There is a lot of confusion these days as to what comes from God and what does not. I am talking in particular about things come under the general heading of occult, such as going to fortune tellers, Tarot card readers, psychics, playing the Ouija board, or going to mediums and other similar practices. A lot of people just consider them harmless fun; besides what could possibly be wrong with them?
God expressly warns us in the Scriptures to stay away from such things. In the book of Deuteronomy it says:
You must not have in your midst anyone... who practices divination, or anyone who consults the stars, who is a sorcerer, or one who practices enchantments or who consults the spirits, no diviner, or one who asks questions of the dead. For the Lord abhors those who do these things (Deuteronomy 18:10-12).
In another book it says, ‘Do not have recourse to the spirits of the dead or to magicians; they will defile you. I, the Lord, am your God’ (Leviticus 19:31).
Why are these things a problem for us? The Lord doesn’t just give us rules for the sake of rules. If God tells us to stay away from something, there is a good reason, just like you will tell your children to stay away from the fire, or they’ll get burned. God does the same for us, telling us what to avoid if we want to stay healthy.
So why are these things, which are now available everywhere, a problem? The first and most important reason is that they interfere with our free will. Our free will is an extraordinary gift which the Lord has given us, because it means that we have the freedom to do anything we choose, be it good or evil, although real freedom is the freedom to choose what is good. We can even reject God if we choose. It is an amazing thing that the Lord who has created us respects us enough, even to giving us the freedom to reject him, and sadly some people do this by the way they live.
Anything occult is an attempt to gain knowledge, or control, of the future. The problem is that if we think we have any kind of knowledge of the future it is going to influence our freedom to choose, because we will probably start acting out of fear of what we think might be going to happen. The Lord does not want us to be afraid, but to be at peace. That is why God does not reveal the future to us. We don’t need to know it. If we did, He would show us, because He wants the very best for us.
When Jesus was talking to the Apostles about the end times and his return in glory, Jesus replied by saying, ‘See to it that no one deceives you’ (Matthew 24:4).
The second reason why these things are a problem, is that by dabbling in them we are going directly against something God has told us, which is a way of creating an obstacle between us and God. We sin when we do this. From a spiritual point of view, they can also have a hold or influence over us. If God does not reveal the future to us, then where is this information coming from? It is not coming from the Lord, even if the fortune teller starts off by praying the Hail Mary or Our Father, which I know some of them do.
I worked with an exorcist priest friend of mine for a while and saw first-hand the mess that some people get themselves into by dabbling in these things that the Lord tells us specifically to keep away from. They are very real. Satan is cunning and will do anything to lead us away from God, because he hates us as God’s creation. Satan is real. If Satan is not real then Jesus is a liar, because Jesus frequently mentioned him in his teaching. Jesus called him a liar and a deceiver and that’s what he does.
‘[The devil] was a murderer from the beginning, refusing to uphold the truth, because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, because he is a liar and the father of lies’ (Jn 8:44).
Satan distorts God’s word, to confuse us and lead us away from God. In the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Satan twisted God’s word. He said to them, ‘Did God really say that you cannot eat of any of the trees in the garden.’ God had said they could eat of any tree, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan also lied to them and said if they did eat it, they would be like God themselves, knowing good from evil, but this is exactly what God warned them about. Remember that Satan wanted to be like God himself, but without needing God. So he was trying to get them to give in to the same temptation. He twisted God’s word to deceive them.
The former exorcist of this diocese told me about one encounter he had. He was called to a house where footsteps kept appearing across the couch! When he got there, he asked the family about themselves. It turned out that the woman was living with a man who was not her husband. She was practicing witchcraft and so was her daughter. So they had left themselves wide open to evil and the demonic. The priest told them that unless they were willing to change their ways, there was nothing he could do for them and they were not willing to change, so he was unable to help them.
I was called to a house one time where radios and lights kept turning on during the night. When I asked the people who lived there if they had been involved in any kind of Occult practice, they said no, but the lady who had lived in the house before them was a medium. She now lived next door. So that was the origin of what was happening. She had opened the door to the demonic. What we think of as harmless fun, is not harmless if God forbids us to do it. Getting involved in any kind of magic, witchcraft, or fortune telling, etc, is also opening up doors to what is not of God. Hence the cases I mentioned where things were happening in those houses. If we do what God forbids us to do, we can expect consequences.
We have to ask ourselves do I believe what Jesus said is true or not? Either the Bible (the Scriptures) is the word of God, or it isn’t. If it is, we need to listen to it. If it’s not true, then what are we doing here?
God wants the very best for us and will continually guide us along the right path, the path that will help us to reach our full potential as human beings, the path that will lead us to heaven, but sometimes we get misled and go astray. That’s not a problem so long as we recognise it and come back again. I’m sure you want God’s blessing for your lives and for your families, just as I do, but if we mess with what God expressly tells us to stay away from, we will be blocking God’s help from us.
If you have dabbled in any of these things at any stage, confess it, which is also what the Lord asks us to do. By confessing it you break any spiritual hold that it can have over you. By repenting of it you also open the door to God’s grace .
In the second reading it says, ‘Remain faithful to what you have known and believed, because you know from whom you learned it…’ You know what you have learned comes from Scripture, which means it is from God, so you can trust it. The Bible is God’s gift to us to guide us in every situation we face. If we listen to it, it will lead us to God. If we ignore it, or go against it, it will lead us away from God.
If God has assured us of his help, then we would be foolish to look for spiritual help from any other source, especially a source which God expressly tells us to stay away from. We know that God wants the very best for us and if we believe that then we must also listen to what He tells us to do and what He tells us to avoid.
Jesus said, ‘Anyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise person who their built his house on solid rock. Rain came down, streams rose, winds blew and beat against that house, but it did not fall because it had its foundation on solid rock.
But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice, is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. Rains fell, torrents raged, winds blew and beat against that house and it fell and great was its collapse.' (Mt 7: 24-27).
‘I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange gods before me.’
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