In this thought-provoking episode, we delve deep into the heart of the New Age movement, exploring its foundations and tracing its roots back to Eastern philosophy and ancient heresies. Adrian Rogers passionately articulates how seemingly benign ideologies are a rebranding of age-old deceptions designed to lure individuals into a false sense of enlightenment. From the whimsical imaginations taught in classrooms to the calculated strategies in today’s corporations, the pervasive influence of New Age beliefs demands our attention and discernment. Join us as we uncover the key tenets of New Ageism, such as self-development, global unity, and the dangerous promises
Adrian Rogers was a motivator, an encourager, and a leader of the faith. He was also passionate about presenting scriptural application to everyday life circumstances. And you’ll hear that in today’s message. Now, let’s join Adrian Rogers.
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Try to imagine with me 25 first graders peacefully lying in silence. on the classroom floor. Now, of course, that takes a lot of imagination if you’ve got 25 first graders lying silently. Now I want you to imagine these first graders being told this. They’re told to imagine the sun radiantly shining towards you. Gaze now into its brightness without being hurt by it. Bring the sun into your body. Feel its warmth, its power. It’s illumination. Now imagine that you are doing something perfect. You are perfect. You contain all the wisdom of the universe within yourself. Now what you have just heard is the New Age. Does that sound harmless? Or let’s imagine that you’re a salesman and that your company says that you’re going to have a sales seminar. And you go to that seminar and the speaker says, visualize with me. Visualize now that you’re the world’s greatest salesman. Visualize it, feel it, bring it into yourself. What would it feel like to make that sale? And then he instructs you how to approach people from their right side. Look into their right eye because that’s the area where you can control with dominance. And then imagine yourself being told you have the power within you to control your destiny. Again, you’ve just been touched by the new age. What is the new age? Where did it come from? Defining it is so very difficult because it is what we call eclectic. That is, it’s part of this and part of that and part of this synthesized together. It’s sort of a melting pot of Eastern philosophy. Now, may I say, as we’re going to see, it is not new. It is an age-old heresy, and I’m going to point that out, But what New Agers believe, if we could oversimplify it, is a return to the ancient wisdom of the Eastern religions. It’s sort of a cosmic sponge that absorbs all religions and all cultures and all governments together. Putting it very simply, in the New Age, God is impersonal. He is not the God of the Bible. He is called force or energy or the one all-pervading reality. I suppose one of the definitive works on the New Age is written by a proponent of the New Age called Marilyn Ferguson. She wrote a book called The Aquarian Conspiracy. And she’s a leading propagandist for the New Age. And this is what Marilyn Ferguson had to say. A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States. Broader than reform… deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy. You see, she calls it a conspiracy, but a benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history. The great, shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is a new mind, an ascendance of a startling worldview. Now, in essence, there are two basic beliefs. One is evolutionary godhood. That is, God is everything and we’re all becoming God. And the other is global unity, bringing everything together. Now, even before I get in the message, let me just give you a few just code words. See if you’ve heard any of these words or read them or see them in advertisement or seen them in movies or heard them in conversation. Words like age of Aquarius, Aquarian conspiracy, new consciousness, new Orientalism, cosmic humanism, cosmic consciousness, mystical humanism, human potential movement, holistic health movement. Are some of these buzzwords like this, awakening, enlightenment, centering, channeling, consciousness, cosmic energy, force of life, global village, holistic, human potential, self-actualization, networking, planetary vision, spaceship earth, synergistic, transcendental, transformational, transpersonal, You hear words like that? Well, obviously. Everybody who uses those words is not a new ager because they are part of the conversation of today. But when you hear those words, a flag ought to go up. They ought to alert you. Not only words, but symbols. Have you seen any of these symbols around lately? And a great use of the symbols like the rainbow, the pyramid, triangle, I in a triangle, Pegasus, that’s the winged horse, concentric circles, rays of light, the swastika, the yin-yang. Do you know what yin-yang is? That’s that circle where the two things look like polywags on the inside that are all wrapped around each other. A goat head on a pentagram, the number is 666, the unicorn. Now, if anybody wears or bears one of these emblems or symbols, that doesn’t mean that he’s a New Ager, if he’s got a rainbow hanging off of his rearview mirror