Despite widespread publicity and organized communities of witches, this activity is still not taken seriously."

Modern witchcraft bears little resemblance to medieval witchcraft, much less to witchcraft in primitive societies. It has a relatively short history (the last 200 years), embraces hundreds of teachings and practices, and has hundreds of thousands of followers. The moment that unites them is the belief in actions that are forbidden by God in the Bible as occult and their performance.

"Two decades ago," as in previous centuries, witches were not successful in society. Most people considered witchcraft to be something like a superstition and did not trust it.

Now, due to the rapid growth of interest in the occult in our culture, the situation has changed. Tens of thousands of people across America, including those with advanced degrees, are involved in witchcraft, Satanism, voodoo, and all manner of white and black magic. Witches openly appear on television' It is said that every high school has its own witch. In Cleveland, you can hire a witch to liven up the party, white magic is practiced by 80,000 people in the United States, 6,000 of them in Chicago alone.

There are a lot of funny things here. But, unfortunately, not all of them. One murder after another is solved, in which the murderers directly declare" that they worship Satan. The police are finding more and more evidence of sacrificial killings of animals, as well as human sacrifices."

THE BIBLE AND WITCHCRAFT

Both the Old and New Testaments mention witchcraft and witchcraft more than once, and say that these actions are strictly forbidden by God, the Bible condemns all forms of witchcraft, including divination, astrology, divination by the entrails of humans and animals. The following passages describe the various forms of witchcraft condemned by God.

1. "Thou shalt not let wise men live" (Exodus 22:18).

2. "Do not eat with blood: do not tell or tell fortunes" (Lev. 19:26).

3. "Do not turn to those who summon the dead, and do not go to sorcerers, and do not defile yourselves with them, 'I am the Lord your God' (Lev. 19:31).

4. "There shall not be among you one who leads his son or daughter through the fire, a soothsayer, a fortune-teller, a fortune-teller, a sorcerer, a charmer, a summoner of spirits, a magician, and one who asks questions of the dead... For these nations, whom thou hast expelled, listen to diviners and soothsayers: but the Lord thy God hath not given thee" (Deut. 18:10-11, 14).

5. "And they led their sons and their daughters through the fire, and divined, and sorcery, and gave themselves over to do evil things in the sight of the Lord, and to provoke Him to anger" (2 Kings 17:17).