Jerusalem Blade
Puritan Board Professor
What follows will be a popular treatment (as opposed to an exegetical, technical one) of an eschatological event (an event, albeit quite drawn out time-wise), from the (still rough-draft) prologue of the book, A Great and Terrible Love: from the Abyss to Woodstock, to Armageddon and God’s Throne.
___________
Prologue: An overview the protagonist didn’t have when he started out
A telling of part of the Story beneath all stories which goes on “beneath the radar” of ordinary awareness. This archetypal view may seem more in line with the fantasy genre than what we perceive as real, yet the genre of this telling is visionary adventure nonfiction.
This part of the Story started in Woodstock, of all places – Woodstock as a symbol for the counterculture generation of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s – though one could trace its inception way further back, but that’s another telling. What happened in the Woodstock generation was a disaster of biblical proportions that slipped by unseen. It is still unseen yet the havoc wrought by it is felt everywhere, and multitudes sense something is so off in our present world as to be unnatural, though many would not go so far as to say supernatural.
This being more a précis than an elaborate telling, I’ll cut to the chase.
Woodstock is usually known / remembered for its drugs; well, a lot of other things too, but the drugs were basic, and at the heart of what happened. It was commonly understood then they opened one up to a spiritual – note, not a “religious” – consciousness, and we saw sacred things, in ourselves, in others, and in the world we were in. We were convinced this new consciousness had the power to change the world, so it fell to reason we would seek to export it everywhere.
And we did. But this “spiritual consciousness” had a depth to it we were initially unaware of. It transported us to another dimension – a realm of consciousness – familiar to a certain class of seers, but we were novices, babes in the woods. A lot of what we saw and experienced purported to be light and glory, sacred and of exquisite human depth, and in a sense it was – for there is light and glory and sacredness in the human heart and body, and we tasted deeply of these things. But in the human heart there is also self-centeredness, self-aggrandizing, and self-love – often at the expense of others’ well-being; there are also non-human things, for there is a gateway in the human depths that opens into spirit-worlds, and not all in these realms is safe or sane. That is, not all means us well. And when we open ourselves to such realms unprepared we may come under the influence of beings capable of exploiting our faults and destructive qualities without our even knowing it, as these are beings capable of interfering with our thought-processes and hearts undetected.
From another angle: an apt image of the collective consciousness of humankind is a vast reservoir with the varied cultures of the world as swirling waters contained therein. At the bottom of this reservoir is not hard rock or land, but an almost impermeable membrane of sorts, on the other side of which is another realm of consciousness – or dimension – which harbors spirit entities hostile to humans.
This near impervious partition between the two species is sometimes breached through the use of substances which fall into the category of sorcery, an unusual class of drugs which allow the barrier “membrane” – figuratively speaking – to become fully permeable so that denizens from either side may pass over into the other’s realm. Though few would knowingly enter from the human to the other region, so filled with horror and madness as it is!
I must bring God into the picture for clarity’s sake. He’s the one who erected this barrier for the safety of humankind, to protect them from far more powerful adversaries they had become vulnerable to when they lost their strength in an earlier incident with them (this Story goes far back).
Sorcery, the use of drugs and potions to open the barrier, has been the endeavor of witches, shamans, wizards and the like for untold ages, to the end of gaining psychic influence over other humans through the demonic power they become channels of (though some falsely claim these powers are benign). Due to this immensely destructive force such activity and its practitioners have been outlawed in many societies, though some have allowed it, to their great detriment.
Back to Woodstock: the LSD, marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and other “psychedelics” – substances of ancient standing (save the synthetics, most notably LSD which was only produced in 1938 and its sorcerous properties partially recognized in 1943) – became widely used in the U.S. and U.K., and the resulting direct entrance of the demonic realm into the human commenced what would come to have an enormous impact. Demonic influence has always been in the world, affecting the thought-life of humans, but its direct and unrestricted entrance to the human heart and life on a large scale was a new development. Those humans without a specific and deliberately active guard against such influence are all vulnerable to the strong delusion they relentlessly promote. When LSD, marijuana et al were exported into the wide world through the exciting new Woodstock spirit, the opening to the human world created thereby was global in scale, and the havoc they began wreaking would eventually swell to catastrophes of cataclysmic magnitude – earthshaking and shattering, precipitating great destruction and suffering!
