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 Fear Of Death
Good Morning, Good Morning!
For more than 30 years, I’ve been involved in an area of sharing that has been treated by some of my fellow-ministers as – at the very least – controversial, and by some as almost heretical. I’m referring to the ministry of deliverance.
More specifically, I’ve taught and ministered deliverance to people afflicted with extreme fear. This is not theory. It is not supposition. It isn’t some crazy, way out doctrine. I’m talking about the three families of fear that afflict and torment people at the three levels of their existence.
In past Coffee Breaks, we’ve discussed the three areas of Love that correspond to the three levels of human existence: agape, phileo, and epithumia. Today, I would like to tackle the first of the three families of fear. Actually, I’m going to take them in reverse order. Instead of addressing the Fear of Evil – which affects us in our spirits – or the Fear of Man – which affects us in our relationships and the way we behave towards other people, I want to begin with the Fear of Death, which afflicts folks at their most basic level of existence: their flesh – their bodies.
I’ve no idea how far we will get today with this discussion because it is pretty involved, and there are far more facets to this than I can possibly cover in one or two, or even three fifteen-minute coffee breaks! No doubt, some of what I share will be really strange to some of you. You’ll think for sure that I’ve gone off into the Twilight Zone. Hopefully, it will trigger understanding of things you may be experiencing now, or things you have gone through in your life.
That said, my coffee is steeping. I’ll break away momentarily to pour a cup. Got yours ready, yet? Tea, anyone? Good! Let’s dive into this discussion.
Guess I’d have to say that I’m beginning with this spirit of fear because this is the one I first became aware of in my own life. Beginning when I was two years of age, and lasting for nearly thirty years nonstop, I was in some kind of major life-threatening incident – accident? – almost every single year.
At age two, I was riding with my parents in Washington state (this happened just prior to our move to Alaska) in our family car. We were in the midst of a horrific rain storm and blinding driving conditions when Dad lost control of the vehicle. We skidded off the road and flipped over several times, coming to rest on the roof of the car.
The Lord was with us, and we were all protected from any physical injury or death. Nevertheless, something infected my spirit in that moment, and it wasn’t until 1970 or 1971 when I heard the English evangelist, Derek Prince, sharing an experience in the realm of deliverance when he spoke to an evil spirit and commanded it to identify itself. The evil spirit spoke out of the person and said, “My name is ‘Accident-Prone.’” The moment I heard him share that experience, something leaped inside of me, and I knew I had the identity of a spirit that had tormented me for many years. I took the necessary steps to expel that spirit, and the train of year-after-year-after-year accidents came to a sudden halt.
Insurance companies today have an insurance category they apply to folks who are in repeated accidents. They clearly recognize that some people – for reasons they don’t begin to understand – are prone to repeated accidents. They categorize folks in that insurance bracket as “accident prone.” If you can get insurance, it costs you a small fortune annually.
I was – at that time in my life – one of those insurance risks they categorized as “accident prone.” My monthly insurance payments exceeded my automobile payments, and the two of them together equaled a house payment on a nice home. It took three years of consecutive accident-free driving before the insurance companies removed me from that category, and brought my insurance premiums down.
Being an “accident-prone,” however, was only symptomatic of the larger issue. I was afflicted with the spirit of the Fear of Death, and it took numerous experiences of dealing with other spirits in that family before I got to the granddaddy of them all.
My brother, Howard, and I were sleeping outside in a tent during one of the construction phases of the church we were helping Dad build in Barrow. It was more fun to sleep in the tent. It was late fall in Barrow, and the daytime temperatures were somewhere around 25 – 30 degrees. Naturally, we wanted some heat in the tent, so we lit a Coleman camp stove. I was pouring kerosene into the tank when it suddenly ignited. In my anxiety to get away from the stove, I tripped, spilling kerosene all over myself. In an instant, my clothes were ablaze. Howard (“Howie”) responded in a flash and threw a rug over me, dousing the flames. His instantaneous reaction saved me from certain severe injury and possible death. We were teenagers at the time and afraid to tell our folks what had happened lest we lose our “tent privileges.” Any burns I had were minor, so I put a couple of Band-Aids on the more critical spots, threw away the burned clothing and said nothing. I don’t think we mentioned it to our folks for a couple of months or more.
