Jerusalem Blade
Puritan Board Professor
This thread disappeared briefly today, and later one of the mods told me it was because the OP was too large and it messed up the system, and he suggested I put it in my PB blog and give a link to that article here in a briefer OP – and so I will. Those who read it and want to discuss it can return here to the regular forum.
This is both a newly-written piece on marijuana specifically and the psychedelic drugs generally, although I have used a lot of my previous material. I have been getting an article ready to publish elsewhere, and when I saw a “young Turk” here pressing the point in a thread that if grass were legal it appeared to be alright for Christians to get high from it (that thread linked to in the blog article), and some folks spoke against the idea but it was mostly anecdotal or moral and common sense judgments and not a refutation from Scripture. We all know that if a practice is to be observed among us it cannot be a rule of man but the command of God. The article seeks to establish just that – that Scripture forbids the use of marijuana under the category of sorcery / pharmakeia – a class of drugs that induce a state of consciousness open to and influenced by demonic activity, as well as being used for that specific purpose by other cultures. It discusses the phenomena of those users who partake (or partook – in their earlier years) of this substance merely recreationally and answers their objections that due to their harmless intent it was not to be categorized as sorcerous activity.
The article also discusses the likelihood of it being legalized in the near future due to increasing cultural pressures, although it is partly legal now in those areas where it is allowed to be used “medicinally”. It is also legal in some other countries. The so-called medicinal use of it is examined.
I continue to write about this because it will be a powerful destructive force were it allowed in the church contrary to God’s word. I bring in lexical and exegetical data, as well as ponder certain portions of Revelation that appear to speak to this very development – the increasing use of these drugs in the very end of the last days.
To respond to one person who asked a question in the earlier version of this thread, No, standard medicines are a different class entirely than the pharmakeia-class. Nor are the narcotics / opiates in this class. These do not have the properties (characteristics) of the drugs used in sorcery.
Also, a distinction is repeatedly made between Biblically-defined pharmakeia / sorcery and the common superstitious varieties, which have no part in the Biblical definition of it.
Here is the blog article: Marijuana allowed in the church?
This is both a newly-written piece on marijuana specifically and the psychedelic drugs generally, although I have used a lot of my previous material. I have been getting an article ready to publish elsewhere, and when I saw a “young Turk” here pressing the point in a thread that if grass were legal it appeared to be alright for Christians to get high from it (that thread linked to in the blog article), and some folks spoke against the idea but it was mostly anecdotal or moral and common sense judgments and not a refutation from Scripture. We all know that if a practice is to be observed among us it cannot be a rule of man but the command of God. The article seeks to establish just that – that Scripture forbids the use of marijuana under the category of sorcery / pharmakeia – a class of drugs that induce a state of consciousness open to and influenced by demonic activity, as well as being used for that specific purpose by other cultures. It discusses the phenomena of those users who partake (or partook – in their earlier years) of this substance merely recreationally and answers their objections that due to their harmless intent it was not to be categorized as sorcerous activity.
The article also discusses the likelihood of it being legalized in the near future due to increasing cultural pressures, although it is partly legal now in those areas where it is allowed to be used “medicinally”. It is also legal in some other countries. The so-called medicinal use of it is examined.
I continue to write about this because it will be a powerful destructive force were it allowed in the church contrary to God’s word. I bring in lexical and exegetical data, as well as ponder certain portions of Revelation that appear to speak to this very development – the increasing use of these drugs in the very end of the last days.
To respond to one person who asked a question in the earlier version of this thread, No, standard medicines are a different class entirely than the pharmakeia-class. Nor are the narcotics / opiates in this class. These do not have the properties (characteristics) of the drugs used in sorcery.
Also, a distinction is repeatedly made between Biblically-defined pharmakeia / sorcery and the common superstitious varieties, which have no part in the Biblical definition of it.
Here is the blog article: Marijuana allowed in the church?