New Age beliefs are modern deceptions



Romans 1:22 - Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

First published on the 4th of June 2017 — Last updated on the 9th of March 2022

New Age claim to respect the Bible but contradict It

We live in a confusing age. There are about 45000 different types of Christian denominations and churches today. Some of these go under the heading of "New Age".  Some New Age beliefs encourage a person to elevate himself or herself to the level of a god. Then they worship themselves for being their own creator. They focus on an exaggerated sense of self-importance to justify their self-admiration. They feel that there is a god-self within themselves. This kind of thinking easily catches on in our modern world of "selfies".

'Selfies' are photos of oneself, taken by oneself, in order to advertise oneself on the internet.

'Selfies' define our modern age where jaded self-obsession seeks new temporary thrills.

New Age beliefs come in many varieties that endlessly mutate as newer clever ideas spread, and find fertile soil in the impressionable minds of spiritually empty people.

Their inspiration comes from the spirit world, often called channels, which pass ideas to them.

Drink, drugs, and a life that is "free" from moral restraints and responsibility attracts many people.

The subtle error of New Age is their very clever, but superficial, references to the Bible, that trivialize the Bible to be little more than a fable.

There are numerous New Age philosophies expounded by different leaders such as Alex Jones, David Icke, and Jordan Maxwell. David Icke sees the Godhead as an Infinite Mind with himself as the "son of the Godhead".

Jordan Maxwell, a prominent New Age lecturer, says, “I don’t know what God is”.

Because he does not know God, Jordan’s talk can only express his ignorance of God. He then dismisses God as the impersonal “divine force of the Universe”. (The Star Wars movie series also refer to "the force" which no-one can define or describe)

So New Agers are doomed to learn about God from those who do not know God.

Icke and Maxwell no longer talk to each other so they obviously have big differences.

But what they have in common is an attempt to expose secret power groups which fascinate many people and is a great source of income as people pay for their books, DVDs, and lectures. These men may or may not actually believe what they say, but they certainly make a lot of money by saying it.

One study cannot cover all the ideas expressed by New Agers so this study will just focus on ideas expressed by Jordan Maxwell.

Jordan at times expresses great respect for the Bible, but then happily contradicts it whenever he wants to.

He says that Jericho never had any walls. This blatantly contradicts Scripture. He also claims that “Hebrew people were never worshippers of one true God.”

Wrong. In a sea of the idolatry of the surrounding nations, the Hebrew people (or Jews) worshiped one God.

DEUTERONOMY 6:4   Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:

Jordan's comments can also be self-contradicting.

He says, “Almost nothing of the background of the Jews is true” and then goes on to say, “I have the highest respect for the Bible”.

But why respect the Bible if it got almost all the Jewish history wrong?

Pagans had many ideas that were started in Genesis.

The Seed of the woman.  A woman has no seed. The seed in her comes from her husband. So the seed of the woman means it comes from no man and must be created in her womb by God. This is the idea of the virgin birth.

Many pagan religions had their myths and legends about a virgin birth but none could turn it into a physical reality.

Here was the big difference between Israel and the pagans.

Pagans could speak of the woman’s Seed, but they could not produce it.

Israel did produce the Seed of the woman, when one woman Mary believed the Word of God, not as a fable but as absolute truth.

 

Death, burial, and resurrection were implied by Cain killing Abel and then Seth appearing to take Abel’s place. Not a proper resurrection of the dead person but the best that could be done.

GENESIS 4:25   And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.

So pagans wanted a more obvious symbol of the resurrection. Pagans used a tree which is cut down and then later produced a new shoot. Tammuz (or Nimrod) was a person who died and was resurrected in myth.

Pagans could imitate the idea but not produce someone who could actually do it.

But then Jesus both died and rose again as the Son of Abraham. So Abraham’s line produced the reality of the resurrection.

New Agers, like the pagans, cannot produce this reality of the resurrection so they seek to trivialize the Bible as if it is a myth that they can freely contradict when it suits them.

