The Greatest Power

Here in the West you could go your whole life without believing in any spiritual power at all. After all, if you see no evidence of the supernatural why would you believe?

I was like that growing up. As a child I followed my parent’s lack of belief. It’s not that they were staunch atheists or anything like that, but the supernatural was never talked about.

I can’t remember the exact moment when my beliefs changed, but I think it happened when I started to do yoga and meditation. I began to experience spiritual ‘feelings’; a sense that there was something more to this reality, even if I wasn’t clear on what that ‘more’ was. I then spent twenty years thinking I was becoming more clear on the nature of our spiritual realm, but in reality I was being more and more deceived.

Nowadays with the rise of the new age, more and more people are believing in something. But if you’ve never done a new age practise, or said a prayer to our creator, you could live your whole life, thinking that this physical reality is all that there is.

In other places around the world, it’s very different. I was listening to Simon Guillebaud’s Inspired podcast the other day and he was interviewing Angela Kemm, a Christian woman from South Africa, who during Apartheid would go into the townships to befriend the people living there. One day she left to go to her car and found that it was surrounded by water, and flour. She realised she had been cursed. From her encounters with witchcraft and the demonic she knew that curses are very real, that the witchdoctors possessed the power to make a car explode and the inhabitants die from their spell.

The people in the township were looking out of their windows wondering what would happen. For a split second Angela felt afraid. But then she remembered her God, the God who created heaven and earth, the God who came to earth as a human to die for our sins, and defeated death and curses, and was resurrected. She drove off without incident, and when she returned the people asked how she didn’t die, so she explained about her God; the greatest power.

Simon shared another story of his time working as a missionary in Burundi. They went into a witchdoctor’s den and a young man from his team was about to pick up a gourd. The witchdoctor started shouting at him saying that if he picked it up he would die. But the man called on Jesus, and carried on and did not die.

The greatest power was in evidence that day, and so the witchdoctor gave his life to Christ.

When you’ve lived in an atheist culture, and you suddenly realise the spirit world is real, it’s very exciting, to think that you could have power, that you could perform spells to get what you want, to manifest your dreams and reach your goals. And it’s all white magic, but it’s okay because you aren’t cursing anyone. Or is it?

Many of us, myself included, lived as if there was no guidebook to exploring the spirit realm. But there is in fact a guidebook, a guidebook that warns against witchcraft; As the book of Deuteronomy says, ‘There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, Deuteronomy 18.10-12

Messing with different spiritual powers is a sin, it’s trespassing into a realm that actually we are welcome in if we accept the invitation; the invitation that comes from Jesus, who died as a sacrifice for our sins, the mistakes we have made in taking the wrong spiritual paths, and all of the other dangerous and harmful things we have done in our lives when we ignore God and don’t believe in him.

In the book of Kings in the old testament Elijah puts the different spiritual powers to the test. The Israelites have a contest to see which spiritual power can light a fire. The prophets of Baal call on Baal and Elijah, calls on God. It is only Elijah’s prayer for fire that succeeds.

For many, seeing God’s power at work is enough for conversion to take place. After all, we’d be crazy not to want the most awesome all-powerful God of the universe to be on our side, saving our lives, performing miracles, providing for us, and guiding us in living well?

But when you haven’t seen this God in action, when you live steeped in atheism, or witchcraft or new age, you might not see that God is there behind the scenes with the power to transform everything.

But if you want to know who is the greatest power behind creation, all it takes is to genuinely want to seek the truth. As it says in the book of Matthew, Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Matthew 7:7-11

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