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Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, it’s great to have you along. Coming up in this week’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Book of Acts, and “How did Paul know he was about to die?” In Religion in the News, “Mugabi for world progress.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Does God hate sinners?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program.
Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave begin a new series of programs addressing the popular spiritual phenomenon known as The Secret . This week we focus on the question, Do you know “ The Secret ? Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary . You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. In this first segment of our Search the Scriptures Daily program, we are going to take a look at what is seducing the world as opposed to the Church, although, Dave, since much of the Church is in the world as well as the world being in the Church, it’s definitely not excluded from what is deceiving the world. The latest phenomenon that is capturing the hearts and minds of people throughout the U.S. is called, “ The Secret .” “ The Secret ” is an 80-minute video, and a book, based upon the video, that was given huge publicity by Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, I believe Good Morning America. Other TV programs have featured some of the principle people involved in “The Secret.” When it was on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Wal-Mart, Costco completely sold out of “The Secret” and, Dave, it’s a phenomenon. I know you’re familiar with the material and you don’t think much of it, ok, I’ll let you speak for yourself. But, it’s amazing. Seventeen weeks on the New York Times best seller list.
Dave:
Just somewhere on it, or on top?
Tom:
No, top. Right now, as we’re doing this program, it’s number one on the New York Times best seller list. There are six million copies of the book that’s been sold, two million DVD’s. So, for whatever we think of it, it’s impressing a lot of people out there, and they’re lining up to take it in. Now Dave, what I want to do is start with what Oprah has to say about it. We have a film clip as well as an audio clip for our listeners, so let’s run that. “It’s making its way around the world, and the buzz keeps building. For years on this show this is what I’ve been trying to do. It is “the secret” to create the life you truly want: make more money, lose weight, fall in love, land your dream job, isn’t that amazing? This is life changing, I’m ready for that—yeah—,okay now the choir’s going, jump in anybody,—tune in to find out the secret.” So, obviously, Oprah is really impressed with this, and I think there are reasons that she should be. She’s been into this for a long time. People claim that she’s a Christian, maybe she has professed to be a Christian. As a matter of fact, somebody wrote to us that saw the program. I didn’t see the program in which she featured this, but supposedly, I was told that a person stood up and said that she was a Christian and she wasn’t into it, and she was shut down, in effect. And Oprah said she didn’t see anything wrong with it, that she was a Christian, and so on. But from what I know about her, what I have read of her material, she is very much into mind science, religious science. One of her good friends, and mentors perhaps, is Della Reese. What do we know about Della Reese, and Robert Schuller, for example?
Dave:
Well, Della Reese has been working with Robert Schuller for a long time. Della Reese is part of the Church of Religious Science ?
Tom:
Correct.
Dave:
And basically they believe the same thing that this “Secret” is supposedly all about.
Tom:
Well, Schuller is all through those that don’t know, so what’s wrong with Robert Schuller? Mr. “possibility thinking” this is more mind science, Unity School of Christianity than it is, certainly biblical Christianity.
Dave:
Yeah, it has nothing to do with the Bible, it’s not what the Bible teaches, and of course “The Secret” is anti biblical, anti God, but I guess you want to get into that a little bit later, but let me just say this, anybody who reads the book or watches the video, DVD, an immediate question arises. Where is all this power coming from? You know, the universe. Oh, the universe, you’re sending out frequencies into the universe and it will give you whatever you want. And then I noticed that at one point in the book they make the outrageous statement that, Oh, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, says that the whole universe came from a thought. Well now anybody is thinking a little bit, who was thinking before the universe was created? What is this thought that’s out there before the universe was created that caused the universe to be created? Well, thoughts just kind of floating around out there somewhere, infinite and eternal, without beginning, without end. You have to have a thinker for there to be a thought, but I did see, God, the word, once in the book. I haven’t thoroughly read every page of the book.
Tom:
Well, when you get to the end, and we’ll sort of build to this—well, we’ll just lay it out because we are going to be discussing this over the next couple of weeks, but the bottom line is, we’re gods, everything is god, this is a pantheistic world view.
