A simple question: Could a man know an event before happening? The answer is no because God denied humans from seeing this. Before happening, it doesn’t have an entity, it is found in the freedom of those able to make it happen, and it might not be their plans to transfer it from their mind to ours. Nothing exists before actually existing.
According to this principle, incantations are part of wizardry. A wizard is the fortune-teller that claims to know the unseen, which is the thing only God knows. We can say the same thing about telling the fortune based on a cup of coffee; as if the threads and lines drawn in the cup resulting from the movement of the lips indicate anything. The Scripture has called divination a sin in 1 Samuel 15: 23; the Book also made it a synonym to false visions in Jeremiah 14: 14 and also in Ezekiel. The Book of acts also said that Paul took spirits out of a fortune-teller (16: 16–18).
Moreover, Horoscopes, which are wide spread in newspapers and other publications, give you a specific character and predict events related to your birthday, birth hour, and a specific astronomic situation. Stars might have a certain influence on your character, but you are a free person and there is no destiny that tells you how to be. Some people tried in Sorbonne, France to make astrology a science; however our religious belief is that you are not a machine and that there is nothing destined for you and that you have “the freedom of the sons of God” as Apostle Paul says. Palm reading falls into the same category: Your age is a result of your health condition, and this could be recorded in your genes or genetics which predicts your willingness to catch a disease and especially cancer. There is an interference that comes from genetics and this has become a very developed science in recent years. You are born with a genetic program, and none of that is engraved on your palm.
Nevertheless, predicting your character from your handwriting is a possible thing because categorizing you into a specific character might affect your handwriting of letters and words. However, this doesn’t reveal the knowledge of the future, and I don’t think that if someone experiments your handwriting, he would be searching for something else.
“Talking to spirits” falls in the same sense, and it is completely prohibited by the church. For us, you can talk to saints through prayer but you can’t control someone’s spirit and you have no authority over any spirit for spirits are under God’s power only. In addition to that, exercising this thing made it in some countries like Brazil an independent religion and made it in other places a kind of drunkenness or anesthetization. Talking to spirits is a kind of magic because magic is to attribute to yourself a power that only God has. God’s book has said: “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord” (Deuteronomy 18: 10–12). The New Testament supports this as the book of Revelation counts murderers alongside with magicians and idolaters (21: 8).
The main idea in the New Testament is that magic is when you think that if you said some words and did some actions, something you want to happen will automatically happen. This opposes our faith that only the Lord can change something in the nature through his word. Praying is different than magic, because it carries hope and because it cannot do anything except through God’s grace. Nothing is sanctified simply when a priest reads a prayer or a text from the Bible. He calls the Holy Spirit over the bread and wine to be transformed into the Lord’s body and blood through the grace of the Spirit and not simply through reading the prayer. This is the main difference between magic and religion.
With this logic, there is no evil eye that can harm you, and this is why putting a blue bead in your neck or a horse shoe on the door of your house opposes our faith because these things cannot prevent you from getting harmed. And if you put a cross in your neck this would be a testimony of your belonging to Jesus, but this has no automatic effect because the sign of the cross must be accompanied by prayer. There is no miracle except through your faith in the Lord Jesus.
There is also another thing not considered as magic and it is telepathy. Telepathy is exchanging thoughts, feelings and images between minds at distance. As an example we mention a British woman that saw (or thought that she saw) her husband, who was an officer in India, being stabbed in the back by an Indian’s dagger. After a few days, the military authorities told her that this incident occurred at the same time that she felt it happening. These are natural powers; something like television transmission. Some people have the power to receive images at distance; some people also have the power to make a grape cluster fall down by simply looking at it. This is not a miracle. Anything other than telepathy, i.e. every action from those we mentioned before is magic, sorcery, or a lie; and all of these carry spiritual harm.
Translated by Mark Najjar
Original Text: “الشعوذة، السِحْر” –Raiati no3- 18.01.2004
