cover article
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in. Coming up in today’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, focusing on the question, “Do We Really Want God’s Justice?” In Religion in the News, “Desmond Tutu Spruces Up God’s Image.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Where Do Children Go When They Die?” We hope you can stay tuned. 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. 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. We continue our revisits to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith. Today we focus on the question, “Is There Really Such a Thing as Eternity?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks, Gary, we are in the second week of going through Dave Hunt’s book, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith. The book begins by posing some questions which ought to grab everyone’s attention. In essence, what is your view of what takes place after death? How do you know you can depend on what you believe? Dave, last week we looked at some of the popular views of life after death, and I want to just briefly review some of the things we covered last week. The first thought that some people have is, “Well, when you’re dead you’re dead” it’s just extinction, when the lights are out the lights are out, that’s it. What about that?
Dave:
Well, you can say that about the body, but you can’t say that about the spirit. We are spirit beings living in a body, and I don’t think very many scientists today doubt that. I think we’ve quoted, even Wilder Penfield, one of the world’s top neurosurgeons, experts on the brain, and, in fact, Herbert Benson from Harvard quotes him favorably, saying that the mind is something separate and distinct from the brain. The mind is non physical and it programs the brain and the brain is like a computer that the mind uses to operate the body. This man is not a Christian. Now we have also quoted, we didn’t quote him last week, Sir John Eccles, Nobel Prize winner for his research on the brain. He calls the brain a machine that a ghost can operate, and normally we’re the ghost that operates it, our spirit, but other ghosts can operate it as well if you go into an altered state of consciousness, which we talked about when we were dealing with the occult, that’s not our subject now. But the point we made, I think, last week was a man that sticks a gun to his head and pulls the trigger, he can only be assured he stopped the functions of the brain cells, the bullet missed his soul and spirit completely. So, the big question is: where will you spend eternity? So, when “You’re dead, you’re dead” doesn’t fit, it doesn’t work.
Tom:
Right, the brain may be dead, but there is a mind, a spirit, a soul that continues on.
Dave:
Which as Wilder Penfield says is independent of the brain. Okay. So, being independent of the brain, it doesn’t rely upon the brain for its existence. It does use the brain when we are in a body, but now it’s independent of the brain and it continues.
Tom:
Yeah, and these men that you mentioned— medical doctors, Benson from Harvard and others—they’re not particularly Christians.
Dave:
By a long shot they are not.
Tom:
Right, and so they are relying on the evidence that’s out there.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Well, there are those who would say then, Oh fine; I believe that when we die that our spirits go on to be somewhere. So they believe in spirit survival, but there’s a problem with that as well.
Dave:
Lots of problems, but of course they say we move on into graduate school, we continue to learn our lessons, there’s no judgment, so Hitler is no worse off that a Mother Teresa, it may take him a little longer to evolve upward. One of the ways that we can identify these spirit beings that are telling you this—these are not the spirits of the dead. The Bible says they are either in heaven or hell, they are not flitting about on the astroplane talking with people. So when you go to séance it’s not Aunt Jane that’s speaking through the medium, it’s a demon impersonating her. Well, somebody listening says, Well, that’s an extreme view, and how can you document it? Very simply, we can document it because of the consistency of the message that comes through. I’ve interviewed people all over the world on this subject who have had this experience. So, whether you are on drugs, whether you are under hypnosis with a psychiatrist, whether you’ve had an out-of-body experience or what they call a near death experience, or you are channeling, there is a consistency. I remember being in Australia a number of years ago reading a new age magazine, and this is one of the things that the author was talking about. He said there is an amazing consistency in the messages that are received independently all over the world. People who have never been in touch with one another, and there is a consistency that comes through. There is a philosophy that is being taught. We could quote a number of the experts who have been traveling around the world ingesting sacred mushrooms and some of these plants, psychedelic plants, investigating what is going on and they will tell you that these things put us in touch, put man in touch with spirit beings. And what I find significant is these people who are not Christians; they say the reason is that these spirit entities that we get in touch with through these drugs are, “trying to teach us something.” What are they trying to teach us? It conforms exactly to the 4 lies that the serpent introduced to Eve in the Garden of Eden that destroyed the human race. So, I think that pretty well identifies who these entitles are. Just for example, some listeners might remember Bishop James Pike, Bishop of California, Episcopal Bishop of California, and his son, James Jr. committed suicide. He was homosexual and apparently in great conflict over this, committed suicide. James Pike, Bishop Pike with his mistress was visiting his apartment, the dead son’s apartment in London. Some strange things happened, things moved about, they left themselves in a certain pattern. He was convinced his dead son was trying to talk to him, the spirit of his dead son. He went to a medium, Anna Twig, and what do you know? She made contact with Jim Jr. I mean, the things, the sound of the voice, the things that he said that only father and son knew about, that she couldn’t possibly have known about. But here’s what the spirit of Jim Jr. said: “Dad, I’m not here for just a pleasant afternoon’s conversation, I have a mission, and part of my mission is to tell you that there is no death.” Well, that’s one of the lies of the serpent, that there’s no judgment Dad, we just continue to learn our lessons and we continue to evolve ever higher. Now, I want you to know Jesus is not the Savior, I haven’t met him yet, he’s on a higher level, but I’ve heard about him and he’s a higher level than I am, which I will evolve up to, and Dad, I want you to know God is not personal, he’s a force. Okay, these are the lies of the serpent, and these are demons who are impersonating the dead and there is just no doubt as to their identity. So, we can prove, not only are we are spirit entities; there are other spirit entities out there.
Tom:
Dave, at the least, what we are trying to encourage people here, particularly people who have some of these views, about extinction, about spirit survival, what are they—if they are depending on this, what’s the basis for depending on it? That’s what we are trying to encourage in them.
Dave:
Amen, they don’t have any solid basis.
Tom:
Right. Another view, which we haven’t gotten to, we didn’t talk about last week, but we can pick up today, is the popular view of reincarnation. That is, there’s an Eastern world view about it, and transmigration, and there’s a very popular Western view, the idea that, “Well, we’re going to come back, maybe in a former life I was even Napoleon or some usually a great figure, someone highly esteemed, but now I get to go through it again.” What’s the basis for that?
Dave:
There isn’t any basis, well, it comes out of Hinduism, and you would find that in the Bhagavad-Gita, you would find it in some of the Hindu Vedas. This was the teaching of the gurus, this has caused the caste system, for example, one of the most horrible things you could imagine in India beginning with the Untouchables at the bottom who have no status whatsoever. And you move up to the four castes of Hinduism, finally you reach the top caste, the Brahmans and then you can launch off into godhood. And the goal of yoga of course, is to escape time, sense and the elements to reach moksha to escape this world and finally reach this godhood. But there’s no basis for it, furthermore, we can prove very simply that it isn’t true. In contrast to spirit survival, there is a judgment but it’s senseless, it’s not just, there’s no basis for it. Well, let me give you—there are three simple things about reincarnation. In fact, I was talking to a very bright woman sitting on the plane next to me the other day. She was leaning in the direction of reincarnation. It didn’t take me two minutes to disabuse her of this idea. There are three things about reincarnation: It’s amoral, it’s senseless and it’s hopeless. It’s amoral because if I am a husband who beats his wife in this life, karma, the law of cause and effect says I must come back in the next life as a wife beaten by her husband. That means that my husband in the next life must come back in another life as a wife beaten by her husband and on and on it goes forever. So that the perpetrator of every crime must become the victim of the same crime, which means there must be another perpetrator, which then there must be another victim, another perpetrator. So, far from solving the problem of evil, karma and reincarnation perpetuate evil. There is no solution to evil, there’s no justice, there’s no one to pay a penalty, you just keep going on and on and on. It leads to horrible stuff, Tom. For example, if I pick someone up out of the gutter in Calcutta, clean them up, put them in a clean bed, I have not helped them; I have interfered with their karma.
Tom:
Right, you’re not allowing them to work off this problem that they have and they have to have for all eternity unless it’s taken care of through the law of karma.
Dave:
The next life they are going to have to end up back in that gutter in that same situation, so it’s amoral. Then it’s senseless, is the world getting better?
Tom:
Dave, this is amoral because if you committed a crime then someone else would have to commit a crime against you through the next process so that you can pay that off.
Dave:
Right, it’s amoral. Now, it’s senseless also. Is the world getting better? I hadn’t noticed that. How many people—if reincarnation were true, do you remember all your past lives? Do I? Does anybody? Now you’ve got a person here and there—déjà vu, you know, Oh, I showed up in this little village and I have a recollection of being here or something. You’ve got a few little things like that, and that’s not going to help anyone. In order for reincarnation to make any sense I should remember the mistakes of my prior life, I should remember the lessons that I have learned so that I could improve. What’s the point of coming back again and again if I’m not improving? In fact, I don’t remember, nobody remembers, and far from improving the world is getting worse. So it’s senseless to keep coming back again and again. This is why Gandhi himself who believed in it, said reincarnation is a burden too great to bear. I’ve got to keep coming back again and again but I don’t know whether I am improving. Then finally, it’s hopeless. The fact that you and I are sitting here right now making this radio program, Tom, is the result of karma that we built up in a prior life. Everything that happens to someone in this life is a result of karma built up in a prior life. So in this life we’re trying to work off the karma we built up from a prior life, and in the process of working off the karma from a prior life we build up more karma. So then we’ve got to live another life to work off that karma, but in the process of working that off we build up more karma, we can’t help it. So then we’ve got to live another life and another life, it never ends, this is why they call it “the wheel of reincarnation.”
Tom:
Don’t the Hindus call it samsara “the wheel of sorrow” because it’s a bad deal no matter how you look at it?
Dave:
It is, and the only way to get off of it is through yoga, so they say, but nobody can prove that.
Tom:
Dave, that’s the Eastern view. Now we have sort of Americanized or homogenized or Westernized this, we buy it at another level here today.
Dave:
We’ve revised it, they make it sound like it’s good, it’s going to give you another chance. That’s the whole idea, isn’t that wonderful I’ll have another chance, and so forth. It doesn’t work, but Tom, going back into the past, now sitting here this is the result of the karma the prior life, but that prior life is the result of karma of the prior life and that was the result of the karma of a prior life, and a prior life and a prior life. You go back into the past a far as you can go, you reach the point where the three gunas, it’s called of the godhead we are in perfect balance in the void. And something happened to cause an imbalance in the godhead, and because of this imbalance in the godhead the prakriti, it’s called, the manifestation began and we are all reaping the result of bad karma that began in the godhead.
Tom:
So that’s where evil began.
Dave:
And it’s built in the fabric of the universe. You can’t escape it, there’s no hope. So, it’s amoral, it’s senseless and it’s hopeless, and I hope we have delivered a few people out there from believing in reincarnation. I remember a young man that came to me late one night, because he knew I stayed up very late, and he knocked on my door, probably about one in the morning. He just wanted to tweak me I think because he had been a professing Christian; in fact he had been in a Bible study of mine. And he said, Dave, I want you to know I believe in reincarnation now. And I said, oh really; tell me what does reincarnation do for you? Well, he said, you could become a bug or a tree or you might move upwards, you know. And I said, Look, you’ve go to be kidding. You’ve got no basis for this first of all; you have turned away from Jesus Christ, who loves you so much that He died for you on the cross. He offers you eternal life, he offers you a wonderful life where He will guide you and bless you, and instead of that you want to put yourself in the hands of an impersonal law can’t even think and could turn you into a bug, and there is no justice, I think you’re crazy, it doesn’t make sense. Now in contrast to karma, reincarnation and so forth, and this poor guy in the gutter in Calcutta, the God of the Bible loves us so much He came down to where we were. He suffered in our place, He took the penalty for our sins on the cross so that God can be just and yet forgive sinners if they will believe in Him and accept the pardon that He offers on this just basis, not paying for it themselves, not doing anything, not claiming that they are not so bad, but accepting that we are sinners and turning to God in repentance and believing in Jesus Christ who paid the penalty for our sins. I mean this is good news, but this other, karma and reincarnation, that’s not good news.
Tom:
Dave, I remember when you were on a radio program, a TV program a while back and you had an audience and as I remember it, wasn’t there some women in the audience who had been to one of your meetings? Well you can explain that one.
Dave:
Yeah, this was Good Morning, LA, I think, in Los Angeles and as I walked into the studio going in where the guests go somebody came by and they were going into where the audience goes, a young woman. “Hello, Dave, I heard yesterday morning—good to see you, my father was a Baptist minister, oh I really loved what you had to say. She went into the audience and the pastor—actually it was the assistant pastor, the pastor was away—before he introduced me he had his aunt, his aged aunt stand up and he said what a godly woman she was, and what an influence she had had on his life and so forth, she was in the audience also. There was a host and a hostess, I think it was the hostess said before we begin this program why don’t we see who is on whose side, how many of you believe in reincarnation? Both of those ladies, the young one and the elderly one raised their hands. Now you can’t believe in reincarnation and resurrection, so I was just absolutely staggered that here we had two professing Christians and they believed in reincarnation.
Tom:
Yeah, I think a lot of the reason, and I think I mentioned this last week, they intend to buy into some things and superficially they sound right, and you know, you don’t follow through to really understand what it’s all about, but you pick it up as part of your theological baggage.
Dave:
That’s why we encourage people to search the scriptures daily, because if they would search the scriptures they would know that reincarnation is absolutely contrary to the Word of God.
Tom:
Now the closest thing in the scriptures to something like the law of karma would be Galatians 6:7: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatever a man soweth that shall he also reap…” but there’s a big distinction between.
