The X-Manual

Exousia—A Comprehensive Handbook on Deliverance and Exorcism

Peter J. Bellini

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666737370, 9781666796728
• eBook ISBN: 9781666796735
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The title of the book, The X-Manual, is taken from the word exousia, from the subtitle. It is the Greek word for authority. The word is used throughout the New Testament. For our purposes, it is used to express the divine authority or right to cast out demons--"I have given you authority [exousia] to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you" (Luke 10: 19 NIV). Jesus gives believers authority to cast out demons. This book is about spiritual authority over evil. The X-Manual is a practical "how to" handbook for clergy and laity on deliverance and exorcism. One reason I wrote the book is because so few understand and/or operate effectively in deliverance ministry. Nowhere is the church more inadequate or excessive than in deliverance ministry. The X-Manual contains specific time-tested biblical instructions on selecting and training a deliverance team, pre-deliverance work, the deliverance session, post-deliverance work, and other useful tools like the C1-13 instrument that helps determine if one needs deliverance. Deliverance is essential to the church's New Testament healing and evangelism ministry. It is time for the church to walk in the authority and power that Christ gave us to set the captives free!

Lesson 1

They’re Real!

This is the brief story of my baptism into deliverance ministry almost four decades ago. My unforeseen initiation into spiritual warfare and deliverance began while I was an open-air campus evangelist. Outdoor preaching was a longstanding tradition at the Ohio State University. Students waited for the warm weather when the campus preachers would arrive. They would eagerly cut class and flock to the Oval (OSU’s version of a quad) to hear and heckle the outdated, over-the-top, Bible-banging preachers. Witches, warlocks, and Satanists attended our preaching events and were ready to stir up a firestorm of opposition at the first syllable of the good news.

Back in the 1980s, following the first week of my conversion to Christ, I felt the call to share the gospel with my fellow Buckeyes. I would set out for the Oval daily to preach repentance and faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sins. Old time, revivalistic, fire-baptized, Holy Ghost convicted preaching seemed to stir up the sleeping sinister sprites in those days. Or perhaps the mere oddity of proclaiming the truth outdoors at a major secular university day in and day out in the twentieth century rubbed some the wrong way.

In any case, my colleague and I found ourselves regularly accosted by a group of self-proclaimed witches and Satanists. Two stood out: an older and a younger woman, both self-proclaimed witches. They informed us that they were cursing our ministry and holding black masses for our death (see preface for another such occurrence). What did I do as a young Christian to deserve this attention? I sure felt special. In that season, my friend and I prayed more intensely in our devotional time. We meticulously “put on the armor of God” and interceded with prayers of divine protection. Undisturbed, we continued our regular outdoor routine. John Wesley would have been proud. Nonetheless, the harassment and threats continued, until a startling incident happened to my friend one night. He called me in a panic and related what had occurred. It went something like this:

I was in my bed trying to fall asleep, when I saw an apparition at the foot of my bed that scared the @#X* out of me. Those two crazy witches who have been praying curses against us appeared in my room. I am not kidding. I freaked out and began to pray. Then, they disappeared. Then shortly after the phone rang. I answered it. I heard a female voice say, “Did you see us?” and the voice began to laugh. It was a shrieking, menacing laugh, along with another cackling female voice in the background. I quickly hung up the phone.

Needless to say, as a young believer, I was a little shaken. For a moment, I questioned the veracity of my colleague’s “ghost story.” Maybe after hearing the frequent threats, he had become paranoid. Yet, in my spirit, I felt he was truly sharing what he had experienced. His alarmed and frightened tone had a ring of truth to it. I began to pray for discernment as to what our next move would be. They had already planned theirs.

One Sunday, we were aghast to find them at our church parking lot, sitting in their car. They began regularly attending services on Sundays and Wednesdays, especially evening services. We had heard stories of occult members sent on assignment to pray against churches and pastors, but we took those tales lightly. Besides, those sorts of things always happen to other people.

The women managed to fit perfectly into our small, non-denominational, charismatic congregation. It was as if they had rehearsed this methodically, almost like they had performed it before. They were clothed conservatively in dresses or long skirts. They clapped to the praise music and lifted their hands when the music shifted from high praise to deep worship. They warmly shook everyone’s hands and hugged every neck when the preacher told the congregation to go and greet each other. During the sermon, the ominous pair would “amen” at the right moment and shout along with the best of them. During ministry time at the altar at the end of service, they would routinely come up front with hands lifted high, ready to receive prayer and even a word from God. The whole charade was eerie. It was something I had never witnessed before or since.

The good people of the church did not suspect anything. In fact, some of our friends in the church rebuked us when we refused to embrace the two “visitors” during greeting time. We were stand-offish with the ghoulish guests. We knew the truth, and they did, too. This went on for weeks. They arrived an hour prior to every service, camped out in their powder blue Trans-Am. We assumed that they came early to pray against the service, the pastor, and the people of the church. Their part was well rehearsed and their performances stellar . . . until the revivalist came to town.

