ON A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
I don’t know your name, but I do wonder whether, when it comes to religion, whether you are like a certain person by the name of Sheila. Sheila is a young woman who was interviewed some twenty years ago by Robert Bellah, a social researcher who was taking a hard look at issues of commitment and individualism. When Bellah got talking with Sheila about religion, she told him that she was indeed a very religious person. She embraced, she said, the religion of "Sheila—ism." "It’s a religion for one," she told him. "My own unique, personal faith."
Like I say, I don’t know your name. But I wonder whether your religion is Steve—ism or Mary—ism or Anna—ism—or whatever your name might be. It’s very possible that you’ve created your own unique spirituality from the many options available today. You’ve become your own private spiritual guru.
As I talk with people today, it seems that while interest in religion is down, interest in spirituality is up. Let me explain what I mean. Today, organized religion is still getting low numbers in the polls. There are a lot of negative feelings about church denominations, with their creeds, rituals, and organizational machinery. A lot of people think religion so defined has brought a lot of bad things into the world. Whether that is really fair is another question. But that’s the perception.
Yet oddly, interest in what’s called spirituality is up. Defining our world just in terms of our five senses—what we can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell—doesn’t seem to cut it. Talking about ourselves merely in terms of biological processes—or in terms of the physical laws of the universe—just doesn’t satisfy. And so the whole world is on a search for toward something ‘greater than self.’ For the ‘spiritual path’ as it’s sometimes called. But of course, what the true path of spirituality is———that’s up for grabs, isn’t it! It’s what has gotten everyone talking! Turn on the talk shows, and it seems that even Hollywood celebrities are baring their souls and talking about their spiritual journeys. Everyone seems to be talking about things that transcend the physical world!
What a change from only a few decades ago! There was a time when it seemed secular thinking was going to sweep all talk of spiritual things right out the door. After all, who needed religious teaching and spiritual experience when scientific inquiry would answer any sensible question. It seemed obvious to people in the know that reason and logic would conquer all those quaint religious beliefs that common folk had embraced for so long. "Religion is the opiate of the people" said Karl Marx. And it wasn’t just communists who thought he had a point. A lot of folks throughout the western world were convinced that the real answers to human problems would come by applying reason to the realms of economics, psychology, sociology and science! The realm of the spirit? It didn’t exist! Religion? It had had its day!
I don’t find such talk anymore. For when you evict God from his universe, you don’t just toss out the divine. You also toss out a sense of transcendent purpose and meaning. You see, people have discovered that we humans need to something bigger than ourselves if we are to have meaning to life. The fact is, there’s no real hope without God. Without God, there is no sense in talking about unchanging goodness. If there is no God, we’re all simply waiting for the last curtain call of cosmic history to fall on a senseless world.
No, we can’t live without God! That came home to me a few weeks ago, as I spent time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I was amazed by the change that Russia has undergone in the last 20 years. This was a society that for decades had banned talk of God from public life. Thousands of churches had been closed. Atheism had become the official political doctrine of an entire nation! Yet in spite of all those efforts to destroy religion, the vast majority of Russians today still identify themselves in some way with the Christian faith. Churches have been restored throughout Russia at an incredible rate. In St. Petersburg, I visited one church which had been transformed into a museum to atheism during the Soviet years. Now, it was used again as a place of worship. Atheism hadn’t been able to hold its ground.
But you don’t find a resurgence of religion merely in countries formerly communistic. People in the secular west have also turned back to embrace the truth: There is a spiritual side to life that can’t be buried or ignored. We’re not evolutionary creatures that have crawled out of the primordial ooze. No, buried deep within our psyches is an ache, a yearning, for the divine.
GOOD NEWS—BAD NEWS
That’s the good news. We’re no longer living in a world that banishes talk about spiritual realities! We’ve rediscovered our spiritual side. And we need to affirm that spiritual side in order to be fully human. We know that such things as love, and trust, and goodness, and evil—these things are real. And they move us from a mere biological into a spiritual existence. To talk about life—real life——means to talk about spiritual things.
That’s the good news. But now the bad news. When secularism rolled over and died, not everyone found their way back to the God who shows himself in Jesus Christ. A lot of folks found their way to all kinds of weird religious places. As has been commonly said: "When a person stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he will believe in anything." And that is precisely what we see happening in the realm of religion today.
THE WEIRD IN RELIGION
Russell Chandler, religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, talks about some of those weird corners of religion in his recent book, Understanding New Age. Let me offer you a taste of what religion is like for many folks today, by reporting on five happenings.
Happening #1: In the late 1980’s, more than 20,000 people rallied at 350 sites worldwide, for what was called a planetary operation. From a Hawaian volcano, to Central Park in NewYork, to Stonehedge in England to the Temple of Delphi in Greece, people gathered to chant, dance, and think thoughts of world peace. In so doing, they said, they would bring about a harmonic convergence, where enough mental energy would be focused to bring about a new age of peace and love.