Dave:
Right, it’s like religious science, science of mind, they are all related. The Church of Religious Science was founded by Earnest Holmes, and he puts it like this: There’s a universal mind out there somewhere. But oddly enough this universal mind, or great mind or whatever, doesn’t have a mind of its own because it will do whatever we want it to do. So this great mind, that apparently created this universe, which has always existed, the mind that is, just exists to give us what we want, and that’s a theme over and over and over in this book, or in the video. You can have whatever you want, you can be whatever you want. So it’s a very selfish concept, and Tom, I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here, but—
Tom:
Well, Dave, let me just lay this out for you. We’re going to go over these things generally, and then in the next couple of weeks we’re going to deal with particulars.
Dave:
I’m going to make an important point here. Again, you’re telling me, Tom, I haven’t followed this, but this is a sensation, the world is going wild buying this, and if you have just a little common sense—I can have whatever I want, I can be whatever I want, okay?. Let’s say we’ve got ten guys in a corporation, General Motors, I want to be president of General Motors. No, Tom, you want to be president of General Motors. So, a lot of people want to be president of General Motors, but we can each have whatever we want. How many presidents are we going to have of General Motors? How is this going to sort itself out? How about, I’d like to be president of the United States . Yeah, Hillary, she want to but she’s going to be thinking these thoughts, and she can have whatever she wants. Look, you’ve got real serious problems.
Tom:
Dave, but don’t you find, let’s look at the heart of man, which Jeremiah tells us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?” In other words, our natural beings, we gravitate towards things that are covetous, that are greedy, and doesn’t that oftentimes override our reason? Oh, man, if I just could get that winning lottery number, you know, and I don’t have enough to eat because—
Dave:
You’ve got another good point, Tom, how many thousands of people are thinking these positive thoughts now? They can create whatever they want, and they are all going to become lottery winners, it doesn’t work.
Tom:
They try and cover that in the book, they say there is no end of supply in the genie out there, the universal line.
Dave:
No end of supply, but there’s an end of supply when you’ve got one prize.
Tom:
Yeah, that’s why it was a good point to make about if there’s one position and ten people want it, now you’ve got some problems.
Dave:
And furthermore, Tom, immediately—this is Star Wars Force all over again.
Tom:
Without a doubt.
Dave:
Immediately, I mean, they tell you right up front it has nothing to do with morals. This universe can give you whatever you want good or bad.
Tom:
Take the dark side or the light side, go with Darth Vader.
Yeah, good or bad even. So, you think negative thoughts, you think of disasters, and so forth, that’s what you’re going to get, the universe will give it to you. So now Tom, just take one more step, and then you had better direct us here or I’ll get going wild, really angry.
Tom:
Hey Dave, get going, okay?
Dave:
One more thought, Tom. And they actually lay this out, the Holocaust. This wasn’t the fault of Hitler, these people brought it upon themselves, they were all thinking negative thoughts. They were thinking Holocaust thoughts, if you can imagine, and somehow six million of them got together on the same thought and that brought this thing about. Tom—
Tom:
Dave, what about tsunami thoughts, tragic things that take place on the earth is because people have drawn those things to themselves. It is ridiculous, Dave, because, as you say, people are not thinking it through on the one hand. On the other hand, these ideas go back to the Garden of Eden, right?
Dave:
Of course.
Tom:
Why don’t you lay this out for us? Genesis chapter 3.
Dave:
In Genesis, where God created the universe. You learn that He had a purpose, and He created Adam, and then He created Eve, and He gave them a command, actually He gave them a couple of commands. The first one was, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Now, the homosexuals and lesbians thumb their noses at that command! And obviously, if everybody followed their life style it would be the end of the human race, because they don’t procreate. I don’t know, I guess they were going to work it out by some kind of scientific, artificial means somehow or other. But anyway, now we learned that this God has a mind of His own. He has a will and He has purposes, and He has morals.
Tom:
Commandments.
