Lee Strobel examines supernatural phenomena—angels saving a missionary from a mob, demons causing unexplained violence in leaders, and 38% of Americans reporting miracles—while dismissing modern "scientism" as ignoring 80% of people’s intuitive belief in the unseen. He contrasts medical hallucinations (like his hyponatremia-induced demon visions) with corroborated cases—such as a blind girl "seeing" during resuscitation or a Mozambican prayer study published in peer-reviewed journals—arguing that external validation separates genuine supernatural events from natural explanations. Strobel warns against both fear and dismissal of the demonic, linking cultural decline to spiritual forces, yet insists miracles demand evidence beyond anecdotes, leaving skepticism unshaken despite widespread unexplained experiences. [Automatically generated summary]
So we're told there's no state religion in the West, certainly not in the United States, but in fact, there is.
It's scientism.
It's the worship of science.
It's the belief, and all of us learned this at a young age, that everything around us, everything we experience, can be measured by people in white coats.
That's science.
If it can't be measured, it's not real.
The problem with this religion is that our life, our daily experience, contradicts it.
Constantly, all of us are seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling things that can't be measured by science, but it doesn't make them any less real.
These are, by definition, supernatural.
Supernatural experiences are a feature of everyone's life.
And if we're honest, we'll admit that.
So what do they mean exactly?
Well, Lee Strobel was a reporter.
He worked for the Chicago Tribune and left and became a pastor.
So he has religious faith, but also a grounding in empiricism, the desire to prove things.
He is the perfect person to write the book that he did about the supernatural.
That would be dreams, mystical dreams, near-death experiences, miracles, ghosts.
We set down with them to hear just how common these experiences are and what they mean.
Lee Strobel's.
So you've written a book.
I don't do a lot of book interviews.
I couldn't resist this one.
Seeing the supernatural, investigating angels, demons, mystical dreams, near-death encounters, and other mysteries of the unseen world.
I think there's an intuitive sense that most people have that there's something beyond what we can see such as eight out of 10 Americans believe that.
But how do we know?
What is the evidence?
And that's what I try to get into in the book.
How can we be sure through corroborated evidence that indeed there are such things as miracles, as near-death experiences, as deathbed encounters and mystical dreams and things like that?
And what's interesting about the Christian interpretation of angels is that it says in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that we should anticipate the possibility that we would encounter an angel.
In other words, it says sometimes when you're providing hospitality to someone, unbeknownst to you, it's an angel.
And so there's an anticipation that perhaps there could be angelic encounters.
And so what I try to look at in the book are cases in which we have angelic encounters.
People actually encounter an angel.
I'll give you an example.
There was a missionary named John G. Payton, P-A-T-O-N, from Scotland.
And he went to an island in the South Pacific to be a Christian missionary.
And he and his wife are living in a cottage there, and he's talking about Jesus.
Well, the local tribespeople didn't quite like that.
And so one day, a mob of them came to burn down their house and kill them.
So they see this mob forming, and he and his wife are in their house.
And what can they do?
They start to pray.
It's like, God, protect us, help us.
They're going to kill us.
They're going to burn our house down.
What do we do?
And they prayed all night long.
And by dawn, the mob began to dissipate.
A year later, he led the head of that mob to faith in Jesus Christ.
And they're having a conversation.
And John said to him, By the way, do you remember that day when you all came to burn down our house and kill us?
Why didn't you do it?
And the man said, well, who are all those men you had there?
He said, no men.
It was just my wife and I. He said, no, no, no.
Your house was surrounded by these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords.
There's no way we could have hurt you that night.
Well, what's the explanation for that?
I think it could very well have been an angelic encounter that God had sent angels to protect him.
And she calls out to the other people and says, Hey, Peter's here.
Well, I said, Can't be here.
He's in prison.
Peter can't be here.
It must be his angel.
So based on those two passages, there are Christians who believe that we have an angel assigned to us.
In fact, I believe in the Orthodox Christian tradition, they believe an angel is assigned to you at the time you're baptized.
I don't know.
There are Christians who deny that, but it could be.
But the other thing I learned in my investigation of angels, I thought, you know what?
I don't think it's appropriate to pray to angels.
I don't believe we're taught to do that.
I think there's a slippery slope if you pray to angels that might slip into worship of angels, which would be blasphemous.
But there's nothing wrong with praying to God about angels.
Martin Luther in the small catechism has a prayer, an evening prayer that says, Lord, send your holy angels to protect me from the evil one.
And so I never used to do this, but I now make part of my prayer that God would send angels to protect me and my family, my ministry, my grandchildren.
Well, there are also moments in the life of every person who's awake and not on fentanyl, maybe even people who are on fentanyl, I hope, where you know that you are being acted on by an outside force of some kind.
You have no idea what it is.
But there are moments when you are much better than yourself, much more empathetic.
And there are other moments where you're seized by the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction, which also doesn't make any sense.
There's no kind of evolutionary biological accounting for that.
Why would you want to destroy something for no reason?
Another person, an object, but the impulse to destroy clearly the hallmark of evil, right?
And it's consistent with the Christian teaching that the demonic realm exists, that it is intent on luring us away from him and luring us down a pathway that is dark and that is dangerous.
