Sunday, August 1, 2021 PM

As you make your way back to your seats, we are going to return to our study on the topic of Christian opposition to witchcraft. Christian opposition to witchcraft, which obviously is a given. It's a given, but if you don't know what witchcraft is, then you don't know how to be opposed to it.

I think in a previous generation, Christian opposition to witchcraft was handled in some terms that were very specific, very.

Limited.

Rebellion as the Sin of Witchcraft and the Heart of the Issue

But what does the Bible have to say? We explored last week that Samuel confronted Saul, King Saul, and King Saul was supposed to obey the Lord. He didn't, but he said he did. He was supposed to eliminate all the Amalekites, and he said he did, but he didn't.

King Agag was still alive. They were to destroy all of the Amalekites' possessions, livestock, and so on. And he said that he had obeyed the Lord, but he hadn't. And he gave the reason why, well, it wasn't me, it was the people, and they only kept the good stuff to give as sacrifices to God.

And what we see here is a sustained rebellion, a sustained opposition to the word of God, and a calling of that which is evil, good. And so in this sustained resistance against God, in the changing of terms to make it sound like it was legitimate, Samuel replies and says that rebellion, which he identifies what Saul was doing as rebellion, the sustained deceptive resistance to God as rebellion, he says that this is as the sin of witchcraft.

This is as the sin of witchcraft. Now, Jesus tells us, you have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you, he who looks upon a woman to lust after her in his heart has already committed adultery.

So he says, you know, adultery begins in the heart. It isn't the physical act that the commandment is dealing with as much as what's going on in the heart. And he says the same thing about murder. You have heard it said, you shall not murder, but I say to you, if you hate your brother, if you hate your brother, if you call him all these horrible things and so on, if you hate him in your heart, you're already committing the act of murder in your heart.

So Jesus says the issue begins in the heart, and then if it's unchecked, what happens? It'll come out externally. But we cannot say, he was trying to teach the people, you cannot say, well, I have kept the commandments.

I've not committed adultery, no matter what goes on in my head, right? And in the same sense, when we have these many prohibitions in the Old and New Testaments against witchcraft, we should not think to ourselves, well, I've not boiled anything in a big black cauldron and said funny words over it, so I'm free of the sin of witchcraft.

What is it?

Well, Samuel identifies this for us. Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. There is a sustained deceptive attempt to establish one's own alternate authority. That's what's going on as the basics of witchcraft.

And we see that Saul began there, rebellion against God is as the sin of witchcraft, and by the end of his career, he was actually in the necromancer's house doing witchcraft, right? And the witch of Endor.

Hope, Providence, and the Need to Name Witchcraft

So last week, we were just dealing with some definitions and introduction. The need, I think, for this is twofold. One, we live in a very strange time when absurdities are stated as virtues. And what is this, what's going on?

Some people will talk in terms of this is an agenda, this is just semantics, so on and so forth. But I think the Bible calls it witchcraft. We live in an incredibly troubled time. I do not think it's been the worst it's ever been.

We read church history, we should see that. Also, if we read the Bible, we should know this is not the worst it's ever been for the church. I don't think that we live in the lowest angle of the worst sewer of history, okay?

I'm not saying things are wonderful. I don't think we're in the lowest angle of the worst sewer in history. There's too many other examples of the Lord's providence and grace and power in church history, and more importantly, in the word of God, to come to that conclusion, no matter what the newspapers want us to feel like.

Hope is one of the three preeminent virtues of Christians. I don't mean cotton candy, I mean hope. I mean genuine, expectant, faith-filled hope. Now, we have hope because of Christ. We have hope because he has died upon the cross for our sins, and he has risen from the dead to deliver us into new life, and to justify us before the God, to be our advocate with the Father, and he has sent us the Holy Spirit.

