The Confessionals - 786: Angels, Demons & the Supernatural w/ Lee Strobel

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Join us as we investigate the supernatural proof you can’t ignore, uncovering what happens when angels and demons show up. In this gripping interview, Lee Strobel, best-selling author of "The Case For Christ", shares shocking stories of miraculous healings, angelic encounters, demonic manifestations, and supernatural dreams that defy explanation, all backed by compelling evidence. From documented cases of spiritual warfare and verified miracles,  to Strobel’s own personal experiences, this conversation will challenge skeptics, deepen faith, and reveal a reality far stranger than we imagine.Please pray for Tony's wife, Lindsay, as she battles breast cancer. Your prayers make a difference!If you’re able, consider helping the Merkel family with medical expenses by donating to Lindsay’s GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b8f76890Become a member for ad-free listening, extra shows, and exclusive access to our social media app: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinThe Confessionals Social Network App:Apple Store: https://apple.co/3UxhPrhGoogle Play: https://bit.ly/43mk8kZTony's Recommended Reads: slingshotlibrary.comMy New YouTube ChannelMerkel IRL: @merkelIRLMy First Sermon: Unseen BattlesSasquatch and The Missing Man: merkelfilms.comMerkel Media Apparel: merkmerch.comSPONSORSSIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsGHOSTBED: GhostBed.com/tonyCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] Strobel:Website | Seeing The SupernaturalMAILING ADDRESS:Merkel Media257 N. Calderwood St., #301Alcoa, TN 37701SOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theconfessionals/Discord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelProduced by: @jack_theproducerOUTRO MUSICJoel Thomas - ImposterYouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

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your period of per month for a All month in shopify.s.combeckr records. Hey, everyone, before we get to this week's show, this is just your weekly reminder to please continue to pray for my wife, Lindsay.

She is battling breast cancer right now, and we're praying for complete healing in Jesus' name. Thank you. Merkel. Media. This was all circulating around the base that a giant had to kill, but no one was supposed to talk about it.

I saw three long, boning fingers. reach up underneath the door, curl up to grab it, and then disappear. When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me. And this giant comes out of the cave and they're all frozen. And he starts running and firing up this giant. With a giant moves, he's got a spear in one hand, and he's running really fast. And spears Dan holds him up like this. Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face.

They basically think how to him. I feel something pulling at my leg. And I look over and there are two small gray entities. And they're literally, I'm getting pulled off the bed. It's pushed and I touch air. Couldn't breathe and I couldn't move because I know I'm seeing a monster. Welcome to the show, everybody, listening to The Confessionals podcast. I'm your host, Tony Merkel.

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We have an archive there on the website now and a docu series coming very soon to the platform. I'm very excited about it. I can't wait to release that episode and get that ball rolling. lots of fun on the horizon. Now, today we have Lee Strobel coming on the show. And friends, let me tell you something. Lee Strobel is a legend in the Christian community. He wrote a legendary book called The Case for Christ. And I never thought I'd be actually talking to Lee Strobel, but here I am talking to Lee Strobel because he came out with a book called Seeing the Supernatural. And while I was talking to him, I just kept wanting to naturally say the case for the supernatural because he has a whole series. of the case for books, but this one is not called the case for the supernatural. It's called

seeing the supernatural. And I had a great time talking with them. So let's get to Lee Strobill and seeing the supernatural right now. All right. Today we have Lee Strobel on the show. Lee, how are you, sir? I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I'm glad to have you here. And you and I were just talking a little bit. And I was sharing with you how, you know, the way I approach the show and the supernatural is a very large part of this show these days. We talk a lot about the supernatural realm and the seemingly complexity, the complexity of the supernatural realm. And so for people who, you know, with my audience, it's a very diverse audience. There's Christians to atheists. They, listen, I know who you are, but for people who

may not know. You've written, what, over 40 books now? Yeah. And the case for Christ is a huge one. And recently, you just came out with another book called Seeing the Supernatural. And that was earlier this year. And when I started catching wind of what's in that book, I was like, I would love to talk to it. I'm glad. I'm glad it worked out. Yeah, yeah. So what is the whole point behind the book? Let's just start broad here. Like, what got you actually thinking about, you know, writing this book? Yeah. You know, I was a former, I am a former atheist myself.

You were describing your audience. I guess I've hit kind of all the different categories there because I was an atheist for much of my life. My training is in journalism and in law. And so I tend to be a nuts and bolts kind of person. I tell me the evidence. Give me the corroborations. Show me the facts.

Don't just tell me a story you see on the, internet. Where's the data? Where's the research that was done? And so I decided to explore this question of the supernatural realm to see, is there really something beyond what we can see and touch and put in a test tube? And so I looked at a variety of different areas. I looked at contemporary miracles that have been documented. I look at near-death experiences. I look at deathbed visions. I look at direct experiences of God that people have that have no other explanation. I look at at mystical dreams that are sweeping the Middle East in closed countries, close to the gospel. So in each case, I'm looking for, is there corroboration, is there evidence?

How do I know this really is true? Yeah. And you do it through a very investigative technique, which is, I think, lends a lot of credibility to what your findings are. And I kind of want to, I think the, I know you've, I know you've told the story before, but I think it'd be really good to lay the foundation as to your own personal experience and how this kind of the conversion happened for you because it is a supernatural thing. It really is. As I say, I was an atheist. My wife was agnostic, I'd say, just kind of spiritually confused and got married young. I was 20, she was 19. And then we met a neighbor who was a Christian. And she was a Christian. She became best friends with my wife. And she shared the story of Jesus with her.