In the book of Hebrews, it says that we will do it unbeknownst to ourselves.
So in other words, the implication is that we will have angelic encounters, but we won't realize they're angels.
And I think that does happen.
Now, I have a couple of cases in my book.
One is a pastor who is driving his car in Ohio.
He loses control of the car.
He hits a telephone or an electric transformer kind of a pole type of thing.
The wires fall down on his car.
The doors are jammed shut.
The electricity is coursing through the car so much so that the windshield starts to melt and he's trapped in this car.
He doesn't know what to do.
And he begins to pray.
God, I'm stuck.
I don't know what to do.
And a man, scrufty kind of guy, comes walking up to the car and he opens the car whose doors were jammed.
He opens the door.
He reaches in.
He lifts out this pastor and takes him about 50 yards away from the car, which then explodes.
And he says to the pastor, he says, you're going to be okay.
You're okay now.
But the police are on their way and I can't be here when they get here.
So just know that you're okay.
And he walked away and disappeared.
Now, the people, the medics who came, the emergency technicians and so forth that came as a result of the accident and they look at the car and say, they can't explain how this is possible that somebody could have opened that car door and not been electrocuted and rescued this pastor.
And yet it happened.
And the pastor says, I believe it was an angel.
Well, maybe.
Could have been.
How do you prove something like that?
But I mean, how do you explain it away naturally?
How do you explain it away that he's able to come, grip the car door, and open up this car that had been jammed shut?
So I think, yeah, there are cases where I think the logical explanation, the most reasonable explanation, if you don't rule out the supernatural at the outset, is that it was an angelic encounter.
And even the incident I had that seemed to, as an atheist, so here I am in this church nearly 30 years old, hearing this, understanding the gospel anyway for the first time.
And that encounter I had with an angel is something that helped open my heart to the truth of the gospel.
Of course, I had to spend two years of my life investigating it from a, you know, to just kind of conclude that it really was true, but it did propel me down that road toward God.
But when the supernatural host, all these supernatural beings are referred to in the Bible, there's almost a sense in which the writer is assuming the reader already knows all this.
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By the way, anyone who denies the soul exists, probably getting ready to genocide you.
He becomes Satan, and the name Satan literally means adversary.
And so the implication of scripture is that this very prominent angel named Lucifer wanted to be worshipped.
He's the one who wanted the worship.
And so his pride is what resulted in him falling from the angelic realm, becoming Satan, becoming someone.
I mean, think about this.
When Jesus encounters Satan, what is it Satan wanted from him?
Worship.
Satan wanted Jesus to worship him.
And that's what Lucifer wanted.
It was pride that got in the way.
He becomes Satan.
And a certain percentage of the angels accompanied him in this fall.
This happened before the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden.
So this predates that.
We don't know how many angels accompany him, but there are a lot of angels.
In Revelation chapter 5, there's a scene of Jesus on the throne being worshipped.
And if you do the math, because it talks about it a little cryptically, it was 100 million angels worshiping him at that time.
So there's a lot of angels.
And a percentage of them fell with Lucifer.
He became Satan, and angels became his minions, so to speak.
Now, Satan is limited in his power.
He's not omniscient like God is.
He's not omnipresent like God is.
In other words, a guy was telling me, he said, there's probably never a time when you and Satan have both been in the same zip code because he's only in one place at a time.
And so he's got things he's doing.
He'd probably never been in the same zip code you have, but his demons probably have been.
And they carry out his will, which is to pull people away from God, to discourage people in finding God, and to drag as many people to hell with him as they can.
Now, his existence, he's sort of on a leash by God at this point.
His ultimate destination in the lake of fire is already predicted.
So he has no future, really, but he has influence and he has certain powers.
And he and the demons are very intuitive.
You'll think they know more than they know, and they go after people.
I tell the story in my book about a very prominent psychiatrist named Richard Gallagher, educated at Ivy League University.
I have a quote from the former president of the American Psychiatric Association calling him highest integrity, Totally trained and prominent in his field of psychiatry.
Of course, he's a medical doctor because he's a psychiatrist, just extolling him as an individual and as a scientist, as a psychiatrist.
And about 25 years ago, he had two cats and they got along great.
They slept together.
They played together.
Everything was fine.
Until one night, the cats started to attack each other viciously.
I mean, they're trying to kill each other.
They're clawing each other.
They're snarling each other.
They're biting each other.
It was unbelievable.
And they pulled them apart and put them into separate rooms.
They thought, what in the world was that all about?
At 9 a.m. the next day, the doorbell rings, and it was a priest at appointment.
A Catholic priest was bringing by a woman to be examined by Dr. Gallagher.
She claimed that she was a high priestess of a satanic cult.
And he wanted her to be examined.
Was she demonically possessed?
Was she just crazy?
Or what is this all about?
So at 9 a.m., the doorbell rings for his appointment.
And Dr. Gallagher opens the door.
And here's this woman who claims to be a high priestess of a satanic cult who kind of looks up at him and sneers at him and says, So, how'd you like those cats last night?
Oof, yeah.
There's something going on.
And that took him on a journey where he, as a psychiatrist who understands what mental illness is and understands, comes to understand what demon possession and demon oppression is like.