or something like that, any more than anybody wearing a cross is a Christian. But what I’m trying to say is these things all ought to alert you somehow, somewhere, that all of this is in the air and we’re facing it. And believe me, the kids are facing it, many of them overtly and some subliminally. Now, Satan knows that he’s not going to sell Eastern mysticism and Hinduism, which this really is, to Americans as Hinduism. and ancient mysticism. So what he has done is just simply repackaged the product that he sold to Eve so long ago. Now I want to show you the four things that he told Eve so long ago. And then I want to show you and explain to you how what New Ageism is, is a repackaging of the mustiest lies around that go all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Now I’m reading here Genesis 3 beginning in verse 1. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden. God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, and literally that’s God, G-O-D, The reason it’s plural in the King James is that it is a plural noun, but it stands for Jehovah God. Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. Now… Here’s what Satan has said to the New Agers. He said, if you want to put in an Aquarian conspiracy, if you want to infiltrate the West as well as the East, here’s the way to do it. Number one, apply satanic deception. Now, what is the deception that Satan told Eve so long ago? And what is he saying today? First deception. The potential for self-development. Look in verse 4. Look at it right here. The serpent said, You will not die. You will not surely die. Now, Satan knows the instinctive fear of death that man has. And he knows that if he can offer a solution to death, that people, many of them, will buy into it. Now, how do the New Agers… Answer the fear of death with the doctrine of reincarnation. Remember this, that reincarnation is a foundational stone of Buddhism and New Ageism. And what is reincarnation? That when you die, you are born again, not spiritually, born again physically, born again as another creature or as another person. Now you may be a human. You may be an animal. A male this time may be a female next time. Or if your karma is not good, rather than progressing, you may go backward a little bit. You may be a… a fish, or a spider, or some kind of a bug. So the idea, though, is reincarnation. You say, well, people don’t believe in reincarnation today. It is incredible how many people believe in reincarnation. The idea is that you go round and round and you get as many chances at perfection as you need. Now that is, you will not surely die. But in all of this reincarnation, when you do die, you don’t die to meet a personal God in judgment to come. There is no personal God to whom you must give an account. Now what the New Agers believe is that plants and animals and humans are all interrelated. And they’re all in a process of becoming. And so you can transmigrate from one form to another. And so we just sort of don’t die. We just play musical chairs and we go and we come back and we just keep on going and coming. Now, they believe in a law called karma, K-A-R-M-A, which is an impersonal force. You have a certain karma about you. And with that karma, you build up credits or debits. This is the way they have the caste system in India, where there are high caste people and the untouchables, the lowest people, whose karma evidently has been bad. And so these people never really have evolved yet to the higher state. Incidentally, it’s this kind of thinking that caused the gas ovens of Hitler. But the New Agers believe that through karma, everybody gets what he deserves. So if you come back as a spider, that’s what you deserve. But if you keep on progressing, you have no fear of death because you get as many chances as you need to get it right. And finally, you come to a state called nirvana. And when you come to nirvana, that is, you have now become perfect and you are absorbed. into one eternal reality. Now this is the way the New Agers answer the problem of evil. They would say that the little children who are suffering get what they deserve. Abused children get what they deserve. What has happened is evidently they did something in a prior life that brings them into this world, into that situation, and so there is no injustice in the world. And if it’s bad for them this time, they’ll have a better chance perhaps next time. It’s incredible some of the things that they’re trying to explain, not only the problem of evil and suffering, but even such things as homosexuality, explained by reincarnation. I mean, Shirley MacLaine put it this way. She said, quote, I mean, maybe a soul makes a rocky transition from a female to a male body. For instance, and there is leftover emotional residue and attraction from a previous reincarnation. So in the last life, you may have been a woman. And in this life, you’re a man. And so therefore, you still have those female tendencies. And that’s what makes you a homosexual. And so what would you do if you were the devil and you wanted to promote New Ageism? Well, what you would do is to activate satanic deception. Number one, what you would do, you would say you need to hand out to people the potential for self-development. That is, you just keep on going through life until you get it