Throughout her childhood, she and her family moved so frequently that, by eighth grade, Sarah had attended 13 different schools up and down the East Coast. Her nomadic existence contributed to feelings of instability, which were exacerbated at home by absent parents. As a young teenager, Sarah began exploring witchcraft on her own by reading books on spells and buying crystals and incense. By high school, witchcraft was an integrated part of her life.
Sarah set up an altar in her room, routinely invited spirits to guide her, and cast spells to change circumstances in her life. But as time went on, things turned dangerous. At the end of her senior year, Sarah felt a spirit was telling her that her only chance at a new life was to take her own life as a sacrifice. So Sarah attempted to commit suicide. Sarah drove her car, waiting for it to fill with leaked carbon monoxide. The next thing she knew she woke up lying on the ground next to her car, where she breathed in enough fresh air to survive.
After her near-death experience, Sarah continued on a destructive trajectory. She drank every day and prayed to spirits on the beach every night. Having failed a second suicide attempt, Sarah began looking to college as a potential solution to her problems. That fall, Sarah left for Mary Washington College with hope for what her new life at college would bring.
When she arrived on campus, Sarah was placed in a room with two other girls, Kim and Stacy. Not long after meeting them, Sarah decided they were strange. Here are some reasons: 1. Teamwork effort. If you lose, it hurts the team by not adding to the score. You have to work hard to succeed, both physically and mentally.
You have to learn your moves and when to use them. You learn a lot of discipline, and how to act when you lose. The match can be slow and boring, then all of a sudden a lot of action. You are out there on your own with everyone watching your every move. If you lose, you not only hurt yourself, but the team. If you win, you are the hero. Marc Gellman: And how could I have forgotten this wrestling is mentioned in the Bible. Jacob and Esau wrestle in the womb, and as a result Jacob is called Israel which means, "one who wrestles with God and man and prevails.
Through a spiritual perception of God as divine Love, we are able to nullify fear and hate, and without these, witchcraft has no door through which to enter our lives. Love, God, is All-in-all. It protects all through its unlimited goodness. The shield of Love covers and protects man and excludes all danger. Man, the image of Love, reflects his creator. He is, therefore, incapable of evil. God-created man--our genuine selfhood--is neither the victim nor the author of evil. He can neither be a witch nor be bewitched.
And divine Love protects him from hatred. To believe that someone hates us is to entertain a belief in hatred. We must understand that man has no personal power to love or to hate. From God we reflect the infinite power to love, and it is impossible for us not to love.
God never made hatred. Therefore, hatred has no reality and no one can truly hate us, any more than we can hate anyone else. This realization disarms the belief in witchcraft and enables us to demonstrate its nothingness, and thus to protect ourselves from it. Witchcraft, then, is a relational issue.
It expresses our failure to enter into a relationship with God, to make discoveries about the spiritual and the material worlds in partnership with him, and to fully trust him with our lives and futures.
Witchcraft robs us of spiritual reality. With a crooked finger, it points away from the speaking God who wants to be known, who always does everything that is necessary for us to enjoy a relationship with him — and who is not far from each one of us.
For these nations, which you are about to dispossess, give heed to soothsayers and to diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you so to do. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren — him you shall heed.
This verse is to be understood against the historical background of the Exodus from Egypt, which is, in part, a liberation from the spirit of witchcraft associated with Egypt cf. Isaiah There is no middle ground. It is the soothsayer or the Lord. This contrast plays out in the broader setting of Deuteronomy —19, which follows directly from the laws relating to the priesthood Deuteronomy —8. This indicates that witchcraft is structurally opposed to the priesthood and the sacrificial rituals that would later be fulfilled in Christ.
Amos Yet witchcraft is parasitic upon true priesthood; aping its forms with counterfeit spirituality, rituals and practitioners. God, who is Spirit John , has made us in his image Genesis as spiritual beings. He wants us to enjoy and express our spiritual lives in ways that are creative and which enhance our humanity.
He gives us, not a spirituality of death, but a spirituality of life. So instead of closing down avenues of knowledge and spirituality, the Bible opens them up in ways that are safe, so that they can be explored fully. It was common for kings in the Ancient Near East to seek oracular consultations ahead of major battles. Texts from Ugarit show that people believed it was possible to summon up a particular person. The necromantic consultation is effective. The spirit of Samuel communicates with Saul and provides him with information verses 16—19 , including new information regarding David verse Yet Saul is unable to manipulate Samuel for his own ends.
Samuel condemns the ritual verses 15—16 and comes with his own message from YHWH. And since the flipside of living in a technological world is that some Western materialists do in fact have a genuine interest in encountering the supernatural, the Bible also presents a challenge and a warning, especially for the next generation who will have to deal with a resurgence of witchcraft practices.
But there is a deeper level of application. We take our cue from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus showed that those who believed they were innocent of murder could nevertheless share the same underlying attitudes of a murderer Matthew — The same reasoning can apply in relation to witchcraft. After all, we have seen that witchcraft expresses our desire to carve out a space where we can make things happen apart from God,[43] and that ultimately, the manipulation of spiritual powers for our own ends is a form of human pride, which seeks to replace God with ourselves.
However, we are each guilty, at some level, of trying to manipulate people and events to bring about what we want, without trusting fully in God. But when you become an expert spin-doctor , you will be known as the Prince of Darkness. I am not, of course, saying that subliminal advertising, for example, is witchcraft. What I am saying is that in our modern secular society we give in to the same attitudes that are manifest in witchcraft. In this way, there may be all sorts of ways in which we behave that have the same dynamic equivalent as witchcraft.
There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising, or television, or technology. Nor should we find a demon behind every MBA. But we do need to be alert to how some of the ways in which our society is organised lends itself, potentially, to parallels to witchcraft.
In this sense, the Western world is steeped in witchcraft. It may even be the case that the most overt forms of witchcraft are not in fact the most evil. The parallels to witchcraft may be the most controlling. In a genuine relationship you can know people and you can have intimacy, whereas in witchcraft, and in parallels to witchcraft, knowledge and control is a substitute for intimacy. The essence of a perverted relationship is getting information about someone else, and then working out what I want to do, so I get what I want.
We get things done in hidden, subversive and manipulative ways, without trusting God or fully respecting the humanness of others. They are parallels to witchcraft because they share the same attitude. They are part of the same paradigm, which is concerned with the exercise of covert power. In the mundane things of life, Screwtape is there. In parts of Africa, for example, it means being much more open regarding the prevalence of witchcraft in society, including among African churches, whilst in the British context, for example, it means realising that, as we lose the protection of Christianity, we are in danger of re-entering an age of overt witchcraft.
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