Raw Confessions of a Former Christian Exorcist
Inside This Episode
Bob DeWaay spent five years performing exorcisms, trying to free people, including Christians, from what he believed were demons. But today, he’s speaking out—saying deliverance methods are not only harmful, but also a serious distraction from the true message of the gospel.
In this powerful interview, Pastor Bob shares why he walked away from deliverance ministry, what he believes the Bible actually teaches about spiritual gifts and exorcism, and how obsession with casting out spirits can pull people away from Christ and the truth of Scripture.
Read Bob DeWaay’s article on Deliverance ➜ https://cicministry.org/commentary/issue78.htm
Subscribe to Pastor Eric’s new YouTube channel
Subscribe to Maybe God’s YouTube channel
Transcript
Eric Huffman: Is spiritual warfare real? And if so, how should Christians deal with demons? More and more ministers today claim they have special powers to cast out demons and free people from spiritual bondage.
But Bob DeWaay, a Christian pastor and former exorcist, says that these practices are not only misguided, they can be dangerous. Today he offers biblical guidance for fighting our spiritual battles.
Bob DeWaay, welcome to Maybe God.
Bob DeWaay: Thanks for having me. I'm honored to be here.
Eric Huffman: I'm honored to have you. I stumbled upon your work, your writings, and talks and interviews recently, and I feel like you're a breath of fresh air and I can't wait for everybody to hear about what you have to say.
Before we get into more, I guess, contemporary issues around spiritual warfare, which we will get into, I'd like to have our viewers get to know you a little bit better. You were raised in kind of a progressive or liberal version of Christianity prior to what you call your conversion later. Talk about your upbringing, your early years in liberal Christianity.
Bob DeWaay: Yes, I grew up in rural Iowa, farm boy, and we went to the family church. I reached 12 years old, it was time to join the church, but I did a lot of reading. I was really interested in science, even at that age.
And when I went to what they call membership training, I had a lot of doubts and I felt bad about it, so I started asking the pastor specific questions. And I said, "I have trouble because I'm doubting. How can Jesus walk on water? How can any of these things in the Bible happen? That's not what I'm learning from science."
His answer was, "That's okay because these things didn't happen. You're not expected to believe that they happened. God doesn't do miracles. These are inspiring stories to make you wanna be a better person."
But it was really odd in a way because I had to sign to join the church. I had to sign that I believe the statement of faith, which actually affirmed miracles like the resurrection and so on. So I didn't wanna shame my parents. In fact, my wonderful mom is still alive at 95. My dad's no longer with us. But frankly, I just stayed for a while. And when I got old enough, I got out of it. [00:02:37] She just wouldn't go. I was going to the golf course. I didn't see why I needed to be religious if none of these things really happened.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I grew up in a fairly progressive denomination as well. Not all progressive Christians fit this bill that they don't all believe that miracles didn't happen in the Bible and it's myth basically. But many do. And it's a common narrative that you encounter in progressive Christianity.
So what I'm hearing is that that sort of drove you away from faith. You didn't receive that as welcome news, even though you were a scientific and rational-minded person yourself. You felt like that rendered religion obsolete?
Bob DeWaay: Well, I thought it seemed too much to ask that I would faithfully do whatever that church would want me to do if it was based on mythology.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, it's duplicitous in a way, isn't it?
Bob DeWaay: Yeah. Now, most progressives have way more sophisticated theology than what was articulated there. But I went off to study science. That was my strong suit. That's where I got my As in school, chemistry and mathematics and science and physics.
So I went to Iowa State University to become a chemical engineer and a horrible, horrible thing happened. My girlfriend became a born-again Christian and she started going to church long about that time. But there's something I'd like to share with you.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Bob DeWaay: It may be helpful. Before the full confrontation with her, I was sitting in a class in organic chemistry and the professor put up on this big overhead a heme molecule, the molecular bonding. And he was explaining carbon-carbon bonding and how it made life possible.
So he put this complex molecule up on the screen and there's 300 of us there. This was like the big lecture hall. And he said, "If one of these electronic bonds was different, we'd all be dead." And I was stunned. It was a fierce iron molecule and all these carbon molecules. At that point in my mind, I said, "I believe in God."
Eric Huffman: Wow, it was in a science class.
Bob DeWaay: In a science class. God created the world. It had to be, it was too complex to happen by chance. So that was a logical conclusion. But interestingly about that same time is when my girlfriend started talking about Christianity. And though I had become a theist, immediately I saw that as a threat, and I started being hostile. So changing my intellectual thoughts about God didn't change my heart.
Eric Huffman: Sure. Yeah, I find that to be pretty common. A lot of people that Christians assume are atheists really are not. They're agnostics maybe or deists even that just believe in some kind of a creative intelligence or power beyond the creative order. But it could be a computer programmer. It could be any number of gods and so how can we narrow it down to the Christian God? And so I understand that dilemma.
How did you work through it? How did you end up becoming one of the people that you despised at that point in your life?
Bob DeWaay: Well, frankly, it was rather miraculous. She had gone off to a retreat for a week and I knew that when she came back, it's probably going to be hopeless. So I determined in my mind that "I've got to get out of this and get back." I was taking my degree. "I'll meet somebody somewhere sometime. I can't do this."
And she, unbeknownst to me, but predictably, was thinking, "I've got to make a decision too." This isn't going to work because..." There's no way I was going to go the way she was going. And I started becoming rather hostile. I was almost like Saul of Tarsus. I'm not going to brag about what I was like then. It was not good. I was really bad.
