This Week in Withcraft - S1:E12

Welcome to This Week in Witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat, and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan.

Can you spot it out in the wild? I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me is

Michael Derham. Michael has yet again found some witchcraft out in the wild, and I hear that it's a spell this time.

Yeah, so this was, I think a lot of people may have seen this, but one of our fellow podcasters,

David Kasten, sent this in to us. He couldn't be with us because he's on the job right now, but this is something that was claimed by Matthew Dowd, who,

I mean, I didn't know who he was, apparently he was a political operative during the Bush -Cheney years, and he,

I believe he claims to be a Christian and is very upset at people claiming a certain kind of morality or a certain type of a philosophy, a philosophical approach in life as being the true

Christian way. He's upset by that because it doesn't agree with his conception of Christianity, and so he came out and said, quote, if Jesus were alive today, he would be accused of being a socialist woke and a groomer for preaching his message of human dignity, or something to that effect.

So this is a very, very common spell that has been used for quite a long time.

This is nothing new. The goal in it is to say, I value this particular social construct,

I value this type of lifestyle, I value this kind of thinking, and if Jesus were here today, he would be right with me in this.

It's kind of like saying, and there's no argument against this, to oppose my values is to oppose

Jesus, because Jesus would agree with me. This type of spell

I don't think is a very complex spell of witchcraft. I think it's more like a junior high level kind of spiel, but basically all you're doing is using a bit of sorcery in which you take homosexual lifestyle or homosexual affections, which

Romans 1 calls vile affections. These are abominable to the Lord, and say, if Jesus were here today, he would be affirming of homosexuals, he'd be affirming of same -sex desires, he would be affirming of these types of people and would want to see them, he would have same -sex attracted disciples, and women disciples too, if he were alive today.

This is a really kind of funny thing, if he was alive today. Obviously he is alive today, he's reigning from the right hand of God, and reigning according to God's word.

So I remember watching a little encounter between Rick Humfert from Living Waters, and he was on the streets evangelizing, and there was a very angry man who was yelling and trying to shut down everything that Rick Humfert was trying to say, and one of the things that he yelled and claimed was that, you know, if Jesus were here today, he'd be with us smoking weed, because that's the kind of, that's how cool he is.

This is a very low -brow, very nonsensical, very easy thing to say, but it doesn't make any sense, you know, if Jesus were here today, he would agree entirely with me.

Well, that's classic, that's a classic form of witchcraft, it's a projection, it's a lie, wherein you're imposing your values on somebody else of authority, and then trying to get everybody to say, okay, you should change your values, because my values are supported by Jesus.

And that's a spell, so you're trying to cast a spell, and then whoever can maybe say it the most, or say it the most often, or yell it the loudest, then they're gonna win, right?

But this is being done in more subtle tones throughout evangelicalism today.

I mean, if Jesus were here, you know, he'd be appalled at churches that didn't have every shade of melanin present in their group.

He would just be appalled, you know, he would go to some poor German Mennonite church up in Nebraska, or over in Montana, and they're all white, and he would go flip their communion table over, because they don't have, you know, black,

Asian, you know, same -sex attracted, they don't have a woman in leadership, you know, and Jesus would just, he'd be livid at their church, you know.

And if he were alive today, or, you know, if he were present on earth today, then he would approve the churches that we go to.

I mean, it's a spell that's used all over the place, and it's really rather silly. So firstly, could we say that professing

Christians cast the worst spells? They're not real, they don't have very good practice on it? I guess it's just pretty clumsy at it.

I would say that Paul does warn about wolves rising up amongst the flock, and not sparing the sheep being savage wolves, even from among the leadership of churches that come in sheep's clothing, apparently on the side of the

Lord, but they come to destroy the flock. So there are very skillful, there are very skillful practitioners of witchcraft within the professing church.

But I would say this particular spell, you know, if Jesus were here today, he'd agree with me, is pretty silly.

Now in particular, it's seen as silly because it always pertains to whatever the hot topic button was, you know, presently.

So why is he talking about Jesus would be accused of being a groomer? Why is he saying that Jesus would be accused of being a

Marxist? Why is he saying that? Because there's this big split occurring, not only amongst politically conservative people, but there's a big split happening within the evangelical church over these issues where many are bringing in Marxist ideologies, which include affirming aberrant, abominable sexualities through the

Hegelian dialectic, synthesizing it with the church. And they're doing that, and many are saying no.

And so what's the response? Well, you know, if you're not evolving and progressing, obviously you're not holy.

And if Jesus were here, he'd be on the side of me. Right. So what we're seeing too is sort of the same thing that we saw in Machen's day where it's a different Jesus.

Right? We're talking about a completely different Lord than the one we worship, and that's what they're presenting to you.

They're trying to use his name profanely and saying this is what he would be like if he were here right now, to at least either try to –

I don't even know if it's about persuading shutting down the discussion, but they're definitely using a false

Christ and presenting him as the true Christ. And that's where we've got to run the reductio, right, is okay, let's see what the true

Christ was like. Right. Go back to the word and see. You know, even in the days of Christ, I mean, the

Pharisees and scribes and even the people were trying to tell Jesus who the Messiah ought to be. Right.

You know, and early on in the church, you know – This is no new trick.

Exactly. And early on in the church, talking, you know, well, dealing with the false claims of Gnosticism and so on, you know, people were envisioning, well, the real

Jesus would be like this. And that's been around for a long time. So that's nothing new to try to say, you know, if Jesus were here today, he'd agree with me.

