Signs & Wonders – Bizarre spiritual manifestations

I do not agree with everything  Derek Prince has to say, but nonetheless I found this very interesting on The Toronto Blessing/Brownsville/Agentinian revival spiritual manifestations:

 ’There are many features of purported moves of the Holy Spirit that I could pick out and hold up as examples of things that are not holy. But I will only deal with one, and that is: animal behavior in human beings attributed to the Holy Spirit. There are many such examples, some I have witnessed and some have been reported.

First of all, there is no passage in Scripture that I know of where the Holy Spirit causes any human being to behave like an animal. There is the example of Balaam, but that is a strong contrast. God caused Balaam’s donkey to speak like a man – but He never caused Balaam to bray like a donkey!

There was one man whom God caused to behave like an animal: Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from men and ate grass like oxen; his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws. (Daniel 4:33) But that was God’s judgment, not His blessing! Revelation 4:6-8 depicts four living creatures that surround the throne of God. Three are there as representatives of the “animal” kingdom: a lion, a calf and an eagle. But none of them make noises that express their “animal” nature. All of them alike proclaim the holiness of God in pure and beautiful speech. It is important to understand that there is an order in God’s creation.

Man was created in the image and likeness of God to exercise authority over the animal kingdom (see Genesis 1:26). Man is, in fact, the highest order of the creation described in the opening chapters of Genesis. This has a bearing on the way the Holy Spirit blesses us. He uplifts those whom He blesses. He will at times cause an animal to act in some ways like a human being. But He will never degrade a human being by causing him to act like an animal.

I have a certain amount of experience in this area because I have encountered animal spirits many times in Africa. I recall one particular deliverance service that I held in Zambia with about 7,000 Africans present. When I had finished the teaching and began to command the evil spirits to manifest themselves and come out of the people, there were all sorts of animal spirits that were let loose. By “animal spirits” I mean evil, demonic spirits that enter human beings and cause them to behave like animals. The first thing that happened was that a man with a “lion spirit” tried to charge me. But someone tripped him up and he did not reach me. You need to know that the reason these Africans in this part of Africa have so many animal spirits is because many of them are hunters of animals. They have this superstition that in order to hunt an animal successfully, you have to get the spirit of the animal in you. So a man tends to have the spirit of the animal which he seeks to hunt. For instance, the man who is hunting a lion, will get a lion spirit.

There are many others. We dealt with spirits of wild boars that caused people to burrow in the earth with their noses like a wild boar rooting for something. Then there were many snake spirits. These were mainly in women, and when they were manifested, the women were flat on their bellies slithering around like snakes. All these I actually witnessed myself.

There was one other spirit that I did not witness, but heard about from the missionary couple who organized the meeting. Later I met the lady concerned. She was a very sweet Christian lady – a school teacher – but her husband was an elephant hunter. When she came to the missionary couple for deliverance, they commanded the elephant spirit to come out. Immediately she dropped on her hands and knees, crawled out through an open door, put her forehead up against a small tree, and began to try to push it down. Wasn’t that remarkable? Perhaps some well-meaning Western Christian might have said, “Our sister is pushing a tree down for Jesus,” but that was not the explanation. The elephant spirit in her was causing her to do what elephants regularly do, which is push down trees with their foreheads. As soon as she was delivered from that spirit, she no longer had any urge to push trees down with her forehead. In the West, we sometimes tend to speak about the people in Africa as unsophisticated and to consider ourselves more sophisticated. However, I think in this realm of animal spirits it is we, in the West, who are unsophisticated and the Africans who are sophisticated. They have lived for generations with such spirits, but until the gospel came, with the power of the name of Jesus and the Word of God, they had no way to deal with them. Thank God that many of them now know how to deal with them!

Another example of which various reports have been given is people behaving like dogs. I am a dog lover, but I think dogs should be kept in their rightful place. I do not believe that the Holy Spirit ever causes anybody to bark or to run around like a dog.

Where such manifestations of animal spirits have occurred, there are certain steps that we need to take. We cannot tolerate or encourage such manifestations. Nor can we merely sweep all this under the carpet and go on as if nothing had happened.

In Matthew 12:33, Jesus instructs us: “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for a tree is known by its fruit.” Wherever there is bad fruit, it comes from a bad tree. It is not enough to get rid of the bad fruit. We must also cut down the bad tree that produced it. If we fail to do this, the bad tree will go on producing more bad fruit. Undoubtedly the tree that produces animal behavior of this kind is some form of occult or pagan practice. For instance, there are frequent manifestations of animal behavior in some parts of Africa and India.

To cut down the tree requires that the leaders responsible identify the problem, confess it as sin and repent of it….’   Derek Prince, ‘Protection From Deception’

Jessie Penn-Lewis was one of the key figures involved in the Great Welsh Revival of 1904. She wrote a ground-breaking book on the revival which makes fascinating reading, as she clearly describes the spiritual manifestations that broke out there, and subsequently.  This book ‘War on the Saints’ (you should get the original and unabridged version as apparently later editions were edited severely), I recommend to every Christian in these times, not just those involved in, or interested in the deliverance ministry. I do not agree with it all, but do read it if you have not already as it may open up your eyes to the demonic deception that preys on the individual Christian and the Church body, particularly at the time of revival which Jessie Penn Lewis describes as a ‘critical’  time as sincere and loving believers can be swept off their feet by the false streams which mingle with the true. True and false manifestations get mingled together and are not discerned and dealt with properly and thus deception occurs and people get led astray – what seems subtle at first leads people a long way astray. Many counterfeit spirits used the name of Jesus and seemed like the real deal and the Holy Spirit until they were confronted and revealed themselves otherwise – ie. as agents of Satan. 

