Occult practices
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Spiritism |
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Spiritism
is the name given to the belief that the living can communicate with the
spirits of the dead so as to receive from them intelligent messages and
proofs of their identity and survival, and to the various practices by which
such communication is attempted. Today spiritism is also known as
spiritualism. The National Spiritualist Association (USA) has adopted the following
definition concerning spiritism: ‘Spiritualism is the Science, Philosophy and
Religion of continuous life, based upon the demonstrated fact of
communication, by means of mediumship, with those who live in the Spirit
world.’ |
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Spiritism
is a very ancient belief and practice. According to the Bible, it was
practiced in the |
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The
basic teachings of spiritism can be found in The spirits' book, The Principles of Spiritist Doctrine, which
was published in 1857 by French spiritist Allan Kardec (1804 - 1869). This
book is presented in the form of questions posed to mediums and the answers
from spiritual entities. It answers over a thousand questions concerning God,
the immortality of the soul; the nature of spirits and their relations with
mankind; the moral law; the present life; the future life, the laws of the universe
and the destiny of the human race. Most spiritists consider this book their
Bible. Spiritists claim that the teachings of spiritism, which I remind you
are teachings transmitted to men by spiritual entities, are Christian
teachings. For Allan Kardek stated in The
spirits’ book: ‘The point which we here desire to establish is this,
viz., that the teaching of the spirits who proclaim it is eminently
Christian, that it is founded on the doctrines of the immortality of the
soul, of future rewards and punishments, of the justice of God, of human
free-will, and the moral code of Christ; and that, therefore, it cannot be
anti-religious.’ (page 146-147) |
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In
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The
basic teachings of the spirits |
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God.
God is eternal, immutable, immaterial, unique, all-powerful, sovereignly just
and good. He has created the universe, which comprehends all beings, animate
and inanimate, material and immaterial. The material beings constitute the
visible or corporeal world, and the immaterial beings constitute the
invisible or spiritual world, that is to say, the spirit-world, or world of
spirits. The spirit-world is the normal, primitive, eternal world,
pre-existent to, and surviving, everything else (Allan Kardec, The spirits’ book, pages 31-32) |
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Man.
Man consists of three things: (1) The body, or material being, analogous to
the animals, and animated by the same vital principle; (2) The soul, or
immaterial being, which is a spirit incarnated in the body, yes because
spiritism teaches reincarnation, so man’s body is just the envelope of an
incarnated spirit; (3) The link – which is called perispirit - which unites
the soul and the body, a principle intermediary between matter and spirit.
The perispirit is a sort of semi-material envelope, and when man dies the
material body, which is the grossest of man's two envelopes, is destroyed;
but the spirit preserves his other envelope, viz., the perispirit, which
constitutes for him an ethereal body that is invisible to us in its normal
state, but can become occasionally visible and even tangible (cf. Allan
Kardec, The spirits’ book, page 32) |
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Spirits.
