How Many Demons Are There?
How many demons are there? Is there a demon behind every bush? Are there a legion of demons available for each of the 8 billion people on earth? Where did they come from?
The most common theory is that they are fallen angels. I sincerely doubt if this is the case. God created many beings that inhabit the invisible realm. Some rebelled. Some remained faithful to God, The prophet Daniel was told that there are evil beings such as those named The Prince of Greece or the Prince of Persia (Dan 10:20). It seems that the original Sons of God were “angels” who were given the responsibility to watch over men and help them. They are involved in governments and national or global matters, not about someone getting drunk or smoking behind the school building.
You and I probably do not have any dealings with Satan personally or with fallen angels. In my experience with evil spirits, I have been impacted by the “humanness” of them. These are what we would call demons. While angels are involved with governing nations, demons are involved with individuals. I have been impressed by their compatibility with individual people. Like a hand in a glove they seem to be naturally compatible with the appetites of individual persons. There are involved with sexual impulses, with appetites such as food and drink. They seem to focus on pain, fear, pleasure and anything else which deals with the human senses. This great difference between them and angels indicates something of their nature and origin.
The best theory that I have heard is that they are the spirits of the children (Nephilim) of angels and human women (Gen 6:4). When humans die their soul/spirit is instantly exiled from this world. When these beings died their spirits were not removed from the earth. They are disembodied spirits that are abandoned on the earth. They wander with the chief goal of inhabiting a body, preferably human (Matt 12:43-45). There they participate in human senses again, sexual pleasure or even pain and sickness. They consider negative things better than being disembodied again.
If this theory is true, this explains the remarkable compatibility with humans and their involvement with them (or us).
However, if this theory is true then the bulk of these spirits would come from beings that existed on the earth before the Flood of Noah's day. All of these beings that were alive at the time were destroyed in the Flood and thus were deposited bodyless upon the earth as spirits. (This same problem came back to some degree after the Flood also (Gen 6:4)). This means that there were few demons on the earth prior to the Flood. How could the society of Noah's day be so evil if there were practically no demons? Evil does not need an attendant (demon) present. Sin does not need an operator to work. Sin and evil are resident in the human heart. Demons just find any opportunity to aggravate things. People are wicked enough without help.
But, how many demons could there be? If demons are the spirits of Nephilim before the Flood there could not be that many, could there? Estimates by some Bible teachers give about 1650 years between Adam and the Great Flood. Another estimate puts the Flood at about 2300 years. Could that give enough time for the human population to become anything significant? Could Adam's family have grown to a couple thousand people in that time?
People probably did not have children before age 100 in those early days.
How many people could have been born in 1,656 years? If we simply use the population growth percentage of recent years (e.g., 1.13% population growth rate in 2016), that would give us an earth population of around 241 million at the time of Noah. (https://petergoeman.com/population-earth-flood/)
However, present day population growth does not reflect reality. While some societies favor many children and some religious groups encourage large families, many Westerns kill their children. To see a woman with more than 2 children is somewhat rare and a woman with many children is considered strange, even irresponsible.
If the early human society considered having many children as something to be envied, a much higher growth rate would be seen.
Israel came into Egypt as 70 persons (Gen 46:27), and yet when they left Egypt 400 years later, their numbers conservatively estimated around 2 million. This is at least a 2.6% growth rate per year. If we use this same growth rate for the pre-flood world, the numbers would be astronomical.
Even if we use a much smaller growth rate than the previous example for the pre-flood (e.g., 1.5% per year) that would still get us to 102 billion people at the time of the flood.(https://petergoeman.com/population-earth-flood/)
Considering only the human drive to reproduce would allow for a considerable population before the Flood. However, something else was going on as well. We are told in Genesis 6:2, 4 that the original Sons of God were taking multiple women for the purpose of obtaining children through them.
Note: There is a theory that this passage means nice boys and naughty girls. When a Baptist marries a Lutheran are their children always 16 foot tall giants? Not that I know of.
Almost every English translation says that these women were so beautiful that angels had to leave their first habitation and take them as wives. That would be a human motivation. Something more sinister was taking place with the Sons of God. They saw that women were “good”. They were useful, suitable, and convenient for their purposes. From a human point of view the women were desirable. From the point of view of evil, they were useful to carry out an incredibly wicked scheme. Women were the key to entrance into the world. The plan was to corrupt the gene pool to the extent it would be impossible to send the world's Savior who was promised to crush the serpent's head (Gen 3:15).
For the one reason or the other every female womb on the planet was “occupied” with humans or with hybrids. No wonder everything had to be destroyed with a flood.
A population in the billions was more than possible. How many were pure humans and how many were hybrids? There was at least one pure human, Noah (Gen 6:9). It is an assumption but quite probably Noah's wife, their 3 sons, and their wives were also. That makes 8. There were possibly more but it seems the Nephilim were a huge percentage of the population. Billions of demon spirits coming from this era of history does not sound unreasonable now.
As I said before, sin does not need the presence of evil spirits in order to operate in the world. Demons agitate things wherever they can find an opportunity. Sometimes, I think, they must have to stand by silently taking notes as men commit evil they have not thought of before. People must shame demons at times by their behavior.
It is our sin that Jesus came to deliver us from. Someday He will remove us from even the presence of evil. Jesus will deliver us from our sins IF we want to be delivered from our sins (not in them).
Jan. 1, 2025