NINETEEN

 “Good morning!” a cheery voice greeted me as I awakened. Who are you, I asked? “I’m your guardian angel, of course”. But you said I’d never hear your voice again, I retorted. “I wanted to give you one last chance, in case you’ve changed your mind”. But that would make you a liar, I said. I hate lies and want nothing to do with liars. “Do you really want to give it all up”, he asked, “all the hidden information, the prestige? I’m ready to finish writing the book now.”

It was true that I hated liars. Although I had skillfully woven lies of my own to cover up my secret sins, I’d convinced myself that these were necessary to avoid hurting someone. But how I hated it when others lied!. In spiritual matters there was certainly no place for lies or half-truths; too much was riding on it. 'The Christ/Wotan' was either the creator of the universe or a liar; and if a liar, one from the pit of Hell, a devil, maybe Satan himself. He admitted as much the previous day. “I no longer want to hear your voice, or any other, as you promised last night. I want you to leave me and not return”; I gave my final word, got out of bed, and went about my day.

But that night I woke up yelling from a most disturbing dream. I witnessed a campfire with numerous devils dancing around it, each with large erections; I awoke with a painful erection myself, and the voices had returned. There were no cheerful voices now, just threats and scolding. Since I’d rejected them, their course was clear; they wanted to kill me and my family as well. Their voices were loud, shrieking and profane. I tried to fall back asleep, although I feared I’d have the same dream again. The only course of action I could think of was to put a Christian song in my head, but I hadn’t learned any in church yet since in my few appearances I would purposely arrive late to avoid hearing the praise music! Then I remembered a gospel song that was a number one hit when I worked at Mays Department Store in the 60’s, “Oh Happy Day”. I didn’t know all the words, but I sang what I did know over and over to myself, trying to drown out the demonic choir. I hadn’t a clue about what “He washed my sins away” actually signified, but this tactic worked and I was able to sleep after awhile.

In the morning I phoned the church for an appointment with the pastor, telling the secretary that it was an emergency, while the demons continued their threats warning me against doing so. I arrived early, although Pastor Green was about twenty minutes late, twenty of the longest minutes of my life. As I sat in one of the new, comfy chairs in the church lobby, the voices vowed retribution if I spoke to the pastor. They said to leave while I still could or we would all die, even my baby daughter. Finally, Andy Green arrived and told me not to worry; he’d seen this type of thing before. A few years earlier, Green said, he’d removed visible demons from a possessed man, calling them out by name as Jesus had instructed. This man was now an elder in his church. Nothing so elaborate transpired in my case; but after explaining G-d’s plan of salvation to me, we prayed together and the voices ceased.

The only thing that remained was the spot on my head that tingled when the demons wanted to speak to me. This, too, disappeared when I answered the altar call the following Sunday at church. Small-town Ashland, Oregon, population 20,000 or so, was then and still remains a major center of every sort of occult activity, but in those days a mini-revival was taking place at the Ashland branch of the Calvary Chapel church. Week after week, anywhere from a handful to twenty or thirty souls would receive new life there. Trembling, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I received Jesus Christ as my Savior, G-d’s gift of forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Diana also recommitted her life to Christ and we were baptized in the creek that ran through the church property. We began attending every Sunday and Wednesday and reading the Bible daily.

If you’ve been a Christian for a very long time, especially growing up in a believing home, you may not remember what it was like to read the New Testament for the first time. For me, and pardon the sixties vernacular, it was positively mind-blowing! Here was the missing Scripture that Jews are forbidden to read, the story of Jesus, the famous John 3:16, the prognostications of eschatology, the deceptions of demons, the origins of expressions used in modern language such as 'the eleventh hour' and 'house built on clay, the depiction of sin, and how we are all sinners but G-d loves us anyway. I also read the entire Old Testament for the first time, noting all the appearances of the Angel of the Lord, and how He could do things reserved only for G-d, the precise predictions of the coming of Messiah in Daniel, the teasing in Proverbs 30 that says G-d has a son, the curious Messianic wording of Isaiah predicting a Savior that was a description of Jesus. Not only were the two Testaments complimentary, but both completely Jewish. Even the church at its inception was made up of Jews. It all fit so perfectly and was convincing in its own right, but I felt something deeper in my soul that just confirmed to me that it was all true. I sighed with relief at knowing that my search had come to an end. Here were the answers to all my questions; there was only to study it and to obey it.

