Does the Enemy Know Your Name?

There is a peculiar moment that happens in almost every household with small children. A little one, perhaps four years old, plants their feet, puts their hands on their hips, and announces to a sibling, “My daddy says you have to give that back!” The authority is not their own. It is borrowed, invoked, wielded like a sword pulled from someone else’s scabbard. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the older sibling rolls their eyes and walks away. The borrowed authority has no teeth when the one borrowing it has no ability to actually deliver the authority they're summoning.

It might play out differently if "daddy" was there, if he was present.

Something like this, only far more terrifying, happens in the nineteenth chapter of Acts.

Seven men, the sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva, attempt to do what they have watched Paul do. They have seen the apostle cast out demons in the name of Jesus, and they want in on this power. So they approach a man possessed by an evil spirit and pronounce the formula: "I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims" (Acts 19:13).

The response is one of the most chilling and darkly comic scenes in all of Scripture. "But the evil spirit said to them in reply, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?’ Then the man with the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered them all, and so overpowered them that they fled out of the house naked and wounded" (Acts 19:15-16).

Naked and wounded. The image lingers.

These were not nobodies. They were sons of a high priest, men with religious pedigree, men whose family had once stood in the holiest places of Israel’s worship.

And yet the demon mocks them, beats them, and sends them running into the street stripped of every shred of dignity. Why?

 

The Authority That Cannot Be Borrowed

To understand what happens to the sons of Sceva, we have to understand what has shifted in the economy of God’s saving work. The old covenant had its priests, its sacrifices, its lineages of authority traced through Aaron. A man like Sceva, if he was indeed a high priest, would have stood in a long line of mediation. His sons would have inherited a certain status by virtue of their birth.

But the writer of Hebrews tells us something extraordinary about what has happened in Christ: ”For it is attested of him, ‘You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek’” (Hebrews 7:17). The old priesthood, the writer says, has been changed. The very basis of authority has shifted. It is no longer about descent from Aaron.

It is about union with Christ.

This is what the sons of Sceva miss entirely. They treat the name of Jesus as if it were a magical syllable, a password one could memorize and deploy. They have observed Paul. They have copied his technique. They have noted the formula. But the name of Jesus is not a technique. The name is a Person, and the Person can only be wielded by those who belong to Him.

Saint Paul himself understood this. He did not cast out demons because he had figured out the right words to say. He cast them out because he had been crucified with Christ, because, as he writes elsewhere, ”it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

The authority flowed from union, not from imitation.

The demon’s question pierces to the heart of this: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?”

It is the question every soul must eventually answer. The demon recognizes Christ. The demon recognizes those who genuinely belong to Christ.

But it sees through every counterfeit, every borrowed garment of religiosity, every attempt to invoke a power one has not actually received.

This is a sobering thought. One can grow up in the Church.

One can know all the prayers, all the formulas, all the right things to say. One can even be the son of a priest, as it were, surrounded by the trappings of faith. And yet still be a stranger to the One whose name is being spoken.

The old covenant of inheritance by birth has given way to the new covenant of incorporation by grace. The question is no longer “Whose son are you?” but “Whose are you?”

 

When the Demons Recognize Faith

There is another layer to this story that deserves our attention. Notice that the demon does not say, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about.” The verb is one of recognition, of acquaintance. The Greek text uses two different words for “know” in this verse. The demon knows Jesus (ginōskō) and is acquainted with Paul (epistamai). Both verbs imply a real recognition.

The demons recognize the saints. They know who has true authority and who is merely playing dress-up. James puts it this way: ”You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19). The question is whether the demons, looking at us, would say, “I know that one.”

Not because we have made ourselves famous in the spiritual realm, but because the life of Christ has become so genuinely woven into our own that we are recognizable as His.

This recognition is not earned through religious performance. It is the fruit of a life that has actually been surrendered, actually been transformed, actually been united with Christ through the long, often hidden work of prayer, sacrament, and obedience.

The sons of Sceva wanted the power without the surrender. They wanted to wield the name without bearing the cross.

 

When the Name Is Not Yours

Saint Augustine, reflecting on this passage in a sermon, observed that the name of Christ on the lips of one who does not belong to Christ becomes a kind of self-condemnation. The closer the imposter draws to the holy thing, the more dangerous the proximity becomes.

Fire warms those who belong by the hearth. It burns those who try to grab the coals.

This should sober us. We live in a religious culture saturated with the language of Jesus. His name appears on bumper stickers, in song lyrics, at the end of prayers offered almost as punctuation marks. Some people even wield his name as a kind of curse word.

We can become so accustomed to invoking that name that we forget it is not ours to use as a tool. It belongs to a person. And that person reserves the right to ask the same question the demon asked: “Who are you?”

The terrifying scene at Ephesus is, in a way, a mercy. It is a public exposure of a private problem, and the private problem belongs not only to the sons of Sceva but to anyone who has ever tried to wield the things of God without first surrendering to the God of those things. Jesus himself warned us this would happen: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you’” (Matthew 7:21-23).

There it is again. The same word. Knew. Egnōn. I never had that intimate recognition of you. You spoke my name, but you were a stranger to me.

 

The Fire That Followed

What happens next in the chapter is almost as remarkable as the beating itself. Word of this incident spreads through Ephesus. The text tells us, ”When this became known to all residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks, everyone was awestruck; and the name of the Lord Jesus was praised” (Acts 19:17).

And then comes the response that should arrest us:

”Also many of those who became believers confessed and disclosed their practices. A number of those who practiced magic collected their books and burned them publicly; when the value of these books was calculated, it was found to come to fifty thousand silver coins” (Acts 19:18-19).

