What Does Deliverance Mean in the Bible? A Biblical Definition

In the Bible, deliverance is God rescuing people from what they cannot escape by themselves: enemies, slavery, danger, sin, death and the devil. David calls the LORD “my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer” (Psalm 18:2). Churches today also use the word for prayer against evil spirits.

Every rescue in Scripture takes its shape from the first great one. At the burning bush God tells Moses, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians” (Exodus 3:7–8). He sees, he hears, he comes down. The people could not free themselves, and he brought them out. That is what deliverance means from Genesis to Revelation, and it is still how God meets us.

Several Hebrew and Greek words stand behind our one English word, and each adds its own shade. The first Hebrew verb, natsal, means to “snatch away, deliver,” as the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon puts it. It is the word for David pulling a lamb out of the mouth of a lion or a bear (1 Samuel 17:35), and it is the word God uses at the burning bush. The second, yasha, means to deliver or save. Strong’s concordance explains its root as being “open, wide or free,” and our Bibles translate it save, saviour and deliverer, the title given to the judges of Israel.

Word	Meaning	Where to see it
natsal (Hebrew)	To snatch away, rescue	“I am come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:8)
yasha (Hebrew)	To save, set free	“the LORD raised up a deliverer” (Judges 3:9)
rhuomai (Greek)	To draw to oneself, rescue	“deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13)
aphesis (Greek)	Release; forgiveness	“deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18)

The Greek words carry the same pictures. Rhuomai comes from a verb meaning to draw, and Thayer’s lexicon defines it “to rescue, to deliver,” noting that the Greek Old Testament chiefly uses it where the Hebrew has natsal. God reaches in and draws us to himself. Paul says he “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13). Aphesis means “release, as from bondage, imprisonment,” and also “forgiveness, pardon, of sins.” It stands behind “deliverance to the captives” in Luke 4:18 and behind “the forgiveness of sins” in Colossians 1:14, the very next verse after Paul’s line. In one Greek word, being set free and being forgiven are the same gift.

The noun itself is rarer than you might expect. In the King James Version “deliverance” appears in 16 verses, counting the plural “deliverances” in Psalm 44:4, and only two are in the New Testament: Luke 4:18 and Hebrews 11:35. The verb is everywhere. “Deliver,” “delivered,” “delivereth” and “delivering” together come just over 600 times, though many of those simply mean handing something over, as when the scroll of Isaiah “was delivered unto him” in the synagogue (Luke 4:17).

Nearly. They sit so close that Hebrew uses one verb, yasha, for both. Yasha is the root of the name Joshua, which Strong’s explains as “Jehovah-saved,” and Jesus is the Greek form of that name. When the angel told Joseph what to call Mary’s son, he gave the meaning with it: “thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name itself tells us who does the rescuing. There is more in what the name Jesus means.

Salvation is the larger word. It covers the whole of what God does for us, from forgiveness to the resurrection. Deliverance usually names one rescue from one danger: a famine, an army, a prison, a fear. The New Testament joins the two. Christ “gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world” (Galatians 1:4). He took on flesh and blood so that “through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15). Even death is an enemy he came down to defeat.

He did it first at the Red Sea. With Pharaoh’s army behind them and the water in front, Moses told the people, “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD” (Exodus 14:13). They had nothing to do but watch God keep the promise he made at the bush.

The later rescues follow the same shape. Joseph, sold by his brothers and raised to power in Egypt, tells them God sent him ahead “to save your lives by a great deliverance” (Genesis 45:7). It is the first time the noun appears in the King James Bible. In Judges the cycle comes round again and again: Israel turns away, falls under an oppressor and cries out, and “the LORD raised up a deliverer to the children of Israel, who delivered them, even Othniel the son of Kenaz” (Judges 3:9). The pattern runs on into the New Testament. Herod held Peter in prison, the church prayed, an angel woke him and “his chains fell off from his hands.” Peter said afterwards, “Now I know of a surety, that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod” (Acts 12:7, 11).

Yet Scripture never promises that every danger will end the same way. Three young men facing Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace said, “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us,” and then, “But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods” (Daniel 3:17–18). Hebrews remembers believers who “were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection” (Hebrews 11:35). Some were brought out and some were not. God’s deliverances in this life are real, and his hope for us reaches past it.

Jesus put deliverance into the prayer he gave us: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13). He began his public ministry with it too. In the synagogue at Nazareth he read from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Then he told the room, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:18, 21). God had come down again, this time in person.

The Gospels show what that looked like: the sick healed, sins forgiven, the dead raised and unclean spirits sent out. Near the end of his life Paul uses the same Greek verb as the Lord’s Prayer: “the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto his heavenly kingdom” (2 Timothy 4:18).

Yes, and the Gospels tell it plainly. In the synagogue at Capernaum a man with an unclean spirit cried out, and “Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him.” The people asked one another what this was, “for with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him” (Mark 1:25, 27). Among the tombs of the Gadarenes he freed a man whom “no man could bind,” and the townspeople came out to find him “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” Then Jesus sent him home: “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee” (Mark 5:3, 15, 19).