He spends the next 25 years as kind of the go-to guy in the medical realm for exorcists of the Catholic faith and has witnessed amazing things that he documents.
And I quote him in the book, cases where we have a woman who, in front of eight eyewitnesses, levitates off of bed for 30 minutes.
Another case where people are speaking in Latin and other languages that they don't know, where they spontaneously are bruised and clawed, where one petite woman picked up a 200-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room.
I mean, these are things, as he said, they go beyond psychiatry.
He believes these are actual demonic possessions.
Now, a true Christian cannot be demonically possessed.
And the reason is a true Christian is indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
He can't be indwelled by evil and good like that in the same way at the same time.
So Christians cannot be possessed, but they can be oppressed.
They can be hectored.
They can be bothered.
They can be attacked by demons.
And there are some amazing examples of that.
I just mentioned a couple of people who are hectored or bothered by demons.
Now, for Christians, the book of James says if you rebuke Satan, he'll go away.
So if you're a Christian, you don't have to be afraid that these demons are going to somehow possess you or kill you or whatever.
Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world, the Bible says.
And so you can, the Bible says if you shun Satan, he has no choice.
He's got to leave you.
So for a Christian, you're protected.
But I fear for those that don't have that kind of protection, there are cases of demon possession that, as Dr. Gallagher and others have documented, are corroborated in ways that I don't think they can be denied.
I think by the when there's when there's no naturalistic explanation for what occurs.
So you have a woman, for instance, in front of eight eyewitnesses levitating off of bed for 30 minutes.
I don't know what the natural explanation for that would be.
That's right.
So I think it points towards something beyond that.
For me, as I investigate another area I investigate in the book are miracles.
And for me, if you have solid documentation, medical documentation, if you have multiple eyewitnesses with no motive to deceive, if you have no natural explanation that seems logical that it can account for the phenomenon, and if it takes place in the context of prayer, then I think it's logical to conclude that a miracle has taken place.
Well, yeah, but it certainly does point toward a supernatural event.
But here's what's interesting.
There's a woman with a PhD from Harvard who's a professor at Indiana University, major secular university.
And she said, I'd like to test whether miracles are possible.
How can we scientifically test that?
So here's what she did.
Miracles tend to cluster in places where the gospel is just breaking in.
And so we see them in China, in Mozambique, in Brazil, places where the gospel is taking root.
We see miracles taking place in a disproportionate number.
So she says, I'm going to put it to the test.
So she sends a team of scientists to Mozambique and researchers, to Mozambique, and they go into the bush and they say, bring us all your deaf and blind.
So they bring all the people deaf, blind, or with severe hearing or vision problems.
They bring them and they test them scientifically right there.
What is your level of vision?
What is your level of hearing?
They get that scientifically established.
Then immediately they are prayed for in the name of Jesus by people who tend to have a track record of God using them that way.
And then immediately after that, they're tested again.
Guess what they found?
Improvement in virtually every case.
In fact, get this.
The average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold.
There was a woman named Martine.
When they first encountered her, she could not hear the equivalent of a jackhammer next door.
After 10 minutes of prayer, she could now hear normal conversations.
Well, this team is flummoxed by this.
It's like, something is going on here.
Virtually every person improves, some of them dramatically so, like Martine.
Let's see if we can replicate it.
So we'll go to another place where miracles are breaking in, Brazil.
They did the same test.
They got the same results.
In fact, there was a woman in Brazil.
She couldn't see me holding up three fingers from nine feet away.
And after prayer for her healing, she could read the name tag of the person praying for her.
Tucker, this was published.
This is a scientifically rigorous study that was published in a peer-reviewed, secular, scientific medical journal, major medical journal, the Southern Medical Journal, published this.
And I interview in my book, I interview the scholar that did that study.
And I say, what do you make of this?
And she said, something's going on.
She said, we're not playing on people's emotions.
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This is not some people at a predisposition for anything.
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When Jesus performs miracles, healing people, making the lame walk, fixing the man with the withered hand, even when he casts out demons from the man in the cemetery on the Sea of Galilee, the reaction he gets from particularly religious authorities...
And you think if Satan were smart, which he is, would he go around the country and around the world trying to possess or bother average everyday people?
Well, you know what?
Much more efficient to go to Hollywood and to influence a bunch of people there who are very influential in, let's say, the entertainment industry.
And let's say he encourages them to create films and television shows that are funny and that are creative and that are fun.
But there's an underlying message to them that there's a normalization of immoral activity that makes it normal.
Because, you know, when we laugh, it opens us up to various possibilities.
When we laugh, our defenses come down.
So I'm thinking of a wonderful, funny TV show like Friends.
But underlying that is a very ugly sexual ethic that normalizes multiple sexual partners and that sort of thing.
The kind of thing that Satan would love to inculcate into American culture.
And you know what?
I think it's much more efficient for Satan to influence movie makers and TV makers in Hollywood to create products that feed us stuff that without us even realizing it open us up to the occult, open us up to immoral activity, normalize it in ways that, well, if Monica to do that on Friends, I can certainly have sex on the first date with this guy I meet.
And you do, I've always noticed that the leadership of Christian churches in just like numerically, way more likely to be screwed up than the people in the pews.
Interesting.
