Wow! During my last business trip my final connection home was held up in Denver due to flight delays. While I sat at the gate catching up on email an elderly lady sat down one chair away from me. We began to talk about the towns in Kansas we both were familiar with and about some of the places she has lived over the years. When she mentioned that her daughter sees the angel of death, I started paying more attention. Then she began talking about how she interacts with spirits and about the vast unseen spiritual world. It was then that I realized I had better shut off my computer and seriously engage this sweet little old lady about the truth.
It would take hours to unpack everything she talked about – things ranging from reincarnation to the lost city of Atlantis. There are a few main things that I focused on, however, and I would like to share them with you in this blog and in the next. First, I asked her how she knew if the spirits she communicates with are good. She admitted to the existence of evil spirits (which I will hereafter refer to as demons), but she was quite confident in her ability to discern between the two. Her means of discernment was based solely on how she felt inside. “You just know on the inside when something is true, when they are good spirits,” she said repeatedly. I challenged her on this subjective view of spiritual truth. I told her that Jesus Christ, as the risen Son of God, is the only one with the authority to speak on such matters. One should only rely on His objective teaching of spiritual truths instead of our personal subjective judgment. Since Satan masquerades as an angel of light, you cannot be sure if you truly are speaking to an angel or demon. Scripture alone contains the proper teaching on the spiritual world, and our limited, sin-influenced personal feelings can easily be deceived and manipulated by demons.
Another belief she had was that all religions serve the same god. This was a softball and an easy one to refute. I asked her why God would contradict Himself – why would He say Jesus is His Son and not His Son at the same time? Christianity (Jesus is God’s Son) and Islam (Jesus is not God’s Son) cannot both be true (this is the logical law of noncontradiction). This stumped her until she pulled out the “true for me, true for you” card. She promptly used a rose as an example – that she could believe it is a wonderful flower but I could hate it because I was allergic to it. Yes, I agreed that this was an illustration of the subjective quality of liking something, but regarding an objective truth such as color, could the rose be both red and yellow at the same time? The rose would either be red or not red – it could not be both, regardless of how much we each believed both to be true. This also seemed to stump her as well.
In my next blog I will share about her view of Christ and her response to the Gospel. I was reminded after this encounter that our command as Christians is not to win arguments but to win souls. There were a lot of things that I could have countered, but I tried to focus on such elemental beliefs as knowledge and truth during the short time we had together. Please pray for this dear old lady, that she would be delivered from Satan’s deception and be brought into the love and truth of Jesus Christ.
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