Halloween, Ghosts, and Spirits

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

…is Halloween, Ghosts and Spirits. It’s a timely sermon in that sense, in that Halloween right now is just over the horizon for us here. Halloween is an odd event, very odd in a way, because its origins, in its origins it was not evil, it was actually good. Probably a number of you know that Halloween is all hallows even. In other words, All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before All Hallows and All Hallows is All Saints’ Day. And originally, All Saints’ Day, November 1st, was the day when all the saints were honored. In other words, it’s a time that the church had set aside to honor those people who had lived exemplary lives, who had blessed others by their lives, and were considered saints by the church at that time. Now, October 31st, though, among non-Christian Celtic people, was a different matter altogether. It was the festival of Samhain, and I don’t know why I had missed this in the past until I decided to look it up in my encyclopedia, was the fact that it was also New Year’s Eve in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon England at that time. It was actually the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. It took place in the autumn, as a matter of fact. It was an occasion for fire festivals. They lit huge bonfires on top of hills to frighten off the evil spirits. And also, it was a time when… laws and land tenures were renewed. It’s a funny thing. It harkens back in a way to the Old Testament, you recall, where in the year of release, all the captives were released. People who had been enslaved because of having been a thief and caught and sold into slavery were turned loose. So it was a year of release in the seventh year. That was always in the autumn, not in the spring. A little earlier than this, because it was connected with the Hebrew calendar, and it would have been the Feast of Trumpets. Actually, the Day of Atonement, I think, ushered in the Jubilee year. But in that, every so many years, all the land, again, went back to its original family owner, the one who received it by lot. And one notices that here they had, in the autumn, a time when all the laws and land tenures were renewed. Now, also in the Celtic religions, the dead were supposed to visit their homes on this night. As a consequence, you get the sinister aspects of the festival, of All Hallows Even or of Samhain, that begins to make its way into it. And, of course, you have the Celtic church right alongside of the Roman church. And the gradual melding that took place in these things over time created something along the lines of Halloween. Although, as the… As the encyclopedia points out, it really became in later times a secular holiday, which really for the most part in the United States it is. But at the same time, it has also retained a lot of those sinister overtones. Halloween was thought to be the most favorable time for divinations, for marriage, for health, for death, and for luck. And it was the only day when the help of the devil was invoked in such matters. Now, I think that is fascinating because, you know, for people who call themselves Christians, who are believers in Christ, people who try to serve God, you can almost see how it would be tempting in certain circumstances, and I’m going to talk about that a little later, that if nothing’s happening and nothing’s going on and there’s a spirit world there that is active, to be able to consult that spirit world to find something that’s lost or to get an omen or something about health or death or marriage or should this take place, to get some guidance from the spirit world could be appealing and attractive to people. I was really fascinated. There was a book called The Name of the Rose, which is a murder mystery set in an old Latin monastery. And there was a little line or exchange between some monks sitting around the table one day talking about this. about the temptation and the sin of trying to establish contact with the other world through the devil. The idea is this, that if, I mean, I can’t see God, I can’t touch God, I can’t experience God, but if I can see or experience or touch the devil, I have proved God’s existence by finding or coming into contact with the devil. Now, there’s a certain rationale in that, perverse as it may be, and I think you might be able to understand, that if I can see a demon or experience a demon and escape from that and can come out of it whole, I will have found in my mind absolute confirmation of the spirit world and consequently of God. And so people have dabbled around with this with a view to trying to come into contact with the supernatural because they want to know. They don’t want to have faith. They want to know that the spirit world is out there. Well, it is. Frankly, the very idea of invoking the help of the devil for anything gives me the shivers. I can’t understand that. Why on earth our society tolerates the existence of ancient Celtic practices, not only on our streets, but in our schools and in our churches, is a little bit more than I can fathom. I really have a lot of difficulty with that. Whereas you can actually allow into a school environment something that had to do with the old days of Samhain and the religions of pagan Celtic England. Which, interestingly enough, this did not come from pagan Celtic continental Europe. This originated with the Celtic people as opposed to the Teutonic people where our Christmas, for example, mostly came from, as we observe it today. But anyway, it’s really striking to me how that could happen. And you can have all the paraphernalia of Halloween in your school. But you cannot pray. You cannot have a religious observance dedicated to Christ or God or even the God of the Old Testament, as the case may be. Now, as I said, the encyclopedia says that Halloween has become a secular holiday, but it has terribly grim overtones. You can ask those people, for example, in Detroit, who’ve had their houses burned down around their ears on Halloween night as a result of all the arson that takes place. They’re not burning bonfires on hilltops in Detroit. They’re burning people’s homes and houses and abandoned buildings and what have you. So Halloween is a night of great evil. But really, it’s a night of great evil only because the devil is invoked in some of the customs and some of the practices. If it were nothing but a harvest festival, it probably wouldn’t amount to much. The question is, is there really a devil? And are there demons in a spirit world that come out on Halloweens, Halloween or at other times? I recently received a letter from a longtime correspondent. I mean, he and I have written letters back and forth for a very long time. And he had what I think is easily the most comprehensive set of questions about the spirit world and the paranormal that I have ever received in my life. I mean, it was one of those things, to answer it would require me to write a book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Spirit World But Were Afraid to Ask. He gave me a really good list. He asked about spirit sightings, dreams that comes true, UFOs, abductions, strange lights, hauntings, healings, psychics, miracles that seem to have nothing to do with God and yet are miracles, and a whole long list. And he