This Week in Witchcraft (S1 E16)

Welcome to this week in witchcraft The elements have been conquered with intense heat and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan.

Can you spot it out in the wild? Welcome back to this week in witchcraft i'm dylan hamilton and with me are michael dirham and andrew hudson

Today we are dealing with the idea or concept of living in a pagan world

And finding a answer to it a counter to it in the way that we have witchcraft thrown at us left and right

And how we might either avoid it flee from it or counter it with our own christian content creation as well.

So we'll We'll kick it over to michael and see how he wants to start us off All right, so it's important to recognize that we live in a culture that is pagan essentially pagan that there is a sense of the

The oneness of everything there's a fungibility to everybody and everything A funny story.

I just heard about a california court ruled that bees are fish What bees are fish and and the reason why bees are fish is because they already have books laws on the books that protect fish in the way that they want to protect bees but because They couldn't come up with any laws about bees.

They just ruled that bees are fish And this makes so much sense in a pagan world where Anything can be anything else and so bees are fish this is this is a sign that we're living in a pagan world and that little bit of witchcraft in the name of save the bees is well we see witchcraft everywhere in the name of hey, we we need to Save these people or help these people or do this right thing over here.

And so we're going to Demonically appropriate alternate authority and we're going to speak words and change realities in rebellion to god, so witchcraft is everywhere and very often we encounter

Concentrations of this witchcraft and we have to decide what we're going to do about it and perhaps we're at a job where Witchcraft is rampant.

The question is am I going to counter it with my

Conversation am I going to expose the folly of it the absurdity of it? am I going to Take this as a sign that christ must be preached here you know paul noticed and was burdened his heart was just Grieved at the level of paganism in athens and he used this as an opportunity to preach christ the resurrection of Jesus from the dead to preach the unknown god to these idolatrous.

Athenians And of course, there's the concern of sodom, right? You know, hey, this place is so pagan

We've you know, it's it's time to leave. Let's let's uh, let's break from this pagan place before you know

Why would we invest in this place that's doomed for disaster, you know, and so on we've got to make these decisions in our in our christian walk and again, some of it's about approach and tactics and preference and christian liberty but there's been a lot of Discussion as of late about the overt pagan

Witchcraft the sexual perversion that seems to be the celebrated program

In various media companies, for example, disney has been under fire Lately from some quarters saying this is a bridge too far

You you know the things that you're saying and advocating for and doing is just ridiculous and we're done with you

You know and so a lot of people have been redirecting their funds away from disney though.

This has happened Many times over and over and over again concerning disney

And concerning other companies as well Personally netflix. I was a subscriber for quite a long time and then eventually

Things started creeping onto their platform I really didn't pay much attention to that because i'm not i'm not buying it for that their service however, yeah, they came out with a corporate stance of not doing business in a specific state because it was a

Supporting of more limitations on abortion on child murder, which I believe the

Limitation on child murder should be an absolute limitation. I there's No good reason

And so I canceled my account and for the reason I support unborn children that's what I left them as the note, but that's just one example and many people

Come to a conclusion at different points in time yeah, so People have begun to you know christians and and even some people who

Not necessarily christian as their primary identity, but maybe in a political leaning towards the right or something there's been a lot of pushback against the the perverse agenda of disney and their media platform of disney plus and so on so Question is what do you do about this?

You know, we have Situations where the christians in the early church we read about their unique situations

Sometimes we can get caught up with the specific details of what they're going through about, you know Meet offered to idols and you know hairstyles and you know different Activities and so on and so forth, you know, but what were they doing?

They were trying to figure out how to love one another and live holy in the midst of a pagan society where there was demonic activity witchcraft everywhere

Hey, well We can relate You know, this is the situation we're in right now

And so we you know, we've got three options, right? We engage with the witchcraft to Repudiate it to expose it for its absurdity to show it as it's in this deception in its lies we avoid the witchcraft we

Move ourselves and our families away from it Isolating ourselves from it

Which by the way whenever someone does that and then later on they're exposed to the witchcraft again

It comes as much more of a shock Having been isolated from it instead of growing accustomed to it.

