Revelation 18 - 23 For thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.
If you have been Jabbed then you will probably say that sorceries means witchcraft , but if you are unjabbed then you will probably say that it means pharmakeia meaning pharmaceuticals. (the jab)
So how do we do this , how do we find the truth on this subject when people only want to speak from their own perspective.
Pretty simple. Pharmakeia is not inherently bad, physicians prescribe medicines and that's a good thing, and this is spoken of positively both in the Bible as well as the historic understanding of the Church. For example St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was chosen to succeed Peter and Paul's pastoral ministry in Antioch after the death of the first successor, Evodius, and who is said to have learned directly from the Apostle John, calls the Lord's Supper the "medicine of immortality", φαρμακον αθανασιας (
pharmakon athanasias).
In the Deuterocanonical book of Sirach--which is accepted by most Christians as Scripture, though it is absent from most Protestant Bibles today--there is a clear statement about the importance of the physician, and that the wise person does not hesitate to heed the good physician's advice and take medicine--because God provided medicines from the earth.
The anti-medical movements that show up now and again among some fringe groups of Christians have never been acceptable from a biblical and historically Christian perspective.
Here is what pharmakeia means in the negative sense: poison-making, or potion-making. That is, those who mix potions or poisons for pagan purposes--such as pagan rituals. An example of pharmakeia would be drinking a concoction to be more in tune with the gods, or to experience a trip or vision that is then perceived as an encounter with the divine.
The nations are deceived by "sorceries" because most of the world followed after false gods, idols, worshiped spirits, or regarded aspects of nature to be gods, and they had rituals, and used drugs, and engaged in various practices of divination like astrology, reading bones, or looking at animal entrails. All of these things are part of the large mileiua of spiritual delusion that holds men in bondage; because none of these things are of any spiritual benefit to anyone. There are no spirits, or gods, or ancestors, or aspects of nature that control our lives, or that we need to appease through ritualized cults of sacrifice, or intoxicating ceremonies.
The antidote to spiritual delusion is the truth of the Gospel. The Gospel sweeps away all of our various idolatry, and brings in the nations together under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, as the Church, of which there is both Jew and Gentile without distinction.
The bondage of sin and death is also the bondage of idolatry, all of our false views of God, all of our false ways of trying to worship God, all of our false gods.
Making this about the COVID vaccine isn't about whether or not one has been vaxxed or not. Insisting that the COVID vaccine is somehow some kind of spiritual bad thing is hocus pocus.
Want to find the real deluded people falling for "sorcery", look at the nut cases trying to convince people to take horse dewormer, or those who tried to sell people bleach as a medical cure.
God is honored in truth, not in lies. And the anti-vax movement has nothing on its side but lies.
-CryptoLutheran