asked that somewhere along the line I would do a sermon or a tape or something on the subject. And so you owe this sermon today to my friend who wrote to me about this. First, I want you to take all that stuff that you’ve heard about all these things, like dreams that come true, things about UFO sightings, things about all the paranormal, and put them all in one box. Then toss out all the lies, hoaxes, tricks, and deceptions. Now, we’re going to assume that somebody who knows which is which will go through the box for us and toss all of them out. Now, all of us know, don’t we, that we’re going to reduce the number of items in our box enormously by this process. Because people lie about things that have happened to them. People actually practice hoaxes to try to trick people on this kind of thing. You also have people who go out and take photographs of pie tins sailing through the air and try to palm them off as though they were UFOs. And they’ve been taken seriously for a surprisingly long period of time. And it’s taken some real professionals to get in there, rummage around in it, and find out what was going on with the thing. So hoaxes take place. Deceptions take place. I mean, if you get all this stuff out of there, we will have taken our box down to what? 20%, 10% of what was originally there. We won’t empty it. We will not empty it because there is a spirit world. There is a devil. And there are things that take place. But by far and away, most of the stuff you hear about never happened. It’s a figment of somebody’s imagination. It’s an invention. It’s a hoax. Or maybe it’s just a magician’s trick. There’s a scripture that’s probably fairly familiar to you back in Exodus the 7th chapter that I think we need to take a look at. Exodus chapter 7. And I’ll begin reading in verse 8. And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Show a miracle for you. Then you shall say to Aaron, Take your rod and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent. So Moses and Aaron went into Pharaoh, and they did what God commanded. Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, before his servants, and it became a snake. That’s a good trick. You know, you have a big staff or a rod in your hand, like the kind you would use for walking, and you just take it, and he says, you want to see proof that I’m of God? And you throw the staff on the ground, and instantly it becomes a writhing serpent. Impressive, to say the least. All right, he did it. Then Pharaoh called on his wise men and his sorcerers. Now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments, for they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents. But Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods, and God thereby hardened Pharaoh’s heart. What happened in this place? Well, we have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty, except that we know that these men by some power other than God were able to duplicate what took place there. Now, a good magician should be able to do exactly the same thing. It should be no great trick for them. Because you know, you’ve seen them, haven’t you, where they have this rod in their hand and they wave the thing around and they go like so. And all of a sudden, instead of this rod, they have a bouquet of flowers in their hands. They have these little devices that will contract that rod right up into almost nothing immediately. And then they have something else that breaks out into this spray of flowers. It was before they did that, a little old tiny thing that they could palm and hide in their hand. There is no real magic involved in any of the stuff you see in a magic show. It is all illusion. It is all a matter of a visual form of deception, optical illusions of one kind or another. I mean, everybody knows that. And we go in there for these guys to fool us, and we give them a big hand of applause, pay large prices for tickets. They go in there and be fooled. It’s great fun, and I would say absolutely harmless as long as we know what’s going on. So there’s nothing terribly surprising, in a way, about them being able to duplicate what Moses did on this occasion. Another occasion, he goes out, causes frogs to come up over the land. Magicians bring in a box, show it’s empty, all sides, upside, downside, put the cover on it, ipso facto, open it up, out come frogs. They did the same thing. So miracle after miracle after miracle was duplicated. either by demonic power, which I am inclined to dismiss, or by trickery, which I am inclined to believe. And off we go. Moses has no details about the circumstances around what these guys did. But how do you think most of the magicians in the courts of ancient time performed their magic? Do you think they really had a spiritual power? Or do you think they were good at sleight of hand, good at trickery, good at illusions? That’s what I think, in most cases, was taking place. So really, people lie. They play tricks. They hoax things. And I want to tell you something else that happens. People also repeat unverified stories and embellish them. Is there anybody here that doubts that? I mean, is there anybody here that hadn’t done it? Maybe I should put the question to you. Nobody’s going to own up to it right now, but… But the fact is, you’ll hear a story, you have no verification about it. Somebody tells it to you with the greatest of sincerity, I saw this, it really happened. Then you pass it on to my friend sitting over here, and you tell him all about that story. And while you’re telling him about it, I don’t know, there’s something inside of us that likes color, and so we may add one small degree of color to it and not tell it to him. And he goes back and he tells it to Dave, and he adds one little small detail to it. And the next thing you know, this thing has become really quite a lot bigger deal than it ever was in the first place. There’s a phrase they use now for things like this called urban myths. They are the kind of stories that get going about things that supposedly happened sometime back in the past. I’ll give you an example of it. A story was told to me once upon a time as though it were absolute, total, complete, and truth. That some guys went out and captured a couple of wildcats and put them in a suitcase and put them on the side of the road, you know, just sitting there with nobody around. Car drives up, you know, the guys reach out real quickly, jerk the suitcase inside and go on down the road. A few miles down the road, the car screams to a stop and everybody is coming out of the car, out of all the windows and so forth. Probably this never happened. This is just an invention that somebody picked up as a joke, a funny thing of a story, and it made its little transitions, and it has come back that the guys driving the car were Aggies, They were blacks. They were Hispanics. They were Polish. You know, whatever way you want to tell it, this story was made all the rounds, and it is told, and the fellow who told it to me told it to me as though it were absolute gospel truth, that he was one of the perpetrators of the thing. And I know for a fact, I mean, I’m just as sure as I am that I’m standing here, it wasn’t true. It was one of those stories when you’ve had about three beers and you’re sitting around telling jokes and everybody’s trying to top everybody else. You tell this