Jesus and the Unseen World
TWICE IN THE past dozen years I have been brushed by the invisible. I have no other explanation for what happened.
The first time was a fall day in Philadelphia. Mrs. Bayly and I had taken our four-year-old boy to Children's Hospital in center city for the blood tests he had to have every two weeks because he had leukemia. It was an anxious, uncertain two hours before we would receive the report and learn whether the dread disease was still in check or not.
To pass the time, we walked seven or eight blocks to John Wanamaker's department store. As we crossed City Hall courtyard, with Danny between us, we passed a blind girl who was seated there begging for money.
"You don't know whether to give to such a person or not," I said. "You don't really know whether they need it, or how they'll spend it."
"You don't need to know," Mary Lou replied. "Jesus said we should give just because someone asks."
By then we had passed the young woman. We crossed the street to Wanamaker's, where we had lunch and tried to be cheerful.
Afterwards I suggested to Mary Lou that she might window-shop while I walked back to Children's
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with Danny to get the results. She could meet us later.
So my little boy and I left the store, crossed the street and walked back through City Hall courtyard. Again we passed the beggar girl. This time, remembering Mary Lou's words, I dropped a quarter into her tin cup.
Now remember that she was blind; but even if she wasn't we were half-dozen blocks from the hospital and Danny outwardly appeared completely well. And Mary Lou and I had not discussed his sickness or the hospital tests in front of Danny as we walked. We wanted to forget it for two hours.
As I leaned over to drop in my coin, the girl said, "God is able to make your little boy well."
The other time was in Logan International Airport, Boston. I was about to fly back to Philadelphia.
This was during a sort of lean period for us, and through poor planning I was ten cents short of the money I needed to get home.
As I walked into the terminal building, I said within myself, not closing my eyes, "Thank you, God, for ten cents."
A moment later I heard a coin drop to the floor. I didn't look down, or stop, because I knew it wasn't mine. Someone tugged at my sleeve and said, "This belongs to you." And he put a quarter in my hand.
People were going in all directions. Whoever it was disappeared in the crowd.
For a moment I continued to hold my hand outstretched, the coin still in it, so that whoever
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really owned it could take it from me. Then I said, "Thank you, God, for a quarter," and put it in my pocket.
The second incident represented God's intervention in ordinary life to meet my need. I prayed and He answered.
I'm not so sure about the first. It was an intervention, but I can't be sure of its source: was it the power of God or the power of darkness?
"God is able to make your little boy well" was certainly true. This would lead me to believe that God was responsible for the strange utterance of these words. Yet the words raised my hopes, and an hour later, Mary Lou's hopes as well when I told her. But four months later Danny died.
I'm not sure that God would raise our hopes only to dash them. Still, He may have affirmed His power to heal to reassure us, when our child's death later came, that it was an act of His will.
There is, of course, another possibility to explain this incident that I don't like to admit, although I must. I could have imagined that the blind girl made the statement; it could have been real in my mind without having any objective reality in fact.
I don't believe this was so, and the fact that I told Mary Lou about the incident and repeated the words to her so soon afterward makes me sure that I had no thought of any possibility of my imagining it at the time. But I am aware of the pressure I was under, and I know the fallibility of the mind, including my own mind.
But there's the problem with a lot of strange
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psychic incidents: the human mind cannot be depended on, especially under stress.
Regardless of the explanation of isolated data, I believe that we are not limited to the "real" world we can see; there is an equally real world we cannot see.
That unseen world became highly visible, I believe, when Jesus Christ appeared on planet earth. Some insights into the spirit world are available in the New Testament records of His life.
He affirmed the reality of Satan, the devil, and talked with him. Jesus did not question Satan's power, although He refused personally to yield to it. Instead He affirmed God's supreme power and said God alone should be served.
Jesus also recognized the reality of demons, spirit beings who are subservient to Satan. He delivered men from demonic possession and power, in some cases after years of bondage, outcast by society. On one occasion He gave demons permission at their request to enter a herd of swine. The swine bolted over a cliff into the sea and died.
