Sunday, August 22, PM

In 12 seconds of awkward silence. Just open your Bibles to Deuteronomy 18. We're gonna read a little bit of that. It'll be all over the place. But we're coming back to a new study on Sunday nights. We have had a few interruptions for other very excellent things, and we'll have a few more interruptions to come, and I'll do my best to review and reflect upon what we've already talked about and try to catch us all up to where we've been.

But before we do that, let me pray for us, and then we'll get started. Father, I thank you so much for tonight. Thank you for those who came. Pray that you would help us to make a right assessment of your word, that we would hear with submissive hearts, that you would give us understanding of your words, so that we may rightly apply it in our lives, following after Jesus Christ.

It's in his name that we pray, amen. We are in a study called Christian Opposition to Witchcraft, which I suppose sounds about as important as Christian Opposition to Murder. Well, yes, of course. Yes, of course, Christians are opposed to witchcraft.

Yes, of course, the Bible was opposed to witchcraft. But it's a topic that I don't know if we know exactly what to do with it, and I'll give you an example. I'm gonna read Deuteronomy chapter 18. Deuteronomy chapter 18, you can take a look there, some of the instructions.

Deuteronomy 18, and I'm gonna begin reading in verse nine. 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 these 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.

Now, there might be a few problems as to why we would not pay very close attention.

To this text.

However, one of the problems is, when we look at that list, we look at that list, and say, well, I don't know any of those. Chick, and no witchcraft around these parts. I have never met a soothsayer, and I've never known one who calls up the dead.

I don't know anybody practicing witchcraft. I don't have witchcraft being practiced in my home, or in my community, and so, Chick, God is just fine with us in this regard. And I think that we pass by it quickly because we don't understand what witchcraft is.

And we talked about from the book of 1 Samuel, and chapter 15. Remember when Saul was instructed to take the Israelites and go kill all the Amalekites. They were under the judgment of God for them attacking the rear guard of Israel when they were departing out of Egypt and heading to the promised land.

And the Amalekites struck the weak and the straggling, and did everything they could to hurt and harm the children of Israel. And God condemned the Amalekites, and said that their days were numbered. And their number came up, and God said to Saul, take the army of Israel and go completely eradicate all the Amalekites and everything that they own.

When Saul took the army and he went out to do that in 1 Samuel 15, he did not finish the job. Not only did they leave King Agag alive, who was the king of the Amalekites, but they also left much of the livestock and the spoils intact as well.

And Saul kept insisting as Samuel confronted him about his disobedience, Saul kept on insisting that what he had done was right,.

That it was good,.

That it was honoring to the Lord. We're keeping these spoils as sacrifices to God. And yes, of course I've killed the Amalekites. And yet King Agag was standing right there. So Samuel responds to Saul, and among the things he says to them, he says this, rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.

Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Now, why is rebellion as the sin of witchcraft? Well, because when you think about what rebellion is, it is a sustained disobedience to God, calling the things that God calls evil, good, and calling evil what God is calling good, a sustained disobedience in the face of God's confrontation, rebellion.

And in order to sustain a rebellion, you have to begin to change. You try to change the words or the meanings of the words. You start messing around with the language to try to bring yourself into some sense of, well, I'm the right one in this case.

And that's the necessary ingredients for rebellion. And so Samuel says, rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Jesus said, you've heard it said, do not commit adultery. I say to you, if you look upon a woman with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery with her.

So what he's saying is if somebody says, well, I haven't committed adultery physically, therefore I'm sinless, I don't have any problems. And then Jesus says, well, here's the meaning of that commandment.

In the same sense, when we say, well, I haven't boiled anything in a big black cauldron and set an incantation over it, so I haven't, I'm not guilty of the sin of witchcraft. But rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.

You see, you can commit witchcraft long before you get to the thing with the frogs and so on. And so when we read these things in the scriptures, we need to understand the nature of what is being forbidden, the nature of what is being called an abomination.

And if it was abomination to God in the days of Moses, it's the abomination to God today, right? Because God doesn't change. So witchcraft is an abomination to the Lord. We need to know what it is. Some people might say, well, we have got more issues to deal with.

There's legalized and celebrated infant murder. We've got legalized and celebrated sexual abominations. We have rising socialism, statism, drug use, crime, violence, corruption, tyranny. And so why talk about witchcraft?

Because witchcraft is how we got to where we are. And anytime any parts of the Bible get ignored or glossed over and not paid close attention to, this is where sin is allowed to thrive. This is where error is allowed to rise.

