Recently, I read this: we should draw on the teachings of Red Indians – they had spirit contact. As modern man turns his back on God, it seems that he is made vulnerable to all the most foolish and primitive of ideas. He sees himself as so sophisticated and yet he replaces the true and living God with dead idols of his own invention, which lack all the wonderful attributes of Almighty God, and substitutes in his place gods without knowledge, without wisdom, without power, without goodness. It is a fitting punishment that the Lord hands the blind over to such worthless things. It gives the lie to their claim to be liberated from superstition, when they deliberately enslave themselves to the worst of pagan ideas.
Reflecting on these words, it may occur to us that this is exactly what happens so often in Charismatic circles. ‘Learn not the ways of the heathen.’ What are the ways of the heathen? The ways of the heathen, and Israelites who turn to those ways, are to close the Scriptures. They are done with the Scriptures. They won't be instructed from the Scriptures, or challenge from them, or guided by them. No longer do they say, ‘The Scriptures are a lamp unto our feet. They are vital.’ They say, ‘No, we are attracted to signs and wonders.’ They might as well say, ‘We are attracted to reading the heavenly bodies, and deriving signs from the skies.’ ‘Learn not the way of the heathen’ – looking for signs. ‘Be not dismayed at the signs of heaven’, portents and indications of some misfortune. The Israelites were ensnared by this, and in essence, a lot of Charismatic thinking is exactly the same. The Scripture is set to one side as the sole source of authoritative light and understanding on all matters of life and faith. Instead we are supposed to look for special communications like people who claim to be virtually clairvoyant. They think they know what God has told them: mysterious communications, things obtained sometimes in trances; things obtained by all sorts of strange routes, and this is what commands attention, and interests, and fascinates. Gradually the mind is being conditioned to all this. But actually, it is a branch of heathenism, welded onto a form of Christianity. ‘Thus says the Lord,’ – to the dismay of the Lord, one may say – ‘Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed [influence in any way] at the signs of heaven as the heathen are. For the customs of the people are vain.’
Verse 5 is difficult to translate. The modern versions have ‘scarecrows in a cucumber field’ and that is right. The Hebrew was not known in KJV times. The scarecrow is effective only to the extent that a bird is fooled by it. Birds are afraid of them for a time, but they have no need to be, and neither should men be afraid of these idols. They believe in them and so harm is done to their thinking, but in reality the idols can do nothing to affect the lives of men. Nor can the demons which are behind them and which are being worshipped through the idol.