kind of story. And they pass into mythology as though they were the truth. And they are told and retold and told and retold. Now an enormous amount of the stories that you have heard about the paranormal are in that category. They didn’t happen. Or something really very quite physical, quite explicable happened is a little unusual. And the story was told and retold and told and told again. It reminds me in a sense also of what I’ve been a victim of once upon a time in my life, what I call the Dean of Students Syndrome. I was the Dean of Students in Brickett Wood, an ambassador college over there for a while. And so you call a guy in your office because of some infraction of the rules, and you tell him, now Bob, don’t you ever do that again. If you ever do that again, we’re going to have much more serious talk than this one. Well, I had him sweating by the time he leaves my office. And he goes back down to the dormitory and sits down and says, wow. And then he tells the people about our conversation, making it sound rather worse than it was, okay? So far, so good. And then one of the other guys said, oh, hey, that’s nothing. You should have heard about the time he had me in his office. And then that story gets told. Well, you know, we used to say in the Navy, the first liar hasn’t got a chance. Because from there on in, one story builds on top of another and on top of another. And the mythology of the dean of students, this harsh disciplinarian who cracks the whip over the men’s and women’s dorms and so forth, is born. And it’s existed in most colleges around the world, although some of that may be changing now, but I really kind of doubt it. Whoever has the job for discipline or keeping order in the place is going to get that kind of reputation. So we get all these images and all these incidents. If we take out of our box all those things that are in the form of mythology as a result of telling stories, the number of items in the bottom of our box gets rather smaller even yet. Then you take all the incidents that are misconstructions of natural phenomena or they’re hallucinations or optical illusions. You take all them out and it gets much smaller yet. You take, for example, St. Elmo’s fire, which is a phenomenon that shows off from time to time. It’s really eerie if you’re flying along an airplane in the rain, especially around thunderstorms. What St. Elmo’s fire is, and you get it on ships too, by the way, in storms and that like. It is a situation that happens when because of the amount of static electricity in the air and the enormous amounts of water that are coming down, you get imbalances in the spread of electrons over the surface of the airplane or on the ship or whatever it may be. And on a ship, you will get little balls of fire that go up and play and run across the rigging of a ship. All it is is static electricity. I’ve seen it on the windshield of an aircraft when I’ve been flying. They see it oftentimes on the tips of the propellers of planes flying through thunderstorms. Call it St. Elmo’s fire, which goes all the way back to sailing days and ships when the men first began to notice this type of thing. Well, you know, someone sees that in a dark night, in a thunderstorm, in exactly the right situation. It’s a very small step. from an electrical discharge of that nature, which again does play and runs up along riggings and down. It’s a very small step from that into a demon or a spirit or a ghost. And by the time the story of St. Elmo’s fire has passed through about ten hands, it’s big serious time stuff indeed. I saw one of the biggest illustrations of that kind of thing in White House not long ago. As I was driving from our place over to the center of White House, there had been a storm, and an electrical pole was down in one of the areas, and you had huge amounts of voltage coming down these lines with apparently nowhere to go or grounded out over at White House. And you had what looked like balls of fire probably three feet across. that were like sort of egg-shaped and they were running down the power lines. You could hear them buzzing loud enough to be heard inside your car, you know, very loud inside the car with all the windows rolled up as you’re driving down the road. Now, I knew what was going on, I knew what it was, but it doesn’t take much for something like that in an impressionable person to become something very important indeed. Well, as I say, the number gets smaller and smaller. Seeing is not really believing, for you’ve oftentimes got to have no sense that what you’re seeing is not reliable because you’re under stress and you’re seeing what you expect to see or you’re seeing what you’re afraid to see. The truth is, by the time we get through throwing everything out of that box, it’s got some kind of an explanation. There’s really not much left down there, but there is something down there. there is a small number of phenomena that really are there. There is a spirit world, there is a devil, there are demons, and they do on rare occasions interact with our world. Now the person who wrote to me also asked several useful questions in relation to these phenomena, which, you know, I could explain and explain and explain all the things that exist out there, but better to consider, you know, some of the questions that you might have yourself. For example, his question was, what is the purpose of these things? Now, in most of the instances of the paranormal, and by paranormal I mean things that are outside the range of any scientific explanation at all, most of the instances of the paranormal, there is no discernible purpose at all. Take dreams that come true, for example. I think most of us have had At one way or another, or at one time or another, a dream that has come true. Then the next question is, why? Now, if a dream were given to you to warn you, if it were a warning to enable you to escape danger, then the purpose is evident, right? Joseph, the father of Jesus, or the stepfather, as it were, is sleeping one night. An angel appears to him in his dream and says, go, take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt because they’re going to try to take his life. So Joseph and Mary and Jesus got up and left. He took the child into Egypt, and after they were gone, they killed all the children of that age in and around Bethlehem, saved his life. So sometimes there is a discernible purpose. It’s a warning and something that has to take place. But most of the time, the dreams that come true seem to have no point at all. Now, dreams are mysterious things and not very well understood. But more and more, I think people are beginning to realize that I had not until I took a workshop, rather unrelated, that dealt with some of these things. It resulted in the sermon that I gave some time ago called A Closet Never Cleaned Out. And the realization that we take into our minds enormous amounts of information, everything. In fact, I was told that inner into our mind goes in there and it never comes out. Never leaves. Everything you’ve ever seen, everything you’ve ever heard, everything you’ve ever experienced is in there, and it will never come out. Now, you are unaware of most of the stuff that’s in there consciously. You have no conscious awareness of most of that. In fact, a lot of the stuff in there, you wish you could. You really