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From time to time, people write to us and ask about speaking in tongues.We've all witnessed the following scene (or something similar to it)—whether on TV, the Internet, or in person. A flashy, well-rehearsed evangelist is pacing back and forth across the stage, preaching to the faithful while clutching a microphone in one hand and his "sweat rag" in the other.
Suddenly, without warning, he breaks out in a strange language: Shanda da malaweesa nokimba ma da shalawanda. He loosens his tie before continuing: Shunda da da ma shunda, tonda, da da na munda! The crowd whoops and hollers with approval. They believe they have just witnessed something supernatural.
Some people say you can't be saved unless you speak in tongues. Others say you're not saved if you do speak in tongues.
So which is it? Is this phenomenon biblical or is it demonic? Is it to be pursued or should it be shunned?
Or should our position fall somewhere between those extremes?
Tongues is promoted today mainly by Pentecostal (or Charismatic) groups; and it's one of several key issues where Pentecostals have marked differences with other Bible-believing Christians.
CJF Ministries is not Pentecostal, but we have a unique connection to the Pentecostal movement.
First, a little background. The founder of CJF Ministries was a Jewish man named Charles Halff who became a believer in Jesus when he was a teenager.
When he first told his Jewish family that he believed Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah of Israel, they chalked it up to a religious phase. They were hopeful that Charles would grow out of it. But a couple of years later, when they realized how serious he was, both parents (who had been divorced for some time and lived separately in Tulsa and San Antonio) banned him from their homes and said they never wanted to see him again.
Their response was not altogether unpredictable. After all, the Halffs were well-known in the Jewish community in San Antonio. In fact, they had been one of 44 founding families of Temple Beth El in 1874. So when young Charles made his profession of faith in Jesus, it was, quite frankly, embarrassing to his parents and other family members. An aunt offered him a large amount of money (in the form of savings bonds) if he would renounce his newfound faith. He turned it down. At age 17, Charles found himself homeless on the streets of Tulsa, carrying his earthly belongings in a cardboard box.
These events took place during a period when he had been living with his father and his uncle in Tulsa—and that's where the Pentecostal connection comes into play: an Assemblies of God (AOG) family in Tulsa, Mr. and Mrs. Luther Burnaman, heard about this homeless Jewish teenager and took him in. They not only provided him with food and shelter while he looked for a job and made the transition to his new circumstances, but they also prayed for him, encouraged him, and helped him become grounded in his faith.
Charles Halff never forgot their kindness. In fact, the daughter (Betty Burnaman Spangler, who was a little girl when he had come to live with her family in the 1940s) visited him here in Texas in 1991. They hadn't seen each other since he was a teenager, and it was an emotional reunion.
At one point, the AOG denomination wanted Charles to become a regional evangelist for Texas and Oklahoma. The offer included a car and a generous salary—and Charles, who was in his early 20s and struggling to build a ministry from the ground up, was tempted to accept it. He later said the "fly in the ointment" was the AOG's insistence that he speak in tongues. Their position back in those days was that speaking in tongues was the initial evidence of being "baptized in the Holy Ghost." That was why they felt they couldn't have a denominational evangelist who had never spoken in tongues.
Even at this early stage of his ministry, Charles had already developed the habit of "testing all things" by Scripture (1 Thess. 5:21). He had many AOG friends by this time and had preached in a number of AOG churches; so when he was challenged on the issue of tongues, he instinctively went to the Bible for an answer. After a great deal of study and reflection, he concluded that he did not agree with the Pentecostal position on tongues.
Around this same time, Oral Roberts set up a tent across the street from a church in Oklahoma where Charles was preaching in a revival. Oral was conducting healing meetings during the day, and Charles was preaching at night; so he took the opportunity to attend some of Oral's daytime services. He later said that what he observed in those meetings (that is, the theatrics and obvious crowd psychology techniques), although brilliantly executed, helped to solidify his non-Pentecostal doctrinal stance.
Some of his well-meaning AOG friends ignored his objections and even offered to teach him how to speak in tongues. They said, "Come on, Charlie—it's easy!" They instructed him to put his brain in neutral ("just let yourself go!") and repeat certain nonsensical syllables over and over until it "came naturally" (an interesting term for something that's supposed to be supernatural).
But to him, it was a matter of integrity. He didn't want to learn to speak in tongues just to appease his AOG friends—or to land a lucrative post with the denomination. It just wouldn't have been right. So he declined their offer.
Even so, he never forgot his Pentecostal friends and what they did for him in those early days. Throughout his life, he appreciated Pentecostalism's emphasis on personal holiness and spiritual fervor, even though he disagreed with several points of the movement's theology.
One of those points of disagreement, as we saw earlier, was the gift of tongues. Charles' study of Scripture led him to an understanding of the gift of tongues that differs from that of most Pentecostals.
Continued in Part 2
National Geographic is a well-oiled, money-making machine.
And an exceptionally profitable one, at that. NatGeo markets everything from books and magazines to DVDs and even genetic testing.
They're especially known for their award-winning photography and documentaries. The wildlife documentaries, especially, are pretty cool.
Now they even have their own television network.
I'd say NatGeo is on a roll.
Another thing they have is a Darwinian worldview. They use spectacular, breathtaking photos of far-flung regions of the universe to advance the standard Darwinian explanation for its history and origins.
I'm not a scientist, of course, so I've learned to be guarded in my pronouncements about scientific matters. We have working scientists on our mailing list who are also committed believers. In fact, one of them was a colleague of Edwin Hubble (for whom the Hubble Telescope was named) many years ago. (You may have read his story in our 2004–05 Messianic Jewish Home Calendar.) Occasionally, one of these scientists steps in to correct something I've said or written about some point of science that wasn't exactly right. They know I don't mind; in fact, I appreciate their help—and also their patience.