Spirits belong to different classes, and are not equal to one another either
in power, in intelligence, in knowledge, or in morality. Those of the highest
order are distinguished from those below them by their superior purity and
knowledge, their nearness to God, and their love of goodness. The other
classes are more and more distant from this perfection; those of the lower
ranks are inclined to most of our passions, hatred, envy, jealousy, pride,
etc.; they take pleasure in evil. Spirits do not belong perpetually to the
same order. All are destined to attain perfection by passing through the
different degrees of the spirit-hierarchy. This amelioration is effected by
incarnation, which is imposed on some of them as an
expiation, and on others as a mission. Material life is a trial which
they have to undergo many times until they have attained to absolute
perfection; it is a sort of filter, or alembic, from which they issue more or
less purified after each new incarnation. When a person dies, the soul
re-enters the world of spirits from which it came, and from which it will
enter upon a new material existence after a longer or shorter lapse of time,
during which its state is that of an errant or wandering spirit. The
qualities of the soul are those of the spirit incarnated in us; thus, a good
man is the incarnation of a good spirit, and a bad man is that of an
unpurified spirit. Spirits exert an incessant action upon the moral world, they are incessantly in relation with men. The good
spirits try to lead us into the right road, sustain us under the trials of
life, and aid us to bear them with courage and resignation; the bad ones
tempt us to evil: it is a pleasure for them to see us fall, and to make us
like themselves. Spirits manifest themselves spontaneously, or in response to
evocation. All spirits may be evoked: those who have animated the most
obscure of mortals, as well as those of the most illustrious personages, and
whatever the epoch at which they lived; those of our relatives, our friends,
or our enemies; and we may obtain from them, by written or by verbal
communications, counsels, information in regard to their situation beyond the
grave, their thoughts in regard to us, and whatever revelations they are
permitted to make to us. The moral teaching of the higher spirits may be sumnied
up, like that of Christ, in the gospel maxim, 'Do unto others as you would
that others should do unto you;' that is to say, do good to all, and wrong no
one (cf. Allan Kardec, The spirits’
book, pages 33-35) |
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Jesus
Christ and the atonement. It is an absurd idea that
Jesus was any more divine than any other man, for he was the Son of God, just
as also all men are sons of God; the miraculous conception of Christ is
merely a fabulous tale; advanced spirits do not teach the atonement of Christ
– nothing of the kind; the doctrine of atonement is the very climax of a
deranged imagination, and one that is of the unrighteous and immoral tendency
(cf. Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the
Cults, page 275). |
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Hell and heaven.
The doctrine of eternal fire comes ‘from taking a figure of speech for a
reality, as men have done in so many instances’ (Allan Kardec, op. cit., page
388); ’Heaven’ and ‘hell,’ then, as men have imagined them, have no
existence? "They are only symbols; there are happy and unhappy spirits
everywhere. Nevertheless, as we have also told you, spirits of the same order
are brought together by sympathy; but, when they are perfect, they can meet
together wherever they will,’ (Ibid., 404) |
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Resurrection.
‘Physical science demonstrates the impossibility of resurrection according to
the common idea. If the relics of the human body remained homogeneous, even
though dispersed and reduced to powder, we might conceive the possibility of
their being reunited at some future time ; but such
is not the case. The body is formed of various elements, oxygen, hydrogen,
azote, carbon, etc., and these elements, being dispersed, serve to form new
bodies, so that the same molecule of carbon, for example, will have entered
Into the composition of many thousands of different bodies (we speak only of
human bodies, without counting those of animals); such and such an individual
may have, in his body, molecules that were in the bodies of the men of the
earliest ages; and the very same organic molecules that you have this day
absorbed in your food may have come from the body of some one whom you have
known; and so on, Matter being finite in quantity, and its transformations
being infinite in number, how is it possible that the innumerable bodies
formed out of it should be reconstituted with the same elements? Such a
reconstruction is a physical impossibility. The resurrection of the body can,
therefore, be rationally admitted only as a figure of speech, symbolising the
fact of reincarnation; thus interpreted, it has in it nothing repugnant to
reason, nothing contrary to the data of physical science.’ (Ibid., 403-404) |
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Confutation |
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Spiritism
is of the devil |
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Spiritism
is a work of the devil and therefore it must be rejected, for the Scripture
warns us against it saying: “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists,
for you will be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus |
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The