right. But not only self-development, also self-discernment. Look, if you will, in verses 5 and 6 of chapter 3. For God doth know, now Satan is speaking, God doth know that in the day that you eat, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God’s. Self-discernment. You will be able to discern things because through meditation and discovering the light that’s in you, you will come to a transformation of cosmic consciousness. You see, New Agers don’t believe in a universal theology that’s right. They say doctrine is not important at all. What is important is religious experience. The idea is for you to feel, not to think. And what Satan really wants you to do is through meditation and what he calls the opening of your eyes, he wants you to have an experience where you encounter him. But he wants you, when you encounter Satan, to believe that you’re in touch with the living God. And so many people have a mystical experience and they say, I touched God. But they didn’t touch God. They came in contact with demonic forces, demon spirits that imitate God. And one of the ways that this happens is transcendental meditation. known as TM, taught in many universities in our land. It is a doorway into this opening, as it were, of the eyes or self-discernment. Now, there are others who say TM takes too long, so they take a shortcut called drugs. Psychedelic drugs. Remember Timothy Leary? Timothy Leary was a New Ager and he called drugs the sacrament of the New Age. That is, as we take the bread and the grape juice, to him LSD was a holy sacrament. That is to expand the consciousness. That is to open the eyes. And so there is self-development. You just keep on going through life. Self-discernment. You wait until your eyes are open. And what does this result in? Self-deification. Look again in verse 5. And ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Now, a New Ager would say of himself, I am God. But so is nature. You see, the New Agers are pantheists. Pan meaning everything and theist meaning God. Now what they believe is everything is God and God is everything. Pantheism, not polytheism, the belief in many gods, but pantheism. That there is one God, and that one God is everything, and everything is that one God. That thought is the foundation of ancient Hinduism and New Ageism that we face today. Now, Dr. Tozer, one of the great devotional writers… of all history in my estimation, who’s now in heaven, said, no religion can ever rise higher than its concept of God. Now, what is the concept of God that the New Agers have? That is this, that the universe is spiritual. But when they mean spiritual, they mean that rather than being a material universe, actually the universe is made up of cosmic energy. And God is an impersonal force. Now, in India, for example, where you have Hinduism, let me show you the difference that that makes. We say God is love. We say here in this church, God is wisdom. But what would the Hindu say? He wouldn’t say God is love. He would say love is God. He wouldn’t say God is wisdom. He would say wisdom is God. That is, everything is God. And therefore, God is impersonalized. And you, man, are part of the universe. And therefore, you are part of God. And God is a part of you. Now, what does that mean? It means that man, therefore, becomes his own savior. Man never needs a Savior in the New Age. You don’t hear the New Agers talking about a Savior. You read all the New Age literature, and you will never find one time where you will ever read that you need help from God to become what you ought to be. In all New Age literature, you will be told that you already have everything within you. You have the potential within yourself. You are God, and you can save yourself. Now, if you believe in pantheism, as New Agers do, you have no basis for morality whatsoever. A pantheist does not believe that there are distinctions between good and evil. The distinctions between good and evil are only illusions. Why? Because God is everything. And if God is everything, then evil is a part of God. Just as good is a part of God. And what seems to be evil is not truly evil. It’s all just a part of everything and everything is God. Alan Watts, who is credited with making Zen Buddhism palatable to Americans, explained it this way. He said this. He said, “…life is like a play where you see good and bad men in conflict on the stage.” But behind the curtain, they are best of friends. Backstage, God and Satan go hand in hand. Yen Min, one of the great Eastern teachers, said, and I quote, “‘If you wish the plain truth, be not concerned about right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind.'” Now, let me just tell you how sick the mind can get. Remember Charles Manson, the murderer in California, who is now in prison? He has embraced pantheism. And this is what he said. I mean, here’s this man who doesn’t believe he’s done evil. He says, and I quote, if God is all, then what is evil? You hear his question? If God is everything, then how can there be evil? God is everything and everything is God. Now, to the Eastern mind that is infiltrating America, they teach that God is male and female, plus and minus, darkness and light. He is perfection and what is sometimes called sin. In this universe, everything is moral for everything is of God. Now, if there’s no