Part 2: An Invitation to read your Bible… Again… The First Time
Test the Spirits
Sunday morning, 6 April, I felt deep anger after witnessing unbiblical things at church that deeply disturbed me. Without getting into the ‘why,’ by that evening, my chest hurt. I woke up Monday morning after tossing and turning all night and decided to go to the Gym and hit the exercise bike for 40 minutes and lift weights. Not one of my smarter decisions, but this chest pain and stomach nausea story continued until Thursday morning when my wife made me go to the doctor. She saved my life. In the emergency room it was discovered that I had elevated Troponin levels, indicating a heart attack.
Early Monday morning, 14 April, I laid on the OR table, unsure if I would wake up from open heart, triple bypass surgery. Strangely, I felt no fear. Like a heavy ocean beach, darkness and black waves crashed into my existence. I felt a gentle pressing and responded, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”
The Lord was with me. This time, I held my impetuous big mouth in check, resting in the embrace of the Lord. The gentle question asked was, “What do you want?”
I said, “To care for my bride all her days, To teach Your Word to Your people, and To not be deceived.”
Heart attacks suck, Open Heart Surgery sucks even more, but the Lord’s mercies are so tremendous. Since early April, I’ve read and thought about the supernatural nature of God’s Word. Now in July, I finally started pounding on next year’s PBJ. With what happened at church, so many things occurring the last bunch of years, and Israel and the United States landing in what I believe is the prophetic ‘Not Yet’ prelude to Ezekiel 38, I am aiming the 2026 PBJ at a simple concept:
Test the Spirits
I want to set your expectations from the start. One of my thought points is that if it’s weird, then it’s important. That said, the 2026 PBJ challenges Christians to see the Bible as its original ancient writers and readers did, especially when it comes to believing in an active, supernatural world that intersects with our own lives. The Bible was written for us, but not to us. It’s a supernatural epic articulated by people whose worldview isn’t our own. We strive to connect readers to that worldview. That said, our primary task this year is to examine the Biblical processes, procedures, and wisdom that detail how we MUST test the spirits. The reason comes to us from two places in scripture:
Act 2:17
‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,
That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your young men shall see visions,
Your old men shall dream dreams.
Joel 2:28
“And it shall come to pass afterward
That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions.
The problem is that our English translations do not draw the full picture. In testing the spirit, we must discern between the Lord’s spirit vs. all others that include:
Host of Heaven
Devine Council
Those permitted to put lying signs and words in the mouths of prophets to sift the faithful.
This year, we will read and study about testing these spirits in order to ‘Not be deceived.’ This exact phrase occurs 6 times in the New Testament. The warnings against being deceived or going astray – using the same Greek word – occurs 39 times in the New Testament.
Job, King Ahab, and others will teach us that lying spirits are out there, and have their own information and deception operations. Bill Gertz wrote a book, Deceive the Sky. It’s about China but from a secular perspective covers the tactics and strategies of deception from elements in the unseen realm. We will see Deception Operations ramp up significantly in these last days as… our sons and daughters prophesy, old men dream dreams, and young men see visions. This will occur at the exponentially growing velocity and quantity of information.
Instead of being ‘nice and polite’ when people prophesy and utilize gifts, especially publicly in church, we must recognize the supernatural nature of potential deception and test the spirits. As Paul described in I Thessalonians and I Corinthians, a prophet must be known to the congregation and in submission to the elders as they test the spirits and message of the Prophets. Keep in mind that another attribute of the last days will be a lukewarm church and a sifting of the Body of Christ. That sifting might be as fun and entertaining as King Ahab’s 400 prophets using lying words, signs, and wonders to deceive Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and dying at the hands of the Assyrians.
By way of illustration, if you were sitting in a small group with the Bible and an Israelite from 1000 B.C. were there, or a Jew from the first century A.D., the era of Jesus, when it was their turn to tell everyone what they thought a given passage meant, their answer would be unlike that of anyone else in the room. The reason is simple. No one else shares their worldview.
Christians have been taught that interpreting the Bible in context means thinking about what precedes and follows the verse they’re looking at. Or perhaps it’s about knowing how ancient people lived through artifacts discovered by archaeologists. It isn’t. There’s far more to understanding how a person thinks than listening to words and knowing where they work and what they used to cook their meals.
The only way to really understand a person’s communication, especially when all we have is writing, is to be inside their head, to know how they think and process life in their world. How can you possibly understand what someone has written if you don’t look at the world the way they do, and know what it is they believe and why? The only correct context for understanding what the biblical writers were thinking when they wrote Scripture is the ancient context in which they lived. That context is inextricably bound to worldview.
We have lost this context as modern readers. Most Christians presume that the right context for interpreting the Bible is the history of Christianity. It isn’t. Another problem is that a lot of what Christians have been taught about the unseen world is either incomplete or inaccurate. Christian beliefs about angels and demons largely come from Hollywood, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or church tradition. Even more troublesome is the propensity of the modern Christian mind to be selectively supernatural. Christians believe in things like a Creator, a Trinity, and the incarnation, but balk a whole host of strange passages in the Bible’s pages, never daring to ask why what they deem too weird to believe is less rational than the core points of Christian doctrine. The biblical writers would not have been so conflicted. When we dismiss their supernatural worldview, we can’t hope to understand what they meant by what they wrote. C. S. Lewis captured the importance of worldview when he offered this definition for the Christian worldview:
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
The goal of this year’s PBJ is to Test the Spirits and get the biblical writers in our heads, so that we can read our Bible through their eyes and understand what it was they believed about the unseen world and its inextricable links to the human story. I challenge you to join the thousands of readers in these last days who will never be able to look at the Bible the same way again. Yes, we will joyfully explore a lot of glorious weirdness in God’s word… Especially when we Test the spirits and discover the TRUTH of God’s spirit poured out on all flesh.
Jay Inman
Christ Follower, Husband of Jan, father of four, Grandpa of two, Iraq veteran, Soldier for 20 years, and builder of Networks and data centers along the axis of the Euphrates and the Rocky Mountains.