A Preview of the Coming World Religion

Tom: Thanks, Gary. Our subject for today is the final chapter in Dave Hunt’s book, Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World and Church. The chapter is entitled “The Coming World Religion.” Dave, your book deals with occultism in the world and in the church, but what is the connection between occultism and the formation of a world religion?

Dave: Occultism, of course, as we’ve been trying to explain in these last few weeks, is really Satan’s invasion of the world, of man. It’s something that he’s offered man, and of course the ultimate goal is to enthrone Antichrist and Satan. I don’t know exactly whether Satan literally indwells him or merely possesses him, but somehow Satan is going to be worshiped through the Antichrist. Because it says “they worshiped the dragon who gave him his power and authority. And they worshiped the beast,” so somehow there is a connection. And so, obviously, occultism, in all its forms, is not only enthroning man as good but is also enthroning this Antichrist who, as god, will sit in the temple of God declaring that he is God. Now, to do that, you have to have a world government and a world religion—at least in my mind that’s the connection that I see.

Tom: I know people are concerned. They may recognize that pagan religions (at least in their mind) will play a part in this, but I think the thing that concerns people is that Christianity, a form of Christianity, will play a part.

Dave: Just as the true Christ has a bride, His true church, which He’s going to take to heaven in the Rapture, so the Antichrist has a bride—the false church, “the whore,” she’s called – and eventually he hates her and burns her with fire. So yes, there is a false Christianity that is being prepared. It’s not Communism that’s going to take over the world, and it’s not Hinduism, although it will be very closely related to it. But it has to be a form of Christianity, because the Antichrist, is [as] we’ve explained, “anti-” a Greek prefix, which has two meanings: not only “opposed to,” but it also means “in the place of.” So, that being the case, then this world religion of which he is the head and whose followers will worship him, it has to be a form of Christianity, because he claims to be the Christ and, in fact, Jesus said it a number of ways: He said, “Many will come in my name saying, ‘I am Christ’” (that’s Matthew 24 and John 5). You get it again in Daniel 9, where it says, “Unto the coming of Messiah the prince, sixty-nine weeks of years.” And then it says “The people of the prince who will come,” that is later after the Messiah, the true Messiah, has come and is crucified, risen from the dead, ascended to the Father’s right hand, Jerusalem is destroyed. The Temple is destroyed, and it has been that way now. The Temple has not been rebuilt in all these years. The people of the prince who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary (that was AD 70). These were the armies of the Roman general, who became emperor, Titus. Titus was not the Antichrist. It’s the people of the prince who will come after they destroy the city and the sanctuary. One day there is coming this prince, the pretender prince, the pretender Christ, who comes out of the Roman Empire because these are the ones who destroyed it. But anyway, I’m getting maybe a little off your topic of occultism.

Tom: Dave, I am sure there are people out there who haven’t heard our program before—many people that way, or many people who have heard past programs in which we’ve developed this as we’ve gone through your book almost chapter by chapter, but when we say Christianity is going to be corrupted, we’re talking about biblical Christianity, what God’s Word says. So there are a lot of people out there who have some ideas about Christianity and probably wouldn’t recognize a change. Moving, for example, into occultism or picking up doctrines changing within Christianity, so that they’re really implementing occultic practices.

Dave: Yeah, that this will happen within the church—it is very clear. Jude, for example, verse 3 says “certain men have crept in unawares.” They don’t say that they crept into the government, or into the universities, obviously they crept in to the church. Jesus said in Matthew 7, “Many will say unto me, ‘Lord, Lord haven’t we prophesied in your name, in your name we cast out devils,’” and so forth? Paul, in Acts 20, said, “After my departing, grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Of your own selves, men will arise.”

So it’s very clear that the church will be corrupted. The “apostasy,” it is called. They will depart from the faith, and that, of course, gives us another connection to occultism because what they emphasize is the signs and wonders that they did. But Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 3, “They will be like Jannes and Jambres.” These were the magicians in Pharaoh’s court who withstood Moses, not by saying there were no miracles, but by seemingly doing miracles by the power of Satan. And so again Paul gives you an occult connection. He says there will be false miracle workers. Jesus said in Matthew:24:24For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
See All..., “They will do signs and wonders that will be so convincing that even the elect would be deceived.”

