Reviews by Hubie Goode: Apostasy and Power

Apostasy and Power

As is all too often the case, Christians who have tasted actual miracles from God give in to the temptation to want to increase the amount of control they have and frequency with which God responds by using certain methods, principles or laws. Many involved in such attempts lose sight of the fact that they have denied true miraculous possibilities and have created a type of false idol god who must respond in a predetermined manner to their positive confessions, visualization and/or affirmations. The reality that they have stepped over into the occult without realizing it, doesn’t help anyone involved in the faith.

This person, who unwittingly has become a sorcerer, has replaced God with an impersonal “cosmic goo” force that can be manipulated in a scientific manner as one would relieve the atom of its energy. Amazingly, Christians often accept the same concepts as success motivational thinking. The book, The Power of Positive Thinking, makes no vagaries about the principles on which it is based.

“Prayer power is a manifestation of energy. Just as there exists scientific techniques for the release of atomic energy, so are there scientific procedures for the release of spiritual energy through the mechanism of prayer. Exciting demonstrations of this energizing force are evident...

It is important to realize that you are dealing with the most tremendous power in the world when you pray... New and fresh spiritual techniques are being constantly discovered.... experiment with prayer power....”


People often have no real clue just what it means to accept Jesus and when they get down the road a bit in their walk they may go through a kind of withdrawal as they confront the erroneous assumptions that they have been programed to believe about what being a true Christian really means. Little could many of us have expected when we first heard the call that a part of us was really looking for the “genie in the bottle”, not the savior of lost souls. Such titles of “Christian books” as: God’s Creative Power Will Work for You or How To Write Your Own Ticket With God, set a tone that panders to mankind’s basic weakness. The seemingly unattractive quality of Christianity for many of the fallen and also those who are unwittingly apostate is that God is the Creator of everything and anything you can name and he calls us to submit to his will. Which, after all, makes sense since it’s HIS universe, and not ours.

Many are those who speak of submitting to God’s will, but much of the terms with which they use to describe this submission negates that same submission. A messenger of God can speak as God’s servant, fulfilling his will, but not as a prestidigitator who has gained control of cosmic forces due to his knowledge of the laws that govern them. Answered prayer is not a positive confession, but a request within God’s will and a testimony of faith that, if it is judged by God as beneficial to us, then we shall have it.

The promises of God are always conditioned upon his will and judgment in any particular situation and upon the obedience of his people. It is a natural thing for us to make the condition for answered prayed our ability to “believe”, but this in fact may hamper a true faith that relies on God as 1) existing despite a lack of visual evidence in any situation and 2) a trust in God’s love and true wisdom to work all things out according to his will. The concept of our receiving exceedingly and abundantly above all we ask of and think, may not be something we confess, which is of course limited by our own time and space and imaginations, but would be something that is even better for us in the long run as judged by He who knows all the hairs on our head.

The Magic Man

Much of the “magic” of our day relies on many of the same principles. With the clear intent of being equal to a physicist or chemist, occultists deal with spiritual laws and metaphysical forces. The material scientist denies any reality except the physical. This view could, however, change over night. As a result, real science and pseudo science will blur the lines between them. Such a thing as “Scientology” is perhaps ahead of the pack in this mixing of the physical laws and the spiritual reality. And what is this except the man in the woods with the hood and the staff now wearing an Armani suit and holding seminars for $60.00 a ticket?

Top scientists now believe that quantum mechanics can prove the connection between the mind and what can be created in reality. A well known philosopher of our time has stated that several leading theorists have come forward to say that much of their work suggests a hidden spiritual world. The swing of science toward mysticism promises to be of catastrophic effect upon the church.

This is the view of certain scientists: John Von Neumann’s rigorous formulation of quantum mechanics shows that physical reality is a fragment of the human imagination and that the only true reality is thought itself....It could be that the scientific community is a kind of spirit society that devotes itself to studying imaginary phenomena, and that the objects of physics are ghosts produced by the observers themselves.

It was only a little while ago that such ideas were the enclave of the intellectual masturbatory elite and generally believed to be mental aphasia by the general public. This idea today however, no matter the illogic or lack of seminal evidence, of the mind creating its own reality (and the accompanying practices) is the basis for the New Physics, and the New Psychology. The New Age movement, the Holistic Human Potential movement and Consciousness movements are all great purveyors of this mental control idea. Now the universe is no longer a machine, but more of a “thought”. Many physicist have become idealists who believe that the mind is the ultimate reality with matter being the epiphenomenon. Things seem objective because they exist in the mind of some eternal spirit.