So we talked about the origin of witchcraft, which is not hard to figure out. But let's go to the definition. This is my definition for witchcraft. And I take it from the word of God. We've looked at different passages concerning this already.

But witchcraft is simply, it's just five words long. It's very easy to remember. It's demonic appropriation of alternate authority. Demonic appropriation of alternate authority. Demonic appropriation of alternate authority.

The reason why it's demonic is, the devil is the father of lies, meaning you can trace all the lies back to him. So if somebody is lying or deceiving or trying to make rebellion look like righteousness, that whole agenda of deception has an origin, and it's not God.

It's not his word. It comes from the devil.

It's diabolical.

So it's a demonic appropriation. The appropriation may be something along the lines of, I'm trying to gain authority, or I'm trying to enforce an authority. It's a grabbing hold of some kind of authority.

But it's demonic, and it's alternate. It's not God's authority. All authority belongs to Jesus Christ. And God is the one who says what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. He has all the authority.

So if somebody starts appealing to an alternate authority to redefine what good and bad are, to define what truth and lies are, this alternate authority is being built upon another source of power and authority, and it has to be diabolical, because it's not Christological.

It's not theological. It's not of God, so it has to be of the enemy. So it's a crash course in the definition, but it's something that we need to be aware of. Now, some folks chalk up things to, we have an age where it's twisted, it's mixed up, it's convoluted, it's perverted.

People say, well, they just have an agenda. You hear that, they just have an agenda. Someone says, well, that's called activist marketing. Someone says, well, that's just politics. Somebody says, that's just semantics.

I think we've got a better word for it in the Bible. I think it's witchcraft. I think it's witchcraft. And in the prohibitions against witchcraft, we learn a lot. Now, when we read through the Bible, we have several different words that fall under the general category of witchcraft, a demonic appropriation of alternate authority.

And that's the big category, and there's a lot of different examples of it. The Bible condemns magic, magicians, wizardry, and wizards. We talked about that last time, and we looked at a few examples.

But where does this pop up most clearly in our day? Would we recognize magic and wizardry in our day and know what it is that we would say, no, it's abomination to God, I don't do that, don't agree with it?

Well, we should be, what this is, magic and wizardry being demonic, is the dark art of crafting new demonic words to obscure or erase the old words. It's the dark art of crafting new demonic words to obscure or erase the old words.

This comes from the very basic definitions of these words in the Hebrew, in which the picture is given of that of engraving a new thing, engraving a new thing. And this is the word picture behind the word of magic and wizardry that God condemns.

Where do we see that? For instance, alternate lifestyle is a new term that was conjured to destroy the old term of sodomy, right? There was a new word conjured to cover it over, that's magic, that's wizardry.

Lifestyle choices replaces the terms such as divorce, adultery, and perversion. We should call things what God calls them. The word flawed, flawed, has replaced the term wicked. And so in this way, magic and wizardry replaces the entry word in the dictionary.

You pick up a dictionary, certain words are no longer there and other words are. That's an abomination to the Lord. We talked about sorcerers and sorcery last time. And in the Old Testament, the term is closely associated with joining that which ought not be joined together.

The Greek word is pharmakia, where we get our word pharmacy. The old picture of a pharmacy where you have the little bowl and the mortar and the pestle and they put all the ingredients in the bowl and they mix it all together and combine it, pharmakia.

That's the word for sorcery in the New Testament. And it is forbidden to bring together the things that ought not be brought together. How do we see that in our world today? We should be opposed to the dark art of demonically joining two irreconcilable or unlike terms.

Demonically joining two irreconcilable or unlike terms. The expression homosexual marriage is sorcery. Those words don't belong together. Sodomite marriage is not truth, it is not from God's word. It is a bit of sorcery is what it is.

Pregnant man, that's a new one. That is sorcery. Know it for what it is. Bringing two things that cannot be reconciled together unlike things, bringing them together in the same expression, that's sorcery.

Saying that mercy and justice are the same thing. That's sorcery. For example, and this is a pernicious example where the mercy of God is wonderful and glorious and we give him praise for it. The justice of God is wonderful and glorious and we give him praise for it.

But it is sorcery to take justice and mercy and say they're the same thing. They're not the same thing. As soon as you say they're the same thing, you have made the gospel of Jesus Christ unintelligible.

So now we're gonna catch up to where we are. And again, the goal, I'm hoping this, we read what the words say in the text and we understand what the meaning is so that we can apply it to our lives. I wanna equip us so that we know when someone is under a demonic spell or when somebody is trying to cast one.

