The Blood Runs Deep: A Christian Apologist's Case Against Generational Curses and For Something Far More Powerful

Introduction: The Questions Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud

There are questions that bounce around in the back of people’s minds for years sometimes decades before they dare say them out loud in a place of worship. Questions like: Is this thing that keeps happening in my family spiritual? Am I carrying something from my father? From his father? Is there a curse on my bloodline? And then, a little quieter, a little more frightened: Can a demon actually get inside a Christian?

These are not small questions. They are the kind that can either liberate a person completely or lock them in a cage of fatalism for the rest of their life. They are asked not just in Dallas or Lagos or London or Manila — they are asked in every culture, every generation, every household where human beings have stared at the patterns of their family history and wondered what invisible force keeps pulling the next generation into the same pit.

These questions deserve serious, biblically grounded answers. Not shallow dismissals, and certainly not reckless sensationalism.

This is an attempt to give them exactly that.

Part One: The Court of History — Paul Stands Before a Legacy of Blood

Before we get to the theology, we need to set the scene. Because the context is everything.

In Acts 25 and 26, the Apostle Paul finds himself standing trial before a man named Herod Agrippa II in Caesarea Maritima. For the average Bible reader, that name might slide right past without catching. Just another official. Just another backdrop. Move along.

But stop. Because this name carries centuries of weight.

There are four men named Herod in the New Testament, and they are all related. They form what historians call the Herodian Dynasty — one of the most powerful and most sinister political families in the ancient Roman world. To stand before Herod Agrippa II was not simply to stand before a bureaucrat. It was to stand before a living monument to everything that had tried to destroy the kingdom of God.

Here is their record, laid out plainly:

Herod the Great (Matthew 2) — Agrippa II’s great-grandfather. When the Magi arrived looking for the newborn King of the Jews, Herod’s response was to order the massacre of every male child two years old and under in the region of Bethlehem. He tried to kill Jesus as an infant.

Herod Antipas (Luke 9) — Agrippa II’s great-uncle. He is the Herod who, intoxicated by the seductive dance of his stepdaughter Salome, promised her anything she asked. When she requested the head of John the Baptist on a platter, he delivered. He executed the forerunner of Christ.

Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12) — Agrippa II’s own father. He had the Apostle James — the first apostolic martyr — beheaded. He then arrested Peter with the full intention of killing him too. Only divine intervention, an angel opening prison doors, spared the leader of the early church.

And now: Herod Agrippa II. The man Paul must face.

Four generations. Four Herods. One unbroken pattern of violent rejection of Christ, his forerunners, and his followers.

Paul knows all of this. And this man — this descendant of a dynasty soaked in the blood of God’s servants — knows that Paul knows. And yet, in the face of all of it, Paul stands up in Acts 26 and testifies to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He looks this man in the eye and says: King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe. He does not soften the message. He does not negotiate. He proclaims.

As Pastor Josh Howton once observed: “You want to talk about courage? Paul had a spine of steel. He just stood there and said, ‘I cannot defy my conscience. Here is who Jesus is. I want you on team Jesus.’”

This is not reckless bravado. This is the courage of a man who understands something profound: no dynasty of sin, however deep its roots, is more powerful than the lordship of Jesus Christ. That truth is the thesis of everything that follows.

Part Two: What Is a Generational Curse and Are They Real?

The Herodian dynasty is, in every meaningful sense, a case study in what people across many cultures call a generational curse. Four generations exposed to the gospel. Four generations hardening their hearts. Four generations choosing to murder the prophets, the forerunners, and the followers of God. The same spiritual posture, passing from father to son like a terrible inheritance.

So are generational curses real?

The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you mean by the word “curse.”

This is not a dodge. This is the most important theological precision you can make on this topic, and getting it wrong in either direction can hold someone in bondage or release someone prematurely from a fight they still need to take seriously.

The Biblical Case That Something Is Passing

Start with Exodus 34. Moses has asked to see God’s glory, and God does something extraordinary. He hides Moses in the cleft of a rock and passes before him, verbally declaring his own character — a passage so significant that it is quoted by the rest of the Old Testament more than any other single verse in the Hebrew Bible. God says:

“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” — Exodus 34:6-7 (NIV) There it is, plain as day. Third and fourth generation. The sins of the fathers visiting the children. It reads like a divine endorsement of the generational curse theology.

