The Seduction of Christianity – Program 5

By: Johanna Michaelson, Dave Hunt; ©1985

Are the mystical experiences many are having today preparing the world for a coming one world religion during the end times?

One World Religion

Ankerberg: Welcome! We have as our guests two people that are talking about a lie that is crossing America. It’s very dangerous, and we want you to know about it. Tonight, we’re going to take it from an aspect that we haven’t taken in any week before, and that is this: in the Holy Bible you will find some amazing statements. We’d like to jump from that into the topic tonight. There’s a statement that says this, that when the final wrap-up comes on earth, that those in Russia, those in China, those that are Moonies, those that are Jehovah’s Witnesses, those that are Marxists, those of all cultures, the Muslims, you name it, are going to unite and there’s going to be one world religion. Now, many people that say that the Lord Jesus Christ—looking at Scripture talking about His return to this earth—many people say that that’s coming soon. You’ve heard that.

But what they might not have told you is that in Thessalonians you will find that before Christ comes back again, the apostasy, this turning away from the faith, this getting ready to have a one world religion, must be on the scene. Where do you see it today? Could it happen quickly? Those are some of the things we want to talk about tonight. Dave Hunt is saying that it’s among us already. There’s a seduction, even inside of Orthodox Christianity, that’s taking place among some of the most well-known Christians that we know, men that are sincere about the Lord Jesus Christ but are teaching some things that come right out of the occult.

Dave, let’s start: A—how in the world do you see a one world religion coming among atheists, the Russians, the Chinese and all of the cults—we have 4,000 or more cults in our own country America—how do all these people come together under one banner and what is that banner that is taking shape right now?

Hunt: Well, John, it’s interesting that not just the Bible predicts this, but any number of secular leaders today. For example, I’m quoting here Jean Houston. She’s supposedly one of the most brilliant women in the world today. Margaret Mead’s mantle has fallen upon her. She is known as the “dazzling visionary scholar-teacher in the Human Potential movement.” She is a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. She has Ph.D.’s both in psychology and theology. And she says in an interview, “I predict that in our lifetime we will see the rise of essentially a New World Religion. I believe a new spiritual system will emerge.” Now, this is not only Jean Houston, but many other people are making this prediction.

Ankerberg: Who else is saying it?

Hunt: Well, we’ve got some of our astronauts that are making these statements. Robert Muller…

Ankerberg: Of the United Nations.

Hunt: …of the United Nations, has made similar statements.

Ankerberg: What’s his position?

Hunt: He’s the Assistant Secretary General in charge of the 32 divisions of the U.N. around the world, UNESCO, UNICEF and so forth.

Ankerberg: What is he saying?

Hunt: He’s talking about a “New Genesis” in his book, New Genesis. He is a Teilhardian, actually. Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist Catholic monk who was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church which forbad him to publish his writings, is called “The Father of the New Age” by Marilyn Ferguson in her book, The Aquarian Conspiracy. [Muller] polled 185 New Age leaders and most of them said it was Teilhard de Chardin who brought them into it. And he talked about “The human race is evolving through the noesphere, the theosphere, to finally, we will merge into godhood at the Omega point.”

Ankerberg: What is making these people in government, in politics, in science, in medicine, what is persuading them of that?

Hunt: Well, it’s in fulfillment of what Jesus said, of course, that the last days would be characterized by the greatest deception the world has ever seen, a religious deception involving false prophets, false messiahs and false miracles.

Ankerberg: They don’t believe that. Why do they believe what they’re saying?

