This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily.You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above.For more listening options, please see our Radio Page .
Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could tune in. Coming up in today’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew, and “What was the Baptism of John?” In Religion in the News, “Canada Shuts Down Ministry.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “How Should we Celebrate Easter?” 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 continue their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Is There Life After Death?” 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 program we’re continuing a new series featuring Dave Hunt’s book, Seeking and Finding God. And later in the program, Gary will tell you how you can obtain a copy. Now Dave, last week we covered one opposing view to your claim that life continues on after death because man’s non-physical parts, his spirit and soul, are eternal elements that are not affected by death. And that opposing view is, there is nothing to prepare for, when you’re dead you’re dead, that’s the end of it all. Today, we’re going to look at another opposing view, that death is followed by unconditional acceptance and it constitutes the next step in our progression, the progression of our existence. It’s really, according to some, it’s a spiritual advancement. Now, that has been, Dave, as you well know, that’s been the gospel that’s common to, and in all forms of communication with spirits, whether it be seances or mediums or psychics, Ouija boards, channelers, through drugs, meditation and so forth. Now, let’s start with communication from non-physical intelligences. Is that a reality?
Dave:
Well, I would say that it is. There are probably more fakes than genuine mediums, but yes, Satan does speak to his emissaries, we document that in a number of books.
Tom:
Satan who is a non-physical entity himself—
Dave:
Right, right.
Tom:
—a spirit being, an angel created by God, who rebelled against God, according to the scriptures, according to the Bible.
Dave:
Right, who apparently has a lot of demons following him now, I presume they are all fallen angels. Well, you have all kinds of mediums all over the world, I mean, this has been going on for thousands of years. And we can document it that the same message—what do we have, more than a thousand channelers in Los Angeles, so they say.
Tom:
Mmhmm, and that was a number of years ago, are you sure that was the—
Dave:
Do you think there was more?
Tom:
Without a doubt.
Dave:
Yeah, but all over the world you have this going on, and how do we know it’s from some demonic source? Because there is a common message that comes through, and that message conforms to what the serpent said to Eve in the Garden. And probably the major one, I’m thinking of bishop Pike. He was the Episcopalian bishop of California some years ago. His son, who was living in London, was a homosexual, and whether it was because of his conscience bothering him about that, we don’t know, but he committed suicide. This was a great blow to the bishop. He went to London just to check out his son’s apartment, pick up his things, and so forth. Some weird things happened to him when he was there, strange things. The clock would suddenly go back to the time when his son had committed suicide. And so that caused him to think, Well, maybe he could make contact with his son’s spirit. So he went to Anna Twig, a very famous medium in those days, and sure enough, here his son comes through. And uh, well, coming through a female, but, so you couldn’t say the voice was recognizable, but—some of the inflections, and so forth—but, talked about things, Well, dad, you remember when—things that Anna Twig could not possibly have known. Of course, the bishop thought only his son could know—I mean, this was intimate things between them, things that had happened in the home, and so forth, so that convinced him. Where certain things hung in the home, and so forth. Well, this must be genuine, and his son said a number of things, but to get back to, Tom, what you were talking about. One of the things that his son said was, Dad, I’m not here for just a pleasant conversation, I have a mission since I have come to the other side. And my mission is to let you and others know there is no such thing as death. We just move on, you know, it’s like graduate school. We keep going through higher stages, and I thin Pike asked his son, Well, have you seen Jesus over there yet? And his son said, No, I haven’t met him yet but I’ve heard of him, he’s on a higher level. So here we have the lies coming through, but the same ones come through all over the world. So we know there is something behind this, it’s not imagination. Okay. They’re out there, these are demonic entities, and of course they have been possessing people.
Tom:
Dave, as we have mentioned, more than mentioned, presented in this series, if we, indeed, are—part of our makeup is non-physical, our soul, our spirit, there is nothing to deny the fact that there are other spirits out there, non-physical entities, intelligences.
