We’re going to take a look this week at a real-world, recent example related to some of the practical ways we’ve been discussing lately, in which believers in the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, can recognize the works of wickedness that attack us all, and appropriate attitudes and practices conducive to more effective faithful and obedient responses to them in our walk through the world in the name of the Lord.
We’ll see how closely related the example is to what we’ve been talking about here lately; and especially to many of the salient counsels brought up in our review of the Jonas Clark book, Exposing Spiritual Witchcraft, from a couple of weeks ago.
Because the reach of “the news”—through our TVs, the Internet and social media—has penetrated not just into our homes, but into our minds and hearts as well, we can’t help but be made aware of whatever latest shiny object the forces of wickedness want us all to be focused on for whatever intentions; intentions about which none of us may have any real clue, but which most of us still reasoning functionally and independently, know have nothing to do with anything good for any of us or for the world in general.
So that many of us also can’t resist getting whipped up into the hysterically incontinent, fearful froth in which those same forces seem so persistently determined to keep us with one manufactured “existence-level” threat after another lately.
“I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…”
Unless you’re a bear still in hibernation, or you spent the last two weeks in a sensory-deprivation tank becoming more intimately connected with your worst nightmares, you were there with the rest of us to witness the latest universally and relentlessly super-hyped and frightfully anticipated, spectacular nothing-burger the total solar eclipse that took place last Monday, April 8, ended up being.
Please don’t get me wrong. As a science geek since I got a chemistry set for an 8th or 9th birthday—along with a subscription to the science-and-tech periodical Omni Magazine in my early teens—I still marvel at the wonders of the workings of the heavens above us; and an event like a total solar eclipse is indeed something spectacular to behold.
Only these days, as a born-again believer in the Lord Yeshua, things like this are no longer an issue of “Wow! What a universe!” for me; but, rather, “Wow! What a God!”
Anyway, getting back to our point, in the hyper-saturated super-hype leading up to the event this time around, there was a significant subtext of fear and anxiety about the happening injected into the pre-game warm-up, stoked by the news and social media’s 24/7 emphasis on all the catastrophic, potentially world-ending potentials associated with it.
As a veteran of a number of eclipses over my nearly 58 years on this scene, I can say that although there have always been the kinds of cranks that put out their “This Is The One!” vibes every time anything like this comes along, this is the first time I can recall the effort being carried so insistently and universally by the media and all the End-of-the-World-ists among us.
It was more of the same, sad Chicken Little in a tin-foil hat, all hopped up on the conditioned fear-and-paranoia porn with which we’ve become accustomed to being bombarded at an almost incessant frequency these last few years about just about everything; so there really should be no surprise that something like a total solar eclipse, with all the cosmic and spiritual contexts and subtexts associated with it, was no different.
The earthquake that rocked the US East Coast just a few days before the event was—without the slightest scientific substantiation—being attributed to the eclipse by much systemic fear-mongering, with the prospects of earthquakes being set off all over the world being floated around for our cowering-in-terror entertainment.
Not to be outdone by the world of the wicked, many Christians were also teeth-chatteringly trepidatious and compellingly convinced last Monday’s eclipse was going to be the Rapture of the Lord’s faithful, which John 14:16, 26, 2 Thessalonians 2:7, 2 Thessalonians 2:3, Revelation 3:7, 1 Thessalonians 4:15-16, Matthew 24:39-40 and Revelation 13:1 all clearly reveal to those who have the ears to hear and the discernment to decipher; and which would have signaled the imminent beginning of the first half of the Great Tribulation to which every prophet of God up to and including the Lord Yeshua himself, allude as the manifestation of God’s final and terrible judgment on a fallen, wicked, sinful and disobedient world.
And yet, after the 3 or-so hours from opening partiality, through totality and to the concluding partiality of the eclipse, there were no earthquakes, no “extinction-level” catastrophes, no outbreaks of mass insanity and violence, no shouts and trumpets from heaven, no clouds appearing with the Lord Jesus in them, and no millions of people suddenly disappearing as they were beamed out of the world by the Lord.
And there’s the rub of it for what we’re talking about here today.
“Aye… There’s the Rub!”
Because as we started out saying, the fear and paranoia-porn-laced hype leading up to the eclipse, ended up being the perfect, real-world illustration of exactly the kind of effort and activity we’ve been discussing lately, that manifests as the workings of wickedness and the witchcraft it employs in its Satan-driven assault on the world; and especially and specifically on believers in the Lord Yeshua.
And for exactly the kinds of reasons, as we’ve discovered, it’s all done.
Last Monday’s total solar eclipse provided the perfect storm for the forces of wickedness in the world to put in motion their machine that cranks up all the influences they normally exploit as a matter of spiritually strategic and tactical policy, for the purposes of attacking and weakening their enemies and creating the environment through which the wicked agenda of conquest through deception, manipulation and spiritual subjugation to sin, can be forwarded.
Except this time it was in the form of a psy-op targeting the entire news and social-media-consuming world, of the likes usually associated with what we’ve come to know as “mass formation psychosis”—which describes the manipulation of whole masses of people with powerful deception for nefarious worldly and spiritual purposes.
In the same way wicked efforts work with targeted individuals, the strategy for targeted millions is to increase the anxiety and fear levels in people to make them more susceptible to the irrational thoughts and feelings that lead them to the harmful attitudes and actions that do damage to themselves and others; and, most importantly, that open them up spiritually to the influences of darkness that invade our spirits when we’re weakened in mentally, emotionally and spiritually negative and sin-attracting states.
So all over the news, the Internet and social media, in the weeks leading up to last Monday, we were inundated with fears of world-ending scenarios, potential seismic catastrophes leading to complete societal collapse, and the Rapture of millions of Christian believers; so that everybody would be primed for whatever triggers would set them off—preferably all at the same time—to try to make sure all that end-of-the-world hype prior to the event would become an apparent self-fulfilling prophesy, with millions of people going out of their minds and going postal in a The Purge kind of way.
