If We Have Authority over All Demons, Why Didn’t Paul Just Take Authority over the Thorn-in-the-Flesh Spirit?
It is plain that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was an evil spirit that kept inciting people to hurt Paul.
Satan is allowed to persecute the Church under the New Covenant. In fact, all those who want to live godly in Christ Jesus WILL suffer persecution (2 Timothy 3:12). If you could command away any spirit that stirs up persecution against you or others, you could invalidate this verse! So you can’t do it, and neither could Paul, who wrote the verse just cited.
We have the authority to make any demon leave any person. However, we don’t have the right to command principalities and powers, or even the Devil, to never bother us again. If we could do that, Jesus would have just taken authority over the devil and made him leave after one temptation rather than enduring three (and more later, according to Hebrews 4:15). We could also invalidate all the Scriptures that tells us how to deal with the devil, which would then be unnecessary.
Thus, our authority over demons has limits. You can cast a spirit of infirmity out of a person in your city, but you cannot cast a demon out of a city completely. No one did such a thing in the Bible, so the people trying to do that today under the guise of “spiritual warfare” are wasting their time and energy.
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