We were holding revival the next few weeks, as any Spirit-filled church would do in the summer. The evangelist was a powerful African American preacher who was also a seasoned prophetess, fluent in the gifts of the Spirit and dripping with spiritual authority. The sanctuary was packed one evening with many new faces, as is customary during revival season. Our stealth sorceresses blended in well, and the service proceeded as usual. At the conclusion of her preaching, the prophetess began to operate in the word of knowledge. She called out people who had various problems and health issues. Again, this is customary in a Spirit-filled service. However, this time was different for both the prophetess and our two friends.

Following the word of knowledge, both pernicious performers came forward with hands raised, the elder standing in front of her apprentice. Immediately, as the woman of God laid hands on the elder witch, the prophetess boldly exclaimed, “We have two witches in the house!” At that very second, the spellbound, startled woman hit the floor and began to scream with a deep howling shriek. She began to writhe on the ground like a snake. The prophetess followed her to the floor, rebuking the spirit of witchcraft as she commanded the slithering figure to repent and surrender to Christ. The angry woman screamed, “No, no, my power!” and would not yield. My friend and I, enthusiastic, young, and insensitive, were elated and energized, as we shot up out of our pews and ran to the altar behind the fallen witch, almost waiting for the prophetess to retrieve a bucket of water to pour on the two women to melt them, like in The Wizard of Oz. (Jesus would have clearly rebuked us. We would later repent for our misguided zeal). For us, the events leading up to this Elijah vs. The Prophets of Baal smack-down was both an adrenaline blitz as well as a comic conclusion.

After lying on the carpet for a few minutes, the elder witch, still screaming and squirming on the floor, managed to get to her wobbly feet. She snatched the wrist of her whimpering apprentice and made a mad dash for the door, never to be seen again. We hoped and prayed that one day those two souls would heed the call to repent of their dark arts and come to Christ. This was my glorious baptism into deliverance.

After nearly four decades of deliverance ministry, I have seen every type of demonic manifestation imaginable. I have heard growling, husky male voices speaking through petite women. I saw one man levitate. I have observed both eyes roll back until only the whites were showing, then smoke coming from the person’s mouth. I watched an oppressed woman go into a violent rage and take on a whole team of ushers. I witnessed all the twitching, shaking, hissing, foaming, screaming, and flailing conceivable.

And some still ask, “Are these invisible beings that the Bible calls demons or evil spirits real?” I could tackle this question from a scientific perspective. We can examine complex concepts like causal closure and the hard problem of consciousness, emergence of intangible properties and downward causation, quantum indeterminacy and quantum non-interventionist divine action, and dark matter and dark energy, etc. And I have done so elsewhere. These discussions all challenge the notion of reductionistic physicalism (the idea that only matter exists) and posit the reality of immateriality. Of course, that would not “prove” in a hard, Cartesian sense that invisible beings like demons and angels exist. But if science can entertain the possibility of invisibility and immateriality, theology can possibly entertain angels unaware.

The scriptural notion of an invisible realm of spirit beings cannot be unequivocally ruled out. Science admits invisibility at the least. Where science wants proof, scripture assumes. The biblical worldview assumes a notion of divine and even spirit agency, which is held by most Christian denominations and other world religions—in other words, spirit beings with a will, such as angels and demons. Everything is not provable by hard reason, nor does it have to be. We are justified by faith, not reason. Reason is instrumental in the pursuit of truth, but it works in concert with faith, “faith seeking understanding.”

As believers, we take scripture by reasonable faith and believe what it reveals about God, angels, demons, heaven, hell, miracles, the supernatural, and other invisible realities. The Bible calls us to believe in a God we have never seen who saves us from a hell we have never seen. Scripture offers us eternal life in a heaven where we have never been. Reality is not just material or matter. We walk by faith and not by sight, like Moses, “who saw Him who is invisible” (Heb 11:27). Our five senses apprehend the rational, empirical world (the world in front of us). But faith is the sixth sense that apprehends th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Lesson 1: They’re Real!
• Lesson 2: A Theological Foundation for Deliverance
• Lesson 3: The Four Laws of Deliverance
• Lesson 4: Pre-Deliverance Preparation (Pre-Op)
• Lesson 5: Deliverance Decorum
• Lesson 6: Operation Deliverance (5 Step Method)
• Lesson 7: Post Deliverance (Post-Op): Renewing of the Mind with Truth Therapy
• Excursus: Church and Community Deliverance
• Appendix A: The X-Manual Summary
• Appendix B: Angelology and Demonology: A Hierarchy
• Appendix C: Eastern Orthodox Exorcism Prayers
• Bibliography