For Pastors, Sceptics, Deconverts 3: Problems With Evidence

There must hundreds of deconversion and deconstruction videos on YouTube.com. And videos of reaction to and discussion about them. Many deconvertees decry the lack of evidence for God, a historical Jesus, and the events recorded in the Bible. Having been in spiritually dead, ritualistic "doctrine" churches, I cannot blame deconverts for wanting to leave that form of religion. God confirms the preaching of His Word, and if there isn't any confirmation, well, you best look somewhere else.

My first spiritual experience was not with God. While I was raised in the Methodist Church, I found no evidence of the transcendent there. After the Navy, I found myself living in the back of a pickup truck in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was still searching, curious about spiritual stuff. In a guided meditation in a kindergarten-level occult class, I encountered a deceiving spirit, a demon. The demon was trying to possess me. This was a very strange experience. In my mind's eye I suddenly saw the spirit or demon, whatever it was, for what it was. I also suddenly realized a number of different things:

1) If this deceiving thing is real, then God also is real.

2) The deceiving spirit did not want to be exposed, but had no ability to stop the one who exposed it.

3) The deceiving spirit had been with me for a long time, encouraging me towards this moment through various cultural influences.

4) The demon hadn't the authority to possess me unless I lowered my naturally superior authority to it, while the one who opened my mind's eye did not need my permission, because he had authority superior to mine.

5) While I am pretty much a bum living in a pickup truck on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, my exact thoughts are constantly monitored by that superior spirit. He knew exactly where I was and exactly what was going down, and . . .

6) The superior spirit was powerful to do something about it.

7) I had arrived at some quality the superior spirit wanted me to have and had used the demon to get me to achieve it for his own sake; i.e. the superior spirit had engineered all this--my lifetime! I had been cultivated by the superior spirit. The unwitting demon's mission completed, I was being moved on to another stage of development, another project.

In an instant I saw that if until now I had been going the demon's way, I was going the WRONG way. Time to go the opposite direction. I mean, really GO.

So my evidence for God was the reality of the demonic and the superior powers and authority of the intervener--that there really was an intervener.

LOOK FOR GOD'S ACTIVITY IN YOUR WORLD: EXPECT TO FIND THE DEMONIC

If you are not really SPIRITUALLY born again--even though you might believe it sincerely DOCTRINELY, and God is not confirming the preaching of His Word with signs and wonders, do not expect miracles of healing and other bright, spiritual events to happen any time soon. LOOK FOR THE DECEIVER. When I got out of that meditation I went straight to my old childhood King James Bible I had kept all those years, even taking it along with me to Hawaii. I opened the concordance to "deceive," and straightaway read Revelation 12:9-12:
9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.
11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.
12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

This was now real stuff to me. I hadn't asked for it, nor did I expect it. The reality that there really is an invisible world of deceiving spirits and Jesus Christ with this world was imposed upon me. Now all of a sudden I have responsibility. I sought my mother's best friend, Lynn, who lived just across the Hilton Hawaiian lagoon from me (I parked in the Ala Wai harbor). Before I could say anything, she told me of how she had gotten a terrible migraine from reading the Jesus testimonial books my mother kept sending her. In severe pain, she flippantly and disparagingly quipped to another witnessing Christian friend, "Jesus gave me this headache, and he can have it!" The pain left her head instantly. She said she couldn't make her head hurt.

You say that is not evidence. I don't know what the heck it is, then. We both were seeking in our own way and met the demonic. The demonic comes first. A glorious spirit tempted Eve before it was made a serpent when God came walking in. Satan--ignorance--is deceiving the whole world NOW, but salvation is on its way. How is the Devil affecting you and your world? When you see that your affecter IS the Devil, you will see then that there must really be a God to be deceived away from. Satanism, by the way, is the secret control of someone else's life. Ignorance is doing that to us. Don't blame God; it's OUR ignorance. We surely have evidence of that. Believe testimonies, go to where God IS confirming the preaching of His Word, watch real miracle videos--T. L. Osborn and the like.

Lynn took me to a small Pentecostal gathering, the House of Praise in Kaimuki. People testified of miracles. Almost everyone spoke in tongues. I went forward to acknowledge that I accepted Jesus as Lord. At another church I asked for the gift of tongues. I encountered God, but He rejected me--wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole. I was crushed and wept. I in a trance, He walked me through to see that I had retained lordship over my life. I still ignorantly deceived myself thinking that I was separate from God, virtually His peer in that "my" life was under my control. Realizing that "my" life is actually God's life making me to live by His grace, and I was a thief, I cast self-control out of myself as a demon, and contritely, broken in spirit, wholly submitted myself to God. He softly said, "Remember this, and it is all right." He accepted me, and the ecstatic infilling of the Holy Ghost flooded my being and flowed out my mouth in the form of tongues. That was pretty good evidence.

Since then, Jesus--while I watched Him in a vision being crucified--spoke directly and "audibly" into my brain. Later I watched my arm extend a half-inch or more in length. I know that is not much, but I, unmoving, WATCHED it. I have been "slain" in the spirit. Then I touched a guy and he went down. One of my most valuable "concrete evidences of God was Janet, my seminary classmate and neighbor. She somehow contracted tuberculosis, and as her classmate and sometimes lunch partner, I contracted tuberculosis from her. In her private devotions she got so emotionally caught up that it seemed to her that she was actually kneeling before God in heaven, worshipping and adoring, ecstatically praising Him. Then in her ecstasy she heard a loud voice: "YOU ARE HEALED!" And she was. Her chest x-ray showed the tubercular hole in her lung filling in with material, BUT I HAD TO CONTINUE TAKING TUBERCULOSIS MEDICINE FOR THE NEXT HALF-YEAR.

Your problem may be that your faith CAN be shattered. Why is it so fragile and tentative? If you had a literal, distinct, concrete experience of God, it couldn't be shaken. I have either had experience of God, or of a conscious, acting entity who wants me to believe in God. And if such an invisible and powerful entity exists, then so also must God. God is not a separate thing, but is this (waving my arms all around)--everything from the "Wholly Other" to the tiniest quarks. You want evidence? "You can't get something from nothing," but you can get everything from the No-thing that imagines your imagination facilitated. The No-thing has imagined being the tiniest quarks, and it has imagined being you. WATCH YOU MAKE YOUR WORLD BY YOUR IMAGINATION. If what you imagine causes your world, you have found Him--your own, wonderful human imagination.