The Sermon on the Mount XIV

Subtitle:  Revealing Areas that are Pitfalls for Hypocrisy

Matthew 6:22-24.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on March 17, 2024.

Our passage continues looking at how the things of this world can become a pitfall for hypocrisy.  Last week, we saw that wealth that is amassed can get ahold of our heart.  It can become the thing we love.

In this passage, Jesus moves to the eye and points out how it can be captured by things as well.

Let’s look at the passage.

The health of our eye (v. 22-23)

How do people who start out wanting to serve God become hypocrites?  How do popes, pastors, general superintendents, and the religious, become hypocrites?  One of those ways is through their love for things more than God.  It shouldn’t be lost on us that Jesus spends more time talking about how things pull our heart away from God, then he does talking about our bad relationships with people.

If wealth can take hold of our heart and become the love of our life, then it can also affect our eye.  What does that look like?

Jesus first starts out with the natural affect of having a good eye or a bad eye.  He pictures the eye as the “lamp of the body.”  The eye  channels light into our brain so that it can be turned into a mental picture of the reality around us.

Notice that the eye is not the source of that light, but only a conduit, or a sensor.  That is exactly how a lamp works.  It is designed to hold oil (the fuel) and generally has a wick, which is lit.  The burning of the oil around the wick is then able to send light throughout the room.

This is important because the man standing in front of them is the “Light of the world.”  He has come to give them the light, the truth, about God’s purpose of salvation and man’s true condition.  Jesus knows that they will need some good spiritual eyes to see him as the light and to receive his teachings, ultimately, to be saved from their sins.  When you have good spiritual eyes, you can make an informed decision and hopefully a wise choice.

Yet, just as wealth can have a grip on people’s hearts so too, it can affect people’s spiritual eyes.  We can be surrounded by the light of God and not see it because we are spiritually blind.  This is why the Scriptures warn us over and over to guard our hearts.  We could add that we need to guard our eyes.  This is the challenge that Jesus speaks to us here.

Yet, there is something more specific than just seeing the truth in Jesus.  An evil eye is always connected to a greedy, miserly, and even covetous person, in the Scriptures.  On the other hand, a good eye is generally connected to generosity and charitable giving.

It is seen as an evil, or bad, eye because you cannot see your brother’s true need.  You can only see that the money you love will be depleted if you use it to help others.  Your eye is good if you can see that the things in your life were most likely given to you so that you could help your brother.  We will come back to this, but it does beg the question.  Why does God allow some to amass wealth and not others?

Jesus uses this concept of an evil eye in Matthew 20 when he tells the parable of the workers in the vineyard.  In the story, the owner of a vineyard goes to the place where day-laborers gather in the morning and hires them to work for the day.  He will pay them a denarius, which was defined as a day’s wage.  He goes back to the hiring place several more times: at the third hour, the sixth hour, the ninth hour, and the eleventh.  For sake of the story, we will assume they were working a twelve hour day.

When evening came, they began to pay the workers starting with the men who started at the eleventh hour.  Interestingly enough, they were paid a denarius.  The story jumps to the men who worked all day long, but imagine if you had worked all day and were in line to get paid when you saw the men who worked one hour receive a whole denarius (a whole day’s wage). Most people would immediately have their hopes up that they would get even more than a denarius, perhaps even 12 of them (for scale, imagine going from thinking you would receive $240 for the day to thinking you might receive 12 times that, $2,880).  Yet, when the men came to get their pay, they only received a denarius.  They began to complain, but the owner challenges them.  Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?  They couldn’t say no.  They were not being ripped off.  Yet, it didn’t seem fair in some way.

Jesus get’s to the heart of the manner with the statement, “Why is your eye evil because I am good?”  It was good of the landowner to pay everyone a denarius.  Yet, somehow that because a situation for those who worked all day to become greedy.  This is an important acknowledgment that we need to make.  Our hearts can be overcome by greed, but here Jesus ties it to our eyes.

These men had their hearts on things, on money.  Thus, they couldn’t see the goodness of the landowner.  They could only see that they had been jilted somehow.  This is hypocrisy in the life of a person who claims to serve God.

