#SpiritualTikTok Is Teaching Kids THIS? | Pastor Reacts

Gnosticism, the Demiurge, and Spiritual TikTok

The Christian God was in jail. This is because he was misleading humans and straying them away from the one true source.

A lot of young people have access to information, but they have no idea what they're truly reading.

He taught people that all the power comes from within. What did she just say?

Ha ha ha, um...

Air roar, air roar. Whatever options are available to you at any given moment, choose the one that contains more excitement than any other.

Is that great advice or horrific advice?

I am protected by God. I will always walk in good health. My destiny helpers are locating me and they will help me. My destiny helpers?

This would be funny if it actually did not lead to real spiritual harm. These spiritual TikTok videos, they're dangerous ideas. Got a brand new TikTok reaction for you. This time we're looking at hashtag spiritual TikTok.

I'm not even sure what to expect, but I imagine it's gonna be filled with heavy doses of new age mysticism. As always, we're gonna examine these things and see whether or not they fit into our understanding of God and his word.

If you're new here, welcome. My name is Nate Sala and this is Wise Disciple where I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you are meant to be. Before I jumped into this ministry, I was a pastor and a debate teacher, and I'll be relying on both of these unique skills to examine what we're about to watch.

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The link for that is below. Hey, I'm probably gonna get slaughtered for this video, but I don't care, it's interesting, it's. First, I need to tell you guys about a mutual that I have. Can't do edit because the video got privated, but I'll tell you what she said.

Basically, she had a talk with her spirit guides, right? She asked about the Christian God and her spirit guides told her that the Christian God was in jail. This is because he was misleading humans and straying them away from the one true source.

By the way, I'm not saying that this is real or fake. I'm just sharing it with you guys because it's fascinating. So I thought that was really interesting. Oh, I'm watching this YouTube video, right? Called the Theory of Everything.

It's a three hour long video. Literally in the first like 10 minutes goes over something called the Demiurge. According to the.

Okay, that's where I thought this was headed. Wow. It's amazing how persistent this particular view is. It's almost as if this were spiritually orchestrated. You know what I mean? The point is the Demiurge is a concept attached to Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is a false religion that seeks to leech off the biblical story in order to tell a radically different and even heretical one. And I'm by no means an expert in this area, although I studied it a bit in school.

But if I remember in Gnosticism, there are two gods. On the one hand, there is a transcendent God that is not personal, not connected to the world in any meaningful sense. This is a God that is distant and removed from creation.

But there's another God who is supposed to be running things on earth. This is a God who made the earth, but is more of a villain, a devil type figure. And this God is known as the Demiurge. Gnosticism is absolute garbage.

And it's constructed from probably early Jewish apocalyptic thought, as well as platonic philosophy. And it just, for some reason, continues to persist, particularly with the proliferation of the internet.

I'm like, I'm shocked, but then on the other hand, like I'm not, like, I don't know. This is what it looks like when a lot of young people have access to information, but they have no idea what they're truly reading.

According to this guy, it's an ancient Greek and Gnostic concept. Now, the Demiurge is the creator of the physical reality, but they are not the supreme creative force behind all things. The Demiurge is typically described as a force or a deity.

Hey, so this video was saying that people get lost in the Demiurge, think that the Demiurge is the one true reality. However, it had imposed itself on top of actual reality, which is the supreme oneness that created all things.

Goes on to say that this Demiurge or false God masks us from the truth, which is literally what she was talking about.

Sam, probably. Yeah. Gnosticism entails a duality. Again, there are two gods. One is the source or the power out of which everything else comes. The other is the God who creates the physical world. But this physical world traps all of us and wraps itself around our transcending goodness so that there is this split.

We are on the one hand good and transcended, and on the other, we are physical and corrupt and wicked. Okay? And so the key to our salvation, according to this idea, to this system, is to tap into this goodness that is within us.

And that's done through esoteric enlightenment. In other words, there is a secret knowledge that we need to understand and accept, and that will lead to our enlightenment, and that will lead to our salvation.

The problem with all of this is there is no evidence that Gnosticism is true. There is evidence that it, as I said, leeches off the biblical story, but in those cases, it completely violates what the original stories in the Bible are trying to communicate.

