The Deliverance Battle

On Saturday, a few of us from All Saints attended a day on Christian Healing at Guildford Cathedral. There were all sorts of workshops and I chose to go to one on Deliverance ministry – this, for the uninitiated, is the ministry which deals with those areas which come under the heading of the Occult and the paranormal.

I would like to be able to be terribly rationalistic about this and say that there is no such thing as people who come under the influence of evil or strange manifestations and psychic type phenomena – but I know there are. There is evil in the world and I know that some people seem to have an extremely tough time under its influence.

In the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, there are many calls for God to join and support God’s people in battle – if God is for them, they cry, then who can be against them – and unless the Lord watches over a city , the watchmen may as well not bother waking up (Psalm 127:1).

In Church, these days, we do not much like war imagery when it comes to our spiritual lives, we tend to prefer a more gentle sort of live and let live with some gentle suggestion (perhaps even persuasion) here and there. The idea of spiritual warfare is not one to which we warm. But whatever language we use there is evil in the world – perhaps personifying it is not where we would want to stand – but there are things which are plain wrong and against God, there are things which people hold onto and get into which pull them away from God and family, and worse than that, diminish their own humanity.

It is not an easy subject – but the fact that the Church does take seriously the subject of evil is really apparent in the Baptism service where, after annointing the candidate with oil – we say fight valiently under the banner of Christ against sin, the world, and the devil…..this is not little stuff, not consigned to a dusty corner, this is real and if it is real it has to be, at least a little bit, urgent.

We all know, from our own journey with God, that we wander far more easily than we would like. This propensity for sin is in all of us as is a sort of morbid curiosity about whether it might be OK just this once to see what the future might hold, or to try to heal a past hurt by summoning a spirit or consulting a medium. After all, we tell ourselves, most of this stuff is just a trick anyway, but it might make things seem a bit better.

TV shows now regularly have people who call themselves psychic summoning spirits and telling people things from the other side – for people of faith this is dicing with death. There is no question that Christians are forbidden from dabbling in any sort of occult or divination practice. We simply should not be fiddling around with things which are hidden from us by death or time to come.

When I was at school one of my friends told me she and another set of friends had been dabbling with a ouiji board and something had happened – some movement or message. My friend was changed, her face became drawn and she looked afraid – as this was near the end of O Levels (GCSEs now!) she moved school and I never found out what happened to her – but her response to something which had started out as a game was extreme and frightening.

I remember when I was revnovating a bathroom in the States a few years ago – I removed some tiles thinking I would have a small job to simply re-tile. It turned out that the pipes behind the tiles had been leaking for years, the dry wall had literally rotted from behind and it would have been a matter of time until someone knocked the visible tiles and they all cascaded back into the hollow wall.

Playing with things of evil seems to be a bit like that – we may look alright – but deep inside, behind the neat exterior, we are being undermined and eaten away – we might not even know what is causing it, why it is happening, we cannot put into a simple frame of reference why things seem to keep going pear shaped. The only response to this is repentance – sometimes it might take some quite intensive prayer with other people – but always we have to turn over the evil which we have played with to God. Evil unsettles and makes us distrustful – it hides itself as common sense and reason – so close to the truth that we do not even notice that the sand has washed away from beneath our feet until we are nearly drowning.

When we realize the damage which we can do to ourselves and the hurt which people do cause themselves perhaps the language of battle seems a little less extreme. God fight against our enemies was the ancient cry and we echo that. God fight against the evil which would beset us, give us strength to keep to your path, hard as it might be, and where we are broken – call us to repentance and healing and deliverance.