But careful Bible reading demands something more: you must read it in its full context. And when you do, something significant emerges.

This passage is not a blanket spiritual law giving demonic forces the right to haunt your bloodline forever. Read the verse again. God says he punishes children for the sins of the parents. The operative word is punishment — a consequence flowing from a specific context. And what was that context? The wilderness generation. The people who received the scouts’ reports about the Promised Land, refused to believe God, and turned back. The consequence was forty years of wandering, which at that time spanned approximately three to four generations. The children bore the consequence of their parents’ faithlessness, not because a demon had been assigned to their bloodline, but because the direct fallout of disobedience is long and wide.

As Pastor Paul Cunningham noted: “It is not a generational curse. It is punishment — a consequence they had to experience.” Consequence. Not occult assignment.

A Prepared People: Abraham, the 400 Years, and the Fullness of Time

Before we read Ezekiel 18, there is another story that belongs in this section — one that is almost always missing from conversations about generational suffering, yet it may be the most clarifying of all.

In Genesis 15, God enters into a covenant with Abraham. The scene is sacred and strange: Abraham has laid out the halved bodies of animals in the dark, and a smoking firepot and blazing torch pass between the pieces as God seals his promise. Then, in the middle of this holy encounter, God says something that sounds, at first hearing, like a curse:

“Know for certain that your offspring will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years.” — Genesis 15:13 (NIV) Four hundred years of slavery. Announced to the very man God had just promised to bless. The man whose name means “father of many nations.” How do we make sense of this?

Read the very next words: “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” (Genesis 15:16, NIV)

This is not a generational curse. This is a divine schedule. God was not punishing Abraham’s descendants. He was preparing them — building an identity, a people, a nation — while simultaneously waiting for the civilizations around Canaan to exhaust their own moral patience with God. The Amorites would be judged, but only when their iniquity was complete. And the people who would be the instrument of that judgment needed to be forged first.

Four hundred years in Egypt was the forge.

The suffering that looks like a curse from the outside is sometimes preparation from the inside. Israel’s time in slavery gave them the experience of oppression that would animate Moses’s cry for justice. It gave them four centuries of crying out to God — and when God finally moved, the entire earth knew it. The plagues of Egypt were not local news. They were a global announcement that the God of Israel was alive and supreme.

What appears to be a generational curse is sometimes a generational calling in disguise. The question is never just why is this happening to my family? but also what is God preparing us to become?

The Biblical Case Against Hyper-Curse Theology

And then there is Ezekiel 18. If Exodus 34 is the verse the generational curse crowd loves to quote, Ezekiel 18 is the chapter they rarely visit. It should be required reading.

God speaks to the prophet Ezekiel and opens with a sharp rebuke:

“What do you mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: ‘The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?” — Ezekiel 18:2 (NIV) The people of Israel had developed a cultural saying, a proverb, that explained all their problems by pointing backward. My father’s sin. My grandfather’s choices. My family’s history. Sound familiar? It should. You can hear it in every generation, in every culture, in every language where human beings have learned to locate the source of their dysfunction in the generation before them rather than in the mirror before them.

God’s response is volcanic:

“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child. Both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.” — Ezekiel 18:3-4 (NIV) And then, later in the same chapter:

“The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.” — Ezekiel 18:20 (NIV) This is not ambiguous. God is directly contradicting the idea that a person is spiritually bound, spiritually guilty, or spiritually helpless because of what someone in their family tree did. Individual moral responsibility before God is non-negotiable.

John 9 reinforces this from the lips of Jesus himself. As he passes a man born blind, his disciples ask the question their culture had trained them to ask: “Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The assumption embedded in the question is that suffering must trace back to someone’s spiritual failure. Jesus answers them with calm, revolutionary clarity: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” (John 9:3, NIV)

Neither. This man. Nor his parents.

The Curse That Was Turned Into a Blessing

There is one more piece of evidence that deserves its place in this conversation, and it is perhaps the most stunning of all.