Thus, wealth not only gets our hearts, but it affects our ability to properly see people (even God) in our life.  Everything becomes twisted and perverted into our lust and desire for more wealth.  Yet, this can even affect your ability to see the Truth of God when He is standing right in front of you.  People would miss Messiah because their eyes were captures (as well as their hearts) with wealth.

When we are generous, it fills our hearts and minds with the light of Jesus.  However, when we are greedy and stingy it fills us with darkness (every evil thing). 

The point is not about having wealth.  It is about how it affects your heart and eyes.  Jesus is not saying, “If your bank account is above a certain amount, then you are full of darkness.”  Rather, it is similar to the statement that it is impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Jesus follows it up with another truth, “but all things are possible with God.”  Similarly, on our own, wealth will conquer our heart and eyes.  We will become hypocritical slaves to it.  But, with Jesus, we can make wealth our slave for His purposes.

Jesus drills home just how bad this problem is.  In the natural, a bad eye simply keeps you from seeing.  However, a greedy, covetous eye is a spiritual problem.  It doesn’t just block light (truth), but also sends darkness into the soul (the whole body).  You become “full of darkness.”  The darkness here is not just the absence of light.  It is something more substantial.  It represents a soul that is lusting with all manner of vice.

Think of it this way.  It is bad not to see when the lights are not turned on.  Israel had received some light in the Law, but the prophets had spoke of a coming Messiah who would give the full light of God.  We can’t blame them for not fully seeing the truth of God.  However, when the lights are turned on (Messiah comes) and we still can’t see, then you find out that something is wrong with your eyes.  The Pharisees and Sadducees were revealing that their eyes and hearts were generally bad all along.

So the problem of heaping up earthly wealth starts by becoming the love of your heart.  It then also affects your ability to benefit from the light of God that you have received.  How can you fix such a problem?  In the natural, there is little that can be done for a blind person, but we are speaking of spiritual matters.  The only solution to spiritual blindness is repentance.  It is casting down the idol that has your heart and going after God.  The sad truth is that we have played a large part in our own blindness because our hearts lusted after things over the top of people and especially God.

The master of your life (v. 24)

A man whose heart is captured by earthly wealth, and whose eye is gripped by greed and stinginess, is a man whose life is filled with darkness.  This leads Jesus to challenge us on who our master truly is.  Is He, who is the Master of the universe, the master of me?  This is easier said than done. 

To the religious leaders, wealth was a sign of God’s blessing upon them.  Yet, they didn’t rightly answer the question, “Why has He blessed me with wealth?”  Most likely, they felt that it was proof that they were such a righteous person and so pleasing to God.  Yet, the truth is that God tests us with wealth in order to see if we will care for our poor brother or not.

The relationship with wealth and things is that wealth enables you to get anything that you want.  This is how it becomes our master.  We will do anything to keep it and amass more of it.  In the end, it rules us and we become its slaves.

Jesus brings up the classical problem of conflicting allegiances.  You cannot be serving your desire for wealth and God at the same time.  You will be drawn one way or the other.  Even selling all of your possessions in order to follow Jesus cannot guarantee that wealth will cease to be an idol in your life.  Idolatry is loving and desiring anything above God.

When we make wealth (or anything else for that matter) an idol in our life, it becomes a worthless and impotent thing.  Nothing in this world can be God to you, but God Himself.  We actually destroy the things in our life by making them into idols. 

It is not that God doesn’t want us to have thing.  The things we have in our life are His goodness and grace.  We should be filled with thanksgiving and fully enjoy them.  But, at the end of the day, if I have to choose between the things and Jesus, I need to choose Jesus.  Otherwise, they have become an idol to me.

It is interesting that Jesus uses the word “mammon.”  Most versions translate this as money or wealth.  This is fine.  However, it seems obvious that Jesus is giving a play on words.  He has been using phrases that keep pointing back to the Exodus.  Jesus is the New Moses come to lead them in a New Exodus.  In the Lord’s prayer, he talks about our daily bread, which is reminiscent of Israel in the wilderness with the manna.  I believe he uses the word mammon because they would have been thinking about the manna in the wilderness just moments before (Daily bread is in verse 11 and this is verse 24).

