Batteries Not Included

There are many places in our Christian experience where we can be misled unless we diligently watch unto prayer; places where Satan finds open doors to attack us.

The health message, which is a great blessing given us by God, is not a blessing mixed with curse or anything of the sort, but Satan delights to take it out of its context, make it so extreme, so rigid, so unreasonable, that people are led to reject it as it seems impossible and impractical to them.

There are other aspects of our Christian life that can be just the same. Satan is a deceiver; he is a liar. He gives us the idea that there are a lot of good things to be had out in the world. When I say world, I am referring to outside, away from God and His Word, heathen, devilish. He gives us the idea that there are things that, although we know that they are not true, we can study these things and we can separate the good from the evil. Then we will be greatly blessed because we can get a lot of good from them.

I could probably show you articles that I had written a few years back advocating that very concept. I thought people were very narrow and bigoted when they would refuse to study such things—because they said they were from the devil—and there was really a lot of good in these things and we could be greatly benefited by studying them. I know differently now, but it has taken a while for me to learn it and I can only wonder at the incredible patience and graciousness of our Heavenly Father, who lets us run, when we are determined to do so, through all the manure piles and all the garbage heaps of worldly wisdom, until we finally realize that there is nothing good out there that He does not already have on the banquet table for us.

When Eve ate of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, she obtained knowledge—but not of good and evil—she only obtained the evil because she already had everything that was good! Eve was led to doubt God’s goodness because she felt something was withheld from her that she needed to have. When she ate of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, she mixed evil in with the good that God had already given her. The only thing that God had withheld from His children was the knowledge of evil. Evil doesn’t bring any goodness, it is a destroyer, it brings sickness and death. Adam & Eve are not here with us today because they are dead. And millions of others are dead—why are they dead? Because of the evil, not because of the good that God had given them, but because of the evil that they were determined to have.

There are beautiful truths that the pioneers studied out in early Adventism, when they spent many hours getting together, praying and studying through the night sometimes, pleading with the Lord that the Holy Spirit would teach them the truth. They prayed for light and God sent light to them. He sent light through the Holy Scriptures and He sent extra light through the Spirit of Prophecy. Following strict rule of Biblical interpretation, and letting the Bible be its own interpreter, they worked out line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little until finally the doctrines stood clear as the Bible taught them. Finally they gleamed forth, free from all the accumulated baggage of heathenism that had gotten mixed in starting from the first century.

Why did God send extra light? Because He knew we needed it! We are the most degenerate and degraded generation that has ever walked the earth. We are 6,000 years from Adam, and corruption is so great that none of us has been able to be born and grow up with out being corrupted in some way by the society we live in. None of us have been free from the ‘Wine of Babylon’. None of us have been protected from the influence of heathenism because our society is satiated with it and we think it to be ‘normal’. We think many heathen things are Christian, and that means all of us—I’m talking about the most enlightened SDA, all of us have been influenced by the wine of Babylon and corruptions of heathenism.

God gave us a special gift in the Spirit of Prophecy. He gave us line upon line, precept upon precept; he gave us minute counsel to cover every aspect of life that we could possibly run into. Sometimes it is spelled out so clearly that you feel that somehow, it was written just for your needs and mailed to you. The Conflict of the Ages series acts as a magnifying glass to show us more clearly the lessons in the Biblical accounts. And we need a magnifying glass as we have bad eyes! Otherwise why did Jesus tell us we needed eye-salve from Him? The Spirit of Prophecy is a part of that eye-salve that we need so desperately.

It makes me tremble when anyone becomes so cocky and so arrogant as to think that they can ‘just use the Bible’ because it is said that IF we had studied as we ought to have done, we wouldn’t have needed the SOP; and so NOW, after God has looked down and saw our desperate need and felt He had to provide this for us, they turn around and cockily say, "Yes Lord, that’s OK for those guys over there, but I’m so smart Lord, I don’t need what You say that I need."

Did you know that every time God sent light into the world there were always many who said; "Oh I don’t need this, I’m fine with what I already have?" It was said about the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament writers, the writers of the epistles and so on. They said the same thing to the Lord Himself; "We believe Moses, but who do you think YOU are?"

