F4F | David Crank Uses Numerology to Prophesy
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- 00:15
- Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Roseborough. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.
- 00:21
- This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. So an alarming thing
- 00:28
- I've been noticing is the more and more Christians are embracing what
- 00:35
- I can only describe as like New Age paganism or New Age Gnostic concepts and things that are forbidden in Scripture and then trying to smuggle them into the church.
- 00:44
- We recently did an episode of Fighting for the Faith just a few episodes back where we talked about Krista Smith and she was interpreting omens, which is strictly forbidden by Scripture.
- 00:55
- But today we're going to be taking a look at David Crank of, you know, of Faith Church St.
- 01:01
- Louis. You know, famous husband of Nicole Crank. They are a power couple in the seeker driven
- 01:08
- NAR kind of circles and he's going to be engaging in a practice known as numerology and he will even name it by name.
- 01:16
- But here's the thing, when it comes to numerology, I don't know anything about it except for like numerology equals bad.
- 01:24
- And so I've invited a friend and a guest on to today's episode of Fighting for the
- 01:30
- Faith. Some of you are very familiar with her work. Doreen Virtue, she's also a fellow YouTube content creator and somebody who publishes discernment work, warning people about bad practices and beliefs in the body of Christ.
- 01:45
- Doreen, good to have you on Fighting for the Faith. How have you been, my friend? Thank you.
- 01:50
- It's great to be back. I appreciate all the work you do with your ministry. It's blessed me so much. Thank you,
- 01:56
- Doreen. And so since we've last talked, you've graduated from seminary.
- 02:03
- I did, and this was something I did just because I needed to learn how to rightly divide God's Word and to get feedback that I really did understand the
- 02:10
- Gospel. So I went to Western Seminary and got a Master's in Biblical and Theological Studies.
- 02:16
- It's 56 units. And I graduated, and I'm not boasting, this is a testament to God's new life and new heart with those who he saves.
- 02:25
- I got highest honors, straight A's except for one B. And it just blew my mind every time
- 02:31
- I got an A because before I was saved I would have got straight F's there because I didn't know.
- 02:36
- I was misinterpreting the Bible, but through God's grace and mercy, I'm here as a saved person to talk about the
- 02:44
- New Age practices, particularly numerology that's creeping into the
- 02:50
- Church, and a lot of professing Christians do not know that. Right, right. Now I would need to make something clear.
- 02:56
- Even though you have a seminary, you're not taking a call to be a pastrix in some leftist -leaning church, are you, anytime soon?
- 03:04
- No. The number one reason I would leave a church is if there was a woman at the pulpit. I absolutely adhere to the biblical commandments and exhortations that we women are not here to instruct or have authority over men.
- 03:17
- Now there's no pulpit here. I'm not having authority over men. I'm sharing because I'm a former
- 03:22
- New Age teacher, and I have insight as a former New Ager into seeing that just it's shocking how it's creeping into the
- 03:31
- Church. I think it's just a lot of don't know. Yeah, it's bizarre.
- 03:37
- We just put out a video on fighting for the faith of a woman with the Global Awakening Church or whatever, and she was legitimately interpreting omens.
- 03:48
- And I walk people through the biblical texts that not only prohibit the use of the interpreting of omens, this is not the voice of God speaking to us through numbers or coincidences and things like this.
- 04:02
- And also gave two examples of where things went really poorly in Israel's history when people, when kings in particular, used the practice of reading omens.
- 04:14
- It's part of the abominable practices that God forbids. But people would look at Scripture in a kind of a narrow way and say, well the
- 04:23
- Bible doesn't explicitly forbid numerology, therefore it's okay for us.
- 04:30
- What would you say to somebody who would make an argument like that? Well, this is the slippery slope fallacy that I see, is people say, well
- 04:37
- God's got repeating numbers in the Bible, He's got 7 and 12 and 40, therefore ipso facto, then it's okay for me to use repeating numbers to get a personal, private, special revelation.
- 04:50
- And that's a fallacy of logic, as we know. We also know that people who are professing
- 04:55
- Christians try to take the verses and chapter numbers in the Bible, which were added in the 1500s, they're not divinely inspired numbers, but they'll do things like take their birth date and then try to plug it into chapters and numbers and say, that's my life verse.
- 05:11
- And someone who's born on April 3rd, 4 -3, might go to Matthew and that's the devil talking.
