When You Have Jesus, You Don’t Need a Second Opinion

I have an interesting testimony today.

First of all, I spent some time yesterday working on removing a big boulder from my yard, and now my back is sore on one side, so prayers would be appreciated. Healing seems to be taking some time.

With that behind me, the testimony.

Last night I dreamed I was in some kind of doctor’s office. There were two small rooms in the office, and they were connected by a door. My dad was in one room, and my mother and my sister were in the other. I was with my dad.

My dad was old and in bad shape. He was not like the transformed father who passed away this spring. He was still in denial. Even after his health got very bad, he used to claim his only health problem was a lower back issue, and he would say he ought to live to be 120. In the dream, he was talking about some medical procedure his doctors had recommended, and he was trying to tell me, in so many words, that it would extend his life for a very long time.

My mother and sister listened to him through the doorway, and they started talking about the procedure. They swallowed the pitch. They clearly thought it was a great blessing and that my father ought to have it done. Their gullibility wearied me, and I closed the door on my dad and talked to them. I didn’t ask him to excuse us. I just closed the door.

You shouldn’t be disrespectful to your parents, but on the other hand, you shouldn’t haggle and negotiate with the flesh. Just shut the door while it’s still talking.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but my message was that they needed to snap out of it. He was dying, he was grasping at straws, and they should have known better than to listen. They knew he was a master of denial.

What he really needed was Jesus, period.

I don’t like relying on doctors. The word says God heals all of our diseases–not “some”–and I believe we have medical science because we have failed to walk in divine protection and healing. If I go to a doctor, it’s because I’ve failed to get help from God, and that has to be my fault, not God’s.

It seems to me that the counsel of doctors represents the counsel of the ungodly. If your walk with God is strong, he takes care of you, and you don’t have to look to human beings and painful human effort to get solutions to your problems. God doesn’t get any glory when a doctor’s knife repairs you, and we know that God wants the glory, because he says so, over and over. If he wants the glory, he is definitely willing to do the work, because God would never steal credit for something someone else did.

God doesn’t mind doing things for us. He loves us, and besides, as he has reminded us, nothing is hard for him. It’s not a chore for him to heal you. God doesn’t work hard. He is rich, and he has never worked for wealth. He has infinite power and resources, so when you ask him to do something, you’re not imposing on him. It’s like feeling bad about asking for a teaspoon of water from the ocean. He doesn’t care. He wants you to have it.

The Bible says the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the ungodly is blessed. See Psalm 1.

While I was talking to them, a little boy came through the door. He was not like us. I come from blue-eyed people. The boy had dark skin, like an Arab, and his hair and eyes were dark. He was wearing shorts and no shirt. He was very friendly. He was happy. His walk had a little dance to it.

He started telling us about a man with some sort of plastic boots. I can’t recall the terms he used. He used words I interpreted to mean plastic boots. The man had helped him to be saved. He seemed to want to talk to the man. He said, “March the second is my birthday!”

Before the end of the dream, he took my hand, and he squeezed my fingers. His grip didn’t feel like a normal child’s grip. It was as if a grown man were hiding inside him, squeezing with greater strength. It felt like a little version of my dad were inside him, squeezing my hand through his to show me he was there.

At this point, I woke up.

I had to find out what had happened to my dad on March the second. I knew of one thing: my mother died on that day. It’s also her mother’s birthday. The night my mother died, my dad and my sister and I hugged each other in the driveway of the hospital in Miami, and my dad cried, which was something I had never seen before.

I got out of bed and looked at my website to see if I had written anything about my dad that would explain the reference to March the second. I found out it was a pivotal day.

Years ago, when my dad’s memory problems were minor, I used to pray for him to be healed. Then God told me he had cut my dad off, meaning he had lost patience with him and intended to reduce his protection. I quit praying for his memory to improve, because I believed God had made a decision and that I would be wasting my time if I prayed for him to go against it. My dad became demented and had to be moved to a facility.

On February 28 of this year, I talked to God about this. I said I felt selfish. My dad’s declining condition was a financial blessing to me. I stood to inherit everything he had. I also stood to be relieved of the heavy burden of his care. On the one hand, I didn’t want to interfere with problems that were intended to drive my dad back to God. On the other hand, it seemed wrong to let my dad slip without even trying to help.

I told God these things, and he made it clear it was okay to pray for my dad. I started praying for God to heal him.

Before this prayer, my dad had been changing radically. He had been losing his pride and his anger. He had started telling me how much he loved me and what a wonderful son I was. He had become less argumentative. He had prayed for salvation. He had been enthusiastic about getting to know God.

I prayed on February 28, and I visited my dad, as always, the next day. He was a different person, and I’m sorry to say he was a person I knew very well. When I arrived at the facility, he was calling his roommate filthy names. He was in a vile mood. His mind was clearer than it had been before my prayer.

He told me he didn’t really believe in God. He said he had gone along with me and prayed just to make me happy. This was a lie, but it’s what he said.