Do you know what I mean?
You see these sex scandals with pastors and you're like, how many people who are going to church every Sunday have sex lives like that?
Probably not very many, but a pretty high percentage of pastors.
The Bible talks about in Ephesians, talks about the full armor of God.
And I talk about this in a book.
I have half a chapter that looks at ways that we can protect ourselves.
I think the key number one way is to be knowledgeable about scripture.
Because if the Bible is really from God, then that is the plumb line of truth.
And if it's the plumb line of truth, we can measure everything against it.
And so if we're tempted by something that violates that plumb line of truth, then we can be assured that's not from God.
And so I think being familiar with what are the teachings of the Bible so that we can deter any effects, any attempts by Satan to lead us down a path that's clearly not biblical.
So I think that's probably the number one way.
I think prayer is important.
I think honestly, and I say this, granted, as an evangelist who wants to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can, that's my life goal now as a former atheist.
I will say the best way to protect yourself is to come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Because if you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, you can't be possessed by Satan.
Holy Spirit, you know, God is one what and three who's.
The Bible teaches there is one God.
That's clear.
But it also teaches that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
And so we have three, we have one what, which is God, and three persons.
And so the Holy Spirit, being disembodied and so forth, comes into the life of someone when they repent of their sin, receive forgiveness through Christ.
John 1, 12 says, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.
Now you've got a plumb line inside of you, so to speak, and you recognize, I'm sure you see things in your life now as a Christian that you did before you were a Christian.
You say, why did I even do that?
What was I messing with that?
I certainly have those examples because now being indwelled by the Holy Spirit as a follower of Jesus, I have that plumb line to tell me what's godly and what's not.
And so it aids our conscience in understanding that.
And by being indwelled by the Holy Spirit, it means we cannot be possessed by Satan as we see these demon possessions.
And those are increasing in numbers.
The Catholic Church has just added a whole bunch of people who are trained in exorcisms.
You see, in charismatic ministries, deliverance ministries, I think we're seeing an increase in demonic activity and in demons hectoring and harassing and oppressing and possessing people.
Good friend who has a ministry in Haiti, and that's a place that has opened itself up to the demonic through human sacrifice, through voodoo, through all these things.
And it is a place where you palpably feel evil often.
I was in some remote parts of India and felt the same thing in many places.
So I think there is just as miracles tend to break out in a positive way in places where the gospel is breaking in.
I think we probably see pockets around the globe where Satan has a stronghold.
Mystical dreams, I talk about these in the book, is so fascinating to me.
We have seen more Muslims become Christians in the last couple of decades than in the 1400 years since Muhammad.
And it's been estimated that a quarter to a third of them before they became a Christian had a Jesus dream.
Now, what's interesting about that is that these are corroborated dreams.
I'll tell you what I mean by that.
First of all, a devout Muslim has no incentive in a, let's say, in a closed country where it's even illegal to share the Christian gospel.
They have no incentive to have a dream as a product of their subconscious mind about Jesus, the Jesus of Christianity, because it might lead him into apostasy.
It might lead him to a death sentence in certain countries.
So there's no incentive for a devout Muslim to have a dream about Jesus.
And yet, we are seeing this all over the Middle East in closed countries, in oppressive countries where Christians are persecuted and so forth.
But here's what I found most fascinating.
In these cases, people are not going to sleep as a Muslim, having a dream about Jesus and waking up as a Christian.
There is always something that points to a phenomenon or an event or a person outside the dream that corroborates the dream.
Let me give an example to clarify it.
There was a woman named Noor in Cairo, mother of eight, devout Muslim.
She goes to sleep.
She has a dream in which Jesus visits her.
It's like, unlike any dream she's ever had.
And she feels the love and the grace and the beauty of Jesus in such a profound way.
She said, Here I am, a woman in the presence of a man.
For the first time in my life, I didn't feel shame.
I felt love.
And she's just overwhelmed by this.
And they're walking along the lakeshore.
And she says, Jesus, why do you appear to me?
I'm just a poor mother of eight in Cairo.
And Jesus said, My friend will tell you tomorrow.
And she said, Who's your friend?
And Jesus gestures to a man she didn't even realize was walking with them along the lakeshore because she was so mesmerized by Jesus, she didn't notice this guy.
And he says, My friend will tell you tomorrow.
She wakes up.
The next day, she goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo on a Friday afternoon, and she sees the man from her dream.
She goes up to him.
Say, you're the one.
He's like, whoa, what are you talking about?
You're the man.
Same glasses, same face, same clothes.
You're the one.
He said, Did you have a dream about Jesus last night?
Say, yes.
Turned out he was an underground church planter.
He didn't want to go to the crowded marketplace in Cairo on Friday afternoon.
It's chaotic, but he felt God had an assignment for him.
So he went that day.
Noor encounters him from the dream.
He pulls her aside, opens the Bible, and shares the gospel with her.
That's the external corroboration that I'm talking about.
It's not just something that takes place in your subconscious mind.
I remember as a new Christian, I felt a really strong urging.
I believe it was from God to empty our bank account and send an anonymous cashier's check to a woman, a single woman in our church, send it anonymously, and to do it on Friday.
I don't know why, but it was on to do it on Friday.