wish, I wish I could remember that. I wish I could go back and dig that up again. I know I heard it. I know what the quote was, but I have no correct, really correct memory of I met a guy the other day that had eidetic memory, and on things that were verbal, phrases and so forth, just click them right off. Tell him to do it once, and he had it. It just did not go away. But for most of us, that’s not the way things are. In fact, we’re far better off that it’s not the way things are. In balance, you’re better off not letting your mind work normally, suppressing things that ought to be suppressed, and keeping the stuff that you need to work with at the top because you can’t handle all that stuff. But at night, At night, something akin to the disk cleanup programs on computers, where they go out and they sort all the information that’s in there, that’s scattered all over the hard drive, and they pull it all together in one piece and put it in another slot over here, which you have programs that will do that, and they speed up the operation of your computer. Something not unlike that goes on at night in your dreams, because they say that if a person is deprived of dreams, If you’re allowed to sleep but only in short enough periods of time that you do not get into REM sleep, as they call it, to where you start to dream, that you begin to have mental problems after a while that can become very, very disorienting. The reason is because when you are dreaming, it is as though your mind has gone in there and something is running by all the little cubby holes in your mind and finding things and finding connection between these things and other things that you know. and building the connections that form memories and things that you need to know and things that you don’t need to know and things you’d probably be better off forgetting, things that you can afford to relegate. In other words, it goes through and it reorganizes all that stuff and creates relationships between things you know. That’s how you come to greater understanding, is you have something over here that you know, something over here that you know, and maybe you have not consciously related these things yet. Then in your subconscious, perhaps when you’re asleep, these things get related and you wake up in the morning knowing something that you did not know yesterday. It’s a remarkable phenomenon and it happens all the time with us. It’s what goes on in dreams. I’m telling you all this to tell you this, that what happens in those things is that an enormous amount of information and stuff goes on in your mind when you are asleep. It is a dream. But generally speaking, you do not recall the dreams that took place where the dream started, passed, ended before you woke up. The only dreams you tend to remember are the ones you had just as you woke up. And if you don’t focus on the dream at the moment of your waking up, you will not be able to remember it an hour later. Now, let’s supposing that in this enormous variety of of scenarios that your mind has run off in your sleep, night after night after night after night after night, in which your mind has dealt with all kinds of events, persons, things, and so forth that are familiar to you and are part of your life. And it constructs a lot of possibilities in these things. Supposing that with your having forgotten it entirely, with it having been relegated, with it never coming to your conscious mind, something that you dreamed about happens very close to what you dreamed it. You will then remember that you dreamed it. And as a consequence, you will say, a dream that came true. Maybe it was, but the fact is, you had enough dreams that sooner or later, one of them was bound to come true. Now, there’s an interesting little exercise that I like to put people through on some of these things. For example, let’s take, imagine that we could get one million people out there and engage in an experiment. We’re going to have every one of these people flip a coin, a quarter, catch it and slap it down and call it with its heads or tails. How many of that million people will be right on the first flip of the coin? About half. It won’t vary from half by far, will it? Okay. We dismiss the half that we’re wrong. We only keep the half that we’re right. That’s what, half a million? And having done that, we have them flip the coin again. How many of them are going to be right? About half. 250,000, right? Quarter of a million. All right, we’re going to take the quarter of a million people out here and we’re going to have them flip the coin. How many of those will be right?

SPEAKER 1 : 26:32

125,000.

SPEAKER 01 : 26:33

Now, I’m not going to take you through the whole exercise. At this point in time, I’ll let you do it when you get home if you’d like to. But by the time you get through, let’s say, we’ve got enough people that we’ve been able to run through ten times, cutting them in half, and then finally we get down to one guy. who called all 10 calls of that coin, that quarter, right every single time. Question. Do you believe that he is better at calling the coin than everybody else that was involved in this experiment? I see heads shaking. I see a lot of people being very noncommittal. They don’t trust me on this. They don’t trust me on this. But you know what’s funny about this? You’re in a casino. And this guy’s about to flip the coin and call it again. There are people who will bet with him because they think that because he has been right 10 times in a row, he is more likely to be right this time than the other people would. There are also people in the casino who will bet against him because they believe because he has been right 10 times in a row, this is the time he should be wrong. And both groups, if they’re getting anything less than 50-50 on their odds, are losers. Because the fact is there’s a 50-50 chance that this guy is going to be wrong this time just like everybody else. The guy who was wrong five times and comes in and flips it again has just as much chance of being right as he does. Okay. But the guy who was right ten times in a row appears to be paranormal. He looks like he might have some help. I’ve known people that would be absolutely sure the man was demon-possessed to be able to be right on the coin cost ten times in a row. But out of a million people, somebody has to be. The fact is that there is so much going on, both in your life and dreams and so forth, that you’re going to get match-ups all the time, and you’ll get what are called deja vu experiences. Your mind has run these scenarios. For example, if you’re scared to death about your son being out driving at night and you just worry and you worry and you worry and you worry and you worry, and sure enough, he has an accident, you’re going to say what? I knew it. I had a premonition. And in truth, you had no premonition. You had worry. Worry is not the same as a premonition. Highly impressionable people are more likely to have this happen to others. And one of the things that’s fascinating about this is I think they will probably remember their dreams more vividly and will even adjust the dream without ever realizing they’ve done this. They will adjust the dream like an urban myth to fit what has just taken place and never realize that that’s what they’ve done at all. You don’t think that’s possible? Oh, I