Yes, and that's the kind of experience we've had before and then also There's the another alternative is that in this pagan world?

These people are still made in the image of god and they they still have this Impulse to worship and to create things that are beautiful and they want to make something of value and good and they're just doing

A terrible job at it in the rejection of christ, but it is a human thing It is a god glorifying thing for those made in his image to create things that are good and beautiful and true to work art and to do things that Do these kinds of things and there needs to be an alternative to?

The witchcraft that is so rampant, isn't there? Yes yeah, so in our home we we kind of view where we take our money to buy subscriptions from content creators as handing over of maybe grains of seed and stories to be cast and Out into the soil and they they bring back yield and so we decided to quit sending our seed our portion off to Some of those places like netflix and disney

And we decided to give those seeds to somewhere else and that that may be at the heart of some of the alternative that christians

Sometimes are reticent to do is understand that once you take it away from The pagans to cast the seed

We should probably be giving it to somebody who does better at casting that seed And we don't always do a great job of that Sometimes we look at the subscription and the cost of the subscriptions and maybe those christian content creators don't have as much content as disney

Well, that's because they don't have the money or the funds or the capabilities or the they don't have the staff or the budget or the the property right like I mean

Disney's living off of the capital of their property from the 20s and 30s still whereas we're just getting started

And there needs to be injections of capital injections of that seed That way we can hand it over to our best content creators to sell it for us and give and what we need to look at it, too as They're creating stories for our children to consume

And if they do a good job at it, why not give them more? To get back more yield of story or of of content for our children to receive as well my family is

We have how can I put this in a way that doesn't sound? uh sanctimonious, um

I'm not trying to say that uh along the lines of supporting christian content creators We support uh, david wood who is very active and involved in apologetics against I would say counter muslim apologetics that is a

Content that is currently being delivered on youtube Where it's a place of censorship and he needs all the help he can get but in the same lines if you're not

Appreciative of the content so whenever you view this this uh light in the darkness and you're

And you go past it and you say thank god for those people maybe consider

In what way can I? Benefit them And in many times they need help making this a full -time thing

Yeah, and we can do that if you are blessed with being able to have more than what you need on a daily basis

Being able to invest that into the kingdom To counter this pagan culture We have to build one for ourselves

So why not start with something that you value? Yeah, one of the things that i'm kind of thinking about here when we're we're talking about supporting christian content creators.

We all here even at this table have Our favorite content creators or we have our interest and we seem to really decentralize

Those funds to different places, right? Well, the pagans have really backed one or two horses a lot of times and at this point it let's be honest

It's disney. They own disney espn. I mean they're as far as content goes. They are

The behemoth that we're looking at that we're staring down, but we kind of decentralize a lot of our

Our funds to different areas and different content creators just based on our preferences and this may look more like a slower march for us to Maybe win affections in different areas of other people

Or to support these people as they create a very broad range of content for everybody to consume

Yeah, I think it's important to recognize The cultural moment we're in a gutenberg moment

Where with the gutenberg press came the decentralization of content creation

It wasn't just the church anymore It was people who disagreed with the church and not just the state anymore

But those who disagreed with the state had content creation ability because of the gutenberg press and we're in that situation now in a digital

Information internet age and and as dylan rightly notes There's a lot of capital that was built up in the analog centralization of media

But that doesn't have to be the way that is anymore and that in the decentralization of content creation.

We have More options than we can even learn about And and there's so many options out there that that we can

Find and reward and enjoy and give thanks to god for we also have ourselves in a situation where we're still

Much like the early christians living in a pagan society. That's been built up with pagan infrastructure you know paul walked on roman roads that were built by roman oppression and The blood of the slaves that built the roads, you know in a very real sense stained the walkway

But he still uses the roads to go preach the gospel, you know and he he went to very pagan places and preached the word and he

Took on some of the the pagan sayings to get his point across but he wasn't compromising

The message he brought at all, but he had a facility with what was going on and he rejected

The pagan world he rejected the idolatry, but he understood what was going on He had to make use of pagan space

Such as when he went to the aeropagus to preach the gospel He was not in a christian space when he proclaimed that word.

