Lee Strobel: Possession, Miracles, Visions, and Encounters With Angels & Demons

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So we're told there's no state religion in the West, certainly not in the United States, but in fact, there is.

It's scientism.

It's the worship of science.

It's the belief, and all of us learned this at a young age, that everything around us, everything we experience, can be measured by people in white coats.

That's science.

And if it can't be measured, it's not real.

The problem with this religion is that our life, our daily experience, contradicts it.

Constantly, all of us are seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling things that can't be measured by science, but it doesn't make them any less real.

These are, by definition, supernatural.

Supernatural experiences are a feature of everyone's life.

And if we're honest, we'll admit that.

So what do they mean exactly?

Well, Lee Strobel was a reporter.

He worked for the Chicago Tribune and left and became a pastor.

So he has religious faith, but also a grounding in empiricism, the desire to prove things.

He is the perfect person to write the book that he did about the supernatural.

That would be dreams, mystical dreams, near-death experiences, miracles, ghosts.

We sat down with him to hear just how common these experiences are and what they mean.

Lee Strobolf.

So you've written a book.

I don't do a lot of book interviews, but you couldn't resist this one.

Seeing the Supernatural, Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World.

Right.

I think a lot of us sense or know on some level.

In fact, I think everybody knows on some level that there is a world that science can't measure or quantify.

That there is,

you know, that there's stuff that we can't explain, but that it's no less real for our inability to explain it.

So

let's go through the list.

Yeah.

You know, by the way,

I was an atheist.

I'm trained in journalism and law.

And so I'm always looking for corroboration.

I'm looking for evidence.

I'm looking for facts.

And so you're right.

I think there's an intuitive sense that most people have that there's something beyond what we can see touch or put in tests.

Eight out of ten Americans believe that.

But how do we know?

What is the evidence?

And that's what I try to get into in the book.

How can we be sure through corroborated evidence that indeed there are such things as miracles, as near-death experiences, as deathbed encounters and mystical dreams and things like that?

Yeah, atheism is the, is the leap of imagination.

It is.

That's true.

It's hard to be an atheist.

It's very true.

I don't admire them in a way, though.

Feel sorry for them.

But anyway, okay.

Angels.

Yeah.

It's an angel.

Fascinating.

You know,

angels are created by God

before humankind was created.

They are spirit beings, so they're not omniscient like God is.

They're not omnipresent like God is.

They don't age because there's no physical body.

They don't marry because there's no physical body.

They're very intelligent, very smart.

And they are, according to the Bible, they are to serve not only God, but also his people.

And what's interesting.

The Christian Bible

with the Hebrew Old Testament

makes reference to these.

Is there any culture in the world that doesn't believe in some form of angel?

It's pretty universal.

Yeah.

It is pretty universal.

Like every culture.

Yeah, just virtually every culture.

Yeah, the Inuit all the way to the Maya.

That's right.

That's right.

Canaanites.

And what's interesting about the Christian interpretation of angels is that it says in the book of Hebrews, in the Bible that we should anticipate the possibility that we would encounter an angel.

In other words, it says sometimes when you're providing hospitality to someone, unbeknownst to you, it's an angel.

And so there's an anticipation that perhaps there could be angelic encounters.

And so what I try to look at in the book are cases in which we have angelic encounters.

People actually encounter an angel.

I'll give you an example.

There was a missionary named John G.

Payton, P-A-T-O-N, from Scotland.

And he went to an island in the South Pacific to be a Christian missionary.

And he and his wife were living in a cottage there, and he's talking about Jesus.

Well, the local tribespeople didn't quite like that.

And so one day, a mob of them came to burn down their house and kill them.

So they see this mob forming, and he and his wife are in their house.

And what can they do?

They start to pray.

It's like, God, protect us, help us.

They're going to kill us.

They're going to burn our house down.

What do we do?

And they prayed all night long.

And by dawn, the mob began to dissipate.

A year later, he led the head of that mob to faith in Jesus Christ.

And they're having a conversation.

And John said to him, by the way, do you remember that day when you all came to burn down our house and kill us?

Why didn't you do it?

And the man said, well, who are all those men you had there?

He said, no men.

It was just my wife and I.

He said, no, no, no.

Your house was surrounded by these these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords.

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

Well, what's the explanation for that?

I think it could very well have been an angelic encounter that God had sent angels to protect him.

And there's multiple numbers of cases like that.

Give me another.

Well, I had an encounter myself when I was 12 years old.

It was the only dream I remember as a child.

It was more of a vision than a dream.

An angel appeared to me and started extolling heaven, how beautiful and wonderful heaven is.

And I looked at him kind of offhandedly and said, well, you know, I'm going to go there someday.

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

And I was shocked by that.

How do I know?

And I started to kind of stumble around to justify my goodness.

I said, well, I obey my parents pretty much.

I get good grades in school and my friends liked me.

And I'm trying to justify why I would get into heaven.

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

And this chill went through my spine.

How can this not matter?

And he said, someday you'll understand.

And then he disappeared.

Well, I kind of wrote it off as being a bad pizza and ultimately became an atheist.

But 16 years later, as an atheist, my wife brought me to a church.

And I heard the gospel for the first time.

That salvation, that the doors of heaven are not flung open based on how nice you are to your parents or

how good grades you get in school.

It's based on the grace of God.

It's not something we earn.

It's a free gift of God's grace.

And I heard that message for the first time and my mind flashed back to that dream and I thought, wait a minute,

that's what he was trying to tell me back then.

Had you thought a lot about that dream in the subsequent dream?

It would come to me every once in a while.

I'd think about it.

I'd just suppress it.

Well, it was a bad pizza, you know.

But then I thought there's two forms of corroboration there.

Number one, that angel told me something when I was 12 years old that I did not already know that salvation is by grace.

And secondly, he made a prophecy, a prediction that someday I would understand that came true 16 years later.

I think that may have been an angelic encounter that I had.

I can't prove it, but that corroboration tells me maybe it really was.

So we see cases like this around the world, and there's more than 200 references of angels in the Bible.

There's not.

200?

Yeah, yeah.

So lots of evidence that indeed this is part of God's creation.

Interesting.

I've been to the church.

I don't know that I've probably the wrong kind of church, but I don't know that I've ever heard anyone refer to it.

It's so funny you say that because I was giving a talk the other day and I said, you know, I've been a Christian now since November the 8th of 1981.

I have never heard a sermon on the topic of angels ever, ever.

Why?

I don't know.

And I go, and so in this book, I delve into it and I learn some new things.

For instance, do we have a guardian angel?

Well, there's actually two passages in the Bible that suggest maybe we do have a guardian angel.

In one passage, Jesus is talking to a group and there's some children there and he said, do not despise these little ones because their angels see the face of God every day in heaven.

Well, who are their angels?

And then secondly, Peter, when he escapes from prison, goes to a home where some Christians had gathered and he knocks on the door.

And the servant says, who's there?

And he says, Peter.

And she recognizes his voice.

And she calls out to the other people and says, hey, peter's here well i said can't be here he's in prison it can't peter can't be here it must be his angel so based on those two passages there are christians who believe that we have an angel assigned to us in fact in i believe in the orthodox christian tradition they believe an angel is assigned to you at the time you're baptized um i don't know there are christians who deny that um but it could be but the other thing i learned in my investigation of angels i thought you know what um

i don't think it's appropriate to pray to angels.

I don't believe we're taught to do that.

I think there's a slippery slope if you pray to angels that it might slip into worship of angels, which would be blasphemous.

But there's nothing wrong with praying to God about angels.

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

And so I never used to do this, but I now make part of my prayer that God would send angels to protect me and my family, my ministry, my grandchildren.

And so

I think that's totally appropriate to do.

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We're going to get to demons in a second, but you use the phrase, the evil one.

Yeah.

So at, you know, the foundational Christian prayer is what we call the Lord's Prayer

handed down by Jesus himself.

Right.

And at the end of it,

after, you know, we seek forgiveness and forgive those who've sinned against us.

Lead us not in temptation, but deliver us from evil is the way way that most, I think, Americans learn the prayer.

But there's another interpretation that says, deliver us from the evil one.

That's right.

And I didn't know that until later in life, but

I suspect that that was kind of toned down because the evil one is a little bit too

supernatural.

Yeah.

Well, you know, there is an embarrassment in American culture towards some of these supernatural phenomena.

In other words, American Christians often want to be accepted and seen as normal by their neighbors.

Oh, yes, I go to church church and yes, I believe in Jesus, but you know, you won't catch me talking about angels or demons or miracles or any of this weird stuff.

They want to be accepted as being normal by other people.

And so I think there's a lot of people that just don't delve into the de-emphasis.

There's a de-emphasis in many churches and in many Christian lives.

And yet, Jesus clearly believed not only in angels, but he was an exorcist.

You know, even skeptics will admit, according to the gospels, that Jesus was an exorcist.

So he believed in Satan.

He believed in demons.

Well, it was one of the primary activities of his

life on earth.

Exactly.

Look at the Gospel of Mark.

I think half of his activity is related in some way to fighting demons.

So

this is something as a Christian that we ought to believe.

And then consider what are the implications of this.

That if this is true, if there is a demonic realm, if there is an angelic realm, what are the implications to me today?

Well, I would put it in another way.

Are you aware of any society in the known history of the human race that didn't believe that there was a supernatural realm filled with good and evil?

Yes,

virtually universal.

I've never heard of any culture that didn't believe that.

Yeah, except post-war West.

Yeah.

Drop the atom bomb.

get rid of the supernatural.

Right.

Because we're God now.

Yeah, that's right.

But before then, I mean, I just think this was taken as a matter of course, right?

Of course, yeah, naturally.

So if every society in known history reaches the same, a version of the same conclusion,

it suggests maybe there's something there?

It sure does.

It sure does.

Why would you come up with it?

Exactly.

You know, it's funny.

People will say, well, you need extraordinary evidence to prove an extraordinary claim,

which I don't think is legitimate.

I don't think that stands up to scrutiny.

But let's take it for a moment on face value and say you need extraordinary evidence to prove an extraordinary claim.

Well, the claim that there are demons is not an extraordinary claim.

It's just the use of that.

Because 95% of humanity through history has believed in it.

So if you're an atheist,

the onus is on you.

You must present the extraordinary evidence that the demonic does not exist.

Well, there are also moments in the life of every person who's awake and not on fentanyl, maybe even people who are on fentanyl, I hope.

where you know that you are being acted on by an outside force of some kind.

You have no idea what it is.

But there are moments when you are much better than yourself, much more empathetic.

And there are other moments where you're seized by the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction, which also doesn't make any sense.

There's no kind of evolutionary biological accounting for that.

