Overcoming the Victim Spirit

The Many Faces of the Victim Spirit

Injustice

Fred is a clerk for a nationwide retail outlet. He started at the bottom and has worked there for six years learning every specialty skill on the floor from cleaning the stock room to being a checker. He doesn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, steal or alienate customers. He shows up for work on time every time. The chain that he works for is unionized, and there are rules to govern just about every aspect of the job.

In spite of the rules and in spite of his good work ethic, Fred seems to get a raw deal everywhere he goes. In six years he has worked in a lot of different stores in his district. He has worked every imaginable shift under a multitude of different managers. Regardless of the manager, Fred consistently finds himself in situations where the rules are being violated at his expense, and there is nothing he can do.

For example, he has to work at least 24 hours per week to have the company health insurance. Suddenly his manager started scheduling him for 23 hours a week. At the same time, the manager scheduled an employee with less seniority to work full time at the same store. This is flagrant violation of union rules.

Fred appealed to the manager and to the district superintendent and nothing was changed. He started paying the $400 per month insurance premiums out of his own pocket so as not to lose the coverage. When he appealed to the union for their intervention, he eventually got the hours he needed for the insurance coverage, but the junior employee still continued to get more hours. Fred was not reimbursed for the insurance premiums he paid.

This snap shot represents most of Fred’s life. Year after year, he cannot get justice at work, and when he appeals to the union or to the state labor board, they stonewall him for the longest time, then if he persists, he still loses. Usually no reason is given for the ruling against him even though it appeared going in that he had an airtight case.

Dishonor

Matthew used to be a pastor. After some crushing church battles, he left the ministry and returned to the business community. His heart was still in shepherding even though he did not have an official position in a church.

Shortly after he started attending a new church, the pastor asked him to teach an adult Sunday School class. It felt good to be needed, wanted and valued. He took the position and the class loved him, but he was soon asked to turn in his teaching outlines for the entire quarter before teaching so that the content of what he taught could be “approved” by the associate pastor. That had never been done before, nor was it done to anyone else. He was singled out.

When Matthew left that church, he changed denominations, hoping to leave controversy behind him. The new pastor welcomed him, but after a month, the pastor sought Matthew out and told him that he was not to visit any other member of the church in their home. He wanted all of Matthew’s fellowship to be on the church property where the pastor could keep an eye on him and be sure he was not building a personal fan club that would diminish the pastor’s own authority.

The next church Matthew and his family went to, he was even more cautious. He went to the pastor privately before attending the church and asked the pastor point blank whether he was welcome there. The pastor urged Matthew to come. Within the first year the pastor asked Matthew to disciple some key men in the church, then to teach the adult Sunday School, then to become assistant pastor.

Shortly after the pastor asked him in private to consider become assistant pastor, Matthew was called before the entire church board and the pastor accused him of disloyalty based on a sixth-hand comment the pastor had heard. Matthew was stripped of all church responsibilities and was still being reviled from the pulpit months after he left that church.

Matthew continued to change churches, but no matter how low a profile he kept, it was only a matter of time before the senior pastor sought him out, accused him, attacked him and dishonored him.

Destruction

Sally was accident-prone. It became a family joke because if you didn’t laugh about it, you would have to cry. It didn’t seem to be anything that could be avoided because it was never her fault, and it was always freak, one-of-a-kind accidents. She opened the top freezer door and a roast fell out, landed on her foot and broke it. If the roast was positioned in such a manner as to fall out, how could the freezer door have been closed to begin with? Who moved the roast after the door was closed? There were no answers.

Cindy had numerous car accidents and none of them were her fault. She read a study that said yellow cars have fewer accidents than cars of any other color. She bought a yellow car and had another accident.

Malpractice

Harry had an accident at work. He went to the emergency room and got a doctor who failed to clean the wound properly or to bandage it properly. That night Harry almost bled to death and three days later there was a massive infection due to the inexperience and negligence of the E.R. doctor.

Harry had emergency surgery with the HMO on-call surgeon who was inept in this procedure. This doctor cured the infection and saved Harry’s life, but the inappropriate manner in which the surgery was done left scar tissue that will cripple Harry for life.

He needed more surgery, but this time it was not an emergency. Harry’s wife changed insurance companies so that he could choose his own doctor and not be at the mercy of an HMO. Harry was careful and methodical. He saw five different doctors and got five different opinions as to what should be done. It was frustrating because he, as a layman, had to decide which one of the contradictory doctors he was going to believe. He made his choice and chose the wrong doctor.

After that surgery made him much worse, he went to one of the most prestigious hospitals in the state, even thought it was far from home. The man who wrote the book on this surgery had trained the surgeon he chose. In fact, the senior surgeon came in and consulted on the case even though he had been retired for a long time.

The surgery was (presumably) brilliant, but the girl in charge of rehab was greener than little green apples. In order to cover up her incompetence, she did not communicate with the surgeon on a key issue and the problem grew worse instead of being helped by the surgery.

Harry finally gave up and went on with life, crippled from the multiple surgeries that made a minor accident into a mess. He recently had a general physical with a new doctor who urged him to have more surgery. The new doctor explained that this was not a big deal. It could easily be fixed. Their doctor was excellent in this area.

Harry opted not to have surgery. For him, the medical system did more damage than good no matter what the credentials of the doctor or hospital.

Devouring

John is an ordained minister, working for a large ministry. He is known around the world, loved, respected and honored. He has a wonderful family, excellent fruit for his years in the ministry and many open doors before him at this time. While he was overseas staying at the home of some trusted friends, someone got into his luggage and stole some valuable items. He was in a tough spot. He had no idea who did it. If he raised the subject at all, it would cause a breach in his relationship with the leaders with whom he was staying. If he did not address the issue, he would have to always distrust them on subsequent visits. Trapped between a rock and a hard place, he absorbed the loss.

It was not the first time he had been robbed while on a ministry trip. Always it was set up in such a way that there was nothing socially acceptable that he could do to get help or identify the miscreant.

Blake had a different problem. He could not get a good serviceman. No matter how carefully he checked out the transmission shop, the plumber or the computer repairman ahead of time, no matter what their credentials were, Blake always got the one butcher in the company. He hated to think about the hundreds of hours he had wasted taking things back for repair the third and fourth time.

