September 29, 2023 Show with Matt Slick on “One Christian’s Journey Through the Occult”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland.

County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 29th day of September 2023, and many of my regular listeners may detect a change in my voice today.

I have been as sick as a dog ever since returning from the G3 conference, but today was the first day I felt well enough to conduct a live interview, and I want to thank all of you who were praying not only for my traveling mercies, but for a blessed time.

Let's even start back further than the G3 conference. The future of Christendom conference that I helped to arrange in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, which also featured a debate with Dr. Gregory Coles, who identifies himself as a gay Christian.

That debate was on the theme, Is Gay Christian a Biblically Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ's Church? The debate and conference went spectacularly well, and I thank you for your prayers for that, and the G3 conference also, where I immediately headed to Atlanta after the Lancaster conference.

I immediately headed to Atlanta, Georgia, to get there early for the G3 conference, and that was a blast as well, and I appreciate your continued prayers for my health, because I have an upcoming pastor's luncheon, free pastor's luncheon next Thursday, and I certainly do not want to be feeling like this on that day.

But today I'm very excited and honored to have on the program for the very first time, by popular demand, Matt Slick, founder and president of CARM, which stands for Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, and we're going to be addressing one Christian's journey through the occult.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio,.

Matt Slick. Well, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Here we are. Hopefully.

It'll be a good show. I'm quite confident it will be, and it is true. I did not exaggerate. There are quite a number of listeners in my audience who have been asking me for a long time to have you on, and I'm finally that this is, I'm glad that finally this has come to fruition.

I'm wanting to tell our.

Listeners, first of all, about CARM. Yeah, CARM stands for the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, and I started it back in 1995 with this new thing called the internet, because before that it was bulletin boards.

You'd dial up on your phone, and you'd get in and type out a message, then you'd get off your phone, come back in a few hours later, and check. So I had a lot of information. It was already written. I always kept everything, and I was using a computer, desktop computer.

We'd back down even. So anyway, as the internet progressed, more and more areas were available to write and to communicate with unbelievers. So I started CARM because I wanted to be able to have a place I could just put answers.

Not that it was going to be any big deal. I just thought, okay, I'll just type up some answers and put them there and say, hey, well, I wrote about that right here. Because I've always been doing apologetics since 1980, and I just love it.

So anyway, I remember when we got 70 page views in a day, and the most we've ever had now is 93 ,000 in a day, and we're averaging about 33 ,000 a day now. But yeah, you know, it's busy. We've had 157 million visitors and 83 million returning visitors, written nine books, been doing radio for 20 years, and you know, just stuff like that.

So CARM's there for people. I like to tell them, I know I'm giving a lot there, but I'm autistic, and so I have Asperger's. And so I just like to get to the point, and it happens to be perfect for writing on the internet.

I just say what I'm going to say quickly, get right to the point, get the information out, and then go on to the next issue. And I guess that's why people like it, because you have to read eight million words to get an answer.

Wow, well you are living proof that we cannot stereotype people with autism or Asperger's syndrome. Obviously you would be in the spectrum known as highly functional autism, because I never would have known in a million years that you.

Had that condition. Yeah, I do. I've been diagnosed and had problems with hearing, with touch, too much sound, things like that. And yeah, there's things that manifest. And my wife would say I got a lot more problems than that, but you know.

Is that connected at all with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder? And some.

People it is, with me it's not. But I do get highly focused, and I will work hard, and I will work for a long period of time solving issues. And because I'm not trying to brag, but I'm not stupid, and I can figure things out.

And so what I'm able to do is take complicated things and break them down and make them hopefully easy to understand. And that's by God's grace. It's only by God's grace, by his glory. That's all it is.

So he gets all the praise. Amen. Well, there.

Are differences amongst the many apologetics ministries out there. Sometime you will have an apologetics ministry that has a very broad approach to apologetics, and they will have staff members and representatives representing a spectrum of theological viewpoints.