In Numbers 22 to 24, a pagan prophet named Balaam is hired by the king of Moab, Balak, with one specific assignment: curse Israel. Balak knew that a people walking under a divine curse could be defeated. He had watched the Israelites demolish kingdom after kingdom, and he believed the only way to stop them was a supernatural one. So he brought in the best man for the job.

Balaam tried four times. Four times he opened his mouth to curse and four times what came out was a blessing. He could not do it. Not because he lacked the will, but because God would not allow his word to be overridden.

The book of Deuteronomy records God’s own commentary on this moment: “Nevertheless the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam but turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loves you.” (Deuteronomy 23:5, NIV)

Sit with that. A curse was professionally commissioned, ritually prepared, and earnestly spoken — and God simply turned it around mid-air. The mechanism is not complicated. It is love. God loved his people and so the curse could not land.

This is the nature of the God we are dealing with. He is not a passive observer of spiritual warfare, watching from a safe distance to see whether the curse or the covenant wins. He is the God who personally intervenes in the trajectory of words spoken against his children and redirects them into blessing.

If God did this for a nation that had not yet even received the fullness of the new covenant, how much more has he secured this for those who stand under the blood of Jesus Christ?

Part Three: Where We Agree — Influences, Strongholds, and the Patterns We Inherit

So what is the theologically faithful position? The one that takes all of Scripture seriously?

Generational curses, understood as fixed spiritual assignments that a saved person cannot escape without a special exorcism no. Generational influences and strongholds, understood as sober realities that shape and tempt and pattern families absolutely yes.

Counselors around the world, working from different schools of psychology, have for decades asked their clients to construct a structured family history: What did your grandfather struggle with? His father? Their parents? And without fail, when people start filling these in, patterns emerge. Alcoholism, four generations deep. Divorce, running through every branch of the family. Rage. Sexual sin. Financial destruction. Repeated. Inherited. Passed along like furniture nobody asked for.

The Bible knew this long before modern therapy. The difference is that the Bible also tells you what to do about it.

The language that is most useful here is generational strongholds. Strongholds is biblical language straight out of Ephesians and Colossians. The idea is not that a demon owns you. The idea is that there are habitual, deeply entrenched patterns of sin, fortified over time through repetition, modeled from parent to child, normalized across generations until they feel less like choices and more like destiny. Like a military stronghold, walls built layer by layer, they do not fall easily. But they do fall.

The critical distinction is this: a saved person is never helpless before a generational pattern of sin. That is where the line must be drawn with precision. To tell a Christian that they are helpless until someone performs a deliverance ritual over them is to contradict the atonement itself. It is to say that what Jesus did at the cross was insufficient — that there is a residual spiritual claim on a believer’s life that his blood did not cover.

The Bible does not teach that.

What it does teach, in Colossians 2:15, is that at the cross, Christ “disarmed the powers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them.” The Greek word for disarmed is the language of stripping armor from a defeated soldier. At Calvary, every demonic power — every principality, every inherited spiritual stronghold, every generational pattern of darkness — was stripped of its final authority over those who belong to Christ.

Part Four: The Most Powerful Story in the Old Testament Nobody Talks About

Here is where things become extraordinary.

We know the story of Josiah. The boy king. A teenager who ascends the throne of a nation that has descended so far into spiritual wickedness that the book of the Law had been physically lost — misplaced somewhere in the temple — and nobody even noticed it was gone. That is how far they had fallen.

Josiah’s grandfather was Manasseh — arguably the most wicked king in Israel’s entire history. The Bible’s account of his reign reads like a horror list:

He rebuilt the pagan high places his father Hezekiah had torn down. He worshiped Baal and Asherah and the stars. He practiced sorcery, divination, and consulted mediums. He built a pagan altar inside the Temple of the living God — physically defiling the most sacred space in Israel. He shed so much innocent blood that Jerusalem was “filled with it from one end to the other” (2 Kings 21:16). He burned his own children alive as offerings to demonic gods.

And then his son, Josiah’s father, Amon — who the Bible says “increased the guilt” beyond what his father had done.

Two generations. Stacked evil. Deeply rooted.

