I had word of knowledge of a young man in City Harvest, that he was addicted to the game - couldn’t get it out of his mind, kept being drawn back to the game. So the guy came up, and we found the game was World of Warcraft, and he indicated the name of the character he played. When I asked him to renounce the game, and renounce the identity of this sorcerer; as we prayed, the spirit of sorcery manifested on his face, and he fell, yelling on the ground. He had opened his life to a spirit of sorcery while he was playing these games! We had an alter call, and nearly 200 people came up, and there was massive deliverance.
This is amazing! People at Bible school learning about God, but privately practicing sorcery. What it alerts us to, is the way it is disguising itself, and become acceptable. You understand now, that this is still a problem. It’s an old problem in a new form.
Another doorway to the Occult is the area of addictive drugs. The word sorcerer in the New Testament is the word ‘Pharmakeia’ from which we get the word ‘pharmacy’. So certain drugs put people in an altered state, and people can become addicted to drugs because of pain in their lives. Rather than resolve the root cause of the pain, they medicate it. So, Pharmakeia – taking drugs, can be an addictive substitute for relationship with God, and proper resolution of issues.
It’s quite interesting that when people get onto some of these drugs, the hallucinations they have can be quite similar. I went to pray for one man, and he was hallucinating under prescription medicine, but he had a history of alcohol and drug addiction. Although he’d given it up, when he got on those pain-killers, he started to hallucinate. He was seeing spiders literally coming out of the walls at him. When we came against the spirit of sorcery and cast it out, the hallucination stopped, and all the pain in his body left as well. So, addictive drugs can open the doorway to sorcery.
Related to that, there’s another form of this. What’s happening in many places in the Western world, and possibly here too, is the use of drugs to render a woman unconscious; so a man can have sex with her, without her realising it. They were called ‘date-rape’ drugs. When the person comes under the influence of the drug, they are literally unable to respond, or unable to control their life, and I believe a spirit of sorcery is involved behind that.
I had a person come to me who said: “I think this is what’s happened to me”. What happened was that I prayed for this girl, and when I prayed for her, I commanded the spirit of sorcery to leave her. In other words, the power the man had bought over her life, by using the drugs - and there was a massive manifestation.
Another example of that, I found in Malaysia. I prayed for a woman, and she was bleeding from her womb. Her belly was very swollen; and it turns out, they told me, she had been charmed. I said: “What do you mean, charmed?” And she said: “Well, there was this man, and he consulted with a evil spirit; and made up this powder, which he dedicated to the evil spirit.
He took the powder, and went knocking on this lady’s door. When she opened the door, he blew the powder in her face. Immediately, she went under the influence of the spirit, and then he sexually violated her, and then left her. When she came out of the trance, or out of the spell, she had this problem that her belly began to swell, and she was bleeding. There was no way to stop it. So we prayed for her, broke the attachment to this man, and commanded the spirit of sorcery to go - and she was healed.
No doubt there are other forms of sorcery. For example, martial arts can open the door to spirits of sorcery. In Mark 5:4, the man had unusual strength – he could break chains, and there was demonic power behind it. So, martial arts - now, you get into trouble the moment you start to talk about some of these areas. I had a son who wanted to get into martial arts, so I talked to him about the doorway to the demonic. I said, “It will start as physical exercises, and it will move to where you have to meditate, in order to open your life for greater power. At that point, if you do that, you’ll be demonised. The power you receive will be a demonic power.” I said: “You’ll notice that at some point, the instructor will give away this aspect of it.” So, he went on for a while, and got involved in doing this martial arts training. Eventually it came to the point where this was exactly what was the issue. At that point, he left and gave it up. So, martial arts can lead towards meditation, which opens the door for spirits.
We have to be aware and alert to various doorways for these spirits to come in. Some forms of music can open up the doorway for demonic spirits. Quite interesting, in the mass murders at the school in USA in Columbine, Columbine massacre, that there were two things that were involved there, that were part of what happened. 1) The guys were on the drug Prozac. 2) They were into heavy music, with these horrendous lyrics and driving beat that shifted them, and opened them up to spirits. That’s not the only reason, but we need to be aware that some forms of heavy music can open the door to demonic spirits.