Then they make claims that are impossible to prove.

New Age fables that planets or the moon control us

Jordan Maxwell says, “All wars and violence can be traced back to the planet Saturn”.

David Icke spent most of his life saying that mind control on earth came from the moon.

How can these statements be proven? This is an extreme example of a modern-day fable that follows on from the pagan Roman days when it was Mars who was thought to be the god of war.

The weakness of astrology is that there is no link between a dead planet and living human beings. The gravitational pull of Saturn on earth is very slight, much less than the moon’s because Saturn is so far away from us.

In addition,

to be a New Ager, you must regard the fable that a planet can control our lives as being a fact.

There is no proof that planets control us. That is simply speculation.

Maxwell thus makes two extreme statements.  He regards the historic facts of the Bible as being fables and then believes that the fable which claims that planets control us, is a fact.

This is a logical case of role reversal. If a fact is a myth then myth must be a fact.

Jordan then links Saturn to a square and to the colour black.

He wants Saturn to be linked to a square and to the colour black so that he can claim that a black square is symbolic of the control of our world by evil people.

Evil people do control our world but that is not because of a planet but because Satan is running rampant and God is bringing the world to its climax, called Armageddon. God would not destroy the world systems at Armageddon if mankind was running a good world. Thus evil must predominate at the end to justify the destruction of our world order. So New Age turns us away from Satan’s schemes that have already been mapped out in Bible prophecy and then leave us running around in circles like headless chickens in our attempts to try to explain an increasingly complex and baffling world around us.

Escape into drink and drugs follows easily because in today’s gifted but dark age it does not take long before we realize that we cannot save ourselves.

He also links Saturn to a circle because it has a ring. So Saturn is linked to a square and a circle.

Buddhists also use a square and a circle. So do Hindus.  But they are very different religions. There are only a few simple geometrical shapes and many religions are looking for a simple logo. So obviously some shapes are going to be shared. (Consider car makers. Mercedes is one of the very few that has a simple logo on its bonnet. Try to think up a different simple logo. It is not easy).

Maxwell says “The ancient Phonecians in Palestine always knew that Saturn had rings.”  Easy to say, but not true.

How were they able to know about Saturn’s ring without modern telescopes which only started appearing in the 1600s?

What Maxwell does not tell us is that much of the Phoenician sacred writings known to the ancients have been lost.

So we know very little of the beliefs of the ancient Phoenicians.

But the good Jews stayed away from the beliefs of these surrounding nations.

 

Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and satellites have recently discovered in 1981 and again in 2006 that its complex weather patterns have formed a lovely huge hexagon in the cloud layers at its north pole. Each of the six equal sides is longer than the diameter of the earth. So far, this is unique in the solar system. But neither pagans nor their modern devotees, the New Agers, realized that Saturn’s symbol is a  hexagon and its number, if it has one, is thus six.

But there is no square on Saturn, so that is fake news.

Why does he consider Saturn to be black?

The mistake here is that Saturn was the most distant planet that is visible to the naked eye. Thus it is coldest planet being so far from the sun. In theory it should be dimmest, being so far away but it is not.  Saturn reflects light better than all the other planets except Jupiter and Venus.

Black means an object absorbs all the light and reflects none.

Our moon looks very bright but only reflects 12% of the light that falls on it. Saturn reflects  47% of the light that falls on it. But remember that Saturn is  1200 million kilometers from earth. The moon is much closer at 384000 kilometers from us and that is why the moon seems brighter.

Saturn is a good reflector of light. This is how white behaves, not black.   Mercury is the “blackest” planet as it only reflects 12% of the sunlight. Pagans and New Agers got this wrong. Mercury deserves the colour black.

To say that Saturn influences our wars is also guessing.

Mars, the red planet because it has reddish iron oxide on it, was regarded as the god of war. So who controls war, Saturn or Mars? Neither planet can carefully control human violence.