And then Josiah.

A teenager finds a dusty scroll in the back of the temple. He starts reading. And something breaks open in him. He does not explain it away. He does not dismiss it. He does not say: “Well, given my grandfather and my father, I suppose this is just the pattern for our family.” He reads the word of God, believes it, and walks out into the courtyard of history and tears down every idol in the land.

But here is the detail that takes years of Bible reading to notice. 2 Chronicles 34:3 records that Josiah, when he “began to seek the God of his father David,” chose a striking word. David. Not Amon. Not Manasseh. David.

David was not his biological father. His biological father was Amon — the man who increased the guilt. His grandfather was Manasseh — the man who burned children alive. But Josiah reached back up the family tree, past the wicked men who preceded him, and he chose a different spiritual ancestor. He claimed David. He said, in effect: I am not my father. I am not my grandfather. I choose a new heritage. My Heavenly Father is my Father, and I will live as a son of David.

And 2 Kings 22:2 confirms what followed: “He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.”

This is not minor. This is a teenager consciously rewriting his spiritual genealogy through faith. This is what it looks like to break a generational stronghold — not through ritual, not through a deliverance ceremony, not through waiting for someone else to pray a special prayer over you — but through a personal, radical, deliberate decision to belong to a different Father.

The Daniel Connection: The Ripple That Changed History

But there is more. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

In Daniel 1, four young men are taken from Jerusalem to Babylon. Daniel. Shadrach. Meshach. Abednego. Royal boys. Nobility. They land in the most powerful and most spiritually corrupt political machine in the ancient world — and they hold the line with a spiritual backbone that still takes the breath away three thousand years later.

They refuse the king’s food because it violates their covenant. They refuse to bow before a golden idol even when the furnace is heated seven times hotter than normal. They refuse to stop praying even when it means the lions’ den. Teenagers, facing death, unmovable.

Where did they get that?

The clue is buried in Daniel 9:21. Daniel, deep in prayer, refers casually to “the time of the evening sacrifice.” Evening sacrifice. He is in Babylon. The temple is gone. And yet his prayer life is still structured around the Jerusalem temple schedule — a rhythm he would only have learned in the palace of Jerusalem, under a king who made it matter.

Do the genealogical math. When Daniel and his companions were boys in the royal court of Jerusalem, who was on the throne?

Josiah.

The boy king who found the Bible. The teenager who rejected his grandfather’s legacy and claimed David’s instead. Who tore down the idols and led a national revival. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego received their spiritual formation — the backbone that carried them through Babylon — directly from the revival Josiah ignited.

One teenager made a decision. Refused to be defined by his father’s sin. Chose a new spiritual father. Started praying. Started tearing down idols. And decades later, four more teenagers walked into the furnace of Babylon unafraid because one person, a generation before, had decided the cycle was over.

That is how you break a generational stronghold.

Not with an exorcism. With a decision. With a Bible. With a Father.

Part Five: Can a Christian Be Demon-Possessed?

It is the question that makes people uncomfortable in two directions at once. The rationalists want to say no, full stop, and move on. Others lean into sensationalism and will happily schedule a deliverance session every Sunday morning. The truth, as with most theological questions, requires more precision than either camp is usually willing to offer.

The most honest place to start is with the language itself.

When the New Testament uses the term “demon-possessed,” it is translating a single Greek word: daimonizomai — literally, demonized. Not “owned by a demon.” Not “taken over by a demon.” Simply demonized. The word functions like the word “fossilized.” Something that, over time, has taken on the characteristics of something else. A person who has progressively opened themselves to demonic influence begins to manifest demonic characteristics, speak with demonic impulses, be shaped by demonic desires.

Using the three definitions of the word possess as scaffolding, a much clearer picture emerges:

To Own

Can a demon own a Christian? Absolutely not.

Colossians 1:13-14 is categorical: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” You were purchased at the cost of blood. The transaction is complete. You belong to Jesus Christ, and no power in creation demonic or otherwise has the legal standing to contest that ownership.

