New Spiritualities: What They Seek, What Christ Gives

Introduction

"As the wise man says, there is nothing new under the sun." In this second part of his talk at Église Baptiste Toulouse Métropole, Florent Varak starts from that conviction: "The new spiritualities are really a recycling of ancient magical spiritualities, adapted to contemporary society." Understanding them helps you recognize them today.

The preacher, who is of Jewish origin, has just come back from a trip to California, where he spent time with Jews for Jesus in Los Angeles. One Friday evening he taught about fifty people, half of whom did not know Jesus. All of these non-believers were involved in New Age spiritualities. "There has always been this pull toward the East."

So he travels through the Bible, from Mesopotamia to Ephesus, and then through today's new spiritualities, to ask a simple question: what do these practices seek, and what does the gospel give? The session ends with half an hour of questions.

Message Outline

1. Nothing New Under the Sun: Ancient Magical Spiritualities

• The ancient spiritualities come "in the form of myths, practices and power." In Mesopotamia, Marduk splits Tiamat's skull and makes heaven and earth from her corpse; Gilgamesh sets out on a quest for immortality through magic and the interpretation of dreams; Ishtar descends to the underworld and returns to life. Four thousand deities, statues that are fed and dressed, and people who are "extremely afraid of attacks from the spiritual world."
• The sociology of religion distinguishes cultures of guilt and innocence (the West, the Greeks), cultures of shame and honor (the Maghreb, Africa, Asia, the Romans) and cultures of fear and power, where people look for power to protect themselves from spirits. The ancient civilizations were closely tied to this third category.
• "The good news is that Jesus Christ answers all three cultures." To guilt, he answers with justification: he became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). To shame, with adoption: we are fellow heirs with Christ. To fear, with the victory of the cross: he stripped the principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15) and transferred us into the kingdom of his Son (Colossians 1:12-14). "The devil was completely defeated at the cross."
• Egypt is "a magical world." Heka is both a god and a force, and his name means magic. The Egyptian anxiety was to keep the world in balance through rituals. The god Atum creates by speaking: "I speak, so it happens. I create reality." The preacher warns: "You find this in some evangelical circles: you have to say things for them to happen. The power of words. That is Egyptian magic."
• Facing Moses, the magicians of Egypt, whom Paul names Jannes and Jambres (2 Timothy 3:8), reproduce the first two plagues and then stop: "This is the finger of God." Their magic is limited. And all they can do is add plagues, never remove them.

2. Deuteronomy 18: A Warning Sandwiched in the Middle

• This is the most fundamental text because of the list and range of the practices it forbids: making your son or daughter pass through the fire, divination, omens, occult techniques, sorcery, spells, calling up spirits, consulting the dead (Deuteronomy 18:9-14).
• Its structure speaks. Verses 1 to 8 deal with the rights of the priests and the Levites, a legitimate spirituality. Verses 15 to 22 announce the true prophet who is coming, Jesus. Between the two, the prohibition. "This sandwich explains to us that there is a great porosity possible between the legitimate expressions of spirituality and the guilty, occult expressions of spirituality."
• Why not offer your child to the fire? Because only one has the right to do so: the Father, who hands over his Son, the Lamb of God. "Occultism, through the sacrifices it offers, is a counterfeit of Christianity." Archaeology has uncovered bronze statues of Molech, with a hollowed belly filled with embers, where children were burned in fertility rites. It is a failure to understand that Christ's sacrifice is enough, "a monstrous and odious alternative, illegal and illicit, to Christian spirituality."
• Hence a first definition: magic is "an illegal interaction with the spiritual world. Not that it is impossible. It is illegal."

3. Three Goals: A Relationship, Information, an Operation

• Here is the key the preacher gives "for the price of a coffee." Magical spiritualities, ancient or new, pursue one, two or three goals.
• A relationship or communion: with a dead person, a deity, a force. Why does someone come to hug a tree? Why consult a medium to speak with a deceased grandmother? For communion, whatever the technique.
• Information: the king of Babylon shakes arrows to know where to attack, the Assyrians read the livers of sacrificed animals (extispicy), others read coffee grounds, cards, palms, the stars. People look for the information that lets them make a decision. Astrology also answers the need to know oneself: "We are such a mystery to ourselves." When he is asked his sign, Florent Varak answers: "I am under the sign of the Lamb." And he goes straight on to the gospel.
• An operation: producing an effect, a blessing or a curse. "White magic tries to do good, black magic tries to do harm. But it is still magic on both sides." In Cameroon, he was told about a tribe that, at every death, questioned the spirits to find out who had sent the curse, and sometimes put people to death on that basis.