Why would you want to destroy something for no reason?

Another person, an object, but the impulse to destroy

clearly

the hallmark of evil, right?

It is.

And it's consistent with the Christian teaching that the demonic realm exists, that it is intent on luring us away from him and

luring us down a pathway that is dark and that is dangerous but people feel that you don't have to be a christian to have felt that if you're if you're honest with yourself there are moments where you're like why did i do that yeah right and yet we do have cases where um we have evidence that there is a demonic realm all right so let's go let me ask you one last angel question because i'm trying to faithfully go in order based on because you can judge a book by its cover i've decided.

So you said that angels in the New Testament, and perhaps also in the old, but

angels are described as present in our world.

Yes.

We will mistake angels for people.

Very well.

That's right.

That's predicted.

So do you think that happens?

Yes.

And if so, can you give us an example?

And what would be the purpose of that?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

In the book of Hebrews, it says that we will do it unbeknownst to ourselves.

So in other words, the implication is that we will have angelic encounters, but we won't realize they're angels.

And I think that does happen.

Now, I have a couple of cases in my book.

One is a pastor who is driving his car in Ohio.

He loses control of the car.

He hits a telephone or an electric transformer kind of a pole type of thing.

The wires fall down on his car.

The doors are jammed shut.

The electricity is coursing through the car, so much so that the windshield starts to melt, and he's trapped in this car.

He doesn't know what to do.

And he begins to pray.

God, I'm stuck.

I don't know what to do.

And a man, scruffy kind of guy, comes walking up to the car and he opens the car whose doors were jammed.

He opens the door.

He reaches in.

He lifts out this pastor and takes him about 50 yards away from the car,

which then explodes.

And he says to the pastor, he says, you're going to be okay.

You're okay now.

But the police are on their way, and I can't be here when they get here.

So

just know that you're okay.

And he walked away and disappeared.

Now, the people, the medics who came, the emergency technicians and so forth that came as a result of the accident, and they look at the car and say,

they can't explain how this is possible that somebody could have opened that car door and not been electrocuted and rescued this pastor.

And yet it happened.

And the pastor says, I believe it was an angel.

Well, maybe.

Could have been.

How do you prove something like that?

But I mean, how do you explain it away naturally?

How do you explain it a way that he's able to come, grip the car door, and open up this car that had been jammed shut?

So I think, yeah, there are cases where I think the logical explanation, the most reasonable explanation, if you don't rule rule out the supernatural at the outset, is that it was an angelic encounter.

Amazing.

Amazing.

But there are probably more subtle experiences, too.

Yes, no doubt.

Where you learn something, you encounter somebody out of nowhere who tells you something or who tests

your compassion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Could very well be.

And even the incident I had that seemed to, as an atheist, here I am in this church, nearly 30 years old, hearing this, understanding the gospel anyway for the first time.

And

that encounter I had with an angel is something that helped open my heart to the truth of the gospel.

Amazing.

Of course, I had to spend two years of my life investigating it from a,

you know, to just kind of conclude that it really was true, but it did propel me down that road toward God.

What are demons?

Demons are fallen angels.

The Bible is a little bit vague on this, but apparently what happened, there was a...

It's kind of funny if I could just pause.

This is my totally ignorant read of it.

But when the supernatural host,

all these supernatural beings are referred to in the Bible, there's almost a sense in which

the writer is assuming the reader already knows all this.

Yes, that's right.

It doesn't have a passage that says, by the way,

these things are real.

Let me explain all this to you.

It doesn't do that, which is interesting.

Because

the culture at the time was familiar with this, and there was kind of no debate that there was a supernatural.

It's sort of like the soul.

I have a chapter in the book on the existence of the soul.

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The Bible doesn't say, by the way, you have a soul, and here's, let me define it for you.

It presumes that we have a soul.

Scientists will deny the soul exists.

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By the way, anyone who denies the soul exists, probably getting ready to genocide you.

It's like kind of a soulless experience.

Well, if there's no human soul, then how is murder wrong?

Well, exactly.

And they'll say free will is impossible.

So there is no free will.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It's crazy.

But demons,

it started out with Lucifer, whose name means morning star.

And he was kind of first among angels.

Name means morning star.

Yeah, Lucifer.

He becomes Satan,

and the name Satan literally means adversary.

And so the implication in scripture is that this very prominent angel named Lucifer wanted to be worshipped.

He's the one who wanted the worship.

And so his pride is what resulted in him falling from the angelic realm, becoming Satan, becoming someone.

I mean, think about this.

When Jesus encounters Satan, what is it Satan wanted from him?

Worship.

Satan wanted Jesus to worship him.

And that's what Lucifer wanted.

It was pride that got in the way.

He becomes Satan.

And a certain percentage of the angels accompanied him in this fall.

This happened before the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden.

So this predates that.

We don't know how many angels accompany him, but there are a lot of angels.

In Revelation chapter 5, there's a scene of Jesus on the throne being worshipped.

And if you do the math, because it talks about it a little cryptically, it was 100 million angels worshiping him at that time.

So there's a lot of angels.

And a percentage of them fell with Lucifer, he became Satan, and angels became his.

his minions, so to speak.

Now, Satan is limited in his power.

He's not omniscient like God is.

He's not omnipresent like God is.

In other words, a guy was telling me, He said, there's probably never a time when you and Satan have both been in the same zip code

because he's only in one place at a time.

And so he's got things he's doing.

He'd probably never been in the same zip code you have, but his demons probably have been.

And they carry out his will, which is to pull people away from God, to

discourage people in finding God,

and to drag as many people to hell with him as they can.

Now, his

existence, he's sort of on a leash by God at this point.

His ultimate destination in the lake of fire is already predicted, so he has no future really, but he has influence and he has certain powers.

And

he and the demons are very intuitive.

You'll think they know more than they know, and they go after people.

I tell the story in my book about a very prominent psychiatrist named Richard Gallagher, educated at Ivy League University.

I have a quote from the former president of the American Psychiatric Association calling him highest integrity,

totally

trained and prominent in his field of psychiatry.

Of course, he's a medical doctor because he's a psychiatrist.

Just extolling him as an individual and as a scientist, as a

psychiatrist.

And about 25 years ago, he had two cats and they got along great.

They slept together, they played together, everything was fine.

Until one night, the cats started to attack each other viciously.

I mean, they're trying to kill each other.

They're clawing each other.

They're snarling each other.

They're biting each other.

It was unbelievable.

And they pulled them apart and put them into separate rooms.

They thought, what in the world was that all about?

At 9 a.m.

the next day, the doorbell rings.

And it was a preset appointment.

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

Gallagher.

She claimed that she was a high priestess of a satanic cult, and he wanted her to be examined.

Was she demonically possessed?

Was she just crazy?

Or what is this all about?

So at 9 a.m., the doorbell rings for his appointment.

And Dr.

Gallagher opens the door, and here's this woman who claims to be a high priestess of a satanic cult, who kind of looks up at him and sneers at him and says, So,

how'd you like those cats last night?

Oof, yeah.

There's something going on.

And that took him on a journey where he, as a psychiatrist who understands what mental illness is and understands, comes to understand what demon possession and demon oppression is like.

He spends the next 25 years as kind of the go-to guy in the medical realm for exorcists of the Catholic faith and has witnessed amazing things that he documents.

And I quote him in the book, cases where we have a woman who

in front of eight eyewitnesses levitates off a bed for 30 minutes.

Another case where people are speaking in Latin and other languages that they don't know, where they spontaneously are bruised and clawed, where

One petite woman picked up a 200-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room.

I mean, these are things, as he said, they go beyond psychiatry.

He believes these are actual demonic possessions.

Now, a true Christian cannot be demonically

possessed.

And the reason is a true Christian is indwelled by the Holy Spirit.

He can't be indwelled by evil and good like that in the same way at the same time.

So Christians cannot be possessed, but they can be oppressed.

They can be hectored.

They can be bothered.

They can be attacked by demons.

And

there are some amazing examples of that.

I just mentioned a couple of people who are hectored or bothered by demons.

Now, for Christians, the book of James says

if you rebuke Satan, he'll go away.

So if you're a Christian, you don't have to be afraid that these demons are going to somehow possess you or

kill you or whatever.

Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world, the Bible says.

And so you can, the Bible says

if you

shun Satan,

he has no choice.

He's got to leave you.

So for a Christian,

you're protected.

But I fear for those that don't have that kind of protection,

there are cases of demon possession that, as Dr.

Gallagher and others have documented,

are corroborated in ways that that I don't think they can be denied.

How can you corroborate a supernatural event?

I think by the,

when there's no naturalistic explanation for what occurs.

So you have a woman, for instance, in front of eight eyewitnesses levitating off a bed for 30 minutes.

I don't know what the natural explanation for that would be.

That's right.

So I think it points towards something beyond that.

For me, as I investigate, another area I investigate in the book are miracles.

And for me, if you have solid documentation, medical documentation, if you have multiple eyewitnesses with no motive to deceive, if you have no natural explanation that seems logical that it can account for the phenomenon, and if it takes place in the context of prayer, then I think it's logical to conclude that a miracle has taken place.

Yes.

And there have been miracles published in peer-reviewed medical journals.

I talk about one in my book.

Here's a woman who was blind for 12 years with an incurable condition.

She went to a school for the blind.

She learned to read Braille.

She walked with a white cane.

And she married a Baptist pastor.

And one night, they're getting ready to go to bed.

She's already in bed.

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

And he begins to pray.

And he says, Lord, I know you can heal my wife.

I know you can heal her right now.

And I pray that you do it tonight.

And with that, she opened her eyes to perfect vision.

She said, I was blind when my husband prayed for me.

He prayed.

I opened my eyes.

I can see.

It's a miracle.

That was researched by multiple medical researchers and published in a medical journal as a case study.

What do you do with that?

What do you do with that?

What did they do with it?

I think it kind of leaves it up to

the reader to say, what's your conclusion?

Because they were upset by it.

Well, yeah, that certainly does point toward a supernatural event.

But here's what's interesting.

There's a woman with a PhD from Harvard who's a professor at Indiana University, major secular university.

And she said, I'd like to test whether miracles are possible.

How can we scientifically test that?

So here's what she did.

Miracles tend to cluster in places where the gospel is just breaking in.

And so we see them in China, in Mozambique, in Brazil, places where the gospel is taking root.

We see miracles taking taking place in a disproportionate number.

So she says, I'm going to put it to the test.

So she sends a team of scientists to Mozambique and researchers to Mozambique, and they go into the bush and they say, bring us all your deaf and blind.

So they bring all the people deaf, blind, or with severe hearing or vision problems.

They bring them and they test them scientifically right there.

What is your level of vision?

What is your level of hearing?