sin… Then you see, man’s problem is not sin, but ignorance. And all he needs to do is to be enlightened. And that, my friend, is the goal of transcendental meditation. Where you sit around and meditate and make your mind blank until you reach somehow this state of awareness. The figure of that is a fat Buddha sitting under a tree, uncaring, unfeeling, unthinking, until he’s finally reached the spiritual state. But actually, there is no morality, whatever. Everything is God. And if everything is God, then man is God too. Now you say, well, how wonderful that I can be God. You see, that’s exactly what Satan told Eve. You be like God. But my dear friend, wait just a moment. Pantheism is not a compliment to you. To call you God because if you’re God, so are the worms God. And so are the grasshoppers God. And every other bug is God because everything is God. Well, you say, what difference does that make? Well, man therefore loses his uniqueness. And man is no different now from the animals. Have you ever wondered where all these animal rights people have come from suddenly? Tell you that you can’t eat meat and you can’t wear fur or you can’t do this or that and be kind to a cow? Where’d all that come from recently? I’ll tell you why. Because they believe that those creatures are God just like you are God. And you know what that results in? A devaluing of human life. You see, in pantheism, animals are not really elevated to the status of men. Men are lowered to the status of animals. You’re God. So is everything God. So you see what you have is self-development. Self-discernment, self-deification, and then what’s the next lie that Satan told Eve? It’s self-determination. Look, if you will, in verse 5, he says, Then you will be as gods, knowing good and evil. Do you see that? You will be able to determine for yourself what is good for you. You, as God, will know good and evil. Have you ever heard anybody say, Well, that may be right for you, but it’s not right for me? and what is right for you is not necessarily good for everybody. We call that today relativism. And relativism and New Ageism go hand in hand. You see, if all is God and God is all, then evil and good are God too. And so you cannot make a distinction empirically between right and wrong. Right and wrong are only illusions. That is, there is no fixed standard of right and wrong. Americans are so pragmatic. No longer do we ask, is it true? We just ask, does it work? And of course, in New Ageism, there is no sin because nothing is wrong. If I were the devil and wanted to apply New Ageism, first of all, I would begin with satanic deception. Let me give you a little exercise today. How much is two plus two? Four. All right. Is there another answer to that? Not a right one. All right, now, how many wrong answers are there? There are an infinite number of wrong answers. Only one right answer. Do you see in a way an advantage the devil has? You see, truth is not relative. There is only one right answer. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by me. But for Satan, he can use as many lies as there are Americans. If you don’t like this lie, he’ll give you another lie. So number one, apply satanic deception. Number two, if you’re a New Ager… Appeal to selfish desire. Satanic deception. I just gave you that. Secondly, selfish desire. Notice in verse 6. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit thereof and did eat. Now, how are you going to sell Eastern religion to Americans? I say you have to repackage it. You can’t sell it as Hinduism. But what you have to do is to find out what man’s hidden desires and selfish desires are. If you want to trap a bear, you use meat. If you want to catch a fish, you use a worm. If you want to snare a bird, you use seed. If you want to catch the modern American, hold up their money. Pleasure, ego, power, success. And that is all that you’ll find in the New Ageism. They’re all telling you how you can achieve, how you can have it, and what they do. They just simply make the lies of Eden appear with friendly faces. You see, Americans are so pragmatic. Now, it’s amazing, dear friend, how the New Agers are appealing to man’s desire to achieve. In many businesses, New Age practitioners are brought in. They would not think of bringing a preacher, a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ to increase sales and productivity. But according to Erwin Lutzer, Pacific Bell, Procter & Gamble, TRW, Ford, Polaroid are only a few of dozens of companies now that have either hired gurus or are teaching seminars based on New Age thought. Fortune magazine. The gurus have adapted their standard programs to suit business clients and are finding a fast-growing market among corporations still searching for the answer to productivity problems. And these power of the mind teachers include Forum, formerly EST for Erhard seminar training, Scientology, and a rash of other human potential groups. Satanic deception wrapped up in selfish desire. When Eve saw the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes and desired to make one wise, she went for it. Here’s the third thing you would do. You would not only apply satanic deception, you would not only appeal to selfish desire, but you would appropriate a subtle disguise. Now look, if you will, in Genesis chapter 3, verse 1. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, which the Lord God had made. Subtlety is his trademark. Now when you think of the word serpent there, don’t think of someone or something hideous and repulsive like a snake today. The Hebrew word there means shining one. Lucifer was an angel of light. Whatever creature, however he came in the Garden of Eden, he was not the hideous reptile that we think of today. And the devil today still appears as an angel of light. He wears a subtle disguise. For example, yoga today would be called a guide to health. Transcendental meditation would be told, well, you don’t have to believe in it to use it in order to reduce your blood pressure or to give you better circulation or to help you to sleep better. Now, generally, TM and these other things are disguised as a pseudoscience today. The Maharishi, the spokesman for transcendental meditation, talked about how TM should be marketed in America. I want you to listen to what he said. He said, whenever religion dominates the mass consciousness, transcendental deep meditation should be taught in terms of religion. Today, when politics is guiding the destiny of man, the teaching would be primarily based on the field of politics and secondarily on the plane of economics. It seems for the present that this transcendental deep meditation should be made available to people through the agencies of the government. Now, you hear what he’s saying? He says, don’t package it as religion unless that’s the best thing. New Thought, which is a New Age magazine, says this, New Ageism should be taught from kindergarten upward. And then with these words, but unless we name it something else, like bioenergetic physics, it’s going to remain a religious idea. and subsequently stay out of our schools. This is not religion, it is science. So what they do, they just repackage it, change the name, give it something like bio-energetic physics, and put it in school or in politics or wherever. Sell it as a science. Imagine the uproar if someone would have tempted to give his testimony for Jesus as Shirley MacLaine gave her testimony. on nationwide television. The hue and cry would go up across the land. But now you see there’s this subtle disguise. Well, last of all. If you wanted to sell New Ageism to Americans, you would achieve a strategic dissemination. You would have your evangelists. Did you know the devil had his evangelists? Continue to read here in Genesis chapter 3, verse 6. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat. Now watch it. And gave also unto her husband with her. And he did eat. Eve was not content until she had under satanic inspiration now become an evangelist for the devil. And I’ve found some advertisements and some things that have come into my home. Secrets that can banish pain. May we send you two very important books, absolutely free. One to use for 21 days with no cost or obligation. The other to use and keep forever and enjoy in superior health. Well, that doesn’t sound bad. Everybody wants to be healthy. I’ll leaf through it. It’s replete with new age overtones. Here’s one. A full-page ad. Get the owner’s manual for your mind. Friend already have it. But here it is. Read, listen. Number one New York Times bestseller. In many thousands of letters, readers praise Dianetics technology, an organized science of the mind built on natural laws, proven effective in over 35 years of testing, a new science that reveals the single source of mental problems, stress, worries, nightmares, self-doubt, and lack of confidence, and so forth. Now, you can buy that in any bookstore here. New York Times, number one bestseller. I didn’t go out looking for this stuff. It came to me. Here’s one. Massage your mind. Plug into the healing calm with this deep relaxation cassette. Relax. Sleep. Relieve stress. Hailed as the next frontier of our medical future. Mental medicine. How to use your mind to heal your body. Here’s an article. Eating with a Conscience. Global issues, personal health, food for thought. Here’s a picture of a cow and a poem. How would you feel if a cow ate you? Caught you and bopped you and chopped you in two. Fried you or boiled you or put you in a stew. So put down your steak when you’re starting to chew. How would you feel if a cow ate you? And then it goes on to tell how there’s going to be a great American meat out. where Americans are not going to eat meat. And there’s a long article here, and it is filled with New Ageism and so forth. Now, folks, the Bible is God’s word. There is but one God. He is the true God who made us all. When we die, we’re going to face Him in the judgment. And there’s only one way to escape, and that’s to come to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Do you know Jesus Christ? If you were to die tonight, are you certain you’d go to heaven? My dear friend, you go to heaven or hell, you’ll not be reincarnated. There is a God and he is holy. His son is Jesus. Believe on him and you will be saved.
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If you would like to learn more about how you can know Jesus or deepen your relationship with Him, simply click the Discover Jesus link on our website, lwf.org. For a copy of this message or additional resources, visit our online store at lwf.org or call 1-800-274-5683. Thank you.
