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 with the focus on the book of Isaiah. In Religion in the News: “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Yogis at Club Meditation.” We’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question: “Who Created Evil?” 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 continue our revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the question, “What is Sorcery?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks for joining us in our on-going discussion of Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion, The Subtle Seduction of the World and the Church. Last week we covered the subject of “Spirit Communication: Why people get caught up in it and why the Scriptures warn against such activity.” Dave, although it’s condemned in the Bible, nevertheless, contacting spirit beings has been going on since the beginning of human history. Since sheer ignorance on the part of some has opened the door to entities intent on destroying their lives, I think it would be helpful to address some of the things that might get them into something that could end up being very devastating for them. What are some of the more common ways people wittingly or unwittingly contact spirits?
Dave:
A major way is through drugs, psychedelic drugs, mind-altering drugs. The New Testament comes down very hard on something that it calls sorcery and that in the last days mankind will not repent of its sorcery and God’s judgment will follow as a result.
Tom:
Right. That’s Revelation 9:21 and as we said before, we’re certainly not Greek experts, but that term “pharmakia” I mean, you don’t have to be a pharmacologist or a Greek scholar to understand that means pharmacy.
Dave:
So, drugs would be a major way and, as you know, mankind has used the sacred mushroom or the peyote from the cactus bud for thousands of years to contact spirit entities. That’s the whole purpose of the idea. In fact, North American Indians today, Native Americans or First Nation People, whatever you want to call them now still have the right by the laws of the United States to take peyote like Christians take bread and wine for Communion. And they do it in order to contact spirit beings. It catapults them into a spirit dimension. In fact, it was drugs that opened the door to the cosmic gospel of the gurus from the East. I have interviewed a lot of people— we quote some of them in this book and some of the other books on drugs—for example, here’s a young man who knew nothing at all about astrology, lived in a little town in California and had never read anything about it and had no interest in it. Suddenly, he is in contact with spirit beings—he has taken some LSD—and they are teaching him about astrology. They are teaching him that there is a Force that’s out there that governs everything and they are laying it out in live color in front of him. He is fascinated by it and when he comes out of his altered state, you know, he retains this information and it has now changed his life and the way he thinks. He had a friend who, on an LSD trip, was initiated into Transcendental Meditation. He didn’t have to pay Maharishi Mahesh Yogi a dime. He got it all from spirit beings on an LSD trip. Now, you don’t have to take drugs even. There’s a book in the library, used to be at least, 250 Ways to Reach an Altered State Without Drugs. For example, I was having breakfast in West Palm Beach; I think it was, with a leading attorney who wanted to talk with me because he had heard of some of the research I was doing. He told me that he had been at this party the other night and he was standing there talking with a leading nuclear physicist, whose name would be familiar, who has done some amazing research being used in some of our top universities, and he said, we were just making conversation and I said to him: “Well, where do you get these ideas?” The nuclear physicist said: “Well, a lot of the ideas I get from a school that I attend at night.” The lawyer looked at him and said: “You mean you go to night school?” And he said, “well not exactly, not what you’re thinking of, but very often when I fall asleep, I awaken out of my body, out in space in the company of other top scientists where we are taught advance concepts by spirit entities.” Now, the lawyer wanted to get my opinion about that. He said “Was this guy drunk, was he pulling my leg, have you heard of anything like this? I said, of course I have. You had better believe it. It is happening to increasing numbers of people. For example, the invention for Xerox, the Xerox machine came by that means. The popular book that sold tens of thousands of copies in Christian bookstores, Jonathan Livingston Seagull—
Tom:
Let me go back just a little bit—when you mentioned “Xerox” and then you put it in the context, how does this information come about? Because we know that there are a lot of rumors and really false accusations against Proctor & Gamble and so on, but—
Dave:
Well, the inventor of Xerox himself acknowledged this.
Tom:
Right, and he wouldn’t say that he was communing with demons or anything like that. So, he would have a rationale for the inspiration that he has.
Dave:
The book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was very popular, was a basic primer, you could say, on occultism and how to make contact and so forth. Richard Bach, who authored the book, said,—(I’m not making this up) — that he received all of this; it was dictated to him word by word by spirit entities. In our last program we talked about Helen Schucman, atheistic psychologist. She got a letter, 1100 pages, A Course in Miracles dictated to her by spirit beings. Again, it’s a phenomenon that it has been consistent down through history. Now, what is interesting, I would say, about the day in which we live, which I believe is the last days and I believe this is one of the indications of the last days. We quoted from the Scriptures and there are a number of other verses beyond the one that you cited that the world would be involved in sorcery; it would refuse to repent of it. It’s not that there are demons out there that are just zapping people, but, there are, in a sense, if you are open to it at all, but we are now training ourselves to do this. So, you were asking about techniques. Well, hypnosis—
Tom:
I would really like you to lay the foundation for this because some people are saying; well yes, I know the Bible condemns this, but now we have scientists doing this or we have these individuals doing that, and it doesn’t seem to be religious. Dave, tell us about Sir John Eccles. I know this is, even on his part, it’s speculation but it’s a learned speculation given the feelings. He’s a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the brain, right?
Dave:
Yes. Well, some of the lectures—I’ve listened to a few of them and the books that Sir John Eccles has written are very fascinating. As you said, he received his Nobel Prize for research on the brain. He describes the brain as: “A machine that a ghost can operate.” He arrived at this conclusion, for example, he wired the brain of various people so that he could trace the neural activity through the various parts of the brain. He would give them a task; not just playing the piano that you could do sort of without thinking but something that you had to think to do and then he would follow the neural activity through the brain in his research. But then, he gave the same task to someone who, perhaps, had Parkinson’s or someone who was, in fact, paralyzed— could not do the task and he noted that always a certain area of the brain—he called it the SMA, the supplementary motor area—that fired first, and then, the neural activity spread from there. But in those who were paralyzed and couldn’t even do the task he noted that, that area of the brain fired normally, but then nothing else happened because the brain could not carry on the message that was being given to it by the spirit. Your brain doesn’t think; if it did we would be prisoners of our brain. Our brain is like a computer that we use. There’s a ghost in the machine, as they say and the brain is like a computer that we use to interface with this space-time-matter continuum in which our bodies function. So, even paralyzed people—that part, the SMA, of their brain fired normally, but then the brain could not carry out the instructions that have been given. Now, the altered state of consciousness is the key to the whole thing. It’s called the ASC or the SSC, the shamanic state of consciousness; because all the shamans, the witchdoctors, medicine men and so forth, all knew that they had to put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. Now, some of them did it, as we mentioned, through drugs, various forms of drugs. But others did it through a simple exercise called “visualization.” They knew that if they got into a relaxed state and they visualized themselves on a journey to the upper or lower worlds to the past or the future that they would meet some kind of an entity, whether it be animal or human. This would be their spirit guide.
Tom:
How does that relate to spirit entities?
Dave:
Well, in a normal state of consciousness your spirit runs your brain. In an altered state you have loosened the normal connection. This is the relaxed but alert state and there are all kinds of names for it—yoga. I remember having a debate on national television with Jose Silva, the founder of the Silva Mind Control. As a young boy, he would have all out-of-body experiences. But nobody is out of their body. The Bible says the body without the spirit is dead. So, if they are out of their body—if Shirley McLean was out of her body she was dead. It would be a resurrection to come back, but you have, as near as I can explain it is; it’s like a demon playing a video tape in your brain. And he used to go out of his body. We have people training you how to go out of your body. Robert Monroe, for example, has the whole institute set up for this and some of our top military intelligence people and the CIA—
Tom:
You listen to Art Bell—if you’re willing to do it.
Dave:
Okay, he will tell you about it. But Jose Silva, on his own, got involved in this. He was going out of his body and there was always this Indian sitting there in yoga fashion, yoga position—
Tom:
In his imagination.
Dave:
Well, yes. He thought he was out of his body and it was very real to him. Finally, one day this Indian told him that if he would follow his instructions he would become his guru, his spirit guide. And he did, and on that basis of following these instructions, he developed the Silva Mind Control it’s called, but now it’s known as the Silva Method. Hundreds of thousands of people are involved in this around the world. Now, Jose Silva used to say that yoga is the slowest way, that hypnosis is the fastest way, and Silva Method is the surest way to make contact. The whole idea with the Silva Method is you build a laboratory; you construct the laboratory in your mind and the big event the big day arrives when the elevator comes down into your laboratory and the elevator door is open and out walks two entities, a male and a female. This is Carl Jung’s animus and anima and these are your spirit guides and this is how they can do incredible things through these two entities. So, if you get into an altered state, no matter how you do it, you have loosened the connection between you, your spirit and your brain, and that allows another spirit to interpose itself, begin to tick off the neurons in the brain, create a universe of illusion, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic colors, voices, revelations, prophesies, inspiration, the various lies of Satan. So, the New Age Movement is also called the consciousness revolution. This is an old technique that has been used for thousands of years.
Tom:
You know, there may be some people out there listening to this and we are going to again address things like imagination, visualization, meditation and so on. But, you know, there are some people who think; wait a minute, I visualize things. And there is a visualization—I’m a writer, I wrote screen plays, very much interested in the arts, and there are certain things that would be impossible for me to do if I couldn’t begin to see some things, begin to visualize what I was—Now, we’re not telling people that’s occultic, are we?
Dave:
No. There are legitimate uses of visualization if you are an architect, an engineer, a screen writer or whatever. It’s when you use the imagination, when you use visualization in order to contact the spirit world, in order to contact God, to contact Jesus Christ, to get revelations, to get some hidden knowledge, or to acquire some supra-normal power that you wouldn’t otherwise have, then, you have stepped into the occult.
Tom:
Right. Based on what we said earlier, Dave, if I said, “chocolate ice cream cone.” Now, to me, I could begin to see that but this spirit, my spirit is in charge of this imagery. In other words, I’m able to see in my mind an object but based on Eccles’ idea, based on what you’ve said that if I somehow put myself into a state where another spirit can interpose itself and begin to do the same thing with my mechanisms—
Dave:
While you were still awake; it’s not a dream; you’re experiencing it. Tom, for example, I’ve interviewed quite a few people who have been, say, on LSD—never have taken it myself, I haven’t even taken an aspirin for many years, I don’t like any unnatural substances—but anyway, I can tell you that some of them have told me—Here’s a half a dozen guys and gals in a room; they have dropped acid, LSD. Suddenly, they are all seeing the same things. They are in the same imaginary landscape, sharing the same adventures. Now, you tell me how that happens without some common source of inspiration.
Tom:
Either it’s an objective reality that they have all tied into or you’ve got entities playing the same scenarios through their brains.
