What Deathbed Visions Reveal About Heaven ft. Lee Strobel
Inside This Episode
Are angels and demons real—and do they still interact with us today? Is there solid evidence for heaven and the afterlife beyond the Bible? What can we learn from supernatural experiences including deathbed visions and NDEs?
In this eye-opening conversation, bestselling author and former atheist Lee Strobel talks about his new book, Seeing the Supernatural. Drawing from Scripture, real-life accounts, and scientific inquiry, Strobel investigates the unseen realm—and reveals why he believes the invisible world is not only real, but closer than we think.
Lee also shares a deeply personal story: an encounter where he believes an angel spoke directly to him—a moment that left a lasting mark on his faith.
Order Lee’s latest book ➜ https://a.co/d/itINnoQ
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: Are angels and demons real? And if so, what impact do they have on our everyday lives? Is there credible evidence for heaven and hell beyond the pages of the Bible? Today, investigative journalist and former atheist Lee Strobel shares what he uncovered in his latest investigation into the unseen realm and why he believes the supernatural world is more real than what we think.
Lee Strobel, welcome to Maybe God.
Lee Strobel: Well, thanks. Great to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity.
Eric Huffman: Man, it's good to have you back. You know, I was thinking the last time we had you on Maybe God, that video quickly became our most watched of all time.
Lee Strobel: No kidding.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Lee Strobel: Oh, that's encouraging.
Eric Huffman: And it still is to this day almost... it's probably going to be our first video that passes a million views. And so-
Lee Strobel: No kidding. That's awesome.
Eric Huffman: So you're near and dear to our hearts. We're grateful for your time today.
Lee Strobel: Sure.
Eric Huffman: Lee, clearly you're best known. People that have heard your name is probably associated with The Case for Chris, whether it was the book or the subsequent film and your work as an investigative journalist, applying it to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, sort of as an apologetics, 30,000-foot course for newcomers to Christianity or people that are kicking the tires, so to speak.
But in this most recent book that I love, Seeing the Supernatural, thank you for this book, by the way. You took a step deeper into some of the mysterious and wonderful and terrifying world of spirituality and talking about angels and demons and heaven and hell and things that people everywhere wonder about.
So just tell us a little bit about why you decided to write this book of any book you could have written.
Lee Strobel: Well, you know, as you said, there's a widespread interest in the supernatural among people who are Christians and people who aren't Christians. You look at the popularity of TV shows, certain movies and books and so forth on that topic, and they seem to flourish. And I thought, "Here's an opportunity to talk about is there evidence, is there any corroboration for the fact that something exists beyond that which we can see and touch and put in a test tube? And if so, is it consistent with what the Bible tells us?"
Because my hope is it will deepen the faith of Christians, but then it will be a tool, a bridge that could reach people who are spiritually curious or spiritually confused, who may be interested in the paranormal or some weird stuff and say, well, would you be interested in what's been documented that tells us that the Bible's telling us the truth about a supernatural realm?
Eric Huffman: What evidence have you seen that there still is, even in this scientific age, interest in all things paranormal, supernatural? Like what evidence is there, as opposed to people that might just say, you know, matter is all there is?
Lee Strobel: Yeah, yeah. And there are a lot of people, there are naturalists or materialists who believe that, for instance, our brain is all that we are, that we have no soul, no consciousness independent from our physical brain and so forth. Well, I think the evidence belies that, and I spell that out in the book. But I think that when you do public opinion surveys, you find that 80% of Americans do believe that there is something beyond what we can see and touch.
I did my own survey where I hired a public opinion pollster, George Barna, who's well-respected, and we did a survey of American adults and asked the question, have you ever had an experience that you can only attribute to a miracle of God? And 38% of American adults said yes.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: Yeah. So there is something going on, and there is interest in this area. Now, having said that, there's also a phenomenon of embarrassment among a lot of Christians about these kind of topics. In other words, in the 21st century, a lot of American Christians want to be accepted by their neighbors and by their friends and colleagues, and so they say,"Well, of course I'm a Christian and I go to church, but I'm not one of those weird ones. You're not gonna get me talking about angels and demons and anything weird."
Well, Jesus was an exorcist. So if you believe that He is who we claim to be, the unique son of God, then that is evidence that there is a demonic realm. I think we have to recognize that our curiosity about it may be something due to the fact that there is something real that's there. We have the story in 2 Kings, there's a story about Elisha and his servant, and his servant is freaking out because the Syrian army is out to get him, and he's afraid they're gonna get killed.
Elisha prays and asks God to open his eyes to the supernatural — and God does, and the servant sees the angelic realm and how God is gonna protect them, and He ultimately does protect them. And so that servant's faith was deepened and his courage was multiplied because he saw the supernatural. And that's the hope I have for people who read this book.
Eric Huffman: That's awesome. I think we are living in a strange time where the church, at least in the West, the American church is less likely to talk much in depth about the spiritual realm of angels and demons, even heaven and Hell. But the less the church seems to talk about that side of scripture, the more interest the world seems to have in other kinds of unbiblical examples of paranormal, whether it's chakras and crystals or witchcraft and all the things that are on the rise in the world.
I went to the movies the other day, and literally they show like 17 trailers now, and every single trailer was either a demonic sort of Ouija board kind of bloodbath of witchcraft, or it was a Christian film. It's like those were the two options.
Lee Strobel: Interesting.
Eric Huffman: But at the same time that we have this increasing or at least a steady interest in the paranormal in our culture. You've talked about in your book a study that you commissioned in 2023 where nearly half of American adults, 46%, strongly or somewhat agree that science contradicts or disproves Christianity.
And so that's the other thread to pull on here is this idea that science or naturalism can explain objective reality, objective truth, and only in some cases, people would say only science can do that.
Lee Strobel: That's right. I actually did a book recently, my previous book to this one is called Is God Real? And it looks at that issue and it looks at science, cosmology, the origin of the universe, physics, the fine-tuning of the universe, biological information or DNA, and how that points toward a creator. And I build a case from science that points toward the existence of God.
