A fierce war rages for your soul. With the Manual for Spiritual Warfare, you will be armed for battle. In this excerpt, learn the powers and limitations of your enemy.
What Are Demons?
The Church teaches that Satan and the other demons were at first good angels, created by God before the creation of the human race. But they became evil by their own free choice, radically rejecting God and His reign. Satan was the leader of the rebels. God and the good angels defeated them and cast them out of heaven. Now they make their influence felt in our world. They cannot repent of their evil, because the choice they made against God is irrevocable.
How Many Are There?
We simply don’t know for sure. Sacred Scripture and Tradition take for granted that there are multitudes of them. But we can be consoled to know that their numbers aren’t increasing: They cannot reproduce themselves.
What Can They Do?
When we keep in mind that demons are fallen angels, we have some sense of what they can and cannot do. Angels are like humans in that they have intellects and wills. But they have no physical bodies as we do that would make them subject to death or physical ailments.
The angelic nature includes certain kinds of superhuman powers. Angels are far superior to us in strength, skill, intelligence, and knowledge. Having no physical bodies, they don’t move through space as we do, since they can’t actually occupy space. Even so, they can act on physical objects, shifting their attention and their activity instantly from one place to another.
The angelic nature of demons, though in many ways superior to ours, has been deformed and darkened by their sin. They abuse their great gifts from God by using them to injure human beings. Their purpose is to see as many human beings as possible join them in rebelling against God — and in their everlasting misery separated from Him in hell.
For centuries, theologians have debated the limits of demonic power. According to the prevailing tradition, the Devil and his cohorts cannot know the future unless God has revealed it. They may, however, make accurate predictions and then act on them, given their vast knowledge of events throughout the world and the corresponding natural consequences. And of course, being aware of their own intentions, they know their own plans for the future.
In any case, demons have remarkable power to use against us. But it’s essential to remember that they don’t have unlimited power. Satan is only a creature, and in the end, he’s no match for God, his Creator and Judge.
The Problem of Evil
God is infinitely more powerful than the Devil and his hosts. So why doesn’t God prevent them from their evildoing on planet earth?
We could ask a similar question about why God doesn’t stop human beings from committing wicked deeds. Evil’s continuing presence among us is a mystery we can’t fully figure out in this life.
Nevertheless, we can say this much: God allows evil because He’s powerful enough to bring out of even the greatest evil a much greater good.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ provides a vivid illustration of this reality. According to the Gospel, when “Satan entered into Judas,” one of the twelve Apostles, he went out to betray Jesus (see Lk 22:3–4). So the worst evil we can imagine — the torture and murder of God’s innocent Son — occurred through the Devil’s influence.
Yet the triumph of the empty tomb transformed the horror of the Cross. Satan was thwarted. When Jesus rose from the dead, He displayed God’s power to bring out of the greatest of evils an even greater good: the world’s redemption.
Meanwhile, our days in this life provide a season for God to test, purify, strengthen, and perfect us, making us fit to live with Him forever in heaven. To that end, the demons serve as useful tools for Him as they constantly test us by tempting us, so that we become purer and stronger and closer to perfection every time we resist the temptation.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Manual for Spiritual Warfare by Paul Thigpen, PhD which is available from TAN Books.
