Renowned Christian author Lee Strobel said Americans’ interest in a “realm beyond that which we can see and touch” drove him to write his latest book — an exploration of the supernatural.
Strobel, who recently released “Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World,” said data showing the majority of Americans believe in these biblical topics led him to want to go deeper.
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“It told me that this is a bridge where we can connect with people who may be far from God and yet have an interest in the supernatural,” he told me and actress Jen Lilley on our new “Into the Supernatural” podcast. “It may be an entryway for them to really learn about what the Bible does teach about the world beyond our physical realm.”
Strobel continued, “Being an evangelist, that was always my desire.”
But the author, who called it an “adventure” to have the chance to dive into these topics over the past few years, said some Christians are hesitant to fully embrace each sentiment.
Listen to Strobel explain:
With that in mind, Strobel was careful to choose cases with a great deal of corroboration to help bring these issues to light. Near-death experiences are just one arena where he was fascinated to see powerful evidence that something supernatural had unfolded.
“You begin to see documented cases of near-death experiences where people see or hear things that would have been impossible for them to see or hear if they hadn’t had an authentic out-of-body experience after their clinical death,” Strobel said. “It just reinforces what Scripture tells us about the supernatural realm, and I think it gives us more courage.”
Strobel shared one such story about a woman who was clinically dead in a hospital and who claimed to have had her spirit separate from her body.
She said she traveled to the ceiling during the experience and could see her body being resuscitated.
“When she was ultimately revived, she said, ‘Oh, by the way, on the ceiling fan here in the emergency room, on the upper part of the blade … is a red sticker,'” he recounted. “And she couldn’t have seen it. Nobody could see it from the room because it’s on the upper part of the blade of the ceiling. So they got a ladder and they went up, and, sure enough, there’s the red sticker that she only could have seen from her perspective of her spirit floating near the ceiling of the emergency room.”
Strobel encountered other examples like this, which he included in the book.
Issues like this are getting increasing attention in culture as faith seems to be making a resurgence. And Strobel said he’s noticing something else — that for the first time in history, “people are doing scientific inquiries into miracles” in an attempt to prove their existence.
“In other words, they’re testing them scientifically and with documentation in a way that I don’t think has been done that much in the past,” Strobel said. “And we’re seeing cases of documented miracles that are really waking up people to the fact that this is not wishful thinking, it’s not … the placebo effect, it’s not fraud, it’s not fakery. There are documented cases.”
He also cited the case of medical healing surrounding a blind woman whose husband prayed for her one night, imploring the Lord to heal her vision.
“He says, ‘Lord, I know you can heal blindness. I know you can do it. And Lord, I pray you do it tonight. I pray you do it right now,'” Strobel recounted. “And she opened her eyes to perfect eyesight, and which has remained fine for 47 years so far.”
Medically documented stories like this have Strobel convinced “something is going on” – something he believes is truly miraculous.
“And I think this is kind of opening people’s eyes to the fact that these aren’t just stories that you hear at Sunday school or whatever,” he said. “But you dig down into many of these stories and you find substance, and you find people with eyewitnesses who have no motive to deceive. You have medical records and so forth.”
For more miracle stories like this, stream CBN’s new documentary “Investigating the Supernatural: Miracles.” We’ll leave you with the trailer:
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