teachings of the spirits refuted |
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As
we saw before, spirits deny the deity of Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His
atonement, they deny also the existence of hell and heaven, and they deny the
resurrection from the dead which they have replaced with reincarnation. It is
clear, therefore, that their teachings are false for they contradict the Holy
Scripture, which is the Word of God. And since we know that every falsehood
is of the devil, for he is the father of lies, we declare that their
teachings are of the devil. |
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Now
someone may point out that spirits believe in the existence of God. Yes, they
believe that God exists. However, it must be said that while some spirits
believe in the existence of a personal God (Kardec considered God a personal
being) others believe that God is all and all is God, that is, they believe
pantheism. That is one of the numerous contradictions which are present in
spiritism and which are justified by spiritists in this way: they affirm that
not all the spirits belong to the same order, for there are ‘higher spirits’
and spirits ‘of the lower ranks’; the former are trustworthy while the latter
are liars! As for the fact that there are some spirits who affirm that God
exists, we are not surprised for James says that even the demons believe
there is one God (cf. James 2:19). Even the fact that from time to time the
spirits speaks of Jesus, making it clear that He lived on the earth, does not
surprise us, for the demon-possessed men who met Jesus on the earth knew that
He was the Son of the Most High God (cf. Mark 5:7); but they did not love Him
nor worship Him till the demons were in them for the demons hindered them
from loving and worshiping Jesus. In the same way, today spiritists – even
though they speak of God (no matter what they say) and of Jesus, do not love
God or the Son, but they hate both God and His Son, for they are possessed
and guided by spirits. Are there any good spirits? No there are no good
spirits, for all the spirits who speak and act through mediums or spiritists
are wicked; spirits differ in rank for in the spiritual realm the spirits
belong to different ranks (the principalities, the powers, the rulers of the
darkness of this world, and the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly
places – cf. Ephesians |
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Therefore
we must be very careful when we hear spiritists speaking of God or Jesus, for
they actually mention God or Jesus only to deceive people into accepting all
kinds of lies. Yes, they mention the name of God or the name of Jesus, but
remember that they say all kinds of lies against them. For as we saw before
they deny the incarnation and the divinity of Christ (to them Jesus Christ is
a good inspiring spirit) and the fact that Jesus purged our sins through the
shedding of His blood for they say that men must purify themselves through
reincarnation (so they denigrate the purification of sins performed by the
blood of Christ and have replaced it with an illusory purification which man
can attain through reincarnation). We saw that they deny also hell and
heaven, even though they say that God is just. They deny what the Scripture
teaches on sin. Therefore, as you can see, the spirits of which the
spiritists speak deny the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel, and it can’t
be otherwise for we know that their master is Satan, the father of lies, who
– as Jesus said – “does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in
him” (John 8:44 – NKJV). When Kardec affirmed that ‘the teaching of the
spirits who proclaim it is eminently Christian’ he lied against the truth,
for the spirits prompt people to do evil things. Do they not teach that the
spirits of the dead may be evoked, that is to say, that spiritism can be
practiced? How can one say then that their teaching is Christian, when the
Word of God condemns spiritism, for it is written: “Do not turn to mediums or
seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them.
I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus |
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Now
let me refute briefly the spiritistic doctrine on man’s composition and the
soul’s destiny after death. First of all I say that the Scripture teaches
that the human being consists of a spirit, a soul and a body, for Paul says
to the Thessalonians: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you
completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless
at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23 – NKJV). The
spirit and the soul are the immaterial part of man, while the body is the
material part of him. As for the so called perispirit (which according to the
spiritists is a sort of semimaterial envelope which unites the soul and the body),
however, it must be said that the Scripture does not speak of it, that is to
say, there is not one hint or suggestion in the whole Scripture that the
perispirit exists; therefore we consider the perispirit something which does
not exist. Second, I want to say that the soul is not a spirit incarnated in
the body for the following reasons. The Scripture teaches that the soul of
every man is created by God in the womb of his mother. So every person has
his own soul, and cannot have the soul of another man who lived on the earth
before him. In other words, the soul of every man came into being in the womb
of his mother and did not preexist in the body of someone else. Furthermore,