So we have all kinds of help. We have all kinds of resources. And we need to recognize what's going on, and instead of retreat, we need to identify what it is. And we need to call it what it is, and we need to repent of it in our own lives where we find it, and call others to repent of it as well, because Christ is worthy, and Christ is king.

And I think what's going on is witchcraft. Now, some people say, well, we have bigger issues to deal with than witchcraft, don't we? We have legalized and celebrated murder of infants. We have legalized and celebrated sexual abominations.

We have rising socialism. There's statism and drug use and crime and violence and corruption and tyranny. And we've got all sorts of people in the evangelical church taking very weak and compromised positions on all these issues.

So why talk about witchcraft? Because witchcraft is how we got to where we are. Witchcraft is how we got to where we are. Not using God's words, but words, authoritative, defining words from another source to describe things.

It's not political correctness. It's witchcraft. And it's important to talk about this. No one knows what to do necessarily. It's like when you read about wizards and necromancers and sorcerers and so on in the Bible.

I mean, you read about that. You're like, well, what do you do with that? But every time parts of the Bible get ignored or glossed over, the church gets sick in just those areas. And the culture is soon to follow.

So we need to pay attention to what the word of God has to say on the matter. We talked about the origin of witchcraft last week, and our definition was only five words long, so hopefully we can remember it.

Witchcraft is simply this, demonic appropriation of alternate authority. Demonic appropriation of alternate authority. It may be overt or subtle that it's demonic. The appropriation may be the grasping for new authority or the implementation, attempted use of new authority, but it's demonic appropriation of alternate, meaning not God's authority.

That's my presupposition. I think it's a biblical presupposition that God has all authority, and all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus Christ. Witchcraft involves the demonic appropriation of alternate.

No, I don't want to agree with God about what these things are. No, I don't want to submit to Jesus Christ on this. I want my own way of doing things. Alternate authority. Authority in this sense means calling something what it is.

Adam exercising authority. It made in the image of God, naming the animals, even naming his wife. The authority to name things as they are. Is that accorded to us, or is it accorded to Christ? Jesus gets to call things what they are.

Authority also in terms of naming things what they are, and what is true and false? What is good and evil? Determining those things. Well, witchcraft is the demonic appropriation of alternate authority.

All right, so we see this in various ways. I made a quick mention of some of these practices of witchcraft in Nebuchadnezzar's courts. How they would look to the stars, or the spots on livers, or they would call out to demons, or to the dead.

They're trying to discover truth through all sorts of alternate forms of power there. And this was both demonic and futile, as we read in Daniel chapter four. The origin of witchcraft is pretty simple.

All devilry finds its origin in the devil. Satan is the father of lies, and a murderer from the beginning, and so also all who follow in his steps. So we talked about the origin of witchcraft, now we're gonna talk about the prohibitions, the prohibitions of witchcraft in the Bible.

And this is where we're gonna get some help, because in the prohibitions of witchcraft in the Bible, there are specific terms, specific words, that God uses to say, if I'm one of these, kill it. Don't allow this kind of person to operate.

Such and such is an abomination. And he uses a variety of terms to talk about the matter. And each one of these terms gives us some specific understanding of what witchcraft looks like, smells like, tastes like, so on and so forth.

If you never met a duck before, and someone begins to describe a duck to you, you'd know one when you saw it, right? I mean, it's kind of a unique animal, when you think about it. When someone describes it all to you, that way it swims and it flies, it has what, you know, so on and so forth.

And then all of a sudden you're gonna see a duck, and it's like, ah, that's what it is. How do you know what witchcraft is? The Bible will tell you what it is, right? The Bible's going to describe it for us, and if we pay close attention, then we'll be able to know what it is when we see it.

We'll be able to know it when we hear it. And we will be cautioned against ever bringing any of its attempted alternate authority into our lives. Now, these prohibitions of witchcraft are both Old and New Testament.

And the basic general term is simply that of witch and witchcraft. And as I was looking through all of the terms, and a lot of this is about, you know, how things are translated in the English, okay? But when I was looking through the terms that are in use in the Bible, witch and witchcraft are the most general translation.