think so. Remember how gossip works? People will swear they got the story right, and yet they got it grievously wrong. You can’t trust your own recollection of dreams. Why should you trust somebody else’s recollection of dreams? It’s the way it is. Don’t put them down, though, anybody who does that, because they have remembered the dream quite vividly in their own mind, and they are absolutely incapable of seeing the dream any other way. Now let me tell you something very important. about such dreams. So it’s important to you that if you cannot independently verify the dream, it has no meaning for you whatsoever. For example, Oral Roberts is lying in his bed one night or kneeling by his bed praying and there’s a movement in the room and he sees this giant angel standing at the foot of the bed and says, Oral, how come you haven’t taken care of getting these medical missionaries out there? And he shows him a vision of a hospital and commands Oral Roberts to go build a hospital. Now, what do you think Oral ought to do? I think he ought to go build a hospital, don’t you? Do you think, though, that Oral telling me that he had the vision means that I have to support his hospital? Oh, no. My answer to people like that, if they should write to me and say, I had a dream, a vision from the Lord. and he showed me that I should build this great hospital, and you should help me build this hospital, Ronald, I would write back and say, I wish you all the greatest success in your hospital, and as soon as the Lord reveals to me that I should help you, I will. Because I have no way of verifying. I don’t know whether he saw an angel up there or whether he had to meet the monthly budget. A lot of preachers, I’m convinced, they pray a lot, and they have somewhere comes along an urge comes into their mind, and they think that urge must be of the Holy Spirit. And that urge gets embellished, and that urge becomes a lot stronger. And then finally, well, the Lord told me. Whereas what an actual fact, what happened was, he just came to feel while he was praying that he ought to do this. Well, I think he probably should do it, but it has no relevance to me whatsoever. I think that’s something for you to bear in mind. Dreams that have no purpose, dreams that don’t touch your life, but even if they do touch your life and they aren’t your dream and you can’t verify the dream, if you act on it, you’re a fool. You’re making a very, very big mistake. If you cannot see the purpose in the paranormal, then there probably isn’t one and there’s no reason for you to concern yourself with it at all. Another question he asked me, which I thought was useful, is do these paranormal events have any danger connected with them at all? Yes, they do. They have physical danger connected with them. Not that you necessarily can do much about it in some cases. For example, here’s Brother Job, who is living life, minding his own business, and doing an awfully good job of being obedient to God and staying out of trouble. He is a righteous man, an upright one, fears God, hates evil, and is a good living man. Okay? The next thing he knows, his entire life has come down around his ears through the paranormal. What had happened to him was that Satan went in to see God, and God said, Have you seen my servant Job? Look how that man lives his life. And Satan says, Well, why shouldn’t he serve you? He doesn’t serve you for nothing. I mean, you blessed him. You made him rich. You put hedges about him. I can’t touch the man. And God said, well, I’ll tell you what. And he begins then the sequence of events that finally led to the loss of everything Job had and him sitting in the ashes covered with boils and scraping on himself or something and wondering what in the world had gone wrong in his life. Can the paranormal be dangerous? Yeah. Is there much you can do about it? Well, in Job’s case, no. There’s not a blessed thing you can do about it except learn, except suffer. Job, you know, all this type of thing with all the temptations that were put upon him to blame God He said, no, no, the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord. It was not easy for him. It was a struggle for him, and there were times he got kind of close, but he still remained faithful to God and trusting in God through it all. So if God’s allowed Satan to get a hold of you and to shake you out, you know, Jesus told Peter on one occasion, he said, boy, he said, Satan has desired to have you, that he could just sift you like wheat. He didn’t say, I’m not going to let him do it. He said, I have prayed for you that your faith won’t fail. Think about that one. So the possibility of an encounter with the devil or with some demon or with some circumstances is out there for you. The important thing is that your faith doesn’t fail. The one thing that I am confident of, I really, and the lesson came slow and it came a little bit hard and with some pain, But I’ve come to the place to where I’m absolutely confident from both from the Bible and from experience that Satan cannot do anything that God does not allow. And so if I say that the Satan has come in and has done this to me or to my house or to my family or something, then I have to conclude God has done it or allowed it to be done. Blessed be the name of the Lord and I will be faithful to him. As Job said, though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Which is a really, you know, That’s a pretty bold thing to say. That’s a pretty big claim to make. And I don’t know where I am in my heart and mind. I fear that there are probably things that the devil might do to me that might push me beyond what I could handle. But then I’ve got a promise, don’t I? That God says he will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able. He’ll always provide a way of escape so you can bear it. So I have a lot of confidence and you should have too. that even in a situation where the devil has gotten a hold of you or gotten a hold of your family or somehow gotten into your life, he will provide a way for you to bear it. But just like Peter, he didn’t say, I’m not going to let him sift you like wheat. He said, I have prayed for you that your faith doesn’t fail. So that’s encouraging. He will not permit me to get into something that’s going to actually let me come completely unstuck. To me, there was a purpose behind what happened to Job. It becomes clear only when one gets all the way to the end of the book does the purpose really become clear in the growth, the spiritual growth that comes in Job as a result of what he has been through. So, yeah, is there danger? You bet there is. It’s a very real danger. There’s also, in addition to physical danger, there is moral danger. Jesus fasted 40 days and 40 nights in preparation for the conflict. In Matthew 4, you’ll find that as he is coming to the end of the 40-day fast, he was hungry. And the devil shows up and said, now, if you’re the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. There’s no reason for you to stand here and be hungry like this. And Jesus said, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God shall man live. He was not prepared for To use the power of God frivolously. To simply satisfy a temporary need. One that he knew he could satisfy by walking down off the mountainside. He was hungry. He was not dying. The temptation