Hi, this is Jim Daly. I hope you and your family are experiencing a godly sense of hope and joy this Christmas season. I'm so thankful you've joined us today for more Bible-based encouragement for your marriage, parenting, and faith. And in this season of giving, we invite you to join our support team here at Focus on the Family. At this time of year, we typically raise nearly 50% of our annual budget.
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Call 800A Family or donate at focusonthefamily.com/slash family. I think of those TV shows that I wasn't allowed to watch as a kid. Ghosts and witches that I see like in pop culture and on TV. I immediately think of the Lord and I think out of this world. Really bad science fiction movie.
It's either God doing something or Satan doing something.
Well, we live in a spiritual world, and that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You might think of ghosts or science fiction, but as believers in Christ, we know that God's supernatural presence is evident everywhere in our lives. Today, on this best of 2025 episode of Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, we're going to hear from Lee Strobel. He'll explore what supernatural really looks like in the Bible. And thanks for joining us.
I'm John Fuller. You know, John, I always enjoy having Lee Strobel here. I think partly because my heart is for evangelism. I mean, I think at my core, I'm an evangelist. You are.
And not a prophet or a teacher. And I just get excited when Lee's here because we connect and it comes across. And I think a lot of people are wired that way. You know, we want to reach people for Christ and introduce people to Christ because of what he has done for us. And that's the excitement.
I always, you know, people I encounter that are like, oh, you Christians, all you want to do is convert us. That's not out of some kind of number thing. It's because we're enjoying a joyful life and we want you to participate. We want you to have. That.
And so here at Focus, that's one of the things we try to concentrate on. Dr. Dobson always used to say: we can help a family, help a marriage, but if we don't introduce them to the author of the family, we've kind of failed in that mission.
So that's why we love to have guests like Lee Strobel come in and talk about, you know, discipleship, evangelism, those things that really buttress everything else. And we're going to explore those things today with a new book that Lee has, Seeing the Supernatural. Yeah, it's really going to be an interesting conversation as we look for God's hand in all of life. And Lee describes himself as an atheist, turned Christian. He's a best-selling author.
He's been on this show a number of times. And he's founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University.
Now, today, Jim, as you noted, we're talking about Lee's book, Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World. And you can Learn more about this terrific resource and our guest when you click the link in the show notes. Lee, welcome back. Always good to see you. Great to be here.
I love you guys and your ministry here and how you touch so many lives and share Jesus with so many folks. I've never said this before, but given your book title, Seeing the Supernatural, I wish I was William Shatner. That sounds like a show. It sounds like a show he would be hosting, right? But it is an interesting area, and so many people express that interest.
I mean, that's why you do have television shows that talk about the supernatural and what's going on. And, you know, one of the things, Lee, that is so important for us to understand is why people are drawn to that. What is it that piques our interest? What do you think it is?
Well, you're right. About eight out of 10 people believe that there is something beyond what we can see and touch. And yet we live in a scientific age, a technological age, where a lot of the elites among us, a lot of the ones who form popular culture and so forth, try to tell us that, no, no, no, we can only believe in that which we can. See and touch or put in a test tube. It's called scientific materialism.
There's nothing beyond what we can actually encounter personally in our world.
Well, I was a skeptic for much of my life and believed that. The Bible, of course, talks about a whole dimension beyond the realm in which we find ourselves. But are there really bits of evidence that point toward the truth that there really is this other realm? And I think people are curious because popular culture likes to delve into things like UFOs and ancient aliens and ghosts and things like that, the occult, very popular. You know, when I was watching the Super Bowl this year, I'm seeing images of people in the stands with voodoo dolls.
And it's like New Orleans. Yeah, it was New Orleans. Which is a little higher. There's a higher with that whole thing. Let me.
I can't believe somebody doesn't know Lee Strobel, but again, I think your background will bring credibility to this whole discussion. But you were an atheist. You were this reporter with the Chicago Tribune. You were the why guy. Yeah, that's right.
Why does it work that way? Why do you say that? I don't believe that. And you were an investigative. Reporter.
