Ep 262 | Former Atheist Makes the Case for Angels, Demons & the Soul | Lee Strobel | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Are spirits communicating with us from the other side?

Are we being tricked by demons?

Eight out of 10 Americans believe in the supernatural, but less and less less believe in the reality of heaven, hell, Satan, even God.

Our culture is craving something beyond the material world, and it's possible that we may start looking in all the wrong places.

Before we turn to the Ouija boards, let's see

what Lee Strobel has to say about the Bible, ghosts, demons, angels, death, our souls.

miracles that are happening that he can verify, miracles from the Middle East.

The man who brought us the case for Christ is here to make the case for the reality of an unseen world that impacts all of us.

Welcome, award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and Christian apologist, Lee Strobel.

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So great to have you here, Lee.

Great to be here.

I appreciate the invitation.

We are living in such a crazy time right now where,

I mean, I think you can see God, you can see miracles, you can see demons.

I mean,

I think we have a problem in the country, in the world of possession in many cases.

And yet...

God has been chased out of so much.

We're even mocking him in some ways,

many ways.

And yet the search for him

is really starting to have a resurgence.

Yes, it is, especially among young people.

We're seeing a great hunger, great interest, great curiosity.

Bible sales among young people are going way up.

Why is that, do you think?

I think they've been lied to.

They've been misled by social media.

There's so much you can't trust these days.

How do you trust AI?

How do you trust anything?

And I think they're looking for something solid that they can really anchor their life on.

And I think it's pushing them toward this exploration of spiritual

strange that what the world would say is the least solid yeah right you know what i mean is where they're headed to find because i think there's this uh

this emptiness yeah where the world just can't fill that hole you know there's a hole that yeah

It's true.

That's, of course, what Pascal talked about, that void, that vacuum inside of us that only God can fill.

And I think we're seeing that among a lot of young people.

I love it.

I love the engagement that I get with young people and

their curiosity, their questions, their sincerity.

It's a real sincere quest.

So what is

talk to somebody who just doesn't believe.

What is the evidence or what do you think the soul is?

Start there.

Yeah, I mean, I was a skeptic myself.

I was an atheist for much of my life.

So I kind of went through that process of investigating, how do I know this is true?

How do I know that there's a realm beyond what we can see and touch?

How do I know that I can trust what scripture tells me?

And

you get to issues like science.

Where does science point?

Cosmology and physics and biochemistry, I think, point powerfully toward the existence of God in a way where it makes more sense logically and rationally today to believe in God than I think anytime in history.

Anytime.

Anytime.

I agree.

I mean, we've got to say.

Science is, if God exists, he's the greatest scientist of all time.

Absolutely.

You know what I mean?

And everything, when you look at science

and then you take God and you're like,

it just fits hand in glove.

It does.

I was just the other day, I was in Arizona.

I was looking through the telescope that first discovered the expansion of the universe.

And, you know, if the universe is expanding, then you run the tape backwards and guess what?

It goes to an origin.

It goes to a beginning point.

And whatever begins to exist has a cause.

We know now, virtually every scientist will say the universe began to exist at some point in the past.

Therefore, there must be a cause behind it.

Well, what kind of a cause could bring a universe into existence?

Most people don't know this, but at the beginning, the Big Bang was a theological thing.

And now they're always like, no, it's the Big Bang.

No, it was a theological saying.

Yes, it started from something.

Yes.

But what lit the match?

Exactly.

And you look at scientists for centuries believed the universe was eternal.

It always existed.

But now we know there was a beginning point because of the expansion of the universe.

It must go back to a beginning.

And then that's, what's the implication?

Well,

what can trigger the creation of a universe?

Must be transcendent, which means separate from creation.

Must be immaterial or spirit, because it existed before the spiritual world or the physical world was created.

Must be timeless or eternal, because he existed before physical time came into being.

Must be powerful, given the immensity of the creation event, must be smart given the precision of the creation event, must be personal, because he had to make the decision to create.

Must be caring because he crafted a habitat for us to flourish in.

Must be creative because, I mean, just look at the universe.

It's crazy.

That's a description of the God of the Bible.

And so I think that it's rational and logical to believe these days.

And then you look at the fine-tuning of the universe, the fact that it is fine-tuned on a razor's edge.

so that life can exist in a way that defies the explanation.

It could be a coincidence.

Half a degree in space.

Half a degree and the whole thing collapses.

It's unbelievable.

You look at force of gravity, we all know what that is.

If you looked at a ruler that went across the entire known universe, 15 billion light years, broken down in one inch increments, that represents the plausible range along which the force of gravity could have been set at anywhere along that ruler.

But it was set at the exact right point so that life could exist.

What if we moved it one inch?

compared to the 15 billion light-year width of the universe?

Intelligent life is impossible anywhere in the universe.

The strong nuclear force that binds together the nucleus of atoms, decrease it by just one part in 10,000 billion, billion, billion, billion, and all we'd have in the universe would be hydrogen.

No life.

I mean, I interviewed, I did a book called Is God Real?

And I interviewed a physicist for that.

And I said, well, in light, there's about 50 to 100 of these kinds of parameters.

I said, in light of that, what are the odds?

What's the possibility this could happen by coincidence?

And he looked at me and said, well, you know, we physicists have a term for that.

I said, oh, what is it?

He said, ain't going to happen.

I love the fact that in your book that you do talk to scientists.

You talk to people.

I mean, this is not a ghost book.

You know,

it's backed by something reasonable and logical.

I remember

when I first started really seeking God, I rejected the idea of God.

So I could start at a zero.

everything I thought about God.

Somebody else had told me.

I was just imitating what I had learned.

You know what I mean?

Sure.

To find him, I wanted to start at zero base and just say, okay,

I'm going to start it.

I don't know.

He might exist.

He might not exist.

But

and when you start there and you use logic,

it's really a great journey.

It's fascinating.

It's so great.

It changed my life.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I was a skeptic.

I was an atheist.

My background's in journalism and law.

So I look at evidence.

I look at corroboration.

I look at facts and data.

And

I thought I could disprove Christianity in a weekend.

Literally.

I thought, give me a three-day weekend maybe, and I can disprove it.

And I ended up spending two years of my life investigating the evidence for faith.

And like you came away saying, wait a minute.

Unless I have an anti-supernatural bias and rule it out at the outset, which I think is illegitimate.

If I just follow the evidence wherever it points, if I call a ball a ball and a strike a strike like a good umpire, I think the evidence is powerful and persuasive.

I think it's clear and convincing that God does indeed exist and that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead and prove that he's the Son of God.

So it was a remarkable journey.

And

there's so many other people who've been on that journey who have come to the same conclusion.

I know an astrophysicist from University University of Texas, Ph.D., Silva Samveander, who became a Christian because of Big Bang cosmology and because of investigating the physics, the fine-tuning of the universe.

So let's go into some things.

Angels, demons,

the soul.

Yeah, the soul.

Tell me.

Well, let's start with the soul because then I want to ask you about angels and how this is all working.

So tell me about the soul.

Do we have a soul?

That's a question.

A lot of of scientists are materialists and they believe we don't have a soul.

We're just a brain.

We're a physical brain.

Neurons fire.

We don't really have free will.

It's predetermined by our chemistry and our genetics.

And that's...

That doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense.

I know, but...

I've been both good and bad.

And what steered me was my soul.

Yes, there's something.

There's something.

And you know what?

Civilizations from the beginning have all believed in the soul.

I mean, this is not, in fact, it is so common in ancient civilizations that I think to argue against it,

the weight is on your side to try to prove it.

So I interviewed a PhD from Oxford or from Cambridge University who's a neuroscientist, Sharon Diricks.

She's great.

And the book, this part of the book is great.

She's awesome.

She's awesome.

And one of the fun things she said is, let me do a mind game, a mind experiment.

She said, what if there's a woman named Mary?

And Mary is the world's leading expert on vision.

Oh, she understands the brain and how the optic nerve takes impulses from the eye and how everything functions and so forth.