What does the Bible say? "Despise not prophesying, but try the prophets whether they are of God". Once this has been done, and it has, and the prophet has passed the tests, then they are to be accepted as the voice of God. If someone brings us a spiritual message, we are to look at it comparing it to the existing inspired counsel—if it passes the tests, it is truth. But what do we do when we find information that has some good stuff in it and yet has some things not true? That is what we need to look at now as many of us are falling for a mixture of truth and error especially in health lines.

We were given an amazing health reform message as our birthright. It is simple, powerful, available to all classes and in all countries, it has the blessing and sanction of God and it really works! If we had always followed this precious light we would have been one of the wonders of the world! Seventh-day Adventist health clinics and sanitariums, using the simple yet profound knowledge that has been our blessed inheritance, would have shone like a beacon into this dark and suffering world, alleviating sickness and misery and giving a practical demonstration to the world that obedience to the laws of heaven is indeed a great blessing.

These simple health centers, using the 8 laws of health and simple hydrotherapy, basic massage and a few fundamental remedies like poultices of charcoal and such, would have sprang up wherever a few of God’s people were. People would have learned to associate us with practical, simple and economic health treatment, affordable even to the poorest and effective even to the richest. We could have left the worldly wise physicians to go the way of costly apparatus, huge emporiums of hospitals costing millions, and elaborate unnatural treatment and surgical facilities, as well as the ridiculously expensive schools to teach these man-made complexities.

Why, oh why is it, when God gives us the very best, perfect gifts, do we insist on mixing the pure heavenly light with more and more earthly dross until the last rays of that godly bounty flicker out and we are left no different in any way from the world except that we are under God’s curse for having rejected and ignored what He gave to us?

Why am I dwelling at large on this subject? I’ll explain, the Bible says in these last days, Satan shall seek to deceive, "Even the very elect". Now, who are the elect in SDA circles? Those who seek to follow the counsels. They see the worldly, drug based unnatural methods of our hospitals and they seek to move in a more natural direction. This is good if they remain on what the Lord has given us, BUT Satan jumps in with his holistic stuff. By the way, he never would have gotten to first base in this ‘New-Age’ Holistic deluge that he is now using to sweep millions into the snare of spiritualism, if we would have been true to OUR birthright! Our clinics, teaching the simple God-given truths, would have occupied the territory long before him and his agents would never have had the success they are now having.

So Satan comes to the elect with his spiritualistic based ‘therapies’; he starts with things really backed up in our health reform message and then mixes in a bit of poison. It is interesting to note that when the Israelites apostatized, it was always by adding something from the heathen that wasn’t really forbidden by God and seemed to have good in it, but it led minds away from the firm foundation and eventually more and more heathen things came to be seen as ‘having a lot of good in them’ and before you know it, it didn’t even seem wrong to them to offer their children to idols! It has always worked the same way. This is always followed up by the ones accepting the so-called ‘advanced ideas’, condemning and persecuting those who stand firm for God’s truth as being backward and fanatical.

You know there was a time in the days of Nehemiah, that even the descendents of the priests had intermarried and mixed so with the heathen that they didn’t even speak the Hebrew language any more and didn’t understand the truths God had given them. I fear the same thing has been repeated today amongst us today. We have adopted so much from the so called ‘scientific’ community and now we are taking in large draughts of spiritualistic, energy-concept theories from heathenism, that we speak only a polyglot and anyone who teaches the straight truth of our birthright, is no longer understood by us.

Why do I entitle this message, "Batteries Not Included?" well you see, God does not give power to those who do not walk according to His council. He only promises power if we obey Him, completely. His power is to bless and enable His children to live in the ways He has laid down for them. He has never authorized us to add or take away from His counsel. If we do start practicing things He has not enjoined or neglecting things He has enjoined, He can’t bless us, we cut the Power lines off completely.

His power can no longer be in one who has taken methodologies and theories from the world or heathenism and added them to our health message, he no longer has the batteries of heaven, the power of God’s blessing just won’t be there!

Many people now are looking at the eastern religions and saying, "Now there is real truth", they look at the teachings of the American Indians also and say, "Oh yes, that’s the way to live. That is Natural." But they forget a vital point! You must take a good look at how those people ACTUALLY lived, because it is not what they SAY that counts—it is what they DO that matters! If you study history, you will see that although they may have had many exulted proverbs, and ‘great wisdom’ in their traditions, (it sounds like great wisdom to us as human beings) it sounds good, BUT the batteries are not included—there is no power to live up to a creed that you make up yourself.