Dave:
So, this is the problem. Look, God speaks to us through his Word. He says some pretty serious things when he warns us, as we have already mentioned, and He tells us to give heed to His Word, to His advice and to follow and obey Him and He warns us that if we do not, if we follow our imagination and we follow the voices that Schuller says everybody ought to get in touch with, you know, then, we have some very serious problems and we are stepping into an area of grave danger. Well, the grave danger, first of all, is that we have disobeyed God. Secondly, we are out there—it always, I find it fascinating, Tom, that so many people think that when they get into a state of consciousness where they can’t verify, where you have lost touch with objective reality so you have no criteria for evaluating this thing, then, they think, suddenly, they are really being tuned in to some great wisdom. Well, part of the wisdom that they get is that they are God. And again, I have interviewed so many people; suddenly they couldn’t distinguish between themselves and physical objects. They weren’t just the rock over there or the tree, the sky, they were everything, they are it, they are the universe, and they are God. They think if I could just—See, this now becomes their reality; and they think there has to be some way without drugs. There has to be some way just by mental processes that I can become master of my fate. I can control my life and the lives of others, by the way, is one of their ambitions, but I could create reality with my mind and this is, you could say, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that many of these people are pursuing. And, it’s being pursued in some of our leading universities from Harvard to Stanford by parapsychologists who are attempting to find some power. It’s the human potential movement, another word for it. There is some infinite potential within mankind, some power greater than atomic power, if we could only learn how to tap into it. And so, they get involved in altered states in order to reach this potential. But, at the same time, when you get into an altered state you have lost contact with objective criteria for evaluating your experience and then, you are led into a great delusion.
Tom:
Dave, you said earlier that you believed that we were in the last days. I agree and we quote the Scripture talking about how sorcery will be abounding in the last days.
Dave:
Well, let me give you another Scripture: 1 Timothy 4:1 “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly” —Paul says, so you had better pay attention— “that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;…” You learn an awful lot from that. I have verified, Tom, I can only say in my own research, most of these people who are the leaders in this movement now, at one time were professing Christians; some of them professing evangelicals. They have departed from the faith; they are apostates, they have rejected the faith that they once—I don’t think they were real Christians, they couldn’t have been but at least they tasted of it as the Scriptures say and they had some consciousness of the validity of the Word of God. Okay, “…they will depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits.” The Bible says there are spirits out there that are literally trying to seduce the human race just as the serpent seduced in the Garden. And then it says, “…doctrines of devils.” I find that interesting because Paul warned Timothy and said, “The time is coming when they will not endure sound doctrine.” I find that, and I know you find this, people are not too interested in doctrine that’s too dull, you know—give me something exciting; I want some exciting experiences. So, we are in a time when doctrine is being despised. At the same time, “doctrines of devils” are being embraced and we are teaching ourselves, even within the church, techniques, literally techniques, if you just visualize Jesus, focus on Him—Tom, there are so many Christian leaders, Christian psychologists who are teaching this—then this Jesus will really come to you. Or, you have some subconscious problem; let me regress you under hypnosis, into the past and so forth. So, we are literally training ourselves, opening ourselves up to these demonic entities.
Tom:
And, as the world, we know the world is being prepared for the antichrist, I mean, there is no doubt about that. And when we find things like, not only ideas and teachings, but we started off this particular program talking about drugs. I mean, we are in an over-prescribed society throughout the world. We have more than a million kids on Ritalin, which is scheduled to addictive drugs like cocaine. We see these things going on—
Dave:
By the way, Sigmund Freud was hooked on cocaine. In fact, he even prescribed it to his patients. There was a time when the major pharmaceutical companies prescribed it. They thought it was great stuff, but we now realize that it isn’t, but not for the right reasons.
Tom:
Well, we have a conditioning taking place today in the world and that grieves us. This is why you wrote this book, Occult Invasion, The Subtle Seduction of the World and the Church, and it’s not just subtle anymore. Maybe when you wrote the book—but I’m only kidding about that—but the seduction is taking place and the conditioning is taking place and what grieves us, many who claim to be evangelicals, who claim to be followers of the Lord, are falling into this. Some are leading the way.
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 with the focus on the book of Isaiah. In Religion in the News: “The Return of a 35,000 Year-old Spirit.” We’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question, “Why Not Yoga at the Y?” 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 continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the question, “Can Spirits Communicate with Us?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. For those of you who may be first time listeners to the program, for the past few weeks we have been discussing Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion, The Subtle Seduction of the World and the Church. Now, our objective is simple. One way to avoid being seduced is to be informed and, Dave, while I may not be exactly unbiased there is no book available, at least that I know of, that is more informative on this particular subject. If you have the book and you just started following along we’ll be discussing chapter 9 during today’s program. The topic is: “Spirit Communication: Why People Get Caught Up In It and Why the Scriptures Warn Against Such Activity.” Let’s start with the Scriptures, Dave. First of all, what are the Biblical warnings against dialogue with spirit entities and what is the reason behind it?
Dave:
Well, you have a number of them. Deuteronomy 18, of course, would be a major one and necromancy or being in touch with familiar spirits, attempting to contact them, is absolutely forbidden.
Tom:
Let me read Deuteronomy 18:10-11. “There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” Now, of course, necromancy—that is inquiring after spirit entities, gods, and idols, whatever it might be.
Dave:
Well, first of all, there aren’t any such beings. I mean, there are demons out there but there are no spirits of the dead and most people think that they are in touch with spirits of the dead, séance, for example. Many of our leaders down through history from Queen Victoria to Abraham Lincoln to McKenzie of Canada and, I’m sure, some of the current ones have been involved in séances and trying to get in touch with spirits. Carl Rogers, for example, and his wife Helen, were involved in séances and that is what led him into the occult. Even after his wife’s death he thought he was in touch with her through an Ouija board. So, this has been very common. The problem is: Number 1—it is a delusion because the spirits of the dead aren’t there—they are either in heaven or hell—they are not flitting about on the astro plane communicating with us. Secondly, the real entities that are speaking are demons and they have a purpose in this. For example, Bishop James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, when he got in touch through Anna Twig, a spiritist in London,—he happened to be in London—his son had been living in London and he was visiting his son’s apartment and strange things were happening that caused him to believe his son was trying to communicate with him—physical things were being moved about and so forth. So, he contacted Anna Twig and here comes his son’s voice. He recognizes it as his son’s voice—Anna Twig has never heard his son speak—he says things that only father and son knew. Intimate things about the home and the life, you know, of his childhood. This convinced him that it was indeed, the spirit of his son. But what does his son say? He says, Well, Dad, I’m not here for just a pleasant afternoon’s conversation. I have a mission now and part of it is to explain that there is no such thing as death. We don’t really die, we just move on to graduate school. I want you to know, Dad, that God is not personal, he’s a force and I want you to know that Jesus is not the Savior. He’s just more highly evolved than the rest of us. I haven’t met him yet, he’s on a higher spiritual plane but I’ve heard about him here, you know. So, there is a purpose behind this communication on the part of Satan and that is to spread his lies.
Tom:
Dave, the Bible, in numerous places warns us against this. Now, if that’s the premise of the Bible that there are no spirits of the dead out and about, then what we’re saying here is that something is posing as the spirit of Bishop Pike’s son and we’re able to put it together that these are adversaries against the God of the Bible, against what the Bible says because of the message and the information, right?
Dave:
Right, even the New Agers. Of course, in the New Age we now call it channeling. They don’t call it séances or spirit communication anymore they call it channeling. There are various channelers who claim to be in touch with—they are actually familiar spirits, various ones speak for them. They, in fact, have their persona that speaks through them. Ramtha, speaking through J. Z. Knight, for example. Ramtha, who claimed to be a fifty thousand year-old warrior from Atlantis—
Tom:
We’re going to address that in our “Religion in the News.” Go ahead, I’m sorry.
Dave:
These are not just my ideas, although I verified this in interviewing people in various countries around the world. But even the New Agers themselves and the leaders, the experts, so called in this area, John Clemo, for example, who wrote Channeling. They all acknowledge that there is a consistency in the messages that come through from these entities. Now these are people who have had no contact with one another previously, they are not in cahoots, they claim to be getting messages from the spirit realm, ascended masters, extraterrestrials, they will pose as most anything and yet there is a consistency in them and, amazingly, it conforms to the four lies that Satan presented to Eve through the serpent—that was a channeling of a sort through the serpent in the Garden. So, that gives us a pretty good idea of who is behind this.
Tom:
Can we categorically say that all spirits are bad? I mean, can’t there be good spirits out there? What does the Scripture have to say about fallen angels?
Dave:
I don’t think God is forbidding this because he doesn’t want us to be in touch with some good spirits. Well, there are angels and angels may communicate, but they initiate it. And I’m not saying it couldn’t happen today. It happened in Bible days and possibly it could happen today. But here is something important, I guess, for listeners to understand. You do not have a technique for getting in touch with the Spirit of God, for getting in touch with Jesus, for getting inspiration from God, the prophets didn’t adopt some technique that allowed them to get in touch with God, receive messages from God, nor do you have some technique for getting in touch with angels. But all of the occultists have a technique. It could be a Ouija Board, a divination device, it could be a crystal ball or it could simply be a particular drug which puts you into an altered state of consciousness, it could be hypnosis, it could be yoga. These are ways of getting in touch with the spirit dimension. This is called divination, necromancy and is absolutely forbidden and yet we have it being taught in the church—Visualize Jesus, get a clear picture of Jesus and he will come along side. Imagine yourself back in some traumatic experience in your childhood and this Jesus will come along and he will deal with it and deliver you from it. Well, very clearly, they are making contact with the spirit world because this Jesus that they began to visualize and imagine, suddenly takes on a personality of his own, begins to move and speak. But this is clearly not Jesus. You can’t call from the right hand of the Father on high, the Son of God, as your private guru to appear before you when you please. Never, ever, were such methods used by the prophets or the apostles.
Tom:
And all of these different techniques, again, to go back to the Scriptures, are condemned. For example, Saul, the Scriptures talk about Saul and how he had banished all those who had familiar spirits from the land. But then when he disobeyed God and Samuel had died, he was in a spot. He wanted to hear from Samuel who gave him counsel prior to Samuel’s death. The Witch at Endor, she was a—call her a channeler—this was basically what she was doing.
Dave:
Spirit medium.
Tom:
Right and she did bring up Samuel.
Dave:
She didn’t bring up Samuel.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
God allowed him to come up, in fact, she was shocked at what she saw and was frightened and then she recognized this really is Samuel. She knew she was in trouble because then she realized that was King Saul and this had been forbidden. But that is the one exception in the Bible and God allowed it for a purpose.
Tom:
And what happened to Saul? I mean, Saul, the Scriptures say, I Chronicles 10:13: “So Saul died for his transgression which he committed against the Lord, even against the Word of the Lord, which he kept not, and also for asking counsel of the one that had a familiar spirit to inquire of it.” So, where as God allowed this to take place, Saul still paid for that sin because….
Dave:
In fact, Samuel was the one who came and told him that it would happen.
Tom:
Right. This is our concern. If the Bible says clearly, over and over, it condemns sorcery in the New Testament, that is, I mean, we are going to talk about sorcery a little bit later, but it really has to do with contacting spirit entities, because these entities are deceivers, they are liars, they are destroyers. They are like their father, the devil, and they are out for the destruction of mankind.
Dave:
That’s their whole purpose. We have a very interesting example that we cite in the book involving the famous, well known psychologist William James.
Tom:
Yes, absolutely. He is highly influential still today.
