Ooh, Wrestling With Demons
I’m a big fan of unintentional comedy, which is often funnier than the intentional variety. I especially tend to laugh when people are being absolutely serious while spouting the most ridiculous nonsense imaginable. Here’s a perfect example, a charismatic preacher telling the story of wrestling with demons.
We were holding a special event. The atmosphere was charged with God’s presence. The service was bathed in prayer and worship. The leadership—from several different ministries—was in perfect harmony. Every gift was in its place and the anointing was flowing. We all expected a great move of God. Of course, when God begins moving demons often begin manifesting. We expected that, but not in the way it panned out.
Wild-Eyed, Demonic Prayer
I was scheduled to preach in a few minutes when I noticed a wild-eyed person praying in what sounded like a demonic language and laying hands on a visiting leader from another nation.* I looked around hoping to dispatch an usher break up the incident but everyone was deep in worship—and no one in the young church had been in this type of situation before. They were stunned. I walked over and gently nudged the wild-eyed person, who was widely known among the congregation, and asked them to sit down. This person was not assigned to the altar and had no authority to lay hands on people.
When the wild-eyed one refused to loosen the strong grip on the visiting minister, I began to pull them away with more force. The person held tight and refused to let go. I would not relent, in the name of Jesus. That’s when the person suddenly lunged toward me, smacked me in the head and began spewing forth curses and releasing witchcraft. It was a literal wrestling match at the altar! Although it was intense, it only lasted seconds because the demon has to bow at the name of Jesus. But it still caused quite a stir…
When you encounter these types of demonic attacks, you have to think quick on your feet. “No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn” (Isaiah 54:17). But sometimes you have to break word curses demon-inspired people release at you in the midst of the battle. I was completely covered in witchcraft after the encounter I mentioned, and yet had to step into the pulpit in minutes.
She was “covered in witchcraft.” I suppose that means she had to be dunked in holy water or something. Funny stuff.
SnowyBiscuit:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:10 pm
“Covered in witchcraft” sounds dirty. Like, Fundie Pr0n dirty.
Akira MacKenzie:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:12 pm
Jesus is setting up Satan for the body slam….Oooooh! Beelzebub hits him from behind with a folding chair!
glodson:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:16 pm
And then we heard the window shattering, and out ran Stone Cold Steve Austin, who showed the demons what Austin 3:16 really meant!
Rip Steakface:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:18 pm
Oh please, the HWF (Heavenly Wrestling Federation) hasn’t been good since St. Peter “The Gatekeeper” left for EVW (Extreme Valhallan Wrestling).
alanb:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Not as funny when you realize that if these people were without their demon delusion they might have been in a position to get this woman some mental health treatment.
Hercules Grytpype-Thynne:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:22 pm
I wonder how she knows what a demonic language sounds like. I couldn’t help being reminded of this.
eric:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:34 pm
[snicker] If you want to call what you’re doing “a great move of God,” I won’t object.
If demons come more often when you have a church service, then the solution for reducing demonic influence in the world seems obvious.
Moggie:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
That’s interesting. The minister didn’t think “hmm, maybe God has chosen this person”. Instead, their immediate reaction was “not one of us! Respect my authoritah!”
Can’t have the little people thinking they can do God’s work! Who would need preachers then?
DaveL:
January 28th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Might I suggest using a lower-proof “anointing” the next time?
raven:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:08 pm
My natal church didn’t really believe in demons.
Therefore, whenever I hear about them, it is like someone complaining about fairies stealing your flowers, brownies stealing your cat’s food, or vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and zombies prowling around your house at night.
Primitive superstition. Demons come from the same place vampires or elves do. The fundies really do live in demon haunted darkness, one of their own invention.
Demons never made much sense anyway. According to xian mythology god created everything. Which means god created satan and the demons and lets them run around doing whatever they do.
caseloweraz:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:23 pm
The preacher: “Although it was intense, it only lasted seconds because the demon has to bow at the name of Jesus. But it still caused quite a stir…”
Right, with her “quick thinking”, she forgot to utter the name of Jesus immediately.
