The first big area of debate that you will come across is whether or not Christians can actually have demons living and operating on the inside of them.
Many will say that once you are saved and born again, that there is no way that a demon can enter in on the inside of you.
We have now been bought back by Jesus Christ Himself and He now “owns” us. Thus, there is no way that a demon or a group of demons can enter in on the inside of a Christian.
At first glance, this appears to be a very logical and valid argument. But in the actual fields of combat, the deliverance ministers who do this on a very regular basis, have found out that Christians can get demons on the inside of them if the appropriate legal rights have been given to the demons to be able to enter in.
Here is their reasoning, and for the record, we do fully agree with this reasoning. The Bible says that we have three parts to our being – body, soul, and spirit. When we get saved and born again, the Holy Spirit comes to live in our human spirits.
It is our human spirit that is instantaneously regenerated and born again at our conversions. Our souls and our bodies are not regenerated at this new birth, it is just our spirits. Please refer to our article, “Regeneration by the Holy Spirit,” on the actual verses on all of this.
What happens in the spiritual realm is that if the appropriate legal rights have been given to the demons to be able to enter in, they will then move into the body and soul of the person. The demons will not be able to enter into the spirit of a Christian because the Holy Spirit is already living there.
One deliverance minister uses the analogy of the Temple that the Jewish people built for God the Father back in the Old Testament to illustrate all of this.
In that Temple built for God by the Jewish people, there were three main parts to it – the Outer Court, the Inner Court, and the Holy of Holies. The manifest presence of God was only in the Holy of Holies, not in the Outer Court or the Inner Court.
In the same way with all of us, the Outer Court of the Temple represents our physical bodies, the Inner Court represents our soul, and the Holy of Holies represents our spirits.
Just as the manifest presence of God was only residing in the Holy of Holies, in the same way the Holy Spirit is only residing in our human spirits, which is the innermost part of our beings, just like the Holy of Holies was the innermost part of the Jewish Temple.
The Bible also tells us that our bodies are now the temple of the Holy Spirit. Some people believe that the word “bodies” means that the Holy Spirit is actually living in the human body itself. But if you use this Jewish Temple analogy, which I believe is analogous to our human-spiritual makeup with the Lord, I believe that our physical bodies are now His temple due to the fact that our physical bodies now actually “house” our human spirits where the Holy Spirit now lives in – just like the Outer and Inner Courts “housed” the Holy of Holies where the manifest presence of God was really at.
This big debate on whether or not a Christian can have a demon living on the inside of them has been going on forever in the Body of Christ and obviously will never be resolved anytime soon until Jesus comes back down for His millennial rule and He then finally lets all of us know who had the correct interpretation on all of this. But until then, each Christian will just have to make their own call on all of this.
After studying all of this at length over the years, it is just my own personal opinion that these deliverance ministers are correct in their assessment in that demons can enter into Christians if the appropriate legal rights have been given to them to be able to enter in. And this will now lead us right into the next topic of debate – the issue of legal rights.