Defilement

Melody was molested by her babysitter’s son for three years before she went to school. She managed to keep herself safe through elementary school, but in Jr. Hi, a lesbian began to pursue her in the showers after the physical ed classes. When she got a boyfriend, he continually crossed over her boundaries until there were no boundaries left. Eventually she married him and thought her battles would be over.

She was wrong. It seemed that no matter where she worked, there was someone who crowded her sexually. It wasn’t even necessarily a physical thing. There were just some people who made it a point to look at her in such a way that left her feeling defiled even though they were twenty feet away.

She dressed extremely modestly, even to the point of going to work looking deliberately unattractive. It didn’t help. She tried to hide in her office and not go out into the general work area, but once a week or so when she had to go to another part of the building, it seemed as though one or the other of those men was sure to be there in the hallway. It was as though they had some early warning system and knew when and where they needed to be in order to visually assault her.

Since they never touched her, there was no way for Melody to file a sexual harassment complaint. She changed jobs three times in four years but every company seemed to have a lecher, and he would find her within a day of her starting to work there.

Changing jobs frequently was beginning to look very bad on her resume, especially since she could not give her prospective employer the real reasons for leaving the last job. Finally she figured out a way to beat the system. She went to work through a temporary agency so she could check out a new company from the inside before she committed to work there permanently.

She found a wonderful job serving as an administrative assistant to a grandfatherly old man. In the three months she had worked there as a temp, there was no problem with anyone. She breathed a sigh of relief and took the permanent job when it was offered to her. Two weeks later, the company hired a new sales manager who would work closely with her and her boss, and she knew the first time she saw him that he was another sexual predator.

The Root of These Problems

These are the many faces of a victim. While everyone hits a pothole in the road now and then, victims seem to hit them much more often than others. While any one or two or three incidents can be written off as part of the reality of living in a world under the curse, some people have too much of what the world calls “bad luck” to be able to ignore it.

In reality, there is a whole genre of demons whose job it is to create victims. I ministered once to a woman who had been in an abusive marriage until her husband died of cancer. She then married a fine man who quickly began to abuse her. She asked me, “Do I have a sign hanging around my neck saying ‘Come abuse me?’”

I assured her she did. It was not visible in the natural, but one part of the victim spirit’s job is to be a flashing beacon in the spirit realm, attracting the attention of all predator demons. Once a predator demon has made connections with a victim demon, the two demons facilitate bringing their human hosts together in a damaging way.

The other half of the victim spirit’s job is to persuade the human victim that there is nothing that can be done to change the situation. They arrive at the conclusion that in some way or another, the recurring problems are their fault, and that they just need to lower their expectations in life and endure what comes.

The bad news is that a very large number of people who love the Lord and are being greatly used by Him are in actuality regularly hampered by a victim demon. The good news is, living with a victim spirit is totally optional. They can be identified and evicted.

We were called to walk in dominion and that call has never been revoked.

The Dominion Mandate

Dominion vs. Domination

The first commandment God gave to man is known as the Dominion Mandate. It says, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Genesis 1:28

The Dominion Mandate was repeated to Noah and his family after the flood. God said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands.” Genesis 9:2

These two passages overtly refer to mankind’s dominion over animals. There are dozens of other passages in Scripture that deal with the whole dynamic of man’s relationship to animals. Eventually our dominion will be restored to Edenic parameters. However, what I want to focus on in this passage is the nature of dominion, not the object of it.

Dominion, as God twice described it, is life giving, requires subordination and is expansionist. Both the initial family and Noah’s clan were to exercise control of the resources around them in order to create a viable community that expanded to fill the earth.

We tend to avoid the word “dominion” because it is so close to “domination.” The difference between the two words is merely the objective. Domination is designed to force someone else to submit, at personal cost to them, for your benefit. There is a distinct win/lose nature to the equation. Dominion is life giving. It forces someone else to submit for their own benefit.

Thus we as parents should walk in dominion. We force our children to eat their vegetables and to learn their times tables because we believe it is beneficial to them. In the long run, those things we forced on them will be life giving.

Dominion is the extreme opposite of victimization. In victimization, demons and people try to damage you in some way. Our basic call as human beings and as members of the royal priesthood is to build up, not to tear down. Any subordination of one person to another should only be for the purpose of restoring the individual and the world into God’s original design. That is dominion. Subordination, forced or voluntary, that is not life giving is exploitation and we call it domination.

Dominion vs. Survival

Most people who are consistently victimized have stopped dreaming of dominion and are focused on just getting out of the potholes of life. One person with massive financial victimization (i.e. a crushing load of debt) told me he would love to be “dead broke” and not own anyone anything. He had been in debt for so long and suffered so many bizarre devourings of his finances that his only remaining hope was to break even by the time he died so his family would not have any debt left.

This attitude is totally understandable. Scripture says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…” Proverbs 13:12. While it is understandable, it is not permissible. Obtaining freedom from victimization requires us to appropriate God’s power. God delights to make His power available to us but only for Kingdom objectives. He is not interested in helping us to survive. He wants to partner with us in releasing His power into our world in such a way that we become life givers to others around us. The Dominion Mandate is about building up and expanding, not survival.

This was the continual tension between God and the Israelites after the Exodus. They had been in bondage and were victimized. God wanted them to go to Canaan, possess the land and become a kingdom of priests to the kingdoms of the world. They were content with comfort. God vigorously objected to providing His power for their comfort. God was passionately excited about providing more power than they could imagine for them to walk in dominion, being builders, life givers, positive change agents in a wounded and wounding world.

Dominion vs. Victimization

In addition to the Dominion Mandate, there is the issue of authority in spiritual warfare. I am a firm believer in coming against demons with personal virtue as a basis of our authority. While I recognize our position in Christ and our special anointings and our delegated authority from spiritual eldership, I still believe that the earned authority from Christlikeness is central to an effective spiritual warfare paradigm.

Take Ephesians 4:28 as an example. “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.” Imagine a number line with –100 being acute bondage and +100 being total freedom.