Know what it is. We're up to the term necromancer, necromancy, or a familiar spirit. You'll read this in the different translations. Read this in the different translations. There are clear prohibitions for necromancy for the use of familiar spirits, for calling up the dead, talking to the dead.

You can talk about seance and those different types of things. All of this is forbidden in the scriptures. Leviticus 19 .31, Leviticus 20 .6 and verse 27. I read for you Deuteronomy 18 .11 gets forbidden twice in that context.

All of these passages are forbidding the seeking of voices of ancestors and seeking that the ancestors will now tell us what the present is all about. Oh, dead ones, define for us life. Sounds pretty stupid because it is.

The most famous story of this abominable act is that of King Saul. Remember when King Saul said, isn't there a woman with a familiar spirit in the land left? He had spent a lot of his time getting rid of them.

And there's a witch at Endor. And so he went down to Endor and had a meal with a witch and asked her to call up the prophet Samuel. The practice of necromancy, the word, the word is ovd. It's a variant of av, which means father.

It's about the ancestor. The practice of necromancy is actually the term ov, ov, ov. That's the, actually the sound. It's an onomatopoetic word. It's the sound that the diviner or the one with the familiar spirit, the necromancer would make.

It would grab a water skin. You see, they'd grab it off a hook on the side of the wall or they'd take it out of their special spot and they'd take this water skin out. And they believe that they had familiar spirits residing in each one of these containers.

And they would put it up and make some sounds in it. It would sound like ov, ov. And they would tell you what the dead had to say. Necromancer would mumble into a water skin and make that hollow sound.

So the Bible explicitly forbids necromancy. It's always shown as a negative light. No question at all, it's wrong. So what are we opposed to then? We're opposed to the dark art of demonically extracting, demonically extracting the semantic meaning of words, meaning the dictionary, the idea of what this word is all about, of extracting that from impossible sources, impossible sources.

You don't go to the dead to find out what life was about.

That's witchcraft.

In fact, it's necromancy. An example of this would be when the determination of what is right and wrong is based on the theory of evolution. Now, there is an impossible source to determine right and wrong.

In an evolutionary worldview, there is nothing right or wrong at all.

What is, is.

And it's all an accident. When somebody who has an evolutionary worldview talks about morality evolving, they're practicing necromancy, extracting semantic meanings of words, right and wrong, from impossible sources.

Another example is to, in order to understand what love and flourishing means, you wanna know what love and flourishing means, then you need to listen and sit at the feet of the hateful barren sodomites and their outreach choir.

Oh, teach us what love means. Tell us what human flourishing is, oh, sodomites. That's an impossible source. That would be necromancy. Though the mercies of the wicked are cruel, let's ask the wicked what kindness means.

Why are we going to an impossible source? Critical race theory and intersectionality is full of necromancy. The calling upon generations, generations of dead ancestors, calling dead ancestors into the witness stand and to fill the jury box, to preside over the living, that is necromancy.

Looking for semantic meaning of words from impossible sources. Roger Scruton says, theirs is an oppositional voice, a cry against the actual on behalf of the unknowable. Listen to that. It's a cry against the actual.

What really is, a cry against the actual on behalf of the unknowable. That's as good a definition of necromancy as I found. There's no possible way of knowing all of this, but we're going to claim it as truth and then condemn the actual.

Isaiah 8, 19 through 20, when they say to you, seek those who are mediums and wizards who whisper and mutter. Should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?

Isaiah asks.

To the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there was no light in them. So necromancy is basically if it was, thinking of it expressed in a dictionary, it changes the root words, it changes the language of origin in the dictionary, switches it all up.

Where did it come from? Now, the big one that seems to happen the most, I don't know if it is the most, who knows, is enchanter and enchantment. The Hebrew word for enchanter or enchantment properly means to hiss, to whisper, to whisper a magic spell, to do something on the sly.

It has the idea of manipulation, manipulating something secretively, and this manipulation occurs along the lines of experience and observation. Those are the ideas behind this word. It's whispering manipulation, subversive manipulation.

Enchantment is a form of witchcraft, the demonic appropriation of alternate authority. Another Hebrew word related is sometimes translated as enchantment, and it refers to an incantation. Now, think about those two words, enchantment and incantation.

Those are two from the, they're both from the same root. They're both from the same root, enchantment and incant, enchant, incant. Okay, they're from the same root. Enchantment means the changing of the nature or character or condition of a thing, trying to change the nature or character or condition of a thing.

