Welcome back to Witchcraft and Wizardry Week on APJ.

We asked, is there good magic and edifying sorcery?

A debate we hear all the time over Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and other fantasy literature.

Pastor John dove in to that big debate on Monday with a twist of his own, as you'd imagine, in APJ 2121.

And another question about witchcraft and wizardry comes in today from Archie,

a listener who is putting together three texts coming up in our Bible reading this month.

Pastor John, hello, he writes,

In our Bible readings coming up in the Old Testament,

we read that sorcerers and those who practice witchcraft are to be killed.

That's very clear to me, according to Exodus 2218 and Leviticus 2027.

But when Jewish Bible scholar, the Apostle Paul, enters Ephesus, a city full of magic, He calls for no one to be executed, simply for all

the books to be piled up in the city center and to be burned. That I see in Acts 1919. Certainly,

Paul would have known full well the contrast from what he saw in scripture from what he was calling

for in Ephesus,

why is the Old Testament more violent here and why is the same sin handled so differently in the

New Testament? Well, this is huge. It has to do with the relationships between God's way of working

in Israel in the Old Testament and his way of working today.

So let me back up and start with Abraham.

With the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12, God brought into being a people for his own name.

That people was defined both by physical lineage as Jewish and by covenant in which God pledged himself to work for their good on their

behalf as they trusted him and obeyed his laws. Now from the beginning, this people was both a

political and a religious reality. They were a nation state and they were in a privileged position toward God. The laws of the

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