And so, I mean, if you're a Christian and you're watching this, right, like the way to engage Gnosticism is, for some reason it's, I can't say the word Gnosticism. Gnosticism. Yeah, say that three times fast.

But the way to engage it is the same way that Irenaeus did, which is to, in some sense, show that if Gnosticism is standing on top of the Bible in order to develop its own system, then it needs to get the Bible right, which it doesn't.

By the way, everyone should read Against Heresies written by Irenaeus, but there's, it's funny because all of these things are just repeats of issues that our brothers were dealing with a long time ago, you know?

So if you go back and read Against Heresies, I think there's a lot in there that actually will help you as a Christian today. But man, Irenaeus, man, he was, you know, I wonder if Irenaeus were alive today, if he would be on TikTok dealing with this kind of stuff.

Jesus, the Pharisees, and Anachronistic Identity Language

Some of you need to decolonize Jesus from your mind, body, and spirit because Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jesus was born and raised in the Middle East. He was an Arab man. He was a brown man, and he was Jewish.

And some of you don't.

Let me, let me let that one sink in. He was an Arab man, and he was Jewish.

Okay. I don't know the difference between race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, and it shows. Not only that, but Jesus was a child refugee and literally was hunted his entire life because he was deemed a threat to the church and state.

Because So I'm gonna let her finish her thoughts here, but notice the way that language is used. There already are a couple of buzz phrases that I immediately recognize that are used all the time today.

But the question is, are those buzz phrases relevant to the time of Jesus? Or are they just anachronisms? Because if they're anachronisms, so in other words, they are more recent concepts that do not fit into the historical narrative in a meaningful sense.

And if that's the case, then why use those terms at all? Unless there's some kind of agenda, right?

Ultimately, Jesus was a teacher about love and forgiveness and community. There are literal gospels in the Bible that talk about how he healed people who are handicapped. He was an advocate for the poor.

And what was really threatening to the church and state There it is again. Was that he taught people that all the power comes from within. That we are sovereign, self-determined beings. That our power does not come from a king, a Pope.

What did she just say? Error, error, error, Will Robinson. Jesus said that our power comes from within, our power. And that we are sovereign, we are self-determined. None of this was taught by Jesus anywhere in the Bible.

Jesus says the exact opposite, as a matter of fact. Matthew 10, 29, are not two sparrows sold for a penny and not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. Okay, the very lives of the birds in the sky who traveled to and fro according to the routines of nature is in the sovereign control of the living God.

That's why when Jesus is talking to Pilate later and Pilate tries to flex on his own authority, Jesus corrects him. John 19, verse 10, Pilate said to him, you will not speak to me. Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?

Jesus answered him, you would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. So who is in power according to Jesus? Who is sovereign according to Jesus? This lady says it's you.

The Bible says it's God and God alone. More than that, if you seek to be self-determined in your life, you are absolutely gonna disobey what Jesus commands you. Mark 8, verse 34, and calling the crowd to him, he said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me for whoever would save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for my sake in the gospels will save it.

So this lady is way off in her ideas.

The church, it only comes from within us. And by the way, Jesus was unalived, he didn't die for our sins. And if there was a word like shmemorist in Aramaic,.

I bet you Wait, wait, Jesus didn't die for our sins. He was unalived, but he didn't die for our sins. Where does this lady get any of it? Where does she get her information from? Clearly she's speaking of things that only come from the Bible and yet she denies the actual accounts of the very source that she's using.

That's amazing.

That's what they would have called him. Nobody did anything. Everybody stood by and watched as he carried his own cross to his own execution. I just know if Jesus was alive today, I know what some of you would call him.

I know how some of you would treat him and don't even act like you wouldn't.

Some of you Okay, first of all, that's an interesting point she makes at the end there. I mean, I wonder if a number of us in the church would be more like the Pharisees and the Sadducees as opposed to the disciples if we were to witness Jesus in action today, right?

I mean, that's definitely something to chew on for all of us. Second of all, I thought that this was supposed to be like spiritual TikTok. This is literally a video that says, hashtag spiritual TikTok.

I mean, it's in the tags here and I didn't see anything spiritual about it. However, this lady does what a lot of new age people do. What a lot of new age spiritualists do. She ends up accomplishing what a lot of new ages do, which is they go to the Bible and then they completely rip concepts out of their context in order to speak from their own agendas.