4. From the Canaanites to Ephesus: Occultism Can Do Nothing Against God's People

• Among the Canaanites, the cycle of Baal, god of the storm, and the goddesses Astarte and Anat, goddesses of sexuality and war, along with sacred prostitution based on correspondence: fertilize on earth to fertilize the heavens and obtain harvests. Later, the people blame the exile on having stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven (Jeremiah 44:18), when the Bible says something else: 490 years of not keeping the land's sabbaths, 70 years of captivity. Ezekiel sees women weeping for Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14); this cycle of the god who dies in autumn and returns in spring would lead, after the year 313, to "some rather unhealthy associations" with the dead and risen Christ.
• Balaam cannot curse Israel: "Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel" (Numbers 23:23). When a sorcerer walks into a church in Africa, three rows in front and three rows behind empty out. "Go and give him a hug. He is a man or a woman created in the image of God. And if you are in Christ, you have nothing to fear. Occultism can do nothing against the church of Jesus Christ."
• Saul is tormented by an evil spirit "from Yahweh," which music calms (1 Samuel 16). "Demons never have an activity independent of God. There is only one boss in the heavenly world." As for the consultation of the dead Samuel (1 Samuel 28), whether it was Samuel or a demon, the preacher is not troubled either way: it is an illegal interaction.
• In Babylon, there were exorcism manuals and catalogs of livers; Daniel is there as "an expert in local sciences but faithful to God," and the magi of the first Christmas were probably influenced by him. The prophets denounce it: "Shouldn't a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?" (Isaiah 8:19). Of idols, Jeremiah says: "Don't be afraid of them, for they can't do evil" (Jeremiah 10:5). And the preacher adds, weighing his words: "Someone who prophesies falsely is practicing divination."
• Can an object harm us? When he was converted, Florent Varak burned all his books on reincarnation. Three or four years later, a publisher asked him for a book on the subject: he bought them all back. "By then, I was free in my head from that kind of world." The devil may claim that an object has power: "it is manipulation."
• In Greece, Dionysianism rests on trance and possession; magic is based on binding, with its pharmaka (Galatians 5:20 speaks of pharmakeia) and its curses engraved on lead tablets. In Rome, it is contractualization: you perform the rites and it works. "When churches are born in a soil, they borrow from that soil."
• In the New Testament, the magi are the first worshipers of Jesus. "The world of magic is extraordinary, because it is a world that prepares for Christ." In Ephesus, people worship Artemis and pay a great deal for the Ephesia grammata, six magical formulas for healing and protection. It is there that God does "extraordinary miracles" through the cloths of Paul, a tentmaker soaked in sweat (Acts 19:11-12). Why? To counter superstition and turn attention to the apostle's message, whose signs authenticate his ministry (2 Corinthians 12:12). After the failed exorcism by the sons of Sceva, the former sorcerers burn their books: "not because they were contaminated, but because they carried toxic information."

5. Today's New Spiritualities: A Sophisticated Recycling

• After the break, a visit to the Asclepeion of Pergamon, a healing center: people slept there with non-venomous snakes that were supposed to reveal the cause of the illness, walked through a tunnel where traces of opium have been found, and bouncers turned away the seriously ill to avoid bad publicity. "Magic is obviously very interested in the phenomena of illness and medicine."
• Antoine Faivre, a professor and Freemason who introduced esotericism at the Sorbonne, describes six traits: correspondence between above and below ("exactly like animism"), a living, connected nature ("pantheism: God is all and all is God"), mediations through ritual and meditation, inner transmutation through levels of consciousness, the concordance of traditions ("a joyful mixture" with no doctrine) and initiatory transmission.
• Popular expressions followed: the Beatles in India, the song about the Age of Aquarius in 1967, Raël and his Elohim, Capra's Tao of Physics ("as soon as you hear quantum physics, it is fertile ground for new spiritualities"), Shirley MacLaine and karma. The latter is "an absolutely terrifying law, because if you suffer, it is your fault." The preacher tells of his own father asking his wife, who was pregnant and very ill: "But what must you have done wrong in a past life to suffer this much?"
• A few phrases to watch for: all religions are fragments of a single wisdom; your thoughts create reality; the separate self is an illusion; nature is sacred, the goddess is back; master plants heal you; the cosmos is a text, the universe speaks to you; the dead speak to us; you are energy; you are divine, your feelings are law, there is no sin.
• An anesthesiologist turned hypnotist offers groups the chance to meet the dead, and invokes a saint to protect himself from malevolent dead people. "To protect himself from the dead, he invokes a dead person."
• The bottom line: "The new spiritualities offer false answers to real problems." They turn people toward themselves: they worship the creation rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25), and end up saying "Who is God? I am God."