The question “Can a Christian lose their salvation?” often underlies this conversation. But the more precise question is not whether a Christian can lose their salvation. It is whether God can lose a Christian. Romans 8:38-39 answers that plainly: nothing — not death, not life, not angels, not demons, not present, not future, not any power — can separate a believer from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

On this definition, a Christian cannot be possessed by a demon. Full stop.

To Hold Without Owning

Can a demon exercise functional influence over a Christian without holding legal title? Here the answer becomes more uncomfortable and more honest.

Consider this picture. You own your home. You have the deed. You have the legal right. But if you leave the back door open night after night and invite people in who have no business being there, they can occupy space in your home. They are squatters. They have no legal right, but they are very much present. And they will stay until you exercise the authority that was yours all along and evict them.

The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are. But the spiritual principle is sound.

When Christians habitually open doors to what the Bible calls works of darkness — occult activity, sorcery, spiritism, radical unbelief, deep addiction — they are not canceling their redemption. But they may be inviting something in that has no right to be there, something that will make itself at home until it is evicted by the authority of Christ.

Ephesians 1:20-22 is the ground on which this authority rests: Jesus was raised and seated “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” and then, remarkably, “he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body.” The victory Christ won over every demonic power he gave to the church. That is the authority a believer wields. And it is always greater than whatever the squatter brought through the door.

To Take On the Characteristics Of

The third definition is perhaps the most sobering, and it is the one the New Testament most consistently uses for demonic activity.

When Jesus turns to Peter in Matthew 16:23 and says “Get behind me, Satan,” he is not performing an exorcism on the chief apostle. He is recognizing that the words Peter just spoke — “This shall never happen to you, Lord” — did not originate in Peter’s heart alone. They came from the spirit of deception, the father of lies, finding a willing channel in a well-meaning but spiritually unguarded moment.

He was not talking to Peter. He was talking to the spirit behind the words.

This is the third sense of demonized — manifesting, speaking, behaving in ways that have a demonic origin — not because you are owned by a demon, but because you have given spiritual ground to influences that are not from God.

It is a sober warning. Not a reason for paranoia, but a reason for vigilance.

The Summary: Oppressed, Not Possessed

A Christian can be oppressed by a demon, but cannot be possessed by one because a Christian is a blood-bought possession of the living God.

Oppression — external pressure, spiritual attack, demonic harassment — is real. The full armor of God in Ephesians 6 would be unnecessary if it were not. But ownership? That was settled at Calvary. And it will not be revisited.

Part Six: The Grace Is Wider Than the Curse

Return, one final time, to Exodus 34.

God punishes to the third and fourth generation for the sins of the fathers.

Three to four generations.

But then — and this is the number that changes everything — God extends his loving kindness “to a thousand generations” for those who love him and keep his commands (Deuteronomy 7:9).

Three or four against one thousand.

The mathematics of grace are staggering. The consequence of sin runs deep, three or four generations. The reach of grace runs to a thousand. Which means that at every point, the grace of God is overwhelmingly, disproportionately more powerful than any generational pattern of sin.

And if that were not enough, the New Testament adds one more dimension. In Romans 5:20, Paul writes: “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.” The word Paul uses for increased all the more is a Greek compound that means to superabound — to overflow beyond measure. Wherever sin has been most prolific, grace has not merely kept pace. It has flooded the room.

The very God who acknowledges that sin has consequences across generations is the same God who has already outpaced those consequences by a factor of hundreds and then declared that wherever the deepest stain of sin exists, grace runs even deeper still.

What does this mean for the person staring at a broken family tree?

It means the Balaam principle applies to you personally. A curse was spoken over your bloodline whether by the enemy’s accusation, by the weight of ancestral sin, or by generations of choices that opened doors they should have kept closed. And the God who turned Balaam’s words around in midair, because he loved his people, is the same God who stands over your life and says: I am turning this around too.

Because he loves you.

Conclusion: You Have a New Father

The pastoral payoff of all of this is not primarily academic. It is deeply and urgently personal.

There are people reading this right now in villages and cities, in the southern hemisphere and the northern, in cultures where ancestors are feared and in cultures where they are simply ignored — who have spent years looking backward at their family tree and concluding, consciously or not: I am probably going to end up like him. I am probably going to repeat this pattern. This is just what our family does. Maybe I am cursed.