Let’s pull up some arbitrary numbers and say that stealing is at –50 on the number line. When a person refrains from stealing, it is only zero. Zero is better than –50, in that the person is no longer sinning and is not vulnerable to God’s discipline, but there is no real authority there against demons. Working with his own hands might be a +20 on the number line, but the Apostle Paul took it farther than that. The man was to give money to those in need. This is the extreme opposite of his taking from the fruit of other people’s work to meet his own needs. This act of giving would be a +50 and would position him well in terms of authority against a demon rooted in and empowered by theft.

It is that paradigm that produced this book. I and others in Plumbline Ministries had worked with a number of people who had gone through deep deliverance on victim issues. They had worked hard to learn to recognize predators in the natural and in the spiritual and to resist them. They were committed to walking in freedom, yet they kept having victimizing demons reattach with ease.

It was frustrating to us since we normally associate spiritual open doors with sin and here we were not able to see a pattern of sin that allowed these demons to come back and exert control. As we sought the Lord, we came to see that for someone who has been a victim, it is not enough to come from –50 on the number line up to +10. God would not grant them the authority they needed over the demonic just so they could be comfortable. He would only release His power to those who were actively seeking to walk in dominion, not survival.

Dominion is the opposite of predator-induced victimization. The predator exploits for the joy of inflicting damage. Someone who walks in dominion builds up those around him for the joy of partnering with God in restoring the world. The predator is opportunistic, looking for people whose guard is down. Someone who walks in dominion is like Caleb and David who each saw a desirable mountain and proactively took out the enemy stronghold that seemed impregnable. The predator sucks life out of his victims. The highest form of dominion is when we are equipping others to possess their own birthright.

The Victim Mindset

Language Problems

The evolving language of spiritual warfare does not yet distinguish easily between demonic power and human attitudes. When we refer to a “victim spirit” the term actually deals with two different things. On the one hand, there are demons that attach to people and cause certain identifiable undesirable consequences. On the other hand, there is a distinct mindset that people can develop, quite apart from demons. The term “victim spirit” is used quite loosely to describe a kind of demon, as well as a mindset in a person who has no demonic attachment.

When we refer to a jezebel spirit, a poverty spirit, a welfare spirit, a predator spirit or a victim spirit, we can be describing a specific mindset in an individual without any trace of demonic presence. In fact, the mindset not only precedes the demon, it actually opens the door for the demon. By extension, if the mindset is not dealt with, then a person who has been through deliverance will open the door again because of their thinking patterns.

This is especially true in dealing with the victim spirit. In Chapters Four, Five and Six, we will explore various aspects of deliverance, but there must be an understanding of the crippling power of a victim mindset before going into deliverance.

Redefining “Normal”

The most flagrant indicator of a victim spirit mindset (with or without demonic attachment) is that the victim can explain why it is right for things to be wrong, and more specifically, why it is right for them to stay in a situation where they are consistently victimized.

This is readily seen in many battered wives. Most can easily explain away being hit. In some cases it is simply denial. They pretend it was a one-time incident. In other cases, they admit there is a problem, but they stay because of their love for him or his love for them. At times they will point to all manner of external causes for the beating such as their husband having a bad day at the office or getting a ticket on the way home. In a worst case scenario, they will put the blame on themselves, saying with conviction that it was understandable that they got hit, because, after all, they failed to get dinner on at the appointed time.

All of these are a victim’s rationalizations to justify staying in a wounding situation. The truth is, most of the time she is trapped. She can’t afford to leave, she is afraid of what he would do if she left, she is ashamed to let people know that her marriage is in trouble or she is emotionally dependent on him. But victims avoid facing the truth about hard situations and instead they deceive themselves with some explanation about why it is right for things to be wrong.

In many families, instead of the husband or the wife being the predator, it is the older child who beats up on the younger sibling. Many parents who do not have the tools to handle this unacceptable behavior become spin doctors and say, “He hits you because he loves you and doesn’t know how to say it.” Not true. The truth is one child has a problem with self-control and the parent is a victim. Since the parent doesn’t know what to do to fix the problem, the parent defines the problem away by saying the abuse is actually love. It is not. The parent has a victim mindset. They have devised an explanation for why it is right for things to be wrong.

Many a victim will stay in an exploitive job situation, even to the point where the boss is not fulfilling the minimum requirements of the law. Scripture clearly teaches that the laborer should be paid a fair wage, on time(Deuteronomy 24:14-15). The victim will say that he is staying in the abuse in order to show his non-Christian boss the love of Christ and hopefully to witness to him someday. While that may be the call of God in some situations, most of the time, the truth is that the employee does not think he can find another job, or he can’t afford to be without a job, but he can’t face those truths about himself. So, as a professional victim, he devises an explanation for why it is right for things to be wrong.

There are predators in the religious circles too. Victims will stay under an abusive spiritual leader because they have been taught that submission to abuse is godly and that God is building character in them through what they suffer in church. While it is certainly true that God calls us to a broad variety of suffering, for our good, in many cases the individual staying in an abusive church is a victim who has devised a theological reason for why it is right for things to be wrong.

The saddest illustration of this truth is the victims of molestation who have been taught that the intrusive visitations are actually good because it makes them more loved and appreciated by their tormentor. They are pampered and made to feel special during the daylight hours to make up for what happens in the darkness. No matter how much they believe that it is right for things to be wrong, it is still utterly wrong. This is the fundamental victim mindset that needs to be changed.

There are times God puts us in a painful situation and expects us to stay there. Those need to be distinguished from those situations where there is a proper, albeit painful, way out. Someone who walks in dominion looks at the hard choices with honesty. Someone with a victim mindset is their own spin doctor and can explain to their own satisfaction why it is right for things to be wrong.

Projecting Pain

A second common pattern in the thoughts of habitual victims is to assume the worst. After being repeatedly traumatized in the past, they gather up those experiences and project them on the future. Thus Harry, who had the bad medical experiences, eventually began to proclaim loudly and widely that all doctors were incompetent and that he was sure this next surgery would be ineffective as well. While it is true that he had genuinely had a series of bad experiences with the medical profession (complements of his victim spirit) it is not true that all doctors are incompetent, negligent or evil.