The guys I worked with, I had a summer job to help pay for college and I was telling them how horrible this was. Really I was a blasphemer. So then when we had our confrontation out in her dad's backyard, I said, "Okay, tell me why you're doing this. One more time, tell me why you're doing this."
And so she started telling me about things in the Bible. I know I knew the Bible better than she did because she didn't even go to Sunday school. And she told me a number of things and I said, "I never heard that. I never heard that. I never heard that in church." I wasn't believing her. And she went in and got a Bible. There's no bookmarks in it. And as she was talking, I said, "Where's that in the Bible? Telling you the truth." She said, "I don't know how to find anything in here." When she opened it, it would open to the page.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Bob DeWaay: That's God's providence. I didn't deserve to be treated this well by the Lord. I was a blasphemer. And then there are two of those. And then the third one, this was a Pentecostal denomination talking about the end times. She was saying, "Well, the rivers are gonna turn to blood." And I said, "All right, this is off the charts. There's no way that's in the Bible." Said, "Well, they said so." And she opened the Bible again, and there it was on that page.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Bob DeWaay: And I was stunned. I was shaken to the core. This was a miracle, Eric. I knew in an instant, because I'd heard all the basic ideas that are in the Bible. I didn't know about the rivers turning to blood. But frankly, I knew, I knew that at that moment, that Christ was real, God is real, hell is real, and that I've been an enemy of God. And that if I didn't repent, I'd end up in hell. I knew all of that in a millisecond.
Eric Huffman: That's amazing, bro. There's always a pretty girl in so many of these stories. What ended up happening to her, by the way?
Bob DeWaay: Well, we're married now. I've been married for 52 years.
Eric Huffman: Wow. Congrats on that, man. She sounds like a keeper.
Bob DeWaay: Oh, you bet.
Eric Huffman: Did you instantly start getting involved in a church? What kind of church did you get involved in from that point?
Bob DeWaay: Well, I went back to Ames to finish my junior year, and there was Assemblies of God church there. I just knew that God called me to preach. A bunch of more providential events happened that I finally... my dad was up in Des Moines, not far from Ames, where I was going to school, and I had a conference, and I went and talked to him, told him, "I need to study theology." And I went up to the Bible College at that denominational, it's now a North Central University, then it was North Central Bible College, and I got a degree in Bible and pastoral studies.
Eric Huffman: Wow. So you go through the Bible College, you get preparation for ministry, I'm assuming right after that, or about that time you're starting in pastoral ministry. How long after you began that path did deliverance ministry, or what we call spiritual warfare, become a part of your ministry?
Bob DeWaay: Well, that was the result of a certain decision I made. At the Bible College at that time, there were two streams. One was theological and based on studying the Greek, sound doctrine, sound biblical exposition. And that's what I should have done. I had teachers there, I loved them, they taught me the truth, they warned me, stay in the Bible, learn the Greek, I did, but I was interested in the powerful experiential part.
And there was another group that had a rather sophisticated version of the revivalist spiritual type. And it was called Daystar Ministries. They had a community which was live-in, and people gave away what they had, turned everything into the ministry, and lived together. That was in the 70s.
Our son came up and was asking us a while back why we did that and I said, Well... he was born in 79. I said, "You missed the 70s. You wouldn't believe what people did in the 70s."
Eric Huffman: So you lived in a commune, basically.
Bob DeWaay: Right.
Eric Huffman: How long were you there?
Bob DeWaay: Five years. Five years.
Eric Huffman: What'd you learn and see while you were there?
Bob DeWaay: Deliverance ministry, hearing from God, trying to live out things that seemed reasonable at the time because of where we were in history here in America. World War I, Great Depression, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam, which was horrible. That was going on.
And then we were known for inner healing and deliverance in that group. I was a young preacher. Immediately was preaching at their Tuesday night meetings, which was the main meeting. And then during this deliverance ministry, casting out demons, trying to figure out why people had so many problems. Frankly, in the 70s, it seemed like the problems were really bad, and everybody had them.
Eric Huffman: Were you delivering each other in this commune or were people coming from the outside to be healed and delivered?
Bob DeWaay: Mostly it was people coming to us with problems, wanting help. And we had most of the cutting-edge ideas that were out there. And all of it's still around, frankly. It just gets reborn in some other form.
But we had spiritual reparenting, deliverance, inner healing, breaking curses. Then there was the, how would you call it, strategic level spiritual warfare, where people would give revelations about what hostile power was over what geographical territory. All-night prayer meetings. We had a required day of fasting every week. We had prayers every morning. We had whatever we thought.
The idea was that we're going to solve the problems that people have that seemed intractable, and somehow these new insights were going to solve problems that otherwise couldn't be solved.
Eric Huffman: I mean, it seems well-intentioned. It seems like it was a good-natured, good-hearted thing to do. And I know now you feel differently about those years you spent there. But at the time, take us back to your mindset and what you saw, what good you saw happening through this ministry.
Bob DeWaay: The leaders, the people in charge of the ministry centers, we had ministry centers in a number of states, the quality people, people you could trust, the top guy in our group, turned out there was some problems there we didn't know about. But that wasn't so bad, which is part of what later made me think there's something wrong, because the people who were the spiritual leaders had never got that way through the mechanisms that we're using to help everybody else.
I started to question it. If this is what everybody needs, how come our elders and leaders and ministry center heads never did that? I actually started asking them, "How'd you get here? How'd you get to be a Christian?" None of them had been through these deliverance classes or inner healing. They got there through conversion.