6. What Christ Gives: A Relationship, Information, an Operation

• God sends Paul to the Gentiles "to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God" (Acts 26:17-18). "The gospel has always been, yesterday as today, a tearing away from that world. If the gospel is not a tearing away from that world, it is not a gospel." And this tearing away does not come from formulas, it comes from Jesus Christ.
• "In him you are made full" (Colossians 2:10). The preacher is concerned about a market, evangelical circles included, that adds rituals to the gospel to be delivered from darkness: "Either you have everything fully in Christ, or you don't have everything fully in Christ."
• Let's go back to the three goals. A relationship? God has sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts, another Helper who will be with us forever (John 14:16). These people look for relationships with spirits; "we have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, who lives in us." He is "reflective": he never draws attention to himself, but to Jesus (John 16:8-11). On July 12, 1984, the day of his conversion, "the Holy Spirit made me look to Jesus." "What communion would I need? With which spirit?"
• Information? Scripture makes the man of God "thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:17). We would like to know more about the origin of demons; "we have just the information we need, and it is enough." We do not worship the Bible, we seek to know God through it.
• An operation? Prayer. It is not the amount of faith that counts, it is the object of faith (Matthew 17:20). Whatever we ask according to God's will, we receive (1 John 5:14-15). "I am not God, I depend on God. I am a dependent and weak being, but helped by the grace and the cross of Christ."
• The decisive question is therefore: what is your fundamental trust? A neighbor who is a market gardener, 60 years old and rejected all her life, had gone to see a shaman: tipi, feathers, drum, a fit of laughter, then vomiting, then the anxiety of searching everywhere for the eagles supposed to protect her. "You were looking for a liberation that did not come." The preacher told her: "I know a liberator, but it is more demanding." She wanted to begin right away. She was baptized in June of this year.
• The final definition: magic is "an illegitimate or deceptive capacity to bring about a relationship with spiritual beings, to obtain hidden or false information, to carry out a positive or negative operation, independently of Jesus Christ and the gospel, the exclusive mediator of the beyond." By contrast, "Life, with a capital L, is an exclusive trust in Jesus Christ that leads to repentance, consecration and love of God and neighbor."

7. Questions: Repentance Rather Than Exorcism

• How do you talk to someone who believes "strange things"? There are three kinds of believers in the new spiritualities: the intellectual who has read everything, the one who is surfing the trend, and the initiate who has had a powerful experience. For all of them: love, listen, ask "why do you believe that?", then dare to say: "Would you let me explain in a few minutes what I believe?" and leave a verse. "It is not your demonstration or your intelligence that will lead someone to faith, it is the Word of God." In Los Angeles, a very generous healer froze when he asked her what she did with the bad things inside her. The Ten Commandments opened the conversation.
• Is there magic in evangelical churches? "But of course." An elder of his church, dying of cancer, was asked by former friends what sin he was hiding, and received a book on positive thinking: believe in healing and you will be healed. Declaring the sickness gone, "where does that come from? We don't have that formula in Scripture." The biblical formula is to ask God in the name of Jesus, and to depend on him.
• How do we protect our children? The gospel has always spread better on magical soil than in an atheistic civilization: films and series are opportunities for conversation. In a missionary boarding school, some boys moved a Ouija board planchette until the noises would not stop. The director neither judged nor punished: "This is wonderful, because you have touched the reality that there is a spiritual world and that this world is not neutral. Now, what do we do?" They repented.
• Hence the only text, in his view, on how to accompany people: Paul writes to Timothy, a pastor in the most occult city of the New Testament. The Lord's servant corrects with gentleness, and it is God who grants repentance, which has a threefold effect: coming to the knowledge of the truth, coming back to their senses, escaping the snares of the devil (2 Timothy 2:24-26). "Someone who is captive to the snares of the devil does not need exorcism, he needs repentance." A woman in his church saw green eyes floating and heard voices; in his office, a hoarse voice told her "I am going to kill you." He only prayed that God would grant her repentance. It took time, but she was completely set free and has lived a fruitful life for decades. "At the beginning of my ministry, I cast out demons. I repented of it. We are not apostles."
• And the porous areas? Breathing is neither mentioned in the Bible, nor necessary, nor dangerous. "If you want to breathe for the glory of God, breathe for the glory of God." But if you breathe to feel a union with the whole, or a union with Jesus through the body and emotion, "you are not on the right track." The same test applies to the Toronto Blessing, the laughter, the animal noises and the uncontrolled movements: not in the Bible, but present in Kundalini awakenings. The same goes for those who go to graves looking for anointings. The remedy: "realize that we have everything fully in Jesus Christ and cultivate our intimacy with him."
• A spiritual or a physical illness? "Who makes one mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Isn't it I, Yahweh?" (Exodus 4:11). This distinction assumes a dualism; God is involved in every process. Music calmed Saul, and medicines belong to common grace.
• Four dangers of demonic influence. On society: the church's preaching gives us a worldview that protects against it. On the individual: gullibility toward an astrologer, like the wife of astronaut James Irwin, fed by the well effect that places everyone "between two opposites" ("by the way, that explains a lot of the prophecy phenomena in churches"). Demonization: "The devil owns nothing. He is a usurper. God owns everything." Demons know neither our thoughts nor the future, and always ask God's permission, as in Job. "God has no opposite." God is in heaven and does whatever he pleases (Psalm 115:3). Finally, temptation and influence within the church: "The devil is a murderer and a liar. That is his job. Ours is to fight."
• The last question, on the zodiac in Job 38:32: the constellations testify to the glory of the Creator, but "a symbol says nothing in itself. We project onto the symbol what we want it to say." The Romans repeated their experiments with chickens until the diagnosis went their way.