When he began to proclaim untruth, he brought his will into alignment with the father of lies. In ways we don’t fully understand, this empowered the enemy to some degree, and the demons in turn caused the next doctor he saw to operate well below his normal level of expertise. I have seen dozens and dozens of examples where highly competent professionals in any field do an abysmal job when they are working with someone whose victim demon has been turbocharged by the victim’s expectation of disaster.

The habitual victim, with or without a demon, needs to speak the truth. An unbroken string of problems in the past does not mean the future must be the same. The truth is, patterns can change, but they must begin to change within the victim, before we will see great changes in the world around the victim. Resigned, hopeless endurance is not one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It is the fruit of a great deal of pain, and it is an indicator of a victim spirit mindset.

Appealing to Authorities

Once a person has been repeatedly victimized and they have decided it is always going to be this way, the logical extension is that they are not worth much. Hence a habitual victim will frequently develop a lifestyle of never asking for anything they have a right to have.

For example, the victim will endure all manner of inconvenience in their apartment, rather than ask the landlord to make the repairs. Even though they have faithfully paid the rent for years and repairs are part of the rental agreement, the victim knows it will cost time and money for the landlord to make the repairs, and they cannot bring themselves to impose this legal, righteous liability on the landlord. Therefore they evolve some elaborate reason why it is right for things to be wrong, and they refuse to alert the landlord to a chronic problem.

In fact, the degradation can be so extreme they cannot even receive good things when urged. I was in the post office the week before Christmas. There was a line with about 50 people in it waiting to mail packages. There was a line with two people in it to pick up packages.

A lady came in with her three year old daughter and stood behind me. She had no package, no envelope and no purse in her hands. I discretely watched her for a few moments as she interacted with her daughter. She had many of the subtle emotional characteristics of a battered wife. I finally turned to her and let her know that if she was just picking up a package, she could go to the short line. She studied the long line and the short line, and finally, hesitantly, she went to the short line. As she left my line, she said to me, “I feel so guilty doing this.”

My heart wept for her. She has been so degraded that she only feels her world is right when she is standing in the longest line. No one was offended or complaining about her taking the short line. It was utterly legitimate and proper. Other people were blithely using the short line. Her staying in the long line would not accomplish anything good for anyone. Her using the short line would not hurt anyone. Her stepping out of the long line to go to the short line would make the people in the long line happy.

Even with all this, it still did not compute for her wounded mindset. She is a professional victim. It did not feel right for things to be good. The long line did not faze her. Having time devoured was normal and fit comfortably into her woundedness.

Mindset vs. Demons

The demons certainly encourage poor thinking and they benefit from it. Demons of victimization can accomplish a lot of mischief even before these three mindsets are established by repeated victimization. However, for a person to remain free from victim demons, they must recognize and change their victim mindsets. The truth will not feel comfortable to them even after deliverance. Thus it is vital that anyone aspiring to be free must, as an act of their will, choose to walk out truth even when it does not feel right. These deliberate choices to override their feelings and embrace truth will bring progressive healing to the victim on their way to dominion.

Demonic Partners

The victim spirit rarely operates alone. Its job is to attract other demons to routinely assault the victim from the outside or to attach themselves to the victim for continual harassment. In doing deliverance, it is sometimes desirable to sever the unholy alliances among the different demons and to recognize the other mindsets that also have to be healed after deliverance.

The Predator Spirit

This demon is the primary partner with the victim spirit. It thrives on inflicting physical and emotional pain on others for the pleasure of the predator. I know a used car dealer who lives in anticipation of Christmas Day. It is the highlight of his year. A week before Christmas he calls all the people who are delinquent on their car loans. He acts very friendly and seeks to determine their Christmas plans. He is looking for someone who is going to a family gathering on Christmas Day.

Once he has identified a victim, he personally takes a tow truck and repossesses the car on Christmas Day in front of the victim’s mother and his extended family. It is not about the car, or the money. This predator, like most, gets his greatest fulfillment out of the emotional pain he is causing by humiliating his victim.

The victim spirit is skilled at leading their captive to the predatory spouse, boss, repairman, coach or neighbor.

A person can be a victim and a predator at the same time. It is quite common for a man to be victimized at work, then come home and abuse his family. Likewise, the child who is a bully on the playground is most likely a victim at home.

The Poverty Spirit

This demon works primarily with a person’s mindset to keep them from possessing their birthright. There are four common manifestations of a poverty mindset.

• A person cannot accept and keep for themselves the good things that come to them. I have watched any number of people with a poverty spirit receive an inheritance or insurance settlement and give it away as soon as they can. While their generosity is to be applauded, it is merely a thin disguise for the fact that in their spirit, they are very uncomfortable having fine things given to them, for them.
• They feel uncomfortable surpassing their peers. If their moral standards are higher than those of their spiritual leaders, they will go to great lengths to keep their walk private or to explain why they really are not more holy or more disciplined or more spiritual than someone else. They also downplay professional and academic excellence, quickly informing others why their own achievements aren’t really all that they appear to be. This is not humility. It is false humility, a manifestation of the demonic poverty spirit. Christ walked in utter humility but never in a poverty spirit. He never turned away praise when it was true and genuine.
• They are typically unwilling to pay a price to achieve. The pain of making a change, taking a risk or facing the unknown is deemed reason enough for downsizing their expectations. They would rather endure endless pain of financial, emotional, academic, spiritual or relational poverty than to face the increased short-term pain required to obtain long-term blessings.
• They are satisfied with less than God’s best for them. This facet of the poverty spirit functions quite freely in the midst of abundance. Because a person finally has more than they once had or more than others have or more than they ever expected to have, does not mean that they have possessed their inheritance. What looks like godly contentment can be a poverty demon in disguise. There is a holy discontent that flows out of a proper understanding of the Dominion Mandate.

Spirit of Jealousy

This demon works through a second party and is empowered by two lies. Suppose Fred is jealous of George because George is going on a short-term missions trip through the church. That jealousy is rooted in one or the other of two perceptions.