Dave:
Right. And Columbia University Professor of Logic, James Hyslop, who, by the way, came to the conclusion that these were evil spirits out there. Nevertheless, they entered into a deal together and they agreed that whoever died first would try to make contact with the survivor. William James died in 1910 and Hyslop lived another ten years and so, sometime after James’ death, Hyslop received a letter from a husband and wife, whom he had never heard of, in far away Ireland, a country he had never visited. They had been playing with a Ouija board-like device and were bombarded by messages from the discarnate spirit of someone named William James telling them to contact a Professor James Hyslop, of whom they had never heard. The message they delivered, finally, when they located him was: Remember the red pajamas? It was an apparent reference to a trip that Hyslop and James had taken together in which upon arriving in Paris their luggage was missing. They shopped for a few necessities and the pajamas Hyslop bought were bright red and James had teased him about them at that time. Now, you would think that only the surviving spirit of William James could have had that information and could have passed it on. I mean, this is an incredible example. These people had never heard of James Hyslop, this professor, and yet here comes this message. Now, the whole purpose of the message is to deny that death is real—to deny, as the Bible says: It’s appointed unto man once to die and after this the judgment. No, he wasn’t under judgment—he’s out there floating about on the astroplane perfectly content and able to communicate. You have it in movies. For example, you remember the film, Poltergeist? They had these strange things happening and so forth and in comes a physic and explains why. Because the house is built over the cemetery and the souls of the dead are restless and so forth. It happens frequently. You have a haunted house and a physic comes in and feels the vibes and gets a message that someone was murdered in this house and their body was buried in the northeast corner of the basement and they just want a proper burial and then they will be at rest. And you dig down there and, what do you know?—there is a skeleton there; there are remains of someone. You give it a proper burial, you don’t even know who it is, but give it a proper burial and then the poltergeist activity and the haunting cease. Well, doesn’t that prove that these people are around? So, this is Satan. These are demons who are bringing these things to light in order to convince the world that what they say is true and that there really is no death and that these people are still able to haunt their house and now they will be at peace and so forth.
Tom:
If we are going to look for a rationale here, I mean, we know what the Scripture says, we know the Scripture says be warned, do not communicate with these beings because they are liars and deceivers but there are lots of rationales out there. They come to us from parapsychologists, from mediums. I mean where do they get the information? They get the information from the entities that the Bible says are liars and deceivers. Now, what would make us think that they are liars and deceivers? As you said earlier, if they are denying what God’s Word says, if they are giving us information or if they are even putting together all different kinds of scenarios. You mentioned Bishop Pike, he was convinced certain things were going on, certain things that only he knew and that his son knew, but what about spirit entities? I mean, haven’t they been around for a long time? Don’t they have the power of observation? If they want to make a convincing case to convince us of the lie they are more than able to do it, aren’t they?
Dave:
They have plenty of information that they could pass out. I’m looking here—I have an article in front of me, Tom, about Alfred Alschuler. He’s a leading psychologist, very well known, (I don’t know whether he still is, but at this time he was president of John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California.)
Tom:
Wasn’t it the university that first gave the Ph.D. in parapsychology?
Dave:
It could be. It’s possible, but I don’t recall, but I think you may be right. Anyway, he was giving a talk to a group of psychologists. This is what he says, “There’s a long and rich history of human beings whose lives have been changed significantly after an encounter with inner voices.” And he urged those attending this convention to take those voices seriously. He said, they come under various guises or people think they’re identity could be the collective unconscious, the Holy Spirit, extraterrestrial beings. He stressed it’s not were the voices originate from that’s important but rather the messages the voices seek to convey. And he says the debate over what inner voices really are is similar to the quest for the nature of electricity. Not quite. Because electricity is a neutral, impersonal force. But these voices have a personality and a purpose behind them. But, here he is, leading psychologist, president of a university, and he’s saying, what we need to do, in fact the heading of the article is “Alschuler Entreats Counselors To Learn About Inner Voices.” So, now all psychological counsels, what he’s saying is, a psychotherapist should learn about inner voices because people will be in touch with these beings, and don’t just brush it off and don’t even think that it’s evil, but try to recognize some good messages coming through. You know that Carl Jung, for example, who probably, and I’m sure in fact, has influenced not just the world but the Church far more than Sigmund Freud. He had his own spirit guide. In fact, not just a voice, but it manifested itself.
Tom:
Is that Philemon?
Dave:
Philemon, the demon, right. I think he called it “Philemon.” Philemon the demon, he said, was as real to me as a person. We walked up and down the garden arm in arm and he taught me most of my major theories. And, of course, on another occasion, well, for three days and three nights, he called them a “screeching chorus of ghosts” came to his home near Zurich and under their inspiration and three days and three nights he wrote his major works: Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos. He became convinced that he was a parson to the dead, that he traveled with the spirits of the dead—(this is Carl Jung). His major theories came from inspiration from the spirit realm—demons, not spirits of the dead, and certainly not angels or the Spirit of God. So, this idea has played a very important role in human history.
Tom:
Dave, let me interject this. When you listen to, whether they call themselves parapsychologists or psychotherapists like Jung and others, especially those who are into transpersonal psychology, you know, the study of the spirit, I mean, as if they could do that; they lay out certain areas that those who recognize that there may be evil involved in some of these. But they lay out things—(where do they get them?)—to say that they are protected if you do this. Even mediums would say, well, if you only use it for the good, if you are altruistic about it, if you do—where do they get these ideas?
Dave:
Or, if you put a circle of white light around here. Well, of course, they are telling you that so you drop your guard and then you think that whatever they say will be true. Edgar Casey also got all of his information; in fact, he called it the information, from the spirit realm. The Course in Miracles was dictated to Helen Schucman, who was an atheistic psychologist at Columbia University. Here’s a woman who didn’t believe in anything at all, certainly not spirits, even spirits of the dead and yet this voice kept telling her: “This is A Course in Miracles, take it down. This is A Course in Miracles, take it down.” She consulted with her psychologist friends at Columbia University and they said take it down! So, she took it down (1100 pages) A Course in Miracles it’s called. But listen what the voice that dictated it said to her. I’m quoting now from her: “The name Jesus Christ as such is but a symbol of love that is not of this world. A symbol that is safely used as a replacement for the many names of all the gods to which you pray. This course has come from him.” So, here we have Jesus, supposedly now, talking to Helen Schucman, an atheistic psychologist, only this Jesus is going to contradict everything that the Bible says about him. This Jesus is going to say there really is no sin; there’s no reason for forgiving someone. Forgiving is simply recognizing that there is nothing to forgive, that there’s no death and no judgment; God is impersonal and so forth. So, this is the whole idea behind this. This is Satan coming to convince mankind of the same lies that he brought to Eve through a talking serpent. And, by the way, talking serpents, that’s not fantasy, that’s not some old fashioned idea. We have modern scientists today who are trying to communicate with dolphins; they are trying to teach the alphabet to chimpanzees. Your North American Indian witch doctors and so forth believe they can communicate with the animals and even with the trees and so forth. So, this is a persistent idea throughout human history.
Tom:
And reinforced right at the Garden, right?
Dave:
Well, the same purpose, right down through history that the serpent had in the Garden.
Tom:
Dave, one last thing. We’re about to finish off here but it’s my concern that if people may hear us saying the Bible condemns this and we give you chapter and verse and all of the Scriptures. But then, on the other hand, they say such and such is a scientist and he is giving us this information about it. Remember, a while back, a number of years ago, we had an on-going dialogue with Walter Martin and Walter felt that hypnotism was all right as long as it was in the hands of medical personnel. But that doesn’t change the technique or the device. It doesn’t —
Dave:
Occultism is occultism. If the witch doctor dresses in a business suit and has a Ph.D., that doesn’t change anything. I’m going to go by the Bible and the Bible warns against this. There are good reasons for it logically. We can verify the same lie comes through everywhere, consistently around the world, independently, people who have never been in touch with one another and it is the same lie that the serpent presented in the Garden of Eden. I think that is conclusive evidence. I mean, there is no way you can explain this by chance. No way you can explain how thousands, literally thousands of these channelers and mediums—and down through history it’s the same—how they all come up with the same four ideas that Satan presented Eve in the Garden of Eden, independently of one another. You cannot explain that by chance—that is absolutely solid evidence.
Tom:
Dave, next week we are going to touch upon some of these particular techniques that people wittingly or unwittingly are getting involved in and their contact with spirit entities to—in some cases to their own destruction.
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 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 with the focus on the book of Isaiah. In Religion in the News: “Shamanism for Old Shep.” We’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question, “Was Jesus a Teenage Guru?” 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 continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the question, “What About Native Religions?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. The topic for today is: Native, Indigenous and Nature Religion, from chapter 8 of Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion, The Subtle Seduction of the World and Church. Dave, now we have mentioned in past programs the rising interest in shamanism and I’m surprised because here it is, we’re in modern society, highly technologized and you would expect such beliefs to be rejected as mere superstition. But that’s not the case, especially here in the United States and I’m sure people are surprised because we can see around us the rise in practices such as Voodoo and Santeria and they are growing in popularity especially among the well educated. Accompanying that interest is a new respect for nature religions in general and in particular, those of Native Americans. Dave, what about nature religions? Does nature hold the solution to mankind’s problems, I mean, either physically or spiritually?
Dave:
It doesn’t make sense, Tom, and, you know, we were flying together and the Lord worked it out in an amazing way. I sat right next to a Marine and he’s a Pagan. He was raised in a Baptist home but he’s into Paganism now and a lot of the Marines on his base are also into Paganism.
Tom:
When our audience hears Paganism they think of that in terms of a generic term meaning somebody who is not a Christian but there is something more specific.
Dave:
Well, that’s right, they worship nature. There are all kinds of Pagans; nevertheless they worship nature, that’s the whole idea of it. I had the opportunity to talk with him a little bit and tell him—you are going to pray to a hurricane? How do you cozy up to an erupting volcano, you know? I mean, nature is not kind—nature isn’t sensitive to your needs, in fact, we fight nature. All the advances of mankind have been made in opposition to the often vicious destructive forces of nature. Instead of turning to the God who created the universe, they are turning to nature. It’s the old religion; Wicca. Star Wars Force, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan are the followers of—the officer says it to him—the Old Religion. So, they are reverting back to the old religion that has deceived mankind forever. Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 1. “When they knew God they glorified him not as God.” How do they know he was God? Well, it says, His eternal power and glory are revealed by the things that he made. The more you learn about nature—it’s so incredible, the organization. So, when you look at nature around you, you know God created it, a great God! And then Paul says, “…but when they knew God in their conscience they glorified him not as God. They became vain in their imagination, their foolish heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise they became fools and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like the corruptible things.” They began to worship beasts and creeping things even.
Tom:
Dave, let me interject this. They would say, no, we don’t worship these smaller things, we don’t worship sticks and stones and so on, some would say that. Our god, Gaia, Mother Nature is larger than that but last week we pointed out that: don’t we believe in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? If this Mother Nature, awe inspiring as they try to make her out to be, is dying, it is going down the tubes.
Dave:
That’s what I tried to point out to this young Marine. Now, this whole thing is in decay—this is death—nothing more natural than death. Now, of course, the reincarnationists try to say, yes, it’s just part of a natural cycle, death and rebirth—
Tom:
What if someone out there is thinking—well, wait a minute, the God you’re talking about, the Creator of all this, how do you square that?
Dave:
In other words you are saying—if a good God, this great God created this, why does it decay? Because it is separated from Him because of Satan’s rebellion and man’s rebellion.
Tom:
And we will be dealing with that down the line.