They get that scientifically established.

Then, immediately, they are prayed for in the name of Jesus by people who tend to have a track record of God using them that way.

And then, immediately after that, they're tested again.

Guess what they found?

Improvement in virtually every case.

In fact, get this.

The average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold.

There was a woman named Martine.

When they first encountered her, she could not hear the equivalent of a jackhammer next door.

After 10 minutes of prayer, she could now hear normal conversations.

Well, this team is flummoxed by this.

It's like,

something is going on here.

Virtually every person improves, some of them dramatically so, like Martine.

Let's see if we can replicate it.

So we'll go to another place where miracles are breaking in.

Brazil, they did the same test, they got the same results.

In fact, there was a woman in Brazil, she couldn't see me holding up three fingers from nine feet away.

And after prayer for her healing, she could read the name tag of the person praying for her

tucker this was published this is a scientifically rigorous study that was published in a peer-reviewed secular scientific medical journal major medical journal the southern medical journal published this and i interview in my book i interview the scholar that did that study and i say what do you make of this and she said Something's going on.

She said,

we're not playing on people's emotions.

This is not some televangelist trying to get people to send in their money.

This is not some people at a predisposition for anything.

Something is going on.

And I think she's right.

I think it's miraculous.

It sounds it.

And I think every person who's awake has experienced something that just

doesn't have a natural answer.

38%.

I did a study.

I hired a public opinion.

firm to do a scientifically accurate study of American adults.

And I asked the question, have you ever had one experience, at least in your life, that you can only explain away as being a miracle of God?

38% of American adults said yes.

And by the way, let's say 90%, 99% of them are wrong.

Let's say they think it was a miracle, but it was just a big coincidence.

So let's just wipe out 99% and say, no, no, no, you thought it was a miracle.

It really wasn't.

Let's wipe away 99%.

Guess what?

That would still mean there would be a million miracles nearly in the United States alone.

So you're right.

So many people have experienced something in their life that they can only attribute to being a miracle of God.

The official story on 9-11 is a complete lie.

The 9-11 report is a joke.

You have the CIA following two men all over the planet and eventually even to America, right?

And you don't tell the FBI.

9-11 Commission to cover it.

So, what did happen?

What did the government know?

What did foreign governments know?

There was a cover-up.

Why?

It's been nearly 25 years.

It is time Americans learned what actually happened.

We're going to tell you, we're releasing one episode per week.

You're not going to want to wait.

If you remember, you don't have to.

You get all five episodes the day it drops.

Right then, ad-free.

Our first episode airs Thursday, 9-11, September 11th.

You will not want to miss it.

Join us now at tuckercarlson.com.

Today on Hey Culligan, reverse to reduce.

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When Jesus performs miracles, healing people,

making the lame walk, fixing the man with the withered hand,

even when he casts out demons from the man in the cemetery in

the Sea of Galilee.

The reaction he gets from particularly religious authorities, the Pharisees, they hate it.

Yes.

They hate it.

Yes, they do.

It's funny you say that.

Why is that?

Well, yeah, I wrote a novel once,

fiction, book of fiction.

It was like a John Grisham thriller.

Nobody read it.

It was a big bomb.

Nobody bought my book.

But

in that book, I have a politically ambitious pastor.

And

is there anything worse?

Yeah, that's right.

And there's a miracle that happens in his congregation.

And a reporter comes to question him about it.

And the reporter's thinking, oh my gosh, the evidence is overwhelming.

Something,

and the pastor is downplaying it.

No, no, no, no, no.

That's just a coincidence.

That can't be true.

The pastor is trying, because why?

Because he wants to be, he doesn't want to be seen as being weird by the community at large, and it would poison his political chances.

So there is something true to that in Americans, and we tend to suppress it.

Yeah, not, I mean, but I mean, this is an account from 2,000 years ago.

No Americans in the New Testament, and they had the same reaction.

But the religion, they did not like Jesus, they did not like his message, they did not like who he was.

I get it, yeah.

I think they'd be happy that the lame man can walk after 30 years.

You know,

at least they could say, Hey, good for you, that's great.

By the way, we don't like this Jesus guy, but no, they didn't.

They just said, We don't like this Jesus guy.

No, actually, they plotted to kill the man he healed, and they did, yes, exactly.

Um, so there's uh, a couple references, at least a couple references, um, in the New Testament to Satan being the ruler of the earth.

Yes,

um,

what does that mean?

It means that in this realm, he in many ways has his way.

In other words, he has access to be able to influence people and point them away from the one true hope that there is, which is God.

And so he prowls about, as the Bible says, as a lion,

hoping to tear people apart spiritually.

I mean,

if that's not true, then explain the First World War.

Yeah.

I mean, there is just no, there's no explanation even now, over 100 years later, for why that war started.

Oh, you know, Archduke Ferdinand got shot to death in Sarajevo.

Really?

Okay, that's not a real explanation, actually.

Why did Christian Europe commit suicide?

Yeah.

And there are many other wars and many other tragedies in all of our lives.

Like, that doesn't make any sense.

That's clearly

supernatural forces are acting in people.

I agree.

And

so what I tried to do is say, okay, what evidence is there that there's more than what we can see and touch?

And because I'm fascinated by this.

And the reason I say that, Tucker, is because if this is true, if demons do exist, we ought to be heads up about it.

Because the two biggest mistakes we can make about the demonic realm, number one, is to deny that they exist.

And number two, to see a demon behind every bush and think they're more powerful than they are.

They're both problems.

But I think the biggest problem in our culture is to deny that there is a demonic realm, pretend like there isn't.

So, what are the hallmarks of it then?

Well, I think some things you mentioned, we see manifestations of it in ways that defy natural explanations.

And I think that's probably the best way of

disorder, distraction, chaos, violence, hate, division.

And you think if Satan were smart, which he is,

would he go around the country and around the world trying to possess or bother average everyday people?

Well, you know what?

Much more efficient to go to Hollywood and to influence a bunch of people there who are very influential in, let's say, the entertainment industry.

And let's say he encourages them to create films and television shows that are funny and that are creative and that are fun, but there's an underlying message to them that there's a normalization of immoral activity

that makes it normal.

Because, you know, when we laugh, it opens us up to various possibilities.

When we laugh, our defenses come down.

So I'm thinking of a wonderful, funny TV show like Friends.

Remember Friends, the TV show was on TV for years.

Very popular show.

Only American who never saw it.

But underlying that is a very ugly sexual ethic that normalizes multiple sexual partners and that sort of thing.

The kind of thing that Satan would love to inculcate into American culture.

And you know what?

I think it's much more efficient for Satan to influence movie makers and TV makers in Hollywood to create products that

feed us stuff that without us even realizing it, open us up to the occult, open us up to immoral activity, normalize it in ways that, well, if Monica can do that on friends, I can certainly have sex on the first date with this guy I meet.

So the way i as a non-theological ignorant person try and figure out whether something's good or bad because it is an open question very often it's like is that good or bad i'm not sure yeah are the people doing it at peace and joyful happy yeah are they tormented yeah and i know a lot of people in hollywood a lot of people i like actually um

not too many happy people yeah some really tormented people for real yeah string of wrecked relationships kids who hate them trans kids drug problems like there's so much of that.

Do you think that's a fair way to assess?

I think because it is logical that if Satan were to try to influence a culture in a mass way, that that is a logical way that he would do it.

And oh, guess what?

By the way, look at all the dysfunction we see in that community.

It does seem to match up.

So if evil

is acting through you, you are harmed too.

Generally, I would say, yes.

You're going going to be someone who's trying to influence others um you may not realize for the full destroys you yeah it does destroy you it certainly it certainly seems to yeah i think so who who would you know

god created us so we could have a relationship with him so he taught us how we can live in a way that maximizes who we are and when we stray from that in in egregious ways as many people have and do

um uh

there are implications for us if i were trying to subvert and destroy, I would go after religious leaders.

Yeah.

I'd have them like molest kids or freaky sex lives or steal money from the church.

Yes.

And I've always noticed that the leadership of Christian churches

in just

like numerically,

way more likely to be screwed up than the people in the views.

Interesting.

Do you know what I mean?

You see these sex scandals with pastors and you're like, how many people who are going to church every Sunday have sex lives like that?

Probably not very many, but a pretty high percentage of pastors.

And I feel like

that is outside influence.

Look at teachers, too.

Teachers who young kids look up to.

You know, you can imagine when you were kindergarten, first grade, second grade, you looked up to your teachers.

Not one time.

There's not one teacher I liked.

Oh, really?

Oh, I sure did.

I never, no, I felt it was a very authoritarian situation.

I was totally opposed from kindergarten on until I left college.

There was not one day where I respected or liked any of them, not a single one.

That is so funny.

I'm serious, dude.

That is so funny.

I happened to go to public school growing up, and yet back then in the 50s and 60s,

most of the teachers are Christians.

And so, no, I had some wonderful teachers that taught me great lessons about

life.

So,

you grew up in a better America than I did.

In Southern California in the 70s, I thought they were all buffoons, freaks.

I wasn't taking orders from them.

I really disliked them.

Sorry, excuse me.

That's funny.

But,

But if you want to lead people astray, you subvert their leaders, I guess.

Yes, very much so.

I mean, yeah, just put yourself in Satan's place.

How are you going to impact the maximum number of people?

You're going to want to go after leaders.

You're going to want to go after religious leaders.

You're going to want to go after children.

You're going to, you know, and influence them at a young age.

We see all of that.

I often think this is such a wonderful country, despite all its problems.

I'm totally convinced it's the best country, having been to a lot of countries.

Yeah.

But our leadership is the worst.

They're the worst.

They're like the worst people I've ever met.

And maybe that's not accidental.

Yeah.

I mean,

could it be, I'll just raise the question.

Could it be that some people have received some assistance from demonic

in terms of achieving what they've achieved?

How many happy political, I don't know how many political leaders you know, but how many happy ones have you met?

Gosh.

Not a lot, I trust, put it that way.

Right, but they're all like tormented,

sweaty and nervous and afraid.

Don't you think those are signs?

I do.

I do.

And you look at if Satan's going to go after children, what is all this stuff about libraries doing children's readings of and drag shows to little kids?

Why?

Why would that happen?

You know what?

Because if you can capture the mind of a child very young, it could influence them for the rest of their life.

What happens because we put up with it?

Yeah.

We do.

A healthy society would not put up with that.

That's true.

For five minutes.

That's true.

Yeah.

Sorry, they'd drive them out of the temple immediately with a whip.

Yeah.

Sorry, excuse me.

So you think that

you believe that demons roam the earth.

Yes.

How do you protect yourself?

The Bible talks about in Ephesians, talks about the full armor of God.

And I talk about this in a book.

