Sunday, September 12, 2021 PM

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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Alright, well, as you get your way to your seat, let's open our Bibles and go over to Deuteronomy 18, where we have got a great list of all the different forms of witchcraft that God said to His people that they were not supposed to do, particularly they were not supposed to imitate it as they found it in the land of Canaan.

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As they encountered the people and the customs, not only were they not to intermarry, but they were also not to adopt the ways of the

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Canaanites. You read through the book of Judges, you see how Canaanized the

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Israelites became, really showing the interest that God had in keeping

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His people out of that whole mess. But, we have this list in Deuteronomy 18 and many other places in the

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Scripture where various forms of witchcraft are condemned. These forms pop up in stories that we read about the kings, like King Saul or like King Manasseh, various evil kings who got involved with witchcraft, and you can see that the story is a negative one, obviously this should never happen.

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Prophets, false prophets in Israel who claimed to speak for the Lord and to do righteousness, they themselves were accused of doing forms of witchcraft and leading the people in the wrong way.

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The Bible is full of these passages and we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture that it is full and abundant for all of our faith and practice, and the authority of the

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Scriptures is that we're to follow it and we're to make application, right application to our lives.

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So the question is, what do we do with all these passages that denounce witchcraft?

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And of course, we should stay away from the forms of witchcraft that are present today.

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This is perhaps a missiological concern if you're in different parts of South America or Africa or other places where people conduct worship practices to ancestors or engage with the witch doctor and so on and so forth, there is a call to new converts to put that behind them and move away from witchcraft to embrace the truth of the

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Scriptures. I know that Verne and Denny Johnson have encountered that as they ministered to the Halakha people in the inner parts of the

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Ivory Coast. So what application does it have elsewhere?

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Well, it has great application to us, it has great application to us.

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It's not only a matter of saying, well, we need to avoid these evil things and their forms as we find them, but we are reminded in Samuel's instruction and engagement with Saul, King Saul, that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.

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And remember that Christ tells us that, you have heard it said, do not commit adultery, but I say to you, if you lust after one in your heart, then you've already committed adultery in your heart.

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And Jesus reminds us that the sin, the breaking of the commandments of God begins in the heart, that there are forms of breaking

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God's law that occur long before it ever becomes evident in public and so on.

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And so if we're going to make right application of the text and be opposed to witchcraft, it should be the very incipient forms of witchcraft, the things that begin in the heart, the things that are not so obvious.

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And the variety of terms in the Bible helps us here, especially in the

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Old Testament. It was a curiosity to me to find so many different terms that God used when he was forbidding witchcraft.

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And we have this handout, maybe you were able to grab it, but these are some of the words that we find in the

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Bible. And of course, translations will differ, but you'll still find a variety of terms.

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You'll find words like witch, witchcraft, magic, wizard, sorcery, or a sorcerer, necromancer, necromancy, a familiar spirit, enchantment, or divination, diviners, soothsayer, soothsaying.

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And in this, there's no need for us to investigate the peculiarities of various parts of witchcraft and dark arts and so on and so forth.

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The Scriptures tells us to be like children, innocent children, like babes when it comes to evil, but to be mature in righteousness.

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And we're also told not to participate with those who do evil deeds, but rather to expose them.

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Now, that's the goal of this study. We're not interested in figuring out how witches do this, that, and the other.

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We're interested in having a familiarity with the Word of God so that we will be able to spot witchcraft, to identify it, and expose it with the light of God's Word.

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Not to let it just keep going on and on, but to identify it biblically. That's the goal.

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And so, in the study of the words, the words that God uses to condemn witchcraft, there is great fruit as we see the nuances of the terms, and then we can look at the examples where those terms are used and gain practical insights about how we're supposed to respond.

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So, Deuteronomy 18, and let's look at verses, let's begin in verse 9, and this is a very helpful text.

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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.

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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.

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For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your

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God drives them out before you. You should be blameless before the Lord your God, for these nations which you will dispossess listened to soothsayers and diviners.

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But as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you. Now there's a wonderful moment here where the children of Israel have been given the negative, the prohibition, just stay away from these things.