Of course, my sister was one of the first to hear that I was 'born again', and she gave me my first Bible. She even accompanied me to church the first couple of times, although she no longer believed as she once did. When I complained that her gift had been taken from a motel room, she went out and bought me a brand new one. Better to begin my relationship with the Lord having a Bible whose legal ownership was not in dispute, I reasoned. The final time she was with me in church, I felt that something the pastor said had made her uneasy. He was, as many preachers do, using Old Testament stories as illustrations, and in the process perhaps denigrated the Pharisees more than was necessary. I stuck with this pastor for the long run, and he turned out to be a man who loves Israel and the Jews, and not afraid to teach Romans 9, 10 & 11, where Paul declares that Israel has a bright future and that Jews have not been forgotten by G-d.

Having spent the past twenty plus years as a believer in the deepest Diaspora of Oregon, I’d recommend that pastors be a little more sensitive when teaching Jewish history, especially those with radio ministries. Who knows whether a Jew might be more open to the Gospel if simple Hebrew words were only pronounced correctly, or the Pharisees were not equated with demons. “Some of us are just like the Pharisees”, Pastor Green taught, “being religious instead of just loving the L-rd”. In truth, the Pharisees were the observant ones of their day, but G-d had not opened most of their eyes to see who Jesus was. Causing the spiritually blind to 'see' is still G-d’s prerogative.

Before the voices in my head had ceased, one had told me to destroy the book I’d written. Whether this was the voice of a demon or an angel was a source of confusion to me at the time. Either way it seemed like a good idea and I destroyed all of my notebooks with automatic writing in them. I also threw away my library of new age/occult/metaphysical books as well as literature I was selling in the store that I now felt was contrary to truth, including a couple of garbage sacks full of Maximum Rock & Roll magazines. I threw away all crystals I’d used for occult purposes. I kept one large beautiful specimen that I’d never involved in any ritual, reasoning that after all it was merely a mineral created by G-d, but it disappeared anyway. I donated my non-occult Jewish books to the local synagogue library, and I returned all the rap, heavy metal, new age and punk rock tapes to the distributors. Anything else in the store with skulls or blood on it, Metallica t-shirts for example, was similarly purged. In fact, our mail order t-shirt business was discontinued entirely. It wasn’t much of a music store after that and sales plummeted. I told my pastor that I was scared that I’d have to close the store; he said that it was possible that was G-d’s will. But perhaps He’d honor my gesture and bless the business. Only time would tell, but either way he assured me that G-d would continue to feed and clothe my family.

We devoted half the store to greeting cards and other paper items, keeping the other half music. We also began carrying Bibles and other Christian items. The name of the store was changed to Loveletters from my wife’s name Diana’s. Some referred to the shop as ‘dirty Diana’s’, and this was no longer accurate. I sent a letter to my pastor telling him of these changes; he decided to read it out loud to the congregation, who erupted in applause. One of the flock came into the store to admit that she had been praying for quite some time that we would close up and leave town. She admitted that it had never occurred to her to pray for our salvation, never imagining that as a likely possibility.

The next few years were very difficult for us financially. While we attempted to stop selling music entirely, it still accounted for the majority of the sales. There were some people in this liberal town, who as 'true' liberals were accepting and supportive of our decision, even if they didn’t understand it or agree. I made no secret of my new-found faith. At the suggestion of one new Christian friend who had done the same thing, I began handing out testimonies to let folks know what had happened to us, but also to warn them of the dangers of the 'new age'. I printed them on 8 x 11” sheets and posted them around town, and also inserted them inside used CD’s. As you can imagine, not everyone was pleased with this. One delivery truck driver reprinted and distributed only the front of the sheet, where it detailed all of my past sinful behavior, and began distributing these to warn people about me. The other side of the sheet dealt with my repentance and salvation, which the driver ignored.

I changed the format of the flyer after that and over the years have distributed close to 2000 of them. In most cases I am totally unaware of any reaction that people might have to reading it. Once, a teacher critiqued it for sentence construction and proper grammar, ignoring its spiritual content, and stuck it under my door. Another time, a college professor told me that any good psychologist could have removed the voices I was hearing, with no need to resort to religion. Many residents and visitors to Ashland are Jewish, and as I make no secret of being a Christian, it is also evident that I am Jewish by well-placed business cards, rows of Jewish CD’s and a pushke (charity box) for Israel. I had a warm conversation with a Jewish customer one day, perhaps for a half-hour, about the famous comedian Mickey Katz. When he left, however, he grabbed one of my testimonies that are displayed on the outside of the building. Ten minutes later he returned, warning me that he was going to do everything in his power to destroy my business!

