SID: Hello, Sid Roth here with Jim Rutz, and have you noticed there is a change going on in Christianity? The great Christian pollster, George Barna, you are reading some of his literature; he said there is a real change going on, why don’t you tell me?

JIM: Well everybody is used to coming and sitting in a pew, or sitting in rows of chairs, and having a building with a steeple on it and so forth, pastor, programs, you know all that, and that’s so.

SID: I have to tell you there was a point when I first became a believer that if I wasn’t in a congregation at least three nights a week I would feel like, something’s wrong with me.

JIM: Yes, that’s the psychology that pertains… “It takes three to five” is the phrase that pastor’s use to get people coming three times a week and you’ve got them. Well that sort of style, good, bad, medium indifferent, is shrinking, is part of the whole, and twenty years from now you are going to see that the entire church is maybe one third of the whole, the traditional church becomes one third of the whole because the other two thirds is going to be a relational church where you and I are talking with each other and a dozen other people in a living room, and we are communicating and God is there changing lives.

SID: But you know what, while this shift is occurring, there is a problem, Jim, and the problem is, according to a Christian magazine, Charisma, and many other sources,
there is a big dropout from the traditional church, that people are feeling it is irrelevant and there is a void, they want to do something but they don’t know what to do.

JIM: Well we have seen dropouts before, this one is different, people are not backsliding, they are not leaving the church because they have lost God, they are leaving the church because they are not finding God there anymore as much as they want to, and they are wanting more, and so they are dropping out looking for something, a lot of them are looking for house churches, campus church, office church, Starbucks church, wherever it is that we are going to be meeting.

SID: And this is the premise of your book, MegaShift, which I love the sub-title, the best news since year one, what is the best news since year one?

JIM: The best news since year one is a number of different things, one of the things I have in there is that the world is rapidly becoming Christian, in fact at the rate we are going now, I mean you can’t take a straight line projection seriously, but if we just kept going, expanding the way we are now, everyone in the world would be a Christian by 2032.

SID: Is it going to happen?

JIM: I wouldn’t put a whole lot of money on that but I just wanted,

SID: But it doesn’t seem to be happening in the United States.

JIM: That’s the problem, that’s why I’m sitting here on your TV program, because it is happening in places like China, it’s happening in India, now it’s starting to happen
in Pakistan and Bangladesh, hard core Muslim countries, countries that have never been known for being Christian, and they are turning to Christ in mass. I know a lot of your listeners are starting to think this, Sid has found a crazy, let me just quote you some examples.

SID: Please.

JIM: The whole last century, 1900 to 2000, it started with about a million Christians in Africa, about two million in Africa, grew to two hundred million in the course of a
hundred years, Latin America started with about one million Christians, and it grew to one hundred and seventy million Christians, China started with probably fewer than
a million Christians, about 1950 when things opened up, and now a count is about one hundred fifteen, one hundred twenty million born again Christians in China, and so the
growth is from about four million in one century to about four hundred ninety million and that is pretty remarkable.

SID: Why is it not going on in the United States?

JIM: Well, a lot of what happens overseas is that the miraculous power of God to heal and change lives, even to resurrect people, we, I have counted 52 countries in my book where we have had resurrections in the last fifteen or twenty years.

SID: Yet you know what, that is wonderful, but that is normal, I have been investigating miracles for almost thirty years, but I have here in this book the best documentation and pictures of miracles happening worldwide and although I thought I had seen everything,
tell me about that girl that was born with two heads, four eyes, one head on top of the other, four eyes of which I think only one had an eyeball, tell me about her.

JIM: Her name is Esther; she is from the village of Sucrapath, which is in eastern Majabadedsh which is the middle of nowhere in India, out in the jungles actually, and
on September 1, 1999, she was born in the evening, and her parents were horrified of course, they just couldn’t imagine, they were going to put her in a clay pot and throw
her out in the jungle for animals to eat, but then they thought, now we have just become Christians, we probably shouldn’t do that, what will we do? Well, let’s pray. So they brought in five or six Christian friends, that’s about all they had in that village at that time, and they started praying. Thank goodness there was no Westerners there to say,
“Look, look, God does certain things but He doesn’t do other things, you are just going to have to adjust to this.”