And there's a variety of Hebrew and Greek words which lie behind those English translations. It's kind of like, if I don't know, if the translators are not sure exactly, we're gonna call it witchcraft, which is a nice big semantic circle in which some of these other descriptions fit.

So witchcraft is the big category, and that's the one I'm using, Christian opposition to witchcraft, in all its forms, however it shows up. That's the big category. And then the other terms are specific examples of it.

And so it's a catch-all. We're gonna talk about magicians and wizards and sorcerers and enchanters and necromancers and diviners and mediums. They are all types of witches. And it's important, too, we have this big category, and the Lord is good to give it to us, because if man comes up with even more horrible pagan crafters than what has already come up with, well, we have a word to call it and something with which to oppose it.

Demonic appropriation of alternate authority. Let's start with the word magic, magician, and or wizard. We're going to read in Acts 8 and 13 in a moment. Acts 8 and 13, we're going to go read about a magician.

But we first hear of magicians in the courts of Pharaoh. In Genesis 41 and in Exodus 7, 8, and 9, there were magicians in the courts when Joseph was there. There were magicians in the courts when Moses and Aaron confronted Pharaoh.

And we discover that there are magicians there. We also have a word wizard, which has a very close meaning to that of magician. And this word we first see in lists of Thou Shalt Not in Leviticus 19 and Leviticus 20.

Now, later on in the Bible, we see both King Saul and King Josiah destroying magicians and wizards from the land. And then later on, we see King Manasseh employing them to horrible effect. So we can see them in various parts of the scriptures.

Now, magician, the word magician is basically used to describe drawing magical lines or circles. Magical lines or circles. There was a TBN preacher, I don't know if it was Joseph Prince or someone, who recently wrote a book within the last five or six years called Circle Maker.

Or maybe it was somebody else. I don't remember who did it. I don't really pay close attention to the Theologically Bad Network. But he drew, there was an ancient story about a Jewish rabbi who was like, oh, there's not enough Jewish magic maker.

We don't have rain, so I'm gonna draw a circle in the ground, and I'm gonna stay inside the circle until it rains. I'm gonna basically force God's hand in the matter. And he stayed in that circle for days and days and days, and people brought him food and kept him alive and so on.

And I don't even wanna know how bad the circle began to become. But he stayed there for a long time, and then finally it rained, and he said, see, it worked.

Ah.

Anyway, the book came out lately. It was highly prized in the Christian bookstores and so on. And you can go buy it for 15 cents today. But circle maker. And this goes back to the Hebrew word for magician, drawing magical lines or magical circles.

It's a word, the Hebrew word is built on another root word, which means to engrave, to cut something into stone,.

To create something new.

Has the idea of even the tools themselves, the chisel itself, the stylus itself that you would use to craft something, to write something on the wax that covers the stone tablet, or something that you're actually gonna chisel into the stone itself.

And that's the root word behind the Hebrew word for magician. The term is used for Aaron when he created the golden calf and called it Israel's God that led them up out of Egypt. If we had an image for this word, it would be the picture of a pagan wise man coming up with something new, a new idol or a new term, crafting a new word or practicing it on the wax tablet, coining a new idea and then carving it into stone.

It is the idea of diabolical inventiveness, coming up with something new. And then we have the Greek word for magician, magos, Simon Magus, Simon Magus. We have the word for, the Greek word for magician.

Sometimes the English translations translate the word sorceries, but that word sorceries covers the word for magician, magia or maguo. And we noticed in Acts 8 that the people really did believe in Simon, this great sorcerer or this magician.

So let's go look at that in Acts chapter 8. And then we're also going to read about another magician in Acts 13. So first of all, Acts chapter 8, verses 9 through 11. But there was a certain man called Simon who previously practiced sorcery.