Happening #2: A few years ago, representatives of major corporations met together to discuss how the occult and Hindu mysticism might help executives compete in the world market. One major oil company reported that it now provides a faith healer to its employees who can assess energy fields and so interpret the auras of ailing workers
Happening #3: For 400 dollars a session, we are now told you can tap the wisdom of Ramtha, a 35,000 year old ascended master from the lost continent of Atlantis. Ramtha is only one of many spirit guides being offered by channelers for personal spiritual consultation.
Happening #4: Interested in pyramids? For a hundred dollars you can buy a pop—together, open—frame portable pyramid kit, complete with compass so that you may align your personal pyramid to magnetic north. According to the promos, your personal pyramid is useful for encouraging the growth of your house plants, and lowering your electric bills.
Happening #5: According to the accounts of some, such happenings as volcanic eruptions on Hawaii and earthquakes in California are more than just natural phenomena. Such happenings are actually the vindictive reprisals of Gaia, the earth goddess, as she fights back against environmental plunder.
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF NEW AGE
What do you make of such things? If they fascinate you, if you’ve been drawn in to such happenings, then you’ve been pulled into a religious movement that is sometimes called "New Age." You’ve probably heard of "New Age." But you may have a hard time defining it. After all, the New Age movement is tough to nail down. I’ve sometimes called it eastern religion come to North America in western dress. And there is a lot of eastern religion in the New Age movement. But it’s more than that. New Age blends east and west, the old and the new. New Age harkens back to ancient paganisms, then turns around and pulls in ideas from quantum physics. New Age likes the look of eastern mysticism, then heads off and dabbles with the latest alternative medicine.
The reason that New Age is so tough to define is that it’s a religion for the Sheilas of this world. It’s a ‘do—it—yourself’ form of spirituality. New Age offers a smorgasbord of spiritual choices. You skip down the serving line and pick the ones that you find to your personal taste. You can dish up a big platter of eastern meditation if that’s your thing. You can dabble in crystals, check out the world of spirit beings, try out a few rituals from ancient witch—craft, then dabble in neo—pagan theologies. You can crack open the latest self—help books, then turn around and spend some time learning the art of Tarot—or perhaps read your daily horoscope. New Age is for folks who like to tinker with spiritual things. If you are a New Ager, you can claim as much, or as little, of all those things as you like. You throw your selections in the philosophical blender, and whip up your own spiritual concoction that you hope will feed your soul.
A LOOK AT SCRIPTURE
If you are a spiritual seeker today, and if you hope this is the kind of spirituality that will sustain you, then it would be worth your while to spend time with a book that has guided millions of people throughout the past millennia. You owe it to yourself to open the Bible, and see what it says about this kind of approach to the realm of the spirit.
You see, the Bible holds a special place for those in search of spiritual answers. Other spiritual writings offer you the personal reflections of interesting people who pondered spiritual matters. The writings of those people are attempts to reach up from earth to heaven. But the Bible makes a far different claim for itself. The Bible declares that moves in the opposite direction. It’s a book that reaches down from heaven to earth. Listen to what the apostle Peter says about the Bible in his first letter, the first chapter, verse 21. There, he describes Scripture as ‘prophesy’ as he declares, "Prophesy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." What a remarkable claim! Yes, the names of many human authors are associated with the Bible—from Moses as the author of Genesis all the way to John as the author of Revelation. Yet Peter, himself an author of Scripture, claims the Bible is more than the religious reflections of folks with a spiritual bent! The Bible claims as its ultimate Author, God himself! When you read the Bible, you are reading God’s personal correspondence to you! It’s divine correspondence that helps you figure out how to think clearly about spiritual things in a confusing world.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
Now, help in thinking clearly about today’s New Age movement begins right at the very beginning of the Bible. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we find the reason why there is so much confusion about religion in our world today. We learn that a sinless world was shattered when our first parents embraced the lies of the Devil. Listen to what happened:
"Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?"
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die."
"You will not surely die, "the serpent said to the woman, "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
I find this temptation of the Devil to be fascinating. For it reflects what I’m hearing from those who speak the language of New Age.
I said a few moments ago that New Age is a spiritual smorgasbord. And it is. But there are also some basic dishes that New Age serves up again and again. There are some common spiritual themes that run through almost all New Age thinking. As I look at those new age themes, I find they aren’t new at all. The fact is, they are remarkably old. As old as human history. They are voiced already in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of time. But they are not spoken by God. They are on the lips of the Devil. Let me explain. In the Garden, the Devil asked our first parents to swallow three mammoth lies. Here they are.
LIE #1
The first Satanic lie was this: "You shall be as God." "Listen," said the Devil, "you don’t need to settle with being a mere mortal. You can have it all. You can reach out and seize divinity! You can achieve the status of the Creator who made you!
