The Kingdom of the Occult should hit the bookstores by mid-October. For those of you who would like an exclusive advance peak at the manuscript (available only on my blog), here you go:

Chapter 1

The Kingdom of the Occult

It is a sad and frightening fact that people are fascinated with the secret or “occult” things that God has condemned.[1] One cannot see a movie like Harry Potter or read The Exorcist, which presents Satan unvarnished and portrays the truth about demonic possession in terms everyone can understand, without being plunged into the core of the occult. Today there is a tremendous fascination with the mysterious and the unknown. The great scholar, C. S. Lewis wrote, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”[2]

The modern age is strong proof of this unhealthy fascination. People are attracted to evil and captivated by it. They are vulnerable to temptation because of a growing revolt against science and technology that, for all their efforts, cannot meet man’s spiritual hunger. People are asking, “If science and technology are supposed to produce all the good things, why haven’t they accomplished it?” Instead, there is a continuous degradation of personality. People are not treated as human beings anymore but as computer data, numbers assigned from womb to tomb.

Today, a terrible spiritual vacuum exists in which people are forced to live because they turned from the living God and tried to fill the resulting emptiness with physical pleasure. Man crowds into this vacuum all the moral and ethical values attached to the material world. Again and again people protest, “There’s got to be something more than this, because we’re not satisfied.” Satisfaction has not come through the dollar sign. Satisfaction has not come through the pill. Satisfaction has not come through economic aggrandizement, or political conquests, or military supremacy. Lost in a spiritual void, the human heart searches for some kind of reality apart from God and His Word, and discovers the occult reality from another dimension.

*****

The Dimension of Darkness

The Bible is a dimensional book in the sense that a dimension is a realm of reality, sometimes imperceptible, but nonetheless genuine. Human beings live in a dimension subject to the five senses, and they tend to make the mistake of believing that anything beyond the realm of those senses simply is not there. To accept such reasoning would be a fatal mistake from a biblical perspective.

Even as people live in the dimension of earth, so the Bible says there is another dimension of heaven, where God reigns as Sovereign. This second dimension of heaven or the throne of God Himself, is more real than human senses can perceive; it is a dimension that was bridged when God chose to become man in the Person of Jesus Christ. Because of Him, mankind now has access to a realm of infinite power, indescribable love, and cosmic justice.

The third dimension is one of spiritual darkness, controlled by Satan and his hosts. The Bible describes it as hell, or the alienation of the spiritual nature of man from fellowship with his Creator. It belongs to the “prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2). This dimension is portrayed in Ephesians 6:10‑12, where the warning is given that it is the domain of the forces of incalculable wickedness, presided over by the one whom the Bible designates as “the ruler of this world” and “the god of this age” (John 14:30; 2 Cor. 4:4). This domain is described variously in the Bible as “outer darkness” (Matt. 8:12; 22:13; 25:30), “fire” (Matt. 5:22; 13:42; 18:8, 9; 25:41; Mark 9:22-49), “suffering” (Jude 7), consciousness of separation from God and fear of others suffering the same (Luke 16:19–31), “prison” (1 Peter 3:19), and, metaphorically, a vast lake of molten sulfur, from which there is no deliverance (Rev. 19:20; 20:10, 14, 15; 21:8).

Perhaps this dimension is best described in terms of the condition of its occupants, who are portrayed as “wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever” (Jude 13). The apostle Peter indicated that some of the fallen angels were already chained in the darkness of hell, awaiting judgment: “God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment” (2 Peter 2:4). It is possible, then, that hell may be one dimension with many levels, some restrictive and some not, since Satan and an unknown number of his demons are still free to roam the earth.

All 752 pages coming soon to a bookstore near you. :)

Let me know what you think!


[1] Deuteronomy 18:9–12

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, preface. The Exorcist, DVD, directed by William Friedkin (1973; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2000).