Key Takeaways

• There is nothing new under the sun: the new spiritualities recycle ancient magical spiritualities, in a more sophisticated version.
• Every magical practice seeks a relationship, information or an operation. This grid helps you spot it and open a dialogue.
• Magic is an illegal interaction with the spiritual world, independent of Jesus Christ, the exclusive mediator of the beyond.
• In Christ, you have all three: the Holy Spirit for the relationship, Scripture for the information, prayer for the operation. You have everything fully in him.
• Someone who is captive to the snares of the devil needs repentance more than exorcism. God has no opposite, and if you are in Christ, you have nothing to fear.

Personal Application

1. What is your fundamental trust today: what, or who, do you really believe in for the good of your life?
2. In your habits or spiritual vocabulary, is there a formula, a ritual or a practice that looks more like magic than like dependence on God?
3. Among the people close to you who are interested in new spiritualities, what are they looking for: a relationship, information, an operation? How can you show them what you have in Christ?
4. Are you afraid of spirits, of an object, of a person? What changes for you in knowing that God has no opposite?
5. Is there an illegal interaction with the spiritual world that you need to repent of, so that you can return to an exclusive trust in Christ and his Word?

Verses Cited

• Deuteronomy 18:9-14
• Ecclesiastes 1:9
• 2 Corinthians 5:21
• Colossians 2:15
• Colossians 1:12-14
• Exodus 8:15
• 2 Timothy 3:8
• Jeremiah 44:18
• Ezekiel 8:14
• Numbers 23:23
• 1 Samuel 16:14-23
• 1 Samuel 28
• Isaiah 8:19
• Jeremiah 10:5
• Galatians 5:20
• Acts 19:11-20
• 2 Corinthians 12:12
• Romans 1:25
• Acts 26:17-18
• Colossians 2:10
• John 14:16
• John 16:8-11
• 2 Timothy 3:16-17
• Matthew 17:20
• 1 John 5:14-15
• 2 Timothy 2:24-26
• Exodus 4:11
• Psalm 115:3
• Job 38:32

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three goals of magical spiritualities according to Florent Varak?

Starting from the list in Deuteronomy 18, Florent Varak observes that every magical practice, ancient or new, seeks a relationship (with a dead person, a deity, a force), information (reading the future, knowing oneself) or an operation (healing, protection, cursing). This grid helps you identify a practice and start a conversation: what are you looking for?

Why is Deuteronomy 18 the key text on occultism?

It is the most complete text because of its list of forbidden practices. Its structure speaks too: verses 1 to 8 deal with the priests and the Levites, verses 15 to 22 with the true prophet who is coming, Jesus, and between the two comes the prohibition of occult practices. According to Florent Varak, this sandwich shows the possible porosity between legitimate spirituality and occult spirituality.

Do you need an exorcism to be set free from occultism?

Florent Varak points to 2 Timothy 2:24-26, written to a pastor in Ephesus, the most occult city of the New Testament: the Lord's servant corrects with gentleness, and it is God who grants repentance so that the person escapes the snares of the devil. Someone who is captive does not need exorcism, he needs repentance and an exclusive trust in Christ and his Word.