Cultish & Haunted Cosmos: The Prologue

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cultish haunted cosmos interdimensional crossover.

Part A. Part A. I guess that's what we'll call it. Man, I'm excited. This is cool. Really cool being on your set.

I'm liking it. Yeah, our set, as you guys well know, is super fancy and very well put together.

It's never just thrown together last minute. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I'm digging this. Man, it's crazy.

When did you launch your podcast? I think you and Brian actually sent me, you both texted me, kind of said a text story,

I mean, right when you guys were starting this. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because we went on with Summer and Joy for Sheologians, and we were like, man, we would love to get the cultish bump.

A year in the making, we're almost there. But we started it in March of this year. So it was just seven months ago.

Yeah, and you guys really took off. That was really interesting. Why do you think people took a huge interest in it?

It feels like this is just something that all the topics that you guys cover, and we cover a lot of the same stuff, there's just this huge,

I would call it almost like a pulse of the marketplace. There's such an insatiable hunger for these type of topics.

Just given the response that you got to your podcast, why do you think that is? I don't fully know.

That's a really good question. I chalk it up to the Lord being very kind to us on the one hand, but then also,

I do think fulfilling a need, where we have a lot of Reformed folk that can't ignore what's in front of them.

People hear things and see things themselves, and yet a lot of people in the Reformed community just won't touch it with a 10 -foot pole.

And I mean, part of me understands why. Usually it's the hypercharismatics or the straight -up pagans that are willing to discuss things like unto this, but then they kind of run with it and take it to a place where we're not really comfortable with, or they give it a name that we don't really feel comfortable with.

But that doesn't mean it's not true and real in there. And so I think that there was a need, hopefully,

Lord willing, that's being filled or starting to be filled by, of course, you guys really leading the charge and some other people kind of joining in behind y 'all.

Yeah, no, it's just interesting because when it comes to how we've dealt with it, I mean, we always looked at Dr.

Walter Martin and how he addressed it. And even during his time, I mean, he was the one of the foremost

Christian apologists when it came to dealing with the cults, a lot of times different discernment -related issues, but also

UFOs, but he also, he's probably the most outspoken, like he was known as the

Bible answer man, but he was very outspoken dealing with topics that many, even many Christians today, even the

Reformed world, just in general, still feel like it's kind of taboo, like things like extrasensory perception, UFO encounters, deliverance, demonic possession, what's the nature of that, spiritual warfare, witchcraft, how to actually deal with a lot of these issues that do seem to be taboo.

And he would just, he would face it head on, but also he would lay a framework in acknowledging these experiences, laying a foundation of saying, hey, the scripture actually talks about this.

The Bible is a dimensional book. So even with the title of yourself, when it comes to the haunted cosmos, there is a real reality where you have, the

Christian worldview gives a distinction of creation that was built, where God said, let there be light, and there was light.

But there's a distinction, the Bible is a dimensional book where you have the physical elements that Christ spoke into existence by the word of his power, but then you also have the unseen, the unseen realm, all principalities and powers, all things visible and invisible were created by Christ and for Christ.

Now, so I do think that there does have to be balanced between the two. So in the same way how

Christ, by the word of his power, made a distinction, like he equally created both the complete physical, the material and the immaterial, as Christians, we need to have what, we have to be able to understand the world we can see physically in front of us, but also understand the unseen world that we can see in front of us, understand those haunted cosmos, but through the lens of scripture.

So I think there's just a hunger for that. I think that has been lacking. So I think what you guys are doing is really, really important, even with the things that we're gonna talk about today.

Right, yeah, and I think, you know, our show is kind of funny because we don't, or we didn't start it out viewing it primarily as a means to do what you guys are doing, which is like investigative, you know, really robust, more scholastic studies of these things.

Ours is more like we, one of our tenants at New Christendom Press and even Refuge Church is that we fundamentally believe people are compelled by stories.

We think that stories are ingrained into the human soul. And so we want to tell compelling stories, first and foremost, that just let people see like, no, actually there is something to this.

And then as a secondary measure, we're like, we'll throw in whatever, you know, biblical commentary we feel that we can provide.

But really it's like a gateway thing where we just want people to hear these stories, like modern folk tale stories, basically, and then get people to ask questions.

Well, what does the Bible say about this? Because you're absolutely right. The Bible does touch on all of these things. And I think something that Dr.

Walter Martin did that really we've all probably experienced and all the listeners probably have to some degree is seeing a minister that you really respect, that you know is grounded in the book that he preaches, and yet he's willing to address things that you previously thought were taboo.

And what it allows you to see is that when you have whatever perspective you're coming from, whether it's reformed or not, you have a field of orthodoxy, a fence line of orthodoxy.

And what people like Dr. Martin have shown is that you're actually free to explore that field.

Parameters. Right, you're not free to go out of it, you know? You don't wanna get into heterodox and Lord forbid, heresy stuff.

But within that field of orthodoxy, we oftentimes limit its scope, I think, grossly.

And we forget that it includes a whole realm of angels and demons and supernatural healings and things like this that normally we're just content to ignore until you're faced with it head on in your own life.

And then you're gonna regret not having thought about it and prayed about it and read about it before. Right, that's good.

It's like within those parameters is also a realm of truth that we must view these things. And if you don't have any realm of parameter to view it through, like we're lens, you're gonna go off like the pagan if you're thinking about the things that go bump in the night, and you're gonna start trying to contact your dead uncle in your basement and thinking that it's fine.

Because it really does sound like my uncle and it's not. Yeah, I promise it's not.

Well, yeah, and I think what's interesting as I was sharing you the clip beforehand, I think this is relevant to like why our podcast has had the audience that it's had.

And also I think yours is taken off and one similar to that is that we're looking at a lot of things, a lot of times just separately.

There's a big discussion right now between like cessationists and the charismatic world, like can

Christians have a demon or like can a Christian be demon possessed? And we're looking at that, but we're also then looking at the issue of witches and witchcraft and dealing with that.

Like on TikTok, the number one hashtag witch talk is now around 50 or 60 billion pieces of content.

Now given some of that's probably just people being silly and doing parlor tricks and stuff like that. But the reality is that there are people who are tangibly tapping into things that are real and things that are real and are spiritually dangerous that God warns against and they're opening up gateways.

You don't have control over what comes out on the other side. You have the rampant use of psychedelic use.

And when you actually look at what scripture warns about the pharmakia, a lot of what's being normalized by Joe Rogan and Russell Brand about tapping and getting in contact with entities.

The work that even Tom DeLonge has done where you have people in the UFO conversation who now are trying to advocate for CE5 disclosures, which are close encounters of the fifth kind, which is contact through aliens by means of occultic practices to get around what the government is covering up.

Like all of these things are happening and we're viewing all these things in part when we're actually not looking at the big picture, which is a fundamental change of worldviews where you're looking at where the final reality is the

God of creation, who's the father of all under which every other family on earth is named, paraphrasing

Ephesians, where you actually now have and as a view of two -ism, where there's a distinction between creator and creation, where now you have the transfer of worldviews where the final reality is one -ism, where there's no distinction between creators and creation.

All is one, all is self, and where it goes to instead of actually worship of the father of the triune

God, now it's the acknowledgement and the worship of the self and the divine feminine. And so what you're actually seeing is this transfer of worldviews, and in that process, there is a real, tangible, supernatural reality in the same way the pagans of old, they had their gods that they were tapped into from Greek culture to Persian culture.

They all had their temples in the high places of things they were tapped into and connected to.

