What to Do When Faced with Voices We Hear?
Professor FOMUM, being a builder of men, certainly wanted to give his spiritual children a solid education to be able to identify and destroy the work of Satan through organized attacks against human understanding, intelligence, and will. He was a great man of God who burned with a fervent desire to share with the Body of Christ any spiritual experience that could make victorious faith possible.
We believe that a book like this must seriously take into account this testimony if we want to act as his sons. It is evident that he did not want a single child of God to be deceived by demonic powers due to ignorance of Satan’s tricks and schemes and his army of demons. There is a powerful army of Satan behind oppression.
Many speak directly into the mind of the person they want to deceive. Their activity produces voices that can convey apparently coherent messages or blatantly false and ridiculous messages. Sometimes these voices demand bizarre things such as taking one’s own life, insulting people, or waking up neighbors late at night to announce the gospel to them.
The devil gains ground when these voices are accepted and obeyed.
If the person hearing the voice condemns it and drives out any spirit behind that voice, Satan will never find access. If Satan comes a thousand times saying the same thing, it must be rebuked a thousand times. If the person hearing the voice remains passive, the devil will win the battle; for the demons say, “Let us kill him with the tongue,” meaning, let us make him hear voices until death ensues, if possible. No matter what Satan tells you to do: good or bad, do not do it.
In his book “The Spiritual Man,” Watchman Nee gives six fundamental reasons that can allow the devil to succeed in deceiving men, even believers, by making them hear voices or giving them visions during sleep or in a state of ecstasy.
Broadly speaking, according to Watchman Nee, we can classify the consents granted into six groups. Let’s briefly mention them:
- An unrenewed mind, while the spirit is regenerated. Repentance has only produced partial results in the intellectual life, and the remaining dark corners provide a basis for the enemy.
- An unclean mind.
Indulging in impure thoughts, nurturing images of sin, accepting ideas of pride, hardness, injustice, all these things open a door that should remain closed.
- A false interpretation of certain facts or acts.
Accepting as natural a situation that is the work of the enemy, or attributing to oneself the responsibility for it, is giving the enemy precious territory which he will undoubtedly use to scheme something else. Conceiving and accepting an erroneous doctrinal explanation prompts the enemy to put us in the actual situation that the correct doctrine would make us reject.
- Acceptance of Satan’s suggestions.
This often concerns our circumstances or our future. He likes to prophesy what will happen to us. If the believer is not aware of the true source of his predictions and lets them take root in him, he paves the way for the enemy to bring about the very situations he fraudulently predicted. For example, he may predict weakness or illness. The victim will soon believe himself to be sick, and he will become so through the intervention of the enemy.
- An empty mind.
God created the mind for man to use it. The vitality of the mind is an obstacle to the action of evil spirits. One of their favorite objectives is to provoke a state of idleness, to establish a void in the mind to make it a sterile entity. The victim thus deprived of his means of reflection will accept without examination all the teachings that the adversary wants him to accept. It is only through normal intellectual activity that the Christian can discern the alleged revelations or other suggestions of Satan.
All notions received by an empty head emanate from an enemy source.
- A passive mind.
In general, it does not differ much from an empty mind. Strictly speaking, the “empty” mind simply expresses its non-use, while the passive mind means waiting for an external force to set it in motion. To be passive is to refrain from functioning, thus allowing external elements to replace us. A passive brain does not think for itself; it lets a foreign power think for it.
Passivity reduces man to the state of a machine. (Spiritual Man pages 312-313)
6.1 Resist the devil.
The Bible says: “Submit yourselves therefore to God; resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” James 4:7
The words or voices that Satan makes us hear aim to sow doubt in us, to plunge us into fear, anxiety, sadness, guilt. It is written in Ecclesiastes 7:7:
“Surely oppression makes a wise man mad, and a bribe corrupts the heart.“
Jesus said to the Jews: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44
In the voices that D.M.D. heard, it can be noticed that since the 10th grade, she first heard blasphemy, then a voice announcing her death. In her 2nd year at the University, she still heard the same voice telling her: “You will die” and she is still alive. This simply means that the devil used lies to create confusion, fear, dread, anxiety, and anguish in her for five (5) years.
We resist Satan by reminding him of what Jesus has done, by refusing to adopt the devil’s suggestions as D.M.D. did when she accepted that the voice that said, “Jesus is a dog!” was hers. For example, when D.M.D. first heard: “Jesus-dog”; she should have said: “Satan, you lie, Jesus is the Holy One of God, Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus is…
This text is an excerpt from the book “Deliverance From Depression” written by Pastor Boniface Menye.
We invite you to read the following article “The Functioning of the Human Being“.
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