However, I do understand enough about these matters to know that there should be no contradiction or antagonism between the Bible and science when both are correctly interpreted. After all, God is the Author of true science. He established all of the scientific disciplines—like biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics (which has been called "the language of the universe"), and even astronomy. He created the universe with all of its seemingly infinite variety and complexity, and ordained the laws according to which it functions.
His Creation includes the micro-universe (molecules, atoms, particles, DNA, and other itty-bitty things we can't see with the naked eye) and the macro-universe (planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, and the like—most of which are also invisible from earth without magnification). In many ways, God's Creation is an expression of His personality (Psalm 19:1-3; Rom. 1:20). It reflects the things that He values, like endless variety and individuality, beauty, creativity, purity, consistency, and order.
This is why it bothers me when I hear comments like, "I don't trust science; I just believe the Bible."
A statement like this, while well-intentioned, plays right into the hands of Darwinists because it creates a dichotomy between the Bible and science. This is exactly what they want. They want us to think that we have to make a choice between science and the Bible. They want us to think that if something is scientific, it's not biblical; and vice versa.
That dichotomy doesn't make sense to me. It's a little like saying we have to make a choice between the Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci. Why can't we embrace both the creator and his creation?
Nonetheless, this is the sort of Neanderthalian thinking that goes on in some obscure corners of the Christian world: science bad, Bible good—ugh. Little wonder, then, that in pop culture, creationism is widely ridiculed as silly and empty-headed:
NatGeo reflects the scientific establishment's predominant worldview, which is Darwinism. As hard as Darwinists try to maintain a respectably objective persona, what they've actually done is set up a sort of anti-religion. It assumes that our world as we see it today is the byproduct of many aeons of random, natural processes with no divine guidance or intervention. It's a naturalistic, non-supernatural (and I would also say naive) way of looking at the world and its history. Darwin himself readily acknowledged that he had turned away from his former religious views and devised a system that essentially made God unnecessary.
Like other religions, the Darwinian anti-religion has its own priesthood (including anti-Christian fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins), seminaries (Yale and Harvard divinity schools, among others), and holy books (like Origin of Species). It even has its own dogma (materialism and natural selection), heresies (doubting the validity of materialism and natural selection), and more recently, its own eschatology prophesying how the world will end.
Furthermore, Darwinism must be accepted by faith. Facts that militate against it are simply ignored—or worse, suppressed.
The discussion about the "early universe" has been heating up (no pun intended) lately because astronomers are getting closer to seeing what they believe is the edge of our space-time universe—at a distance of roughly 15 billion light years in the Hubble Deep Field. That means (based on the assumption that everything started with a Big Bang about 15 billion years ago) we can actually "see" the aftermath of (and background radiation from) that infamous primordial explosion.
So if it's really true that we can detect light that's traveled 15 or so billion light years to reach earth, shouldn't that mean the universe is at least 15 billion years old? Well, that's the old-school Darwinian view—but let's not chisel it in concrete quite yet. Recent cosmological theories and ongoing research have opened up a whole vista of alternatives. For instance, check out “Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem” by Jason Lisle (PhD, Astrophysics), in Answers Research Journal 3 (2010), pp. 191-207. In the abstract, Dr. Lisle writes, “In particular, we find that an observer-centric anisotropic synchrony convention eliminates the distant starlight problem by reducing radially inward-directed light travel-time in the reference frame of the observer to zero. Such a convention implies that everything in the universe has an age of a few thousand years as we currently see it.”
Even more light might be shed on this by Einstein's concept of gravitational time dilation (that is, the idea that time isn't necessarily a constant because it can flow at different rates in different environments).
There are other possibilities, as well. The theoretical Einstein Rosen Bridge (dramatized in Carl Sagan’s best-selling novel Contact and later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) suggests that hours, days, or even millions of earth-years might elapse in far-flung regions of the expanding universe (accessed through a "wormhole" in space-time) while only moments pass on earth.
Especially curious is the recent discovery that distant regions of the universe are moving outwardly much more quickly than had previously been thought. It's like we're on play but the outer regions of the universe are on fast-forward. The expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down.
Maybe some people shouldn't have been in such a hurry to throw out the Genesis Creation account after all. As it turns out, there are special circumstances where millions or billions of "years" might pass in far-flung regions of the universe while only hundreds or thousands of years elapse here on earth.
Who knew?
Why are we so anxious to cow-tow to unbelieving scientists whose conclusions may be tainted by unbiblical assumptions (like closed-system naturalism and uniformitarianism, for instance)? Modern science was pioneered by God-fearing people like Isaac Newton, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Copernicus, just to name a few.
So who died and left the skeptics and unbelievers in charge of the scientific domain? I say it's time we took it back.
The more we learn about our time-space universe, the more "old school" Darwinism looks like it's just that: old and outdated.
Even now, in the 21st Century, the most profound words ever written are still these:
"In the beginning God ..." (Gen. 1:1).
I'm not going to say "I told you so" because I don't like it when people say it to me.
But I did.
In my September 4 blog entry ("Middle East Peace Talks ... Again"), I declared (with my characteristic sense of undying optimism), "The current talks are ... doomed to failure."
Before you hail me as a prophet, however, it should be noted that it didn't take a genius to figure this out.
Abbas, the Palestinian president, seems to be a nice enough guy. He looks like somebody's white-haired grandpa and I really don't believe he's a terrorist like Arafat was. But the poor guy is trying to rein in large-scale terrorist elements in his constituency. He's also going against the grain of a culture plagued with deeply-embedded anti-Semitism. He's up against wealthy and powerful anti-Israel interests who won't so much as acknowledge Israel's right to exist. I can sum it up in four words: they hate Jewish people.