So I think science is a great friend of Christianity. And I think, especially over the last 50 years, we've had a series of discoveries in biology, in the fine-tuning of the universe, physics, and in cosmology, the origin of the universe, just in the last 50, 80 years, that I think have made the case stronger than ever for the existence of a creator who matches the description of the God of the Bible.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I mean, I love your approach because I think like a skeptic, even now that I'm a Christian, and I think you do too, just because of your training. You start out by really dismantling the most powerful competing worldview to the supernatural worldview, which is... I guess it's a materialism, scientific naturalism that you might say is its own sort of religious worldview in a way, because science explains everything. But what is scientific materialism, and why is it so persuasive to so many today?
Lee Strobel: You know, it's a good question because it's actually self-refuting. In other words, to say... listen to one sentence. The sentence goes, science is the only arbiter of what is true. Well, that is not a scientific statement. So that is a philosophical statement. You can't test that scientifically. And so it's self-refuting. So to make the claim that science can explain everything is not a scientific claim.
Eric Huffman: Right.
Lee Strobel: So it just kind of falls apart.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Lee Strobel: I think the evidence points in a different direction. I interviewed for my book, for instance, Dr. Sharon Dirckx, who has a PhD from Cambridge University. She's a neuroscientist who shoots down the claim that we are just a physical brain.
No, we have a soul, we have a spirit, we have a consciousness that is distinct from our physical brain, and yet it interacts with our physical brain. And she presents a very powerful case that that is true. And if that is true, then where does that come from? We are more than just our physical brain. And near-death experiences, for instance, help establish that we do have a soul, a spirit that continues on after our clinical death.
Eric Huffman: That section of the book reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, which no one really seems to know about. Everybody knows Dallas Willard, but his book, Knowing Christ Today, is... the title doesn't do it justice, because he's talking about the philosophy of knowledge and how scientific materialism says that the only way to know things is objectively and empirically through science. And he says, No, there is such a thing as spiritual and experiential knowledge that can be trustworthy, reliable, under the right sort of scrutiny or discernment. And we should get back to trusting that again, lest we fall prey to this self-refuting worldview that you've just described.
Lee Strobel: Right. You know, it's funny. People say, oh, well, you're making an extraordinary claim that there is a God, an extraordinary claim that there's miracles, and so you need to present extraordinary evidence to back that up.
Well, the problem with that is people have believed since time immemorial in the existence of a spiritual realm, in the existence of a creator, in the existence of God. So the extraordinary claim is that He doesn't exist. So if you're an atheist, the onus is on you. Give me extraordinary evidence that He doesn't exist.
Secondly, we don't need extraordinary evidence to prove something to us. You know, if you told me that a spaceship just landed in Washington, D.C., that would be an extraordinary event. But if I see credible sources of information that are reporting on this, with photographs, with video, on respected-
Eric Huffman: Multiple eyewitnesses, yeah.
Lee Strobel: And multiple eyewitnesses, that's not extraordinary evidence, that's just good evidence. So we just need good evidence. And I believe, as my book lays out, we do have good corroborated evidence that there is a supernatural realm.
Eric Huffman: Well, I agree. I wanna offer this little disclaimer to anybody that's watching that's either an ex-Christian or a spiritually curious person, I know that the idea of a Christian author writing a book about the supernatural is not novel in itself. There's plenty of options out there. But as a fellow skeptic, I could just say that, Lee Strobel, your approach as a trained journalist is refreshing because you come at it like a skeptic would. If anybody opens this book with an open mind, I think they'll at least be surprised by some of what they find.
What surprised you? I know you set out with a mission to write a book on these topics that we'll get into in just a second in more depth, but what surprised you based on what you expected to find and what you actually found in your research?
Lee Strobel: Well, one thing that surprised me is the evidence for pre-death visions, deathbed visions. These are visions that people have of the realm to come just before they die. This is different than near-death experience. In a near-death experience, a person may be clinically dead, no brainwaves, no respiration, no heartbeat, but they're gonna be revived at some point. So they're coming back.
In a deathbed vision, they're about to die permanently. They're not coming back into this world. And they see something of the realm to come. And we see this in the Bible, in the book of Acts, where Stephen, who's described as being full of the Holy Spirit, he's about to be stoned to death, he's on his deathbed, and he looks up and he sees the heavens open up, and he sees the Father and the Son together in heaven. So there's a biblical precedent for this.
I was shocked by how common these deathbed visions are. There have been tens of thousands of these cases that have been investigated by scholars. One group of researchers went to a huge hospice facility in New York State, and they said to the dying people there, if you have an extraordinary vision before you pass, would you please tell us about it? Because we wanna know. Because a lot of people are embarrassed by it, or they think you're gonna think I'm weird, so they don't wanna say anything. But they gave them permission, "tell us." 88% of them had a pre-death vision.
Eric Huffman: These were people that were terminally ill or something?
Lee Strobel: That's right. They're on their deathbed, they're in hospice, they're waiting to die, and they have a pre-death vision. So these are incredibly common. And that's one reason why I believe they're authentic, because if they only happen once in a blue moon, then you could say, well, billions of people have died over time, every once in a while, there's gonna be an anomalous experience, so it doesn't really mean anything. But these are incredibly common.
In fact, I was having dinner in Oklahoma City with Steve Green, the president of the Museum of the Bible, and there were seven people of us having dinner. And we started talking about these pre-death visions, and it turned out that four of the seven had family experiences of pre-death visions.
If you talk to a hospice nurse, she will tell you of the cases that she or he have personally encountered of people having these visions. And here's the corroboration, because like you, I want evidence, I want... show me something that's more than just...
Eric Huffman: Heartfelt stories or whatever.
