CAN BELIEVERS BE DEMONIZED?
When we come to God for salvation our sins are gone and we will spend eternity with God, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be afflicted by demons. The Bible makes no distinction between believers and unbelievers as far as demonizing is concerned. In fact, the Bible refers to many believers who were demonized: Paul’s thorn in the flesh was a demon (2 Corinthians 12:7), King Saul was a believer (1 Samuel 11:6) and was obviously demonized (1 Samuel 16:14-23), David was motivated by Satan to take a census of the people (1 Chronicles 21:1ff; 2 Samuel 24:1ff), Ananias and Saphira were believers (Acts 4:32-35) but allowed Satan to “fill” them (Acts 5:3), and Peter was Satan’s spokesman in tempting Jesus to not go to the cross (Matthew 16:23). Paul warns believers to not give Satan a “foothold” in their life (Ephesians 4:26-27), showing such a thing is possible. Jesus Himself called deliverance “the children’s bread” (Matthew 15:22-28), meaning it was for His children. A Christian can receive “another spirit” (2 Corinthians 11:2-4) and there are examples of believers being demonized (Luke 13:10-16; I Cor. 5:4, 5). Christians are warned to guard against this (1 Peter 5:8-9; Ephesians 6:10-18).
A believer belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. Satan cannot own him as he did before salvation (1 John 4:4), but he can still attack the person. As long as we are in this body we still have a sin nature, a capacity to sin just the same as we did before salvation. Salvation creates a new spiritual nature within us. But the old capacity to sin still remains in us. It is in this area, this sin nature, this capacity to sin, that demons work. Our new nature is greater but doesn’t take away our free will choice to still function in our sin nature. Paul’s struggle as recorded in Romans 7 describes this well.
A Christian has every right and resource to be free from this demonizing, however. Another person can trespass on property that you own, but you have every right and resource to put him off your property. You just need to learn how to do it. There are many resources on my web site for Spiritual Warfare: ChristianTrainingOnline.org If you have any questions please contact me at jerry@ChristianTrainingOrganization.org