The first perception is that Fred was more deserving than George; therefore, Fred should have gone on the trip, not George. “Deserving” is a hugely relative term. It does not have to be pegged to any objective standard. All that matters is that in his own mind, Fred felt he was as qualified or more qualified than George. Many times it is small people who have not been willing to pay the price to excel who are jealous of those who have paid the price. Their defense mechanism is to tear down the other person in their mind, rather than growing up to the spiritual stature necessary for the job in question.

The second perception is that if George had not gone, Fred could have. Therefore, George displaced Fred. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes there are only three available slots and six equally qualified applicants. Much of the time however, that is delusion. Even if George had not gone, Fred would not have been invited because he was not qualified.

When Fred believes untrue things about George, he enters into agreement with the father of lies and empowers demonic assaults against George. This is the power of jealousy. Rather than our personal sin empowering the enemy, it is someone else’s jealousy that empowers the demonic assault against us.

One of the most devastating applications of this is when a woman in the pew admires a man in spiritual leadership and evaluates his marriage. She may envy the fortunate woman who has this man for her covering and provider. She may wonder what it would be like to have this man of God for her husband, instead of the husband she has or had. Or she may feel his wife is not serving him adequately as a helpmeet and she could do a much better job. Either way, these jealous thoughts empower a demonic assault on the leader’s wife and on his marriage.

I am convinced that many of the marriage breakdowns we have among ministers are the result of a spirit of jealousy. There are many spiritual leaders who have a victim spirit. They have only been slowed down, not destroyed by it. If a man or his wife has a victim spirit and the people in the pew have a spirit of jealousy about the marriage, the combination of the two can be devastating to a wife’s physical and mental health, or to the marriage covenant itself. Men likewise can covet the pastor’s wife, opening the door for the spirit of jealousy.

For more on this demonic strategy, listen to the CD on “The Spirit of Jealousy” available through Sapphire Leadership Group.

The Welfare Spirit

I grew up in the jungles of Brazil. My father has a Puritan work ethic and Yankee ingenuity. This was wonderful because we had to solve all of our own problems in the jungle. There was no plumber, doctor, policeman or pest control service to call for help. In fact, there was no way to call. It was a normal part of the job for Dad to go minister for a week or more and leave Mom alone in the jungle with several kids and no phone, no radio, no fallback position.

If there was a problem, we fixed it, bubble gummed it or found a way to function without that resource. We owned our problems. No exceptions. No excus

When I came back to the United States I began to work in construction. I was appalled at the welfare spirit. By that I mean, the mindset here in America is that problems are to be punted, not owned. If something goes wrong, you call the foreman, the superintendent, the engineer, the inspector or the owner. Then, if you couldn’t find someone to take the problem, you were careful to find someone you could blame for the problem.

Then, if all else fails, Americans hide. The use of phone message centers, caller I.D., emails and secretaries who screen your calls all point to a wholesale embracing of the welfare spirit as an accepted core value in our culture.

The welfare spirit is diametrically opposed to the Dominion Mandate. God called us to be life givers and rebuilders to the world around us regardless of whose fault anything is. Someone who wants to be free of their victim spirit must vigorously resist the deceptive mindset and the demonic power of the welfare spirit. Problems were made to be solved. Period.

Curses on Time

Many people can quickly identify one day, week or month of the year when things go wrong for them year after year. For some, it is financial devouring at the same time every year. For others it is recurring illness at a given time. Some people can only hold a job for so long or stay in a neighborhood for a limited period of time then they feel compelled to move.

Curses can attach to time as well as to material things. The victim demon will make a bad situation worse if there is a curse on time. For more teaching on this subject, see the CD “Breaking Curses off Time” available through Sapphire Leadership Group.

Reinfection

As bad as the problem of cross-pollination is, the worst of it is the issue of reinfection. If you deal with the victim spirit and fail to evict the demons that are partnering with it, then the ones that are left will usually manage to create situations that will reempower the victim spirit that was once evicted.

Most of these demons are generational. When you look at just one person, you may primarily see one demon active. However, when you take the history of an entire family line, you can usually see patterns that will reveal a bigger picture, and you can identify the demons in the background.

Deliverance

Family History

If you opt to do a family history, it is important to be systematic, but not too detailed. You can end up with so much trivia you can’t see the patterns. I usually evaluate one generation at a time and ask four general questions.

• How was their health? One person’s death at 62 from cancer or heart attack is not indicative of a generational demonic problem. However, if every male in the family dies before the age of 50, there is a curse on time. Be sure to also check for reproductive difficulties and for a higher level of health problems with the first-born children.
• How were their finances? It does not matter if they were rich or poor. You are basically looking for devouring. Were there repeated cases of promotions being denied, partners robbing the business or endless litigation?
• How were the social skills? Did people get married, stay married, stay out of jail and have reasonably functional children? Were they morally proper?
• How was their spiritual walk? Was there a pattern of hyper-spirituality, or pursuit of aberrant religious experiences, or a systematic hardness to spiritual things?

I ask the person coming for ministry each of these four questions about himself. Then I go back one generation and ask about his father and his father’s siblings. Then his mother and his mother’s siblings. Then I go to the paternal grandparents and the maternal grandparents. Last we come back to his generation and ask about the cousins on his father’s side, then on his mother’s side.

By the time you finish looking at those six individuals or clusters, the patterns of recurrent problems reveal the work of generational demons.

Deliverance

There are many different ways of doing deliverance. The method I describe here is neither unique to me, nor is it the final word on deliverance, nor is it necessarily what God wants you to use for your situation. It is merely a method, nothing more.

I prefer to do deliverance with a small team present including intercessors who can operate with words of knowledge. We begin by declaring that we have a blood covenant relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ that gives us certain legal rights before the Throne of God. Then after asking the Lord to secure the perimeter, I bind any lying spirits.

There are two basic questions that chart the course. I ask the Lord how many generations back He wants us to go to deal with the issue. Each person listens to the Spirit and reports the first number he hears. Sometimes everyone on the team gets one number. Other times there are various numbers indicating that there have been major reempowerments of this demonic spirit.

We will go back to the furthest generation, let’s say the 27th, and ask the Lord what happened there. Again, the team contributes various pieces of data, either words, emotions or pictures. When we have a feel for what iniquity opened the door initially, I coach the person through a renunciation of those things.