Man has no power to do good in himself, not at all! Absolutely none! And so no matter how exulted the teachings of Buddhism may sound, or the teachings of Hinduism, or Taoism, or Krishna, without God and without Christ there is no power in it to allow anyone to obey. So you can profess the loftiest things, but there’s no power to carry out your profession. So you will find in these religions, people who have naturally very strong wills excel in these religions. Some people do have a type of stubbornness and natural will power that if they make up their mind to do something, some can live up to this especially if by doing so they gain the admiration and acclaim of others as a kind of ‘holy’ person. You can see certain Yogi’s that seem to have, at least outwardly, will power to live a rigid, abstemious life through their own determination. (Some times they just put on a lying, false front as well) Satan helps some of these by not tempting them too much, as to have them seeming to succeed in his lying service is bait to others and good for his business. They can thus appear godly when there is really no godliness in them at all.

I’ve had people who studied these religions say to me, "How can people who advocate such noble sounding truths as these eastern religions and the North American Indians yet be so hideously cruel?" The answer is that there are no batteries included when you make up your own religion or follow one made up by someone else. There’s no power in it, and man does not have power to do anything but obey Satan and exult himself. Man can not change his own heart and so these external restrictions are always a heavy burden to bear, but they can put on the front for the sake of worldly honor.

It is important to realize that the heathen don’t have a monopoly on this problem. Any time we try to practice religious tenets of our own choosing God can’t empower us, and the best we can ever become is a hypocrite just like the Pharisees! They refused to accept God’s doctrines in the simplicity in which they were given and added their own rules to God’s truths and embroidered them. So they had pulled the plug on God’s enabling power and a life of externals and lying hypocrisy was the best they could ever have. Only religion that comes from God can lead to God!

We see another example there where people didn’t recognize the language any more—Jesus came and what was He teaching? You know many people claim He had completely new, unheard of ideas. Some even go so far as to claim Jesus went to the East in His youth and brought his teaching from there. But every thing He taught was taken from their own scriptures! He had nothing new, but they had so far mixed in Greek philosophical error, added their own traditions and departed from the Bible truths, that they didn’t even recognize their own scriptures any more. Jesus—through the enlightenment of the Spirit—stripped away the man-made additions and presented the pure scripture truth.

Whenever you mix the perfect word of God with any heathenism—the result is heathenism—it’s not perfect anymore once it’s mixed and it isn’t the Word of God any more once it’s mixed. The Jewish religion was mongrelized so badly they couldn’t even understand the simple Bible truths any more. Jesus cleared away the trash and when the disciples first went forth to carry the truth of Christianity to the world it was at first pure and so it was powerful. God could bless it.

Very early, however, scholars coming in from heathenism began to think that they could improve Christianity by combining the ‘best’ of their own higher educations in heathenism with it and once again, a mongrel religion came about. God’s power could no longer bless and soon the church took hold of the arm of the state to enforce its now powerless religion and the papacy was born.

The health reform guidance that was given us by God is perfect. It could not be improved upon. In its purity and completeness it is powerful and when practiced as given to us, according to God’s instructions, it has the added power of His blessing. Nothing that the world or science, so called, or heathenism or spiritualism has, can hold a candle to the healing power of true, pure health reform!

This message seems so simple that many grossly underestimate its power and grab after the more complex theories of the world—which are only spiritualism in new, scientific disguise—and seek to add to it, or update it, or make it even better. The result is that we loose it, and we loose God’s blessing and power. Then Satan lures us on into his snares until we loose our souls as well. God’s pure message has the Batteries included—God backs it up with omnipotent power, but just add man’s theories to it, and His blessing vanishes as the morning mist.

There are many man made theories that seem to really make sense—but in the long run, they don’t work. Every year you can see on the bookstore shelves the latest crop of ‘self-help’ books with their methods and programs. Friends if they really worked, there would be one and everyone would say, "Yes, that is it—it really works!" and there would be no need of any more. But they don’t work in the long run and most don’t even work in the short run. The batteries are not included.

There is one book that works—the Bible—it is still there and it doesn’t go away. But if you were to start looking for a self-help book of ten or twenty years ago, you’d be most unlikely to find it. There’s a new crop all the time. Why? Because they don’t work! They sound good—but they don’t work!