Dave:
There’s a “but” “That which you sow you reap “but” Christ paid the penalty and there is forgiveness with God. Karma and reincarnation, there’s no forgiveness, there’s no other turn to forgiveness. This is an inexorable law that just grinds you down.
Tom:
You know, our subject here is, “eternity,” and we’re asking lots of questions about it if there are things that people try to avoid looking into, but they do at their, really destruction. I mean, we plan for a lot of things, but rarely for eternity. But Dave, aside from the Bible teaching it, why should anyone believe that there is an eternity ahead?
Dave:
Well, we know, for example that the universe has not been here forever, it had been the sun would have burned out by now, same for the stars. We know there was time when they didn’t exist. Now of course the scientists try to say it all began with a big bang, but they have no explanation of where the bang came from, where was the energy, why did it happen, and so forth. There was, in fact we know a time when nothing physical existed, out of nothing came everything. Now we know that it had a beginning. You can’t say that there was some matter existed back there, because matter doesn’t last forever, Second Law of Thermodynamics. So there couldn’t have been matter that began this thing. There had to be a time when they was nothing therefore, therefore there must have been, not some thing that some one who exists, who always existed, no beginning, no end, who had the capability to bring out of nothing everything that exists. Okay. Now this God speaks to us through His Word and we can prove that the Bible is God’s Word. Now He tells us that this universe is going to end and He’s going to bring a new universe, but He says that He made man in His image. Man became a living soul, spirit and soul in a body and bodies wear out, but there’s absolutely no scientific evidence that souls and spirits cease to exist. Now God warns us that we will either be with Him in His presence or we will be separated from Him forever. And Jesus talked more about hell than he talked about heaven, actually, He taught more about it than anybody. Oh well, Jesus is so loving and kind. Yes, that’s why He warned us. So the most important question—that’s why we begin the book with talking about death. Death is certain, the death of the body, but the most important question we can face is: where will I spend eternity? Because we are made in the image of God who is eternal, we are eternal beings, and we will be either in His presence, enjoying His love, or we will be experiencing His wrath against sin because God is holy and just and He cannot condone sin. There’s no escape from this and in fact the Bible warns us, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation.”
Tom:
Right and He offers the salvation as a free gift. I’m sure there are people out there thinking, Well, why would God do this, why would God do that? The point we’re trying to underscore here is, He has made salvation available for all as a free gift for those who will come to Him.
Dave:
Tom, you can’t even play a game without rules, and somehow or other we recognize that we don’t allow God to have any rules. It would be like an NBA or NFL player complaining that the referee is narrow-minded and dogmatic because he’s enforcing the rules or saying that he’s extreme or intolerant. God has rules; there are rules for the physical universe. We know there must be more on spiritual rules; we know that in our conscience. We don’t have to violate them; He’s provided salvation for us. If we would accept it we would have forgiveness, if we don’t, the justice of God is going to be meted out.
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in. Coming up in this week’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, focusing on the question, “What Must We Do to be Redeemed?” In Religion in the News, “Getting Drunk to Talk to God” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Are Your Hymns Politically Correct?” 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. We begin a new series of revisits to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith. Today we focus on the question, “Is Death the End of Existence?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. Today in our feature article, we’re beginning a new series. We’ll be going through Dave Hunt’s latest book (at least at the time of this recording). The title of the book is An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith. Now Dave, if you really want to know what a book is about, that is so I’ve been told, you read the back cover and I’m going to do just that. It says: Based upon rock-solid biblical doctrine and the unsurpassed hope of the believer, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith fosters deeper trust in and a commitment to God by defining the biblical gospel and what it saves us from; clarifying the call to discipleship, articulating the faith for which we must earnestly contend, explaining the necessity for taking up the cross, developing what the Bible says about the Trinity, the incarnation in the church, confronting the challenge of living in the last days. Well, that sounds like the kind of stuff that ought to bless our listeners. Let’s get right into it. Now you opened with a topic which everyone faces, which most everyone tries to avoid and which few want to discuss: death. But you come right out of the chute with that subject. Why?
Dave:
Before I answer that Tom, let me just mention that this is a different book from anything that I’ve written, in that it has no footnotes.
Tom:
Okay, well we’ll get letters about that Dave.
Dave:
And most very few quotes other than the Bible. So it’s entirely different, so you can read it a little faster, you don’t have to keep referring to footnotes and so forth.
Tom:
Dave, death is not a popular subject. Why would you start out with that?
Dave:
Well because it’s inevitable, except if the Rapture occurs before we die. That’s the only hope, but people have been dying ever since Adam and Eve were created. It’s a subject that isn’t pleasant and you don’t like to think of it maybe when you get as old as I am. My next birthday, I’ll be 74 coming up in September and you think about it a bit more than when you are younger. But there are so many reminders in the Scripture, in fact in those two Psalms that most people realize were written by Moses—it says a prayer of Moses a man of God, Psalm 90 and 91. He says: “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” In other words, if I think I am going to be here forever, I am not going to make the wisest decisions, but if I realize that life is brief (and it really is), James says your life is like a vapor. It appears for a little time and then is gone. You couldn’t make me understand that when I was fifteen or twenty, or even thirty. But now I can understand it because I don’t know where 73 years went. I never thought I would be this old. How in the world did I get this old? It doesn’t seem possible.
Tom:
I feel the same way, Dave.
Dave:
And I’ve got 20 years on you! Can I be the same person I was back there? And Solomon in fact, goes even further when he says it is better to go to the house of mourning than to a house of feasting. In other words, better to go to a funeral than to a party, he says because that is the end of all life and the living will lay it to heart. In other words, it will remind us how short life is. So, it’s something they say that is inevitable. Death and taxes. It’s something that we have to face. And what concerns me is, at one time Ruth and I owned and I administered a convalescent hospital [with] a lot of elderly patients and I had thought that when you are approaching death you would be concerned about it and yet I didn’t find that with many—a very few exceptions—of these dear people. They just kind of drifted off. And it seems that if you don’t face the reality of death in time, you know when you get old and you’re nodding in a chair or you’re heading for a coma in a hospital or whatever, you’re not likely to think about it. On the other hand, younger people, religious people who think that they have made some preparation in what they believe—I am staggered by the pitiful reasons they have—for example, we just came back from Europe and I was talking with the flight attendant and this dear gal, thought she believed in re-incarnation. She didn’t have any reasons for it and it took me about three minutes to disabuse her of that idea. She could immediately see that what she had been believing was foolishness, but yet that was what she had put her hope in. Other people…
Tom:
Yes, but Dave, let me stop you here. Before I was a Christian, I bought into that and it wasn’t that I really truly believed it—it just looked like something that solved the problem. Well, if I don’t get it right this time, I’ll come back again. Now I didn’t understand transmigration or any of the religious beliefs behind it, I just thought “well this will cover it.” So then, I just put it aside and went on to be merry or whatever.
Dave:
Yeah but the point I am trying to make Tom is you didn’t have a good reason for that nor did this lady and yet death— I remember the scientist some years ago, giving his testimony. He was at Stanford Research Institute which became SRI, he was a physicist, a brilliant guy and he was so unhappy that he was ready to commit suicide, although the friends that—he was an atheist—the friends that he would invite over to his cocktail parties, he would say wow, you must really have a great psychiatrist, you throw such wonderful parties and he’s dying inside. The only thing that kept him from suicide was that he had a Christian grandmother that was praying for him and she had warned him that there was place called hell out there. Now he didn’t believe that, but he kept thinking “suppose Granny’s right, suppose there is a place called hell and you get out there and you can’t get back. I better hang on a little longer. In fact he met Christ through reading the Scriptures and his life was transformed. Now he knew where he was going and he was going to heaven now, not because of anything that he had done, in fact in spite of what he had done, but because Christ had paid the penalty for his sins and in his last visit to the psychiatrist he said, I don’t need you, you need me. I’m not coming here to pay you if you don’t want to listen to the gospel. The point I am trying to get at is suppose there is a place called hell out there? When you die and I go into the three possibilities….
Tom:
Let’s do that. Before we get to that one, what are the popular ideas that people…?
Dave:
Well, let me just finish now Tom—When you die—unless one of these three ideas will bring you back or give you another chance and we can dispense with them pretty readily—it’s pretty serious. In other words, people will make it a choice of the church, or of the religion they believe in— well I was born a Hindu, I’ll die a Hindu, or I was born a Catholic, or Baptist, or whatever, I’ll die a Baptist and you try to ask them well what do you really know for sure about this? Well, I like the choir, or the pastor is so friendly, or the people are so friendly—I mean they have reasons for their hope of eternity that I wouldn’t be comfortable with buying a refrigerator or a used car. They would be much more careful about that and yet they are going to launch out into eternity, so that was, getting back to your question, way back there—that was why I began there. Because that’s what we have to face and really that’s what so-called religion is about. Every religion believes there’s something after death and they’ve got their theories and so forth—let’s call it faith. And this is called An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith, so let’s get serious about where we are heading.
Tom:
Well, lets talk about the popular views. One that you mentioned is that when it’s the end it’s the end. Just extinction—that’s it. When the lights go out, the lights go out. What about that one? That’s based on materialism.
Dave:
Materialism. In other words, material bodies die and that’s it for the body unless there’s a resurrection, so there’s no doubt about that. But nobody can sensibly imagine that they are just a lump of protein molecules wired with nerves, you know, a piece of educated beef steak that has learned to make programmed responses to this stimulus like Pavlov’s dog. You can’t explain a sense of truth, justice, morals, ethics, purpose and meaning in terms of electrical current in your brain.
Tom:
Or chemistry…
Dave:
Or chemical reactions in the brain. There’s got to be something else in there.
Tom:
So it’s absurd that just the physical exists.
Dave:
Well Tommy, a young man that’s sitting in the back of a courtroom let’s say and he doesn’t like the decision that the judge has just come up with and he says angrily, “There’s no justice in this world!” Well what is he referring to? The absence of something that he says doesn’t exist. If he’s never seen it, how does he know it’s missing? You can’t explain ethics and morals and so forth in terms of chemical reactions and electrical processes in the brain. You can’t even explain thoughts. Your brain doesn’t even think. If your brain thought, you would be the prisoner of your brain. You would be running around doing whatever your brain comes up with you have to do it. We all have a pretty good idea that we do make choices, not always rational, sometimes based on lusts and greed and so forth, but we are not running around following our brain, but we’re telling our brain what to do. We have more non-physical thoughts (thoughts are not physical). For example, you say to me justice or truth. I know what you are talking about, but justice isn’t physical. Truth is not physical; I mean what does it weigh? What’s the texture? What’s the color? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? It has nothing to do with the physical universe in which our bodies function. So we have thoughts about something that isn’t physical. That bugged Lenin and that’s a very famous problem in….
Tom:
Right, the communist, atheist, the materialist, not John Lenin, but Vladimir Lenin.
Dave:
Right. It’s a very famous problem in philosophy—Lenin’s dilemma. Lenin as you said, was a materialist. Nothing exists but matter. In fact, he was right when he said you can’t think of anything that doesn’t exist. Try it. Well, I can think of pink elephants, but pink exists and elephants exist. If you think you can think of something that doesn’t exist, in this physical universe, come up with a new prime color to the rainbow. You can’t do it—so that all we can think of is supposedly all that we know out there. What has affected us. Ahhhh, but what about God? Where did that idea come from? You’ve never seen anything in this universe that looks like God that feels like God, that even comes close to the human concept of God and that bothered Lenin to his dying day. He couldn’t solve that problem. So the thoughts that we have are not physical [and] cannot be explained in terms of any process going on in the brain. In fact—
Tom:
Dave, can I—am I over simplifying here? So the only way we could possibly know about God is Him revealing himself to us.
Dave:
Exactly, exactly.
Tom:
In other words, man did not—could not, according to Lenin, could not make up God.
Dave:
That’s right. And Lenin couldn’t get away from that. Now the Bible does tell us [in] Romans chapter 1, that the power and the eternal wisdom of God are revealed in the things that are made. You can’t—we’ve got not too far outside our kitchen window is a mother goose, Canadian goose sitting on eggs. Now how do they even know enough to lay all the eggs first and then start hatching them? Otherwise, you would have them popping out at different times and there would be chaos. Or how does—sometimes I look out and I see a spider spinning a web. Where did this come from? You can’t—well look, with the electron microscopes we have now, we are able to probe into the molecular level of life and it is so complex. It is incredible. We’ve probably quoted it before, but you remember Richard Dawkins, one of the leading evolutionists, he acknowledges that the nucleus of every cell has—this is just the nucleus—has a digitally—these are his words—a digitally organized database larger than the 30 volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So you couldn’t be a rational person and say this happened by chance. Some one planned this and designed it and so forth. You cannot escape it—alright? But that doesn’t tell me about God’s love. That doesn’t tell me about God’s character. It tells me of His power and His genius. So as you said, that must be revealed to me and the fact that I have a sense of perfect justice, of truth and so forth indicates that. Now…
Tom:
The point here is there is something beyond our physical makeup that we have to acknowledge.
Dave:
It’s inside of us. Right, right, the Bible calls it the soul and spirit. In fact, we’ve quoted Robert Jastrow you know, who said that some beings (he’s an evolutionist) out on some of these planets, could have evolved beyond the need for bodies. They would be what old fashioned religious people call spirits. So even he believes that there could be non-physical entities. Wilder Penfield, one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons and experts on the brain—he says the mind is separate and distinct from the brain. The mind is non-physical, the brain is physical. He says the brain is a computer that is programmed by something independent of itself and that is the mind. Your brain doesn’t even think. But your brain is a computer which you use, I use to operate this body to interface with this physical universe [in]which our bodies function.