And my wife and I both prayed about it.
I said, yeah, we're both feeling this.
It's odd, but we feel it's legit.
unidentified
So to empty your bank account and we emptied the bank account.
She had actually had a lot of negative experience with Christians growing up, but she ended up coming to faith through a debate on Christianity we did in our church between an atheist and a Christian.
And so I knew who she was and so forth.
So on Monday morning, she calls me out of the blue and she's crying.
She said, Lee, I don't know what to do.
I said, what's going on?
She said, my car broke down over the weekend.
They say it's going to cost $500 for me to fix my car.
I don't have $500.
I'm going to lose my car.
I'm going to lose my job because I got to have my car for the job.
Would you pray for me that I would get this $500 somehow?
And I said, absolutely.
I'll pray for me.
Let's pray.
And sure enough, that afternoon, because I'd mail on Friday, Monday afternoon, she gets this anonymous $500 check.
And the ad says, call this number and we'll tell you about the man in white you met in your dream last night because there's so many of these i interviewed for my book seeing the supernatural i interviewed tom doyle who is the world's leading expert on this and tom said lee i could pick up the phone right now and i could call syria i could call iraq i could call iran and i'll give you five more stories they are so common i'll give you one from my church in houston texas so
I'm part of a church.
I live part-time in Houston, part of a church there.
I used to be on the staff.
And there was a woman who was born in the Middle East in a closed country where you can't share the gospel legally.
And she had a dream when she was about 16 years old.
And she said it was unlike any dream I ever had because it was like a projector, was projecting an image of Jesus.
And it influenced her, it touched her, but she didn't know what to do with it.
And she said, I was having problems with my life.
I called out for help.
And that's what happened.
Well, she ended up marrying a Muslim gentleman who was transferred to Houston, Texas because of the oil industry.
So she moves into near our church and she has another dream.
And in this dream, she's up to her waist in a body of water.
And there's a man with her with a book that's open and the man is weeping.
And she's thinking, what does that mean?
What is that supposed to be?
Well, a neighbor of hers goes to our church and she invited her to come to Easter services at our church because her husband was out of town.
So she came to Easter services.
She's sitting on the aisle in the auditorium waiting for the service to begin.
And she sees the man who was with her in the pond And she said, that's the guy.
He was the one in my dream when I was in this pond for no reason whatsoever.
But I saw him.
Well, his name is Alan Splawn.
Alan is our pastor of baptism.
Alan comes over.
They introduce her.
This woman ends up receiving Jesus Christ as her forgiver and leader.
She becomes a Christian, and she learns about baptism.
And sure enough, Alan Splawn takes her to the pond on our property where we baptize new believers and with her water up to her waist and with Alan with the Bible open and weeping at the joy, baptizes her in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So there's a case in my own church in Texas like that.
And so in a sense, everything is spiritual, right?
I mean, God rules and so forth.
So in a sense, any dream is spiritual.
I think to me, a mystical dream is one that has strong spiritual overtones.
And there's no natural explanation to say this could come from your subconscious mind.
You know, I think sometimes people will write off a dream as saying, well, that's just something that came from your subconscious.
Maybe you saw something on television, didn't even realize it, and it was in your subconscious.
But when you have examples like the one I gave, that doesn't make sense.
I'll give you another example.
There was a guy named Omar.
And Omar grew up in a refugee camp in the Middle East, hated Jewish people, hated Jewish people.
His life goal was to murder as many Jews as he could.
And so he wanted to join Hamas.
This is about a dozen years ago.
He wanted to join Hamas.
So he makes arrangements to meet with some leaders of Hamas.
So he's walking down the road toward that meeting, and he's blocked by a vision of Jesus who stops him and says, Omar, this is not the plan I have for your life.
I want you to turn around.
I want you to go home.
This is not what I want for your life.
Well, it freaks him out, right?
And so what does he do?
He turns around and he goes home.
That afternoon, he lived in an apartment building.
That afternoon, an American family was moving into the apartment across the hall.
And he goes over there and he says, I just had this vision of Jesus telling me that.
And he explained the vision.
And he said, as a Christian, can you tell me what it means?
And this Christian man said, well, let me just do this.
And he opens the Bible and he shares the gospel with him.
And Omar not only becomes a Christian, but today he himself is an underground church planter in the Middle East.
Omar's not his real name, by the way.
So there you have, again, external corroboration.
The image, the vision he had pointed him ultimately towards somebody else who then explained the gospel.
That to me tells me this is more than a subconscious manifestation of something in our heads.
And that's what, as someone trained in journalism and the law, I'm looking for those kind of anesthesis of corroboration.
But the problem is they have to raise the sodium level very carefully because 25% of people with this condition end up mentally or physically disabled.
So they have to raise it.
So I was in the hospital about a week and they had to gently, slowly raise.
I would look at all of the factors involved where we have the external corroboration like people left with scratches on them or bruises that cannot be explained, where we have levitation, where we have people speaking in a language they don't know, spontaneously speaking Latin, things like that.
Then that is the external corroboration to me that there's something demonic going on.
It doesn't mean it couldn't be demonic.
I'm just saying those are the cases I'm more comfortable in concluding that they're demonic when I've got that kind of external corroboration.
