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@noah-cochran

Come on man. xD The audience and what they think don’t matter, God is our ultimate audience, and what He thinks is what matters.

This is going to be the point after which I have to bow out. To say God has a problem with the English word “magic,” a word which necessarily does not exist in a book which was not written in English, such that a thing becomes evil even if it is not essentially evil before that label is applied, is not only to put words in God’s mouth but to engage in a kind of magic yourself, to believe uttering a word has the power to bestow the evil you think is intrinsically tied to it.

Words mean things. Words sometimes even mean different things.

I’ll close with an example you may or may not find interesting. One of the words which does exist in the Bible and which is often translated in words and phrases as “magic” is the verb root “anan (עָנַן).” This word has multiple meanings, depending on its stem. The “Poel” stem meaning of “soothsaying” or “witchcraft” occurs ten of eleven times in the Old Testament. You have your condemnation of diviners, witches, soothsayers (note that almost every example of magic in the Bible is of fortune-telling or divination, of trying to grasp the future instead of trusting in God’s prophets), but you also have one single other use of this word, using the “Piel” stem.

This comes in Genesis 9:14, and God Himself uses it.

14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: 15 And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. (KJV)

With a word that means witchcraft in every other OT usage, God establishes His covenant with man.

Moreover: The masculine noun form “anan (עָנָן)” means cloud, and is not only used in Gen 9:14 directly after the verb form above, but is also used to refer to the pillar of cloud and the other times God was present in a cloud in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

If a word for “magic” in the Old Testament could be not only used by God to establish His covenant but also to refer to the cloud from which He spoke to Israel, I believe without the tiniest shred of doubt that the English word “magic” can be used without inherent spiritual danger.