The members of my family have experienced the spirit realm firsthand many times. My granddaughter Mesha is no exception.
When Mesha was 18 months old she began behaving rather strangely.
Jaime, my daughter, would go into her room and find her talking and interacting with someone who was invisible. Mesha called these invisible people “birds.” At first we all thought this was just the normal “kid pretending” thing. But something about these “birds”
troubled us, although we couldn’t put our finger on it. Mesha seemed to know things that she said the “birds” told her. One day Jaime was taking a bath with Mesha. The presence of the Lord suddenly filled the bathroom in such a powerful way that it startled my daughter.
They both sat up in the tub and Mesha shouted, “The birds are here!” She began to giggle and laugh as she interacted with them. Jaime immediately realized that these “birds” that Mesha had been talking about for months were actually angels!
Our spirit takes us to places our minds would never go!
As Mesha has gotten older (she is eight years old at the writing of this book), these encounters have grown stronger and more profound.
The angel that comes to visit her most often told Mesha that “her”
name was Beniah. Beniah would often come dressed in different colors like gold, purple, and red, which seemed to mean something to
Mesha. Mesha speaks of the angels as one would speak of a close friend.
Recently Mesha called me on the phone as she often does. I asked her if she had seen Beniah lately. “No,” she replied. “She’s on a ‘time out’ because she disobeyed God.” Wow! Could that be true? I really don’t know. But I’ve learned that much of the Kingdom lies in the when her mom walked into her room. She looked up and said, “Mom, Jesus has been taking me to Heaven a lot lately.” She went on to tell Jaime that she had been to Heaven 14 times in 14 days.
Jaime asked her if she was having dreams of Heaven. “Nope,” she replied. “I have visions.”
Jaime said, “Are you seeing these visions with your mind?”
“No, Mom. I see them with my eyes.” Then Mesha went on to describe Heaven in great detail. She said, “Heaven is a very beautiful place and someday I am going to live there.”
Jaime asked her if Jesus talks to her. “Yes,” she replied. “He told me that He has a lot for me to do!”
Mesha may seem super-spiritual to you but most of the time she is just a normal little girl who loves to have fun. When people like Mesha have encounters with the spirit realm and don’t understand what has happened to them, they often look for counsel at their local
church. The struggle is that many leaders in the Body of Christ simply don’t understand much about the invisible realm, or they often don’t really believe in it at all. As a result, they give advice like,
“You need to see a psychiatrist,” or “You need to read the Bible more, come to church more often, and spend more time in prayer.”
Some of these things can certainly be true for people, but these pat answers don’t solve most people’s longing for insight into their supernatural encounters. To further compound the problem, if the people who are having these encounters happen to share their story with someone in the occult or Wicca, a New Age person, a psychic, or a Buddhist, they will usually find that these people understand them and have had similar encounters!
For some Christians the fact that people who aren’t believers have similar spiritual experiences indicates that all these encounters are from the dark side and must be repented of. This is simply not true.
Spiritual encounters are common throughout the entire Bible. Trances, angelic visitations, visions, third heaven experiences, exorcisms, and loads of other spiritual phenomena are talked about in the Old and New Testament. It is true that many of these encounters are from the dark side, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Kingdom of God is a spiritual experience.
God is often the One who initiates these manifestations. Where do you think the devil got the idea for this stuff? He is not a creator—
only a copycat.
Here are a few examples of supernatural encounters that people in the Bible had with the spirit world. I will explore some of these in greater detail later in the book.
TRANCES
Here is Luke’s account of a trance that Peter had. This led to the conversion of the first Gentile family.
On the next day, as they were on their way and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. But he became hungry and was desiring to eat; but while they were making preparations, he fell into a trance; and he saw the sky opened up, and an object like a great sheet coming down, lowered by four corners to the ground, and there were in it all kinds of four-footed animals and crawling creatures of the earth and birds of the air. A voice came to him, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat!” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything unholy and unclean.” Again a voice came to him a second time, “What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.” This happened three times, and immediately the object was taken up into the sky (Acts 10:9-16).