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I taught in Argentina for ten years. One of my students was the son of a Protestant preacher living across the street from me. One day the preacher asked me if I would like to join him in a small Bible study group. I agreed. As it turned out the others in the group changed their minds, so I had several months of private Bible study with this man.

He liked to talk and I liked to listen. One of the things he told me was more than a little creepy. Fully understood the tale reveals that, hard as we moderns would very much like to think otherwise, there is more to this world than what is written in science books.

He told me of a friend of his, a missionary who had lived around Lake Victoria for 25 years preaching the Gospel of Christ. He took the time to learn several of the languages spoken around the lake. It was a difficult post. The pastor had to deal with unimagined horrors—cannibalism, genocide and bizarre sexual perversions among them—but the most terrifying was the out and out worship of demons he saw regularly. He believed that Lucifer walked among those people almost without disguise.

He received constant death threats but nothing ever happened to him. He managed to convert more than a few Africans to Christianity, and he had set up several churches there.

His home church at last called him back to the US. After arriving home he found out his new post was in another state, and he decided to drive there. It was three days away, and he found himself one morning in a small town on a Sunday. He drove about looking for a Bible based church that he could attend. He found one and went in. He met the pastor but said nothing about his life, just that he was traveling through and wanted to go to church.

As the service began it was clear that part of this congregation’s worship was ‘speaking in tongues,’ what theologians call glossolalia.

Glossolalists believe that the Christian glossolalia practiced today is the ’speaking in tongues’ described in the New Testament. They believe that it is a miraculous gift of the Spirit. While some Christians claim that these tongues are a real, unlearned language…others - Pentecostals in particular, explain the activity as a ‘language of the spirit’, or a ‘heavenly language’, perhaps the language of angels.

Sure enough, about half-way through the service the pastor stood up to give the homily, and almost immediately he began to do what he always did. His voiced changed and he uttered words and sounds unknown to his congregation. The congregation did what it always did, and it raised its hands in the air with praises of “Hallelujahs” all around as the pastor continued to ‘speak in tongues.’

The visiting pastor sat in the pew dumbstruck. His mouth went dry and the hairs on the back of his head stood up. There was a cold tingle that went down his spine. He knew that the pastor was not ‘speaking in tongues,’ but was speaking a language that was little known even back in Africa where the missionary had lived. Though the local pastor could not possibly have known it, the missionary knew it.

What the local pastor was saying in that foreign tongue was, “I am Satan. Worship me.”

My second tale happened to me. I knew a man I will call ‘Tom.’ He was in many ways a friend of the family for 25 years. Tom and I never really got along—a rather large understatement. He was a friend to my mother though, and when she died I paid him a visit. I stayed with him a few days and ran errands for him.

I was in the habit of driving around and listening to Christian radio. One day I pulled into the driveway and shut the car off without first turning off the radio. I greeted Tom, who asked me to run him up to the store. We got in the car and I started it up. The radio came on as well, to the Christian station. Some pastor was reading words from the Gospel.

Immediately upon hearing the words, Tom cried out. He began to scream, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” His body convulsed and obscene blasphemies poured out of his mouth, words that to this day I have never repeated. He began to kick the floor of the car and strike the inside of the roof with his fists, and kept yelling, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!” Tom was a heavy man, and the car began to shake and rock back and forth to his kicking and pounding.

I turned the radio off, and immediately Tom returned to normal. It was as if nothing had happened. He gave some excuse about why he had been upset, but I knew the true reasons, which were legion.

Then He asked him, “What is your name?”
And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”—Mark 5:9

My last tale was told to me by my confessor, an American priest named Father Harvey who was living in Argentina and saying Mass for the English speaking community in Buenos Aires. It was our habit every Sunday after Mass to go have Chinese food and more than a few beers. He was of Irish descent and I was one-quarter Irish, so I am sure you understand.

During one of these sessions he told me of an experience of his close friend, another priest I will call Father Anthony. This father was known for bringing wayward priests, or those who were losing their faith, back into the Catholic fold. An unusually difficult case was a priest who had clearly become an atheist. He had no kind wards to say about the Catholic Church, yet he still wore the collar. No matter what Father Anthony did and said, the atheist priest refused to return to the faith.