So now I believe that what you're gonna be seeing along the West is a lot of what would typically was reserved for missionaries and mission work overseas is now gonna be normalized in the

West. And so I think a lot of, there are a lot of Christians now, even the reform camp who probably are seeing things that they don't really know how to deal with it.

I don't know if they necessarily have a polemic for it. And so I think when we're addressing these things and giving a biblical precedent for it,

I think there's just a huge hunger where finally someone's actually acknowledging their reality so they don't feel like they're being gaslit all the time, like they're going crazy.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think like when we get down to, what

I'm trying to say is I think people are about to start reaping what they've sown and essentially viewing human history in two discrete parts and thinking that everything up until about 1850 was borderline not real.

It happened, some of it surely happened, but those people just lied all the time. They were crazies.

And now we're in this enlightened modern age, I guess it started at the Renaissance, maybe even far earlier than 1850, where we now know what's right and what's wrong.

We now know what's true and what's untrue. And all the crazy stuff, well, it's just not true.

And so you still, even today, you still have the trope of someone who encountered Bigfoot or saw a

UFO or think there's a ghost in their house and they get mocked by a large portion of people. And people are about to start reaping the rotten fruit of doing that.

Because human history isn't split up into two discrete parts, it's one big story. And it has major themes and major sections.

And so I think that people are about to start realizing that we actually do still live in a cosmos that's haunted epistemologically, realistically, ontologically, economically, by the overwhelming victory and ownership of Christ over everything and also the usurper who wants to come in and say, no, it's actually mine.

Like that, those two hauntings are still occurring. Haunting in the sense that it's just this backdrop, common denominator for everything that happens in the world.

Everything is a war and a battle and a fight between the two opposing forces of supernature,

I'll say. And so I think that we're about to start seeing the consequences of ignoring the truth and validity of that that the

Bible actually gives to us. And so you see, we were talking about this a little bit before recording. You see this in the different creation myths of people all through the world.

Even before the global flood stuff, let's just look at the creation stuff. Like you have the

Greek myth of chaos reigning before time and space and everything. There was just chaos.

And then from chaos comes these seven primordial essences. And then they have the titans and then they have the gods.

And so the point is, the Greeks are saying that instead of the divine logos, by whom and through whom all things were created and for whom all things were created, and the triune

God that accomplished it all economically, instead of that, you have chaos, not logos, and you have three corrupted generations of divine offspring that create a horrible mess of the earth that they have to keep redoing because they just keep screwing it up.

So instead of triunity, you have three corrupted generations of divinity. And then instead of logos, you have chaos.

And the point is, is that epistemic battle has never stopped. It's been repackaged.

Maybe people that are pagans don't think the way the ancient Hellenistic Greeks did about it, but it's still here.

And we're gonna have to reckon with it. And answers like the Big Bang and evolution is not going to be the thing that reckons with it.

Yeah, that's what we're coming out of right now, essentially in the worldview or the world, let's say like in the modern

West is atheistic materialism. Like that's the reality, like this pagan shift or judgment that God is placing on the

West world is because we have the bastard children of atheism. You know, and they're trying to get explanations for things that their parents didn't give them explanations for, or Carl Sagan couldn't explain for them, you know?

So they're going to, they have no parameters, right? They had no one actually giving them parameters of truth in which to actually view these weird things that are going on, or they're not even getting answers to any type of spiritual question that they have.

Like, Jerry, you're talking about earlier about this invisible realm in which is around us. I mean, the human body shows us that, right?

Like I'm looking at you, you're physical, but you're also spiritual, right? But I can't see that, but I know it's there.

I know your spirit is there, but people like, if you didn't grow up in the church, right?

They didn't grow up with this type of worldview. You know, they grew up with that, they're purely matter in motion.

And so when weird and odd things happen, there's no explanation for them. And then there's nowhere for them to stay in a good, healthy realm.

They don't go to God for the answers, they go to chaos. Right, and so very practically, if you have your feet planted firmly in midair from your childhood to adulthood, and then with materialism, and then suddenly you're faced with the brute fact of like,

I think that my friend was just demonically possessed. Right. Like I have no other way to understand what

I just saw. Well, who are you gonna turn to? You're gonna turn to the ones that are talking about it. Maybe it's

Roman Catholicism in the best case scenario, but in the worst case, it's probably gonna be like some new agey, even like theosophy stuff.

And the Christian church has to realize that that is a real pipeline that happens more and more frequently in the modern world.

And we have to be ready to intercept it and say, no, no, no, no, no, this is the truth. Look at the holistic perspective of goodness, truth, and beauty that we can give you from God.

And you try to tell me that the theosophists got it better. Right. Like that would be absurd.

And I think like one of the biggest challenges that the church is going to have to deal with, this is cross denominationally, is how are you going to explain, like deal, say a member of your congregation comes in, say is talking to you and Brian, and they say, hey, my sister was playing.

I was toying around with a Ouija board. We had a conversation with her, said, hey, you shouldn't be messing around with this stuff.

And we decided to kind of, you know, go a little cage stage and we put a pipe, we rebuked that Ouija board, we put a

Bible on top of it. And all of a sudden the Bible flew across the room and the Ouija board levitated.

And all of a sudden like there's something punched me. And now I flew across the floor and there was like a welt that was like, that felt like someone like had kicked me in the chest.

And all I could do was like, was to cry out to Jesus. I feel like I'm crazy just telling you about this.

Well, the majority of either Christian, I think a lot of Christian pastors or even another Christian, if they confided in them would say, you're crazy.

Did you like, did you slip in like some DMT like in order to experience that? But it was,

I'm actually paraphrasing a document, a case in Dr. Walton Martin's book, Kingdom of the Occult of something that he would go in and he was the king of the skeptics when it came to like any thing that was like some sort of verifiable event.

Like I need to have independent lines, witnessing testimonies. And he'd even say to, he goes, well, before I even want to admit something's a miracle,

I want to examine the evidence down to the blood corpuscles because there's so many things around that are being perpetuated as miracles and supernatural events that aren't.

But just because there's counterfeits doesn't mean that there's authentic. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges, one, being able to help

Christians who if they experienced something like that, like I had encounters like that even when I was a child of stuff like that.

But also one of the things we're talking about, the transfer between the

Christian worldview, theism, one versus two, is you're also seeing really since 2020, there's this huge, you call it explosion of revival of just people who are coming out of the new age to Christ, like in droves, it's nuts.

Even major new age influencers are trying to figure out how to address it. They're trying to figure out, okay, how do

I actually handle this? Because so many people, there was just someone, Kat Von D. Yeah, and I had no idea who she was even until people started tagging me on her, but she has large, like 9 .2

million followers, has a pretty large following. But people like her are just coming out in droves.

And it's like, okay, what do you do with this stuff? But when you're ministering to and counseling these people, you have to acknowledge a reality that they have seen things that we haven't seen, praise the

Lord. But it's something that's real, that scripture talks about. And if you don't acknowledge that reality, you're gonna end up gaslighting them and they're gonna go somewhere else looking for answers.

And the reality is like, I have plenty of charismatic brothers on that side of the aisle that I love, that I care for, that I show charity to, but there is a reality with the majority of people who come out of the new age and the occult to Christ, they end up in a charismatic church.

And the reason why is because whether or not you agree with how they handle things in their camp, they do acknowledge the true tangible reality of the supernatural realm.

And that's an area that, especially in the reform world, needs to really reform on.