SID: You know I think someone could have more faith to pray for someone dead to come
back to life than that particular situation.

JIM: Really, really, I was stunned by it just like you, I started begging my friends to get a camera to the team, and it took them six months to get a camera back in the jungle, but they finally did, anyway, they prayed all night over this horrible looking little thing and now if you look in the book you see this cute little girl, a picture of her, and the two heads became one, and the one real eye stayed there and the other eye got, just normal, and so by the next morning, she had two eyes, perfect eyes, the only thing you can see if you look real carefully at the picture in the book, her easy are still a lot bigger than a little
tiny child’s easy which is usually pretty small, and that’s because the ears originally matched two heads instead of one, other than that, perfect. And here is the bigger thing though, I mean I was surprised when I heard the miracle, but then a prophet in Switzerland named Eric Rabber, got hold of that and God spoke to him strongly and said, “this is not an ordinary miracle, this is a message from God because God is saying that for to long the church has been a two headed monster, men have set themselves up as the head of the church, Jesus wants to be the head, men have said no, we’ll be the church so the church has been a two headed monster and the world looks at us and said, “Hey, that’s church planting, we know that we have our armies run that way, we have our corporations, our governments, the guy at the top gives the orders and everybody else follows the orders, I see that in the church, so where is your God?” So now God is wanting to make a perfect church, a church body, with one new man, everything under the headship of Christ.

SID: Well, most churches would say it’s under the headship of Messiah, however there is the one placed in charge, what is the difference?

JIM: Well the difference is that over the course of the first couple of centuries you had a shift in the church from being the house to house church we read in the Book of Acts, to being a pure middle, top down organizational structure with a command and control center.

SID: It’s almost like multi-level, I’ll tell you what; don’t go away, this is really getting hot, be right back.

SID: What’s wrong with that, I know what’s wrong, but in other words, what is wrong with Star Wars and all of these movies, I mean it’s almost a cult group, they collect everything, I mean its good versus evil, give me a break.

BOB: It’s not, it’s not, it’s not good versus evil. The Bible tells us in Romans to overcome evil with good, but what is the definition of good? In Star Wars, and in occultism, such as Daoism, good is merely the flip side of evil. Much of this stuff comes out of the teaching that good and evil are harmonizing opposites that must live in equilibrium. The Bible says Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil; we are to eradicate evil not figure out how to live with it, so in Star Wars the power that is used by Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader is the same power, it just depends on who is using it, it is all in the mind. It is not in the mind, it is in the moral prerequisites set down by God. Not, you don’t choose what is good and evil, God tells you in the Bible what is good and evil. What is wrong with someone sending their children to the Star Wars movies; let’s take their most recent movie, what is wrong with that?

BOB: I’ll give you a good illustration, my wife went into a Christian Bookstore the other day, and it’s really one of these high-tech upscale Christian bookstores, and they got this big flat paneled TV there, and they are constantly showing DVD’s, they are showing Star Wars. My wife went ballistic, I guess a little of me has rubbed off on her, she went to the counter, to the clerk and said why are you showing Star Wars and you know what, clueless, absolutely clueless, here’s the danger, the kids sitting there watching that are going to loose the power of spiritual discernment and then when they are faced later with something like Silva mind control or whatever, they are not going to be discerning enough to know this is dangerous because gradually their spiritual sensitivity has been eroded over time.

SID: Okay, the producer-director of Star Wars, what’s his agenda?

BOB: George Lucas is an avowed Buddhist; he was a disciple of Joseph Campbell, the man who wrote so much about mythology and who is the founder, the philosophical founder of the new age movement in America, he brought Joseph Campbell out to his ranch, sat down with him and had Campbell school him in Buddhism, and so he deliberately projected this into the storyline of the film, you see it over and over and over again.