Eric Huffman: You've thrown out some terms that I'm somewhat familiar with but I don't think I could define them, even though I've heard them a lot. In ministry you run into folks that still do this stuff today. Let's just define some of these. Spiritual mapping and spiritual reparenting and the regional dominion, identifying of those demonic forces. What are we talking about here?
Bob DeWaay: Well, there are things mentioned in the Bible about principalities and powers. You look at the list, like in Ephesians or in Colossians and so forth, that indicate there are such things. And there's other things in the Old Testament. There are hostile powers in the heavenly. I think Galatians and Colossians calls it stoikia, hostile powers. That's a Greek word, stoikia.
The idea is that, well, Jesus cast out demons and then you have this legion narrative in Luke 8 and you have things that happen in Acts and the idea of these spiritual powers in the heavenlies. So some folks came to think that Christians can be influencing what's going on in the world by dealing with these spirits or powers over regions. Okay, using certain terminology from the Bible.
That's still out there and there are books written about it and whole movements doing that and people making decrees, trying to influence the outcome of elections and so on. Well, that's what was going on with that. And usually it has to do with spoken words, almost like incantations. "Say this. Bind the spirit. Identify the spirit and bind the spirit." In that article that people find that I wrote about my experience in that, I tell about that sort of thing happening.
The spiritual reparenting was even another level. This would be going into a person's past. So the assumption was that present problems were due to things that happened in someone's past. So if you had bad parents who were not raising you properly or were abusive or whatever, that's causing you to have damage in your life and not be who you could be.
Maybe you're under a generational curse because you look at in the Pentateuch the third and fourth generation. So then they're identifying these generational curses usually through some sort of a revelation. Again, everything was interpreted in that warfare worldview.
So somebody would get a revelation that whoever we're praying for was under a curse because somebody a few generations back was in the occult. Now, if you think about it, it's probably everybody. How many ancestors do they have? Then you would either renounce that curse or repent on behalf of whoever did it, which is not really valid.
Eric, the thing that really eventually the Lord used to get me out was the complexities just kept piling up. And then the manifestations were real. I saw that things were happening. People were saying they felt better, but then in the end, the same people had the same problems.
The spiritual leaders who were in charge of things were still solid people for the most part. There were a few exceptions, and the people with problems still had problems. So the manifestations got me in, the lack of fruit got me out. I don't see this actually changing people's lives.
And furthermore, why would God give us an unbelievably complex process based on things we cannot see? We cannot see these spirits. They may manifest or they may not, but we can't see them. We can't see the spirit realm. We don't have the tools and equipment we need for that. We are equipped by God to objectively and rationally use human language, seeing cause and effect in an objective way like I was taught in science. And the evidence that Christ was raised from the dead.
So the rational made a lot of sense to me and all these other things we're in over our head. I finally decided that we're in way over our head.
Eric Huffman: I wanna talk more about the complexities that you perceived and the way they piled up and how the complexity increased. But first, could you just give us some window into that period of time and what kinds of things you were seeing from people, and maybe the most dramatic or memorable experience that you had as a deliverance minister at that time?
Bob DeWaay: Yes, there was a lady staying with us at that ministry center, and she'd come in from another state, had a very bad background, occult, all kinds of really bad material, really bad stuff in her life. And she'd been getting some prayer and there were some hissing and manifestations going on.
We had the Tuesday night meeting, I was the preacher that night. I did preach in the Bible because it's really the only thing I was good at. I didn't wanna preach just something, I wanted to preach in the Bible. But at the end of the meeting, we were there to pray for people.
She was there, and suddenly, she just went into a total altered state. Her face was contorted. Her fingers were like claws and screaming, she went running right at me. There's another guy standing there, but she was going after me. While I did this, I didn't have time to think about what to do. I just said, "Stop in the name of Jesus," and just before she got to me, she fell, collapsed right there. I look at that, it's just God's mercy. I don't know what kind of a hostile thing would have happened as she started clawing at my face, but she just was a pile of the person laying there.
Then we went and prayed with her, and we went on. The next day she was going to leave town so she came in for a final session. And when she got there, she was a totally different person.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Bob DeWaay: She was in her right mind. She was rational. And she told me something, which I mentioned in an article I wrote, turned out to be really a bad thing for me to think about. Because she said, "Bob, I want you to know that Satan's afraid of you." I didn't say one word, [00:22:11] other anything about that. And it made me think, "Well, maybe I can do this."
And then she went on her way. We never heard from her again. Now, she was in another state. In those days, long-distance calls were expensive, but I think we would have had she not been better. Eric, I think that was her conversion, as I look back now.
Eric Huffman: Something happened.
Bob DeWaay: Yes.
Eric Huffman: Something happened, and that's evident. By the way, you tell the story. Something happened in her, and it would seem to be, I guess, a feather in the cap of the deliverance ministry folks that this deliverance stuff is real because the difference was tangible. And yet in retrospect, you look back and you see that not as a person being delivered necessarily, but a person being converted. And deliverance happened as a result of her conversion. Is that right?
Bob DeWaay: That's how I see it now. It's not how I interpreted that.
Eric Huffman: How'd you see it then?
Bob DeWaay: Well, we were going by an assumption back then that I don't go by anymore. Our assumption was anybody that went to Christian meetings and says they were a Christian was a Christian. They could have grown up in any kind of a church. They may be either Catholic or old-line denominate or whatever. If they were going to the meetings, they were Christian.
So we never were looking for conversions other than somebody had never heard about these things before. So we rarely looked at any positive outcome as a conversion. It was always a healing or a deliverance. Now, the change that she went through, though greater in scope and intensity, wasn't that different from the change I went through when I was converted. Because I was hostile, not physically. I was blaspheming. I was angry at Christians. I was angry at people who had got my girlfriend involved in religion.
