My Testimony

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Background

I was born and raised on the east side of Richmond, Virginia. I lived in a three bedroom house with my father, mother, and two younger brothers. Growing up, both of my parents worked full time jobs so most of my childhood I only spent a lot of time with them on the weekends or during holidays and vacations. Otherwise, I was raised by my grandmother and saw my grandfather on occasion, though he worked as well and didn't retire until I reached adulthood.

My parents were very young, my mother having me when she was eighteen and having my youngest brother when she was twenty four. My mother's side of the family were Christian for the most part, varying between non-denominational and Baptist and with only my grandmother being Catholic. On my father's side, they were not very Christian though my grandmother on that side also was Catholic, as well as her sisters.

Despite all this religious influence from family, when it came to my parents, brothers, and I, we never attended church and my parents instead decided to allow us to decide for ourselves what to believe. We were raised on television, movies, cartoons, and video games, and that's what filled our early childhood. My only exposure to Jesus Christ was through hearing bits and pieces of the gospel from my grandfather or from his side of the family at gatherings on Easter and Christmas.

Exposure to Pornography

My family got a computer while I was still in elementary school and I remember being excited for the internet alongside my brothers and being able to visit websites and download games. We weren't always able to get on it since my father wanted to use it most times, but we would get on together or with my mother and explore together. It hardly needs to be said these days, but the internet is not a kind place for a child to explore alone. I wasn't exposed to the worst of it just yet.

That didn't happen until middle school. Though I had a lot of friends in elementary school, I ended up going to a different middle school than most of them and having to be around a new crowd. During sixth grade at this new school, we were given laptops to use for classwork. Now I was part of that very first wave of children in Virginia schools to get laptops, and back then, there were no restrictions on any sites as far as what you could visit. And that's when I ran into internet pornography. Without talking about it in any detail, I became addicted to it at a very young age, when I was eleven to twelve years old. Soon enough the school did put blocks and censors on pornographic websites and other websites, such as gaming websites, but the damage had been done and I found ways around the blocks to get to the pornographic websites.

Addictions like pornography are the easiest way to open yourself up to negative influences. Pornography is an addiction that completely warps the mind and plays on the wretched nature of our sexual lust as fallen men. Like most other addictions, it led to many others. I was already addicted to rock music, video games, and entertainment in the form of television, movies, anime, and cartoons, but pornography was by far the most destructive to me as a young boy going into my teenage years. I would try to find ways to get on my school laptop at night without my parents knowing and view pornography, being obsessed with it thoroughly.

Spiritual Darkness Worsens

Not too long after I was exposed to pornography, I began to always feel a presence in my bedroom with me, or whenever I was alone. It started in middle school, around the same time I got addicted to pornography. Because I didn't know any better, I thought it was because of the scary movies I watched.

I had seen movies like Alien, The Grudge, The Thing, The Ring, and others that really did a number on my young mind, so I thought it was my own cowardice and fear getting to me from the scary images and sounds. Over time, through middle school and high school, this feeling of a presence being there got worse. I would sometimes hear voices but couldn't make out what they were saying. The times when I could make out what they said, it was simply my name being whispered – "Matthew". More than once, I leaped out of my bed at this, and I began sleeping with headphones on playing music or having a fan directly in my face to block out sounds so I couldn't hear these voices. Having the fan in my face while I slept also helped with another problem - the feeling that something was face-to-face with me when I closed my eyes in bed. Having the fan there in my face and the covers over my head made the feeling go away.

Although still having the feeling of an eerie presence at times and occasionally hearing voices, I got through middle and high school mostly intact and went off to a technical school to get a bachelors degree in Network Security. Even though computers through the internet had gotten me a horrible addiction to pornography, they had given me an idea of what to do for a career so I went with what I knew and liked at the time. While at that technical center, I ended up taking up smoking cigarettes once I started working night shifts there due to one of my teachers and mentors being a smoker as well as a good friend of mine.

After I graduated from technical school, I began working at a major Fortune 500 company as an analyst and later on their cyber intelligence team. During my time at that company, I picked up another addiction – alcohol – that slowly grew worse over time, as did my addictions to smoking, pornography, and music. As far as musical tastes, I began listening to a lot of very vulgar rap music in addition to the rock music I already loved, and it heavily affected my mentality.