A pertinent excerpt from the essay, The Fate of Babylon:
“The explosion of these drugs onto the world scene was an event (the term now used for military-scale biological, chemical, or nuclear events) that befell nations around the globe through the drug-energized sixties generation in America, as this potent counterculture permeated these nations through its music and musicians, literature, art, film, and other culture-bearing vehicles, as well as spiritual teachers and gurus (think Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass). The nations and cultures of the world were leavened from within by the exciting new consciousness of the sixties and the Woodstock spirit exported into them, but it was a Trojan Horse filled with the denizens of Hell. Its impact was, in the psychic realm, the equivalent of a massive nuclear detonation. . . . The damage done is irreversible.”
The darkening zeitgeist of the world (“spirit of the age”) that we live in now – 2015 – is the direct result of this massive demonic incursion into our midst half a century ago. What they hate most are Christ and God, then humankind, and after that peaceful societal order – domestic tranquility – enforced by law and government, as the holy, human, and orderly go against both their nature and their goal for the planet.
They now are able enter the unprotected human heart and mind either directly (affecting the passions and perceptions) or through ideas (affecting thought-life and perception) and the results in various areas will more and more manifest. Some notable ones are: hatred of authority (the targeting of police will spread); exaltation and normalizing of various kinds of depravity will bloom in full; anti-Christian hatred and persecution will increase; dissenters will be dealt with violently.
Even those who never took drugs are impacted by the new zeitgeist – the ever-evolving cultural norm – and humankind filled with this new “spirit” will be one in which the saying shall be realized (to quote Dostoevsky in his Brothers Karamazov), “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” In other words, with no absolute standards, anything goes. And this increasingly is the world we are in now; it will become a place where reasoned discussion is disdained, and impassioned feeling will emerge as that which trumps what was once considered sane and decent.
Into this world our poet enters, blind as to the big picture slowly unfolding beneath his own radar. It will be half a century before he begins to see it, though the little vision he has enables him to stay conscious and on the move.
[end Prologue]
____________
I take the New Year attack by Newsweek as the opening volley of a new phase in the wave of iniquity; it was followed by the New Black Panthers former chairman Malik Shabazz’s call to kill more police. I think we err in minimizing the Newsweek incident, likening it to other years’ rather feeble “exposés” of the Faith by hostile journalists and their rags. This year’s had a new vehemence and vitriol and without restraint went for the jugular of both Christians and the written word of God; the author had done his homework partly through studying Bart Ehrman’s work, and other false teachers.
The clarity and depth of those who rebut that article, such as James White here and here, and Michael J. Kruger (who wrote, The Heresy of Orthodoxy with Andreas J. Köstenberger) here and here (this book, by the way, is an excellent refutation of Bart Ehrman), but as I was saying, these well-reasoned and well-documented rebuttals may assuage the minds of believers, but they will fall on mostly deaf ears with regard to the general public who will choose points of view in accord with their growing antipathy to Christians. As I noted in the above prologue, “impassioned feeling will emerge as that which trumps what was once considered sane and decent.” This is no longer an age of reason. There is coming a time when all the peoples of the earth will either be against the Biblical Christ and His people, or afraid (cf Rev 21:8 – fearful or cowardly) to speak up against the injustices done against them. We just like to put it off far away in the distant future – even the amils, who don’t want to prepare to leave their comfy Hobbit burrows.
Conspiracy? Of course the satanic hosts con-spire – which comes from the Latin meaning breathe together in unity of purpose – against God and His kingdom, which on earth is His beloved church.