They'll have theologically reformed individuals on the staff. They'll have Arminians who are evangelical, and they will have other evangelicals represented. They'll have Credo Baptists and Paedo Baptists.

Is there a broad spectrum at CARM, or are you more specific from a specific point of view theologically? Well, I myself am a five-point.

Amillennialist, Paedo-Baptist, non-cessational covenantalist. But you don't have to believe all of that in order to work with CARM. We have people who work with us, and I'm not even sure some of the areas that they hold eschatologically, because I believe in the rapture, post-trib, amillennialism, and that the first one's taken when Jesus comes back, or the wicked.

That's a whole other topic. I believe in the charismatic gifts, but you know. And some of the people I work with at CARM affirm some of these things, and some don't. That's okay. So I'm probably wrong about it anyway, you know.

Well, do you have.

Anybody on staff that is not theologically Reformed? No, and that's.

Not by design. It's just by how it's worked, because generally what happens is as people get to know me, and they listen to me on the radio or read the articles, generally what happens is they disagree with Reformed theology, but they keep listening, and then they realize it's very, very biblical, and they become Reformed, and then they end up working with us, because I've listened to you for three years, you know, four years, and I want to help out now, and so that kind of helps work that way.

Yeah, I've found that many.

People who think they're adamantly opposed to Reformed theology are opposed to a fiction that is in their imagination that they have learned from anti-Calvinists. Sorry, folks, that I am repeating back to myself, and that's something that's beyond my control, but people who have only read anti-Calvinist literature by anti-Calvinists and never read the heroes of the Reformed faith themselves, so some of these folks may be getting an epiphany here when they discover what true Reformed theology is, is, wait a minute, this is not what I always thought about it.

This is completely in line with the.

Scripture, and so on. Yeah, I guess you're Reformed and didn't know, but yeah, and I have a way of showing people stuff in Reformed theology and asking them questions and teaching. I've been defending it, I don't know, 32 years, I.

Guess, give or take. Yeah. Well, if anybody wants more details on CARM, go to C-A-R-M, as in Michael, or ministry, dot org, C-A-R-M dot org. Well, we're talking today about a subject that I find very fascinating, one Christian's journey through the occult, and that one Christian would be you.

Whenever we have a first-time guest on Iron Sharp and Zion Radio, we always have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, but in this case, the entire program is really going to be your journey through the occult and then eventually coming to Christ and so forth.

So let's start with what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which you were raised. Well, I have an unusual.

Background. My dad was a stutterer who served in World War II in the Navy, Korea in the Army, and Vietnam in the Air Force, and so I literally had moved 26 times before I was 12 years old. Wow. And I've moved a total of 40 now, and I live in Idaho.

We've lived here the longest I've ever lived in one place in my life, which is about 19 years, so I'm almost 67 and I've been around. But at any rate, so we moved a lot, and I wasn't integrated in any church, anything like that.

At 12 years old, moved into Orange County, Southern California, and a friend of mine that I became friends with, his mom was involved in the occult stuff, and that's where I got started in it and was involved with it for a few years.

But I don't always tell this story, but before that, my mom, she's passed away, my dad's passed away. She told me some stories that happened to her that relates to all of this, and I remember talking to her about it, saying, were you on drugs?

Were you on medications? You know, after a given birth, sleep deprivation? And she she said no, and this has happened, I'll tell you what it was, but she said it happened for several years. My mom's IQ was genius, and you know, sweet.

Anyway, she said that she would start having these dreams of a man coming to her in her sleep, and he would be dressed in a black hat, white long-sleeved shirt, rolled up to the elbows, black slacks, black shoes, and that he would just come to her, and it would terrify her, and she'd wake up, and she would watch him walk through the wall, the foot of the bed, and then stand there at the foot of the bed and watch her.

Wow. It terrified her, yeah, and she said it happened many, many times, and I said, Mom, come on, you know, any drugs? You know, you see, she goes, look, once or two times, you know, okay, whatever, bad dreams, but she said no.