He was in The place where everybody went to go talk new philosophy and it was all pagan idolatrous philosophy

The whole place was stained with it. Yeah, he was there and he was delivering his word the word of the gospel so we recognize that We may be led by the holy spirit and we have liberty in this because where the spirit of the lord is there is liberty but we have the freedom to cancel pagan media when we say

Yeah, I want to invest my funds somewhere else. That's You know this uh, the witchcraft is so thick here.

I mean i'm not finding anything worth worthwhile I don't think this is worth it. I don't want to give my money to these people anymore and at the same time, you know

There's we're still Using the equivalent of the pagan infrastructure, right?

I mean apple and windows and google and amazon and You know you feeling me?

Yeah, these are not somehow righteous corporations in comparison to disney

No You see what I mean? Yeah And whereas the political moment has certainly put disney front and center for our considerations

And we do have a choice to make about these things we recognize that we still live in a pagan world

We still live in a world filled with all of these Problems and all this idolatry going on But here's the good news that in christ

We are set apart unto him sanctified That we're made clean

That we can live as saints in the middle of a filthy world This is in no way saying feel free to consume whatever you want

This is saying this is saying that in christ because of his holy spirit we are made clean and we are free to move about as holy vessels in a pagan world and To even use the pagan infrastructure to bring forth the message of the gospel and to do things for the kingdom

This is not tarnishing I think sometimes those hermits and monks of old

Just couldn't stomach it Right, and they just went away in disobedience to christ

They saw holiness in a less robust way So the answer is not to go live in a commune, right?

No, and that's not what people think if you cancel your subscription to netflix you cancel your subscription to disney plus That's not what you're saying

You get the liberty to do that Right, hey i'm done with that let's do something different look at all the freedom

I have and that's awesome so when people do this, I think some people like Well, you just need to cancel and go away

You know There's liberty here. Okay, but he's also recognizing that our holiness is bound up in our following after christ

And he's called us to walk on dirty streets To proclaim the gospel a good example would be the library system of oklahoma city.

They are very Promoting of the the month of june and what they call pride a lot of the titles that they purchase

I would not support at all Yet there are times that I find that if you would want to let's say do a critique of the witchcraft that you find in harry potter

Star wars those types of titles as a way to counter To to say look kids.

This is against what the word says and to go through it yourself And to guide them into what the truth is you're still using the library system, but I didn't necessarily have to pay for These pieces of content that I find to be objectionable

So there are many ways to counter witchcraft You just have to be wise on how you do it and in the very end it's it's about honoring your master

So follow your master You talked off mike andrew about what was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for everybody or for each individual family which

I found to be interesting because As I was thinking about it for me, there was a lot of things

I could overlook about some of the content creation But I think it came down to The points where I was watching things and it got so far away from the good and the true

That I said that is desecration like there's not an ounce of beauty in that you may have like a beautiful shot

But you're desecrating it somehow with the way you're telling a story where you're desecrating it somehow with a lie about reality

And I think for me and my family personally It was noticing that the beauty was sucked out of whatever we were watching or whatever we were consuming and so for some people it may be they're seeing no goodness there first or Truth there first and they're they're leaving right away.

And then for some people it's Recognizing that now that all that's taken away

There's no more beauty either and I think disney thrived on that for a long time because they were telling loads of lies

But they did things so much more beautifully than everybody else That we were just like, okay, we can we can parse out the the lies

We can parse out the badness in this in exchange for still having it look beautiful. But now we have nine -year -old girls out running

Her captors and running into head high logs that they should see in star wars where you're just like That's just bad storytelling.

There's nothing beautiful about that You're actually we have to make so many conceits in order to believe this

And it's just you can't stomach it anymore because it's just bad storytelling There's no more willful suspension of disbelief.