Just as they didn’t need to worry about their daily bread (manna), so they don’t need to worry about having enough money (mammon).  “Man doesn’t live by bread alone.”  We tend to take this as natural bread, but in the context, it begs to be seen as the manna.  Man doesn’t live by the manna alone, but by the fact that the God of heaven decreed that you were to be given it.  We must learn to rest in God’s care for us, rather than amassing wealth so that we can stop being anxious.  Spoiler alert:  the more money you amass the more fearful you will become about losing it.  If money is your idol, you will never be more anxious than when you have a lot of it.

Life has a way of testing us and trying us.  Do we want God or do we want wealth?  If you are serving wealth, then there is going to be a conflict some day.  Do you really love God?  You will find out on the day choosing God will lose you all your wealth.

Yet, Jesus brings up something more than love.  “He will be loyal to the one and despise the other.”  Loyalty and despising have to do with how much you value something.  Would you rather have God than all the gold in the world?  It is easy to say so when no one is offering us all the gold in the world.  In countless many ways, we make choices that declare God’s true value to us.  This is a good place to start looking. 

Jesus, please show me all the ways in which I am saying that something else is more valuable to me than you.  And then, Lord help me to choose You over them.

This reminds me of Isaiah 53:3-4.  Speaking of Messiah Jesus, it says, “He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.  And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.  Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.”

It is a scary thing to live your whole life saying that you love God, but when He reveals Himself, you value Him little.  This is the big reveal of the Old Testament prophets.  Of course, the nations would be in trouble when God came down to judge.  However, Isaiah shows us that even the people of God who claim to love Him and value Him greatly, would despise Him and walk on by.  Imagine not choosing God and esteeming created things over the top of the Creator.  We should value God above the things that He can give us.  We should be thankful to the Giver for the gifts that He gives, but we should never let them have our heart, damage our spiritual eyes, and make us a hypocritical slave to things.

Pitfalls audio

Not by Bread Alone

Matthew 4:1-4.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on November 27, 2016.

The commercialization of all things good usually brings out the worst in humanity.  Thus, after a day that is focused on being thankful, many go out and shout, fight, and wrestle over the best deals of the year, Black Friday.  As Christians we must not lose sight of the reality behind Thanksgiving, or its reason for being.  In fact we dare not lose sight of the reason for our lives themselves.  Thanksgiving has nothing to do with getting the best deals on the latest electronic gadget.  But, rather, it is about stopping in the midst of our often busy lives and showing appreciation for what we already have, despite what we may not have.

Today we are going to look at Jesus during a time in his life where we are allowed to see Satan trying to tempt Him.  I believe these temptations are instructive and valuable to us so that we can know that we do not live by bread alone.

We are tested by material things

In Matthew 4 we are told that Jesus is “led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”  It is clear that the Spirit had a purpose that involved this word “tempted.”  In the passage the devil is also called the “Tempter,” (same word but as a noun).  Now we know that the Spirit is not in league with the devil so what is going on here?

Part of the mystery lies in the word that is translated “tempted.”  When this word is used in a situation that is for something good, say refining metal, it means something more like “to prove or test.”  When the word is used in a bad situation, say blowing all your money on gambling and drinking, it means “to tempt.”  We would never say that a teacher is tempting a child when they give them a test because our focus is on the intent.  The Greek’s chose to use the same word because in both cases you are being tested.  Here we know that it is the Spirit’s purpose to test Jesus in order to prove who He is.  But it is Satan’s purpose to tempt Jesus, disqualify Him, and bring Him under control.