Lee Strobel: Exactly. So there's two forms of corroboration. Actually three. One of them is two researchers studied 3,000 of these cases and compared them to other experiences. And their conclusion, I'll quote, is, "these experiences are definitely not hallucinations, fantasies, or memories caused by grief, nor are they projections of the subconscious mind or products of an overactive imagination."
So here you have researchers who are documenting these things. But then secondly, we have people who are on their deathbed who get a vision of something that they could not have known to be true. So I'll give you an example. There's a woman named Doris. This is a well-documented case. Doris is dying. She has a pre-death vision. She sees the heavens open up. She sees angelic beings in the realm to come. She sees her father, who had died several years earlier, who's kind of welcoming her to this next realm. But then she gets this very puzzled look on her face, and she says, "Wait a minute. Why is Vida with my father? What's Vida doing there? Makes no sense. Why is Vida there?" And then she died.
Well, Vida was her sister, and Vida had died two weeks earlier, but nobody had told Doris because Doris was so ill, they didn't want the shock of the news to kill her.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: So they withheld the news that her sister had died. And yet on her deathbed in the realm to come, she sees her now-deceased sister.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: So that's a form of corroboration. Another form of corroboration is in Luke chapter 16, Jesus tells a story about a guy named Lazarus, who was a beggar and a rich man, and they both died. The rich man goes to a place of torment because of how he'd lived his life, and the beggar goes to a place of bliss. In verse 22, Jesus says, angels carried Lazarus to this place of bliss.
Now, it is so common in these deathbed visions for people to see angels coming for them. One example is the well-known atheist from Canada, Charles Templeton, who was the best friend of Billy Graham and Billy Graham's pulpit partner, who lost his faith at a liberal seminary. Wrote an ugly book called Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith.
Well, he ended up coming back to faith before he died. And on his deathbed, he saw angels coming for him, and he called out to his wife, Madeline, who by the way, is not a Christian, she's a deist. And he said, "Madeleine, can you see them?" He said, "Chuck, what are you talking about?" "The angels, they're here in this room. You can't see them, they're right here. They're so beautiful, look at their eyes, listen to their music." He said, "I'm going to heaven, they're gonna take me to heaven." And this is incredibly common.
But what we see in children who were dying is you would imagine if a youngster, five years old, is dying, and they had a vision of an angel, and it was manufactured by their own imagination, you would imagine that they would picture these angels like a child would.
Eric Huffman: Long hair, blue eyes, yeah, wings.
Lee Strobel: And big wings, right? The feathery big wings, because that's the caricature that kids are familiar with. That's not what they see. We have a documented case from a doctoral dissertation of a little girl who was dying, and she said to her mom, "Mommy, Mommy, can you see them?" She said, "What are you talking about?" "The angels, they're here, they're coming for me. Oh, they're so beautiful, look at their eyes." And her mother didn't want to disappoint her, so she said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see them, look at their big wings." And the little girl said, "Oh, Mommy, they don't have wings." And she went on to describe them in great detail.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: So that tells me, wait a minute-
Eric Huffman: That's a great point.
Lee Strobel: Isn't it? So there's something to these pre-death visions that I think is really fascinating.
Eric Huffman: I agree. Yeah, I agree with you. And nothing against near-death experiences, which is when someone technically dies for a time and comes back. But I confess that my team here, they had to talk me into doing any episodes on near-death experiences because of my own dark heart, I guess, cynical heart, let's say, towards such things.
Now, I've come around. John Burke helped me come around to giving near-death experiences a chance. But the difference between what you're talking about, these deathbed experiences and near-death experiences, is that the person going through them and expressing them doesn't have anything to gain by sharing what they're going through. In fact, I've been at many deathbeds, pastor comes with the territory, and I've seen and heard what you're talking about.
And oftentimes, it's given in a way that isn't even meant for the people around them to hear it. Like, they're not even sometimes aware that anyone else is in the room. They're talking to someone, they're experiencing this, so it's very personal, very raw.
Lee Strobel: They'll often reach up as if they're being taken.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. That adds another layer of credibility to these on top of near-death experiences where somebody comes back with a dramatic story to tell the world, and sometimes they'll write a book about it and get famous and all that stuff. Here, you just have someone in the most tender, vulnerable moment of their lives going through something that, by all accounts, seems extremely authentic and real. So I agree with you.
Lee Strobel: In fact, there was the researcher who got his PhD in this area, J. Steve Miller, who's now a university professor, who I interviewed for my book. He documents 47 points of consistency between biblical teaching and deathbed visions and near-death experiences, 47 points of correspondence, which I think is fascinating.
Eric Huffman: It really is. All right, let's get into the weeds a little bit more and talk about... you just mentioned angels and some of those deathbed experiences. What did you learn through your work about angels in particular and what they are, what they're for? Talk to us about that.
Lee Strobel: You know what, it's funny. I've been a Christian now since November the 8th of 1981, and I cannot recall ever hearing a sermon on the topic of angels. We don't talk about angels very much. And so here I am doing this research with scholars who've written books on angels, and I'm learning a lot of things.
People have a lot of misconceptions about angels. They think that when they die they turn into an angel. No, angels are separate beings, that God has created as spirit beings. They don't age because they're spirit. They don't reproduce or marry because they're spirit. They don't have a physical body. They are very strong. We see an angel who flicked away the stone at the tomb of Jesus. That stone is estimated to have weighed four tons. They are very intuitive and smart. They're not omniscient. They don't know our thoughts like God does. They're not omnipresent. They're not everywhere. There are lots of them.
We see in the book of Revelation, a scene where Jesus, the post-resurrected Jesus, is on His throne, and if you do the math according to how this scene is described, there were 100 million angels worshiping Him. So there's a lot of these guys around.
We're not to pray to angels. We're not to worship angels, but we can pray to God about angels. And I never used to do this. I'll tell you, when Jesus was being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, He said, I'm paraphrasing, but He said in a sense, do you not think that I could right now ask the Father, and He would not send legions of angels to protect me? So Jesus is saying, "I could, if I desired to, pray to God for angelic protection."
