I remember hunching over a Ouija board with friends and watching spellbound as some unnamed force supposedly moved the pointer to letters spelling out replies to our questions. We were atheists at the time and would have laughed uproariously at anyone suggesting we were treading on dangerous spiritual ground.
Now a modern version of the Ouija board — the "Charlie Charlie Challenge" — is spreading across the Internet like wildfire, with more than 2 million people recently tweeting about it.
All you need are two pencils placed in the shape of a cross upon a sheet of paper with “yes” and “no” written in adjacent corners. Players ask a demon named Charlie to answer their questions and then wait for the pencils to move.
Here’s where the rubber hits the road for Christians. If you don’t believe in demons, then why not allow your kids to play occult games? Nothing bad could possibly happen, you would say, since demonic forces are just a figment of our imagination.
My friend from church, who has two boys, posted an article about Charlie on Facebook, and when someone commented that it’s just a silly game, she disagreed strongly.
“You can’t believe in heaven and deny the existence of hell,” she wrote. “I’m stressing to my kids to avoid messing with the occult. Period.”
In “Manual for Spiritual Warfare,” Paul Thigpen notes that a Ouija board may seem innocent enough, but can give demons “easy access” to players. Still, many people who identify as Christians might chuckle at this because they say the devil, demons — and even hell — aren’t real.
How did we get to a place where basic tenets of Christianity are demoted to symbols? And how can people say they’re Christians while denying Jesus’ teachings?
I have actually heard a preacher say that back in Jesus’ time, people believed in demons because they were ignorant about the ego, superego and id. Why, even Jesus lacked that perspective, you see, because he was born before the advent of modern psychology!
This kind of nonsense overlooks a fundamental Christian belief in the divinity of Christ, which means he certainly didn’t suffer from the lack of a modern university education.
And what about the Gospel story where Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert? Deniers of the devil say Jesus was grappling with his subconscious desires. And when he cast seven demons from a woman? They were actually repressed memories from her childhood.
It's discouraging to say how few sermons I've heard stressing the reality of the devil. Maybe this slow erosion of basic theology from the pulpit partially explains why the majority of U.S. Christians say Satan is merely a symbol.
If that were true, Christians could freely indulge in occult games without concern about spiritual harm. But if the Bible portrays the devil accurately — as an evil spirit prowling through the world seeking prey — then calling on demons is playing with serious fire.
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