Thoughts on faith, life, and art.
2. Who can become possessed?
In my previous post, I laid out a series of supernatural experiences I’d gone through. While all of them had disturbed me on some level, none more so than the possession experiences. The biggest question burning in my mind was, who exactly can become possessed? I mean, I had spent most of my life believing that Christians were safe from possession. But the experiences I’d had with my friends seemed to say otherwise. And if they weren’t immune from it, then neither was I—and that was a disturbing thought. I had to be honest with myself, and ask why I believed that Christians couldn’t be possessed. Was it something the Bible taught, or was it just an assumption I’d made? Or was it some combination of both?
As I began to read up on this, I encountered a number of fascinating books on the topic. One of the first things that got my attention, though, was a book by Merrill F. Unger entitled, What Demons Can Do to Saints. He writes, “Clinical evidence abounds that a Christian can be demon-controlled as a carryover from pre-conversion days or can fall under Satan’s power after conversion and become progressively demonized, even seriously.”[1] Did you catch that? His use of the phrase “demon-controlled?” What Unger had observed clinically, I had observed experientially. Something else, or rather, someone else—an intelligent malicious entity—had been controlling the speech and body movements of those two friends of mine.
Secondly, I appreciated his use of the term “demonized.” It helped me frame this phenomenon from a Scriptural perspective. Did you know that when we read the word “possessed” in the Bible, it would be more properly translated as the word “demonized?” In fact, most translations will now have a footnote at the bottom saying, “demonized” whenever we encounter the word “possessed.”
From The ESV Study Bible Copyright © 2008 by Crossway — ESV Text Edition: 2016
One book summarized it saying, “Much of Christians’ confusion stems from an unfortunate translation in the King James Version, in which some were said to be “possessed” by a demon. . . The Greek word translated “possessed,” as numerous better-spoken authors have explained, is either daimonizomai, which carries a meaning of “demonized” without the ownership overtone, or echo, meaning several different things, notably, “with, accompanied by, or gripped by.” So [to be demonized means that] we can be influenced without being owned, nudged without being overwhelmed, [and] controlled without knowing it.”[2]
I love that summary because of its brevity. But I also loved the mention of “numerous better-spoken authors,” because it sent me on a search for a more in depth explanation. Perhaps the best, and most scholarly one I found was in C. Fred Dickason’s book, Demon Possession and the Christian. He breaks down the original Greek, and explains the grammar in a much more detailed way:
When we look at the word for demonization, improperly translated, “demon possession,” it is highly instructive [from an etymological standpoint] to notice its root and structure. The verb daimonizomai means “to be possessed by a demon.”(i) The participle from the same root, daimonizomenos, is used twelve times in the Greek New Testament. It is used only in the present tense, indicating the continued state of one inhabited by a demon. . . This participle has components to its structure. First there is the root, daimon, which indicates the involvement of demons. Second is the causative stem, iz, which shows that there is an active cause in this verb.(ii) Third is the passive ending, omenos. This conveys the passivity of the person described as demonized. Putting it all together, the participle in its root form means “a demon caused passivity.” This indicates a control other than that of the person who is demonized; he is regarded as the recipient of the demon’s action. . . Confusion has been introduced by translating this participle as “demon possessed.” The word possession implies ownership. . . Such a faulty translation, then, misleads people regarding the state of the demonized person and causes undue consternation and terror in the hearts of the afflicted and those concerned for him. . . It is better to use the term “demonization” or “demonized.”[3]
- C. Fred Dickason, Demon Possession and the Christian
Yes, the verb daimonizomai means “to be possessed by a demon,” but the word Scripture uses is, daimonizomenos, which paints an entirely different picture (as Dickason explained above). It was very helpful to learn the term “demonization,” because it cast a whole new light on many of my experiences. Especially the one where I woke up with that thing breathing on my neck—I hadn’t been able to fit that experience into the possession/oppression paradigm.
It didn’t seem to be a possession, because everything had been external. Not only could I sense its presence, but I could physically feel it in the room with me. Second, when I would command it to leave in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, it would actually obey me and leave. In classic possession instances, demons don’t do that. In fact, it is very difficult to get them to leave. But the part where I was the most confused, was that it kept coming back night after night for 3 months straight.
That’s what made it seem like it would be a case of oppression, albeit a severe one. But that didn’t quite fit the bill either. Oppression is usually subtle, and in this case, there was zero subtlety to its approaches. Sometimes, I could even hear the demon coming. In most oppression cases, people aren’t even aware that they are being oppressed. It’s like the frog in the boiling water analogy. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it jumps right out. But, if you put a frog in a pot of room temperature water, and slowly raise the temperature until it’s boiling, the frog will stay in the water until it boils to death. That’s how demons like to oppress us. Most of the time they don’t want us to know that they are there slowly raising the temperature on the water.
The term “demonization” was much more comprehensive and far better at describing what I’d gone through—specifically, where one is regarded as “a recipient of a demon’s action.” There had definitely been a demon acting, and I was definitely the intended recipient of those actions. Once I learned to start thinking of things in terms of being demonized, rather than in terms of being oppressed/possessed, I realized I had been asking the wrong question all along. Rather than asking, “who can become possessed?”—I should have been asking, “who can become demonized?” The answer, it would seem, could be, “anyone.” Anyone could become demonized—believers and non-believers alike. How, and why, will become much more clear once we answer our next question. “How does one become demonized in the first place?”
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Merrill F. Unger, What Demons Can Do to Saints, (Moody Publishers, 1991), page 150.
Andy Reese, and Jennifer Barnett, Freedom Tools: For overcoming life’s tough problems, (Chosen Books, 2015), page 58.
C. Fred Dickason, Demon Possession and the Christian, (Moody Press, 1987), page 37-38.
i. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (U. of Chicago, 1952), page 168.
ii. William Douglas Chamberlain, An Exegetical Grammar of the Greek New Testament, (Macmillan, 1957), page 15.
(posted 03-07-23)