When people are involved in idolatry, much of the idolatry in those days was connected with temple prostitutes and sexual sin, because the part of our mind that's engaged when we love God or worship, or when are loving or expressing love, is the same part that's involved in the sexual area, so worship and the sexual area of your mind are very similar areas. They touch the same part of your brain, so we don't know then whether he was involved in idolatry and that's how the spirit entered into him. My experience has been, that when people have been involved in idolatry or spiritism, they usually have spirits of lust go with it - or he may have been involved in sexual sin, had a relationship or engaged a prostitute, or been involved in sexual sin of various kinds. We just don't know. The Bible leaves that part out, but those are some possible ways.
What we do know, is he had more than one spirit, and the main one was an unclean spirit. In the presence of a strong anointing, it began to flush up and manifest in a way which was visible. I was in Singapore a couple of years ago and we were just speaking in one of the meetings [laughs], and I just got up and started to talk; well the Holy Spirit's going to come and start to touch people. I'd talked less than five minutes and this cleaner lady suddenly appears up the top there and she's holding a broom, and she must have been just outside the room cleaning. She just burst in, held up this broom and began to shake it, and she's shaking it at me, and yelling at me: why you come here? Why you do this to me? And it's obviously a demon, so I began to walk down towards her, but as I did I saw other people start to manifest and I thought if I do that, we're going to have it all go off right now, and I want to preach the gospel and get some people saved, so I'm not going to let demons take over. I just re-managed the meeting a bit, and then we had all the full scale deliverance at the end of the meeting.
So you see here, the evil spirit cries out: leave us alone, what have we to do with You? We know who You are, so evil spirits recognise the person of Jesus. A lot of people don't know who Jesus is, but the spirit world does know. The spirit world sees things as they are. We see things as they appear to be, so people can appear to have their life together, but in the spirit world you're seen for who you are, and what you are. Everything is seen, so if we were to look at one another now, we'd just see the temple, the body, the external, but the real man is the hidden man of the heart, the spirit and the soul. Now we look, and the body looks as though it's got substance, the soul and spirit looks a bit, sort of way out there. I can't kind of see that or understand that, but from the spirit world if you looked, they would look at the spirit man and soul, and say that's the substance, the other is temporary. It's like a cloud of water vapour that conceals the person.
So in the spirit world, it's your spirit man and soul that are eternal, and therefore substantial. So the spirit world, demons, can look at people and see their condition. We'll come across that a little bit later. Now that's a bit scary isn't it? God can see your condition too. It's just we've lived so long thinking no one knows what's going on, that we can hide, and we do try and hide like Adam and Eve like hiding from God, rather than actually being and living a full life and an open life before Him. So the demon said: what have we got to do with You? We know who You are. Now see how Jesus handled it; Jesus rebuked him, or rebuked the spirit - Be quiet. Come out! So you notice how Jesus dealt with in the area of deliverance. He asserted His authority, He spoke a verbal command, and He had faith that the demon would come out. That's how it operates, just straight verbal commands, to deal with the demonic spirit - and the demon came out.
It says when the demon had thrown him on the ground, it came out of him, and didn't hurt him, so you notice that the demon manifested as it came out. It threw the guy on the ground, and I have see some extraordinary things of demons throwing people on the ground, or doing different things, and it looks spectacular, but at the end what really counts, is actually that the spirit came out. So the key thing is not that he manifested, not that he fell on the ground, it's that the spirit came out, and so the man got mightily delivered, and the demon - notice it didn't hurt him at all. It just looked like it was going to, but it couldn't. Jesus was in firm control. The demon didn't hurt Jesus. The demon didn't hurt the man. The demon just left the scene. I've spoken to one or two who have had spiritual visions or pictures of demons leaving. I said tell me what did it look like? Both of them said to me a similar thing. They said: they went so fast, we could hardly even see them. They said they're just like [whoosh] They just were out of that place as quick as they could. They just left the place, couldn't wait to get away.