An African pastor has warned that the dark powers of witchcraft and demons are indeed real forces in the world that Christians need to be prepared for.
Conrad Mbewe, an author and pastor of Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, said in a video for The Gospel Coalition Africa last week that one of the greatest challenges African Christians have is related to the spiritual world.
Mbewe explained that, in many villages, there’s a mixture of African religious traditions and confusion over how to speak about witch doctors and witchcraft.
Some of the questions people have about witchcraft, he said, include whether the “powers that are in witchcraft [are] real, or just imaginations that human beings seem to have?” And “Is it major deception like people who are playing magic or tricks?”
As for how Christians should respond to that world, Mbewe said believers should keep in mind that “this is nothing new.”
“When you go through the Old Testament, you find that one of the areas that God was very adamant with respect with the children of Israel was that they were not to engage in witchcraft,” he said.
“In fact, if anybody was found genuinely guilty of it, that person was to be stoned to death. That’s how hard the writings of the Old Testament go as far as witchcraft is concerned.”
The pastor pointed out that in the New Testament, believers are not threatened with being stoned to death, but are urged to be delivered from “the acts of darkness, witchcraft included.”
He said that one of the examples is in Acts 16, where a slave girl who had a “spirit of divination” and practiced fortune-telling was rebuked by Paul, who commanded the dark spirit to come out of her.
Mbewe said that what Christians can learn from the passage is, No. 1, “it was a spirit and it was an evil spirit that finally had to be cast out. No. 2, they were real extraordinary powers that this woman [had,] it is real power, dark power … but real power nonetheless.”
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Stoyan Zaimov
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