Fifty thousand silver coins. Each silver coin was roughly a day’s wage. We are talking about an immense fortune, set ablaze in the public square.

The Ephesian believers could have done many things with those books. They could have sold them to recover their losses. They could have donated the proceeds to the poor. They could have rationalized that what they did with their old life was no one’s business now that they were following Christ.

But they burned them. Why?

Because to sell those books would have been to allow the darkness they had renounced to fall into someone else’s hands. It would have been to profit from what had once destroyed their souls and to let it destroy another. True conversion does not merely separate us from our sin. It refuses to perpetuate the sin in the lives of others, even at great personal cost.

This is an act of faith of staggering proportions. It is the willingness to suffer real, calculable, measurable loss for the sake of the kingdom.

These believers trusted that the God who had delivered them was greater than fifty thousand silver coins. They trusted that the One whose name had defeated demons could provide for them in the absence of the wealth they were destroying.

There is a kind of holy bonfire that must happen in every Christian life, where we burn what cannot accompany us into the kingdom. Not because we are commanded to be poor, but because we are commanded to be free.

 

What the Demons Would Recognize in Us

The story of the sons of Sceva is an invitation to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question. If a demon were to look at our spiritual life, would it say, “I know that one”? Or would it ask, “Who are you?”

Are we wielding a borrowed name, hoping that proximity to holy things will substitute for actual union with the Holy One? Are we children of priests, as it were, who have never made the faith our own? Have we mistaken religious familiarity for spiritual authority?

And when conversion comes, when grace actually breaks through, are we willing to burn the books?

Or do we hold on to little pieces of the old life, telling ourselves we might need them someday, or that someone else might want them?

I'm not talking about initial conversion. That time you went forward after a rousing sermon preached by an Evangelical pastor. I'm not talking about the day you decided to add your name to the roster of your local parish or congregation. I'm talking about the ongoing conversion, the stubborn, persistent, pursuit of the believer to become more fully Christ's, to more fully unite one's heart to His, to shed the material attachments (no matter how much they might be valued) and cling wholly to the richness of Christ who is in you.

I don't know what you are struggling with. This e-mail will go to over a thousand people, though, so I'm betting someone reading this is struggling with a temptation, a kind of spiritual attack, the kind of thing you have been battling for years without success. You have prayed. And you have prayed. You have talked to a few trusted people about it, and picked up a few practical tips to "manage" the issue. You might have even tried commanding whatever demons might be hassling you to depart in Jesus' name.

But have you taken real, sacrificial, steps toward pursuing greater unity with Christ? Have you gathered people among you whom the demon would recognize and flee from, because they stand in authority? I'm talking about people with a deep, abiding, and profound relationship with Jesus. The kind of people who spend more time in prayer than they do scrolling their socials, or arguing politics, or watching sports. I'm talking about a pastor, or a priest, and not just anyone who happens to hold an office in the church, not just any minister who is on a church's payroll and treats their ministry like a job. You know them when you meet them. The people who seem to radiate God's grace, His heart, in their lives.

I'm also not talking about people who just look "good" on the outside. I'm talking about people who have thrown down with the enemy, maybe even were stripped bare and humiliated, who have overcome real spiritual assaults in their lives, and have come through with a deeper, unshakable, impenetrable faith.

Do you have those people in your corner? Are you asking for their support, for their advice, and also their prayers? Are you allowing them to guide you, to show you how they did it? Or, are you just "googling" for some article that tells you a five-step process for overcoming your lust, your anger, you greed, your resentment?

Spiritual battles are not won alone, nor are they won by learning the right formulas. They are won when we have so surrendered every part of ourselves to the point that Christ dwells in us, to the point that when the demons see us, when they recognize us, it is because they recognize Christ with us.

It is not enough to merely speak the Word of God. We must abide in it. That is to say, we must abide in and with the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ.

 

Practical Steps for the Road

Begin by examining the gap between what you know about Christ and what you know of Christ. Set aside ten minutes each day, perhaps with the Gospel of John or with a single Psalm, not to study but simply to be present to the One who is speaking.

Authority in the spiritual life grows from this quiet, sustained communion.

Look around your home, your computer, your habits. Is there a book, a subscription, a relationship, a pattern that belongs to the old life? Not all things must be burned, but ask the Holy Spirit to show you what you have been keeping that ought to have been surrendered. The thing that gives you the most anxiety about losing is the thing your heart is clinging to the most. If that is something of this world, if it is something that you cannot bring with you into heaven, it is worth asking if you're valuing it too much. The willingness to suffer loss is one of the surest signs that we have actually believed.

When you pray, especially when you pray for difficult things, do not invoke the name of Jesus as a formula. Stop. Remember that you are addressing a Person who knows you, who has called you by name, who has joined Himself to your soul through baptism. Speak from that place of belonging, not from the place of trying to be heard.

If you are not there yet, but the battle you are in is real, are you still trying to go at it alone? There are saintly men and women who will stand beside you. And if they are truly saintly men and women, they will not judge you for where you're at. Because they've been there, too. They have the battle scars to prove it, and they know how to wage the war.

Finally, consider what you might be passing on to others. The Ephesians burned their books so the darkness would not spread. What in your life, if left intact, might harm those who come after you? What chains might you have the privilege of breaking, not only for yourself, but for the children, the friends, the strangers who will one day walk where you have walked?

The demon’s mocking question still hangs in the air across the centuries: “Who are you?” May we live in such a way that we never have to answer it alone. May we live so deeply hidden in Christ that when the question comes, He answers for us: “This one is mine.”