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This isn't for you, and the children of Israel were very blessed that God showed his covenant love upon them, and he said it wasn't because you're something special, it's because I made a promise.

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I love you because I love you, he says in Deuteronomy 7. And so he says I've got something way, way better for you.

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Now I'm driving these nations out because they listened to soothsayers. Now as the people of God, right there, we should say to ourselves,

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I don't want to listen to soothsayers. I don't want to listen to diviners.

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I don't want to listen to people trying to tell me what the world is all about and truth is if they're a bunch of witches.

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So we should immediately agree with that, but it's not simply about what we're not supposed to listen to, but we have something else appointed for us as the people of God.

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So let's look at verse 15. This is now in contrast to all the witchcraft. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet.

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Now if you look there in your text, you might find that that word prophet is capitalized. You see that?

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Okay. Now remember that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, and priests and prophets and kings got anointed in the

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Old Testament, and they were all pointing the way to the prophet, the great prophet, which is here, the prophecy is here in this text, the promise, the great prophet.

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The great high priest, our high priest is Jesus, and the king of kings, son of David, son of man,

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Jesus. So Jesus is Messiah, the anointed one, because he's the king of kings, the great high priest, and he is the great prophet.

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Well this is the passage that promises Christ as our prophet. The Lord your

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God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren, him you shall hear.

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That's just, you should look from there, and you should immediately go read the account of the Mount of Transfiguration, right?

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Where Moses and Elijah are up on the mountain, and Jesus was there, and the Shekinah glory cloud comes and says, this is my son, hear him.

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Reaches right back here to Deuteronomy 18. Now verse 16, according to all your desire of the

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Lord your God in Horeb in the day of assembly saying, let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, nor let me see this great fire any more lest I die.

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Now that's just the book of Hebrews, the whole thing, verses 15 and 16. He said, well the book of Hebrews is about Jesus being our great high priest, yes, but it's also about him being the prophet, the mediator of God's truth.

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And so you have the contrast between Moses and Jesus, obviously similar, but there's also a difference between Moses and Jesus, you read about that in Hebrews.

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And then when you get to Hebrews 12, there is this very big contrast between the mountain where Moses declared the word of God, and there was great fear and trembling, and I don't want to hear this anymore, it was too much, the smoking fire on the

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Mount Sinai. And then right after that, in Hebrews 12, we're told about a different mountain where Jesus preaches, where Jesus declares the truth of God, and it's a mountain that we can come to and we're welcomed before the face of God, and everything's different between the old covenant mountain and the new covenant mountain.

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So, here, in Deuteronomy 18, it's already talking about it, already talking about it here in Deuteronomy 18, near the beginning of the

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Bible, so it's important to think about those connections. Now, this is placed into contrast with the witchcraft.

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Don't engage in witchcraft. Don't do witchcraft, don't listen to information coming from witchcraft.

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You have something better, and his name is Jesus Christ. He's the way, the truth, and the life, right?

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He's the light of the world, and we don't need to, as Isaiah 8 says, run to the spiritist and the mutterers and the whisperers who do witchcraft, no, we've been given the light of God's word.

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So that's our goal, is to try to understand what God is saying to not be involved with, to not support, to not engage in, and one way we do that is just by paying attention to the words that God is using.

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Remember, that confession is a very big part of being a Christian, that we confess what is going on around us, and in us, and wherever, we want to say the things that God says.

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Same word as God. So if God calls something witchcraft, if God calls something enchantment, if God calls something soothsaying, okay, why don't we call it that?

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Why don't we call it that? Well, soothsaying sounds like a really old word. Yeah, well, it is.

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Maybe there's a better word that we can use, but let's make sure it's accurate, accurately rendering the meaning of that word that God chose.

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Let's be as accurate as we can, not just change words because we want to use words that sound better, but use the words that God uses.

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We want to do our very, very best, and if we don't have a better word, then we'll use God's word, and when people look at us funny, then we'll have a little word -building exercise and we can teach somebody the meaning of a new word.

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That's okay. That's okay. If we have to use one of God's words that somebody doesn't understand, then we can use that as a discipling opportunity.