I have a half a chapter that looks at ways that we can protect ourselves.

I think the key number one way is to be knowledgeable about scripture.

Because if the Bible is really from God, then that is the plumb line of truth.

And if it's the plumb line of truth, we can measure everything against it.

And so if we're tempted by something that violates that plumb line of truth, then we can be assured that's not from God.

And so I think being familiar with what are the teachings of the Bible

so that we can

deter any effects, any attempts by Satan to lead us down a path that's clearly not biblical.

So I think that's probably the number one way.

I think prayer is important.

I think honestly, and I say this, granted, as an evangelist who wants to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can, that's my life goal now as a former atheist.

I will say the best way to protect yourself is to come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Because if you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, you can't be possessed by Satan.

And you can tell Satan to flee.

And the Bible says he will flee.

What is the Holy Spirit?

Holy Spirit, you know,

God is one what and three who's.

The Bible teaches there is one God.

That's clear.

But it also teaches that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.

And so we have three, we have one what, which is God, and three persons.

And so the Holy Spirit,

being disembodied and so forth, comes into the life of someone when they repent of their sin, receive forgiveness through Christ.

John 1, 12 says, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.

But in practical terms, like what is the Holy Spirit?

So the Holy Spirit comes into you, then what happens?

Yeah, the Holy Spirit indwells you.

Now you've got a plumb line inside of you, so to speak.

And you recognize, I'm sure you see things in your life now as a Christian that you did before you were a Christian.

You say, why did I even do that?

What was I messing with that?

I certainly have those examples because now being indwelled by the Holy Spirit as a follower of Jesus, I have that plumb line to tell me what's godly and what's not.

And so it aids our conscience in understanding that.

And by being indwelled by the Holy Spirit, it means we cannot be possessed by Satan as we see these demon possessions.

And those are increasing in numbers.

The Catholic Church has just added a whole bunch of people

who are trained in exorcisms.

You see in charismatic ministries, deliverance ministries.

I think we're seeing an increase in demonic activity and in demons hectoring and harassing and oppressing and possessing people.

I think we're seeing an increase in that.

Are there certain places?

I mean, there are physical places I have been where the hair on my arms go up.

Yeah, me too.

And without any, you know, foreknowledge.

Yeah.

Not like this is a really spooky place.

Watch this.

It's like some place.

I can think of a few of them in my life where it's like, ooh, I don't know what this is about.

What is that?

Think of Haiti.

Think of Haiti.

I've been to Haiti.

I feel that strongly.

Good friend who has a ministry in Haiti, and that's a place that has opened itself up to the demonic through human sacrifice,

through voodoo, through all these things.

And it is a place where you palpably feel evil often.

I was in some remote parts of India and felt the same thing in many places.

So I think there is,

just as miracles tend to break out in a positive way in places where the gospel is breaking in, I think we probably see pockets around the globe where Satan has a stronghold.

And I would think that

physical places, yeah.

Like I think Haiti is a good example of that.

I've been in some places in the U.S.

where I felt that really strongly.

I was in a house once.

I lived in a house once as a child.

We're part of the house.

There's something so wrong with it.

And every person who lived in the house knew that.

Does that sound?

Could be.

Could be.

Could be an occultic thing.

Yeah.

What's a mystical dream?

Mystical dreams, I talk about these in the book.

It's so fascinating to me.

We have seen more Muslims become Christians in the last couple of decades than in the 1400 years since Muhammad.

And it's been estimated that a quarter to a third of them before they became a Christian had a Jesus dream.

Now, what's interesting about that is that these are corroborated dreams.

I'll tell you what I mean by that.

First of all, a devout Muslim has no incentive in a, let's say, in a closed country where it's even illegal to share the Christian

gospel.

They have no incentive to have a dream as a product of their subconscious mind about Jesus, the Jesus of Christianity, because it might lead them into apostasy.

It might lead him to a death sentence in certain countries.

So there's no incentive for a devout Muslim to have a dream about Jesus.

And yet, we are seeing this all over the Middle East, in closed countries, in

oppressive countries where Christians are persecuted and so forth.

But here's what I found most fascinating.

In these cases, people are not going to sleep as a Muslim, having a dream about Jesus and waking up as a Christian.

That's not how it works.

There is always

something that points to a phenomenon or an event or a person outside the dream that corroborates the dream.

Let me give you an example to clarify it.

There was a woman named Noor in Cairo.

mother of eight, devout Muslim.

She goes to sleep.

She has a dream in which Jesus visits her.

It's

unlike any dream she's ever had.

And she feels the love and the grace and the beauty of Jesus in such a profound way.

She said, here I am, a woman in the presence of a man.

For the first time in my life, I didn't feel shame.

I felt love.

And she's just overwhelmed by this.

And they're walking along the lakeshore.

And she says, Jesus, why do you appear to me?

I'm just a poor mother of eight in Cairo.

And Jesus said, my friend will tell you tomorrow.

And she said, who's your friend?

And Jesus gestures to a man she didn't even realize was walking with them along the lakeshore because she was so mesmerized by Jesus, she didn't notice this guy.

And he says, my friend will tell you tomorrow.

She wakes up.

The next day, she goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo on a Friday afternoon, and she sees the man from her dream.

She goes up to him, says, you're the one.

You're the, he said, whoa, what are you talking about?

You're the man.

Same glasses, same face, 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 God had an assignment for him.

So he went that day.

Nor encounters him from the dream.

He pulls her aside, opens the Bible, and shares the gospel with her.

That's the external corroboration that I'm talking about.

It's not just something that takes place in your subconscious mind.

There is an external factor to it.

I'll give you another example.

There was.

Fantastic.

So, one of the miracles, there are at least two in the story you just told.

Yeah.

And one of them is that the pastor felt the call to go to the marketplace on a Friday and he obeyed.

Exactly.

Have you had that experience in your life where you just feel like you're being told to do something and you obediently do it?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I remember as a new Christian,

I felt a really strong urging.

I believe it was from God to empty our bank account and send an anonymous cashier's check to a woman, a single woman in our church,

send it anonymously and to do it on Friday.

I don't know why, but it was on, to do it on Friday.

And my wife and I both prayed about it.

I said, yeah,

we're both feeling this.

It's odd, but we feel it's legit.

So

to empty your bank account and check to a stranger.

We emptied the bank account.

That's odd.

Yeah.

Well, that is, Leah, that is odd.

Yeah, it's fair.

Hey, it was only $500.

But still, for us, that was a lot of relevance.

So we send this check.

Did you know the woman?

Yeah, we knew her.

Yeah.

Nice woman.

She had come to faith.

She had actually had a lot of negative experience with Christians growing up, but she ended up coming to faith through a debate on Christianity we did in our church between an atheist and a Christian.

And so I knew who she was and so forth.

So on Monday morning, she calls me out of the blue.

And she's crying.

She said, Lee, I don't know what to do.

I said,

what's going on?

She said, my car broke down over the weekend.

They say it's going to cost $500 for me to fix my car.

I don't have $500.

I'm going to lose my car.

I'm going to lose my job because I got to have my car for the job.

Would you pray for me that I would get this $500 somehow?

And I said, absolutely.

I'll pray for me.

Let's pray.

And sure enough, that afternoon, because I'd mail in Friday, Monday afternoon, she gets this anonymous $500 check.

So there's.

Did you ever tell her?

No, she doesn't.

No, unless she's listening.

Maybe she.

Is she still around?

Oh, yeah.

She's still.

Yeah.

She actually quit her nursing job and joined the staff of our church.

She used to deliver my mail every day at the church.

Wow.

So I guess if she's listening, now she'll know.

But

you've never told her.

What year was that?

No.

Oh, gosh.

This was when I was a new Christian at the church.

It was probably 1987.

Somewhere in there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Almost 40 years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, I think that does happen

where God influences you.

Do you try to be open?

I do.

I do.

When I pray, I try to leave time at the end of the prayer.

Say, God, I'm just going to be quiet for a while.

If there's anything you want to tell me, anything you need to alert me to, any way you want to lead me, I'm just going to be quiet.

I'm just going to listen.

And I just spend, and normally there's nothing.

That day there was $500.

But normally, I don't feel anything that specific.

But it's okay because what's important is saying, I'm open, God, to anything you want me to do or what you want me to do.

I'm open to it.

Of course, anything, the Bible says, test the spirits.

So if I'm feeling something, I want to test it to make sure it's scriptural because God's not going to tell me to do, he's not going to go tell me to poison my neighbor.

All right.

So it's going to be consistent with scripture.

But I want to leave myself that opportunity to open myself up and say, God, I'm listening.

And just pause for a while and see, is there something?

And on that day, there was something.

It doesn't happen that often, but every once in a while, something will take place like that.

Amazing.

So you,

sorry for the, for the cul-de-sac there.

You believe there has been an uptick in mystical dreams.

Oh, definitely in the Middle East.

In fact, get this.

In Cairo, there's 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.

Really?

Because there's so many of these.

I interviewed for my book, Seeing the Supernatural.

I interviewed Tom Doyle, who is the world's leading expert on this.

And Tom said, Lee, I could pick up the phone right now and I could call Syria.

I could call Iraq.

I could call Iran.

And I'll give you five more stories.

They are so common.

I'll give you one from my church in Houston, Texas.

So I'm part of a church.

I live part-time in Houston, part of a church there.

I used to be on the staff.

And

there was a woman who was born in the Middle East in a closed country where you can't share the gospel legally.

And she had a dream when she was about 16 years old.

And she said it was unlike any dream I ever had because it was like a projector, was projecting an image of Jesus.

And it influenced her.

It touched her, but she didn't know what to do with it.

And

she said, I was having problems with my life.

I called out for help, and that's what happened.

Well, she ended up marrying a Muslim gentleman who was transferred to Houston, Texas because of the oil industry.

So she moves into near our church and she has another dream.

And in this dream, she's up to her waist in a body of water.

And there's a man with her with a book that's open and the man is weeping.

And she's thinking, what does that mean?

What is that supposed to be about?

Well, a neighbor of hers goes to our church and she invited her to come to Easter services at our church because her husband was out of town.

So she came to Easter services.

She's sitting on the aisle in the auditorium waiting for the service to begin.

And she sees the man who was with her in the pond with the book.

And she said, that's the guy.

He was the one in my dream when I was in this pond for no reason whatsoever.

But I saw him.

Well, his name is Alan Splon.

Alan is our pastor of baptism.

Alan comes over.

They introduce her.

This woman ends up receiving Jesus Christ as her forgiver and leader.

She becomes a Christian, and she learns about baptism.

And sure enough, Alan Splon takes her to the pond on our property where we baptize new believers and with her water up to her waist and with Alan with the Bible open and weeping at the joy, baptizes her in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So there's a case in my own church in Texas like that.

