This Week in Witchcraft - S1:E13

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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

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

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Michael Durham. Michael has yet again found some witchcraft out in the wild for us. Actually, no, he did not.

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This comes in from Joel. And Joel found it out in the wild for us, and we're going to analyze it and see where we land.

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All right, so the quote comes from a person by the name of Neville Goddard, and there's a lot of popular sayings and quotes that you can find of his online, you know, set to beautiful backgrounds, and it's like, you know, when you see mountains and sky and beautiful scenery, then whatever's set in the middle of that picture must be true, you know, right?

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If you see beauty, then what's in the middle of that beauty must be truth, right? Right. So that's the idea, but that in itself is a bit of witchcraft, so just because you have some sort of statement superimposed over beauty doesn't make it true.

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So that would be a false association there. But you found it out there in the middle of the beautiful creation. Yeah, yeah. So this comes in from our producer, which we appreciate his discernment and quick eye to this.

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And so here's the quote, and this is one of many quotes from Neville Goddard. You believe in a

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God, believe also in your imagination. Yeah, how about that?

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So this is just one example of Neville Goddard's teaching. Now, he had a view of the

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Bible that was not biblical, it wasn't according to the

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Bible's own claims. He saw the Bible more like an analogy, kind of a book that is helpful in terms of understanding the self.

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So it helped give insight into how the human worked, how the human thought about things and felt about things.

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And if anything, the Bible taught, Neville Goddard would see the Bible teaching humans how to bring into actuality the things that they desired.

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So all of his quotes are kind of geared towards that self -help, you know, speak the change you want to see in the world.

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Wish fulfillment type stuff. Yeah, kind of wish fulfillment, you know, bring to pass, you are your own

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God, bring in your own reality through your own word type of approach.

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This kind of spawns out of, or it's part of the New Age movement, but to understand what

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New Ageism is, it is certainly an overt and confusing mess of paganism precisely.

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It is a Western skin put on Eastern pantheistic monism.

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So Eastern referring to Hinduism and its spinoff of Buddhism, pantheistic meaning that there is no true separation between creator and creation, that Atman is

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Brahman is the confession of Hinduism, wherein the many and the one, the one and the many are ultimately of the same.

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Eastern pantheistic monism, all of that in terms of one, Peter Jones would say one -ism versus two -ism.

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So if everything is one, then you are your own God and you are able to bring into existence that which you desire.

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And that is not a view unique to Neville Goddard. It is something that is very widespread in popular culture today and in various strains of Christendom.

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We can point to various teachers and preachers in prominent, large churches, highly publicized, celebrated authors and teachers and preachers who say similar things.

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So we can think of various names and maybe some of the things that they say. So you can think of perhaps going back to the

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Gospel of Self -Esteem by Schuller. You can think of the same kinds of ideas being preached by Joel Osteen today.

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You can think of the name it, claim it, health and wealth prosperity teaching that has had such prominence in not only

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American religious life, but also it has been exported across the known world through the internet and all kinds of people are being instructed in regards to these superstitions.

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So the basic idea is believe in yourself. The basic idea is not to say anything negative about the self, not to say anything detrimental or discouraging about one's own endeavors, but only to continually say what seems to be encouraging and affirming and supportive of one's own agendas and paths.

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Can we think of anything possibly wrong with that idea? It's highly therapeutic.

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It is a self -centered, self -worshipping type of thing, but it seems to say go easy on oneself for having these thoughts.

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And it is converging on maybe a yearning or a tendency for all these people who are being drawn to it to have, and that's one of the things of these false teachers really prey upon the depravity of man.

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They figure out those niches or those places that people struggle and they just massage it.

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And that's part of the therapeutic Christianity and I think we actually see it in more places than we realize.

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I think they're in major denominations. I think it's even in places sometimes that we would consider to be staunchly conservative, reformed churches and backgrounds, and we don't realize that it's there, but it can sneak in through either classes or teachers that we're not really aware of.