I was so changed that the guys I worked with knew I was different the minute they saw me. That was a conversion. So that's why I look back at that change that she went through, which was unlike most of the others that we had the same people with the same problem for years. And she was changed and she wasn't the same.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, man, I can so relate to that. I've talked on this podcast before about my conversion experience. I was pretending to be a Christian and a pastor for 13 years, but I wasn't. I didn't believe in supernatural miracles. It was kind of like you described earlier. I didn't believe in the physical resurrection. I didn't believe in those sorts of things.
I just thought being a Christian meant being a better, and in my worldview, a more progressive-minded person, more charitable, generous, all that, and anti-capitalist, anti-America, anti-all of that that came along with it.
And then Jesus got a hold of me, confronted me in the Holy Land in 2013. I have talked about how when I came back from that trip, my wife wasn't with me on this trip, and when I came back, the first thing she said when I got in the car at the airport, when she picked me up was, "What happened to you?"
Bob DeWaay: Wow.
Eric Huffman: And I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "You're different." And she could tell the moment she saw me, there was a different countenance. And I felt different. And I said, "What do you mean?" But I kind of knew what she meant because I felt fundamentally different.
It's one of those things that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced that sort of conversion. But yeah, I think whatever demonic forces there were working on me, met their match at my conversion. And so it was the conversion moment where Jesus dealt with the darkness.
Bob DeWaay: Amen. That's very biblical.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, I think so too. But it's obviously getting muddied with this conversation around deliverance ministries. And I think for whatever reason, there's an uptick in these conversations happening in local churches and on the internet and all of that.
You said earlier that when she told you the devil was afraid of you, it wasn't a good thing for you to hear. And I just wanna be sure I understand why that wasn't good, because it seems like a great thing for a preacher to hear.
Bob DeWaay: Well, in the gospels, one time, for example, when the disciples came back and said, "Well, even the spirits are subjected to us." And he mentioned the authority that he'd been given. And he said, "Don't rejoice in this, but rejoice that your name is written in the book of life." Don't rejoice in that.
There's a danger. Pride is a bigger danger than anything else. This also put fuel on my fire that I'm some great man of God and I need to do more of this. I see it as a temptation. A better way to look at it is God is merciful and powerful and forgives sins and transfers us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved son.
I don't know how much that influenced me, but it certainly put more fuel on my fire to keep doing the same thing, which I eventually quit because those things were kind of rare to people that kept having the same problems were more common.
I actually had somebody that I'd been helping during those years calling the phone. Once we got out of that communal living and got a home and we're living there and there was a church that I was part of when we started that I got a phone call. I haven't told this story often. And it was a lady I used to counsel. And she said, "I have a message from God for you." She started prophesying. And her prophecy was, "You're a great man of God. You are going to do all these mighty exploits." It was all that.
And so I was thinking, "I'm sure God didn't call me up to flatter me." I did something which was maybe a little naive because this is probably more of an intellectual test of spirits, but I used the one literally from 1 John. And so the prophesying person voice, I said, "Has Jesus Christ come into flesh?" And the voice through the woman said, "She believes that."
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Bob DeWaay: I said, "This is the wrong answer." And I hung up.
Eric Huffman: Oh, wow. What did that tell you?
Bob DeWaay: It told me it wasn't from God.
Eric Huffman: What was it that ultimately led you to walk away from that kind of ministry that you had given your life to, to that point?
Bob DeWaay: Lack of fruit. Other than that one story I told you about that one gal, the same people had the same problems and the same people I mentioned earlier, I just objectively started looking at what's going on. You know, the spiritual leaders are still the same people, and they never went through any of this. The people we trusted never went through any of this. I never went through any of it.
And at Bible college, there was a whole nother option. And that was scholarship. I loved it when I was there. I had a teacher, Reverend Wesley Smith. He taught through the gospel of John, bringing in the Jewish background and the language and the narrative flow. I used to sit there with a little reel-to-reel tape recorder, this is early seventies technology, in the front row recording this. And I thought, "Okay, why don't we go back to the Bible, because it doesn't change?" There's a new theory coming out.
Eric Huffman: All the time.
Bob DeWaay: Yeah, constantly. It was a new revelation or a new theory or a new process that's going to solve all these intractable problems. I mention this constantly, really, when I share my story. 1983 was the pivotal year. '81, '82, trying to figure out what to do. New moves of God were coming through town, but again, they'd fizzle out.
I was an assistant pastor and a senior pastor, 10 years older than me, we had a conversation in 1983. And I said, "We can't keep doing this. The people get let down too often. They think something's going to make things better. Some new revelation, some new move of God, some new insight. And they fizzle out. Some people were just giving up and dropping out, not even going to church. I think we need to do something that we won't have to apologize for later. And the one thing I can think of is teaching the Bible."
Eric Huffman: Yeah, imagine that. What a novel idea!
Bob DeWaay: Well, the point is, it won't change. It'll still be the Bible.
Eric Huffman: Yes, exactly.
Bob DeWaay: So we started on that in '83. I've been an expositional, exegetical Bible teacher from that time to now.
Eric Huffman: And I know you are, by no means, a cessationist, because you walked away from the deliverance approach from that past life in your ministry. You still believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit that's in the Bible, right? I mean, prophecy and speaking in tongues and healing and all of that. But what do you make of those realities, given your experience and seeing some of the tricks of the trade that you witnessed as a deliverance minister?