to perform a miracle just to see one. You know, that’s an interesting thought all by itself. Because I know that any one of us in this room would dearly love to see a miracle. To be able to watch the withered hand of somebody suddenly become whole. We are thrilled anyway when we can’t see it, but we know about it, where someone was suffering with cancer, and they had all the diagnosis in there, and then the doctors put him under the thing again, and now they can’t find anything when God’s people have prayed for him. We all take great delight in that, and it’s just a thrill to us, and we’re all excited by it. And we would love to see one with our own eyes. We’d like to see Jesus walking on the water. What a thrill. be to see jesus walking on the water the disciples were scared spitless when they saw him walking on the water they weren’t exactly thrilled because they just they didn’t understand what it was that they were actually seeing but here’s jesus with an opportunity to perform a miracle just to say if i’m this what i mean if i am the son of god i’ll prove i’m the son of god at the same time he knew that he wasn’t going to prove anything to satan he knew But there was no reason to try to perform a miracle to prove a spiritual point, because if a person could not grasp it otherwise, the miracle wouldn’t help. And this is something we oftentimes forget about. And so with the other two incidents of temptation, with Satan coming after Jesus and Jesus resisting Satan in the process, there was a moral struggle underway. The struggle had to do with who he would obey. The struggle had to do with whether he would indulge himself in the use of a power and abuse of a power that he might otherwise do. Would he tempt God by casting himself down and show off? Let’s show off. Let’s jump off here and watch God catch me before I hit the bottom and see the angels grab hold of me. A temptation to do all sorts of things that he really should not have done. So here he was trying his best to get Jesus to do that. I think it’s important to know Again, though, that Satan can’t do these things unless God allows him to come into the picture. So you have a moral danger from the supernatural or the paranormal. The problem you face is that you don’t really know or not really aware when these things come to you that that’s what they are. Because this risk is going to rarely be in the form of a supernatural manifestation. It’s not going to be a ghost that comes into your room that tries to tempt you to do wrong. You know why that would not work with most of you? Because of the Bible. Because of what you have read already in the Bible. And you know that Satan came to Christ and tempted Christ. Something comes to you and tempts you to do something that’s wrong. You’re going to know that you should not do that, aren’t you? That in fact, the very apparition as it appears would tend to strengthen your resolve not to do wrong if you knew it was wrong. How do you know it’s wrong? From the Bible. And do you recall Jesus’ answer? Each time that this great archdemon tempted him, it is written. It is written. It is written. In every single case, he appealed to the written word of God, the authoritative word of God, every time. And it is that written word of God that provides for you a defense against that kind of temptation. The temptation that you are not so able to deal with is the kind that comes when you don’t really realize that the temptation is paranormal. It seems normal. It seems to be a part of your workaday life. There’s also mental danger because the mental struggle with Satan can become absolutely exhausting. And unless you are strong, unless you are in prayer, unless you are in contact with God, Satan can wear you down. I knew a minister once, this is a really strange circumstance, who knew a person whom he believed was demon-possessed. Now, there’s a very large question mark as to whether the person really was or whether they were not in the first place. But the minister decided in a marathon session to cast the demon out of this person. and pulled a couple of other people in. Their idea was, listen for this, they were going to wear the demon down. Now, does that sound reasonable to any of you? If it is, you haven’t been paying attention. You can’t wear down the devil. He is spirit. You are physical. He doesn’t need sleep. You do. These people worked on this so long. He finally weakened himself so far that the devil got a hold of him. An exorcism is not a long drawn out affair. You know how long a successful exorcism takes? About five, six, seven seconds. In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out. And if it doesn’t come out, you get out. Get away. It’s as simple as that. Because if this situation does not respond, to a simple command by the authority of Jesus Christ, I command you to get out of her or get out of him, then one of two things exists. God is not going to back up your word in this situation for his own reasons, or two, there’s no demon there at all, and you have just made a very big mistake. Take it from me. It’s a voice of experience. Next question that he asked me, an important one. Would it be okay to consult a psychic To find a lost child. I’m not going to ask you to answer that or give me a show of hands on how you feel about that. Because I can imagine personally the agony of a mother with a lost child. I say I can imagine it. I really can’t imagine it, but I can sort of feel in that direction. The fear, the worry, the frustration, and the temptation to reach out to anything to find out about this lost child. would just be overwhelming. Would you ask the devil where the child was? That’s what they did on Samhain Day. That’s the one day of the year you could ask the devil, apparently, to resolve that kind of question for you. My question is, once you invite the devil into your life, how do you get him out again? And that’s something I don’t think I’d want to play with. My question is, why wouldn’t you go to God to find the child? Why go to a psychic? And if God cannot or will not find the child for you, then are you willing to accept his will? Or are you going to leave him and go to a psychic? Well, I could not bring myself to do so. Isaiah 8, it’s sort of out of context in a way, but it’s a fascinating little statement in here I think that you should know. In Isaiah 8 and verse 19, and I’ll leave it to you to study it in context and see if you can kind of Try to understand the whole package. It says this, when they shall say unto you, seek unto them that have familiar spirits. And this is the idea of a psychic. It’s as though this person has a familiar spirit as they are in connection with the spirit world. And the spirit world, because they can go and come and so forth, can know things that you and I might not know. And that is true. He says, when they say unto you, seek to those that have familiar spirits, or to wizards that peep and mutter. Shouldn’t a people seek their God? Should the living seek the dead? They should seek to the law and to the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. In the Old Testament, by the way, the word testimony in that sense is a reference to what’s inside the ark of the testimony, the Ten Commandments, which are called the testimony of God. To the law, the Torah, and to the testimony of the Ten