And my wife was intrigued. She wasn't negative like I was. And she came to me one day and she gave me the worst news an atheist husband could get. She said, I've decided to become a Christian. And I thought, divorce. I'm going to walk out. Because I was a pretty hardcore atheist. I mean, and I'm embarrassed to say this, but I lived a very,

self-centered, narcissistic, immoral, life, drunken life. I mean, that was the life I chose. And I was successful in my career. What people saw was me winning awards for investigative reporting at the Chicago Tribune. But they didn't see the other side, which was me literally drunk in the snow in an alley on Saturday night. And so she shares this message of Jesus with me, and I thought, I don't believe it. In fact, what if I could rescue her from this cult that she's gotten involved in? What would that look like?

And I thought, even as an atheist, I recognize that all of Christianity is based on the resurrection of Jesus. Why? Because clearly, he made transcendent and messianic and divine claims about himself. He claimed to be the son of God. At one point, he gets up before a group of people, and he says, I and the Father are one. And the Greek word for one there is not masculine, it's neuter. which means Jesus was not saying, I and the father are the same person. He was saying, I and the father are the same thing.

We're one in nature, we're one in essence. Well, the audience understood what he was saying because they picked up so-and-so-kill him. He said, you, you're just a man and you're claiming to be God. So, Jesus claimed to be God, but so what, I could claim to be God. Tony, you could claim to be God. But if Jesus claimed to be God died and then three days later returned from the dead, that would be pretty good evidence he's telling the truth. And so I focus a lot of my investigation into the historical data.

What is the data, not just in the New Testament, but outside the Bible, that looks at the question whether Jesus didn't just claim to be the Son of God, but he backed it up by his resurrection. Well, the resurrection is a supernatural occurrence. It is a supernatural event, probably the most publicized supernatural event of history. And so I came to the conclusion on November the 8th of 1981, after two years of researching this stuff, that in light of the avalanche of evidence that I believe points so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, in my opinion, it would have taken more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian. And so that's the day I confess my sin, received forgiveness through Jesus, I became a follower of Jesus, and my life began to change, my values, my character, my morality, my parenting, my marriage, all these things over time began to change for the good.

So much so that my little daughter, Allison, I remember when I was an atheist and living this rather wild life that when she was a toddler and if she was playing with some toys in the living room and she would hear me come home from work through the front door. Her natural reaction was just to gather her toys and go in the room and shut the door. So you're going to be drunk again? She's going to be yelling and screaming and literally kicking holes in the wall, which I would do out of rage. You know what? At least it's nice and quiet in here. But five or so months after I gave my life to Jesus Christ and he began to change my character and values. And she's watching from her little five-year-old eyes. Something's different with my dad. Something's changing with my dad. Something's new with me. My dad, one day she came up to my wife and she said, mommy, I want God to do for me what he's done for daddy.

And that day, she received this free gift of God's grace. She became a child of God. Her life has changed. She's married to a seminary graduate. My son, same story, basically. He ended up getting a Ph.D. in theology. And now he's a professor of theology at a major seminary on the West Coast. So God didn't just change me and my wife.

he changed my kids and not one by one, my grandchildren. So it's really an intergenerational impact that this has had in our family. Well, it's really interesting because, you know, people talk about the idea that, you know, things that, you know, people who come from our lineage, from our past and stuff, how they can affect generations to come. Yeah. And you can say that that's, you know, learned behavior to more of a supernatural thing of, you know, what kind of things were people involved in the past and what kind of, like almost like a legal right do certain things feel like they have in the spiritual realm, like demonic entities,

to that family line because, say, you know, your great-great-grandfather was a warlock or something like that and had made these like packs with these entities. So, I mean, that's a great open door for me to open up to the supernatural and the idea of alien, or not aliens, angels. We could go aliens, but let's go angels and demons. So when it comes to the, you come to Christ, you become a Christian. I'm assuming the idea, the understanding of the supernatural realm probably wasn't the first thing on your mind. I'm assuming you come to, go ahead.

Yeah, you know, it's funny you say that because I think there's a certain tendency among American Christians. where we want to be respectable. And so I don't care that my neighbor knows I'm a Christian. So what? I go to church. I believe in Jesus. That's fine. But I'm not going to get into any of that weird stuff, you know, like angels and demons and heaven and spooky stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not into that. I'm just like you except I believe in Jesus. We want respectability. And I think that has caused a lot of Christians to kind of turn a blind eye, a blind eye, to looking into the supernambi. natural realm. But what I find is the more you delve into it, the more you see the corroboration that it is real, it deepened my faith. It broadened my faith. And it also gave me a point of connection

with people who were curious about Christianity because eight out of ten Americans believe in a supernatural realm of some sort. So that's a point, a contact of point, a commonality that, you know, let's have a conversation. What is the evidence? And isn't it interesting that it tends to with what the Bible tells us. Yeah. And when you're talking about evidence, I mean, you have the idea is angels and demons. And I would say if one is real, the other is real as well. Yeah.

And when it comes to, let's start off with angels and stuff. I mean, through your investigation and, you know, you've been a Christian for a long time. So there is a, I would imagine a natural just course of belief. But like for somebody out there that maybe doesn't believe these kind of things, like, what is it about the angelic realm or the angels in another realm that you would point to as saying this is a factual thing? Yeah, it's interesting in the Bible in the book of Hebrews. It says that there's the potential that you might have an encounter with an angelic being. Because it says sometimes you're providing hospitality to someone. You don't realize it's an angel. So it anticipates

that we might have connection with an angelic being. And we have, I think, persuasive cases of that happening. I'll give you one well, I think, researched one. And that involves a guy by the name of John G. Peyton, P-A-T-O-N from Scotland. John and his wife were Christians, and they went as missionaries to a tropical island in the South Pacific. Because they wanted to share the message of Jesus with the tribes people and others who lived on that island. So they lived in a little cottage. Well, it turns out a lot of the tribes people didn't like the message of Jesus. And so they were kind of pissed off at all things. So one night, a mob begins to form outside their house.

They were coming to burn down their house and kill them. So what could they do? They just huddled in the house just to two of them. They began to pray, say, God, these guys are coming to burn our house down and kill us. Protect us. Help us. We need help. We need protection.