Bob DeWaay: Well, right now, I waited until quite a few years later. I'm teaching through 1 Corinthians verse by verse. I've been doing so the last three years. I preach two weeks. Our pastor preaches for two weeks. He's in Matthew, I'm in 1 Corinthians. So I'm right now going through 1 Corinthians. I went through all of it up until now I'm in chapter 14.
And there are scholars now, I have at least four, in fact, you have more, but that's all I got time to read. Four great scholars from the Greek and giving us what we need to do the exegetical work, believing in authorial intent. The Holy Spirit inspired author determines the meaning of the Scripture, not the reader.
Much of that, what we thought were the key things like a word of knowledge is learning a secret that couldn't be known by any ordinary means. That's not what word of knowledge means. And we can learn about that from earlier in Corinthians.
So having gone verse by verse through all these chapters, now I realize, wait a second, the problem was elitism. There were people who claim to have knowledge that ordinary Christians don't have and in fact, they had slogans. You can see that in the text when Paul's interacting with their slogans.
1 Corinthians 8, there's a slogan. We all have knowledge. Well, this was "we all" in our little group. We have knowledge. You less than us Christians don't have the knowledge we have. And what did their knowledge tell them? Well, the idols are nothing. They're just stone or wood. And really, you know, they'd been converted out of paganism. Their business contacts, their opportunities, their income were tied to people that went to the pagan temple. Their knowledge told them it won't hurt us if we go to the pagan feasts. It doesn't really mean anything anyhow.
So their knowledge was the elitist perversion of what true knowledge is. The little phrase word of knowledge, which isn't in 1 Corinthians 12 specifically defined, but it means a word that comes from knowledge. And what Paul is saying, everyone that God has saved is gifted. And He distributes gifts as he wills. And none of them are to make somebody think that they're a superior, elite Christian compared to others.
Eric Huffman: This is important, especially for folks watching right now that might feel like they're novices in this world that we're talking about right now of the demonic spiritual warfare, all of that. Because in deliverance ministry, you'll often hear people say they have a word of knowledge. And what they mean is they've got a word for you that God gave them and it's a secret word of knowledge.
And it's borderline Gnosticism when you get into that sort of thinking. Because it's a secret that I and only I have from God for you, and you have to take it and trust it, whatever it is. That's not at all what Paul meant when he said the phrase that's been translated as word of knowledge. I think you've clearly articulated that.
And it's also a reminder of something you alluded to earlier, Bob, which is these words we get from the spiritual realm; it's difficult to know which side of the spiritual realm they come from. Like the phone call you got. If we're trusting demons to tell us their name, we know demons are liars, for instance. So why would we assume they're giving us the right information, whether it's their name or a word or whatever?
It's something we have to be very careful with. Because when you have assumed that kind of elitist authority over others, you better steward it with care because there's hell to pay if you harm one of God's little ones, as Jesus said.
Bob DeWaay: What we need to remember is that God speaks through His ordained spokespersons. And He appeared to them objectively. When God appeared to Moses on Sinai and gave the 10 words, is what it says in the original, the 10 commandments, and he wrote on stone the finger of God, that was their objective, valid communication, understandable, applicable, and not coming from some secret source. The people who were more interested in the golden calf, they had control over it.
You see that through the prophets and Paul's disputes with false apostles and false teachers. The Jesus Christ come in the flesh. I mentioned that earlier, in 1 John 1:1-3, that we've seen, that we've touched, that we've heard, our hand is handled, that word of life.
The apostles were taught by Christ objectively, real words, understandable. The resurrected Christ wasn't a spirit, that's what the cultists say, He was raised in a physical body, a resurrection body. And the apostles, Paul speaks about this, 1 Corinthians 15, that He appeared and tangibly spoke.
What happened was, he was dealing with people who claimed they'd been to heaven or had some spiritual experience or knew things that ordinary people didn't know. There's a passage that I like to cite, Deuteronomy 29:29, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law."
So, when it comes to the different gifts of the Spirit, word of wisdom, prophecy, it's not humans gaining some secret information from the realm of the spirits, somehow knowing this, that, or the other thing, and then saying it. And how can you judge? The subjective can't judge the subjective. Each of these commentaries they have, and most of them are pretty recent, well done.
Gordon Fies was the first one I read, but prophecy is bringing out valid implications and applications of scripture. Well, we do know it's true. Hermann Nuding will make that clear. And you're saying, well, is that just reading a Bible? No, it's making applications. Sometimes we should be better at that than we do.
The Ten Commandments, thou shall not steal. What does that mean? Well, people may talk themselves into doing things that amount to stealing, and actually end up stealing by thinking, well, somebody has something I need. God wants me to have it. And a prophecy would say certain things are actually stealing. And so you're bringing out the implications, and you're doing it together.
This happened in Acts 15, if you want an example of how the apostles did that. And they're apostles. Are we going to require the Gentiles to keep the Jewish food laws? And they had a debate about it. What's an implication?
It says in Mark 7, Jesus declared all foods clean. So they debated. And finally James, who was most attached to the Jerusalem church, said, "Why should we put a yoke on the disciples that neither us nor our ancestors were able to bear?" They did binding and loosing, and that was their result.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. A good example of what you're talking about, and I think it's so important that we exercise discernment and understand that revelation is based in objectivity and clarity, not in secret knowledge, was a word that God gave you one time, and it turned out to be a word from His Word.
You tell the story in this article you've alluded to. And for everybody watching, I just want you to know what we're talking about. This article is called How Deliverance Ministries Lead People to Bondage. You can Google that, find it online. We'll put it in the show notes here, so you can find the link. But it's a great piece that really opened my eyes to a lot of the problems with deliverance ministry.