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Sure. I mean, the heart is desperately wicked and who can know it? I mean, that's the observation and the question that is made by Jeremiah in the context of a culture, a very religious culture, his own people who were saying things like peace, peace, when there wasn't actually any peace.

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And so just the affirmation that all is well does not mean that all is well.

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In fact, it could very well be inoculating you against any further word of caution or warning to be able to avoid the danger.

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This is a horrible problem that we have in our culture today, where in everything is about affirming the self and whatever you observe about the self, you are encouraged to affirm and celebrate.

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This comes back from the Freudian techniques of observing everything that goes on with somebody and even

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Carl Jung as well, just saying, you know, look, what you observe about yourself doesn't mean that something wrong, that's just you, right?

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And so by observing that and affirming it, this is the way to health.

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You know, as long as you remain in tension and conflict within yourself, that's it.

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The problem is not that you desire these things. The problem is not that you have these thoughts.

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The problem is that you're fighting against them and you need to accept them and understand them for what they are.

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The opposite of dying to self. Yes. Yes. Going out and eating locusts and honey and wearing sackcloth.

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I mean, yeah, and we'll talk more about that in terms of of Christ's call of response to his gospel, but just a word of caution from Proverbs, right?

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So Proverbs 14 verse 12, there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end is the way of death.

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I mean, that's a sobering thought that just because you think that this is the right way and you say that it's the right way, you speak that the success of this path out loud and you pursue it doesn't mean that it's right and it's good and it's life affirming.

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The end of the way easily can be death. How do you know which way is up?

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How do you know whether you are heading for disaster or you are heading for prosperity?

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How do you know? The Bible tells us that man in and of himself cannot know that we are dependent upon the perspective, the wisdom, the understanding, the truth, the revelation of God to know which direction we are heading.

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And speaking of directions, when Jesus proclaimed his good news, he proclaimed himself.

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Now he's the one that does that, not us. He's the anointed of God. He's the chosen one of God.

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He's the second Adam. And so yes, of course he proclaims himself. Every time we try to proclaim ourselves and trying to affirm ourselves, we are presenting a false gospel, a competing gospel to that of Jesus Christ.

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And when he declares himself, his person and work, he is showing us that he is both savior and sovereign, that he is the

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God man, that he is the anointed one, the chosen one, the glorious one.

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And so what is the proper response? Well, the only proper response is that of repentance and belief.

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And this is entailed to us in a metaphor, a picture.

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And what is that? It is one in which Jesus says, if anyone wishes to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow after me.

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So what a series of word pictures there, denying of the self. There's a very clear idea of a man like what

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Paul did, kind of listing out all the things that seemed right to Paul when he was a

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Pharisee of Pharisees and saying, I die to this. This is as a heap of dung to me.

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Okay. Dying to self, denying the self, taking up the cross, which was the picture of cruel torturous execution, meaning

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I bear the suffering of denying the self. I bear the suffering, identify with Christ, with everything that entails, not only the shame and the suffering, but also

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I identify with the salvation that Christ brings through his sufferings on the cross.

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And I follow him. The picture in Revelation 14 of the saints, that they sing the song of the redeemed and they follow the lamb wherever he goes, rather than just affirming themselves and their individuality wherever they want to go.

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I remember in my undergrad, which was not a very orthodox experience, but I did get a degree in pastoral ministries and we,

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I did go on a short term mission trip down to Guatemala and there was a member of the team and she felt called into the ministry.

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So she was going to go be a preacher. So we went down to Guatemala and they got her up into the pulpit and she got up to preach and she preached a sermon in which she took some passages out of the

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Psalms and basically said that wherever she goes, God follows her and that, you know, he's always supporting her in everything that she does.

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Everywhere I am, there he is, he's following me. And it was the exact inverse of what we're told in the scriptures.

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Not that God follows us around and affirms us. That's the new age mysticism.