Evil Spirits Increase Activity

It was also during this time that my experience with the world of evil spirits took a step beyond feeling a presence or hearing voices from time to time. In 2015 while working night shift as an analyst, I was by myself at the office since I had volunteered to work over Christmas break. While sitting in the office, which was an open-air style arrangement, I saw a black gangly creature crawl across the ceiling in the bright office and disappear behind a column. I felt a chill run up my spine and suddenly noticed all the darkness outside of the windows and the darkness of the open offices behind me. I quickly left to take a walk and talk to a security guard that was on duty, but didn't make any mention of it to him.

Later on in 2016, I came to the office at night in order to work out at a gym that was on location. After talking to some coworkers on night shift upstairs, I went down to the gym alone which was pitch black. Before entering the gym, I went into the men's locker room in order to change into my gym clothing. Before I could finish getting changed, I suddenly heard a man with a high pitched voice laugh right outside of the door to the locker room. I froze in fear before going for a knife I had in my gym bag and slowly checking around the locker room with it. Eventually I worked up the courage to go outside and into the dark gym, and I walked over into it until the automatic lights came on. There was no one there. I decided to go ahead and work out rather than go back out into the dark parking lot by myself to leave, and eventually after the work out I felt comfortable enough to leave.

Not too long after that incident, I'd say about a month later, the worst of these early incidents occurred. I was at my apartment by myself, about to settle down to go to sleep. I had started to get comfortable sleeping with my lights off in my bedroom – I used to sleep with them on always, since I used to feel a presence in the room with me. I didn't feel it lately at that point, and hadn't been hearing the voices. However, that night I was unable to sleep so I stared up at the ceiling, the only light being from a lamp post outside that shined through the slits of my blinds. Suddenly, I saw that dark gangly creature crawl out of the darkness of the corner of my room and crawl above me to my left and disappear in the darkness above a dresser beside me. I immediately jumped out of my bed with my blanket and ran into my living room where I flicked on the light and slammed myself down on the couch. Terrified, I got under my blanket and shut my eyes and tried to get to sleep, not wanting to be awake and have to deal with what was happening. However, it only got worse – even though I had my eyes closed, it was as if I could see through my eyelids and I saw the head of a woman with long hair raising up beside the edge of the couch and under the blanket with me. I screamed loudly and threw the blanket off of me, and at that very moment a loud sound like a chainsaw being revved up sounded from my utility room across from my bedroom.

After that, I stayed awake until the morning, and then went to sleep. I counted it good only that I didn't have to work that next day. Back then, I didn't really understand what it was all about. I thought it was ghosts of deceased people, or negative energy manifesting because of problems at the time in my family, or any other explanation other than the activity of evil spirits, or demons.

Addiction to Sins Deepens

Time went on, and still I didn't have any real connection to Jesus Christ in my life. Though still talking to family that believed in our Lord Jesus and knew about salvation through Him, I didn't understand any of it. My addictions grew worse, and I went out a lot with friends to bars and eventually began going to strip clubs in 2019 as well. I wasted a lot of money at those on tips and lap dances, completely lost and dead in my sins and carnal desires of the flesh.

In addition to the addictions getting worse, so did the effect of evil spirits in my life. My addiction to music had come in full and I'd spend a lot of time whenever I didn't have work, or time to spend with family or friends, pacing around my apartment and later my house I moved into. I would just pace all over the place listening to music, and I started imagining other worlds in my head, other lives, and this included seeing musical concerts and karaoke with imaginary anime-style characters I made up in my head. Though it is the old me before I was born again, I am still embarrassed to think about it, as these characters I would picture were due to my addiction to pornography and my loneliness of not having a romantic relationship.  

Because I thought it was better than being addicted to live action pornography, I looked at a lot of animated pornography in the style of Japanese animation, known as hentai. So these characters I saw in these alternate realities in my head were anime and cartoon women, sometimes ones I made up and sometimes ones from shows I watched. I liked both western cartoons and anime, such as Avatar: The Last Airbender, Gravity Falls, Transformers, My Little Pony, Full Metal Alchemist, Persona, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Berserk, Kill la Kill, Dragon Ball, and Mobile Suit Gundam. Since I was obsessed with it as far as my addiction and tried to hide it, I grew into a very hateful and spiteful person, both to myself and others over it.

