The realm of spirits is not one I have had much to do with, but last night I heard a story that sounds like it came straight off the pages of the New Testament.
I am in the far north of Cambodia visiting some community development projects. We have been transported by tractor along a dusty dirt track to the edge of the Sekong river, then to the village on the other side by raft. The sun is setting behind us and the view is spectacular.
We are an hour early for our meeting, so our host encourages us to go for a walk. The jungle is thick around us, the light is fading. We pass timber houses, pigs, dogs, chickens. At one stage I am greeted by a short Cambodian man who has a huge smile. He takes my hand, refuses to let it go, and speaks to me in his native tongue in greatly animated voice. It’s a cart being pulled by two bullock that needs to pass that forces him to release his grip.
As we continue along the track we pass the home of a man who works in the project we have come to see. He and his wife invite us in. Plastic chairs are placed in a circle out the front of the house and in the semi-darkness he and another staffer share about their lives.
We have been talking for about 45 minutes when I ask the men how they came to faith in Christ.The man whose house we are visiting tells us it was through the witness of the project staff. Then the second man tells his story. He speaks for a long time with greatly animated voice. When he finishes, our translator relays the story in English. It went something like this:
“I was a spirit caster. When a person in the village became possessed by a spirit, I would cast it out. A more powerful spirit would come and enter me and I would use its power to cast out the spirit in the other person.
One day I felt a powerful spirit leave my body. I vomited it out. But a day later I discovered it had entered my sister. When I tried to cast it out of her, the spirit spoke through my sister. ‘You are not powerful enough to cast me out. You have no authority over me.’
I didn’t know what to do. Then I felt a force enter me. I had heard about Jesus from the project staff and the spirit in my sister sensed it was Jesus that had entered me. The spirit acknowledged Jesus had greater authority and left my sister. It was then that I believed in Jesus and became his follower.”
The secular rationalist in me wants to dismiss this as a supernatural interpretation of what was nothing more than a psychological event. But what if it’s the other way round? What if I am placing a materialist interpretation on what was a genuinely supernatural event?
There is so much we don’t know about life, the universe, and everything. What if the spirit realm is one of them? What if this man and this tribe in the far northern jungles of Cambodia knows far more of this than we westerners? What else does he have to teach me?
And so this encounter symbolizes much more than the realities of a spirit realm. It challenges me to remember that there is much I don’t know and much to learn, and that my teacher may well be a formerly illiterate spirit caster from a remote village in the jungles of Cambodia.
We in the west have been so conditioned that rational/scientific reality is the only reality that even we Christians question spiritual reality.
No doubt there are psychological things and even fraud going on in villages all over the world, however there is also a lot of reality we don’t understand.
Hi Andy,
Interesting that in his book People of the Lie, psychiatrist Scott Peck describes a handful of extreme cases that no medical treatment could help but who were helped by exorcism. From memory this leads Peck to contemplate the reality of supranatural evil.
There are many accounts in the New Testament of interactions between Jesus or his followers with evil spirits. Authority is clearly a major issue in many of these encounters. When I was younger I was quite skeptical about these things, in spite of the clear teaching of scripture, because of a lack of personal experience which I ultimately gave greater credence to than scripture. In God’s kindness he has led me to encounter so many evil spirits in my ministry in India that I long since abandoned my skepticism and have seen first-hand that Jesus has authority over them.
What a fascinating meeting, Scott! Why do you think we don’t ever see anything like this in Australia / the west?
Luke, one of my lecturers at theological college had an interesting theory – that to be possessed by a spirit one must open oneself up to that. In traditional cultures this is common, but in secular cultures, we are closed off to this so rarely see possession occur.