Question: If the casting out of evil spirits was common in the past, and human nature doesn’t change, why isn’t the casting out of evil spirits common today, such as in priesthood blessings, instead of resorting to drugs for abnormal behavioral problems?
Answer: As many people can testify, the phenomenon of evil spirits exists today as much or more than it always has. Demonic entities invade people’s thoughts, dreams, bodies, houses, facilities, and even neighborhoods. To believe otherwise is to agree with the devil of devils, “I am no devil, for there is none,” its consequence being that thus “he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance” (2 Nephi 28:22).
When a person reaches that point in his denial of the reality of evil spirits, he is indeed well on the way to a spiritual point of no return. In today’s politically correct society, who wants to acknowledge that they are “troubled by evil spirits,” “have attachments” they picked up from unwholesome people, attribute outbursts of anger and accusations to being “overpowered by the devil,” or that they are “seeing apparitions” of demonic entities in dreams, visions, and NDEs?
In full possession mode, aberrant behaviors become the norm. Radical alteration of a person’s appearance to something other than God-given physical or facial features, gender confusion, trans lifestyles, multiple personalities, and outright hostility as people’s thoughts, actions, and emotions operate in conflict with their inmost spirits—these fruits of yielding to dark influences Isaiah depicts symbolically by likening their victims to feral animals or de-created humans.
But instead of going to the root of the problem and acknowledging that Jesus’ infinite atonement for transgression promises complete healing from spiritual abnormalities—our society turns to medications based on “symptoms” of this or that condition, to counseling sessions and therapy classes, many of which may perpetuate the very conditions they are intended to heal, feeding the egos and narcissism a lot of troubled persons display with their obsessive desire for attention.
Isn’t assigning clinical names to possession by evil spirits a way of sanitizing reality and denying the existence of the Devil? Isn’t resorting to medical treatments a way of avoiding the cure? Do we suppose that when we pass from this world we will somehow be healed and not have to face the fact that “that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world” (Alma 34:34)?
When indeed shall we return to New Testament times when devils were cast out and bodies healed? “Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them. And the people heeded with one accord the things Philip spoke, hearing and seeing the miracles he did. For unclean spirits, crying with loud voice, came out of many who were possessed by them, and many taken with palsies and lame were healed. And there was great joy in that city” (Acts 8:5–8).