Since we're reformers, we have to always be reforming. So I have some thoughts to what you just said. Andrew, I'd really like to, from a pastor's perspective, like what you think about this.

So the first thing is I don't, so you're saying that just because there's a counterfeit doesn't negate the authenticity of some things.

I would say like, yeah, the abuse of the thing doesn't negate the use of it. I would even say a counterfeit almost validates the authentic, because it'd be absurd to have a counterfeit of nothing.

And then the other thing is that God's not capricious. He doesn't give us things to do and then fails to equip us to do them.

He equips us to do everything that he commands. And one of the things that he commands of a minister, of the pastor, is to pastor everyone that comes into his church, becomes a member of his church and says,

I'm gonna give an account for your soul to the living God, weighty charge, as you well know.

So how do you reckon with the fact that a lot of us, because praise the

Lord, we were raised in homes that weren't exposed to those kinds of things. But if we do get into some kind of like pastoring situation with someone that did, how can we be equipped to properly shepherd that person and give an account to God for their soul and what we've done?

Does that make sense? Does that question make sense? That makes perfect sense. I'm an elder candidate right now, so I'm not a pastor yet. I'm a deacon.

You're the closest to all. We're the same bro, I'm a deacon. Yeah, but you're a candidate. I'm just a deacon. All right, all right, all right.

So no, yeah, I think that's a great question. I think a pastor needs to be equipped with what's going on in the culture.

Like the pastor has to be culturally aware of the world around him. Like a pastor - Has to know the times.

Yeah, know the times, know the spirit of the age, because the people that are gonna be coming into your church, hopefully are coming to Christ from that, right?

So in order to best equip them to be on your best defense against the dark arts,

I don't even know why I'm speaking like some weird Hogwarts terms here, is to know your word.

I think it's also to think covenantally, right? And to think mainly on Christ and his kingship and his authority and his rule and his power over all of it.

So what do you mean covenantal? Because I don't know if people know this, but our view of the covenant is slightly different between the two ends of the table.

Oh, right, right, right, right. You guys are Baptists. So let me explain. So I'm thinking - I am not. Right. I'm not gonna say what

I am. Yeah, so let me explain. When I'm thinking terms of covenantally, I'm thinking about Christ's kingship.

And I think we would probably agree 110 % on the covenantal exchange that happens. So with Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, we have

Colossians, right? Where all rulers and authorities are disarmed and put to open shame through him. That federally, as a human being, my representative's no longer

Adam, but in terms of a king and a ruler of the world in which the world will prosper, I'm also not under the headship or covenantal curses of local presidents, right?

I'm under Christ and his kingship. Love it. And I'd say so is the world. So covenantally, through what

I can see and what I can't see, it's all ruled and owned by Christ. And since I'm kept in him, there's nothing but conquering, right?

We are more than conquerors in him who loves us. So that's what I mean. No, that totally makes sense.

I would add another layer to that. Let's go. Let's see if you agree with it.

Of course I agree. The covenant head of humanity is Christ now. You can reject your covenant head and you will be damned, or you can accept your covenant head in faith and you will be saved.

A family, you would agree, is also covenantal in structure to some degree.

So what if you have a mother and father who actually, actually

Walter Martin talked about this in that video that you guys sent me. I won't spoil everything for our upcoming exorcism special, but basically this woman, she was married to a

Christian man. She was a teacher of Sunday school in the church. She had been on mission trips her whole life.

She was bearing the fruits of being a Christian for the most part, and yet she became demonically possessed.

So it's a red flag that, okay, she was not a Christian and she, Lord willing, or praise

God, became one. But what does that do to the children? That's the question that I'm getting at.

Because I think that another layer to the problem that we're seeing with the incredible bankruptcy of materialism is that you're also seeing lines of materialism that are coming to an end.

But just because a line of materialist thinking comes to an end doesn't mean its influence suddenly stops.

So really what I'm getting at is kind of a question, kind of just a speculative observation.

What if we're about to see in the, at least some non -negligible percentage of the church, an incredible mix up between people that are being faced with the brute reality of the supernatural, and yet they've been raised for generations materialistically, and they have absolutely no clue what to do with it, versus parts of the body of Christ that are not that way and are gonna be tempted to maybe grow impatient.

And then also another layer to that is what about families who were into the occult and new age practices and things like that for generations, and then their children become saved?

Like the baggage that comes from that, that has to be a huge pastoral concern, especially in Utah.

Oh, for sure. Because it's been pagan for its entire history. And so anyone that comes to Christ in Utah that's lived here their whole life has either been grown up in a home that used to be

Mormon, and is now probably some weird new age atheism, or is still

Mormon and they are the ones leaving it. So I guess, what are the implications of that? Do you guys think?

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Yeah, well, I think there's layers to it, you know, and I think there's extremes of everything, you know, right now, like in the whole, like in the whole cessation versus like charismatic, it's kind of like some major tribal gangs in New York tribal warfare going on between the camps.

Dibs on Daniel Day -Lewis. Right. Oh, I know, I wanna get, I feel like I'm also wanna like get into character with him, but you know, a lot of times in the charismatic world, they will talk about like generational curses, right?

And I think there's ways in which they take that too far, but there is something in scripture about 1 ,000, you know, with you being on the

Presbyterian side of things, about 1 ,000 generations and when you, about a faithfulness, and when you look at Psalm 112, which is one of my favorite

Psalms, when it talks about the blessed man who fears the Lord and how his generations will be blessed.

So there is this principle about this river that flows downstream or upstream of just your generations that go past.

And I think there is something that is truly tangible when you look at, you know, there is, you talk about people who are saved, they have a whole history of their father and their great, their father, their grandfather, and great -grandfather, for example, being like a rigid alcoholics.

You have people that are saved out like the, during like the Prohibition Movement or their family lineage goes back there.

And there is something about carrying down the sins of the next generation or, you know, the sins of the father and also parental reconciliation.

Malachi, when it talks about the spirit of the Lord has come upon me and how the hearts of the children will be turned to their fathers and the fathers will be turned to their children.

So there is something that is true and tangible there. And I think there is times where a lot of history of families are connected to the occult, especially when it comes to like the covenant of witches, there is something when those sort of people come to Christ, there's this huge amount of spiritual warfare, both pre -conversion, because when they're all of a sudden they're starting,

God's beginning to draw them, then afterwards where there is that sort of a lot of spiritual warfare, or even sins of the past in the same way in which, you know, like when our earlier days during at a, when we were at Calvary Addiction Recovery Center, where Jeff was a chaplain at, so the majority of people coming out of our congregation were former drug dealers, former hookers, former, you know, you name it, like the

Jesse Pinkmans, all the Jesse Pinkman -like characters, and every character in Breaking Bad was like on some level part of Apologia during the early days.

And, but yeah, we have, for example, somebody who, you know, committed like a couple of felonies before they came to Christ, where they did things that were wrong and there were consequences for that, even like post -conversion.

There might be a tangible reality I'm open to where somebody where they tapped into things and they broke

God's law as far as things that are unseen that are still consequences you kind of have to deal with, and that's gonna be a part of like their sanctification.

So I think I have sort of seen that where there's a lot of unique sanctification going on with like weightiness of somebody who comes out of the new ways.

There's so many different things that happen. Like they, a lot of them, when they first come to Christ, they become very conspiratorial.

And in fact, 2020, because the whole world is such a madhouse, that's a lot of them just sit, they sort of question the world around them.

