What Do You Do When You Don’t Know If Someone’s Condition Is Demonic?
NEVER try to cast a demon out of someone unless you are SURE that you are dealing with a demon. Otherwise, you will cause all kinds of trouble and confusion; the person you’re ministering to could assume that since no demon left, he still has a demon when he really doesn’t. Do NOT get into presumption thinking that you just KNOW a person’s epilepsy must be a manifestation of a demon, for example. (Of course, if the person is being thrown into fire or water with the obvious intent of killing the person, as in Mark 9:17-29, it’s safe to assume it’s a demon.)
The good news is that you don’t really have to know if an illness is being directly caused by a demon that needs to be cast out. What I would do, and what I’d urge you to do, is to just take authority over that sickness and command it to be gone in the name of Jesus. For example, “Cancer, leave her in the name of Jesus!” That will cover things. If the cancer wasn’t caused by a demon, it has to leave and obey the name of Jesus. If a demon IS causing the cancer, it has to leave and obey the name of Jesus, and once it’s gone, the cancer it’s causing will be gone too.
We sometimes get the impression that God is a lot more technically nit-picky than He really is. I’ve seen people cast out what I was sure were nonexistent demons and people have still gotten healed – not because the minister prayed right, but because God honored his faith and met him where he was. If you’re commanding sickness to leave in the name of Jesus, Jesus will back His name and He won’t nit-pick over causes.
You can see this principle in Acts 19:11-12. The anointing drove out both sicknesses and demons. There was no need to make a distinction. There was no need to have a pile of certain cloths with a healing anointing and a pile of separate cloths with a different cast-out-demons anointing.
I also look at it this way – if I NEED to know that a demon is present (rare), the Holy Spirit will reveal that to me. Otherwise, I will just go ahead and command sickness to leave in Jesus’ name. I’ve had times that the Lord has shown me demons when I needed to see them, but it certainly hasn’t been the rule.
In other words, assume that a condition is NOT demonic unless (1) the Holy Spirit shows you otherwise or (2) there is an obvious manifestation like a growling voice telling you that he remembers when you cast him out of someone else in some other country. But even on (2), let me give you a word of caution. In some cultures, people have been “trained” well to “manifest” demons and sometimes they’ll go ahead and “manifest” something that isn’t really there. The risk in such places is that the people involved may actually end up with demons they didn’t have when they walked in because they opened themselves up to having demons mess around with their bodies. This can happen in those unbiblically-based churches where they think that have to puke up demons into fast-food fried chicken buckets. And I’m not making that up; I went to one place like that and saw what was going on. In a word, yuck. (I didn’t know in advance that they were going to pull that stunt.) A similar issue occurs in places where they’ve been taught incorrectly that ALL sicknesses are caused by demons and they try to cast demons out of EVERYONE who is sick. The result is a Satan-exalting mess, even though I’ve had people insist very adamantly that ALL sickness is demonic. They’re clearly wrong, as you can see by reading this book.
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