Martin Luther, in the small catechism that he wrote, has a prayer to God about send your holy angels to protect me from the evil one.
So I never prayed that way before, but I've started to do it. There's nothing wrong. Don't pray to angels, but I pray to God and say, "Send your angels to protect me and my family and my ministry and so forth." There's nothing wrong with doing that. So that's fascinating.
Another fascinating area is do we have a guardian angel? That's an interesting... Now some denominations say yes, some scholars say no. There are two passages in scripture that I think suggest that we do have an angel assigned to us.
In one passage in Matthew, Jesus is talking about some little children, and 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, we see Peter being liberated from prison, and he goes and he knocks on the door of some Christians who have gathered, and the servant said, "Who's there?" And he says, "Peter." And she calls out to the gathered people, "Hey, Peter's here." And they said, "That can't be Peter, he's in prison. So it can't be Peter. It must be his angel."
So some people, based on those kind of passages, believe that we have a angel assigned to us.
Eric Huffman: The Jesus one is especially compelling.
Lee Strobel: It is.
Eric Huffman: Matthew 18, I think, verse 10, maybe, Matthew 18:10, where Jesus clearly says, "These children have angels that are theirs." Their angels.
Lee Strobel: That's right. That's right. In Greek Orthodox Christianity, they believe that at the time of baptism, an angel is assigned to each person.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Lee Strobel: And the Bible does say that one of the functions of angels is to serve God's people. Here's the other thing. In the book of Hebrews, it suggests that we may very well have encounters with angelic beings in this world. Because it says sometimes we may be providing hospitality unbeknownst to us to an angel.
And we have, and I document in my book, cases where we have encounters that people have that are hard to explain if these are not authentic angelic encounters. So there's a case of a guy, him and his wife, who were... his name was Paton, P-A-T-O-N, his last name. He and his wife were missionaries in the South Pacific on this island and they were sharing the gospel among these tribes people.
The tribe people didn't like it, and they started to get angry, and so a mob of them came one night to burn down their house and kill him. So here Paton and his wife are praying, "God protect us. God save us. We don't know what to do. This mob is gathering outside to kill us." And then they prayed all night, and by dawn, the mob dissipated.
Well, a year later, he leads the head of that mob to faith in Jesus Christ. And he's talking to him, and he says, "By the way, remember that day that you and the mob came to burn down our house and kill us? Why didn't you do it?" And he looked at him, he said, "Well, who were all those men that you had?" And he said, "What are you talking about? It was just my wife and I." And the guy said, "No, no, no, your house was surrounded by these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords. There's no way we could have attacked you that night." Well, is that an angelic encounter? I mean, you know?
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I have a concern lately as a pastoral concern with the number of anxious Christians I'm encountering all the time. People that are Christian by faith and church-going people, but carry around with them all kinds of worry, anxiety, feeling of vulnerability, and exposure. I wonder if part of the reason why is our lack of attention to the angelic realm. If we knew, if we only knew.
Lee Strobel: If we only knew. And in the book, I describe an angelic encounter that I had. I was always embarrassed by this because you don't talk about stuff like this, right? I was 12 years old. It's the only vision or dream I recall from my childhood. I'm in my home, in my kitchen, and an angelic being appeared to me and he began to extol heaven and talk about the beauty and the wonder of heaven. And I listened for a moment and I said, "well, I'm going there someday." And he looked at me and he said, "How do you know?" And I was stunned by that. "What do you mean, how do I know? I'm a good kid. I obey my parents."
Eric Huffman: Just trying to have my breakfast here.
Lee Strobel: Just trying to have my breakfast here. And I'm trying to justify by my good deeds that somehow I'll get into heaven. And he looked at me and he said, "That doesn't matter." And a cold chill went down my spine. "How can my efforts to be a compliant kid not matter in terms of opening heaven for me?" And then he looked at me and he said, "Someday you'll understand." Well, I wrote this off. I thought this was a bad pizza or something. And I never talked about it hardly at all. I told my parents, but nobody else. And I became an atheist. I suppressed it, became an atheist, wrote it off.
And then 16 years later, as an atheist, my wife brought me to a church and I heard the gospel for the first time that explained it's not on the basis of your good deeds that God opens the doors of heaven. It is a free gift of His grace that we need to receive in repentance and faith. And as soon as I heard that, my mind flashed back to that angel.
Two things tell me that was authentic. Number one, he told me something that day that I did not know. And secondly, he made a prophecy that came true 16 years later. Now, I later, of course, came to faith and I was being ordained as a pastor and all these theologians are there and they're questioning me about my doctrines, my beliefs, and I'm thinking to myself, "Do I tell them about this angelic encounter I had? They're gonna think I'm weird. They're gonna say, hey, forget it. We're not gonna ordain you." And I thought, "No, I have to be honest. I have to tell them about it.
So this goes back 30-some years. I said, "I gotta tell you something that happened to me." And I laid it out just as I did. And you know what their response was? "Okay, that's fine. Some people have that experience. That's fine."
Eric Huffman: Good for you. Well, yeah, I think that's just symptomatic of something deeper in the church, which is the church is being influenced by naturalism as opposed to the church influencing people that adhere to naturalism. We're just sort of waving the white flag so that we don't weird people out with the strange supernatural stuff in the Bible. And so we're playing the game on the world's terms.
Man, it's another one of those, if we only knew, the power that comes with telling these stories. I don't think there's anything that wakes people up more than hearing stories like this and the justifications for them biblically and experientially as Christians.
One more reason why I'm proud of you for writing this book and I'm grateful for it, I think it really does stand out. I've read so many other books and they're all good. The first one I remember reading was Philip Yancey's something about the invisible world. Rumors. Rumors of the Invisible World. That was a great book too. And some of your work around miracles has been obviously great as well. And John Burke. but man, this one was like all encompassing. And I think it's a great starter book for people that are really trying to figure this stuff out as well.