What did her husband say when he got home?

He doesn't know to this day.

He doesn't know.

He doesn't know because she can't tell him she said he would he would who knows what he would do she can't she can't so she keeps she has a bible that we gave her she keeps it hidden and um um she doesn't go to church because she can't um so she has to keep it hidden from her husband um wow it's sad but again she didn't know nothing about baptism what what kind of what kind of a

Mystical dream you're standing up to your waist in water with a guy with a book who's crying.

I mean, what in the world is that all about?

How do you tell a difference between a conventional dream and a mystical dream?

Or are all dreams mystical?

We don't know what dreams are just for the record as a matter of science.

No one's ever been able to explain what that is.

You know, it's interesting.

God is in control of all.

And so in a sense, everything is spiritual, right?

I mean, God, God rules and so forth.

So in a sense, any dream is spiritual.

I think to me, a mystical dream is one that has strong spiritual overtones.

and

there's no natural explanation to say this could come from your subconscious mind.

You know, I think sometimes people will write off a dream as saying, well, that's just something that came from your subconscious.

Maybe you saw something on television, didn't even realize it, and it was in your subconscious.

But when you have examples like the one I gave,

that doesn't make sense.

I'll give you another example.

There was a guy named Omar.

And Omar grew up in a refugee camp in the Middle East, hated Jewish people, hated Jewish people.

His life goal was to murder as many Jews as he could.

And so he wanted to join Hamas.

This is about a dozen years ago.

He wanted to join Hamas.

So he makes arrangements to meet with some leaders of Hamas.

So he's walking down the road toward that meeting, and he's blocked by a vision of Jesus who stops him and says, Omar, This is not the plan I have for your life.

I want you to turn turn around.

I want you to go home.

This is not what I want for your life.

Well, it freaks him out, right?

And so what does he do?

He turns around and he goes home.

That afternoon, he lived in an apartment building.

That afternoon, an American family was moving into the apartment across the hall.

And he goes over there and he says, I just had this vision.

of Jesus telling me that, and he explained the vision and he said, as a Christian, can you tell me what it means?

And this Christian man said, well, let me just do this.

And he opens the Bible and he shares the gospel with him.

And Omar not only becomes a Christian, but today he himself is an underground church planter in the Middle East.

Omar is not his real name, by the way.

So there you have, again, external corroboration.

The image, the vision he had pointed him ultimately towards somebody else who then explained the gospel.

That, to me, tells me this is more than a subconscious

manifestation of something in our heads.

Yes.

And that's what,

as someone trained in journalism and the law, I'm looking for those kind of

anesthesis of corroboration.

Visions are something we associate with hallucinogenic drugs.

Yes.

What is that?

What are the visions produced by ayahuasca and LSD?

There are

what I would call naturalistic visions.

In other words, visions that are caused by things that we can determine are natural.

I mean, natural, medically natural.

In other words, chemicals.

I'll give you an example.

In 2011, I had a condition called hyponitremia.

Hyponitremia is a severe drop in your blood sodium level.

And it causes your brain to expand in your head.

Well, there's no room for your brain to expand very much.

And so you have hallucinations

and almost died as a result of it.

Just out of the blue, you had this.

Well, it was a combination of several things I had.

I was allergic to a drug that they had given me because I'd lost my voice and they gave me a steroid.

And I was allergic to the steroid.

I didn't know I had pneumonia, which can be a factor.

I'd lost a kidney, which I wasn't aware of, and that regulates sodium.

So I had all these weird things.

This was the Job period.

Yeah, it was a Job period.

That's right.

So here I am.

I had hallucinations.

I saw demons.

I saw weird things.

Do I believe they were from God?

No.

Do I believe they're from Satan?

No.

Do I believe they were demons?

No.

I think they were a product of the medical problem I had of my sodium dropping so low.

How long did this go on?

And where were you when you saw these visions?

I was at home and

I finally fell unconscious.

They called the paramedics.

I woke up in the emergency room and the doctor looked down at me and said, you're one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.

And then I went unconscious again.

That That was the message the doctor gave me.

I know.

Pretty reassuring.

I know.

You think he could have sugarcoated it a little bit?

The last thing you heard was you're dying.

Yeah, I know.

It's like, hey,

give me it sugarcoated first.

But the problem is they have to raise the sodium level very carefully because 25% of people with this condition end up mentally or physically disabled.

So they have to raise it.

So I was in the hospital about a week and they had to gently, slowly raise one potato chip at a time.

Exactly.

So do I think those were mystical?

Do I believe I really saw a demon?

Probably not.

I think that was a medically induced phenomenon.

I don't have any external corroboration other than to say it was these low sodium that it's known to cause hallucinations, and I had hallucinations.

So, I think there are medical things that can cause that.

There are drugs that can cause hallucinations.

Now, God is overall.

I get that.

But as a skeptic, I'm always looking for those cases where we have evidence that it's true beyond the experience itself.

There are certain forms of what we refer to as mental illness,

which is like a phrase invented by people pretty recently.

And clearly, there are forms of mental illness, I think, I guess, whatever that is.

But there are certain people who have visions that are very unpleasant

and that bear like almost a precise resemblance to the demonic possession described in the New Testament.

And

they may be demonic.

I don't know.

I have to evaluate each one to try to determine.

Of course,

these are broad brushes.

Is it fair to

conclude that maybe not everything the shrink tells you is mental illness?

They can never describe where it comes from or how to fix it.

They have no idea.

But whatever.

They know nothing, to be clear.

But is it fair to assume that maybe some of that is spiritual?

Yes, I think it can very well be.

I would look at

all of the factors involved.

Where we have the external corroboration, like people left with scratches on them or bruises that cannot be explained, where we have levitation, where we have people speaking in a language they don't know, spontaneously speaking Latin.

things like that.

Then that is the external corroboration to me that there's something demonic going on.

It doesn't mean it couldn't be demonic.

I'm just saying those those are the cases I'm more comfortable in concluding that they're demonic when I've got that kind of external corroboration.

But speaking in languages you don't know is also, can also be, is described as, in the Acts of the Apostles, as

a manifestation of the Holy Spirit of God indwelling.

That's right.

There are other languages people speak,

but not when they're spitting at

clergy who are trying to exercise.

Oh, is that a sign?

Yeah, that could be a sign.

When you're cringing before a crucifix,

you're trying to bite people.

But what about glossolalia?

What about speaking in tongues?

Yeah, that is a spiritual gift.

There are Christians who believe that those gifts have ended with the apostolic age and are no longer applicable.

There are other Christians who believe they are still active in this world.

I believe they are still active.

I've met Christians who speak in other tongues

and others who interpret that.

So I believe it's a gift that still takes place.

I have not experienced that personally,

but I have credible

people who do and have experienced that.

There are other Christians, though, who say, no, no, no, that ended with the apostles.

So that's one of those side issues theologically that when we get to heaven, we can raise our hands and ask God, hey, what about that speaking in tongues thing?

Yeah, no, I know that there is a debate over it.

I have no idea what I think about it, but it is true.

I guess just as a factual matter, it's true that there are people who, seized by some unseen force, begin speaking in languages they have never learned.

Yes, and often this is a generally, I would say, this is not a language that other people speak.

It is a

spiritual language.

But then there's someone, and this is a good corroboration, someone who can interpret that and they understand it, this language, even though it is a spiritual language.

It's not Latin, it's not Greek, it's a spiritual language, and that someone else is able to hear, and they have a gift as well to interpret what is being said.

I got to take you down one other back alley here really quick.

So

both the Hebrews and the early Christians wrote extensively about the concept of a name.

Yeah.

God's name.

Holy be your name.

Yes.

In the name of God.

In the name of Jesus.

What does that mean exactly?

Why the name?

It means a couple of things.

I mean, to do things in the name of God, Yahweh, in the name of God, is to do something consistent with how God is leading you and how scriptures would suggest that you act.

So in other words, to act in God's name is to do something consistent with his character.

So if I

do something charitable to my personal loss and yet to someone else who's in great need,

I do that in God's name.

I do that because this is what the Bible teaches me, that I should be generous and helpful toward people who are hurting.

Names, you know, names in Scripture, you know, you look at the name of Jesus is called Emmanuel.

Well, he's never called Emmanuel.

It said it was his name.

But what that means in the ancient language is

that

he is God with us.

That's what Emmanuel means, God with us.

And that was the name given to Jesus.

But that wasn't the name he was called,

but it was a name that was associated with with Jesus.

So names have all kinds of

implications in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

Sure seems that way.

Now we just name people according to what everybody's what we see on Friends.

Yeah, that's right.

But I mean, you know, observant Jews do not spell out the name of God, right?

They leave the vowels out because the name is itself holy, just the name.

Yes, that's right.

The name, that's right.

They would and they would talk around the name.

There's a verse in Luke 15 where it says

that there is rejoicing in heaven.

How does it go?

Yeah, I can't think of the exact terminology, but basically it's a way of saying there's rejoicing in heaven whenever a person becomes a Christian

without saying the name of God rejoicing.

It kind of talks around that a bit.

So

there's a hesitation and in fact,

something you didn't want to do in the ancient Jewish world is to use the name of God that was forbidden.

Like at all.

Yeah, you wouldn't use it.

And you wouldn't spell it out.

You talk around it.

Because it's so powerful.

So holy.

It could hurt you.

So near-death experiences.

Walk toward the light, Lee.

What's a near-death experience?

A near-death experience is when a person is clinically dead.

That is generally no brain waves, no respiration, no brain heartbeat.

Yeah.

They're clinically dead.

Yet they're going to be revived.

And so they are dead for a period of time, clinically dead, but they're not permanently dead.

So the body will be revived at some point.

So by the measurements of science, they're dead.

That's right.

That's right.

So maybe right there, if we just pause, like maybe right there, we have further evidence.

that science, while useful, of course, and life-improving in some ways, does not have the tools to measure the totality of the experience.

Well, you know, it is.

So they're actually like, that's the failure.

Like, they're obviously not dead.

Yeah, that's right.

They are coming back.

That's right.

All the signs are that they're dead.

But, you know,

the Bible says that, and Christianity teaches that when a person dies, their spirit separates from their body.

And this is what we see in a near-death experience.

This is evidence for the soul, for the spirit.

So the physical body is clinically dead.

There's no sign of life in the body.

They're still working on you.

Once again, has there ever been a culture that we're aware of in the entire span of human history that did not believe in the soul?

They all did.

And thought that people were just meat puppets.

I quote experts in the book that talk about that, that

every civilization believed in the spirit, a spirit, a soul

that continues to live on after we die.

Our leaders don't believe that.

