When I was a child I grew up in a world of traditions loosely based on eroded forms of Christianity filtered by Western history, passed down from generation to generation, mostly orally, with loss of accuracy with each successive hand over. So it was a mixture of concepts I received. The teachings given me included a denial of credibility of information about spirits. Materialism replaced such information. Risk aversion perhaps motivated such denial. Children were taught to not believe that ghosts exist. Spirits of natural elements such as living things, elements of wind and rain, any attribution of spiritual existence to anything natural, attributing real veracity to supernatural things, all was denied. The maturity of growing education and help of scriptures gradually persuaded me these denials were foolish. The denials would lead to atheism. Science supposedly justified such denials. The idea given by traditional Western post-Christian supposedly enlightened society was (is) that it is evil to believe there is any reality in traditional teachings about spirits and rituals of magic. Only medicine in its Western form was to be accepted. Yet mature understanding makes me realise that God enshrines in the gospel and the way of Christ some important applications of traditions about spirits. The wrongdoing is not in accepting the reality and wisdom of things pertaining to spirits. The wrongdoing is in refusing to put aside lesser spirit worship and refusing to be devoted to worship of the Most High God. The wrongdoing is in failing to be a servant of Christ. We need not reject truthful information about how witches use rituals and drugs to draw spirits into inanimate objects or their own bodies. We instead accept the ritual of eating the bread of communion of Christ’s body and drinking the blood of the covenant to identify with Christ and receive Him into our human bodies having been baptised into His name. We have the presence of Christ joining with us in this identification with Him and know by persuasion that He is alive from the dead having died a sacrificial death on a symbolic cross. The traditional ways of spirit persist, yet we are given over to receiving the living human Christ alive from the dead and the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit of the Most High God, rather than serving elemental spirits and angelic gods. The other spirits do exist, we know this, yet we are freed from slavery to them as lordship of Jesus Christ supersedes any lesser mastery over us. God Himself, the Father of Jesus, in sovereignty over us frees us to serve only the Father who is God. This is eternal life.
