What About Psychic Experiences?

How would you feel if a complete stranger told you details about your life that in no way – outside of some sort of supernatural power – they should or could have known. Would it get your attention?

That’s what happened with a young man named Alex, who told me about meeting with his grandfather and a friend of his grandfather’s named Derrick, who seemed to have some sort of prophetic or psychic powers. When Derrick told Alex several details about recent events in his life, he had Alex’s attention, and from there he seemed to have the authority to make claims that both Alex and his grandfather were spiritual “shamans” in previous lives. As Alex described this experience, I could tell he had been impressed and rather flattered at the possibility of having an important role in a past life.

I hear of personal experiences with the supernatural in maybe 1 of 6 people I talk with on the streets, and I don’t doubt the sincerity of their stories. On the positive side, these experiences usually leave them with a strong sense of the presence of the spiritual realm that exists alongside our physical reality. On the negative side, I find these experiences usually distract people away from God and faith in Jesus.

I usually try to affirm their experiences - that yes there is indeed a spiritual dimension to life, but from a Christian perspective I try to explain that these are most likely counterfeit experiences from the spiritually demonic designed to distort and misrepresent God, and attract them to cheap substitutes.

I say “counterfeit”, because to my knowledge the devil and his minions are never portrayed in the Bible as trying to attract followers to themselves straight away. Rather, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14) and I’m sure his demonic followers are doing the same.

So in order to attract people to himself, the devil doesn’t try to reveal his true nature, but rather to pretend to be like God or to be positive and beneficial in some way. A psychic, in an attempt to establish his authority to reveal the distant past and future to his subjects, often tells them details about their present lives in much the same way that Jesus revealed his personal knowledge of the Samaritan woman he spoke with at the well in John 4: “...(Jesus said) ‘The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.’ ‘Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet...’ ”

As the Son of God, Jesus naturally has divine power, but where does the demonic get such knowledge? Is it all-knowing? Can it read our minds? Can it see into our future? Absolutely not! The demonic can only be a cheap imitation of attributes only God can have. At best, it can only quietly collect information and enable its human counterparts to use it in ways that appear to be supernatural and authoritative.

So if both the godly and the demonic appear to us as “light”, how can we tell the difference between the two? Psalm 119 gives us a clue: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” The source of true light comes to us as God reveals Himself through his word, both in Jesus, His living word, and in the written words of scripture. Just as one recognizes a counterfeit bill by comparing it to the real thing, so we must have a familiarity with God’s word in order to recognize imposters.

And anyone who has sincerely looked to God’s word, or heard it’s truths unfolded through biblical preaching, knows that it too has a way of revealing personal details about our lives, truths we may or may not want to hear, but truths nonetheless. Truths that indeed have the authority to explain our past and give great hope for our future.