- 05:17
- So we can see that that's not something that we should be doing at all. The Bible forbids divination.
- 05:23
- I was convicted and saved because I read Deuteronomy 18, 10 -12, which is
- 05:29
- God speaking through Moses before they crossed the Jordan River, saying don't be like the Canaanites, do not burn your children in the fire, do not practice divination, mediumship, or interpreting omens.
- 05:41
- And these were things, I didn't burn children, of course, I've always been pro -life, but I was involved with divination and mediumship and interpreting signs and omens, personally and professionally.
- 05:52
- And that passage broke me. It made me realize, as the passage said, that not only the practices are abominations, but the people who practice them are abominations.
- 06:03
- So I've seen this numerology with people saying, well, because God has repeating numbers in the
- 06:09
- Bible, therefore. And you see that with signs and omens. People will go to Gideon and the fleece and they'll say, well, he used that as a sign, so therefore
- 06:17
- I can use signs. And they just twist Scripture to justify doing condemned pagan divination practices.
- 06:27
- You know, at the end of the day, and correct me if I'm wrong in my understanding, because this might be an overly simplistic way of looking at this.
- 06:35
- When I look at the reading of omens or numerology or particular practices that go along with that, those all seem to be part of the mechanism of a broader topic known as fortune telling.
- 06:51
- And over and again, when I've seen people using practices that are forbidden in Scripture, they're always trying to use it to justify some kind of a prophetic utterance that relates to somewhere in the near or the not too far future.
- 07:08
- Am I correct in saying that numerology is one of the mechanisms used for fortune telling in paganism?
- 07:16
- Absolutely. It is fortune telling. It is a form of divination. I would also say it's idolatry of the self, even idolatry of numbers.
- 07:25
- And there's all these different methods that people even are charging for. And on TikTok, which
- 07:31
- I never go on to, but I'm aware of the trends, there's one, there's a Russian man who was imprisoned, a cult leader named, and I've got to grab his name here because it's a
- 07:39
- Russian name. It's Grabovoi.
- 07:48
- Grabovoi codes. This is a big trend among people, including professing
- 07:55
- Christians, that you can actually speak these number codes and you can get whatever you want.
- 08:00
- There's even Grabovoi codes to get thicker hair. There's a book on how to have more success in your job.
- 08:08
- So these are where you initiate the number code to speak it.
- 08:13
- They call it the universe instead of God to get what you want, kind of prophetic utterances.
- 08:20
- I've heard of things like this, like cheat codes for the universe to be able to, so that you can manifest better results in your life.
- 08:27
- I'd like to know what the cheat code is to get rid of gray hair without having to use dye. Indeed.
- 08:36
- There's what I was kind of well known for before I was saved, and I've repented for this.
- 08:41
- I know God's forgiven me, but it's still out there. You know my old books, I can't get them out because they're licensed to others.
- 08:49
- They're not as sold as much, but one of the number, the books I was most known for was a book called
- 08:54
- Angel Numbers, and it was a term I coined. I had an app where you would look for repeating numbers in license plates, and receipts, and phone numbers.
- 09:05
- We said that that is a message from the angels. So if you see 444, it means something 333.
- 09:12
- The thing was, we put in this book kind of biblical quotes, and we put three is the
- 09:18
- Trinity. So it gives some credence, so professing Christians who don't know their Bible do feel kind of safe, because oh, after all, three is the
- 09:27
- Trinity, and after all, angels are in the Bible. And that's how I was fooled, too.
- 09:33
- Yeah, so you know, ultimately the way I see this is it comes down to a question of where has
- 09:41
- God's promise that His voice is going to be heard, and where has He forbidden us to listen for His voice?
- 09:49
- I think it really comes down to something simple like that, and since God has forbidden fortune -telling as a practice in total, including any mechanisms included in that, which would be like tarot cards, or any kind of astrology, or even numerology, all for the purpose of fortune -telling, that we can definitively say that those who know their
- 10:12
- Bible know for sure that God isn't going to be speaking in these ways at all, and the only place where we can go where we know we're hearing
- 10:21
- God's voice without any question is the actual scriptures themselves. So when we look in the scriptures, it's true, prominent numbers throughout the scripture, 3, 7, 12, 40, these are prominently featured numbers that repeat themselves throughout the scripture.
- 10:39
- However, this does not justify any kind of fortune -telling practices that would be based upon interpreting numbers.