Hunt: Well, I think if we traced it in modern times, of course, some people have always been saying this. They have been working toward this for a long time. But it suddenly exploded in the Western world in the 50s and early 60s with the drug movement when our young people dropped out to “tune in and turn on” with drugs. Now, the significance of that, the altered state of consciousness that they achieved; Sir John Echols, Nobel Prize Winner for his research on the brain, describes the brain as “A machine that a ghost can operate.” Sorcery in the New Testament indicates sorcery would be revived. There are two Greek words for it:[1] “mageia.” Simon the Magician in Acts 6, a sorcerer. Magic powers—black magic, white magic, whatever they want to call it. And [2] “pharmakeia.” A sorcerer takes conscious-altering drugs in order to contact spirit beings to gain supernatural powers. This is the whole “spirit guide” thing that we’re talking about. They got it first on drugs.

Ankerberg: What did they get on drugs? What you’re saying is that if they had an experience on drugs, they wouldn’t call it “demons.”

Hunt: They had mystical experiences of contact with spirit entities; some of them were initiated to transcendental meditation on LSD….

Michaelsen: Getting the same information from the spirits about cosmic consciousness, about the unity of the world, about the direction that their personal evolution had to take, that people were getting through the revelation of transcendental meditation. And, in fact, that was kind of a jumping off place. People said, “What do we need to take drugs for? We’ll just join TM or the other meditation, mind-centering movements.

Ankerberg: Go into that. TM came in, you have yoga, you have these things. And they also gave us this altered state of consciousness, which, from our viewpoint, is simply the fact that you’re making contact with the spirits; you’re making contact with the demons out there that are giving you information. Now, what kind of information are they pulling in?

Hunt: Well, another word for the New Age movement is the “Consciousness Revolution.” And they’re telling us that everything is in states of consciousness. What we need to do is to achieve a higher state of consciousness. The only difference between Jesus and us is that He had attained a higher state of consciousness called “Christ consciousness; cosmic consciousness.” When we attain this state, “God consciousness,” we become Christ just like He is. There’s a New Age synagogue, for example, not far from where I live, Makom Ohr Shalom, in the San Fernando Valley of the Los Angeles area. Ted Falcon, the Rabbi, says, “The moment is going to come when the cry will go out, ‘Will the real Messiah please stand!’ and we will all arise and the world will be transformed because we are all the Christ, if we only knew how to tap into this and look within us.” So, when you attain these so-called “higher states of consciousness,” this is helping us in an evolutionary step which they describe as a “quantum leap” to a higher state of consciousness, we won’t sprout wings, you know; it’s going to be a spiritual thing. And a transformation is coming, and they say it’s going to come through an emergency. They talk about “emergence through emergency.” A new species is literally going to be evolved on planet Earth called “homo noeticus.” When Edgar Mitchell, whom I referred to earlier, came back to this earth and joined the inner space program, the new frontier of modern science, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. “Noetic” coming from the Greek word nous, the stuff of which everything is made, and we are it, you know.

Ankerberg: Let me see if I could summarize some of the things that you have said before, Dave, and jump off of this, okay? You are saying that this worldwide deception is coming. It’s coming from a couple of areas: philosophically, you’ve got the nuclear movement because we’re thinking of the world—it could perish because of nuclear war. So people are getting together and saying, “We need a one-world government.” Other people are saying, we also need a one-world food supply. We need one world in money so that don’t get ripped off in the cards—our plastic cards and so on. So, the fact is, some of these ideas are good in themselves. But what people that are saying it do not realize is that this parallels what the Bible says—there will be one day one who comes on the scene that sets this up, okay? But he will also control the world for evil purposes, but they don’t see that. That’s part of it; just a philosophical mind-set where people are saying, “We want a one-world everything.” You had the rock concert not too long ago where, you know, coast-to-coast and country-to-country you have people saying, “Hey! We’re one humanity; we’re one people.” Now, along the way, you also have your psychiatrists, your atheists, your people that are having mystical experiences, like the astronauts. And in this book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, she talks about people all being glued together from different backgrounds by these mystical experiences. Now, these mystical experiences, from what you are saying, is the fact is that the demonic is giving these wonderful, beautiful, mystical experiences, which comes with a full-blown Eastern mind-set, alright? Now, you put that together with these people that are saying that they want a one-world everything, and the occult comes in and starts to lead in that same direction. Now, take it from there.