They prayed for hours. They prayed all night long. And by dawn, the mob dissipated. And everybody went home. Well, a year later, John led the head of that mob to faith in Jesus Christ. And he had a conversation with him. He said, by the way, do you remember that night that you all came to burn down our house and kill us? Why didn't you do it?

And the guy said, well, who were all those men that you had there? And he said, we didn't have any men. He was just my wife and I. He said, oh, no, your house was surrounded by all of these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords. There's no way we could have attacked your house that night. And how do you account for that? Where did that come from? Why did that mob dissipate?

So that's the kind of angelic encounter that intrigues me. The other one is in the form of deathbed visions, where we have people who are about to die, see angels coming for them. Now, in the Bible, in Luke 16, verse 22, where Jesus is describing a beggar who died, he says, angels carried him to his place of bliss. He went to a heavenly realm. And so often what we see with these deathbed visions are people who see angels coming for them. One good example of an atheist who had this experience in the end after he came back to Christ is Charles Templeton.

Templeton was the best friend of Billy Graham, the great Christian evangelist. They were pulpit partners. He was a pastor up in Canada, and he went to a liberal seminary, and he lost his faith. And he wrote an ugly book called Farewell to God, My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. Well, several years ago, I wrote a book responding to all of his objections to Christianity. It's called The Case for Faith. And I became friends with him because I interviewed him from my book. I wanted to know, why don't you believe anymore? And so, we kind of became friends. Well, a couple years passed, and he ended up, according to the best testimony we have, coming back to faith in Jesus Christ. And then he was dying. He's on his

deathbed. He calls out to his wife, Madeline, Madeline, can you hear them? Can you see them? What, Chuck? What are you talking about? The angels, they're in the room. They're right here. Oh, my gosh, they're so beautiful. The singing. The eyes are so wonderful. I'm going to be with the Father, I'm going to be with God just before he died. This is this kind of experience is unbelievably common. A team of researchers went to a huge hospice facility in New York State, and they said to all the dying people there, if you have a vision, unlike anything you've ever had your life, would you please tell us?

Because some people are embarrassed. They don't want to say, you know, they may think I'm weird. 88% of them had a pre-death vision. Wow. Similar to that. And here's where a bit of corroboration comes in. I think in two ways. Number one, if this was just something that happened once in a blue moon, then a skeptic could say, well, you know, billions of people die.

Every once you're going to have an anomaly. It doesn't mean anything. But when it is so common, I think we've got to deal with it. But here's the other thing. some researchers got together and studied 3,000 of these deathbed visions. And they compared them to things like hallucinations and drug-induced things and brain phenomenon, so forth. And this was their conclusion. They said, these deathbed visions are definitely not hallucinations, fantasies, or memories caused by grief,

nor are they projections of the subconscious mind or products of an overactive imagination. But then one last thing, here's a bit of corroboration that's fascinating to me. Children who are dying see angels coming for them, but they're not what you would expect that they would see. In other words, for a five-year-old child who is dying, what's their image of an angel? Well, it's like a cartoon, right? It's this feathery kind of guy with big wings. That's what a five-year-old or six-year-old would think. That's not what they see.

So it's a doctoral dissertation investigating deaths of children. And so many of these stories, there's one in particular where a little girl is about to die and she sees angels coming for her and says, mommy, mommy, look at them. Oh, they're in the room, the angels. They're coming for me. Oh, they're so beautiful. Listen to their singing. Oh, I'm going with them. I'm going to be with God.

And her mother didn't want to disappoint her. So she said, oh, well, yeah, I see the angels. I see them. Look at their big wings. And a little girl said, oh, mommy, you don't have to lie. They don't have big wings. And she went on to describe them in vivid detail because the Bible doesn't say that angels have big wings. So that is an interesting little bit of corroboration to me, that if this was just the product of a child's imagination, they would have probably seen a cartoon character.

But that's not what they see. So there's some very interesting things. And then, of course, you get in the demonic realm and there's great corroboration. there as well. Yeah, and we can definitely touch on that for sure. You know, when it comes to the angel idea, I grew up with a grandfather who did a lot of preaching at like tent revivals. Yeah. And he had such a similar story as to what you just said. It just, it's shocking to me, because he literally said that one night they were in a town that they weren't welcoming, and the people in the town were planning on coming and destroying their camp.

And so my grandfather and a few other men that were there stayed up all night waiting for these people to show up. And he said they did. They showed up. And they came down this driveway in their cars and they stopped at a certain point and just idled. And then backed out and left. And they came back a little bit later with more cars. Same thing. Third time, they come back even more cars.

But they weren't passing a certain point. And I remember my grandfather said, he always said the word clown. And he's like, he said, I always just stood there thinking, are these clowns going to do something or what? And, you know, he was like, he was just like, we're going to get our butts handed to us, but we're going to fight for our camp. And so nothing happens. And the next day they go into town. And my grandfather said, it must have been the talk of the town, that they had every intention to destroy their camp.

But every time they came down that driveway, there were these tall angels standing there guarding the camp. And he said, I never saw them, but they apparently saw them, you know. And it's wild. If you have any random missionary on your program, somebody from Africa, India, whatever, they will probably have a similar story. missionaries have these stories all the time. It's a way of a life. It's just remarkable. Do you think that, because I hear people debate this topic and stuff, but do you think that people have assigned guardian angels to them? It's a great question. There's a division among Christian theologians on that issue. There's two verses that suggest that we do. In one verse, which is in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is talking to a group and he says about some little children. He said, do not despise these little ones. Because their angels see the face of God every day in heaven.

Well, who are their angels? And then in the book of Acts, Peter escapes from prison with the help of an angel. He escapes from prison. And he goes to a home where some Christians had gathered and he knocks on the door. And a servant said, who's there? And he says, is Peter. So she calls out to the group, hey, Peter's here. And they said, Peter can't be here.