Dave:
And here are a lot of Marines on this base on Okinawa, getting together on their Holy Days, their holidays at the Solstice and various times, going with the seasons of the years, you know, the cycle in nature and they are having their worship ceremonies together. They are very ecumenical, some of them worship some part of nature, others worship another part and so forth but they all get along together and I’m trying to reason with him. Why would you worship nature? What is there about nature that would cause to worship—well, she gives birth to us, you know. I mentioned to him—he was raised a Baptist, and I said, You know, Isaiah, the prophet, inspired of God, He mocks people like you, I’m sorry. He says, they cut down a tree, with part of it they light a fire to warm themselves, to roast their meat, to pick their teeth, and then, with some of it they form it into a god—a god that has eyes but can’t see, it has ears but it can’t hear. Our vice president hugs trees. A tree doesn’t know that you’re hugging it. Okay? It is just ridiculous, but we want to honor our Native people. In our public schools you can bring anything you want about Native Americans in, oh, it’s culture!—but you can’t talk about Jesus Christ in our public schools. But they’ve got their god and you cannot separate their culture from their religion, it is their culture. And then, we have these—
Tom:
Dave, on this point, you know, we’re shifting here from Paganism in the form of Wicca, in the form of the worship of nature to native religion. One of the big differences here is contacting spirit entities. Pagans worship Gaia, Mother Earth—Nature, but they don’t usually commune with images and power animals.
Dave:
Well no, Tom, they ultimately get involved in it. If you worship a tree, something from that tree is going to talk to you. It just all runs together, you can’t escape it. Here’s a prayer in the steam lodge and listen, it says, oh, you ancient rocks who are sacred, you have neither ears nor eyes yet you hear and see all things. Through your powers—this is the initiation of a warrior. This young man has become pure, worthy to go to receive some message from Wakan Tonka. So now, he is going to go out on his spiritual quest. Things appear to them and they get messages. We can bring this into the public school. We can worship these, — even teach the little kids in grammar school how to get involved in nature worship and so forth. As we have mentioned in a previous program, the Native American Indians have the right to take peyote and that’s how they contact their spirit means. But we get a lot of lies about this culture...
Tom:
That’s the way it comes in—that’s the first thrust. This is culture; we don’t want to diminish the ethnic aspects of a people.
Dave:
Tom, there’s a very good point there because, maybe it points out the departure from true Christianity that we are experiencing in this country so that we have people who claim to be Christians but it doesn’t impact their culture. It doesn’t impact their job but they try to separate it and try to keep it in compartments. Oh yes, I go to church on Sunday and I worship God, but then during the week I live like a pagan—and that’s the problem here. At least, the Native Americans or indigenous people everywhere, are consistent. Their religion is their culture. Their religion is their life. They live it every moment of every day. It’s all intertwined, you can’t escape it. So, religion comes in as culture and it ought to be the same for us. If America were a Christian country, which it is not, then Christianity would permeate our society, it would be in everything. But you have a big complaint if a judge wants to have the Ten Commandments in his chambers or in the courtroom. So, we try to separate—we try to keep the God of the Bible—we won’t let him be part of our culture. We won’t let him be part of our life. You dare to talk about God on the job or somewhere you are inducing a foreign element. But for the indigenous peoples, their religion is their life, it is everything. So, that’s a problem. So, when you bring it in as culture you bring in religion. But then, Tom, we also have a lot of lies, misinformation, revisionists, history, about these indigenous people. They are almost held up as perfect, you know, the native in the jungle is part of nature—
Tom:
Well, it’s pure.
Dave:
Right. He is so pure—no, that’s not the case. They were scalping, they were fighting, they were torturing before the white man—we’re not defending the white man— but before the white man ever came here. Talk about respect for animals and so forth—American Indians would drive an entire herd of buffalo over a cliff and then just take from the dead bodies just what meat they wanted and what skins they wanted and so forth and let the rest of them rot.
Tom:
And this is humanity no matter what color. This is the way we are.
Dave:
Exactly. It’s no reflection upon Native American Indians anymore than upon Europeans or Africans. The fact is, the Africans were fighting, torturing, enslaving—they had slaves long before the white man ever got there. In fact, it was the Africans, who themselves, sold the slaves to the white man. By the way, it was the Arabs first, the Muslims who were the first slave traders back there and yet the blacks today are so enamored or can be, so enamored with Islam. Go to Africa today—it is blacks who are killing blacks. The Zulus—you don’t go into a Zulu area if you’re not a Zulu and that’s what’s been happening in other parts of Africa. So, it’s the heart of man. We’re all the same whether you are white, or black, or red, or yellow, whatever you are, we are all sinners before God and we need to stop blaming one another and trying to make it out that certain groups of people are pure and without sin. No, we are not. But the problem that we are talking about is religion and a false god. We’ve talked about that. They knew the true God in their conscience by the evidence that he had created this universe and then they turned to the worship of nature which makes absolutely no sense because nature is not kind; it’s not going to help you. In fact, everything that we do is in opposition, to protect ourselves from the destructive forces of nature.
Tom:
You know, within Christianity we have a movement now that attempts to redeem the culture of the indigenous people, of the tribe, whatever it might be. In other words, you just mentioned earlier that the religion is so integrated within the culture, the society, you can’t separate them. How then do we redeem false religion?
Dave:
Well, Tom, on the one hand, a missionary lets say, that goes with the gospel, doesn’t try to change the diet or the way people live basically but he does bring the gospel of Jesus Christ and that’s going to change their religion.
Tom:
Some would admit some missionaries have gone that route.
Dave:
Oh, they have, tragically. It’s like today in America Christianity for many people is conservative politics, conservative right wing politics. We equate Americanism, our brand of Americanism, with Christianity. That’s not true, so it’s wrong to do that. On the other hand, we don’t then try to Christianize native religious practices like the sun dance or the sweat lodge, those things that are part of their religion but also of their culture. Well then, we’ll let them keep that and we’ll try to adapt it to Christianity. No, you can’t adapt Voodoo to Christianity. Now, the Catholic Church, of course, has done this, as you know, around the world.
Tom:
But we’re not talking biblical Christianity
Dave:
No, we are not. So, that’s one of the evidences that Catholicism is not biblical Christianity because you follow it around the world, you go to Haiti and it’s all intermingled with Voodoo. Go down to Brazil and it’s intermingled with Candomblé, or Macumba, Santaria, which is a mixture of the paganism that was brought from Africa by the slaves with Catholicism and you have the Catholic saints all intermingled now. They have become the gods. They changed the names of the gods. Like in Rome they changed the name of the statue, it was Isis, and now it became Mary and Horace, her son from Egypt became Jesus. They left the same statues but they just changed the names and so forth. You just can’t do that. This is what Catholicism has done. It has adapted itself to the religion. They have the sayings, you know, and Haiti is 85 percent Catholic and 110 percent Voodum and every Voodoo ceremony begins with prayers to the Catholic saints and you have this thing all mixed together. Now, we know that but now it is astonishing. Youth with a Mission, is one of the leaders in this movement and they are talking about redeeming the culture. And now, somehow, we are going to Christianize these religious ceremonies that were for the worship of false gods and somehow we’re going—well, we don’t want to change that but now we will do this to Jesus Christ. You can’t do it—it doesn’t work....
Tom:
Isn’t this like bringing strange fire as the Scriptures tell us, from pagan altars before the true and living God? God is not going to put up with it or accept it, obviously.
Dave:
Well, there is a reason for it because, as you know Tom, these native ceremonies, the pagan ceremonies, were all designed to pacify or to encounter—communicate with the false gods. Behind the false gods, Satan is called the god of this world, 2 Corinthians chapter 4. Paul says the god of this world has blinded the minds of those that believe not lest the light of the gospel of Christ should enter in and they should be saved. So, to take something that was, for example, visualization, has been adapted now. Visualization is not found in the Bible. Visualization is actually condemned in the Bible but the witch doctor uses visualization. He goes on a journey into the past, the future, the upper world, the lower world and that’s where he encounters his spirit guide. His power animal could be a jaguar, a coyote; it could be some human being and so forth. Now, we have Christians who are using that methodology to encounter Jesus Christ. So, here is an example. It’s an occult technique which the rain dance, the sun dance, these things—dancing yourself into an altered state, into a trance, dancing yourself into a state of consciousness where these spirit entities that are not of God can enter you and possess you. Now, to do that sort of thing, in order to worship God, is not biblical. No only is it not biblical but it is going to be destructive. It’s like Elijah saying, well, we will just kind of Christianize Baal worship or Judaize Baal worship. We’ll let you carry on with your same ceremonies—. Well, we were reading from the Old Testament in a previous program and the Old Testament lays out very specifically the worship tabernacle, the sacrifices, the priesthood and everything because there is a purpose behind it that is looking forward to Christ. It’s a picture of heavenlies and now to take demonic activities that were designed for worshipping demons and to try to Christianize those—it’s staggering! But this is what is happening in our day and people think, well, but I’m doing it in the name of Jesus. Well, that brings us back again to that verse that we keep quoting: “Lord, Lord, in your name didn’t we do this and Jesus said, I never knew you.”
Tom:
Didn’t Jesus say you were sincere? No, he didn’t.
Dave:
Yes, that’s all that matters, you were sincere—you did it in my name—that’s okay, you meant well—No, he doesn’t.
Tom:
I never knew you—those are sobering words.
Dave:
So, we have to know the true God and if I’m going to know—again, we keep quoting it, John 17:3: “This is life eternal that they might know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom I have sent.” If I’m going to know God, I’m going to have to know him on His terms. I’m going to have to know Him for who He is. Tom, I use ridiculous illustrations, I hope people forgive me but I have in my wallet let’s say, a picture of Marilyn Monroe and I say it’s my wife. Then you say wait a minute, that doesn’t look like Ruth at all. Well, what does it matter—I mean, it’s a woman and I just, you know, this is my wife and I look at it and I think— So, God doesn’t want you to mistake Him for someone else. He must be known for who He is and it’s not enough to say, well, I believe in some higher power and I’m just going to be religious, I’m going to be spiritual and not religious some people say, and I really mean well. That’s why God has given us His Word and that’s why we have the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Tom:
You know, Dave, your analogy is really good because on a human level, what would Ruth think of this? You’re carrying around a picture of somebody else in your wallet and attributing qualities to her. We’ve talked in other programs about manipulation—what would Ruth think if you came to her on the basis of manipulating, trying to get her to do what you wanted all the time. We wouldn’t put up with it on a human level, why would God? Why would we think God would want to put up with it?
Dave:
He won’t and He shouldn’t, and there is no reason why we should expect it. We’re lowering Him to, not only our level, but we are destroying God as He really is. So, that’s why we want people to be Bereans. Don’t accept what we say but check it out from the Word of God. See what God himself has said.
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 broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, and “What is the true meaning of Christ’s death on the cross?” In Religion in the News: “Israel’s Evangelicals Go Home Policy.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Should Christians perform magic?” 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 question: “Is it natural or supernatural?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Thanks, Gary. For the past few weeks we’ve been discussing Dave’s book, Occult Invasion, which documents the rather troubling fact that both the world and the church are increasingly turning to occultism in a myriad of forms: shamanism, witchcraft, sorcery, spiritism, astrology, fortune-telling, magic, and so on, and on, and on. All of these are forms of divination condemned by the Scriptures. Too often, people including those who are truly Christians get involved in occultism out of ignorance, and they are seduced because they don’t understand the difference between the miraculous and the paranormal, which, I think, can best be understood by learning the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism. And that’s our topic for today. So Dave, what is the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism, and you know, even probably more importantly, how will understanding the difference help us to avoid being seduced by occult practices?
