The High Treason of Witchcraft Text: Exodus 22:18
Introduction: The Offense of a Hard Text
We live in a soft age, an age that likes its Christianity domesticated. We want a Jesus who is a celestial guidance counselor, a God who is a cosmic teddy bear, and a Bible that is a collection of inspirational quotes suitable for framing on the kitchen wall. And when we come to a text like our passage this morning, the modern mind recoils. It is an offense. It is jarring. To our therapeutic sensibilities, it sounds harsh, intolerant, and frankly, primitive.
“You shall not allow a sorceress to live.” There it is, stark and unyielding. The modern evangelical impulse is to do one of three things with a verse like this. The first is to ignore it, to skip over it and pretend it isn’t there, hoping no one asks. The second is to apologize for it, to treat it as a regrettable, Bronze Age relic that we have thankfully evolved beyond. The third is to allegorize it into meaninglessness, suggesting it’s really about not letting “toxic influences” live in your heart, or some such pablum.
But we are not called to ignore, apologize for, or neuter the Word of God. We are called to understand it, and to do that, we must first recognize that our offense at this verse is not a sign of our moral superiority to the ancients, but rather a sign of our profound spiritual dullness. We are not offended because we are more enlightened; we are offended because we have lost the biblical category for the sheer, cosmic gravity of evil. We no longer believe in high treason against the King of Heaven. We think of witchcraft as something involving pointy hats and Halloween costumes, not as a damnable trafficking with demonic powers in rebellion against the Most High God.
This verse, situated in the heart of God’s case law for His covenant people, is a load-bearing wall for a biblical worldview. It teaches us about the nature of God’s holiness, the nature of true justice, the responsibilities of the civil magistrate, and the reality of the spiritual war we are in. To dismiss this verse is to dismiss the very foundations of a godly social order. It is to declare that we know better than God what constitutes a threat to a nation. And that, my friends, is the very sin that this verse condemns: the arrogant pride of wanting to be our own gods, defining good and evil for ourselves.
The Text
“You shall not allow a sorceress to live.”
(Exodus 22:18 LSB)
The Crime Defined: What is a Sorceress?
Before we can understand the penalty, we must understand the crime. What exactly is a “sorceress”? The Hebrew word is mekhashephah. Our modern, secularized imagination immediately conjures up images from fairy tales or, more recently, from popular books about wizarding schools. But the Bible is not a fantasy novel. This word refers to something real, dark, and profoundly rebellious.
A sorceress, in the biblical sense, is one who attempts to manipulate reality, to gain hidden knowledge, or to exercise power over others through supernatural means that are outside of God’s ordained channels. It is an attempt to bypass God. It is a rejection of prayer, providence, and dependence on the Creator, in favor of incantations, potions, spells, and communion with spiritual forces that are in rebellion against Him. It is the practical application of the serpent’s lie in the garden: “you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). It is the creature attempting to seize the prerogatives of the Creator.
Scripture is uniformly hostile to this practice in all its forms. Deuteronomy 18 gives us a catalog of these dark arts: “There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead” (Deut. 18:10-11). Notice the company that sorcery keeps: child sacrifice, divination, necromancy. This is not about quirky, eccentric old ladies. This is about idolatry of the deepest and most malignant kind.
The sorceress sets herself up as a rival authority to God. She offers an alternative source of power, an alternative source of knowledge, and an alternative salvation. King Saul, in his desperation, turned to the witch of Endor, and that act sealed his doom precisely because it was a formal rejection of God’s authority (1 Sam. 28). In the New Testament, we see Paul confronting Elymas the sorcerer, calling him a “son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy” (Acts 13:10). The Bible does not treat this as a harmless superstition. It treats it as spiritual insurgency, as collusion with the enemy.
So, the crime is not an odd religious opinion. It is high treason against the covenant Lord, who is the King of the nation. It is an attempt to establish a rival kingdom, a fifth column, that operates on demonic power and satanic principles right in the midst of God’s people.
The Penalty Assigned: What Does “Not Allow to Live” Mean?
Now we come to the part that truly scandalizes the modern reader: the penalty. “You shall not allow a sorceress to live.” This is not a suggestion for church discipline. This is a command to the civil magistrate. It is the death penalty.
Why such a severe penalty? Because the penalty must fit the crime, and as we’ve just established, this is a crime of ultimate gravity. In a theocracy, which ancient Israel was, a nation explicitly ruled by God, idolatry is not just a personal sin; it is a political crime. It is sedition. Trafficking with demonic powers to subvert the order that God has established is an act of rebellion that threatens the very foundation of the nation.
