One problem people have with the Bible's description of hell as a literal place—with fire and brimstone and all—is they can't understand why a human's body wouldn't instantly burn up in such surroundings.

The answer is that the physical body isn't what goes down there, it's a person's soul and our soul exists in a different dimension.

"A soul can walk right through that wall," explains my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. "Right next to the four dimensions we live in—the three dimensions of space, and then add time—is the phenomenal dimension. Right next to that is another dimension of the spirit world. In fact, there are several dimensions to that, just like there are four dimensions in our realm of experience."

When the world's religions tell you can get in touch with God through physical activity, they're saying God is physical, but that's simply not the case.

"People tell you that with a physical rite or ceremony, you can get in touch with God and get in Christ and all, but that's only superstition," says Jordan. "The physical world is the creation. God, if He's the creator, couldn't have made Himself. He had to make something that's outside of Himself. So just logic tells you that God is outside of His creation."

Satan is called "the god of this world" because his main spirit influence over people is religion.

"When he's called 'the god of this world' that means he has religious activity and a religion that he promotes," says Jordan. "In fact, he is the great promoter of religion in the Bible. There's only one religion God ever gave, and He gave it to the nation Israel through the hands of Moses and it's called 'the Jews religion' in the Bible. He never gave a religion to Gentiles; they have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ."

People who try and make Christianity into a religion go back and take the Jews religion of the Bible and try to counterfeit it.

"They take the priesthood, the sacrifices, the ordinances and ceremonies and try and bring all that into where we are today," explains Jordan. "In Scripture, what happens is the Crosswork puts away all of that. Paul said that 'Christ is the end of the law' and the law's the Bible's name for the Jews religion."

As Jordan explains, word communication between humans is transmitted on the spiritual level.

"When I'm talking words to you, if you understand them, it's because there's a spiritual communication between you and me through the words that we speak," he says. "You have a spirit of a man in you, and I've got the spirit of a man in me. That's the reason you can't intelligently talk to an animal. A squirrel can't say, 'Boy, brother Mel, I thank you for giving me this Hershey Kiss,' and then have a conversation about Hershey candy. Mel trained him to get the candy just out of behaviorism, and the reason you can't communicate with the squirrel and have an intelligent conversation, is the squirrel doesn't have the spirit of a man."

In I Cor. 2:11, Paul writes, "For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God."

God communicates with Believers through our spirit as we take in the Word of God. His means for making Himself, His will and His mind known is through the Word.

That's why Jesus Christ said, "The words I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life."

"This is why we study God's Word, not tradition, scholarship, rites and ceremonies and all the other activities man has developed," says Jordan. "We take God's Word that He wrote and preserved through history for us and we try to study it and understand it. Now the challenge is, if it's God's Word it's going to be a lot bigger than us, so we're going to spend the rest of our lives studying it and still not learning it all and that's why it's fun.

"If some little noodle like yours or mine could figure it out, it wouldn't be very complicated and we'd get it all figured out and it'd be boring just like the Super Bowl is."

In warning us about the conditions leading up to the Rapture, Paul says in I Tim. 4:1-2, "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron."

In other words, there are doctrines that promote Satan's lie program just as there are doctrines to promote the truth of God's Word and both work on a spiritual level.

"That's why the issue is your inner man and your heart's attitude—the thinking in your soul inside of you," says Jordan. "The outward stuff you do comes as a response to what's inside of you. Jesus said that 'out of the heart are the issues of life.' Everything you do in your life comes from inside of you. The things that flow out of your life come from your heart, from your inner man, and it's with the heart that man believes."

This spiritual activity on the part of Believers is counterfeited by the adversary to make a religious system focused on the physical, because if you have people focused on the physical, the reality of the spiritual is obscured.

Demonic activity is on a spirit level and, as Jordan says, "The problem is we're not talking about God's working and God's Spirit, we're talking about Satan and his angels and his cohorts, the demons."

The very reason you find most unsaved people are superstitious is because they are in touch with the spirit world connected with demonic activities.