It's in your makeup to doubt. I want corroboration. I want facts. Give me evidence. I want corroboration.
That's right. That's right. You say you love me?
Well, how do I know? What's the corroboration? You know, before we get married, you know. But so, yeah, you're right. And, you know, what amazes me is the level of corroboration there is for a supernatural realm.
It is absolutely stunning when you look at things like deathbed visions of people before they die, how common those are.
Well, we're going to talk about all that. I want to start with a couple of stories that you start with in the book on supernatural experiences. Why don't we talk about, I think it was a Secret Service agent. Yes. This is a guy I hope you could trust.
Yeah, that's right. This is a guy, he's trying to get to sleep, it's 3 a.m., and all of a sudden he feels gripped as if. As if his mother was hugging him. You know, this he never had this sensation before. Just in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., this gripping, and it scared him.
He literally jumped out of bed and got his gun and went hunting in the house. How was that real? It was that real. It was like, this is so unusual.
So it's got to be, is there somebody in the house or what is going on? Finally, he goes back to bed. And when he went back to bed, he felt a sense of peace. And then he gets a phone call two hours later that at 3 a.m. when this happened, his mother died.
So right at the same time. Right at the same time that he had this experience of feeling hugged at that moment. And he said, you know, if I didn't believe in God before that, I do now. Let me ask you, though, I mean, people, again, I think within the Christian community, many are skeptics as well. And we say, well, you know, we kind of like that idea of science and naturalism.
And, you know, we need to see it, taste it, touch it, even within the church. Yeah. How do you explain that happening with him, but not with somebody else? Yeah, exactly. And I raise the question when I tell that story in the book, I say, could there be a natural explanation for this?
Was it a coincidence? Maybe, could have been, or was it something supernatural? Was it a counter? And Christians tend to want to not believe it could be something that God allowed to happen for whatever purpose. Yeah, I find a lot of Christians really shy away from delving into the supernatural realm.
You know, when you deal with things like near-death experiences or deathbed visions or even God intervening directly in people's lives in a dramatic way. We should believe it. We should believe it because, my goodness, we see evidence of that kind of thing happening in the Bible. I guess that good skepticism is you can go too far and everything becomes something. That's right.
And it becomes a superstition kind of a thing. And what are you really believing in here and so forth?
So some of these things that I talk about in the book, it could have multiple possibilities in terms of could it be a natural explanation? But often the evidence is much stronger that it's some sort of supernatural encounter. And it's good to keep our spiritual eyes wide open for those things as believers so that we can identify what we believe to be true and what possibly is false. I was interviewing a famous theologian and kind of a stayed theologian, you know how they are. And he grew up in a Pentecostal home where he said there was an expectation of the supernatural.
And then he told me a story. He said, In my church, when I was growing up, there was a family driving in their car, this is the day before seatbelts, and their 10-year-old child. opened the back door and fell out of the car at seventy miles an hour.
Well, they thought, My gosh, he's going to be dead.
So they stopped, they turned around, they went back and they found their son standing there in the street, perfectly fine. And they said, What happened? And he said, Oh, you didn't see the man that caught me. Wow. And this theologian pulled out his handkerchief and started to dab his eyes.
He says, I miss that. I miss being in that culture where there was an expectation of the supernatural. I believe an angel caught him. And that'll shape your faith really. Exactly.
Wonder what happened to that boy. Yeah, good question. His life. Yeah. You mentioned another story, and then we'll get into some of the things you talked about, but Pastor John Boston.
What a great name. Yeah, I know. John Boston. What happened to John? John was in a car accident.
His car hit a utility pole. An electric wire fell down and electrified the car. The door of the car was jammed shut. And then there's a scruffty man appears from nowhere and comes up. and opens the car door.
Has an oil effect, opens the car door, takes out this pastor, takes about 50 feet away, and then the car kind of blows up, and that was it. And then he walked away and disappeared. And this guy, this pastor said, it must have been an angel. I believe it was an angel that rescued me. Of course, the Bible says there are times when we provide hospitality unknowingly to angels.