No secret society can control random events of today

Everything about the world changed dramatically with the first World War and its aftermath.

Things were never the same after that as a spirit of demonic dictatorship was unleashed during the war. This spirit was picked up by natural dictators like Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. These natural dictators swept the world into the second world war where the demonic forces were unleashed on natural Israel in the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews.

No secret power group was able to start World War 1.

Two bullets set in motion a series of events that shaped the world we live in today.

The Archduke of Austro-Hungary, suddenly wanting to visit the hospital in Sarajevo to see an officer who was wounded by a bomb thrown at the Archduke's car which bounced off the car before exploding, had a driver who had not been told of this change in plans. The driver turned right instead of left, by mistake. When he stopped in order to reverse, he just happened to stop a couple of metres from the assassin  Princip who then shot the Archduke and his wife. From there on events escalated into war. This action was random as Princip was not in control of events, although he succeeded in his aim.

Scientists have discovered that the basic atom behaves in mysterious ways. We have no clear picture of what atoms are but we understand how atoms affect each other. Unfortunately, this interaction of atoms is best described by the random laws of chance that describe the average behaviour well but tell us nothing about the individual.

Consider human beings instead of atoms. In today’s confusing world so many unpredictable events seem to occur at random. Boris Johnson led the British Brexit vote to leave the European Union. When he won, he did not want the job. Hillary Clinton was a firm favourite to win the 2016 American Presidential election but lost.

Consider the assassination that started the first World War.  A driver taking the wrong turn and then stopping right next to an assassin. These are completely random events. It sounds more like fiction than fact.

In the first World War, corporal Hitler and some friends were sitting in a little hut. Officers came in and ordered them out. They had to move far enough away so that they could not hear anything. About twenty minutes later a British shell (by sheer chance because the cannon was out of sight) landed exactly on the hut, exploded, and killed everyone inside. Hitler was spared and went on to cause World War 2.

Thus one shell could have saved the world from World War 2 and the 70 million people who died in it. Such are the vagaries of chance that no human being, no secret society can control.

Hitler survived at least twenty assassination attempts on his life. No secret society could have either planned all these different attacks nor defended him from them. One was a bomb in a light aircraft that simply failed to explode.  Another bomb exploded on time but Hitler, uncharacteristically, had left that meeting  20 minutes before his scheduled time of departure. So when the bomb exploded, he was not there.

Randomness infects our human history making it impossible for a man or a group of men to control the uncertain paths of force.

When the allies landed for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day on 6 June 1944, Hitler was asleep and his aides were scared to wake him. General Rommel, who was in charge of the shore defenses, was away in Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday which just happened to be on 6 June as well. These random events which gave the Allies a breathing space to get established on the shore could not be organized by any secret society, however powerful they might be.

The randomness of the behavior of the atom defies our ability to understand how it behaves. We thus use the laws of chance to describe the behavior of groups of atoms.  And we have exactly the same problem when trying to analyze human events.

Events become so intertwined and random and complex that no human thread of logic can simply explain them. Truman was losing badly against Dewey in all the polls of the 1948 American presidential election. Truman’s Democratic party had split into three rival groups, so he had no chance. Then, on voting day, it rained heavily in many Republican farming areas like the lower Mississippi Valley and Illinois with heavy downpours in the south.  A Pacific storm hit northern California where Dewey had his Republican farmer followers. Because of the thick mud on the farmers’ dirt roads they never turned up to vote. So Truman won.

No human, no planet could produce heavy rains in the Republican farmer areas on election day.
But Jesus Christ can. Why would He do so?  Because Truman had been the first president to grant recognition to the state of Israel when it was declared in 1948.

So a deeper plan that is running through human history is God gathering the Jews together in their Promised Land so that He can return to them as He promised to do. Truman, knowingly or unknowingly, tuned in to help God’s purpose with the Jews. God rewarded him with another four years in office.

One world leader needs churches and military dictators

For one man, the man of sin who will be the end-time Pope, to rule the world he needs to rule the churches as well as having the military help of ten end-time dictators.

