Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Black Magic or Resurrection Power

Wes Peppers

01 The First Lie and the g-o-d who Replaced God

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2022 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for the beautiful gift of the Bible.

Thank you for the Holy Spirit who guides us in the truth.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

And Jesus also said that your word, which is the Bible, is truth.

And so, Lord, we wouldn't attempt to understand the great truth, the great depth of Scripture without asking for the Holy Spirit today.

So we pray for Him, we plead for Him, we ask Him to come and move upon our hearts, lead us closer to You, and closer to an understanding of what You would speak to us in these last days of earth's history.

The title of our message this morning is The First Lie and the G-O-D, the little God who replaced God.

And I'll just tell you right now, who do you think the little G-O-D is?

And you're going to find that to be true today.

This subject has actually always been a passion of mine.

In fact, I preached a sermon on this at Camp Meeting a number of years ago when I was the early morning speaker.

I've preached a similar message to this in all of my churches, and I'm very passionate because I believe that many of God's people in the last days, in his last day final movement, are deceived by this topic.

The devil is very good at making things that are very deadly seem cute and innocent, especially in the last day of verse history.

Not just cute and innocent, but very attractive and appealing.

And so it's my desire, truly, to help us open our eyes to this subject and make sure that we are not going to be deceived by it.

But as I studied in preparation for this, I haven't really preached this sermon in about, I don't know, 4 or 5 years, I was blown away at the statistics that I found in the last few days.

A 2017 Pew Research survey found that 62% of Americans say they hold New Age beliefs.

That is 6 out of every 10 Americans believe in some form of new age, whether it's tarot cards or a psychic or some kind of witchcraft or occult practice or whatever it may be, 6 out of 10 people in America today would say, would actually confess that they believe in some kind of New Age practice.

Now, that doesn't go to say those that would not admit that, right?

So the number is probably actually even higher.

Twenty-five percent of Americans today claim to be atheists.

And the numbers of Christianity is declining.

Of Protestant Christians and others, it's declining as this increases.

Including a belief in astrology, psychics, and the presence of spiritual energy in inanimate objects." How many of you have ever heard of these crystals?

They're becoming very popular, these crystals that people are wearing.

Someone was telling me just the other day about her friend who was getting answers to life from this crystal.

And she had this crystal and she would swing it and she would ask it a question, is my name so and so?

Very mind-blowing what people are getting themselves into these days.

Newsweek also recently put out an article that stated that the number of Wiccan witches across the U.S.

Increased from 8, 000 in the 1990s to over 1.5 million in the year 2018.

They now outnumber the Presbyterian Church at 1.4 million.

There was a number of articles about this that witches today actually, and just in the United States alone, this is not globally, this is just in the U.S., actually outnumber the Presbyterian Church.

I'm not picking on the Presbyterian Church.

I'm just saying it because that's what the article said.

But that's mind-blowing, wouldn't you say?

Christians are even becoming outnumbered at this new epidemic.

USA Today reports that in 2001, there were 134, 000 self-identifying witches.

By October of 2021, that number had increased to more than 2000000, with many of them coming from young women.

So you look at this stats and how this growth has been explosive and not over the course of 100 or 200 or 300 years, but just over the course of the last 20 to 30 years.

1990s, there were about 8, 000 known witches in the United States.

Sorry, 2018 had grown to 1 and a half million, and in today's year, 2022, more than 2000000 just in the US alone, very mind-blowing.

Leadership magazine, which is a Christian magazine really written for pastors and leaders Recently published a whole issue of on satanic influence and the occult.

They have had thousands of letters by ministers requesting help and assistance With this problem so pastors are writing in saying our young people are being swallowed up with this stuff.

People are trying to bring these things into the church, claiming that they're Christian.

It's really becoming a crisis in our church today, and it's even becoming a crisis in the Adventist church, and sometimes we don't even realize it.

So I'm going a little bit deeper here, just talking a little bit about Wicca.

How many of you have ever heard of Wicca?

Wicca is a modern form of witchcraft and sorcery, witches and warlocks, and it's really wrapped around nature.

We're gonna talk about it some today, a little bit more later in the week.

But I want you to notice this, from the same article in USA Today, Wicca has no universally accepted Bible or regimented mode of practice.

And the only tenant widely adopted by Wiccans is, harm none and do as you ought.

Now, how many of you see that phrase, do as you will, and you recognize that from somewhere?

Alistair Crowley was a modern mystic, occultist, and bisexual adventurer known to his contemporaries as the Great Beast.

He lived in the early 1900s, and he is labeled by many as 1 of the most wicked men in the history of humanity.

I mean, he was just mind-blowing that this man had no boundaries, no lines, no filter, and he just continued to get worse and worse, and he was a very deep practicing occultist, and he developed this phrase, and people began to make t-shirts and all this type of things, do what thou wilt.

Now as Christians, do we believe in do what thou wilt?

No, in the Lord's Prayer, the Bible says, Jesus said to God his Father, thy will be done on heaven as it is, I'm sorry, on earth as it is in heaven.

Not my will, Jesus said, when he was about to go to the cross, but what?