But speaking in languages you don't know is also, can also be, is described as in the Acts of the Apostles as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit of God indwelling.
There are Christians who believe that those gifts have ended with the apostolic age and are no longer applicable.
There are other Christians who believe they are still active in this world.
I believe they are still active.
I've met Christians who speak in other tongues and others who interpret that.
So I believe it's a gift that still takes place.
I have not experienced that personally, but I have credible people who do and have experienced that.
There are other Christians, though, who say, no, no, no, that ended with the apostles.
So that's one of those side issues theologically that when we get to heaven, we can raise our hands and ask God, hey, what about that speaking in tongues thing?
I have no idea what I think about it, but it is true.
I guess just as a factual matter, it's true that there are people who, seized by some unseen force, begin speaking in languages they have never learned.
Yeah, if I've ever spoken, it's a spiritual language.
But then there's someone, and this is a good corroboration, someone who can interpret that and they understand it, this language, even though it is a spiritual language.
It's not Latin.
It's not Greek.
It's a spiritual language and that someone else is able to hear.
And they have a gift as well to interpret what is being said.
I mean, to do things in the name of God, Yahweh, in the name of God, is to do something consistent with how God is leading you and how scriptures would suggest that you act.
So in other words, to act in God's name is to do something consistent with his character.
So if I do something charitable to my personal loss and yet to someone else who's in great need, I do that in God's name.
I do that because this is what the Bible teaches me that I should be generous and helpful toward people who are hurting.
Names, you know, names in scripture, you know, you look at the name of Jesus is called Emmanuel.
Well, he's never called Emmanuel.
It said it was his name.
But what that means in the ancient language is that he is God with us.
That's what Emmanuel means, God with us.
And that was the name given to Jesus.
But that wasn't the name he was called, but it was a name that was associated with Jesus.
So names have all kinds of implications in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.
Yeah, I can't think of the exact terminology, but basically it's a way of saying there's rejoicing in heaven whenever a person becomes a Christian without saying the name of God rejoicing.
It kind of talks around that a bit.
So there's a hesitation and in fact, something you didn't want to do in the ancient Jewish world is to use the name of God that was forbidden.
So maybe right there, if we just pause, like maybe right there, we have further evidence that science, while useful, of course, and life-improving in some ways, does not have the tools to measure the totality of the experience.
I quote experts in the book that talk about that, that every civilization believed in the spirit, a spirit, a soul that continues to live on after we die.
Well, that's not only tragic, it's dangerous because if you believe we are only our brain, we're only neurons that are firing, that means technically we have no free will.
And seriously, you're saying we don't have free will.
How do you punish someone for doing something wrong if they really didn't have any further?
For leadership, if you don't believe human beings have souls, if that's not the basis of the way you understand other people as a separate person with a distinct and unique soul.
Right.
If you don't believe that, you can have no power in our society.
I have an interview in my book with a PhD from Cambridge University in Neuroscience who says the evidence is so persuasive that yes, indeed, we do have a soul.
What's interesting is that we have cases where people are clinically dead, their spirit separates from their body, and they see or hear things that would have been impossible for them to see or hear if their spirit had not actually separated from their body.
But she said later, I was conscious the whole time.
And her spirits floated out and she watched the, she's able to see the resuscitation efforts.
She was able to see childhood friends who she'd never seen in person, but she knew intuitively who they were.
Oh, that's Mary.
That's Jimmy.
She sees birds for the first time.
She sees trees and so forth.
And then when her body is revived and her spirit returns to her body, she's blind again.
Medical researchers said this is impossible based on current medical knowledge.
How does this happen?
So there's a phenomenon here that tells me that there's corroboration, that there's something to this idea that we have a soul, a spirit that is different than our physical brain and body.
And I'll add this.
This is really important.
John Burke is, I interview him for my book.
John Burke is a Christian pastor with an engineering degree and science background who studied 1,500 cases of near-death experiences in depth.
He has video interviews with people and so forth.
And here's his conclusion.
He said, Lee, if you look at not how people interpret what happens, because we all interpret things through our worldview, if you're a Muslim, if you're a Hindu, you're going to interpret things differently.
Forget that.
Set that aside.
Just look at what actually takes place during a typical near-death experience that is consistent with the Christian Bible.
Well, things like encountering a divine being, things like encountering people who had preceded you in death, things like a life review where your life is reviewed and you not only experience with this divine figure next to you who's encouraging you.
It's not a judgmental kind of a way.
It's you're judging yourself.
You're reviewing every little action you took, but you're able for the first time to see the ripple effects of that.
So I may have done something that hurt you years ago, and I never realized the impact that had on you and how that caused you to do this, that, and the other thing.
And yet in this life review, you see not only what you did and you did good and you did bad, but the ramifications of it.
Yes.
That takes place.
Now, you're not permanently dead.
The Bible says in Hebrews, we're appointed once to die and then the judgment.
So you would think that, biblically speaking, you would die and then you would encounter judgment.
Well, you're not permanently dead.
You're coming back.
This is not your permanent death.
So this is kind of a taste, a foretaste of what death is like, but you're not permanently dead.
You're just clinically dead.
But you still have some of the attributes of what the Bible talks about in terms of a judgment.