REVELATION 17:12   And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.

"Power as kings". Not crowned kings but have a king's dictatorial power.

REVELATION 17:13   These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

These ten dictators give their military power and strength to the end-time Pope.

That is where the real power to rule the world will come from. Not from any secret societies.

Occult means hidden. The occult or New Age people are correct when they say there are powerful secret societies that are hidden from our everyday view. Yes, the Illuminati, the international capitalists and bankers, and the Free Masons, etc. do exist and strive hard for dominion over people to increase their power and wealth. But there are only about 6 million Free Masons on earth. Here is their problem. The world is simply too big for them to gain dominance over it all. They will achieve a measure of localized control and power, but they are rather like a collection of lakes because their water or influence only spreads so far.

They do not represent the restless sea of the real masses of humanity.

To dominate the world will require universal political control. The Russians, the Chinese, the Moslems, North Korea, Iran, etc. all constitute powerful regional blocs that no secret society will be able to control.

A one-world ruler also has to use religion to glue the world together.  Thus we should rather be watching the growing popularity of the Pope as he has religious and political power on a worldwide scale.

This is the mistake of New Agers like Jordan Maxwell. They profess to believe the Bible, but then deny so much of what is written in It. Thus they offer no real alternative other than their human guesses.

What is their point of studying the Bible if it is just to find out the so-called mistakes in the Bible?

That is a pointless exercise.  Maxwell criticizes the churches for being wrong but he makes the same mistake that the churches make.

The churches also study the Bible to point out all the mistakes in the Bible because they have insufficient insight to put it all together just the way it is written.

In addition, no one has sufficient military clout to conquer the world.

America is the strongest nation but blunted her military teeth in the wilds of Afghanistan and the sands of Iraq. Under Obama, America just vacillated in Syria, which has been the world’s biggest humanitarian disaster since World War 2, without any really effective policy. Then Trump wanted to build up fortress America, which takes some attention away from trying to police the world.

In 2022 Putin's invasion of Ukraine caused the next major crisis with huge financial repercussions. Especially as it was so soon after the havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

No secret society is able to cause and control all these crises.

Think of Putin the strong man of Russia. He does what he likes and stays in power for as long as he likes. A big rival of his, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead near the Kremlin in 2015. Yes, Putin was elected democratically but his election is just a formality. In reality, he is a dictator.

So, one trend to watch is the rise of dictatorial leadership.

The major problem with the New Agers is that they do not focus on the main enemy.

They track down the modern politicians in America and the secret societies and hidden power brokers. These all have a role to play in world affairs but they are not the main enemy of mankind. Events are too complex and too entangled.  A storm is gathering in the hidden dimensions of spiritual church power and the New Agers will miss the main culprits because they have the incorrect interpretation of the Bible.

This is typical New Age reasoning :

“ Before the Great Flood, Saturn was regarded by all mankind as the supreme god and ruler of the kings. Occult researchers affirm that Saturn ruled the kingdom of Atlantis”.

What written evidence do we have of what it was like before the Flood? There is none. So this is just guesswork. Atlantis was a continent, possibly somewhere in the Atlantic, that sank at the time of the Flood. This is probably correct. Some evidence that seems to confirm this idea is the American eels that migrate out to the middle of the Atlantic as if there used to be a breeding site there, and then don’t really find any purpose for being there. It is as though this migrating instinct was hard-wired into their brains long ago when there was a continent in the Atlantic. But what evidence do we have that Saturn was the god of Atlantis? None.

This is just speculation in the absence of hard evidence.

GENESIS 4:26   And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos:

then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.

Early man worshipped God. 

Only later did the worship of nature in the form of the sun, moon, and planets arise.

Enoch lived so holily that he never died. God just translated him up into Heaven. No planet, no supposed god Saturn could do this.

GENESIS 5:24   And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

After the Flood, God was very strict with the Jews that they should not get involved with the worship of heavenly bodies.