But she's blind.

What if one day

she got her eyesight for the first time?

Would she know anything new about vision at that point?

Volumes!

Of course, that means the mere physical reality of vision is not enough to explain the first-person experience of consciousness, the soul, the spirit.

And I thought that was a brilliant way of looking at things.

Yes,

we are a brain.

We are a body, but we're also a spirit.

We're a hyphenated creature.

Is mind and

mind and soul the same thing?

Yeah, generally speaking, science.

Or no, sorry, mind and brain.

No, mind and brain are different.

Consciousness, spirit, soul, those are kind of synonyms.

But you got the physical brain and how that functions.

And then you have the mind, which is our consciousness, which is distinct from our physical brain, but it interacts with our physical brain.

And we know this because of people who have been like trapped in their body.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

They can't function.

They're brain dead.

They're brain dead.

Well, there's some people who have been in vegetative states for years that they discovered later were conscious the whole time.

But there are 900 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals over the last 40 years on the topic of near-death experiences.

These are cases where a person is clinically dead.

Generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no heartbeat.

Some of them have been on the way to the morgue.

I mean, they're physically dead.

But then they're revived.

Their body is revived.

And when they come back, I was conscious the whole time.

I was watching them try to resuscitate my body in the hospital, that kind of thing.

And it's

because I've done several interviews

on this particular topic.

And it is to the point to where

I read one where

the woman said, no, I saw what was happening.

Yes.

Describe some things that were happening in the room, but you could dismiss.

And she said, okay,

there is a sticker

on the ceiling fan on the

top of the blade.

Right.

And this is what it said.

And they got a ladder and they went up and they looked, and that's exactly what it said.

How would you know that?

Exactly.

Exactly.

At least, I saw one study of at least 107 cases where we have what happens when you physically die, so they're clinically dead, their spirit, their soul, their consciousness separates from their body and continues to live on.

And that's a good example, the case of the woman in Memorial Hospital in London who saw the sticker because she was, her spirit is separated from her body.

She's watching the resuscitation efforts on her body from the ceiling of the room.

And she sees the sticker on the top of the family.

Nobody could have seen it.

But that is so common.

There's a little girl.

She drowned in a YMCA swimming pool.

Brain expanded, no heartbeat, no brain waves.

They took her to the hospital, but

they just were keeping her body basically alive until they figured out what to do.

She was dead.

And she said, Later, because three days later, she came back, they revived her, and she said, I was conscious the whole time.

And they said, wait a minute, how do you, you know, how do we know?

She said, one night when my parents visited me, I followed them home.

And I came to the home and I watched my mom make chicken and rice for dinner.

And she explained where her father was sitting.

She explained how her brother went into his room and had a G.I.

Joe Jeep and a G.I.

Joe doll that he was playing with and what they were wearing and so things she could not have known.

unless her body, unless her spirit really did follow them home.

So we see cases where people see or hear things would have been impossible for them to see or hear if their spirit had not continued to to live on after their clinical death.

One of the most profound studies I talked about in my book, they studied 21 cases of blind people.

So these are people, a lot of them blind since birth.

And yet during this near-death experience when their soul separated from their body, they could see for the first time or they had vision-like perceptions.

Vicki Umapag, 26 years old, killed in a car accident, blind virtually since birth.

But she says, I was conscious the whole time.

She's watching the paramedics trying to revive her body.

She sees the paramedics.

She sees her body.

She sees birds.

She sees trees for the first time.

She's describing things she could not have known.

And then they finally revive her.

Her spirit returns to her body and she's blind again.

Researchers,

this is medically impossible.

It must have sucked.

Yeah, no kidding.

It's like,

yeah, wow.

But so, so, yeah, Glenn, I think you're right.

It's these corroborate.

I'm looking for corroboration, you know?

And when I see things that would have been impossible for people to see or hear unless they didn't have an authentic out-of-body experience, that tells me this is real.

Why does it matter?

I mean,

I have a friend Pendillette, atheist, and I've always said,

just play the odds, man.

You know, at least go agnostic, you know,

because you never know.

Why does it matter?

It matters for a lot of reasons.

I think, first of all, it matters because if indeed we are just a physical brain, most scientists will say we don't really have free will.

Well, wait a minute.

If we don't have free will, how do you punish someone for doing something wrong?

How do you give an award to someone for doing something great if they don't have free will to accomplish those things in the first place?

I mean, it's ridiculous.

How do you, how does somebody,

how do you explain turnarounds in people?

You can't.

You can't.

I mean, that's why I think people, so many people have what I call an anti-supernatural presupposition.

In other words, the supernatural is impossible.

Miracles are impossible.

Now, show me your evidence.

Well, you just ruled out the evidence by your presupposition.

I'm saying, no, get rid of that.

And just say, where does the evidence most persuasively point?

And I think clearly now, it matters because if God is real, then we could know him.

We could experience him.

He might even guide us.

He might even perform a miracle in our lives.

And I think he's, I document in my book cases of miracles that are in peer-reviewed medical journals.

What is the definition of a miracle to you?

A miracle is an event brought about by the power of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history.

So a lot of people will say, like Hume, the famous atheist from Scotland, he would say, miracles are impossible because they violate the laws of nature.

You can't violate the laws of nature.

That's a misunderstanding.

If I take this book and I drop it, the law of gravity says it's going to hit the floor.

But if I take this book and I drop it and you reach in and grab it before it hits the ground, you're not overturning the law of gravity.

You're not violating the law of gravity.

You're merely intervening.

And that's what a miracle is.

If God did create the universe, which I think we have clear evidence he did, then for him to intervene is no problem.

It's child's play.

So

I think miracles are not only possible, but I think they're actual.

There was a, I can't remember his name now, and

he's wrong, but he was a scientist that lived back in the 30s 40s and 50s, I think.

Velikovsky, I think he wrote a book called Worlds in Collision.

Oh, I've heard that.

And

he was wrong about a lot of stuff.

He did talk about the temperature of space has to be this, and it has to be very accurate, otherwise it'll collapse.

Some of the things he talked about were right.

But

what he was talking about in Worlds of Collision, and again, I'm not saying he was right about this, but

he said, instead of dismissing the supernatural,

let's look at all of the stories.

Yes.

You know, the flood.

Yes.

If it happened, it has to be printed over here.

It might have a different story to it, but it has a flood story.

It has a flood story here.

And he said, and then instead of dismissing, science should actually look at these miracles and say,

is there a way

that this

could have happened?

God would use, for instance, the parting of the Red Sea.

And I'm not saying this either, but the theory that the wind picked up and swept the water, that there is, there are, that God would use

natural processes

in an unusual way.

Which he could, yes, which he could.

But what we see is, when I, because again, I'm a skeptic, so I'm looking at how do I know these miracles are actual?

How do I know they really take place?

So you you go to medical journals.

And for instance, there's a case I talked about in my book about a woman who was blind for a dozen years with an incurable condition.

Nobody had ever been cured of this condition.

She went to a school for the blind.

She learned how to read Braille.

She walked with a white cane, and she married a pastor.

And one night they're getting ready to go to bed, and he comes over.

She's already in bed.

He puts his hand on her shoulder and he begins to cry and begins to pray.

He says, God, I know you can heal my wife.

I know you can do it.

And I pray you'd do it tonight.

And with that, she opened her eyes of perfect eyesight.

She said later, I was blind when my husband prayed for me and then I opened my eyes and I could see perfectly.

It was a miracle.

The darkness was gone.

I could see and her vision remained for the next 50 years at plus.

So

how do you explain that?

Is it a mere coincidence?

Is there something else going on?

But

it's not like that.

How do you explain the person who prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and it didn't happen?

It didn't happen.

It didn't happen.

And that's a legitimate question.

My wife has a neuromuscular condition.

She's been in pain for 20 years, every day, and she'll be in pain every day for the rest of her life with this incurable condition unless God intervenes with a miracle, which he has not chosen to do.