Perhaps you have struggled with understanding why God lets temptation or challenges exist in your life.  It is because He knows that they can strengthen and prove our faith in Him.  Even our past failures are used by God to make our faith stronger.  Times of temptation can help us grow by revealing areas of weakness that we need to surrender to God.  God can and will give you the victory over your spiritual enemy if you will trust Him.  On the other hand, Satan actively tempts us in order to pull us away from God and bring into bondage under his dominion.  He uses our past failures as chains to keep us from turning to God and believing Him.

One of the main things that Satan tempts us with is material things.   This is on display in the first temptation.  But let’s further explore the setting.  We are told that Jesus fasted and prayed for 40 days in the wilderness.  You see, the Spirit was leading Jesus towards spiritual purposes.  Jesus was spiritually preparing to go to war against the evil spirits that had taken control of Israel, and then the whole world.  Satan may have showed up throughout the 40 days and Matthew may only be recording three of many temptations.  Regardless, the first we are told about involves breaking his fast by creating bread from the stones around him.  It is here that we should recognize that we often lose the spiritual by pursuing the material.  Even deeper, often letting go of the material is necessary to receive spiritual gain.  Another thing to recognize is that most of what we have spiritually has come through combat with the Tempter.

Most translations quote the devil as saying to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God.”  It sounds like Satan is questioning this fact.  However, this Greek conditional does not necessarily bring the first part in question.  It has the sense of this, “If you are the Son of God [and we both know you are, why don’t you] command that these stones become bread.”  The temptation is to prove what you know to be true for fleshly reasons, rather than trusting God to demonstrate the truth at the proper time.  If we boil it further down, the temptation is to follow your flesh rather than the Spirit of God.  The Spirit of God had led Jesus to a hungry, weakened condition, where there was no food around.  Why not use your power to get off such a loathsome path?

This doesn’t always have to be about something material like bread.  The Corinthian Church members even used the spiritual gifts that God had given them of speaking in unknown languages to please their fleshly desire for pride and high standing with the other Church members.  Thus the material is not so much the problem as the desires of our flesh.  When we let our fleshly desires lead it always takes us away from what God wants to do in our life.

So God is not against the material things in your life.  However, He knows that they cannot save you.  Jesus responds to the Devil by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3. “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”  The passage Jesus quotes is not about forbidding bread to people.  In fact God had supernaturally provided bread (manna) for Israel while they were in the wilderness.  The passage is pointing out that God had revealed to Israel that their life was not about the things we see around us, but about what God says.  Thus a person can be surrounded by food and yet lack life, especially eternal life.  Yet, a person can be in a wilderness where there is nothing and they will live because of what God commands.  Up to 6 million Israelites survived in a barren wilderness because God commanded it.  Can he not take care of you?  God knows that you have physical needs, but He also knows that the desires of your flesh generally pull you away from Him and His ways.  This temptation that the Devil brings to Jesus, he also brings to us.  He wants to rob you of the greater treasure that God has for you, and trap you in a materialistic prison.  If you have failed this test then quit trying to “make bread out of stones,” (a.k.a. trying to make it happen by your power).  Yes, we don’t have the same power that Jesus had, but we are tempted in the same kind of way.  Let it go!

We are given life by the Word of God

Throughout history Christians have pointed to the tactic that Jesus employs here as the key for our own victory.  Jesus used God’s Word (or The Truth) to counteract the twisted, false logic of the Devil.  This doesn’t make it easy.  Often the “lie” that Satan is offering us is something that our flesh wants to believe.  Now Jesus had the power to attack Satan head on.  Through His divine power He could have commanded Satan to be locked up in the Abyss, or Bottomless Pit (a spiritual prison for evil Spirits, 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6; Revelation 9).  But Jesus did not stand against Satan in this way.  Instead, Jesus resisted Satan as a human can, or as you and I can.  If we take time to familiarize ourselves with the Truth of God’s Word, then we are equipped to neutralize the lies of the enemy of our soul.  Each of Satan’s lies and temptations are like a small chain that is used to tie us up into spiritual knots.  Though you may be tied up in a pretzel and powerless, the Word of God through Jesus Christ is not.  No matter how bound up a person is they can be set free through this same tactic: stop trusting the lies of Satan and start trusting Jesus, the Son of God.  Don’t settle for others in your life to know the Bible.  You need to know it for yourself.  Your spiritual life depends upon it.