The Bible says: you have a new Father.

That is not a metaphor. That is a legal, covenantal, blood-secured reality. The moment you place your faith in Jesus Christ, you are adopted into a new family (Romans 8:15, Ephesians 1:5). You receive a new genealogy. A new spiritual heritage. Josiah did not sit down in despair because his father was Amon and his grandfather was Manasseh. He looked back past the wreckage, found David, and said: That is my father. That is who I come from. That is who I will be.

You can do the same. Not David but Christ himself. The perfect Son. The obedient King. The one who broke every curse there ever was at a single wooden cross outside Jerusalem. And the one who rose from the dead to prove that neither death, nor sin, nor any generational inheritance of darkness has the final word.

The cycle can end with you. The stronghold can fall in your generation. The faith that was lost in your family can be found and passed forward, to the third and fourth and thousandth generation after you.

An Invitation

If you have never placed your faith in Jesus Christ, there is no better moment than this one.

You do not need to sort out your family history first. You do not need to deal with the sins of your fathers before you come. You do not arrive clean and then receive Christ. You come to Christ precisely because you cannot clean yourself and he makes you new.

The promise of Scripture is not conditional on how good your family was or how bad. It is not reserved for people who grew up in church or who have never wandered far. It is extended to every human being who will simply turn away from the life lived apart from God and turn toward the One who gave his own life to bring you home.

Romans 10:9 puts it plainly: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

That is it. That is the door.

And on the other side of that door is not merely forgiveness — though forgiveness alone would be more than enough. On the other side is a new identity, a new family, a new spiritual heritage, and a Father who loves you so fiercely that he turned a curse into a blessing, who flooded your sin with superabounding grace, who disarmed every power that had a claim on your life, and who is even now calling you by name.

You are not your grandfather. You are not your father. You are not the sum of everything that was done to you or done before you.

In Christ, you are new.

Come home.

Biblical References

• Genesis 15:13-16 — God’s covenant with Abraham; the 400 years of slavery foretold as preparation, not punishment
• Numbers 22-24 — Balaam commissioned to curse Israel; unable to do so
• Deuteronomy 23:5 — God turned Balaam’s curse into a blessing because he loved Israel
• Deuteronomy 7:9 — God’s loving kindness extending to a thousand generations
• Exodus 34:6-7 — God’s self-declaration to Moses; third and fourth generation consequences
• Ezekiel 18:2-4, 20 — God rebukes the proverb of transferred guilt; individual moral responsibility before God
• John 9:1-3 — Jesus denies that the blind man’s condition results from generational sin
• 2 Chronicles 34:3 — Josiah seeks the God of his father David (not his biological father)
• 2 Kings 22:2 — Josiah follows in the ways of David
• 2 Kings 21 — The reign of Manasseh; Israel’s most wicked king
• Daniel 1 — Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego maintain spiritual fidelity in Babylon
• Daniel 9:21 — Daniel prays according to the Jerusalem temple schedule while in Babylon
• Matthew 2:16 — Herod the Great orders the massacre of infant boys
• Luke 9:7-9 / Mark 6:14-29 — Herod Antipas beheads John the Baptist
• Acts 12:1-2 — Herod Agrippa I beheads James the apostle
• Acts 25-26 — Paul testifies before Herod Agrippa II in Caesarea Maritima
• Romans 5:20 — Where sin increased, grace increased all the more
• Romans 8:15 — The spirit of adoption
• Romans 8:38-39 — Nothing can separate the believer from the love of God
• Romans 10:9 — The confession of faith and salvation
• Colossians 1:13-14 — Transfer from the domain of darkness to the kingdom of Christ
• Colossians 2:15 — Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities, triumphing over them at the cross
• Ephesians 1:5 — Adoption as sons through Jesus Christ
• Ephesians 1:20-23 — Christ seated above all rule and authority; his victory given to the church
• Ephesians 6 — The full armor of God against spiritual opposition
• Matthew 12:29 — Jesus on binding the strong man
• Matthew 16:23 — Jesus addresses the spirit behind Peter’s words