SID: Does he have an agenda?

BOB: He has an absolute agenda, and his agenda, look, he has made statements such as this: “There is no difference between the virgin birth of Jesus Christ and the myths of pagan gods coming down and having sex with human women to produce offspring, it’s all the same.” And that is blasphemy; this guy is truly out to lunch.

SID: Okay, switch gears, in Los Angeles there is a professional basketball team and the coach, who is one of the most famous coaches of all time, is involved in Zen. And it is kind of an “in” thing to be involved in, what’s wrong with Zen?

BOB: Well I mean Phil Jackson has got issues in his own life, he is not willing to resolve, and what Zen is for him and millions of people is a mindless escapist way of avoiding dealing with your issues and the issues of a fallen suffering world. It is a form of detachment. Now what it does in the sports world, it allows people to become so detached from everything that they can find a calm center and perform better. And from that standpoint it looks good

SID: It’s good; that is good.

BOB: From that standpoint it looks good. But there is a spiritual price because you are adopting a world view that causes you to also become detached from any moral realities that you might be a sinful creature in need of a holy God.

SID: Have you prayed for people that have been involved in something like Zen just to relax, etc, to lower their blood pressure that needed deliverance?

BOB: Oh, many, many times, and here’s what happens. Most meditative disciplines like Zen teach you that the mind is the enemy of the spirit so to release the spirit you have to still, shut down, or as they say, kill the mind. But in killing the mind what you do is that you become completely vulnerable, there are no spiritual defenses, in other words the resistance against evil is a choice of the soul

SID: So you are opening yourself up to the Zen mind?

BOB: Yeah, what you do is you put the choice in neutral, it in not operational anymore, and so any inherent, by God’s grace defenses against demonic forces are just not there, they are shut down.

SID: Have you been involved in deliverance with people that have been involved in things such as Zen?

BOB: Yes, yes I have, many people. I can’t think of a specific instance but I have done a lot of exorcisms of people in Zen and various forms of meditation.

SID: White witchcraft, we know that witchcraft is evil, white witches use their power for good, what’s wrong with that?

BOB: Well the Bible teaches, and you talked about it earlier, Deuteronomy eighteen, that all that comes from the devil is evil, it only masquerades to appear to be good, but in all of these cases the definition of good and evil is not contingent upon an external revelatory source, its all what you decide is good and evil, so it’s the witch who decides if he or she is doing good or evil. And I remember a classic story one time, I was on Larry King debating a witch and the witch kept saying well I only do white magic, and I just kept pushing, then he starts telling this story about you know, getting ticked off at a taxi driver on the way over to the studio and putting a spell on him that he would be in an accident. I said whoa, wait a minute, I thought you only did good magic; he said well that was for the benefit of that guy to wake him up. All right, I think we, history has shown us, Hitler thought he was doing the world a service, he thought he was doing a good thing. Mental maniacs operate from an internal moral compass that is corrupted and witchcraft knows that, and so you can say what you are doing is good for the benefit of the world but it might be a horrible evil.

SID: Okay, go ahead.

BOB: So what you define as a witch, as white for your benefit, might be to somebody else’s detriment, that’s why the Bible teaches us, we leave all judgments in the hands of God and seek only to obey Him.

SID: Okay in your book you have researched so many different religions, cults and occults, one that was to you one of the most amazing in the entire book and there is hundreds of them.

BOB: The forms of Satanism that taps back into ancient Egyptian black magic believe they have power to recreate Satan in our age, this is very diabolical stuff and it is extremely dangerous and more pervasive than people would realize: the actual Luciferism.

SID: But why is this flooding society at this moment more than ever before in history?

BOB: Because (a) the church is playing games, it is not directly willing to confront this stuff. I had a church recently who said they were going to go into a new church growth campaign, their slogan would be, “We serve Starbucks inside.”