When Jesus' identity was still hidden from his human contemporaries, and hardly perceived by His close associates, demons knew Him and shouted that He was the Son of God. "Why do you come to trouble us?" they cried (I am reminded of the obsession the mediums Bishop Pike consulted seemed to be under, or the ones who spoke through them from "the other side," to talk about Jesus.)
Jesus did not talk with dead people through a medium, nor act as a medium. According to the record he raised dead people, brought them back to life from the other side: a man, the only support
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of his widowed mother, as his dead body was being carried to the cemetery; the daughter of a synagogue ruler, Jairus; a man who had been in the grave four days.
Jesus also prayed to His Father, acknowledged that He was dependent on His power. While He lived on earth, Jesus had an open channel to the unseen world.
He seemed to have powers of extra-sensory perception. He knew what men were thinking; saw Nathanael when he was hidden from view, at a distance, alone; told Peter that he'd find a coin inside a fish he would later catch; knew undisclosed details of a strange woman's personal life; perceived — in a crowd — a woman's touch behind his back, a touch that healed her from a twelve-year illness.
On one occasion, Old Testament prophet-leaders Moses and Elijah appeared on a mountain with Jesus and conversed with Him. This was in the sight and hearing of three of Jesus' disciples. He was glorified, His face became radiant, and His clothing shone as a voice from the sky announced: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear Him."
Jesus Christ claimed to be a manifestation of the unseen world to men. "Our eyes saw him, our ears heard Him, our hands handled Him" was the disciple John's description of the wonder. He was called God-appearing-in-human-flesh.
The day He died, the bodies of many dead men left their tombs and roamed the streets of Jerusalem, appearing to people after His resurrection.
After He was buried, on the third day, Jesus
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amazed His followers by appearing to them on a number of different occasions. He ate broiled fish and a piece of honeycomb with them, talked and walked with them.
But He was different somehow from the One they had known before His death. He appeared in a room at a time when the door was shut. His friends were thoroughly frightened. He answered Thomas' doubts by inviting him to touch the nailprints in His hands, the spear hole in His side.
After 40 days of post-death appearances, He arose into the sky, where a cloud received Him out of His followers' sight.
The battle between two different worlds of the unseen continued in the early church. Stephen cried out with joy at glimpsing the beyond: heaven opened, and Jesus Christ was standing beside the throne of His Father. He was stoned to death. Paul delivered a girl sorceress from her bondage to demonic spirits opposed to God; her owners, who had been exploiting her, raised a tremendous storm of protest against the Apostles; as a result, they were imprisoned. On another occasion, with Barnabas, Paul stood against Elymas, a sorcerer who was trying to undo their work. Elymas was temporarily blinded.
You say these things are myths, incredible stories? Perhaps so, but are they less believable than your horoscope — those words based on the idea that planets and stars in your birthday sky control your destiny today, reveal your future?
Will you believe in Anton LaVey's church of Satan in San Francisco, but ridicule the idea of Satan in Jerusalem at the time of Christ, Satan in
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Berlin at the time of Hitler? Will you fear the influence of such a witch as Sybil Leek, or some dark influence in your neighborhood, while ridiculing the idea of demon possession in the New Testament?
And what of believing that James Pike talked with his dead son through a medium? Can you accept this and not believe that the Witch of Endor brought back dead Samuel at King Saul's request?
There is an unseen spirit world.
It is a world that throbs with the presence of God and the influence of Satan.
Satan seeks to bring humans to the conviction that he exists and God doesn't, that his dark power is the only authority underlying individual and corporate human existence and the universe itself. If they're already convinced of the reality of God's existence, and His sovereignty, Satan may try to cover up his own existence, to hide his actions from their view.
But he's here, even though he's as invisible to our eyes as God is. And the climate in which he works, his goals are the opposite of God's: darkness instead of light; lying instead of truth ("The Devil," Jesus said, 'was a liar from the beginning"); war instead of peace; fear and violence instead of love.
