Harry Potter and the Small Step

As a child the first book I read cover-to-cover was a Western. The first thing that I saved up to buy with my pocket money was a cap gun. My parents were not afraid of me turning to a life of violent crime because of the big step between play-acting and handling real guns. Later when I did start handling guns, the first lesson I was given was in weapons safety. Later, in the army, weapons safety was drilled into me.

Today, the first book a child may read cover-to-cover could be about the occult. Children’s interest in such books as the Harry Potter series provide us with a great opportunity to teach our children not only to handle unseen forces but to overcome them with the power of Jesus.

Unlike the imaginative world of Westerns, there is a very small step for us from play-acting about unseen forces to actively summoning and using them. Our own children could well have been the objects of such destructive behaviour. When I was a child my parents taught me how to look after myself when faced with physical and emotional bullying. Today we could well add the psychic dimension to such parental guidance.

The most important thing for our children to know is that God loves them.  Jesus protects them from all forms of evil. If they love God and do what he wants then psychic attacks and evil curses are going to bounce off them and often they won’t even know about it.

The next important thing is that those who use spells and such things need help. So if your children think that others are doing something creepy then tell them to ask God to bless those people. This will confuse whatever unseen forces they are trying to use.  It will also show them that the goodness of God is better than whatever they are using.

Then it is helpful for our children to know that there are good beings in the unseen realm too. These are our Angels and Saints. Two encouraging prayers are the Prayer to St Michael and the Prayer to the Guardian Angels. The Rosary is another powerful prayer.

With so many occult films and television programmes around these days, we can say that unseen influences have become accepted into the fabric of the contemporary culture. Our Children need to learn how to overcome the destructive influences they portray. They need to know in a practical way that Jesus is the Lord of everything, seen and unseen. So here is a great prayer and a great proclamation for creepy situations:

 “Every knee shall bend, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” (Philippians 2:10-11)

Jews opposed to Zionism

In 1990 I was on a ship that docked at Zada on the Adriatic Coast of Yugoslavia. The place looked so inhospitable. When I came ashore further down the coast at Split, I had a similar impression. The outward indicators were that the officials were officious; the modern architecture was bland; there were few flowers around the streets. Others had told me that you get a certain feeling in a Socialist country. And I felt it. The feeling was more normal when I mixed among the local people.

Surprisingly, I had a similar feeling as I flew into Tel Aviv for the first time, which surprised me. And it was there when I visited a kibbutz which had been founded by people with a socialist mind-set. I had thought that Israel would be a bigger version of my childhood neighbours’ place.

As a child, I had lived for a time next door to the Jewish Club in Wellington, New Zealand, a few years after the Second World War. The cook’s son and I played together. I still remember the fresh platted bread loaves with sesame or poppy seeds on top. Sometimes I would see men with a haunted look at the club and my mother told me that they had suffered in the war. Even with these sad reminders of the recent past, there was a sense of hospitality and of faith in God about the club.

 Things fell into place when I came across Jewish people on the Internet who are opposed to Zionism. Their beliefs seemed much closer to the ones that I had experienced as a gentile child amongst Jews.

http://www.nkusa.org/index.cfm

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/

http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/index.htm

Jews opposed to Zionism think that secular Jews have taken matters into their own hands to get back the Promised Land.  From my reading of it, Jews opposed to Zionism believe that they were dispossessed of their land in the first century because they had been unfaithful to God and His Law. God would restore them to the Holy Land in his time and in his way.

Inspired by their earlier history, they say that the Jewish people are to be productive citizens in their places of exile. (See Jeremiah 29:7, 10) God will intervene by choosing a gentile instrument like King Cyrus (See 2 Chronicles 36:19-13) who would provide them with the help to return home. They are to believe and not to interfere in God’s work.

Such an approach does raise interesting questions. Do Zionists unwittingly carry out the socialist plans of their financial backers?  Does God have a plan to restore the Jewish People to their historic homeland so that they can live in peace and justice with the people around them?  Are the Muslims neighbours not so much opposed to people of Jewish faith as they are to secular Zionists? In other words, do they smell a rat, something to do with a socialist New World Order?

The faith of the Jews opposed to Zionism inspires me to think even further. They believe that God will restore them in his time and in his way to their land. The God they worship is also ‘the God of all the kingdoms of the world’ (Isaiah 37:16). Then, if the Christians among us are as faithful to our Gospel as they are to be to their Law, the Peace of Christ will come to the earth. (See Luke 2:14)