Dave:
Right. Tom, it’s very interesting, and I don’t know to what extent we mentioned it, and I won’t get off on that, but you could say materialism is dead. I remember when I was in school, as a boy, even in grammar school, well, consciousness, even conscience, everything. The psychologists were leading the way in this but the physicists were going along with them. One day we would be able to explain it, just in terms of the brain, just in terms of chemical reactions in the brain, and electrical currents jumping between the synapses, and so forth, and that’s all it was, we’re just matter. Tom, they don’t believe that anymore, and there are physicists, quantum physicists who have been talking about this. They would say, Look, well where is—I was just reading George Wald, Nobel Prize winner, just reading him today, you’d think he’s on our side because he says, You can’t find consciousness, it doesn’t have any physical substance, it does not have any location. And then he likens it, he says, It’s like in the electron. It doesn’t have any, I mean, it’s just like a will-o-the-wisp. It goes from here to there and it doesn’t cross the space in between, you can’t find the location of an electron. So now we’ve got them into George Wald—well, but there’s a great mind out there. And everything is conscious, even the matter, even rocks, there’s a consciousness in everything. Now we’re moving into real mysticism, a denial of the God who created us, and suddenly the Creator is part of His creation, and is manifesting himself. We’re into Hinduism, Tom, as you know. But this all comes from these demonic entities.
Tom:
Dave, you alluded to Satan in the Garden of Eden speaking to Eve as a serpent—
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
—and I want to quote that verse. This is Genesis Chapter 3, Verses 4 and 5, “And the serpent said unto the woman, You shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” So, on the one hand we’ve been saying that, Yes, there is physical death, but beyond the body dying the soul and spirit continue on. Okay, so in a cense, how does that fit in, You shall not surely die? Are we contradicting the scriptures here?
Dave:
No, because death is a separation.
Tom:
Mmhmm.
Dave:
Physical death is separation of the soul and spirit from the body. Now, man is dead in trespasses and sins because ever since Adam’s fall, he has been spiritually, morally separated from God, and only Jesus Christ can bridge that chasm and bring us back into a right relationship, but it will be even better than Adam and Eve once had. So, God was talking about physical death. Well, he was talking about spiritual and moral death as well.
Tom:
Right, which is separation.
Dave:
Right, and the day you eat that you’re dead. It took a while longer for physical death to take over but they were separated. Suddenly they have lost commune with this God who created them, who used to walk in the cool evening and reveal himself and talk with them. Now they are afraid of him and hiding behind trees in the garden and sewing fig leaves for aprons, and so forth.
Tom:
So Dave, in laying this out, the serpent says, Ye shall not surely die. That’s a theme we’ve seen it throughout history, and you point out that evolution is really the perfect set-up for demons. Obviously, the idea being that we don’t really die, we just evolve beyond the need for physical bodies.
Dave:
Well, we could quote Robert Jastrow, founder and for many years the director of the Goddard Space Institute that sent Pioneer and Voyager and so forth, out into space. He is an agnostic, he would deny being an atheist, but you don’t know what they’re talking about, Tom, because—now what do you believe in? Do you believe in Einstein’s god, who was kind of a deist, deistic god, he starts the thing off and then it’s just going. Or do you believe in George Wall’s god, who He’s in everything, and pretty soon this consciousness is even in rocks. What significance is a man? Well, we can understand a little more, they would say. So, in evolution, if we want to take it a step further, let’s take Richard Dawkins. We’re of no significance, Tom, we are just a corpus for our selfish genes to inhabit, and the genes are really running the thing. So, in that sense you could say, we don’t die, I mean, our genes carry on. But anyway, getting back to Robert Jastrow, he said evolution could have been going on ten billion years longer on some planets than on planet earth. Those creatures would be as far beyond—on the evolutionary scale—would be as far beyond man as man is beyond a worm. And when we see them they would seem like gods to us, the powers they would have. And then he even says, some of them could have evolved beyond the need of bodies, and they would be what old-fashioned religious people call spirits, souls and spirits. Well, that’s a perfect setup isn’t it? Now we have them trying to communicate with extraterrestrials out there somewhere. Well, you’re not going to do that physically, because radio waves that go at the speed of light, now that’s very fast, but it would take a hundred thousand years to cross our galaxy. So you would have to have psychic communication. And you know, we’ve got even some people in the military, oh yeah, they’re in touch with these beings out there, and so forth. So, evolution again, it just carries on this lie in one form or another, but it opens the door for scientists to try to make contact with these spirit entities highly evolved.
Tom:
Right, which again is a perfect setup for entities that are trying to deceive humankind,
Dave:
Right, right.
Tom:
…that are trying to come up with beliefs, to promote beliefs that are contrary, diametrically opposed to what the Bible teaches.
Dave:
Right, and it carries right on from what Satan the serpent said to Eve.