I want to tell you a little about my own experience in studying heathen philosophy and many ‘self-improvement’ theories, as well as the psychiatry and psychology I had to take to become a nurse. To become qualified in nursing psychology you have to study various theories that oft times contradict each other and you end up with a confused bunch of soup in your head that is supposed to help you to care for mentally ill persons.

One theory had its roots as one man decided to keep a careful diary of the development of one baby—his own son—as he grew and developed. Then from this careful diary of one baby, he made his theory, which is now taught as the normal way for all babies to develop. People think it has been scientifically studied with thousands of children—but no—it was from observations of one baby.

There are many other theories that have be foisted upon the world by so-called educated people that are out of fictional works made up by the mind of a man. You see when you write fiction, you can make anything work, but in real life, it doesn’t work, as it is contrary to God’s Universal Laws that govern how things really work. That, by the way, is why you’d better not read fiction—even so called ‘good fiction’—as you can be badly misled. Other theories, I have since learned, came directly through the person’s contact and communication with evil spirits!

I started my quest through the rubbish heaps of Satan’s counterfeit wisdom, with the study of Yoga. Influence by the popular movie of the life of Gandhi, [largely fictionalized propaganda] I studied first his writings, then yoga theory and philosophy. Yoga—first used as a method to prepare Hindus for death—it is now popular as a road to ‘incredible health and well being’. The principles of diet, morals, dress and exercise are similar to our health reform, but based on spiritualistic principles of universal energy.

I began to practice these things, and there are some health benefits in these things, but as I later studied the Spirit of Prophecy counsel, I found it already had all the good points for me, with none of the occult, spiritualistic baggage that Yoga attaches to these things. We already have all the good in the 8 laws of health, all Yoga adds is the evil, in the form of spiritualistic theory, self hypnosis, and devil worship. I will warn you that the ultimate end of Yoga is not super health, but rather demon possession and enslavement.

Buddhism, in the same way, has a lot of ‘good’ philosophy and health advice and teaches you to sit around and meditate—you know, we are supposed to meditate, but not that way. We are not supposed to meditate by emptying the mind and opening it up to allow the devil to dump in it! We meditate by taking the Words of God and putting them into our mind and focusing our mind to understand, while asking for the Holy Spirit to teach us how these things are to become part of our lives. By doing this we think God’s thoughts after Him and it lifts and recreates us. God’s Word has great power to change us, as we think on it and lay it up in our minds.

These false systems of religion have discipline and methods that one is supposed to use to lift one’s own self up by one’s own boot-laces, as it were. Many teach a series of steps that you seek to accomplish one at a time. Man can’t change himself at all, but he thinks he can get around that, if he just breaks the change down to a series of baby-steps that he can work on one at a time. So people in these religions sadly wear away their lives, always hoping that if they try hard enough and long enough the big change will come and ‘ye shall be as gods!’ Oh—if you don’t make it in this life—you can have assurance that you will be reincarnated to keep on trying. Again there are always some, who are able to make a convincing display of accomplishment of the physical feats of these religions and so become known as ‘Masters’ or ‘Gurus’ and then teach others.

These things are such a pitfall and snare as they lead you on, always expecting that just around the next corner is the ‘real breakthrough’ and things will really change if you just hang in long enough. You do accomplish certain disciplines and improvements physically and you just know you’ll get the rest in time.

Self-help programs are like this too—you keep reaching out to that ‘carrot on the stick’ thinking—‘this time I really have it’, only to have it recede before you. You are ever learning, but never come to the knowledge of the truth and when you get in deep enough—they teach you that there really isn’t any thing such as solid truth anyway! So you float along in the devil’s fogs and mists always hoping for something real but always finding it just around the corner, or just beyond the next level or maybe you’ll get it in the next self-help seminar.

With the things of the Lord, there is solid, authoritative truth and even though one can go on learning forever and not exhaust the bounties of the Lord, as soon as you submit to Him you are given real solid evidence and have something to stand on that makes sense. "Taste and see that the Lord is good," God invites us, "Take of the water of life freely." When we have a "thus saith the Lord" then we know what the truth is—we don’t have to suppose and wonder.