- 10:45
- A better way to look at it is that God's Bible, His Word, has a way of hyperlinking to itself, and so when you see words like that, they're invoking other passages of scripture, which are kind of inviting you to a fuller reading of the biblical texts, and looking for that meaning in Christ, not in yourself.
- 11:04
- So when we talk about fortune -telling, one of the things that I cannot get away from is this idea that fortune -telling as a practice is extremely narcissistic.
- 11:18
- I am so important, and my future is so important, that I need to get an inside track on so that I can know what to expect is what is coming in the future, because it's really all about me.
- 11:30
- Is there really a feeding of a narcissistic tendency that we all have because of our fall into sin that fortune -telling plays into?
- 11:38
- There's absolutely narcissism. It's all about me. It's all about what is in it for me in the future.
- 11:44
- It's a lack of trust in God, and God's sovereignty, and what we see is that the people who are numerologists are acting like false prophets that God warned about, and the false prophets always talk about, oh you're going to have a job promotion.
- 12:02
- You're going to meet your soulmate. It's all about false promises, feel -good promises. It's tickling the ears, where the true prophets in the
- 12:10
- Bible always talked about repentance and coming back to God's covenant. Yeah, that's a great distinction, and the true prophets of the
- 12:19
- Old Testament were never really popular fellows. No one wanted to be told they needed to repent and turn from their evil, and so a lot of them lost their lives kind of unexpectedly.
- 12:31
- Well, I'd say tragically quickly is a good way to put it. So let's let's take a look at the the sound byte or video byte in question.
- 12:40
- I'm going to whirl up my desktop here, and we're gonna head over to Faith Church St.
- 12:47
- Louis, and this was just posted a few days ago, and the name of it is
- 12:52
- How to Be a Yes Man, and this is Pastor David Crank of FaithChurch .com,
- 12:59
- and I've covered him for many years, but I've never seen him quite so open about the practice of numerology, and so we'll listen to its entirety, and then
- 13:12
- I'll get your feedback on it, but here we go. This week, it's really kind of cool how quick our team is.
- 13:18
- The Lord spoke to me to give a word on that your season of no is over. Our team put together that Yes, Yes, Yes video.
- 13:25
- Could you give it up for our media team and ushers and every campus here in Earth City? Listen, thousands of people are at church today here in St.
- 13:31
- Louis, and it just doesn't accidentally happen, but I want you to hear me today and know that this is not just a sermon.
- 13:37
- This is a prophetic word to you. God said that a lot of you have got no after no after no after no to where you've got inoculated to no.
- 13:43
- You're expecting no, and so here's what I want you to understand. You're getting ready to enter into August. How many of y 'all are gonna enter into August?
- 13:49
- That is the eighth month. Everybody shout the eighth month. Eight in numerology means new beginnings. Then, that means that there's five months left in the year.
- 13:58
- You got August, September, October, November, December. Five means grace and favor, and so I'm expecting some people you'll start seeing doors of opportunity prophetically,
- 14:05
- I speak it over you, opening now, but get ready in the month of August, they're gonna fly open. Where the door was closed, it was locked, and it was blocked.
- 14:11
- Who's going with me on that? Where God is for you, who and what can be against you? No more no's and a whole lot of yes, a series of yes.
- 14:20
- Doreen, so that's the segment in question, and he invokes numerology, and numerology eight means new beginnings, and then you got five months left, and so he's declaring a kind of a cotton candy generic ear -scratching, you know, blue sky is smiling at me kind of prophecy, you know, if you walk into the month of August, was that a biblical prophecy we just heard?
- 14:46
- And can Christian pastors invoke numerology and make prophetic utterances like this, or is this exactly the stuff you were doing when you were a
- 14:54
- New Ager? Yeah, it's exactly. In fact, I would post on my social media every
- 15:00
- August that it's the eighth month, and eight being kind of that, you know, ever -ending circle was always about abundance.
- 15:08
- In numerology circles, eight is about abundance, so I can see that he twisted it to say it's a new opportunity, and I even knew someone who had a personalized license plate of 888 saying that that would attract abundance to him, so this is very fleshly desires grounded and steeped in paganism, occultism, even witchcraft.
- 15:27
- Witches use numerology, so this is something that I pray that the Holy Spirit would convict
- 15:33
- Crank and help him to see the error of his way, and that he would repent publicly because he's misleading his flock with numerology.
