Recently, a post popped up in my Facebook feed entitled “Why Some Women Leave the Church for the New Age.”

I thought it was interesting, because my journey went completely in the opposite direction.  I was raised with occult practices in my home and turned away from that as an adult when I found Jesus.

The next morning in church, when I pulled a notebook out of my Bible cover, I accidentally opened up to the wrong page.  In an entry from all the way back in 2016, it said, “Write something about the occult and the wiles of the devil.”  It was an idea for a blog post that I never followed through on.  I knew then that the Holy Spirit was reminding me to finally do it.

When I was growing up, my mother was into astrology.  At one point, my mom’s friend, Tony, taught her how to read tarot cards, and she in turn, taught my sister and I to do it.  

When we got into the tarot cards, we quickly began to get obsessed with it.  We didn’t want to make any major life decisions without consulting the cards.  One of the reasons that happened is because, believe it or not, sometimes the cards were right.  My mother once read for a woman and told her that there was a lump in her right breast.  The woman went to the doctor, and it turned out to be true, and she got treatment for it.  In moments like that, it appeared that the cards were a source of truth and light, and it encouraged us to put more faith in them.

The turning point happened one day when I was home alone.  I heard my sister’s voice calling my name, but no one was there.  When my sister and mother returned home, I told them about it, and surprised, they recounted having recently had the same experience.  My sister had heard my mother calling her, and my mother had heard my voice.  We also began to notice dark “shadows” darting by in our home.  We came to the realization that when reading the cards, we were actually inviting spirits into our home to communicate with us through them.  We were so freaked out that we stopped doing it for a while.

Prior to this, I’d been working one Saturday in Tony’s vitamin shop and there was a snowstorm that day, so we had no customers.  He read my cards for me to pass the time and wrote all of the predictions down on a slip of paper.  One of the things he predicted came true shortly after, so I apparently put the slip of paper in my journal to save it.

Twelve years later, a lot had changed in my life.  I’d given my life to Jesus, broken up with the man I’d been dating for eleven years when I found out that he never intended to marry me, and was praying for God to bring someone into my life who would feel the same way about me that I felt about him.  I became friends with a nice guy who I had a crush on, but I was not sure how he felt about me.  I was trying to heal from the past and to understand where I’d gone wrong and what I should be doing differently, so I pulled out my old journals, and that slip of paper fell out.  I’d completely forgotten about it.

Reading it, I discovered that among all of the predictions that Tony had made, he had focused on one particular thing, because throughout the reading, it kept coming up and interrupting whatever else we were talking about.  It was a night trip that I was going to take, under the stars, with a man who had an unusual name.  He wasn’t sure what the nature of the relationship was, but something about this night was very important.

I suddenly remembered that snowy day in the vitamin store and him asking me if I knew any men with that name.  At the time, I felt impatient because it was a name I’d never heard used for a man before and because I wanted him to bring up the name of someone else – the one I ended up wasting eleven years on.  But…reading this years later, I was stunned to realize that it was the name of the guy I currently had a crush on.  How could Tony have guessed that?  Was it some kind of sign from God?

I’d become a Christian maybe a year before this, so I was still a “baby Christian.”  I was still learning to surrender some areas of my life.  I went to a service at a Messianic church once, and the rabbi said, “If you feel that you need something besides God to be happy, you are making an idol of that thing and you need to repent.”  I think idolatry is probably a lifelong battle, but I had two battles in particular that I fought in those early days – idolizing love/marriage and a reliance on the occult.  I saw it as harmless, and something that could reveal things to me that I wanted to know but couldn’t see on my own.  If I could get this insight, maybe I wouldn’t make the kind of mistakes I’d made in the past, and I could avoid getting hurt again.

I didn’t do tarot anymore and I wouldn’t have gotten into anything deeper than that.  I’d had a friend from work several years before whose wife was involved with Wicca.  Mark and I initially bonded because of our shared interest in spirituality.  He came into the area where I worked to make a copy, and the machine kept jamming.  He asked for my help, and I saw that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, so I put the document in the machine myself and inconspicuously placed my palm on the machine and held it there while it made the copy.  When the copy came out fine, Mark said to me, “I saw what you did there.  You were trying to override my energy with yours.”  He was exactly right.  I’d noticed that there were certain employees that couldn’t make a copy or send a fax without the machine jamming, and it always worked for me, unless there was a mechanical issue.  We started chatting, and we were buddies from that point on.  When his wife got into Wicca, we thought it was cool at first.  She made him a good luck charm – a little pouch with some herbs and a tiger stone that he wore around his neck.  After I admired it, he had her make one for me, too.  However, a couple of years later, when we no longer worked together, he started sending me concerning messages.  His wife had joined a coven, and her new friends would come to the house and perform abusive acts on him.  I begged him to leave and later discovered that they had divorced, but we lost touch.