You can argue and reason with these people until you're blue in the face—and they'll still hate the Jews. The Jewish people, to them, are a sub-human race that descended evolutionally from monkeys or pigs. They should be exterminated like a nest of cockroaches. That's the thinking. Palestinian children read this garbage in their grade school textbooks.
And that's not all. They tell their young people that if they end up killing themselves (say, with a strapped-on explosive device) while murdering Jewish men, women, and children, they'll get a special reward—namely, a free pass to Paradise. They're promised that the death itself will hurt no more than a "pinch." Not only that, but the martyr (shahid) can vouch for family members also to gain entrance to Paradise when they die. And if the martyr is a male, he'll also be rewarded with 70 virgins when he gets there. (Sorry, ladies, no word yet about what you get.)
Not all Palestinians believe these things, but many (and some would say most) do. You can get all the documentation you need on Palestinian anti-Israelism at the MEMRI website, including actual transcripts of Arabic sermons by the mullahs (translated into English and other languages). It's always interesting to hear (or read) what Islamic spiritual leaders are telling their congregations.
This is what Abbas is dealing with. He has to talk and act tough or the foaming-at-the-mouth elements (like Hamas) will call him soft—or even worse, irrelevant.
So it was a foregone conclusion that the peace talks would fail. The only thing we weren't sure about was what the sticking point would be. As it turns out, it's those bothersome Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That's what's about to do in the peace talks this time.
All of which leads me to something I don't understand: why can't Jewish people live in the West Bank if they want to?
We hardly ever hear anyone complain about the many Arab settlements in Israel. In fact, they're all over the place. Please don't dispute me on this. Some of my favorite restaurants are in Arab towns in Israel. They're the best ones.
So Arabs can live in Israel but Jewish people can't live in the West Bank? (Sorry, I still can't bring myself to call it "Palestine.")
What's the rationale for this? What's good for the goose should also be good for the gander.
If all the Jewish settlers pack up and move back into Israel, will the Arabs in Israel agree to relocate to the West Bank?
True, the settlers tend to be a different breed. We all know that. They are more militant than your typical, secular Israeli. But still, if you leave them alone they pretty much keep to themselves. There have been a few unfortunate episodes involving settlers over the years, but every bushel basket has a bad apple in it somewhere. After all, people are people. Like a surgeon friend told us one time, "Once I open them up, they all look the same."
But my question is still valid. If Arabs can live in Israel, why shouldn't Jewish people live in the West Bank?
Is it because these prosperous, clean, well-run Jewish settlements provide such a contrast amidst the poverty and squalor of so much of the West Bank? Or is it because these little pockets of prosperity and liberty are seen as symbols of freedoms the Palestinian people don't enjoy? Like the freedom of association, for instance, or freedom of the press, or the right to a fair trial if one is accused of wrongdoing. Palestinians have none of these freedoms (at least, not in reality).
Check out the Palestine Facts website for an interesting discussion of the term "illegal" that's often used in the press to describe the Jewish settlements.
So that's why it looks like this round of peace talks is about to fail. Hillary and George (Mitchell), I think, put forth an heroic effort. Here's a word picture for you: they gathered Netanyahu and Abbas (and their aides) around a campfire, roasted some hot dogs, sang Coombya, and asked, "Now can't we all just get along?"
Seriously, they gave it their best shot. The opening speeches were hopeful and inspiring. But colliding cultures can create chaos—and that (along with the sad fact that the Palestinian culture is so deeply anti-Semitic) also figures into what has happened here.
The Israelis represent a highly-developed, modern, largely westernized culture while many of the Palestinians are still living in the 15th century. They even make the Egyptians and Jordanians uncomfortable. Both Egypt and Jordan are fortifying their borders with Gaza and the West Bank.
Now think about that. If the Egyptians and Jordanians had as much compassion for the poor, oppressed Palestinians as liberal politicians in North America and Europe do, wouldn't they be reducing border fortifications rather than increasing them?
Really, now—wouldn't they?
These emerging, harsh realities in the Middle East only go to reinforce what we've been saying all along: the only real hope for lasting peace in that part of the world is the coming of Sar Shalom—the Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:6).
May He come soon.
One upside to all of this, however, is that the Obama Administration, the European Union, and perhaps other interested parties may now have a more realistic understanding of who the weak and unreliable partner is in these negotiations—and why these efforts persistently fail.
At least, I hope so.
Almost every week, we receive a prophetic "warning" of one kind or another from someone who claims to have had "a word from God."
Sometimes these warnings are about the Rapture. Other times they're about imminent natural disasters, political happenings, or other prophetically significant events that these folks have allegedly been told (by God) to warn the rest of us about.
In some cases, these emails arrive after the fact (that is, after a predicted event has already happened—like a bridge collapse, tsunami, mudslide, or terrorist attack). The writer of the email claims to have predicted it before it happened. Forgive me, but I'm a skeptic by nature. I'm always left wondering why I didn't get the memo beforehand.
This latest warning is about a great fleet of extraterrestrial spaceships that will arrive on October 14 and "float above major world cities." Someone else had a dream that he says confirms this coming event and suggests that we need the protection of eagles and tortoises.
I'm serious. Eagles and tortoises—one million of each, in fact. This is really what they're saying.
Come on, folks; I can't make this stuff up.
So according to these people, UFOs will be floating over the world's major cities roughly a week from now. They say it's part of an elaborate "deception." Maybe someone fell asleep during an episode of ABC's "V" and subconsciously absorbed this idea by osmosis.
They claim that the whole scenario was outed by "a retired NORAD official." Hmm. I guess the air gets pretty thin up there in those Colorado mountains.
The Internet has proven to be an almost indispensable tool in missions and other areas of Gospel work. One of the downsides of the World Wide Web, however, is that any crackpot in the civilized world with a few bucks a month to spare can set up a website and broadcast his flaky prophetic theories to the world. What's equally unfortunate is that some professing believers possess so little in the way of spiritual perception or discernment. They're ready to jump on the bandwagon for whatever new theory the wind happens to blow across their path. The Apostle Paul says these folks need to grow up:
That we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting (Eph. 4:14).