And maybe to a lot of people, this sounds profound, but to those of us who love the Lord and we love his word, this is gobbledygook. And even worse than that, it's anti-gospel. And it will lead to people rejecting the true teaching of Christ while at the same time thinking they're accepting him.

It's amazing. Just stick close to the Bible, friends. I mean, it's all there, but you have to take it seriously and you have to be a good reader of what God is telling you in the Bible. Hey, real quick, I hope this video is blessing you.

Would you do me a favor and like and subscribe to the channel? It really does help me to get this video out to more and more people. I really do appreciate it. My question is, can you tell me like everything I need to know?

New Age Self-Determination, the Law of Attraction, and Destiny Helpers

Yes, I can. And I've already actually said it. Everything you need to know is this, truly this. Whatever options are available to you at any given moment, choose the one that contains more excitement than any other, even if it's just a little bit more.

Act on it to the best of your ability, taking it as far as you can until you can take it no further do this with me, with integrity, do this with absolutely no assumption, no insistence on what the outcome ought to be or how it should look or how you should get there whatsoever.

When you do that three part formula, act on your highest excitement to the best of your ability with no insistence on the outcome, you open up and activate the kit, the toolkit of excitement. The toolkit contains everything you need to be supported in life in whatever form it needs to come in.

The driving engine that moves you through life, the organizing principle of synchronicity that allows you to do what you need to do when you need to do it in perfect timing, in perfect order. It becomes the path of least resistance that allows you to flow through your life effortlessly.

It becomes the path that connects you to all other expressions of your excitement. Even if they don't look like they're connected on the surface, it's the excitement that tells you that they are.

Do you notice a pattern with a lot of these types of folks? I'm looking at this channel here too, you know, it's called Free Vibrations. So it seems like this is another new age infused message, but do you see a pattern of communication?

Especially those of you who are familiar with my debate videos, okay? I'm talking to you. Much of the communication is presented with a lot of confidence and a lot of passion, right? When this is done well, it establishes implicit ethos, okay?

This is not the way that people establish their ethos in regular circles. In regular circles, we establish our ethos by developing arguments, okay? Arguments that hopefully are valid and sound, right?

And within an argument, so I mean like the Tolman structure of argumentation, which consists of a claim data and a warrant, right? But wait a second, that's not what these guys are doing. These guys are just claims all day long, right?

That's all they got. So to establish their ethos with folks, they speak with high confidence. They very often will seek to provide moments of realization, right? I would argue that these moments are manufactured, but nevertheless, they try to like sprinkle, you know, their communication with these moments so that again, their audience attributes to them the type of credibility they need in order to keep making their claims.

But all of this obscures the fact that as I just said, all of it from start to finish is claims. There are no arguments here.

Watch. And it becomes the reflective mirror that reveals to you anything within your consciousness that might be out of alignment with that excitement so that you can identify those definitions that don't work for you and let them go and add their energy to your excitement and continue to expand.

And then any circumstance whatsoever, any situation whatsoever that arises from those actions, no matter how it looks, if you give it a positive meaning, you will only get a positive and beneficial effect regardless of how the situation may have originated, regardless of anyone else's opinion or experience in that situation.

That's it. That's all you need to know.

Now, which by the way, that took two minutes for him to say, do whatever excites you. Is that great advice or horrific advice? Especially for a boy, the boy asked the question, right? Oh my gosh. Now, look, now I'm turning into Brett Cooper.

Like, look at some of these comments, right? This one guy goes, well, I did this, now I'm in rehab. Ha ha ha ha ha. This other one says, so instead of doing my homework or studying, I should go to a rave, right?

Somebody else said, did this, now I have five kids. Ha ha ha ha ha. These are the consequences of this kind of teaching, but it was just, it was a lot of words, you know, and it sounds profound. Therefore, it must be a good philosophy, except wait a minute, there's no data, there's no warrant to back up any of these claims this person is making.

And if you actually try to sit down and flow what he's saying, it amounts to do whatever excites you, which leads to all kinds of deleterious outcomes. So why should we listen to these ideas?