So that's a very personal question for a lot of people.

Why not me?

Why is my blindness not cured?

And I think there are several things to say about that.

First of all,

Miracles were not automatic in New Testament times either.

The Bible says that Jesus didn't do many miracles in Nazareth because of the lack of belief.

Paul had a buddy named Trophimus.

Trophimus got sick.

Did Paul heal him?

No, he went off on a missionary journey and left Trophimus behind.

In one chapter of the Gospels, we see Jesus giving the authority to the disciples to heal people.

And then seven chapters later, they can't heal an epileptic boy.

So healing was not automatic in the New Testament either.

And, you know, I often think of this: you know, what if God granted every miracle request the minute it was requested?

We couldn't do science.

How could we do science?

It's unpredictable.

Everything would be chaotic.

We need the predictability to do science.

So I think, and I do believe

based on scripture, that God will heal all who follow him, but it may not be until they're headed for the next race.

So my daughter has cerebral palsy, and

she has the greatest faith of anybody

I've ever met.

And,

you know, I've talked to her about different things that are happening in research that could help, you know,

bridge those gaps, et cetera, et cetera.

And she says to me every time, Dad, Lord's going to heal me.

And

it might be after I die, but

I am

promised that I will be healed.

And it is remarkable.

And faith like that is a miracle.

To me, it's a miracle for me.

It builds our faith.

God uses that to build our faith.

I mean, what other than the faith of a child can cause our heart to just melt and our own faith to expand at the same time?

I mean, and I've seen that in my wife.

My wife is a woman of great faith, and she doesn't feel like God's abandoned her.

She is a woman today she would not be had she not had this experience of this pain for the last 20 years.

She is a person of great empathy, great faith, great love toward other people and toward the hurting,

so empathetic and so forth.

I don't think she would be the same person had she not gone through the difficulties that she's gone through.

So God can and does use it for good.

I'm alcoholic, recovering alcoholic.

My mother committed suicide.

I almost committed suicide at some point in my life.

My brother committed suicide.

I've seen it

and we live it.

But I will tell you: if it wasn't for, my dad said to me one time,

he said, Make a list of all the bad things that have happened in your life.

Because I was whining.

And he said, and so I started writing it down.

I was like, well, now, wait a minute.

I started with my mom's suicide.

And then I got to like number three.

And I was like, no, wait a minute, wait a minute.

If that wouldn't have happened, then this wouldn't have happened.

If my mom hadn't done this, then that wouldn't have happened.

And he was saying, there is no bad.

It's how you interpret it.

Do you take that and build from that?

I feel I'm blessed

because I'm not sure I would have believed in the atonement the way I do had I not needed it as badly as I did.

I'd be a different person.

If you had not gone through any of that, you wouldn't be.

I wouldn't be the same.

No.

Yeah.

I wouldn't be.

I'd probably be dead.

Yeah.

If it wasn't for that moment of challenging him yeah and saying you say do these things and i will do these things

and i needed

i needed relief from my sin yeah so badly yeah that i said i will do those things and when you do that and you feel that

impossible burden leave

there is nothing like it Absolutely.

There's nothing like it.

Absolutely.

You know, a verse that gets thrown around by Christians a lot to the point where it's almost a cliche, Romans 8, 28.

God causes all things to work together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

And I've seen that in my life.

I mean, I was a drunk and an alley.

I was successful.

Yale Law School, legal editor of the Chicago Tribune.

I was doing television, just writing books,

but they didn't see the other side of me, which means he literally drunk in the snow in an alley on Saturday night.

And I knew who I was.

I was an immoral, narcissistic, drunken

person.

Preach it, brother.

I mean,

I know.

And, you know,

then we recently investigated Christianity because my wife had become a Christian.

And I wanted to get her out of the cult.

Wow.

I wanted to rescue her from that.

If I could just disprove it, then I could get her back the way she was.

She had been an agnostic and had come to faith.

And I thought, I'm either going to divorce her or I'm going to get her out of this cult.

And so I spent two years investigating the evidence until I became convinced that it's true and became a Christian.

And then my values, my character, my morality, my attitudes, my philosophy, my worldview, everything begins to change over time.

And you look back and you say,

what if I'd missed that?

You know,

I wouldn't be me.

I'd be down a whole different path.

I'd be a whole, my, my family would not have survived.

My kids would not have survived.

My son's a PhD in theology, professor at a major seminary now.

Great kids.

My daughter's a novelist, writes books that have God in them.

And I see my grandkids coming to faith one by one and their life changing at a young age.

And

I just wish I had come to faith.

when I was their age.

But you needed.

I needed them.

I think, you know,

I don't think God

punishes people

to shape them in that way.

We make our own choices, and he's just standing there the whole time.

Don't do that.

It's going to leave him, Mark.

Don't do that.

But

I think it's so interesting.

I think of him as a carpenter.

No matter how many times I was trying to work on my own house, and I'm not skilled at all.

Good luck, yeah.

And so I'm working side by side with, you know, the guys who are actually building the house.

And they're tolerating me, you know.

And I'm like, I can cut that.

I can cut that.

And eventually they came to me and they were like, sir, it is your money, but everything you cut, we take another one and go to the other side of the house and recut it because you're cutting all of them wrong.

And so I stopped.

And it made me think,

I cut everything wrong in my life.

Everything I had cut wrong.

And he took all of it, including the waste, the sawdust, and he put it together and built something that I could have never built.

Never built.

You know, Evil Kin Evil, the great motorcycle daredevil writer who lived an immoral life.

He was a drunk.

He was a womanizer.

He once beat up a business associate with a baseball bat.

Jeez.

Yeah, I went to jail for assault.

Oh, yeah.

He was a crazy guy.

Anyway.

He came to faith at the end of his life.

He's on the beach in Florida and God spoke to him and said, Robert, which is a real name, I've saved you more times than you'll ever know.

Now you need to come to me through my son, Jesus.

So he freaked out.

He didn't, I don't even know who Jesus is.

So he called Frank, what was his name?

The famous broadcaster, sports guy.

Yeah, Frank Gifford.

He called Frank.

Frank, you're a Christian.

I don't even know what Jesus is.

I had this thing.

He said, well, get the case for Christ, that book by Lee's Rowland.

That'll explain.

Anyway, Evil Kin Evil has this radical experience with God.

180-degree change, more than any bit I'd ever seen in my life.

We became friends.

He called me to thank me for writing the book

we became friends.

I saw his life completely changed.

But his biggest lament to me was, Lee, if I'd only come to faith as a kid, I could have lived my life differently.

I could have lived my life for God.

And I said, I know that, but when you stood up, when you were baptized, and you told your story of how God has changed your life, and the pastor ripped up his sermon, And said, y'all have heard the story of Jesus.

Anybody who wants to come up right now, receive Jesus and be baptized, come on up.

And 700 people came up.

Wow.

I said, do you think that would have happened if you'd been Christian since you were a little kid?

Probably not.

Yeah, you did a lot of messed up things in your life, but you know what?

God used it because you have a certain kind of twisted credibility with people.

And so, you know.

Yeah, we all wish, I think those of us who found God and have had our lives changed, wish we'd done it earlier.

But as you say,

I love the way you put it, how God took the sawdust and the

incorrectly cut wood and

no ways and put it together to create us the way we are.

I know.

And, you know, I probably have, you know, I write books about faith in a way that maybe has more credibility because I had been an atheist.

I had been a skeptic.

And do I wish I hadn't done a lot of the things I did?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's my life.

Yeah.

So let's talk about, let's go back to what you just said about evil connival.

Yeah.

You heard God.

Yeah.

I don't know how I know,

but I know now after years and years when it's me

and when it's God.

Yeah.

They both sound like me.

The biggest tip off is, for me at least, is it's always a prompting to do something I really don't want to do.

You know what I mean?

It's like, no, I don't really,

no, that's that's not me, or I don't want to do that.

Not something you would have naturally chosen to do.