Tom:
The mind or the spirit. Can we say that?
Dave:
Absolutely, Tom no rational person can deny that. So the man that sticks a gun to his head, pulls the trigger can be assured of only one thing. He stopped the function of his brain cells. He ended the life of this physical body, but the bullet passed—didn’t even touch the soul and the spirit. That goes on forever. Physical things, you know 2nd law of Thermodynamics, physical things wear out— the law of entropy—and we can see that in the universe around us. That’s how we know the universe hasn’t always been here. If it had been here forever, the sun would have burned out by now. So there was a time that it didn’t exist and so forth. But the spirit and the soul—we have no reason to believe that they wear out. Therefore the most important question any person can face is: Where will I spend eternity?
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
But to suggest that when you’re dead, you’re dead and that’s it—we’ve got no rational basis for that. Everything we experience of life says that’s not true. Something inside of you is going to go on after the death of that body.
Tom:
The other options—you know we’ve only got a few minutes left in this segment, so we’ll continue with this next week and as we’re going through the book, we’ll just keep touching upon these subjects as time permits. But the other option Dave, is well when I die, it will all be just bliss. It will just be the white light and perfect acceptance. I’ll keep evolving upward, I’ll be more brilliant than I am right now and that’s what I have to look forward to. Is there any evidence for that?
Dave:
And these people, they do believe then that there is a spirit and soul, okay? Give them credit for that. They believe that it survives the death of the body. There are a lot of problems with that idea—that we just move on into graduate school, that we just continue to learn our lessons and so forth. Hitler’s fate is no worse than Mother Theresa’s. It doesn’t really matter—
Tom:
Well, this white light is not going to be as white as others—its dark gray and other…
Dave:
Yes, well they never say that. Everybody—these people that have these near-death experiences—NDEs—and they go through this tunnel and they see this bright light, then there’s nothing but love and acceptance—and they come back and they say well I didn’t even want to come back, you know death is a myth, you don’t really die and you just move up and so forth—a lot of problems.
Tom:
Yeah—no judgment, no accountability.
Dave:
Right, I mean that’s just the wonderful thing! You can be a murderer and a thief and so forth, but then you escape it all when you die. I mean that makes suicide sound wonderful. You know—let’s escape everything. No, no that violates the very sense of justice that we have. The Bible says that it is appointed unto man once to die, after this the judgment. And we wouldn’t let someone get away with this on this earth. To imagine then that you leave this earth and you can escape all the consequences—that doesn’t make sense, furthermore….
Tom:
Well we’d object to it, most people would say well wait a minute, this guy was a jerk, how does he either get away with it all, or how does he become a non-jerk—what’s the change? If he hasn’t changed here on earth, why’s he going to change later?
Dave:
Exactly. The one basis you would think for keeping people in line, at least some people think this, would be the death penalty, that there are some serious consequences or imprisonment or whatever and now suddenly when you die you escape all of this and you are out in the realm somewhere, you’re just floating around and everything is peaches and cream, and you are just accepted and you’ve got no incentive for progressing. It doesn’t make sense from that basis as well. Furthermore, there are people who do come back from these near-death experiences and they’ve experienced hell. Now they don’t remember it generally, but if you talk to them right away, in fact some of them—I’ve known doctors who have resuscitated people, who’ve suddenly had a massive heart attack, and they’ve gone into a coma and then they’ve brought them back and they come out of it screaming that they’re in flames, so I can’t trust these experiences because I get contradictory.
Tom:
And as you said we don’t know if they are valid, if it actually happened, or if this was something that just went on in the brain or a circumstance of the physical nature that he was going through.
Dave:
Right, right, so I wouldn’t trust this “when you’re dead, you’re dead” idea. I would investigate it a bit further and I guess we are running out of time and we better investigate it further in the next program.
Tom:
Dave, we’ll pick up on this, as we said we are going to continue through these issues and your book, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith, we’ll get it next week.
Welcome to a special edition of 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 with us. Coming up in this week’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, focusing on the question, “For Whom Did Christ Die?” In Religion in the News, “The Highly Criminal Yet Highly Religious USA” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Are We for Israel or Palestine?” We hope you can stay tuned. 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. We wrap up our revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the topic, “The Coming World Religion.” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks Gary. Our subject for today is the final chapter in Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World and Church. The chapter is entitled “The Coming World Religion.” Dave your book deals with occultism in the world and in the church, but what is the connection between occultism and the formation of a world religion?
Dave:
Occultism of course, as we’ve been trying to explain in these last few weeks, is really Satan’s invasion of the world, of man. It’s something that he’s offered man, and of course the ultimate goal is to enthrone Antichrist and Satan. I don’t know exactly whether Satan literally indwells him or merely possesses him, but somehow Satan is going to be worshiped through the Antichrist. Because it says they worshiped the dragon who gave him his power and authority. And they worshiped the beast, so somehow there is a connection. And so obviously occultism in all its forms is not only is enthroning man as good, but is also enthroning this Antichrist who as god will sit in the temple of God declaring that he is god. Now to do that you have to have a world government and a world religion, at least in my mind that’s the connection that I see.
Tom:
I know people are concerned they may recognize that pagan religions (at least in their mind) will play a part in this, but I think the thing that concerns people is that Christianity, a form of Christianity will play a part.
Dave:
Just as the true Christ has a bride, His true Church which He is going to take to heaven in the rapture, so the antichrist has a bride—the false church, the whore she’s called and eventually he hates her and burns her with fire. So yes, there is a false Christianity that is being prepared. It is not Communism that is going to take over the world and it’s not Hinduism, although it will be very closely related to it. But it has to be a form of Christianity, because the Antichrist, is [as] we have explained, “anti-” a Greek prefix which has two meanings: not only opposed to, but also means in the place of. So that being the case, then this world religion of which he is the head, and whose followers will worship him, it has to be a form of Christianity because he claims to be the Christ and in fact, Jesus said it a number of ways: He said many will come in my name saying “I am Christ,” (that’s Matthew 24 and John 5). You get it again in Daniel 9 where it says “Unto the coming of Messiah the prince sixty-nine weeks of years” and then it says “the people of the prince who will come” that is later after the Messiah, the true Messiah has come and is crucified, risen from the dead, ascended to the Father’s right hand, Jerusalem is destroyed, the Temple is destroyed and it has been that way now—the Temple has not been rebuilt in all these years—the people of the prince who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary (that was A.D. 70). These were the army of the Roman general who became emperor, Titus. Titus was not the Antichrist, it’s the people of the prince who will come after they destroy the city and the sanctuary. One day there is coming this prince, the pretender prince, pretender Christ who comes out of the Roman Empire because these are the ones who destroyed it. But anyway, I’m getting maybe a little off your topic of occultism.
Tom:
Dave, I am sure there are people out there who haven’t heard our program before—many people who are that way, or many people who have heard past programs in which we’ve developed this as we’ve gone through your book almost chapter by chapter, but when we say Christianity is going to be corrupted, we’re talking about Biblical Christianity, what God’s Word says. So there are a lot of people out there that have some ideas about Christianity and probably wouldn’t recognize a change. Moving for example into occultism or picking up doctrines changing within Christianity so that they’re really implementing occultic practices.
Dave:
Yeah, this will happen within the church—it is very clear. Jude for example [in] verse 3 says “certain men have crept in unawares.” They don’t say that they crept into the government, or into the universities, obviously they crept in to the church. Jesus said in Matthew 7 many will say unto me Lord, Lord haven’t we prophesied in your name, in your name we cast out devils and so forth? Paul said in Acts 20 after my departing grievous wolves shall enter in among you not sparing the flock. “Of your own selves, men will arise,” so it’s very clear that the church will be corrupted. The apostasy it is called—they will depart from the faith and that of course gives us another connection to occultism because what they emphasis is the signs and wonders that they did, but Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 3 they will be like Jannes and Jambres. These were the magicians in Pharaoh’s court who withstood Moses, not by saying there were no miracles, but by seemingly doing miracles by the power of Satan and so again Paul gives you an occult connection. He says there will be false miracle workers. Jesus said in Matthew 24:24 they will do signs and wonders that will be so convincing that even the elect would be deceived. Now some of them are definitely phonies. We’ve talked about them. The televangelist who had the listening device in his ear and his wife is giving him the information from back stage and he’s calling out names and so forth and claiming that he’s getting this from God. There were magician’s tricks that others have used. One televangelist who is right now in prison—I haven’t heard that he got out yet, but anyway because of this kind of trickery. So they’re phonies. There are others who apparently they even think that it’s the power of God and so they say Lord, Lord didn’t we do this in your name? We did miracles and He will say I never knew you. So there must have been some power, but let me just go back to an illustration we gave. Here’s Benny Hinn on TBN, do you remember? I watched it live with Paul and Jan Crouch and he’s telling how he touched this man, then he fell over, his wig flew off, or was it [just] a bit askew? He did it five times to this man just to see the wig fall off and they are laughing uproariously about this. Now the Holy Spirit does not knock people down to see their wigs fall off so you can laugh. So we can know that it is not the Holy Spirit. Was this just the power of suggestion? I don’t know. It would seem that five times in a row this dear man is going down; there must have been some power at work. Certainly it is not the power of God. But Benny Hinn would say he is doing this certainly in the name of Jesus and in the name of the Lord. I’ve done this. Now I think we have to seriously face the implications or when Oral Roberts claimed that a 900 foot Jesus talked to him for seven hours—now is Oral Roberts lying? I wouldn’t want to accuse him of that. Was he hallucinating? I think a 7 hour hallucination is rather long. Then who was this? What was this? Certainly not Jesus. Jesus is not 900 feet tall any more than he is a baby appearing with our Lady of Fatima. So something actually appeared to him—some spirit and had a lengthy conversation and told him to build a hospital that wasn’t needed and went bankrupt, promised miracles and so forth that didn’t occur—a cure of cancer, so again we have to—Tom, we’re not trying to jump on people. We’re just saying, look you can’t just slough this off. You can’t just say well that’s okay forget about it. There are things that are happening in our day. There are people who claim to be called of God, who claim to be doing signs and wonders that they claim that Christ has appeared to them. Others who would say, well C. Peter Wagner: When God spoke to me, he says, and told me to head up the spiritual warfare network.” Spiritual warfare, I think we have documented, at least the way they do it is not Biblical, and it’s not of God. But he claims that Christ spoke to him and told him this. Now these are people who are doing things in Christ’s name that seem to be miraculous and the Bible warns us about them and one of the things we try to point out in the book is that there is an occult invasion of the church as well as of the world and this is—you ask me what is the occult connection, okay I took a long time to say it—sorry.
Tom:
No, that’s fine. The scripture that talks about seducing spirits, doctrines of demons, you know we’ve gone over this before, but basically occultism comes in the form of power as well as information to lead people away from the true and living God and the church is being subjected to this, not just through the Word Faith which has its background in Gnosticism and the mind-sciences religious science, but Dave there are other forms for those who maybe wouldn’t be a part of the charismatic or hyper Pentecostal movement and that would be Christian psychology. These are things that seem scientific and okay, but still the techniques, the methodologies of psychotherapy are occultic in many, many cases.
Dave:
Hypnosis.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
You regress someone back into the past and in a hypnotic state you are moving into the occult. There’s no question about it.
Tom:
Right and we mentioned before that psychology, the latest stream, if we can use that term, is transpersonal. Really, contacting spirit entities. So this again, is doing what we are talking about. It’s setting the church up for a one world religion. These things all have spiritual ramifications.
Dave:
Or visualizing Jesus, you don’t even have to run off to Magigoria or Fatima where they had an apparition, you can have your own apparition right sitting at home. There are evangelical teachers, psychologists who claim to lead people into this and you can contact Jesus through the inner healing movement and so forth. Yes, we’ve dealt with this.
Tom:
Dave, in your book you mention Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II in relation to spirituality. As a matter of fact you say that John Paul considers Gorbachev to be a crypto-Christian—
Dave:
Yes, although he’s an atheist.
Tom:
He’s an atheist, but he seemed to be impressed with Gorbachev’s spirituality. Now how does that play into this?
Dave:
I just sat next to a lady on the plane the other day who said “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” Meaning I don’t subject myself to any dogmas; to narrow minded rules and regulations, I am very spiritual, but Gorbachev could be spiritual. This is a popular idea today. Maybe he doesn’t even believe in God, but he’s spiritual. He’s got some kind of a spirituality that he’s tuned into out there. There are a lot of people that are in that category. It’s a growing category.
Tom:
A form of Buddhism that is atheistic.