Now, some of them are definitely phonies. We’ve talked about them. The televangelist that had the listening device in his ear, and his wife is giving him the information from backstage, and he’s calling out names, and so forth, and claiming that he’s getting this from God. There were magician’s tricks that others have used. One televangelist that is right now in prison—I haven’t heard that he got out yet – but anyway, because of this kind of trickery. So they’re phonies. But there are others who, apparently, they even think that it’s the power of God, and so they say “Lord, Lord, didn’t we do this in your name? We did miracles . . .”  and He will say, “I never knew you.”

So there must have been some power, but let me just go back to an illustration we gave. Here’s Benny Hinn on TBN - do you remember? I watched it live with Paul and Jan Crouch – and he’s telling how he touched this man, and when he fell over, his wig flew off, or was a bit askew, and that he did it five times to this man just to see the wig fall off! And they are laughing uproariously about this! Now, the Holy Spirit does not knock people down to see their wigs fall off so you can laugh. So we can know it’s not the Holy Spirit. Was this just the power of suggestion? I don’t know. It would seem – five times in a row this dear man is going down – there must have been some power at work. Certainly it is not the power of God! But Benny Hinn would say he is doing this certainly “in the name of Jesus and in the name of the Lord I’ve done this.”

Now, I think we have to seriously face the implications! Or when Oral Roberts claimed that a 900-foot Jesus talked to him for seven hours. Now, is Oral Roberts lying? I wouldn’t want to accuse him of that. Was he hallucinating? I think a seven-hour hallucination is rather long. Then who was this? What was this? Certainly not Jesus! Jesus is not 900-feet tall any more than He is a baby appearing with our Lady of Fatima. So something actually appeared to him – some spirit – and had a lengthy conversation and told him to build a hospital (that wasn’t needed and went bankrupt); promised miracles and so forth that didn’t occur; a cure of cancer – so, again, we have to . . .

Tom, we’re not trying to jump on people. We’re just saying, look you can’t just slough this off. You can’t just say, “Well, that’s okay. Forget about it.” There are things that are happening in our day. There are people who claim to be called of God, who claim to be doing signs and wonders; that they claim that Christ has appeared to them. Others, who would say . . . well C. Peter Wagner: “God spoke to me,” he says, “and told me to head up the Spiritual Warfare Network.” Spiritual warfare, I think we have documented, at least the way they do it is not biblical, and it’s not of God. But he claims that Christ spoke to him and told him this.

Now these are people who are doing things in Christ’s name that seem to be miraculous and the Bible warns us about them, and one of the things we try to point out in the book is that there is an occult invasion of the church, as well as of the world, and this is – you asked me, “What is the occult connection?” Okay, I took a long time to say it—sorry.

Tom: No, that’s fine. The scripture that talks about seducing spirits, doctrines of demons – you know, we’ve gone over this before, but basically occultism comes in the form of power as well as information to lead people away from the true and living God and the church is being subjected to this, not just through the Word-Faith, which has its background in Gnosticism and the mind-sciences, religious science, but, Dave, there are other forms for those who maybe wouldn’t be a part of the charismatic or hyper-Pentecostal movement and that would be Christian psychology. These are things that seem scientific and okay, but still the techniques, the methodologies of psychotherapy are occultic in many, many cases.

Dave: Hypnosis.

Tom: Right.

Dave: You regress someone back into the past and in a hypnotic state you are moving into the occult. There’s no question about it.

Tom: Right and we mentioned before that psychology, the latest stream, if we can use that term, is transpersonal. Really, contacting spirit entities. So this again, is doing what we are talking about. It’s setting the church up for a one-world religion, because these things all have spiritual ramifications.