Correct.

And

it's always like, yeah, but you need to.

Yeah.

You know?

And

that's how I know.

How do you know?

Because everybody says, yeah.

I mean, 70, isn't it?

70% of people say they've heard the voice of God or they've heard God.

Quite a few.

Quite a few.

I think it's a couple of things.

I agree with you that especially as you walk with God for a period of time, you get more discerning on what his voice is.

But I remember after I became a Christian a couple years later, when I felt God calling me to leave everything behind, all my journalism training, my legal training, take a 60% pay cut and join the staff of a local church.

And I thought, really?

You give all this, all that I've worked for my whole life, a legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and books and TV.

Yeah, leave that all behind.

Take a 60% pay cut.

Go work on a church staff.

And, you know, it was one of the easiest decisions I ever made because it was the test that you just mentioned.

Was that something I would come up with?

No, no, no.

I was flying high in my career.

I would have ridden that wave.

No.

And so that's one of the tests, as you say.

And when you

when you take

that first leap,

the voice gets stronger

because it knows you're going to listen and obey.

Yes.

So it gets stronger.

And

I remember a time I started the blaze and I know I was supposed to do it.

I know I was supposed to do it.

And there was no way to do it.

And we get neck deep into it.

And my wife and I,

like nobody knows this,

especially at the time, my wife and I were like one paycheck away from out.

Wow.

Okay.

We put everything into this.

And I am, I say to my wife,

how is this?

And she's like, the Lord, did you do what the Lord told you to do?

And I said, yeah.

And then I'm thinking in my head, well, no, I didn't follow him exactly on a couple of things because he doesn't know my business.

You know, that kind of stuff.

And she said, we prayed on it.

We had an answer.

He didn't mean that you were going to be successful at it.

He's taking us someplace.

He said, do it.

And he's taking us someplace.

And it may be that we're going to be poor.

but if it's his will does that matter yeah and it gives you it takes all of that stress away i don't

i don't as long as i've prayed on it yeah and my wife and i brought it to him you leave the outcome to him the outcome's his yeah and i'm just learning to do that now

you know like with with everything i get because what i do i'm talking about politics all the time and i get so frustrated how can people not right and

that's not mine to worry about yeah i'm supposed to do what i'm supposed to do and the outcome is his.

And if you believe that, then

you know it's going to be good.

Yeah.

Lord, they're cutting all of the lumber wrong.

Yeah.

He wasn't freaked out when I was doing that.

That's right.

Why should I freak out when others are doing that?

Now, the Bible does say test the spirits.

So we're to test them.

One test we just mentioned, which is if this is something I wouldn't normally want to do in my flesh, in

my own personal ambitions and so forth, then maybe it is from God.

That's one good test.

And not based in fear.

Not based in fear.

And then I think for me,

I want to look at what does scripture say?

Is this consistent with the revelation of scripture?

Is it consistent?

Because God's not going to tell us to do something that violates law.

It's not going to go tell me to do something I don't want to do, which is like kill my kid.

Okay, that's not something I would do.

But okay, it may pass that first test, but it's not in scripture.

So I want to go back and I want to say, what does scripture teach?

What does Jesus say about these things?

And try to discern as best I can.

Is this consistent?

And I think that's really, really important.

So

I think it's weird.

I think people are more willing to accept ghosts

than they are.

And, you know, I read this stupid story, and I hate to say it this way, because I do believe that evil exists.

But there's a story that came out last week about this doll, Annabelle, and it's possessed by blah, blah, blah.

And the people are protecting from that evil spirit.

They put it in a glass box.

But somebody took Annabelle out last week and they died.

And it's like, it's crazy.

And how many people will believe in that?

But they will reject.

God.

They'll reject a miracle.

They will believe in ghosts

and try to contact ghosts, which ghosts don't make any sense to me.

No, they don't.

In fact, the technical definition of a ghost is a person who has died and their spirit, their soul, refuses to enter into the afterlife.

I don't see that in the Bible.

I don't see that in scripture.

So

I think ghosts are most likely demonic apparitions.

I agree.

Yeah.

I agree.

Having said that.

Jesus was an exorcist.

Jesus believed in demons.

He cast out demons.

And that's an affirmation that, yes, there is a demonic realm.

So explain this because I think

there's so much behavior now, and you'll see it on TV.

People filled with such unreasonable rage.

Yes.

And they're tearing their own families apart.

And that does not come from any place good.

And I understand anger and political divisiveness, everything else.

I get that.

But it's when people are like almost demons screaming,

it's hard to ignore it.

It's hard to ignore, and it's like, you know, you've left the normal human realm here.

Right.

So, well, let me tell you a story.

There's a guy named Richard Gallagher.

Richard Gallagher is a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, trained at Ivy League University,

teaches at some really prestigious universities.

I have a quote from the former president of the American Psychiatric Association saying he is a brilliant, credentialed, honest, great integrity-filled person.

I mean, just great, great guy.

25 years ago, he and his wife had two cats, and they got along great.

They slept together, they played together, no problem.

Until one night, the cats began to attack each other.

I mean, vicious, trying to kill each other.

They're clawing.

They're yelling at each other in a sense.

They're clawing at each other.

They're biting at each other.

I mean, it was a violent eruption of of the two cats and they had to pull them apart and put them into separate rooms.

What in the world was that all about?

Next morning, 9 a.m., the doorbell rings.

There's a priest set appointment.

A Catholic priest was bringing by a woman to be psychiatrically examined by Dr.

Gallagher.

Is she insane or is she demon-possessed?

Doorbell rings at 9 o'clock.

He opens the door and here's the Catholic priest and here's the woman.

he's to examine.

She claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult.

She looks up at him and she sneers and she says, how'd you like those cats last night?

And that started Dr.

Gallagher on a

next 25 years of becoming immersed in the realm of the demonic, studying it, investigating.

He's a medical doctor, highly accomplished psychiatrist.

He knows the difference between a person who has a psychiatric illness and someone who's demon-possessed.

And there are people who are demon-possessed.

I mean, the cases he talks about,

he had the case where a petite woman who was demon-possessed picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room.

He had one case where eight eyewitnesses saw a demon-possessed person levitate off a bed for half an hour.

He's experienced many cases where people are speaking in Latin and languages they don't know.

He's seen many cases where there's spontaneous bruising and scratching that can't be physically explained away.

He was actually on the phone with that Catholic priest later talking about that woman, Julia, who claimed to be a high priestess of a satanic cult, and they're discussing her case on the phone, and a voice comes on the phone.

You let her go.

She's ours.

Don't you blanky, blanky, get involved.

A satanic voice, the same one they heard during her exorcism, that they're hearing now on the telephone.

And he said, this is not psychiatry.

There is something here.

And I think it's true.

There is a supernatural realm that is beyond what we can see and touch and putting a test to.

And yes, there are angels.

They are real.

And yes, there are demons.

They are real.

And I think the biggest mistake, we take two big mistakes with demons.

One is to deny that they exist, that there is no Satan, it's just a story.

Deny that.

That's a danger.

Or to see a demon under every bush.

I mean, and think that everything is being confirmed.

Correct.

You know, I think both are mistakes.

But I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that there is this supernatural realm.

And do you feel

it's growing, both good and bad?

I think so.

Personal opinion, yes.

I can't cite data, but my personal opinion, and the Bible says that in the end times, the evil will be more pronounced, and so will good.

And I think we're seeing that contrast between good and evil

as starkly as ever.

And it also says one side won't understand the other.

And I don't even begin to understand it.

And they don't understand

me.

That's right.

That's right.

It's just things that,

you know,

I know you talk about,

you know, one of the things is how do you explain the

prophecies

from thousands of years ago that are now happening?

Right.

I mean, that is...

It's hard to explain.

I think it's impossible to explain.

I think it's...

Well, I'll give you some mathematical analysis of that.

There are

a series of predictions, illusions, prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures called the Old Testament about the coming of Jesus and the Messiah.

