it is in the Gospels. But the Gospels
are a different dispensation. The Gospels are the period of the Law and dealing
with this specifically intense period under the Age of Israel, the dispensation
of the Messianic offer of the Kingdom. It happens also in Acts and only during
the transition period at the beginning of the Church Age when the apostles are
going out and proclaiming the gospel.
That makes it clear from Scripture that this is not a problem for Church
Age believers. Yet, there is a whole segment of Christians who have been
influenced by the theology of third-world countries, the mysticism, animism, spiritism that comes out
of these third-world countries. Missionaries become deceived
by this. This is what happened.
One event is that you had a great professor at Dallas Theological
Seminary, Merrill Unger, who wrote his doctorial dissertation on Biblical Demonology concluding that
Christians could not be demon possessed, impossible for Christians to be demon
possessed. Then he got a lot of push back from missionaries who gave all their
personal testimonies based upon experience, not exegesis, not the Word of God.
These missionaries said that they knew all these people who made professions of
faith, etc., etc., and then they were demon possessed.
You do not know because you are a finite being. You cannot see into the
realm of the invisible. You have to rely on the Word of God. Unger succumbed to
the pressure and changed his view and wrote another book called Demons in the World Today and also What Demons Can do to Saints. He took
the position that Christians could be demon possessed.
Everybody in Bible churches, including Chuck Swindoll
and a number of other people, have been confused ever since because they have
lost the ability to exegete the text. They are no longer standing on the Word
of God and the Word of God alone, but they are standing on:
to tell them what is
really going on. Charles Ryrie said many, many times that you are not following
the Scripture if you are interpreting the Scripture from your experience. You
have to interpret your experience from the Word of God. The Word of God tells
you how to understand your experience. You may have had some kind of
experience.
You cannot question somebody else’s experience. You cannot say that they
did not experience that. “They would say that they did, and how can you say I
did not?” The issue is you did not interpret it correctly, because you
interpreted it on the basis of your experience and not on the basis of what the
Word of God says.
Once you get the Word of God into your soul, then you can hear or even
experience these things and know that it sure seemed real, but that devil is
the great deceiver! I have been deceived. I am going to interpret this
according to the Word of God.
Remember what Deuteronomy 13 says. It says that you are going to have
dreamers of dreams and false prophets that come along, and they even work
miracles. But God said these false prophets are given to test you to see if you
will love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and
not run after these deceivers and these deceptions. It does not matter how real
it seems to you, you are going to be tested to see if the Word of God is more
real to you than your feelings, your experience, and everything else.
This really comes to play when you come under some really serious
adversity in life. I have seen so many Christians who fade out, and they run to
all kinds of different solutions. Because the trend of our sin nature is to say
that I do not want God’s solution. I want to solve it myself. We are
antagonistic to the solution that God says, because that is the trend of our
sin nature.
That is a nice introduction bringing us back to Saul who is just as carnal. He is über carnal. He is hyper
carnal. He has been in rebellion against God, and that rebellion against God
has been identified by the prophet Samuel as being equivalent to idolatry and
to the sin of divination. It is equivalent to already being involved and under
heavy demonic influence. That is who Saul is. He is under this heavy demonic
influence.
We come to this situation where Saul is under extreme paranoia, extreme
fear that is debilitating him, shutting him down. This may also include
depression. We see across the board today, in Christianity and in the world,
people who are struggling with all sorts of psychological problems, emotional
problems. They are real problems. They come under extreme depression. They come
under fear. They come under anxiety. They come under all kinds of things.
The knee-jerk reaction from our culture is to say, “Let’s go to the
doctor and get some medication.” The medication is going to do something. It is
going to do some good things. It is going to do a lot of bad things. There a lot of books out on it. You can go to various
sources and search on these things on the Internet. A book I have read is Toxic Psychology and several others that
are out there. Every time I talk about this I get an upset e-mail, because
people are relying on whatever drug they are taking in order to solve their
problem.
But what we see here is a very interesting dynamic. I am going to start
off by asking the question here:
Can music deliver a person from demonic depression?
It is an interesting question. What in the world is going on here? We
have to understand the mechanics of the situation:
This is not a believer who has been on negative volition, rejecting God
for a few days or a few weeks or something like that. This is somebody who is
the anointed leader of Israel in a special position of the history of the
world. He is not John Doe Christian. He is very, very different. He does not
have the Holy Spirit indwelling him, but he is not demon possessed either. That
is not the issue here. The solution is unusual. There is not another place in
the Scripture that has anything like this.
When it is recognized that Saul is under this oppression from this demon
that is outside of him. That is very important. That is what the preposition tell us. Even his servants say:
1 Samuel 16:16, “Let our master
now command your servants, who are before you, to seek out a man who is a
skillful player on the harp.”