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That's the pantheistic idea of, you know, we are creating a God that affirms us in and of ourselves, but that we are to follow the lamb wherever he goes, affirming what he does because he's the king.

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Does this play out practically because it's preaching to oneself, affirming oneself all the time saying my imagination is something to be believed in?

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Is this preaching to oneself soft things in order to harden the heart when we should be preaching hard things to ourselves in order to soften our hearts?

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Yeah, I think I agree with that assessment. And I think that Jesus put it in terms of some people, they don't have ears to hear what the

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Lord says. He has ears to hear. Let him hear what the spirit says. But when people don't have ears to hear what

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God has to say, it's not that they hear nothing, but they only hear themselves, right?

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They only hear what they want to say to themselves about themselves. And very often you'll find that people who spend all their time, like you say, preaching to themselves about themselves, the gospel of the self cannot tolerate anybody who says otherwise.

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Right. And it's kind of a sad picture. But imagine seeing a group of people together in a room and they're all there because they agree philosophically that you should be for the self.

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But what are they going to be doing? Nobody's in conversation actually with one another. They're just sitting there talking about themselves and monologuing in the same space to themselves about who they are and how great they are and so on.

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Exact opposite of communion with the saints. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's a, there's an isolation that occurs with sin, right?

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As soon as Adam and Eve sin, they're isolated from each other. They're cut off from God. We see the same thing in terms of being cut off from the world and the flood, the separation of the nations in Babel.

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Sin separates, false gospels separate, isolate. You can think of the false gospel of feminism, you know, the destruction of the family, the false gospel of Marxism, the separation of societies and classes and classes and so on.

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And every false gospel destroys and isolates and the gospel of the self is no different.

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Yeah. It's interesting to think of it in those terms. Well, I think that about wraps it up for us today on that bit of witchcraft.

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Michael, what do you have to suggest for content? So I got a book by David Chilton called Paradise Restored, a biblical theology of dominion.

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And this is a book published by Dominion Press. And what

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David Chilton does is he goes from the beginning to the end several times over in scripture and talks about how to see the story of the

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Bible as paradise restored. And so there's hope here, there's unity here, harmony of the scriptures in watching the story of how

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God redeems us through Christ. Do you have any areas that you disagree with Mr.

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Chilton? Well, I agree with David Chilton in several areas.

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I think I disagree later on in his life after some severe health problems, he turned to an erroneous position called full preterism, which

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I totally disagree with. But the balance of his life's work was not with that.

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Also, there are some areas where in, I think he reads the text a little too far in seeing certain types of fulfillments.

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But again, you know, there's probably various areas that I just don't understand him as well as I could.

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All right. My suggestion is, and it's actually a dietary study done by Mr.

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Weston A. Price. It's called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects.

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And thus far, I've noticed that not in just this study, but kind of having a small understanding or read through of dietary history over the last century, you want to talk about a place where there's loads of witchcraft.

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If you just want to research the American Heart Association, Kellogg, Ancel Keys, they've used a lot of government subsidies and incentives to press a very inflammatory, a very industrialized diet, and with the absence of loads of whole foods.

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And it's led to lots of inflammation in our bodies, cancer, that sort of thing.

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But Price actually went out and studied primitive groups, and he came back with some results that were pretty impressive, even to the point of your diet having a major effect on your appearance, your facial appearance, and your bone structure, and your tooth decay.

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So reading through those studies is quite fascinating, and may have an effect on the way that you view health, and the way that you view your diet as well, because he is taking loads of truth about creation, and the human body and other bodies out there, and applying it pretty consistently.

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So if you want to go look at that, if you're into your diet recently, or you're looking to have a different perspective, this is one that is not as influenced by outside sources like government spending, and it was basically done on his own dime.

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So it's a fascinating study. And that wraps it up for today. We're always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week, and for supporting us by rating, reviewing, and sharing the show.

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