Well, that's not only tragic, it's dangerous.

Because

if you believe we are only our brain, we're only neurons that are firing,

that means technically we have no free will.

And seriously, you're saying we don't have free will.

How do you punish someone for doing something wrong if they really didn't have free will?

It also means we have no inherent rights.

We have no right and wrong.

Does a rock have a right?

No.

Exactly.

Right.

So maybe that should be the acid test.

For leadership.

If you don't believe human beings have souls, if that's not the basis of the way you understand other people, is a separate person with a distinct and unique soul.

Right.

If you don't believe that,

you can have no power in our society.

Is that fair?

I like that.

I like that.

I never thought of that before, but I certainly wouldn't trust a person personally, morally,

if they believed only that we are.

I wouldn't give them a driver's license.

That's scary.

It is scary.

You don't think other people have souls?

Exactly.

What?

You're a psychopath.

Exactly.

I have an interview in my book with a PhD from Cambridge University in Neuroscience who says the evidence is so

persuasive that, yes, indeed, we do have a soul.

We do have a spirit.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you, neuroscience.

Yeah.

What's interesting is that

we have cases where people are clinically dead, their spirit separates from their body, and they see or hear things that would have been impossible for them to see or hear if their spirit had not actually separated from their body.

So this is confirmation that the soul exists.

Interesting.

And let me give you some examples.

There's a woman named Maria.

She was dying in a hospital in London, England.

But she said, I was conscious the whole time.

And so here they are working on her body, trying to bring her back.

She said, my spirit floated out of my body.

I met a divine being.

But mainly I'm looking down from the ceiling of the hospital room at the resuscitation efforts.

I'm I'm watching them trying to revive my body.

And then at some point, the reviving works and the spirit returns to the body.

And she says, by the way, see the ceiling fan here in this room, the hospital room?

There's a red sticker on top of one of the blades of the ceiling fan.

Now, you couldn't see it from the room because it's on the top of one of the blades of the ceiling fan.

But she saw it because from her perspective near the ceiling watching resuscitation, she was looking down.

So they got a ladder.

They went up there.

Sure enough, on the top of this blade, here's the sticker exactly as she has described it.

That tells me that she really did have an out-of-body experience, just as the Bible describes.

And this is extremely common.

We have a woman, woman, a young girl.

She was nine years old, so I recall eight or nine.

She drowned in a swimming pool at YMCA.

It's horrible, horrible.

Her brain had swelled.

She had no respiration, no heartbeat.

She was clinically dead.

So they brought her to the hospital to keep her body alive mechanically until they decided what to do, you know.

And they continued to try to revive her.

But as it turns out, three days later, she was revived

and with no brain damage.

And she said, by the way, I was.

Seriously.

Yeah.

And she said, I was conscious the whole time.

and they said well that's not possible and so the doctors who were skeptical said here here's a piece of paper and a crayon why don't you draw the emergency room where we took you when you were dead so she picks up the crayon she draws the emergency room exactly as it appears and then she said by the way one night when my parents visited me in the hospital I followed them home

And I watched as my mom, she was making chicken soup with rice on the stove.

And my dad was sitting in a certain chair and he was looking in a certain direction.

And her brother, she said, was playing with a G.I.O.

Joe Jeep in his bedroom.

And these are the clothes that they were wearing.

Everything was exactly correct.

How do you explain that if she didn't have an authentic out-of-body experience

while she was clinically dead?

So this is affirmation that near-death experiences do point toward a spirit, a soul that separates from our body at the time of death.

Now it can return to our body if we're revived.

And that's what happens in these cases.

Interestingly, there was a study done of 21 blind people,

either blind since birth or shortly thereafter.

They were able to see or had visualized perceptions during their near-death experiences.

So there's a woman named Vicki.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

Vicki Umapag, 26 years old.

She's blind virtually since birth.

She is killed in a car crash.

She's a passenger in a car.

She's killed.

But she said later, I was conscious the whole time.

And her spirits floated out and she watched the, she's able to see the resuscitation efforts.

She was able to see childhood friends who she'd never seen in person, but she knew intuitively who they were.

Oh, that's Mary.

That's Jimmy.

She sees birds for the first time.

She sees trees and so forth.

And then when her body is revived, and her spirit returns to her body, she's blind again.

Medical researchers said this is impossible

based on current medical knowledge.

How does this happen?

So there's a phenomenon here that tells me that there's corroboration, that there's something

to this idea that we have a soul, a spirit that is

different than our physical brain and body.

And I'll add this.

This is really important.

John Burke is, I interview him for my book.

John Burke is a Christian pastor

with an engineering degree and science background who studied 1,500 cases of near-death experiences in depth.

He has video interviews with people and so forth.

And here's his conclusion.

He said, Lee, if you look at not how people interpret what happens, because we all interpret things to our worldview.

Of course.

If you're a Muslim, if you're a Hindu, you're going to interpret things differently.

Forget that.

Set that aside.

Just look at what actually takes place during a typical near-death experience.

That is consistent with the Christian Bible.

And what is it that's consistent?

Well, things like

encountering a divine being,

things like encountering people who had preceded you in death,

things like a life review where your life is reviewed and you not only

experience with this divine figure next to you who's encouraging you.

It's not a judgmental kind of a way.

It's you're judging yourself.

You're reviewing every little action you took, but you're able for the first time to see the ripple effects of that.

So I may have done something that hurt you years ago, and I never realized the impact that had on you and how that caused you to do this, that, and the other thing.

And yet, in this life review,

you see not only what you did and you did good and you did bad, but the the ramifications of it.

Yes.

That's that takes place.

Now, you're not permanently dead.

The Bible says in Hebrews, we're appointed once to die and then the judgment.

So you would think that, biblically speaking, you would die and then you would encounter judgment.

Well, you're not permanently dead.

You're coming back.

This is not your permanent death.

So this is kind of a taste, a foretaste of what death is like, but you're not permanently dead.

You're just clinically dead.

But you still have some of the attributes of what the Bible talks about in terms of a judgment.

So

I think that's reassuring for Christians like me who used to think, oh, that's new age stuff, near-death experience.

That's what we've, there have been, Tucker, 900 scholarly articles written about near-death experiences in medical journals and scientific journals over the last 50 years.

This is a very well-researched area.

And they have concluded that there is no natural explanation that can account for all of the aspects of a near-death experience.

It's a fascinating area.

And so I interview, as I said, John Burke, who's an expert on them, to give examples of this sort of thing.

What about pre-death?

Yes, this is death vision.

This is,

this is new.

Can I just add one editorial comment?

Yeah.

I'm so filled with rage, I have to do it.

That

our culture systematically excludes conversation, real conversations about death.

Obviously, we're very pro-death.

You know, kill your baby, euthanize your parents, whatever.

We're all about death.

But the actual experience of death is kind of cloaked from most people.

And I don't think they have any idea what it is when someone dies, the process of dying.

And

so this is a welcome conversation.

Tucker, it's fascinating, these deathbed visions.

The difference between a near-death experience and a deathbed vision is in a near-death experience, a person's going to come back.

Right.

In a deathbed vision, this is a vision someone has just before they die.

They're not coming back.

I mean, they're permanently going to die.

But we see a biblical example of this in the book of Acts.

We see Stephen, who is described as being full of the Holy Spirit, who is on the verge of being stoned to death.

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

So this has a biblical precedent.

But what is fascinating, and I think what you said is so true, people don't like to talk about it because

at all.

Because if you have one of these experiences before you die, you think they're going to think I'm got dementia.

They're going to think I'm nuts.

They're going to think, you know, so a lot of people don't like to talk about it.

So there's a researcher.

He went to a huge hospice facility in New York State.

And they went to all the dying people and they said, please, as a favor, if you have a vision, a dream unlike any you've ever had,

tell us.

Would you tell us?

And so

88%

of those dying people had a pre-death vision that they reported on before they died.

88%.

I think the other 12% probably had one, but they died before they were able to say anything.

Or they were so high on morphine they couldn't talk.

That's true.

People get drugged up.

That's true.

So there's that.

I mean, obviously, you don't want people to suffer.

You want to alleviate suffering and alleviate pain.

I'm totally for that.

I'm, you know, want to be clear about it.

But there's also this custom, which has grown to ubiquity.

Now it's just, it's everybody who dies gets

from the hospice nurses.

Yeah.

They kill you with morphine.

I mean, no one wants to say that out loud, but I've seen it.

They kill you with morphine.

Yeah.

And

okay, first we should just be honest about what's happening always.

But second, we should be clear about the cost.

So if people, if

everybody on the way out is getting visions of some kind, maybe there's a purpose to those.

Exactly.

Maybe we shouldn't short circuit that.

And Tucker,

there's also corroboration for these.

So in other words, they did one study of 3,000 of these, and they determined this is not just something coming from the subconscious mind.

There is something else here.

And I'll give you the example of the corroboration.

There was a woman named Doris.

She's dying on her deathbed, and she has a pre-death vision.

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

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

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

But then she gets this confused look on her face and she says, wait a minute, why is Vida with my father?

Why would Vida be there?

It makes no sense.

Why would Vida be there?

And then she died.

Vida was her sister.

Her sister had died two weeks earlier, but no one had told Doris because she was so ill, they didn't want the news to kill her.

So they withheld the news that her sister, Vida, had died.

And yet on her deathbed, she sees Vida in the world to come.

That is fairly common.

It actually happened with my father-in-law.

So that to me is a corroboration.

Another form of corroboration, get this.

In the Bible, in Luke 16,

there's a story of a rich man and a beggar who both die.

Yes.

And the rich man goes to a place of torment.

And the beggar goes to a place of bliss.

The rich man, by the way, has walked past the poor man every day.

That's right.

And ignored him.

And ignored him.

So

the beggar, according to Jesus in verse 22, is accompanied by angels to heaven.

That angels accompany him to heaven.

And what's particularly fascinating is people who have pre-death visions often see angels coming for them, just as Jesus suggested in that parable.

So, for instance,

the most famous

skeptic in Canada, Charles Templeton.

Charles Templeton was the pulpit partner of Billy Graham.

He was going to be the great evangelist.

But then he went to a liberal seminary.

He lost his faith.

He wrote an ugly book called Farewell to God, My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith.

And I got to know him.

He became a friend.

I actually wrote a book called The Case for Faith, where I answered all his objections to Christianity, and we became friends.

Anyway, he ended up coming back to faith in Christ before he died.

And then he's on his deathbed.

And he calls out to his wife, Madeline.

Madeline, what?

What, Chuck?

Can you see them?

What are you talking about?

They're in the room.

You can't see them.

They're right here in this room.

They're the angels.

They're coming for me.

Oh, they're so beautiful.