There is another thing that all these systems of eastern and related philosophies have in common—they all cultivate pride. Because as you progress in Buddhism, Taoism, martial arts, Yoga or such things you become more proud and self centered. They teach humility, but it is an external type of ‘wearing of sackcloth’ put on to disguise the pride within.

These incredible ‘powers’ that some of these ones develop, are all from the power of the devil, but they think it is from themselves. Now there are things that one can naturally develop, such as skill, dexterousness, agility, strength, balance, technique, but exactly where your ability leaves off and demonic assistance begins, is not really discernable. When you find out that you have para-normal or supernatural powers in some line then you are really proud. You feel your mind is superior to others and is so highly developed and all that. Wow! What I can do!

The more you are able to accomplish in your own strength, the more proud and disdainful you become. That pride is a great barrier to really accepting the Lord, because you think you know certain things, and you can do certain things, and you have certain ‘powers’ within you and all these things bordering on spiritualism, make it hard to totally die to self and bow as a penitent at Jesus feet, admitting your hopeless lost-ness.

Satan leads you on by giving you just enough success to keep you wanting more; but remember, he can’t give you total success, real victory, because he doesn’t even have it to give you. Only God can give you that. All Satan can really give you are novelties and parlor tricks; they are unreal and largely meaningless performances. The only real thing he has to give you is eternal death!

He specializes in feelings and illusions—this is Satan’s realm—making something appear real when it really isn’t. He uses such things so much in these religions of yoga, martial arts and meditation because he can give you impressions and feelings to tantalize you and lead you into his traps. So please realize that we must never have a religion that is based on feelings and impressions.

During the time I was studying eastern philosophies, I was a postulant and later a novice in an order called the ‘Jahalda Knights’, studying to become a leader in the group. There were books that we were encouraged to read which put forward the theories we were practicing. One book— and I won’t give you the name of it in case someone would be curious and go looking for it or something, I don’t want to promote it—but it was putting forth the spiritual side of martial arts. It went the round of those of us who were studying for the leadership of the Jahalda Knights. My immediate teacher over me—my Sifu—read it, and was greatly impressed with it and passed it to me and said, "Here, read this book!" So I read it—it was a medium-sized book—and I read it from cover to cover and I have to tell you it was the most fascinating book I ever read! It was amazing! I thought it was a wonderful book. I said, "This is so enlightening—this is so wonderful—I really love this book!"

Later I returned it to my teacher and I said, "I read this book right through and this is really a good book—it’s a wonderful book!" Well for some reason or other—he didn’t know why, but I know why now—God had His hand in something there. My teacher turned around and he handed me back the book and he said, "Well, if it is that good, don’t just read it once, read it again!"

So I took it and I said, "I will, I’ll read it again." I’ll tell you how I know it was God who interposed there, because afterwards my teacher seemed so annoyed both with me and with himself—he said, "Do you have to do everything I tell you? Can’t you think for yourself?" or something like this, but I said, "No, I will read it again." You know, we have no idea the spiritual battle that rages around us! Satan knew God was going to interpose and he was mad.

I didn’t ask for God’s blessing—I didn’t ask Him to show me if this thing was true or not. I didn’t take it to the Word of God and test it to see if it was truth; at that time, it didn’t cross my mind. But our Lord is merciful beyond anything we can imagine, really! And He was gracious and merciful to me, who was deliberately seeking after things that I knew better than to seek. God sent His Spirit and angels to be with me the second time I read that book. I didn’t ask for this help, but I am so grateful to Him for this and I have thanked Him many times. He stopped the hypnotic spell of Satan and when I read it again, I never read such a pack of rubbish in my life. It was the same book! I had only read it two days before and thought it so wonderful. It was just a bunch of fabricated rubbish from cover to cover. There was no good in it—just stupid-ness—Disgusting! Why didn’t I see it the first time? Satan was influencing me and God stopped him and let me see the truth.

When I read it the first time, one of the things it talked about was this experience of ‘enlightenment’. Now if you hang around ‘New Age’ people very much, you will hear a lot about enlightenment. It is supposed to be that all of a sudden when you are meditating or practicing, you get this experience where everything seems more real to you and more plain and clear and it’s like light flooding into your mind. I will tell you that that kind of ‘enlightenment’ comes from Lucifer, the fallen light-bearer—he specializes in that kind of experience. You can hear or read something and feel that it is so wonderful, something that you feel has opened a whole new world to you and opened up your understanding like never before, and it is nothing but a feeling, it has no basis in reality at all! It is a hypnosis kind of a thing he uses and you can feel nothing has ever been so precious in your whole life.