The Word of God not only counteracts the deceptions of Satan, but it also keeps us in connection with the Source of Life.  Satan ultimately wants to sever any connection you have to the Spirit of God by getting to your trust.  In Romans 8:14 Paul says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.”  One of God’s amazing truths is that He adopts into His family everyone who dares to believe Jesus and follow Him.  As a believer in Jesus and a disciple of Jesus, the Spirit of God leads us to put to death the deeds that are inspired by our fleshly desires.  However, Satan tempts us to give into satisfying those same fleshly desires.  In fact Scriptures tells us that our flesh is hostile to the things of God even as a Christian (Romans 8:7).  Rebellion against God’s revealed will, or ignoring His Spirit because we are so inebriated with our fleshly desires and materialism, both become a barrier between us and the Source of Eternal Life.  Even though the world around you may say that you cannot live without such and such, it does so because it has given into the temptations of Satan.  When we are trapped in materialistic lies, we become a part of a system that helps the Tempter by being a temptation ourselves.  Why would you want to be like the devil and take on his image, when the Spirit of God is offering to make you into the image of Jesus?  May we shine out as bright lights in this world of darkness.  May we be the children of God who are being led by the Spirit of God to inherit all things along with the One and Only Unique Son of God, Jesus.

Not by Bread Alone audio

Society under Siege: The Paranormal Paradigm Shift

Acts 16:16-19; Ephesians 6:10-12; Revelation 9:20-21.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on October 23, 2016.

It is interesting that as drug abuse has sky-rocketed, so has alternative spirituality and paranormal activities.  Historically drugs have been used to make it easier to connect with the spirit world.  However, America’s fascination with the paranormal began long before the 1950’s.  In the 1800’s a large influx of eastern mysticism came to the United States and spawned groups that sought to explore the spirit world.  Séances and contacting spirit guides began to catch fire among certain groups.  Contrary to popular conception, we are not becoming more and more anti-supernatural in our society.  Actually more and more people are adopting a spiritual world view that is alternative to the biblical view.  These alternative views typically teach that all things are connected and that the living can tap into this cosmic connection or force in order to obtain information.  They do not believe in a personal God that will judge our life.  Rather, they believe that we are all part of God, along with everything else in the universe.  This paranormal paradigm shift that is happening in America is really a going back to the ancient world views.  I do not mean that there are huge numbers of people worshipping Zeus.  However, they are reaching out to entities and conversing with “ascended masters,” whether they go by the name Zeus or not.  In many cases American Christians are not prepared for the reality of where this is headed.

It is past time for Christians to get acquainted with what the Bible has to say on this issue and be ready to give an answer for the reason for the hope that we hold.

The Early Church Had A Supernatural World View

In Acts 16:16-19, we join the Apostle Paul in the Greek city of Philippi.  Now a large percentage of the modern Church has rejected the supernatural element of the Bible.  Yes, they will acknowledge that there is a God, but the idea of angels and demons interacting with the world is just too much for them.  Miracles are too much for them.  Thus they explain away the miracles and supernatural events of the Bible.  We will see in our passage today that this is completely foreign to the first Christians.  Such a “belief” is not true Christianity.  It is something else entirely.