The NT warns us frequently about this sort of "trickery" by certain people who want us to believe that they speak with divine authority when they are in fact deceivers. The Lord Jesus himself said that there would be a profusion of "false prophets" in the last days—and their deceptions would be so compelling and so convincing, they might "deceive, if possible, even the elect" (Matt. 24:24b).
But wait a minute. The NT also says that there will be a resurgence of supernatural gifts (specifically, prophecy, visions, and dreams) in the last days, particularly during the Tribulation (Acts 2:17-18), and possibly even before.
This means the true and the false will exist side by side—which begs the question: how can we tell a true prophet from a false one?
Fortunately, we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. The people of Israel dealt with this problem thousands of years ago. During the wilderness wanderings, their very survival hung in the balance. If the nation perished in the desert, the messianic prophecies wouldn't be fulfilled. God's plan of redemption might have been derailed (at least, in theory). So it was vital that they hear and obey God. Israel's very survival was on the line—and the devil knew it. So he did something very cunning and clever: he sent false prophets to confuse the people. The situation got so bad, evidently, that the people didn't know to whom they should listen.
Do you remember those "Where's Waldo" books? Our kids loved them. Each page was filled with hundreds or maybe even thousands of tiny, detailed images—and it really made it hard to pick out the real Waldo. This is what the devil tried to do to Israel. He cluttered up the prophetic pipeline with fake messages so the people couldn't pick out the real ones.
God moved swiftly and decisively to remedy this potentially disastrous situation. First, He decreed that prophetic deceivers should be dealt with by means of capital punishment: "But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die" (Deut. 18:20).
I know we had a little fun with the UFO thing a moment ago; but now we've come to something that isn't funny. Presuming to speak for God is an extremely serious business. The Lord himself elevates it to a matter of life and death. The Lord says, in essence, "If you mislead My people, you're going to die."
The second thing He did was tell His people how they could differentiate between the true and the false: "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him" (v. 22).
How much clearer could it be? If someone claims to have a warning from God (whether he says it came through a dream, a vision, or some other form of divine revelation), and the predicted event doesn't come to pass, then that person is a false prophet and we shouldn't listen to him/her (cp. Jer. 29:8-9).
That's what God said, not me. If you disagree, feel free to take it up with Him.
The irony in all of this is that the warning about deception is itself a deception.
Some of us need to grow up and act like adults. There's enough juvenile clutter out there as it is. We don't need any more.
We're updating and republishing my booklet Israel, God's Timepiece. Our plan is to roll out the new edition at our prophecy conference in Branson, MO, next year (www.godisraelandyou.com).
I originally wrote IGT in the late 1980s. Dr. Halff (the founder of our ministry who went to Heaven in November of 2000) suggested the title. A lot has changed in the world since then (the Soviet Union was still in business back in those days, if you can believe it!), so we felt it was time to revisit this important topic.
Once we started working on the rewrite, we realized that we all know a lot more about prophecy today than we did 25 years ago. And I mean a LOT. In fact, there's so much new material, we ended up tossing out the entire text of the old one and starting from scratch. The new version covers the topic much more thoroughly and makes the point with greater effectiveness.
The main point of the booklet, as you may have deduced from the title, is that the modern State of Israel can serve as a sort of prophetic "clock." By watching the Middle East, if we know what we're doing, we can gain a general idea of where we are on God's prophetic timetable.
But simply having a clock isn't enough. We have to know how to read the clock. I'm sure we all remember learning how to tell time when we were kids. We were told about the big hand and the little hand, and how their relative positions on the face of the clock pinpointed the time. If the big hand was on the 12 and the little hand was on the two, for example, we knew it was two o'clock.
Likewise, it's not enough simply to know that Israel can function as a timepiece. We have to learn how the clock functions and how to read it correctly. That's what this new booklet is about.
The booklet has two main sections. Part One of the new IGT is about prophecy in general—what it is and what it isn't. We distinguish between the extremes of (1) sensationalist date setting and (2) ignoring prophetic signs completely. Are there signs for the Rapture or is it a completely signless event? We respond to these questions in the new IGT.
We even touch on the relatively new phenomenon of Darwinian eschatology (an offshoot of the new scientific discipline of astrobiology). Yes, Darwinism is a religion in almost every sense of the word—and its high priests have developed their own system of eschatology! They agree with us that the world had a definite beginning (they call it the Big Bang) and that it will have a definite end someday—but of course, they disagree with us on when and how.
This new edition has several new charts. One compares the historical development and teachings of the three major prophetic systems: premillennialism (and its ancient forerunner, chiliasm), amillennialism, and postmillennialism. Another one is a side-by-side comparison of the two phases of the Second Coming. And a third one shows how the Eschaton (lit., "end things") fits into the overall scheme of "salvation history" (Heilsgeschichte in German)—and how this helps us understand the 2,000-year perceived "delay" in the Lord's return.
We also talk about the pre- versus post-Trib Rapture debate, concentrating on the two stages of the Second Coming (the Rapture and Messiah's coming in glory). There's even a chart that shows the dual profile of the Second Coming in the NT.
Some readers might be taken slightly aback by my rather blunt response to people who say, "When is the Lord coming back? For Pete's sake, we've been waiting for 2,000 years already!" I just said what I felt needed to be said. Next year, when you have a chance to read it for yourself, let me know what you think.