Their pre -commitments of, when you're with the new ways taught about them were kind of shattered, but then all of a sudden your confidence is in this hidden secret esoteric knowledge.

And all of a sudden when that skills go off your eyes and you realize that all of that was satanic deception, you usually pendulum swing where all of a sudden everything's the devil almost.

And there's a reason just from an eschological standpoint where the majority of people who are in the new age and the occult, they go into a very rigid dispensationalism.

So if you look on what's going on in Israel, everyone I know who's an ex -new ager, they're all into that, right?

And the reason why is just because that's usually where they end up. But yeah, I think that when it comes to this is that they do have a lot of, even like new age

PTSD, right? Even if we're talking about someone whose life is hidden with Christ and God, they have just a lot of sort of baggage even when it comes to experiences and they view the world through that.

That's why even in the whole conversation about Halloween, if we talk about that, there's a reason why the majority of new agers, ex -new agers and people who are in the occult, they view

Halloween in an extremely negative light because they're viewing it through the lens of how it's been since the 1970s of having this very dark, rigid approach to this day and age.

Halloween just reflects our culture right now, which is a culture of death. Yeah, I think a good way to think about it in terms of,

I would say, quote unquote, generational curses, I think every generational curse that you may have grown up with, if you become saved, it's broken, it's done, it's gone.

And I think there's an overwhelming support in the New Testament where Paul's constantly reminding Christians, such were some of you, you have been crucified with Christ.

The life I live, no longer I live for me, but I live for the Son of God, paraphrasing, that it doesn't necessarily have a power over us that it once had, but we need to have our minds restored through scripture, essentially.

Sanctification is different from justification. And justification is, you are saved, you are validated before God by your mediator.

But sanctification now is the long and usually grueling process of growing in holiness.

And so, yeah, I guess the point is like, we have to make sure we draw a line of distinction between evangelizing these people into the church, praise

God, and then also then shepherding them. These are two different tasks and they require different skillsets, different wisdom, all these things.

Now, it's very fascinating. That is some interesting stuff. Like we live in a world in true reality that because of what

Jesus Christ did on the cross, no matter what, everyone is essentially coming to Christ in one way, right? There's either his judgment or his blessing.

Christ is Lord. In Psalm chapter two, right? So when we're even thinking about what's going on in our world today, none of it is outside of God's control.

A rise in paganism doesn't mean that God is losing anything. No, it's the exact opposite.

It's because our nation has to obey what Christ says and we don't obey him, we get handed over to things.

Right, yeah, exactly. I always think of it like the armies of men in Lord of the

Rings at the Black Gates, the men of the west of the Black Gates of Mordor. And, you know,

Gollum and Frodo together kind of throw the ring into the fire and everything crashes.

Barad -Dur falls, the gates are crumbling, the ground is swallowing up. This is the movie version, but the book is similar enough.

And so the victory is won. That's Christ on the cross, his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

That is the victory that is won. And it's overwhelming. The world is Christ's. It no longer is the prince of the power of the air.

It is under the dominion of Christ completely. But there remains outposts of the enemy that have to go and be dealt with.

This is one of the things, if we want to get into like more Halloween -y type stuff, Halloween -y. Halloween -y.

I actually used to listen to a podcast called The Halloweenies. I don't recommend it, the language is foul, but it was like fans of the movie on Halloween.

Mike Myers and stuff? Yeah, and they would just geek out about like all the behind the scenes stuff. Anyway, funny name.

So this is one of the things that drove the Puritans to the new world was their functionally post -millennial eschatology, recognizing

Christ's dominion over the whole earth and saying it's our duty, it's our birthright to take that dominion because we are already belonging to Christ.

Two parts of the world that don't yet know its covenant status. Your covenant status is already there, you just don't know it yet.

Exactly. So we have to make sure you're fully aware of what's going on. And that was, apart from like political stuff with the

Anglican church, that was one of their big driving forces. And so when they got here, and I'm sure you guys know this, they would clear out the

Massachusetts Bay Colony and all the other New England colonies. And anything that was outside of that perimeter that they cleared belonged to the devil in their eyes.

They were like, the devil is still reigning here because he knows that whatever people or whatever land and animals are there don't know the covenant status yet.

And so it's fertile ground for the devil to go and sow his seeds of deception. And so they literally thought like, if you spent a lot of time in the woods, they didn't trust you because you're like, why are you spending so much time in the realm that the devil is still trying to control?

So we get into the witch thing. A lot of the reason that people got accused of witchcraft, well, not a lot, some of it, was because they spent an abnormal amount of time in the woods.

And so they saw that as, well, that's the devil's playground. Like literally, that's where the devil still thinks that he can reign in his own self -deception.

Why would you go there and spend a lot of time? We have to go there in an organized way together.

You know, but anyway, like that just shows us how deep this idea of covenant restoration of the world goes.

Or even the land itself has to be made aware of the covenant status so that it can begin to bear the fruit of righteousness and the people in keeping with repentance.

But let's talk about witches. Yeah. Are y 'all cool with that? Yeah. What do you think? I mean, they're real.

Crazy open -ended question. I mean, it's real. They have a worldview where they do believe that there is, and it's also the worldview of one -ism where there's no distinction between the material and the immaterial.

And so because of that worldview, they believe that they can somehow create elemental potions and they can manipulate spirits.

And that's usually, and you have white witches and you have white magic, dark magic, and you have all these, but there's a fundamental worldview, which it comes from, which is one -ism, a distinction between the, no distinction between the material and the immaterial.

But what the powers that they're tapping into to do these things are via satanic power.

So in reality, the witches are living in a world that's created by Christ and for Christ, where the only thing that they're doing, one, is given by permission by God, that nothing happens without his consent, but ultimately they're giving themselves over to the enemy to be able to tap into these things.

So yeah, there's a tangible reality to it. And I think people realize that, that if everything was a sham and this whole thing is a hoax, there's no, sometimes the marketplace speaks for itself.

So when there's 50 billion, the hashtag witch talk is a 50, 60 billion, I could look it up right now and see what it is.

There's a tangible, something doesn't get to that length of interest without there being a tangible reality to it.

Right, some kind of power. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, witches are real.

I think there's this thirst for esoteric knowledge, secret things that leads people into the occult to do spells or any type of incantation or ritual, typically based off of a text or a writing, right?

Their own sacred types of utensils or objects. And they exist, absolutely.

Do I, am I scared of them? No. Right, yeah, I don't think any Christian should be. Right, yeah, and I think the modern form of what we could call a witch on like witch talk or something like that is nothing like a medieval form of witches.

I'm not even sure what the medieval form of witches is. You could probably tell me, but yeah, a lot of it is just based off of the

Corpus Hermeticum, which is a body of writings that was discovered around the Renaissance period that was translated into the languages of that time, which had, the phrase of as above so below comes from the

Corpus Hermeticum. A lot of our occultic, modern day occultic practices literally come from those, that body of writings, like 24 different bodies of writings.

And even some of the early church fathers mentioned the Corpus Hermeticum. I did not know that. Yeah, it's a -

The as above so below thing is really striking. It's Hellenistic Egyptian writing. The Corpus Hermeticum, at least where it comes from, that's the claims of it.

So it blends Egyptian occultism and some early Greek occultism together.

The Corpus Hermeticum, yeah, you can look it up, it's an actual thing. Yeah, because we're looking, one of the big things that we like to talk about on Hanukkasmos is how the deception of the deceiver or the deceivers really doesn't fundamentally change.