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That's not a bad thing. So we've got two words that we're going to look at tonight. The first one is divination or diviner, and the other one is soothsayer and soothsaying, and that'll bring us to the conclusion of our word studies as we're looking at the major terms that are used.

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Remember that witchcraft is the general term, witchcraft is the general term, the big term, semantic field, big term, and then all these other terms are found within that.

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So witchcraft is the big term that encompasses all of it, and then there's particular forms of witchcraft, such as magic, creating new terms where they didn't exist before, or enchantment, keeping the term and then replacing it with a new content or new definition and so on.

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Those are all specific instances of witchcraft. So if I'm saying witchcraft up here, you understand

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I'm saying about everything, all the different types, and then these other words are more specific instances of it.

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Let's talk about diviner and divination. When we read in the story of Balaam, he practices divination.

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In fact, the term for divination is used to describe the payment that he gets for it, because it's so close, because he's the witch for hire.

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He's going to go do his witchy words, and remember we talked about enchantment being something where there's a secretive redefinition of something, and that's what he was hired to do.

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He was hired to go up and change something from a blessing to a curse on Israel and so on.

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And Joshua 13 .22 reflects upon Balaam and talks about divination. Divination, when you find it in the scriptures, very often in the original, if we read it very literally, the words next to each other, we would read divining divination, because the word is very often repeated.

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It's often doubled up, and it means to distribute. It means to distribute, to determine by lot, the casting of lots, or the use of a magical scroll.

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In this case, it would not be casting lots in agreement with God's word, where God said to do it.

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It would be doing it in an alternative way. Remember the definition for witchcraft is the demonic appropriation of alternate authority.

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Demonic appropriation of alternate authority. So it's a way of trying to get at authority, definitional authority, the authority of what you should do and how you should do it, all of that.

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Grabbing authority that's alternate than God's, and if it's not God's definition, if it's not God's authority, if it's not

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God telling us what this is and what that is, then it's a lie. And who's the father of lies?

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So where are you getting it from? So witchcraft is the demonic appropriation of alternate authority, and in this case it would be casting of lots not according to the word of God, because God did command that in certain cases.

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So it's the idea of distributing or determining by a lot, or magical scroll. It has a connection to the notion of prudence.

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Prudence. Now prudence is a good thing. But if you're trying to be prudent and determine the best way forward, you're trying to determine what's the right path.

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Should I go, there's a why of decision making here in my life, and I could go this way or I could go that way.

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And I need prudence to decide. Now if you use divination, then you're going to use some kind of casting of lots or some magic scroll.

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You're going to use something to say, which way should I go, and the decision is then made through your acts of divination, and then you go that direction.

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It's a seeking of prudence that's not from the word of God. This happens a great deal in the name of Christ in the charismatic movement, where everything can become a sign, everything turns into divination, and if this leaf falls from the tree and lands over here on the cement, then

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I'll do this. If it falls and lands over here on the grass, then I'll do that. And that's the will of God telling me what to do.

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Well, that's divination. That's not the word of God. So in divination, the casting of lots was used to determine the ethics of a thing.

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We have a very odd little trinket in our American culture.

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The ball, the liquid inside, little triangle messages, and you speak to the ball, say, should

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I or shouldn't I? You shake the ball up, and you turn it over, and the little triangle floats to the top and says, you're a moron or whatever.

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It's supposed to be a gag gift, but the form of it is divination. The form of it is divination.

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If you actually lived your life according to it, if you own one of those, you don't have to go burn it, but if you use it, then it is divination.

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If you use it like, I'm going to have this thing tell me what to do, that's an

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American version of it, a crystal ball kind of thing.

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Now, remember that very often God creates things that are good, and then the evil form of it is a copy of it, but it's perverted.

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So, God made the relationship between man and woman, and he made it good, and then the devil inspires great perversions of it.

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Well, in Exodus 28, and I'll start turning our Bibles to Exodus 28, and we're going to read verses 28 through 31, and it's in this area where we kind of zone out as all these descriptions of the stuff that they're manufacturing for the temple and for the worship of God through the priests and so on.