Dave:
Well, naturalism involves nature, and naturalism basically says that nature is all there is. So the indigenous people, the First Nation Peoples, they are called, native North American Indians, or whatever around the world, they worship nature. They worship the trees, the waterfalls, and now they would say that there is a spirit in these things, and they talk about the Great Spirit. But the Great Spirit is not beyond nature, but is part of nature, and this is a very important distinction to make. Science worships nature, all science can deal with, for example, is the natural world, the physical world. So if you are going to be scientific, you know, when Mary Baker Eddy turned Jesus into a scientist and founded the First Church of Christ Scientist, she thought she was doing a big favor. But if this universe is all there is and we can deal with it scientifically, then we don’t have a real God to deal with but God himself is part of nature. The God of the Bible is totally other than nature, He’s totally other than the universe. He created the universe out of nothing, not of himself; therefore He can do what He will with nature. He is not bound by the laws of nature and science and so forth. So when you fail to make that distinction, then you can get caught up in trying to find scientific methods of praying. For example, we mentioned Norman Vincent Peale, I think, in our last broadcast or at least a previous broadcast. Remember, he said, and I’m quoting him now: “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 becomes a mechanism, it becomes a scientific method for releasing energy. Well then, the god that you are dealing with must be part of this universe and he must be subject to scientific laws. But the God of the Bible, He existed long before this universe existed. Genesis chapter 1 makes it very clear: “In the beginning…”—that is not the beginning of God but the beginning of this universe, God created the heavens and the earth. So He is totally other. In Hebrews 11:3, says, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” So, God created this universe by His Word, He exists totally separate from it. Now, if He is part of this universe, and this is all scientific, as Norman Vincent Peale said, Yungi Cho says, Oral Roberts, and Kenneth Hagin, and Copeland, and so forth, then he’s like the Star Wars Force. This universe as we know and I think the scientists are pretty well agreed on that, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the Law of Entropy, this universe is running down like a clock. The Star Wars Force is running down like a clock. One day it will be approaching absolute zero, the sun will have burned out, that’s one way we know the sun wasn’t always there because if it had been there forever it would have burned out by now. All of the stars will have burned out, and it will all be like there had never been anything, you know, all the dreams and schemes and corporate plans and ambitions of mankind will be like sand castles washed out into a cosmic ocean of nothingness. And the god of the Star Wars Force, it will be wiped out too. But God is separate and distinct from His universe, therefore He can reach in from outside, not with reincarnation. All reincarnation does is it recycles this dead and dying universe that’s on its way down, the Law of Entropy. But the God of the Bible, He can reach in from outside with resurrection, in fact it says, one day, 2 Peter chapter 3, He’s going to let go of this whole thing. This whole universe is going to be wiped out in one huge atomic explosion of some kind and God will create a new heavens and a new earth. Well then, if this is the God that we are dealing with, then it is going to be on the basis of His grace and His mercy and His will, it is not according to laws!
Tom:
Dave, you know, this bring up something that is kind of baffling if you understand what you just said, but most Christians who buy into these methodologies and techniques, I don’t think they realize that they’re changing, I mean, not that they could, but in effect they’re changing the character of God. They’re making Him into something that if you said, Wait a minute, is your god, the god you believe in, is an impersonal force that you can manipulate? And they would say, No, of course not! But why then are you going through this methodology and this technique?
Dave:
Well, Tom, I don’t know whether you could reason with them, because it is something that is so—well, they even argue against it. Let me quote—I don’t think we quoted in previous programs—this is John and Paula Sanford, the inner healers, and listen to what they say. Well, you know, we mentioned that Pat Robertson in one of his books, The Secret Kingdom he says it runs on 8 laws and he says that one of the laws is the law of miracles and that God never does a miracle except according to the law of miracles. But wait a minute, if it follows laws it’s not a miracle, to be a miracle it has to override the laws of nature, any laws whatsoever. But here are John and Paula Sanford and listen to what they say. They say: “Miracles happen by the cooperation and union and interplay of spirit and matter together. Confused men have thought there had to be a violation of principles for miracles to happen, what rot and bunk! Miracles happen by releasing power within matter according to God’s principles.” They say, “Nature being filled with the Spirit of God”—Wow! That sounds like native religion. “The worship of nature has immeasurable power locked within its tiniest cells. Miracles happen by the operation of the Holy Spirit within principles far beyond our ability to comprehend, but nonetheless scientific. I have sometimes been called a Christian Scientist when lecturing on these subjects.”
Tom:
Well, why not!
Dave:
Exactly, this is what they’re teaching. So you say, well, maybe they don’t understand. They are arguing to support this position so that everything God does has to be according to principles. Now wait a minute! Who made these principles? If God is bound by some principles, then there must be somebody bigger than Him who established these principles that God must obey. It’s like the “faith teachers” Capps or Hagin or Copeland, or whatever, they say, I’m quoting Charles Capps now: “God is a faith god.” Wait a minute! Who does God have faith in? So, we’re back to certain principles—really these principles, these laws, this scientific framework within which everything works, even God has to work within that! Now maybe there is a temptation—you know science has become a sacred cow, as you know. I mean, we worship science—whoa, science says, you know if science says it—because science has transformed our universe, and I mean, what science can do is so amazing. Maybe that’s why they think science is bigger than God! I don’t know, but Tom—
Tom:
Well, there’s a pride element too. We talked about evolution, why some theologians are intimidated by science, particularly related to origins. But wait a minute, there were no scientists that were there! But God was there! I mean, why wouldn’t theologians—you know, again, you talked about Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church, their view, flipping back and forth between condemning Galileo, and now, you know, honoring him sometime later, but it’s a pride thing. It’s that you want to be right, and also you would like to have others in control that are humans, not a transcend God.
Dave:
Well, that’s exactly—I mean that’s a big part of it, Tom, is the matter of control, we want to be in control of our lives. We don’t want to say, as Jesus prayed in the garden, and as Paul prayed, “Not my will, but thine be done.” But we want to somehow—well, this is what the business world teaches, success motivation, positive mental attitude, that you can make it happen the way you want it to. Basically, we don’t want to—I say “we” I’m speaking for the whole human race myself as well, without the grace of God, and the constraint and the wooing of the Holy Spirit and the insight to realize that God really loves me and that His way is best, we all want to run our own lives. We want a God who is like the genie in the bottle, you know, you rub the bottle and the genie appears, what would you like this time? We want some kind of a cosmic bellhop, when we push the bell he comes to do our bidding. And you get that from the very title of Kenneth Hagin’s booklets. We’ve mentioned one already, How to Write Your Own Ticket with God. I don’t want to write my own ticket with God! In other words, then God becomes some kind of a source of power in which we can tap into and if we know how to push the right buttons, and we know the laws that even God himself is subject to, then we can make this whole thing work the way we want it to, and somehow they think that that’s being godly!
Tom:
Well, part of the delusion here is that when people—they may not even be thinking this through and they say—no, that’s not me—I just want God’s will. In effect the methodology, you know, they want to be consistent in getting answers to prayer, and if you can do it through some kind of ritual, or technique and you’re more consistent with getting answers, I mean, that’s really the heart of it here. We want what we want when we want it.
Dave:
Yeah, that’s right, we want to be able to make it happen now, and of course that’s a big part of the whole signs and wonders movement. Advertise “Miracle Service Tonight,” and God is to come through and do these miracles.
Tom:
Or: “Have You Received Your Miracle Today?”
Dave:
Yeah. We quoted in a previous program, Pat Robertson for example. I’m sure that, you know, as I watch him on TV he seems to really want souls to be saved, he seems to be earnest about this, but he says, The Bible is not an impractical book of theology, but it is a success manual. So, theology somehow is impractical. We live in the day when Paul said, they will not endure sound doctrine. You don’t hear much doctrinal teaching. Doctrine is about God, doctrine is the container of truth, and doctrine keeps us on the right track. I think doctrine is exciting, because it tells me, it instructs me about God and tells me of Him and of His will and His way, and so forth. But we live in a day when we want to experience power, we want to experience miracles, and so forth. So, well then there must be some technique for making this happen. And whether it was Benny Hinn rubbing his jacket on his body, I don’t know what that meant, you know, to get some static electricity or something, and then waving it at the crowd, or this—then the waving of his jacket at one time became somehow a technique for making whole groups of people fall over.
Tom:
Sure, this is a technique that God responds to because look what happened.
Dave:
Right. Yeah, well it’s sad, Tom, but we are all prone to this sort of thing.
Tom:
I agree.
Dave:
We want to—if there is just some way that I can get God to respond the way I want Him to when I want Him to. That’s what it’s about, and that’s what occultism is about. And when the, as we’ve mentioned, when the witchdoctor slits the rooster’s throat, and he mutters a formula that he learned from his father, who learned it from his father before him, and he sprinkles the blood in a certain pattern, then the gods, the spirits, whatever they believe in, must come through. It’s the magician’s bargain that Dr. Faust made with Mephistopheles. So Yungi Cho, you remember, he’s praying for a bicycle and God says I don’t know what bicycle you want. You want a French one, a racing bike, you know, what do you want? You’ve got to visualize it, and when you visualize it clearly, then I can give you what you want. Of course, Jesus said, your heavenly Father knows what you have need of before you ask. So it’s a difference between getting what I want or what God know I have a need of. But Dr. Cho has insisted upon this. In an interview, he insisted—he said: “You cannot have faith unless you visualize.” I don’t find that teaching in the Bible at all. So, once again, I’m not saying they’re not trying to be godly, they are wanting miracles, but they are adopting ungodly methodologies, techniques and that brings us again to a verse that probably we would refer to many times. Jesus said: Many will say to me, Lord, Lord, didn’t we, in your name we did these things? Miracles, prophesied, cast out devils. Jesus said, I will say, I never knew you!
Tom:
Right. The other aspect of this that should be obvious— maybe it’s obvious to some and not to others, but there’s a bondage involved here. If I have to go through methodologies and techniques, I mean, that’s a lot to put together. In effect, I have to be a scientist, and I have to be a scientist with exactness because—we see it in the more obvious forms of occultism like voodoo and you know, other forms of magic and witchcraft that these people who are practitioners live in fear of making mistakes. For a Christian now, in another form, maybe something not as overt, but the responsibility for every variable, I mean, how far can the Yungi Cho go in terms of visualizing? You want to get down to not just the color of the bike and the amount of spokes. If you’re the one who is in control and you’re creating this through your technique, you have to get down to the subatomic particles. I mean, if you’re God, if you’re going to be playing God here, you’ve got to do it all, or what happens? You don’t get it, you don’t get not only what you want, you get something less, if indeed you could, which you can’t.