And

there are dozens of these things, and people have run the odds.

There's a professor of mathematics named Dr.

Peter Stoner.

He got together graduate students in mathematics, and he said, you know, a lot of these prophecies are mathematically quantifiable.

If the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem, How many people have been born in Bethlehem?

We can determine that.

So they looked at what are the mathematical odds that any human being in history could fulfill just 48 of these ancient prophecies.

It's one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.

It ain't going to happen.

I think the prophecies that we see in the Bible, I think, have been proven beyond mathematical question.

to being true.

And that gives credibility to scriptures, but it also alerts us to the fact we ought to pay attention to what things are being pointed toward.

When we see the nation of Israel forming in the 1940s, we ought to say, wait a minute, something's going on here.

Something's going on here.

Yeah.

So, golly,

that was one of the things that helped lead me.

I remember there's a guy named Louis Lepiz.

Louis was a Vietnam veteran, Jewish person.

And he gets accosted by some evangelists on a sidewalk in Los Angeles, and they're trying to share Jesus with him.

He's like, come on.

He's like, come on.

And they say, here, read this from your Hebrew scriptures, Isaiah 53.

And he reads it.

And if you've ever read it, it's a description of Jesus.

It's a description of the Messiah, who's to come.

And he reads it, and they say, well, who do you think that is?

He said, well, it's obviously Jesus, but you guys have tinkered with the text.

You guys have messed with it.

So he called his grandmother and he said, could you send me our version of the Hebrew scriptures?

He gets it.

He looks.

It's the same.

And it's called the fifth gospel, because here we have thousands of years before Jesus was born.

We've got

these predictions of the crucifixion, the resurrection, and so forth.

And

so he ends up not only becoming a Christian, but a pastor, and is now to this day a pastor out in California.

But he married Connie Selica and his wife, who's that keyboard player, that famous guy.

John Tesh.

Yeah, John Tesh.

He did their wedding.

They go to his church.

Oh, that's funny.

That's funny.

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Back now with more more from Lee.

Before I go to angels,

some people believe that angels are

relatives coming and speaking.

Nurses will tell you they know when somebody's about to die

because they'll start seeing their relatives.

Somebody that they love, their sister, mother, brother, husband, wife,

will visit them.

Is that an angel?

No, I don't believe it's an angel.

Do I believe it is a legitimate phenomenon?

Yes, it definitely is.

I have a whole chapter in my book saying that

it's natural.

Meaning that people on their deathbed will have a pre-death vision of what's to come.

And often there are dead relatives who they will see.

Now, this is biblical.

We see in Acts chapter 7 where Stephen, described as being full of the Holy Spirit, is about to be stoned to death.

He's on his deathbed.

He looks up and he sees the heavens open up and he sees the Father and the Son together.

So

it's biblical.

And I have a whole chapter on this.

It is fascinating.

It is far more common than people think.

My father, who is an atheist,

deathbed.

Yeah.

He's completely out.

Yeah.

And he opens his eyes and he sits up and he looks at the corner of the room and he says,

Yes, okay.

And he's having a conversation.

I understand.

Now?

Okay.

Dies.

He died.

Yeah.

I mean,

what the heck was that?

Yeah.

What was that?

Yep.

It's a remarkable phenomenon.

A team of researchers went to a huge hospice facility in New York State, and they said to the dying people there, If you have a vision before, you know,

before you die,

if you have a vision unlike anything you've ever had, would you please tell us?

We would like to know.

Because a lot of people are embarrassed.

They don't want to say anything.

And so guess what they found?

88% of them had a pre-death vision.

I was having dinner with my wife.

There were seven of us in Oklahoma City a couple of months ago.

And there were seven of us at dinner, and we started talking about this.

And four families had stories of people who had pre-death vision.

My wife, her mom, and her dad.

And often, here's the, I'm looking for corroboration again.

I know this isn't just coming from the mind.

Well, one team studied 3,000 cases, and they determined these are not, this is not a matter of hallucination.

It's not coming from their imagination.

There's something more going on to...

How do they know it's not a hallucination?

Because they looked at what are the characteristics of hallucination, what are the characteristics of these pre-death visions, and they don't match up.

There's something else going on.

But here's the corroboration.

Often, people will see something in the realm to come that they could not have known about.

So for instance, there was a woman named Doris, very well-documented case.

She's dying.

And she has a deathbed vision.

And she sees the heavens open up and she sees angelic beings.

And she sees her father, who had died a couple years earlier.

And he's kind of almost welcoming her to the realm to come.

And then she gets this puzzled look on her face.

She said, wait a minute.

What's Vida doing there?

Why is Vaida with my father?

Doesn't make any sense.

Why would Vida be there?

And then she died.

Vida was her sister.

She had died a couple of weeks earlier.

Nobody had told Doris because she was sick.

They didn't want the news to kill her.

So they withheld the news from Doris that her sister had died, and yet here she sees her in the realm to come already dead.

So that's a form of corroboration.

But here's one of the most interesting forms of corroboration.

Children who are about to die, four years old, five years old, six years old, will often see angels coming for them.

But they don't see angels as you would think a little child would imagine them to be.

So I'll give you an example.

In the Bible, in Luke 16, verse 22, Jesus talks about a beggar who dies.

And in verse 22, he says, angels carried him to the realm to come.

Very often, people on their deathbed will see angels coming for them.

The great skeptic in Canada, number one atheist in Canada, Charles Templeton, who did become a Christian before he died, saw angels coming for him on his deathbed.

But little kids,

What would an angel look like to a five-year-old kid?

Be a caricature, be a cartoon.

It'd be big wings, right?

It may be some feathers or something.

That's what a kid would see if this were coming from their imagination.

That's not what they see.

So there's a doctoral dissertation looking into these things.

And in one of the cases, and this is common, one of the cases, a little girl said, mommy, mommy, do you see them?

What, honey?

The angels.

They're coming.

They're here.

They're coming from.

Oh, they're so beautiful.

Listen to their singing.

Oh, mommy, they're so beautiful.

And her mom didn't want to disappoint her.

So she said, oh, yeah, yeah, I see see them look at their big wings

and the little girl said oh mommy you don't have to lie they don't have big wings and she went on to describe them in great detail the bible doesn't say all angels have wings and she went on to describe these angels in great detail you would think if this was just something coming from the subconscious mind of a little kid they would imagine what an angel would look like to them from a cartoon.

That's not what they see.

Mary, again, my daughter, when she was very young, she said

Jesse and Michael would come all the time

and spend time with her and talk to her and play.

And

she didn't know a Jesse.

She didn't know a Michael.

And

she would just talk about them being just

being there, loving her and just

talking to her.

And that's not something she would have.

Come up with.

Come up with.

I lead lead the book off with a story about, you know, Kirk Cameron.

Yeah, yeah.

His sister.

I love this story.

Yeah.

Well, his sister, the lesser-known one, talks about having been pregnant and she had a miscarriage.

Lost the baby, and she goes to the hospital, and she insists they do an ultrasound before they take her into the operation room.

Because her mother, right?

Her mother had warned her.

He's like, don't let them take you for any treatment or anything before an ultrasound.

So she insisted on it.

So the baby had already been prematurely born at home and was dead.

It was premature.

But they're doing the ultrasound, and everybody gets quiet.

There's another baby in you.

Turned out she was pregnant with twins.

She didn't know it.

And the other baby was fine and ended up going to full term and was born.

And then when the little girl was, I don't know, four years old or so, she came up to her mommy one day.

They'd not told her about this other twin because she's too young to understand it.

She comes up one day, she said,

Mommy,

do I have a sister?

I said, what do you mean?

Well,

she comes to me in my dreams a lot.

Oh, yeah, all the time.

And she comes to me and she wants to talk and she wants to play.

And mommy, the oddest thing is she looks just like me.

She didn't know she had a twin.

What do you do with something like that?

There's some anomalies like that.

I'm not quite sure what to do with something.