- 15:41
- It's one of those doors that seem to be innocent to walk through, but it leads to deeper and darker occult practices if people walk through it.
- 15:51
- Yeah, I can see that, you know, somebody's sitting there, and obviously the people who are attending
- 15:57
- Faith Church St. Louis do not know their Bibles. If they knew their Bibles, they would be fleeing this building, recognizing that this is a practice that is associated with fortune -telling, and that that wasn't a prophecy that they heard.
- 16:11
- That wasn't the voice of God. This was a man specifically twisting and manipulating a
- 16:17
- New Age pagan fortune -telling practice for the purpose of making them feel like they have promises from God that God isn't actually obligated to perform, and so as a result of this,
- 16:33
- I mean, it's 30 days, half September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, except for February, which has 28, right?
- 16:40
- So that being the case, 31 days of August, and that entire time they're expecting these things to happen to them, but God isn't gonna make anything change in August like this.
- 16:55
- This is not a promise from God at all. Where does this leave people, when promises have been made like this, and then
- 17:06
- God doesn't deliver on said promises? Well, that's just the thing. He's giving false hope, which 2
- 17:13
- Timothy 4 talks about in the End Times, so we will see these false teachers tickling people's ears with false hope, and that's what
- 17:21
- I was doing before I was saved, regrettably. The thing is that the only people who prosper by teaching numerology are those who sell tickets, or write books about numerology, so he can promise all day long that August will be profitable for him, and it will be for him, but not for those who give him money, because they think it's going to sow a seed, and that there's some guaranteed blessing, because it's the 8th month.
- 17:46
- It doesn't work that way. This is exactly what God was talking about in Deuteronomy, with those who speak a prophecy that does not come true, that he said, that means it wasn't for me, and he actually, in Deuteronomy, said that such false prophets should be killed, and this is just so troubling that David Crank, a professing
- 18:07
- Christian, would deceive his audience. I don't even want to call them his congregation, because it's not a church, and it's exactly like we used to do at the
- 18:18
- Mind, Body, Spirit New Age Festivals. I can't believe that some of these so -called churches are operating just like we did in the
- 18:26
- New Age, but it's even more dangerous, because they are pretending to be Christian, pretending to be biblical.
- 18:33
- And so you invoked Deuteronomy 18, and in fact, there's two passages in question here that I think are helpful.
- 18:42
- In Deuteronomy 18, you have this wonderful Hang on a second here, I need to pull this up so everybody can see this.
- 18:50
- You have the forbidding of particular practices, and so you have the practice, when you come into the land
- 18:58
- Yahweh your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes.
- 19:11
- Numerology is a form of fortune telling. Numerology is one of the mechanisms of fortune telling, so it falls under the prohibition there.
- 19:21
- Anyone who interprets omens or who is a sorcerer, a charmer, a medium, a necromancer, or anyone who inquires of the dead, this pretty much gets rid of a whole swath of particular types of paranormal shows on certain cable channels as well.
- 19:37
- Just saying. And whoever does these things, it's not that these practices are, only the practices are abominable, but whoever does these things is also an abomination to the
- 19:49
- Lord. The actual person is an abomination. And because of these abominations, Yahweh your
- 19:54
- God is driving them out from before you, and he shall be blameless before, and you shall be blameless before Yahweh your
- 20:01
- God for these nations which you are about to dispossess. Listen to fortune tellers, and I think that's what
- 20:06
- David Crank just turned himself into by invoking numerology and diviners, but as for you,
- 20:12
- Yahweh your God has not allowed you to do this. And then you get to the actual amazing prophecy regarding Jesus Christ, and with it, what to do with false prophets.
- 20:26
- Yahweh your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers, it is to him you shall listen.
- 20:34
- And this is Moses prophesying of Jesus. Just as you desired of Yahweh your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, let me not hear again the voice of Yahweh my
- 20:43
- God, or see this great fire any more lest I die. And Yahweh said to me, they are right in what they have spoken.
- 20:50
- I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
- 20:58
- And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.
- 21:04
- But the prophet who presumes, and isn't there a whole ton of presumption going on when people are engaging in numerology and practices like fortune telling?
- 21:14
- I mean, the whole thing is just a whole bunch of presumption, presuming that this is how God speaks when he doesn't.
- 21:20
- But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.