SID: Tell you what, I don’t know about you but I believe we are so close to the return of the Messiah, this world is about ready to destruct, and I don’t want anything separating me from God, but how am I going to know truth, Jesus said, My word is truth. You may say your kingdom is within, but in a kingdom you need a king. Who is your king, who is your king? If it is not Jesus it is that other one, the dark side. Read the book, Deuteronomy eighteen lists all the things that Bob Larson is talking about, in the days of Moses people would have been stoned to death, you know what happens today? Spiritual adultery, separation from God forever, and as the song goes, “Forever is a Long Time.” I have walked with Jesus as a Jewish man for over thirty years and I tell you the peace that I have inside of me, the purpose, the destiny, have you ever had the song go off inside of you, there must be something more? There is, intimacy with God, no other name but Jesus gets you to God, that’s God’s way, try it, you’ll like it.

BOB: Yes, absolutely. Look, the classic movie “The Exorcist” was indeed a story of a child who did just that with a Ouija board, and I cannot tell you of the hundreds of case studies I have of people with Ouija boards or other forms of divination who have tried to communicate with the spirit world who they themselves got those spirits, and then they need exorcism and deliverance.

SID: I have even heard of people going to movies needing exorcism as a result of what they have seen in the movies.

BOB: Well, a spirit of fear can enter into somebody at a slasher movie, if you want to go see Texas Chainsaw Massacre, be prepared, you may come home with something you didn’t have when you went there.

SID: Listen, Bob Larson is talking about movies like Star Wars, talking about Zen Buddhism, talking about things that are kind of, you know, just kind of in, Kabala, all these things are doors to the demonic. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any door to the demonic, do you believe what he is saying? He is going to tell you some real life experiences, don’t go away, we’ll be right back.  

SID: I’m here with Bob Larson, foremost world expert in deliverance, cults and occult groups, and Bob, we’re featuring your new book, it’s a wonderful book, as a matter of fact, you have so many different cults and occult groups mentioned, so that if someone says something and you feel like, well there just might be something wrong with it, you look it up in the book, it’s written in such a simplistic fashion, you find out its roots, its origins, why its wrong and what to do about it. I think that every believer in the Messiah needs this book and if you are not a believer in the Messiah you doubly need this book, what kind of results are you getting from people reading this?

BOB: Absolutely fascinating, peoples reaction they after give me is just, “I can’t believe this.” We had a woman who came to one of our conferences, and she was a massage therapist and a very sweet Christian girl. She said, “I looked at this book, I think I’m doing something wrong.” I said, “What are you doing?” She said, “Well the person who taught me these therapies did hot stone therapy.” I said well you know a nice hot rock to relax with is not a bad idea, but she said there’s more to it than that. They told me to lay these stones at the location of the seven chakras and in doing so I would spiritually enlighten the people. She said according to your book I’ve done something wrong. And I said well lets pray about it, I said just renounce what you’ve done. And when she began to speak the words they would not come out of her mouth and she had to go through a full- blown exorcism to get free from that. She was innocent; she didn’t know what she was doing

SID: the blind leading the blind.

BOB: The blind leading the blind. But ignorance is no excuse in spiritual law.

SID: So you are touching something. What about a massage therapist that says I’ve got healing hands and when I give you a massage I think good thoughts and you, is there anything wrong with that?

BOB: Let me tell you another story, I had some people come to me with a child paralyzed from birth in a wheelchair, and I began to delve into this and I said well you know the only way the devil gets that child if this is of the devil and not simply an organic disease is through the parents, so lets talk to you about the entries of your life. And I began to work with the mother and she actually manifested demons right on the spot. I said, “How did you get this child?” And it said the aunt; I said the aunt, what’s the aunt got to do with it? And the spirit said aka. And I talked to this woman and said you have a sister. Yeah, she’s a massage aka practitioner. What happened was one time she had left the aunt to baby-sit her child, and this aunt did this energy distribution, passing the hands over the baby, and actually put spirits into the little baby, which were spirits of infirmity that had paralyzed this child.

SID: What about something as innocuous as yoga, especially the exercises, which they lower blood pressure, they relax people, they limber them up, what’s wrong with that?