It's impossible. He's in prison. It must be his angel. So those two verses lead many Christians to believe that, yes, we do have a guardian angel who's assigned to us. In fact, in I believe the Greek Orthodox Christian tradition, they believe that a guardian angel is assigned to each Christian when they're baptized. Okay. So there's quite a few Christians. Some Christians say that's not enough evidence for me to believe that.

We believe that angels exist and that they do protect people and they do guard as one of the functions. The Bible says that angels serve not just God, but his people. So, yes, but they're not convinced that that's enough scriptural evidence to establish that we have a guardian angel. I tend to lean toward, yeah, that we do. But I had an angelic encounter. Please tell. That I was always too embarrassed to talk about. I was 12 years old, and I'm in the kitchen of my house, and an angel appeared to me.

I knew intuitively it was an angel. is a male. By the way, when angels embody themselves in scripture, they're always male. But in ancient Jewish literature, there are some female embodiments by angels, just FYI. But anyway, this angel appears to me, and he's extolling heaven, talking about heaven, how wonderful heaven is. And I listen for a moment. I said, well, you know, I'm going to go there someday. And he looked at me and he said, how do you know? And what kind of question is? What do you mean? How do I know? I'm a good kid. I obey my parents for the most part. I got good graze in school. I got friends. I'm trying to justify how good I am to enter into heaven. And he looked at me and he said, that doesn't matter. And a chill went down

my spine. Well, how could this not matter? My efforts would be a good kid. You're telling me that doesn't matter. And then he said, someday you'll understand. Well, I thought maybe I had a bad pizza. But it was unlike any dream I ever have. It's the only dream I remember from my childhood. And I suppressed it. I thought, it was just a fluke, and I ended up becoming an atheist. But then, as I began investigating Christianity, 16 years later, my wife invited me to a church. And the pastor gets up, and he explained the gospel. In fact, the name of the sermon that day was basic Christianity. And I heard that it is not by how good we try to be that opens the doors of heaven.

is a free gift of God's grace that we need to receive in repentance and faith. And as soon as I heard that, my mind flashed back to that dream. That's what that angel was trying to tell me back then. And I thought that dream is corroborated in two ways. Number one, the angel told me something that day that I didn't know. And number two, he made a prophecy, a prediction that someday I would understand that came true on that day. But I was even, I guess, I'll admit this, because we talked about respect to and American Christianity.

I didn't tell people generally about this. I told my wife and some others. And then I was being ordained as a pastor. And at an ordination, you have these theologians who are asking you these tough questions about God to try to make sure you're orthodox and your beliefs and everything. And I thought, do I tell them about this dream? I feel like I should. Maybe they'll disqualify me.

Maybe they'll think I'm weird. Maybe they'll write me off. But I got to be honest. I got to tell them the truth. So I said, guys, can I tell them? tell you something that happened to me when I was 12 years old. And I told them the story. And you know what their reaction was? What's that?

Yeah. We've heard that kind of thing many times. That's fine. But I was embarrassed. In fact, I wrote a book called The Case for Miracles as being turned into a movie that will be coming out in theaters in December. And in that book, I have a chapter called Embarrassed by the Supernatural and how so many American Christians are embarrassed. And I interviewed a very prominent theologian for that. You know, theologians can be kind of prim and proper sometimes. And so I'm interviewing him. And he said, you know, I grew up in a Pentecostal home, a charismatic home,

where we had an anticipation that God was going to do miracles and supernatural things in our midst. And he said, later I moved out of that. And I'm in a more stayed denomination now. But he said, I remember when I was in that church as a young church, some a family in our church was driving in their car about 70 miles an hour this before seatbelts and their son in the back seat opened the door and fell out of the car and they thought our son's been killed going 70 miles an hour he falls out of they they stop they turn around they go back and they find their son standing in the middle of the row and they said what happened

And he said, didn't you see the man who caught me? And this stayed theologian took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his eye. And he said, I miss that. I miss being part of a church that had that kind of anticipation that God's going to continue to do supernatural things in our midst. I'll never forget that. And that kind of goes with the whole idea of, you know, idea of. Christians believing or not believing in guardian angels, to me it's like, why not? Like, what's the harm in having the faith and believing that the angels that we know are here and

present are here to guard us and that there could be a guardian angel assigned to me? Exactly. That's how I feel. You know, Jesus believed in angels. Jesus believed in demons. Actually, the Bible says, demons believe in Jesus. They believe he's real, but they shudder at the implications because they refuse to put their faith in him. But you're right. I mean, you know, here's an interesting thing, Tony. I've been a Christian now since 2 p.m. November 8, 1981. In all these decades, I've never heard one sermon in a church on the topic of angels. Never. Wow. Why is that? I think it's kind of, and when I researched this book and really interviewed scholars and experts on this, I learned so much. It's really

change the way I pray. Because in the Protestant tradition, you don't pray to angels because you only pray to God. And if we begin praying to angels, that could lead to worshiping them. And that's a slippery slope. So we don't pray to angels. Jesus told us to pray to the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit and so forth. But it's okay to pray to God about angels, which I never did because I never was taught anything about angels. And so I look at the small catechism by Martin Luther. And in there, he has an evening prayer that says, Lord, send your holy angels to protect me from the works of the evil one. And as I said, Jesus, as he's being arrested, said, could I not call upon the father? And he would not send legions of angels to protect me? Well, if he can pray to God for protection by

angels, I should be able. So I've started since I did the research for this book. I've changed my prayer life. And one of the things I pray every day is, Lord, send your holy angels to protect me and my wife and my children and my grandchildren and my ministry from the works of those who are out to thwart us. And I think that's healthy. I do too. In fact, hearing you say that makes me feel like my expectation is coming up a little short in the sense that every night before we go to bed, I pray with the kids. And one of the things I pray every night, it's like ritualistically, Lord, commission your holy angels to border our property to keep us safe tonight while we sleep. And but that's, I do that for protection while we sleep when I could be doing that for a lot more.