This went on for a while, the bars, drinking, smoking, strip clubs, pacing, loud music, imaginary lives and women in my head, and pornography. Still, I didn't understand that there was any wicked spiritual influence involved in all this.  

It's important to note the fact that I myself opened myself up to demons because of my own sinful nature. We are drawn into such horrible addictions of the flesh by our own lust, and that's what happened. When lust conceives into sin, then we open ourselves up to much worse than our own wickedness.

During this time, I thought about turning to Christianity. My middle brother had went through a horrible period in his life not too long before that and turned to Roman Catholicism and wore a rosary. I actually found a rosary myself in a gas station parking lot and would wear it and keep it on me from time to time. I did have a Bible that my grandfather gave me before that and made a bit of progress in Genesis and Matthew, but only got about a third through each before giving up.

My Dad Passes Away

The next major event was in 2020 when my dad seemed to lose his mind. He quit his job in April that year and began to say he was ill and that he was dying. He already had a problem with alcohol and smoking cigarettes and not eating much, and at the time I chalked it up to the COVID lockdown getting to him and making him snap. That was only part of the story. He started getting my mother to take him on various doctor visits to find out what was wrong with him, and was very erratic when results didn't come back certain ways. He also refused to go through with certain procedures, like a CAT scan. Eventually, he stated that he was possessed by a demon named "Belial" and he begged my mother to get a Catholic priest to come over and talk to him. That didn't change his condition at all, so he got my mother to get her father over to pray with him, and she did and he prayed with my grandfather to accept Christ. These things didn't change his condition at all, however, and the worst was to come.

One day in September 2020, I had a horrific nightmare. In it, I was laying in my bed and there was nothing but darkness all around me. Next to me was a woman in bed with me, but I couldn't make out who she was or what she looked like. Suddenly, a huge cockroach-like creature with a woman's face came out of the darkness in front of me. I was in mortal terror but couldn't move or make a sound. The creature put forth a huge insectoid leg and pierced the woman beside me and dragged her into the darkness. It then said to me "I'm coming for you after her" and receded back into the darkness. Immediately afterward, I heard a dog barking and looked to my right and saw through my bedroom door into the hallway. There was my parents' neighbor's little black dog. The dog, whose name was Onyx, barked at me until I got the energy to finally get out of my bed and follow him up the hallway. He began to run, so I began to run after him. He led me through my kitchen and into my mud room and out into the brightness of the outside. I woke up. I didn't know what to make of that dream, but was very unnerved by it. Because of what happened later that day, I realized later that that dream was a spiritual warning, or maybe even a spiritual threat by that devil calling itself "Belial" that had a hold of my father. I got a call from my mother in the afternoon and she was crying – she told me she was in a fast food parking lot and had my brother's gun. She told me that my father had chased her through the house with it, intending to shoot her, but she managed to get into the kitchen, duck behind the fridge door, and knock him over with it and get the gun away from him before running out and calling the police.

Though my father had attempted to shoot my mother, the police told us that without getting him to come out of the house of his own volition, there was nothing they could do. So soon after, a former coworker of my father and myself went over with a police officer. I was wearing that rosary that I had found before in that gas station parking lot, and it snapped off of my neck when I walked through the front door. That had frightened me, but I continued instead with my father’s former coworker and we managed to get him to come out after talking to him. He seemed in better mental condition, but it only got worse after he was arrested and sent to a behavioral health center. I picked him up about a week later from it, and I was able to talk to him normally for a while, However, he still wanted to drink alcohol and to smoke, and I caved into his demand and pulled over at a gas station for him to buy some alcohol and cigarettes. I brought him back to his house – my mother and youngest brother now living with me – and dropped him off there.

After that, he spent a lot of time in a trailer outside of the house, miserable and drinking and smoking himself to death. He would barely eat, and was skin and bones for the most part. My mother and I didn't know what to do, we would go over and check on him but he insisted he was dying and kept saying he was sorry over and over again.