- 21:30
- And if you say in your heart, well, how may we know the word that Yahweh has not spoken? And people sit there and today you say, well, this doesn't apply today because prophecy in the
- 21:39
- Old Testament is different. No, no, no, no. The test is to tell whether or not this is a word that God hasn't spoken.
- 21:45
- That's how can we know for certain God hasn't spoken it. When a prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that Yahweh has not spoken.
- 21:55
- The prophet has spoken it presumptuously, and you need not be afraid of him. In other words, you can invoke the civil justice code of ancient
- 22:03
- Israel, if you were living in that at the time, and the person would be put to death for blasphemy, right?
- 22:11
- So, you are making the claim here that because of what
- 22:16
- David Crank has done, saying that all these no's that you've come to expect, and that in August, God's going to turn all your no's into yeses, which is an absurd claim, by the way, that when that does not come true for people, this proves that he's not only a fortune teller, and engaging in an abominable practice that makes him an abomination to God, but this also clearly shows him to be a false prophet, correct?
- 22:40
- That is absolutely correct. And he said that God gave him this word, which is even more shocking than what
- 22:48
- I normally hear from people who are teaching numerology. I mean, he's claiming that God gave him this word to give to others, and that is so beyond blasphemy.
- 22:59
- I'm literally speechless about that. And like you said, God's word said, this is not from God, because it's not true.
- 23:07
- How could everyone in that audience have yeses all of August? That's not going to happen.
- 23:14
- Yep. Now, here's the thing. Be careful what you say out loud,
- 23:19
- Doreen. The reason why, because I've noticed that when you say something like that, Satan sits there and goes, challenge accepted, okay?
- 23:26
- Because you're going to note in churches like this, they're always fishing for and soliciting people to give testimony that will then validate what the person said.
- 23:38
- So it's kind of like when I was in grade school, I was a Cub Scout, right?
- 23:44
- And so we would go to Cub Scout meetings, and we would have these big shindigs every so often, and people would bake cakes.
- 23:52
- So this is the 1970s. They still allowed things like this. They would bake cakes. And then we would have raffles.
- 23:59
- People would buy raffle tickets for the purpose of possibly winning one of the delicious cakes that was baked by the moms.
- 24:05
- It was a way of helping to fund our Cub Scout den. So always and again, there seems to be somebody that has the winning raffle ticket when it comes to these false prophecies, although it didn't apply to anybody else except for this person.
- 24:21
- They'll find that person and bring them up and says, oh man, David Crank told me that all my no's would turn into yeses in the month of August.
- 24:30
- And wouldn't you know it, the bank that wouldn't approve my car loan approved my car loan, and now
- 24:36
- I have a new car. And the company that I applied for and told me that they weren't going to hire me, they called me back and said
- 24:43
- I had the job. And so everyone's going to go whoo, yay, right?
- 24:49
- Does that prove that he's a true prophet? Well, that's what's going to happen also in these kind of churches is those who got all the no's in August, they'll be told it's their fault that they didn't have enough faith.
- 25:01
- Yeah, yeah. This is, by the way, is where the other text comes into play. Now I remember where I was going.
- 25:08
- Listen to this one, because there's a second text in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 13. If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass.
- 25:19
- And if he says, let us go after other gods, which you have not known and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams for Yahweh your
- 25:28
- God is testing you to know whether you love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
- 25:34
- And so the way I look at it is, if I'm correctly understanding this text, is that even when they find the one guy who won the golden ticket, right?
- 25:44
- And he gets to go to Willy Wonka's month of August of full yeses. Okay. The guy who gets the golden ticket, that still proves that David Crank is a false prophet because although David Crank didn't say from the stage, in numerology, the number eight means new beginnings and therefore let us worship
- 26:06
- Baal. He didn't say that. But what he did do is still engage in idolatry because by invoking the practice of numerology and using it in a prophetic word, which really amounted to fortune telling, he is invoking a different deity than the deity of scripture.
- 26:26
- And you'll note that within the cults, think of Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormons believe in Jesus, but do
- 26:35
- Mormons believe in the biblical Jesus, Doreen? That's right. Yeah, they use the same terms.
- 26:41
- And a lot of these false teachers, they'll take scripture and just twist it. And they engage in this practice also that is fortune telling called bibliomancy, where they teach people just to pray for a word from God and just open the to wherever it falls.
- 26:57
- And there's your message. And again, if you land on Matthew 4, you might be reading something from the devil.