But you talk about a story of getting a call in the midst of, or the height of your deliverance ministry, where you were exhausted and pulled in too many directions. Tell us about that call and what the Lord showed you.
Bob DeWaay: A couple that we knew had gotten married and had a lot of problems, but eventually the wife just started running out, going to the bar and picking up men in the middle of the night. And they'd call me, and I'd try to do some damage control and try this and try that, and she just had this... She was bent on living for the devil, frankly. It's not good for anything else.
But one time she started railing on me. I'd run out there at 3 in the morning to help them, try to keep their marriage together, get her to settle down and she started blaming me. And the reason she was running out at 3 in the morning, or that's when I got the call, she had run out earlier while the bars were still open, and "it's your fault. You're a terrible counselor. Why don't you do something? Why don't you make my husband be a better husband? Then I wouldn't have to do this."
And I just thought, I said, "This is silly. You don't have to do this. The ordinary people don't do this. People that don't claim to be Christians, many, many people don't claim to be Christians are running out, cheating on their husband. And it's my fault?" And she called me a smart aleck, and I never heard from her again.
But I realized, you know... this was about in '82. It was before we finally just decided Scripture alone. But this is going to wear out anybody. If they start thinking that your persona, your gifting, your knowledge, whatever you have is going to do something for them that God couldn't possibly do by any other means, you're in a really bad situation. And that's exactly what I was in. And there's other stories that I haven't really...
Eric Huffman: But after that, I remember you writing about how you prayed and you sort of took all that frustration to the Lord and he opened his word to you. Tell us about that, because I can't recall the Scripture that He showed you.
Bob DeWaay: I put it here at the front of the article. This Scripture was a life-changer for me, in its simplicity. And it was Paul writing to Timothy. It's from 2 Timothy 2:24-26. "The Lord's bondservant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness, correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will."
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Bob DeWaay: The lady that was in her right mind the next day, I believe was converted because we never heard from her again, and she was a different person. The other one, as far as I know, never did repent, and she just lived this horrible life, because if that's not a description of that in a snare of the devil, it's not for lack of a deliverance counselor, it's for lack of repentance.
Eric Huffman: That must have spoken to you volumes. I mean, at that particular point in your life, it must have been a real eye-opener.
Bob DeWaay: It totally changed everything, because then I realized Timothy had enough problem people to deal with there in Ephesus. But we used to have these really almost violent deliverance sessions and shouting and whatever, but don't strive, gentle, gentleness, correcting, because it's the truth that sets you free, not the persona of the powerful man of God.
Eric Huffman: Or the formula or the incantations or whatever. It's the truth of the gospel.
Bob DeWaay: It's the truth. And since then, I've been a gospel preacher and a Bible teacher, and I know that that's how God is going to... it doesn't solve every problem, because not everybody's a Christian or will be one. The Lord knows that, that's between Him and God, but we want to put the gospel out so people know who Christ is and what He did and why they need Him and what He expects of them. And we can include that.
Eric Huffman: Deliverance ministers that I've spoken to will often say that the church isn't, even churches that are gospel, Bible-based churches aren't doing enough to deliver people, and that's why deliverance ministries exist. What do you say to that? Have you seen, since you've just been preaching the gospel and leading people to repentance, have you seen people delivered too? And what does that look like?
Bob DeWaay: Well, I've seen people converted that are totally different. Okay? And people that come in and say they just heard of us and maybe one of our members has talked to them. "Well, I have this horrible bondage in my life and I don't know what's going to happen." And I say, "You need to trust Jesus and turn it over to Him and come to church and we'll listen to the word of God."
And when God converts people, pretty soon I don't hear about that stuff anymore. Some of them end up going out on our evangelistic team, preaching the gospel out on the streets and others are serving in this way or that way. And part of it comes from reinforcing these things.
Colossians 1:13-14, and now I use so much I think I'm going to wear those verses out. Of course, they don't actually wear out. But it says, "He rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of His beloved Son in whom we have redemption and forgiveness of sins." Simple way. This is simple.
When you're in the domain of darkness, you're alienated from God.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Bob DeWaay: And if someone has a wonderful life and a wonderful family, makes lots of money, kind, decent person, pays all their bills, exemplary person, but they don't know Christ, they're still in darkness. If someone has many difficulties, has a lot of things going against them, and difficulty just going about ordinary life because of all sorts of things that may happen, but they've turned to Christ, they are out of the domain of darkness and into the kingdom of His beloved Son.
And here's the thing that's so awesome. When you're in that kingdom of His beloved Son, through conversion, by believing in the gospel, you're also in a new family. You're adopted son or daughter of the King. No matter what curses may have been on your ancestry, no matter how awful life had been in the past, whatever you'd been through.
The way we used to look at it, we're looking for causality. "This could have caused this, this could have caused that. We got to redo this." Now I look at, no. And some of the old gospel songs brought this out. I love this one about child of the King, from the door of the orphanage to the house of the king. There's songs like that in the 30s and 40s that reflect how the evangelical truth, the euangelion, that's the gospel, changed the status.
That was a lot of the people in those small churches. And now that even conservative religions become massive and powerful, and we have our own cathedrals and buildings and institutions and everything, the simple truth sometimes just gets lost on us.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Bob DeWaay: What a great privilege to be adopted into the family of God.
