Does this stuff really happen?
This week I had a chance to meet with a friend for coffee. As we talked about our families he said that his daughter started to date this boy that was a Christian. She is reading her Bible and a lot of the darkness had left the home. I asked him what he was talking about. He said that when his daughter was doing a lot of things that she shouldn’t have I saw dark shadows moving around the home and heard noises. It was getting so bad they had purchased some cameras to record any “paranormal” activate if possible. They set up cameras and were not able to capture anything on video. He said once his daughter prayed over the house it had been gone for at least a year.
You need to know that this person has not talked with me about any beliefs and does not seem to have accepted Christianity. He also is a professional and when he was talking about this he seemed to be 100% serious. In fact it seems that it has sparked an interest in him to want to know more.
I know I have not had to deal with this personally and never had anyone really talk about this with me.
In researching this I found this commentary that I thought was interesting:
Demons are masquerade artists. In other words, they can disguise themselves. In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 11:14-15), we are told how these creatures are able to appear or disguise themselves as what Paul calls “angels of light” and “servants of righteousness.” Because of this ability, it is certainly reasonable to assume that a demon could in fact appear to someone as the spirit of a deceased person–especially that of a loved one–if it helped the demon to carry out its evil purposes.
The Bible assures us that we only die one time, and then we will await judgment. There are several passages which help to explain how it would not be possible for us to die and then to live on, in some sort of spirit form, as a ghost. Hebrews 9:27 (NIV) tells us clearly that we are “…destined to die once and, after that, to face judgment.” And when we are judged, the decision for us is heaven if we believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior (John 3:16). However, if a person chooses to become an unbeliever (and continues being an unbeliever), then their destination would be hell (Matthew 25:46; Luke 16:22-24).
There is no “in between” state of existence for us between death and eventual eternal life or eternal damnation. We are assured of this again in Matthew 25:46 (NIV), where words similar to those in Hebrews 9:27 (NIV) are used. We therefore know that there can be no “in between” state for us, and, therefore, it cannot be possible for the spirit of a deceased person to roam the earth as a “ghost”. Chances are, if you truly think you have seen a “ghost,” it was probably just one of Satan’s servants (demons), sent to trick you.
Do you believe this? Have you ever dealt with this? What do you think?
Read it and Share it on DoYouReallyBelieve.com!
Reference: http://www.getchristiananswers.com/articles/what-does-bible-say-about-ghosts#.TflnH6N5mSM
Demons are a real entity in our world, here is another good Biblical site to describe this activity and how to avoid it and how to handle it.
http://carm.org/questions/about-demons
http://carm.org/questions/about-demons/what-demonic-oppression
thank you for this site
Youve got it. Could not have put it better.
I have never read a scripture or verse that was vague on the status of human final destiny, only the words of confused or possibly under-educated persons speculating on said final destination. King David wrote about going to ‘Sheol’ in death, being unaware of the concept of relativity. Many of the early prophets or other biblical writers spoke in the scrolls about death, but always as the next level of sorts, almost like moving forward on the other side of a wall that you could only go over one-way. Saul’s encounter with the “Spirit of Samuel” via a witch was only possible because he had lowered himself from being a servant of the One True God of Israel, to believing in the lies of the very deceivers he had previously been instructed to drive from the land. In consulting with a witch, Saul had opened himself up to the power of Satan, and was sent the deception that oddly enough, still delivered the message of God (as God reigns supreme and can make the fallen angels/demons do whatever He commands by force, and even use them in spite of themselves.)
Why is it so very hard for some to believe in the power of the supernatural, the spiritual, the paranormal? Because it’s all part of the self-deception that takes place in a culture and world where in order to justify one’s existence separate from God, you must deny all that is spiritual in nature. The typical Atheist/Scientist starts off everything they do with an assumption: that the natural world is all that there is, and nothing else exists except for that which is physical. Oddly, this is the polar opposite of the very first heresy against the Church doctrine, that being Gnosticism, which states that all that is good is Spiritual in origin, and that nothing physical is ultimately real or good. The Athiest claims that either Yeshua didn’t exist at all (rare now), or that he was a mere man with delusions or absurd claims. The people who actually knew Yeshua/Jesus and were contemporaries with him had to be convinced that he was indeed physical after the resurrection, and not just pure Spirit! The Gnostics who lived contemporary to Jesus thought that he was in fact a ghost, intangible and void of form! They saw him and denied that he was flesh, and yet modern man claims that he was flesh but never spirit.