DEUTERONOMY 17:2   If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the LORD thy God, in transgressing his covenant,

:3   And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded;

II KINGS 17:15   And they rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified against them; and they followed vanity, and became vain,

and went after the heathen that were round about them, concerning whom the LORD had charged them, that they should not do like them.

:16     And they left all the commandments of the LORD their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove,

and worshipped all the host of heaven,

and served Baal.

ISAIAH 47:13   Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee.

The downfall of astrology. Even if you guess right about the future, you cannot save yourself from it. God told Noah about the future Flood and He saved Noah from it.

In Babylon, the four Jews who had God’s Word knew far more than all the stargazers. Astrology is thus rather useless.

DANIEL 1:19   And the king communed with them; and among them all was found none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: therefore stood they before the king.

:20   And in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king enquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.

So the Jews had beliefs that were very different from the pagans.

There were no ancient Hebrews before Abraham.

Maxwell Jordan keeps referring to “ancient Hebrews”.

There was no such thing.

Abraham, when he was in the Promised Land and believing in one God, was the first man to be called a “Hebrew”. The word means “crossed over” because he crossed over the wide Euphrates river to go to the Promised Land. He had to cross this huge barrier before he could achieve his goal and purpose in life.

Abraham had to cross over and separate himself from pagan Babylon’s side of the Euphrates in order to find God.

The Hebrews had many names for God who was a Spirit. Each name represented certain qualities of God. “El” was a word for “God” which meant “Strength”. Elah meaning Awesome One was another name for God.

God is an invisible Spirit. His Old Testament names reflected His attributes when He dealt with people.  One God has many different ways of manifesting Himself. He provides. He heals. He is our Shepherd. He is our peace. Our righteousness.  He had different names to describe these qualities.

It is not different Gods.   It is one God showing Himself in different ways.

This is like invisible energy. We name energy from the effects it has on matter. Moving energy.  Height energy.  Light energy.  Heat energy.  These are all the same energy. This energy, under different conditions, just has different effects like making things move faster or higher or making things brighter or hotter.

But all these names of the Spirit of God (which astrologers mistake for being different Gods) seem to fade away in the New Testament when God hides Himself in the Body of the Man Jesus Christ. God manifests Himself as a Man and takes on the human Name of Jesus Christ.

COLOSSIANS 2:9     For in him (Jesus) dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily

COLOSSIANS 3:17   And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,

Jesus is now the only Name that we need for God.

MATTHEW 28:18   And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

All of God’s powers are manifest in the Man Jesus. God became a Man. We cannot get a clearer picture of God than that.

Jordan Maxwell says, “The different names for God in the Bible reflect the process of going through the many ages in which one planet superseded another and was again superseded by the next one in the celestial war.”

This is just plain wrong. Planets cannot fight each other. Each one is just stuck in its orbit. The different names of God represent the different ways He dealt with the Jews. Now all this has fallen away because God became a Man, died for us and now dwells in our hearts if we have repented and accepted Him as our personal Saviour.

In the Old Testament He dwelt above the Jews with His many names, then He dwelt with the Jews as Emmanuel and now He dwells in us as the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

No other Name of God is necessary today, just the Name of Jesus.

4 planets have rings so Saturn is not Lord of the Rings

Maxwell calls God a Divine Presence. Thus Maxwell is  2000 years out of date. God put His Spirit into a Man and now we can call on God as a fellow Human Being.  A kinsman Redeemer.  God is no longer a mysterious supernatural Presence out there somewhere. He now dwells in the hearts of men and women who are born again.

Maxwell says,  “The advent of the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam confined the worship of Saturn to occult circles. As we saw here, the Lord of the Rings is still omnipresent in popular culture but only recognized by those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.”

But the ancients knew nothing about Saturn’s ring.

Four the planets in the Solar System have rings. They are the four giant gas planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” — 1 Corinthians 16:23