Dave:
Right, Tom there are several levels of this. We talked about those who remain within the church—they’re into occultism, they are teaching false doctrines, but they’ve remained in the church. We give the example of former Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, now the coach of the L.A. Lakers. Raised in a—well his father and mother were co-pastors, I believe, at least his father was pastor and his mother put John 3:16 on the wall in his bedroom, he was raised apparently in a Christian home and a Christian environment, yet he didn’t seem to understand Christianity at all and he has moved into Zen Buddhism and is a Zen Master now and he’s gotten his team involved in it and he’s moved into North American Indian witchcraft and so forth, so let me just quote him— he writes: “Merging Zen and Christianity allowed me to reconnect with my spiritual core and begin to integrate my heart and mind. The more I learned about the two religions the more compatible they seemed. Was Christ a Zen Master? That may be a stretch, but clearly he was practicing some form of meditation when he separated himself from his disciples and became one with the Father and so forth.” So here we have a man who seriously has put Zen Buddhism and Christianity together and the Pope you know, he visits with the Zen Buddhists, with the Buddhists of all kinds, with voodoo priests, with Hindus and Muslims and so forth. So we are seeing a merger of all religions into one and false Christianity is part of it and going back to your original question, it’s power that seems to do it. You get results, that’s what unites them all and by the way, it was the experience of being baptized in the spirit with speaking in tongues that originally united the charismatics and the Catholics. We have about 70 million Catholic Charismatics in the world today and they amazingly having supposedly been baptized in the Spirit, filled with the Holy Spirit and spoken in tongues—they are more enamored with Mary, more enamored with the Mass and so forth, and the Pope loves them—they are really loyal to the church now—I can’t believe that’s the Holy Spirit. So here we have, it was the experience of speaking in tongues, prophecy and so forth that—again it was the miraculous that drew these two streams together of Christianity supposedly. And again we have power, but it is not the power of God, because God does not lead people to love Mary above Christ and to believe that the Mass is His body and blood being offered again and again.
Tom:
Dave, some people might be thinking, well Phil Jackson, that’s one thing, he was just ignorant of some things, but this really can’t happen to solid evangelicals. But one of the things that you point out in this book of yours is the Templeton Prize. Where you have leading evangelicals [like] Billy Graham, Chuck Colson and Bill Bright. Now either they are completely ignorant of what Temple stands for Sir John Marks Templeton, or—well I don’t know what else to say.
Dave:
Tom they can’t be ignorant. It’s impossible to be ignorant of what he stands for. The man has published at least half a dozen books in which he lays this out. He has the Templeton Foundation in which he lays it out. He has written publicly, and these are not old books from way back, these are current writings, almost every year now, he is coming out a new one, so I don’t see how they could be ignorant. Furthermore, people have critiqued this and let them know and so forth and yet I don’t find any apology, any admission of having done anything wrong and just—not to go back into detail, but John Marks Templeton is an occultist. He’s into mind science. One of his mind science books was advertised full back cover just in Christianity Today that just tells you that reality is in your mind, you create your own universe with your thoughts, that there’s no heaven or hell, that’s all in your mind and so forth and he says, you are god, I am god, everything is god, that Christianity doesn’t communication anymore and what we need is a new scientific religion that is not dependent upon ancient manuscripts like the Bible. He doesn’t believe that the Bible is God’s Word. He was on the board of managers of the American Bible Society for 15 years. And he goes on to say that what we need is a scientific religion that all the religious, anybody, everybody on earth and all the extra-terrestrials can accept and to encourage progress toward this I am offering the Templeton Award for progress and religion. Tom he’s talking about the one world religion of the Antichrist. Could you accept a prize for that?
Tom:
If these gentlemen knew nothing about his occultic involvement (which is rather doubtful) they’d have to know what his objective and his goal is they received the million dollar prizes for being a part in Templeton’s view point of moving toward this goal.
Dave:
Well he lays it all out Tom. Again it’s incredible and how do I understand why these men would accept this prize along with Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and so forth who have accepted it, I don’t know. But the man is an occultist and now we are all uniting together toward a new world religion, that is unquestionable and I think we document it thoroughly and…
Tom:
Dave, part—
Dave:
Let me just finish here. Part of the problem is that we live in a day when as Paul said they would not endure sound doctrine. If you wanted to go by the Bible and measure John Marks Templeton and measure any of these other things that we’ve just talked about in this other program, measure them by the Word of God, you would have to say they are not right. Now, the only way that you could kind of look the other way, and to just continue on with this is to ignore what God has said and that really the purpose of this program, Search the Scriptures Daily. We want to get people back—don’t believe what we say, check it out from the scriptures and we’ve got to have the Bible as our guide. If we don’t have the Bible as our guide we will be led astray.
Tom:
Dave, for some people listening, they’d say, well I believe these guys are—believe that the Rapture will take place and you know, we’ll be out of here, before this formulation of one world church. But doesn’t this have an impact on us; on our fruitfulness and productiveness in the Lord if we buy into certain ideas that are preparatory for this one world religion?
Dave:
It makes it very difficult to talk about “straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life and few there be that find it,” if all these people are being embraced out there, you know the evangelicals and Catholics together and now we have embraced a billion Catholics. They’re all Christians, anybody that’s into spirituality, you’re into the same kind I’m into and we all seem to be involved in this, and we don’t draw any lines, any categories, but we’ll work together, we’ll accept prizes, and so forth. That makes it very, very difficult—
Tom:
The Great Commission is out the door with this idea.
Dave:
Exactly! Very difficult to present [and] to stand there like Peter: “Neither is there salvation in any other for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must (not may, but we must) be saved. Yeah, but the Mormons, they talk about Jesus and everybody’s into spirituality and so long as you’re sincere, and you believe in some form of higher power—well that must be okay—and Tom, although if you sat down with these men and you said, “That’s not what you are presenting, is it, you don’t really believe that?” I am sure they would say no that’s not what we believe, but appearances seem to lead to that and it does make it very difficult and we are seeing the foundation laid for this false world church.
Tom:
Right, appearances yes, but I think it’s a little bit more than that Dave. What these men are saying, how they are influencing people— you can’t go along with these ideas and be fruitful and productive in the Lord, that’s the bottom line.
Dave:
Well, you are going to create false believers.
Tom:
And such false believers will become, through persuasive but unbiblical teachings through occult powers and lying signs and wonders—they’ll become the congregation of the universal religion of the Antichrist. And for those who are truly born-again believers in Jesus Christ who are trusting in Him alone, by faith alone for their salvation, the only preventative action we know to personally falling prey to the destructive aspects of this developing world religion is to “search the Scriptures daily,” to see if what they are being taught is true to the Word of God.
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael; it’s great to have you along. Coming up in the next hour in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, focusing on the topic, “The Importance of Repentance.” In Religion in the News, “Sisterly Help from Dr. Brothers” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Biblically or Politically Correct?” 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. 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. We continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the topic, “Getting Rid of Generational Curses.” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks Gary. We’re picking up where we left off last week. The topic being spiritual warfare. This movement has generated a great number of unbiblical teachings and practices which have influenced a great many in the church today. Much of it is derived from the demons themselves as more than a few of the leaders in this movement have stated. Dave, would this be an example of what giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils found in 1 Timothy 4:1.
Dave:
Well, it certainly would be one example. I had, you know until this sort of thing came along, I didn’t used to think of it in that way. We know that people are going into altered states of consciousness through drugs, hypnosis, yoga, even in Christian psychology, you know regressing them back into the past and when you get into that state of consciousness you definitely are open to demonic entities. And we have been getting doctrines of devils. But here is another way. They claim to talk with these spirits and then they command them to tell the truth and the spirits I think we mentioned last time, give them their modus operandi—Oh yeah, this is how we got in and so forth and so on…this is the way we operate, so definitely it’s doctrines of devils.
Tom:
I gave the example last week of what C. Peter Wagner who is the author of Confronting the Powers, which Dave as you know is an apologetic in defense of the spiritual warfare movement. Now Dave I know you stated your compassion for these people and their zealousness to really combat evil, but empathy aside, isn’t this a form of divination?
Dave:
Well Tom, they do engage in various forms of divination, but the whole thing is first of all not biblical. I don’t find it in the Bible. Where did Paul or Peter or Jesus or anyone ever engage in spiritual mapping? Where do they give such credit to demonic entities? And then to their locations and they went out as I recall from last week and they found some fetishes or what not in this vacant lot.
Tom:
They were buried there supposedly by witches. Now how would they get that information except from impressions from where?
Dave:
The witches, I mean from the demons that inspired the witches. So what is the point? Who cares? Who cares whether there are some occult things buried in the ground somewhere or someone’s home or whatever? They have no power over us. They have no power unless people believe in them.
Tom:
Give credence, right?
Dave:
Right, if you believe in them and this is your religion and this is what you are following. But imagine that you have to go out and you have to pursue these objects and ferret them out and that this is what is preventing the gospel from bearing fruit in these neighborhoods and once you do this then you have set the people free. First of all, it’s not biblical as we said, nobody ever engaged in this in the Bible that we know of. None of the great revivalists of history, Wesley, Whitfield, Moody, Spurgeon you name them, the great preachers the great moves of God without anything like this being engaged in both historically and biblical times. And the idea that now we have new techniques, I think we quoted C. Peter Wagner last week—these are new techniques now that God has given us and they are going to release millions of souls. You have to ask the question, Why didn’t God reveal this to us sooner? And in fact why did the demons themselves reveal this if this is what is going to set people free from their power. Tom, it’s a waste of time. People are spending their time now—they’ve got a new idea and they’re spending their time….
Tom:
And money— We’re going to get into some of the expenses that you have to go through to pull this stuff off.
Dave:
Right, traveling to strategic locations, supposedly, you know YWAM sent a team out to the northern most, southern most, eastern most, and western most parts of the continents to pray strategically. I don’t find anything like this in the Bible and it’s a delusion. Furthermore Tom, it has been going on for a long time. It was way back in 1989 it seems to me that they started this in the Los Angeles area. 1300 pastors from many denominations were led by Lloyd Oglvie and Jack Hayford and they began meeting quarterly in prayer at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church to wage spiritual warfare for what they said would be the deliverance of Los Angeles. Now in the years that have followed I haven’t seen the deliverance of Los Angeles. Evil only seems to have gotten worse there. You remember one pastor who was involved wrote and he said “we meet and fast and pray and bind the spirits and as soon as we leave the meeting they are on the loose again.”
Tom:
Dave how do you make a distinction between people coming together to pray for something yet taking this next step of binding and commanding and taking authority, I mean isn’t there a distinction that can be made?
Dave:
Yes there is. If we want to pray for God’s blessing and pray for revival that’s biblical, that’s one thing. But then to think that we can somehow take control of demonic spirits in this area—whether a person is under the control of demonic spirits or not is a matter of their own will, their own beliefs. Now if you want to cast demons individually out of people, that’s one thing. That’s biblical and we believe in that. On the other hand, Jesus himself said that when an evil spirit is cast out, if something doesn’t come in, in other words if the Holy Spirit does not indwell that person and they have not believed the gospel you’ve wasted your time. Because that spirit gets seven more spirits more wicked that itself and so forth. Tom, these meetings in Los Angeles were called “Love LA” and they were inspired by Larry Lee. And he said, “This is a day to wage nothing less that militant warfare in the spirit realm. Demonic strongholds keeping the greater Los Angeles area and our country in bondage will be pulled down.” Charisma magazine called him the “apostle of prayer” and it showed him in combat fatigues on the front cover, but I haven’t seen any strongholds being pulled down. You could remember back way back in September 1989. Now we’re talking about 11 years ago. This has been going on for a long time.
Tom:
So we can check out what’s happened since and see if this has been effective.
Dave:
Well, the Miami Arena rang with the songs, prayers and victory shouts of about 10,000 enthusiastic Christians. They had been promised a “spiritual breakthrough” by Larry Lee. They were backed by 430 local pastors and they were demonstrating unity that we’ve got to have. Lee, (he’s speaking to them now) and he identified specific spirits of: violence, drugs, witchcraft, greed, and so forth that he said were dominating Miami. He vowed (I’m quoting him) “these spirits will not dominate this area.” He even declared that God had shown him the strong man of greed holding back the wealth of the wicked. Wealth which belonged to Christians and that (and I’m quoting him again) “if we bind the strong man of greed, the wealth of the nations will be given to the church and to individual Christians.” He got this audience so excited that they joined him in wielding an imaginary sword hacking this demon of greed to pieces. Well I’ve been to Miami recently and I would have to say that rather than there being any reduction in violence, drugs and so forth, or any transfer of wealth to the Christians, the opposite has happened.
Tom:
They are still cleaning up dead animals from the practitioners of Santa Maria around the courthouses of Miami and Dade County. So, nothing has changed. Things have, at least from some perspectives, gotten worse. But let me—
Dave:
Tom, so it’s a delusion and a lot of time and money, as you say, has been spent on this. Why don’t we rather get out and preach the gospel?
Tom:
Okay it’s a delusion, but there is another side to this that has, both of us, even more concerned. There are methodologies and techniques in these practices. Now how do these approaches to spiritual warfare, Dave, really differ from the very things that shamans and witches and those who are into sorcery, how different is it than what they are doing?
Dave:
They don’t differ. It’s hocus pocus. In other words the witch doctor, when he slits the rooster’s throat, he sprinkles the blood in a certain pattern; he mumbles a formula—bingo! Something happens in the spirit world. It’s like the rituals, the sacramental rituals of whether it’s the Catholic Church, or the Orthodox Church, or the Episcopalian church.
Tom:
The high church of whatever denomination.
Dave:
Right, you go through these rituals and you think this has some efficacy, or has some power—
Tom:
Yes, sacramentalism.
Dave:
That’s exactly what it is. And so they’re involved in, I call it hocus pocus, I’m sorry. Going through certain formulas and certain rituals, which you will not find in the Bible, which Paul, Peter, James, John, Jesus, nobody and the great preachers down through history never engaged in this. But now they’re going to do this and it’s very complicated and so forth, and they’ve got their prayer networks and they are all engaged in this and mapping, and Tom it’s really a tragedy. They’ve gotten off the track, they are spending their time and effort in something, it’s like spinning your wheels and it’s not producing anything and we’ve had 11 years now to see whether it did or not.
