A Remarkable Demonic Assault

John C. Rankin

(January 17, 2013)

In February of 2005, while returning home one night from teaching at New York Divinity School, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a devastating physical exhaustion.

For the next six weeks I slept 12-14 hours a day, and was not able to be productive in my waking hours. As a result, my finances went from a healthy trajectory to a disaster, and our house eventually went into foreclosure, which we later escaped only by the skin of our teeth.

In this time period, I was preparing to work on the Ministers Affirmation on Marriage, a document where I recruited 700 ministers and church leaders in Connecticut as signatories: “Yes to Man and Woman in Marriage: No to Same-Sex Marriage.” In its 2003 publication in the Hartford Courant, and here again in 2005, no one in the state – media, same-sex marriage advocates, academics, politicians, activists, et al. – raised one public question about its content and nature. And Connecticut was at the time the most educated state in the nation per capita, as well as the wealthiest and most skeptical.

At the six-week mark, I had seriously been considering writing my will, and how to make provision for my family as life was ebbing away. One friend called me “the walking dead.” Then, one day at my desk, suddenly it hit me. This exhaustion was not physical in origin, but demonic. And especially, in face of the work I was then seeking to accomplish. So I created an email group of some 70+ men, and asked them to intercede in prayer for my deliverance.

The next morning, when I awoke, the exhaustion was gone, my health and energy fully restored, and there has been no return of this exhaustion until 2014 in different circumstance. Sorcery at the right hand of power?

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