If the Bible is literally true, then it must be true in all of its claims, or none of its claims; it’s either the trustworthy Word of God or it isn’t, and there is no acceptable middle ground; the claims of the Bible are too important to try and cherry pick for our convenience, because they form a whole that doesn’t stand if only one piece is false, incorrect, inaccurate, or wrong.
Now working on the previously established assumptions and factual assertations by @ 2,000 years’ worth of scholarly research by millions of other educated men, let’s say that the Bible, while not being 100% literal, is in fact 100% true. That same Bible is pretty clear that demonic spirits exist, and are even allowed to in some instances run free and create havoc among humankind. Based on the collective attributes of God’s goodness and greatness in the Bible, this doesn’t mean that He is cruel, but that even evil beings can be used for good in God’s ultimate plan.
The Bible states that fallen angels and regular angels can be used to torment people who are disobedient, people who need a wake-up call, and in general are free to do whatever they want to the unsaved within reason, and can even be allowed to torment believers if God can use that torment to produce positive results or character building. Unfortunately, the humans of this world live in a state of Spiritual death, blindness, and confusion, so instead of the supernatural producing the desired result of people believing in YHWH God Almighty, instead they have to live in deluded self-deception and oblivion to guard them from the horrible reality of God, and so they choose to either believe that these spirits are something else entirely, like the ghosts of the departed, or they are completely dismissed as never having been real, and are nothing more than misdiagnosed natural phenomenon or deliberate deceit on the part of others with malign or even benign intentions.
Sadly, life in the modern world complicates this perception problem.
Before I mentioned King David, who didn’t seem to understand that to be dead in this world meant instantaneous transfer outside of time and space. King David had a bronze-age understanding of science and reality¹. Now we live in an era where many mysteries have been revealed to have actual natural causes, and so very many things that once were thought to be supernatural in origin it turns out are actually very ordinary and explainable in the light of science. But does that go for everything? What was once thought to be demon possession in the New Testament era has been explained away as being descriptive of epilepsy, mental illness like schizophrenia, cerebral palsy, and other rational causes.
But was it all natural? and can even natural causes have supernatural points of origin? Or can those who have a natural illness also have the super-natural torment of demonic persecution on top of their natural ailments? Jesus said, or was said to have, on several occasions cast out demons from people who had what to modern eyes appear to be naturally-caused illnesses. Did Jesus and the Disciples lie? were they misled? Was the description metaphorical language, or can we take the Bible at face value that there were real demons involved as well?
Unless a good Hermeneutical apologetic case can be made for metaphorical expression in the cultural context of language for that time, then we must assume that if the Bible is literally true, then the demon possession and/or torments was also literal.
But what about now? If demons are real and really active, is there something we’re missing? Less scientifically-focused and less secular cultures, such as in Brazil, India, most of Africa, and other “less educated” areas frequently report this sort of spiritual activity. Is that a problem of ignorance, or is the real problem that the Atheistic mindset that permeates the culture of Western Science and medicine writing off things that have actual supernatural origins as well as natural ones?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about being skeptical. I firmly believe and can often prove that most of what is passed of as being supernatural in origin is pure crap and/or deception of one kind or another. Saint Thomas is my hero; he wanted to see the holes in Yeshua’s hands (wrists?) and side before he would accept the presented case as reality, and even Jesus was cool with that; He didn’t curse Thomas for questioning the story he was told, He merely stated that more blessed are those who could not see the physical evidence and still believed in His resurrection from the dead. My problem is with those who have already made up their minds from the start that the supernatural is impossible; that’s not a very scientific way to go into a search for truth! That’s prejudice, and it’s unacceptable in a career where balanced objectivity is the alleged center of truth.