Dave: Or visualizing Jesus! You don’t even have to run off to Medjugorje or Fatima, where they had an apparition. You can have your own apparition, right sitting at home. There are evangelical teachers, psychologists who claim to lead people into this, and you can contact Jesus through the inner healing movement and so forth. Yes, we’ve dealt with this.

Tom:  Dave, in your book you mention Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II in relation to spirituality. As a matter of fact, you say that John Paul considers Gorbachev to be a crypto-Christian . . .

Dave: Yes, although he’s an atheist.

Tom: He’s an atheist, but he seemed to be impressed with Gorbachev’s spirituality. Now how does that play into this?

Dave: I just sat next to a lady on a plane the other day who said, “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” Meaning “I don’t subject myself to any dogmas; to narrow-minded rules and regulations. I’m very spiritual.” But Gorbachev could be spiritual. This is a popular idea today. Maybe he doesn’t even believe in God, but he’s spiritual. He’s got some kind of a spirituality that he’s tuned into out there. There are a lot of people that are in that category. It’s a growing category.

Tom: A form of Buddhism that is atheistic.

Dave: Right. Tom, there are several levels of this. We talked about those who remain within the church—they’re into occultism, they are teaching false doctrines, but they’ve remained in the church. We give the example of former Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, now the coach of the LA Lakers. Raised in a . . . well, his father and mother were co-pastors, I believe – at least his father was a pastor, and his mother put John:3:16For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
See All... on the wall in his bedroom. He was raised apparently in a Christian home and a Christian environment, yet he didn’t seem to understand Christianity at all, and he has moved into Zen Buddhism and is a Zen Master now, and he’s gotten his team involved in it. And he’s moved into North American Indian witchcraft and so forth. So let me just quote him.  He writes: “Merging Zen and Christianity allowed me to reconnect with my spiritual core and begin to integrate my heart and mind. The more I learned about the similarities between the two religions, the more compatible they seemed. Was Christ a Zen Master? That may be a stretch, but clearly he was practicing some form of meditation when he separated himself from his disciples and became one with the Father and so forth.”

So here we have a man who seriously has put Zen Buddhism and Christianity together. And the pope, you know, he visits with the Zen Buddhists, with the Buddhists of all kinds, with voodoo priests, with Hindus and Muslims and so forth. So we are seeing a merger of all religions into one, and false Christianity is part of it.  And going back to your original question, it’s power that seems to do it. You get results, that’s what unites them all. And by the way, it was the experience of being baptized in the Spirit with speaking in tongues that originally united the charismatics and the Catholics. We have about 70 million Catholic Charismatics in the world today, and they, amazingly having supposedly been baptized in the Spirit, filled with the Holy Spirit and spoken in tongues, they are more enamored with Mary, more enamored with the Mass and so forth. And the pope loves them—they are really loyal to the church now. I can’t believe that’s the Holy Spirit.

So, here we have . . . it was the experience of speaking in tongues, prophecy and so forth that, again, it was the miraculous that drew these two streams together of Christianity supposedly. And, again, we have power, but it is not the power of God, because God does not lead people to love Mary above Christ and to believe that the Mass is His body and blood being offered again and again.

Tom: Dave, some people might be thinking, Well, Phil Jackson, that’s one thing, he was just ignorant of some things, but this really can’t happen to solid evangelicals. But one of the things that you point out in this book of yours is the Templeton Prize, where you have leading evangelicals: Billy Graham, Chuck Colson, and Bill Bright. Now, either they are completely ignorant of what Temple stands for – Sir John Marks Templeton, or . . . well, I don’t know what else to say.

Dave: Tom, they can’t be ignorant. It’s impossible to be ignorant of what he stands for. The man has published at least half-a-dozen books in which he lays this out. He has the Templeton Foundation, in which he lays it out. He has written publicly, and these are not old books from way back; these are current writings, almost every year now he is coming out a new one.