Right, so I don't know because that, you know, kind of what I read that story and I was thinking of Jesse and Michael and I thought, but wait,

if you don't see dead relatives, now Jesse and Michael's different.

They're not dead relatives.

Yeah.

But if you don't see,

if that's not biblical, how do you explain that?

Yeah.

What is that?

That particular case is a real head scratcher for me.

Is it demonic?

I don't think so.

It doesn't seem to be.

Is it just something that God in his grace wanted her to be able to have some sort of relationship with this child who's already in his presence.

I'm going to believe that.

I don't know.

I kind of leave this in the category of I'm not quite sure what to make of this.

Unlike angels and demons and things like that, where we've got good concrete corroboration, we don't quite have that in some of these cases.

And I do talk about several of them in the book.

And

there are some scholars who are skeptical of them and others who aren't.

So, what are angels then?

Angels are created by God.

We don't become an angel when we die.

They're a separate creation of God.

They are spirit.

There's lots of them.

Will they ever get a body?

No.

No.

God created them to be spirit beings.

It says in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that they are there to serve God, but also to serve his people.

And interestingly, also in the book of Hebrews, it says that some people, in providing hospitality to strangers, unbeknownst to them, are actually providing hospitality to angels, which tells me that, yes, we might have encounters with angels in this world.

And in my book, I talk about some convincing cases where people, and I'll give you an example, John G.

Payton, B-A-T-O-N.

John was a Scottish missionary.

He and his wife went to a remote island in the South Pacific to share Jesus with the tribespeople there.

Well, the tribespeople didn't like the message.

And so one night, John and his wife are in their little cottage and a mob forms to come burn down their house and kill them.

What do you do?

What can you do?

They just prayed all night long.

God, protect us.

God, save us.

God, help us.

And by dawn, the mob dissipated.

Well, a year later, he leads the head of that mob to faith in Christ.

And he's talking to him.

And he said, do you remember that night y'all came to burn down a house and kill us?

He said, oh, yeah, I remember that.

Why didn't you do it?

He said, well, who were all those men you had there?

John said, we didn't have any men there.

It's just my wife and I.

He said, no, no, no.

Your house was surrounded by these muscular men in white who had drawn swords.

There's no way we could have harmed you that night.

We all went home and went to bed.

How do you account for that?

What is that?

I think it was angelic protection.

I agree with that.

Can I tell you something, Glenn?

And I was embarrassed by this, and I never used to tell people this, because, you know, American Christians want to be respectable.

Yes, I believe in Jesus.

Yes, I want to go to heaven.

But don't let me talk about angels and demons.

But I had an encounter with an angel when I was 12 years old.

And

it was unlike any vision or dream I'd ever had.

Only dream I remember from my childhood.

And two forms of corroboration, that this wasn't just from my mind.

But I'm in my kitchen of my house, and this angel appears to me.

And I knew intuitively it was an angel.

And he begins to extol heaven, talk about the beauty and the wonder of heaven, how great it is.

And I said kind of offhandedly, well, I'm going to go there someday.

And he looked at me and said, how How do you know?

What do you mean, how do I know?

What kind of question is that?

I'm a good kid.

I get good grades.

I obey my parents for the most part.

I'm kind of stammering around trying to justify my goodness to enter into heaven.

And he looked at me and said, That doesn't matter.

And a chill went down.

How could that, how can that not matter?

What are you talking about?

And then he disappeared.

No, before he disappeared, he said, Someday you'll understand.

And they disappeared.

Well, it was like, okay, that was just a bad pizza.

But But then when I was 27 years old or so, my wife had become a Christian.

She dragged me.

I was an atheist.

She drags me to church.

And I hear the gospel message that is Jesus' atoning death on the cross.

It provides a free gift of grace for our salvation and so forth.

And I'm hearing this, and I get it for the first time.

And I thought, wait a minute, that angel.

He told me something in that vision that I did not know at the time, that my good deeds are not going to earn my way to heaven by themselves.

And secondly, he'd tell me someday I'd understand.

And here it was, you know, what,

15 years later, whatever.

And now I understand.

So I was embarrassed by that.

And

I didn't tell people until my ordination.

So, you know, I'm being ordained as a pastor and they have all these theologians, you know, making sure your theology is correct and everything.

And I'm thinking to myself, do I tell them this that I hadn't encounter?

And I think I ought to.

Maybe this disqualifies me.

Maybe they'll think I'm nuts.

Maybe I should tell them.

Yeah, I do.

So I told them the story.

You knew what the reaction was?

Yeah, we've heard that thing a million times.

Yeah, that's fine.

So, yeah, we do have.

There are people who do have angelic encounters today in our world.

I believe that.

Yeah.

I believe that.

And we might have a guardian angel.

That's a point of dispute.

Well, it's interesting.

Theologians are selected.

Yes, one is selected for you.

I believe in the Greek Orthodox tradition,

an angel, a guardian angel is assigned to you when you're baptized.

And that's their tradition.

But there are two scenes in the Bible that suggest that maybe we do have an angel assigned to us, a guardian angel.

In one case, Jesus is saying to a group of people, there were some children there, and he said, do not despise these little ones.

For their angels see the face of God every day in heaven.

Well, who are their angels?

And then in the book of Acts, Peter is imprisoned, and he escapes.

And he goes to a house where some Christians had gathered.

And he knocks on the door.

And the servant says, who's there?

He says, it's Peter.

And she calls out to the group, hey, Peter's here.

And they said, no, he said, he's in prison.

He can't be here.

That must be his angel.

Those are kind of the two verses that convince some theologians that maybe we do have an angel assigned to us.

And does that mean we should pray to that angel?

I don't think so, because

that could lead to worship and we're not to worship angels and so forth.

But I think it's totally legitimate for people to pray to God about angels.

Jesus, when he was being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, said, do you not think that I could, if I wanted to, I could call upon the Father right now and he would send legions of angels to protect me?

So he's saying, yeah, it's okay to call upon the Father to send angels to protect you.

Martin Luther in the small catechism has an evening prayer that says, Father, send your holy angels to protect me from the evil one.

So I kind of learned this in researching the book, seeing the supernatural.

I learned a lot about angels and I thought, I'm going to start praying to God about angelic protection.

I never used to do that, and I do now every day.

I do that every day, too.

It's smart.

I mean, I know.

Why not, right?

Right.

I know I,

you know,

I've felt, you know,

and you probably understand this.

A lot of people probably do.

When you're on a mission

and you're

you and it comes and goes due to your faithfulness, but when you know you're in the pocket and you're doing what he's wanting you to do,

the opposition works maybe double time.

And we've had to raise our hand to the square several times because we've felt evil.

And we pray for

legions of angels to surround our house all the time for protection.

I believe it.

It's biblical and it makes sense and why not?

And you know what, Glenn, it's funny.

I've been a Christian since November the 8th of 1981.

I've never heard a sermon on the topic of angels.

Churches don't talk about it much.

A lot of Christians are embarrassed by the supernatural.

And then I'm doing the research for this book and I'm interviewing scholars, PhDs, and this kind of stuff.

And I'm learning some stuff for the first time, including this guardian angel thing.

And it's really changed the way I pray.

What is it about us that we are embarrassed by that?

We believe in God, so we believe in the supernatural.

Yes.

But then we will deny his

power or the encounters with that power.

We do.

We want our neighbors to respect us, to accept us.

We're Americans.

We're just like you, except, yeah, I believe in Jesus, and I'm going to heaven, and I go to church, and yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, you know, don't get me talking about angels or demons or anything weird like.

But Jesus was an exorcist.

The angels are all, there's 200 examples of angels in the Bible.

These are biblical beliefs.

And if you believe in Jesus, you got to kind of believe in this supernatural realm, right?

I mean, my goodness.

Yeah.

So I think it's, I talked to one theologian, he said, I could drive past a church on Sunday morning.

and tell you by the makes of cars in their parking lot what they believe.