I'll skip ahead. Eventually, we went to check on him one night in December 2020, and found him dead in his bedroom. He had fallen out of bed and broken his neck on a milk crate laying beside it. I still remember my mother screaming, standing out in the cold hugging her, and talking to the paramedics and cops without wincing. My youngest brother eventually pulled up in his truck, and I briefly talked to him, and he seemed about the same as me – not knowing how to feel.

But when I got into my car and began driving to my grandparent's house to let my middle brother know, I burst into tears. My father had died, and I didn't understand any of it. Why it had to happen this way, why this man despite all his faults had to die so pitifully. There was a lot of self-spite, and I know my mother felt that way too at the time. I cried when I told my grandparents and my brother, and it was all bitterness for a while.

Telling others came soon after, and his funeral and burial passed by soon after that. I don't want to dwell on my father's death too much, but it led directly into my own further spiral downward and my eventual coming to Christ through the grace and mercy of our Heavenly Father. I did consider Roman Catholicism at some point after this once more, and I had told my brother that I would read the Catechism with him and join the Roman Catholic church with him. That never came to pass, but it is worth mentioning as I was confused and looking for spiritual comfort during this time.

Spiritual Possession Reaches Breaking Point

I had been working from home ever since mid-March 2020, and continued to after my father's death. This was all due to the COVID-lock down, though the promise came in 2021 that we would eventually return to the office. However, that isolation at home alone all day, since my mother and my youngest brother both worked, took a quick turn for the worse. I was alone, I had lost my father the year before, and there was no office or coworkers there to stop me from drinking, smoking, looking at pornography, and whatever else. My work took a horrible slip and I got into trouble for waking up and logging on late, and everything was a terrible fog of drunkenness. I'd log into meetings and be drunk and smoking cigarettes, making sure not to have my camera on but only my microphone. And I was the one supposedly leading many of these meetings as well.

I would just spend all my time I wasn't phoning in my work pacing, smoking, drinking, listening to loud music – and even rewriting the lyrics. I'd see rock concerts in my head, live out entire fantasy worlds and lives with various anime characters I had invented. Even when I wasn't working or was with family and friends, there was this terrible, miserable, dark urge to just go back into my bedroom with a case of beer, a bottle of liquor, and a carton of cigarettes, lock the door, and pace while blasting rock and rap music into my ears.

I thought I was simply crazy during this time in 2021 and early 2022. And I half was crazy I'm sure. I heard voices all the time, I'd see things in my house with me and pretend they weren't there, and my imagination seemed to be what was in control of me more than anything. I thought I had what psychologists call schizophrenia – I had already thought I had it for a while even before everything with my father transpired since I did hear voices and see things occasionally, but now it was worse than ever. The drinking and smoking seemed to quiet the voices and I wouldn't see anything while consuming alcohol and cigarettes; in hindsight, however, that was most likely only a "trick" by these dark spirits so that I would drink and smoke more. 

There were multiple nights now, happening all the time, when I would feel something in my bedroom watching me while I tried to sleep. I could never sleep with the covers down, I always hid under them. Because if I had them down, I'd feel an entity face to face with me staring at me that I couldn't see. But I could feel it. It could see me, even if I couldn't see it. I'd hear voices all the time too, even if people were in the house with me. They would whisper things I couldn't understand into my ears, though I would always still hear them clearly when they said "Matthew".

One night it got so bad, I fled into my living room to sleep on a recliner. Both of my brothers were in there already asleep on my two couches, so I felt a bit safer. Instead, it was even worse in there. I could see in the reflection of the glass on my backdoor two creatures watching me from my kitchen, peeking at me over the counter top. Every time I would turn to look, they would duck down behind the counter top, and when I would turn away, I could see them peeking over the counter top at me again. I eventually pulled my blanket over my head and shut my eyes, but then they started whispering non-sense and babbling into my ears.

