What Does the Bible Say About the Supernatural? (Part 1 of 2)

Focus on the Family has great resources for all types of families, and what I would encourage you to do is to go on their website, poke around, see what type of resources are available. They have an 800 number that you can call, you can talk to someone, you can even pray with someone at Focus on the Family, and they will steer you in the right direction. Linda is a big believer in our mission to strengthen and support families, and that's why she gives monthly to Focus. You know, whether it's just getting resources online or being able to make monetary donations, it's a great ministry. I'm Jim Daly. Working together, we can be a lifeline to families, giving them godly truth and hope.

Join our monthly support team today by calling 800 the letter A in the word family, or visit focusonthefamily.com slash families. 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.

Some really bad science fiction movie. It's either God doing something or Satan doing something. Well, we see the word supernatural in a lot of different contexts, and it means many different things to different folks. You might think of ghosts or science fiction, but as Christians, as followers of God, we know that his supernatural presence is evident in every aspect of our lives. Today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, we have Lee Strobel talking about what supernatural really looks like in the Bible and in our lives. 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. 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 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. Oh, 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 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 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 believe 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. Sure, psychics, all that kind of thing. 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, are you serious? Well, it was New Orleans. Yeah, it was New Orleans. Which is a little higher.

There's a higher rate there. 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. You know, I want facts. Give me evidence.

That sounds so romantic. 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, you know, supernatural experiences. Why don't we talk about, I think it was a Secret Service agent. 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, he never had the 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. It was that real. It was that real. It was like, this is so unusual.

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.

You know, we need to see it, taste it, touch it. Even within the church. How do you explain that happening with him, but not with somebody else?

Yeah, exactly. And I raise a 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 an encounter with God? And why do these 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 in that stuff. 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 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 staid 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, that's the day before seatbelts, and their 10-year-old child opened the back door and fell out of the car at 70 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. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Yeah, that'll shape your faith real quick. Exactly. Wonder what happened to that boy.

Yeah, good question. In his life. You mentioned another story, and then we'll get into some of the things you talked about, but Pastor John Boston. Yes. 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 this scruffy man appears from nowhere and comes up and opens the car door, has no ill effect, opens the car door, takes out this pastor, takes him 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 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.

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 and so forth. 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? We say, well, we believe all of it but that line. No, the Lord told us. Exactly.

Exactly that. Let's go to the soul. I mean, we have world views 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 talked 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. 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 do it. 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. 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. 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 is taking 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, and 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 with 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.

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 part of me is going, really?

I need to see that. Yes, in fact, I did a study. I hired George Barna's 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?

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 Ph.D. 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, and 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. That's very true.

And it's just really kind of come out over the last decade or so. There have 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, that's tough. Yeah, because you know the people not being prayed for, somebody's praying for them, 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 field question here, but in the book you talk about Evel Knievel. Yeah.

I can remember being a teenager going, this guy's crazy. Right. But. But I tell the story in the book. This is an example of God supernaturally intervening in a life. Evel Knievel lived a evil life in many ways. He was a gambler, he was a womanizer, he was a drunk.

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 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 sportscaster?

Frank Gifford, sure. And so he calls Frank and says, 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 Strobel. Oh, seriously? Yeah, yeah, that'll explain it.

Oh, my. So he gets, anyway, Evel 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 who wants to come up right now, receive Christ, be baptized? 700 people came forward in two services.

Christianity 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 said, is this Lee Strobel? I said, yes. He said, this is Evel.

And I thought, Satan has got my phone number. Is this even possible? He said, no, no, Evel Knievel. Oh, okay. I was going to say, if you went to dinner, you didn't let him drive, did you? No. You know what? No, I'll drive.

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. Yes, he did. 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 a 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 US.

That's right. Describe some of Tom's... Yeah. 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. And 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 lakeshore. 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 her. You're the man. He's like, whoa, whoa, what are you talking about?

You're the man. I saw you under the same glasses, 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, my. 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 and 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. And he's a researcher of near-death experiences. 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 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. 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? And then the immediate follow-up was, I love everyone of my creation, everyone. 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, believer, non-believer.

And the Bible says in the Old Testament in Jeremiah, the New Testament in 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 was 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 the man in my dream. He was the 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. That's amazing. So there's these incredible stories that I think are just hard to explain away otherwise.

It is so, so good. And you know what's interesting? Right at the end here, I think it's a good place to drop this kind of bomb. People can hear the enthusiasm that we're talking about this with, and you look at the root word of enthusiasm, it's entheo, God in you. So the fact that we're talking about these expressions of angelic visits, expressions of the Lord reaching the Muslims through dreams, et cetera, I mean, this is the spirit in us. This is entheo, that enthusiasm.

It's rising. You can feel it in our discussion. It's a good thing to have this belief, and we'll come back next time, talk about angels and some other things that you've covered in this great book, Seeing the Supernatural. But Lee, it's so good to get day one done, and I hope you're catching that entheo, that enthusiasm. And we want to get this book into your hands. I think, you know, Lee's in an exceptional position where he's interviewing these people, he's following up, he's the reporter, making sure that these things are true. And he's compiled this great book for us as particularly believers, but also non-believers to capture what's happening supernaturally, not to run from it. We should be the ones explaining it to the world, not the world and psychics explaining it to us.

That's ridiculous. So get a copy today if you can make a gift of any amount through a monthly donation or one-time gift. We'll send the book as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry. Yeah, donate generously when you call 800 the letter A in the word family. And we're especially looking for a thousand people to join our community of monthly sustainers.

These are folks who commit to a monthly gift, month in, month out, that helps kind of smooth things out. That's how we donate. It is a wonderful way to contribute to the ministry.

And if you're not yet doing so, let me invite you to join that 1000 people that we're looking for and become a monthly pledge partner today. Call 800 the letter A in the word family and just let us know how much you'd like to commit or we'll have details for you online in the show notes. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we continue the conversation with Lee Strobel and once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. If the fights with your spouse have become unbearable, if you feel like you can't take it anymore, there's still hope. Hope restored marriage intensives have helped thousands of couples like yours. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face them together. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.