Hunt: Well, Revelation 13 makes some incredible statements. It tells us that everybody is going to worship the Antichrist. You see, when you talk about the Antichrist taking over the world in the last days, most people are interested in the latest plot of international bankers to create new money or the Trilateral Commission or the Council of Foreign Relations or political maneuvers or military maneuvers by the Soviets and so forth. But, the takeover by the Antichrist is primarily a religious, a spiritual event, toward which Satan has been plotting since the Garden of Eden.

Ankerberg: The thing that you say amazes you is when you look at the words, “All will worship him.”

Hunt: Everybody.

Ankerberg: If that means “all,” it talks about all the cults of all different countries….

Hunt: Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, capitalists, communists….

Ankerberg: So what kind of worship is it going to be? How do you get these diverse people together?

Hunt: Alright. Now, they’re going to worship a man as God. Second Thessalonians 4:4 tells us about that man. He’s going to sit in the temple of God and declare that he is God. Now, the primary application of that would be the temple that would be rebuilt in Jerusalem and the Antichrist. But, you have a secondary application. It’s telling us the religion of the Antichrist as clearly as you can ask for it. Our bodies are supposed to be the temple of the Holy Spirit. “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which you have of God. You are not your own.” [1 Cor. 6:19] For the first time in the history of humanity, across the Western world, millions of people, through yoga, through Transcendental Meditation, are looking within—where ought to be the temple of the Holy Spirit—to discover the true “Self.” And having found the true “Self,” declaring that “Self is God,” okay?

This man is not saying that he’s God in the classical biblical sense. It says, “He exalts himself above all that is called God or all that is worshiped.” He’s an atheist. “So that he is God and sits in the temple of God, showing himself…” [2 Thess. 2:4] it says. Self-realization. Discovering to himself that he is God. Now, there’s a transformation coming, I believe, that’s going to cause the world to accept this, because he will be the first one to demonstrate that this goal of godhood is attainable. He’s going to have the psychic powers, and the world is going to want to follow him.

Now, it also says, in Revelation 13, “The whole world will worship the dragon.” An entire world involved in Satan worship. But, of course, they won’t call him Satan, most of them. A few Satanists will, but most of them will call him Lucifer. This is a popular idea. In Masonry it’s been around for a long time. When you get to the highest levels of Masonry, you find out that Lucifer is the “good guy,” the god of right and good, and Adonay, the Lord, in the Bible, is the god of evil and darkness. But, let’s take a recent film, 2010.

Ankerberg: Right. Coming into our media.

Hunt: And in that film, the climax comes when the United States and the Soviet Union are about to engage in a nuclear holocaust, when, suddenly, a new “sun” is born in the sky. And what the movie doesn’t tell you, Arthur C. Clarke, the author, tells you in his book. The name of that sun is “Lucifer.”

Michaelsen: And David Spangler, one of the great leaders of the New Age, who spent time at Findhorn—Peter Caddy kind of blessed him as a magnificent leader there—he comes back and he says in one of his books that we are all to take a “Luciferic initiation” if we are to enter the New Age. There are groups around the country, they call themselves “Transmission Groups,” where they are busily chanting “666” to try and send out the vibrations that will bring in the force of this great being.

Ankerberg: And the people that aren’t that far into the philosophy, though, that have the spirit guides, like Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who has her spirit guides that perform at some of her many thousands of clinics that she does, alright? If you have a spirit guide—and we’re going to talk about your spirit guides next week; you had a spirit guide named “Jesus,” who wasn’t Jesus at all. You just imagined that he was, and he was actually Satan again—but your spirit guides, if they are all controlling people, giving these mind trips, giving these wonderful mystical experiences like Shirley MacLaine is having and other people across our country, and they are saying, “These are great things, and we ought to listen to these Ascended Masters,” like Napoleon Hill and so on. So, if they’re all following different “Masters” and at the appropriate time the “Masters” point to the Master, the Guru, the Leader, people say, “How can we all worship one man?” Well, if that one man says that he is the highest in the evolutionary process of becoming a god and he’s achieved it, and now he’s going to show you, how you can achieve full godhood, just like him, the people will want to worship him, will want to follow him.