All right. Let's flip the script a little bit and talk about the other side of angels. Because we've talked about all the positive, reassuring stories and revelations about angels but there's a dark side to it as well. What'd you learn through your research and writing about the demonic realm?
Lee Strobel: Well, first of all, that it's real. In the book, I tell the story about a highly respected Ivy League-educated psychiatrist, so he's a medical doctor, as well as trained in psychiatry, named Richard Gallagher. I have a quote from the former president of the American Psychiatric Association saying Richard Gallagher is a highly educated, highly reliable man of great integrity. So just extolling this psychiatrist as being a reliable source of information.
Well, Dr. Gallagher, 20 years ago, he and his wife had two cats. And the cats got along great. They were best buddies. They slept together. Everything was fine. Until one night, and one night these cats began attacking each other. I mean, venomous kind of attack, just snarling and clawing and trying to kill each other, ripping at each other. And they were just stunned by this.
They pulled the cats apart and put them in separate rooms and thought, "What in the world was going on there?" 9 a.m. the next day, the doorbell rings, and it was a predetermined appointment where a Catholic priest was bringing by a woman to be psychiatrically examined by Dr. Gallagher. She claimed that she was a high priestess of a satanic cult.
So the doorbell rings at 9 a.m., he opens the door, here's the Catholic priest, and here's this woman who claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult, who looks up at Dr. Gallagher and sneers and said, "So how'd you like those cats last night?"
Eric Huffman: What?
Lee Strobel: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Oh, my goodness.
Lee Strobel: So Dr. Gallagher ends up spending the next 20 years of his life involved with exorcisms, with the demonic and documenting that. He actually wrote a book called Demonic Foes in which he documents all of this. He documents cases in which people who are possessed by a demonic spirit are able to speak Latin, a language they don't know.
One petite woman picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room.
Eric Huffman: Goodness.
Lee Strobel: Eyewitnesses saw a body levitate off of a bed. I mean, these are cases that he has personally documented. There is a demonic realm. Now, the good news is that Christians, authentic Christians cannot be possessed by a demon because we're already indwelled by the Holy Spirit. So we can't be possessed by a demon. But they can hector us. They can bother us. They can try to deter us from going on God's path.
I'll tell you a funny story. This just happened a couple of weeks ago. I was doing a national radio show, a live show on the Moody Broadcast Network. It was a call in show, and we're talking about this book. And a woman called in from Florida, and very nice woman, very... you know, had a question and she wanted to talk a little bit about the demonic realm. And as soon as she brought up that topic, I hear through the earphones, this guttural growl.
Eric Huffman: Jeez.
Lee Strobel: And I thought, "Wait a minute. This is my imagination." I didn't say anything." As soon as the show was over, I called the host. I said, "Did you hear that?" And he said, "Yes." He said, "We called the woman. Didn't come from her. Didn't come from you. Didn't come from me. We actually have the tape recording of it. We've preserved that. We don't know what it was." That was kind of, no, I'm not saying that was necessarily a demonic intervention, but I'm telling you...
I'll tell you this. If I imagine what a snarl of a demon would sound like, it was that.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Do you ask her if she had any cats?
Lee Strobel: I didn't because I'm suspecting all cats are demon-possessed.
Eric Huffman: Well, I always believed that even before I was a Christian. No, I'm looking at my team because we've probably done over a dozen episodes where we deal with the demonic and ask questions to expose demons and things and understand them better. And almost every time that we do something technologically goes off the rails in ways that we don't experience.
Typically lights go out, internet cuts out, wires fail, and strange strange things happen. I know to the average skeptic, they just hear anecdotal stories, but when you live these stories, they start to take on way more meaning and you start to pay attention to patterns.
Lee Strobel: We had a case where a woman, a mother, a son was dabbling in the occult and in the demonic and so forth. He was an atheist. And she said, "I heard about your book, The Case for Christ," that lays out the evidence and convince you as an atheist that God is real and that Jesus is His Son. So she said, "I went on Amazon and I bought a copy of the book to be delivered to my son." I thought, "What have I got to lose? Maybe he'll read the book." The book is delivered, he opens the book and all the pages are blank.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: Every page was blank. I don't know how that happened. Isn't that weird?
Eric Huffman: That is very weird.
Lee Strobel: The cover was okay, but every page was blank. There was a case that Richard Gallagher talks about where there was a woman who could not hear when you would bring up the topic of Jesus. She became deaf. She could not hear that. And where he actually wrote out something about Jesus and showed it to her, and she said, "Why are you showing me a blank piece of paper?" She couldn't see it.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: There's some weird stuff out there.
Eric Huffman: There is. The question is what's really going on, I guess, and much the same way you described sort of what angels are biblically and what we've experienced them to be as humans. What do we say about demons? Who or what are they as relative to angels?
Lee Strobel: They are fallen angels. There's some of them who fell, this is before the creation of the world, we believe, who fell and led by a guy named Lucifer, who was a shining star among the angelic realm who wanted himself to be worshiped. He wanted to be God. And so are they omniscient? No. Can they read your mind? No. Are they everywhere? No.
In fact, it's interesting that Satan himself is not omnipresent. He is not everywhere. In fact, I have a friend who just wrote a book on spiritual warfare, and he says to people, "I would bet you that there's never been a time that Satan has been in your zip code at the same time you have been."
Eric Huffman: Chances are, yeah.
Lee Strobel: Chances are. But there are demons who do his bidding. The good news is that God is stronger. Satan is not the anti-God. In other words, he is not the same thing as God, except in a negative or evil way. He is limited in his power, and God, in a sense, has him on a leash. And his ultimate demise is foretold and so forth, so his days are numbered.