It's always like, has God really said, and iterations of that. But it is repackaged for different periods of technological advancement or societal advancement in the world.

And so I was just thinking recently like, and even just listening to you guys talk right now about kind of the timeline of witchcraft through history.

So we know, of course, the Canaanites were engaged in it heavily. And the law of Canaan included necromancy, sorcery, witchcraft, all that stuff.

We see the Witch of Endor in King Saul's day, and she's doing very traditional witchcraft, familiar spirit, communing with the dead.

It's charlatanism, but it's actually real charlatanism in a way, if that makes sense. But then it almost seems, so then in the

Middle Ages, actually, what's really fascinating is that with the spread of Christendom, you had a complete stoppage of witchcraft.

Well, praise God. Or complete enough to where it doesn't show up in the historical record during that time. But instead what you had were more light magic practices, and even the clergy practicing the use of charms, where they would use a charm or a talisman to like bless a field or someone's livestock or whatever.

They amalgamated something. Right, which is like just kind of the same thing. Isn't that also like the belief in sacred relics?

Yes, yeah, exactly. So you have that, which seems very akin to everything, but it's repackaged to be

Christian now. And I'm not gonna propose any views on that at all.

But, and then now in the modern day, you have this like, it's almost like the twisting of nature's arm to achieve ends that are contrary to nature.

You know, like someone sent me a video of someone pouring blood that they had spilled, they like got a cut or something, and they collected the blood from the cut before they stopped the bleeding.

And then they poured it back into the earth. And the idea was that you're giving your, which is interesting that they know that this is true, you're giving your life essence, we're told by God that the blood is the life of a thing, back into the source of life,

Gaia, mother earth. And you're like, that's just witchcraft. That's just plain, whatever end you're hoping to achieve from that is bad.

It's a witchcraft end. But it's fascinating how you can even see clear demonic influence in a brand of Wicca today that's very focused on nature and material and supposedly natural things.

It's just funny how that demonic influence permeates everything. Absolutely.

And it makes it a really valid and I think a tricky deception. Yeah, I mean, Paul kind of highlights that in Romans chapter one, when we exchanged the worship for the glory of the immortal

God for images resembling creeping, crawling things. And we worship the creation instead of the creator, like false worship, false gods, like these things have been things we do all the time.

It's interesting you talk about the blood. It's not like early in the Bible, we hear about the blood poisoning the ground. It's the exact opposite in all reality.

The source of life doesn't come from the ground, it comes from God. Well, it's interesting. So are y 'all doing the

Bible reading plan that Moscow puts out? Do y 'all follow that? Oh yeah, I follow that. Okay, that's what I follow too.

And we're in Leviticus. And so Leviticus 18 is one of my favorite chapters because it goes through just all of these horrible sexual practices that the

Canaanites were doing. That's not why it's my favorite chapter. And then it gets, it interjects really quick.

And you shall not give your children to Molech, some language along those lines. So already you're thinking, okay, so sexual degeneracy is somehow associated with child sacrifice, at least in the minds of the

Canaanites. And then it says that it's for these reasons that the land is spitting them out and vomiting them up.

Vomiting them out, yep. That verse is crazy to me. But when you start to think of things in terms of the blood being the life of a thing, well, sexual degeneracy does spill human blood, clearly.

Child sacrifice very obviously spills innocent human blood. And so when the land is drinking that up, it grows sick.

And so it spits you out. And then the land later drank up the river of life that was the blood of Christ.

And from there, it spread to cover from the river to the ends of the earth. And hopefully things will be made better.

But then you take that and I'm like, coming into the modern day, I always say this unironically.

I'm like, man, imagine how beautiful Utah is gonna be in 500 years when it's Christian. We're not gonna have a drought anymore.

It's gonna be fertile and beautiful. Not just the mountains, but like all of it is gonna be beautiful.

Why? Because the land is gonna be drinking up the blood of wickedness. It's gonna be instead enjoying the fruits of the righteous who are spreading

Christ all through the, anyway. I'm just ranting. No, no, no, Pastor Wade and I talk about this all the time.

We say, I'm like, man, they really want it to rain out here. Well, they need to get on the news and they need to tell people to repent of their Mormonism and come to Christ.

They say Christ is Lord. Yeah, it'll rain. It'll probably rain. Yeah, well, even talking about the spirit of Molech is that if you were to tell us, like when we started the abortion ministry with Apologia 10 years ago, that the majority of people working at the

Planned Parenthood were people that were devout Satanists, members of the temple, the satanic temple, or even witches that were out there.

Like one of the very first times I was out there at one of the, we had the first End Abortion Now Conference and then we went out to the most popular

Planned Parenthood here in Phoenix. I was on the front lines and I had witches coming up to me trying to throw incantations and curses or blowing incense in my face.

Wow. And I just was like, oh, okay. Well, I now know whose team you're on. Yeah. And I just rebuked them.

I said, yeah, Christ is Lord. And those elements, whatever you're throwing at me has nothing over Christ's completed work.

I just quoted Colossians 2 .15, I just proclaimed that. And I just said, you've got no, whatever you're trying to throw at me has no authority over me.

And it was just like, and I'm doing this, it's like, this is just happening in real time. I'm just saying these things because I feel like this is what

I was being inclined to say to these witches that are trying to curse me. You know, and it was just like, why should we be surprised when you see people like demonically manifest?

I mean, when you were looking at with Jeff, with Pastor Jeff, he was at John Barrow, the clinic with John Barrow with Florida.

And he was talking about the interactions with them. And he said from the pulpit, said everyone, these people that I was interacting with, they're all controlled by demons.

And we should have a polemic where we shouldn't be afraid to say that because in a way, the same way how they put their children to the fire, we're doing the same thing now.

Like all, now when you look at when, like there's a reason why, when you look at Romans chapter one, excuse me, when you look at Romans chapter one, and when you look at the very first thing that happens when you worship the creation, instead of the creator, when you embrace a worldview of one versus two, the immediate by -product of it, there's a distortion of gender.

There's the places, the roles get reversed. The men take on the role of women. The women take on the role of men.

So there's a reason why in the new age, you see women try to embrace their inner divine goddess and they end up wearing the pants and all the men become super effeminate.

And you just see that. And that's one of the reasons too, why there's this huge new, like hunger, because both men and women know that's not the roles that God created them for.

But what you really end up seeing, like in the whole worldview is that this is the reason why we're dealing with transgenderism the way that it is right now.

In the same way with how Moloch was, like even Pastor James said, even the people who threw their children to Moloch knew what gender they're throwing into the fire.

Now we're doing the exact same thing. We're letting children be the measure of all things and then to back them off, then we go ahead and pump them up with something to try and change up their generals or cut off their private parts.

And this is being celebrated on the national scale in less than five years. So when you're looking at, okay, what's the actual spirit going on behind that?

That's something you have to be able to look into. And you can't ignore it. And that's why you're looking at this when you're talking about the great transfer worldviews, like the cosmos are haunted, but they're going to be, all the cosmos are gonna be under the authority of Christ and where Christ is still in the process of advancing his kingdom.

There are other things that people are tapped into. When you look at the old native spirits or when you look at, there was a film like the

Northman that was about the Viking movie that came out about two years ago. It's kind of like the

Savior and Private Ryan of Vikings movies. But it shows, it just, it was such a dark film because it just showed the brutality of these different tribal

Vikings who were just worshiping all the gods of old, but who are all just rampant and brutal and killing each other.