Deception happened in Wales in 1904/1905 and it is still happening today. There is nothing new under the sun. I remember personally hearing Randy Clark (a key figure in the Toronto Blessing) of the Vineyard say of the Toronto Blessing ‘this move is of God…. These manifestations happened in the Great Welsh Revival…they happened in Jonathan Edward’s day…’  What Randy Clark crucially neglected to say was that the leaders of the Great Welsh Revival did not think these manifestations were of God, neither did Jonathan Edwards - a crucial – and in my view a decietful – omission of fact. (Evan Roberts the ‘leader’ of the Welsh Revival wrote a foreword and afterword for War on the Saints.)

Yes,  Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn Lewis saw the same spiritual manifestions as at  Toronto and Brownsville, but crucially they believed most of these manifestations as NOT  from God.

When I read ‘War on the Saints’, I rejoiced that someone who believed in the gifts of the spirit urged discernment as most discernment camps seem to hate all spiritual gifts and thus everything, baby and all, gets thrown out with the bathwater. Yes, the Holy Spirit is powerful and still in operation, there are true gifts but there are also false, there is a true spirit but many false spirits, there is a true anointing and also a false, and test and weigh the spirits! this book urges. How refreshing to read this, written in the infancy of the Pentecostal Movement, and if only this advice had been heeded! The Pentecostal Movement has been historically noted for its lack of discernment and sound judgment. Seduction can be most subtle.

Extract from ‘War on the Saints’:

‘From a book recently published, said to contain the very words of the Lord Jesus, spoken THROUGH some of His children, and written down as spoken in the first person, the following brief extract is taken, showing the extract of the mediumistic control by deceiving spirits, which some are believed to be the work of the Holy Spirit. The Lord Jesus is supposed to have said:-

‘The manifestations of the Spirit, in some things, are very strange. Sometimes He will twist the body this way, and that, and the meaning is dark to you. I want you to know some things about this part of the Spirit’s work. I want you to see that they are not useless. If you had spoken in your own tongue, when the Spirit came in, it would have graciously blessed you; but perhaps you might have thought it was yourself, as many have. So the Spirit comes in and speaks in an unknown tongue to you, that you might know that it was not yourself speaking… Your hands He has often lifted up, and again He has raised your fingers in various ways. Your eyes open and shut by the Spirit now, as they did not before. Your very head has been shaken by the Spirit, and you have not known why He did this. You have thought sometimes, it was just to show He was living there, and that is true, but there is more in it than that, and He will show you as well as He can, in a few words, what some of these things are….Some things in the manifestations are very peculiar to you. You have gone on wondering about them. Don’t think it strange that the Spirit works in you in many ways. His work is more than a twofold work. It is manifold. This is puzzling many minds. They see the Spirit shaking. They hear Him singing. They feel him laughing, and they are sometimes tried with His various twistings and jerkings, as though He would tear them to pieces. Sometimes it seems He is imitating the animals in various sounds and doings. This has been all a mystery to the saints. His work, I say, is manifold. He seeks, in some, to show them that they are all one with each other, in the whole creation … If He shows you, by making a noise as of some wild animal, and that you are like that, you must not despise His way of working, for the Holy Spirit knows why He does it. He makes these noises in the animals, can’t He make them in you?’

A very holy and useful woman says, that soon after receiving the baptism of the Spirit, there came to her one night in the church, a wild abnormal impulse to throw the hymn-book at the preacher, and to run over the church screaming; and it took all her will power to keep her hand from throwing that book, but she had common sense to know that the Holy Spirit was not the author of such a suggestion. If she had yielded to that sudden feeling, it would have likely given that fanatical demon admission to her emotional nature and ruined her life-work. She is a person who knows the mighty demonstrations of the Holy Spirit, and understands God sufficiently to know He is not the source of wild and indecent conduct . . . Another person said he felt like rolling on the floor, and groaning and pulling the chairs around, but he distinctly perceived that the impulse to do so had something wild in it; and a touch of self-display contrary to the gentleness and sweetness of Jesus; and, as quick as he saw it was an attack of a false spirit, he was delivered. But another man had the same impulse, and fell down groaning and roaring, beating the floor with his hands and feet, and the demon entered into him as the angel of light, and got him to think that his conduct was of the Holy Ghost, and it became a regular habit in the meetings he attended, until he would ruin every religious meeting he was in.

It requires great humility to try these spirits and detect the false ones. Other demons in existence are those pseudo pious ones who soar round the high altitudes of the spiritual life, like eagles around great mountain tops, and seek to fasten their talons upon the lofty and conspicuous prey. These are the demons of spiritual pride, of religious ambition, of false prophetic vision, of strained and far-fetched illuminations, of wild fantastic notions. These are the demons that flit over the sunlit regions in the land of Canaan, and attack very seldom any but advanced believers.

The effects of being influenced by this sort of demons are manifold, and plainly legible to a well-poised mind. They cause people to run off into things that are odd and foolish, unreasonable and indecent. It leads them to adopt a peculiar voice or twang, or unnatural shouting, or some shaking of the body, or such an influence is manifested by peculiar heresies in the mind, of which there is a nameless variety. It produces a certain wildness in the eye, and harshness in the voice. ….’