This coming year will open some eyes within the precincts of the holy people. William Hendriksen, discussing Rev 20:7-10, wrote,
“. . . the era during which the church as a mighty missionary organization shall be able to spread the gospel everywhere is not going to last forever; not even until the moment of Christ’s second coming. Observe what is happening in certain countries even today. Are certain regions of this earth already entering Satan’s little season?” [emphasis added] (More Than Conquerors, pp 194-195)
Note that he wrote this around 1962! Were he writing today he would no doubt express himself more strongly. We are being slaughtered in so many countries around the globe, and the “civilized” West is slowly gearing up for a massive “cleansing” of the “problem of Christians” and their “witness” – which many can see, though it has been slow coming. It may well be speeding up.
We are just like the frog is the slowly-heating pot; “It’ll get better” we say, or “It’ll be a long time before it gets really bad, maybe decades.” The trouble is we have become used to riding the wave of prosperity and safety along with the ungodly who partake of the blessings the great harlot riding the beast lavishes on her tools; even though genuinely godly, we have received luxury and comfort along with those who use these “blessings” for idolatrous living, and when we are no longer anonymous citizens in the great mix, but stand out as those who refuse to sign on to the agenda required by the powers-that-be, we shall then be marked as NOT OF THE WORLD, ENEMIES OF THE EMPIRE. Followers of the Book of Hatred and Bigotry, antique beliefs that impede the enlightenment of humankind, lovers of the God of primitive laws and guilt-tripping.
2015 will be, I think, a year to remember. The first voices have already spoken for the dark side, modeling a hatred for Christians and the Bible that the cultures of the world have already seen, and lo and behold, it is now socially acceptable to despise and mark these Nazarenes – in Arabic symbolized by the letter N or [SIZE=+2][SIZE=+1]ن[/SIZE][/SIZE], as Islam has already marked them and their homes – and it will get picked up by many ears. Watch and pray, and cultivate a close walk with Him who saves those who trust in Him, and empowers them to bear witness. For that really is what this is about: we are being brought to a place to bear witness to the world of its evil deeds, and God's offer of forgiveness and eternal life through Christ the Saviour. We will quit ourselves as men, for His Spirit is in us.
___________
Prologue: An overview the protagonist didn’t have when he started out
A telling of part of the Story beneath all stories which goes on “beneath the radar” of ordinary awareness. This archetypal view may seem more in line with the fantasy genre than what we perceive as real, yet the genre of this telling is visionary adventure nonfiction.
This part of the Story started in Woodstock, of all places – Woodstock as a symbol for the counterculture generation of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s – though one could trace its inception way further back, but that’s another telling. What happened in the Woodstock generation was a disaster of biblical proportions that slipped by unseen. It is still unseen yet the havoc wrought by it is felt everywhere, and multitudes sense something is so off in our present world as to be unnatural, though many would not go so far as to say supernatural.
This being more a précis than an elaborate telling, I’ll cut to the chase.
Woodstock is usually known / remembered for its drugs; well, a lot of other things too, but the drugs were basic, and at the heart of what happened. It was commonly understood then they opened one up to a spiritual – note, not a “religious” – consciousness, and we saw sacred things, in ourselves, in others, and in the world we were in. We were convinced this new consciousness had the power to change the world, so it fell to reason we would seek to export it everywhere.
And we did. But this “spiritual consciousness” had a depth to it we were initially unaware of. It transported us to another dimension – a realm of consciousness – familiar to a certain class of seers, but we were novices, babes in the woods. A lot of what we saw and experienced purported to be light and glory, sacred and of exquisite human depth, and in a sense it was – for there is light and glory and sacredness in the human heart and body, and we tasted deeply of these things. But in the human heart there is also self-centeredness, self-aggrandizing, and self-love – often at the expense of others’ well-being; there are also non-human things, for there is a gateway in the human depths that opens into spirit-worlds, and not all in these realms is safe or sane. That is, not all means us well. And when we open ourselves to such realms unprepared we may come under the influence of beings capable of exploiting our faults and destructive qualities without our even knowing it, as these are beings capable of interfering with our thought-processes and hearts undetected.