God Begins to Intervene

By December 2021, I had been fired from my job due to my drunkenness making me late to my job and causing me to fall behind on work. During this period, I kept telling myself I would find another job, and until then, I would just live off of the money I saved up. To deal with my self-hatred and self-pity, I kept all of what was happening to me from my family. I just bottled up my hate and my pain, toward myself, toward my life, toward what happened with my father, all of it. I was also very hateful toward the world and saw everything as hopeless. My imagination didn't help, as now it had become absolutely demonic – now it was themed around demonic fictional women attacking fictional men, portals between worlds, and was a strange blend between Catholicism and Eastern mysticism, such as the ideas of reincarnation and a land of the dead we go to between heaven and hell. It had been festering in my head for years, but I began to lose grip on my identity as a man and would imagine myself as a woman. I would fantasize about some sort of magic or demonic spell that would make me go from a man to a woman in my twisted imagination.

I began to rewrite lyrics to songs I was listening to - specifically, lyrics to Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Rob Zombie, and Alice in Chains songs. The lyrics were becoming progressively more demonic into early 2022, writing all sorts of blasphemies about God, Jesus, and the Scriptures that I won't repeat. I still didn't put two and two together at this point that I was outright possessed by wicked spirits, even though I was writing about subjects related to the Holy Scriptures, even if in a blasphemous way. Those fictional women in my head had become solidified over time and became associated with the seven deadly sins from Roman Catholicism, and I made up an anime-style woman to go with each one. I had also assigned very specific eye colors to each one – black, green, red, blue, yellow, purple, and pink in that order. I didn't realize it until after I was saved, but these colors are associated with chakras and Eastern mysticism. This may have been because these entities were brainwashing me to believe in false religions and fake spiritual ideas. In any case, these seven became the characters that now were in my imagination always.

Eventually I reached a point in late February 2022 where I was smoking four packs of cigarettes, drinking eighteen cans of beer, and drinking at least half of a one liter bottle liquor a day. I was jobless, hopeless, and utterly obsessed with doing nothing more but being in my room and wasting my life being locked in my own head with my vain imaginations.

That is until the last week of February, when I was pacing in my kitchen and suddenly looked down at the beer I had sitting on the table and an empty pack of cigarettes next to them. One beer half empty, and six still waiting. At this point I wasn't a Christian and didn't understand anything about the faith. So I looked at the seven beers with one half empty in a more Catholic sense – since I had been leaning toward the Roman Church already, and much of my horrific strange imagination had to do with blending Catholicism and Eastern mysticism – I imagined the seven deadly sins once more. I saw the first beer I had drunk to half empty as representing the sin of Pride, with the other six deadly sins still waiting to quaffed down. And I saw this as a sign, and then something told me that I was done and it all had to stop. The smoking, the drinking, the pacing, the music, and especially the pornography. It all had to stop. So I threw away the beer and the empty pack of cigarettes, and kept away from my computer and from any music. I believe this was the Holy Spirit of God working on me, though I wasn't saved just yet.

The first day was hard, but I fought through it until I got to sleep. When I awoke the next day, that's when my entire conception of the world and the reality of it changed. At first I felt a bit liberated, and was able to walk around my yard feeling a little sick but enjoying the company of my dog and my cat. But then I had the compulsion to go for a drive to keep my mind off of my addictions, and so I did. I drove without music up to a corner store, and I went inside. Immediately I was tempted to buy beer, but I managed to walk away from the coolers to the front counter. I saw the cigarettes and thought to buy some as well, but then I saw the horns of the Marlboro steer stretched out above the racks of cigarettes, and dread fell upon me as I pictured them as the horns of the devil, so I didn’t buy any. I quickly paid for gas. I walked back out and began to feel even worse. I felt sick and scared. I pumped my gas then climbed into my car and began driving back home. Every sign I passed seemed to have some dire warning to me, such as "No fires after 4 PM". Something was wrenching and banging against my brain case and twisting everything around. I took that sign as the world was going to be destroyed after 4 PM that day.  

So I drove back to my street, and I saw my neighbor's two horses, a white and a black, staring at me from next to a shed. The shed isn't red, but today it looked red to me. And I suddenly thought of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Then I drove back to my house in a state of despair, and as I got out of my car, I thought I heard trumpets in the distance. I was terrified now, and went back into my house in a state of panic and delirium. The feeling that God was about to destroy the world not with a flood, but with a nuclear-style destruction came over me. A weird message in my mind told me that my house was the ark, and that I had to get my dog and cat inside or they would be destroyed. My dog was already in the house, but I dashed outside and tried to grab my cat. I got a hold of her and tried to get her inside, but she ran away and disappeared under my shed. Not wanting to risk being caught outside, I ran back inside and shut my backdoor before curling up on the couch with my dog and shutting my eyes. I heard the sound and rush of trees being turned to dust by an approaching wall of nuclear destruction. It washed over the house and yet I still laid there on the couch sweating and terrified to open my eyes.