Yeah. And when you consider like stories like a Jacob's Ladder and even Christ, when he refers to it. It's the ascending, then descending angels referring to the fact that they're already here with us. And so it's just like, utilize what you got, man. There's no shortage of angels. There's one scene in Revelation, I think it's chapter 5, where the post-res resurrected Jesus is on his throne. And if you do the math, according to how many legions they're talking about, there were 100 million angels worshipping him just at that one time. So there's plenty of angels out there. There's no angel shortage out there. I agree. I agree. So, you know, again, going to theology and stuff, there's plenty of differences when it comes to understanding and thought of how do demons come to even

exist, right? So people believe that, you know, if you go to like Anakian language, it was, you know, the dead spirits of the Nephlin became demons to more traditional Western Christian, at least, a theology, which would be, you know, fallen angels are demons. That is, the, that that whole debate aside, demons are very real no matter how you look at it. Right. And when you looked into these kind of things and you're uncovering stories and stuff, what kind of details are you looking at or looking forward that would be a verifiable thing? This person was demonically possessed.

They were repressed. What are you looking for? I'm looking for credible medical evidence that there is, for instance, demon possession of an individual. So I'll give you a couple of stories documented. One of the, a great psychiatrist, so that means he's trained as a medical doctor. He's a psychiatrist, now a psychologist, psychiatrist, medical doctor trained in psychology and so forth. From an Ivy League university, he teaches part-time at some very prestigious colleges in the Northeast. I have a quote from the former president of the American Psychiatric Association saying Richard Gallagher is a man of high integrity, high training, high accomplishment, just extolling. the virtues and the professionalism of Richard Gallagher. Well, 25 years ago, Richard and his wife had two cats.

And they got along great until one night they began to try to kill each other. I mean, they were snarling, they were fighting, they were clawing, they were biting, they were attacking. He didn't have seen anything like it. It's just actually literally trying to kill each other. And they literally pulled them apart and put them in separate rooms. And they thought what in the world was that about? The next morning at 9 a.m. the doorbell rings. It was a preset appointment. A Catholic priest was bringing by a woman to be examined by Dr. Gallagher to see whether she was insane or maybe demon possessed. She was a woman who claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult. So he opens the door at 9 a.m. And here this woman who says she's a high priestess of a satanic cult kind of looks at him and sneers and said, so how'd you like those cats last night? And that sent Dr. Gallagher kind of on a journey for the next 25 years where he began to delve into exorcisms conducted by Catholic priests.

And he was not participating in these, but he's a medical doctor trained at the highest levels in psychiatry. He can tell the difference between someone who is suffering from a psychological condition or someone who's actually possessed by a demon spirit. And so he has actually written a book about it called demonic foes. And he documents cases where one petite woman picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across the room. Or another case where there's many cases where people possessed were speaking in languages they don't know. Latin. They're speaking in Latin languages they don't know. One case with eight eyewitnesses where a demon-possessed person levitated off a bed for half an hour.

other cases where spontaneous bruising and claw marks appear on these people. So this is not just something that's happening in people's minds. There is something going on there. Now, the good news is an authentic Christian cannot also be possessed by a demon because an authentic Christian is indellled by the Holy Spirit. And you can't have both at the same time. But we can be hectored. We can be annoyed. We can be tempted by the demonic.

And in fact, I'll tell you a funny story. A few weeks ago, you know, somebody asked me once, did you have any weird supernatural experiences writing this book? No, not really. Until about a few weeks ago. And here I am on a national live radio program on the Moody Radio Network. And Chris Fabry was interviewing me from Arizona. the studio was in Chicago. I was in my home in Houston, and it's a live show. And a woman called into the show from Florida. And she said, very well-spoken woman. She said, you know, I made a mistake when I was a new Christian. My father was dying. And I thought, I should try to find out about what death is like. And I thought maybe I'll try to contact my dead great-grandparents, not realizing the Bible says, don't get involved with trying to contact the dead. But she said, I did out of ignorance.

I'm sorry I did it, but I did it. And she said it was like there was this static in the line. And then almost this demonic feeling happened. And as soon as she said the word demonic, I hear, I hear this growl, this brough like that. It was a guttural growl. And I thought, is that my imagination? Is that something in the micro?

What was that? I didn't say anything at the time. As soon as the show was over. I call Chris Fabry, the host. I said, did you hear that? He said, yeah. He said, we've already called the woman. Wasn't her.

Wasn't me. Wasn't you. We call it Chicago the series. Wasn't them. In fact, we have a recording of it that we made from the broadcast, and he sent it to me. So, and you can hear it. My face, and my father had an incurable cancer, and he was dying. And one particular night, I just started crying out.

the Lord, why? You know, why? Why does you have to go through this? You know, how do you do? And I was off and on asleep doing this throughout the night, and all of a sudden it came to me. You know, I knew afterwards it was a temptation, but it came to me to ask my great-grandparents. And I was like, oh, yeah, genius idea. They're already there. I don't know if they were, I don't know, I wasn't a Christian as a child. I don't know if they're in heaven or not, but I'm like, they've already gone before us. I can ask them. And as soon as I was like, genius, I started hearing static and these voices. And I was like, it was like, it kept asked Pap and Granny. It kept coming to me, and that's pap and granny. And I was like, that's a good idea. And they got closer and just statically.

And I thought, what is that? Is that? Just as the word demon was mentioned, that's when this voice came up. And it reminded me of a story of that woman who claimed to be the satanic cult leader, with Richard Gallagher. He was later having a conversation on the telephone with the priest. And a voice break broke in to their conversation and said, you leave her alone. She's ours. You don't mess with her, you blankety, blankety priest. Stay away from her.