She's very cognizant, she was aware. She'd wake up my dad, and he's back, and dad would go turn the light on, he'd disappear. So this happened for a few years, and then I was born, and let me turn my throat, so I was born, and he came again in her sleep.

She woke up, and she told me that this time, he walked over to where I was in the crib, was standing half in a wall and half out of the wall, just watching me in the crib, and she woke up, you know, my dad, and, you know, what's he doing?

I know, and my mom said, well, he's been staring at Matthew. She was calling Matthew, and what's he doing? Nothing, just staring, and so she went, or he wouldn't turn a light on, and the guy disappeared, and that was it.

No more. So no more of these, right? Well, after I was involved in the occult with my friend, we're trying astral projection, and I never told him about this story. I just never felt comfortable telling anybody about it, because when you're mid-teens, your mom and dad, you don't want to, you know, talk about them too much with your buds and stuff like that, but you're kind of embarrassed about them, but so I never told, I never told him, and we're, like I said, we're doing astral projection.

I could never quite do it, though. I got close, but, and he said he could do it. He lives across the street, and I said, okay, his name was Dave. I said, Dave, look, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna, we're in high school, I'm gonna put stuff in my room and certain objects from around the house on my desk in a certain pattern.

You please come over, you know, and astral projection, you tell me what these objects are so I can verify that this is happening. He said, sure, no problem. Next day, we're heading to school, and I said, so what'd you see?

He said, nothing. Yeah, right, of course. I said, why not? And he said he was projecting across the street, and there was a man at the front of the house who wouldn't let him in. I said, what? He said, yeah, he was a man who had a black hat on and a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to his elbows, black shoes and black pants, and he wouldn't let me in, and I was stunned by that.

So that was kind of my intro to a lot of.

This stuff, and then I got involved more heavily. So that didn't frighten you.

Away from it, it actually drove you into it. Yes, it did. Because I was, you know, because I moved so much, I was anorexic also, which is rare among males, and so at 19 years old, at six feet tall, I weighed 117 pounds.

Wow. So there was a lot of trauma and some stuff, but so people often get involved in the occult because they want some power, influence, regularity. Some are just curious, but generally it's because they want to have some influence, power, and control.

Well, that's what I wanted, because I was so stinking skinny, and my last name being Slick, I got beat up a lot and chased and things like that. Actually, I think you.

Have the coolest name on the planet. You sound like a private detective or.

Something. Yeah, well it was, you know, I went to 12 different elementary schools, so it was not easy. When your last name's Slick, you have buck teeth, you're super skinny. So I was the lightest, physically the lightest kid in our junior high, including all the girls.

Wow. So it was a lot of trauma. I've got, still have some effects of the trauma from a lot of stuff. It took years to get over. And because of my autism, I had to develop a way to get around things and work through things.

So because I'm intelligent, not trying to boast, but you know, I'm not, anyway, so I was able to figure out workarounds. But this is one of the reasons, I believe, all of this stuff is why I got involved in the occult.

And so I got involved with it and things started happening, started seeing stuff. Now I'm assuming, from what I have.

Heard, that the occult is a broad term and it's not monolithic. There are some aspects of the occult that would overtly, publicly admit and claim an identity that is connected to Satan and that kind of thing.

And there are those who are more involved in nature worship, pantheism, all kinds of things in that category. And then, you know, you have people involved in Santeria and some of the Latin American and, or should I say, Latin forms of the occult.

So what was it that, what aspect of the occult were you involved in and what specifically and.

Uniquely was appealing to you? Well, because I had so many nightmares of being killed in my sleep. I didn't stop till I was 35 years old. Wow. Of being murdered. Yeah. Oh, I was, it was a lot of trauma and growing up.

So I had to use my brain to survive. But, so I wasn't involved in, like Wicca is occultic, Santeria you mentioned, there wasn't too much of that in Southern California. But a lot of astrology and the New Age movement was up and coming at that point.

