Chapter 6: The Spirits' Conversation
With lights flashing and the siren wailing, the ambulance bearing Jack Krantz turned out of the lane onto the main highway and headed toward the nearest hospital. The driver called ahead to inform the hospital staff that they were on their way with an emergency patient in critical condition.
In the back of the ambulance, the other paramedics continued to monitor Jack’s IV and vital signs, and started him on oxygen. The two spirits sat one on either side of the gurney on which Jack lay, unseen and unheard by the humans.
“You’re still missing the big picture,” said the good spirit earnestly. “You didn’t quote the entire passage when you referred to the Scriptures earlier.”
“As if it matters?” scoffed the evil spirit. He had one hand placed on the side of the gurney, as if still laying claim to the man on it.
“It does matter. Jesus went on to say that ‘narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it’. It doesn’t say that none will find the way; it says that few will!”
“So what’s your point?” the evil spirit demanded. “For all practical purposes, we are still in the majority. In the end we still win.”
“Being in the majority is not the same as winning,” said the good spirit patiently. Now he also had his hand on the gurney. “Truth is not determined by majority opinion or popular vote. You and I both know that...”
The evil spirit hissed, his red eyes glowing balefully.
“We both know”, the good spirit said confidently, “you are never going to win. It’s just not going to happen.”
“What are you talking about?” the evil spirit snarled. Then his eyes widened in comprehension. “Wait a minute. Does this have something to do with what you said earlier when you told me there were two things I overlooked?”
“Yes it does. Face it: more often than you would like to admit it, humans surprise you,” said the good spirit with a smile.
“How so?”
“By intentionally abandoning evil and choosing to do good. If Jack Krantz is the model for evil, then Tyler Emerson is the model for good. He, and others like him, shatter the lie to your claim that evil triumphs. It never has and it never will.”
The evil spirit laughed. “HA! Evil has the clear advantage! And your own Scriptures state as much. God said that ‘the heart is deceitful above all things, and is desperately wicked’?”
“Ah, but once again you have overlooked the important point of how humans were created,” said the good spirit patiently.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Much. Certainly, God gave them free will. And yes, they can use that free will to choose to sin,” said the good spirit.
“And they do – a lot,” said the evil spirit smugly. “The Bible says all people have sinned and fallen short of God’s expectations.”
“But they can also use that free will to correct their mistakes,” the good spirit explained. “You said that Jack Krantz is an adulterer. So was King David. But was it not the same King David who said after repenting of his sin: ‘O God, create in me a clean heart, and renew a steadfast spirit within me’?”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is this. Here you are, hovering over Jack Krantz, waiting for him to breathe his last breath because you are certain you have him permanently under your spell.”
“I’ve had him under my spell nearly his entire life!” the evil spirit declared with a triumphant grin.
“But what if he pulls a King David on you?” demanded the good spirit. His gentle face bore an expression of hard intensity as he looked at the evil spirit. “What if he survives, realizes the error of his ways, repents, and begs God: ‘Create in me a clean heart, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.’?” The good spirit smiled. “People repent more than you would like to admit.”
The ambulance reached the local hospital. Pulling into the emergency entrance, it backed up to the emergency room doors. Having stopped, the driver jumped out, ran around to the back and opened the doors of the ambulance, helping the other paramedics to bring Jack’s gurney out of the medical vehicle. As they wheeled the gurney hurriedly in through the big doors that opened automatically to the emergency department, a doctor and two nurses rushed up to the gurney and took over the care of Jack from the EMTs, and Jack was taken to the trauma emergency area. As the trauma team ascertained Jack’s situation, the room entered into a flurried state of organized chaos. Doctors and nurses gave brisk commands and orders for drugs and testing, only to conclude that Jack Krantz was in a very critical condition and would need immediate emergency surgery to extricate the rake from his body. Hopefully, through heart surgery, they would be able to save his life.
As the doctors and nurses busied themselves in a flurry of urgent activity around Jack, once again nobody was aware of the two spirits in the room who were observing the patient’s treatment. One sat on a cabinet in the far corner of the room, eying Jack the way a hunched black vulture looks down on its prey. The other spirit sat on the empty examination table beside the one Jack was on, his blue eyes with the bright white pupils glowing thoughtfully. For a while neither of the spirits spoke to each other as they watched the trauma team working fiercely to keep Jack alive.
“So you think Krantz is going to be revived and somehow walk out of here a ‘changed man’?” the evil spirit said skeptically. “I doubt it.”
“As I said, it has happened before,” the good spirit replied. “In fact, stranger things have happened. You remember the story of King Manasseh of Judah, do you not?”
The evil spirit rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation. “What has an ancient king got to do with Jack Krantz?”
