We live in an age when the veil seems thinner, when the headlines read more like the Days of Noah than the daily paper. Mass shootings carried out by the unhinged, ritualistic murders splashed across social feeds, random acts of cruelty so senseless that even unbelievers shake their heads and say it “feels demonic.” You hear it now not just from pulpits but from the lips of secular journalists and podcasters: the suspicion that some darkness lurks behind the chaos, a recognition that evil has a personality, a cunning, and a will. The irony is cruel, because at the very moment the broader culture begins admitting the supernatural, the church has lost its voice. Evangelicals are quieter than ever about the devil, and Reformed cessationists, who pride themselves on fidelity to the Puritans, seem more embarrassed than anyone to speak of demons. Our timing, as usual, is abysmal.
Paul warned us quite explicitly that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against the principalities and powers of darkness in high places. But that wasn’t metaphor. He spoke of a cosmos alive with hostile spiritual agencies, an invisible council of rebel gods, thrones and dominions conspiring to oppose Christ’s reign. The modern evangelical, nervous and self-conscious, prefers to allegorize Paul’s warning into psychological or sociological categories, as though demons were metaphors rather than enemies. Yet if our eyes are open, we see that reality is stranger and darker than metaphor. We are not only fighting bad policy, mental illness, or social decay. We are fighting demons.
And here is where the past suddenly becomes more relevant than ever. For the Puritans, demons were not the stuff of curiosity or fringe belief. They were a daily assumption, a theological category as ordinary as providence, as central to the Christian life as prayer. These men, the ones our movement reveres - Perkins, Owen, Baxter - spoke with unflinching seriousness about the devil, about his influence in temptation, about his schemes in the church, about his hand in calamities. They were not embarrassed to treat the demonic as a subject of theology, and they did so not because they were naïve but because they were biblical.
DEMONS AS DAILY REALITY
William Perkins, often called the father of Puritanism, wrote extensively about Satan’s devices, warning ministers not to underestimate the subtlety of the tempter. His Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft was not a sensational tract but a sober theological treatise, an attempt to apply Scripture to the real fears and afflictions of his people.
Richard Baxter, remembered for his practical wisdom and pastoral heart, filled his works with counsel on discerning the devil’s assaults upon the conscience, the family, and the church. He gave space to the reality of believers tormented, sometimes physically, by dark powers, and he treated their suffering not as superstition but as pastoral crisis.
John Owen, whose volumes on sin and sanctification have shaped generations of Reformed thought, constantly named the devil as the theologian’s greatest opponent, the enemy who sought to corrupt doctrine, to weaken prayer, to poison assurance, and to fracture the fellowship of saints.