We also spend some time in IGT talking about the vast common ground we have (as biblical literalists and messianic evangelicals) with much of Orthodox Judaism. Both we and our conservative Jewish counterparts see the Bible as literally true and we both anticipate a literal coming of the Messiah. We also share a belief in a literal Kingdom on earth where the Messiah will reign from the throne of His father David in Jerusalem. The watershed issue between our two camps is the question of who the Messiah is. We believe He's been here before in the Person of Yeshua of Nazareth—and that He's coming again. Our Orthodox Jewish friends, on the other hand, say he will be a newcomer.
Part Two delves into the main thesis (about telling the time prophetically) and outlines the five prophetic convergences that come together to indicate our position on the prophetic timeline. In the military, they might call this something like "triangulation"; that is, using multiple points of reference to zero in on a target. Here we emphasize Israel's central role in future prophecy.
There are also two appendices—one showing the historical development of the modern messianic (Jewish-Christian) movement and another one documenting the United Nations' anti-Israel bias vis-à-vis its own recorded resolutions.
Roughly a third of the booklet consists of endnotes—which I think is somewhat unique. Rather than interrupting the flow of the text at various points where additional explanation was needed, we used endnotes to present the extra, explanatory material. Hundreds of hours of tedious work and research went into producing these endnotes. We're suggesting that you read the booklet twice—once without the endnotes and then a second time with them. We decided on endnotes rather than footnotes to minimize the disruption of the text. When there's a footnote at the bottom of a page, the reader is tempted to glance downward to see what it says. With endnotes, though, you have to flip back toward the end of the booklet to find the notations. It removes at least some of the distraction.
Since the booklet won't actually go to the printer until the beginning of next year (2011), there's still time to let us know if there are any particular questions or issues you'd like us to address in the new IGT. Feel free to address your input to GHedrick@att.net.
This past weekend, we heard from a woman in Oklahoma City who says she's demon possessed and has been shunned by her family and friends. The message she left sounded like a desperate cry for help. Our pastoral staff has already set the wheels in motion to get this poor girl the spiritual assistance she needs—that is, if she really wants it.
In the meantime, however, this episode raises an issue that I think Bible-believers need to think about. What is our position on demon possession? Is it a legitimate spiritual problem or is it merely a throw-back to medieval and earlier biblical times when superstitious people thought evil spirits lurked under rocks and around every dark corner?
More specifically, the issue distils down to the following questions (and possibly others, as well). We'll take them one at a time.
1. Are demons real?
In ancient and medieval times, it was commonly believed that human beings are influenced to varying degrees by unseen spirits and forces, including "daemons." To the ancients, these spiritual entities were not usually evil. Sometimes they were seen as helpful. The physical world was animated for good or for evil by these invisible forces. Even Plato and Socrates wrote about this phenomenon.
In our enlightened age, however, secularists prefer to believe that all human behaviors and afflictions can be explained physically or chemically. There's no such thing as pure evil, we are told. Everything must have a logical and scientific explanation. But is this really true?
The Bible is our plumb line for truth—not worldly philosophies or popular mythologies. The OT (Tanakh) tells us that there's an unseen, spiritual world that is very much connected to what happens in our visible world (for example, see 2 Kings 6:14-17).
The NT confirms this. In Ephesians 6:12, the Apostle Paul outlines a hierarchy of satanic powers who fight and scheme against us: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities (Gk., archas), against powers (exousia), against the rulers of the darkness of this age (kosmokrataras tou skotous tou aionos), against spiritual hosts of wickedness (pneumatika teis ponerias) in the heavenly places."
There are over 30 references to demon possession in the Gospels. If we apply the "law of first mention," that takes us to Matthew 4:24: "Then His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed them."
The broader category in this passage is "all sick people." Then it breaks down into finer distinctions between "diseases" and "torments"—and between people who were demon-possessed and others who were epileptics and paralytics (notice the contrast in those last two categories between people whose bodies move uncontrollably and those who can't move at all).
So yes, demons are real and what happens in the visible world can be influenced by forces at work in the unseen, spiritual realm.
However, we need to maintain our balance here. As my friend and fellow blogger John Turner (a local pastor who's on our CJFM board) pointed out recently, some people go to extremes: "Demons get blamed for a lot of things today: the demon of poverty, the demon of cancer, and even the demon of car trouble." How true!
Many years ago, when I was a pastor in Illinois, we had a young mother in our church who thought demons were everywhere. She was a sweet lady (and had her hands full with three small children), but she was a bit unbalanced when it came to the kingdom of darkness. One summer, during a church picnic, we were playing volleyball. She thought the referee made a bad call, so she threw up her hands and started verbally (and rather loudly) rebuking the devil. She was convinced that the ref's bad call was the work of the Evil One. The rest of us thought it was just ... well, a questionable call.
Again, balance is the key. C.S. Lewis wrote, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or magician with the same delight" (The Screwtape Letters).
2. Are psychoses and other forms of mental illness sometimes mistaken for demon possession?
Yes, and very likely, vice versa.
I apologize for beating the same drum over and over—but again, balance is important here. It's wrong (and maybe even dangerous) to assume that every behavioral problem can be treated by drugs and/or medical therapies. If there's a spiritual component (like demonic influence, or guilt resulting from unconfessed sin, for example), that needs to be dealt with. Otherwise, you're treating symptoms rather than root causes.
On the other hand, I have friends who are convinced that Christians should never resort to psychological counseling or drug therapy. Their position is that virtually all psychological disorders—whether it's depression, ADHD, or whatever—have spiritual (rather than physical) causes. They are generally unwilling to entertain the possibility that the brain can malfunction in much the same way that other organs (e.g., the heart, liver, or pancreas) occasionally do.
With all due respect, I disagree. Is there something unspiritual or ungodly about having bypass surgery to correct a heart problem? Or having a kidney transplant if you need one? Or taking insulin if you're a diabetic? Of course not. Neither should we hesitate to get medical treatment for psychological or mental problems, when indicated. Depression, for example, often requires an integrated approach including counseling and medication. There have been far too many cases of Christians—including teenagers—who didn't receive proper treatment for depression and ended up committing suicide. It's a shame—and in most cases, unnecessary.