“The Bible says that the king ‘misled Judah so that the people did more evil than the nations whom the Lord has destroyed before the people of Israel. Manasseh shed much innocent blood, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to the other.’”
“Sounds like my kind of guy!” the evil spirit said happily.
“Not so fast!” the good spirit warned. “Listen to the rest of the story. It turns out that Manasseh was defeated by the king of Assyria and was carried away in shackles as a slave.”
“And this helps you how?” the evil spirit wondered.
“The story doesn’t end there either,” the good spirit went on. “Manasseh repented and prayed to God for forgiveness.”
The evil spirit shuddered.
“Is this going to be another one of those ‘King David’ type of bedtime stories?”
“The Bible said that ‘God received his entreaty, heard his plea, and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord indeed was God.’ The same kind of thing could happen to Jack Krantz,” the good spirit said fervently.
The two spirits looked back over at the examination table. A copious amount of blood was visible, and the doctors were working frantically over Jack. One of the doctors, Doctor Daniels, came over with an X-ray photograph in his hand to speak to one of the trauma team members in charge.
“One of those rake prongs clipped his heart,” Doctor Daniels said urgently, holding up the X-ray. The picture of Jack’s chest cavity clearly indicated the sharp prongs sunk deep in his body, and one of the rusty points had entered his right ventricle.
“Get Dr. Kelly! This man needs surgery now!”
The rush of activity now moved faster than ever.
The evil spirit turned back to the spirit in white, who stood with arms folded, a small smile of optimism on his face.
“I keep telling you, this guy is mine,” the evil spirit bragged. “You know what he’s like. He stole his partner’s wife, cheated him out of his future, and evicted him from his home. Not to mention everything else he’s ever done that violates honor and truth. The word ‘repent’ isn’t even in Krantz’s vocabulary!”
“Are you sure about that?” the good spirit questioned. “That’s what people thought about another king of Judah – Jehoshaphat.”
“Oh boy, you’ve got a thousand of these king stories, don’t you?”
“You would do well to listen,” answered the good spirit, his bright eyes flashing. “There is an important moral here. Jehoshaphat started out as a good king but then made an evil alliance with the wicked king of Israel, Ahab. Jehu the prophet said to Jehoshaphat, ‘Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the Lord? Because of this, wrath has gone out against you from the Lord.’”
“Once again,” the evil spirit spread his hands in a mockingly curious manner. “I ask you: how does this help your case?”
“The Bible goes on to state that the king repented of his evil actions and ‘went out again among the people...to bring them back to the God of their ancestors.’” the good spirit said. “Don’t give up on people so quickly – even the likes of Jack Krantz.”
“Look,” said the evil spirit harshly, “David, Manasseh and Jehoshaphat started out good. Jack Krantz doesn’t have a good bone in his body. He’s been bad all his life.”
The good spirit smiled quietly. “Are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely!” cried the evil spirit. “The guy is evil – through and through. He’s got no interest in repenting. He’s self-centered, greedy and just plain mean. He loves to lie, steal, cheat...he’ll never change.”
“Ah, but he could change, given the right incentive and information,” the good spirit declared. “You know the old saying, ‘there are no atheists in foxholes.’ Well, there aren’t any atheists on hospital gurneys either. Jack Krantz has certainly been provided with the incentive to cause him to repent!”
“Big deal! Suppose he doesn’t survive the rake poking into his heart? Suppose he dies on the operating table? Then I’ve got him!”
“True,” said the good spirit simply. “But what if he does survive? Suppose he makes it through this ordeal. Then – whether you want to admit it or not – he does have a chance to repent, change his ways, and alter where he spends eternity.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me that if he survives there’s someone out there just waiting to get the proper information to him about exactly what he would need to do to change his ways and get on the road to eternal glory?” the evil spirit said in a bored voice.
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” the good spirit smiled. “God has always provided all the information people need to change their lives for the better.”
“That hasn’t helped Jack Krantz very much, has it?”
“But it could, because God has also guaranteed people access to that information. The psalmist–”
The evil spirit let out a long, heaving sigh. But the good spirit went on, undeterred.
“–Speaking on God’s behalf, said: ‘I love those who love Me, and those who seek Me diligently will find Me’. You would really hate for that to happen, wouldn’t you – Jack Krantz ‘finding’ God?”
“That’s never going to happen!” the evil spirit viciously shook his head. “Trust me. I know this man. He’s rotten – side to side and top to bottom. There’s not going to be any saving him. I’ve got him and you don’t. You never will. Give up.”
The dark spirit’s red eyes narrowed as he looked into the white, glowing pupils of the good spirit. “Admit defeat.” he hissed.