Hunt: Let me give you a quick illustration. Marquette University, a fine Catholic University, has Ph.D.’s, M.D.’s, going across the country for some time now teaching a course… Well, here was the first World Conference on Imagery, which they sponsored. The course is called “The Healing Power of the Imagination.”

Michaelsen: And then they went on to give the Ninth American Imagery Conference in Los Angeles. There are groups like this all over the country, intelligentsia from around the world, scientists.

Ankerberg: Yeah. Imagining things, because it’s a doorway into this altered state of consciousness.

Hunt: Let me explain it. Let’s go to the plush palace of fine arts in San Francisco where over 1,000 people took this particular course and tens of thousands have taken it. And it’s only one of many similar courses. These are Ph.D.’s, these are scientists, medical doctors, psychiatrists, university professors, leading politicians taking this course. And they are taught to “visualize themselves in a beautiful landscape. See an entity approaching—be it animal or human. Begin a conversation with this entity and it will talk back and it will become real.” Now, you can read of the experiences of Christians who, when they visualize Jesus in their minds, suddenly “He began to do things; He became real.” They’ve made contact with a spirit entity, okay? And in this course, you are taught, “This is your inner guide. It is never wrong. It will be with you forever.” Now, you don’t have to be too bright to imagine the day when millions of these inner guides around the world will identify the Antichrist as the “good guy,” and it will be believed.

Ankerberg: Sounds just like “Star Wars.” Isn’t that what “Star Wars” was saying, Dave. “The ‘Inner guide’ will be with you until the end….”

Michaelsen: “I’ll be with you always.” Well, E.T. was saying that to the little boy, “Behold, I’ll be with you always.” Remember? When he put his finger on….

Hunt: Right here [point to forehead]. “I’ll be right here.”

Michaelsen: I’ve come across Christian tracts: “The enlightenment of E.T. can be yours—Jesus.” And they are correlating Jesus with a fat snake, you know, who came to mimic the true Jesus. And there are people out there right now, also scientists, who are saying there are thousands of UFO’s hanging around and Jesus was one of them. You know, this is a serious movement that is going on right now.

Ankerberg: Dave, where does Positive Confession and the Possibility Thinking that is coming into the Church and is actually a part of the Church now, where does this coincide with this overall big lie and the coming deception of the Antichrist?

Hunt: Well, you’ve got two threads, John, one from psychology and the whole [range of] occult ideas. Let me just quote a leader in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. You can read the book and find out who he is and get the full documentation. In fact, he was the keynote speaker at the recent Presbyterian Congress on Renewal that was held in Dallas. He said, “I had and have now a growing belief that we are in the beginning of an exciting new age. A new age, which I believe is already imminent and will change life for all people upon this globe. Inner space and intra space will become just as important, if not more important, than outer space. Mine is not an isolated hope. Carl Jung stated that ‘in Jesus Christ there is made possible a new rung on the ladder or evolution.’ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talks about his dreams for the evolution of a new being and a new society. My dream is that we’re on the verge of such a discovery.”

There are those who believe that, through Human Potential, we’re going to bring about a transformation of Planet Earth. But, if we can really create with our words, “You get what you say,” we can speak health and wealth and prosperity and healing and peace with our Positive Confession, our Positive Thinking and so forth, then we ought to speak this to the whole world. And indeed, this is the logical conclusion that many of the leaders in this movement are now saying. That, “Since we are created to be the gods of this world—Satan stole the dominion and became the god of this world; we’re going to take that back. We’re going to take dominion of this earth. The wealth and the power of this world is going to flow to us as Christians. We’re going to have the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever seen.”

