Deut. 18:14-22; 1 John 4:1-3, It’s a “New Age” (or not)

Here’s a headline from US News and World Report (for you young-uns that used to be an important weekly news magazine, to some people at least) from February 1987: “Americans are Looking for Supernatural Answers to Real-Life Problems.”  Where were they looking?  Well, the “new age” stuff was on the rise.  What was “New Age?”  It was hard to define because there were many beliefs and fads.  Not all did the same thing, except on special occasions (like a “solstice” or “harmonic convergence”) when believers in I Ching or crystals gathered with believers in astral travel, shamans, Lemurians and tarot readers, so they could chant the om, the Hindu invocation that often precedes invocation.  It was a combination of reincarnation, psychics (channelers), mystic religion or spiritualism. 

As Ecclesiastes says about people’s attempts to come up with some way to get away from the personal Creator of the universe to whom all are subject, there’s nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9-11).  The “New Age” stuff was present in New Testament times (Acts 13, the sorcerer; Acts 16, the girl with a demon) and in OT times (the witch of Endor).  It just showed up with new clothes on.

Shirley McClaine was a big voice in this stuff; she was an entertainer (what did we say: there’s nothing new under the sun; those are the experts today too, aren’t they). She said, “I’ve made it alright for people who’ve been thinking about these things in private to do them with less fear and ridicule.”

Now before you quit reading, wondering why in the world we’re taking this journey into the recent past when we’re supposed to be studying the life of Elijah, let me make these simple statements about the New Age.  They claimed AUTHORITY that was based in a pantheon of former earthlings, some claiming greatness, all claiming deity in a pantheistic sense.  They preached a MESSAGE based in reincarnation and steeped in pantheism.  The good news was, “you are your own god” (sound familiar? Gen. 3:5).  And they claimed VERIFICATION, based on the fact that their message “worked.”  For example, one Detroit mystic, Robert Thibodeau, claimed 87% accuracy, speaking for thousands of channels he heard on radio talk-show programs who would get you in touch with all kinds of dead people, for a large sum of money of course.

Please return for the next post.  Please.  I hope you understand that for me this nostalgic trip into the 1980’s was for a purpose.  In our next post we will take those 3 high-lighted words in the previous paragraph and apply them to Elijah.