Now, you notice that both men had the same experience, but each interpreted their experience differently. One had no root of rejection – “He obviously didn’t hear me, he’s busy. It’s ok, I’ll catch him again.” The other one – “He didn’t want to hear me.” The other one, same experience, but when you ask the question: “what does that mean?”, “It means he doesn’t like me. I knew he didn’t like me!” So, the person’s emotions get stirred up, the stronghold gets stirred up; and the demon constantly torments them.
What Jesus is saying, is that the spirit of rejection is the “strong man” exerting influence on his life. The “armour” is what conceals him, or protects him from being cast out. The armour is the root systems of bondage in the person’s life. The key way that demons gain access, is through deception. The person believes the lie, and the demon hides behind the lie.
So, if the person has a root of rejection, there may be a spirit of rejection, but there’s also a lie; and there’s also some emotional pain; and there may be some experience they had where it has come in. What Jesus essentially is saying is this: remove the structures that the demon lives in, and you can easily get it out. Remove the armour, or the defence system of the demon, and it’s easy to deal with it.
So in our ministry, we should not just focus on casting the demon out; but work with the person to find out the structures that the demon lives in. Remove the demonic house, and there’s nowhere for the demon to take hold. Remove the demonic house, and there’s nowhere for the demon to grip on, and so it has no place to come back in again. So, if you cast out a demon of rejection, but the person still believes the lie (I’m unloved and unwanted), then after a few negative experiences, soon the demon will come back in again. So, deliverance is not just casting out demons; it involves us ministering to the person, and dealing with the strongholds that allow the demon to sit there.
To do that, we need to identify what they are, and how they work. So, in ministering to people, we want to find out what are some of the structures the demon used, to occupy and hold them in bondage. That raises the question then: “how do demons gain entrance to people’s lives?” Now different deliverance ministries approach this in different ways. Some don’t even look at the root systems, but I think this is a mistake, because once the demon has gone out, it will come back in again. So, different ministries have different ways of looking at it; but in the end, it will come down to the same things.
So, number one group is legal rights. Legal rights mean sin. I’ll just list these 3 things, and then we’ll come back to them later. 1.) Legal rights. A legal right means the demon has a right, under spiritual law, to occupy the person. It has authority to be able to go there; and that authority has been given to them because the person sinned. For example, in Ephesians 4:27 “Give no door or room for the devil. Give no foothold to the demon.” The word ‘door’ or ‘foothold’ is the Greek word ‘topos’ meaning: a legal ground. So, don’t give a legal ground for an evil spirit to enter. We’ll explain what some of those are later. A major door that demons use, are legal rights.
When we walk in God’s order or guidelines, or when we walk in the law of God, we live under blessing. When we break the law of God, there are consequences. We reap what we’ve sown, and demonic spirits have legal right to access. A little later we’ll demonstrate that Jesus, at the cross, dealt with legal rights; and when you are ministering to people, you need to deal with the legal rights, and remove all grounds for the demon to be there - it’s quite simple to do.