I'm thinking, oh, just interrupting our phone call. And I thought, what was that? I don't know. I'll be honest, I don't know what that was. Was it demonic? It sure sounded like that to me. So, you know, I think in the demonic realm is real. Jesus believed it.

Jesus cast out demons. And we ought to, I think we make two mistakes. And many people have said this. And one mistake is ignore it. Pretend it isn't there. Now we're not prepared for it. And that opens us up to problems. Second mistake is seeing a demon behind every bush and thinking, because the Bible says,

if you're a follower of Jesus, if you cast away, Satan, he's going to go away. It doesn't say he might. It says he will. So God has Satan on a short leash. And we know his ultimate destination. And if you're a follower of Jesus, we don't have to be fearful of them. We need to be mindful of them. And we need to, as Ephesians said, put on the full harmer of God, part of which is to understand scripture so that we can use scripture as a plum line to try to tell us to test the spirit. if something happens to us and we're wondering, is this some sort of demonic attempt to tempt me or whatever? I can compare it to scripture and say,

yeah, or whatever, but at least I have a way of testing whether or not this is coming from an evil source. Yeah. When it comes to the demonic and the operations that we see, like the physical manifestations of superhuman strength to things like. that. I look at it and I, and I, it sounds familiar because there's a lot of stories in the Bible

of that, those, those kind of things only coming from a godly source. Like you guys, the classic one is Samson to even ones that aren't talked about enough like Elijah with, I think it's First Kings 1846. It talked, I recently kind of read this in a new light that I had never seen it before. But it literally says that God gave Elijah superhuman speed. He tucked his cloak into his rope. I forget how it says it, but he ran ahead of Ahab's chariot all the way to Jesreal. And they suggest that it's about 15 miles of a run. So he ran faster than chariots for about 15 miles. And so you see these things of like superhuman strength that God has done. And it's like there's this imitating factor. And another one would be the idea of healing. So, you know, I was, I was, I was, you were right.

references the earlier stuff, but I was raised Pentecost, I was raised to believe that they expect these things, and I still am. Yes. And along with that, you know, the idea of miraculous hymns, which we could certainly get into, there is that demonic counterfeit as well, though.

Yes. And I'm curious, I don't know if this is a perspective thing, or if you come across, like, things in your research, but, you know, there are claims that there can be healers outside of, you know, the Christian faith, like Reiki healers, energy healers. What are your thoughts on that? I mean,

is it something, is it possible that there could be demonic forces that have that ability to heal? Or do you think there's some kind of counterfeit going on? I think there's definitely demonic forces that have abilities that go beyond what we can normally do. And they, can they actually heal someone? I don't know, but I think they could create. create the illusion that they are doing. I'll give you an example for my book. Back during the Jimmy Carter administration, a twin-engine airplane, I think it was part of the CIA, crashed in Africa, and they couldn't find it. America, we wanted the plane back. We couldn't find it. We had, we reoriented satellites to look and try to find this, the wreckage of this plane. We could not

find it. And so Stansfield Turner, who was the CIA director at the time, went to California, and he consulted with a psychic. Now, just as an aside, we need to understand the Bible says, don't consult with psychics. Don't mess with mediums. Why? Because they'll often try to deceive you or they're perhaps even unknowingly conduits to the demonic. But he goes out to the psychic. The psychic goes into a trance and writes down longitude and latitude where they could find the airplane.

So they reorient the satellites and look at that place. And guess what? They found the aircraft. Now, you go, did she have some sort of supernatural ability? I don't think so. I think a more logical explanation is because we're told, don't mess with psychics, they're illegitimate, they're not, you know, so I measure it, I test it against scripture and say, there's something going on here that's not right.

Could it be that the demonic realm provided her with that information because they often know things that we don't know. Could they have known where that plane went down? Could they have provided that information to her? Why would they do that? Because the next time the CIA wanted to know something, let's go back to that psychic because she was right about that airplane. She's got special abilities.

What about this? What about that? And all of a sudden, she has a credibility that can lead people astray in so many ways. So I think there's a demonic motivation there. and because it's contrary to scripture to be messing around with mediums, I think that's a more logical explanation rather than she is a psychic who has access to a supernatural knowledge. Yeah, it's almost like becoming the middleman. Yeah, yeah.

And maybe it's unwitting. Maybe she's sincere in thinking that she's a psychic and does not realize that it's the demonic that she's interacting with. I don't know. In my book, I talk about psychics, and I talk about three ways they, many of the false ones, many of the ones who are con people, try to fool folks into thinking they know more than they do. And I talk about cold readings and warm readings and hot readings that they do to try to fool you into thinking they know more than they really do. So there's a lot of people who claim to be psychics who are con people. But then there are those who may be unwittingly. or even knowingly engaging with some sort of demonic influence. And that's why the Bible says, hey, stay away from that stuff. Don't mess with it. So there's, this isn't, I want to preface it with this is not, I don't believe demonic, but it's an analogy, I guess.

Recently I did an episode about dreams. Yeah. And there is a real push right now with technology to do what I'm calling dream hacking. there is several companies, but one off top of my head is called REM sleep or REM space. And they develop technology theoretically, they say this works, where they'll hook up two people to a machine while they sleep and they'll send a message to one person where the other person communicates that to the other person in their sleep. They wake up and then they can tell the person what the original message was. and it's kind of like this this relaying of information and like what you were saying with the psychic ability where it's does that person without the machine able are they able to do what they just did no it's because of the machine

yeah and it makes you feel maybe it's a weak analogy but with what you were just saying with the idea there's like this relaying of information it's not just from one to another but there's a middleman yeah yeah exactly yeah so And that's why when I look at things like mystical dreams in my book, I look at the external corroboration to see how do I know this isn't just a product of someone's mind or a mind trick or something like that. So with the dreams, that's another topic that when I first started the show eight years ago, I couldn't have cared less about people's dreams. I'm very open about that. When people would email me, I was like, I don't care. The more time has gone on, the more I've realized that there are things to dreams. And then scripturally, it's like, oh, yeah, light bulb goes on.