But in the interim, and that's why Ephesians tells us to put on the full armor of God. In my book, I have an interview with Ron Rhodes, who's an expert on the occult and paranormal, and he talks about what does that mean? How do we really protect ourselves from knowing what is of God and what is of Satan? But Satan and demons can be counterfeits of what we think is from God, and yet is a demonic deception intending to lure us down the wrong path.
Eric Huffman: I mean, talk about things churches don't talk enough about. I mean, we talked about angels before, but Satan?
Lee Strobel: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: It's pretty rare, unfortunately, that you hear... at least in big steeple-type denominational churches, we don't hear much about Satan and the demonic. And I guess the question is, how vigilant should we be as Christians and just people in general? How aware should we be of the demonic? What's the difference between being rightly vigilant and being wrongly afraid, I guess?
Lee Strobel: That's a great distinction. We don't need to be afraid. If you're a follower of Jesus, if you're born again, if you're indwelled by the Holy Spirit, you don't have to be afraid of the demonic. But we need to be aware of it. The biggest victory of Satan has been to convince people he doesn't exist, because then we're not prepared. Then we don't put on the full armor of God.
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Part of that full armor of God is Scripture. When we understand Scripture, when we understand the biblical teaching about these things, then we can be better equipped to discern what is of God and what is not.
I'll give you an example. I have a chapter in my book about ghosts and mediums and psychics. And there are a lot of people that believe in these sorts of things. And yet, what is the definition of a ghost? A definition of a ghost is someone who has died, and yet their spirit refuses to go into the next realm. Well, I don't see an example of that in Scripture. I don't see an example of someone who's, "Oh, no, I'm not going into the next realm." I don't see that.
I think a lot of what people interpret as being ghostly apparitions may very well be demonic counterfeits, and we have to be very careful of that. When we talk about psychics, I expose in my book the ways that psychics trick people into thinking they know a lot more than they really do.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Lee Strobel: And so we need to be aware of that and to be aware, again, of Scripture, where the Bible tells us, don't mess around with psychics. Don't mess around with mediums. That's not something to dabble in. The Bible is very clear about that.
Eric Huffman: Why is that? What happens when we do dabble?
Lee Strobel: I think there's an open door. I think it opens the door not just to the quote-unquote, pure and normal, which sounds kind of okay. It opens the door to a potential satanic-
Eric Huffman: Influence.
Lee Strobel: Exactly. I'll give you an example. Let's say, hypothetically, that someone comes back from the dead, and you have a vision of your Uncle Bob who comes back, and he's a ghost. Okay, so you encounter your Uncle Bob's ghost. Uncle Bob, by the way, was a drunk. He was a womanizer. He was violent. He hated God. He was an atheist. But here Uncle Bob appears, and he's fine. And he says, "You know what? I'm fine. Live your life, and everything's going to turn out fine. I'm just here to tell you you're okay. Everything's going to be fine."
Well, if you believe that, you may very well think that, "Oh, I can just live my life like Uncle Bob did." But what a setup by an angelic counterfeit to deceive you into thinking that, "Oh, Uncle Bob's fine," when Uncle Bob ain't fine.
Eric Huffman: Therefore, you can live how you want. Eat, drink, and be merry kind of thing.
Lee Strobel: Exactly. Yeah. I think there's a motivation that Satan has to deceive people. And when we open that door through Ouija board, through psychics, through mediums, and so forth.
Eric Huffman: I would add pornography to that list.
Lee Strobel: Pornography, exactly, takes you down a dark path. So, yeah. So, you know, we need to be in an accountable relationship with other Christians where we can be honest with each other about how we're living our lives, who can give us advice and wisdom when we face things. You know, the Bible says test the spirits. Well, there's no reason to test the spirits if they all come from God.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Lee Strobel: They don't all come from God. There are counterfeit spirits that we need to discern.
Eric Huffman: Man, that's a good reminder. Are you familiar at all with the rise of deliverance ministries?
Lee Strobel: Not wholly, but, you know, every denomination has its approach to dealing with the demonic. You know, the Catholic Church has a very well-defined exorcism ritual that they go through. I think it's 1,600 words. Very well-defined. There are charismatic ministries that have more deliverance kind of approaches. So different denominations and different religious traditions recognizing the demonic among us have different ways of dealing with it. I'm not an expert. I wouldn't call myself an expert on it.
Eric Huffman: There is an uprising both in America and I think throughout the world of churches and ministers, parachurch ministries sometimes that are making it their sole mission or maybe their primary mission to address and deal with the demonic in their meetings, their revivals and things. I just wondered if you'd seen any of that and whether you are encouraged or troubled by some of those phenomena where we're kind of picking the fights with the demons going to them.
Lee Strobel: Yeah. You know, when we talk about the success of Satan in convincing people he doesn't exist, the other extreme is to believe that there's a demon behind every bush and that somehow these demons are stronger than God because God can't deal with them and that's why we have to deal with them in our everyday life and so forth, and become obsessed by them and obsessed by things that don't warrant our obsession.
I think we have to take a balanced approach to this and to realize that God is sovereign. God is stronger than Satan. He is stronger than the demonic. If we're a follower of Jesus, we can be protected from that. We just need to be vigilant. We need to be cautious and so forth. But I think to get too deep into it may be playing somewhat into Satan's hands.
Eric Huffman: Wow. That's a great way to put it. And that's the C.S. Lewis satanic fallacy, I think.
Lee Strobel: Yes.
Eric Huffman: He says, "There's two different ways to get Satan wrong. One is to never think about him and the other one is to obsess about him." I'm butchering the quote.
Lee Strobel: That's exactly right.
Eric Huffman: But I've seen that obsession in well-meaning Christians where everything that's not of God is and must be demonic. Every illness, every malady, everything is demonic influence. Therefore, it must be dealt with with deliverance, including in the lives of believers.
You have to be delivered and then re-delivered and re-delivered every time you sin. It takes you back a little bit to the old covenant where every time you've sinned, you got to go back to the temple, got to get clean again, got to go back.