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There's a lot of details here, but this will help us understand it.

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Exodus 28, beginning in verse 28, and this is about the uniform of the high priest.

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They shall bind the breastplate by means of its rings to the rings of the ephod, using a blue cord, so that it is above the intricately woven band of the ephod, and so that the breastplate does not come loose from the ephod.

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There's a breastplate that the high priest wears, precious stone for each of the tribes of Israel in that breastplate as he represents the people of God before God, and now woven into that breastplate, inseparable from the breastplate, is the ephod.

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It's the ephod. So Aaron shall bear the names of the sons of Israel in the breastplate of judgment over his heart when he goes into the holy places of memorial before the

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Lord continually. Now here's something important for our purposes. Verse 30, and you shall put in the breastplate of judgment the

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Urim and the Thummim. Now don't name your kids that. If you have twins, maybe.

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The Urim and the Thummim, and they shall be over Aaron's heart when he goes in before the Lord. So Aaron shall bear the judgment of the children of Israel over his heart before the

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Lord continually. Now what is the Urim and the Thummim? The Urim and the

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Thummim were lots. They were for the casting of lots.

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Sometimes there were decisions that had to be made. They needed a yes or no, up and down, this one or that one kind of decision.

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And God said, well, clairvoyance will be through the high priest. The high priest will show you which way to go.

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Okay, trivia question. When was the last time that lots were cast in the Bible in a good sense? Not the deacons, close though.

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Yeah, they needed an apostle or placement for Judas Iscariot. So Matthias was chosen by lot.

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Holy Spirit showed up in Acts chapter 2, and from that point on, no more casting of lots.

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So we're given some instruction there about why there's no more lot casting if we just kind of pay attention. But the

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Urim and the Thummim were very helpful. Now sometimes they would give a positive answer. Yes, this is the way, or so on and so forth, or no, don't do this.

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And so you get some clarity. But sometimes they would cast the Urim and the Thummim and not get any clear understanding of what was going on.

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And so they would say, okay, now it's time to wait on the Lord. Okay, so that's the way that it would work.

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They would often consult the high priest for guidance, for clairvoyance.

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What are we supposed to do here? And if he was a good high priest, he'd say, well, here's what the

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Word of God says. We don't need to cast the Urim and the Thummim. Here's what the Word of God says. I mean, and the Levites out in your areas should be telling you this.

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You should be paying attention to the reading of God's Word. Why are these Levites, are they not reading God's Word? But in any case, let's say there's something that they didn't know how to decide, and they would come and they would consult the high priest.

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It's not stated, but I think it's fairly clear that Joshua consulted the

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Urim and the Thummim in the case of Achan's sin that was determined by lots. In Joshua 7, they failed to take

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Ai, and they wanted to know why. And so when we read in Joshua 7, it says, and the tribe of Judah was taken.

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And this clan was taken. And then Achan's family was taken.

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Taken, what do you mean? They come up and take them somewhere? No, it's the casting of lots. Is it this one or this one? Is it

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Judah or is it the rest of Israel? Oh, it was Judah. Well, which one is it? Which clan is it? And they were getting to who was the sinner until finally

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Achan was exposed. Saul tended to rely on the

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Urim and the Thummim. In 1 Samuel 14, he's hanging out with the high priest. Why? Because the high priest has the ephod.

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And Saul's underneath the pomegranate tree hanging out. He's like, oh God, should I attack the enemies of Israel?

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Dear God, should I obey you? Is it your will that I do your will?

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I mean, come on. He's already in trouble because of what he did in Chapter 13. He's consulting the ephod.

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He's getting no clear answer at all. Meanwhile, his son's off cracking

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Philistine skulls. God's blessing it, and God uses Jonathan and his armor bearer to start up the whole war while Saul is navel -gazing under the pomegranate tree.

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Now, later on, Saul had made this awful oath. Now that the war is going, nobody eat any food till I am avenged on my enemies.

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He's very self -centered, very prideful, and so on. He's going to bring great harm to his whole army and sabotage any real true victory because he's so self -centered and prideful.

