“Spiritual Things: Part 4 – Demons” 

Series: Spiritual Things [on screen] 

Rev. Matthew C. McCraw, EdD 

First Baptist Church, Bartow, Florida 

May 31, 2020 

Introductory Comments: 

What a joy to be led in worship through music. I joked with Dirck this week about trying to pick out some songs that had to do with demons. 

Well, there’s not a lot of worship songs out there about demons, but we are going to learn about them nonetheless. Before we do, let’s go to God in prayer and ask Him to teach us.

(prayer) 

Think about what comes to mind when you think about demons. For many of us, our ideas of demons have been shaped by movies, literature, Halloween costumes, nightmares, and even team mascots.

If I were to ask you to describe how a demon looks, many of you would probably describe something slender with grayish or red skin, sharp teeth and claws, pointy ears, perhaps with a set of horns, and a pointed tail.  However, those descriptions don’t come from the Bible.

The Bible has quite a bit to say about demons so let’s get into our study.

We are continuing our series called “Spiritual Things.” [on screen] Thus far we have discussed Heaven, Hell, and angels. Today, we will discuss demons. [on screen]

Most of you, if you’ve been worshiping along with us each week, have picked up on the fact that I try to answer a few basic questions each week about the topic we’re studying. So, here we go!

First, let’s answer the question . . .

I. What are demons? [on screen]

Theologian Wayne Grudem offers a good definition for demons, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Grudem defines demons as, “Evil angels who sinned against God and who now continually work evil in the world.”

That’s a pretty simple and pretty biblical explanation of what demons are.

So, demons are actually spirits or angels. How do we know this? Well, the Bible says as much. Second Peter 2:4 says, “For if God didn’t spare the angels who sinned but cast them into hell and delivered them in chains of utter darkness to be kept for judgment” [on screen]

Remember, also, that God created everything and it was good. So, demons were once good angels, but something happened. As we learned last week, angels have moral choices. Well, a certain group of angels decided to make the moral choice to reject God and His ways, they were cast out of Heaven into Hell, and these evil angels, or evil spirits, are what we know as demons.

We don’t know all the details about how they fell into sin and fell from God’s grace, but by the time we get to Genesis 3 we see a demon tempting Adam and Eve to sin. So, sometime between Creation in Genesis 1, and the entrance of sin into the world in Genesis 3, these evil angels rebelled against God and His ways.

These evil angels also share some characteristics with good angels. 

They are generally spirit form, so they are invisible. Just as there may be good angels around us at any time, there may also be demons around us at any time.

They can at times take on physical form. We see this demonstrated most clearly in the story of the chief demon, Satan, taking on a physical form of a serpent. Further, we see in Scripture that demons may inhabit physical beings as, and we’ll look at a little more later.

They are intelligent, moral, and personal creatures. Although they do make wrong choices, primarily in rejecting God’s ways, they are able to make choices and communicate as intelligent personal beings. 

They can have great power and abilities beyond human abilities. Demons can do things that human beings can’t do. They are supernatural beings.

There are also some who are personal in nature. We hear about the name of a group of demons named Legion in Mark 5. We’ll learn more about Legion later. We also learn about Apollyon in Revelation 9. Obviously, the chief demon is a personal creature, and we’ll hear more about him in a moment. 

Also, demons are large in number, beyond what we ca