Think of it this way. If a man in wartime is caught communicating with the enemy, giving them secrets, and aiding their cause, what do we call that? We call it treason. And what has historically been the penalty for high treason? Death. The sorceress is a spiritual traitor. She has gone over to the camp of the serpent, the ancient enemy of God and man, and is actively working to advance his kingdom of darkness, chaos, and death within the borders of God’s kingdom.
The penalty is severe because God loves His people and wants to protect them. Allowing such a spiritual cancer to fester in the body politic would lead to its destruction. The surrounding Canaanite nations were being judged and driven out precisely because their cultures were saturated with these abominations (Deut. 18:12). For Israel to tolerate the very practices for which the Canaanites were being dispossessed would be to invite the same judgment upon themselves. This law, then, is a guardrail. It is a flaming sword set at the border of the nation to keep out the deadliest of spiritual poisons.
This is not vigilante justice. This is a command for the courts, which would have required evidence, witnesses, and due process. But once the crime was established, the sentence was not negotiable. The very life of the covenant community was at stake.
The Principle Applied: What is the General Equity?
So, what do we do with this today? As Christians, we are not under the specific civil code of ancient Israel. The ceremonial laws have been fulfilled in Christ, and the civil laws were for a specific nation at a specific time. However, the Westminster Confession rightly teaches that the general equity of those laws still requires our obedience. General equity means the underlying, timeless moral principle. So what is the general equity of Exodus 22:18?
The principle is this: a just civil government has a duty to suppress open and flagrant rebellion against the ultimate reality. A Christian social order, what we might call Christendom, must formally recognize that trafficking with demonic powers is a real and present danger to the health of the nation. It is not a matter of private conscience; it is a public menace.
Now, let us be very clear. This does not mean we should be forming posses and hunting for witches. It does not mean we should hand over the power of the sword to our current, secular, and often godless government to enforce. To give our current crop of magistrates the authority to execute for religious crimes would be a catastrophic folly. They can’t even define what a woman is, let alone what a witch is. To entrust such a sword to such a state would be like giving a straight razor to a toddler.
The application of this principle must be downstream from a widespread cultural conversion. A people must first be discipled by the gospel. They must have their minds renewed by the Word of God. They must build righteous institutions, families, churches, schools, and businesses. Only after a society has been thoroughly Christianized, from the ground up, could it even begin to contemplate how to apply the general equity of this law in a just and righteous way. Politics is the art of the possible, and we are a long way off.
But this does not mean the principle is invalid. It means we must not despise the day of small things. The principle tells us that our modern, secular pluralism, which treats Christianity and Satanism as equally valid lifestyle choices on the smorgasbord of spirituality, is a lie. It is a suicidal pact. A nation that will not formally distinguish between God and the devil is a nation that has lost its right to exist. The general equity of this law requires us to say, as a people, that we are on God’s side of the cosmic war, not the devil’s.
The Gospel Conclusion: The Sorcery We All Commit
In the final analysis, this text should drive us to the foot of the cross. For what is sin but a form of sorcery? What is our rebellion against God but an attempt to manipulate reality for our own ends, to be our own gods, to operate by our own power? We have all tried to conjure up a life for ourselves apart from God. We have all listened to the whispers of the serpent. We have all committed high treason against the King of Heaven.
And the penalty for that treason is death. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). We were all under a divine death sentence. We were all the sorcerers who were not to be allowed to live.
But God, in His infinite mercy, enacted the greatest plot twist in history. He sent His own Son, who took our treason upon Himself. Jesus went to the cross, and on that tree, He was executed in our place. He paid the penalty that we deserved. He drank the cup of God’s wrath against our sorcery down to the dregs.
The gospel does not abolish the death penalty for sorcery; it reveals that the death penalty was carried out on the person of Jesus Christ for all who would repent and believe in Him. He is the one who disarmed the rulers and authorities, the very demonic powers that the sorceress seeks to serve, and “put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:15).
Therefore, our first response to this text is not to puzzle over civil application, but to flee to Christ. It is to repent of our own autonomous, god-playing rebellion. It is to confess our treason and to receive the pardon that He purchased with His own blood. For it is only when we are saved by grace that we can begin to think rightly about how to build a society that is ordered by that same grace.