Eventually I did open them. And things were quiet for a while, but that's how it was during this period. This was only a part of what happened to me over the course of the seven days after I quit all my addictions at once, all on the prompting of what I took as a sign from God. Because the worst of it wasn't these types of strange occurrences, there were others like them – going online and thinking I'm logging into another realm, being suspicious that my dog and cat are watching me and "know something" - yes I truly was losing my grip on reality at that point.

The Demons Reveal Themselves

No, the worst of it was the direct tormenting by the evil spirits or demons I was possessed by. I knew they were demons at this point – and unlike before where I couldn’t understand what they were whispering to me other than “Matthew”, now they were talking and yelling at me loud and clear and I could understand every word they were saying. They took on the forms of two of the imaginary women I saw in my head – one called itself "Lilith" and the other "Jezebel". Lilith was the one I associated with “lust” in my head and looked like a Japanese woman dressed as a Catholic priest. Jezebel was the one I associated with “gluttony” and looked like an Arabic woman dressed in the attire of European nobility. Thinking back, I thought maybe I was possessed by two evil spirits because it was only two specifically from my imagination that were brought to life to torment me, but I think I could've been possessed by more. The number seven was very important to my imagination back then – for example, the seven deadly sins that I was obsessed with – but I can't be sure. I was also obsessed with the number eight, and kept turning it sideways as a symbol of reincarnation in my head. So possibly as many as seven or eight of these spirits, but only two actually appeared to me and tormented me. Perhaps the other spirits were weaker and fled out of fear of the Lord because they realized the Holy Spirit was working on me.  

Lilith and Jezebel appeared to be in rooms with me, and able to talk and shout at me as if physically there. They had "manifested" themselves to me.

Regardless, Lilith and Jezebel tormented me night and day that week, coming and going and I never knew when to expect them. During the day, they would berate me and threaten me - Jezebel told me, for example, that if I got into the shower then it would come in there and attack me. So I didn't shower and I had the stink to match it. During the night, I would try to sleep and Lilith would whisper in my ear to lay on my back. If I stayed on my side, the demon would keep talking and whispering in my ear, making it hard to sleep. If I laid on my stomach, then I would have horrible night terrors. If I did lay on my back, then I would see Lilith sitting on top of me and choking me with a mocking sneer stuck between anger and happiness on its face.

I clung to the rosary I had found years ago all the time to try and get through. I would beg God through it to help me, but no help seemed to come. The tormenting continued unabated in between weird mood swings, twisted thoughts, and visions of destruction.  

Jezebel started to tell me not to call my mother for help – that it was my mother. Therefore if I called my mother and she came over, as soon as I turned my back, it would really be Jezebel there with me ready to do me harm.

The next day after this threat, the one called Lilith told me it was going to play Hide N' Seek with me, and that if I heard it coming, I better not open my eyes or it would attack me. Later that day, I was in the living room when I heard the sweet yet scornful voice of the evil spirit Lilith from the hallway – it was whispering "I'm coming" over and over again and slowly getting louder. I fell to my knees before a picture of my deceased father and gripped my rosary in my hands, pleading for help to come. I could hear that creepy female voice getting louder and closer - "I'm coming" - and now I heard scratching and clawing coming up the hallway toward me. My dog began to growl from the couch, and I let go of my rosary and pressed my hands over my eyes – I had to do this because I could see them through my eyelids. Regardless, the one calling itself Lilith suddenly stopped, and that's when my phone began to ring. I crawled over to it without opening my eyes, scared that evil spirit would attack me if I did. And I answered it – it was my mother. I don't even remember what she was calling about, but I remembered in the misty haze of my mind calling her before. She was returning my call – I broke down and begged her to come over. I told her I needed her there immediately. She had been watching a friend’s house for a while, but now I told her she had to come over now. She was scared, but told me she was and I stayed on the phone with her until she got there.