One day Father Anthony heard that the atheist priest was dying, in fact that he was laying right then on his deathbed in a local hospital. Father Anthony immediately headed for the hospital, hoping to save from Hell the soul of the atheist priest. He brought with him a young and inexperienced priest whom he had begun to mentor.

The two men entered the hospital and found out the room of the atheist priest. The nurse told them to hurry, as the doctor had already informed the staff that the man would be dead in an hour. As the two priests hurried to the deathbed they passed another room where an old woman had died a few minutes before. The men heard a great commotion from the room, and glancing in they saw the dead woman crawling upon the ceiling, making all kinds of noises, smiling at them and asking for help. The young priest began to enter the room but Father Anthony grabbed him and said, “Hurry up. Ignore what you just saw.” He knew that an ancient enemy was very close, in fact was at their heels.

The room of the atheist priest was a few doors down. They entered just as he was entering his final moments on earth. He repented and so his soul was saved. Father Anthony administered the Last Rights, and both men left the room.

While having coffee in the hospital café the young priest asked Father Anthony why he had prevented him from entering the room of the dead woman, and why he had grabbed him and rushed him along. Shouldn’t they have taken the time to minister to the woman and perhaps save her soul? Father Anthony smiled, and taking the hand of the young priest, said, “My son, the soul of that poor woman was already in Hell. What we saw was a demon moving in her dead body. I saw that immediately. Had we stopped we would have arrived at the room of the dying priest too late. His soul would have already entered Hell. The demon in the woman’s body was trying to stop us. Lucifer wanted the soul of the priest.”

You can believe these tales or not. Christians will have no trouble with them, and many will have had similar experiences. You see, to be a Christian means that you begin to “put on the Mind of Christ.” You begin to see and understand much more than you did in your pagan days. Christians call this ‘discernment,’ which is nothing more than the ability to see beyond the seen.

This is why a Christian and a non-Christian can witness the exact same thing, yet come away with opposing views of it. It would be as if they had seen two different events, which in a way is absolutely correct. The Christian had ’seen beyond the seen,’ the other fellow had seen the merely material aspects of it, only that part in the natural world. The Christian had seen both the natural and supernatural worlds.

You may or may not be pleased to know that right now, at this instant while I am typing these words, that we are being watched. You and me. One of the creatures observing you is a very pleasant one, the other most definitely is not. Both want something from you. One will get it, for you cannot please both.

If you ever wonder why you fall into the same weakness again and again, it is because the unpleasant creature watching you right now knows you. It has watched you all your life and knows all of your failings. It knows how to ‘get to you.’ If you continue to do as it tempts, you will become as it is, as John is, as that dead woman is. You will not like it.

You might be concerned about the direction this nation is heading, but first things first. You must get rid of the filth inside you before you demand much of others. You must repent before you start giving advice to this nation. Before national repentance comes the repentance of the person who glares back at you in the mirror.

Once you are clean you will notice that non-Christians will consider your advice to be silly, or idiotic, or itself evil. They will slander and ridicule you and your faith. Be not worried about this, as the Carpenter said that such would happen to His followers. In fact if a man claims to be a follower of Christ, but is never tempted or slandered by the world, he might actually be on the other side. Demons need not bother with those already on their team. Christ called such folks “wolves among sheep.”

If you wonder what sort of nation these types would create you need only look at our nation today. The nation is conforming to their will, just as their will long ago conformed to the will of another, to the will of the same creature that pursued the dying priest.

A non-Christian believes the problems of the nation are due to bad policies, and that only if the right man and the right programs are put in place, that all will be well. They are dreadfully wrong. The Christian believes the problems of the nation are due to men unhitching themselves from the Mind of Christ. Both views cannot be true. One view will prevail, for we cannot continue as a house divided.

If this nation continues in the direction it is going, it will share Eternity with Nineveh, with Babylon and with that old dead woman.