With Halloween behind us, the witch and warlock costumes can be put away for another year. But the real witches are still very much with us.

News comes to us that a British university is scheduled to offer a master’s degree in witchcraft, magic, and occult science in the 2024 school year. Professor Emily Selove is the director of the new program at Exeter University.

She justifies the degree’s development to:

“A recent surge in interest…. Magic and the occult inside and outside academia lies at the heart of the most urgent questions of our society.”

The university website says that the classes will take place in the Institute of Arab and Islamic studies. Selove goes on to explain that the classes will:

“Allow people to reexamine the assumption that the West is the place of rationalism and science while the rest of the world is a place of magic and superstition.”

Actually, this university class is an interesting accumulation of viewpoints, all of which have Satan’s fingerprints all over them.

There is no doubt that there is “a recent surge in interest” in witchcraft and the occult. The Pew Research Center reported in 2014 that there were about 730,000 adult pagans and wiccans in the United States.

This desperate search for meaning has led to the creation of:

“…sea witches, city witches, cottage witches, kitchen witches, and influencer witches, who share recipes for moon water or dreamy photos of altars bathed in candlelight. There are witches living all over the world, hosting moon rituals in public parks and selling hangover cures that ‘adjust the vibration of alcohol so that it doesn’t add extra density and energetic ‘weight’ to your aura,’” according to The Atlantic magazine.

However, one church in Florida has demonstrated a highly effective biblical approach to the solution of these people's problems.

Bill Losasso, senior pastor of Pathways Community Church in Largo, Florida observed that his state was “one of the three hotbeds of witchcraft, along with Texas and California.” because witches have actually come in and attempted to disrupt his worship service.

Apparently, the pastor had trained his people well because when the witches came in expecting a fight, they were, instead, welcomed by a loving concern for their spiritual welfare.

Over time, some were converted and baptized. It became sort of a contest with other witches coming for revenge and meeting the same joyous fate. Losasso says that:

“There have been no more physical attacks by the witches, but, of course, a ton of spiritual warfare. But everyone involved learned the power of the scripture: '…greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.'” (1 John 4: 4.)

Everyone witnessing to a real witch needs to understand that they are generally more afraid of us than we are of them. Bill Gordon, an associate of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board, says that:

“It has been my experience that witches are normally more afraid of us than we are them.”

Just as an individual has that God-shaped vacuum in their heart, there is also that vacuum in a culture such as ours.

We have spent many decades systematically eliminating God from our culture and now we are watching His evil replacement. Man is essentially a spiritual being who cannot long tolerate a secular-based worldview.

But to the Bible believer, spiritual darkness is only a challenge. The longer that people are lost, the deeper their despair and the more ready they are to respond to the gospel. And salting a community with gospel tracts that people love to read will ferret out those who are ready to respond. Any effort you make will be worth it because Chick tracts get read and God promises that:

“...So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11)

Description: When Saul visited the witch of Endor he discovered the terrible price God requires of those who play with witchcraft.

Description: When Saul visited the witch of Endor he discovered the terrible price God requires of those who play with witchcraft.