There's the English word covering the Greek word for magos or magus in the city and astonished, and astonished, I think the King James has bewitched, which we're going to come to that also in Galatians, and astonished the people of Samaria, claiming that he was someone great to whom they all gave heed from the least to the greatest, saying, this man is the great power of God.

And they heeded him because he had astonished them or bewitched them with his sorceries for a long time. So the audience believes him. Now, when you read the story, where did he get his power from? Did he get his power from, they said he's the great power from God, didn't they?

I remember the Samaritans were somewhat religious. I mean, even the most immoral woman in all of Samaria got into a theological debate with Jesus. So I mean, you gotta be a pretty religious people when the most wicked woman in your midst has a pretty good grasp on theology.

Now, these people believed in God. And then they looked at Simon Magos, the Simon the sorcerer, Simon the magician. Oh, he's the great power of God, right? They were interpreting what they saw as the power of God, but he was bewitching them, he was astonishing them.

But was his power from God? No, when you read later on in the text, he doesn't understand the Holy Spirit. He's like, what in the world is going on? When the preaching of the gospel begins and people begin to come to faith in Christ and people are being filled with the Holy Spirit, he's like, now, what is this?

Because the power of God was utterly foreign to him, although he had been attributed as the great power of God for quite some time. So where did he get his power from? He had become an alternate authority in the land, but where did he get his power from?

It was demonic, it was demonic. He had appropriated in a demonic fashion, alternate authority, he's practicing witchcraft. And everybody was like, oh, wow, he's, but he wasn't of God. Now, in Acts 13, verses six through 12, Barnabas and Saul, before his name became Paul, along with John Mark, verse six, now when they had gone through the island to Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer.

Again, the Greek word is for magician. Now notice how it's immediately, this is described, the magician is called a false prophet. You see, immediately, this practicer of witchcraft is called a false prophet, as a descriptor.

A Jew whose name was Bar-Jesus. Bar is the Aramaic word for son. So we don't know if he was saying, I'm the son of, I'm, was he calling himself the son of Jesus, trying to play off of Jesus of Nazareth, or something else.

And he was with the pro-council, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man. Notice that his name's also called Elemus, the sorcerer. Where has he placed himself? He's with the pro-council. He's with the governor of the island.

Okay, he's in his ear. He's offering him alternative authority by which to live his life, okay? Now this man was an intelligent man, so he wanted to hear the word of God. So he called for Barnabas and Saul.

We see that in verse seven. Now, verse eight, Elemus, the sorcerer, withstood them, seeking to turn the pro-council away from the faith. Verse nine, then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him, and said, O fool of all deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, which is, you know, that's what Jesus called the Jews, the religious Jews who opposed him.

You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord? And now, indeed, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you shall be blind, not seeing the sun for a time.

And immediately, a dark mist fell upon him, and he went around, seeking someone to lead him by the hand. Then the pro-council believed when he saw what had been done, being astonished at the teaching of the Lord.

You know, if we had a governor of the state of Oklahoma, who his right-hand advisor, the one who was like, you know, always in his ear, was just a bona fide witch,.

What would we do?

Do we wring our hands? Or do we pray for the opportunity to go preach the gospel to the governor, right?

What do we do?

I mean, in this case, look, there's no hope for this place. No hope for this place, right? Actually, there's all kinds of hope. Preaching of the gospel. But it has to be opposed to the light. Rather than participating in the deeds of darkness, we are to expose those deeds of darkness by the light of Christ.

Now, this term for magos in the Greek is the idea of someone who possesses and uses supernatural knowledge and ability. Somebody who has special, secret wisdom. And of course, magos, we get the word magic from that.

And it's a synonym for another Hebrew word, wizard. Wizard is where we get our term Jedi from. You probably didn't know that Lucas and Spielberg put a lot of Hebrew motifs in Star Wars. But Yidehoni, Yidehoni, and in the Germans, transliterated that, they made the Y a J.