Tom:
Right. Dave, there’s another interesting contrast here. Actually you say that there are serious consequences here for somebody who’s attempting to find God, seeking after God, looking for truth. And that is, that if a person thinks that we are temporal beings, then he loses sight that eternity, compared to a temporal time period, it’s like the blink of an eye. So consequently, putting all our emphasis on this temporal world,
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
…we’re making a huge mistake if that’s where somebody’s mindset is. Now let me just give you some scriptures to point out the biblical position on this. Matthew 6:19-21: “Lay up not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Dave, there are so many verses, let me give you one more, people who are struggling on this temporal time period for them. “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” And that’s 2 Corinthians Chapter 4 Verses 17,18.
Dave:
Well, the Bible makes a clear distinction between life and physical things. Life is not physical, where did it come from? God created man out of the dust, but he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And as the scientists know, and they acknowledge the Law of Biogenesis, life only comes from life, and they try to get around that, because, well, it couldn’t evolve, it couldn’t have come from nowhere. You can’t, you can’t say it’s a product of evolution or natural selection because there has to be life in order for natural selection to work. Okay so, what is the source of this? Well, John 1, says that Jesus Christ created all things. There was nothing made that was not—that He didn’t make, but that says, In Him was life. So, here we have it, life only comes from life, exactly what science concedes, but they try to get around it every way they possibly can because, as George Wald, I just quoted, the Nobel Prize winner, he says, Well, you’ve got only two choices, spontaneous generation, life just comes, you know, it just happens—well we know that that can’t happen—or you’ve got to have a supernatural creative act by a supernatural being. And he says, Well, we won’t accept that.
Tom:
Yeah, one’s impossible, the other is not acceptable, so where does it lead, Dave? (laughs)
Dave:
He says, Well, here we are, as a result of spontaneous generation. So, very clearly, right there in the second chapter of Genesis, He created out of the dust of the ground, and He breathed in his nostrils the breath of life, man became a living soul. So we have a distinction between something inside of man that came from God, and the body. And, as you were pointing out, and it’s a very solemn thought, the physical body—God was the One who said it, and you hear it at funerals, in Genesis Chapter one, “…dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” But that’s not all there is, there’s something else inside, and God lays it out right there in Genesis, and that something else comes from God. It is not subject to the deterioration, like the body, under the laws of thermodynamics, the second law being the degeneration of everything. No, it doesn’t says that about the soul because the soul is not physical. So all science can deal with is physical things. This soul, what we really are, comes from God, and you know what the scripture says, from God thou art, to God thou wilt return. The dust—your body goes to the dust. No, no, your soul and spirit is going to go back to the Creator and you will give an account. So Tom, I don’t like to refer to science, we don’t need science to back us up, but on the other hand it’s interesting, science does back us up on this.
Tom:
Well, true science,
Dave:
Right.
Tom
…that’s just recognizing what the Creator has done.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Well Dave, just to finish this off, we’re told, whether it be by spirit entities or people who had so-called near death experiences,
Dave:
Mmhmm.
Tom:
…there’s just something wonderful out there. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, this is a place—as the son of Bishop Pike, and many, many others, supposedly whether it was his voice. I think we can deal with that now. It wasn't! This was a demon pretending to be his son, but he presented the false gospel, what’s called the cosmic gospel, that there is no judgment, that it’s all wonderful, and so on.
Dave:
Mmhmm. Tom, there are so many testimonies we have from the clinically dead who have come back. They weren’t dead, of course, clinically or otherwise, and that is that they met this being of light, this feeling of love and acceptance. Well, interesting, Paul says Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, and just acceptance, and it was so wonderful, I didn’t want to go back, I wanted to stay here, but the voice told me, No, you have to go back, you have a mission. Your mission is to let those on earth know that there is no such thing as death: the lie of the serpent in the Garden.
Tom:
Dave, which leads us to another opposing view, and that is reincarnation. The idea being that, Well, we have a physical death but we keep coming back again and again and again, whether it be the Hindu view of reincarnation, the Buddhist’s view of transmigration. Somehow, some way we get to do it over again and get better and better—which we will talk about next week.
Dave:
Very good.
This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still to come, answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith, and in Understanding the Scriptures, Dave and Tom will continue their discussion of God’s salvation. In addition to this radio program, we publish a monthly Newsletter which we make available free of charge. We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books in print, e-book, and audio book formats, CD’s, DVD’s and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials, or to get a copy of today’s broadcast, write to us at PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708. Call our toll free order number 877-882-4253, that’s 877-88Bible, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org. If you would like a copy of this broadcast on compact disk ask for Program #1808, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station. And if you would like to watch Dave and Tom, our weekly broadcast is available on DVD, ask about a subscription when you contact us. You can also download both audio and video podcast at our website. We’ll repeat this information at the end of the program.