And by observation and experience, the enchanter divines how and what he must whisper to bring about the desired manipulation. I'll give you an example, and this is still practiced today in the Hindu culture in India.

So the same thing happens today as it did back then. I'll give you an example. The idol maker knows, the idol maker knows that he's overlaying a chunk of wood with silver or something like that or gold, and then he shapes it into some grotesque form, and it's just a lump, it's just a paperweight.

He knows that. How does it then become a live emanation of a god? That's when the enchantment comes in. That's when the incantation comes in. If you whisper the right things into the ear of a god, and it comes alive, how can you tell if you did the enchantment right?

How can you tell if you did the incantation correctly? By observation and experience, do the prayers start getting answered in your estimation? Do the sacrifices appear to be effective? And if they are, then you have enchanted the idol correctly.

That's still practiced today in India, and it's the way that idolatry was done even in the ancient Near East. Now this term is used in a couple of contexts that isn't directly about some sort of idolatrous enchantment, and it gives us some insight in how the word is used.

It's first used in the story of Laban and Jacob. Laban and Jacob. After the birth of Joseph, which was Jacob's 11th son, he was ready to leave Laban's shadow and get out on his own, do his own thing. And Laban strongly urged him otherwise.

He didn't want him to leave. And he explains why. Genesis 30 verse 27. And Laban said to him, please stay if I have found favor in your eyes, for I have learned by experience. Learned by experience. That the Lord has blessed me for your sake.

That expression learned by experience is the English translation which covers the Hebrew word elsewhere used for enchantment. What's going on here? Laban sought to manipulate God's blessing on Jacob to slide over and land on himself as well.

I learned having you around is good. If I can keep you close by, I can still get some of this blessing. I have learned by experience. I've learned how to work this system. In another text, 1 Kings 20, Ben-Hadad was the king of Syria.

And he'd been defeated by God in battle against Israel and King Ahab. And so Ben-Hadad got holed up in the city of Aphek and him and his servants were talking about what were they gonna do? They were in trouble.

So they decided to make a play for mercy. And he sent out his servants in sackcloth and ashes and ropes on their heads. And they pled for their lives and for the life of their king. And they made their appeal directly to Ahab.

And this is 1 Kings 20, verse 33. Now the men were watching closely. They were watching closely to see whether any sign of mercy would come from him. And again, that term watching closely has the English translation and covers over the Hebrew word for enchantment that is elsewhere condemned in lists of, don't let an enchanter to live and don't do enchantment.

So Ben-Hadad and his servants, you can see they had whispered together and developed this manipulation. And then they watched to see whether or not it would work. So consider Laban did not deserve the continued blessing intended for Jacob, but he tried to maneuver himself into that category.

And Ben-Hadad did not deserve mercy. And Ahab was actually judged for sparing Ben-Hadad's life. But this king maneuvered himself into that category. And what's going on here? It's spurious manipulation.

I'm gonna see if this works. I've learned by experience that I can do this thing. I can make this maneuver by experience. And I'm watching and I'm observing to see if this works or not. Okay, that's bound up into the idea.

So in enchantment, the idea is that you would use whispering manipulations to try to change a situation and see whether or not that works before going forward with it some more. Learning an incantation.

Oh, this is an effective incantation. This works really, really well. You know, like praying to Mary. You know, like praying to Mary. That's an incantation. Or praying to Joseph. I just listened to the Catholic radio the other day and some girl was on there just gushing about how powerful Joseph was and how people just didn't get a lot more Joseph in their life.

She's never had a prayer that didn't go unanswered by Joseph because he's so powerful. It's incantations. Might be some necromancy too. So in Leviticus 19 .26 and Deuteronomy 18 .10, forbid enchantment, specifically of the kind used by Balaam.

Remember Balaam, the prophet for hire? He was asked to go do incantations against Israel. So Balak hired him to go out and curse Israel by means of an incantation. This word shows up in the text. And so he's gonna go out and do an incantation against what he was supposed to do.

He was gonna stand up on a hill far away. Nobody in Israel would hear what he had to say. He was up far away. And he was supposed to say what he needed to say to make Israel curse. The problem that Balak had was that Israel was so blessed.

Israel was so blessed. They were powerful, they were strong. I mean, all the stories of God loving them and so on and so forth. He said, we gotta change this narrative if the Moabites are gonna survive.