And so we do have, according to the Bible, these interactions sometimes with angels. And he's convinced that that's what took place. And, you know, we interview some of the emergency medical people who came, and they have no explanation for how this could have taken place and how somebody could easily have opened that car door in the midst of that terrible accident. Yeah, sometimes the best explanation is the one right in front of you. And especially, again, as believers, the word says that.
Do we strike that from scripture? Yeah. We say, well, we believe all of it, but that line. Yeah. The Lord told us.
Exactly. Exactly that. Let's go to the soul. I mean, we have worldviews that compete on this idea. That the human soul exists.
Describe for people that haven't maybe thought about this: what is the soul? Yeah, the soul or our consciousness, our spirit, is the locus of our introspection. It's our first-person perspective, and so forth. It's the center of our emotions and our thoughts and so forth.
Now, there are scientists today, many of them, who will say, no, no, no, we're just a brain. We really don't have consciousness. That's an illusion. You are just the product of your neurons firing in your brain and your environment. You don't even have free will.
Most of them will say you don't even have free will. You think you do, but you don't. And yet, I think the Bible presumes that there's a soul, that there's a consciousness, that there's a spirit. It never comes out and says, by the way, this is what the soul is. It just presumes it, as virtually every civilization in history has presumed we have a soul.
When I interviewed a neuroscientist from Cambridge University in this book, Seeing the Supernatural, and she talks about how, as a scientist, she can map things that happen in the brain, areas of the brain that light up when certain thoughts take place or whatever. She said, Those aren't the thoughts, those are correlated to the thoughts. She said, There's been no discovery of modern neuroscience that disproves the existence of God. And she said, and contrary, if there is a God, this would explain why we have a mind, not just a brain, but a mind. Because we're made in His image.
We're made in His image. God is a disembodied mind. Mind. And so it makes sense that we would have a mind as well.
So, yeah, I think it's important because the Bible says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Jesus told the other person being crucified on the cross next to him, he said, Today you'll be with me in paradise.
Well, you know, Christian teaching is that at the moment of death, our spirit, our soul, separates from our physical body and goes either to be with the Lord or away from the Lord until. The consummation of history, when Jesus returns, when our body is reunited with our soul, and where we have final judgment, and then we spend eternity either in the presence of God or absent His presence in hell.
So it's consistent with scripture that we would have a soul that survives the death of the physical body. And we see this in near-death experiences as well. In fact, Lee, I think this scientist you're quoting also compared the soul to coffee.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Actually, she was saying that, you know, how do you describe the smell of coffee? And she asked me that as a writer, and I'm saying, how would I describe the aroma of coffee? And she said, you know, we could talk about. The physical makeup of caffeine, the chemical makeup of caffeine. That doesn't get you very far.
We could talk to what happens in your body when you consume coffee, but that doesn't get us to the smell of coffee. She said the smell of coffee is an example of what they call qualia, which are things that we can't really capture except in a first-person experience. You have to experience it. And that's what the first-person perspective and first-person experience is: what the soul, the consciousness, the spirit provides to us. What we see and touch can only take us so far.
This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and our guest today is Lee Strobel. We so appreciate Lee and this perspective on things that maybe don't make sense but do make sense. Lee's book is called Seeing the Supernatural. The full subtitle is Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World. Get a copy of this book from us here at the ministry.
The link is in the show notes. Lee, when we read the Bible, there's many accounts of miracles in there, but literally denominations have sprung up with those that believe those miracles no longer exist or those that believe that's really the only thing that exists and everything in between. But even the idea that so many denominations or churches have risen up based on this theological difference, what should we as healthy believers look at when we read these scriptures? And the deaf can hear and the blind can see and the lame can walk and you know the routine. And we don't see it as often today, at least in Western culture.
I hear more of this in Africa and parts of Asia.
So what's going on?