Dave:
Yes, He distinguishes between right and wrong. Now, He doesn’t say that you’re going to go to hell if you visualize hell, but you will if you rebel against Him, because—Well, Tom, you can’t even play games you know without rules, and I can’t make up my rules as I go along. And you can imagine that once in a while they have an altercation on the floor of the NBA. I guess we’ve had a few in the playoffs, and this guy slams somebody and just knocks him out, and the referee blows the whistle, and he’s going to suspend him. And this big 7-foot guy says, “What are you trying to do, telling me what to do, I can do this if I want to.” Well, that’s the end of the game, you can’t have a game without rules, and you can’t be in God’s universe without rules. He doesn’t create the universe without rules. We know it physically, law of gravity, laws of science, and so forth, they didn’t make themselves. But of course in this book, The Secret , it’s a law of nature— The Secret , the law of attraction. Tom, there is no such law, but Satan can delude people into imagining that there is, and they are putting themselves in Satan’s hands because if he can make this work out for them, and which he may be able to in some cases, then they are believing in him, they are not believing in God.
Tom:
Well, Dave, what about the lie, that you could be as God? We’re going to see that as we go through more material, and The Secret . His bottom line is that we’re gods, that’s what it’s all working up to, and as God works we work that way because we’re gods.
Dave:
Tom, you know, years ago when we—I don’t know whether we wasted our time—we would go to a few of these big conventions, New Age conventions, and they were telling the same thing. The human potential movements, this comes from psychology. That 90% of your brain that you don’t use, if you just knew the potentials, it’s yoga. Self realization, you realize that your are God, that you are one with Brahman, and so forth. Atman and Brahman are one and the same. I remember I used to put it like this, many years ago: Well, Tom, if everybody gets this power going, they can do anything they want, be anything they want, I don’t think that’s going to be good, that frightens me.
Tom:
Sorcerers.
Dave:
You’ve just got a bunch of Darth Vaders and Obie Wan Kanobies out there zapping one another with mind power. So, the problems with these is we’ve got too many gods! Now, somebody is going to have to be the head god. It won’t work because all these people can be what they want and do what they want. Well, wait a minute, you’re getting in my way, man, I want that! So, Tom, if anybody would think about it for a minute they would realize this is amoral, it is wicked. But it’s what Satan has offered the human race from the very beginning, and it’s what Satan himself opted for when he said: I will be like the most high.
Tom:
Dave, I want to go back to Genesis chapter 3. Satan’s first words to Eve were: “Yea, hath God said?” so the whole basis for His approach for destroying mankind is Number one to undermine what God says, the Word of God, and then reject it completely, but sometimes not totally, Dave. They view God as a universal mind, even a genie, okay.
Dave:
Right, that’s what they say.
Tom:
Right, because He’s going to give you, or not “He” but “it”. Now Dave, historically, you look at the religions of the world. This is why I wanted to go back to Genesis Chapter 3, because you have the ideas of God that are so far removed—they are still an idea—and you have to make it more attractive to people. Number One: If it’s a universal mind, then there are no rules. It doesn’t think, we do the thinking for it, but it’s still—what about these terms, Dave. We talked about the Force, what about Brahman, what about the Tao, what about Ch’i or ki, or however you want to pronounce it. How about prana, aren’t these God-concepts that have no personal characteristics?
Dave:
Well, it’s something that you can use, that’s the bottom line. YOU can be what you want to be, YOU can have what you want to have. So, whatever this “force” out there is, the dark side or the light side, why should Luke, God is such—
Tom:
You’re not talking about the gospel writer Luke?
Dave:
No, I’m talking about Luke Skywalker. Why should he stick with this light side of the force, it’s kind of inhibiting him, when Darth Vader, he’s got everything, he’s got all the wealth, he’s got all the power, and he’s playing the dark side. And what’s the difference between the dark and light side? Because you can’t say one is right and the other one is wrong although they try to depict it that way. So Tom, it is a self-indulgent, selfish hedonistic concept without any morals, without any limitations.
Tom:
Yeah, but Dave, it’s interesting because as you look through the book, you read the book, or look at the DVD, then you find them getting uncomfortable with some of these ideas and they try and moralize them, they try to throw in things like caring and being generous, and so on and so forth. But basically they are making up their own qualifications for this.