Look at them.

The singing is so beautiful.

They're coming for me.

I'm going to heaven.

I'm going to be with God.

That is incredibly common that people will see angels coming for them in that vision they had before they died.

Now, now here's another bit of corroboration.

Children who are dying will see angels, but not like you would expect them to be seen.

In other words, let's say a five-year-old who's dying.

What is their image of an angel?

Well, it's a furry thing with a feathery thing with big wings, right?

It's a cartoon, right?

It's a cartoon.

They all have big wings.

And so there's a case from a doctoral dissertation I read of a little girl who's dying, and she says, mommy, mommy, can you see the angels?

They're coming for me.

Oh, they're so beautiful.

They're so beautiful.

Their eyes.

Look at their eyes.

And the mother didn't want to disappoint her.

So she said, oh, yeah, yeah, I see them.

Look at their big wings.

And the little girl said, oh, mommy, they don't have wings.

And she was able to describe them in vivid detail before she died.

Wow.

You would think if a child of that age was going to have just a vision from their imagination of angels coming for them, they would have big wings.

They don't.

In the Hallmark version, yes.

That's right.

And in case after case, they don't see the big wings.

And by the way, the Bible doesn't say that all angels have wings.

So

that to me is another very interesting dynamic of these pre-death visions.

Not all people on their deathbed have joyful visions

or reunited with loved ones in the next world.

Yes.

There are many people who are in terror.

Yes.

And horrified.

And

can you describe that and what is it?

Yes.

We have this in near-death experiences and in deathbed visions where people who are about to die have a glimpse, I believe, of a hellish experience to come.

And they are frightened beyond belief and scared beyond words.

I'll give you an example of a near-death vision where this happened.

There's a man named Howard Storm.

Howard was an atheist.

He was a professor of art at a secular university, chairman of the art department.

And he was visiting France, and he died of a heart attack.

So here he is.

He's in a French hospital.

He's dead.

But he said later, I was conscious the whole time.

It was a near-death experience.

His spirit had separated from his body.

And there were some people in the hallway.

Say, Howard, we've been waiting for you.

Come with us.

Come with us.

So he does.

And he's walking down the hallway.

His spirit is walking down the hallway with these people.

It goes on and on and on, and it gets darker and darker.

And then they're becoming abusive.

And they're saying, come on, come on, why are you so slow?

And then they start to attack him.

And he said, he said, they,

he said, no horror movie can ever capture

the

horror of what they did to me.

I mean, he was absolutely mauled.

He said, I was roadkill.

And he said, I called out to God.

He called like physically mauled.

Yes.

Eyes gouged out, ears ripped off.

Just horror.

And he calls out to Jesus.

Jesus, rescue me.

And And this white orb comes and brings him and rescues him from that.

And he is restored.

Well, ultimately, his body is revived.

His spirit returns to his body.

This is such a profound experience that he not only renounced his atheism, he not only quit his tenured position as chairman of the art department at a secular university, he not only became a Christian, he went to seminary and he became a pastor.

And today he's he's a pastor of this little church.

I think it's in Kentucky or Oklahoma or somewhere in the middle of nowhere serving God.

That's how transformative this experience was.

But there are multiple cases of people having horrific.

In fact, one study of near-death experiences said it was 24%

had negative experiences and not positive.

It doesn't feel like a good sign.

No.

No.

I mean, what it does to me is it's affirmation that, you know what,

what the Bible tells us is true.

There is a heaven, there is a hell.

And every

society ever has thought that.

Yeah.

Every society.

And I think everyone intuitively knows that.

Yeah.

I've never had a near-death experience, but the one time I thought I was going to die many years ago, I was in a plane crash.

I was filled with sadness.

I had no peace at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

None.

Only regret.

Yeah.

So I did take that as a as an indication I should change the way I was living.

And I did.

Well, God used that in your life.

Well, I felt that way.

And certainly in retrospect, I think that.

Yeah.

But I remember thinking, wow, I'm going to die.

I was certain of it.

And

then I thought later, I thought that when people knew they were going to die, they were filled with like

peace and warmth and walked toward the light.

That was not my experience at all.

It was like, man, I can't believe I did a few things.

And I've really felt sad about it.

So,

that's the reality.

Well, but I guess it's, yeah, well, it was the reality that I experienced for sure.

But I also think that it's what a blessing

to have an opportunity to,

you know, to

turn back and change.

That's the thing about these near-death experiences that

you have another chance.

You don't have it in deathbed vision, but you're going to be revived and then you have a choice to make.

Is that the road I continue to want to go down?

The first thing I did was quit drinking and then had a fourth child.

Wow.

It's awesome.

It was.

It was awesome.

It was awesome.

It was literally awesome.

So,

yes.

So I think that there's something real there.

And it does seem like a crime of some kind to deprive people of that

with drugs.

I know.

And everyone experiences it, just like anything else.

Like, maybe there's a reason.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not random.

Maybe.

You know, I'd encourage people who are watching or listening to this podcast.

Next time you have a big family get together with the cousins and the uncles and the aunts and everything,

ask people, do we have any family stories about deathbed visions or near-death experiences?

I bet you you'll find, oh, Uncle Bob had that experience or cousin Jim had that experience.

I was having dinner with seven people in Oklahoma City and four of them, we talked about this, four of them had relatives who had pre-death visions.

I'm not surprised.

It's incredibly common.

I've never asked that question at a dinner party, but I have asked, has anyone seen a ghost?

Yeah.

100% of the time, there's someone at the table who has.

100%.

What is that?

Ghosts, I have a chapter on ghosts and psychics in my book.

The technical definition of a ghost is someone who dies, but refuses to go into the afterlife.

Their spirit refuses to go into the next life.

I don't see that in the Bible.

So I don't think that ghosts per se are from God.

I think most likely an apparition that we interpret as being ghosts is most like a demonic apparition.

I think people feel that.

I think so.

Ghosts have a bad rep.

Yes.

Yeah.

No one is summoning ghosts.

It's not like Casper who's going to bring you some flowers.

Generally, people are anti-ghosts.

Yes.

Ghost stories.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Ghosted.

Yeah.

That's not a good connotation.

So I don't think that surprises anyone.

So I do talk about ghosts

and I talk about psychics and the tricks that they use to convince people that they're

called.

Sorry?

Are you pro-psychic?

I'm anti-psychic.

Yeah, I am too.

Why are you anti-psychic?

Because the Bible says do not consult mediums.

Do not consult psychics.

I mean, it's very clear, multiple places in scripture, do not do it.

Oh, it, well, among the ancient.

Hebrews, that was a death penalty offense.

Exactly, it was.

And so you just, that's not something we wanted to mess with.

And I think there's got to be reasons for that.

I think it's because it opens the door to the demonic,

that you're trying to consult the dead.

You're trying to find out something apart from what God might reveal through a psychic, through a medium who supposedly has a cultic

wherewithal and is able to take you down that pathway.

It's dangerous.

And

I talk in the book about the tricks that they use to, you know, there's things like cold readings and warm readings and hot readings, where people who want to fool you into thinking they know more about you than they do will employ that.

And they think, oh my gosh, this person knows all about me.

No, they don't.

They're just very clever people who are able to read certain things about you.

No, I mean, of course, there's a lot of BS gypsy tricks.

But I'll tell you one case.

It's already true in the Bible that,

at least in my reading of it, that

they're taken seriously.

Well, there are cases.

That's why it said death penalty offense,

not because it's fake, because it's real.

Because it can be real.

And

that's a good way to argue it.

There is a case in contemporary times when President Carter was president and a

two-engine aircraft went down and crashed in Africa.

And the United States government was trying to find it.

I don't know why, but they wanted to find that aircraft.

And they had satellites repositioned, looking for it.

They could not find the wreckage of this airplane.

And so

the Stansfield Turner, who was the head of the CIA,

consulted a medium, a psychic in California.

She went into a trance and she gave the longitude and latitude of where to find the plane.

They went, they reoriented the satellites and boom, there was the wreckage of the plane just as she had said.

What do you do with that?

That tells me

she was in connection with something there.

Now, if the Bible says don't be connecting with psychics, it was probably demonic.

And why would she do that?

Because now she's got credibility.

Now, the next time they want to know something, let's go to that woman in California, told us where that plane was.

She seems to have these abilities to know the future, to know things that we don't know.

And now she has credibility.

I think that was a way for Satan to give her credibility so that we'd be fooled into thinking into the future to take advantage of her psychic.

Yeah, best not to play with that stuff.

No, no.

It's best to stay away from that.

So contacting dead relatives through a medium, Ouija boards, all that stuff, scary, bad.

Yeah.

On the other hand, I mean, that's my position.

I'm sure it's yours.

Yeah.

I came to that position through experience, not just guessing.

It's bad.

However, I know a lot of decent, God-fearing people who have said, well, I really feel like I was contacted by a dead relative, a dead loved one.

Yeah, that's an interesting.

And I have a couple of cases I talk about in the book of that that seemingly are corroborated.

What do you do with that?

Because.

How is that inconsistent with your theology?

On the one hand, there are a couple of cases in scripture where the dead have come back like that.

Elijah came back,

the

transfiguration.

So there's an example of a dead person coming back.

There's another example

in the Old Testament of going to a medium and a dead person coming back, not because of the power of the medium, because she was surprised it happened, but through the power of God, he allowed that dead person to come back.

So there are a couple of perhaps precedents in scripture of dead people coming back.

One of the reasons I'm skeptical is because when Jesus was talking about in Luke 16, about the rich man who died and the beggar who died, he talked about a gulf between the living and the dead.

That concerns me.

So that raises some questions in my mind.

I think the transfiguration and the incident with what's called the medium of Endor in the Old Testament may be one-offs.

And those are unusual circumstances.

So I'm, Tucker, I know, I'm not quite sure what to do with it because I talk about a couple of cases in the book where a dead relative returns

and a person talks to that relative, and then they disappear, and then

their child comes in, eight-year-old child, and says, I just saw grandpa.

I just talked to him.

So he experienced the same vision.

Well, that's pretty weird.

Yeah.

Is that corroboration and so forth?

Well, here's my concern.

So many times people have contact with these dead people.

These are people that lived ungodly lives.

And yet they say, everything's fine.

I'm fine.

Everything's good.

Just take care of the family.

Tell everybody I love them.

I'm good.

Don't worry about me.

That's the general message people get.

Well, what does that say to someone who

is thinking about what do I need to do to live a life that will bring me to heaven and to God?

Well, Uncle Tom came and told me he's fine.

He didn't, he was a, he was an adulterer and a, he never came to faith in Jesus.

He's a, you know, bad guy.

And yet he says he's fine in the afterlife.