So I think that's reassuring for Christians like me who used to think, oh, that's new age stuff, near-death experience.
That's what we've, there have been, Tucker, 900 scholarly articles written about near-death experiences in medical journals and scientific journals over the last 50 years.
This is a very well-researched area.
And they have concluded that there is no natural explanation that can account for all of the aspects of a near-death experience.
It's a fascinating area.
And so I interview, as I said, John Burke, who's an expert on them, to give examples of this sort of thing.
In a deathbed vision, this is a vision someone has just before they die.
They're not coming back.
I mean, they're permanently going to die.
But we see a biblical example of this in the book of Acts.
We see Stephen, who is described as being full of the Holy Spirit, who is on the verge of being stoned to death.
And he looks up and he sees the heavens open up and he sees the father and the son together.
So this has a biblical precedent.
But what is fascinating, and I think what you said is so true, people don't like to talk about it because at all.
Because if you have one of these experiences before you die, you think they're going to think I've got dementia.
They're going to think I'm nuts.
They're going to think, you know, so a lot of people don't like to talk about it.
So there's a researcher.
He went to a huge hospice facility in New York State, and they went to all the dying people and they said, please, as a favor, if you have a vision, a dream unlike any you've ever had, tell us.
Would you tell us?
And so 88% of those dying people had a pre-death vision that they reported on before they died.
88%.
I think the other 12% probably had one, but they died before they were able to say anything.
We have this in near-death experiences and in deathbed visions where people who are about to die have a glimpse, I believe, of a hellish experience to come.
And they are frightened beyond belief and scared beyond words.
I'll give you an example of a near-death vision where this happened.
There's a man named Howard Storm.
Howard was an atheist.
He was a professor of art at a secular university, chairman of the art department.
And he was visiting France and he died of a heart attack.
So here he is.
He's in a French hospital.
He's dead.
But he said later, I was conscious the whole time.
It was a near-death experience.
His spirit had separated from his body.
And there were some people in the hallway say, Howard, we've been waiting for you.
Come with us.
Come with us.
So he does.
And he's walking down the hallway.
His spirit is walking down the hallway with these people.
And it goes on and on and on.
And it gets darker and darker.
And then they're becoming abusive.
And they're saying, come on, come on.
Why are you so slow?
And then they start to attack him.
And he said, he said, no horror movie can ever capture the horror of what they did to me.
And this white orb comes and brings him and rescues him from that.
And he is restored.
Well, ultimately, his body is revived.
His spirit returns to his body.
This is such a profound experience that he not only renounced his atheism, he not only quit his tenured position as chairman of the art department at a secular university, he not only became a Christian, he went to seminary and he became a pastor.
And today he's a pastor of this little church.
I think it's in Kentucky or Oklahoma or somewhere in the middle of nowhere serving God.
That's how transformative this experience was.
But there are multiple cases of people having horrific.
In fact, one study of near-death experiences said it was 24% had negative experiences and not positive.
You know, I'd encourage people who are watching or listening to this podcast.
Next time you have a big family get together with the cousins and the uncles and the aunts and everything, ask people: do we have any family stories about deathbed visions or near-death experiences?
I bet you you'll find, oh, Uncle Bob had that experience or cousin Jim had that experience.
I was having dinner with seven people in Oklahoma City, and four of them, we talked about this, four of them had relatives who had pre-death visions.
And so you just, it's not something we wanted to mess with.
And I think there's got to be reasons for that.
I think because it opens the door to the demonic, that you're trying to consult the dead.
You're trying to find out something apart from what God might reveal through a psychic, through a medium who supposedly has a cultic wherewithal and is able to take you down that pathway.
It's dangerous.
And I talk in the book about the tricks that they use to, I mean, there's things like cold readings and warm readings and hot readings, where people who want to fool you into thinking they know more about you than they do will employ that.
And they think, oh my gosh, this person knows all about me.
No, they don't.
They're just very clever people who are able to read certain things about you.
On the one hand, there are a couple of cases in scripture where the dead have come back like that.
Elijah came back and the transfiguration.
So there's an example of a dead person coming back.
There's the other example of in the Old Testament of going to a medium and a dead person coming back, not because of the power of the medium, because she was surprised it happened, but through the power of God, he allowed that dead person to come back.
So there are a couple of perhaps precedents in scripture of dead people coming back.
One of the reasons I'm skeptical is because when Jesus was talking about in Luke 16 about the rich man who died and the beggar who died, he talked about a gulf between the living and the dead.
That concerns me.
So that raises some questions in my mind.
I think the transfiguration and the incident with what's called the medium of Endor in the Old Testament may be one-offs.
And those are unusual circumstances.
So I'm, Tucker, I'm not quite sure what to do with it because I talk about a couple of cases in the book where a dead relative returns and a person talks to that relative and then they disappear and then their child comes in, eight-year-old child says, I just saw grandpa.
I just talked to him.
So he experienced the same vision.
Well, that's pretty weird.
Yeah.
Is that corroboration and so forth?
Well, here's my concern.
So many times people have contact with these dead people.
These are people that lived ungodly lives.
And yet they say, everything's fine.
I'm fine.
Everything's good.
Just take care of the family.
Tell everybody I love them.
I'm good.