I have experienced this trick. I can still remember experiencing this after I first read that book. As I left my apartment that day to go to work—how everything seemed so bright, and so wonderfully new and beautiful, so different, so much more real, and I had this feeling of enlightenment. It was all so incredible, but it doesn’t last, friends, it doesn’t last. In fact when it fades, you usually end up in discouragement and darkness afterwards because Satan and his nasty bunch have more things to do than to sit around and make you feel good all day, because he really hates you with a passion, because you belong to Jesus. It’s nothing personal; he just hates you and delights to destroy you so as to hurt Jesus. But he gives people these sweet experiences to lead them to seek more as they think there must be real truth in this because of what they saw or felt. The ‘Master’ of the order based all his confidence in a hallucination he had in meditation one time, where he saw supernatural beings he thought were angels (they were fallen angels), who told him to start this order.

Many people are given an experience when they first come into occult territory. They may visit a psychic-type therapist and receive a treatment and find it makes them feel sooo good! Then they really believe in it and come back again and again. Seldom is there any lasting health benefit, but the good feeling keeps them returning and spending their money. Often they choose to take classes and begin to practice the therapy they have chosen. They also accept the spiritualistic explanation of the therapy as true.

Many times when a person first visits a psychic, he is told, "You don’t realize it, but you have a rare gift, special powers, and with training you could really be good at this and help many people." The person thinks "What? Me? Special powers? I never knew that!" It really makes him feel important. The person is made to feel he is under obligation to develop this hidden ‘gift’ for the blessing of others. In reality, it really boosts your pride to think that you have a ‘special gift’ that others don’t have. Once pride gets in there, you are led like a beast to the slaughter. Satan will give you just enough success to keep you coming back for more.

I am sad to tell you that some of the "New Theology" being preached in our pulpits today has the same effect—the person feels an astonishing exhilaration; he thinks he has never heard anything quite so wonderful. He is sure he has received a real blessing ‘from the Lord’, but in reality it fades away and leaves him more spiritually dead than ever before. Whole audiences experience this ‘false sense of revival’ together, and when it wears off, they have to look for some new excitement to keep them going. The hypnotic power of demons is involved in these false doctrines. Don’t ever underestimate the hold it can take on your mind!

I hope you are able to see the implications of this phenomenon in relation to alternative medicine. It is an easy thing for Satan’s angels to give a pleasant sensation, or wonderful sense of well being, as you receive one of these therapies, but unless you bring your life into harmony with God’s real health laws, there can be no lasting benefit. People seem now to base their choices of whether or not to use a particular modality of treatment by whether or not it ‘seems to work’. This is not a valid way to make your choice! Satan can make many things ‘work’.

Sometimes a particular therapist seems to have power to make us feel so good that we are sure his treatments are doing us real benefit. But often all that happens is that we become more dependent and in the long run, little lasting benefit, if any, is had. Often much money is spent for nothing. I once took a series of shiatsu treatments from a man who was the head of a shiatsu school. I was under the impression that he had studied and worked with this all his life and because he was Japanese, of course, I felt he had learned from the ‘Masters’. I later learned he had taken a couple treatments in Canada from a lady here and then studied a relatively short time and then set up his business. This ‘great base of knowledge’ that I was believing in, had no existence in fact at all.

We must make our choices based on what the Bible and inspired counsel has told us is acceptable therapy in the sight of the Lord. Remember, a treatment with God’s blessing on it is worth far more than something under His curse! God has given us the laws of health, simple herbs, hydrotherapy and massage. Practices based on ‘energy’ theory, balancing of forces, eastern religions and such are not under His blessing even if they seem to be ‘natural’ to us. It is safer to err on the side of caution and have God’s blessing than to take one step beyond the boundaries He has placed and so lose it. Without God, there are ‘no batteries included’ and even though effects might be experienced, no lasting good can come of it and Satan may use it as the doorway to come in and destroy your soul and others through your influence.

