V. Applying the Passages

Now that we have looked at both the passages in Scripture and their application to every day life and we have briefly summarized the way that the spiritual warlords use demonic utterance and other religions to substantiate their teachings, I would like to make direct application of the Word of God to their situation.

A. Appealing to Other Religions and World Views to Expand and Substantiate Teachings on the Demonic

As we have said above, the whole idea of subscribing to another world view for insight into spiritual reality is not allowed. God has made it abundantly clear in Deuteronomy 18 that the children of Israel were not allowed to use Caananite methods, because the world view was different. Ann Jeffers supports this, pointing out that, “They [the sorcerers] are banned because of the world-view they hold, a world-view that is similar to surrounding cultures.”35

As the Priest-Mullen-Campbell paper has sufficiently shown, the new spiritual warfare model is not based on a Biblical world view, but on an animistic one.1 In this way it falls under the ban of Deuteronomy 18.

What Dr. Wagner and Dr. Robb are doing in using other religions to substantiate their claims also falls under this category. God has not revealed the truth to other animistic and pagan religions about the realities of the spiritual worlds. All that these hold are, at best, the fantasies of humans and, at worst, the claims of demons each purporting to be objective reality, which brings us to the problem posed by Dr. Kraft and the other warlords.

B. Doctrinal Statements Supported by Demonic Testimony

As to the practice of questioning demons, from a purely logical point of view their very nature should make us wary of anything they say. Granted, they will tell the truth at times as they have while in the presence of Christ, but it is demonstrable that they will always subvert the truth to their own aims and thus it will be twisted in one way or another.

Aside from this observation, Dr. Kraft, Dr. Murphy, and Dr. Dickason to a lesser degree are guilty of spiritism and divination for the following reasons:

1. They are getting information about the spiritual realm and their patients2 with the help of supernatural forces that lie outside the Biblical scope. This would make them fall under the definition of divination as the art of obtaining special information from spiritual beings.
2. They are speaking to people who they claim are possessed by evil spirits, thus falling into the category of the yiḏḏeōnî who have familiar spirits. This is a practice that is not only forbidden by God in Dt 18, but also judged by God in Isa 8 by placing darkness upon those who will consult such people.
3. They are working on a “science” of spiritual warfare that sound suspiciously more like a magical science, something that the JPS commentary interestingly points out is exactly what separates a true prophet of God from a sorcerer, medium, spiritist, or false prophet.3 Their using the Name of Jesus to subvert and control demons in a seemingly ritualistic way4 would also fall under the definitions of magic that we gave.

• 35Jeffers, p.68
• 1Robert Priest, Thomas Campbell, and Bradford Mullen, “Missiological Syncretism,” Spiritual Power and Missions: Raising the Issues (E. Rommen, ed., Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1995), pp.9-77
• 2Dickason, Ibid., pp.194-196 and 238-239.
• 3Jeffrey H. Tigay, Ibid., p.174.
• 4See Dr. Kraft’s experiments of putting demons in a box or “shutting them down” until they are challenged in the name of Christ in his chapter “Dealing With Demonization” in Behind Enemy Lines, pp.79-120, especially p. 116.