Tom:
Dave it’s also spawning other, basically false doctrines that some churches, not every church is into this obviously, but there are some churches that pick things up because they think it might be efficacious, it might have some affect, some good affect. One practice in this movement is the breaking of generational curses. And they base it on Numbers 14:18 and there is a similar verse in Exodus 34:7: “The Lord is long suffering and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” The idea being that our forefathers were cursed in some way for something that they did and now this curse has come down through the second, third and fourth generation. People—their activities and their lives are really being affected by these curses and they have to be delivered from these things.
Dave:
Yes, I am not sure exactly what that scripture means. Venereal disease for example goes down to the third and fourth and whatever generation. But to imagine then that I have got to somehow go back and search out my ancestors—my father came from England so I probably have ancestors that were Druids out there at Stonehenge worshiping. My grandfather on my mother’s side came from Norway, so they were probably involved in the Norse spirits. How can I ever find out, first of all, what all my ancestors were engaged in, the evils they were engaged in, whatever curses may have been put upon them and so forth. Furthermore, who says that has any power on me today, or on anyone else? The Bible says that if any man be in Christ he is a NEW creation, old things are passed away, all things have become new. Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. My sins have been forgiven. Christ died for my sins. Therefore to imagine that somehow all of this past history… How about back to Adam? —Is laid upon all of us, no our iniquities were laid upon Him, upon Christ and that includes all of this.
Tom:
Well, let me step this up a little. Because we are discussing the individual curses from lets say my generation or your generation and some of our forbearers. But there’s also identificational repentance. That means that not only do I have to worry about my own personal ancestors, but whatever nationality or background I came from—what sins did they do? For example, if I had—in this country, being an American, if our forefathers had slaves, if they oppressed the blacks, if they took land from the Indians, (which they did) I’m accountable for that. That’s affecting our land and unless—
Dave:
According to this theory you’re accountable—
Tom:
According to this theory I’m accountable and I have to—
Dave:
And this has come down upon you in some kind of a spiritual curse that has a power over your life, this is what they say—
Tom:
Exactly, so unless our country confesses these sins and Christians stand up—we could even go back to the Crusades—we have to repent over what our—what they would call Christians did during the Crusades, because all of those lay a curse on me and we’re not going to have healing, we are not going to have deliverance, we’re not going to be fruitful unless this is done.
Dave:
These were not Christians first of all, but apparently they don’t even have to be Christians—if they were our ancestors. Tom, this is putting a burden upon us that is not in the Bible, it’s too great to bear, and it’s like inner healing. Going back into the past—you go back and you search out some trauma or experience back there that supposedly has some power over you, you bring in Jesus and you are delivered from it. Things seem to work better for awhile, but then you fall back into depression or whatever it is, so now you are on an endless quest. Now I have to keep probing into the past and in contrast to what Paul said—forgetting those things that are behind, reaching forth unto that which is before, I press toward the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. It was never done in the Bible. It just isn’t true Tom! Now it’s related to psychology of course. It’s Freudian in one sense.
Tom:
Right, it’s like determinism.
Dave:
Right, we’ve got to go back and be delivered from these things. It gets people off the track, it gets them spinning their wheels, spending their time in unfruitful, unproductive, unbiblical techniques and complicated formulas—
Tom:
Let me keep getting to this. Generational—
Dave:
Tom, let me say, we’re not trying to be critical, I mean we’re sympathetic with these dear people, many people have been caught up in this— they believe—
Tom:
And they don’t know! It sounds good, seems to have some effect—
Dave:
And the problem is it can lead to disappointment and disillusionment because if you have put your hope in this— I mean if I am there with Larry Lee in Miami and I really believe this and I am whacking this demon into pieces with this imaginary sword, and he has identified this and now all the Christians have cried out to bind the spirit and so forth— I put my faith in this and then I find out it doesn’t work—somehow, I am going to blame God. I could blame God, because I’m saying well God let us down. No, God didn’t let us down. We took upon ourselves some idea that was not of God and that could be a trap from Satan to then cause us to lose our confidence in the Lord and in His Word. Jesus said, and that is what this program is all about—search the Scriptures daily. Jesus said if you continue in my word, then are you my disciples indeed. You will know the truth. The truth will set you free. He’s calling upon people to believe the truth. He’s calling upon us to preach the truth and we are His ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5), to beseech people to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, not through all these techniques—have absolutely nothing to do with it!
Tom:
Dave I want to keep talking about some of these other aspects, because some people, you know we get letters, people write to us, we track what’s going on in the church, magazines—
Our youth— we talked a couple of weeks ago about them marching around their high school, trying to claim the school for Christ.
Dave:
Bearing crosses—
Tom:
Right, well this is based on “Marches for Jesus.” And some people say well come on it’s just us standing up for Christ. It’s us out there in fellowship with other believers and we’re proclaiming Christ. But that’s not what the people who put that together, who are behind that—that’s not their mindset. This is spiritual warfare.
Dave:
Spiritual warfare—again, I sound like a broken record. But it’s not taught in the Bible and it’s not productive and that has been proven over the last 11 years. Charisma magazine said, and it’s referring to a group of experts now. Let me name some of them who are part of this spiritual warfare network: C. Peter Wagner, John Dawson, Cindy Jacobs, Jack Hayford, Larry Lee, Gwen Shaw, Dick Brunell, Tom White, Joy Dawson, Dick Eastman, Ed Murphy, Charles Kraft, Frank Peretti, and so forth. They formed this spiritual warfare network and C. Peter Wagner, he says God told him to take charge of this and it was going to have tremendous breakthroughs and so forth. Well Charisma magazine said “the insights that they have (you know, that they bring to this subject of spiritual warfare were not derived solely through Bible study (I have to say not at all through Bible study), but also through personal experiences of challenging the forces of darkness.” So this is where they got it from. We quoted last week, I think it was, and let me quote it again. C. Peter Wagner says “one fundamental thesis will control, that is coming to grips with the relatively new and at times somewhat radical ideas surrounding strategic level spiritual warfare, spiritual mapping, identification repentance and other such issues. Listen to this: the thesis that ministry, that is experience precedes and produces theology not the reverse and so Wimber said, John Wimber who is really you would have to say is behind this because C. Peter Wagner said Wimber was his mentor.
Tom:
Right, the late John Wimber.
Dave:
The late John Wimber. He said we are “cataloging all of our experiences so we can develop a theology. No! You judge your experiences by theology and theology comes from what the Bible says.
Tom:
Right, sound doctrine.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Which is not a favorite with most of these that you’ve mentioned.
Dave:
Its—you know I hate to mention it, but Tom its tragedy—
Tom:
Dave, I hope our audience understands that we believe that there’s a battle going on out there, but as you said last week and we can repeat—it’s the battle for truth. The Scripture says “put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” By the way, “wiles”—the Greek word there is “methodea” from which we get our term method which I think is interesting. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand. James 4:7 says to submit yourselves therefore to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you. That’s what the Scriptures say.
Dave:
The armor of God does not include any of these techniques.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
And this is not aggressive attacks against Satan, but it is withstanding his attacks against us and do it by truth, by righteousness and by the gospel and by the shield of faith.
Tom:
Right. We are to resist steadfast in the faith. That’s what we are encouraging.
Dave:
Right. That’s all we want to get across Tom.
Welcome to a special edition of 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 join us. Coming up in today’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation. In Religion in the News, “Who’s Pastor is In Your Pulpit” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Should We Forget about Healing Our Memories?” We hope you can stay tuned. 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. We continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the topic, “The Inroads of Spiritual Mapping.” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks Gary. The content for this week’s program is taken from chapter 24 of Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World and Church. Our discussion will center on spiritual warfare, which is a legitimate biblical endeavor. However, as you will learn, if you are not already aware, it’s taken some rather bizarre distortions in it’s applications among Christians today. Dave, it seems that most of what we’ve addressed in this series involves a legitimate doctrine or teaching of the scriptures perverted to such an extreme that it has become a tool of the adversary rather than the blessing God intended. Faith for example, prayer we’ve talked about, who Jesus is, His salvation and so forth. Now spiritual warfare—first of all, is spiritual warfare a true biblical endeavor?
Dave:
I don’t believe the term is found in the Bible—spiritual warfare. Ephesians 6[:12] does say “For we wrestle not again flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” So I suppose you could call that spiritual warfare. The next question however is what do we mean? How do we wrestle against these demonic powers? Well Paul says put on the whole armor of God and none of it is offensive—
Tom:
This being [Ephesians] 6:11.
Dave:
Right, none of it is offensive. He says that you may be able to withstand in the evil—not take the offensive against, but withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand. Stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth, and you know the helmet of salvation, the preparation of the gospel, your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all taking the shield of faith wherewith we shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. It doesn’t say anything about shooting darts back at them. The battle is really a battle in the mind and in the heart. It’s a battle of the faith. And II Corinthians 4: Paul says the god of this age has blinded the minds of those that believe not. Now I don’t believe that you can combat that blinding by some prayer or binding Satan or binding spirits. But you can only combat with the gospel. It’s the truth that sets people free. It’s not some ritualistic or some technique that we adopt.
Tom:
Right, you know James 4:7 lays it out very simply, very clearly: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
Dave:
It doesn’t say I can go after him and chase him.
Tom:
No, we have the same in 1 Peter 5:8-9: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: 9) Whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.” So there we have—resist and we are to resist through the content of faith.
Dave:
Yes, Tom probably many of our listeners don’t realize exactly what we are saying or the context. We are talking about some new idea. Spiritual warfare is a new idea. I don’t find it in the Bible. In fact, here is C. Peter Wagner of Fuller Theological Seminary and he says Lausanne II— I was at Lausanne I in 1974—
Tom:
Which was a missions conference.
Dave:
Right, I attended it in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974. It was sponsored by Billy Graham and you had Christian leaders from all over the world. It was the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. Lausanne II was held in Manila, I believe. It was, you could say, a follow up. There had been a number of follow ups. So C. Peter Wagner is saying “Lausanne II was the seedbed for the subsequent development of the spiritual warfare network. While in Manila, the Lord spoke to me (this is what God said to him) ‘I want you to take leadership in the area of territorial spirits.’ And he goes on and says I became the coordinator of the International Spiritual Warfare Network.” Now, I don’t know Tom, when you want to get to territorial spirits…
Tom:
Well, we are going to go through all of these, but for our listening audience there are a number of aspects which is what you are getting at Dave. Ingredients that make up what C. Peter Wagner calls strategic level spiritual warfare.
Dave:
This is something new, entirely new Tom.
Tom:
Right and it’s what they say. That God is using later day technology and that these things didn’t go before—we have no basis for it, because time wasn’t ready for it, in effect. But they involve things like territorial spirits, spiritual mapping, tearing down strongholds—
Dave:
Spiritual mapping—what is that? I remember being in Santiago, Chile when one of the leaders of this movement was in a Piper Cub flying over the city radioing down to earth. He was identifying the spirits that were in control of certain areas, certain parts of the city. So by doing spiritual mapping, you do so by identifying who these spirits are and then you bind them and that—
Tom:
Well that’s the claim.
Dave:
Right, well then that sets people free in this particular area. Now I notice that Paul never did that, Jesus never did it. It is not a biblical teaching at all, but anyway—
Tom:
These methodologies are numerous: tearing down strongholds, identification repentance, prayer walking, prayer journeys, prayer expeditions, now Dave it seems at the heart of this—we’re going to talk about probably each one, just so people—you know they don’t all come together and some churches get involved in maybe one aspect or another, so we want to cover as many of these things as we can, but at the heart of it really is hearing from God. In weeks past, we’ve talked about the contemplative movement—the idea that we develop techniques for hearing from God directly. Now—
Dave:
We didn’t develop them—they developed them.
Tom:
Right, foundational to this, the idea that God not only speaks through His Word which they would call the logos, but he also speaks on the basis of rhema. That is you are going to hear from God directly not through the written word and—
Dave:
Now Tom, can I just interrupt?
Tom:
Yes, sure.
Dave:
I think way back in 1950, maybe it was slightly later than that, the Assemblies of God did a white paper on this idea of rhema. Of course, Kenneth Hagin’s school is called The Rhema School of the Bible in Tulsa. The Assemblies of God themselves in their white paper said there is no difference between rhema and logos. That you might find some differences that seem to be in the Bible, but when you put it all together, basically it’s talking about God’s Word.
Tom:
Dave, these terms, anyone who wants to check it out in a concordance—these terms are used interchangeably. There really is no difference.
Dave:
Right, but they have made a BIG difference between them and that has become the foundation for the theology.
Tom:
Right, because you move now from basic doctrine—God’s written Word, to experiential information that you are hearing from God about His…
Dave:
Right, you are getting a rhema word from God they would say.
Tom:
Right, so that’s really at the heart of this.
Dave:
Well Tom, let me just give you another quote here from C. Peter Wagner. Well he’s introducing a book that he edited titled: Breaking Strongholds in Your City: How to Use Spiritual Mapping to Make Your Prayers More Strategic, Effective and Targeted. Now listen to what he says: “This book uncovers the wiles of the devil to release millions of unsaved souls now held captive. I am excited God has given us a marvelous new tool for effective spiritual warfare.” Just a little common sense—where did this new tool come from? If it’s a new tool, then Paul didn’t use it, Jesus didn’t use it, the Church didn’t use it for 1900 years. Now we’ve got a new tool, it came from somewhere—this is what you’re saying. They got a rhema word about this apparently. Furthermore, “finally it’s going to force the enemy to release millions of unsaved souls.” Now I thought it was the gospel that that sets people free and each one that hears the gospel, they have the option of believing it or not believing it. But now we’ve got a new tool and we’re going to set people free, unsaved people to believe the gospel, why didn’t God give us this tool before? If that’s how it works, why didn’t we know about this?