And there's a scene where you actually sort of, you see something about them mentioning they're aware of this sort of this

Christian God. And they're just like, who's this Christian guy? Like he just allowed himself to be crucified? Like that's foolishness.

And it's just funny because, well, y 'all know how it turned out for them. Like the gospel conquered those kingdoms.

Of course it's foolishness to their men. Yeah, so I think there's something like with our, like this discussion about the cosmos they're haunted with the advancement of the gospel, especially with being, having a post -colonial eschatology, you're looking at this kingdom.

So it's not just the nations in Psalm chapter two that are going to be conquered by Christ. You're seeing that, but you're also looking at the gods that those nations have yielded themselves over to that are in slavery to.

That Christ is in the process of continuing to make a public spectacle out of them. Shames, puts them to open shame.

And then it's too, you're like, okay, so all of these pagans, it's a target -rich environment.

What I'm saying is that we should be very positive and excited because we're post -millennials. And so it's a target -rich environment, which means that all of these pagans that we're seeing today are going to follow in the grand pagan tradition of converting to Christianity and saying

Christ is Lord, just like the Vikings did. So it's going to be really good news for us. Yeah, like that, the part of the way

I think about it, I could be totally wrong about this, but when I see God conquering all of these things,

I don't see them coming back the way they were, right? I see, what I see with the modern society and the modern forms of paganism is they're trying to resurrect the dead gods of the past.

They're like rebuilding them and they're trying to suture them up with all kinds of different things to try to keep them alive, right?

They're behind them and moving their arms. It's only a matter of time before those things fall to pieces.

It's like a Frankenstein's monster of old gods. Exactly, I don't think you can actually resurrect something that God has actually called conquered, right?

But you can try to recreate it. You can try to find different texts that talk about things from ancient times and try to do incantations or this or that.

I'm not saying there's no power in any of those things. Of course there is, but I don't think it's like it was before. I don't think it is like before Christ.

And I find it interesting because you talked about the medieval time. There were no talks about witches because Christ was conquering them.

What we should be thinking about as the church or the body of Christ is our heart should be breaking for the individuals that are searching for things to bring them peace when the true answer is what the church holds, the keys of the kingdom, which is the power of the gospel.

Because I think it's R .C. Sproul Jr. or it could be R .C. Sproul who said this. I could be wrong too. But he says the culture is the report card of the church.

So how are you doing? Yeah, well, I think it was Henry Van Til that said that culture is religion externalized.

Right, yeah. So that would be directly correlated. Yeah, I mean, and I believe that. Like if I am a

Christian and I'm looking at the world that I'm living in today, well, the church has the living water that flows out from it.

Like you said, the earth groans for the revealing of the sons of God. Like it wants to drink from that river. If our neighbor is suffering, it's because we're not getting the first table of the law right.

We're not loving God correctly in order to love our neighbor correctly because the person that doesn't know God, they can't help themselves.

So we need to be the ones to help them help themselves. So I think what God is doing in terms of letting people resurrect these dead gods and creating these

Frankenstein type religions is he's trying to tell us, you need to get out there and do your job.

Yeah, yeah. Right, these people are dying so much for some form of peace and you're not doing what you're doing that they're trying to piece together a dead men's bones when they're wearing them.

You know, it's interesting just going, kind of going back to the earth mother thing with the blood and all that. You know, we look through scripture and a clear indication of evil is serpent imagery in scripture, whether it's serpent itself or in revelation where it explicitly says dragon, although it's always talking about a dragon the whole time.

And then you look at like earth mother religious practices in like the Celtic regions of Ireland or even in Northern France and Germany.

The thing that they would oftentimes worship was the earth mother. And it was in the form of a serpent, almost all the time.

And it lived under the earth. This is what C .S. Lewis was doing in the silver chair. As he was playing off of this trope where the queen of under land or whatever, she looks very fair because she's the mother of the land.

And yet when, what's his name? What's the guy's name? In the silver chair. Oh, Puddleglum.

Oh man, I'm so mad at myself for forgetting the best character in the book's name. But yeah, when

Puddleglum finally like says it for what it is, and she takes her true form, which is this like grotesque serpent.

It's just interesting how these two things are always linked. The conflation of the creature creator distinction is always linked to the worship of earth, which is a created thing.

And then that is always taken back to serpentine imagery, everywhere, everywhere. I mean, all of the giant myths in all of the ancient world that included the intermingling of divinity with man, which all of them did, the giants always without exception came from a mixture of the divine and the human.

And every single time, those giants were leading the people in the worship of their fallen divinity, which was connected to the earth, which was of course the serpent.

So you see always, like the places of worship are usually obsessed with serpentine imagery.

You see this in Ohio with the Serpent Mound. You see this in the Golan Heights with the Gilead Refaim, that's just south of Mount Hermon.

And then you see it elsewhere as well, like in Peru and things like that. It's just fascinating how these two things are linked.

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on Instagram. Do you think there's a danger in there? I think there's a danger in ignoring and sticking your head in the sand when it comes to what

I believe is gonna be one of the major things that's gonna happen within the West. And also for the church is gonna deal with,

I think the next 15 to 20 years is gonna be one of the biggest challenges is just neo -paganism is gonna be even more of a resurgence.

I think you're gonna see Burning Man festivals in every single state on a regular basis. It's probably something my children are gonna have to deal with.

There's a danger, I think, between sticking your head in the sand and just saying, that's not a reality.

Very similar to when King Thaddeus said, I will not risk open war. And Eroquin said, open war is upon you whether you wish it or not.

God, what a king, both of them. Yes, I know. And I'm gonna go back to Gordon Thaddeus in a second towards the wrap.

I have an idea where to take this. But there's also a danger, I think, do you think there's also a danger between overreacting to it?

Because when you look at the 80s, you had a lot of crazy evil things that really were going on, but you had a huge overreaction amongst fundamentalists, amongst other people too, that created the satanic panic.

And that entailed a lot of false accusations, a lot of sensationalism, people's lives being destroyed, not people being accused in the same way the way the

Salem witch trials happened, people being accused of satanic ritual abuse without due process, and people's lives being destroyed.

When you kind of look at what's going on, I see it all around me. I see people overreacting, and I see the potential for satanic panic part two.

What do you guys think? I definitely think so. I think that humans are reactionary creatures. Boving says that the heart has reasons which reason itself knows nothing of.

So if your heart's not anchored in the truth of the scripture, then it's going to be tossed about by your own wild tossing about, which is usually your fear.

Like fear is what you, what you fear is what you give your mind to. So when you fear the Lord, your mind is grounded.

But when you fear something else, or heaven forbid you fear yourself, you're going to be tossed to and fro, and you're going to be very reactionary.

So I think it's easy. It's very easy to overreact. It's easy to get excited about this kind of thing. When to learn that something actually isn't taboo that you thought was, and then you can get way too deep, way too quick.

And you can also conflate the enemy, capital E, with the individual who's engaged with that enemy in practicing sin.

Like it goes back to something you said earlier, where like we have to have our hearts broken over the individuals that are struggling with these things.

Completely, yes. And people miss that, especially in our camp. We have to have hearts that are broken for those that don't know

Christ, because but for his grace, there go we. But we also have to have a tenacious hatred for what the enemy is doing.

So it's important to distinguish between the broad movement of the enemy, and then also the individual that's caught in that.

And say, okay, enemy, I want you dead. I hate you with perfect hatred, Psalm 109, I think. Or Psalm, yeah,

Psalm 109. I hate you with perfect hatred. Individual who is deceived by Satan, who's engaged in sin, just like I was, come here.

