There, the title sums it up. This pastor, Otha Turnbough, says that people keep coming to his church because he believes in and teaches all this stuff about numerology and demon possession.

And he’s partly right.

Just for the wrong reason.

The Apostle Paul warns us in 2 Timothy 4:3–4 that in the end times, people with “itching ears” will essentially gather themselves around false teachers who believe and teach the things they want to hear while ignoring the truth and “wandering off into myths.” And there is certainly no shortage of people who are obsessed with this kind of pseudo-Christian demonology.

And this kind of numerology and demonology is largely devoid of any real biblical substance.

Listen to what he says in the clip. He starts talking about the passage in Matthew 12:43-45, where Jesus is giving the illustration of an unclean spirit that has gone out of a person. Jesus says that when the spirit comes back, it finds the house clean and swept and put in order. Therefore, the spirit goes out and finds seven more, even dirtier spirits, to defile the person even more.

And here’s where Turnbough starts wandering off into myths.

Turnbough starts reading into the numbers, insisting that we put emphasis on Jesus saying exactly “seven” more spirits, as opposed to simply “more” spirits, or another number of spirits. And his reasoning for saying exactly seven is that seven more spirits, plus the original spirit, equals eight spirits—and eight is the number of “new beginnings.”

And according to Turnbough, this cycle of demons entering a person, leaving, and coming back with seven more to “restart the cycle” each time is why demonic activity in the end times is increasing.

But Jesus wasn’t illustrating the mechanics of demon possession in this passage. He was addressing the state of Israel at the time. Jesus referred to the people of that time as “an evil and adulterous generation” that rejected “something greater than Jonah” and “something greater than Solomon” who was standing right in front of them.

Even as John the Baptist was sent out to proclaim the coming Messiah, many had gathered around him to hear him preach and to “repent,” and even the religious leaders of the day attributed Jesus’s works to Satan.

The point Jesus is making is that Israel had become a nation filled with people who were obsessed with cleaning up their behavior, their morality, but still rejected Christ. They superficially cleaned the “evil spirits” out of them, but did not replace the evil spirits with Christ—so their wicked deeds just kept coming back and getting worse.

Simply put, Jesus was contrasting outward reformation with true, godly repentance that embraces Christ.

“As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” —Proverbs 26:11

“So also will it be with this evil generation.” —Matthew 12:45