So you have the idea of Jedi in there. It's, the word is wizard. It's used 11 times, and it refers to a knowing one. A knowing one. The root concept here is somebody knows something that others do not.

Special knowledge, okay? The term is built on the Hebrew word for knowledge, Yedah. Which sounds like Yoda. Again, you know, I'm just deconstructing Star Wars now. And he brings forth out of his secret special knowledge,.

What?

New things, new realities, new words. At the heart of this word is one who is a conjurer. Someone who brings up something new. Now, magicians, specifically when you read the scriptures, you're gonna see magicians listed.

And you never find, thou shalt not suffer a magician to live, or anything like that. But you do find them, because early on we see them with Pharaoh, and we see them with Nebuchadnezzar. And we see that time and again, they are defeated and humiliated and shown to be false.

So you get the idea from reading the scripture that, well, there's nothing here. There's nothing here. Wizards, particularly, who do a lot of the same things as magicians, and the same idea of carving something new, creating something new, conjuring something new, okay?

Wizards are prohibited very specifically, and I would say that any prohibition against a wizard is the same against a magician. I'm not talking about the things that people do in play acting and whatever, you know.

I'm talking about the actual thing. The actual thing is what? This conjuring up of new idols, new false realities, alternate words, this is prohibited. Specifically, now, Deuteronomy 18, 11 is a passage, I think, that would be kind of helpful for us.

Just a single verse that encapsulates many of the terms that we're going to talk about. And actually, Deuteronomy 18, I'll start reading in verse nine, really. When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations.

There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.

For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of the abominations, the Lord your God drives them out before you. You shall be blameless before the Lord your God for these nations which you will dispossess.

Listen to soothsayers and diviners, but as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you. So this is a passage we're going to refer to again and again, just kind of a list of all kinds of practices there.

But especially as we read through wizards, or those who are conjuring spells and so on, these are expressly forbidden. One more passage, I want to make some application from this. Isaiah chapter eight, verses 19 through 20.

And this, and of course Isaiah was always mocking the pagans and the way that they worshiped and the way that they operated. This is one of those places. Isaiah eight, verses 19 and 20.

And when they say to you,.

Seek those who are mediums and wizards. All right, and how do we identify a duck when we see it? Who whisper and mutter. Should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?

To the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. So we're definitely warned against consulting, seeking, asking for understanding from magicians, from wizards.

Magic and wizardry is witchcraft. It is demonic appropriation of alternate authority. So then what should we be opposed to? Just as rebellion is, as it's in a witchcraft, something that begins, what are the initial stages?

What is the latent witchcraft at work in our world today that we should be able to acknowledge what it is and call it what it is? Well, think about what magicians and wizards do. They craft new words, they conjure up new things.

And they do so in a way, in a demonic fashion to try to grasp alternate authority. So we should be opposed to the dark art of crafting new demonic words to obscure or erase the old words. A new term is conjured, alternative lifestyle, right?

A new word is conjured, a new term is conjured, alternative lifestyle, in an effort to destroy the old term, sodomy, right? And if you don't, and then your acceptance of the old term is a new term is conjured, or rejection in society is based on whether you use the new terms or not.

There's a grab for authority. Lifestyle choices replace things like divorce, adultery, perversion. The word flawed replaces the term wicked. I'm going to try to relate each one of these specific instances of witchcraft to the dictionary.

And I have a few handouts in the back. It's called a Christian's Guide to Etymological Witchcraft. What does magic or magicians or wizards try to do? They change the entry word in the dictionary. They change the entry word in the dictionary, right?

We're going to change the term. We're going to call it something else than what it actually is according to God's word. And everything in witchcraft begins with that sustained deceptive grab to try to change things up.

And then it's going to be dealing with the dictionary. So again, so we're going to talk about sorcery that tries to change the synonyms in the dictionary. Necromancy, which changes the root words or language of origin in the dictionary.