Come taste the living water of Christ. Be free from that. It's like when Theoden says to Grima regarding Saruman, be free of him.

And he can. He hates Saruman for what he's doing. But he still has a sincere tenderness in his heart for Grima, despite the horrible evil that Grima participated in.

So I think that that's a really easy, low -hanging fruit way to keep yourself from being reactionary and going way too far in the other direction.

And that is to always remember the distinction between capital E, enemy, and the individual, who may, by all earthly accounts, be your enemy, but you're still called to love your enemy.

So you should pray for that person, and you should hope for their repentance. And then also, going back to what

I said earlier, I think that a key guardrail is just the orthodoxy that we have in the

Reformed tradition. And saying like, we have to constantly be reminding ourselves of our love of the first things, the foundation, the salvation in Christ, and the

Reformed understanding of that. And if we don't keep going back to that and realizing its beauty and being compelled by its beauty, then we may grow discontent with it, which would be sinful.

And then we may be hoping to leap over the boundary of orthodoxy and get into areas that we have absolutely no business playing in.

So enjoying the field of orthodoxy that God's given us, exploring it fully, but when we reach the fence line, don't just turn around,

I mean, do, don't cross it, but also love the fence line. Love what you see when you see the fence post, be like, praise

God, this is wonderful. I'll go back over into that other direction. Those are very high -level, conceptual, principled ideas, but I do think they're important.

Yeah, I think Paul says that in Colossians 2. He says, all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ. And then he says, abound in your thanksgiving for your salvation.

Then right after that, he says, don't let anyone fool you in empty philosophy and deceit because of that nature of the elemental spirits literally is exactly what you said.

Right, we have to hold in tension the charge that Solomon gives us, that it's God's glory to conceal a thing.

And it's the glory of kings to search them out. So searching out a hidden thing is glorious and good in the eyes of God.

And yet what Paul says later, which is he admonishes all Christians to be mature in thought, but infants in evil.

And so holding those two things, realizing that they're friends, but holding them in intention, being pulled equally by them,

I think helps keep you on the straight and narrow for sure. Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Because we can see even within the church at large today, kind of doing what they did in the medieval time with these holy relics or whatever, or amalgamating certain pagan practices.

Like we have some churches where people are imparting shakti pot on other individuals and laying on the floor doing belly holy laughter.

It's like the same thing, right? It's so cringe. Yeah, because if they don't have the parameters, the knee jerk overreaction is also to put some of those practices into the church.

You know what I mean? The C .S. Lewis said that the devil loves two things. When someone thinks that nothing is from him and that he doesn't exist, and when someone thinks that everything is from him.

And so, just to your point, those are both, I think, equally dangerous. In fact, it may be more dangerous when an organization presents itself as a lamp stand of the living

God, but in reality is being completely deceived by the powers of darkness because they overreacted to it and ended up just doing the same exact things.

Exactly. Well, and also when you think about this whole thing about reactionary, overreactionary, like you said, there's a danger in just ignoring it, sticking your head in the sand.

But when you realize, too, in Sun Tzu, The Art of War, you know, one of the opening lines where he talks about all warfare is based on deception.

When you are small, you must deceive your enemy and in thinking you have large forces. When you have large forces, yep. And when you have large -

It just says right here, all warfare is based, and I was like, I don't know if I agree with that. I know. All warfare is based.

All warfare is based. Yeah. All warfare. But yeah, there's this, and so when you look at even like a big part of war is propaganda.

So in Christopher Nolan's film, Dunkirk, the very beginning segment of it, you have these soldiers that are walking through and all these propaganda leaflets are falling down, and one of the soldiers grabs them, they're falling out of the sky, they're being dropped by the

German planes, and he sees this map. You can look this leaflet, this drop, and it said, we surround you.

And it had all these like arrows showing where these 400 ,000 men were pinned up against the English Channel. So that's something to incite fear into people.

So there is a lot of times, I think, propaganda that is given by the enemy to say that I am here,

I am everywhere, we surround you. And you look at it through that line, where in reality, you start looking at all that's going around the world today, and there's almost this emphasis of people who focus so much on the devil and the demons and all that, where it becomes like the

King of Gondor, when he goes, abide in your posts, flee for your lives. The steward of Gondor?

The steward of Gondor? The steward. Okay. He's not the king. Yeah, okay. Look. We've got to correct ourselves, since we're talking here too.

Dinothor, son of Icthelion. But yeah, you see an emphasis where people react in that way, when you see a lot of craziness in the world right now and knowledge of the reality of the demonic, but I see people who go there and they stay there, and I see them emulating that, and I think the way the chaser, the clump of ginger to chomp on to reset your palate, to be balanced in all this, is looking at who

Christ conquered, right? So in other words, I mean, people who obsess or just make this big idea that Satan's everywhere, if you stay there, it's the equivalence of New York Giants fans, who think they're gonna win the

Super Bowl, and you're looking at, you know, it's like Aaron Rodgers, he broke his ankle in the first play. Like that's -

Some great memes came out of that. Yeah, I know. But that's, there's an example too, where it's like, this is the reality of like, where Satan is, this is what

Christ did when he came in and invaded the world, and there were spirits that were at work in King Herod, when he wanted to go, and we always look at this romanticized nativity scene when it comes to Christmas, but we don't look at the spiritual reality, where it wasn't just this, you know, beautiful manger scene as nativity scene, it was the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, landing on the beach head of a world that was just oppressed by all sorts of elemental spirits, and you see the spirit that goes behind King Herod, that goes and, you know, killed all, tried to kill all the firstborn, the same spirit that was probably in the

Egyptian, the Egyptian King, when they went after Moses. Israel becomes Egypt. Yeah, you see that parallel there, and all of a sudden you have

Christ who goes in, and he's, you know, he's tempted, he's given the same temptation, he's offered the promises given to him in Psalm 2, his promise that right now, when he goes with Satan in the wilderness, and I think when you're looking at everything going on in the world right now, when you look actually at who

Christ is, what he accomplished, the fact that he made a public spectacle out of all elemental spirits, principalities, and powers, and he nailed the certificate of death to the cross, it allows us, through the power of the

Holy Spirit, to look at the forces of darkness in the same way as King Theoden, with his armies and the riders of Rohan, to look at the forces that are doing evil in the world and yell death.

And chase them head on. Yeah, that's good. A sword day, a red day. Yeah. The day the sun rises.

Man. I've got goosebumps right now. Me too. That's good stuff, dude. And it all requires humility and contentment.

And those are two really hard aspects of human existence. Right. Humility and contentment.

They are, they are very difficult. And it's so easy to think that you're practicing those things.

And even just recently, I was talking to one of my pastors, and he's also just a good friend of mine, and he was like, yeah, you've been really arrogant lately.

And it was great. We reconciled, I repented, because he was right. But it's funny because I just was completely blind to it.

I was like, no, I'm not actually. You're incorrect, pastor, who has to give an account for my soul.

You're wrong. And you're not thinking about it right. But he was right.

And it's just alarming how, just how blind you can be, even when you've been saved for decades, to your own sin.

Yeah. And how it can creep in and a little leaven leavens the whole lump. So I think another answer to your question would be, be in community with people that are solid believers, who aren't afraid, and who even have responsibility given to them by you to address your sin when they see it.

Basically what I'm saying is practice Matthew 18. Go to your brother when he's caught in a trespass and seek reconciliation, and do it in the spirit of Galatians 6, 6, 1, and 2, where you who are spiritual, restore such one caught in a trespass in the spirit of gentleness, keeping watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.