Christians often use these ideas, quoted from the mouths of so called experts, as support of spiritual reality. The underlying concept being that these ramblings somehow prove that man has some kind of untapped potential in the form of mind powers by which to transform reality. To say that we regard consciousness as fundamental and matter as its derivative, is far from a Christian concept. It elevates the human mind to Godhood. New science has taken a huge leap from materialism to the strange land of the mystic and occultic which is having a big impact on society and the church.

Science and Hinduism

There is increasing acceptance among scientists of what a Stanford University Professor of Materials Science says is “new energies”. Whatever these new energies are, they are becoming regarded as not being a part of physical reality but instead they are connected to human consciousness. Science has become spiritism, a practice which renders its own methods and instruments redundant and thus becomes a victim of its own erroneous ideas.

Scientists are coming forth with the idea that at some point in the universe, we are all connected ... time, space and matter are all mutable. This is not a new idea, ask any Hindu. If such a thing is true, then in fact we are all not just merely potential “gods” but in fact WE ARE GOD. Yogis have long intimated that all we need to find self realization (or God Realization) is to look within ourselves to find out who we really are. God is in you, not outside of you. Due to its role in the advancement of mankind over the last couple of centuries, science has found itself to be the sacred cow of mankind, and is influencing the church in ways though impossible by those who lived three hundred years ago and beyond.

Yoga Unbearable

Yoga, the very heart of Hinduism, is now also calling itself science. In the last 30 years it has become a big part of western civilization. It is taught everywhere, at the YMCA, the YWCA, clubs, public schools, industry, and also in many churches. With an Armani suit, Yoga has insinuated itself into medicine, psychology, education, and religion under the auspices of “centering”, “relaxation therapy”, “self-hypnosis”, and “creative visualization”. Yoga is designed to lead to the realization of one’s true godhood through an inward journey that finally locates the ultimate source of everything within the human psyche (a Freudian term). Even Nobel Prize winners in science have stated it is possible for them to gain insights into objective reality by practicing traditional Eastern meditational techniques. Though wether or not this has ever happened for them is still a non-event. Surely, with an idea as old as this one is, there has to be the resultant successful accomplishment somewhere, somehow for others to investigate. Wouldn’t you think?

Hollo Sweet

Paradoxically, despite the rise of movie ticket prices, 3-D effects have taken on a kind of new age themselves. Inferior enough not to warrant the higher prices they ask for, they none the less have begun a rise in filmmaking where most movies will soon have 3-D effects. Why? You have me on that one. The next logical step for technology in the filmmaking business will be, of course, holograms. Though you may only think of them as science fiction at this point, they do have an intriguing scientific basis. Three dimensional images which project the action right out into the audience is an ability that is not so far out into the future as one might believe. But here’s the thing about holograms, no matter how small or how many the pieces the hologram is cut into, despite reduced resolution, each piece retains the image of the entire whole. The same is true of single cells of the body. Each one has the entire DNA formula for replicating the whole, which is why it is theoretically possible to clone an entire human being from a single cell.

It’s not a far jump to then claim that each of us is a little holographic image of the entire universe. We are a “God” that contains within ourselves everything that is. It’s unfortunate but the teachings going around the church today are supporting eastern mysticism more than they perhaps realize.

What Would "The Great Falling Away" Look Like Then?

David Yonggi Cho is a Korean Christian minister. He is Senior Pastor and founder of the Yoido Full Gospel Church (Assemblies of God), the world’s largest congregation with a membership of 830,000 . Cho still conducts two services of the seven the church holds a day; they are so heavily attended that people often must arrive an hour early to have a seat. Here is a direct quote including his summary of the fourth dimension:

“Then God spoke to my heart, “Son, as the second dimension includes and controls the first dimension, and the third dimension includes and controls the second dimension, so the fourth dimension includes and controls the third dimension, producing a creation of order and beauty. The spirit is the fourth dimension. Every human being is a spiritual being as well as a physical being. They have the fourth dimension as well as the third dimension in their hearts.” So men, by exploring their spiritual sphere of the fourth dimension through the development of concentrated visions and dreams in their imaginations, can brood over and incubate the third dimension, influencing and changing it. This is what the Holy Spirit taught me”

*Cho, The Fourth Dimension 1979:p40

This is a blatant contradiction of logic and science as well as scripture to say that the spirit is a fourth dimension that includes and controls the three dimensional universe. This not only denies God’s transcendence by placing him in a dimensional cause and effect relationship with the physical universe, but it is the Hindu concept of God who is everything and made everything out of himself. To give the source of this information as the Holy Spirit is troublesome enough on its own, even without the fourth dimension information, and should be tested and proved as all revelations should be while holding fast to that which is good. Seriously, did God leave something out of his revelation of himself to us? Ooops! (I joke of course.)

More on this fourth dimension information next time in part 2.