A few weeks ago when I was touching on this, somebody made some comment,
“I cannot wait to hear about your thoughts on music therapy.” I had not even
thought about that. That was great. That really gave me something to think
about. David is going to play. He is a skillful player on the harp.
“And it shall be that he will play
it with his hand when the distressing spirit from God is upon you, and you
shall be well.”
“Upon” is the word ‘al, which
means outside of.
Here we see the solution:
1 Samuel 16:23, “And so it was,
whenever the spirit from God was upon Saul, that David would take a harp and
play it with his hand. Then Saul would become refreshed and well, and the
distressing spirit would depart from him.”
The “spirit” is the evil spirit that came from God. The spirit was upon
Saul. That is the word ‘al, outside,
not inside. It is not be,
which is the preposition for the word “in.”
Notice, whenever this happened, which was not just once or twice, this
happens regularly. Saul has got a real problem. Saul has a fragmented soul. He
is in extreme paranoia. He constantly has to get relief. What that tells us is
that the music therapy only alleviates the symptoms for a short time. The
playing of music only has a short duration in terms of relief.
We are told that when he would do this that Saul would become refreshed
and well. The distressing spirit would depart from him. That is ‘al, meaning from over or above him. It
is not in him. We are not talking demon possession. We are talking an external
vantage point.
I worked my way through this. I had to have a good visual for this. We
are going to start off thinking about the make-up of every human being. We have
a brain inside most of our heads. There are a few people that you wonder about
on occasion. They appear a little brainless and vacuous, but we imputatively
have a brain. In that brain is a material thing, but inside that brain is a
soul. That soul is immaterial.
If you can explain how a ghost runs the physical machine, then you are
more knowledgeable than anyone else in human history. How does a material body and brain get run by an immaterial soul? How
does it connect? How is it secured? How is it held together? We do not know.
There is another thing that has to be understood here in the make-up of
a person. That is the sin nature. It inflames the soul. When that sin nature is
not controlled, then the sin nature controls all of the components of the soul.
The more the sin nature is allowed free rein, especially in the areas of
weakness and sin, the more destructive it is to the soul, to the thinking of
the person, to their conscience, to their self-consciousness, and it is also
going to impact their emotions.
There is another thing that we have to add to this. At this point this
is a picture of an unbeliever.
We are going to add the human spirit. That shows that this is a
regenerate person. I believe Saul was regenerate, but he still has that nasty
sin nature that is fragmenting his soul because he is relying upon that and not
on the Word of God.
If we think about this a little bit in terms of the spiritual progress
and deterioration, the first thing that we see is that negative volition gives
the sin nature control. When we choose to operate on the sin nature we are
choosing to make that decision. We are letting the sin nature control. The more
the sin nature controls, the more it fragments and tears up our soul. But who
is making the choice? Who is responsible? We are responsible. It is not some
external influence.
There may be influences from peers, professors, the world system, and
all these other things, but we choose what we are going to respond to. We
choose what we are going to apply, and what we are going to think about. The
more we reside in the power of the sin nature, the more destructive that is
going to be, until we are a backslider, and until we are at a point where God
is going to pull back the restraints and let us freefall into self-destruction
spiritually. That is part of divine discipline.
The next thing that happens is the sin nature creates emotional control.
One term that was coined for this is the emotional revolt of the soul. I have a
little problem with that. I like it, but a little problem with that is that it
indicates that the emotion is always controlling the soul, but the emotion may
be the original control, but it changes the thinking, because the unbeliever is
going to generate a lot of thought that is consistent with his false views.
What I mean is that you can have someone who is an intellectual that is
not apparently emotional. They are still in emotional revolt, because that is
ultimately what is generating. What is the emotion? Hatred toward God is the
emotion that is generating everything. It is hostility, an antagonism, hatred toward God.
Remember, I taught that in worldliness you are imitating the thinking of
Satan. You have two basic broad ways in which that is manifested. One is this
sort of antagonism toward God, this hatred toward God.
The other is arrogance. Those two A’s.
This is what we have seen in Saul. We have seen his arrogance almost
from the beginning. He becomes more and more hostile toward God until God gives
him over. That is that verb, that process, that is indicated in Romans 1:26–27,
“God gave them over to …” Each one of
those steps is further deterioration because they have suppressed righteousness
and replaced God with the worship of the creature rather than the worship of
the Creator. That is what Saul did.
Remember, “rebelliousness is like the sin of divination, and
insubordination is like the sin of idolatry.” That is what this is. You get so
immersed in idolatry, where you are worshiping the things of the world, the
details of life, that eventually it destroys your soul.