Realize that any number of things could have opened the door for victimization. It could have been a rape, war and pillage, slavery, business fraud, political betrayal or a host of other things. Other smaller issues invariably surrounded any one of those iniquities.

After we feel a release that everything necessary has been confessed, renounced and rejected at that generation, I will say, “I ask you, Father, to apply the blood of Christ to these iniquities from the beginning of time to the 27th generation back. We bring this cleansing forward from the 27th generation to the 26th . . . ”

It may be necessary to stop at various generations along the way and add some more renunciations as different people in the family line have had additional wrong responses to pain. When you arrive at the present generation, extend the cleansing forward to a thousand generations of your physical and spiritual seed.

All of that is merely legal work. The devil can maintain a grip when we have unconfessed sin, but when the Lord reveals the nature of the generational issues, we can apply the blood to them, thereby negating the demons’ power. Having done the renunciation, you then command the demons in question to leave. In most cases, there is no manifestation. You may even wonder if anything has happened but time will tell whether there has been a shift in the spiritual realm.

Disclaimer

For some who have no background in deliverance, what I described above will seem terribly complex and sophisticated. For many others reading this, it is old hat, generic deliverance stuff. For anyone who has been in deliverance for very long, this approach is pathetically rudimentary, skeletal and simplistic to the point of being embarrassing.

I know that.

Regardless of the inadequacies of this short description of a deliverance model, it will be sufficient to help some people who have no other deliverance resources available to them. For those whose situation is too complex for this tool, they will at least not be hurt by trying it. For those who find freedom through this description, they will be glad I risked the wrath of the “Pros” by including it.

Growth Sequences

Although deliverance is usually advisable in cases of habitual victimization, the primary focus should always be on healing the mindset. However, the deception cannot be renounced and the truth embraced until the victim sees where he has been deceived and what the truth is.

The following categories illustrate different behaviors that are illustrative of changing mindsets. Each list is presented as a generalized continuum. It begins with behavior that represents severe deception and severe demonic bondage. It moves through the neutral zone and ends with behavior that represents a masterful grasp of the Dominion Mandate.

These lists are intended to be a diagnostic tool to give you a general idea of where you may be walking in deception. Don’t allow the devil to use them to condemn you. Everyone walks in some victimization. No one has fully grasped the magnitude of our Dominion Mandate and walked it out in every area of life. Don’t compare yourself to others. Merely identify approximately where you are now and move forward.

Boundaries

• You invite abuse because your boundaries are totally nonexistent.
• Your boundaries exist but are easily violated by anyone.
• You defend a small number of boundaries.
• You establish moderate boundaries and defend them against most incursions, but an experienced predator still can violate your boundaries with impunity.
• You defend your boundaries against all intruders.
• You enlarge your boundaries to reflect a higher level of personal dignity.
• You walk with such authority and dignity that people instinctively respect your boundaries without your actively defending them. There are no more incursions.
• When you are around, predators pull back from everyone without your having to do anything. People are safer and have larger boundaries when they are around you because dominion is so deeply engrained in your spirit.

Abuse

• You endure overt physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual and financial abuse and you protect the perpetrators.
• You reject physical or sexual abuse but tolerate emotional, spiritual and financial abuse.
• You reject all abuse but you tolerate neglect.
• People offer you nurture, comfort or pleasure, but you decline it because you don’t feel worthy to receive something that cost someone else.
• You can accept someone protecting or nurturing your body or spirit but not your soul.
• You initiate caring for your own body and spirit.
• You can stop people from abusing your time.
• You stop people from exploiting your expertise without giving you reasonable reimbursement.
• You take responsibility to nurture your own soul.
• You can play with absolute abandon when it is appropriate.
• You expect others to want to protect and nurture you because you are worth it, and they do!

Dishonor

• You attract dishonor everywhere you go. People who are normally gracious with others are drawn into taking cheap shots at you to your face.
• Dishonor is pervasive at home because you have accepted it in the past. It may be physical and sexual degradation. It usually included verbal slams that pretend to be humor and an utter disregard for your time and possessions.
• You dishonor yourself by participating in the crude humor, by voluntarily highlighting your own failures and by denigrating your own achievements.
• Whenever someone around you is unhappy, you apologize for and own their pain, even though it is usually not your fault.
• You begin to recognize the truth, that dishonor is optional and abnormal.
• You stop dishonoring yourself.
• You stop the gross verbal abuse from others.
• You begin to experience some dignity as God intervenes in circumstances around you to protect and affirm you.
• You grow in dignity as God communicates with you regularly and personally.
• You learn to partner with God as you act on the promptings of His Spirit.
• You discern God’s unique call on your life and begin to walk it out.
• You become so skilled in using your gifts and spiritual anointings that you are much in demand by those with pressing needs.
• Leaders seek you out for ministry to and with them.
• Honor naturally flows toward you in informal settings.

Deception

• You are truly unaware that there is any other way to live. The blind spot is comprehensive, all encompassing. Abuse is utterly normal to you.
• You see others living without abuse but don’t even question your situation.
• You begin to react to the pain other people suffer at the hands of your predator, and you attempt to run interference for them to protect them.
• You acknowledge to yourself and then to someone else that there is a predator in your life, and his behavior is unacceptable according to the laws of God and man.
• You acknowledge that you are unable to change the predator through your love or your reasoning.
• You acknowledge that the pain of making a change is less than the pain of not changing.
• You acknowledge that although God does allow us to suffer some pain, it is wrong before God for you to tolerate this abuse, even though you may be willing to.
• You acknowledge that God has not promised to protect your predator from the consequences of his sin, even though you may wish him no harm.
• You see flight as a possible righteous option.
• You see invoking civil or spiritual authority against your predator as a righteous (i.e. Biblical) option in some circumstances.
• You see yourself as someone worthy of receiving help from God or man because you are a steward. You have Kingdom work to do; therefore, it is reasonable for someone to help position you to do that work. Even so, you feel like a debtor and look forward to serving well enough that the debt can be discharged.
• You are able to embrace the abstract truth that God loves you as a person, not just for what you do.
• You realize that the debt of love is unpayable. You continue to do good things, but now you do them out of the joy of partnering with Jesus, not out of debt or duty.
• You start to recognize that God the Father gives you many gifts throughout the day that are not strategic for the Kingdom. They are unadulterated expressions of His love. He does that for you, because that’s what fathers do for their beloved children.