BOB: Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means yoked with or in union with God.

SID: So every Christian, every Messianic Jew should want to be yoked with any union with God.

BOB: The catch is the definition of God, and it’s the god of ultimate unitary conscientiousness of the enlightenment, the Brahman if you will of Hinduism. And all the classic yoga texts teach this. In fact the classic yoga texts warn you cannot separate yoga from Hinduism. You cannot do it, they tell you this outright and they become very angry when Americans try to do this because they say it can’t be done and I believe them.

SID: Okay, someone doesn’t, forget Hindu, smindu, all they want is exercise, its good exercise Bob, what’s wrong with that?

BOB: I do good exercise, Sid, I have a

SID: No forget what you do, what’s wrong

BOB: No, no, no, no, I have a stretching routine every single day and some of what I do can resemble certain yoga positions, but I am not practicing the world-view and all the accoutrements of it, I am not putting myself in a body posture and calling them after names of Hindu gods and goddesses and various animals. I’m simply stretching my muscles. The difference is in the process of yoga you don’t do one or two stretching positions, you do a whole routine, all of which is designed just like just like a radio to tune you into the spirit world and to awaken these chakras which I believe are some kind of locale in the body of spirituality and the devil knows that.

SID: Tell me about some people that have been involved in yoga that you had to pray that evil spirits leave.

BOB: I’ve had so many I can’t begin to tell you who just went for, like Hoffa yoga that just went for the physical yoga

SID: Yes.

BOB: And they picked this stuff up along the way. And I remember one particular woman all I did was just take a Bible and run it up her spine and in doing so called forth seven demons which were in the spine. I remember another man, a very prominent businessman came to me and he had been involved in this and the Lord spoke to me and said take your Bible and put it right there in the seventh chakras, and he was just sitting there calmly, when I put the Bible there and said I come against the psychic third eye, the seventh chakras, this guy just went berserk, he said oh my God what’s that? And I said this is what you got doing yoga and it becomes localized. See the whole purpose of yoga is to achieve a psychosexual union between shockte and shiva. Shiva is the third member of the trinity of Hinduism, the destroyer, the death angel if you will, linked with shockte who is the female consort and the two of them come together, this is the whole purpose for yoga. There is a whole field called tatra yoga, which is designed to create demonic sexual arousal.

SID: Listen you’re stirring a lot of things up right now

BOB: Good.

SID: I want to find out about Zen Buddhism, I want to find out about the movie, Star Wars, we’ll be right back after this word. 

SID: Sid Roth here with Bob Larson. Bob is the worlds foremost leader in understanding, you’ve probably seen him on Oprah, or Larry King, or any of the other popular shows, but one of the most foremost spokesman on behalf of deliverance, cults, occults, as a matter of fact I have your brand new book called “Larson’s Book of World Religions.” Why did you write this?

BOB: Well first of all to give people an understanding of the place that Judaism and Christianity play in the larger picture of religion. So the book starts out, you can’t understand what cults do until you understand the fountain of cults, which is Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism, and the so called great religions of the world, and then from there I move into the basic concepts, you have to understand what words like meditation, enlightenment, reincarnation, these things that are bandied about to give you a foundation. And then we move into hundreds of specific cults and show you this root structure manifested in all these belief systems.

SID: You know, I couldn’t believe, we were talking previous to this interview and you said in England they asked for the number one religion, what was it?

BOB: Stars Wars, or The Force, or Jedi. In fact the same thing happened in New Zealand, they did a poll there and they found out that, I believe that it was about fifty percent of the people put down as their religious preference Jedi Knights.

SID: What is going on? You can’t turn on a television these days without seeing something about the new age, something about someone communicating with the dead, there is Harry Potter, I mean it is sort of like what was whispered in the closet is now wide open. What is, Bob Larson you a world renowned expert, if not the world renown expert in the occult, in new age, in deliverance, what is going on, why is it all of a sudden all over the place?