"Angels of God will preserve his people while they walk in the path of duty; but there is no assurance of such protection for those who deliberately venture upon Satan's ground"

"In the name of Christ I would address his professed followers: Abide in the faith which you have received from the beginning."Shun profane and vain babblings." [2 TIM. 2:16.] Instead of putting your trust in witchcraft, have faith in the living God. Cursed is the path that leads to Endor or to Ekron. The feet will stumble and fall that venture upon this forbidden ground. There is a God in Israel, with whom is deliverance for all who are oppressed. Righteousness is the foundation of his throne.

"There is danger in departing in the least from the Lord's instruction. When we deviate from the plain path of duty, a train of circumstances will arise that seems irresistibly to draw us farther and farther from the right. Needless intimacies with those who have no respect for God will seduce us ere we are aware. The fear of offending worldly friends will deter us from expressing our gratitude to God, or acknowledging our dependence upon him." Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene: Consulting Spiritualist Physicians, pg. 115

It is vital that we realize that these practitioners of occult based therapies, yoga, martial arts and so on, often have demons backing them and the hypnotic power involved can deceive any one who puts himself in their sphere of influence. I know of many times when God protected me so that such power was not able to take hold of me; but I want to warn—please don’t feel that it is safe to investigate such things and that God will protect you while you satisfy your curiosity. There have been people who just get involved with these things and they are swept away and never recover. We had a man in SDA history named Moses Hull. He thought he could play with the devil’s fire and debate and socialize with spiritualists! He was rescued by the brethren but later Satan got to his pride and he went back—never to recover again.

I don't know how I came out—by God's incredible mercy is all I can say. God plucked me from the fire, He opened my eyes and led me out step by step—I did one thing when I got into Yoga and such spiritism—I think it was the only thing that allowed God to pluck me from Satan's fist. When I was taught that I was to choose a Guru, and to follow him completely in my training, I thought a lot about this, and then I chose Jesus! I now know that was an insult to Him in a way, but I know He accepted me as His student and He led me out! If I would have chosen a man, I feel for sure, I would have perished. Oh what a loving Saviour we have! Patient beyond anything we can imagine.

Some point out that the Spirit of Prophecy talks about ‘electric currents’ in body and brain and so they feel that this verifies the ‘energy balancing’ theories. Well, it must be noted what things God showed us affect those currents, and that if such therapies were important, God could easily have directed us to them instead of what He did give us.

Note: Temperance: "The brain nerves which communicate with the entire system are the only medium through which Heaven can communicate to man and affect his inmost life. Whatever disturbs the circulation of the electric currents in the nervous system lessens the strength of the vital powers, and the result is a deadening of the sensibilities of the mind." Testimonies, vol. 2, pg. 347.

"…His Spirit, operating upon the heart, has acted like an electric battery, arousing the apparently benumbed faculties to vigorous and persevering action. .." RC pg. 300

"Physical inaction lessens not only mental but moral power. The brain nerves that connect with the whole system are the medium through which heaven communicates with man and affects the inmost life. Whatever hinders the circulation of the electric current in the nervous system, thus weakening the vital powers and lessening mental susceptibility, makes it more difficult to arouse the moral nature." Education pg. 209

"These signs shall follow them that believe on Christ as a risen Saviour, who proclaimed, over the rent sepulcher of Joseph, "I am the resurrection, and the life." But if the workers neglect to link themselves in divine connection with God, the electric current of reviving, life-giving spiritual energy can not flow in full, rich streams to the people." Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, 07-19-98

What are we shown here that affects this current of electric energy? Why clearly the laws of health AND contact with the power of God through His Spirit! So we have been given the best energy therapy on the planet and we certainly don’t need to run after Satan to have something from him. Can’t you see what his game is? By getting people looking to each other for energy and rituals and therapies, he keeps them away from looking to God and plugging into REAL POWER!

Remember, don’t depend on feelings to show you guidelines as to what is right or wrong, or what you should or shouldn’t do. Feelings and sensations and impressions and ‘wonderful experiences’ are all Satan’s specialties to deceive, manipulate and lure man to destruction. It can be so real. You can be so sure you are seeing wonderful light when all is darkness! If you follow your own ideas—or the ideas of any man, ancient or modern—you walk in the sparks of your own kindling, not in God’s heavenly light and the Batteries are Not Included—there is no real power!