Is our culture overmedicated? I'm not a medical professional, but I think I can safely say the answer is yes, absolutely. They have a pill for everything. In some cases, it's been shown in double blind studies that placebos are nearly as effective as the drugs. This is all true. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't get professional help when you really need it.
3. Can a Christian be demon possessed?
This is a very old debate in Christendom. These days, many evangelicals make a distinction between possession and oppression, saying that true believers can be oppressed, but they can't be possessed. In real life, however, the distinction between the two can be largely academic. Believers I've known over the years have told me that they never experienced spiritual warfare before they came to faith in Yeshua. In many cases, they never even thought about it before. But once they were saved, the conflict began.
If you define possession as "taking ownership" of someone, then the answer is no, a true believer cannot be possessed by evil spirits. We have been bought with a price (the precious blood of the Lamb) and we therefore belong to Him (1 Peter 1:18-19). The devil can never, ever, under any circumstances take ownership of a blood-bought believer in Yeshua the Messiah (Rev. 12:11). That's one thing we can say with 100% certainty.
However, that's not to say that a believer cannot be influenced by evil spirits, or that he won't find himself in conflict with these forces at times (as we saw above in Ephesians 6:12). One of the Reformers once felt the presence of the devil so strongly, he reportedly threw a bottle of ink at him! We may sense that presence, too, sometimes. But it shouldn't intimidate us because the devil's power is very limited since he was conquered at Calvary. The only power he has over us is what we give him. He cannot force us to do anything we don't want to do. We can't use the excuse that "the devil made me do it."
4. If we encounter a legitimate case of demon possession, how do we deal with it?
Christianity isn't for sissies. When you become a believer, you're enlisting in an army that's at war (2 Tim. 2:3). The NT tells us that we face a three-pronged attack by: (1) a world-system that's opposed to God (1 John 2:15-17), (2) the flesh (that is, our own, internal, fallen nature; James 1:13-15), and (3) the devil and his minions (1 Peter 5:8). Notice that 2/3 of the battle is not directly attributable to the devil.
However, in that other third of the cases, when it's a direct spiritual attack, these matters are best dealt with at a local church level. Pastors and elders are our God-ordained authorities in the Body of Messiah and it's their responsibility to watch over the flock of God (1 Peter 5:1-4). When church leaders discern that evil spirits are involved, it should be dealt with privately so it doesn't become a public spectacle or side-show. In the numerous NT instances where the Lord himself cast out demons, there is no indication that He announced it ahead of time or used it to attract a crowd—or that He ever did it in connection with a church/synagogue service. And I'm pretty sure He didn't take an offering afterward.
Above all, never forget: "He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world" (1 John 4:4b).
I feel your pain!
That was my first thought when I ran across the Recovering Religionists website this past weekend while doing some research online.
Their home page announces:
We are Recovering Religionists™, people who have given religion our best shot but just can’t bring ourselves to believe in virgin births, resurrections, 2,000 year old miracles and the “power of prayer.” We are recovering Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah Wittnesses [sic], Hindus, Moslems, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and more.
Just start clicking on the site's various links and you'll embark on a journey into a strange and sad universe of people who were involved in some form of religion at one time or another and later emerged from the experience embittered, disillusioned, and (very often) alone.
And yes, one of their core tenets is that religion is harmful to mental health. They say it renders us incapable of being good for its own sake (because religious people, they say, are good not just because they want to be good, but because they want to avoid the punishment for being bad). Religious people are delusional (they tend to see and hear things that other people don't see or hear) and their IQs are generally lower than their non-religious counterparts. Religion and its institutions seeks to control gullible people through guilt and manipulation. These are some of the things they say about religion.
Would it surprise you if I said they're not entirely wrong?
For instance, they say that religion is a tool for manipulation. All you have to do is take a look at church history and you'll see that religious authorities (both Catholic and Protestant) have, at various times, manipulated the masses for their own, selfish purposes. In Catholicism, for instance, when finances were tight in medieval times, "indulgences" became a common fund-raiser. Although the Catholic Church never officially said that people could pay money to be forgiven of their sins, that is nonetheless how many Catholics came to view indulgences. Pope Leo X was quick to capitalize on this trend and encouraged the selling of indulgences all across Europe to pay for a building project. A monk named Tetzel shamelessly marketed indulgences in Germany with the skill of a snake-oil salesman. The abuse of indulgences was one of Luther's main objections in his 95 Theses, in fact, and helped provide momentum for the Protestant Reformation. Even the Vatican eventually recognized the problem (better late than never, I suppose) and Pope Paul VI revised the Church's teaching in 1967 to downgrade indulgences and make them purely voluntary (Indulgentiarum Doctrina [AAS 59, 1967, nn. 5-24]).
Even today, Protestantism has its own religious con artists. Just flip through the religious channels on TV and you'll see any number of slick operators plying their trade and hawking everything from anointing oil to Jordan River water to prayer cloths. Some of them even promise a hundred-fold return on any amount of money you contribute (that is, if you send one of these guys a dollar, you'll get $100 back—such a deal!). It's pure manipulation and religious hucksterism at its worst.
No wonder some people think religion is bogus. If all you've ever been exposed to is this this superficial, self-absorbed, commercialized, slick-talking version of what passes for "Christianity" in our culture, then one logical conclusion (albeit not the only one) is that the whole thing is a fraud.
What these folks are missing, however, is that true Christianity is not so much a religion as it is a relationship. Religions are man-made—and yes, evil people have used them to manipulate the masses—or worse.
But religious abuses are not God's doing. It's sad that He often gets blamed for things He didn't do. How ironic that people end up blaming the existence of evil (and its consequences) on the most benevolent, loving, and just Being in the entire universe: Elohim (God).