And it creates this works righteousness anxiety in people. It also creates the wrongheaded idea, unbiblical idea that every illness is against the will of God and therefore must be and can be cured and healed if you have enough faith. If you as a healer have enough faith, if you are a sick person, if you have enough faith, then everything not only can be healed but will be because the demonic is being cast out.
Lee Strobel: It's a dangerous position to take. Do I believe God will heal all? Yeah. But it may be when we pass into the next world where there's a world of no pain, no suffering. So I think God will heal everyone at some time. But automatic healings were not what happened in the New Testament times either.
Eric Huffman:Â Not all the time.
Lee Strobel: No. I mean, Jesus didn't do many miracles in Nazareth because of a lack of faith. We have the thorn in Paul's flesh that apparently was never healed. Paul had a buddy named Trophimus and Trophimus was sick. Does Paul heal him? No. He says, "Okay, you stay here. I'm going off on my missionary journey."
Eric Huffman: Timothy was sick to his stomach. Paul said, "Drink some wine."
Lee Strobel: Yeah, right. And then Jesus gave the apostles the ability to heal, and then seven chapters later, they couldn't heal an epileptic boy. So healing was not automatic in Old Testament times, and New Testament times either. Nor is it today.
My wife suffers from a neuromedical anomaly condition that is incurable. She's been in pain for 20 years and she will be in pain every day for the rest of her life unless God does a miracle and cures this incurable condition, which He has not chosen to do. Has that changed her faith? It's deepened her faith. It's strengthened her faith because God has used it remarkably in her life to create in her a woman of empathy and caring and compassion that maybe she never would have been had she not gone through this experience.
Romans 8, 28 is still valid. God causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. That's not a throwaway catchphrase. That's biblical teaching.
Eric Huffman: Can I ask you a personal question about that?
Lee Strobel: Yeah, yeah.
Eric Huffman: Do you still pray for her healing?
Lee Strobel: I do. Yeah, I do pray occasionally for that. It's not happened.
Eric Huffman: I'm just curious because I had a recent conversation with the deliverance minister who informed me that sort of the way I pray for healing implies a lack of faith on my part because I say... when I do pray for people's healing, and I've seen it, I believe in miraculous healings, I'll pray, "Lord, if it's your will to heal this person right now, do it. Let's go. But give her, give him, give us faithfulness no matter what." That's sort of... he would say that I'm hedging. That's saying, well, then you're saying it's not His will to heal everyone, and so that's why this person doesn't get healed, which I'm laughing, but it's pretty heavy if you think about it. I would lie if I said that hadn't kept me up at night a little bit.
Lee Strobel: But that puts the onus on us. "Oh, you lack faith, therefore, God's not healing you. If you just had more faith. If you just go strong." That's a very destructive thing that can impulse, that people can develop as a result of that. Do I believe that God heals today? Yes. In my book, I've got documented cases in peer-reviewed medical journals that cannot be explained other than God has chosen to intervene.
But I interviewed, I did a book called The Case for Miracles, and we have a movie coming out by that title at the end of this year, there'll be movie theaters for two weeks around Christmas called The Case for Miracles, where we document miracles. But one of the people I interviewed for that is a famous Christian philosopher, Dr. Douglas Groothuis. His wife, when I interviewed him, was dying of a brain condition, and they had prayed for her healing. It did not come, and she ended up dying right after the book came out.
And I said, "How do you deal with that?" In my book, The Case for Miracles, he goes into much more detail about how he deals with that as a Christian. But he ended up writing a book, which I encouraged him to do, about that experience called Walking Through Twilight, or Walking Toward Twilight, I think it's called, by Douglas Groothuis. So anybody going through what my wife goes through, or what his wife went through, where we don't see God healing in the way that we want, in the time frame that we want, I think that book is a very powerful book that will help a lot of people.
Eric Huffman: That's important. Thank you for clearing that up for me. So talking about your research in the book, and specifically around near-death experiences and the deathbed revelations, the question becomes about afterlife, right? What is it pointing to? Heaven and hell. What specifically about heaven did you learn that caught you off guard or surprised you that you want to share?
Lee Strobel: Well, again, I think there's a lot of misconceptions about heaven and hell. We could start with heaven, that a lot of people think that heaven is this ethereal place where we're on clouds somewhere playing harps and singing worship songs all the time. Now, heaven is the renewal of our world without the sin that has corrupted it and corroded it, a very physical place for people who have resurrected bodies. And it'll be a place of celebration and banquets and love and interactions, community between believers.
In fact, one of the interesting things that one scholar told me, he said, I believe that there's going to be a moment... when we get to heaven that'll be a moment of reconciliation because we die sometimes at odds with other Christians. We've had an argument with someone or whatever, and we die and we're in a state of conflict with that other Christian. We're going to spend eternity with that Christian. His belief is the first hour of heaven, we will be totally motivated, as will our friend, to reconcile in a complete way.
I think there's probably some truth to that. You know, I had a very difficult relationship with my father. My dad looked at me on the eve of my high school graduation and said, "I don't have enough love for you to fill my little finger." Now, we had all kinds of conflict. A lot of it is on me from how I rebelled and so forth. But he was a Christian, and I believe he's in heaven. And I believe when I get to heaven, he's going to be totally motivated, as I am totally motivated, to own my side of what brought conflict into our relationship and to embrace and to be reconciled in a way where we can now spend eternity in the perfect father-son relationship that we didn't enjoy in this world.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: I think that's an element of heaven that I think makes a lot of sense. Whether it'll be instantaneous or whether it'll take... I don't know.
Eric Huffman: There's no time there, so it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Lee Strobel: That's true. That's true. Well, there's got to be that reconciliation. In terms of hell, I think people... you know, the fires of hell, are there literal fires? Well, no, I don't think there are. And even Martin Luther did not believe that there are, because it talks about, the Bible talks about it being a place of darkness and a place of flames. Well, if they both were true, the flames would light up the darkness. So the flames are meant to represent something.