With that in mind, I believe that there may very well be supernatural activity taking place all around us every day that we miss because it has been pre-supposed in our minds that it isn’t there. If you tell yourself enough that something doesn’t exist, how will you know it should it suddenly be seen? The rush to whitewash the supernatural as being anything but, and the culture that crams this down the throats of anyone who will listen has dulled our sensitivity to what may very well be an active truth of an unseen world beyond our own, that can and does interact with the purely physical realm of the five dimensions that we mere meatbags occupy.
Not only do we miss out on the power of the evil that can take place around us if we deny the negative aspects of the supernatural world, so also could we be missing out on the awesome power of the positive side of the Good and Loving God who is moving all around us in this life, working to set right what once went wrong, to fix up the world more often in spite of us than through us.
If you keep your mind too open, anyone who walks by can dump their garbage into it. If you keep the door to your mind locked shut, you close the door on greater possibilities as well. The Power of Positive Thinking may often be an illusion that flies in the face of a dark reality, but you’d better believe that the power of negativity will also block you from reaching potential you didn’t have.
Be skeptical, but in a positive way! Test all claims about the supernatural by the yardstick not just of science, but also of Truth; facts come in many different packages.
For what it’s worth, I do believe in the presence of the forces of darkness around us, and the power that they have over the lost of this world, who are subject to them and their Master, The Deceiver. I believe that they occupy additional dimensional realities that Scientific study has predicted exists in the construct of our Space-Time. I believe that they can cross over, and that a lot of what we call ‘supernatural’ would in fact be called “additional realities” when science has finally advanced enough to develop the tools to “see” these additional dimensions around us. I believe that when we die, our boat anchor, this limited poly-dimensional organic machine construct we call our bodies, is cleaved away from our higher-dimensional self that is called the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and we are finally free to see the rest of the layers of the universe that have been on top of ours all along. I believe that in that moment, we are also relieved from our position on a specific location in the flow of time/space, and having been set free from “time” as we understand it, are instantaneously sent into the presence of God, either the God who is ready to welcome us at His second coming, or the God who judges the lost souls at the Great White Throne. Either way, there’s no “sticking around” or “haunting”, because like a balloon that has had its tether cut, we are no longer capable of staying down, but must rise up to the next dimensional level.
¹The really cool part about this? the whole Relativity aspect means that having been freed from Time as we understand it, there is no more “time” for us to move through; that means that everyone who has ever lived instantaneously gets to God at the exact same moment! Your dearly-departed dead relative hasn’t been sitting around for forty years waiting for you or their former spouse; they see you at the same exact time! King David’s limited understanding of the nature of reality held him back from understanding this awesome realization, that death isn’t a place where you sleep in limbo for centuries or millennia, waiting for the rest of the human race to live out their lives and then catch up… you’re already at the end of the finish line, and the race is over! Think about the New Covenant description of the Rapture and the Resurrection… one passage states clearly that to be absent from this life is to be present with God. Another speaks of all the dead rising at once; pair those together and what do you get? Fast-forwarded to the good part. Need more proof? What did Stephen say as he was being stoned to death? “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Stephen saw the very return of Christ Messiach Yeshua at the moment of the resurrection of the dead in Christ. The others who spoke about “sleeping for a little while” were still relating to humans in human terms that could be understood by a barely literate, iron-age audience. I mean, how would you explain temporal physics and trans-dimensional theory to a bunch of farmers, slaves, superstitious Romanesque citizens, and general bumpkins? No, that sort of thing is only understood with our current base of Science and knowledge, but having built upon that, we shouldn’t just yank out the foundation of the understanding of the presence of a ‘spiritual’ world, which may be nothing more than just our bumpkin way of trying to understand something that one day everyone will scoff at us for having not figured out as having actually been part of extra-dimensional constructs and temporal anomalies.
This has made my day. I wish all psotigns were this good.