It shows how inventive and self-deceived human beings can be. If we can't find a religion that suits our fancy, we just concoct one. Seriously, now—it's not that hard to do. L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer back in the 1950s, did it. He created Scientology, almost instantly gained a following of enthusiastic followers, and today it claims to be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world (although some experts insist that the list of ex-Scientologists is almost as long as the list of active Scientologists). Current followers of Scientology reportedly include Hollywood personalities like Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Anne Archer. Greta Van Susteren of Fox News is also a practitioner, along with Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley (ex-wife and daughter of the late Elvis Presley), among others.
Again, religions per se are human inventions. But the Christian faith is something entirely different. It breaks all of the rules of religion-making because on almost every meaningful level, it says just the opposite of what we instinctively want to hear. For instance, it begins by telling us that we're sinners in need of redemption. We would much rather hear something to the effect that we're fundamentally okay and just need some fine-tuning or a new perspective. Then it tells us we must die (to self) before we can truly live (Gal. 2:20). Who wants to die? And worst of all, it says the Bible is the true and authoritative Word of God and anything that contradicts it is false. How narrow-minded! Most people are more comfortable with a more enlightened, inclusive approach.
The Bible's message is radical. It goes against the grain of many of our natural inclinations and preferences. But the reason it works is that it addresses our main problem: the God-shaped vacuum in our hearts (to borrow Pascal's phrase). It explains how we can connect with the Creator of the Universe in a personal and meaningful way through His Son, Jesus the Messiah:
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved (John 3:16-17).
And guess what? Once you get a good, healthy dose of the real thing, you'll never have to "recover" from it.
I promise.
Over the weekend, Rob Styler, our director of missions, sent me this link to "The New America" blog site: click here
What's particularly interesting about that blog entry is that it was written by Zach Duke, who went on our August 2010 "Live the Land" student tour to Israel. There were around 40 participants this year and by all accounts, it was a great experience for everyone who went.
Some of the things we try to do on these student tours include:
1. Exposing young believers from North America to Israeli culture and customs;
2. Educating them about the Jewish roots of their Christian faith;
3. Familiarizing them with the geopolitical situation in the Middle East;
4. Allowing them to interact one on one, as much as possible, with Israelis; and
5. Helping them understand the need (and biblical basis) for Jewish evangelism.
Zach obviously "got it."
He's not only smart, and a capable writer, but he also absorbed and processed the information we presented on the tour in precisely the way we like to see it happen. We know it's not easy. It's a lot of information to process in such a short time.
Zach's blog makes us feel like we're doing some good on these tours. It also speaks well of the quality of teaching on the tours. The teachers on our 2010 LTL tour were Rob Styler and Doug Robins (a member of the pastoral staff at Bandera Road Community Church here in San Antonio).
Let me hasten to say that Zach's blog isn't the only feedback we've had from tour participants. We've received numerous notes and emails from other people who went on the tour. We appreciated their words of gratitude and encouragement, too. Several of them mentioned how the Lord has used their "Live the Land" experience to make His Word come alive for them when they read it. So Zach wasn't the only one who got the point.
By the way, these student tours are the brainchild of my son Michael, who is currently a student at TEDS (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) in the Chicago area. He went on his first tour to Israel in March of 1993, when he was almost nine years old, and he's been back at least once almost every year since. When he was in high school, he came up with the idea of having tours designed specifically for young people. They enjoy activities like rappelling down the cliffs at Qumran, hiking, bicycling, parasailing on the Red Sea, and even white-water rafting—in addition to the normal, touristy things that most tours do.
They also like to deliver care packages to Israeli military bases, where they sometimes have opportunities to spend time with the soldiers, who are typically around the same age as the young people who go on our tours. One year (when I was hitching a ride with the group), we arrived at the base late in the afternoon, after their work day was over. When they found out who we were, a couple of soldiers brought out their guitars. They started playing and singing, and the music attracted more soldiers. They sat around with our kids and taught them some traditional Hebrew songs. It was quite a sight.
This year, our group connected through JFK Airport in New York and flew from there to Tel Aviv on El Al Israel Airlines.
Planning is already underway for the 2011 tour, so please pray for wisdom and guidance for Michael, Cindy Castillo, and the rest of the team as they deal with the details.
While you're at it, pray that next year's group will "get it" like Zach and the other 2010 tour participants did.
And as always, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: 'May they prosper who love you'" (Psalm 122:6).
See? I knew that would get your attention.
Jacob Staub, a self-styled gay Reconstructionist rabbi, has published an essay on the Zeek website with this title: "Worship for Agnostics: Building a Personal Relationship with a Non-personal God."
Reading the rabbi's story reminded me in some ways of similar testimonies on numerous "ex-Fundamentalist" websites, where people gush about how their strict, religious upbringing left them psychologically and/or emotionally scarred.
Please don't misunderstand. I don't doubt that there are some religious wackos who do indeed inflict damage on their children; but I also think some of it is blown out of proportion. Sometimes you just want to say, "Come on, already. Enough is enough. Grow up and get over it."
In Jacob's case, he grew up in Orthodox Judaism, but ultimately left Orthodoxy because He couldn't accept its caricature of God which he felt was "judgmental, mean-spirited, and stifling." He doesn't say whether the fact that Orthodox Judaism generally condemns the practice of homosexuality played any role in this parting of the ways, but I suspect it did.
At times, his view of God sounds like a New Age mantra, almost pantheistic: "If God is a Process that grounds all existence, a Force embedded in the universe upon which we can draw in our efforts to become better people and repair the world, then we can pray without having to imagine an old man in the sky or a difficult mother’s embrace."