Well, we do see miracles in clusters around the planet, as you mentioned, where the gospel is just breaking in in Mozambique, in Brazil, in China. It's been estimated that 90% of the growth of the church in China is a result of people either themselves have had a miracle in their life or they know somebody who has. Interesting.
So, but. Nevertheless, there are modern miracles that, and again, I'm a skeptic, so I want documentation, I want corroboration, I want investigation. And so, what it does for me is it does two things. Number one, it gives me more evidence that God exists, and number two, it gives me more confidence in the gospels and in the Bible. Because if Jesus did miracles in the first century, a lot of people find that an impediment to believing the gospels as being true.
But if we're still seeing miracles today, then they certainly could have taken place in the first century.
So, it's a way almost of corroborating what the gospels are telling us.
So, I look at cases that are particularly either Published in peer-reviewed medical journals that are done as scientific studies. And there are cases, I'm telling you, that there is no explanation other than a supernatural event has taken place. I'll give you an example. It's a woman who was blind for 12 years from an incurable medical condition. She went to a school for the blind.
She learned to read Braille. She walked with a white cane. and she married a Baptist pastor.
So one night they're getting ready for bed, and she's in bed, and he comes up and he starts to cry. And he puts his hand on her shoulder, and he begins to pray. He says, Lord, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can restore her sight. And I pray you will do it right now.
And she opened her eyes to perfect eyesight. And she said, I was blind when my husband started praying. I opened my eyes. I've got perfect eyesight. It's a miracle.
I can't believe it. My life has changed. And for 47 years since then, she's had good eyesight. Yeah. This is again published in a peer-reviewed medical journal as a case study.
How do you account for that? Where did she live? I'm not sure what town she was in. But in the U.S. In the United States.
Wow. And you know, part of me is going, really? I need to see that. Yes, exactly as you. You know, there was, I did a study.
I hired George Barnes' organization to do a study, and I asked a cross-section of American adults: have you ever had at least one experience in your life that you can only explain as a miracle of God? Wow. 38% of American adults said yes.
Now, Let's just throw out 99% of them. Let's say, yeah, they think it was a miracle. It was just a big coincidence. Let's throw out 99%. That still leaves a million miracles just in the United States.
So God is still in the miracle business. And we see scientific tests that have been done that point toward miraculous things taking place. A woman from Indiana University, a professor with a PhD from Harvard, went to Mozambique to investigate a cluster of miracles.
Now, here's the thing. This is a valid scientific study that was published in a secular, scientific, peer-reviewed medical journal, the Southern Medical Journal, a reputable medical journal. And I went and in my book, Seeing the Supernatural, I interviewed the scholar that did this research. I said, what's your conclusion? And she said, well, being a professor at a secular university, she can only go so far.
So she said, well, Something is going on. Interesting.
Something is going on. You know, Lee, now that you're saying this, you know, I go to Mayo for a checkup every year. There is more talk about the importance of prayer, the importance of God, even in those medical discussions because they're seeing those that do that have quicker recovery, better outcomes. And so even the medical profession is noticing something in this area of spirit. Yep, that's right.
That's very true. And it's just really kind of come out over the last year. There's been a number of studies like that. One of the problems with those studies is, though, they'll divide people like they're recovering from a heart attack, let's say. And these people are going to pray for, and these people are not going to pray for.
Yeah, because you know the people not being prayed for, somebody's praying for, right? They have family members.
So it's hard to kind of get it. But you're right. There have been a series of scientific studies published in publications through the years that have established that something is going on.
So this is going to be, it's going to feel like a left face. Question here, but in the book, you talk about evil kin evil. Yeah, I can remember being a teenager going, This guy's crazy, right? But but it's, I tell the story in the book. He, this is an example of God, um, supernaturally intervening in a life.
Uh, evil can evil lived an evil life in many ways. He was a gambler, he was a womanizer, he was a drunk. Um, Very successful financially, but he's standing on the beach in Florida toward the end of his life. And he told me, he said, God spoke to me. He said, I didn't hear him through my ear, I heard him in my ear.
Chest in my body, and God said to me, Robert, which is his real name, Robert, I've saved you more times than you'll ever know.