And so I did some New Age stuff, but what we would do is have seances and table tilting and pendulum work, energy transference, aura visualization, astral projection, summoning spirits. I can't believe, I cannot, you know, I wish I could go back to my young teenage self and beat the crap out of myself for my stupidity.

I still want to beat the crap out of myself. My wife wants to beat it out of.

Me sometimes, but that's another story. You know, she rubs her forehead around me a lot. I don't know what her problem is. She gets headaches a lot. But so that was it. And that was what led to it. My friend's mom was involved with this kind of stuff.

And so it was only because of her that I started getting involved with some things. And then we introduced a couple of our other friends from high school into it. And we would do things. We do stuff. We can tell you what happened.

We can tell you all kinds of stuff, but we do stuff.

Now, did you view this as something that was wrong and dark and evil? Just like there, you know, when you're a kid, especially, there can be things that are titillating. I was very much involved in heavy metal music when I was a teenager.

And much of the lyric content was very dark and satanic. The album cover artwork and so on. And I knew that this stuff was in rebellion against God. And even as a rebel against God as a teenager, I never ceased to believe from my Catholic upbringing before I came to Christ.

I never ceased to believe that God was real, that Jesus Christ was God. I believed in the Trinity. Of course, I didn't have a very deep understanding of these things. I knew that somehow Jesus Christ died for my sins.

And I knew, I actually knew, that if I had died as a teenager, I would go to hell. But I still defied the odds, thinking that I was going to live to an old enough age where when I had already sown my wild oats, I could come to Christ.

And thankfully, He did spare my life that long. But did you know, did you enter into this knowing that it was somehow dark and something that was taboo and that you shouldn't be doing it? No. I just thought.

It was fun. Because, yeah, I believe in God, but the devil believes also in Trumbull's, you know, James 2 .19. But yeah, I believed in all that kind of stuff, but it didn't really matter. Didn't have any power, didn't have any influence, because it wasn't, it was just Ascensia, not fiducia.

Ascensia's mental ascent, fiducia's trust and heartfelt trust. And so for me, it wasn't that. It was just, hey, look at this, let's try this. And got involved. And what specifically were you doing? Was.

It. Ouija boards, Ouija boards, other kinds of things? I don't remember specifically.

Ouija board, but I believe I did because we did so many things. But one of the things we would do, and I'm not going to give too many details because I don't want to explain how to do stuff. Right, right.

But one of the things we would do, there were four of us that eventually a group that we were in, we'd go over to one of our guy's friend's houses. And this is one of the things we would do. We would turn the lights out.

And then we would prepare ourselves and wait. And just wait in the darkness. And sometimes nothing would happen. We'd be there for.

An hour.

Sounds like a Quaker meeting house.

Yeah, well, yeah. But so we would see lights move, form in the air, things like that. One time I was laying on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've heard my name being called by a female voice out of a ceiling before.

I mean, audible, you know. So one time, I remember this one, we were down doing this and nothing was happening. And I wasn't seeing anything that night. And so we the goal was we would we'd wait. So one of us would talk because we didn't know if anybody was seeing anything or where I was.

I couldn't see around me. And I was laying on the floor next to a coffee table in the living room. You know, this guy's house, his parents were gone. And so after a half hour, I said, Hey, guys, you seeing anything?

And they told me to be quiet. And I said, Why? And they said, The light, you don't see it. I said, See what? There's a light over you, Matt. There's a we say we're watching it. And I couldn't see it was right over, you know, directly in front of me.

But they could, which I have no explanation for. But they could. And so then after a while, it just faded away, went away.

So you're saying that you believe these things were somehow conjured up or manifested just by your desire to open up that window into some other realm, just because you and your friends wanted this to happen.

Now, I'm assuming you don't believe this would always happen just because a group of like minded people are sitting around wanting things to happen. But for some reason, it happened with you.