Not surprisingly (since such philosophies generally come in packages), Jacob also decided that there's very little literal truth in the Bible. Its stories are metaphors (e.g., God didn't create the world in six days or split the Red Sea so the Israelites could walk across it to safety). More importantly, according to the rabbi, the God that the Bible presents is a construct—not a real Person:
The God that Jews have constructed throughout history — Exodus’ Man of War who splits the sea with his outstretched arm; the seductive and elusive Lover of the Song of Songs; the Talmud’s Shekhinah, who weeps as she accompanies us into exile; Maimonides’ ineffable One, who is unchanging and unaware of this world and yet is the object of our passionate love; the Kabbalah’s infinite Ein Sof, who is beyond all description and mediated by more accessible Sefirot (emanations)—all are only our constructions of God. Because God is beyond accurate description, our ancestors felt licensed to describe God in any and every way that they, in their limitations, imagined perfection. The best of these inherited metaphors point beyond themselves, guiding us to the mystery of existence.
But to me, here's the really sad part. Jacob writes, "God can only be metaphorical. By definition, God is beyond human understanding and description. It is beyond our capacity not only to see God but also to know God. At best, we get glimpses, flashes, intuitions. And we are never able to verify what we glimpse or experience."
This makes me sad not only because it's Jacob's view, but also because he speaks for multitudes of Jewish people around the world. And they're not all fringe Reconstructionists or Renewalists. Many are Conservative and even Orthodox. For them, Judaism has devolved into more of a cultural exercise than a way to experience God. I was looking on a certain synagogue's website the other day (I won't tell you which one because my purpose here is not to embarrass them) and noticed, to my surprise, that God wasn't mentioned even once anywhere on the site (at least, nowhere that I could find). It was all about their activities and programs—and believe me, they have tons of them. Need a support group? They've got one for you. And yes, they gratefully accept donations. But nothing about God. Zip. Nada.
For crying out loud, how do you compose an Orthodox congregation's core values and mission statement without mentioning God?
God is unknowable.
God cannot be seen or experienced.
This is what many Jewish people believe. Maybe that's why they think they don't need God in their mission statement.
And like I said, I think it's sad.
Why? Because this just flat out isn't what the Bible teaches. (And by "Bible," I'm referring here to both the Old and New Covenants.)
The Bible tells us that our God is not just personal—He's intensely personal. Not only can He be known; He wants to be known.
In fact, life's highest and noblest purpose is knowing Him.
And the Messiah was willing to give His life to bridge the gap and make it possible (John 3:16-17).
This was the Apostle Paul's message when he visited Athens:
Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, "Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious;
"For as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:22-23).
In the Torah, the LORD God heard the cries of a pregnant, brokenhearted Egyptian teenager named Hagar. It was sometime around 1900 BC. She had fled into the desert and thought she would die there. But the Angel of the LORD "found" her (Gen. 16:7). He spoke with her, listened to her concerns, and told her what she should do (vv. 8-11).
Hagar was ... well, blown away. Utterly amazed. God spoke with her! None of the Egyptian gods had ever expressed any interest in her. Amon Ra, for instance, had never asked her where she had been and where she was going. Not so much as a word. But here was the LORD God of Abraham, engaging her in personal conversation. She was so impressed, she did exactly what He told her to do. She even named a nearby well after Him because she wanted everyone to remember what He had done for her there (v. 13). The name she chose was Beer Lahai Roi. Literally, it means "Well of the One Who Lives and Sees Me."
How's that for "personal"?
Oops, I forgot—the Hagar account didn't really happen. Alas, according to the rabbi, the patriarchal narratives are also metaphors.
Sometimes you just can't win for losing.
An attorney friend here in San Antonio just sent me a copy of a lawsuit being brought against the IRS by a pro-Israel organization called Z Street.
You'll find the text of the lawsuit here.
What's interesting about this is that Z Street is alleging that the Obama Administration has put in place an IRS "Israel Special Policy" that requires an unprecedented review of organizations whose "activities are related to Israel, and that are organizations whose positions contradict the US Administration's Israeli policy."
If this is on the up-and-up, it wouldn't be a huge surprise because the current administration has thus far had less than cordial relations with the State of Israel. In fact, it's hard to remember a time when our relationship with our closest ally in the Middle East has been so icy. The UK's Telegraph newspaper provides this analysis with a heaping helping of British spin: click here.
Historically, such a "special policy" toward Israel would be a throwback to the policies of the 1950s. In the early 1960s, LBJ (whose historic ranch is situated only a few miles from where I'm sitting right now as I type this) was the first president to openly align his administration's policies with the interests of the Jewish State. His warm relationship with Israel actually went back to his days in the US Congress. LBJ's predecessor, JFK, had sold weapons to Israel, thereby breaking a longstanding arms embargo of the Jewish State; but even he did not take up the cause like LBJ did. JFK's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, was more interested in maintaining good relations with Nasser in Egypt (and the rest of the Arab world) than he was in Israel's welfare. Here's a summary of some of this history: click here.
I'm not a lawyer, of course, but even from my limited, layman's perspective, the problem I see with the Z Street complaint is that it doesn't cite any proof for its rather extravagant claims. Do they have recordings of (or witnesses to) the alleged conversations with "Agent Gentry" of the IRS? Or any copies of emails? What about a paper trail of any kind? Is this new "Israel Special Policy" in print? If it is, they don't mention that fact in the text of the complaint.
Forward Magazine, a Jewish publication, is also having second thoughts about the Z Street action: click here.
I don't know anything about Z Street (and had never heard of it before now); but I truly hope they're not doing this as a publicity stunt. Supporters of Israel aren't doing the movement any favors if they don't keep it real.
At this point, it's too early to pass judgment one way or the other. Maybe the complaint is legit; maybe it's not. Maybe this new "Israel Special Policy" truly exists; or maybe it doesn't. Either way, the truth will eventually come out.
In the meantime ...
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,
Gary Hedrick
