Idolatry in the Wizarding World of Myth Making
By Pastor Larry DeBruyn
Looks like the concept of “god” in the book and movie The Shack is spreading.[1] Fiction and fantasy have merged. J.K. Rowling, author of the occult Harry Potter series of books, popular reading among even many Christians, has announced that like The Shack, she believes “God is a Black Woman.”[2] (Rowling’s declaration, as well as The Shack‘s fiction, reminds me of The Black Madonna.)[3] Both Rowling and Wm. Paul Young write from a worldview where almost anything or anyone, even God, can be imagined to be whatever mythmakers want or need her/him/them to be; kind of like Christmas, upon a whim, when we wish upon a star, Christ can become Claus. From Disneyworld to Star Wars, magic creates myths.
But deliverance from a magical worldview where minds whimsically make a fantasy out of any reality—believe to conceive—can only come from reading the Scriptures. Now I can hear the protest, well didn’t Moses and Jesus work magic, do miracles? No because both, as well as other prophets and the apostles, performed miracles of God to expose the fraudulent marvels perpetrated by fake spiritualists. The biblical and revelatory miracles, culminating with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, testified against those the magicians worked; Moses against Pharaoh’s (Exodus 7:1-9:35), Daniel against Babylon’s (Daniel 2:37-39), Jesus against the Jew’s (Matthew 12:22-29; 9:34; Acts 19:13), Peter against a Sorcerer’s (Acts 8:8-14-24), and Paul against the seven sons of Sceva (Acts 19:11-20). By miraculous workings through Jesus and the other Prophets and Apostles, God introduced miracles from the unseen world above (heaven) to refute and rebuke the miracles being performed by magicians in phenomenal world below (earth). (See John 8:21-24.) Upon Jesus’ healing of the paralytic, the crowd exclaimed, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:12). Any presumption that we inhabit a Disneyland-like world raises “real” contradictions with the Christian faith. So the question arises: Who are we going to allow to define God, Jesus or Young and Rowling?
But deliverance from a magical worldview where minds whimsically make a fantasy out of any reality—believe to conceive—can only come from reading the Scriptures. Now I can hear the protest, well didn’t Moses and Jesus work magic, do miracles? No because both, as well as other prophets and the apostles, performed miracles of God to expose the fraudulent marvels perpetrated by fake spiritualists. The biblical and revelatory miracles, culminating with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, testified against those the magicians worked; Moses against Pharaoh’s (Exodus 7:1-9:35), Daniel against Babylon’s (Daniel 2:37-39), Jesus against the Jew’s (Matthew 12:22-29; 9:34; Acts 19:13), Peter against a Sorcerer’s (Acts 8:8-14-24), and Paul against the seven sons of Sceva (Acts 19:11-20). By miraculous workings through Jesus and the other Prophets and Apostles, God introduced miracles from the unseen world above (heaven) to refute and rebuke the miracles being performed by magicians in phenomenal world below (earth). (See John 8:21-24.) Upon Jesus’ healing of the paralytic, the crowd exclaimed, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:12). Any presumption that we inhabit a Disneyland-like world raises “real” contradictions with the Christian faith. So the question arises: Who are we going to allow to define God, Jesus or Young and Rowling?
Only the Scriptures, God's revelation and disclosure about Himself, can move people, especially Christians, from a world of magic below into the majestic world of God on high (Isaiah 2:10; Psalm 93:1). Only by reading the Bible and believing the words of Jesus can the Christian become separated from the world of make-believe and introduced into the reality of who God is. Only God is qualified to tell humanity about Who He is.
The Apostle John wrote of Jesus that, “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (Emphasis added, John 1:18). Interestingly the verb “declared” (Greek, exegeomai) is “used in Greek writing of the interpretation of things sacred and divine, oracles, dreams, etc.”[4] So this verse teaches that God’s One Son interprets who the One Living God is. As regards the divine being, we must allow Jesus to define God. If we don’t, we indicate we are against Him, and that is to be against Christ, to be anti-Christ (1 John 4:1-3).
The Apostle John wrote of Jesus that, “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (Emphasis added, John 1:18). Interestingly the verb “declared” (Greek, exegeomai) is “used in Greek writing of the interpretation of things sacred and divine, oracles, dreams, etc.”[4] So this verse teaches that God’s One Son interprets who the One Living God is. As regards the divine being, we must allow Jesus to define God. If we don’t, we indicate we are against Him, and that is to be against Christ, to be anti-Christ (1 John 4:1-3).
To the Samaritan woman Jesus declared that, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him worship Him in spirit and truth” (John 4:26). “Spirit” is colorless, neither white nor black. Jesus Himself, it can be inferenced, was neither white or black but likely a brown-skinned middle eastern Jew. Though in His divine essence God is “raceless” He is not “genderless.”
In the Gospels Jesus constantly referred to or addressed God as Father (John 8:16; 14:2; 17:6; etc.). Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father. . .,” not “our mother” who is in heaven (Matthew 6:9). Unlike the world of the mythmakers, that’s the way God is and He does not change (Malachi 3:6; Romans 1:21). Incidentally, Jesus is “the only begotten Son,” not daughter of God (Isaiah 9:6; John 3:16). Christmas celebrates the birth of God’s Son, not daughter (Luke 2:1-20). Sure we can deny this, but this is Christianity, and anybody can either take it or leave it, accept it or reject it.
To conclude, I think that Jesus knows more about God than either Wm. Paul Young or J.K. Rowling. Why? It’s because Jesus is One with the Father (John 10:30). He is God and who is more qualified to tell us about God than God? Though they may think otherwise, Young and Rowley are not “gods” and therefore are not positioned to define God. They may think they are, but they aren’t.
In defining who God is, I choose to believe Jesus. He is The Prophet (Deuteronomy 18:15; Acts 3:22). He speaks for God who is His Father and His Father for Jesus His Son (John 5:37; 8:18). Peter confessed, a confession (not about himself) that serves as the bedrock of the church for over two-thousand years, that Jesus is, “the Christ (one Christ), the Son (one Son) of the Living God (one God)” (Matthew 16:16). So who will you believe? In this decision about who you believe God is, give heed to the Apostle John’s last words of his first letter: “Little children, guard yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
Endnotes
[1] In describing the god Papa, Young twice notes him/her to be a “large black woman”... a “big black woman.” Wm. Paul Young, The Shack (Los Angeles, CA: Windblown Media, 2007): 84, 86.
[2] Lucas Nolan, “J.K. Rowling: God Is a Black Woman,” December 13, 2017, Breitbart (http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/12/13/j-k-rowling-god-is-black-woman/).
[3] When in Warsaw, Poland, in the Spring of 1990, I personally saw a Black Madonna inside a Roman Catholic Church I visited. The graphic is of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland from the Wikipedia Black Madonna page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna
[4] James Strong,The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible: Showing Every Word of the Text of the Common English Version of the Canonical Books, and Every Occurrence of Each Word in Regular Order, Electronic Ed. (Ontario, Canada: Woodside Bible Fellowship., 1996).
Republished with permission. Original is posted at: http://guardinghisflock.com/2017/12/17/idolatry/. For further reading see the many articles about The Shack posted on the Herescope blog, especially http://herescope.blogspot.com/2009/10/unshackled.html and http://herescope.blogspot.com/2017/05/truths-we-believe-about-god.html
Pastor Larry DeBruyn is the author of UNSHACKLED: Breaking Away From Seductive Spirituality which is available from Discernment Ministries: 903-567-6423.