Now you need to come to me through my Son Jesus. And he freaked out. He didn't know what to do. I don't even know who Jesus is.
So the only Christian he knew was Frank Gifford. Remember the sports car? Frank Gifford, sure. And so he calls Frank and said, Frank, I just had this experience. I don't know who's Jesus.
And Frank said, get that book, The Case for Christ, by Lee Strow. Yeah, that'll explain it.
So he gets back. Anyway, Evil Knievel had a radical born-again experience, 180-degree turn in his life. Just remarkable. When he was baptized, he shared his testimony. The pastor ripped up his sermon and said, You all have heard the gospel?
This is a church that never had an altar call. He said, Anybody wants to come up right now, receive Christ, and be baptized? 700 people. Came forward in two services. It was Christian Today did an article about it.
It was like Pentecost. I mean, and we became friends. I remember the first time he called me, I answered the phone. I said, Hi, this is Lee. And he says, This is Lee Strobel.
I said, Yes. He said, This is evil. And I thought, Satan has got my phone number. Is this even possible? I said, No, no, evil could even.
Oh, okay. I was going to say, if you went to dinner, you didn't let him drive, did you? You know what? You know, he died. Hey, Lee.
Let me, no, I'll drive. He actually died about a year and a half after he came to faith. And on his tombstone, it says, Believe in Jesus. Wow. Tom Doyle is a mutual friend.
He used to pastor here in Colorado Springs. And we've had him on the broadcast here. And he kind of parlayed his ministry being a pastor into reaching out to those in the Middle East and having ministry to the Muslims. That's right. And he has got some incredible stories that, again, we don't see or experience a lot of here in the U.S.
That's right. Describe some of Tom's. I interviewed him in my book, Tom, who, by the way, just recovered from cancer. Thank God, and we've been praying for Tom. He's doing great now.
But I interviewed him about this: this phenomenon in the Middle East where Muslims are going to sleep and having dreams about Jesus. These have corroboration. Here's what I mean. I'll give you an example. There's a woman named Noor, and Noor lived in Cairo.
She had eight children, and she's a Muslim. She goes to sleep. She has a Jesus dream. And Jesus appears to her. She feels, this is like no other dream she's ever had.
Jesus, she felt the grace and the love. It overwhelmed her. And she's walking in her dream with Jesus along the lake shore. And she says, Jesus, tell me more about you. And Jesus said, My friend will tell you.
And she said, Well, who's your friend? And he points to a guy she hadn't even noticed who was walking with them. And he said, My friend will tell you. She wakes up. The next day, she goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo.
And she's walking through the crowd and she sees the man from her dream. Oh my. And she walks up to him. You're the man. He's like, whoa, what are you talking about?
You're the man. I saw you in the same glass, the same face, same clothes. And he said, wait a minute. Did you ever dream about Jesus? And she said, yes.
And he turned out he was a missionary. Oh, okay. And he came over and he opened the Bible and shared the gospel. And this is the phenomenon that we see. People don't go to sleep as a Muslim, have a Jesus dream, and wake up as a Christian.
The dreams point them towards something else and something that's corroborative. And that's a good example of that. This is so common in the Middle East. There's ads sometimes in the Cairo newspaper that says, call this number and we'll tell you about the man in white you encountered in your dream last night. Right.
You know, both of us have another mutual friend in John Burke who wrote The God of Heaven, Imagine the God of Heaven. Great. And he's a researcher of near-death experiences. Right. But Gene and I, we got a hold of the audio.
Version of the book, The God of Heaven. And so in there was a story about a Muslim who came to Christ and through a near-death experience. And I'm having this discussion with the Lord. You can't do that with every Muslim. Is that fair?
Yeah. No, this is dangerous territory. But I said, Lord, is that fair that some will have a vision, have a dream, have a near-death experience, others won't? Yeah. And what I heard in my spirit in the middle of the night, so I didn't concoct this, it was, oh, do you set the boundaries of my grace?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then the immediate follow-up was, I love everyone of my creation. Yeah. Everyone.
