That’s not exactly the way it works, in my experience. I was nearly possessed by a demon when I was fifteen, so I remember what it feels like.
What you say is true, one cannot be possessed without surrendering the will. But it’s not like one makes the decision to surrender the will in a clear environment. It’s not a decision that the mind based upon reason and choice alone. It’s closer to being tortured into submission.
You know, a person being tortured for information always has a choice. They can keep resisting the torture, or they can surrender their own wills and do the torturer’s will. So there’s always a choice.
A demon can bring to bear on the mind many powerful tools to coerce the surrender of the mind to its will. For instance, a person on drugs is more susceptible to demonic possession. A person who is addicted to some sort of sin, such as sexual licentiousness, might be more vulnerable, as they feel pressure inside their mind to continue to behave in this way. I think that demons can cause mental problems, insanity and such. The Bible describes Jesus as curing demoniacs whose behavior was very much like insanity. Submitting one’s will to the devil is not a clean intellectual act- there is a very powerful compulsive element to it. A drug addict feeling compelled to take drugs is similar. They could resist, but their will is under such pressure that they don’t choose to resist.
My experience didn’t include any of those things. I had committed no sin- in fact, I was just beginning to pray that God would give me a deeper relationship with him, that I would come to know him as a reality rather than as an idea. My faith was non-existent at that point and I wanted God, so I began to pray for a relationship with him. A demon at that point attacked me, and I began to feel an enormous compulsive pressure in my mind to murder my family members or to commit suicide. I would be doing completely mundane things, or chatting with family members, and suddenly I was under incredible pressure to just kill them, and I had to strain with all of my willpower to resist. Many times it almost wasn’t enough. Once, when I was standing and talking with my Dad in the garden, the pressure was so great that I had to open my hand (which was clutching a hammer) and let the hammer fall to the floor where we stood, because otherwise I would have struck and killed my father. It was horrible, and I didn’t tell anyone about it because I was afraid that I was going insane, and would have to be sent to the asylum.
Then I met Christ. He answered my prayers and revealed himself to me, and told me that he would protect me. Then I told my parents about what I had been going through, and they realized immediately that it was a demon and prayed over me.
A few days later, the demon came back, though. I actually physically saw it, a lobster-like creature a foot long with many pincers and claws that appeared next to me in the night and then vanished into thin air.
I went out into the living room of my house and then sensed an incredibly powerful and twisted presence, full of hatred and the desire to murder. I banished it in the name of Jesus and it went, and it never returned after that.
Throughout my times enduring near-possession, my mind was under incredible pressure, incredibly strong. The Lord told me, when I got to know him, that if it hadn’t been for the support of his Holy Spirit, I wouldn’t have survived the attack.
My experiences tell me that free will is involved, but just as a person with a drug addiction feels massive psychological pressure to satisfy his urge, a person enduring possession trauma can feel incredible pressure to surrender his will to the demon. The demon doesn’t only ask for the person’s will- the demon demands it, tries to force compliance as a torturer might when trying to get someone to give information.
They are cruel. Free Will is involved, for one must choose to submit to the pressure. The drug addict always has a choice.
My suspicion is that the father cursed the daughter and the demons came and haunted the daughter so horribly and severely that she surrendered to their will and became their captive.
There can be pressure such as the kind I described, but there also is deception. A person can be deceived by the evil spirit and thus invaded. There are a lot of ways that these kinds of things can occur, but the enemy doesn’t just ask nicely if you will give your soul to the devil. He’ll rather say, “follow me- I’m God!”, or might try to deceive in another way and so gain control of another person’s will. Or the demon might actually try to force another person to submit to being possessed, as one did with me.
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