Dave:
Yeah, Tom, some people that are listening haven’t just gotten angry and turned this off, or maybe they are thinking, Why are you even bothering with this, aren’t we splitting hairs? It’s the difference between knowing God and not knowing God. And Jesus said in his prayer John 17: 3, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” And if a person spends his or her life dealing with a false god, thinking that they are dealing with a true God, but they have a mistaken idea of God, mistaken idea of prayer, mistaken idea of the relationship that God wants them to have, a relationship of total dependence upon Him. First of all, the One who must pay the penalty for their sins. The One who must redeem them. The One who must provide salvation. They can’t do it, and we have to come to Him as repentant sinners trusting in His grace and His love and His mercy. If, instead of that relationship, a person has a relationship where they think that they can get God to do what they want Him to do, when they want Him to do it, and in fact if you can’t you’re really not a man or a woman of faith, but this is really being godly, and you’ve got to be able to accomplish these things and make this happen. It’s tragic to go through life like that and find out that this is not the God of the Bible at all that you’ve been dealing with, that you’ve been deceived. So again, it gets back to the issue of the eternal destiny of souls. Jesus said you will know the truth; the truth will set you free. The Bible talks about the battle between God’s truth and Satan’s lie. This is basically Satan’s lie; you can be like the gods. I will be like the most high, Satan said. Well then, I can do this too. And in fact, tragically, this is literally what these people teach. So, you have Paul Crouch in his newsletter saying, If we are not little gods, I will apologize before ten thousand times ten thousand in front of the glassy sea. Well, if he’s a little god he won’t be in front of the glassy sea. Although Satan said, you can be as gods; we have Benny Hinn, or Crouch, or Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, arguing that we are gods, insisting upon it in contradiction to the Word of God. This is serious, very serious, and it’s not that we are trying to quibble over some doctrinal, distinctive, splitting hairs, or whatever, this is the difference between life and death for eternity. This is the difference between, do you know the true God or do you not! It’s a very solemn matter!
Tom:
As a word of counsel to those out there who have said, hey, this is starting to sound like a little bit of what I’m doing. What would we say to someone like that? Well, first of all, I would think you would say, if what you’re doing—first of all, is it biblical? Are you going to God His way? And then what are you doing? Are you the one in charge here, are you the one who is manipulating God, or attempting by what you’re doing, whether you recognize it or not. Ask yourself, Is this something that God would have me approach Him, is this the way He would have me approach Him? That alone can be the beginning of some discernment here, and maybe some change, some repentance toward God.
Dave:
Well, God said in the Old Testament, “You will seek for me and find me when you seek for me with all your heart.” It doesn’t mean you will seek for me and find me when you seek for some higher power, when you seek for some cosmic bellhop or some god who will give you what you want. If you seek the true God, God I want to know you. Then He will reveal himself, of course He does that in His Word. You can go to His Word with your own preconceived ideas and you’re not going to find God. In Jeremiah 9:23, 24, God says: “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.” There has to be some understanding because the Bible is very clear that false gods, there are false gods, false concepts of God and God will not answer to those, but Satan hides behind them. Paul said that the nations, the heathen, the Gentiles offer to idols, they offer to demons. So, there is a power behind this, so we must be certain that we know the true God, and this is the God of the Bible. Don’t take my word for it or your word for it or Kenneth Hagin’s word for it or Copelands or Billy Graham or the Popes or anybody’s. Be a Berean, go to the Word of God yourself and see what God says about himself and about the way in which we must approach Him. It is only by His grace and His mercy in submission to His will, His plan for this universe that we can come to Him.
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 side. 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: “One-Size-Fits-All Chapel.” We’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question, “Who Were the Nephilim?” 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 continue a revisit to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the question, “Should Christians use Divination?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahan.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. The topic for this week’s program is Dave’s book, Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World in the Church. We’ve been talking for the past couple of weeks about a relationship between evolution and the occult. Today, Dave, I thought that we would zero in more on what occultism actually is. To many of our listeners the term may make them think of magic or witchcraft but certainly not anything that would touch their every day life, or would it?
Dave:
Maybe we ought to define it first of all. Occult comes from the Latin, “occultist”, which means concealed or hidden. If you look it up in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, it defines the occult as, hidden, concealed, secret, esoteric, beyond human understanding, mysterious, and designating of certain mystical arts or studies such as magic, alchemy, astrology and so forth—it’s a wide range. Basically, what it is is some kind of a power that is not physical and cannot be explained by human science. I quote Archie Fire, Lame Deer, a Lakota Medicine Man, —it’s medicine men, witch doctors and so forth who claim to have these occult powers. He says, quote, a medicine man has spiritual powers to do something supernatural. Now, it’s not supernatural and somewhere we have to deal with the difference—
Tom:
We will. We are going to talk about naturalism and supernaturalism.
Dave:
But he says,—which cannot be explained by the white man’s science. Now you say, well, doesn’t that impact our lives? There are a lot of people who play the Ouija Board, for example. Ouija boards, in case people are not aware of it, were originally designed to contact the spirits of the dead soldiers who died in World War I over there in France. It wasn’t long before it became the most popular parlor game, past Monopoly. And, they have done experiments with ouija boards where they have scrambled the alphabet, they blindfold the persons playing it, they don’t even know where the letters are. Under those conditions it moves faster then ever spelling out meaningful messages. You are in contact with something going on out there. Or dowsing, water witching, over half a million wells have been discovered in the United States....
Tom:
Some people would say well, if I’m contacting entities out there, you know, I want nothing to do with that, some people wouldn’t even believe in it, but there still is an interest in things like that but there are different rationales.
Dave:
ESP, psychic powers and so forth.
Tom:
But when you are talking about dowsing, that doesn’t seem to be anything with which you would be contacting spirits.
Dave:
It’s called divination in the Bible. The Ouija Board is a divination device. Divination uses any physical object that allows you to tune in to the spirit world. Are we really tuning in to the spirit world in dowsing? Yes. We can prove it very simply. Originally, it used to be that you took a green willow wand and walk across the ground and suddenly the thing goes down. They would say it’s the moisture in the green twig that’s attracted to the water in the ground and therefore, you know, some magnetic attraction. However, for a good dowser, that wand will bob up and down and tell you how deep you have to drill. It will also bob up and down and tell you how many gallons per minute the well will produce. If you were dowsing in France it will tell you how many liters per minute and how many meters deep you have to drill. So, information is being communicated. Now furthermore, we now know you can dowse for anything. You can dowse for buried treasure, for oil—a dowser dowsing in Kennebunkport, Maine—his name was Henry Gross—
Tom:
Now this is documented, right?
Dave:
Yes, this is documented. You go to Kennebunkport, Maine, and you will find a plaque that says: In this room, October 22, 1949, Henry Gross dowsed three fresh water domes,—and he gives you the names of them—on a map of Bermuda, an island on which no potable spring water supposedly existed. In Bermuda, December 7, 1949, Henry found the domes as dowsed in Kennebunkport—tells you the water they produced and so forth. Actually, ground water geologists had gone over Bermuda and had said there was no water there and they had to bring it in by ship or they had to catch it in rain. Now, here’s a man dowsing over a map of Bermuda maybe fifteen hundred miles away or so. Now tell me the relationship between lines drawn on a piece of paper as a map of Bermuda and what is actually under the ground over there. There is no scientific explanation.
Tom:
There is no physiological connection, — there is no scientific rationale that could explain that.
Dave:
Well Tom, on the one hand you would say it would be really easy to slip into this sort of thing. You know, I can remember when I was in the Army many, many years ago, we played around with hypnosis. We could do amazing things with hypnosis. You could get a guy as stiff as a board and put his head on one bunk and his heels on the other one and you could sit on it. Now, you couldn’t possibly accomplish that unless you were in a hypnotic state. All kinds of amazing things would happen. So then, you would have to ask yourself, what is behind this? It doesn’t seem to be normal. By the way, all these things are referred to in Scripture, Deuteronomy 18 for example, and they are absolutely forbidden in the Bible. So, it is so easy. You get involved in Positive Mental Attitude Seminars, success motivation training in the end. For example: I’ve talked to—here’s a high school kid who comes up to me and says, Mr. Hunt, I’m taking a business course in high school and the instructor tells me; write on a piece of paper my ambition. Do I want to be Chief Executive Officer or Chairman of the Board? What do I want to be? Sales manager? How much do I want to earn? Write it on a piece of paper put it under my pillow and sleep on it and this will bring it to pass. Well now wait a minute. What power is doing this? So, what happens is, you begin to believe that there is some kind of a power in your subconscious mind or—they have all kinds of explanations. Some universal mind out there and you can tune in to this. This is how religious science, science of mind and so forth—these things work. And the next thing you know, you have begun to believe that there is some force or some power, some spirit—it doesn’t matter what you want to call it—some higher power. It’s not the God of the Bible, but something that you want now to commit yourself to and you want to become in tune with this thing so that you can use it to your own ends. That’s the lie of the serpent in the garden and then the next thing you know, I’m a regular little god. I can use what I think are supernatural powers. So, a person is very easily drawn into this. Now, how would they protect themselves from this? Well of course, if they know the Bible they would know that it’s not biblical and they are warned against it. But even if you don’t know the Bible you would realize—wait a minute, this isn’t normal. There’s something going on here. I go to a palm reader—come on! You’re telling me that lines in my palm are there and they are going to tell me what’s going to—astrology—you mean the stars are going to determine my fate and so forth—reading in a crystal ball you mean—now wait a minute! We’ve got a scientist today and he is teaching people how to see their relatives in a mirror. They did this on TV, actually demonstrated it and suddenly, here comes your dead relative. Their image is in a mirror, mirror gazing. So, when you start to get involved in these things you realize: (a) It’s not normal. (b) There’s some real power here. (c) You ask yourself, what is it? Maybe I had better not get involved because maybe this power has some intelligence and it’s drawing me into this for some reason and I would be a fool to think I can use this power. No, it’s sucking me in so that it can use me. I had better back up fast and get some facts on this. And that’s what we are trying to do in this program.
Tom:
Certainly skepticism, I mean, non-believers have a healthy skepticism even to the point of denying the spiritual realm which we certainly are not doing here today. But is there a criterion for deciding if something is of the occult and how can we best discern whether or not, things that are not so obvious are really of the occult.
Dave:
A lot of our young people got involved and older ones as well, unfortunately, in psychedelic drugs. I’ve talked to so many of them that I have interviewed and we deal with it quite a bit in this book and other books. But here are half a dozen guys or girls in mixed company who have dropped acid and they are sitting in a room together. Suddenly, they are all experiencing the same adventure in the same landscape, they are all there together. Now, you tell me how does that come about? Furthermore, there is a philosophy that comes through and it comes through all around this world whether it’s under hypnosis, in yoga or on drugs. The whole idea of drugs is called sorcery in the Bible and the idea is to contact spirit beings. The Native American, the First Nation People, the Aborigines or whatever you want to call them, who occupied America and now their descendants living here today have the right under the laws of America to use peyote as a religious ritual and they contact spirit beings. So, the world of the occult, we have to understand, doesn’t involve some force that’s innate in the universe, it involves spirit beings. Because information is being communicated and there is a purpose behind it.
Tom:
Dave, back to this criterion though—for example, you used dowsing and you took us through just logic, just reason, that there had to be something behind this that was not just some kind of physics or chemistry that we didn’t understand. There is some more involved information. So, is that what you are saying? The Bible condemns this. I want to go over some Scriptures in a minute but my point is to recognize that we’ve got to use our head. We’ve got to search the scriptures but we also have to check things out reasonably and rationally, correct?