- 27:05
- So this just makes no sense. And it is divination. It is idolatry. It is something that's condemned
- 27:11
- Old Testament and New Testament, because I get the same argument that, oh, that's the old covenant. Jesus fulfilled that.
- 27:18
- But when we look at Acts 16, where the psychic girl is condemned, we look at Acts 19, where the sorcerers are burning all their divination, sorcery books, etc.
- 27:29
- We look at Revelation, where the idolaters are cast out, and not part of the new heaven and new earth.
- 27:37
- So this is something that all Christians need to be concerned about and watch out for. That includes reading your horoscope would be in the same category, the
- 27:46
- Enneagram, where you're identifying as an Enneatype number. Your identity is either that you're a child of God or you're not.
- 27:53
- That's the only identity that matters. Right. My identity is in Christ. I have no other identity outside of Him that is worth pointing to, except for sinner.
- 28:04
- So the idea then is, although David Crank did not invoke the name of a false
- 28:10
- God, he invoked a practice that the true God has forbidden and said that he's receiving from the
- 28:19
- Holy Spirit a prophecy to give to everybody, which then means he's actually worshiping a different deity.
- 28:25
- But you're going to note within the New Testament itself, 1 Corinthians 10, 14, therefore my beloved flee from idolatry.
- 28:33
- That's not an old covenant command, that's a new covenant command here. And you're going to note that the
- 28:40
- Ten Commandments still apply to Christians. The first commandment is you will have no other gods.
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- That means that we should fear, love, and trust in the true God, not in a
- 28:50
- God of our own making. And so, when people somehow ascribe to the true God practices or ways of communication that God has forbidden, they are by definition engaging in idolatry because the deity that they're believing in and invoking is not the actual deity of Scripture.
- 29:09
- Amen. Yeah. 1 Corinthians 10, 21 summarizes it so beautifully. We cannot drink of the cup of demons and the cup of the
- 29:17
- Lord. We cannot eat at the table of the demons and the table of the Lord. And that is so important because the number of letters
- 29:23
- I get from professing Christians who want to argue that Christian liberty gives them the right to engage in numerology and other pagan practices, and that's not what
- 29:33
- Christian liberty is about at all. And they call me a legalist and a Pharisee because these are practices that we need to condemn.
- 29:39
- Ephesians 5, 11, of course, have no fellowship with this darkness, but instead expose it.
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- That's what you do all the time with your ministry. And we have to be so careful that we don't say that it's okay to blend paganism with Christianity.
- 29:57
- It's not. Christianity is a narrow path. It's the one way. Jesus is the only way, truth, and life to our
- 30:06
- Father God to heaven, and not these pagan practices that seem like they feel good. People will argue, well, it works.
- 30:12
- It makes me feel better about myself, but that's not the litmus test for whether it's God's will or not.
- 30:18
- No, in fact, that might actually be the litmus test for the demonic because every time I read God's holy law in the scriptures,
- 30:25
- I don't feel good about myself. And the picture that comes back from the mirror of God's holy law is that I am a sinner in need of a
- 30:35
- Savior desperately. In fact, the longer I've lived as a Christian, the less appealing myself is to myself, and the more
- 30:45
- I recognize that I'm legitimately the problem of my own life, and that sin is not a problem out there.
- 30:53
- Sin's a problem in here. Let me pull this up here. So, the text you invoked was 1
- 31:01
- Corinthians 10. Listen to what Paul says, talking about the sacrifices of the pagan world when they sacrifice to idols.
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- And Paul says, I imply that what pagan sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.
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- You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons, and you cannot partake of the table of the
- 31:25
- Lord and the table of demons. I would note that being an abominable practice, numerology,
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- I hate to say this, but I think this is true, will oftentimes put you in touch with and in communication with not
- 31:43
- God, the Holy Spirit, but with the demonic realm. Am I speaking hyperbole? Am I correct in saying that when you invoke numerology and fortune tellings, and you're expecting things like this, you're not dialing
- 31:54
- God in heaven, you're dialing a 666 area code, and the thing connecting on the other line is actually the devil or the demons?
- 32:02
- Am I wrong in saying that, Doreen? You're absolutely correct. And I think it's one of the reasons for God's commandments against these fortune telling and divination is to protect us from the voice of the demons who can mimic our deceased loved ones, they can mimic, people will say it's the
- 32:20
- Holy Spirit, they'll say it's the voice of God or an angel, and it'll mix in truth and lies.