In the film, "Out on a Limb," Shirley MacLaine, self—proclaimed spokeswoman of the New Age movement, stands ankle—deep in the waters of the Pacific. She is urged by David, her spiritual guide to shout out the "God—truth" within. He suggests she call out "I am God." At first this is all quite embarrassing to MacLaine. But David identifies her reticence as a mere problem with self—esteem. Finally, MacLaine raises her arms into the air, and shouts out to the world "I am God!"
"You shall be as God," sneers the Devil. New Age keeps alive that same lie. New Agers would have us believe that we are shards of divinity that have fallen to earth. We are gods and goddesses—if only we knew it.
LIE #2
Ah, but you say, "Hold on a minute. How can it be that I am a god? After all, isn’t the only certainty beyond my yearly tax bill the fact that I will die? We all die, don’t we? I die——you die. Doesn’t death disqualify us from divine status? Doesn’t a drive past the local cemetery sober us up as to who we really are?"
Well, check out the second lie the Devil offers in Genesis 3: "You shall not die! You shall not die!"
If you explore the New Age movement, you will find again and again that demonic lie republished for our world today. New Agers like to tell us that we only THINK we die. Death, they tell us, is the greatest unreality of all! The ultimate crisis of death is an illusion! After all, our spiritual journey just continues as we are reincarnated into another life form! Death is unreal.
LIE #3
But you ask, if there is no real need to conquer death, what is the basic need of humanity? Well, consider the third lie of the Devil: Your eyes shall be opened, knowing good and evil!" Satan promised Adam and Eve new eyes to see reality. "Your eyes shall be opened! You will have new eyes to see the world," said the devil. And with what result? Well you will have a new way to assess right and wrong, good and evil!
And that is precisely what New Age promises. What we need, says the New Ager, is not salvation from sin. Indeed, sin as the Christian faith understands it, doesn’t even exist. What we need is a new way of seeing things. A transformation of consciousness.
And now do we bring about this new consciousness? Not by meeting God in Christ Jesus as our Savior, but by a journey within yourself. For after all, you are divine, are you not? If you are divine, then you have all the resources you need within yourself to bring about your own salvation!! You can take a journey within, and discover spiritual wholeness.
CONFRONTING DECEPTION WITH TRUTH
Three key teachings from New Age. When examined in the light of Scripture, they emerge as the oldest deceptions on the face of the planet.
During the next few weeks here on The Back to God Hour, I’m going to be exploring in depth these demonic lies that are being published today by New Age teachers. Together, we’ll explore the deceptions that hold the New Age movement together—and the gospel truths that meet these deceptions head—on.
And at the center of that gospel truth, we’ll meet Jesus Christ. He is the key to all spiritual understanding. Any religion that doesn’t take seriously his claim as the one who is the Way, the Truth, the Life, isn’t telling it like it is.
In relationship with Jesus Christ, we discover who we truly are. We are not gods or goddesses. Instead, we are beings who uniquely reflect God’s image. We aren’t deities—but we are stewards—caretakers, entrusted to bring out all the potential of God’s creation.
In relationship to Jesus Christ, we unlock of mystery of death. Death is real—all too real. But there is One who conquered death for all those who place their confidence in him. On Easter morning, the grave was empty. Christ stepped in victory from the tomb! So that those who know him might also step from beyond the grave into life eternal!
In relationship with Christ, our eyes are opened——but not to our inner divinity. Instead, our eyes are opened to the miracle of God’s redemptive work in the world. Our eyes are opened to our proper place on this planet. Our eyes are opened so that we may declare the mighty things God has done for us in Jesus Christ!
So let’s explore together. And as we do, let’s not be intimidated. It can be rather frightening to know that in New Age teachings we confront the lies of devil. After all, what we confront in New Age is not merely human opinion. In New Age thinking, we confront the principalities and powers of this world. We confront demonic deceptions so powerful that they cast an entire universe into sin and corruption.
But don’t be afraid. Not when the One who is Truth is on our side. For greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world
Robert Heerspink
Rev. Robert Heerspink is a native of west Michigan. He completed his undergraduate studies at Calvin College and holds the degrees of Master of Divinity and Master of Theology from Calvin Theological Seminary. He has also received a Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Bob was ordained a minister of the Word in the Christian Reformed Church of North America in 1979, and has 26 years of parish experience, having served four churches throughout west Michigan. He was appointed the Director of The Back to God Hour in 2006. Bob has written several resources related to congregational stewardship, including the book, Becoming a Firstfruits Congregation. He is a regular contributor to TODAY, the monthly devotional of The Back to God Hour. Bob is married to Edith (Miedema) and they have three children. His hobbies include reading fictional and historical works, watersports, and occassional golfing.
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