Dave:
Absolutely. If you go to a fortune teller and they give you some secret information or something, you’re going to have to ask yourself, where does this come from? They’re telling you what’s going to happen, well, how do they know? Is my fate all determined and if it is how come they know this and I don’t and where does this information come from?
You had better ask yourself some hard questions, because you can then be enslaved to wanting to go back to the fortune teller to find out more and the next thing you know you are drawn into dependence upon this power. And that’s exactly what it wants and then you don’t need God, you don’t need the Bible. But now, you have a substitute and this is Satan himself and he’s the one who is behind it and I don’t think, rationally, as you study this, you can come to any other conclusion.
Tom:
Most of the condemnations of this we find in the Old Testament but it’s also supported by the New Testament. Let me go over some of these Scriptures. Deuteronomy 18:10-14, “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire.” A contemporary example of that is, this fire walking business. We haven’t seen too much of it lately but for a while it was a big trend and people who went through those experiences would say, wow, this experience—if I can do this I can do anything, everything is open to me! Well, it’s not exactly the same but there is a connection, don’t you think? So, to continue with the Scripture—or one who practices witchcraft or a soothsayer or one who interprets omens or a sorcerer or one who conjures spells or a medium or a spiritist or one who calls up the dead. (vs. 12) For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord and because of these abominations, the Lord your God drives them out from before you. (vs. 13) You shall be blameless before the Lord your God for these nations which you will dispossess listen to soothsayers and diviners but as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you. Other commandments, Leviticus: “Give no regard to mediums or familiar spirits, do not seek after them to be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God.” Now those are Old Testament. Somebody would say, well, yes, but that was under the law and that was the Old Testament. But we find in the New Testament, Galatians 5:20: idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, and heresies. These are all condemned. Acts 19:19, “…also many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all and they counted up the value of them and the total, fifty thousand pieces of silver.” Why would they do that if it was okay—if God, in the New Testament, was saying, O well, don’t worry about it—it was just an Old Testament thing.
Dave:
Well, God said, you will have no other gods. I am the Lord your God. So, the occult is dealing with some power that is god-like. It’s not a normal human trait and when they try to say that this is a potential that we all have—well, wait a minute, come on, this isn’t natural. No, if it were natural why doesn’t everyone naturally exhibit this? No, you have to get involved in this. You have to give yourself to this power and it can come to you in many forms. Well, I can tell you that the witch doctors, the medicine men, they recognize that there is a spirit world and that there are spirits out there who are guiding and who are empowering them. You cannot explain it as some kind of a force. A force doesn’t have intelligence. A force doesn’t communicate information. Information is communicated over a telephone wire but somebody is talking on one end and someone is listening on the other end. It doesn’t come about by electrical current in and of itself. That’s one of the ludicrous parts of the Star Wars force, with a dark side and a light side and so forth. No, that’s not rational. So, you’ve got to come to the conclusion that there is some entity, some being, some spirit, because it’s non-physical. Physic power is non-physical, that is behind this and it is certainly not the God of the Bible who warns us against this.
Tom:
And Dave, some people would say, well, you know I played around with Ouija boards and nothing ever happened—I got involved with this and it was a little waste of time and money but there are plenty of testimonies out there to people who have, not only been entrapped, but the bondage, the destruction in their lives, is, for some who haven’t come to Christ, ongoing today, isn’t it?
Dave:
The Exorcist was based upon a true story and actually that person got involved with this through an Ouija Board. So, if an Ouija Board is nothing what’s the point? If it has some power then you had better find out what this power is. What is the point of asking an Ouija board questions, or looking to it for guidance? I mean, that’s ludicrous. So, the person who even begins to play the game is suspecting, at least, maybe there is something there—and you had better stay away from it because God warned you to stay away from it. Now, the reason for that is, because there is an enemy of the human soul, an enemy of God, and his name is Satan, Lucifer, the devil. He’s called by a number of names and he wants to damn men’s souls and he is intent upon deceiving them with the same lies with which he deceived Eve. And the major lie was you can be like the gods. So, this is what physic power is all about. You can gain control of your life, you can heal yourself, you can become wealthy, you can get what you want, you can find things or locate wells or, you know, whatever. You would think this is wonderful that a man would dowse over the map of Bermuda and find three wells—isn’t that terrific? Yes, but wait a minute, that causes a person then to believe in this power and to become the servant really, eventually, of this power instead of the servant of God.
Tom:
And, servant underscored here, really bondage, really entrapped. People get into this because of a power trip but they become the victim.
Dave:
You look to it for guidance; you look to it for help, instead of looking to God.
Tom:
Dave, you know, again, there are people who either pooh-pooh this or say it’s no big deal or they dabble a little here and a little there and so on. Certainly, they may not be affected to the way that some are, I mean, lives destroyed, but isn’t this a conditioning effect, isn’t this leading up to something? If I recognized and maybe was sort of skeptical about this but all of a sudden I see a new variation of it, something that I am attracted to. Isn’t this conditioning me if I buy into it for some big payoff down the line?
Dave:
Well, what the person is looking to is the magic effect. This seems to validate in itself as being something desirable—something I want to tune in to or something I want to look to and the Bible does say that there is a man coming, antichrist, who will be the ultimate demonstrator of all this power. It says he comes with all deceivableness among righteousness with all the power of Satan to deceive the world. So, if a person is impressed by magic, you know, by seemingly supernatural—but it’s not, we still have to get to the difference between supernatural and natural—actually this is naturalism but it seems to be supernatural—then, when some man arises who can do the ultimate in this, he’s going to follow him. So, yes, the world, I think, is being set up for something and it’s amazing how many movie actors and actresses, how many celebrities, athletes and so forth, I mean, look, just to be superstitious about the number 13, and there are many hotels and you go up the elevator and it goes from 12 to 14. There are people who wouldn’t walk under a ladder. Some star athletes have a certain shirt that they think if they wear that or, you know, a rabbit’s foot, or—there all kinds of ways that you can be drawn into trusting or fearing some power out there that is not of God. And then, when this man, that is the ultimate demonstrator of it arises, Wow, he’s got the world’s attention.
Tom:
You know, you would think if this was legitimate—I mean, it’s been around forever—but something would have developed here. There would be an individual or there would be somebody with psychic powers that would have developed that to the point of stability, of being able to control it. We have no examples of that. We have some people who have been touted as having this power or that power, whatever, but we never see consistency, we never see something that’s really controlled but we do see lives destroyed.
Dave:
They are working on it in the laboratories from Harvard to Stanford. They are trying very hard and they can demonstrate some amazing powers but you are right. It is very capricious—you don’t control it, it controls you.
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 alongside. 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, and “What is Condemnation?” In Religion in the News: “Suicide Condolence Cards?” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “What is the difference between the soul, the spirit and the body?” 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 on Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion. Today we focus on the question, “Can you believe both the Bible and evolution?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon.
Tom:
We’re continuing our discussion of Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion, subtitled, The Subtle Seduction of the World and the Church. Now Dave, for the last couple of weeks we’ve been underscoring the fact that the theory of evolution is not unique to Darwin or modern science, but it’s origins are religious, and is, in fact, found in the lie Satan offered to Eve in the Garden of Eden, and it’s foundational to all false religions, especially Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Then we covered theistic evolution, which we find among many professing Christians as an attempt to reconcile evolution and the Bible. Before we address the basic problems with evolution let’s remind our audience why it cannot be compatible with what the Bible teaches.
Dave:
Well, the Bible says that God created the world in seven days. It says He created man out of the dust of the ground, He formed him and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and then it says that He found that man, not that God needed to find it out, but He was demonstrating to man that he was lonely, he needed a helper. We don’t know how long Adam had been on this earth, but he had named the animals, and had been here for some time at least. And then God put him to sleep and out of the rib He created a woman. Now that can not be reconciled with an evolutionary process over many years of time, and two critters, male and female evolving up to humanoid status, and then being zapped with a human soul and spirit, which theistic evolution attempts to do. Evolution, of course is atheistic, life began by chance, which is ludicrous, couldn’t possibly happen. It doesn’t reconcile with the Bible at all, but when they try to—and of course the whole purpose of evolution is to prove that we don’t need God for our existence—
Tom:
We’re going to have some quotes by many evolutionists to that affect.
Dave:
— But we came by chance. So that is absolutely irreconcilable with the Bible. Now, theistic evolution attempts to reconcile it, and says that well, God used evolution to bring these anthropoid critters up to the point—two of them, male and female—up to the point that they were close enough to what He wanted, and then He put a human soul and spirit in them, and this was supposedly, Adam and Eve. That does not reconcile with the Scripture. Jesus, of course believed in the story of Adam and Eve, He quoted from it—so Jesus isn’t God if He believed that. The Bible says Romans 5:12: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” But if death was here, these critters are dying and evolving and dying and evolving for millions of years before Adam sinned, then we have a major contradiction in the Bible. So, there are many biblical reasons why evolution is not true, and there’s no way that you can reconcile theistic evolution with the Bible. Now, the only reason I would presume that our major seminaries, even evangelical seminaries, evangelical Bible colleges, universities, Christian universities do this is because they are intimidated by science, and they think that science has somehow proven that evolution is true and therefore, in order not to contradict science, they try to make the Bible fit. But scientifically, it is not proven, it is ludicrous! We have a little pond on our property because that’s how we water our lawn, everything is pumped out of the pond, everybody has a pond, and it flows in from the river. We have a lot of ducks, all kinds of things, you know, from nature, and I sometimes think—we’ve got a lot of little ducklings around now, they just hatched, and I sometimes think of an egg. Now, how are you going to evolve an egg? It’s either an egg or it isn’t an egg! I mean, it either has that shell around it, and the whole thing holds together and inside is something that is sufficient to produce a little baby duck, or it isn’t! You can’t have a half way egg, or a quarter way egg, you can’t have eggs built by stages, they wouldn’t work! So the idea that you can somehow evolve, or that you can evolve the human eye, it’s ludicrous! And how did the duck learn to sit on the egg? You know, the ducks don’t sit on the eggs until they’ve got them all laid, or a chicken. So they all hatch at once, otherwise they would hatch in stages. So they wait until they have laid them all, and then they sit on them and they all hatch at the same time. How did they learn to do this? How did the first spider that got the capability, somehow evolved, I mean you can either produce a web or you can’t. How are you going to evolve this by stages? How did it learn what to do with this web that suddenly it finds it coming out of his body? How did it pass it on to his progeny, or how did the first bat that somehow got this capability of sending out a sound and—Tom, when I was in university, I just wouldn’t let the professors get away with that. I would just challenge them and say, you’ve got to be kidding, you’re going to tell me—this is what they tried to say—that the eye, how did the eye develop? Well, some primitive organism back there had an irritation on its skin, and gradually over billions of years it finally—wait a minute! An eye won’t help you to survive unless it can see. How are you going to evolve this thing in stages just from that standpoint? It’s ludicrous, but mathematically it’s impossible!
