Living according to the letter of the law denies the real fact that the Christian has died in Christ–has died to sin and has died to the law. Paul is not blowing smoke when he says that we have been crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20; Colossians 2:20), and our life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3), having been made alive with Christ. (Ephesians 2:5) And if we are raised with Christ, we are now to seek the things that are above (Colossians 3:1), not being pre-occupied with religious observances (Colossians 2:20) which can not save or perfect us, but that merely teach about spiritual truths. We are buried and raised with Christ in baptism (Colossians 2:12), and through baptism into Christ’s death (Romans 6:4) we are dead to the law (Romans 7:4) and have been unshackled from the law. (Romans 7:6)
The difference between God’s people the Israelites and God’s people the Christians is in their baptism. The Israelites were baptized unto Moses as their lawgiver in the cloud and in the sea (1 Corinthians 10:2) at the Red Sea crossing. And their inheritance in the land was bound up in their obedience to the law of Moses. (Deuteronomy 6:17-18) We are baptized into Christ as our lawgiver, and the Adamic man is destroyed so the the Mosaic law has no more jurisdiction over us, only the spiritual law of God. The law has dominion over a man as long as he lives, (Romans 7:1) and no longer. So anything that puts a Christian under the law of Moses is anti-Christ and anathema.
The Oprah Show has been exposing many people who are interested in God and spirituality to a false gospel of “you can have your desires” through her promotion and partnership with New Age gurus and writers.
Marianne Williamson is teaching “A Course in Miracles” on Oprah’s XM channel, which teaches New Age ideas with Christian terminology. The textbook for the course even purports to have been dictated by Jesus himself. But the textbook used is not the Holy Bible.
Many of Oprah’s guests are from the same school of New Thought as Marianne Williamson. Rhonda Byrne, the writer of The Secret: The Law of Attraction, is a frequent guest of Oprah. She advises people in her book how to use thought to get the things you desire to come to you.
“Yes, You can!” — Barack Obama
There is a theology common to Oprah’s favorite spiritual authors. They believe in the false doctrine of monism–that God is everything, and everything is God, but that this world is an illusion caused by our unawareness of that fact. So, they believe that we are all part of God in essence; and as God, we can create our own reality by what we believe. But if this world is not real and if we are God, then there is no good and evil, and sin is not a problem, and there is no need for a Savior, just an enlightened master to teach us more “truth”.
But, these assertions are false. God is real, and His creation is real as well. God is at once separate and intimately involved in creation. There is good, and there is evil. Sin separates us from God. We can not approach God with our sin. We need a Savior–Jesus Christ, son of God, come in the flesh. He lived a sinless life, gave that life as a ransom to reconcile us back to God.
The danger in A Course in Miracles and other such teachings is that it uses the latent power of the soul, psychic energy, to effect change. And there is a supernatural power there in the soul. But using it is illegitimate without the direction of the Holy Spirit. Christians need to depend on the power of God, not the power of our soul.
I believe that these teachings will be used in the near future by deceived people to focus peoples’ minds in concert toward the accomplishing of political ends, possibly bringing the anti-Christ to power.