Many people on your planet choose to complicate things beyond that and make them more difficult, but they don't have to. If they do, then that's their process. But it all comes down to understanding that what you believe to be true, what you define to be true is how you experience your reality.

Ah, there's the claim. What you believe to be true is how you define your reality. Which by the way, this kind of idea is shared by so many new agers, it's not even funny. But the question for this person is, even if this were true for a lot of people, what follows from this?

That therefore objective reality conforms to your beliefs? Because if that's the implication, that's a wild claim to be making that again, needs some data and warrants to support it. But hold on a second, maybe the opposite is true.

Right? Like maybe objective reality does not conform to our beliefs. Maybe our beliefs should conform to objective reality. Right? Like I've used this illustration before, but imagine that you're holding two tablets, right?

Two round white tablets in your hand. One of them is aspirin, the other one is arsenic. Okay? You're about to swallow one because you have a huge headache. But wait a second, if it was really true that objective reality conforms to your beliefs, well then it doesn't matter which tablet you swallow because if you just believe it will cure your headache, it's gonna cure your headache.

Right? But is that actually true about reality? No. And if these same principles apply to the physical world, why should we think that those same rules all of a sudden don't apply to the spiritual? The fact is it does, ladies and gentlemen.

And the only spiritual faith that consistently gives the best explanation for the way reality works is Christianity. All of these other ideas and faiths, they lead to huge non-rational leaps that force us to deny our own experiences.

And that your beliefs generate your feelings, your thoughts and your behaviors. So anytime you have a behavior you don't prefer, a thought you don't prefer, a feeling you don't prefer, you can always trace it back down the line to something you must believe to be true that you're not aware of.

Find out what that belief and definition is. When you identify it, if it's out of alignment with your true self, you will find that it will suddenly be nonsensical and illogical and you'll drop it and let it go.

If you don't drop it, if you still behave the same way, you haven't found the deeper belief yet, keep digging. That.

It's amazing. So the measure by which you should gauge yourself is again, not objective reality, but a deeper version of yourself. The deeper belief that is somewhere buried inside of you. Right? And so the investigative process entails not looking outside of yourself, but deeper within.

Are you seeing how this works? Are you noticing that this kind of thinking by design moves a person further and further away from seeking God? You see that?

That's it. That's all you actually need to know. And one more thing. As you do this, as you move through life in this way, acting on your highest excitement, you will start living more in the present, living more in the moment.

And because of that, you will know what you need to know when you need to know it.

You know, a lot of us in the church kind of chuckle at stuff like this. I mean, I do as well, right? But boy, ideas have consequences, ladies and gentlemen. And these kinds of new age concepts are leading so many to reject their creator.

They purport to solve problems and provide solutions and they just suck people into the quagmire of self. Once again, we are posed with two options. Choose to embrace the self or choose to deny the self.

One is clearly taught by Jesus in the scripture. The other one is not.

Prophesying Blessing, the Line of Despair, and Objective Truth

Let me show you a secret, something that no one has ever taught you. Wake up early in the morning before your feet even hits the ground. You should be barefooted and don't talk to anyone. Then you begin to prophesy over yourself.

Begin to speak the words of God over your destiny. I'll give you an example. Use your name. I, Kimona, will prosper. The works of my hands are blessed. Everything I touch is blessed. My life is blessed.

My business is blessed and will always prosper. Opportunities will always find me, always locate me. I am protected by God. I will always walk in good health. My destiny helpers are locating me and they will help me.

My destiny helpers?

What are those? I'm not gonna look that up. Anybody? What is a destiny helper? Life is a blessing. My children are a blessing. My marriage is a blessing. I will never know lack.

I will always prosper. I will attract wealth. All the days of my life. I am favored by God. My destiny is connected to great people in Jesus' name. Speak up. Okay.

I will attract wealth. This sounds an awful lot like, you know, health and wealth prosperity gospel mixed with the law of attraction, right? This is basically the word of God being used to further new age mysticism.

It's interesting. You know, I've been going back through the writings of Francis Schaeffer. I think I've mentioned this before, but Schaeffer is a huge influence on me. I think his ideas are more relevant than ever, particularly with the way like the culture is mirroring the sort of moral and epistemological predicament he was wrestling with back in the late 1960s.

