Can Demons Cause Sin? (Questions Teenagers Ask 2.)

Part two of my series on Questions Teenagers Ask. All posts in this series are responses to questions I’ve had from young people written in the style I answered them.

Question: Can Demons Cause Sin?  // Is It Demons Fault When I Sin?

Answer:

Hmmm… great question. I think my answer is:

No, not directly – but they flippin don’t help!

Sin comes from us, pure and simple. We were made in the image of God under His authority and rule. We then decided that we knew better, disobeyed His commands, rebelled against Him and then rejected Him. Sin is the behaviour altering cancer that results.

It goes beyond just rebellion and disobedience. Sin is like a genetic disease, it gets passed down from that original mess-up to every human on the planet. Romans 3:10 says ‘there is no one righteous, not even one.” And we know it don’t we? How many times have we rejected God today? Have we today fallen short of showing Him the proper love & respect? Even the Apostle Paul himself struggled daily with sin: “I try to do good but sin is right there with me” (read Romans 7).

This is why it’s so important to get the virgin Birth right isn’t it? Jesus didn’t have a human father and so He didn’t inherit Sin the same way we do. He then did what those first humans (and us!) just couldn’t do – He lived obeying God. He also went that extra, massive and substitutionary step by dying in our place taking the punishment that we deserve for rejecting God.

But anyway I’m off topic… demons… hmmm. They are not sin themselves and they are not what makes us sin – but like I said they do not help at all! What do they do then? I think they whisper lies to us. They poke and taunt. They tell us all sorts of tempting falsities like, ‘God’s not listening,’ ‘This will be more fun,’ ‘You’re too sinful,’ ‘You’ve got to work harder to get God to like you,’ ‘Its better to be popular,’ ‘You smell bad,’ ‘Live a little’… etc.

Demons are also good at mimicking and playing pretend – they like to pretend to be God, or pretend to be the voice of reason, or our conscience, or the voice of an Angel. They are non of these things. We must continually pray that God’s voice will be clear to us and demon’s voices will be numb to us. We must train ourselves in relationship with God to hear His voice more acutely.

Demons are really not very helpful, but they don’t directly cause us to sin. They do however, use the sin in our own lives against us. We have the loaded gun in our hands; demons try to taunt us into using it.

Sin is always self-destructive and demons love destruction – particularly of those who love God. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis offers some great, tragic, and hillarious fictional insight into this.

This is probably the best way I can put it: Sin is the heavy weight pushing down on us – and demons are the ones jumping up & down on it, tickling us under the armpits. Little blighters.

Best defense: Keep praying, keep reading God’s Word so you know how to recognize His voice, worship Go every day, and enjoy the delights of being His!

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