From another angle: an apt image of the collective consciousness of humankind is a vast reservoir with the varied cultures of the world as swirling waters contained therein. At the bottom of this reservoir is not hard rock or land, but an almost impermeable membrane of sorts, on the other side of which is another realm of consciousness – or dimension – which harbors spirit entities hostile to humans.
This near impervious partition between the two species is sometimes breached through the use of substances which fall into the category of sorcery, an unusual class of drugs which allow the barrier “membrane” – figuratively speaking – to become fully permeable so that denizens from either side may pass over into the other’s realm. Though few would knowingly enter from the human to the other region, so filled with horror and madness as it is!
I must bring God into the picture for clarity’s sake. He’s the one who erected this barrier for the safety of humankind, to protect them from far more powerful adversaries they had become vulnerable to when they lost their strength in an earlier incident with them (this Story goes far back).
Sorcery, the use of drugs and potions to open the barrier, has been the endeavor of witches, shamans, wizards and the like for untold ages, to the end of gaining psychic influence over other humans through the demonic power they become channels of (though some falsely claim these powers are benign). Due to this immensely destructive force such activity and its practitioners have been outlawed in many societies, though some have allowed it, to their great detriment.
Back to Woodstock: the LSD, marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and other “psychedelics” – substances of ancient standing (save the synthetics, most notably LSD which was only produced in 1938 and its sorcerous properties partially recognized in 1943) – became widely used in the U.S. and U.K., and the resulting direct entrance of the demonic realm into the human commenced what would come to have an enormous impact. Demonic influence has always been in the world, affecting the thought-life of humans, but its direct and unrestricted entrance to the human heart and life on a large scale was a new development. Those humans without a specific and deliberately active guard against such influence are all vulnerable to the strong delusion they relentlessly promote. When LSD, marijuana et al were exported into the wide world through the exciting new Woodstock spirit, the opening to the human world created thereby was global in scale, and the havoc they began wreaking would eventually swell to catastrophes of cataclysmic magnitude – earthshaking and shattering, precipitating great destruction and suffering!
A pertinent excerpt from the essay, The Fate of Babylon:
“The explosion of these drugs onto the world scene was an event (the term now used for military-scale biological, chemical, or nuclear events) that befell nations around the globe through the drug-energized sixties generation in America, as this potent counterculture permeated these nations through its music and musicians, literature, art, film, and other culture-bearing vehicles, as well as spiritual teachers and gurus (think Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass). The nations and cultures of the world were leavened from within by the exciting new consciousness of the sixties and the Woodstock spirit exported into them, but it was a Trojan Horse filled with the denizens of Hell. Its impact was, in the psychic realm, the equivalent of a massive nuclear detonation. . . . The damage done is irreversible.”
The darkening zeitgeist of the world (“spirit of the age”) that we live in now – 2015 – is the direct result of this massive demonic incursion into our midst half a century ago. What they hate most are Christ and God, then humankind, and after that peaceful societal order – domestic tranquility – enforced by law and government, as the holy, human, and orderly go against both their nature and their goal for the planet.
They now are able enter the unprotected human heart and mind either directly (affecting the passions and perceptions) or through ideas (affecting thought-life and perception) and the results in various areas will more and more manifest. Some notable ones are: hatred of authority (the targeting of police will spread); exaltation and normalizing of various kinds of depravity will bloom in full; anti-Christian hatred and persecution will increase; dissenters will be dealt with violently.
Even those who never took drugs are impacted by the new zeitgeist – the ever-evolving cultural norm – and humankind filled with this new “spirit” will be one in which the saying shall be realized (to quote Dostoevsky in his Brothers Karamazov), “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” In other words, with no absolute standards, anything goes. And this increasingly is the world we are in now; it will become a place where reasoned discussion is disdained, and impassioned feeling will emerge as that which trumps what was once considered sane and decent.