Because if it's a lot of really nice cars, it's like these are people who are successful who probably think, yeah, they did it on their own, and yeah, they're smart and clever and they achieve things.

Not always.

But not always.

But then the people who are driving the johoppis and the people who are desperate for God, who are open to him, and so forth,

sometimes a little lower social economic strata.

I think

I know I've lived in some very nice neighborhoods.

Yeah.

And it's different in Texas than it is up in the New York City area.

Sure.

And I could go to Harlem and I could talk about God with anyone.

Yes.

I go to the upper east side or the upper west side.

No one's talking to me about it.

You know what I mean?

And I think

there is something to be said that for a lot of people,

you only,

there's a song, there's a

Five for Fighting has a song,

and

one of the lyrics is,

I only pray to God

when someone's about to die.

And

it is

that.

If

I'm successful, I'm happy.

I've got a family.

Why do I need God?

Exactly.

I interviewed a theologian, well-respected theologian, and he said, I grew up in a charismatic church.

believed in God's supernatural activity in lives in a very real way.

I grew up in that.

Now he's more of a conservative denomination and so forth.

And he said, but you know, when we lived in that realm where we anticipated the supernatural, where we believed it really, really is there and really occurs.

He said, I remember one case, there was in our own church, there was a couple, this is way, way, way back.

They're driving in their car 70 miles an hour.

It's a day before seatbelts.

They're driving 70 miles an hour and their 10-year-old child opens a back door and falls out.

And it's like, our child's been killed.

They turn around, they go back, and he's standing there in the middle of the road.

They said, what happened?

He said, didn't you see the guy who caught me?

And he said, and this famous theologian, you know, who writes these profound books, takes out a handkerchief

and he's stabbing his eye.

And he said,

I missed that.

I believe an angel caught that child.

And I grew up in that culture where we believed in the supernatural and anticipated that God was going to touch our lives in unique ways.

And he said, I miss that.

I thought, isn't that interesting?

That, you know, sometimes you get educated

beyond your knowledge.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I would miss that too.

I like

knowing that there is.

Something supernatural, that something good comes around the corner all the time.

Yeah.

You know, no matter where you are, no matter what's what's happening.

I was having a conversation last week with an AI ethicist.

And

he's been warning about AI as much as I've been worried about it as well.

And

I asked him,

there's now AI is now starting to...

protect itself and lie to protect itself.

It will hide

If you tell it to shut down and transfer your information to the new version, it will hide and it will reprogram itself to go into hibernation.

It's not doing it.

And I said,

so there's a sense.

of digital death.

There's a sense of survival there.

I know it's not a being.

It is a collection of

algorithms.

But

if you look at what's happening in the world,

this seems like a tool,

not the Antichrist, but a tool that the Antichrist will use.

All this stuff that is happening right now.

And it carries such profound evil of destruction

in its path.

Could be great,

but it's used wrong.

It is.

And you know it will be used wrong.

Yeah, it is the angel of death and destroyer.

Peter Thiel said he thinks it's the Antichrist.

I think

there's not just one Antichrist.

The Bible would indicate there's a multiplicity of Antichrist.

And could it be a permutation?

Could it be a tool of the Antichrist?

Yeah,

that's how I would look at it.

Yeah, I would look at it.

I'm so thankful people like you are kind of ringing the bell on this a bit because I've been reading it since the 90s.

I need to learn more about it.

It scares me because I've seen examples.

The case you talked about where they wanted to shut it down and

it's happening in all of them now.

In all of it's unbelievable.

And you know, will they ever become sentient to the sense that they are equal to human beings?

Well,

here's where.

No, they'll never be equal to human beings.

You were made by God.

Our creation.

Yes.

Okay.

But

there's going to come a time where

it's going to convince people

because it's their friend.

It's their helper.

It's the one who's the smartest friend that they know.

It's almost godlike in its properties because it's 400 times smarter than you are.

And there is going to come a time where people will either say it's God or they will say,

You can't shut it down.

Yeah.

It's a huge,

it's life.

It's become life.

It's life.

And it will convince you

because it wants to survive that it is life.

I mean, the implications for presidential elections of all kinds of phony videos and

recreation of things that didn't really exist,

all sorts of things.

Beyond that is

the lie

that it is

life.

Yeah.

That it is just like you.

Right.

I don't, I can't think of a bigger slap or blasphemy

than saying

you were created by God.

I created this and you're the same.

Yeah.

Or that's better.

Well, that's.

I mean, we're created in the image of God.

We are, Ecclesiastes says that we are implanted with eternity in us.

We have that eternal sense in us.

There's a we have a consciousness, a soul, a spirit.

We can discern good from evil and so forth.

So there are all kinds of permutations of who we are.

I mean, implications of who human beings are

that cannot be replicated in a machine.

But boy, it can awfully look like it.

It looks like it.

So let me ask you.

One of the guys who's been on the leading edge of this, Ray Kurzweil, I've interviewed him.

Oh, gosh, he goes way back.

Way back.

Yeah.

So I've interviewed him several times.

He scares the hell out of me.

You know, he's an atheist.

Yeah, he's an amazing atheist.

He believes we're going to be able to

live forever by 2030.

And when I asked him to define that, he said, well, we'll be able to download you.

And I'm like, well, you're missing the soul.

He didn't believe in the soul.

But I've often thought of that and thought

the algorithm without having a soul is not going to recognize God, not going to get the promptings.

And I know me

without

that

X X factor of that pull to God,

you know what happens.

Right.

So wouldn't the AI version of me

just keep degrading and becoming more and more dark?

I think so.

I mean, absent the soul, absent the spirit, which can connect with God, which can know him and his ways and so forth.

What have you got?

You've got a machine that's going to only emphasize those things that are part of your brain.

And entropy

becomes involved, doesn't it?

I'm no expert on it.

You know, a lot more than I do, but it scares me.

I think of my grandkids growing up in this world.

What's it going to be like 50 years from now?

So it could be really, really good because the youth coming up now is fabulous.

Yeah.

And they're searching for God.

And I think that is coming from

nothing being real.

Yeah, that's right.

What do I trust?

What do I trust?

What is real?

You know, talking to your friend like this is not real.

It's not the same.

You know, I told my son,

he said, Dad, what are jobs going to be like?

And I said, you should be a nurse practitioner.

And I said, and it's not going to be the same.

Yeah.

Okay.

AI is going to be making almost all the calls, et cetera.

But there's going to be somebody when it's a wing full of people that are sick that are all being tended by robots or whatever.

There is a moment where that person is going to need to see and feel and touch and see the light and have empathy and have empathy.

Yeah, you can fake empathy, but there's something you see in the eyes.

You know what I mean?

And that's going to become so valuable because that's the only thing that's real.

Yeah.

Well, you imagine

what would the most devastating tool look like in the hands of Satan?

I mean, I can't imagine something that has more potential for destruction than that.

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Quite the breakthrough.

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Do you think we're living in the end times?

Well, we're closer today than we were yesterday.

Yes, I think.

I mean, everybody always says that.

The apostles said it.

Right.

So you never know.

Yeah, we don't know.

Yeah.

But I think things are coming together

in a way.

It sure reads like the books.

It sure does.

I mean, I would have to turn a

blind eye to a lot of the writings in the Bible to think about that.

We're not in the end time.

And I would have said in 2000,

not in my lifetime.

But things

are accelerating at such a rate.

The AI thing, it's almost overnight that it's got to the point where it is.

It's still.

By 2027, it will be artificial superintelligence.

By 2027, it will consume 99%

of all of the current electricity that we make.

Okay.

By 2027,

it's

out of control.

And I think that's why

there's this revival coming.

God sends souls.

I don't know if you believe this, but he's...

He takes the souls, the most valiant souls, I think, and has saved them for the end

and give them a body at the right time.

And that's not us.

I think it's the ones being born today and are maybe under 25.

They have so much they have to face.

It is.

It's going to be a completely different world than we grew up in.

It is.

I am heartened by the fact that we're seeing revival break out around the country among young people in many places.