“Of course, when God begins moving demons often begin manifesting.”
Kind of like the way the fastest gun in the West keeps getting challenged, I guess.
“We expected that, but not in the way it panned out.”
Makes you wonder what they did expect. Pea soup, perhaps?
Taz:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:26 pm
I prefer unicorns to god. They poop rainbows.
theschwa:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:28 pm
…and here comes the money shot – OH! covered in witchcraft!!
jnorris:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:30 pm
I don’t understand how the demon got into the church with all that God stuff flowing perfectly fine everywhere.
Was the demon riding in an iron chariot?
anubisprime:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:33 pm
@ OP
And what does our little hero do?
So not much of an attack then was it, if all you had to do was mutter some anglicized fictitious name of a character that was never actually called that in his own supposed tongue and it was certainly not what our little hero was blubbering!
There seems to be a sense of some deep erotic longing in that description, it is never seemingly far from what passes as a mind in their circles!
What a load of complete cobblers, some nutty ‘person’, the usual mental state among such dumb losers in these circuses, spills what marbles they might have had and lose all sense of proportion pretends to be manipulated by the will of ‘de lawd’ only to have the privileged scammer get all discombobulated when realizes said scam is in danger of being usurped by one of the rank and defiled and throws a hissy fit!…then makes up utter bollix to cover the fact !
They really are a disparate and pathetic bunch of cretinous clowns are they not?
Moggie:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:38 pm
D&D is less melodramatic than this, and avoids the risk of head injury.
Marcus Ranum:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:42 pm
Meanwhile, the unfortunate woman, who had been praying in Armenian or whatever, was grabbed by some deranged person who tried to pull her hands off the visiting minister, her nephew. So she smacked him on the head and told him he was an asshole, in Armenian. …
eric:
January 28th, 2013 at 3:59 pm
@8:
Even more interesting given this is all in a protestant splinter sect. You get the real feeling that this person, transported back in time, would be saying “This person was only a monk and had no authority to object to indulgences.”
OP:
Yet, somehow, its the demon that covers the priest in witchcraft. I think she must be drawing her imagery from several different web sites.
birgerjohansson:
January 28th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Having read the novels about Thomas Odd by Dean Koontz, I thought he headline was “Odd wrestling with demons” which would at least have been interesting.
In regard to daimons, they are simply the Greek word for spirits. The holy ghost technically is a daimon, too.
My reconstruction of the event is; the holy ghost gave the woman the gift of speaking in tongues, but these heretics brutally interfered. They are Satanists!
anubisprime:
January 28th, 2013 at 5:18 pm
eric @ 18
Or reading Dennis Wheatley under the bed clothes with a torch at night!…then having erotic dreams with succubi taking a prominent role!
anubisprime:
January 28th, 2013 at 5:22 pm
anubisprime @ 20
Or if the story telling muppet is female then Incubus…or maybe I was right the first time!
Brain Hertz:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:02 pm
God doesn’t create demons. He just puts descriptions of them in /etc/init.d before starting the universe…
frog:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
How do they know the difference between someone babbling in demonic language and someone babbling in god-inspired tongues?
Or even, as Marcus Ranum points out, someone speaking a real language other than English. Or hell, even a made-up but coherent language. Might be fun to go to a revival and start declaiming in Klingon or Quenya.
Christoph Burschka:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:43 pm
I guess this is Christian-style LARP.
vmanis1:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
How does a fundie tell the difference between `speaking in demon’ and `speaking in tongues’? I know that the former sounds vaguely orcish, `splitznakh zu platwadh’, while the latter is more on the demented end, thus `Lala loololo poopoo floorwax’, but we really need an old-style philologist like Tolkien himself to untangle it. Meanwhile, it might be wise to avoid Pentecost.