Tom:
Well, we’re going to get into that, Dave, but if we just back up a little bit, you would expect that kind of battle at a secular university. But our concern here, and this is what we really referred to last week, our concern is that evangelicals are moving into this. Let me quote from your book: This issue was discussed at a gathering of mostly professing evangelicals at Biola University in Southern California, in mid-November 1996. There were scientists from various fields along with journalists, theologians and educators, representing 58 state colleges and universities, 28 Christian academic institutions, and 18 other organizations. “While all agreed that God was involved in the process, which Darwinism denies, there was a wide disagreement on the extent of that involvement all the way from a strict biblical creationist view to the belief that God used evolution to create various species over a period of millions of years, and finally infused the pair of them with human souls.” That’s a forum that a Christian school—
Dave:
Tom, you said you would expect this in a secular university. I wouldn’t even expect it at a secular university, except they don’t want to believe in God. Rationally, it makes absolutely no sense, mathematically it’s impossible. I don’t even have to talk about fossils, and so forth. But now for Christians to say that God used evolution—why would God use a “hit or miss” chance to somehow, eventually, over millions of years produce something—
Tom:
And get it right.
Dave:
Yeah, why doesn’t God just create it? It’s what the Bible says! I mean, why would God leave it to chance, and chance isn’t going to do it, because most of the innovations, or the mutations that come about through radiation, or whatever, are harmful. I mean, it is ludicrous! I’m sorry, and it is a libel on the character of God that He would leave things out there—Well, you say, Well, He leaves things to chance now. Well no, its man has the opportunity to make his choices and we live in a world of that nature. But to produce the human eye by chance!
Tom:
Well, we’re going to give our listeners some particulars for this, but let me, you know, there may be some out there who really are not familiar with evolution, with the teachings, the belief really. So what we want to do is give them just a little refresher, some ideas about it. First of all, it’s important to understand that evolution is not a scientific theory. It’s a belief system about the past, the origin of the universe, how life forms came to be, and how they reach their present state. The fundamental concept is that life evolves from inorganic chemicals around three billion years ago ascending from simple to complex life forms, from simple living cells to complex human beings with all the necessary stages in between. And all of this came about, as you said Dave, by chance slowly and gradually over billions of years, or at least that’s what it is alleged. That particular idea is called “uniform terianism”. Now that’s just the basic idea of what the claim is according to evolutionists. Now you say in your book that the theory should be discarded. Now you’ve given us some reasons, but let’s get into it. Why should this theory, which is in all of our academic institutions, why should this be discarded?
Dave:
Well, Tom, again, just as a rational human being, you couldn’t produce the human eye in stages. Why? They say survival of the fittest. I mean, what would be the guiding factor behind this? Well, you think of an eye, we can’t even build one with our computers, I mean, it’s beyond any camera that we can build, it’s incredible! The human brain, this is going to develop in stages? But it doesn’t help you survive until it works, until it’s complete. So just rationally, it’s absolutely impossible for this to come about. Mathematically it’s impossible! Look, let’s take it like this—we don’t have time, but as quickly as I can. We have 26 letters in the alphabet, how many combinations of those letters are there taken 26 at a time? Well, if you know your mathematics it’s 26 factorial, 26 x 25, x 24, x 23, and so forth on down to 2. That’s a long number, I don’t know, 400 and some septillion, I don’t even know how to name the number, but that’s just 26 letters at a time! Now, Richard Dawkins, who is one of the world’s leading evolutionists, a proponent of this, in his book A Blind Watchmaker, he says that the nucleus of every cell, that’s just a nucleus now; with every cell animal or human has an organized data base larger than the 30-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now how are you going to get all of those letters lined up in the right order by chance, and if one of them is out of order, it doesn’t work. Now, Sir Fred Hoyle, he just—
Tom:
Let me just add another one, Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner, he states that, a single cell, the smallest living unit is more complicated than New York City. I mean, we talk about volumes, but this is incredible complexity.
Dave:
How are you going to put this together by chance? It’s just a matter of mathematics, like flipping a coin, 50% chance every time, but if you are trying to get trillions, you know, of things lined up, or millions or even thousands lined up, then the odds are very small, in fact, they are impossible! So, Sir Fred Hoyle said, he’s a mathematician, and astronomer, not a Christian by any means. He said let’s assume the whole universe is made up of the primitive stuff of life, and let’s stir it around for billions of years. Let’s just take the mathematical probability that you could get the basic enzymes of life by chance, just get them lined up in the right order. Well, he said, it’s a matter of mathematics—how many things do you have to have line up in the right order? Then go to your computer and calculate it. He said it was one chance in one with 40 thousand zeros after it! Okay? We don't even know what that number is. I’ll try to give you some idea. What is the likelihood that by chance you can reach out and pluck a particular electron out of the universe as we know it? Well, that’s one chance in one with 80 zeros after it. All right then let’s take every electron and make another universe out of it. Now what is the likelihood that by chance you can reach out and pluck a particular electron out of all those universes? That’s one chance in one with 160 zeros after it. Then you better believe that one chance in one with the 40 thousand zeros after it will never happen. Mathematically, evolution is a joke! It’s impossible! Mathematically it couldn’t possibly happen by chance, period!
Tom:
But Dave, haven’t we been told that scientists have actually produced life from inorganic material in a laboratory?
Dave:
You may have been told that, but it hasn’t happened! We don’t even know what life is, but scientists are trying to work at it, you know. I mean, what scientist was guiding evolution?
Tom:
In your book you quote Klaus Dose, a prominent evolutionist and he states: “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on earth rather than to its solution. At present, all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or are in a confession of ignorance.” I mean it didn’t happen.
Dave:
No, it hasn’t happened. Tom, let me quote Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History. He’s not a dummy, he says: “I’ve been working on this stuff for more than—he was an evolutionist—on this stuff, (he means evolution), for more than 20 years and there was not one thing I knew about it. It’s quite a shock to learn that one can be misled for so long.” So, he starts asking his fellow evolutionists: What do you really know about this? He says, I don’t know anything, what can you really know for sure about evolution?
Tom:
In other words, the fossil record, where do we have something—is that what he is referring to?
Dave:
Well, he’s asking for anything, he just says; give me one piece of evidence. He says biologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York had no answer. Now, I’m quoting him: “I tried that question on the geology staff at the field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminary in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists and all I got there was silence for a long time, and eventually one person said I do know one thing, it ought not to be taught in high school. They don’t know anything, this is a theory, as you said, it’s really a religious theory, it gives them a substitute for God, it’s a way of saying God does not exist. Now, going back to Sir Fred Hoyle for a moment, he gives us these impossible mathematical odds, and then he says and everybody knows it! Everybody knows that it’s impossible. So then he says, well, how come they still keep teaching it? Because it’s academically respected. You can’t even talk about the other possibility, that God created this universe; they won’t allow it in our public schools. I think that that is reprehensible!
Tom:
Right. You know, Hoyle says that most scientists still cling to Darwinism because of its grip on the educational system. I’m quoting him: “You either have to believe the concepts, or be branded a heretic.” That’s the state.
Dave:
And I am saying that it is absolute stupidity! I’m sorry, Tom, but it is absolute stupidity to believe that the human brain or the human eye or anything could have evolved by chance, and there is absolutely no evidence that it ever happened, but it is a matter of faith because they don’t want to believe in God. And tragically, science, so called, has intimidated the church. The Pope goes along with it. Christianity Today in an editorial goes along with it. New Man Magazine way back there, Promise Keepers, they went along with it, because they want to be academically respected as well. Bu it doesn’t make sense, and it is not biblical!
Tom:
You know, you would think in the face of some of these renowned evolutionists and what they have to say, that evangelicals would take stock of this. For example, Thomas Huxley, I mean he really was Darwin’s major promoter, he writes: “It is clear that the doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of creation. Evolution it’s consistently accepted makes it impossible to believe the Bible.”
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Now, his grandson, Julian Huxley: “Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion. Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed since natural selection could account for any known form of life; there was no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution. I think we can dismiss entirely all idea of a supernatural overriding mind being responsible for the evolutionary process.” Now that’s Thomas Huxley’s grandson.
Dave:
Well, let me interrupt for a second.
Tom:
Okay.
Dave:
I would say that a supernatural mind would not use evolution. I will agree with him, a supernatural mind did not oversee evolution, but you can’t get evolution by chance. Okay? And a supernatural mind would not use evolution, he would create, but anyway, sorry I interrupted you.
Tom:
But the bias is unbelievable, and sometimes showing. You know, I just quoted Julian Huxley, well, here’s another quote from Julian Huxley which may be more to where the problem lies. He says: “I suppose the reason we leaped at the origin of species, Darwin’s thesis, was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” I mean, what we really want to do is throw out a God that we are accountable to and this was the device, all right.
Dave:
Exactly, well that’s an honest admission.
Tom:
And the bias, you know, one more quote that I think is worth while. This is from Sir Arthur Keith, a prominent evolutionist: “Evolution is unproved and unproveable.” We’ve been saying that! Well then he goes on to say: “We believe it because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.”
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
That’s the bottom line.
Dave:
It’s as simple as that, Tom. But I think you’ve got to be very stubborn to reject God, and to say evolution, it all happened by chance. No rational person could support that thesis. And I would challenge anybody—and they have been trying and trying and trying, and the more they get down—when we discovered electron microscopes, and we got down to the molecular level of life, we found that it was far more complex than Darwin realized. It’s like Darwin is looking at a superficial similarities in the outward form of creatures on this earth. He knew nothing of the complexity of the eye, he knew nothing of the complexity at the molecular level, and had he known that, I don’t think Darwin would have had the courage to come up with such a ridiculous theory.
Tom:
Well, he offers this challenge, he says—I’m talking about Darwin—he says that if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down.
Dave:
Yeah, and he didn’t know the complexity.
Tom:
No, no.
Dave:
Yeah, it can’t possibly happen by chance.
Tom:
You know Dave, we’re touching upon this because this really is related to, as we’ve talked about in previous programs, this is related to occultism. Evolution is at the heart, which we discussed the weeks before, so we won’t go over that. But there are many ministries out there which do a terrific job in explaining how false evolution is, and how true creation is. You know, God said: “In the beginning, God created.”
Dave:
But Tom, as you said, it causes people to believe that there is some kind of a force, Star Wars force behind all of this that’s guiding evolution, and that does open the door to the occult, and evolution is related to the occult. It’s related to reincarnation, what’s the point of being reincarnated back again and again unless we’re evolving higher upward to godhood. And in fact, Robert Jastrow, one of the world’s leading astronomers, the founder and director for years of the Goddard Space Institute in New York that sent out Pioneer, Voyager, and so forth, he’s an agnostic, he said: Evolution could have been going on some planets out there ten billion years longer than on planet earth and those beings would be as far beyond man on the evolutionary scale as man is beyond the worm. In fact he said: They would seem like gods to us, they would have such amazing powers, and then he says: And some of them could have evolved beyond the need of bodies and they would be what religious people call, spirits. So now—the evolutionist has gods, this force of evolution somehow has produced gods who don’t even have bodies anymore. So, we’ve got spirit beings out there, highly evolved extraterrestrials supposedly, that our scientists are trying to contact. What a setup for demons! And again, it opens the door to the whole world of the occult.
Tom:
And the door is open. You have one last quote as we close, mathematics professor Wolfgang Smith says, “Evolution is a metaphysical myth, totally bereft of scientific sanction.” If that’s the case, then anything goes.