Then there was the accident we had when we (Howie and I) were riding with Mom in the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. We were driving an old 1947 Ford – you know, the upside down bathtub style. Driving through a pass at 13,000 feet on an infrequently-driven highway, the front end of the car suddenly came apart, and the tie rods broke. Mom lost control of the car, and we skidded toward the edge with a sheer thousand-foot drop. The rear end whipped around, dropping the rear wheels over the edge, catching, and flipping the car so that we rolled over and over again, landing in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.
To say the least, that car was demolished. There wasn’t much left of it. Mom and Howie came out of it with glass shards in their hair, and my left wrist was shattered. By the grace of God, another car came along about five minutes later. They stopped, helped us out of the wreckage, and took us to Cody for medical treatment.
Whoops! I almost forgot. ‘Scuse me while I pour my coffee. I don’t want it to get cold on me. Back in a flash.
Mmmmmm…… That tastes good!
In 1967, while serving at Bethel Union Church in Duarte, California, we decided to take a weekend jaunt up to Big Bear Lake in the mountains with one of my college classmates from Bethany – Alan Parker – and his wife, who had moved to southern California and lived near us. On the way back, traveling on Highway 18, the road was very narrow and winding, there were no guard rails on the side of the road with sharp drop-offs, and we were in a long line of traffic. It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and we had the windows rolled up and the air conditioning turned on. I was driving an almost-new Oldsmobile Starfire sports hardtop. We apparently hit a very sharp rock on the road. It punctured and blew the right front tire. When the tire blew, we didn’t hear it because of the noise of our conversation, the radio and the air conditioning. The car lurched to the side when the tire blew. I didn’t realize what has happening and didn’t react quickly enough. In seconds, we went right over the precipice. The car flipped in mid-air, dropping about 250 feet before hitting a berm that kept us from rolling down another thousand feet or so. The impact shattered all the glass and wrenched the doors open. We came to a stop with Debbie (my oldest daughter) lying outside the car on the ground, and my wife sprawled out the passenger door. Alan Parker and his wife were on the back floor of the car with their feet up in the air.
Astonishingly, none of us received more than minor bruises. There wasn’t anything left of that car to even call a car. Nevertheless, the Lord had protected us – once again!
That accident wasn’t unlike one that happened when I was in Bible College and on my way to a Teen Challenge event with my then-fiancée. Rounding a turn in the Santa Cruz Mountains, we came across an area where road crews had been doing some repairs. Loose gravel was scattered across the pavement. I was probably doing 55 – 60 when I hit the gravel. It caused the car to twitch sideways momentarily. I turned the wheel to compensate, and instead of pulling us out of the skid, it increased our sideways slide. So I did what I had trained to do driving in the north on ice and snow. I hit the accelerator and yanked the steering wheel around intending to do a power 360 and get us out of it. It worked. Almost! It was close!
“Close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Isn’t that what they say? Right. Anyway, I realized we weren’t going to make it. We had accelerated to 70 MPH and were headed off the road. I shouted at the top of my voice, “JESUS!” (Remember the previous article where I talked about this?) In that instant, the Lord spoke to me in an audible voice and said, “Nothing’s going to happen to you!”
The car hit a concrete lip on the roadside and became airborne. We traveled 120 feet through the air and dropped 90 feet on the nose of the car, taking down trees with it. The trees cushioned our impact, and we came to a rest in the back, next to the tailgate of my new Dodge station wagon, the seats ripped out of their moorings, and our seat belts snapped like threads.
My fiancée had a gouge in her scalp from flying glass, but I didn’t have so much as a bruise anywhere on my body. We extricated ourselves from the wreck to hear a voice calling out in the darkness, “Is anyone down there? Is anyone alive?”
The climb out of the trees was too steep, and eventually a rope was lowered to help us climb out. The Good Samaritan who stopped to help took us to the Los Gatos hospital for treatment (my fiancée needed stitches to close up the gash in her scalp). While we were waiting, a CHP officer walked in and I heard him say to the doctor on duty, “OK, where’s the bodies?” He walked into the room where my fiancée was being treated, and I said to him, “There weren’t any bodies. We’re OK.”
He stared at us and said, “Impossible! No one could have survived that accident!” I shrugged my shoulders and said, “OK. But we did, anyway. The Lord was with us.”
By now you’re getting the picture. I’ve given you a small sampling of the kinds of accidents I kept going through year after year. Now, maybe you will understand when I say to you that this kind of repetition of life and death confrontations developed a reactionary response to anything that appeared to be death-dealing.