Or enchantment, which changes the whole definition in the dictionary. Or divination, which changes the example sentence in the dictionary. And soothsayer, which changes the whole purpose of the dictionary.

And so we're going to talk about these terms. And I'm building this out of what are the words.

That God used?

How are they used in their context? And then how do we make application of that in our world today? I think at least very quickly we can talk about sorcery. The word sorcery, the Hebrew word for sorcery is it's unsurprising and significant that it first shows up in connection with Jezebel.

Who would have thought?

I don't know anybody who's named their kid Jezebel.

Do you?

In 2 Kings 9 .22. This word is used in close connection in the Old Testament with cultic whoredom. So cult prostitutes and so on. There is a very real sense that sorcery and sorcery is joining what ought not to be joined together.

Joining that which ought not be joined together. And sorcery is mentioned time and again with cultic whoredom. That shows up again in Nahum 3 .4 in Revelation 18 .23. The great harlot, also named Jezebel, joining things together and doing sorcery.

The meaning of the word in the Hebrew, makeshaf, means to whisper a spell. To practice magic as a sorcery, it has the idea of whispering, doing something subtly. It's often translated witchcraft in their English translations, but sometimes it's also translated sorcery as well.

The Greek word is also very interesting. The Greek word, this will be fun. The Greek word for sorcery is pharmakia. Pharmacology, pharmacy, pharmacist. That's where we get our English word, but in the Greek word, that was the Greek word for sorcery.

And in modern use, as in the ancient, you have the picture of the pharmacist doing what? Mortar and the pestle. He puts a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And then he does what? He blends them together.

In Greek usage, because it was often used to poison people, sometimes they just meant poisoner. I'm not saying anything about our modern pharmaceutical issues today.

Exactly.

But in the idea of pharmacy, you're combining things. You're joining things together.

You're blending them together,.

Making them a new substance. That's the idea. That's the basic idea of the word.

Okay?

And as with the Hebrew word, which is associated with the profane joining of things which ought not to be joined, so also the Greek word talks about the blending together of ingredients, bringing together of things.

And the idea is that which should not be brought together. Sorcery is condemned in Micah 5, verse 12. It is condemned in Galatians 5, verse 20. It is condemned in Revelation 9, 21. It is in the list of abominations and transgressions that God hates.

Sorcery. It's a form of witchcraft. Sorcery is witchcraft. It is demonic appropriation of alternate authority. So how does that translate into things today? Would we know sorcery if we saw it? Let's start at the beginning, how it begins to manifest.

We should be opposed to the dark art of demonically joining two irreconcilable or unlike terms. We should be opposed to the dark art of demonically joining two irreconcilable or unlike terms. Any examples?

Homosexual marriage, right? And don't forget about the married bachelors, right? Why is one absurdity and the other acceptable? Because the sorcery has been conducted on the one for particular purposes to gain alternate authority.

How about when people say generous justice, just mercy. Justice and mercy are the same. Generosity and justice are the same. There's no difference between them. Remember we talked about that witchcraft.

Witchcraft is a whiteboard. You have generosity, mercy, forgiveness, grace over here. And then you have justice over here. And people are doing sorcery when after writing this up on the whiteboard, they then take the eraser and then erase the line between them.

That's sorcery. It is a good thing to know that the justice of God is righteous and good. But if God gives me justice, I'm not getting mercy. I'm not getting grace. I'm not experiencing his generosity.

I'm getting what I deserve, justice. That's the way the Bible tells it. But sorcerers will erase that line. Those doing sorcery will erase that line. Other words, pregnant man. That's the new one. They had to come out with an emoji of a pregnant man.

That's sorcery. Yes, we can say, oh, that's ludicrous, so on and so forth, or good grief. Let's call it what it is. That is sorcery. And in this case, in the dictionary, it changes the synonyms. You know, when you read your dictionary entry, you know, when you're done reading the definition and so on, they'll give you some synonyms of other words that are like.