So, I don’t see how they could be ignorant. Furthermore, people have critiqued this and let them know and so forth and yet I don’t find any apology, any admission of having done anything wrong and just . . . not to go back into detail, but John Marks Templeton is an occultist! He’s into mind science. One of his mind-science books was advertised full back cover just in Christianity Today that just tells you that reality is in your mind, you create your own universe with your thoughts, that there’s no heaven or hell, that’s all in your mind, and so forth, and he says you are god, I am god, everything is god – that Christianity doesn’t communication anymore and what we need is a new scientific religion that is not dependent upon ancient manuscripts like the Bible. He doesn’t believe that the Bible is God’s Word, but he was on the board of managers of the American Bible Society for 15 years. And he goes on to say that “what we need is a scientific religion that all the religious, anybody, everybody on earth and all the extraterrestrials can accept. And to encourage progress toward this, I am offering the Templeton Award for Progress in Religion.”

Tom, he’s talking about the One World Religion of the Antichrist! Could you accept a prize for that?

Tom: If these gentlemen knew nothing about his occultic involvement (which is rather doubtful), they’d have to know what his objective and his goal is! They received the million dollar prizes for being a part in Templeton’s viewpoint of moving toward this goal.

Dave: Well he lays it all out, Tom. Again, it’s incredible, and how do I understand why these men would accept this prize along with Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and so forth who have accepted it? I don’t know. But the man is an occultist, and now we are all uniting together toward a new world religion. That is unquestionable, and I think we document it thoroughly.

Tom: Dave . . .

Dave: Let me just finish here. Part of the problem is that we live in a day when, as Paul said, they will not endure sound doctrine. If you wanted to go by the Bible and measure John Marks Templeton or any of these other things that we’ve just talked about in this other program – measure them by the Word of God – you would have to say they’re not right.

Now, the only way that you could kind of look the other way, and to just continue on with this is to ignore what God has said, and that really the purpose of this program, Search the Scriptures Daily. We want to get people back—don’t believe what we say, check it out from the scriptures. And we’ve got to have the Bible as our guide. If we don’t have the Bible as our guide we will be led astray.

Tom: Dave, for some people listening, they’d say, well I believe these guys are . . . believe that the Rapture will take place and you know, we’ll be out of here, before this formulation of one world church. But doesn’t this have an impact on us – on our fruitfulness and productiveness in the Lord if we buy into certain ideas that are preparatory for this one world religion?

Dave: It makes it very difficult to talk about “straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it,” if all these people are being embraced out there, you know, the Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and now we have embraced a billion Catholics. “They’re all Christians. Anybody that’s into spirituality, you’re into the same kind I’m into, and we all seem to be involved in this, and we don’t draw any lines, any categories, but we’ll work together, we’ll accept prizes, and so forth.” That makes it very, very difficult . . .

Tom: The Great Commission is out the door with this idea.

Dave: Exactly! Very difficult to present:  to stand there like Peter: “Neither is there salvation in any other for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must [not may, but we must] be saved. Yeah, but the Mormons, they talk about Jesus, and everybody’s into spirituality, and so long as you’re sincere, and you believe in some form of higher power—well that must be okay. And Tom, although if you sat down with these men and you said, “That’s not what you are presenting, is it? You don’t really believe that?” I am sure they would say, “No, that’s not what we believe, but appearances seem to lead to that, and it does make it very difficult. And we are seeing the foundation laid for this false world church.

Tom: Right. Appearances, yes, but I think it’s a little bit more than that Dave. What these men are saying, how they are influencing people – you can’t go along with these ideas and be fruitful and productive in the Lord! That’s the bottom line.

Dave: Well, you are going to create false believers.

Tom: And such false believers will become, through persuasive but unbiblical teachings, through occult powers, and lying signs and wonders—they’ll become the congregation of the universal religion of the Antichrist. And for those who are truly born-again believers in Jesus Christ, who are trusting in Him alone, by faith alone for their salvation, the only preventative action we know to personally avoid falling prey to the destructive aspects of this developing world religion is to “search the Scriptures daily,” to see if what they are being taught is true to the Word of God.