To set up this encounter in Acts 16, we need to understand that the Bible presents the reality of spiritual beings.  Just as there is a hierarchy among the peoples of the earth, so there is a heavenly hierarchy within the spirit world.  The Bible presents a cosmic problem.  A rebellion against the Creator has begun in the spirit world and mankind has been caught up in it.  There are good and evil spirit beings that are of lesser or greater power.   There are holy and fallen angels.  Now when Paul entered Philippi, he had come to preach the Gospel of Jesus to those who would listen.  At some point a young girl began to follow him around loudly proclaiming that Paul was a servant of the Most High God and people should listen to him.  This went on for several days.  No doubt Paul was praying about what motivated this girl and what he should do.  We are told that the girl was possessed with a spirit of divination and was used by her master to make him money by telling fortunes.  The word translated “divination” is literally python.  She had a python spirit.  This snake spirit was connected to the god Apollo and was supposed to be responsible for the amazingly accurate prophecies given by the oracles of Apollo.  Now this is not a story of Greek mythology.  Paul meets a real slave girl who is apparently good enough at fortune telling to make her masters money.  Notice that this spirit that possesses the girl operates in a “benign” way in order to give her information.  This is quite the opposite of the spirits that possessed the Gadarene demoniac that Jesus met on the sea of Galilee (Luke 8).  Those spirits manifested in a raging and insane manner that scared the daylights out of anyone who met him.  Thus some spirits are predatory in a malignant and dysfunctional way.  But, other spirits are predatory in a seemingly benign and somewhat functional way.  The ancient world was afraid of the spirits.  This fear and yet desire to know how to be safe in this world is how Satan kept the ancient world under his sway.  The early Christians knew that demons and deceiving spirits existed.  Any fortunes that this girl was ever able to give were part of a deceptive game plan to keep the Philippians under the control of the evil spirits.

Notice how Paul responds.  He is annoyed by what the girl is doing.  However, his problem is not with her.  He knows that the real problem is that python spirit that possessed her.  Early Christians knew that their warfare was not against people, kings, or nations.  They knew that their warfare was against spiritual entities that Satan used to manipulate the people.  This girl was not just a slave of men.  She was a slave to a predatory, evil spirit. 

Look at Ephesians 10-13 for a moment.  This is the famous armor of God passage.  Notice that this is about spiritual warfare against spiritual entities.  The armor of God is also spiritual.  They are to arm themselves with: Truth, Righteousness, The Gospel of Peace, Faith, Salvation, The Word of God, Prayer, and a Watchful Disposition.  He says in verse 10 that these things are needed to stand up to the schemes of the Devil.  Do not let yourself be deceived.  Our real enemies are the spiritual powers that hold the world under their sway.  Our job as Christians is to labor to set people free by the Truth and Power of Jesus Christ.  Of course, most people in Philippi were not possessed by an evil spirit.  Most of them were only “possessed” by the teachings of these evil spirits.  The devil doesn’t have to have everyone possessed.  He only has to manipulate and influence the larger masses to do all his bidding.  This young girl was set free by the Apostle Paul because he first recognized it and then called upon the authority of Jesus to set the girl free.  She needed an exorcism first and then the truth.  But most people Paul ran into needed simply needed the truth of God to cut through the blindness that they had embraced.  We don’t have to look for evil spirits.  Paul wasn’t doing that.  Rather, he was doing what Jesus had sent him to do.  He was looking for people who would listen to the Truth.  Those evil spirits that had dominion over the city didn’t like it and that is why this manifestation occurred.  So focus on people and their need for the truth.  As you are successful at counteracting the lies that these spirits promote in our society, you will start to run into opposition and perhaps even a person who is possessed.  Remember, they don’t all look like the foaming at the mouth girl in “The Exorcist.”

The Failure of Scientific Materialism

The West has come under a world view that is sometimes called Scientific Materialism.  It teaches that there is no spirit world and that all things can be explained through natural processes.  If there is something that can’t be explained we are given a kind of promissory note that promises that science will eventually figure it out.  This materialism points to the supernatural beliefs of the past and labels them all ignorance.  This itself is ignorant, but let’s press on.  It is partially true that the ancient supernatural beliefs were because of man’s ignorance.  However, because it rejects a spirit world, materialists do not recognize that much of the ignorance was because of meddling, evil spirits.

Materialism has problems though.  If humans are just biological machines and our thoughts are merely the random firing of synapses (i.e. just natural processes), then there is no right and wrong and there is no purpose or free will.  A crushing hopelessness lies at the end of such a belief.  It also runs into a logical contradiction.  If there is only material then the material had to either bring itself into existence or it is eternal.  Yet, if it has always been (if we can eternally go back to an earlier time) then time would never have gotten to us.  You cannot have an infinite regression of a material thing (space, time, matter).  This adds to the weight that few humans can actually follow such a world view.  It is too cruel and too inhuman.  Something in us cries for something beyond.  The weakness of scientific materialism has given rise to a new wave of the old spiritual ideas and paranormal activity like Paul encountered in Philippi.