I asked God what I should do, and an idea came to me. I asked my dad whether he agreed that preparing for the afterlife was the most important thing a person could do. He agreed. I said I wanted to pray for God to do whatever had to be done to help him prepare, and he consented.

I asked God to give my dad whatever he needed to be given, and to take away whatever needed to be taken away, in order for him to be saved.

The next day, which was the second of March, my dad’s mental improvement was gone. So were his anger, rudeness, and pride. He was as he had been before I prayed on February 28.

My dad prayed for salvation without prompting, very sincerely, on March 21, but he began the final, uninterrupted leg of his life on March the second, which was the birthday of the boy in the dream.

Do I think God let my dad send me a message from beyond the grave, to show me he was okay? No. I don’t think my dad was involved at all. Communication with the dead is dangerous and wrong. Sometimes God uses the dead to reach us, but generally, the work goes to the Holy Spirit, human beings, and ministering spirits sent by God. The dead aren’t sent to us often, and we are never supposed to initiate or ask for contact with them.

Just to be clear, God can send the dead to us, but we are never to seek the dead.

The other day I saw a photo of a lady from the Bethel movement, lying on the grave of a dead Christian, trying to absorb his anointing. That’s not okay. It’s necromancy. The Holy Spirit is sufficient for us. She was worshiping a man, not God. Jesus didn’t die so I could go lie on Kathryn Kuhlman’s grave and hope her virtue would rise up and infuse me. He died so I could be infused with his virtue and know him personally.

If God himself lives in me, why would I need to lie on a grave to get his power?

I’m not a Bethel fan. They revere William Branham, a strange preacher who made a number of false prophecies with great conviction. A friend of mine gave me a Bethel book teaching about their “sozo” therapy. The idea is that if something traumatic happened to you in the past, you should ask Jesus where he was. People who have done this claim Jesus came to them and showed them where he was during their trouble, and they claim he heals their hearts. I gave it a sincere try, not wanting to brush anything off without considering it, but when I asked Jesus where he was when certain bad things happened to me, nothing at all happened. God talks to me all the time, but on these occasions, I got nothing.

I get a creepy feeling when I watch Bethel videos.

I just realized I have seen the boy in the dream before. In 1984, I was living on a kibbutz, and I was sent to Nazareth to buy charcoal for a cookout. When I got off the bus, the boy accosted me, and he would not leave me alone. He kept saying, “my FRIEND,” when he addressed me, with great emphasis. He walked in front of me like a herald. He bowed and made gestures ushering me forward, as though preparing a path for me. He told random people I was his friend. His face glowed because he was so happy to see me.

Of course, I am just a person. I am not God’s special, unique anointed one who was sent to fix the world. I am one of many. I am not good. I am not entitled to have my own John the Baptist to go before me proclaiming my arrival. I think people would be pretty let down when I showed up!

When I sat on the bus bench and waited to go back to the kibbutz, he sat down next to me and put his arm around me. He did something even more odd. He licked his index finger and touched my leg. Gross.

In the years before he died, my dad developed a practice of licking his index finger and rubbing things. He thought he was cleaning them. It drove me crazy.

I always thought the boy in Nazareth was demonized. I still don’t know what his story was. I actually wondered if Nazareth had child prostitution. Anyway, he was the boy in the dream.

Could my dad’s spirit visit me on one continent while he was alive on another? Did God send him to me in Israel for some reason? No idea. I know my dad wasn’t making much use of his spirit at the time! I also know the spirit and the mind are not the same. God’s word divides the spirit and mind.

The boy wanted to meet the man with plastic boots. I wouldn’t say I wear plastic boots, but I wear boots every day, and the soles are Vibram rubber, which is rubber molded like plastic. They’re lined with Gore-Tex, which is a fabric made from Teflon, a type of plastic.

The book of Ephesians says we should be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. I have to say that I was so shod when I deal with my dad at the facility.

Interesting thing: in the Bible, feet represent people who are Spirit-led, and Gore-Tex keeps water out. Of people who confess to God and repent, the word says, “Surely in the floods of great waters, they shall not come nigh unto him.” The Bible uses floods to represent the sea of voices of people and spirits who are against God. Most people live submerged in that sea and drown in it. Jude called false preachers, like Rich Wilkerson and Joel Osteen, “raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame.” They speak for Satan and the world, not God.

Jude also called them “clouds without water.” God’s word is also water, as Noah found out, and these people don’t have it in them.

When my dad appears in dreams, he isn’t necessarily my dad. Sometimes he’s the leadership of the church. Sometimes my mother is the church. Sometimes my sister represents spirits that are against me and against God. The other day she appeared in a dream and tried to take things from my house. She appeared in a friend’s dream and tried to move into my house. My friend doesn’t even know her.

In all likelihood, my sister represented a spirit speaking against faith in God.

Why would God use a boy to represent a man who had been saved? God says we have to be born again, and he says we have to enter his kingdom like little children. He said to permit children to come to him, because of such was the kingdom of heaven made.

This is the dream I had. If you think it has value, ask God to explain it to you.