However, when she got there, I refused to open the door and come outside and my mother was terrified I had a gun or that I was going to hurt her. The threat that the devil calling itself Jezebel had made was still in my mind – that it was my mother. So I didn't want to go outside, the horrible devil had planted it in my head that if I opened that door and went out to her, it would be that demon and not really my mother waiting for me. So I begged my mother to come to the house and come inside, but she was so scared. I feel ashamed and sorry for her looking back on it, but eventually I convinced her I had no weapons and wasn't going to hurt her, and she came inside and I gave her the tightest hug I had given her since my father had passed away.

My mother stayed with me at my house from that point forward, as I couldn't bear to be by myself. I give thanks to God that my mother believed me about the evil spirits, and she was willing to be around me as much as she could while I tried to find a way to drive them out of my life. Several days went by and the devils would still show up here and there, and I was heavily reading the Bible as well as studying material online trying to learn more about God as well as Satan and his angels.

The Night of Salvation Through Jesus Christ

Then there came a night when my mother went out to see a movie with my youngest brother, and this time my middle brother was at my house with me. I was acting very erratic and I was trying to hide it from him. He had brought over some figures of medieval soldiers he was painting on my kitchen table, but I was busy caught in the struggle with the devils that had been tormenting me. Over the course of what I remember being an hour, I would go into the kitchen and say a few words to my brother while he was painting, then I would march back to my bedroom, kneel down next to my bed, grip my rosary, and pray to God to make the devils go away. The devils were standing on the other side of my bed, mocking me, sneering at me, and making threats. Nothing seemed to be working to make them go away, and I was so scared, and in such a terrible state, I had run out of options. I didn't know what to do anymore. They had been tormenting me for days now and I was at wit's end.

There was a change, however. After suffering through another round of having the two devils taunt me in my bedroom, I went back into the kitchen to check on my brother. And I looked over at the soldiers he was painting. Suddenly, a thought crossed my mind that my brother was the Catholic Church painting up men to go die in wars for them. Then I asked him to see his crucifix, and he did let me see it – and I realized that it had a representation of Jesus permanently stuck on the cross on it while having a representation of Mary placed above Him. The meaning of the symbols on the crucifix and rosary struck me in a way it never had before, that it was as if Jesus was forever trapped on the cross, unable to be buried, resurrected, and ascended into Heaven, while Mary was glorified over Him as the true saviour. I went over to the trash bag and threw away my own rosary while my brother wasn't looking, and I began to walk back out of the kitchen.

And that's when the Lord gave me His greatest mercy yet. The words "Gospel of John" popped into my head. Then I thought of my grandfather Johnny. Then I remembered what he had always emphasized to me whenever he would talk about the Gospel of Jesus Christ – all you need is the grace of God and faith in Jesus Christ, and that's it. I burst into tears. Suddenly the brilliance and beauty of what true faith in Jesus Christ is came upon me. I understood what my grandfather meant, and how God spoke through him to reach me. The seeds were planted years ago, but it finally made sense now that God had given the increase. I understood that God gave salvation through Jesus Christ as a gift and there was absolutely nothing I could do to earn or deserve eternal life – that God will give it freely to whoever earnestly calls upon the name of Jesus Christ.  

I broke down so badly at being saved by the grace of God and receiving His Holy Spirit that I begged my brother to forgive me for everything I had ever done, and he was extremely unnerved and even angry at me, but he gave me a hug that I was demanding from him. Eventually he became very angry as I called my mother and talked to her and my youngest brother as well as my grandfather, because he said that our family already went through all of this with our dad who had passed away and he didn't want to go through it again. I wasn't able to explain it to him then, but eventually he calmed down.

Devils Begin to Be Driven Away

And now, the situation changed with the two devils who had been tormenting me as well. Now, they were steadily and surely being driven away from me, and out of my life. It wasn't at an instant – as I grew more and more comfortable realizing the salvation Christ had wrought for me, a salvation a sinner like me against a Holy God didn't deserve, then the devils began showing up less over the next couple of weeks.