Dave:
Tom, they say it over and over, you can be anything you want, you can have anything you want. This universe does not care about right or wrong, it will give you what you think, and of course, it’s the old thing of visualization. Now Tom, as you know, this is what anthropologists call shamanism. The witch doctors have been doing this, for the sorcerers—
Tom:
The mystics.
Dave:
Yes, for thousands of years. So, this Secret , somehow—Tom, another thing here, and I know we want to come back and deal with this some more in more depth, but let me just—They have a list here in the back of people who were—here’s one gentleman, Wallace Waddles. Now, he’s really the founder, one of them, of what was called, “new thought”, that’s science of mind, which by the way, is exactly what Norman Vincent Peale taught.
Tom:
This goes back to Emerson, transcendentalism, and so on.
Dave:
Now Wallace Waddle’s most famous book was, The Science of Getting Rich . He lived most of his life in poverty, he got rich toward the end. We’ve got another problem here. He wrote this book, he was 50 years old when he wrote the book, that was in 1910, and he died in 1911. Now the immediate question arises, Why did he die so soon? You can have anything you want. Another one of our experts died at 57, I think. You can anything you want. Didn’t he want to live forever? Didn’t he, at least, want to live to 100 or 200? So somehow, this thing doesn’t seem to follow through, it doesn’t seem to work right, but Waddles, he had a lot of problems, a lot of failures in his early years. Then he began studying Swedenborg, Emerson.
Tom:
Again, mystics, religious science.
Dave:
And he claimed he had discovered the truth of new thought principles, and part of it was practicing creative visualization. Now they mention Napoleon Hill in the book. It’s not an accurate mention of Napoleon Hill. They claim that, I forget, maybe you remember, somebody taught this to him. No, he got it from the masters of the temple of wisdom. He got it from demons, and he says that he doesn’t—I never heard him say that he learned it from some human being, and I’ve read his books. And what was the secret again, whatever you think, whatever you conceive you can achieve, and visualizing, visualizing, create it in your mind. Tom, it’s the same thing Yongi Cho teaches, okay. It’s the same thing that Norman Vincent Peale taught, creative visualization, and he built a large church by visualizing people coming in. So, it’s the lie of the serpent, it is very appealing. If I could just have a magic genie, any time I ever rub the lamp here— he comes. It’s very appealing to the flesh, it’s very appealing to selfishness, but it’s not true, it doesn’t work.
Tom:
Dave, the interesting part about it being called, The Secret , is that, we can trace, just as you have mentioned, we can trace these ideas back through mystics, shamans, religious science, transcendentalism—
Dave:
Back to the Garden of Eden.
Tom:
Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, we find it over and over again, and the goal is, in many of those cases, healing and prosperity. We can take it back to Messmer and really the beginnings of psychology.
Dave:
Well, let me take it back farther, Tom. I was recently in Idaho , and I was reminded that I had had a debate up there. Wally Topin and I had a debate with two Mormon guys, and one of the things that one of the Mormons was saying, which I don’t know whether the church would accept, that Joseph Smith was the first prophet of the New Age. I said: Joseph Smith was a prophet of the New Age, but the first one was a serpent in the garden, and we can trace this back through all these people that want to trace them back, it goes right back to that serpent.
Tom:
Dave, we only have a minute left so I want to set this up for our next program, the Lord willing, this “Secret.” It was 22 years ago we dealt with the “Secret” in The Seduction of Christianity . These ideas were prevalent in the church through Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagen, Frederick Price. This was “word faith, positive confession”, it was all a part of that. Also, what was infecting the church back then was the whole Amway approach, the Zig Zigler was the positive mental attitude, and so on. So, this stuff keeps coming back, and coming back, and coming back, and I think, Dave, in the programs ahead, the Lord willing, we’re going to demonstrate that this is really a major part of the religion of the Antichrist, if for nothing else it’s because of it’s appeal to our lusts, to our covetousness, to our greed, and so on. And this is why the people are lining up for The Secret right now.
Dave:
And I don’t know how the Antichrist is going to make it work, because there is going to be a lot of judgment from God coming on this earth under His rulership.
Tom:
But Dave, right prior to that we’re going to have signs and wonders, lying signs and wonders. People who have not a love for the truth are going to believe the lie. I think this is a major part of the lie.