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Well, Jonathan wasn't there to hear the oath because he was off doing God's will. He shows up later, and they're on the march trying to run down the enemies of God.

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He's like, ah, honey, let's eat some. And they're like, your father made this oath.

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And he's like, we've got to eat, guys. And so suddenly Saul wants to know what's going on, why are we not succeeding.

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There's sin in the camp, and so on. And they bring out the ephod, and this time they get a clear answer. Is the sin in me and my son

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Jonathan, or is it with Israel? Well, it's with you and Jonathan. Well, is it me or Jonathan? And the urn and the thumb are cast, and clarity is given.

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So you read about these things in the stories in the Old Testament, and that's what's going on. They're consulting the high priest who has the ephod, and sometimes you just don't know which way to go.

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You don't know what the answer is, and so he's casting the urn and the thumb. And they're looking for a clear answer. When Saul turned against the high priest and had most of them killed, the priestly family, and had most of them killed except for the high priest, using the sinister hand of Deweg the

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Edomite, the high priest, is it Abiathar, ran to spend time with David.

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He ran to the anointed one, ran to David, and David found himself in a situation in a city.

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He wanted to know, is this city going to defend me or turn me over to Saul? And he consulted the ephod, and he found out they're going to turn you over, so you better go.

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So he left. So we see this time and again in the Old Testament, the urn and the thumb. Now that was legitimate.

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That was a good thing to do. God said this is how you're going to handle it, casting of lots to discern which one is the right way to go.

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What is the moral good here? Which way to go? But we also find wrong counterfeit approaches, a demonic substitute for this holy grace.

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And we find that example in the post -victory hubris of Gideon.

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Gideon, the people wanted him to become king. He said, yeah, we want to make you king.

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But he humbly declines the honor. They say, oh, no, no,

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I won't be your king. I won't be your king. But go ahead and give me a king's ransom of the loot you just grabbed.

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Thank you very much. And Gideon was an investor. He wasn't just going to take that and stick it away somewhere or maybe use it for his own purposes.

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No, he's going to take that and leverage it into power. And so what he does is he takes all this gold given to him, kind of reminiscent of all the earrings given to Aaron, and he makes a golden calf.

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Well, Gideon takes all this gold, the loot that they have from beating the Midianites, and he makes an ephod, an ephod.

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And it says that people went to Gideon and played the harlot there with the ephod that he had made.

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How do you play a harlot with an ephod? What in the world? Are they offering sacrifice? No, it's divination.

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Gideon says, come to my ephod. I'll give you the answers, yes or no. By the way,

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I'll leave some at the door. And all Israel then was surrounded around Gideon.

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Oh, Gideon, what should we do? Oh, Gideon, what should we do? And he's like, now just remember, I'm not your king. By the way, his notorious son that he had,

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Abimelech, his name literally means my father is king. So anyway,

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Gideon was using the whole idea of casting lots and using an ephod in an illegitimate way, a demonic way.

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So rather than seeking a yes or no from God, divination is looking for the question to be answered from a demonic source.

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We're looking at a situation in which the diviner is ascertaining the rightness or wrongness of a concept through demonic interrogation.

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How do we know whether something is moral or immoral today? How do you know?

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Let me Google it. Oh, Google. Oh, magic ball.

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Should I or should I not? I'll just keep doing it until I get canceled.

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Then I realize, oh, that was wrong. Or whatever. Divination is prohibited, as we read in Deuteronomy 18.

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But we see it practiced by pagans. We see it practiced by wicked

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Israelites. And in Jeremiah, the book of Jeremiah, it's particularly egregious that the prophets who prophesy peace, peace in the name of the

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Lord, they were prophesying these things that the people liked. But the Lord says their words were a divination.

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Their words were a divination. They were getting their ethics for what they were saying from some other source than what he had. And we hear the same problem in Zechariah and Micah.

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So we should be opposed to divination. We should recognize it for what it is, call it what it is, oppose it, and not derive our ethics from it.

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Divination is the dark art of redetermining the ethical or moral value of words by demonic consultation.