Just then, the doctors began rolling Jack’s gurney out of the emergency room to take him to the operating room. The attending doctor turned to the nurse and said quietly, “He’s lost a lot of blood, and I don’t think either of the chambers on the right side of his heart are working at all. I don’t think he’s going to make it through the night.”
Hearing this, the evil spirit smiled widely in a way that made him look even more dreadful than when he was glowering.
“You might as well go on,” he told the good spirit, who folded his arms and cocked his head. “He’ll be mine tonight.”
The good spirit just smiled, but his blue eyes hardened determinedly.
“As humans say, ‘I have all the time in the world’,” he replied coolly. “And I think Jack still has a chance.”
In the operating room the two spirits stood on either side of the operating table, looking over the shoulders of the surgeons from time to time to observe the surgical procedure to save Jack’s life. Once again, neither spirit was seen or heard by the doctors swiftly working on Jack’s heart.
The evil spirit’s red eyes burned fiery hot as he became more and more excited about Jack’s condition. In contrast, the good spirit stood with his hands behind his back, face calm, eyes bright with anticipation and a secretive smile on his face that greatly annoyed the dark spirit.
“It’s so easy to get these humans to sin and lead them to hell,” he at last remarked boastfully in an attempt to irritate the good spirit. The good spirit turned his head from looking at Jack to stare calmly at the evil spirit across the table.
“All we have to do is simply get them to disobey God by tempting them with their own petty desires. When that desire overrides their wanting to please God, we’ve got them,” the evil spirit continued. “God Himself has condemned all to hell who don’t follow the commandments of His Son Jesus. Only those pitiful few who actually do that will you be able to take to Heaven. Jack Krantz here was one of the easier targets.”
He laughed recklessly.
“Why, I can get even the best of them to sin sometimes,” he boasted.
“That may be true,” said the good spirit softly. “But God gave His son Jesus to die a cruel and torturous death on the cross of Calvary to become the living sacrifice for all the sins of all mankind. And God the Father said by that sacrifice He would forgive any and every one of their sins if they were to become a faithful Christian and would confess their sin to God and truly repent of that sin in their life.”
“But we teach them to think they are safe and righteous in God’s sight when they’re not!” the evil spirit declared triumphantly. “It’s so easy to do! We have a great slogan: ‘Worship at the church of your choice’. By using that, we get the miserable humans to believe they can worship God anywhere, any place, any time, any way they want. One of our best lies.”
The good spirit looked as if he was about to speak, but the evil spirit wasn’t finished.
“They simply don’t pay attention to the fact that God has always been very strict about how and what He will accept as true worship to Him,” he said smugly.
The good spirit’s eyes saddened, but his gentle voice was firm.
“Again, there is a point there. Most humans are in fact involved in empty, vain worship God has not asked for. But Jesus has made it very clear what true worship is, and all have been given an opportunity to know and practice what is acceptable to God,” he added with confidence.
“But my lies will get them to disobey God and then we have them,” said the evil spirit gleefully. “It’s so easy to lead them to hell. I just have to get the best of them to disregard the will of God. There are always the good old standbys like adultery, fornication, abortion, murder, stealing, lying, and all the sexual sins God hates.”
“God has given all humans, through His Son Jesus, all they need to know to be saved from you and hell,” said the good spirit firmly. “But He also gives them the choice to seek that information and act on it to be the godly people He will accept. That list of lies you brought up earlier may be extensive, but you can’t force the humans to believe those lies. That’s up to them, the same way it’s up to them to choose for themselves whom they will serve: Jesus or Satan.”
“Well, what about those atheistic lies we feed them?” the
evil spirit went on, as though determined to prove to the good spirit how much he enjoyed what he did. “You know, there are many humans who fall for the lie that God doesn’t even exist. When they believe that, it makes our job so much easier. We can get them to believe things like...there is no life after death, and God and Jesus don’t exist.”
The evil spirit burst into laughter. “Haha, I love to see their faces when they die and find out they were wrong!”
“I’m sure you enjoy it,” said the good spirit dryly. His voice was flat.
“Oh, and here’s a great one: the lie that God didn’t create the earth, and make up all kinds of ridiculous ways God’s creation got here.”
“But you and I both know that God did create the earth some thousands of years ago,” the good spirit reminded him. The evil spirit shrugged.
“But our lies keep them from believing that, and that also makes them say God lied. Nowadays with over 360,000 new humans entering the world each day, we have our work cut out for us in getting these condemned to hell–“
“Which is everlasting punishment for all of you,” the good spirit interrupted. For the first time since he had appeared in the Emersons’ yard, his soft eyes began burning an intensely white-hot.
“You know that in the end you will be subject to eternal punishment as much as those who reject God,” he told the evil spirit. “Hell is not reserved for human beings alone.”
“Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” -James 4:7