The Devil's New Age Traps

Now, the New Age is actually nothing new.

This goes back to the original temptation in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of the Bible with the temptation that you can be like God, right? So if you eat of the eat of the knowledge, right? If you take the knowledge that God has forbidden, you will then become like God, and you will shift the divinity from the external source where it actually exists in the Creator into yourself, or you will become aware of divinity that already existed in yourself.

And this was, um, of course has always been a seductive idea for people because, you know, we have egos and we'd like to imagine that we have special powers or that if we get access to the right information or the right techniques that we'll have powers that other people don't have and that we'll be able to dominate others.

Right.

Um, This played out in the ancient world with various, what the church would consider heresies that were contrary to an understanding of the creature, us, and the creator, the Trinity.

And it played out in other cultures, so the Greek mystery schools.

These were just what they sound like.

They promised to have secrets and mysteries at the inner circle of the school that you could only access after you had spent time with the school and shown, uh, devotion and, um, made certain commitments and gone through different rituals and exercises and perhaps donating money.

All of these things and that the mystery school was basically a little secret society that kept its secrets hidden at its core.

And if you advance far enough in it, you would be privy to this special stuff that would give you, in a sense, you know, salvation ultimately, but also in the short term, psychic powers, powers to dominate others, powers for your life to go well or for your life to be extended.

All of these things.

So the mystery schools were part of this in the ancient world.

And it has come down through time, through the occult, which just means hidden, right? So again, hidden secrets, hidden information, coded information, things that if you learn them, you will have powers that other people don't have.

You'll be special and other people won't be.

Or you will be able to unlock or discover the... bit of divinity within you that most people are ignorant of.

This is kind of the ideas of the new age.

And some modern spins on this are things like the secret and the idea of manifesting things that if you just wish it and visualize it long enough, it'll just come into being.

And a lot of this approach to life sees any type of divine figure or idea as essentially like energy or the generic universe in some way, that almost like the universe is this impartial, unconscious ocean of energy that if one is privy to the right things, knows how to tap into it, one can learn to manipulate that and start having supernatural powers.

So it almost always removes the idea of a creator or of a godhead.

Now, there are versions of it, because the core idea here is you can be like God.

That if you either learn to manipulate the universe or learn to discover the power within yourself, you will start having supernatural powers.

That's the core idea with New Age stuff, with a lot of Gnosticism.

But it can be spun out into different forms.

So that impartial energy of the universe that one, you know, would think that they can learn to manipulate can take the form of, you know, Gaia or, you know, the Earth as like a conscious being or...

Yeah, different gods, different groups of gods.