the Scripture teaches that when a man dies his soul leaves the body and goes
either to heaven or to hell, which are two different places located in the
hereafter; the former is a place of comfort and the latter is a place of
torment. The righteous go to heaven and there they await the resurrection and
the reward for their work; the wicked go to hell and there they await the
resurrection in order to be judged according to their works and cast into the
eternal fire. However, notice that the spirits who speak through the mouth of
the spiritists deny the existence of heaven and hell, even though they claim
to be the spirits or the souls of the dead. That is a clear evidence of the
fact that the spirits which appear or manifest themselves during
spiritualistic séances are not the spirits of the dead, but demons who
deceive people into thinking that they are the souls of the dead. They are
neither in heaven nor in hell, but they are in the air and they are able to
see and hear men and to appear to men when they are evoked. Yes, because
demons – unlike the souls of the dead – can see and hear those who are on the
earth. But the souls of the dead, according to the Scripture, are not able to
see or to hear us, or to minister to us or to attack us or to guide us or to
led us astray or to appear to those who evoke them, nor do they wander for a
longer or shorter period of time after which they will enter upon a new
material experience, for when they leave the bodies of men they go either to
heaven or to hell, where they will remain till the resurrection, so they are
not able to communicate with the living. The Scripture clearly states that “the
dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5 – NKJV), and that when the wicked has
died “his sons come to honor, and he does not know it; they are brought low,
and he does not perceive it” (Job |
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Having
demonstrated that the soul of man is not a spirit incarnated in the body and
that when a person dies his soul leaves the earth and goes either to heaven
or to hell (if he is saved he goes to heaven, but if he is lost he goes to
hell), I want to speak of those strange and supernatural phenomena which take
place during the spiritualist séances and which are attributed to the spirits
of the dead evoked by mediums, whose presence is considered necessary during
the spiritualist séances so that the spirits may manifest themselves (for it
is said that a medium is able to communicate between the dead and the living
for he has a perispirit which is better than those of the other human beings
which contacts the perispirit of the spirit which is evoked). Now many people
when they hear about these strange phenomena – above all about tables who are
raised from the ground or about other objects which move from one place to
another - think that they are only tricks performed by the medium to deceive
those who are present into thinking that there are some spirits in the room
where they are seated. There’s no denying that in some cases these
manifestations are nothing but tricks (which are exposed in due time). However,
the fact still remains that in some cases these manifestations cannot be
attributed to the craftiness of the medium, for they are phenomena worked by
demons. I mean that we as believers must not think that those things are bad
tricks worked by mediums in order to fool people and to make money; for
actually the Scripture teaches us that the ministers of Satan,
guided and helped by evil spirits, can work wonders like the above mentioned
ones. Let us not forget that the Egyptian magicians, who opposed Moses and
Aaron, also were able to perform by their occult arts some of the wonders
which were worked by Moses and Aaron, as it is written that they turned their
rods into serpents: “But Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers,
so the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their
enchantments. For every man threw down his rod, and they became serpents …”
(Exodus |
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What
shall we say then about those spirits who appear during spiritualist séances
and speak with a voice which is very similar to the voice of the dead who
have been evoked? We shall say this: since they cannot be the souls of the
dead for the above mentioned reasons, they are evil spirits who manage to
mimic the voice of the dead so well that those who attend the spiritualist
séances think that they are their loved ones who have been evoked. And what
shall we say about the fact that sometimes what these spirits have said about
the life of some people who participated in the spiritualist séances have
proved to be true? Well, we are not surprised, for we know that the evil
spirits see what men do, they know their identity and in certain cases they
can reveal these things. Let me give you some biblical examples to show you
this. The evil spirits which were cast out by Jesus Christ knew that Jesus
was the Christ, as it is written: “And demons also came out of many, crying
out and saying, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of God!’ And He, rebuking them,
did not allow them to speak, for they knew that He was the Christ” (Luke 4:41
– NKJV); the spirit of divination which was in the slave girl of Philippi
knew that Paul and his fellow workers were servants of God, as it is written:
“Now it happened, as we went to prayer, that a certain slave girl possessed
with a spirit of divination met us, who brought her masters much profit by
fortune-telling. This girl followed Paul and us, and cried out, saying,
‘These men are the servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to us the way