Eric Huffman: Amen, amen. It's really a rebuttal against the idea that we have to be saved and re-saved and re-saved and re-saved through various kinds of deliverance over years. It happens all at once. We have been transferred into the kingdom of light. It is a marvel of grace. Now, that doesn't mean that once you come to Christ and you're saved, there aren't still things to work through and habits to be sanctified from. But even then, you don't need the magic. You don't need the show. You just need to be discipled.
And so there's salvation where it's all at once, and then there's the working out of your salvation, which is discipleship. And the more you press into the word of God and into the community of Christ, the more you're freed from the old self, the old you, and it's your old habits and proclivities.
Man, I struggle with this. There are people that I dearly love who are deeply involved in deliverance ministries, and we have gracious, wonderful conversations about this. They're dear brothers and sisters. But I genuinely believe that a robust discipleship ministry is what deliverance should be.
I don't want to denigrate or dismiss the wonders people have seen in these deliverance ministries because I think a lot of it is real by the grace of God, a lot of it is true, and some people have been really helped, but I think what we need is discipleship followed by the gospel salvation followed by discipleship.
Bob DeWaay: Yeah, amen. Another thing that I emphasize, and I resisted it for a while because it seems Lutheran or whatever, it's called means of grace. But once you unpack what that means, God gave us certain promises. God gives us access that's accessible. A-C-C-E-S-S. We have access. It's not something that's way above you like Paul says in Romans 10. God doesn't tell you, well, sprout wings and fly to the moon. He says, do this in remembrance of me.
He says, wherever two or more of you gather my name, there I am in your midst. And baptism is accessible and reminds us that we buried the old man.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, amen.
Bob DeWaay: You don't have to be a spiritual genius to have the Lord's supper. That is the word of God purely taught. The word of God is God speaking to us and it is a sanctifying thing. Jesus prayed in John 17, "Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is true." And so they can be under the teaching of the word of God. What God provides for our growth are things that are accessible to every Christian. And these other things in their complexity are inaccessible.
Eric Huffman: Right, yeah. Well, the thing I appreciate most about your work and particularly that piece we've talked about that you wrote 22 years ago is that you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don't give in to, you know, the other end of the extreme, which is, I guess, a cessationist worldview.
You offer a different lens through which to look at these issues we're talking about. So the dominant lens is the spiritual warfare worldview that we've talked about a lot today. The deliverance ministries fit nicely under that worldview. You offer this new worldview that I don't think the world's heard about. But every Christian needs to know there's another way of looking at these matters. You call it the providential worldview. Could you briefly break down the differences in why the providential worldview is preferable for Christians?
Bob DeWaay: Well, for one thing, it's taught so clearly in Romans 8 and elsewhere. Again, there's misunderstanding. It says those who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God. In Romans 8, we used to think that meant the ones that hear voices and they know which one is God. But the word in there in the Greek is "ago", which means "bring" or "carry". So I wrote an article about that called Carried by the Comforter.
And what God is assuring us is that He is going to bring us to Himself conformed to the image of Christ and that nothing will separate us from the love of God. And so a robust doctrine of providence, which is not often heard by evangelicals, is an amazing thing. And you can teach it out of the Old Testament like Israel coming out of Egypt.
During that whole time, if you look at Joseph, someone just was asking about Joseph, there's no prophet that showed up and told Joseph where to go or what to do. He would be betrayed by his family, thrown in a pit. And then he was lied about by Potiphar's wife. And then the guys in jail forgot about him when they got out. One of them did. God used him to save the very people who had mistreated him. And when you get to Genesis 50 in verse 20, he says, "Don't be angry with yourself." There's two verses about this. "God sent me before you to preserve life."
God sending Joseph through all of that was providence. Providence is not deism. It's not just rationalism. Providence is God bringing His own people to glory through everything that happens. He's there and nothing separates us from His love. And the end results were conformed to the image of Christ.
So I wrote an article on that called Carried by the Comforter. That worldview is so liberating because we're not full of fear. Even if bad things happen, even if we fail, if we fail badly, the Christian is full of grief and turns to God. He disciplines those He's received, however that works through His providence. There's nothing.. see because I've talked to people, I try to get them to believe in providence and they think it sounds... they don't like it. They want direct words from God.
Well, what about us? Nothing can separate us. Well, we can separate ourselves. Well, first thing I ask is why are you so eager to do that? That's not a good idea. But then the other one is, wait a second, the last phrase in Romans 8 is "nor any other created thing". Are you created or did you exist from all eternity like God? Well, no, I'm created. Well, then you're not going to separate yourself from the love of God either. God's giving comfort.
Eric Huffman: So how does that apply to the conversation about demons and the spiritual warfare we've been talking about? What would a providential view have to say about that stuff?
Bob DeWaay: Well, God's in charge of the realm of the spirits because only He has all the knowledge of this. He put us in part of providence as the rulership of nations. There are different sons of God, sometimes means hostile spirit beings or fallen angels. Deuteronomy 32, the best reading and the best text, we're under those hostile powers, but not directly because it says in Acts 17, God draws out the boundaries. Romans 13, pray for the civil leaders because God appointed them. So, therefore, it's God's mercy. We have civil leaders. We may not like them. They may be corrupt sometimes, but we have civil leaders. They're not demons. We can see the civil leaders and we can reason with them and pray for them, but we're not under the demons. That's God's realm.
And so I try to tell people, if you're going around casting out principalities over cities, that's really dishonoring God. I wrote an article about that too. God's in charge of drawing out the boundaries and He appointed the civil rulers. And we should be thankful. It could be worse. We could be directly under the demons, but we're not.
