Perils of Unholy Spiritual Knowledge

I knew a woman once, in fact, I still know her today. A friend of mine was ministering to her deliverance. I was not present. And the spirit that was plaguing her and binding her named itself as the spirit of sleep, which is a biblical name, the spirit of deep slumber.

The man who was ministering to her commanded the spirit to come out of her in the name of Jesus. And it said, “I won't. I'm her salvation.” Wasn't that an extraordinary thing to say? But as I meditated on it, I saw the truth of it in a sense. When that woman couldn't face life, you know what she did? She curled up and went to sleep for 16 hours at a stretch. Sleep was her salvation. It was her substitute for God.

Now, people have many, many substitutes: nicotine, alcohol, drugs, the television, many other things to which we turn for help, for comfort, for strength. And when we do, we make those things our god. But the worst and the most serious is when we turn to some form of occult power or practitioner, like a fortune teller, a clairvoyant, a palm reader, a person who practices ESP, or hypnosis, or handwriting analysis, or a host of other things.

We're in agreement about that. There's a young lady in the front row who had a very strong disagreement with me some years back about the rights and wrongs of handwriting analysis. So I let the Lord deal with her about that, and she came round to my point of view. But I think she would tell you, if you asked her, that she'd have done better to agree quicker.

Almost any form of supernatural knowledge is very, very dangerous. There are only two sources of supernatural knowledge. One is God, the other is the devil. If it doesn't come from God, it does come from the devil. If it comes from God, it comes through Jesus Christ. Because he said,

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

So if we come to God the Father, it's through Jesus Christ. If we get into any other supernatural realm of visions or revelations or knowledge or prediction, and we didn't go by Jesus Christ, we got into the realm of evil and of Satan. And in a certain sense, we have tied ourselves to false gods.

We need to repent, we need to revoke the claim that they have over us, and we need to loose ourselves from their dark, evil influence. And as I say, the experience may not be in your life. It may be in the life of your parents, your grandparents, or your great-grandparents.

In relationship to the occult, to witchcraft, to fortune-telling, to divination, to sorcery, I've observed that there are certain lines that follow. It usually goes through the female line most often. Sometimes it'll skip a generation, and you'll find that a grandmother who's a fortune teller or a clairvoyant is liable to have one favorite grandchild, and it's usually a girl. And that favorite grandchild will be the recipient of that evil supernatural power.

My personal experience is that children born of parents in the occult who are practicing the occult are frequently born with the occult spirit in them from birth. A spirit of divination, a spirit of witchcraft.

Let me try to describe to you divination as I understand it. Divination is essentially the predictive ability. You can predict certain things that are going to happen. It's very real. The 16th chapter of Acts, there was a young woman who had a spirit of divination. King James says, the Greek says, a spirit, a python. A python, you know, is a kind of snake that coils itself around the body of its victim.

And it's very significant in the original versions of Jean Dixon's story, A Gift of Prophecy, it's related specifically out of her own lips that her peculiar gift came to her in the form of a snake which came into the bed with her, curled itself around her. That's left out of the later editions, but it's there. Nothing to a person who knows the Bible could more clearly advertise the source of that gift.