So as Christians, we have a mantra, we have a principle that we live by, a biblical principle, that God's will would be done in our lives, God's will would be done in the earth, and ultimately God's will would be done in this great battle of the great controversy, yes?

But Aleister Crowley came along in the early 19th century, he was kind of the birth, really, of the modern will of contemporary occultism and many of those type of facets, but he has this theme, do what thou will.

He developed his own school of mysticism, magic as he called it, summoned its users to embrace the imagination and to do what?

This is actually taken right off the back of the book that you see there, which is for sale.

And I won't even tell you where it's for sale.

You just listen to this seminar, and that's enough information.

You don't have to get into all that stuff.

So, there's an interesting draw among young people, and this idea of do what thou wilt, to reject the current authority, to reject contemporary religion or Christianity, and do what thou wilt.

02 Spiritualism and Witchcraft in the Old Testament

Father in Heaven, we thank You for this time together.

We thank You for the privilege of opening the Bible and opening and studying Your Word.

You've given us warnings and entreaties and encouragements and various forms of Scripture to open our eyes to the truth.

So we pray that We would heed those warnings.

And that we would be safely in Your plan.

That we would not stray this way or that way.

That we would study to show ourselves approved.

And that we would understand Your truth and surrender ourselves to it.

We thank You for Your great hope, for the great love and the great joy that we find in Jesus.

I'm just going to do a very quick review of yesterday's topic, and it'll be very brief.

Do you remember what percentage of Americans believe in New Age?

And I didn't do the deeper research on that, but I almost guarantee you that a certain percentage of those people are probably also believing in Christianity.

There's a huge crossover that's taking place, and that gets more and more and more.

But as you'll see today and throughout the week, God has called us to separate from those things.

In addition, we saw that in the 1990's, does anybody remember how many proclaimed witches there were in the United States.

That number has exponentially exploded in the last just 2 to 2 and a half decades.

And pretty much it's been the same throughout history, but in the last days it's increasing.

And the words of Jesus today in Matthew 24 are becoming true.

False Christs and false prophets would arise.

And not just those being false Christs who claim to be Christ, but those who claim to know the future, those who claim all the attributes of God.

Those who have the ability to contact the spirit world, and we know what the spirit world is.

So they're going to have to keep up with me in the back.

We're on slide 7 of 86, So you can jump to that.

So we saw that the birth of modern spiritualism was, yes, as some people would say, in the 1800s with the Fox sisters, but also in even more modern times, the more deep, occult practices were really invented by Alistair Crowley.

And he developed this statement, do as thou wilt.

And He believed that he used this term magic and the K on the end of that is not a mistake.

The word magic as we spell it today with just a C, the People who are in that type of activity, they view magic with a C as just like little tricks.

Like card tricks and those type of things.

And he believed that we should embrace the imagination and glorify the will.

And we know that the will in the issue of the great controversy is a very big subject, isn't it?

It's a very important piece of whether we are going to be saved or lost.

And we also looked at the Boston Globe, and we found that there are several things that they embrace or that they hang on to as a reason that they Practice this.

1 is to be empowered, and 2 is to have what?

That myself, I'm my own God, and I will decide for myself what I am going to do.

So we asked the question, what is spiritualism?

And spiritualism has many definitions, but we saw from the Bible this great controversy that's taking place in the world today in the realms of the news, in the realms of Hollywood, and so forth.

And we saw that there's this great battle between good and evil.

In many Hollywood movies, you see this issue of the great controversy being played out.

And as I mentioned yesterday, even lines, even statements being made that are from books like The Great Controversy and others that only Adventists understand and know.

He studies prophecy more than any Seventh-day Adventist on the planet today, and he knows what his fate is.

He knows what is to come, and yet he's still pressing upon the world these things.

And what's very, very scary is that oftentimes these false concepts and the things that God has forbidden like cultism, sorcery, magic, those types of things are presented in an innocent, fun, appealing way that often makes that which is wrong and bad seem like the victim or something that is actually very good.

And the devil has a great way of making those things which God has forbidden for very good reasons to seem cute, innocent, and fun.

How many of you have seen that to be true in the world today?

As I was doing the research for these presentations, I was coming across multiple websites of Christian theologians and Christian leaders who would take the very things that I'm talking to you about this week and say really there's nothing wrong with them.

Just the other day, 1 was defending Harry Potter saying the difference between Harry Potter and real occultism is that Harry Potter is a fake story.

Friends, how can we discern these things?

If Satan was able to deceive Eve in the Garden of Eden, and she was unfallen and had all of her intellectual power, she had more access to God Himself, if He was able to deceive her, if He was able to deceive a third of the angels in heaven, What makes you think you're going to stand up against Him on your own?

Alright, So I'm going to close my computer so I don't get confused.

03 Spiritualism and Witchcraft and the New Testament

Father in Heaven, we thank You so much for the privilege we have to study and open Your Word.

Thank You for those who are on their way.

May You speak to us mightily through the power of Holy Scripture, through the Spirit of Prophecy, which we believe is a guiding source for us today.

And Lord, we have special insight there and it always points back to the Bible.

So We want to hear the Bible speak today.