Ministry

• You don’t minister. You are sure you couldn’t minister. You don’t dream about ministering. You utterly decline to minister when someone asks you to.
• You refer people in your circle of influence or to a good book when they need help.
• You refer people who need help to someone else who might be able to minister to them.
• You say you will pray for them and you try to, but you do it mostly out of guilt since you promised, not out of confidence in your effectiveness.
• You incarnate some truth in your life and begin to casually share that area of personal freedom with others.
• You experience enough effectiveness in prayer that you feel a tiny bit of holy boldness on occasion.
• You allow yourself to be coerced into serving on a ministry team, so long as there are some really spiritual people on the team who can pull their weight and yours too.
• You are forced to admit that there has been some fruit to your ministry in spite of how you feel about yourself.
• People see you as a prayer warrior and refer others to you for prayer in informal settings.
• People start to seek you out informally for spiritual counsel.
• You are willing to formally minister in public, alone, under the scrutiny of others.
• You have great confidence that the truth you have lived out and the authority you walk in will bring freedom to others.
• You have such compassion for the needy that any personal inadequacies are swallowed up by your desire to set the captives free.
• You are so consumed with passion for the Kingdom that you cry out fervently for greater power and anointing, not to mask your inadequacies but to touch more lives in a deeper way for the glory of God.

Values

• You passively, unquestioningly absorb the values promulgated by the culture of a dysfunctional family: don’t trust, don’t feel, don’t talk.
• God sovereignly intrudes in your life with a message about different values. He pursues you until you are able to embrace that message and reject the culture of professional victimization.
• You bring with you most of the values of your birth culture. From time to time God, other people or circumstances challenge the validity of one of your values, and you change it into a Kingdom value.
• You begin to take the initiative to seek out the full range of Kingdom values while vigorously rejecting the culture of birth.
• God surprises you by causing you to see and appreciate certain positive values of your birth culture. You sort through that culture, embracing your God-given roots, while rejecting bad fruit.
• You seek out and appropriate the generational blessings that you have a legal right to receive from the spiritual trust fund of your birth culture.
• You become effective at helping others in your cultural stream to change their value system.
• You can identify the Kingdom values expressed in the culture of a different religious, socioeconomic, racial or national people group.
• You can translate missing Kingdom values into the language of that other culture.
• You can change people’s values across cultural lines.
• You can change the values of an entire culture.

Joy

• You have none, nor any hope of having any, and you don’t even realize you have none.
• Your denial is so deep you are able to pretend that “serving” your predator is personally fulfilling in some strange way.
• You admit to a small amount of pain.
• You suppress the pain with endless work.
• You vicariously enjoy the joy other people experience.
• You surreptitiously indulge yourself occasionally, so long as it does not cost anyone else (especially your exploiter) any time, money or inconvenience, but you feel guilty for having pleasure when others in the dysfunctional family cannot or are not.
• You become more willing to pay the price of someone else’s displeasure in order to have some pleasure.
• You move into a culture where pleasure is not forbidden by others, merely limited by your circumstances.
• You remain conditioned by the past, indulging in pleasure sparingly because the critical tapes playing in your mind rob your pleasurable pastime of most of its pleasure. You are doing pleasurable things, but being crippled in your enjoyment thereof because of your identification with the wounded family. Joy is not one of their core values. You are apart from them, but still part of them.
• You work through the change of values and are more at ease enjoying yourself.
• You begin to form wholesome, healing relationships that are non-family, something that was frowned on in a secretive, controlling, dysfunctional family.
• More joy comes to you from being in relationship than from doing activities.
• Your joy derived from relationships develops a rich, complex texture, bringing levels of fulfillment never imagined before.
• You can enjoy “being” in the presence of God without “doing” anything
• You leave a trail of “essence of joy” everywhere you go.
• Your anointing of joy is so great, it infects the land and buildings where you have been. There is a residual joyousness emanating after you leave.

Potential

• Your total mindset revolves around enabling your predator. You simply don’t even think in terms of your being an independent entity with value apart from being an enabler.
• You visualize the possibility of being in less pain if you become a better enabler.
• You visualize the possibility of being in less pain if your predator were changed. You therefore embark on a program to improve him.
• You dream about changing circumstances since changing people who don’t want to change is yielding poor return on investment.
• You contemplate changing yourself and decide it is theoretically possible to change some things.
• You read biographies about people who excel.
• You are drawn to people who do change, grow, strive for more, etc.
• You experience some spiritual growth initiated by God. It surprises and pleases you.
• You do some premeditated spiritual growth and surprise yourself.
• You concede that your potential may be a little higher than you originally thought, but, of course, nowhere near as high as what other people say about you.
• Continual growth becomes normative.
• The extent of your growth becomes defined by the extent of the hurt in the world around you. Every time you run into a problem that is bigger than your ability to solve it, you crave the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to help that person.
• You seek God to find out from Him His design of your nature and His call on your life.

Curses and Blessings

• (Worse case scenario) You are conceived in illegitimacy and are systematically cursed in the womb by family, doctors and clergy.
• Shortly after birth, generational curses are activated by sexual abuse or spiritual dedication.
• Your high level of pain triggers more sin and rebellion as you make wrong responses to pain. These cause additional curses from God, civil authorities and victims to accrue to your account.
• As you do things you don’t want to do, it causes you to turn against yourself and you curse yourself.
• God causes someone to begin praying for you.
• You get saved, and you get help to begin breaking off curses.
• Spiritual authorities begin blessing you with their blessings.
• Spiritual authorities begin imparting to you generational blessings from your own trust fund.
• You learn and begin to practice the disciplines that will accrue more blessings from God.
• You learn to privately bless people, social structures, buildings and land with your positional authority in Christ.
• Blessings begin to pursue you and attach to you even when you feel your cup is already full and running over and you were not looking for more.
• The discerning seek you out for blessings.
• Your words are life giving. There is virtue attached to them that is much greater than the data being transferred in a cognitive manner.

