The Demonic Was Obvious

Why doesn’t the Bible contain more instructions on healing and deliverance?

Deliverance ministers say that deliverance ministry is biblical, but to learn how to cast out demons, you need to read a deliverance manual. If deliverance ministry is biblical, why don’t we find instructions on how to do it in the Bible?

Jesus commanded His disciples to heal the sick and cast out demons, and they apparently did it. But the Gospels don’t tell us how, other than some anecdotal evidence: they commanded demons with their voices. The Gospels give no indication that the call to continue this ministry ended with the disciples.

In fact, the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel contains an explicit expectation of exorcism. The earliest surviving manuscripts of Mark do not contain Mark 16:9–20, and most scholars believe the original ending of Mark has either been lost or that the Gospel originally ended at 16:8. Whatever conclusion one reaches about the textual history, the longer ending is significant because it reflects an early Christian expectation that casting out demons would continue among believers.

Here is the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel:

“Go into all the world,” he said to them, “and announce the message to all creation. Anyone who believes and is baptized will be rescued, but people who don’t believe will be condemned. And these signs will happen around those who believe: they will drive out demons in my name, they will speak with new tongues, they will pick up serpents in their hands; and if they drink anything poisonous it won’t harm them. They will lay hands on the sick and they will get better.”

—Mark 16:15–18 NTFE

So here we have the command and expectation, attributed to Jesus and delivered to us through the early Church. But again, there is no how-to instruction manual.

This fact should not come as a surprise to us. The Bible does not give us comprehensive how-to instructions for countless essential questions: How do you have a happy marriage? How do you raise children? How do you evangelize? How do you pray for the sick? How do you plant a church or organize a worship gathering? Yes, there are “tips,” short words of instruction, examples, principles, and encouragements, but nothing about any of these things that constitutes a comprehensive how-to manual.

The reason for this is, I believe, twofold.

First of all, God is not a controller.

The fruit of the Spirit in a believer’s life, Paul tells us, is self-control—not God controlling our every move and thought. God didn’t create us to be machines that simply obey commands. God made us free-will image-bearers, and He invites us to choose to be like Him, which means learning to think like He thinks.

A good teacher never simply gives all the answers to his students. A good teacher guides the problem-solving process so that students learn the logic of the subject they are studying. If you are given the answer to one problem, you can write the appropriate answer to one problem. But if you understand the logic behind the answer, you can potentially solve countless problems.

The second scenario is by far the more beneficial to mankind and the world.

God wants a world where humans aren’t simply given an answer key in the Bible. They are given a wisdom key—a revelation of the heart of God.

And the most essential part of that wisdom key is the Holy Spirit inside us. With that key, humans can learn how to do the works of God by following His heart and the logic of the cross. Understanding the atoning work of the cross, possessing the authority Jesus gave us, and having the Holy Spirit inside us is enough for us to begin doing the work. Then we can write books about what we learn so that others can be instructed in the work more efficiently.

In other words, God dreamed up a world where His image-bearers would write the “how-to” manuals as part of the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to walk in (Ephesians 2:10).

Discovering and relaying the information we learn is part of the glorious calling God bestowed on us humans.

Secondly, the world of the ancients—and particularly the first-century world that produced our New Testament—was a spiritual world.

There is much about that world that the writers of the Bible simply assumed.

The strongest-held beliefs of a culture are often not the things that are constantly taught or written about, but the things that are simply assumed. The Apostle Paul and the rest of the Scriptures reference the reality of spiritual warfare regularly, but they rarely stop to give long explanations defending the existence of the spiritual realm. Their world was conscious of spiritual realities.

It is the modern Western world, shaped by the Enlightenment and rationalism, that has confused things.

The modern Western world has particular difficulty believing in spiritual entities because we are practical materialists, bathed in Enlightenment thinking that trains us to regard what can be physically observed, measured, and tested as the only reliable description of reality.

Despite popular opinion, this isn’t a Christian belief. It is a modern Western belief.

Therefore, we demand more instruction from the Scriptures concerning deliverance ministry and the miraculous partly because we have difficulty taking the spiritual realm as seriously as the biblical writers did.

We are walking too closely in line with materialists and rationalists who demand that God answer their questions on their terms.

“If God is real,” they say, “He must subject Himself to rigorous scientific laboratory tests and analytics!”

Yet those same laboratories, by their very methodology, generally exclude spiritual realities from the possible explanations of their equations. In the materialistic worldview, the spiritual realm either isn’t real or cannot be considered as affecting the outcome of scientific investigation.

And Christians can unknowingly approach the Bible with the same assumptions.

We demand that the Scriptures provide evidence sufficient to satisfy our modern standards of acceptability rather than allowing the Scriptures to challenge our worldview.

Perhaps the reason the Bible doesn’t spend more time explaining the demonic is much simpler than we imagine.

To them, the demonic was obvious.