Jezebel was the first to leave – it had been the more outwardly aggressive spirit, but with the newfound faith that God had graciously gifted me out of his eternal love, it was driven away. However, Jezebel did give one last try at a spiritual attack while I was laying in my living room along with Lilith, but after that Jezebel was truly gone for good. This spiritual attack was after I had played a board game filled with occult imagery and spell-casting with my brothers and my cousin. During the game, I had drawn a card that had a Roman Catholic nun with a rosary and the card had a pentagram in the corner. I knew right away I shouldn’t be playing the game, and a bad feeling fell over me. After they had left, I fell asleep on the couch but suddenly entered sleep paralysis, which is something I had never had before. During this sleep paralysis, I had what can only be described as a spiritual sex attack, where I could see Lilith holding my arms down while Jezebel pinned me down on the midsection and raped me. Lilith taunted me while this was happening by saying that I was "consummating my marriage with Jezebel". This affected me horribly as I had already been saved, but I quickly understood that as long as I kept dabbling in the occult through games, I was opening myself up to those two demons coming back to attack me.

In any case, though my faith and reliance on my Lord Jesus was increasing, Lilith clung on longer and its attitude changed – it went from being playfully cruel to trying to be nice to me. The devil appeared to me twice when I slept in my living room on the couch. The devil sat on the arm rest the first time, and the second time appeared to be laying down next to me. It was trying to convince me to let it and the other devils back into my life. That I missed them, and that things would improve if I gave into them. That they would treat me better. It also mentioned “I miss laying this close to your face" when it laid down next to me, which showed that this devil Lilith was admitting to being the very presence I felt was close to my face whenever I tried to sleep since I was young and all my life. Thankfully, I ignored the obvious lies of this devil and kept my thoughts toward our Lord Jesus Christ. After that, the last time I saw the devil calling itself Lilith, I was driving back home from the dump and it appeared in my truck with me and tried to distract me from watching the road. However, after turning to God in prayer through our Lord Jesus Christ, and parking outside of a church and dumping water on my head, it finally went away.

Saved And Thankful, Born Again and Joyous

There was still so many things I struggled with even after the Lord drove those devils away, but the Lord was merciful and drove those things out of my life as well. The foul and evil rock and rap music went away soon after, and I am so thankful to the Lord for that. Though the devils were gone, I was still having wicked thoughts related to them and the rock music was a part of that. Slowly but surely over the months that followed, the Lord would guide me and take negative influences away from me, and this harmed relationships with family and friends but it was necessary. No more going out to bars and strip clubs, no more playing video games and tabletop games full of occult imagery and violence, no more watching anime and other media that glorifies sin, and no more filling my ears with the sinful music of the world.

Then I was truly free. As our Lord Jesus said in John 8:36, "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." I had been freed from my past, present, and future sins by the precious blood of our Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ. And now I could return the undeserved and everlasting love my Father in Heaven had shown me by serving Him – learning His Word, studying it, keeping it in my heart, sharing His gospel whenever and wherever I can, and living a life of holiness pleasing to Him. I know I will still stumble and I have stumbled since being saved, I know I will still struggle with temptation and I have struggled since being saved, I know I will have doubts and lack of faith and I have had those moments, but now I know I have my loving Creator that can work in my life to change me through the power of His Holy Spirit. Our Lord Jesus called the Holy Ghost the Comforter in John 14:26, and the Spirit of Truth that in dwells all born again believers truly is comforting. The Spirit guides me and I know as long as I trust in my Lord and Saviour, He will always be there to fight for me when I am tempted, and to teach and chastise me whenever I need it.

May God be glorified, and may our Lord Jesus Christ free you from demonic possession if you too are going through anything that resembles what I experienced when I was a lost sinner. Please read this post if you are struggling with hentai addiction, as it is a massive gateway of sin and spiritual corruption for devils to enter into your life. Worshipping fictional characters, whether they are existing ones or ones you have created in your heart, is idolatry and these idols can be used by demons to influence you and pervert your mind. If you have an "anime waifu", whether one from a manga/show or one that you created in your heart, this is also idolatry and can be used as a costume for devils.

There are many events and situations that occurred that I've left out of this testimony that either will be covered elsewhere, at a later time, or not at all. May you put your faith in the one and only Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of your soul.

God bless you as you consider the words of this testimony.

Matthew