The Oldest Offer
“Spiritual Deception of the New Age”
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND · Renaissance Ministries
Introduction
Rob Pue, publisher of Wisconsin Christian News, recently wrote a column warning that New Age spirituality is a deception with a single root, however many names it wears. He writes from the front line of pastoral work: his ministry receives prayer requests from mothers worried about occult influence on their grandchildren, from a young woman pulled between Wicca and the Bible, from a husband whose wife grows more hostile to Christ the more seriously he follows Him. Pue reports that such requests are rising sharply.
He is right about the core of the matter, and I offer this essay in support of his warning. But a warning persuades best when every part of it can bear weight, so I want to do three things here: lay out the reasons behind the warning more fully, correct two points where the column says more than the text of Scripture says, and add one observation about the way the New Age borrows the language of science.
The war behind the visible
Scripture does not treat the unseen world as a figure of speech. Paul writes that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual powers of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). Peter tells us to stay sober and watchful, because the adversary prowls like a lion seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). If these statements are true, then much of what we see in the culture is the visible edge of a contest we cannot see directly, and the right response is neither panic nor dismissal but discernment.
Pue’s prayer letters illustrate the point better than an argument could. None of the people who wrote to him describe a debate about ideas. They describe anguish, hostility, a sense of being pulled, homes divided. Those are the marks of a battle over persons, not merely over propositions.
The wheel and its spokes
The most attractive teaching of the New Age is that all paths lead to God, like the spokes of a wheel converging on one hub. Each culture has its tradition, each person finds the path that “works” for him, and all sincere, loving seekers arrive at the same center. This sounds humble. It is not, and we should show why by reason before we show it by Scripture.
First, the paths do not say the same thing. One teaches that a man lives many lives through reincarnation; another teaches that “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). One teaches that God is an impersonal force or a universal consciousness of which we are each a part; another teaches that God is a Person who made us, distinct from us, and who speaks. One teaches that our problem is ignorance, cured by enlightenment; another teaches that our problem is sin, cured only by forgiveness. These are not different descriptions of one road. They contradict each other about what is real, and contradictory claims cannot all be true.
Second, the wheel picture contains a hidden claim. To know that every spoke reaches the hub, a man would have to stand above the whole wheel and see it in its entirety. The pluralist tells the Christian that no one can claim to know the one way to God, and then claims to know that all ways lead there. That is an exclusive claim, and a far larger one than the Christian makes, because it rests on no revelation at all.
Third, exclusivity is not arrogance when it is true. A physician who says that only one antidote will counteract a particular poison is not being narrow-minded; he is being accurate and kind. When Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), He was either telling the truth, or He was not. If He was, then the most loving thing anyone can do is say so plainly.
Pue rightly notes the irony here. Many in the New Age prize ancient wisdom, and the older and more hidden a text is, the more it is trusted. Yet the Bible is the best-attested document of the ancient world. The New Testament alone survives in more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, some within a few generations of the originals, far more and far earlier than any other work of antiquity. It is not hidden. It has simply been preserved, and the fact that anyone may read it is no argument against its truth.
The oldest offer
The New Age is not new. It first made its central offer in the Garden.
The serpent began with doubt: “Did God actually say…?” (Genesis 3:1). He then denied the consequence: “You will not surely die.” And he closed with the promise: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4–5). Every element is still in use. Doubt about whether God has really spoken. Denial that rebellion carries any cost. And the promise of godhood, which in New Age teaching takes the form of the higher self, the divine spark within, or the soul that evolves through many lives until it becomes divine. Knowing good and evil, in the serpent’s sense, means deciding for oneself what is good and what is evil. That is precisely what a path chosen because it “works for me” amounts to.
Here I want to correct one point in the column. Pue writes that Satan approached Eve when her husband was not around. Genesis 3:6 says otherwise: she “gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” Adam was standing there. The failure in Eden wasn’t that the man was absent; it was that he was present but silent. That is a sharper warning to men than the one Pue gave, and it fits his own point that a husband is meant to protect his home. The danger is not only that a man is away. It is that he is there and says nothing.
