Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08064 Telling temptation from Satan apart from the ordinary pull of your own flesh is harder in practice than most teaching admits, and I think we should say so at the start. When you are actually in the moment, the experience does not usually arrive with a label attached. Even so, Scripture does distinguish…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08063 Whether spoken curses can affect a Christian is a question I have been asked in quiet voices more than once, usually after something unpleasant has happened. Someone has cursed a believer to their face, or a relative involved in witchcraft has made a threat, or a stranger online has pronounced something ugly over…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08062 The question of whether generational curses are real comes to me most often from people carrying something heavy. There is alcoholism in three generations of the family, or a pattern of broken marriages, or a history of depression that seems to travel down the line, and someone at a conference has told them…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08061 I get asked about reading horoscopes more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has done it for years without thinking twice and has suddenly started to wonder whether it matters. The question behind the question is nearly always the same. Is this a harmless bit of fun tucked between the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8060. Tarot cards have moved a long way from the fairground. They are sold in high street shops, recommended as tools for self-reflection, and used by people who would be offended at the suggestion that anything occult is involved. That shift in packaging is the first thing worth noticing. Scripture forbids fortune-telling in every…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8059. Ouija boards are sold in toy shops and used at sleepovers, and that is precisely what makes them worth talking about. A thing packaged as a game is a thing nobody examines, and what this particular game attempts is the one activity Scripture singles out with the sharpest possible language. The danger is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8058. Scripture forbids occult practices in the strongest language it uses about anything, and the reason is not that they are silly. The reason is that they are real. God does not warn His people away from empty superstitions with the word abomination, and He does not prescribe the death penalty for parlour games….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8057. Sleep paralysis is one of the most frightening experiences a person can have, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. You wake, you cannot move, you cannot speak, there is often a weight on the chest and a sense of a presence in the room, and it can last long enough…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8056. When people ask about ghosts and demons they are usually asking two questions at once. Do the spirits of the dead come back, and if not, what did I actually experience? Both deserve an answer, and the answers are different. My position is that Scripture rules out the return of the departed, that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8055. The question of whether a haunted house is a real thing comes up more often than you might expect, and rarely from people looking for entertainment. It usually comes from someone who has experienced something in a building they cannot account for, and who is not at all sure they want to talk…