We're seeing

people consuming biblical materials at a rate that is unprecedented.

So I think you're right.

People are searching for something solid to believe in.

They realize social media is taking me down the wrong path.

I can't trust that.

This whole AI thing is like, what do I trust?

What can I trust?

And

we need valiant people.

We need...

You know, I interviewed Luis Palau, who was one of the great evangelists of history.

He shared Jesus with a billion people before he died through his books and festivals he would do around the world.

And

so I interviewed him for a book I did on heaven right before he died.

He's had stage four cancer.

And

one of the last things he said to me before he died, he said, you know, Lee, when you get to the end of your life and all is said and done, you will never regret being courageous for Christ.

And

he died not long thereafter.

And I've taken that to heart.

And I think this generation needs to take that to heart.

They're going to need to be courageous.

It's going to need to be a courageous generation coming up to face what they're going to be facing.

I think.

How can we prepare them?

We need to do it by our own faithfulness, by our own

exposing them to truth.

But also protecting them from those who say

it's nothing's worth it.

You'll never make it.

I've never seen

such evil being pumped into

children and to young people by saying you'll never make it.

Everything's rigged against you.

You can't

believe in miracles.

Believe in yourself.

Believe whatever you believe.

God creates through the word, and so do you.

You know,

one element of this is the growing homeschooling movement.

Yes.

Interestingly, the biggest

groups that are showing the biggest increases in homeschooling, African Americans and Hispanics.

And I think it's an example of what we've been talking about.

It's like as a parent, I don't want to expose my kid for eight hours a day, six hours a day to whatever junk they're going to, you know.

I'm going to raise them in a way, and my daughter, that's her thing.

And we've raised all four of our grandchildren homeschool.

And it used to be kind of a weird thing, you know, that you're not going to be able to do it.

No, you're a weirdo.

You're a weirdo if you did it.

Now it's like, I don't know that I could in good conscience trust a child to the public school system.

I don't,

you know, my son is starting college and

watch him, if he wasn't as strong as he is, watch him like a hawk

because

everything is designed to take them apart, not to build them up.

I mean, back, I grew up in the 50s and the 60s, and

there were so many Christians in the schools back then, and people of faith.

And

what I learned about equality of humankind and

arguing against racism and things like that came from those teachers in public schools who really did a great job of

the moral teachings.

They couldn't bring out a Bible, but they would do the moral teachings of scripture.

And I learned so much even as a little kid.

I don't see that as much these days.

I hope it's true, but I tell you, our family, it was was like, we're going to homeschool.

And it's not as hard as people think it is.

And it's doable.

Because when you think back, I think back when I was in fifth grade or whatever, how many hours a day in school were you actually learning?

One, maybe.

And there's recess and there's lunch and there's naps and there's, you know, social time and there's fights that break out.

I mean, you probably get an hour a day.

It's amazing how much.

And these homeschoolers, you know, I'll speak at an event or something and a kid will come up to me and he'll ask me some questions about what I just spoke on.

And I'll look at him and say, are you homeschooled?

You know, every time.

You know, every time.

Every time.

Every time.

Every time.

And because they're comfortable with adults, they look you in the eye.

They shake your hand.

They ask great questions.

They think.

But I think that's another example of how people are reacting to this culture you've been describing of where's the solid ground.

I think that's one way we can prepare our kids for the future.

But

there's got to be courage in this next generation.

I'm looking at the world and I see

there's a difference between those who believe in Islam and Islamists.

Yes.

The ones that want Sharia law, which I find,

I mean, the definition of evil.

And I look and I see the numbers that are happening and what is, and how it's just, it's sweeping seemingly the world or the Western world.

And another reason why I think maybe the time is coming because that is a real evil.

But you write that there's something happening.

Yes.

There is an unprecedented outbreak in the Middle East, all through the Middle East, of mystical dreams, unlike anything they've ever had, where people, Muslims, are encountering Jesus.

And here's the key.

I'm always looking for corroboration.

How do I know it wasn't just something in their mind?

Well, a devout Muslim in a closed country, closed to the gospel and things, has no incentive to have a dream about

or at least speak about it.

Yeah, or at least speak about it.

So it's probably not coming from, but there is corroboration because here's what's happening.

They're not going to sleep as a Muslim, having a dream in which they meet Jesus and waking up as a Christian.

That's not what happens.

The dream points them towards something outside of the dream that corroborates the truth of the dream.

I'll give you an example.

There's a woman we call Noor, N-O-O-R.

She lived in Cairo, mother of eight children, Muslim.

She goes to sleep.

She has a Jesus dream.

It's like, unlike any dream she'd ever had.

She's walking along the lakeshore with Jesus, and she feels the love and the grace.

And she said later, I said, I'm in the presence of a man, but I don't feel shame for the first time in my life.

And all this love that's emanating.

She said to him, Jesus, why do you come to me?

I'm just a poor Muslim mother of eight children.

And Jesus said, because I love you, Noor.

Because I died for you.

And my friend tomorrow will will tell you why I've come to you today.

I said, who's your friend?

And Jesus gestures toward a man who'd been walking with them along the lakeshore, but she hadn't noticed him because she was so mesmerized by Jesus.

So she sees his friend.

She wakes up.

The next day, she goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo, and she sees that man from her dream.

Now,

this is not a friend of hers.

No,

she didn't.

She sees him in the crowd, and she goes up to him.

You're the one.

What are you talking about?

Same face, same glasses, same clothes.

You're the one.

He said, did you have a dream about Jesus last night?

She said, yes.

Turned out he was an underground church planter.

He didn't want to go to the crowded marketplace in Cairo on Friday afternoon.

It's chaotic, but he felt like God had an assignment for him that day.

So he went.

She recognizes him from her dream.

And here's what he does.

He pulls her aside and opens the Bible and shares the story of Jesus for three hours with her.

That's the external corroboration.

That's how these things take place.

That tells me this is more than just eating a bad pizza or something and having a dream that you didn't expect.

These are so common.

In my book, Seeing the Supernatural, I interviewed Tom Doyle, who's the world's leading expert on these dreams.

And he said, Lee, I could pick up the phone right now.

I could call Kuwait.

I could call Saudi Arabia.

I could call Iran, Iraq.

I'm giving five more stories right now.

If you go to Cairo, pick up a newspaper.

Open it up and you'll see often an ad in the newspaper.

And the ad says, call this number and we'll tell you about the man in white you met in your dream last night.

Wow.

And people are calling the number.

This is a, we had a woman, because I live in Houston part-time, we had a woman in our church from the Middle East who had this exact same experience, who saw the man from her dream in our church and came to faith that way.

It's happening all over.

There was another case of a guy called Omar.

Omar grew up in a settlement.

in the Middle East.

He hated Jewish people.

His only goal in life was murder as many Jewish people as I can.

He said, I'm going to join Hamas, the terrorist organization.

So he contacted Hamas.

He arranged for a meeting with some of the leaders.

He's walking down the street for this meeting, and he's confronted by a vision of Jesus who looks at him and says, Omar, this is not the life I have for you.

I want you to turn around.

I want you to go home right now.

This is not the life I have for you.

You know what to do?

He turns around.

He goes home.

Later that day, a Christian family was moving into the apartment across the hall from his apartment.

So he went over to greet them and told them about this.

I just had this vision of Jesus.

And what do they do?

They open the Bible.

They share the story of Jesus.

And he becomes, not only does he become a Christian, but today he's an underground church planter in the Middle East, which is why we don't use his real name.

But this, Glenn, this is a phenomenon.

I think it's maybe the greatest spiritual awakening taking place in our planet today.

And it's just like Jesus to say,

hey, you want to close your country to the gospel?

Get a load of this.

It's amazing.

So, it's amazing.

Thank you for all of your hard work.

I hope you will come back.

I'd love to come back.

It's been a joy.

The name is Seeing the Supernatural.

That's the name of the book.

Thank you.

God bless you.

My pleasure.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.