25 Years in a Demonic Prison
Welcome to our podcast series, “Stories From the Field.” I’m your host Joy Kita and with me today is Ron Pearce.
Ron- It’s good to be here again, Joy.
Joy- Hi Ron, I hear today we are going to do a story from Ethiopia about demon possession.
Ron- That’s right and this is one I remember very, very well because of how strange it was and how sad it was all in one. And I’m going to tell the folks that we don’t just make up these stories and try to remember the details. We have tape recordings of all the interviews with all the people around the world. And second of all, I take notes while we are interviewing these folks and then I add on to the notes afterwards other sub notes, trying to describe the environment, things like that. So when I read something back to all our friends, etcetera, this is very, very accurate. We are not embellishing, we are taking the numbers right off the page. So today, in view of this, what I’m going to do is read my notes with all of the additions so people know this is exactly what I saw at this time. So here we go.
It was a village in Ethiopia and there was a lady who had been demon-possessed for 25 years. When her husband died, his family came to her and did a demonic ceremony and completely dedicated her to demons.
We are not embellishing, we are taking the numbers right off the page.
Joy- Her father did that?
Ron- No, this is the children. This is the children of her husband that came and I’m sure that the other children came too and they dedicated her to the demons. For 25 years after that she stayed in her house and didn’t come out. So my question was, at that time, what was the point to this? And the idea was, is that they thought that the demonic powers of one person who was sacrificed in this situation to be a prisoner in her house and to have all this demonic activity within her, and just be a portal for power. They thought that they could get the power of all this demonic force for their business and for their farm and for everything that they were doing in life. Therefore, she was sacrificed so they could have the benefit of demonic possession, so that was behind this thing. Okay, so here we go. She had 13 children and nine of them died but she remained in the house tormented by the demons day and night. A local pastor who is a church planter, went to see her even after being warned that if he were to just look at her he could die. He took his Bible with him and went into the house. He wasn’t afraid. I got that here, he was not afraid. He immediately said, “Jesus is Lord,” and the woman started to scream as the demons manifested themselves. The pastor asked the demons how many of them there were in her. They spoke to him and said there are 158 of us and she was their home and center to do whatever they wanted in that place. So the family was correct. This was a repository, this was demon central shall we say, for that whole region and she was the one who was in the middle of it.
Joy- Do you think that she agreed to this?
Ron- I don’t know.
Joy- I wonder if it was a demonic family maybe she agreed to that.
She had 13 children and nine of them died but she remained in the house tormented by the demons day and night.
Ron- I don’t know. That’s a hard one because so many things go into that. She was maybe so depressed of her family dying, her children dying. Who knows what was all going in her mind. But here she was, she adopted this and they wouldn’t let her out of the house. She was a prisoner. So, here is the pastor. He prayed over her for three hours claiming Jesus as Lord and her house as a house of God and not a house of demons. After three hours she was totally delivered and set free. She went out of her house for the first time in 25 years and the people were afraid of her until they saw the pastor eat with her and she walked around and greeted people. Now she is almost 80 years old and is still worshiping God today, the pastor said. There has been a big church planted in that place because of her deliverance and her testimony. They said she would go around for years telling what it was like to be a prisoner of Satan for 25 years. The church has 193 members and more and more are giving themselves to Christ daily. That is the story right from the notes.
Joy- And that would have been a while ago right?
Ron- Yes, this was a few years ago, this was six or seven years ago.
Joy- So that church has definitely continued to grow.
Ron- Oh, it’s exploded by now. But the pastor, when he came in and told us the story, he was trying to talk about the idea that there is nothing that can stop the growth of the church of Jesus Christ. And all these demonic forces are a force, okay it’s true, but they do not have the power to curtail the work of God. This is one woman who is a living testimony that there is a demonic force and satanic forces out there keeping her captive for 25 years, making her life, and I’m going to put it this way, a living hell and that is the sort of environment she was in. But when she accepts Jesus, in a moment of time she can be set free, she becomes normal. She goes outside, she greets people, she is back in her right mind and the power of God and Jesus to set her free is as real as anything in this world. And that is the point of this story for people.