As I said earlier, this began in the 1800’s as gurus and Tibetan masters interacted with the West.  The mystical world view of the East promoted a mushy spiritual paradigm.  Everything is God and we can learn to tap into it and the collective wisdom of all the spirits.  Thus séances, channeling, the occult, and many other vehicles became popular ways to connect to the spirit world.  Now surely there were charlatans who were out to make a buck off of the superstitions of suckers.  But, some activity could not be explained with this.  Early debunkers were not entirely successful.  Of course they didn’t have the scientific know how that we do today, right?  But then explain why even modern debunkers have trouble explaining away every experience and story that comes along.  Explain why our colleges and military still conduct experiments in the paranormal.

This alternate spiritual world view was different than the biblical world view.  However, during the 1800’s many Christian denominations began to give up the idea of the supernatural and miraculous.  Thus the Church was seduced to embrace scientific materialism and create a hybrid that allowed for a God, Jesus and not much else.  Jesus became a mere example and most of what is said about him never happened.  These moralists on one side and a harsh scientific materialism on the other side became a perfect dichotomy for funneling people toward something more and something spiritual. 

The alternative spiritual world view offered something that was new and exciting to many in America and the Western countries.  Thus many unwittingly opened themselves up to evil spirit with malignant designs.  The Bible warned us about them, but we have been set up to disregard what the biblical prophets had to say.  These spirits are deceivers and they cannot be trusted.  This is why God forbids and warns against attempts to contact spirits.  Christians are to pray only to God Himself.  We interact with only His Holy Spirit.  Don’t get me wrong.  The “wisdom” of these spirit beings can be powerful and seductive.  But like Satan with Eve, they only seek to steal from us what we have.

So What Should Christians Do?

First we need to quit running away from the Bible and start believing it.  You do not have to reject the reality of science in order to embrace the Bible.  You might have to reject the world view that some scientists have.  But, many scientists are Christians too.  Some of them do not have a biblical world view, but some of them do.  So what is the biblical world view?  God created both the spiritual and material world.  A rebellion in the spirit world came into the material world, when Satan tricked mankind into disobeying God.  God then gave mankind over to the desires of their heart and they became enslaved to these spiritual beings, or false gods.  Yet, in His mercy, God provided a way for humans to be saved from this slavery and His eternal judgment.  Christians have been sent into the entire world to set people free from the rule of these false gods and their demonic spirits.

In fact, Revelation 9 reveals that in the last days before Christ returns, a spiritual prison called the bottomless pit will be opened up and the earth will be inundated with malevolent spirits who will angrily attack mankind because they know their time is short.  The earth is not becoming less spiritual.  We are headed towards a time of great spiritual deception and attack.  Revelation 9:20-21 says, “The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.”  This is where we are headed.

We should also be busy warning people about these deceiving spirits and the deceptions they have promoted in our society.  Many are enslaved by the teachings and ideas that come from these evil spirits.  Science is not our enemy.  Our enemy is using science and a deceptive interpretation of its findings to deceive mankind.  He wants us to be caught off-guard by his true intentions.

Lastly, Christians must walk in the authority of Jesus Christ.  Paul said to the demon, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.”  A little girl was set free that day because Paul knew that these evil spirits cannot stand up to Jesus.  We have been sent on a mission from God to tell people about Jesus.  If you read the entire chapter of Acts 16, you see that Paul got his first convert by preaching by the river where people gathered to pray.  Lydia believed in Jesus and asked Paul to stay and teach her more.  The world would call Paul a cultural murderer.  But, He knew he was operating under the authority of Jesus who is Lord of all Lords and King of all kings, both on earth and in the heavens above.  Let’s trust Him and be about our Father’s business.

The Paranormal Paradigm Shift audio