I have been journeying alongside a young woman for about 7-8 years. I have some responsibility for her that arose out of her broken family history and having no one on whom to lean. She has developmental disability and some emotional and spiritual traumas. We’ve worked through a lot over the years, especially in emotional and spiritual literacy. But there is only so much that we can do given her limitations. The perverse, pervasive, and persistence of trauma in her young life has caused significant dissociative behavior, externalizing emotions and spiritualizing life to a degree that makes her wide open to spiritual forces with little discernment. Every once in a while we have to revisit areas and do deeper work. Some recent circumstances have raised some fears and brought back a pre-occupation with demonic influences. She happened into a friendship with a woman who took her under her wing, to her church, and to a pastor. They set out to do a deliverance to rid her of some troubling demonic fears and delusions. I was aware of them and recognized the pattern and began reassuring her and strengthening her in Christ. She wanted to do their deliverance. At nearly 30!years old I am not going to interfere. I can only stay close by and be ready to help her understand and interpret experiences in light of her own past and current ability to grasp wisdom from confusion.
After a couple of conversations with these people and a deliverance session, I listened as she shared her thoughts about it and her doubts about their assumptions and declarations. I asked her few questions. I reminded her how she and I had worked through some of these same issues in the past. They wanted her to come for another session.
After a few hours she called me back and said she had decided that they were not helpful. They had said things that we both agreed were not in alignment with the character of God. They seemed more preoccupied with the Enemy’s wiles and power than God’s wisdom and authority. Her husband of several years and I were both grateful and happy that God had led her to a wise conclusion. We’ll be doing more trauma work and leveling up on her further understanding of Christ’s work in and with her.
Having had now nearly three decades of spiritual realm conflict experience and more than a few deliverances with women in crisis, I have also been studying deliverance now for three years as God has called me to greater engagement in that work.
Today when I read this interview article with N.T. Wright, I was struck by his comments about spiritual realm conflict. It is much as I had come to think of spiritual realm conflict through my experiences and from teachers like Jon Thompson, Paul Bellini, Ben Witherington, Steve Seamands, etal.
N.T. Wright, Anglican theologian, on spiritual warfare:
“Ephesians 6 famously exhorts believers to put on the “armor of God,” but Wright places that passage alongside Ephesians 1 and 2, which say believers are already “seated in the heavenly places in Christ.”
“The heavenly places is where the battle is going on right now,” he explained. “God has won the battle in Jesus.” The armor, he notes, is almost entirely defensive, “apart from the sword of the Spirit.”
The real danger is not demonic forces alone but the misidentification of enemies, Wright stressed.
“Paul, like Jesus Himself, says … our battle is not against flesh and blood.”
Humans may “instantiate evil,” he acknowledged, but to demonize whole groups or nations is itself part of the spiritual problem.
“If you think you can fight this battle by fighting particular people or groups of people or ethnic groups, then that itself becomes part of the demonic problem, rather than the Christian solution.”
Wright warned against subscribing to either extreme: theological skepticism that dismisses spiritual evil entirely and what he calls the tendency to see demons “behind every bush.”
“As C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, ‘There’s two equal and opposite errors. On the one hand, people who say that that’s all just medieval mumbo-jumbo. On the other hand, people who see demons behind every bush,'” he said.
During his tenure as bishop of Durham, Wright said he supervised a discreet deliverance ministry that dealt with genuine cases of spiritual disturbance.
“They would pray with them and do what you could carefully call an exorcism,” he said. “It’s just very nasty, dirty, messy … and you end up feeling desperately sorry for people who are caught up in it.”
Still, he said, dramatizing every setback as demonic breeds confusion and spiritual irresponsibility. He recalled watching the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.
“The television cameras focused on a woman who was sitting in a corner praying and saying, ‘angels are coming, angels are coming.’ I saw that and thought, ‘you’re living in a Left Behind novel,'” he said. “It was obvious that [she] was radically deluded.”
He added, “One of the worst demonic delusions is the idea that everything you don’t like is a demonic delusion.”
CBB 12/9/25