Wouldn't that be something that a demon might want to imitate to send a false message?

I think maybe.

So I guess I'm giving you two answers.

One is there is some biblical precedent for a dead coming back, but I think they may be one-offs.

I'm not sure.

I think there'd be a good motive for Satan to counterfeit that.

You know, it says Satan can appear as

an angel of light, as a counterfeit.

He can fool us into thinking he's something he's not.

Would that be to his advantage to do, to mislead people?

I think it could be.

So I'm not quite sure where I'm at.

Are UFOs what we call UFOs spiritual entities?

I don't know.

I didn't get into UFOs in the book.

It's a fascinating topic.

Maybe I'll I'll do another book on that.

But

so I didn't research it thoroughly.

Having said that, though,

it would not be an affront to my faith if indeed we found intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

The Bible doesn't say that we are unique in that we.

No, it doesn't.

But I wonder.

Could they be spiritual?

Is the question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Could be.

It could be, yes.

Is it?

I don't know.

I'm just not as knowledgeable on that to be able to give a strong opinion.

Last question.

Miracles.

Yeah.

What is a miracle?

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 in other words, a lot of people, skeptics.

That's a nice definition.

Thank you.

That's from Robert Pertill, who was a philosopher.

I thought that was the best definition I'd heard.

Here's the problem.

A lot of skeptics will say, I don't believe in miracles because you can't violate the laws of nature.

So by definition, a miracle is impossible.

We haven't even settled on the laws of nature.

They're so dumb.

Well, here's how I answer.

Like the laws of nature, really.

Science every day challenges the laws of nature.

And especially with quantum physics and energy.

Exactly.

But I say, look, I have this glass of water here.

If I were to drop it, the law of gravity would say it would hit the floor.

Yeah.

But if I drop it and you reached in and grabbed it before it hit the floor, you're not violating the law of gravity.

You're not overturning the law of gravity.

You're just intervening.

And that's what a miracle is: God intervening temporarily into his creation.

He brought it about.

So of course he could intervene.

And

man.

But again, our understanding of nature and its laws changes every day.

And it's so shallow.

It's so shallow, what we know.

Yeah, but I mean, our, I mean, our view of what is natural is different now from what it was five years ago yeah and what it will be five years from now exactly yeah so that's just the silliness and the shallowness of claims like that kind of shock me it does so miracles um

but you know to the extent we can know like this is so unusual like this couldn't have happened accidentally give you an example yeah please do this one i personally investigated and it's been um widely documented a woman named barbara um she was was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic.

So we got all those records with multiple sclerosis as a teenager.

And it was progressive.

She got worse very quickly.

So she

just got worse and worse and worse, multiple hospitalizations to the point where the doctor said, look, and her parents said, look, next time she gets pneumonia, which she would get on a regular basis, we're just going to let her die.

Let her go, yeah.

Because we're just postponing the inevitable.

So here she is on her deathbed.

She hadn't walked in seven years, so her muscles had atrophied.

Her fingers were, she was curled up like a pretzel.

Her fingers were touching her wrists.

Her feet were permanently extended.

Her diaphragm was, one diaphragm was paralyzed.

So one lung was collapsed.

The other lung was at half full.

She had a tube in her throat that went to oxygen canisters in the garage.

She was in hospice at home, so she could breathe.

So she got a tube in her throat.

She had lost her urination and bowels, control of those.

She lost her eyesight, so all she saw was gray shapes.

And she's on her deathbed.

She's dying.

Well, some people said, wait a minute, let's call WMBI, the Christian radio station at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and ask people on the radio show to pray for poor Barbara.

She's dying.

So they did.

Well, we documented that at least 450 people began praying for Barbara because they wrote letters to Barbara saying, I'm praying for you and to encourage her.

So here we we are on Pentecost Sunday, 1981.

She is in her bedroom and her aunt and two girlfriends are reading her some of these encouraging letters from people praying for her.

And from the corner of the room where nobody was, she heard the voice of God.

And the voice said, my child, get up and walk.

Well, she hadn't walked in seven years.

She had no muscle tone in her legs.

pulled out the tube so she could talk and she said, I don't know what you're going to think of this, but God just told me me to get up and walk.

Go find my parents.

I want them to be here.

So they ran out, but she couldn't wait.

She jumped out of bed.

She told me, she said, Lee, the first thing I noticed, my feet were flat in the floor.

And they hadn't been flat for years.

They've been rigidly extended, but they were flat in the floor.

Second thing I noticed, my hands had opened up like flowers.

And they hadn't opened up in years.

And then she said, the third thing I noticed, I could see.

She said, wouldn't you think that'd be the first thing I noticed?

It was actually the third thing I noticed.

She was instantaneously completely healed of multiple sclerosis.

Her mother came running in, fell to her knees and grabbed her calves and said, your muscle tone has come back.

It was Pentecost Sunday.

There was a service at their church, Wheaton-Wesleyan church.

They went, they decide to go and thank God that she was fine.

She's dancing, literally dancing around the house with her father.

So they go to church.

They're in the back.

The pastor gets up and says, does anybody have any announcements?

Barbara comes walking down.

Yeah, that's a good announcement.

Barbara comes walking down the center aisle.

People freaked out because they haven't seen her except in a wheelchair for seven years.

They began singing spontaneously, amazing grace.

I once was blind and now I see.

Totally healed.

She goes the next day to her doctor, one of her doctors.

He said later, he said, I saw her walking down the hallway toward my office.

My first thought was, oh, she died and that's a ghost.

He said, this is medically impossible.

And it is medically impossible.

She was instantaneously, totally healed of multiple sclerosis.

She ended up marrying a pastor at that little Wesleyan church in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

And I got to know her, sweetest woman.

Is she still alive?

She just recently, this happened in 1981, lived perfectly healthy all these years.

She just died in Florida.

They just retired just a few months ago.

So she found that.

But Renault completely healed.

Okay, that's a.

What do you do with that what do you do with that well that's a challenge to like the most basic understanding of everything yes right yep

so um

if she's on her deathbed from ms which is a well-studied yes disease um you know like you would think that

you know harvard medical school would just like see cease operations until they figured out what that was i know you know i i mentioned it to my doctor i said i told him the story he said it'd be interesting to know because there's plaque that that develops in the brain in multiple sclerosis it'd be interesting to know did that plaque disappear and I said which is the greater miracle that the plaque would disappear or that God would totally heal her with the plaque still there I don't know which are greater but was her case I guess my question is was how could we in a in an advanced country allow a case like that to go unnoticed and unstudied.

I know.

It was the next day it was in the Chicago Tribune,

which most newspapers don't cover stuff like that.

I mean, it's too speculative.

But did she get called?

Yeah, but that's not speculative.

No.

I mean, so she had a team of physicians saying it's time for her to go, and she's dancing and singing Amazing Grace and hearing a pastor.

But were doctors calling in to say, I want to study this case?

There are two doctors who wrote books about it.

Wrote books about it.

Yeah.

Well,

they wrote books, and in the books, they talked about her case.

Yes.

So two of her physicians actually wrote about it in their books.

That's ingredients.

I know.

I know.

And it's not the only one.

I don't know.

We don't have much time.

Give you a real quick one.

Yeah.

There's a kid who was born, little baby, kept vomiting, couldn't keep down food, kept vomiting, vomiting.

And they realized this baby has what's called gastroparesis, which is a paralysis of the stomach.

It's an incurable condition.

It happens from time to time.

You can't live that way.

No.

So they operated and they put tubes in so that the food would go directly

into the small intestine.

I don't know if it went through the stomach that was paralyzed or whatever, but that way

he was able to live.

And he lived that way for 15 years, 16 years.

He lived that way.

There were restrictions on what he could eat.

It was uncomfortable, but at least he was alive, right?

They bring him one day to a church and they asked the pastor, would you pray for him?

The pastor puts his hand on his shoulder, begins to pray, and the kid said later, I felt an electric shock.

go through me at the time he was praying.

And he was instantly healed of gastroparesis.

There has never been a documented case of anyone ever healed of gastroparesis,

a paralyzed stomach.

He was totally normal.

They went in, they took the tubes out, and today he's totally healthy.

He's a business guy, doing great.

I just emailed with him the other day.

That again, this was researched by multiple medical researchers and published as a case study in a medical journal.

And in the medical journal, it's probably like, here's what happened.

So that's an incredible story.

The girl being cured of MS is an incredible story.

Everything you've said is amazing.

But so many of the things you've said are also instantly recognizable to everyone listening, whatever their religious faith or lack of religious faith as things that do happen, actually.

It's real.

We all know.

that there are things that happen to us and people we know well and love that are outside the ability of science to explain.

Guys,

supernatural.

Yeah.

So my final question to you, Lee Strobel, and this has been amazing.

Thank you.

Oh, my pleasure.

Is why do we keep ignoring it?

Yeah.

I think it goes back to what I said earlier.

I think we're embarrassed sometimes by the supernatural that we're going to think, people are going to think we're nuts.

But if that's real, and it clearly is real,

then

like it puts everything else into perspective.

Yeah.

When you take it seriously and when you look at it like

you not take it seriously,

grow up in a culture that tells you none of it's real, and yet it's super obvious that it is super obvious that it's real in some most general sense.

Yeah.

The supernatural is real.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Then why don't people talk about it all the time?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think the fact that I've been a Christian since November the 8th of 1981 and I've never heard a sermon on the topic of angels in my life It tells you something.

I think we shy away because

we want to be accepted as normal.

Why do you get out of bed on Sunday to sit in a church where they're like pretending that nothing they say is true?

It's a good point.

If it's not supernatural, why are you bothering?

Exactly.

If you believe in Jesus, you got to believe in angels.

You got to believe in demons.

You got to believe in Satan.

You got to believe in heaven.

You got got to believe in hell.

Because if you believe in Jesus, he taught on all those things.

So, my goodness, how could you not?

I agree with you.

How could you not?

Yeah, I mean, go on, move on to something else.

Yeah, go play tennis or something.

And if 40% of Americans have had an experience that they can only attribute to a miracle of God, that means the other 60% probably know one of those 40%, right?

And oh, my brother had this experience.

My cousin had.

And we kind of say, what do we do with that?

And I think what we ought to do is look for that which is

corroborated and which is consistent with what we trust to be true, which for me are the Christian scriptures.

If you just fight against distraction

consistently for just a day or two, like I'm not going to be distracted.

I'm just going to notice.

That's it.

That's all you do is just notice.

I'm just going to notice stuff.

Yeah.

If you do that as an exercise, literally for 48 hours, you will experience the supernatural.

I think you're right.

It's hard to do that.

Yeah.

Leastroble, thank you.

Hey, I enjoyed it.

Wonderful.

Great to meet you.

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