After you have gone through this process, that is all generated by your
own volition. All of this was generated by Saul’s volition. Then you get to a
super level of divine discipline that only a few people have experienced in
history. It may not be us. That is demon depression. This is the only example
like this that we have in Scripture. This demonic depression on Saul increases
the fragmentation of his soul until he is almost incapable of functioning.
Then what happens? There is a temporary alleviation of the problem:
music. Music does not provide a permanent solution. It provides temporary
relief through structure and meaning. That is what music is. Music has
structure and meaning, unless you are listening to John Cage, Def Leppard, Kiss, or somebody like that. There is structure
and meaning that when it is listened to apparently helped Saul’s thinking to be
structured, and to have relief from what was going on.
If you want to get an in-depth analysis of music and worldview and all
that, I recommend those studies I did back in the Revelation
series on worship and music, or the three
lessons that Scott Aniol had in the Chafer Conference
in 2013. His book you can also get on the Internet, Worship
in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship. It is excellent.
Too many Christians have been deceived by the devil to think that the
music is neutral. Music is not neutral. All music communicates something by its
form and structure. You are either communicating something that is consistent
with a biblical worldview or derived from a biblical worldview or you are not.
Most music that is used in churches today does not communicate by form and
structure. You have got the devil’s music. It is not “rock” and it is not
“syncopation”. It is not any of these things that a lot of people said it was.
It is just the structure of the music. What happens is this provides temporary
relief, and there goes the demon. He is out of there.
Something new has developed over the last few years. There is a lot of
debate over this, even in academics, as to how valid this is. It used to be one
of those “Mickey Mouse courses” about 30–40 years ago. It is called “Music
Therapy.” It is a branch of psycho-therapy. I want to
define it for you.
The Music Therapy Association defines “music therapy” as:
There is a lot of debate as to just what that is. This is something that
we ought to understand. There is something that happens when music is played
for patients who have dementia. You can start singing a hymn, and they will
remember it and sing it with you. Or you can sing a Bible verse that they have
learned that tune and they will sing it with you, but if you ask them to say
the verse with you, they cannot do it. They do not remember it.
Music works in another part of the brain than the memory. We know that
music has an impact that people who are struggling with anxiety, paranoia, that
music has an impact in calming them down. But no one has any data on it. This
is a really under-funded, under-researched area according to my research. There
are a lot of people who jump to a lot of overblown conclusions as to what it
can do. We know it does something, but nobody knows why or how it works, but it
does do something.
A lot of it is mixed up with a lot of psycho-therapy,
mumbo-jumbo, and juju black magic that does not have any biblical base.
That seems to be what is going on with Saul, but it is not a permanent
solution.
It is just like all the other quick-fix solutions we have for people who
are facing depression and anxiety and all these other things that we have in
our culture for which they are being over medicated and over medicated and over
medicated. The medication has a temporary quick fix, but it does not solve the
problem because the problem is the sin nature. The problem is a spiritual
problem.
If this spiritual problem is not addressed with the Word of God, if it
is not addressed with the spiritual skills, if you are not confessing sin, and
if you are not turning to the Word of God to cleanse you further from your sin
by refreshing and rebooting your mind with the truth of God’s Word, renewing
your mind, Romans 12:2, then it is not going to work. The quick-fix human
solutions of human viewpoint are just that. They are nothing more than a
panacea. It does not solve the problem. We have to address it spiritually.
Slide 38: I think this chart explains what is going on and what can happen to
many believers as they are under some kind of serious fragmentation of the soul
due to years of carnality, years of not really trusting the Word, years of not
really understanding the Word, and deceiving themselves. This happens with a
lot of people.
If you are in a tough situation and are going through anxiety, you are
going through depression that does not necessarily mean that that is the cause
of your case. It is for some people. You look at your life and you have not
been confessing sin. If you have been living in a lot of sin for a long time
then this might fit you. If you have not been, then do not put yourself under a
pseudo-guilt complex and say, “Well, golly, I have been a horrible sinner for
years. I have not used any doctrine.”
We all go through different tests. We all fail, but the solution is the
Word of God. There is always hope. God can solve it. If a person is going
through depression, that can be the area of weakness of the sin nature. They
trend toward fear. They trend toward worry. They trend toward depression. You
have to memorize Scripture that relates and targets those areas in your sin
nature. Constantly claim those promises to reformat your brain into thinking in
terms of the Word and not in terms of your own weak sin nature.
Saul only gets a temporary fix. Every time that David takes down the
harp, Saul is temporarily refreshed, then the spirit departs and then it comes
back. Saul goes back and forth. There is no solution because he does not turn
to the Word of God. Our hope, our only hope, is the Word of God.