And in sorcery, the synonyms are changed in that things are brought next to each other in comparison with one another that should not be brought together. They are not synonyms. They're not comparable.

They're not the same. They don't have that relationship together, but they're doing it anyway. So there's a couple of examples, magic and sorcery as part of witchcraft. Practically, the idea is not to, you know, people are, you know, just kind of repeating the things that they've heard, or there are certain catchphrases that have just kind of entered into the etymological water, so to speak.

They're just everywhere.

Everyone kind of uses them and so on. The goal isn't to discover that and then poke the witch in the eye immediately. It's to recognize what it is. And a lot of people are just being led astray. They just don't think about it.

We don't think about it sometimes. Sometimes we're using the new conjured words, aren't we? Sometimes we're using the terms that have been created by sorcery. Sometimes we're using those terms and so on.

And we just have to be aware of, oh, hang on a second. This is a bit of witchcraft. And you know what?

I'm against that.

I'm against that. I want to use God's words to speak and show light in the darkness. I'm not going to participate, Ephesians five, I'm not going to participate in these evil deeds of darkness and use the terms of witchcraft, the terms of magic, the terms of wizards, and the terms of sorcerers.

I'm not going to participate in this. I'm going to speak to light. I'm going to show the light. I'm going to expose this for what it is.

See, that's the goal.

There are some people that need a poke in the eye, but we'll let God do that. All we have to do is shine the light into the darkness. And at some point, if someone corners you about political correctness or loving your neighbor by using pronoun hospitality or some such sorcery, you can just say, you know, I don't do witchcraft.

And smile when you say it. My president of my seminary said, you just tell people the truth and smile. Smile real big when you tell the truth. Because you want them to understand the truth. Like, I don't do witchcraft.

Well, hopefully that'll bless you. We have time for like a couple of questions. Anybody has questions?

Okay, yes.

When Conjured Terms and Redefinitions Create Confusion

Yeah, this is a question. So what do you do when you don't know where to begin? Like, you know, it's, okay, generosity and justice. We can look that up in the Bible and be pretty clear on that. But what if you have like terms that have been conjured up and invented, and then sorcery has been done on the conjured terms and brought together.

And then when you have the new terms, they re-enchant them with new definitions. And this is the biggest mess you've ever seen in your life. Well, first, by understanding what happened. And then by, I would say, through further conversation, because God has rigged the whole thing to work in his favor, or made it his image, you know.

So it's impossible for them to communicate with you the meaning of their expressions without resorting to somewhat plainer speech. And then you can begin to understand how is it that they got where they're at and do what you can to untangle.

Sometimes, you know, you take the approach of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot. You just go for the blade and just cut the whole thing in half. It's like, oh, let's just get to the heart of the matter.

Okay.

But if you come up against a snarl like that, it's good to know what it is first. Because if you know that what's going on here is the demonic appropriation of alternate authority, then the real issue here is not about what do you mean by those made up, those made up, confusing, intentionally confusing terms.

At that point, it's like, well, let's talk about authority. Who gets to say what things are? And you just go straight to the heart of the matter. If you can recognize witchcraft, then you know the issue is about authority.

And you just, you go straight there. Kind of a presuppositional approach. Yeah, critical race theory and intersectionality. Yeah, that is a very high-level bit of witchcraft. Yeah, that's definitely so.

A lot of terms get redefined and then they get recombined and so on. If you type into the Google search line, who was the sorcerer of German philosophy,.

Hegel will show up.

And you'll start learning about the Hegelian dialectic, which is the engine that makes CRT go. All right, so next week, we are Thursday night from six to nine, workshop in the fellowship hall on anti-abortion ministry, about going and standing in the gap at the abortion mills.

And then we have Friday night, if you want to go down to Blue Lakes Baptist Church, they're having a workshop on apologetics, street-level apologetics, talking to people about the subject of abolition and stopping the legalized murder of unborn infants.