Since naturalistic materialism became all the rage, Christians have been shamed out of the supernatural elements of the faith. We’ve been conditioned to be embarrassed by them, to hedge them with ‘there’s a story in Scripture that goes’ or however many other ways we have of saying ‘you aren’t supposed to take this as fact, since it is supernatural, but the point is’.
However, God is not mocked, and reality can only be denied for so long. A society full of people that were created in contact with a supernatural world are not going to live like naturalistic materialists for long. So, the seeds that were planted before this author was born have now started to bear fruit, largely in the face of New Age spirituality. Our society has gone from a categorical denial of all things supernatural to a no holds barred buffet banquet of every spiritual practice one could think of (so long as it isn’t the one instructed by Jesus). Today we have everything from the people obsessed with crystals and tarot readings and other forms of divination to those people normalising and repackaging Eastern religion into a more modern suit, whether they know it or not, and whether they mean to or not.
So the Christians, who had just gotten used to the rule that ‘to sit at the table with public intellectuals, you can only deal with empirical data’, are now gobsmacked as the atheists and agnostics are the ones bringing spiritual categories to bear in common parlance. If you have ever heard the term ‘spiritual but not religious’, that phrase is the product of what we are talking about. ‘Religious’ is the formalised, empty, old-fashioned and dead counterpart to ‘spiritual’, by which images of freedom, exploration, openness, liberty, authenticity and reality are implied.
Let’s take a second and realise where we stand. We stand between the blind man and the witch; between an ignoramus in denial of the supernatural world God made and a fool embracing all of the impure spirits in the unseen realm.
It also just so happens that we stand on a solid rock, and that all other worldviews are built on sinking sand. The world we know, which is the world God tells us about, is far more splendid and fantastic than any of these other worlds we are sold.
Dear reader, please see this! The world the atheists want to sell you is boring! Dawkins is right, the world he believes in is an unbelievably vast void of blind and pitiless chance, merely a great string of accidents occurring deterministically as entropy runs its course. At the same time, the world we are now being sold is a dangerous misunderstanding. Our society finds astral projection, but does not see the chains and fetters tied to it. Our cultural icons see DMT and Ayahuasca as new and exciting tools for self-actualisation and addiction relief, but they do not hear Moses shouting his warning, telling them of the perils and spiritual bondage they are inviting themselves into.
This author has seen more and more films and T.V. shows popping up that feature multiverse theories, astral projection, the pineal gland (most commonly referred to as the ‘third eye’), mindfulness, yoga, spirit guides, etc. This author is neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but he fully expects new age spirituality to come fully and earnestly into the mainstream and enslave a generation before people start realising that even Satan presents himself as an angel of light. If you, dear reader, have fully managed to not see this cultural shift, you should watch the trailers for two films: Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Eastern religion / New Age spirituality are the bread and butter of these stories.
They are not benign, they are not simply unwise like a bunch of teenagers sneaking off with cigarettes and small amounts of marijuana to go and experiment. Stephen Bancarz, and so many others that were deep into the New Age who have now come to Christ can tell you with the proper terminology just what depths of slavery and bondage our neighbours are selling themselves into when they learn remote viewing or eastern meditation or any of those other practices. We fear that in 10 years, exorcisms may become common (or at least widely needed) in the west, from the sheer volume of demonic activity that so many people are inviting into their lives.
Ok ok, we’ll pull back on the doom and gloom for a second. The thing that this author finds so wonderful is that we have a better story. Sure, the herbalist/dryad aesthetic has its attractive elements. Granted, the suave scientist with his data and rock solid facts has his prestige. However, we belong to the one True and Living God, before whom all spiritual beings will one day kneel. In the ultimate Endgame, we have the confidence of knowing that we will be clothed in the righteousness of a saviour who took on innumerable lifetimes worth of sin and atoned for them all on the cross. The Almighty God who dreamed up the stars and invented physics also created great beasts of the deep and so many birds of the sky and tiny little bacteria and insects and—most amazing of them all—human beings, this is the God who you are invited to have peace with, and to call on as your Father.
God is not to be trifled with, or treated like a magic dispenser, but it is true to recognise that in history, God has used his infinite power to show the rulers of the world who he is. Imagine being Moses before Pharaoh, or Peter on the mount of transfiguration, or an Israelite behind the cloud of smoke and pillar of fire. That was our God. That was in this world, not in some fictional multiverse. There is a patch of desert somewhere in the Sinai region where that all happened.We would do well to remember that the most amazing universe is the real one, and the only all-powerful God worthy of any worship is the God Yahweh who revealed himself to us in 66 books that we call the Bible. The greatest salvation story ever is the one that has already been decided, and we have only just begun telling the world about it. What are we waiting for?
Distilled Orthopraxy 