The mascot of FreeBSD Unix is a cute, cuddly little daemon [sic]. Apparently, there have been a few complaints over the years that the developers were in league with Satan. (In Unix and Linux, a daemon is a background process for running programs like a web or printer server.)
busterggi:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
,Is there anyone out there who did not hear Jesse Ventura’s voice narrating that story? Raise your hands
Karen Locke:
January 28th, 2013 at 8:01 pm
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Zeno:
January 28th, 2013 at 9:31 pm
Holy water is one of the Roman Catholic “sacramentals” and thus regarded askance by devout Protestants. Of course, if it scalds the hide off demons and banishes vampires (as the movies and Buffy have taught us), maybe it’s okay to use it.
wholething:
January 28th, 2013 at 9:39 pm
Maybe the wild-eyed one didn’t think a woman should speak in church. Instead of witchcraft, she just had 1 Timothy all over her. That’s a problem with the big book of multiple choice.
frankb:
January 28th, 2013 at 9:40 pm
If your neck hurts when you move it a certain way, the doctor will tell you don’t move it that way. If you suffer demons when the Lawd is moving then avoid being around when the lawd in moving. Common sense really.
Akira MacKenzie:
January 28th, 2013 at 9:42 pm
Believe it or not, there is. “Christian” RPG called Spritual Warfare.
DrewN:
January 29th, 2013 at 12:16 am
I have an aunt that has a habit of holding on to peoples elbow when she’s talking about something she’s very excited about. I can easily imagine her being tackled by this pastor if she were speaking a foreign language. After all, we all know foreign = demonic anyway.
dingojack:
January 29th, 2013 at 12:56 am
“Of course, when God begins moving demons often begin manifesting”.
Well of course they do, they are his minions after all. And who else is gonna carry the piano out to the van? BTW anyone catch god’s new address? I’ve got some bills that need forwarding.
:) Dingo
———–
“Wresting with Demons” – wasn’t that a lesser known BBC doco narrated by Kenneth Branaugh?
bad Jim:
January 29th, 2013 at 1:03 am
I was completely covered in witchcraft
“He slimed me … I feel so funky”
anubisprime:
January 29th, 2013 at 3:25 am
Karen Locke @ 27
‘Never before has any voice uttered the words of that tongue here in FTB… but the black speech of Morrrrdooor may yet be heard in every corner of the west….!’
I wonder if our hero can tell the difference?
birgerjohansson:
January 29th, 2013 at 4:02 am
Glossolalia, speaking in tongues, is not limited to Christianity. Maybe she was tuning in to some religion in upper Assam, or whatever.
bbgunn:
January 29th, 2013 at 8:03 am
Full release preachifying with a happy ending.
democommie:
January 29th, 2013 at 8:06 am
“then having erotic dreams with succubi taking a prominent role!’
“Or, if the story telling muppet is female then Incubus…”
Wasn’t there a song by Jay and the Americans?
I think it went something like:
“Incubi, succubi, I’m so horny, I could cry. I just cannot get a date, won’t you help me masturbate?”.
But I only ever heard it on the AM spectrum of the wireless machine back in the 60′s.
Today’s Moment of Comedy « Foster Disbelief:
January 29th, 2013 at 11:28 am
[...] Courtesy of Dispatches from the Culture Wars: [...]
brianwestley:
January 29th, 2013 at 11:45 am
I distinctly remember watching Oral Roberts describe him wrestling with a demon in bed, and his wife agreed, and then she described it exactly the same as waking him up from a nightmare, To such people, dreaming about wrestling with demons is proof that they actually wrestled with demons.
bradleybetts:
January 29th, 2013 at 11:57 am
God moving = Demons manifesting
Contextually, moving is synonomous with manifesting
[] God = Demon?
That would tend to explain large parts of the Old Testament…
Also “Covered in Witchcraft” cracked me right up :) I love how these people are so deadly serious when they spout this blatant shite.