Yeah, well, we had been working, trying to make contact. It's called necromancy is the attempt to contact the dead, which you can't do. I've never heard it.

Pronounced that way. I've always heard it necromancy. But I guess I'm perhaps.

Wrong. Necromancy, necromancy. I've heard different ways. Tomato, tomato. So this is what we would just do that and we would wait. But I do remember once seeing a ball of light moving, you know, just a speckle, not a speckle, but it's a thing of light, stuff like that.

I've heard noises, even to this day. My wife and I, we've noticed lately, we can skip ahead, but we've noticed some thumps in the house and some very odd sounds. And I can get into all that kind of stuff.

But we can talk about what to do about things like that. We've got stories of people who come over the house and one guy said he could see things. OK, whatever. Don't know if he can. Don't know if he can't.

And he said that he could see watchers outside of our house. And OK, I said, really? Then my daughter, one of our daughters once said she saw a figure in our hallway here in the house once. And people, what I did, what I tell you, but what I did was I had my wife take the kids out and then I prayed to the house and going to the entire house with the oil, prayed and, you know, worked with it.

But she could understand what I do for a living is very unusual because I actually go into occult things like study Wicca. I'll be studying Satanism. Mormonism is occultic. Jehovah's Witnesses are occultic.

Roman Catholicism is occultic. So is Eastern Orthodoxy. There's a lot of occult stuff in these things. And so when I have books, like one time I was doing a section on Wicca, which is a form of witchcraft,.

Witchcraft, light, and they call it white witchcraft or something like that.

Yeah, some do and some some don't. And there's different there's there's different versions of it. So I got these books and I ordered a bunch of them, got them in the mail. And what I was going to do was was research.

And I did. I wrote a section on Wicca. It's on Karm. And so I when I got these box of books, I prayed over them, laid hands on the box, laid hands on stuff and prayed over them, binding in the name of Jesus Christ, et cetera.

Well, that night I had one of the most gaspingly terrifying nightmares I'd had in my life and woke up and took 30 seconds to come back. You know, so terrifying. I looked over at those. I went, that's why.

And prayed, went back to sleep. Two days later, I'm on the freeway. My right rear tire explodes, not just goes flat on the freeway, just boom. And I mean, so loud that, you know, you could easily flinch and cause your car to do stuff.

But I didn't and had to get out and change it. I still remember how loud and terrifying it was. So unexpected. And then a few days after that, I was out in the live in Boise, Idaho area on the Boise River.

Now, I just let you know, I'm a fish. I've been swimming since I was four years old and I'm a natural swimmer, love water. And so we're on the Boise River. And long story short, I got ejected from a raft and landed on rocks on the middle of the river, cracked ribs, cracked my wrist, you know, had trouble walking for a while, had trouble breathing.

But all of this happened within just a few days of getting those books. And if one thing happens, OK, but three, something's up. So I just kept moving forward and kept kept studying. I still do and expose all the filthy lies of Satan that's out there in so many religions, so much crap in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, even in Protestantism.

There's a lot of witchcraft people don't know. And a positive confession movement. There's so much. So I have a shirt that says so much heresy, so little time.

Well, let's pick up where you left off there, because I want you to identify and because of the limits that we have with time and summary form. But I want you to identify how these major religions, world religions, and even in the realm of Protestantism can somehow be accurately linked with the occult.

If anybody has any questions, our email is chrisarnsen at gmail .com c h r i s a r n z e n at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

You may remain anonymous if you are asking a personal and private question because you have been involved in the occult or something else that would compel you to remain anonymous. We will grant your request.

Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We are going to be right back after these messages.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with Matt Slick. We have been hearing about his journey through the occult, and on second thought, I'm second guessing myself from what I said earlier. I think we should probably, before we go into some of the specifics about major religions that even identify as Christian, how they are naively involved in the occult in some way, perhaps we should hear how you eventually came to Christ first, and then we can proceed after that with those details that I mentioned earlier.

So what were the providential circumstances that eventually led you to Christ?