A Jew that comes to believe in Jesus, or Yeshua in Hebrew as his disciples called Him, is a meshumad, a traitor, literally 'one deserving of extinction'. This term goes back to the days of the early church, firstly to the Roman massacre of 70 A.D. which the Messianic Jews avoided by safely leaving Jerusalem as Jesus had warned them to, and secondly to the Bar Kochba revolt sixty-odd years later. Messianic Jews were fighting alongside their compatriots until Rabbi Akiva declared the commander of the Jewish army, Bar Kochba, to be the Messiah. At this point, the believing Jews, recognizing only Yeshua to be Messiah stopped fighting. Typically in modern Jewish households, if a son or daughter becomes a meshumad, he will be disowned and the family will sit shiva, because their child has died.

A few weeks after my own conversion, I wrote a letter to my father explaining what had happened to me, along with some xeroxes to 'prove' that Jesus was mentioned in the Talmud, and actually existed. I also signed him up to receive mail from Jews for Jesus, along with numerous other Jewish relatives and friends. Although my dad was not miraculously saved by these efforts (he is over 90 and prayer is still ongoing for this), he did not disown me, but told me that he loves me unconditionally. However, he said that of all the crazy things I’ve done in my life, this was the worst.

I began listening to Christian radio, or rather continued listening, but now more seriously. I’d started tuning in to programs such as The Bible Answer Man and Point of View with Marlin Maddox, back when my 'guide' had first declared me to be Christian, but I hadn’t a clue about that yet. I remember a pastor I’d met, who knew the extent of my sinful lifestyle, saying “isn’t grace wonderful?” I just gave him a blank stare, smiled and nodded. I hadn’t heard that term, grace, before other than in a Velvet Underground song. Although I was still firmly in the left wing camp politically in those days, as a New Yorker I could still appreciate the wise-guy attitude of those radio programs, the smug superiority of the hosts, and the incessant arguing and even name calling if a caller disagreed with them. After getting saved, however, I tuned in to non-political teachers such as Charles Stanley and J. Vernon McGee. Christian radio had once passed for sheer entertainment but had now become a source of nuggets of truth.

On one program I heard about a young new-age leader, Randall Baer that had written a channeled book about the use of crystals, but had later become 'born again' and was attempting to stop Warner from reprinting his best-seller, Windows of Light. He’d written a new book denouncing the New Age Movement, Inside The New Age Nightmare, and had begun to speak about his conversion at churches. But his car had suspiciously run off the road and he died before the completed book had even been published. I shuddered when I heard this; would this also be my fate if I 'ratted out' the demons that I had channeled? After my story appeared in a local Christian newspaper, I got a call from a pastor asking me to speak at his church. I turned him down. To my surprise, however, my own pastor called me up to the podium one Sunday and had me give my testimony in front of the assembly.

Suddenly I was being introduced to other people who were dabbling with 'angels'. A young woman at church told me that she, too, had an entity that spoke with her, but claimed hers was a true angel. I told her to test everything it said by comparing it to Scripture. She didn’t return to that church. Another young lady was brought to me at work that could see spirits. She told me that I hadn’t gotten rid of mine at all; she could see one sitting on my shoulder as we spoke! She was becoming a Christian but did not want to get rid of her 'guide', who always told the truth and never behaved untowardly. She’d found acceptance in the Orthodox faith, I believe, who did not require her to shed her 'friend'. But as for my 'guide', she claimed that it was a demon all right, of a most mischievous type.

I had seen a demon a couple of times myself, walking up or down the stairs at my apartment. They were about four feet tall and creepy looking, as you might imagine an alien might be. Demonic dreams never seemed to cease entirely, especially if I fell asleep without praying. I’d either dream about being in a familiar, creepy haunted house, or I’d dream that I was still channeling. Typically I’d quote a line of Scripture to the dream ‘spirits’ and I’d wake up. Once, I woke up, having fallen asleep on the couch, and saw three demons moving slowly towards me, with one in front of the other two that appeared to be in charge. I commanded them to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. The leader said, “Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you?”, at which point I started screaming and they disappeared. I stopped lying down on that couch after that. I reported these goings on to that church elder whose demons had previously been exorcised by Pastor Green. He told me that he and his wife still had occasional demonic dreams years after being saved, but they just laughed about it. “They want you back”, he said, “but don’t worry about it; they have no power to harm you. You belong to the King”.