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- It's basically Genesis 3 over and over again, where the devil will say you can have this special knowledge, this special wisdom, this secret that no one else knows, and people are just drawn to that.
- 32:39
- Yeah. We want to have the thing we're not supposed to have, as if we know better for ourselves than what
- 32:46
- God says. A real prophecy was one given by the Apostle Paul in 1
- 32:51
- Timothy 4, and here's what he says. The Holy Spirit expressly says that in latter times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons.
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- And I have been, I've had a front row seat for watching evangelicalism completely implode.
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- And when you have a mega church pastor who has a pretty significant platform and a notable television ministry on several notable
- 33:27
- Christian television stations, invoking numerology and using it,
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- I cannot help but think that what he ended up doing there was fulfilling this prophecy that God the
- 33:39
- Holy Spirit warned us about, and by jumping in and using numerology and claiming it's the voice of God, he is instead, he's devoted himself to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons for real.
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- Have I miscategorized David Crank's ministry at all here, Doreen? That's exactly right.
- 34:00
- It's horrifying. It really is. He validated this very dangerous, spiritually dangerous practice, and people will think it's safe now because their pastor talked about it.
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- The pastor said God gave it to him, so therefore it must be okay. And people will go on their merry way into numerology, but that always leads to other practices.
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- People are never satisfied with just a little bit of paganism. They always go down the path. I've met so many people who said they started out with something that seemed innocent, like numerology or Reiki energy or angel cards.
- 34:33
- And then through the years, they got into witchcraft and Satanism. And we have to just warn people right at the outset to stay away from this.
- 34:42
- The Bible is sufficient. Everything we need to know is in God's Word, and we need to be in God's Word every day so we can recognize these false teachings.
- 34:51
- Indeed. And I would just add to that. I remember several conversations I've had with Jesse Westwood, who graduated from Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.
- 35:01
- And he has made a point, and he's even made the point on his YouTube channel. So many of the alumni from his graduating class and around the time of his graduating class, they're no longer practicing
- 35:13
- Christians, and a notable number of them are now fully steeped in the
- 35:19
- New Age, and they're openly pagan and New Age in their practices. And it was
- 35:25
- Bethel, the School of Supernatural Ministry, and the physics of heaven, which basically was the gateway drug for them to walk out of Christianity and into the
- 35:35
- New Age. So, yeah, no, it's absolutely troubling the days that we live in when pastors are invoking
- 35:43
- New Age practices as if somehow that they can be redeemed by God, when
- 35:49
- God the Holy Spirit, through His Word, has forbidden these and said that they are abominable, and those who do them are abominable.
- 35:56
- Any last thoughts, then, as we wrap up our quick discussion on numerology? Well, again,
- 36:02
- I'm going to repeat myself. The latest Ligonier study about the survey of the state of theology showed that people are not reading their
- 36:12
- Bible at all. I mean, the statistics are actually depressing. But we need to be encouraging people that the
- 36:19
- Bible is alive. It is so convicting, as you talked about. It shows you what we need to work on.
- 36:26
- It's everything we need. I read it every single morning without fail. And then at night, my husband and I listen to a book of the
- 36:32
- Bible every night. And unless you're in the Bible, you're going to be just influenced by false teachers, like this video that you've shown, by the world, by fleshly desires.
- 36:44
- There's so much pull on us to go down that path that we need to arm ourselves with the armor of God, which includes daily
- 36:53
- Bible reading. Yeah. And if you're not reading your word, you are legitimately making yourself easy pickings for the demons.
- 37:03
- And I would note that the days have become far more deceitful. Somebody asked me recently, what's the difference now in what's going on in the church as compared to when
- 37:15
- I first started fighting for the faith? And this is going on a long time ago, not quite two decades, but it'll be there before too long, about 15 years now.
- 37:27
- And one of the things I noted is that when I first started fighting for the faith, there was a tendency within evangelicalism to kind of follow certain fads.
- 37:37
- And they would follow a fad and go this way. And everybody seemed to go in that direction. But the day we're living in, it's as if like every single childhood disease and heresy that the ancient church suffered from, they've all come back all at the same time.
- 37:54
- And on any given day of the week, I just, I cannot, I can't focus on only one,
- 38:00
- I can pick one, and then I got to get onto the other ones because it's like fighting a 50 front war.