Like this is all key. So being in a community, being a part of the community of the saints, enjoying that rich means of grace is

I think very important in maintaining a level head in all of this. Right. I love that Galatians 6 passage.

Cause he goes, he goes and he says, don't think more highly than yourself than you are. He says, you are nothing.

Yeah. Right after that. I love it. He's like, oh. I'm like, really? I'm kidding. I don't know

Paul. Yeah. Well, I mean, we covered like a lot of different things, you know, and I think we, I think we have some really good balance of reminded ways where you want to acknowledge the reality of the world around you that's created by Christ and for Christ.

And I think I had an experience, I think as we're kind of getting, wrapping up here in this sort of introductory overview of the things we're gonna be talking about in our, this is our pre -crossover crossover.

Is that what it is? Yeah. Yeah. An appetizer. An appetizer. An appetizer. What do you call it?

A cutery board. This is our contacting the other side. It's the whole cosmos. Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, 70 to 80 minute appetizer. There we go. Yes. I have found, not just in the real world of actually interacting with people, one of the most powerful apologetics, or you want to call it a polemic, when it comes to talking with people who are in the new age is believing them.

And I'll go by sharing the story is that it was about a couple of months ago, almost a year ago,

I managed, I just sort of have this conversation, this networking event with someone who is an active Reiki energy healer.

And talking with her, I just felt the spirit inclining me to like, say this, ask her this question.

And I asked her if she was taking DMT or something of that nature. Cause it was just, it was around last year's

Burning Man. And she said, yeah. And I immediately said, so what's it like? So when those little green men start and those entities are contacting at three o 'clock in the morning, what do you, how do you, are you receptive to that?

Or do you have reservation? Do they seem friendly or hostile? And she looked back at me like, how does this guy know?

And I said, listen, I don't have any powers that ever like, I'm a Christian. And the Bible actually like talks about these things of what you're experiencing.

And then I explained to her what the Bible actually says about the unseen realm and Ephesians about the heavenly places and how you're, and it allowed me to actually articulate the gospel in a way that she like understood.

And it was just seeing, being able to believe them, not believe them because they experienced that.

It's not as these things that she experienced aren't true because she experienced them. It's true because she's living in a world and she's operating to tapping into an unseen world that God talks about that's created by God, but it's also accessed in a forbidden way.

And to be, when you understand that, it allows you to be able to communicate to people who are tapped into that.

And I think more than ever, like we have to be able to have a balanced view of the seen and the unseen realm and understanding how the role of Christ operates.

Otherwise we're never gonna be able to reach those people, whether they're people who are lost out in the marketplace of ideas or people who are also coming into the church who are coming to Christ out of the new age.

Yeah. Yeah, you can't like talk to an LDS person and be like, you don't have a testimony. I don't believe that you actually experienced a burning in the bosom.

It's like, no, I believe you experienced something, but how do you know it's from God? Right. That's the question. How do you know it's actually giving you truth?

Something may have happened, but it doesn't mean they're feeding you or it is feeding you correct information. Yeah. How do you know that it's good, true and beautiful?

Yeah. Right. Right, and so as we kind of wrap up here, we're talking about, we're gonna be dropping this episode and this one prior to Halloween.

Every single October, there seems to be the whole conversation. Should Christians participate in Halloween or not?

And I feel like we've already kind of addressed that. We don't wanna just recur to the things we've already said. There is a reality though of understanding, how did we get here?

Why does Halloween look the way it does today? Yeah. And I think that is the result of the change of worldviews in the same way

Halloween has gotten darker throughout ever since the 1970s. It was not this way in the 1950s,

Norman Rockwell era. It's gonna be like that in every avenue of culture, whether it's television series, film, music, everything now is articulating and the dark arts are being incorporated into all aspects of life.

There's no way to escape it. How do you have a balanced worldview? So when we rejoin forces with you and Brian, we're gonna be looking at a topic that has been on a lot of people's mind and that is the role of exorcism.

That is one of those areas. This is something that has a whole history throughout Christian history.

You also have Catholic versions of it. You see that are being articulated in the charismatic world.

And you just see that all throughout. What's the balanced way to approach it? How do we navigate that?

Well, that's what we're gonna be tackling in the second part, part, what is it?

Part one. Part 1B. Part 1B. Part 1B, dude. Maybe this is part zero. Yeah, part zero.

Episode zero. Episode zero, dude. Yeah, I like that. That's a fun way to do it. So we'll be doing this by the time this is being dropped.

They're also, you'll have heard like a message by Dr. Walter Martin on exorcism. Yeah, which is excellent. And then we're gonna follow into it.

And so, yeah, I think it's gonna be challenging. We need to kind of look through and not be afraid to tackle it. What does scripture say about who we are?

The big part is that who are we ontologically? To what proximity when it comes to spiritual warfare, given we're part of a kingdom that is advancing, that is conquering the kingdom of darkness?

To what are the actual risks at play? When someone prepares for any sort of war, you always wear light armor if you wanna be rigid and be able to move quickly.

If you're in a defensive position, maybe you'll wear heavier armor, right? The question is, who are we ontologically?

What should we be prepared for? To what extent are we vulnerable? There's a classic book by John Bunyan, not

Pilgrim's Progress, but he had another book called Holy War. And he did talk about spiritual warfare.

We had different gates. You have eye gate, ear gate, mouth gate. Have you read the Holy War by John Bunyan? No, no, no. I mean, the title alone.

Sounds good. Just title alone. It's gnarly. But we're gonna be just tackling that.

I'm sure it's gonna open up lots of conversations. I think that is something that is inescapable. We wanna be able to take a look at it and -

Let's build our parameters, right? Build our parameters. Let's build our parameters. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what we've done this first episode a little bit. Yeah, hopefully.

Yeah. We're willing. Should be fun. Well, to close out, I'd just like to remind people, and then you guys feel free to say anything at all, but remember that the powers of darkness fear the one to whom you belong.

They know that Christ is Lord and they shudder. And so you need not fear them. Instead, expose them and do it for the glory of God, recognizing all the while that you are held and kept as precious, as a precious child by the

Almighty Father who created all things. If he is able to create all things, how much more is he able to keep safe one of his beloved children?

And he does not lose any that he calls him to himself. And fear not, little flock, for it is his good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

And he doesn't give his children stones when they ask for bread. So if any of this fears you, especially going into the

Halloween season, some people are, by their conscience, bound to absolutely hate any celebration of Halloween.

I disagree with it, but I respect that. If it fears you, then pray.

Ask the Lord for help. He answers the prayers of his children. He doesn't hate his children's prayers.

Instead, he encourages us to ask for things, just like any good father would. So ask the Lord for help, enjoy his protection, and ultimately live in the radiant joy that is the light of Christ.

Amen, that's great. That's the best way. Awesome. That's the best way to wrap it up. Well, this has been fun. This has been a blast.

I like your headquarters here. This is gnarly. Oh, thanks. Yeah, once we turn the lights on, it gets a lot uglier in here. Thank you guys for signing off.

Go check out Cultish and - Yeah, you guys listen to Hampton Cosmos. Yeah, yeah. You'll probably see this same thing on both feeds, so hopefully.

Sounds good. Awesome, see you guys. All right, see ya. What's up, everybody? If you are blessed by this content and you wanna support the gospel's proclamation to the cults while equipping the church to combat deception, then come join us and become a

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