Tom:
But Dave, they would say because the technology was not there.
Dave:
What technology?
Tom:
Let me give you an example. Alright, he writes as an example of this: “It begins by breaking the city down into neighborhoods, manageable geographical areas. In Medellín, Colombia, they have designated 255 neighborhoods. Each one is mapped in detail, showing each lot, what buildings are on the lot, what color house and the name of the family or families who live there. The maps are distributed to prayer groups in the city, in other parts of the country and in other countries. If at least three prayer groups report spiritual impressions (there’s the experiential part) spiritual impressions, about a particular household or place, trained workers go right in and solicit specific prayer requests for that house. Prayer groups outside the city keep in touch through fax machines and computer modems. In Medellín, one of the participating prayer groups was a Baptist General Conference church in the United States even though they had no tradition of receiving prophetic words from the Lord, one day the group heard clearly that there was something wrong with a certain vacant lot in the neighborhood they were praying for. They faxed the information to Medellín. A ministry team visited the lot and found five occult objects cursed and buried by witches to control the neighborhood. They were destroyed and the gospel flowed freely.” What do you think?
Dave:
Well Tom on the one hand I have great sympathy for these dear people. They are so earnest, so sincere and they really think they are accomplishing something. Unfortunately they’ve gotten themselves caught up in spending their time and effort on a project that I don’t find in the Word of God. If this is really effective, you know it’s like Christian psychology. If Christian psychology has anything to offer, then we would have to say that the church was without it for 1900 years. If these spiritual warfare techniques that they are spending so much time on have anything to offer, then the church was without them for 1900 years. Jesus didn’t teach them, Paul didn’t teach or practice them—
Tom:
—or practice them. Right, there’s no examples—
Dave:
So now what are we basing this on? Well, back to this rhema word. Now we’ve got a word from God, we’ve got impressions, we have subjective feelings, and the people have that have now become the basis of truth apparently.
Tom:
Which they interpret as being from God.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
But with no support scripturally.
Dave:
Tom, how many years ago was it now, ten years or so, that John Dawson wrote his book: Taking Your Cities for God, this is the title of the book—Taking Our Cities for God: How to Break Spiritual Strongholds. Pastor Jack Hayford said this is a book of Holy Spirit insight into the toughest problems we face on this planet today. C. Peter Wagner called it again, the most important book on the subject ever written. Now John Dawson writes in the book, “The demonic strongholds that bind our urban populations, (this is what you’re talking about-and they’ve mapped this out now) have power, but we can over throw them. This section lays out a five-fold approach to bringing down our city strongholds. Now Pastor Jack Hayford has had a number of seminars in his The Church on the Way titled “Taking Your City for God.” This has been going on for years. I don’t know of any city that they have taken for God. In fact, evil seems to get worse: drug addiction, pornography, homosexuality, and so forth, all of these things are on the rise. I don’t know of a city they have taken for God. Furthermore, it isn’t biblical. Jesus didn’t take any cities for God; Paul didn’t take any cities for God—never told us that we were to do this, so again unfortunately they are spending their time and effort on something that isn’t biblical and will not be productive.
Tom:
Right, so it’s futile in that sense, but can be worse because now you are giving credence to methodologies and techniques. Rituals in effect that are—I mean that is the game plan of the adversary.
Dave:
Let me give you another quote from Wagner. I am sorry I am interrupting you and then carry on Tom, but we don’t rehearse this ahead of time, so—and I don’t even know what you are going to say next.
Tom:
Neither do I Dave, but that’s alright.
Dave:
Okay, but maybe that makes it interesting. But here’s Peter Wagner again and this is very significant in relation to what you’ve been saying “One fundamental…”—(he’s talking about spiritual warfare now) “One fundamental thesis will control this discussion of us coming to grips with some of the relatively new and at times somewhat radical ideas surrounding strategic level spiritual warfare, spiritual mapping, identification repentance and other such issues— the thesis that—ministry that is—experience precedes and produces theology, not the reverse. Now the man is very boldly, blatantly stating—where do these ideas come from? Let me tell you he says, “We are not taking them from the Bible.” This is not based upon biblical teaching but it is based upon our experience and what we have experienced, then we will interpret the Bible in light of this experience and part of the experience is Tom, they have conversations supposedly with demonic entities. And they ask: How did you get in? What is your modus operand, how do you operate and so forth and so on. And then on the basis of what these lying spirits have said—
Tom:
You see the delusion is even if you are commanding the spirit it’s not going to lie you because you’ve taken authority over it. I mean talk about delusion!
Dave:
I think spirits lie, but I think a lot of it— well I have a friend and they were part of a secular rock group—very successful—and they became Christians and they told me they had the experience with some of these people of—I think each of them had oh I don’t know a dozen or two dozen demons cast out of them and these things spoke with audible voices and so forth, this was after they became Christians. And then they told me that looking back on this experience, they felt that they had really been hypnotized. There weren’t demons in them at all, but they had been hypnotized into role playing to please those that were telling them that there were demons and so forth. So I am not even sure whether they are really talking to demons. But if they are, they are lying, deceiving spirits. And now we are going to base our ideas on how we are going to combat them from what they tell us. That doesn’t make sense.
Tom:
Well Dave that goes back to sort of the foundational teaching from this perspective. And that is that Christians do have and can have or that is they can have demons.
Dave:
This is what they say, not what the Bible says.
Tom:
Right, and there is a host of Christian writers that you know, from a fairly large ministry or are well known throughout Christianity and they would promote the idea that a Christian can be demonized.
Dave:
And they don’t get it from the Bible—
Tom:
And they admit that.
Dave:
Right, they get it from experience. After all, they’ve talked to these demons and so forth.
Tom:
And the analogy is that just as a psychotherapist, a clinical psychologist arrives at information through dialoging with individuals, through his experience with the individual, that’s the same basis that they have for coming up with their doctrines.
Dave:
Right. I am sorry Tom; I interrupted you back there—if you can remember where you were—
Tom:
Dave, we’ll go from point to point. You know there is so much in this. Going back to spiritual mapping—this is a technique, a methodology that has really gained a lot of popularity—George Otis, Jr.—he is one of the big names in this. Tell me about spiritual mapping. They say it’s based on the idea of the prince of Persia, the—
Dave:
Yes, if you went to the—if they try to get some justification from the Bible, then they go back to Daniel where Daniel has been praying for three weeks and the angel Gabriel comes and he says that he was delayed because the Prince of Persia withstood me for three weeks. So that supposedly means that there was a demonic being who was the Prince of Persia, who was controlling Persia, and the way you could get Persians saved would be to bind this spirit. It doesn’t say that at all. Daniel wasn’t praying for Persia, Daniel didn’t have Persia in mind at all, what Daniel wanted to know was what would happen in the last days and the angel Gabriel was sent to reveal this to him. So the warfare was between Gabriel and some demonic entity apparently of some power. We don’t understand that, but there is a warfare going on in the spiritual realm that you read of for example in Revelation chapter 12. There is war in heaven, Satan and his angels fought against Michael and his angels and so forth. But there’s nothing about binding, it doesn’t say that Gabriel bound this demon. It doesn’t say that to do so would deliver Persia. Persia in fact was never delivered from demonic delusions even to this day. So you couldn’t possibly get this whole idea of spiritual warfare from that teaching.
Tom:
The methodology involves going into the history books, looking back at what went on in a certain area, what they might find with regard to spiritual involvement, whether there were witches or shamans or whatever involved in a certain territory and then (as you said) binding those spirits because the belief is that those spirits are preventing the flow of the gospel.
Dave:
Tom we offer an excellent video, I think it is, (maybe you can remember the name of it) of missionaries in the South Pacific who went into a tribe, (a demonic tribe). They didn’t bind any spirits, they didn’t engage in any of this and they had tremendous success through the Word of God and through the gospel. You remember that tape?
Tom:
Right, Dave you are right. This is a video tape produced by New Tribes and it’s called “Delivered from the Power of Darkness” and if somebody’s interested they can call the 800 number and when we have that—we also have lots of materials— You know sometimes Dave, we forget we have great resource materials for these things that we just touch upon and if people are interested in more information with regard to some of the things that we talk about, they ought to contact us and Gary will have some information for them later.
Dave:
Tom what we’re trying to say—I guess our time is up—is we need to go by the Word of God. This is God’s Word, this is the guide. It is a “lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path” and when you come up with “new”—this is something “new,” they themselves say it—that ought to be a red flag right away. If it’s new, how come Paul didn’t know about it? Why didn’t the Holy Spirit reveal it sooner? Why isn’t it clearly taught in the Word of God and why don’t we have the doctrine and the practice of it there? So we just urge people to get back to the Word of God.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
Let’s go by this.
Tom:
Absolutely, and if they’re buying anything and they don’t check it out—the dangers that could be ahead—it’s not just a matter of exercise in futility here or there and using your energies that are not going to bear fruit, but you could be lead into heavy occultism.
Dave:
Become obsessed with demonic entities that you think you’re battling, when in fact you lost the battle against them because they are taking up all your time and they’ve deluded you with their lies.
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael; we’re glad you could tune in. Coming up in today’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation focusing on the question “What Does the Bible Say About Eternal Punishment?” In Religion in the News, “The Feng Shui Approach to Education” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Should Born-Agains be Baptized Agains?” We hope you can stay tuned. 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. We continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the topic, “The Inner Secrets of Inner Healing.” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks Gary. The main topic for this week’s program is the rise of occultism in Christianity and in particular it’s entry through psychology and inner healing. Last week we addressed the occult influences in the church of Christian psychotherapy. Today, we plan to discuss similar affects in the church brought in through inner healing ministries. Now inner healing is a form of metaphysical healing which attempts to bring about peace and harmony between the soul, or mind and spirit. Its methodology involves a mixture of biblical, psychological and occult concepts and techniques. First of all Dave, is there a difference between inner healing and Christian psychotherapy or is it all cut from the same tree?
Dave:
Well it is cut from the same tree I guess you could say but there are some differences among them. Psychotherapy can only be practiced by licensed psychotherapists. You have to have a Ph.D. and be licensed by the state. Inner healing is practiced by anybody who picks it up and starts to do it. Not all psychotherapy is like inner healing. In other words, inner healing basically involves not just going back in the past which psychotherapy does, but visualizing Jesus coming along side in some traumatic experience and working it out for you. There are many Christian psychologists who don’t advocate visualizing Jesus, but many of them do. So yes there are similarities and there are some differences.
Tom:
Dave last week we talked about Norman Vincent Peale being the father of Christian psychotherapy-psychology really and his background as we mentioned was the mind sciences, that’s really his theology. Now, it’s really interesting that the kind of—
Dave:
Maybe we need to explain mind sciences—
Tom:
Okay.
Dave:
These are the cults of Christian Science, Religious Science, Mind Science as you mentioned and the whole idea is that sin, sickness, death and so forth which was Mary Baker Eddy’s idea which she got of course from a hypnotist Quimby.
Tom:
Right Dr. Phineas Quimby.
Dave:
Right, the idea that these things don’t exist—they only exist in our minds and like the Power of Positive Thinking, or Schuller’s Possibility Thinking—you can change your circumstances—not just the way you feel about them, but your whole universe around you by changing the way you think. So Mary Baker Eddy in fact, denied the reality of sickness or death. In fact, Jesus didn’t die on the Cross because there is no such thing as death. So these are the mind sciences and Norman Vincent Peale in fact is claimed by them. He spoke, I don’t know how many times, but a number of times at Unity Headquarters at Lee Summit, Missouri. Unity is one of those what they call the New Thought—the New Thought Alliance. The New Thought Alliance which involves these various churches are really cults, there is nothing biblical about them at all. They claim both Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Robert Schuller was Norman Vincent Peale’s main disciple. Schuller credits Peale as being his mentor. The New Thought Alliance claims them as being part of—you know they teach the same thing. Robert Schuller has also taught at Unity Headquarters in Lee Summit, Missouri. He didn’t go there to correct them; he went there to commend them and to share his church growth principles with this horrible cult. He dedicated a Unity Temple in Warren, Michigan. He has spoken a number of times and blessed the Unity people, in fact he had one of the major Unity ministers, well she now is not directly affiliated with Unity—she was called in his brochure, Schuller’s brochure for his Church Growth Institute a couple of years ago—the Reverend Dr. Joni Coleman. She’s the pastor of Christ Universal Temple in Chicago. Again so their affiliation with Unity, with Science of Mind is very clear. In fact, I think you are about to read a quote out of The Seduction of Christianity.
Tom:
Right. A lot of people were shocked when we stated that Norman Vincent Peale, his background, most of his teachings were right out of Religious Science and Mind Science and in The Seduction of Christianity we quote Charles Braedon who—here’s a historian of New Thought, of Religious Science and so on and he writes “Peale’s father once told his son ‘you have evolved a new Christian emphasis out of a composite of Science of Mind, metaphysics, Christian Science, medical and psychological practice, Baptist evangelism, Methodist witnessing and solid Dutch Reformed Calvinism.’” Now that’s really the heart of Religious Science and Unity and so on. It’s an amalgam—it’s a collection of different ideas, but it all has sort of a Gnostic or metaphysical foundation.