I had seen the spiritual darkness that some of these practices could lead to, but I still viewed astrology as a harmless tool, and I was willing to believe that God could speak to me through that tarot card reading from years before, even though I wasn’t actively into tarot anymore.  I believed it because it was telling me something that I wanted to hear at the time.   

2 Timothy 4:3-4 (NKJV) “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.”

There are some branches of Christianity that try to blend the occult with biblical teaching – like Bethel.  However, the Bible makes it clear where God stands on the matter.

Leviticus 19:31 (NKJV) “‘Give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek after them, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God.”

Deuteronomy 18:10 (NKJV) “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.”

Isaiah 8:19 (NKJV) “And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?”

Micah 5:12 (NKJV) “I will cut off sorceries from your hand, And you shall have no soothsayers.”

1 Timothy 4:1 (NKJV) “Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons.”

So, over time, as I was growing in my faith, I had to confront the fact that I couldn’t participate in things that God forbid and I needed to repent of it.  Just like a toddler doesn’t understand why when you tell them not to touch a hot stove, we often don’t understand why God is telling us not to do things, but it is for our own protection.  

It took time for me to come to that realization, though, and in the meantime, I held onto the hope that God had a plan for me with this guy, even though the relationship never moved forward.  I wasted a lot of time and energy – again – on hoping for something that was never meant to be.  It caused me a lot of discouragement, and that eventually led to some backsliding.  At some point, I realized that message written on that paper never was from God.  It was from the devil, who wanted to deceive me by using the things I idolized to pull me away from God.  He mixed some truth in with the lies (predictions of events that DID come true) to suck me in. 

Ephesians 6:10–12 (NKJV) “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

When we rely on our own wisdom or our own strength, we aren’t relying on God.  In the Garden of Eden, the serpent asked Eve:

“Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” – Genesis 3:3-5

Satan rebelled out of pride, because he wanted to be equal with God.  He convinced Eve to rebel by promising her the same thing.  It’s a futile quest, though.  We will never be equal to the Creator of the universe, but we can and should rely on Him, which requires trust.  Trusting God is hard, though, especially when our experiences with trusting people have led to so much hurt.  We can fall into the trap of projecting those human frailties and failings onto God.  We think we will only ever be able to rely on ourselves and whatever strength that we have, since relying on others has led to disappointment in the past.

If you have fallen into this trap yourself, I beg you to ask yourself why. Is there some church hurt or disappointment in your life that you are subconsciously blaming God for?

I previously wrote another blog post about Renouncing God and blaming Him for the actions of sinful humans who claim to represent Him.  Churches are full of sinners, just like you and me.  If they weren’t, they would have no purpose.  Who needs a Savior if they are without sin?  However, so is your neighborhood, your workplace, your friend groups, etc.  You won’t escape sinners by fleeing church.  They’re everywhere!

I’m not belittling that experience.  I suffered spiritual abuse at a church that I belonged to in the past.  I’m so grateful that I left when I did.  I’m even more grateful to be part of a loving church family now that holds its leaders accountable, rather than giving them a free pass.

After the experiences that I have had with the occult, I can see more clearly the harm that it can do and why God wants to protect us from it.  In the end, it brought nothing to my life.  Instead, it was used as a tool to deceive me.  It can’t protect you or answer your prayers.  It won’t accurately tell you the future.

God, on the other hand, told the future to His prophets, and that’s a fascinating thing to study.  Check out Isaiah 53.  Anyone, Christian or not, could read it and know exactly who it is talking about…even though it was written 700 years before the person existed.  Why?  Because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the only one who knows the beginning from the end, told Isaiah to write that. 

If you have fallen prey to the deception of New Age practices, I encourage you to ask God to help you let go of a reliance on these things, and to rely on Him instead.

John 14:6 “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

John 8:31-32 “Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed.  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”