So don't just speak to our minds today, Lord.

And may we be every moment of every day found to be new creatures in Christ, born again with Your Spirit pervading in our hearts and in our lives today, making us more and more like Jesus until we become just like Him.

So this is our prayer this morning, and I pray it also for my friends here, those that are watching online.

And we ask this and thank You for it ahead of time in Jesus' name.

By the way, I haven't done this, but those of you that are watching online, we thank you for joining us wherever you are in the world today.

And we want to encourage you to share these messages with your friends.

Those of you that are here as well, they have posted various means that you can do that, but share those things with your friends.

If you have friends, you feel like it would be a benefit to it.

Spiritualism and witchcraft in the Old Testament.

So we saw yesterday, from yesterday's message, that there's a bottom line here with spiritualism, especially in the church.

I'm going to read it because these are my own words, but I want to make sure that I'm pretty clear about this.

The most baseline and fundamental form of spiritualism is any form of disobedience to God.

Would you agree with that based on what we've studied?

Now, it kind of begins to branch out into speaking to the dead and occult and all these things, but the bottom line is we saw from Genesis that spiritualism is disobedience.

We think that we will arrive at some higher place through exercising our own will rather than choosing God's will.

Believing in our own words rather than His Word, and lifting up ourselves rather than lifting up Christ.

In doing so, we replace the God of Heaven with the little God of who?

And you know, we often as Adventists, we will love to shout from the rooftops about the Antichrist of Bible prophecy.

And I say that, and when I say it that way, Some of you might think, well, maybe are we not supposed to do that?

But we love to do that while at the same time, we're setting ourselves up as little popes.

When we stray away from God and do our own thing, we become a little pope ourself, you see.

And so we can proclaim that over there while still doing this over here.

We can be trying to call people out of Babylon while Babylon still exists in our hearts.

You love to say this and that in front of the congregation.

You love to do the Scripture reading in the synagogue.

I'm not calling you whitewashed tombs today.

I'm just telling you what Jesus said to them.

Well, the point is, Paul said once again, let us take heed lest we want, lest we fall.

We can get spiritual pride about these kind of things and think, well, I don't practice spiritualism.

All those witches and warlocks, they're going straight to hell.

Well, at the same time, our hearts are disobedient and rebellious towards God and some of the most basic, fundamental beliefs of Christianity.

How many of you think that's possible in our world today?

How many of you think that's possible even in the Adventist church?

So we approach this topic very humbly recognizing that we need Jesus in our hearts.

And we need Him to bring understanding to us that we also may not fall into the same pit.

So let's not serve the God of self today.

Again, we saw that all through biblical history, but we see it in modern times as well today.

The common denominator in the act of worshiping nature and using spiritual forces to get results, that's the common denominator.

It is the ultimate manifestation of the worship of self and self-exaltation.

Rather than looking and ruling over nature for the glory of God, we seek to manipulate nature for the glory of ourselves.

So we saw that very much involved with spiritualism is contacting the dead.

And what did we see the Bible says about that?

But there's very subtle forms today that are leaking right into the church and into the daily lives of God's people.

But Leviticus 19.31, I'm just going to read 2 verses from this.

Give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits.

Do not seek after them to be defiled by them.

Mediums, familiar spirits, any form whatsoever of contacting the dead, what does it do to your Christian experience?

It doesn't say you may do this, but not that.

It doesn't say go ahead and do this, but here's the line that you must not cross.

That includes any television program, any movie, any book, any video game that has even the remotest hint of those things.

And I'm saying that strongly to you today.

And I'm going to touch more on this tomorrow.

But the reason I say it is, you're saying, oh, well, you're saying Caspar the ghost is bad.

I'm not saying Caspar the ghost is going to make you demon-possessed.

But what I am saying with all confidence, authority, and fact, is that Caspar the ghost is a gateway into the next thing.

And then that thing leads you to the next thing.

And before you know it, you're walking around possibly with things following you that you don't want to follow.

04 Spiritualism and Witchcraft in Modern Media

Father in Heaven, we count it a joy to be here in Your presence again.

But we want to sincerely ask today that You would cleanse our hearts, open our eyes, our minds, and our ears to Your truth today.

And as we take a look at this very important subject, we pray that Your Holy Spirit would guide us, would lead us, would draw us, would direct us.

Comforting us where we need to be comforted.

Convicting us where we need to be convicted.

May we be 1 with You today is our prayer in Jesus' name, Amen.

We're going to jump right into it because we just don't have time to waste.

But there's a couple of passages that I want to look at with you that I think are very strong, significant passages in the New Testament Dealing directly with witchcraft.

You know, in the early church, this stuff was prevalent.

And in many places in the world today where we do Christian missionary work, we always have to continue to battle these things even in post-2000.

I was in Malaysia just a few years ago and visited some of the local sites there.

I was doing some speaking appointments and I went to some of these little parks where they have these little stands and people have pictures of their dead ancestors.

And every day, they'll bring little bowls of rice and all these types of things.

Series

Black Magic or Resurrection Power

05 Spiritualism and Witchcraft in Contemporary Christian Culture and Theology

Transcript

Parent Series

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