I am reading through Dostoevsky’s Demons right now (which is a fascinating and deeply challenging read), and wrestling with the fact that demons exist.
While I don’t believe in Deliverance ministry in its contemporary sense—that is, the Protestant brand of exorcism—and furthermore do not believe that people who have received Christ’s death and resurrection as salvation can be possessed by demons, I do often wrestle with various lies or ideas that have accumulated in my head over the years, just from the twists and turns of life. These ideas or ideologies have “taken possession” of me to a certain extent, at times, influencing choices I have made, spurring me in certain directions (oftentimes away from the “straight and narrow”). While I do not attribute these ideas or influences to demons necessarily (not in the literal sense), I find it interesting to consider the ways I continue to wrestle with my sin nature in this light.
Considerations of sin nature come with a mystery. How do childlike fears of monsters under beds, with time, yield to the horrifying fantasies that adults seek to realize every day? What goes wrong along the way?
The nature of darkness and of light has not changed; but something in our hearts has, in a way that none of us can repair on our own. A sort of entropy, a falling away, a missing of the mark. A distrust and a lack of wonder as we hide among the trees in the garden, steeped in shame and covering ourselves with fig leaves, thinking our ways are better.
There’s a simplicity to those child-like fears, a certain trust inherent to them that believes there is someone out there capable of slaying those monsters, even as we are incapable of slaying them ourselves.
I don’t think the same can be said for the dark fears and fantasies of adulthood. Instead, here I fear we find a form of learned helplessness that may in time calcify into a thoughtless (or, if we are honest, thoughtful) willingness to give into the darkness rather than allow the light to pierce it.
That, to me, is what’s truly frightful.
But in all of this, there is only one Word that can banish these ideas from our lives, and take them captive once and for all. That Word is a Name. That Name is Jesus—the name of the man who defeated death.
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What goes bump in the night, and instills us with such fear that we lose our sense of self to the maw of “might have been”? They once convinced me that nothing lived beneath my bed, just the dust bunnies that bred so freely on days we ceased to care to sweep far enough back. But then I grew, and something took possession of my mind that either I was greater, or lesser than who I really am. Such ideas have unmade nations, have brought to nought the roaring guns of war which tore apart the consciences of men. Such ideas have driven droves of swine to death in shallow coves, and nipped the heels of low-lives who haunt the ways to empty tombs, afraid to leave their chains behind. That monster under my bed, then is nothing like the one inside my head— that nature twinging my hidden springs, prodding me to death, just as I’m nodding off to another troubled slumber. Like so many, can this one, too be banished with just one word? ©Graham Jackson, 2025
Jesus is the true answer to all our woes and fears!! Thank you man!!