And we just have to be aware of that maneuver and not get sucked into it ourselves.

And the point is not that if Jesus were here, he'd agree with me. The point is that he's running from the right hand of God and we all better agree with him.

And his word is not confusing, it's clear. You know, the reason why it's difficult is not because the word of God is confusing.

The reason why it's difficult is that the word of God is clear and we can understand it. Right. And to the clarity point, as a pastor, we see loads of pastors who have been clear on loads of other things, be less clear on some of the subjects that Mr.

Dowd tried to espouse there. And I'm just kind of wondering, why are we seeing that shake out in historically clear men?

Why are we seeing the vagueness popped up now? Is it because they have connections they don't want to break? Or what do you think is incentivizing that?

Well, I think it's cowardice, which we're all prone to. The fear of man is a snare.

If you see somebody who's been, you know, courageous and clear on, you know, issues of controversy that are essentially settled, but then are tripping over themselves about issues of controversy, which are currently the hot button issues of the day.

Why are they tripping? It's because they're ensnared. They got tripped up by the fear of man.

And we're all prone to that at some level. So it's something to be watchful in our own hearts about.

But you know, wherever the battle is being fought, that's where we've got to go plug the hole and throw ourselves into the fray.

It's no good sitting back and, you know, patting ourselves on the back because, you know, we're on the right side of the infralapsarian superlapsarian debate, or we're on the correct side of, you know, hyper -Calvinism versus Calvinism.

What are the issues of the day? What are the concerns of the day? And that's where you've got to go labor according to the word of God and feed the sheep, protect the sheep, and give a loud amen to the word of God.

Does the word of God expose us, make us uncomfortable, so on and so forth? Okay. But that's what's got to be said.

Yeah, because they have an office that God gave them, and they should be using that office to serve him and not to serve man.

Like the existence of the office itself ought to speak to this issue. And the misuse of the office, fear of man, service of man, it's becoming really clear these days with the onslaught of all this controversy, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, and there's a more subtle form of the spell of, A, if Jesus were here, he'd agree with me. And the more subtle form of the spell comes along the line of, well, the things we're going to talk about in terms of wealth and systemic injustice, and we're going to talk about sexuality and all these different things.

And what we're going to do is we're going to challenge the status quo. There's been a lot of sin in the church, and we really need to have the word of God sanctify the church.

So what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the word of God with a fresh lens and a fresh look, and we're going to cast off these cultural prejudices that we have had all this time, and we're going to read the word of God now with the eyes of Christ.

And we're really going to understand it for the first time now, and we're going to really apply it correctly now. And so in the same sense, like, well, everyone's making that claim, right?

Everyone's saying, we really understand what the Bible is saying. If you would just read the

Bible correctly, you would see that it agrees with me. It's basically the same spell, but it's a little bit more subtle, a little bit more complex.

The only problem with this is if you look at the talking points of MSNBC and CNN Plus and, well, now they're dead, but if you look at the talking points of the political -minded, the agenda of paganism, and then you look at the talking points of some of these pastors and teachers, and you notice that they're lining up, who are they being informed by?

This isn't cultural courage, preaching to churches that, as far as they knew, homosexual desires were an abomination to God.

Oh, but now, unless we have a same -sex -attracted youth pastor, we're in sin.

Or even more, we need a same -sex -attracted woman in the pulpit who's black. Otherwise, we're sinful.

These mindsets, where is that coming from? This whole agenda is being fed to them by the ever -shifting winds of pagan doctrine.

They're being tossed to and fro by every wind of pagan doctrine, rather than being grounded in the

Word of God. Attracted by those priests. Yep. Well, I think that wraps up that discussion on that little spell we got to analyze.

Michael, what would you suggest for your content this week? Yeah, so it's a series from Ligonier.

I'm sure you can stream it online. I have an old DVD set.

It's called The Consequences of Ideas, an overview of philosophy with R .C. Sproul. And I really like this, because I didn't get an education in philosophy, a tour of philosophy, when

I was going through all my education. I'm not sure exactly why, but... You were spared. I guess I was spared, but yeah, but you know, the value of Sproul's peripatetic walking about scratching some stuff on the chalkboard, 23 -minute long thing, is that you get to learn about all these old philosophers, like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and then you get to learn about more modern philosophers of the

Enlightenment, like Pascal and Locke, Hume and Hegel, and so on, and Kant, and all these things, and as he says, the consequences of ideas.

And then you begin to realize, oh, like the things I'm hearing about today, and the things that are being talked about today, have a very deep root in which man has been constantly trying to avoid

God, and every time you try to avoid God, you run headlong into absurdity. So it's very educational, it's very helpful,

I highly recommend it. Amen to that. I'm going to have to check that out at some point, but my suggestion kind of runs in the same vein as far as the type of guy who produced this subject, it's

Art in the Bible by Francis A. Schaeffer, and he was largely my introduction to a form of apologetics, but also an understanding of art and an understanding of creativity, and also a little bit of work from the standard of the

Bible. And I really appreciated this short little work, I read it on a weekend trip to a bachelor party that we had at my old church, and it was very profitable,

I had to read it over again, but it's short, and it's sweet, and it's actually a good introduction to Schaeffer and his writings.

And that wraps it up for today. We are always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week, and for supporting us by rating, reviewing, and sharing the show.

And we hope you can join us again for another week of uncovering and rebuking witchcraft in the modern world.