Commandments, if they don’t speak according to this word, there is no light in them. What are you doing going out there, he says, and rummaging around in the spirit world and dealing with people that have familiar spirits? How do we protect ourselves was another question he asked. First, stay away from it. That really, above all, is what I think you need to do. If you don’t invite it, it will probably never come. The fact is that I have been in the ministry now for over 35 years, and I have never yet encountered a demon-possessed person when I knew it. Never. Now, it’s possible that I have come into the presence of people who were. But the people I have met, whom I think maybe some ministers would have called demon-possessed, I am absolutely convinced were not. I think that when you start making the assumption of demon possession, and when you start playing around with demon possession, when you start trying to address the devil, you can call him up. And I think that is what’s happened in more than one case. And I’ll tell you, to me, I feel that I’m fairly convinced from what I read in the Bible that whenever there is a demon involved, a man of God will know. He will not have to guess. There will not be a question that you have to follow some methodology to work the thing out. There’s a thing called the discernment of spirits. And whenever a man whom God intends to deal with a demon comes into contact with a demon, he will know. I mean, how did Peter know? How did Paul know that he could strike this man blind? He didn’t figure it out. He just said, you child of the devil, you’re going to be blind and not see the sun for a season. And the poor guy went wandering out of there looking for somebody to lead him by the hand. He didn’t guess at that, folks. He knew. And if you read through the scriptures, you don’t find somebody saying, you know, I think this guy may have a demon. Let’s cast it out. Or let’s try to cast it out. There’s not a question, A, of guessing, and there’s not a question of trying. You know, and you do, or you get away from it entirely. And I’m very concerned, I think, that we have, not we, but some ministers have, really hurt some people by suggesting demon possession to a suggestible person who then began to act like they were demon possessed when they were no more demon possessed than anybody. They were just sick, impressionable, upset, and mentally a little bit off. David Antion, many years ago, did a very interesting sermon on knowing the difference between, or the difference between, that there is a difference between mental illness and demon possession, and even showed examples of them in the Bible, which I thought was really very interesting. He goes on, and just to point out to you, don’t invite it. It probably will never come. And the second thing you do to protect yourself is you resist that type of thing. In James 4 and verse 6, James says, God gives more grace. Wherefore he says, God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. There is no need for you to run from him. He will run from you. What do you have to do? You submit yourself to God and you resist the devil. And you say, well, how do I know the difference? You look to the law. You look to the testimony. You stay close to God, and you will know the difference. And you don’t fool around with wizards that peep and mutter and people who have got familiar spirits. You don’t invite them into your house. You don’t deal with them in any way. And if you encounter it, you get away from it. One of the questions this man was asking me was about a haunted house. Well, I don’t have a whole lot of doubt that there is such a thing as a haunted house. I suspect that there have been some. Maybe one here and one there over great periods of time. That sort of thing does take place. What’s the solution to it? It’s get away from it and don’t mess with it. Don’t hang around and watch the thing and say, oh, isn’t that exciting? Isn’t that thrilling? Wasn’t that a thrill? Wasn’t that exciting? Wasn’t it electric? Get away from it. And get it out of your mind because it’s not something that you need to be dealing with. You don’t have the power to deal with it. Just a simple case. If you own the place, find yourself a realtor that doesn’t believe in haunts and get them to sell the house for you. But get away from it. Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil. He will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. In other words, there’s a process of getting your life straightened out, getting your heart right with God, and you will not have to worry about that. Be afflicted fast. Mourn and weep. Not all the time, but mourn and weep for your sins and your attitudes and your wrongs. Get yourself right with God. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaven is humble yourself. That’s what all this stuff’s about is humble yourself before God and he will lift you up and you won’t have to worry about demons and demon spirits. Probably the greatest danger in all these things is that they distract us from the real workings of the devil. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean is that most of us assume that the workings of the devil are in haunted houses, things that go bump in the night, demons that get inside people and scream and yell and tear hair and cut themselves and do all kinds of terrible things. We have this image of evil. Now, I’ve said this before and I will say it again for your children and for your grandchildren. that the movies that are out today in very large measure do your children a terrible harm in ways that you don’t realize it’s being done. And one of the chief ways that it’s being done is they are painting evil as ugly. And evil is not ugly. Evil can be beautiful. Satan himself is transformed as an angel of light, totally beautiful. The movies are teaching children that evil looks ugly and kidding them that they can recognize it by that. The truth is it can be beautiful. It can be tempting. It can be appealing. Evil is evil. And it’s not easy to recognize. It takes a certain amount of spiritual discernment to do so. We expect the devil to haunt a person and haunt a house or scare people in cemeteries at night. And I think it’s time that you really began to warn your children that there are people who look good, people who look respectable, people who live what appear to be respectable lives, who are not good at all, but who are evil. There is human evil in this world, and there is spiritual evil in this world. And neither one of them look like what the movies portray evil to be. I’m not an anti-movie person and I’m not going to scream and rail and say, keep your kiddos out of the movies. But I will tell you, you better know what’s going on there and you better have some discernment so you can teach your children that what they’re seeing there is not likely to be the way it is at all. That there is a much more serious thing to deal with. If you’ll turn back to Ephesians, last scripture, but one that I think is extremely important for you. Ephesians chapter 6. It’s an old Familiar scripture, but I’m sorry to say sometimes neglected. Bible’s getting a little old and I have trouble finding my pages like I used to. I’m getting a little old too, I suppose. In Ephesians, the sixth chapter and beginning in verse 10. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and the power of his might. put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Wiles. You don’t usually get a frontal assault from the devil. He is much more slippery than that. Then he says, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual wickets or wicked spirits in high places. Now I dare say, that most of you do think that most of the struggles that you have in this life are with flesh and blood. They’re with your boss, with a customer, with a neighbor. You can go ahead, just lay out, just tell me all about all the troubles and all the wrestling and all the agony that you have in this life, and most of it will seem to you to be a struggle against flesh and blood, won’t it? Now, I’m not suggesting that this person that you have a lot of difficulty with is demon possessed. I don’t mean that at all. What I’m meaning is that the real struggle is not with flesh and blood. It is with the spirit world. It’s there. It meddles. It fools around with things. It gets people into frames of mind. It whispers in people’s ears. They don’t hear anything. But the truth of the matter is that every one of us have heard the whispering of the devil in the wee small hours of the night and didn’t know it for what it was. Just thought it was our own mind. Just thought it was maybe in some cases even the whispering of the Spirit of God. It takes a level of discernment to know the difference between those things. The battle’s not against people, folks. It’s not against government, not against Bill Clinton, not against Bob Dole. It’s not any of those things. There is a spirit world out there. It’s powerful, it is subtle, and it works in ways that most of us don’t look for or recognize. So he says, take unto you the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done everything there is to do, to stand. Stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth. What did Jesus say was truth? God’s word. Thy word is truth. Having on the breastplate of righteousness. What defines righteousness? The testimony of God. The Ten Commandments. Having your feet shed with the preparation of the gospel of peace. That means a study of the message, the good message of God. Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. Fiery darts. Burning arrows. Yeah. Yeah, I think I can identify with what he’s talking about there. And over many, many, many years of different kinds of experiences in different places and different times, there are these burning little things that come searing into your mind from time to time. I remember a battle. that I had, my, it must have been 30 years ago now. In fact, it’s no longer than that. It’s closer to 36 years ago. It was not that long after my baptism, and it was the weirdest thing, and I’ve encountered many people since who’ve had similar things happen to them, that I would be dealing perhaps in prayer, or I’d be sitting reading something or studying in a quiet moment, and a thought would come into my mind that was either profane or wrong or, you know, I knew that the thought was a very, very wrong thought. It should not be in my mind. And I forget how long it was I wrestled with that the first time I had to work my way through that. It was probably two, maybe three weeks or so. I fasted about it. I prayed about it. It took me a long time to figure out exactly how to deal with it. I began to realize, though, in the process of time, that it was a matter of coming to the place that if I understood that I was praying about this thing, all the time I was praying about this thought, all the time that I was worrying about this thought, I was burying the thing deeper into my conscious and subconscious mind. That I was fighting with it, I was arguing with it, I was struggling with it, and I began to realize that the more I did that, the harder the struggle got. And there came a point in time where I began to realize that what I need to do is I need to pray, I need to ask God to put that thought away from me, and I need to consciously turn my attention to something else and stop worrying about it. Just turn. The first time I tried it, it didn’t work. The second time I tried it, it didn’t work. Third time I tried it, it sort of worked. It took quite a while before I finally one day woke up and realized I was no longer involved in that struggle at all. And I have talked to any number of people since that time who’ve come to realize the same thing, that you don’t win that battle by fighting it directly. You turn the battle over to God and you go live your life and put it behind you. And when you do that, god takes care of the battle you don’t have to fight it i don’t have any idea what kind of laser swords and battles and all this kind of stuff have been going on over my roof and around my house because i can’t hear it and i can’t experience it because i know that’s his battle not mine and that’s where i think a an important realization comes for all of us is that we are in the world we are threatened in the world but we need to have the shield of faith which means a complete trust in god to fight the spiritual level of battle that we can’t fight. Because if you try to fight that battle, you’re going to lose. You are going to lose. It will pull you down. It’s only when you can put up the shield of faith and the fiery dart is quenched in the water of faith, then life becomes just a whole lot easier for you. And you can put those things behind you. Above all, taking the shield of faith, which you should be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, and the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Your one offensive weapon, by the way, is the Bible. Remember what Jesus said when the devil tempted him? He said, it is written. And again, it is written. And again, it is written. So, these things, God takes care of us. One of Satan’s greatest tools, and this is, I think, the last idea that I’m going to leave you with today to think about, is misdirection. Making us look in the wrong places. Making us blame the wrong person. Blame the wrong people. Fight with the wrong person. Fight with the wrong people. Whatever it is you think you’re struggling. Misdirection. I said once that if an opposing general can make you believe that he’s got five divisions over here behind this mountain, he doesn’t have to have them there. Doesn’t matter whether they’re there or not. All that matters is that you believe they are there. And he’s won. Because you have to allow for them. The truth of the matter is that we don’t have to allow for them. And Satan, in the process of trying to make us believe that he is stronger, that if he can convince us and make us believe that he is stronger, he’s won. So, all these paranormal things out there, kind of in summary, are things that you really don’t need to worry about. They are not your battle. It’s not your battleground. It’s not a place where you have to fight. There is danger for you there, but you have a protector. There are risks for you there, but you have armor. There are weapons aimed at you there, but you have a shield. And there is no reason whatsoever for you to ever be afraid. And to realize that at whatever time that God allows the hand of Satan to come upon you, it is for his will, and it is ultimately God’s. For your good, just bear up under it. God bless you. God strengthen you.