Don't worry about me.
That's the general message people get.
Well, what does that say to someone who is thinking about what do I need to do to live a life that will bring me to heaven and to God?
Well, Uncle Tom came and told me he's fine.
He was an adulterer and he never came to faith in Jesus.
He's a bad guy.
And yet he says he's fine in the afterlife.
Wouldn't that be something that a demon might want to imitate to send a false message?
I think maybe.
So I guess I'm giving you two answers.
One is there is some biblical precedent for a dead coming back, but I think they may be one-offs.
I'm not sure.
I think there'd be a good motive for Satan to counterfeit that.
You know, it says Satan can appear as an angel of light as a counterfeit.
He can fool us into thinking he's something he's not.
Would that be to his advantage to do, to mislead people?
A miracle is an event brought about by the power of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history.
This one I personally investigated, and it's been widely documented.
A woman named Barbara.
She was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic.
So we got all those records with multiple sclerosis as a teenager.
And it was progressive.
She got worse very quickly.
So she just got worse and worse and worse.
Multiple hospitalizations to the point where the doctor said, Look, and her parents said, look, next time she gets pneumonia, which she would get on a regular basis, we're just going to let her die.
Let her go, yeah.
Because we're just postponing the inevitable.
So here she is on her deathbed.
She hadn't walked in seven years, so her muscles had atrophied.
Her fingers were, she was curled up like a pretzel.
Her fingers were touching her wrists.
Her feet were permanently extended.
Her diaphragm was, one diaphragm was paralyzed.
So one lung was collapsed.
The other lung was at half full.
She had a tube in her throat that went to oxygen canisters in the garage.
She was in hospice at home, so she could breathe.
So she got a tube in her throat.
She had lost her urination and bowels, control of those.
She lost her eyesight.
So all she saw was gray shapes.
And she's on her deathbed.
She's dying.
Well, some people said, wait a minute, let's call WMBI, the Christian radio station at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and ask people on the radio show to pray for poor Barbara.
She's dying.
So they did.
Well, we documented that at least 450 people began praying for Barbara because they wrote letters to Barbara saying, I'm praying for you and to encourage her.
So here we are on Pentecost Sunday, 1981.
She is in her bedroom, and her aunt and two girlfriends are reading her some of these encouraging letters from people praying for her.
And from the corner of the room where nobody was, she heard the voice of God.
And the voice said, My child, get up and walk.
Well, she hadn't walked in seven years.
She had no muscle tone in her legs.
She pulled out the tube so she could talk.
And she said, I don't know what you're going to think of this, but God just told me to get up and walk.
Go find my parents.
I want them to be here.
So they ran out, but she couldn't wait.
She jumped out of bed.
She told me, she said, Lee, the first thing I noticed, my feet were flat in the floor.
And they hadn't been flat for years.
They've been rigidly extended, but they were flat in the floor.
Second thing I noticed, my hands had opened up like flowers and they hadn't opened up in years.
And then she said, the third thing I noticed, I could see.
She said, wouldn't you think that'd be the first thing I noticed?
It was actually the third thing I noticed.
She was instantaneously completely healed of multiple sclerosis.
Her mother came running in, fell to her knees, and grabbed her calves and said, Your muscle tone has come back.
It was Pentecost Sunday.
There was a service at their church, Wheaton Wesleyan Church.
They went, they decided to go and thank God that she was fine.
She's dancing, literally dancing around the house with her father.
So they go to church.
They're in the back.
The pastor gets up and says, Does anybody have any announcements?
Barbara comes walking.
Yeah, that's a good announcement.
Barbara comes walking down the center aisle.
People freaked out because they haven't seen her except in a wheelchair for seven years.
They began singing spontaneously, Amazing Grace.
I once was blind and now I see.
Totally healed.
She goes the next day to her doctor, one of her doctors.
He said later, he said, I saw her walking down the hallway toward my office.
My first thought was, oh, she died and that's a ghost.
He said, this is medically impossible.
And it is medically impossible.
She was instantaneously, totally healed of multiple sclerosis.
She ended up marrying a pastor at that little Wesleyan church in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
So if she's on her deathbed from MS, which is a well-studied disease, you know, like you would think that, you know, Harvard Medical School would just like cease operations until they figured out what that was.
But so many of the things you've said are also instantly recognizable to everyone listening, whatever their religious faith or lack of religious faith as things that do happen, actually.
It's real.
We all know that there are things that happen to us and people we know well and love that are outside the ability of science to explain.
They're supernatural.
So my final question to you, Lee Strobel, and this has been amazing.
When you take it seriously and when you look at it like you not take it seriously grow up in a culture that tells you none of it's real and yet it's super obvious that it is super obvious that it's real in some most general sense.
I think the fact that I've been a Christian since November the 8th of 1981 and I've never heard a sermon on the topic of angels in my life tells you something.
I think I think we shy away because We want to be accepted as normal.
And if 40% of Americans have had an experience that they can only attribute to a miracle of God, that means the other 60% probably know one of those 40%, right?
And oh, my brother had this experience.
My cousin had.
And we kind of say, what do we do with that?
And I think what we ought to do is look for that which is corroborated and which is consistent with what we trust to be true, which for me are the Christian scriptures.
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