We're there again. You know, that's a rabbit trail. The point is, Schaeffer talked a lot about the line of despair. The line of despair is the arbitrary division that has been created by people who refuse to accept the Christian worldview, okay?

As Christians, we understand that reality is ordered, it's logical, and that objective truth is real precisely because God exists. The fact that logic, for example, can be stated propositionally, right?

Think of the three laws of logic. It all depends on the God who speaks propositionally to us, who has a mind that is ordered and thus creates an ordered world that we can discover. We should not expect any of this if God does not exist, and yet that's exactly what we find in reality.

But for those who reject the Bible and the God of the Bible, they are left to say either there is no objective truth or there is. There's a lot more to say about this, but here's why I bring this up. For those who want to live in a world where there is no objective truth and still have some kind of faith, they must relegate faith and spirituality to be this thing that stands outside the concept of logic.

Spirituality becomes something that it cannot be supported by argumentation and justified by any kind of objective reasoning or evidence. But once you do that, your faith becomes nothing more than a bunch of claims.

That's what I was talking about a moment ago with the other person. When you live underneath the line of despair, according to Schaeffer, your spirituality is nothing like the spirituality of Christianity.

You can talk about God, you can quote the Bible all day long, but all you're doing is you're stealing Christian concepts to make your non-rational faith sound good. And that's all this is. New Age mysticism is a system built on non-rational claims that cannot be supported with any good evidence and warrants.

And so nobody bothers to come up with them in any way. And it sounds compelling to folks because people speak with extreme confidence. They try to provide these manufactured moments of realization. Hey, did you know that Jesus was 33 years old when he performed his ministry on earth?

Did you also know there are 33 vertebrae in the human spine? Have you heard that one? And then cue the moment where our eyes get as big as dishes because of this moment of realization, except wait a second, we don't know that Jesus was 33 years old when he was in ministry and your spine does not have 33 vertebrae by the time you're an adult.

Oh, but that, no, none of that matters because I'm speaking with lots of confidence, you see. And I just gave you a feeling like you just realized something that nobody else knows, right? This would be funny if it actually did not lead to real spiritual harm.

And that's exactly what's happening. Colossians 2, verse eight says, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ.

I preached a whole sermon on this passage of scripture. There's a lot to unpack here, but the point is on a very basic level, don't fall into error. Don't be taken by ideas and philosophies that sound good in the moment, but are actually spiritual poison to your soul.

What's the solution? Verse six and seven, therefore, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him. So live your life rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught abounding in thanksgiving.

In other words, pay close attention to what Jesus said. Pay close attention to what the word of God says because there are many ideas and philosophies and concepts that are seeking to pull you away from the objective truth that the God of the Bible exists and that what his word says is objectively true.

Is any of this like what the Bible teaches, right? That you can speak on your own destiny and that you can somehow take control of your own destiny? No. Like, look at this, Ephesians 1 .11, in him we have obtained an inheritance, having been, here it is, predestined according to the, who?

The purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will. You know what, Lord, take a break because I'm gonna speak to my own destiny now, according to the counsel of my own will. No, that's not what the Bible teaches, ladies and gentlemen, that is false.

As a matter of fact, if anyone thinks that they can control their own destiny, they don't have a problem with me, they have a problem with the Lord. Daniel 4, verse 35, Nebuchadnezzar says, all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing.

And he, God, does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand or say to him, what have you done? These spiritual TikTok videos, they're dangerous ideas, ladies and gentlemen, and we need to know how specifically unbiblical they are.

And we need to be ready to give an answer to those who are taken with these ideas, amen. Well, as in all these kinds of videos, let me remind us all to pray for these individuals, just because they may be caught up in these kinds of philosophies and lifestyles today does not mean that the Lord can save them or cannot save them and bring them into the light of his truth.

So yeah, let's pray for them and for these folks, followers, there are many followers of these individuals on TikTok, it's amazing. So let's pray for them all. All right, if you made it this far, you got to join the Patreon community, even just to read the Bible with me, we're doing a Bible study over there and it's totally for free.

So I encourage you, jump over there, let's study the word together. Let's go deep in the scripture and see how it applies to our lives in real ways. If you choose to jump into a financial support tier on Patreon, thank you so much.

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