Jesus told us what these acts meant: “But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you” (Luke 11:20). Still, he would not let them become the centre of his disciples’ joy. When the seventy came back saying, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name,” he answered, “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:17, 20).

Nor do the Gospels treat every illness as a spirit. Many of Jesus’ healings mention no spirit at all. The Assemblies of God in the United States, a Pentecostal church, says in its 2019 statement on spiritual warfare that Jesus “did not identify every human malady with demonic possession.” The boy in Mark 9, whose seizures many readers now compare with epilepsy, is where the two questions meet.

It is the name many churches give to prayer for someone troubled by evil. It can be as simple as a prayer for protection or as formal as a rite for casting out an evil spirit. Churches practise it in different ways, and each one sets limits on it.

In the Catholic Church

Catholics call the formal rite exorcism. A simple form of it is part of the celebration of baptism, the Catechism explains, while the solemn rite, “a major exorcism,” “can be performed only by a priest and with the permission of the bishop” (Catechism 1673). Church law says the same: “No one can perform exorcisms legitimately upon the possessed unless he has obtained special and express permission from the local ordinary,” and the bishop is to give it “only to a presbyter who has piety, knowledge, prudence, and integrity of life” (Code of Canon Law, canon 1172). The Catechism then turns to sickness: “Illness, especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science.” Before any exorcism, “it is important to ascertain that one is dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness.”

In the Church of England

Anglicans in England describe deliverance as “part of pastoral care: it is the ministry of liberating, freeing, or delivering a person from a burden which they carry.” Each diocese has a deliverance team working under the House of Bishops’ guidance, and those teams must consult doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists. The church’s safeguarding rules say that “where formal rites of deliverance are being considered, a medical professional must be consulted,” and for children and young people the rite needs the bishop’s authority after that consultation.

In the Assemblies of God (USA)

The Assemblies of God in the United States is one Pentecostal church among many, and its 2019 statement on spiritual warfare sets out what it teaches. It speaks of “a spectrum of demonic influence,” from the slight to the extreme, and it holds out real hope: “if one repents, forsakes their sin and carnal activities, resists temptation, and calls upon the Spirit to cleanse and deliver, victory and freedom will be obtained.” It teaches that “while believers will engage in spiritual warfare and will be oppressed, they cannot be possessed by the demonic forces.” And it warns against any fixed method, since Jesus’ own “actions were varied.”

Christians disagree over how often evil spirits trouble people today and how formal this ministry should be. Yet all three churches work in Christ’s name, and all three warn against mistaking illness for an evil spirit. The Catholic and Anglican rules go further and require a medical judgement before a formal rite. The Assemblies of God says that “the wise counsel of godly doctors, counselors, and psychologists can be of assistance in discerning the actual condition.”

Most of us seek it in ordinary ways long before anything formal: the Lord’s Prayer, confession of sin, Scripture, and the sacraments in the churches that have them. James gives the shortest instruction of all: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). When Peter sat chained in Herod’s prison, the church prayed for him “without ceasing” (Acts 12:5), and asking others to pray for you belongs to the same practice. Short prayers for these moments are gathered in prayers for deliverance. If you would like others to pray for you, you can send a request through the prayer request form.

The New Testament speaks straight to that fear, and it speaks of Christ’s authority over every evil power: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4). The Assemblies of God says the same of evil spirits: “The believer must be aware of their evil intentions and activities but should not fear them.”

Illness belongs with a doctor, and mental illness above all. The Catholic Catechism says so. The Church of England warns that deliverance ministry “is inappropriate for (and may indeed be harmful to) people suffering from some mental disorders.” The Assemblies of God warns that confusing mental illness with demonic activity “can bring harm to individuals, preventing them from receiving the medical care needed.” So please do not stop seeing a doctor or taking medicine because of a prayer or a deliverance session; none of these churches asks it of you. If someone is urging you or a person you love toward a deliverance session, talk first with a pastor or priest you trust, and with a doctor.

They use words built on freedom. The Reina-Valera Bible of 1960 calls God “mi libertador” in Psalm 18:2 and gives Joseph’s “great deliverance” as “gran liberación” (Genesis 45:7). In Luke 4:18 Jesus preaches “libertad a los cautivos.” The Almeida Bible has “o meu libertador” in Psalm 18:2 and “grande livramento” for Joseph’s great deliverance. “Liberación” and “livramento” name the same thing our word does: God setting his people free.

That is a different subject from liberation theology, the movement that began in Latin America and dealt with freedom from poverty and oppression. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a 1984 instruction on that movement, put the order of things in one sentence: “Liberation is first and foremost liberation from the radical slavery of sin.”

That is the slavery none of us can walk out of alone. The God who saw Israel’s affliction and heard their cry still sees and still hears, and he has come down. “The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer” (Psalm 18:2).

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