- 38:08
- I've never seen anything like it, and it's only getting worse. What are your thoughts about the state of the church, having read the
- 38:17
- Ligonier study? Yeah, it is, it's scary. I get letters from people every day showing me videos of people at church pulpits teaching shocking untruths.
- 38:30
- And I can't keep up with it. It's just all we can do is share the gospel and point people to His word.
- 38:37
- That's right. That's right. And so a good way to put it is that there's a million different ways to counterfeit, but there's only one truth.
- 38:44
- And there's only one genuine article, and you're going to find it in God's word. And yeah, it might actually require you to read, it might require you to study, it might require you to go to a library and check out a book.
- 38:58
- It might require you to be in dialogue with the ancient church. But that's not a bad thing.
- 39:04
- That's a good thing. One of the things I'm hoping to do in the near future is I'm going to pick one of the most difficult passages in all of scripture, and that's
- 39:13
- Ezekiel 1. That's the one where the New Agers claim that Jesus shows up in a UFO, the wheel within a wheel and all that kind of stuff.
- 39:21
- And I'm going to unpack that and demonstrate that there is a way of understanding this, but you got to put all the nonsense away.
- 39:30
- And you have to let the scripture interpret the scriptures so that you can understand what's going on there, and then show you how the ancient church understood that text.
- 39:38
- I think taking one of the most difficult texts in all of scripture, and then giving somebody a methodology for how to work through it,
- 39:46
- I think that it might be helpful and inspire some people to think, oh, you know what, maybe the
- 39:52
- Bible is more approachable than I think. It's definitely not as hard as a Rubik's cube, that's for sure.
- 39:57
- But it does require a little bit of digging and a little bit of humbling yourself, because your intuition is most likely going to lead you astray.
- 40:06
- You have to learn from those who've gone before us so that you can listen to the voice of scripture and how the churches then use those biblical texts to comfort them in their times of trial while they sojourn through this life like we are.
- 40:18
- So... It's so true. Yeah, it's all about trusting the Lord with your future, not trying to predict or control your future.
- 40:25
- Yeah, listen, I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning, and I definitely couldn't tell you what
- 40:33
- I'm going to have for dinner tomorrow night. So, my days are all in the
- 40:39
- Lord's hands, and He can be trusted. I mean, the reality is that the scriptures are described as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, which basically, you have to think old school here.
- 40:50
- We're used to flashlights, right? But back in the day when they didn't have flashlights, if you lit a lamp and you were walking in the dark, you had just enough light for your next step.
- 41:01
- And so, I think that's a good way to think about it, is that God's Word will always give us just enough light for our next step, but it's not going to give us the broad view of history as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death so we know what our future is.
- 41:14
- I know what the future holds, by the way. Jesus is going to return in glory to judge the living and the dead. He's going to put an end to Satan, throw him into the lake of fire, along with death, new heavens, new earth, marriage feast of the
- 41:27
- Lamb, and a world without end, and no sin, no pain, no death. It's going to be glorious.
- 41:32
- I know all about the future. It's all we need to know. It's the leading up to it that I don't, the details get really fuzzy.
- 41:44
- But I do know the future, and that's not fortune telling. That's prophecy that we can go to the bank on.
- 41:50
- And it's that hope of the future that has given Christians the strength necessary to even be willing to lay down their lives in their confession of Christ.
- 42:00
- Well, Dorian, thank you for your time. Like I said, I don't know much about numerology, but I needed somebody who knows the ins and outs of it to make sure that I wasn't leading anybody astray in my criticism of numerology, because the last thing you want to do is like incorrectly describe the error that you're trying to warn everybody about.
- 42:21
- So thank you for carving out a little bit of time on short notice and coming on Fighting for the
- 42:27
- Faith. And we'll put a link down to your YouTube channel so that people can also benefit from the work that you're doing there in warning the body of Christ.
- 42:35
- And your expertise is, you know, it comes from your experience in the New Age world.
- 42:41
- So again, thank you. Thank you so much. All right, stay on. We'll talk and I'm just going to sign off with the audience and we'll come back and talk here in a second here.
- 42:50
- So if you found this to be helpful, all the information on how you can share the video is down below in the description.
- 42:56
- And let me say a quick thank you for all the people who support Fighting for the Faith financially. You make it possible for us to continue to do what we're doing.
- 43:04
- If you would like to join our crew and support us financially, all the information on how you can join our crew is down below.
- 43:10
- And until next time, God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and his vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.