It's just you're just left with this is unbelievable, right? Yes. Yeah yeah, and and but tied tied with the

The art that is no good and total lack of verisimilitude. There's no truth there

Right. It's no good. There's no truth and it's not beautiful at all tied with it though Which is the especially insulting element here

Is that we're being told Celebrate this or you're a racist celebrate this or You are a misogynist

Right. That's what you're being told by And they they know it. They already know it so bad

That they send out these preemptive warning labels Right that if you if you have something bad to say about this, it's because you're you're part of the the male white

Hegemony, and you're the problem The reason why this art is it looks no good to you.

The reason why this art is not hitting you Right. The reason why this art it is not beautiful to you is because you're the problem

They send out the mot In the in the review that comes out before the premiere, right? Oh, yes

Yeah, the critics advanced copy when you when you see that I mean that's that's when it's like you recognize that This is in a roundabout way a testament to the reality that there is an objective standard for beauty

There is an objective standard for truth. There is an objective standard for good They know it too, but they're trying to suppress that in unrighteousness

Oh to be known as Those dirty christians and their their bigotry

What a what a label to wear as a badge of honor for christ's sake to to oppose evil

And to be maligned for his name's sake Amen to that and to for me to support the fact that beauty is objective

Our god is beautiful and therefore beauty is an objective thing and I think The the paganism of subjective

Beauty like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I hear so many christians like hold to that like yes to the death and i'm like How can you say that when your god is ultimately beautiful like that does not as long as it's god's eye that does the only

Beholding and i'm i'm cool with that. But but you see the witchcraft is in in the the demonic appropriation of alternate authority in the

Simple Declaration. Oh, this is good. This is true. This is beautiful. You must say it to be so You know, we're telling you what to say about this.

It's very much like 1984 Yeah I I think about uh, you talk about beauty you know the the commercials the

Sunset where the the two dads are walking on the seashore with the child

They're ostensibly their child You're it looks beautiful, but when you see it it's repulsive Because it's not true

Maybe the the true thing about that is that that homosexuality is it's seeing its sunset

It's in death rows right now and it will have its judgment like i'm I mean like to a certain degree Sometimes they play their own jokes on themselves and they don't realize it like that's that's what's sort of funny about some of this stuff, but it's also very you see

How that's true in romans 1 well, there's a lot of humor That the lord brings to pass in the absurdity

Of of the wicked for laughter is the righteous response to absurdity Yeah Well, I think we have filled up our time on witchcraft today

What content do we have to suggest in return michael? I've got a book as part of the five solas series.

Um, you don't have to get all five. This one is uh, christ alone Has come out in 2017

At the 500 year anniversary the reformation christ alone the uniqueness of jesus as savior

It was written by stephen. Wellam and it is just an excellent biblical theology of the

Centrality preeminence of christ in all the scriptures a very refreshing devotional even uh encouraging read

I'm going to take this a little bit different direction There are many people who might be listening to this that still have their children in public schools

Or they may even orient their private or home schools to have summer off I would advocate a blessed time would be to Engage in a summer reading program for your children for the bible

I know that I have benefited from my wife doing that with my children and uh recently being

A teacher over some children here at the church and re -engaging with the book of judges has been

A wonderful time so never underestimate the power of the word Amen to that.

Amen to that. Um, we were talking about taking our money and placing it elsewhere and christian content and that's something that heather and I have done recently moving away from disney and we decided to subscribe with canon plus and there is a treasure trove of things both new and old to um, enjoy and to Mind the depths of over there.

They tell wonderful stories. They do it beautifully and wherever there's disagreement with them We know that there's an excess of agreement that we have with those those folks over at canon

They just keep producing solid solid stuff and specifically one that i've listened to most recently is in the house of tom bombadil by c .r.

Wiley and that was just a fun it was more fun than it was anything else because i'm partial to tom bombadil and I'm, still a little sore that he was left out of the movies.

So yeah, how dare they? But uh, that was one specifically that i'd like to to drop the recommendation for And that wraps it up for today

We are always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week and for supporting us by rating reviewing and sharing the show