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The idea of, for instance, and I'm relating this to the dictionary because it's a good illustration for what's going on in modern expressions of witchcraft that we encounter in our culture.

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Obviously it would be different in different cultures, but God's against it whatever culture it shows up. So the redetermining of the ethical, moral value of a word coming from some demonic consultation.

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So, for instance, the word patriarchy used to be a good thing. Now it's a bad thing. Why did it change?

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I mean, it's the same thing it was before, but now the ethics on it has changed. Anybody thinks that patriarchy is a bad thing hasn't met

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Ralph Bullard. That's a good thing. I always considered that a good thing.

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Or Jerry Brown. That's a good thing. Oh, what a blessing to see a man and his elder statesman having godly influence on generations.

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What a wonderful thing. But things get changed in witchcraft.

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I'll give you an example. I looked up some definitions from the dictionary, the 1828

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Websters and the 2021 Websters, which are a little bit different. And it's not because English has changed that much, it's because the culture has changed that much.

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I love the way that Webster's 1828 handles this word sodomy. This is in the Bible.

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How does he handle it? He just says, a crime against nature, period. That's the entirety of the entry.

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Spot on. Well done, sir. A crime against nature, period.

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2021 has no ethical, moral information at all.

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It just talks about function and no kinds of ethical or moral up or down, thumbs up, thumbs down at all.

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The ethics left. It evaporated. 1828, definition of marriage.

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The act of uniting a man and a woman for life, wedlock, the legal union of a man and a woman for life.

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Marriage is a contract, both civil and religious, by which the parties engage to live together in mutual affection and fidelity till death shall separate them.

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Marriage was instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children.

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Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled, Hebrews 13 .4.

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Webster's 1828. Oh, wow. That's a whole sermon there.

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Time to take the offering. 2021, the state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.

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Notice the total gender neutral definition. Male and female does not even enter into the definition.

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So divination basically changes the example sentence or changes the ethical sense in the dictionary.

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When a word that God calls good is neutral or somehow negative now, when a word that God calls bad is somehow good or neutral now, when the ethics on something changes, they're getting their information from a different source.

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There's the consulting of the demonic authority on right or wrong rather than getting the right and wrong from the

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Lord and from his revelation. So that shows up. And the last word is soothsaying or soothsayer.

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Soothsaying, soothsayer. Isaiah 2, verses 5 through 6. Oh, house of Jacob, come and let us walk in the light of the

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Lord, for you have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob, because they are filled with Eastern ways. They are soothsayers like the

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Philistines and are pleased with the children of foreigners. Oh, people of God, you're just enraptured with people coming from other cultures who are bringing in their witchcraft.

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You think that's amazing. You rejoice in that, and you're getting involved with that. Jeremiah 27, 9 through 10.

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Therefore, do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers, or your sorcerers who speak to you saying, you shall not serve the king of Babylon.

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This is after Jeremiah 25, when thus saith the Lord, you will serve the king of Babylon. The soothsaying prophets came and said, oh, no, you won't really, no.

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Verse 10, they prophesied, I lie to you, and to remove you far from your land, and I will drive you out, and you will perish.

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Not everybody who is a preacher is interested in telling you the truth of God.

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Not everybody who has a religious book published in the bookstore is actually interested in telling you the truth of God's word.

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Not everybody who has a ministry is doing the work of the

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Lord. Here, these are soothsayers. Now, think about that word just for a second.

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It's made up of two English words put together, and what are the two words? Soothsayer.

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A soothsayer. Paul says people like to heap up for themselves those who soothe, say soothing things, and tickle the ear, and so on.

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This is the central meaning of the English term soothsayer. We have in 2

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Kings 21, 2 Chronicles 33, evil kings employing soothsaying as part of their wicked deeds.

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This is an important thing. Soothsaying is so important to the conducting of witchcraft and the conducting of evil because you need to have words that soothe, that round out, that fog, that obscure, that make things not so sharp anymore in order to continue doing wicked, evil things.

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Lack of clarity is of utmost importance in the conducting of rebellion against God.