Dave:
You would not get that so obviously if you know the occult. You would very clearly get it in his most popular book The Power of Positive Thinking. But we could take you to other books by Norman Vincent Peale, for example: Positive Imaging and in that Norman Vincent Peale teaches directly occult techniques that if a pastor wants to increase the number of people in his congregation he needs to visualize these people coming in.
Tom:
Yes, last week we mentioned how he utilized occult techniques such as visualization. We gave an example of how he got into fund raising through this methodology. Dave—
Dave:
And you could even get somebody to write out a check for you by visualizing them doing it. So this is direct occultism.
Tom:
Right, exactly. Now what’s interesting and what I am leading up to here is that as Norman Vincent Peale with his mind science background as the founder of, really the one who introduced the idea of Christian psychology—Agnes Sanford—she’s really the mother of inner healing. She really brought that into the church. Now her background: she started out the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary in China, but her theology developed into Religious Science.
Dave:
The teachings (and we don’t make this up) these are in her books and this is in writing. The teachings of Agnes Sanford are so incredibly unbiblical and directly occult that I don’t see how anyone can possibly deny it and yet she is the mother (you could say—I call her the Mary)—
Tom:
I did say that.
Dave:
I call her the Mary Baker Eddy of the Charismatic movement. She is indeed the mother of the inner healing movement. She trained all of these people—well she didn’t train all of them, the ones she trained, trained the rest such as Ruth Carter Stapleton, Rosalind Rinker, John and Paula Sanford who are still all over the country involved in inner healing; William Vaswig, Rita Bennett, and you’ve probably got other names you could add to it.
Tom:
Well, Richard Foster, we’ve mentioned his involvement—
Dave:
She didn’t directly train him, but he relied very much upon her.
Tom:
…And recommended her in an early edition of his book Celebration of Discipline.
Dave:
Yes, right and said he has learned a great deal from her; received a lot of insights from her…considered her to be very sound.
Tom:
Yes, David Semands certainly, Morton Kelsey, I am looking down a list here—Leann Payne of course, Francis McNutt—these are people who are still very much involved in inner healing and our concern here is that as sincere as they may be in trying to help people, the methodology, the techniques here come right out of the occult.
Dave:
Tom, let’s just get down to that. John and Paula Sanford say that Agnes Sanford was “for all of us the forerunner in the field of inner healing.” Now when we exposed some of these things about Agnes Sanford, John Sanford said that he had cast a demon out of her.
Tom:
Yes and no relation—she has a son named John or Jack, but this is John and Paula Sanford.
Dave:
With a “d” in it. Her name does not have a “d” in it. He claimed that he had cast a demon out of her and led her to Christ, but nevertheless he says that she was their mentor. Now this was before he supposedly cast a demon out of her and led her to Christ but—
Tom:
She was heavily involved in influencing people prior to that.
Dave:
—But let me just give you a few quotes from Agnes Sanford: “God’s love was blacked out from man by the negative thought vibration of this sinful world. So our Lord lowered His thought vibrations to the thought vibrations of humanity and cleansed the thought vibrations that surround this globe.” Where do you find that in the Bible? This is pure Science of Mind; Positive Thinking, negative thinking. “Therefore since He became a very part of the collective unconscious of the race when He died upon the Cross a part of humanity died with Him and an invisible personalized energy of our spirits has already ascended with Him into the heavens. Now this energy you know, this blood, that mysterious life essence remains upon this earth in plasma form blown by the winds to every land exploding in a chain reaction of spiritual power. We direct this great flow of life into a closed mind by doing penance for the sins of the world or for a particular person and by taking that one, that is visualizing them to the Cross of Christ and there receiving for him forgiveness, healing and life.” You know I thought that salvation comes through proclaiming the gospel and those who believe it are saved. But you don’t have to proclaim the gospel you can simply visualize. Now she called God—well she said we could tap into this flow of energy, this high voltage of God’s creativity. She claimed we are part of God; she called God primal energy and Jesus the most profound of psychiatrists. And she said you could forgive other people’s sins through visualization. We give a lot of quotes in this book and we could go on and on, but I think that’s enough for anyone to recognize that this woman is not only unbiblical she is teaching some very dangerous and destructive concepts of the occult. And yet this is the founder, the forerunner in the inner healing movement. And these people still look up to her and honor her and her books are still sold in Christian bookstores. Now what does that say about the discernment not only of these people but of those who still follow them to this day. That’s one reason for this radio program, Tom we are just pleading with people—we’re not trying to run anybody down, we are not making false accusations, we’re simply saying what do they teach? We give you the quotes, we give you the documentation and then we say let’s get back to the Bible.
Tom:
But Dave it isn’t just a matter of them having fond memories of or ideas about Agnes Sanford, they utilize the techniques that she is talking about that come out of the occult. We talked about psychology and Carl Jung last week. Agnes Sanford was a Jungian to the max! That’s where she got most of her ideas. For example, the collective unconscious—she believed as you mentioned in the quote earlier, that Jesus is a part, everything is a part, all of our memories are a part of a collective unconscious that you learn how to tap into.
Dave:
Tom, let me just go back a minute, because Richard Foster would be a name that is well known. He has the Renovaré ministry now in which he is taking this across the country and around the world. His books, beginning with Celebration of Discipline and so forth have sold, I would say, hundreds of thousands of copies. He’s been very popular. Now after what I’ve quoted of the beliefs of Agnes Sanford, listen to what Richard Foster says: “I have been greatly helped in my understanding of the value of the imagination in praying for others by Agnes Sanford. This advice of prayer through the imagination, picturing the healing and much more, was given to me by Agnes Sanford. Well I guarantee you Tom, that wasn’t given to her by God. It is not in the Bible. This is an occult technique. Foster endorsed Sanford and her books. He said, “I have discovered her to be an extremely wise and skillful counselor.” And yet she openly taught Eastern mysticism and occultism. She taught that humans existed in heaven prior to coming to earth trailing “a cloud of glory with an unconscious memory of that pre-earth existence and so forth….” Now how can we honor a woman like this when we really consider that she is really behind the inner healing movement? That gives you some insight into what this movement is really about and the dangers that are involved. And yet Tom, these people persist in this in spite of the fact that it is not biblical, it is contrary to God and it uses the imagination to visualize Jesus, to visualize people as though you can create reality in your mind. Tom, if I had any hair left I would pull it out I guess. It becomes a little bit frustrating after a while.
Tom:
Dave, I remember going back to the beginnings of the Vineyard movement. Ken Gulickson actually founded the movement before John Wimber was involved. But Ken had tapes then, he very much got into inner healing. His wife got involved and then he got involved out of her encouragement. From that, when John Wimber joined the inner healing movement, this was a major part of what the Vineyard movement was all about and when and it was all based on Agnes Sanford and her teachings.
Dave:
Yes, they offered her tapes, her books—
Tom:
Correct.
Dave:
It’s a tragedy Tom. What we’re seeing is—you follow the leader, you get some new idea—the Bible is not sufficient. What we need is some new technique for dealing with people’s problems. This is how psychology got into the church. This is how inner healing got into the church. But once you turn away from Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture—is this God’s Word? Is this the Manufacturer’s Handbook? Has He as Peter says in the 2 Epistle, chapter one given us all things that pertaineth unto life and godliness? Is the Bible, as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3, it will make the man of God will be perfect, mature, complete, thoroughly furnished unto every good work. Now as soon as we say no that’s not true, we need some help from other techniques, then you’ve lost your moorings, you’ve lost your compass, you have no basis left for determining whether this thing that you are involved in is true or false. It seems to work. You take a pragmatic approach. In fact, this was the approach that John Wimber took way at the beginning. He had a Calvary Chapel, a large Calvary Chapel and you know the story. Chuck Smith was concerned about some of the things that were happening and finally he said to John are you going to go by the Bible or by experience? And John Wimber said we are going to go by experience. If it works, that’s what we are going to do. And that was when Chuck Smith said (to his credit) please don’t use the name Calvary Chapel anymore. This is where the Vineyards came from.
Tom:
That’s the thrust that they took.
Dave:
Yes, you had some Vineyards already. I used to speak at them. These were good people, I loved them, but I began to warn them about John Wimber and some of his ideas and then of course when he called himself the Vineyard, he was well-known and most people think he was the founder of the Vineyard Movement. But the point we are trying to make is that when you get away from the Bible and when you go by experience you can get all kinds of experiences on drugs. I have talked to people all over this world, Tom. Moral re-armament people, their headquarters are in Kos, Switzerland. They could give you fantastic experiences. I’ve talked to Hindus and Buddhists, occultists, incredible experiences and some of them—they think they’ve had experiences with God. Carl Jung—the Holy Ghost appeared to him in the form of a dove, he picked up a spirit guide as we have mentioned in the past.
Tom:
Right, Philemon the demon.
Dave:
So this is experience and where it will lead you. I’ve got to get back to the Word of God and have my confidence in this.
Tom:
Dave, I just want to add this. When John Wimber began healing, he was looking for signs and wonders. That was his thrust. And as the inner healing started it involved physical healing. And that was the same way with Agnes Sanford except she wasn’t having much luck with regard to organic problems that people had. So then she made her shift to the healing of the soul, basically back to the mind science roots which she had. But that’s the trend that we see. They start out signs and wonders, looking for physical manifestations, but then they have to fall back to the spiritual and they push it to the realm. Again the spiritual and the experiential, but no real basis for objectively—
Dave:
Okay Tom, why do we even talk about this and why do we name peoples’ names? Well, because they may come to your church or you may pick up their books. They may be recommended to you by someone and the next thing you know, you are caught up in this. So it is amazing how many people can sit under someone’s ministry and not recognize the false teachings that are coming forth, not realizing where they are being led, until finally there they are. So we’re simply trying to warn people, trying to give them some facts. We’re letting you know what these people teach, where the teaching comes from. It comes out of the occult and involves occult practices and we are simply saying compare it with the Word of God. Get back to the Bible and let’s renew our confidence in God’s Word as being sufficient for our needs.
Tom:
Dave, just to add to that—if these individuals that we’ve mentioned are teaching things that are biblical, fine. I mean to their credit if that’s the case, but people have to be discerning as to whether that’s the case or not.
Dave:
There’s a mixture Tom, because not everything they teach is wrong and that is deadly. Because the good stuff then causes you to accept what is not of God.
Tom:
Dave, earlier I mentioned Gnosticism. That’s a term we don’t hear much these days, but really what it is— this is a problem that the church dealt with early on. These are the early heresies. We could say they were Gnostic heresies. It had to do with first of all, a mixture of different beliefs. Some out of the East, some dealt with mysticism, some dealt with secret knowledge. Gnostic means—it goes back to knowledge—
Dave:
It goes back to the Garden, the Tree of Knowledge, right.
Tom:
Right, but this is really the root of so many of the problems that we see have come into the church. It’s really at the heart—we talk about mind science, religious science, it has to do with the spiritual being more profound or important than the physical side of life to the point that the actual physical side is denied and everything must be spiritualized. We’ve talked about in other programs, positive confession, positive mental attitude, the Word Faith teaching; these are all Gnostic heresies to one degree or another.
Dave:
Amen, so let’s get back to the Bible and see what it says. Don’t believe us, we give you the facts, we give you the quotes, but mainly we want to teach the truth from the Word of God.
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael thanks for joining us. Coming up in today’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation focusing on the question “What is meant by More Abundant Life?” In Religion in the News, “The Monogamy or Polygamy Dichotomy” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “What’s Wrong with Your Imagination?” We hope you can stay tuned. 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. 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. We continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the question, “Healing the Inner Child?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks Gary. We are picking up where we left off last week. Our subject is the rise of occultism in Christianity and in particular its entry through psychology and inner healing. In our previous show we discussed the occult foundations of psychotherapy. Today we plan to discuss some of the ways that the spread of occultism is taking place in the church. Dave, Christian psychology is one of the major vehicles isn’t it?
Dave:
One of the major vehicles for occultism coming into the church is indeed Christian psychology because Christian psychology isn’t something new on its own. You can look it up in any index in any textbook, in any university or seminary in the library. In any psychology textbook there is no listing for Christian psychology because there is no Christian that is the founder of a school of Christian psychology. So what is Christian psychology? They have taken it from the theories of godless, in fact, anti-Christians to a man, every one of them is and as we noted last week, much of psychology comes out of the occult.
Tom:
Right, if this is new to some of our listeners and perhaps shocking, last week we laid the occult foundation of psychology, giving examples of how it started and what was involved particularly in regard to occultism.
Dave:
Yes, Carl Jung had his own spirit guide. Philemon he called him, that’s where he got most of his major theories. “A screeching chorus of ghosts….” These are his words, filled his home outside of Zurich and in three days and three nights under their inspiration he wrote his major work Septem Sermones ad Mortuos—The Seven Sermons to the Dead. He believed that he traveled with the dead in the spirit world that he was the preacher, the pastor to the dead, and it goes on and on. His major theories came out of the occult and we could talk about Carl Rogers and many others and so this is where it comes from. Now I want to quote Martin L. Gross. He is an investigative reporter, not a Christian; in fact he is an anti-Christian, so that makes all these words all the more interesting. He says, “Freud’s atheistic ideas have paradoxically influenced ministers, priests and rabbis who now flock to courses in pastoral counseling making many members of the cloth seem more Freudian than Christian.” Rather interesting, so Christian psychology isn’t Christian psychology. It is psychology from the world which is atheistic, it’s occult manifestations actually, that’s the origin of it, much of it, not all of it and they’ve brought it into the church and they’ve dressed it up in biblical language. Now let me just say another couple of things here, just to bring our listeners up to speed.