The column also argues that Satan especially hates women and targets them, citing the enmity of Genesis 3:15 and the false teachers of 2 Timothy 3:6–7 who “creep into households and capture weak women… always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” There is something real in this. Genesis 3:15 sets enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between his offspring and hers, and that offspring is Christ, “born of woman” (Galatians 4:4). The adversary has every reason to hate the line through which he was defeated. Paul also describes false teachers who work through the home and prey on those weighed down by guilt.
But Scripture does not say that women are the devil’s chief target, and we should not say more than it says. Paul describes a condition, not a sex: the person who is burdened, restless, always studying and never arriving. That condition is common enough among men, and nowhere more common than among educated men who collect ideas the way others collect coins, admiring each one and committing to none. The same chapter goes on to describe men who oppose the truth as “corrupted in mind” (2 Timothy 3:8). The warning applies to anyone unguarded, and the guard Scripture prescribes is the same for everyone: knowledge of the truth, held and obeyed.
Counterfeit love
Pue identifies the second great lie as “all you need is love”: if a path is loving, it is good and will lead to God. He traces its lineage well. The Wiccan Rede says, “An it harm none, do what ye will.” Aleister Crowley stands behind it; in 1904, in Cairo, he claimed to receive by dictation from a spirit the text he called The Book of the Law, whose central command is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The spirit in that text describes itself as the serpent that gives knowledge. Pue is right to notice the echo of Eden.
The Rede softens Crowley by adding a condition: harm no one. But the two share the same center. In both, the self is the measure. My will defines what I may do, and my judgment defines what counts as harm.
Scripture defines love differently. Love is not a feeling that sanctifies whatever it accompanies. It is willing and doing the real good of another, as the One who made him defines that good. “Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). Jesus tied love to obedience: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Love without truth is sentiment, and sentiment can walk a man pleasantly to ruin. Paul says truth without love is a noisy gong (1 Corinthians 13:1). We need both, and we don’t get to choose one.
This is why the slogan “love is love” fails as an argument, including in Pue’s debate over marriage. The question is never whether a desire is sincere or intense. The question is whether it serves the person’s good, as his Designer intended. A love that cannot say no to anything is not love; it is indifference with a warm face.
The borrowed vocabulary of science
One feature of the modern New Age deserves more attention than it usually gets: it dresses itself in the language of physics. We hear of energy fields, vibrations, quantum consciousness, the universe as one mind, and thoughts that create reality. The words sound scientific, and that is their purpose. They lend an air of discovery to very old claims.
Physics does not teach that the self is God, or that a man can will reality into being by thinking hard enough. Where questions of consciousness do arise at the foundations of physics, they point in the opposite direction: toward an order so precise and so intelligible that it implies a Mind behind it, a Mind that is not ours and that we did not make. “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The universe is intelligible because an intelligence spoke it. The New Age takes that truth and turns it inside out, making the creature’s mind the source and God the echo. A Christian need not fear science. He should simply refuse to let it be borrowed for a purpose it does not serve.
An angel of light
Paul warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). Deception that looked evil would deceive no one. What deceives is what looks good: peace, openness, love, wisdom, self-discovery. That is why John does not tell us to judge spirits by how they feel but to test them by what they confess: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not is not (1 John 4:1–3). The test is not warmth. It is Christ.
For those, like the husband who wrote to Pue, who live with someone they love on another path, Scripture gives a pattern rather than a formula. Peter tells believing wives that an unbelieving husband may be won “without a word” by his wife’s conduct (1 Peter 3:1–2), and the principle holds in the other direction as well. Argument rarely wins a heart hardened against faith. A life that plainly bears the fruit of that faith often does. Pray steadily. Keep reading your Bible openly, without either hiding it or brandishing it. Be ready to give a reason for the hope in you, “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). And remember that God opens eyes.
Conclusion
Pue closes with a question: what if what you believe about God turned out to be wrong, when would you want to find out?
The New Age promises a God who asks nothing, a path chosen by preference, and a destination no one can miss. Christianity offers something harder and better: a God who is real whether we prefer Him or not, a truth that does not bend to our wishes, and a love that went to the cross rather than leave us where we were. The first offer is very old. It was made in a garden, and it has never kept its promise. The second was made on a hill outside Jerusalem, and it has never broken one.
Source: Rob Pue, “Spiritual Deception of the New Age,” NewsWithViews, October 19, 2026. Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.