of salvation” (Acts 16:16-17 – NKJV); the evil spirit which prevailed against
the seven sons of Sheva, a Jewish chief priest, knew who Jesus and Paul were,
for he said to the seven sons of Sheva: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but
who are you?” (Acts |
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At
this point, someone will ask me, ‘If the dead cannot communicate with the
living, for they are either in heaven or in hell, how is it then that Samuel,
who was dead, spoke with Saul when he was evoked by that woman who was a
medium at En-Dor?’ In this case, God permitted Samuel to be brought up, therefore it was by God’s will that he could speak to
Saul. However, you must remember that Saul was put to death also because he consulted
that medium, as it is written: “So Saul died for his unfaithfulness which he
had committed against the Lord, because he did not keep the word of the Lord,
and also because he consulted a medium for guidance. But he did not inquire
of the Lord; therefore He killed him, and turned the kingdom over to David
the son of Jesse” (1 Chronicles |
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The
main reasons why people consult mediums |
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Now
let me say something about the main reasons why people attend spiritualist
séances. |
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Most
people, when one of their loved ones has died, wonder where he/she is or if
he/she is happy or sad in the afterlife. That happens also to some believers
when one of their relatives has died, and they think that he/she – even
though he/she had heard the Gospel many times from their lips and had refused
in their presence to repent and believe - might have repented and asked God to
forgiven him/her just before breathing his/her last. The reason is clear, therefore,
the grief caused by the loss of their loved one is great and they want to
know if he/she is with the Lord for if they knew that he or she went to be
with the Lord they would be greatly comforted. But the grief caused by the
loss of a relative leads unbelievers to consult spiritists for spiritists claim that they can communicate with the dead,
so they attend the spiritualist séances where they are deceived by all kinds
of spiritistic manifestations which according to spiritists prove that their
loved one is among them. It is wrong for a man to consult mediums, who are
ministers of Satan, for by their work these people manage to cause him to
trust in their occult arts, and to enslave him of their occult arts, and to deceive
him into believing all kinds of lies. Furthermore, he who consults a medium
defiles himself, as it is written: “Do not turn to mediums or seek out
spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God”
(Leviticus |
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Many
people attend spiritualist séances in order that the dead might tell them about
the afterlife, or about heaven or hell; these people also commit a sin in
consulting the dead, and they also are deceived by the evil spirits who tell
them that heaven and hell are human concepts and not real places. The best thing
to do in order to know what heaven or hell is like is to read the Bible, for
there are enough references to heaven and hell in the Bible. If then a
Christian, after reading what the Bible says about heaven and hell, decides
to ask God to show him heaven or hell, he does not commit any sin. Obviously
God will answer his prayer if what the Christian asks of Him is according to
His will for him. While if it is not according to His will, the Christian
will see heaven when he dies, and he will see the everlasting fire when God
will cast the wicked into it, that is, on the Judgement Day. |
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Conclusion |
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To
conclude I say this: in the light of the Scriptures, the teachings of the
spirits are lies and thus they must be rejected without hesitation. Therefore
the spirits must not be inquired of. Spiritism is a work of the devil, which
is condemned by the Scripture, and spiritists are under condemnation just as
all those who consult them. On the other hand, we who are sons of God know
that we have a living God in heaven, a God who reveals the mysteries He wants
to reveal, who can be inquired of, or rather who must be inquired of by each
one of us when we need a specific revelation. However, I say it again, even
if God does not show us where our dead ones are, even if God does not show us
heaven or hell, we must hold on to the Holy Scripture, that is, to what the
Scripture says about the state of the dead and the places where the souls of
men go after death. Let no one of you attend spiritualist séances out of
curiosity, just to know if there is some truth in spiritism, for his
curiosity would lead him to be unfaithful to the Lord and his unfaithfulness
would expose him to the influence of demons, and would lead him to the
everlasting fire. So I conclude with the following words God spoke through
the prophet Isaiah: “When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who
whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the
dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony! If they do not
speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and
hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished,
they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their
God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness
and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness” (Isaiah |