Tom:
It’s your mike, go for it!
Dave:
I’m quoting R. Christopher Barden, because Tom one of the reasons we have to say this is because the world has been deceived into thinking that psychology, secular psychology is scientific which it is NOT. And under that basis then many pastors have said well if this is scientific, well then it must be very helpful. So here’s a quotation from R. Christopher Barden. He’s a psychologist lawyer. He’s the president of the National Association for Consumer Protection in Mental Health Practices and listen to what he says, “It is indeed shocking that many if not most forms of psychotherapy currently offered to consumers are not supported by credible scientific evidence. And let me quote one other authority E. Fuller Torrey. He’s an internationally respected psychiatrist, again not a Christian, he says, “Psychiatry has been willing to sanctify its values with the holy water of medicine and offer them up as the true faith of mental health. It is a false messiah. So from the very beginning it’s very questionable at best; harmful at worst; not scientific. You know the psychiatrist themselves of every profession—the highest percentage of them under the care of psychiatrists, divorces, emotional problems, suicide and so forth. They can’t help themselves. So now—
Tom:
This stuff doesn’t work and we have not Dave Hunt saying this, or T.A. McMahon. We have research psychiatrists, people who are committed to checking their own field out.
Dave:
Many of them Tom. They recognize the bankruptcy of their own profession and they write against it. Now that Christians would now embrace this and bring into the church as though this could somehow supplement or improve the Bible is staggering. Of course as we have pointed out the man who first did that was Norman Vincent Peale. I am sure you want to get to that but in 1937 he established a psychiatric clinic and it had one psychiatrist in his church and it grew to more than a score of doctors and ministers and that became the inspiration for Christian psychology. And by the way, the entire evangelical church opposed this for about 50 years. But now it has been embraced. So this is where it came from. It came into the church and we’ve embraced it as though the manufacturer’s handbook, you know God created us in His image and our problem is that man rebelled against Him. We have the restoration of fellowship with God and a dynamic life in Christ through Christ indwelling the believer, but instead of relying upon that—
Tom:
It’s not sufficient according to this view.
Dave:
No, so we say well, but we’ve got to integrate. Let me just quote from an advertisement by Wheaton College in Christianity Today. It says that what they are offering is “the integration of psychological theory with Christian faith.” Now why do we need to add psychological theory to the Christian faith? For 1900 years the Christian faith was sufficient. The Bible says the just shall live by faith. We walk by faith, we’re saved by faith and we live by faith in Christ. But now suddenly that’s not enough. That’s not good enough and we’ve got to add to it psychological theory which is theory. There are hundreds of psychological theories which contradict one another, they don’t work, why do we want to bring them into the church? But now you want to talk about occultism—
Tom:
Yes, but before we get to that Dave, I just want to add this. When we are talking about wanting to walk by faith, we’re talking about the content of faith, the Word of God. As you mentioned earlier, He’s the manufacturer and He’s given us the “manufacturer’s handbook” and all things that we need to live a life that’s pleasing to Him—it’s in the book, but they are saying the book’s not sufficient; we have to turn somewhere else to science, but as we’ve established and we can continue to underscore, psychology, psychotherapy is not scientific.
Dave:
So let me just add this. We’ve probably said it before Tom, but it is so simple and so logical. If Christian psychology has anything of any value to offer the Christian, then the church was without it for 1900 years and the Holy Spirit somehow left out of the Bible things that we need to have to deal with our problems today. But when I read Hebrews 11 for example, the great faith chapter, I read of people who suffered. They suffered, they were slaughtered, they were hated, they were chased, they were starved, they dwelt in dens and caves, they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, tormented, afflicted, of whom the world was not worthy and yet they triumphed through faith.
Tom:
Right and these were really practical problems that they had.
Dave:
Absolutely.
Tom:
Everything that we experience today—you can’t say well we are more sophisticated, more anxious, more anxiety-ridden society—I don’t believe it for a minute. What do we face that they didn’t have to face?
Dave:
So let’s take it from James Dobson himself. We’re not trying to criticize James Dobson, he’s a very sincere man, a lot of what he does we have to commend him for, but on the other hand in his Focus on the Family magazine he said that (well I’m going by memory) this is a paraphrase, but it is very close to an exact quote. He said “Christian psychology is a good profession, a wonderful profession for any young Christian to aspire to (now these are his words) provided their faith is strong enough to withstand the humanism to which they will be exposed.” Now you have to ask yourself why do Christians have to go to humanists? They are anti-Christians, they hate God, they hate the Bible, but why must we go and study under them and study humanism in order to learn how to improve the Bible and to counsel from the Bible. It doesn’t make sense, but this is exactly what it is. In fact, Dr. Dobson and Dr. Gary Collins—he was interviewing Collins on his radio program, they pointed out that psychology is based upon the same five foundation points as atheistic humanism, but they said we can integrate it with the Bible. Now I believe that the Bible is sufficient. It’s been sufficient for Christians, for centuries, for thousands of years. Why then do we have to integrate godless theories that aren’t scientific, that don’t work and that are even harmful? Well, but we are going to sort through them and we’re going to throw out the ones that aren’t right, but we’ll use the ones that are biblical. I want to quote again the last few verses of one of my favorite poems. It says: Who would leave the noon day bright, to grope mid-shadows dim, and who would leave the fountain head to drink the muddy stream where men have mixed what God has said with every dreamer’s dream? I don’t think we should mix this stuff in with the Bible, because the Bible is perfect. This is God’s Word, and it claims as you quoted earlier 2 Peter 1:3 “According as his divine power hath given us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue…” Now the whole secret to the Christian life—I mean it’s not me struggling to live a good life—it’s Christ in you, Christ is my life and I do not believe that Christ in me needs any help from a psychotherapist and I don’t care whether you call it Christian psychology or what. What we need is to allow Christ to have his way in our lives. We need to deny self and take up the cross and follow Christ and trust Him to live His life through us. That’s all we are saying Tom. Search the scriptures daily, get back to the Word of God. Unfortunately Christian psychology undermines our confidence in the scripture because it says it’s not sufficient and we need some help.
Tom:
Dave I remember back when you and Martin Bobgan, who’s written, along with Deidre Bobgan have written many books about Christian psychology and they are terrific books, but I remember when you were at Fuller speaking to—
Dave:
No, Martin was speaking—
Tom:
Oh Martin was speaking? But anyway, he gave a challenge to them. Do you remember what the challenge was?
Dave:
Well Tom they didn’t invite him to speak to the whole group. They in fact, they don’t allow me or Martin Bobgan to really speak on this subject at our seminaries, at our Christian colleges, we are really banned. You probably know that John Ankerberg for example, tried for years to get any Christian psychologists to come on his television program and discuss the issues with us. No one has been willing to do it. But anyway they allowed Martin to speak to a small class. These were pastors who had gone back to get their PhDs in psychology in order to supposedly be effective in counseling from the Bible. I was sitting in the back of the class and I can tell you I was embarrassed, I was slinking down in my seat to get smaller and smaller because—
Tom:
Why were you embarrassed Dave?
Dave:
Because Martin Bobgan was laying it out clearly, the bankruptcy of this whole thing that they were studying and I was sure that there would be a wholesale exodus. They would all just abandon this because what he laid out was so factual—it was so thoroughly documented and couldn’t be denied. You know he didn’t change anybody’s idea at all. And so in the question and answer time they asked him some questions and then he challenged them. He said what we have to deal with are two basic problems: that is the model of man and the method of change. Now he said give me one theory out of psychology concerning the model of man-what is man- and the method of change-how do we change him—that is biblical, that the Bible hasn’t said first and said better—that’s going to improve upon this. There was a long embarrassed silence and finally one person spoke up and said, “well I’ve found psychology very helpful in potty training mentally retarded children.” Now Tom, I think it is pitiful that was the best they could come up with.
Tom:
Well even that is fallacious, I mean—
Dave:
Well it is, but now here are pastors and they have left their pulpits to come back to get a PhD in psychology so that they can be more effective in handling the Word of God and when Dr. Bobgan asks them—give me one reason why you are here, give me one thing out of psychology—that psychology offers concerning the two basic problems that we face—the model of man and the method of change—tell me what is it? There are a couple of professors there, here’s the class—they cannot come up with anything.
Tom:
Dave couldn’t we just simplify this even more and just ask people who are into this what has this provided that is efficacious, that is effective? That you don’t find in God’s Word. I mean if it is something new and something unique and something that works and something that’s very practical, we’d say fine with one proviso: Is it true to God’s Word or is it contrary to God’s Word? Because we know that there is pleasure in sin for a season and some things can seem to be effective, but in essence that’s a challenge.
Dave:
Yes, now we haven’t gotten to the occultism that you wanted to get to Tom.
Tom:
Well we have other programs Dave.
Dave:
We may have another week for this, I am sorry.
Tom:
Well let’s go back to Norman Vincent Peale in particular because he is of all the people involved in this who have had impact, you would have to start with him wouldn’t you? Well what I want to get at with regard to him is his theology. It seems to me it’s very consistent with the occult practices of psychotherapy.
Dave:
Well he offers occult practices. For example, he tells you that visualizing people—if you are a pastor—this is in his book, The Power of Positive Imaging—
Tom:
Imaging, right.
Dave:
He tells you if a pastor wants to increase his congregation he needs to visualize people coming into that church. And that will bring it about. Norman Vincent Peale in that book tells how he went out as a young pastor—they needed some money. And one of the board members that he had said to him, Look you go out and (he gave him a list of wealthy people in his congregation) you ask each of them for a contribution of $5000 and I will visualize them writing out the check to you. Norman Vincent Peale said well is that going to work? Well go ahead and try it. And he went to the first man, a physician, and he asked him for a contribution of $5000. The man laughed and said you think I am going to give you that? And then suddenly his whole manner changed. He pulled out his checkbook and wrote out a check for $5000 and Dr. Peale comes back to his board member and says it worked, it worked, I’m amazed. He [the board member] said of course it worked. I sent a thought hovering over you that hit him right between the eyes and changed his whole way of thinking. Dr. Peale said yes, I saw it hit him. I saw it change him. Now two quick things: 1) It’s not even ethical. I am going to get people to write out a check for my church by this kind of mind power, if that’s what it is? It’s not ethical. 2) What is this? This is not the power of God. This is occultism. Now let me just quote Dr. Peale, real fast—I know you have to get back in here, but let me just quote it real fast. He says, “Who is God? Some theological being—(I am quoting him from page 118 of Occult Invasion and we give you all the full documentation.) “Who is God, some theological being? God is energy. As you breathe God in, as you visualize His energy, you will be re-energized. Prayer power is a manifestation of energy. Just as there exists scientific techniques for the release of atomic energy, so are there scientific procedures for the release of spiritual energy through the mechanism of prayer.” So prayer is a scientific mechanism. This is science of mind, religious science—this is occultism.
Tom:
Dave you put the example before the statement that I wanted to make and that is that his theology is religious science; it is mind science. Some people believe that Norman Vincent Peale is a evangelical Christian or he’s a conservative Christian, but his theology is really religious science; mind science. It goes back to Mary Baker Eddy, to Christian Science—that’s the heart of it.
Dave:
Yes, well it is occultism. Somebody says well what does that have to do with Christian psychology? Well he’s the founder of Christian psychology. Okay, well so what? That doesn’t mean that Christian psychology has to partake of everything he believes. Well, as a matter of fact, there are hundreds of Christian psychologists who use hypnosis in their therapy. They regress people back into the past. This is a technique that has been in the occult for thousands of years. It is one of the most powerful occult techniques and we’ve discussed it before. It is even banned by California for example, will not allow testimony in court by any one who has been hypnotized. Because they can no longer remember exactly what happened if they have been hypnotized concerning the subject of the court proceedings. This has been fully documented in occultism, and yet they continue with this. They also have you visualizing Jesus. Many Christian psychologists have you do that. This is not the Jesus of the Bible. Going back in the past and visualizing Jesus coming along side and so forth, so we are running out of time Tom, but there are many other ways that we could document in which occultism has come into the church through Christian psychology.
Tom:
Dave we are going to get into inner healing. Inner healing by the way is a form of therapy, but it’s sort of more spiritual. When I say sort of, it’s not necessarily practiced by licensed psychotherapist, although they are into it to a great degree. It’s a ministry found among many people in the church and there is a connection here with Religious Science. For example, Agnes Sanford we can talk about next week if we have time. Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of Jimmy Carter—there are people who have developed this in the church and their background is really Religious Science, mind science. That’s the occult connection here that we are concerned about.
Dave:
Yes, so psychotherapy is what you could say the atheistic secular psychologist use. Let me quote Lawrence LaSham, we’ve probably quoted him before. He is president of the American Psychological Association who said, “Psychotherapy will be known as the hoax of the 20th century.” But it is as you said closely related not just to practices among Christian psychologists who follow these same proceedings, but now we have lay persons and they are doing wholesale psychotherapy on an audience—getting them into a quiet mood, and visualizing themselves and going back and seeing Jesus coming along side and so forth. So this is a form of psychotherapy which is being done to entire audiences and it’s called inner healing.
Tom:
Now this is in the church big time and one of the reasons for this program is to not only alert people to things that are going which we believe are drawing them away from God’s Word, from what God wants, from doing things His way. So we would challenge people to check these things out. Again this is the—our program here is Search the Scriptures—be Bereans—look to these things and see if they are true to God’s Word.
Dave:
Amen.