Eric Huffman: Something awful, yeah.
Lee Strobel: Something awful. And the darkness is meant to represent separation from God and so forth. The other thing that helps me in terms of understanding heaven is the scriptures involving Jesus that suggest very strongly that hell is not one size fits all, that there are degrees of torment in... and by the way, torment is different than torture. Hell is not a torture chamber. Torture is applied from without. Torment comes from within, from a sense of our regret and our anger and so forth. So hell is not a torture chamber.
But it's also the experience in hell is going to be different for different people. And, you know, because Jesus said—I'll paraphrase—but He said, you know, woe to this town where I came and did miracles, and yet they rejected me, versus this town that didn't have that. So there's going to be different punishments or different-
Eric Huffman: Levels, you might say.
Lee Strobel: Levels, so to speak, yeah, in hell. And that helps, I think, to understand... you know, in Genesis it says, "Will not the God of all the earth do what's right?" He's the judge of all the earth. He's going to judge appropriately. And it would make sense that the experience of those who've rejected God for their whole life, who end up separated from Him forever, will have a different experience based on how he judges them.
Eric Huffman: What do you say to the critic that might say, or the cynic, that the fact that near-death experiences are shared by people who are Christians and not, and even some non-Christians or people of other faiths have reported positive near-death experiences and deathbed experiences? Some might say, well, that seems to be evidence of some kind of universalism where heaven is open to all rather than this salvation by Christ alone.
Lee Strobel: Right. Well, in near-death experiences, for instance, we have one study showed 24% of the cases were negative cases. They had bad experiences in the life that comes. And a lot of people, I believe, suppress what happens in a near-death experience because who wants to say, "Oh yeah, I went to hell?"
Eric Huffman: Yeah, especially the negative ones. Yeah.
Lee Strobel: Negative ones. I think the number is probably more than 24%, but there are those cases that are negative. And keep in mind in a near-death experience, these people are coming back. This is not the final judgment. You know, Hebrews says we are appointed once to die and then the judgment. Now, they haven't died permanently. They're clinically dead, but they're going to be revived.
What does the Bible say that attracts us most to God? Kindness attracts us. And so it would make sense that some people who have a near-death experience and experience the kindness of God, giving them another chance when they are revived to come to Him in faith and repentance and receive Him and so forth. There could be demonic counterfeits as well. We can't rule out that possibility.
Eric Huffman: Sure. That's a good point. And we shouldn't get carried away with our emotionalism or sentimentality about this. Test the spirits, right?
Lee Strobel: Yeah, test the spirit. Do I believe that near-death experiences do tell us that our consciousness survives our clinical death? Yes, I believe they tell us that. Do I base my theology on near-death experiences? No. I base it on the Bible.
Eric Huffman: They're clues.
Lee Strobel: Exactly.
Eric Huffman: They're clues to a greater story. And I know we need to wrap up, but I think this is important for people that ask questions about heaven, because the most common questions about heaven are, how do we know life continues beyond physical life as we know it? Will there be some kind of a chance for people that aren't given a chance in this life or don't have an opportunity to receive Christ in this life before some ultimate decision is made? And then, will I recognize my loved ones?
Lee Strobel: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: And to some degree or another, I think that last question, NDEs, deathbed experiences, all their testimonies, and the Bible itself, Jesus' story about heaven and hell, Lazarus and the poor man, the beggar, they recognize each other. And so there's all kinds of evidence that we will indeed recognize loved ones in heaven. Your dream, your story about your dad and being reunited and reconciled, that's more than wishful thinking. That's backed up by evidence and our faith in the scriptures and all that. So that question is helped along by these experiences, as is the question of consciousness continuing beyond this life. How else do you explain these thousands upon thousands of stories?
Lee Strobel: And you know what the number one question about heaven is?
Eric Huffman: What?
Lee Strobel: Will my pet dog be in heaven with me? People want to know.
Eric Huffman: Yes, the dog, but not the cat.
Lee Strobel: That's right, dog. No cats, no cats. And there's a division among theologians on that question.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah. Wow. This is all so fascinating, Lee. To respect your time, I'll just ask one more question, if that's okay, brother.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, sure.
Eric Huffman: Just a general question. Your biggest takeaway, your biggest takeaway that you personally were impacted by, or that you want others to hear in your experience writing this book.
Lee Strobel: You know, in 2 Kings, there's a story about the servant of Elisha. They're being hunted by the Syrian army, and he's afraid of what's going to happen. God opens his eyes to the supernatural, and it deepens his faith and gives him courage to know that God was going to protect him in that moment.
That's what this experience did for me, investigating the supernatural. It deepened my faith, it gave me more courage, and it also heightened my desire to share with nonbelievers and people who are spiritually confused or curious, to use this as a bridge to say, Oh, I know you're kind of interested in UFOs and Sasquatch or Bigfoot or kind of that, but, you know, maybe you'd be interested in what this former atheist discovered when he investigated the supernatural with corroborated stuff. I hope it can be a bridge to lead people, because the gospel is clearly in the book.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, amen. Well, if you're watching and listening, I hope you'll pick up Seeing the Supernatural by my friend Lee Strobel. You will be blessed by it, no matter where you are on the religious spectrum or identity, spirituality, all of that. I think you will love this book. I did.
Lee, I love your enthusiasm. I love your tenacity. I love when God takes someone's past training and expertise and just tweaks or aligns it a little bit for the kingdom, like He did with Paul's Phariseeism and his, you know, ambition as a Pharisee. He just tweaked it a little for the gospel and changed the world. He's done the same with you as a journalist. So I'm very grateful.
Lee Strobel: That's very kind. Thank you so much. Thanks for what you do.
Eric Huffman: Thank you for your time today, Lee. God bless you.
Lee Strobel: My pleasure.
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