Eric Huffman: Yes, but I can hear my deliverance ministry friends saying, but demons are real and the New Testament repeatedly implores Christians to go out and cast them out and deal with the demonic. The Providence worldview, I guess, could be extrapolated out to suggest we're just to throw up our hands and kind of live with it rather than aggressively casting out these forces of darkness. What do you say?
Bob DeWaay: That's a total misunderstanding. No, we're not throwing up our hands and living with it. We're appealing to the creator of the universe on our behalf. We're going to the throne of grace. We're going to the real power.
When Paul had a messenger from Satan, Angelos in the Greek, angel from Satan tormenting him, whatever it was, we don't know, he appealed to God. God's answer was, "My grace is sufficient for you". We have access to the very throne of grace, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has all authority and power, who sits at the right hand of God, ruling.
Now, some people take that wrong. Psalm 110:1, ruling in the midst of his enemies. But we're the ones that are going to get rid of the enemies. No. He's going to do that when He returns. Now, we go to Him with our concerns about what the devil is doing. And by the way, this is too much for today, obviously, but I have a whole bunch of material out of Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Peter 2, Jude, especially in Colossians, that tell us not to do that. We're literally told not to revile angelic majesties. God shows us His evil ones. We're told not to do that.
Eric Huffman: So does that mean talking to God about demons rather than talking to demons about God? Help my simple mind compute this. If you're confronted with something that's clearly darkness, clearly demonic, you're suggesting Christians should appeal to God in heaven, to the Holy Spirit, to deal with this for us rather than speaking directly to the entity?
Bob DeWaay: Oh, yep. Yep. You bet. Go to God. The examples that they give are all either signs of the apostles or Jesus showing that He had power over them and that there is a way out of their domain. Deliverance is not therapy for Christians.
Eric Huffman: Mm-mm.
Bob DeWaay: It never is therapy for Christians.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Feels like it's trying to be sometimes.
Bob DeWaay: Well, it is. That's where that passage in Timothy comes in. If even somebody's demonic activity, it says gently, gently appeal. It says here, may God grant repentance. So pray for that. If we have access to god, there's no higher authority.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Amen. And I wouldn't be so interested in this conversation if it weren't for the dozens of people I've seen in recent years who have been devastated by negative experiences with deliverance ministries to the point of, in some cases, walking away from the church, from the faith in some cases, because of not only negative experiences emotionally, but, like, they perceived falsehood, and they have evidence that it was false, what they were told in these sessions that they had with deliverance ministers. And it does so much harm when it goes wrong. And I understand there's stories out there where it went right, and that's great.
But I guess to wrap up since we're almost out of time, Bob, what would you say to a fellow brother or sister in Christ that's a believer in this stuff, that's, you know, knee deep in deliverance ministries and spends their weekends hosting traveling prophets and things like that. What would you say to someone who is in this world?
Bob DeWaay: Well, I would say that you need to search the scriptures and not just take superficial claims that can be refuted easily if you look at the scripture in context. And understand that there are scriptures in 2 Peter 2 and in Jude and in Colossians that warn us not to do that. It talks about people taking their stand on visions they've had, but they're not holding fast to the head.
The experiences interacting with demons creates manifestations. Manifestations invite more manifestations. And pretty soon you're having manifestation meetings where the word of God is hardly even taught.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Because the demons like it that way.
Bob DeWaay: Yeah. They like the attention. The fact that we live in ordinary lives, ordinary, if any Christian life can be ordinary, praying to God and trusting Him and raising our children and teaching the word of God and trusting Him for daily sustenance. Look at the Lord's prayer. Give us this day our daily bread. Don't rejoice the demons are subject to you. Rejoice your name's written in the book.
And so what gets pushed to the side is the gospel. And the promises. Colossians 1:13-14, I don't know what they make of it, but they ignore it.
Eric Huffman: The fact that we have been delivered.
Bob DeWaay: Yeah. Rescued like the Israelites brought out of Egypt.
Eric Huffman: I think there are people who have started to see what you've seen from that world, but they're afraid to step away from it because there's so much of their identity and relationships are built into that world. It's hard to walk away from something you've been a part of and you've preached, you know, and taught to others and invited others into.
But I think this is again where your providential worldview comes in handy. Because I would imagine that there would be plenty of opportunity for you to feel remorse, regret, shame over spending years doing deliverance ministries and things that you saw and did and said.
Instead, a providential worldview says God's hand was on even that part of your life. And He has now used that part of your life to shape your ministry to be as effective as it has been in preaching the truth. You understand how important it is to stay grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ and to bring people into repentance.
You wouldn't be as passionate about the things you are today if you had not been through that season of your life by the providence of God.
Bob DeWaay: You're absolutely right.
Eric Huffman: Well, I am so grateful for your wisdom and your discernment and clarity in what you wrote in the article that we've talked about. I hope that all of our viewers and listeners will look that article up and read it for themselves. Because, again, you offer such a clear case, a compelling biblical case for the providential worldview, regarding the spiritual realm.
Bob, thank you so much for your time today, for sharing these thoughts. I just pray you'll keep going, brother, as long as the Lord gives you here on this Earth.
Bob DeWaay: Well, I have absolutely zero retirement plans. I tell you that.
Eric Huffman: Our retirement plan is heaven. Right?
Bob DeWaay: Yeah. Graduation to heaven is the next... Between then and now, if I can, I'll just keep preaching and teaching.
Eric Huffman: Just keep preaching the gospel. Thank you so much for being here today, Bob.
Bob DeWaay: Nice to meet you, and thank you for having me.
Eric Huffman: Nice to meet you.
Bob DeWaay: God bless you.
Eric Huffman: God bless you, brother.