Oh, yeah, that's actually a thing. But, you know, with the topic of dreams and the miraculous things that happen with dreams, what are some of the things that you've uncovered with that? Because I think there's scriptural references for these kind of things to actually be taking place. Yeah, there's 200 examples in scripture of God using dreams and visions. So certainly it can be biblical. There are Christians who are called cessationists who believe that that phenomenon has ceased and no longer occurs. There are other Christians who believe that it continues.

For me, again, I'm a researcher. I'm looking for evidence. And so when I research, for example, the dreams and visions that are breaking out in the Middle East, that's when I'm looking for that external corroboration, that these are more than just something happened in somebody's mind. There's a case where there was a young man who was raised in a refugee camp, and he hated Jewish people. And he wanted to, his greatest goal in life was a murder as many Jewish people as he could. And so he says, I'm going to join Hamas, the terrorist organization. And he made arrangements for a meeting with some leaders of Hamas to join Hamas so he could kill more Jewish people.

And he's walking down the street and he has a vision. and the vision is Jesus standing there blocking his path. And Jesus says to him, Omar, this is not the life I have for you. This is not the life I have for you. I want you to turn around. I want you to go home. This is not how I want you to live your life. Well, he freaks out.

Is that a vision, a dream? What is that? So, but he obeys, he figures, I better. So he goes home. later that day, a Christian couple was moving into an apartment across the hall from him. And he went over to them. And he said, hey, I just had this experience, this vision. Jesus told me this.

And what do you make of that? And the Christian opens the Bible and shares the gospel, leads Omar to faith. And today he's an underground church planter in a country closed to the gospel. So there's an example of, to me, an extent. Corroboration of a vision. And we have this of the dreams that are happening among Muslims as well. I had it in my own church in Houston, Texas. We had a woman from the Middle East when she was a teenager. She was going through some really tough things. And she had a Jesus dream. And she said, it was unlike any dream I ever had. It was like a motion picture was projecting it into my mind. And I said, what did Jesus say? And she said, that wasn't important. It was who. he was, what I felt when I engaged him. And that was what was important. And so I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't. And it, it, it registered in her soul, but she didn't know what to do. So she later married a Muslim man. And because the oil industry, he gets transferred to Houston, Texas. And they're

living not far from where my wife and I live. And he goes out of town on business. And one of her neighbors happened to go to our church and said, before this happens, before this happens, she had another dream in the United States. And the dream, she couldn't make any heads or tails of that one either. It was her in a pond, a body of water up to her waist. And it was a man with her with a book. And he's looking at the book and he's weeping. And it was, again, like any other, no other dream she'd ever had. So her husband goes out of town. One of her neighbors goes to our church said, Hey, would you like to come to Easter services at our church?

She said, okay, sure. So she came to our church at Easter. She's sitting in the aisle seat in the auditorium, and she sees the man who is with her in the pond. Wow. And his name is Alan Splann. He's our pastor of baptism, our pastor of baptism. So Alan comes over.

They introduce him. She's freaking out because he was, anyway, she ends up coming. to faith in Jesus Christ. And then she goes to the pond on our property where we baptize new believers with water up to her waist and Alan with the Bible reading the passage about baptism and then with tears in his eyes, baptizing her in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So there's an example right in our church and of all places use in Texas of a Muslim having a Jesus dream and also a follow-up dream that pointed her something external, an affirmation,

because she saw the guy from her dream. That was the corroboration. This was more than just something I'm imagining. So that's the kind of thing I'm looking for when I look at this stuff. Yeah. And that's, I mean, when you're talking about evidence, when it comes to the supernatural, and maybe it's because we live in a culture where it's just,

it's been built into us to deny the supernatural. When you're able to have a situation where there's a mass audience to it, Like you're talking about the dreams in mosques. I mean, I have heard as far as like they're closing down mosques because of so many people converting to Christianity. Yes. So like that's the kind of. A third of them have had Jesus dreams. Right. And so it's that kind of thing that's like, okay, you take the Jesus dreams, the supernatural aspects of that. And then the mass amount of people and you put those two together, it's very hard to deny. And that should be the goal in the investigation. When you're investigating the unseen realm and you're investigating the unseen realm and you're,

you're trying to uncover these things and prove it to people, especially people who don't believe it to begin with, there has to be outside of just, well, this is what I believe. It's like, well, that's not a good argument for people of, well, this is what I believe. It's like, well, that's, that's fine, but I don't, you know. Yes, right. Give them a reason, right. That's right. So, you know, we're talking about the angels, the demons, the, the, the idea of these dreams. there's this underlying current, I would say, of this conversation, which would be like supernatural spiritual warfare. Yeah. That there is this supernatural realm that operates around us.

There is activity happening in that realm, angelic activity, demonic activity. Yeah. To people, like the woman that you were talking about, the high priestess of the satanic heaven. I mean, that's in my mind, a depiction in the physical of spiritual supernatural warfare. Yes. I look at Daniel 10 as something, the beautiful depiction of spiritual warfare, where you have a literal prayer delayed by an angel because of the conflict that was happening in Daniel 10. Do you feel like, and I feel like I know the answer to this, but do you feel like what happened in Daniel 10, the praying,

the laying of the prayer, they answer the prayer because of the activity happening in the supernatural realm. Do you feel like that is something that is still continuing happening today? Because, you know, there's a lot of people that they said, I tried the God thing, or I tried praying. Nothing happened. And I feel like if they understood what's actually happening in the supernatural realm, they might have a little more patience. Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it. I have difficulty praying. Well, if you thought about this. And, you know, Yeah, I think this is a very alive realm of activity, as you say. And we have angels, we have demons.