But when she accepts Jesus, in a moment of time she can be set free, she becomes normal.
Joy- You know, there’s a few things that stand out to me in this story and the first one is, it’s really easy to tell a story like this but if you have the imagination to actually picture the reality of the situation, I’m amazed at the pastor’s courage because I’m sure walking into this house that has had demonic activity for 25 years, it’s not a pretty house, it’s not a happy place. It has to be a little scary and a little dark, and for him to walk into the house and say he’s not afraid because he probably wasn’t and then to instantly say Jesus is Lord! That couldn’t have gone over well with the demons.
Ron- Oh no, but at the same time he was protected. And that is the thing about people who are afraid of demons and afraid of Satan and everything like that. We give respect to their position and their power but we’re not afraid of it. We are not afraid and the powers of darkness cannot overpower us. I’ve run into situations like this over the years many times starting when I was a teenager dealing at a Christian camp with demon possession. I’ve watched this over the years and after a while, you get a confidence in God. The confidence in God centers around the fact that you are absolutely convinced that God exists, God has the power to keep us and preserve us and that Jesus loves us and gave us promises to protect us. And more than anything else in my thinking, that the Holy Spirit is indwelling me. I am the temple of God and the Holy Spirit, when I was born again, indwelt me. At that time when he indwelt me, he set up residence there and nothing can dislodge him which means that there is no power that can separate me. What shall separate us from the love of God? Shall this and that and the other thing? No, nothing can.
Joy- I wonder if Christians forget that sometimes? That we are being indwelt by the Holy Spirit and absolutely nothing can separate us from that. In the moments of darkness in our own lives, I wonder if that is a struggle.
Ron- Well, there are people today who are playing with Christianity. It’s almost like, I’m in, I’m out, I’m in, I’m out and you know it’s this halfhearted, half-baked commitment to Jesus. They’ve never grown, they go to church, they walk in, they walk out. There is no depth there. But when you walk with God for years and you grow in Him, and the Spirit of God teaches you and indwells you and he’s your living partner, living within you and you can sense His presence. The Spirit of God bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, yes, absolutely that is true. And once you do that for long enough and you have no second thoughts about going backwards, well, there is nothing that can hurt us and harm us. We just will walk in the power of God and with the protection of the Holy Spirit at all times. We are just convinced of that so there is no fear in that. There is no fear.
But when you walk with God for years and you grow in Him, and the Spirit of God teaches you and indwells you and he’s your living partner, living within you and you can sense His presence.
Joy- And currently I find that it’s more of a feel good ministry, if it feels good then you might stick with it. That’s the in and out thing rather than the depth. The other thing that struck me about the story, and you say this a lot when relaying stories from the field, how they prayed for hours. They fasted and they prayed for 15 days and in this story, he prayed for three hours. That just strikes me as incredible that, why didn’t he give up after 10 minutes or 20 minutes or an hour. He just had the faith to continue.
Ron- Well, it’s determination. You know, we’ve got stories in the Bible, many stories about how things were done instantly. But then there is also the teaching of repetitive praying and coming again and again and again. That is the sort of idea that is built into prayer around the world. Remember that in many cultures, prayer is not foreign to them in their religions. Like in Buddhism, prayer is a central part. Hinduism they go to the temples to pray. Islam they go five times, I think it is, every day and they kneel down and pray. It’s part of them. So they will go repetitively and they will go for long periods of time. We, if we don’t get it very, very quickly, as children which we are, I’m finding more and more all the time in the West, we just give up or we say well, I’m tired of this now. And that is the way children are and they get tired very quickly. Around the world, they will look at prayer totally different than we do from their religious backgrounds.
Joy- Right, thank you, Ron, I think it’s been very encouraging on many levels, this particular story. As always it’s been a pleasure being here with Ron Pearce and our podcast series “Stories From the Field.”
