It was like something out of a movie. I was being led across India in the footsteps of Thomas with multitudes of Indian Christians. They welcomed me as if they were welcoming the apostle after a two-thousand-year absence. At one site I was greeted by an elephant adorned with festive decorations. In its trunk was a garland, which it placed around my neck.
It was not long into our journey, however, that we began noticing strange occurrences of another kind—we were being followed. We would travel over a thousand miles to our destination, and yet the same faces, a multitude of faces, all of them male, would reappear over and over again in the crowds, by our vehicles, on city streets, in restaurants, in alleyways, in our hotels, everywhere we went. They appeared most often to be on edge, tense, and deadly serious. We took as many precautions as possible. But there were other things, stranger things, against which no precautions were possible. I will mention just one of them here.
Seizure
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It happened at night in a hotel in Tamil Nadu as we were getting ready to sit down to eat. I was about to lead the team in prayer over the dinner. But I never prayed that prayer. It was just as I was about to open my mouth that the leader of my security team, the man who had served as my principal bodyguard, a former New York City policeman, was suddenly and violently thrown backward. He came crashing down on the dinner table, then onto the floor, where he began convulsing in seizures, out of control and foaming at the mouth. Those witnessing it feared for his life. Emergency medics were called in.
He had never experienced anything remotely like what happened to him that night. Nor, after leaving India and returning home, did anything like it ever happen to him again. Back in America he underwent several medical tests to find the cause. No cause was ever found. It made no sense in the natural. But we had come to a land of many gods and thus a land of many shedim, principalities and spirits. We were there on a mission that would put us in conflict with such things. In the New Testament Greek it meant we were in a land of many daemonia—demonic spirits. And so it was no accident that what took place that night manifested the signs of the demonic.
The Crash
And then it happened. At a speed far above what was safe, our car crashed into the vehicle ahead of us. The vehicle was hidden by the fog until it was too late. It was a truck. The car rammed into the truck in such a way that it became latched onto it. The truck, also going much faster than it should have been, was now dragging the car through the fog. The driver of the truck did not, at first, realize what was happening. The car began swerving dangerously back and forth, each swerve putting us in danger of flipping over.
Finally, we came to a stop. The front of the car was badly damaged, the driver and his passengers, shaken, but the car hadn’t flipped over, and we hadn’t been killed. It was only our second day in the land, and our journey had almost been brought to a sudden end.
After returning home from India, I came across an article on Hindu mythology. It spoke of Krishna. Krishna was an avatar, an avatar-god, the bodily manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Krishna is known as the “trickster god.” He was famed for performing pranks on the villagers of his land. What we experienced in real time and space as we traveled through the land of a god, on the particular route associated with his birth, matched the mythology of that particular god and the very same strategy he employed to destroy his enemy. It was a myth. And yet it almost killed us.
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We were not battling mythology. Mythology is inert. But the principalities are present, active, and moving. What we witnessed that night aligned with what the Bible says of the gods. Behind the gods are spirits, the shedim, the daemonia—and they were present, active, and dangerous.
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Prepared by Charisma Media Staff.