Yeah. And it was such a feeling of that. It was deeper than just an intellectual. It was like the. immeasurable love God has for every person.
Yes. Believer or non-believer. And you know, the Bible says in the Old Testament, Jeremiah, the New Testament, Hebrew, that those who sincerely seek God will find Him. And we had an example in our own church in Texas, where I was a teaching pastor down there. We had a woman who is Muslim from the Middle East.
When she was about 22 years old, she had a dream in which Jesus appeared to her because she had been in a quest. She was in a crisis in her life, and she called out, God, if you're there, I want to meet you. I want to know you. I want to encounter you. She has this dream about Jesus.
It kind of opened her eyes to the possibilities there. They moved to Texas because her husband was in the oil industry. She has another dream. And in this dream, there's a man with her standing in a pool of water up to her waist. And he's reading a book and he's weeping.
And she has no idea what this means. And she meets a woman from our church, and the woman invites her to come to our Easter services at our church.
So she comes, and she's waiting in the auditorium for the service to begin. And she sees the man from her dream, the one with the book, the one who was, he was a man in my dream. He was a pastor of baptism at our church. She had dreamed about baptism, even though she didn't even know what it was. She ended up coming to faith, and sure enough, that guy ended up in our pond at the church, up to their waist in water, with the Bible, weeping as he then baptized her as a new believer in Christ.
What a great story and what great insights from Lee Strobel today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Lee has such wonderful observations about how God shows up in the most unusual circumstances. Yeah, and to our listener, I hope you've experienced God in one of those miraculous, unexplainable ways. I love how the Lord uses his people to extend his touch to our everyday world. In fact, that's why Focus on the Family exists.
We want to be the hands and feet of Jesus for your family. And we hear so many wonderful, heartwarming stories. One listener, Elena, wrote to tell us, Thank you, Focus on the Family, for the powerful impact you've had on my life and marriage. I began listening during a difficult first year of marriage, and your programs changed my heart, teaching me how to love God and my husband more deeply. Nine years later, with two wonderful children, I'm So grateful for how your ministry continues to guide and bless our family.
What a beautiful testimony. And you know what? Just that emphasis of our ministry together, those that support the ministry, that's the bounty. This is what we're trying to do: to help people move closer and closer to God. And man, thank you for helping us do that.
But we can't do it without you. This Christmas season, you have a wonderful opportunity to deliver hope and joy to families in crisis through your support of Focus on the Family, just like Elena's testimony there. Your gift can bring real help to couples on the brink of divorce, parents who feel overwhelmed, and others who need encouragement right now.
So donate and join us in ministry. When you give a gift of any amount to Focus on the Family today, we'll send you a copy of Lee Strobel's outstanding book, Seeing the Supernatural, as our way of saying thank you for stepping up and supporting families. And right now, through a special match opportunity, your year-end gift will be doubled, dollar for dollar, and God will use your gift to bring healing and redemption and hope to twice the families. Donate today and get your copy of the book Seeing the Supernatural when you call 800, the letter A and the word family. 800-232-6459.
or online, and the link is in the show notes. While you're at our website, sign up for our free audio collection of this year's most popular Focus on the Family with Jim Daly episodes. You're going to get encouragement for strengthening your marriage, improving your parenting, growing in your faith, and even overcoming trauma, all from a trusted biblical perspective. And the 20 featured programs include insights from folks like Jay John, Lee Strobel, and Gary Chapman, the late Dr. Gregory Jance, and Sheila Walsh, and many more.
Again, that's a free audio collection of our best of shows. You'll find the link in the show notes. And thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we continue the conversation with Lee Strobel and once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Jesus Christ is the ultimate source of truth.
As we celebrate his birth this Christmas, I hope you'll be inspired to share God's truth with grace and love. Become better equipped by listening to my podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly from Focus on the Family. Every episode, I talk to fascinating guests about important cultural issues and how we can reach people for Christ and share his joy. Listen at refocus with JimDaily.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