Jesus is very active in our world yet today. And so, you know, no, we don't see it. No, we don't hear it explicitly. But can it affect us? Well, yeah, I believe it affects us every day. And, you know, you think of Satan. A friend of mine said, you know, Satan, because he is a fallen angel, he was Lucifer, whose name meant an angel of light and became Satan, whose name means the adversary. He is not omnipresent.

He's one spirit, a spirit being. He's only in one place at one time. And this guy said, you know, Lee, Satan and you have probably never been in. in the same zip code at the same time. He's not other things he's probably doing. But he's got demons who are very active, millions of them all around the planet. And he said something interesting about this supernatural realm. He said, Lee, if you were Satan, wouldn't you want to go where you could influence a greatest number of people? I said, what do you mean? He said, wouldn't you go to Hollywood? Wouldn't you go to a place where they could produce movies and TV? And, you mean? He said, wouldn't you go to a

place where they could produce movies and TV shows that are winsome and funny because when we laugh, we let our guard down and yet teach really terrible moral truths and horror movies that really open up people to want to know more and experience more of this demonic dimension and so for wouldn't you spend a lot of your time there and wouldn't you spend a lot of your time maybe in Washington where you can influence lawmakers and people of great influence I thought man there's some truth to that if he wants to maximize his nefarious doings he's going to want to do it by influencing people who have influence so Tony I say that to you as someone who is influenced No, I'm just saying, it's just logical that, yes, we live in a place that has a supernatural

dimension, but maybe the activity, it might be different in different places than it is where I am in Denver, Colorado. Yeah, absolutely. You know, as we wind things down here, we did touch on the idea of miracles. And, you know, talking about the mass audience two things. right. I brought my grandfather up earlier. He had told me a story before he passed away of when he was praying for somebody at, I guess a healing service. I don't know. I wasn't born. He said that he prayed for this person and their leg grew on stage. And he said my dad was present for it. My dad was a little kid,

though. I miss that. But he was praying for somebody on stage and their leg grew right there on stage as he was praying for them. And my father was there as a little kid. child. But there was a whole hundreds of people that witnessed this. That's, you know, if we're talking about evidence, that's me speaking a story that was told to be by my grandfather that I choose to believe because I love him. Right. Sure. So when it comes to miracles, have you come across any cases that it's like this was a documented miracle that wasn't just documented, like, they went to the doctor and they were healed of cancer, but like, there was an audience to this.

People saw this happen. Yeah. I mean, I interview for my book, Craig Keener, who's written multiple volumes on actual miracles that have taken place around the planet and documented many of those in his books. And I interview him, and we talk about many of those. One of them that's really fascinating is a baby that was born and could not keep down food, formula or mother's milk just vomited everything up. And they did a study, studied this child, what's going on, what's happening? And they realized this child had a condition called gastroporesis.

That means his stomach was paralyzed. He was born with a stomach that had, was paralyzed, couldn't process food. And so they had to do an operation on that infant and put in tubes so that the food would go right through his stomach immediately into his small intestine. Okay, saved his life. And he grew up, but, you know, he had a very restricted diet, and he couldn't do a lot of sports because of the surgery. It affected him in many ways, but he was at least alive, right? Well, when he was 16 years old, his parents brought him to a Pentecostal church.

And the pastor got up and was talking about how God had healed him of something. So they went up to the pastor later and said, would you pray for our son? He has this paralyzed stomach. There is no account anywhere in any medical journal of anybody ever been healed of gastroporosis. It's an incurable condition. But would you pray for him? So the pastor said, yes. He puts his hand on the young man's shoulder. The young man said later, I felt during the prayer in electric shock that went through my body. And he was instantly healed, of gastroporesis. So doctors followed up with medical test. They did surgery on him. They removed the tubes that had been inserted into him. He's been healthy ever since. I just was emailing

with him the other day. But his case was documented by multiple medical researchers who then publish it as a case study in a medical journal. Wow. Well, this is not just a story that you hear. Yeah. This is documented. And those are the kind of miracles I talk about in my book. One for which we have good, strong evidence. We have medical documentation, multiple eyewitnesses who have no motive to deceive, no natural explanation that can account for it, and it happens in the context of prayer. That's huge.

It's absolutely huge for the medical documentation of that. It paired with the people who were there and present. And I think that's happening more and more than more than people realize. it happens. And I think everybody has something in their life that they would love healing or somebody else to be healed in their life. And if anything from this conversation, I hope they take away that you don't need to lose hope. Like you could just put your faith in Christ and he is the great healer. I believe he will heal all of us. Now, it may not be until we leave this life and enter into a life of perfect bliss in heaven. I welcome that too. Yeah, which is fine with me. But I believe he will heal us all. Yes.

Well, Lee Strobel, I really appreciate you joining me. New books, Seeing the Supernatural Realm, available pretty much anywhere. Is there anywhere specifically you prefer to people buy it? Some authors care. Wherever they get books, keep an eye out for the movie, December 15th in motion picture theaters all over the country called The Case for Miracles. We've talked about a lot of cases and we have interviews with people. That's why I talked to the man who was healed of gastroporesis to set up an interview for that film.

And just some remarkable cases. And I think that'll be a fun experience for people. I have another book coming out in a few weeks, actually, I think in September, called The Case for Christmas. And I really try to set the record straight on what the Bible really says about Christmas and deal with a lot of issues involving the incarnation and the historical event of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. and so forth. I would love to at some point have you back on for that. Yeah. And we could make that a Christmas episode.

I think that would be awesome. Let's do it. There's a lot of misconceptions about Christmas. And by people of good faith who've been told stories that kind of fit with the biblical description. But when you understand things like how the houses were built in the first century, you get a much better picture of what actually took place during the birth of Jesus. And there's a lot of other interests and stuff to it. I'd love to come and talk about it.

That'd be great. I appreciate you join me today. Thanks so much, Tony. God bless you, man. God bless. Yeah, I'm just a rude competition, yeah. It's like it's a sickness.