BOB: Well it’s nothing new of course, it’s as old as the tarsus, it’s as old as humanity, this idea that we can connect with something which is out there, but what you’ve got is the result of scientific and rational thought having overtaken the western world but not producing anything that meets the spiritual hunger, so people are still asking the question, “Is there anything beyond this life, do we survive after death?” And into this vacuum: psychics, spiritualists, trans-channelers, have stepped to say, yes, and I will put you in touch with those spirits

SID: How many Hollywood movie stars are involved in these things, BOB: Absolutely, absolutely.

SID: There’s something called Kabala, but what is actually going on when someone says, well look, I talk to people all the time who says my husband died, my father died, and it is so good, they are still with me, they communicate with me. What’s wrong with that?

BOB: Why they always have some unfinished business, that’s the whole idea, these are beings that haven’t totally passed to the other side because they have something to share with us here. In Biblical terminology, if we look at the Old and New Testament, it is consistent; there is absolute, impenetrable gulf between the living and the dead. We are here and they are wherever they are going to go. There is no communication between the two, it just doesn’t happen, it can’t happen.

SID: But wait a second, these people are hearing something, they are not making it up, it is not imagination.

BOB: Absolutely, what they are hearing are the voices of demons, of discarnate entities, spirit beings who rebelled with Lucifer, who fell,

SID: Well but wait, how do these people know these intimate things at séances, they might say something that no one knew?

BOB: Cause Satan’s been around for thousands of years, he knows what happened; the demons were there they saw it, so they can tell you about it. It’s no problem, they knew Uncle Fred before he died, Uncle Fred, was probably full of the devil.

SID: All right, how do you explain the doctrine of reincarnation then, that you come back until you get it right?

BOB: Well once again, spirit beings know what’s happened in the past and so they are able to implant thoughts and memories of previous existences in peoples minds of events, you know what’s interesting to me Sid, I’ll tell you, everybody was always the king or queen of something, nobody was ever a bag lade in an old life, nobody was ever homeless in an old life, it was always good.

SID: But Bob, people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to psychics to communicate with the dead.

BOB: Because they’re desperate, they’re desperate; they are filling a spiritual hunger that the church and the religious community should be filling by speaking existentially into reality of what exists in the spiritual world after we are not here anymore. But because you don’t hear preaching about heaven and hell anymore the psychics have stepped in and said well we’ll tell you what’s after death.

SID: You know what I find interesting, that is totally, one hundred percent kosher on secular television, but let someone be talking about the blood of Jesus, about forgiveness of sin, about sin, and ooh, don’t want them to say that. Why is it so acceptable, why does the public, listen, in Hollywood they don’t supply movies because they are evil, they supply movies of what the public want, they want to make money.

BOB: Because… the answer is simple, in spiritualism, in talking to the dead, there is never a moral frame of reference, there’s no sin, there’s no judgment, there is no ethical accountability because everybody is okay on the other side, you don’t hear any of these psychics communicating with somebody who is in hell screaming out in torment, and no matter how they lived, everybody gets to go to a good place.

SID: Okay, what is the spiritual repercussion for someone going to a séance, trying to communicate with the dead, even using a Ouija board to get a message from the spirit world, what is the repercussion, what harm is there?

BOB: Because you are not talking to something, which is human, passed to the other side, because you are talking to a demonic spirit being by virtue of your connection and communication with it you give it the right to come into you and possess you.

SID: All right, but what about if this thing doesn’t say anything evil, what about this thing you communicate with

BOB: Well, it never does.

SID: is maybe helping your spirituality, isn’t that okay?

BOB: Oh, they do a lot of good, like I mean they find lost people, they discover dead bodies, and you know.

SID: I mean just watch Larry King; you have these psychics on all the time.

BOB: Absolutely. Well but the Bible says in:  So he looks good, but the real test is whether or not something is Biblical, whether it is supportable from a faith foundation, not whether or not if feels good or looks good.

SID: Can someone open themselves up to a demon to actually come inside of them from dabbling in these areas?

BOB: yes.

SID: Even if they don’t know the bad things?