Into this world our poet enters, blind as to the big picture slowly unfolding beneath his own radar. It will be half a century before he begins to see it, though the little vision he has enables him to stay conscious and on the move.
[end Prologue]
____________
I take the New Year attack by Newsweek as the opening volley of a new phase in the wave of iniquity; it was followed by the New Black Panthers former chairman Malik Shabazz’s call to kill more police. I think we err in minimizing the Newsweek incident, likening it to other years’ rather feeble “exposés” of the Faith by hostile journalists and their rags. This year’s had a new vehemence and vitriol and without restraint went for the jugular of both Christians and the written word of God; the author had done his homework partly through studying Bart Ehrman’s work, and other false teachers.
The clarity and depth of those who rebut that article, such as James White here and here, and Michael J. Kruger (who wrote, The Heresy of Orthodoxy with Andreas J. Köstenberger) here and here (this book, by the way, is an excellent refutation of Bart Ehrman), but as I was saying, these well-reasoned and well-documented rebuttals may assuage the minds of believers, but they will fall on mostly deaf ears with regard to the general public who will choose points of view in accord with their growing antipathy to Christians. As I noted in the above prologue, “impassioned feeling will emerge as that which trumps what was once considered sane and decent.” This is no longer an age of reason. There is coming a time when all the peoples of the earth will either be against the Biblical Christ and His people, or afraid (cf Rev 21:8 – fearful or cowardly) to speak up against the injustices done against them. We just like to put it off far away in the distant future – even the amils, who don’t want to prepare to leave their comfy Hobbit burrows.
Conspiracy? Of course the satanic hosts con-spire – which comes from the Latin meaning breathe together in unity of purpose – against God and His kingdom, which on earth is His beloved church.
This coming year will open some eyes within the precincts of the holy people. William Hendriksen, discussing Rev 20:7-10, wrote,
“. . . the era during which the church as a mighty missionary organization shall be able to spread the gospel everywhere is not going to last forever; not even until the moment of Christ’s second coming. Observe what is happening in certain countries even today. Are certain regions of this earth already entering Satan’s little season?” [emphasis added] (More Than Conquerors, pp 194-195)
Note that he wrote this around 1962! Were he writing today he would no doubt express himself more strongly. We are being slaughtered in so many countries around the globe, and the “civilized” West is slowly gearing up for a massive “cleansing” of the “problem of Christians” and their “witness” – which many can see, though it has been slow coming. It may well be speeding up.
We are just like the frog is the slowly-heating pot; “It’ll get better” we say, or “It’ll be a long time before it gets really bad, maybe decades.” The trouble is we have become used to riding the wave of prosperity and safety along with the ungodly who partake of the blessings the great harlot riding the beast lavishes on her tools; even though genuinely godly, we have received luxury and comfort along with those who use these “blessings” for idolatrous living, and when we are no longer anonymous citizens in the great mix, but stand out as those who refuse to sign on to the agenda required by the powers-that-be, we shall then be marked as NOT OF THE WORLD, ENEMIES OF THE EMPIRE. Followers of the Book of Hatred and Bigotry, antique beliefs that impede the enlightenment of humankind, lovers of the God of primitive laws and guilt-tripping.
2015 will be, I think, a year to remember. The first voices have already spoken for the dark side, modeling a hatred for Christians and the Bible that the cultures of the world have already seen, and lo and behold, it is now socially acceptable to despise and mark these Nazarenes – in Arabic symbolized by the letter N or [SIZE=+2][SIZE=+1]ن[/SIZE][/SIZE], as Islam has already marked them and their homes – and it will get picked up by many ears. Watch and pray, and cultivate a close walk with Him who saves those who trust in Him, and empowers them to bear witness. For that really is what this is about: we are being brought to a place to bear witness to the world of its evil deeds, and God's offer of forgiveness and eternal life through Christ the Saviour. We will quit ourselves as men, for His Spirit is in us.
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