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The Hebrew word relates to the covering over by clouds, and by extension, the covering over of something by sticks.

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Had a rag mutt of a little dog given to us by a great aunt when

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I was a kid, and it was about this big, and you could put it on the end of a pole and mop the floor with it if you wanted to.

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And we could not keep it in the backyard. It would climb the chain link fence and jump over. And it lived in the front yard.

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It never left the front yard, but it lived there. So we put the food out there, and the birds come and steal the food. So this little dog would go and grab leaves and bring it over and cover over the dog dish with leaves so the birds wouldn't know it was there.

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That's the Hebrew word. It's the idea of covering over or camouflage, clouding things up.

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That's the Hebrew word, cloudiness and camouflage. That's Soothsaying, cloudiness and camouflage, anything but clarity.

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And so this word is speaking of ways of acting covertly, practicing magic covertly.

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It entails magic and enchantment and sorcery.

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In the lexicon of this Hebrew word, magic, enchantment, and sorcery are being used here to cloud things up, to camouflage, to make things less and less clear.

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So Soothsaying is the employment of magic, the inventing of new terms. Birthing person.

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I mean, how confusing can you get? Not even the people using the term know how to explain it.

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When pressed on it, can you please explain what a birthing person is? Should we change the holiday to birthing person day?

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What's going on here? They don't even know how to explain it. And then you have enchantment, the crafting of new definitions.

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Oh, it's the same word but we've changed the whole definition and everyone doesn't know what you're talking about because you're using this definition and they're using the old definition and everything's confusing.

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Well, this is prohibited, of course, in Deuteronomy 18, Leviticus 19. But Soothsaying is an essential element of witchcraft.

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It is the dark art of demonically clouding and obscuring the clarity of God's words.

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The clarity of God's words. This might be evidenced by the entry for truth in the dictionary, carrying mutually exclusive contradictory entries.

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You know, 27 entries on the definition of truth and they contradict each other.

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That would be Soothsaying. The philosopher Roger Scruton calls it the nonsense machine.

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Postmodern writings, critical theory authors, he calls it the nonsense machine.

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The French philosophers who paved the way for the bloody revolution, the nonsense machine.

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It involves, he says, a cry against the actual on behalf of the unknowable.

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Crying out against the actual on behalf of the unknowable.

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We see that a lot in our day. We'll cry out against the actual known recorded history of our country in the cause of the unknowable, undefinable, unquantifiable oppression that is so obvious that nobody should question it.

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It bringing in the name of a cloud that we cannot define and we can never see the end of and we can't trace the shape of it or anything else, but that's our great cause and we're going to destroy concrete good things in the name of the unknowable.

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That's Soothsaying. In this,

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Soothsaying just changes the whole purpose of the dictionary. Why do you go to the dictionary? I don't know what that word was.

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I'm going to go look it up. I need some clarity. Soothsaying changes the entire purpose of the dictionary to keep things obscure, to keep confusion going.

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Witchcraft entails Soothsaying. Of course, we have that example we talked about the birthing person or that people can use locations as their pronouns or whatever.

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I looked up pronouns, by the way. This is Soothsaying.

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You can say he, she, zai, sai, I, they, tay, ee, zim, sai, em, vir, tir, em, zeer, here, ear, vis, tim, ear.

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What is that? What is that? That's Soothsaying.

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That's witchcraft. That's the word that God uses on it. Oh, they're trying to cloud things up.

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They're trying to make things confusing with the use of their words. What is that? That's called Soothsaying.

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So those are the terms that we have. I hope you have your handout. The goal moving forward is to take these words that God gave us, that he says these are wrong and we should be opposed to them, and then consider where they are manifest in our society.

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We've already been doing that, already been doing that, trying to get concrete examples. But where do we see it in our conversations, in the news, or in articles that we read, or so on and so forth?

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Can we identify it? Do we see it? And so we're going to consider the manifestations of it in our world so that then we will respond.

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And then the last part of our study is how to properly respond to it.

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What's the biblical way to respond? And so that's where we are in our study.

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I hope it's been helpful to you. Let's close with singing the doxology. Praise God from whom.