Despite the continuous deliverance from death by the Lord, time after time after time, I was infected by the Fear of Death. It was a spirit whose entire purpose was to develop within me unconscious reactions that would contaminate my responses to the leading and direction of the Lord in my life.
With that fear came other physical symptoms that developed in my body. Allergies were the most apparent. Nervous reactions. Hacking coughs. There were others, as well.
I suppose the single greatest unconscious consequence of the Fear of Death was what I would call, “the Daredevil Effect.” Maybe you’ve seen this one. Subconsciously you want to prove to yourself that you can beat death, so you deliberately run into situations and circumstances that any sane person would avoid like the plague. You try daredevil stunts. You practice beating death.
It’s nothing more and nothing less than the Fear of Death driving, enticing, spurring you on into situations that will either kill or maim you, or render you useless emotionally and spiritually.
Hearing Derek Prince talk about an accident prone spirit really began to trigger understanding for me. As I began to review the events of my life up to that moment, I realized that I had been targeted by an enemy who was determined to destroy me or prevent the call of God from ever coming to fruition in my life.
Not until I was ministering deliverance to a woman one day and I heard an unnatural voice speak out of her (the voice of the evil spirit) and whine, “Nooooooooo…..I don’t want to die!” did I realize that spirit had just identified itself in her: the Fear of Death. Once I addressed that spirit by name and commanded it to leave, the change in her was nothing less than dramatic. Her entire countenance changed. Within a relatively short time, her whole personality changed. She became vibrant, alive, outgoing!
And I finally had the identity of the granddaddy spirit that had fathered the accident prone spirit. In the years since, I have seen how asthma is a byproduct of the Fear of Death. I have seen how Parkinson’s disease and an abundance of nervous disorders stem directly from the presence of that spirit.
I have also seen how the Fear of Death spawns disobedience and rebellion in children, and how it drives rapists and murderers to carry out the horrendous acts they perpetrate on others.
While waiting for a flight at LAX one day, I heard a voice from behind say, “Regner Capener, is that you?” I turned around to see a friend I hadn’t seen in years who worked with Campus Crusade for Christ in Hawaii. He said to me, “Do you have a few minutes for us to talk, or do you have a flight to catch immediately?”
I told him that I had gotten to the airport early in order to miss heavy traffic, and that I had perhaps 30 – 45 minutes. He said to me, “You are one guy I know and trust who has experience in the realm of deliverance. I’ve been having some really strange experiences that I need to talk to you about.”
Over coffee and a piece of pie, he began to relate to me a series of encounters he’d been having with immigrants in Hawaii, and native Hawaiians who had grown up with links to their old culture. He talked about them having nightmares, about peculiar manifestations in which ancient rituals would be reenacted. Then he said, “One day when I was praying for a young fellow, I decided to be bold and demand that the evil spirit who was obviously tormenting him identify itself. A strange voice spoke out of him and said, “I am the Fear of Death.”
He said to me, “I never heard of such a thing. Is there such a spirit as the Fear of Death?” I assured him that it was real, and that the Fear of Death was a master spirit with many other attendant spirits. As we talked, and he shared some of his experiences in dealing with the native cultures, I realized how much of the ritual practices, the animism, the witchcraft and shamanism associated with those cultures was driven by the Fear of Death.
It was a defining moment in my understanding, and in later years when I was back in the arctic, it provided me with valuable identification to the core spirit that tormented so many of the Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts.
We’ve really only scratched the surface on this topic. Tomorrow, I’d like to address what I’ve come to call the “End Times Syndrome,” and how the Fear of Death torments believing Christians with all kinds of fear scenarios surrounding what is commonly referred to as “the Rapture,” or the return of Jesus Christ.
I’ll share with you what I saw with the Y2K situation and the horrendous extremes to which people went in fear of what “might happen.”
Grab yourself another cup of coffee (or tea).
One last thing I have to share with you before we let this day get underway. It has become very clear to me that the weakest Christian is stronger than the most powerful demon. If you are intimidated by evil spirits, stop it! Start taking your spiritual authority. Stop letting these wicked enemies control and manipulate your life.
Blessings on you!
--Regner
Regner A. Capener
EKKLESIA HOUSE
RR-15, Box 6180
Mission, TX 78574-9589
(956) 583-5355
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This article may be reprinted, reposted, copied and re-used – in whole or in part – with proper attribution.
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