So Balaam, you get up there, do some incantations and let's change the scenario. So Balaam was supposed to go up and rattle off some incantations that would curse Israel. He's gonna change the nature of the thing by saying what he had to say and nobody in Israel would ever hear it.

So it was a secretive, subversive type of manipulation. And these are the things that are forbidden, these incantations, these enchantments. He was to employ spiritual power to redefine Israel from a blessed people to a cursed people without their knowing it.

Hence, the whispering. So enchantment is one of the more common occurrences of witchcraft in our day. It is the dark art of replacing the meaning of a word, the meaning of a word with another demonic meaning.

The word stays the same, spelled the same, pronounced the same, but the definition completely changes. You ever notice this? For example, the term racism no longer means the sin of partiality expressed along ethnic lines.

It now means the use of privilege to materialistically oppress minorities. I changed the meaning, kept the word, changed the meaning. In other words, minorities, by definition, are exempt from any charge of racism because they do not have the power by which to oppress.

So the definition underneath the word has changed.

How did it happen?

Through incantations. Words are redefined ad nauseum. Anybody catch the Blue's Clues song? Did you make it through all seven verses? Oh, get a barf bag for that one. Go look at the Blue's Clues song about love is love is love.

And what they do is not that much different than what happens in mainstream media and so on. The words, the new definitions are repeated over and over and over ad nauseum.

Why?

Because these are incantations. If you repeat it long, often enough, and repeat it over and over and over and over again, finally people start saying, oh, that's what that means. So love got redefined, justice gets redefined, truth gets redefined, gender gets redefined, racism gets redefined, family gets redefined.

Because the incantations are going 24 -7 of what it actually is now. The 1828 Webster's. 1828 Webster's has a definition for family. Here's the definition for family, Webster's 1828. The collective body of persons who live in one house and under one head or manager, a household, including parents, children, and servants, and as the case may be, largers or boarders.

That is very, very close to the definition of household in the New Testament, oikonomos, where we get the word economy from. That is very, very close. The Webster's 1828 is almost spot on with the definition, the lexical use of the word for household in the New Testament.

Modern Webster's definition of family, 1A. The basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children, also any, now here's the fun one. Any of various social units differing from but regarded as equivalent to the traditional family.

Anything anyone thinks is equivalent to the traditional family is family, okay? So the word family stays, but there's a enchantment going on, a changing of the definition. Many of the terms which define the role and the limits of the federal and state governments, they're still in place, but they've all been enchanted with new meanings, freedom, liberty, so on and so forth.

They've been given new meanings. So we've got two more terms to look at in future occasions being diviner and divination and soothsayer. But again, the whole goal here is to take up the words that we have in the scripture, which say, these sins are abominations against God.

These are all forms of witchcraft, they're abomination to God, and we are not to have anything to do with them. Ephesians says that we are not to be partakers in darkness, partners with those who work in darkness, but rather we are to expose what's in darkness with the light, and the light is the word of God.

The light is Christ revealed in the word of God. And we are to use the light of God to clarify the proper use of terms. It has happened to you, it's going to happen again, it's going to happen again and again and again.

You're gonna be in a conversation, or you're gonna be listening to something and someone else is around you is listening as well. And someone's gonna be using magic, wizardry, sorcery, necromancy, enchantment, something, and they may have no idea what they're doing.

It's just what, yeah, everyone knows that, right?

This is what this means.

Or someone may be really advocating along these lines. If we do not correct the words, we endorse the spell, right? That's from Joe Boot. He says, if we don't correct the words, we endorse the spell. Someone's gonna say, you know, hey, someone says birthing person.

You say, yeah, I'm not into witchcraft, right? I'm not into witchcraft. That's an abomination to God to change the word from woman to birthing person. That's hateful to the image of God. I think we should love and I think we should speak truth and I think we should care about people.

I don't think we should use witchcraft to be so hateful to folks as to dehumanize them like that. You know, immediately take the high ground of the word of God and call things what they are,.

That this is what this is.

And I just hope that'll equip you. We have a few more definitions and then after that, the goal, as the Lord wills, is then to begin to look at the manifestations of witchcraft, which we've been referring to here and there already.

I wanna take a look at that and then at the end, talk about the best ways for us to approach, you know, what does the Bible say, how we're supposed to approach that? I mean, Bible forbids witchcraft and then it says, here's what you're supposed to do about it.

So we wanna take a look at that as well so we'd be equipped to respond to the witchcraft that is rampant in our society today. Let's close by singing the doxology together. Praise God from whom all