Enforcing Freedom

The Problem

A habitual victim has three parts to the problem. There is the mindset, their victim demon and the predator’s demon. After deliverance, their victim demon is gone, and they have more freedom to work on the mindset changes that are necessary. Eventually, they will walk in such dominion that when they walk into a room, predator spirits cease to operate. This is not normally the case, initially.

At first, predator demons will consistently attempt to intrude. This is especially true within family and work dynamics where the predators have a well established habit pattern. It is therefore necessary for the newly freed person to enforce their freedom.

The Solution

It is important to realize that you deal with people and demons differently. You can reason with people, show mercy to people, exercise patience with people. You should do none of the above with a demon. The only thing you want to do with a predator demon is to confront it.

The wonderful part of the story is that predator demons seem to need cooperation from you or your demons to be able to do their abuse. Your demons are gone, so if you confront the predator demons instead of cooperating with them, they retreat.

I call this, “bumping the predator.” All it requires in the spiritual realm is recognition that there is a predator demon present. All it requires in the natural is a very mild verbal resistance.

As I sat down to write this chapter, the phone rang with a fresh illustration. I had taken an entire family through deliverance of the victim spirit a week ago. A few days ago, two of the girls were approached by a friend who a week ago they would have seen as merely obnoxious, but now they recognized as a predator. Under their breath, one of the girls rebuked the demon. Then when the person said something rude, the youngest girls merely said, “Excuse me?!” With those two words, the person backed down instantly and apologized.

A week before, it would not have worked, but with their victim demon gone, a tiny confrontation made the predator demon vanish.

Another time a receptionist was being abused over the phone. She covered the mouthpiece and simply rebuked the demon. Within seconds, the abusive person on the other end changed and was cooperative.

A man who had been in international ministry for decades had been repeatedly abused by the leadership of various ministries he had been with. Shortly after he heard this principle, he was scolded for almost an hour by a board member. When the fellow got completely done, my friend quietly went back to the beginning of the conversation and asked, “Was that really what so and so said?” Instantly the board member backed down. (Next time, don’t wait for an hour).

It is that simple. Recognize the demon. Bind it verbally if you have the freedom. But gently “bump” the human being with a very mild verbal rebuke. So many times, all it takes is raising your eyebrow and saying “Excuse me?!”

Don’t try this when you still have your victim demon. But once you get rid of it, maintain zero tolerance. It will become a source of great pleasure to see how large a reaction you can get from a predator demon with the smallest possible nudge. I have one friend who no longer needs to say anything. She deals with the public, and she can look a predator in the eye, and even though she has never met him before, his demon backs down without her saying a word. That is dominion. It should be normal.

The Art Form

While some of the offensive behavior coming against you is caused by a predator spirit, there are two other possible causes. Our society is generally rude plus a lot of people are harsh because of their own woundedness. So each time you meet an offensive person, you need to evaluate which of the three causes you are dealing with: a predator demon, a rude person or a wounded person.

We are called to an interesting dynamic. We are to have a servant’s heart as Christ did (Philippians 2:6-11). We are also called to walk out the Dominion Mandate until the whole earth has experienced the glory of God (Habakkuk 2:14). As I said in Chapter Two, our basic call as human beings and as members of the royal priesthood is to build up, and that may well require exercising control over another person. But subordination of one person to another should only be for the purpose of restoring the individual and the world into God’s original design.

Following Christ’s example, we see that He yielded all His rights in an effort to minister to people. He became tired, hungry, cold, poor, over worked, imposed upon. He did all this voluntarily and endlessly for the sake of bringing healing to a broken world. But He repeatedly shifted out of compassion to confrontation any time a predator spirit tried to dishonor Him. He would serve endlessly, but He refused to be victimized.

He stressed this point. He was not victimized in His death. No one took His life from Him. He refused to tolerate any form of victimization, even in the course of fulfilling His ministry. Instead He willingly laid down His life for the world (John 10:17-18).

So each person we meet who is not gracious needs to be evaluated. One individual is simply habitually rude. We exercise dominion by being gracious and modeling for him what good manners look like.

The next person we perceive to be wounded. We refuse to take offence at their offensiveness. We exercise dominion by silently or out loud pray blessings on them, asking the Lord to minister to their wounded soul.

The third person seems to have a predator spirit. We exercise dominion by rebuking the demon and/or mildly confronting the person.

To the bystander, all three situations may look the same. The surface indicators certainly are almost identical. It takes a learned sensitivity in your spirit to sort them out. It is a work of art to be a servant who walks in utmost dominion. You will have to grow out of your mindset of convincing yourself why it is right for things to be wrong, and learn to discern the different ways to exercise dominion. The good news is, you can’t fail the class even though you may fail some tests. God and the devil will see to it that you have a string of predators to practice on. If one gets by you now and then, just recover quickly, learn a lesson and be more excited about walking in dominion the next time.

The Milestone

While we are unlikely to ever master every nuance of the Dominion Mandate, there is one milestone you can look forward to as a sign that you are well on your way. You know you have a high level of dominion when you don’t have to exercise it. When you can walk into a room and all the predator demons retreat into silence, making it a safe place for everyone without you having to do or say a thing, you have done extremely well in your pilgrimage.

I ministered in a church this year where the pastor had a serious victim spirit. There was an out of town prophet present who had a very serious predator spirit, and he was more or less inviting himself to be on the church staff. I knew nothing of this situation when I came to do some leadership training for the church staff.

I had never heard of or met the prophet/predator before. I did not engage him in any dialog the whole evening. He stayed well away from me and was uncharacteristically subdued as long as I was there.

Some months later the whole story came out after the pastor had been through deliverance. Looking back, the pastor realized that the predator demon had recognized that I would confront it instantly if it attempted anything, so it hid from me all evening and caused its host to leave town the next week.

I told the pastor, “Now that you know the truth, and the rules of the game, there is no reason you could not walk in that kind of dominion within six months.” I’d say he is well on his way. It was his daughters who routed that predator spirit this week with two words on their very first attempt.

Copyright by Arthur Burk

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