You know, the Bible talks about apostasy; it talks about Jerusalem being surrounded by the armies of the world and Jesus has to rescue it. If He doesn’t cut those days short, “no flesh would be saved.” [Matt. 24:22] But these people are saying, “We’re going to take over the world for Jesus. We’re going to set up the kingdom for Jesus. And Jesus is going to come and He’s going to rule over this kingdom that we’ve taken over by our positive statements and our confession of faith,” and so forth. Well, if the real Jesus is going to rapture us out of here and as 1 Thessalonians 4 says, “We will be caught up together with the dead who are raised to meet him in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord,” [1 Thess. 4:17] and you’re meeting a “Jesus,” [and] when you meet Him your feet are planted on Planet Earth, you’ve got problems. You’ve met the wrong Jesus, not the real One.

And many Christians today forget that Hitler deceived Germany. Even the Evangelical Christians were deceived. He did all the right things. He got rid of homosexuality, pornography, he cleaned up the streets, got rid of prostitution, he was for “Positive Christianity.” That’s exactly what he stood for. He worked for all the right things, and they were behind him one hundred percent. And I’m afraid that some people could be deceived.

Michaelsen: And, you know, one of the ways that deception is going to come in is through the area of guided imagery and visualization, John. Because if you can bring the people to a point of imaging a Jesus who is, according to Scripture maybe “another Jesus,” “another spirit,” “another gospel,” if you’re talking about a Jesus that you can manipulate through spiritual “laws,” through techniques, then you wind up with the kind of Jesus talked about by Morton Kelsey in his book, Healing in Christianity, or in this little book that he wrote called Dreams: a Way of Listening to God. And let me give you a quote that he says here, on page 23, and this is a startling one. He says, “One of the reasons why modern Christians do not understand Jesus is that they think of Him as a university professor of ethics rather than as a shaman.” A shaman is a witchdoctor. Put feathers on him and paints and you’ve got your regular run-of-the-mill witchdoctor. And then lest we misunderstand what he means by shaman, he tells us that “in the United States the Indian shaman has once again become very important.” He tells us on page 29 that “Christianity maintains that the only safe way to pierce the unconscious or to enter spiritual reality is with a leader—Jesus.” In other words, Jesus, in essence, has become a spirit guide. “Shamanism shows us that even before Jesus, though, God worked among the people.” Not according to my Bible. My Bible doesn’t talk about latent powers that this neutral force can use for good or evil, depending on your bent.

Hunt: Let’s explain who Morton Kelsey is.

Michaelsen: Morton Kelsey is a priest.

Hunt: An Episcopalian priest.

Michaelsen: He’s a Jungian psychologist.

Hunt: In fact, he was Agnes Sanford’s pastor and a very close friend. He teaches at Notre Dame. And you would find his books on psychology in some of the finest Christian seminaries today.

Ankerberg: Okay. We’ve got to wrap this up, because we’re out of time. Well, you wrap it up for us, Dave, in terms of the total scene. What strikes you? What would you like to leave with the people?

Hunt: Well, the Bible warns about an apostasy. It’s coming. An apostasy means people will be deceived. It means that it won’t be an obvious lie, but it will be a counterfeit that looks as much like the real thing as possible. Therefore, we’ve got to be very careful that we’re hearing the Shepherd’s voice, the voice of Jesus; that we’re really following His Word, and not the words of well-meaning people. I mean, we’re not saying this to put anybody down. I can be deluded and deceived as well as anyone else. But we’ve got to recognize that there is a deception, and get back to the Word of God, and be crucified with Christ. Accept His Lordship in our lives. Let Him have His way and live His life through us. Not depend on some power, some potential within me.

Ankerberg: Okay, next week we’re going to talk with Johanna about how she got into things, followed her spirit guides, and was aiming toward being a full medium doing miraculous things in Mexico City. We’re going to talk about that next week. Please join us.

Read Part 6