Of course, it didn't end up happening.
Thank the Lord for that.
Not for a lack of trying by the wicked, though; but only because far too many of us—especially after the lessons of Operation Covid have been well-imprinted on us—have proven to be not as naive, gullible, unaware and susceptible to the kind of puerile, deceptive manipulation with which these efforts are invariably executed; by people of the mind that they’re such master manipulators and we’re all such stupid, gullible dupes, that they can just wave their pocket watches in front of our faces, snap their fingers and get us to jump off cliffs on command with the most asinine of horror-story fairy tales.
But what it did end up doing was to provide us all with just one more piece of evidence of exactly who the forces of darkness in the world are, from where they operate, how they operate, for what purposes, and to what desired effect.
We can draw our own conclusions about the people bringing us all this because we all know that saying about walking and quacking like a duck.
And this duck sure seems to walk and quack a whole lot like much of what we discovered in what Jonas Clark tells us about how the practitioners of spiritual witchcraft work.
Just to remind of us of the points Clark makes specifically relevant to what we’re talking about here, let’s cite a few; and we’ll clearly see the how the characteristics of the practice of spiritual witchcraft Clark outlines, line up perfectly with the attempt to turn last week’s total solar eclipse into a mass formation psychosis event.
“When witchcraft is operating there is a release of chaos, confusion and turmoil... Witchcraft will attack your peace and offer you confusion in return...
“Witchcraft plants seeds of deception in the mind through vain imaginations. The release of those imaginations causes confusion, which is a sure sign of witchcraft’s influence... Witchcraft will get you to live out an imagination... to act on things that are not real... to lose your grip on reality...
“People operating in witchcraft are masters at taking the focus off of them whenever they are about to be discovered... Remember that witchcraft always takes the focus off of itself and puts it on others through blame...
“Many controlling prophesies are full of fear...
“Witchcraft paints a dark and gloomy portrait of life in one’s mind... Witchcraft thrives during times of discouragement...
“Witchcraft makes problems appear larger than they really are...”
It doesn’t take a stretch of any kind to see how precisely the characteristics of what Clark describes are almost perfectly manifested as examples of them, in the way in which we were encouraged to interpret and experience last Monday’s eclipse.
The Strategic and Spiritual Assessment
So the IMDB synopsis version of it all is that what we saw last week—in addition to an awesome display of God’s cosmic artistry and timing—was the forces in the world who employ “Satan’s so-called deep secrets” (Revelation 2:24) as a strategic and tactical plan against all the rest of us, taking the opportunity of a spiritually and cosmically-charged event like a total solar eclipse, to attempt to wreak more worldly and spiritual havoc as part of the scheme in which they’re engaged as followers of Satan’s wicked will.
Blame something else (the eclipse) for their own evil (whipping up mass insanity). Make problems seem bigger than they appear (“It’s the end of the world!”). Promote reason-debilitating and hysteria-inducing fear for everybody else, so that manipulating them like that can satisfy their own sociopathic pride and purposes.
And sinfulness—that bursts into all of us under this kind of coercive duress as easily as a flash shoplifting mob into a Target—can abound.
As if that weren’t bad enough for all of us—believers and non alike—with which to have to deal, we also got the added bonus of some unstable Christians, who should really know way better, piling on with insistently dire warnings about catastrophically portentous events like the Rapture taking place on the occasion of this eclipse; just to make sure the mass formation psychosis didn’t pass over the Assembly of Messiah, either.
Predictions by Christians for theses kinds of events (how many times has the world ended according to such “prophesy” in just the last couple of decades?), that, “This time this is it! And I’ve got all the scripture to prove it!” are mostly driven by a sadly embedded pride in some that makes them each want to be “The One Who Predicts It and Gets It Right!”
As if God—once he’s done leveling the world and judging the wicked—is then going to award the grand prize to the winner who guessed the right number of jelly beans in heaven’s jar.
There are two dark lights (Matthew 6:22-23) shining through the eyes of this effort that don’t do any favors for the Assembly as a whole, nor for the people themselves making it.
Although there’s nothing wrong with studying Holy Scripture to get a good idea of the course of God’s plan and how it’s going to be played out according to his word and his will—and gauging the current state of the world against the course of that plan to get an approximate idea of where we are in it—there’s plenty wrong with trying to pinpoint the exact nature and exact timing of the events associated with that plan as a manic obsession, and then trumpeting our presumptive prophesies for all to hear and over which to get all worked up into fearful—or what may be worse, gleeful—froths.
All at the expense of fomenting unsubstantiated fears and expectations in the hearts and minds of believers, contributing to chaos and confusion (instead of the peace of which we’re told by God’s word he’s the author; and in which we also, presumably, should be encouraging one another).
While neglecting seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness first (Matthew 6:33), loving God (Mark 12:30) by keeping his word and obeying his commands (John 14:15), and loving and selflessly serving our neighbor (Mark 12:31, Matthew 7:12).
This gleeful zeal with which some believers eagerly anticipate the Rapture and the Great Tribulation to follow, is antithetical to what God’s word tells us about what our attitude should be towards them, and a betrayal of what his word tells us our attitude should be towards the unbelieving world, to boot.
The Lord Yeshua, the Son of God, tells us himself in Matthew 24:36:
“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
God’s prophet also speaks for God himself when he tells us in Isaiah 46:10 (NLT):
“Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish.”
So what—and more importantly, whose—purpose does it serve to run around with our hair on fire about the end of the world at every apparent opportunity?
Moreover, the glee with which some of us joyfully welcome every “This is the Rapture!” that’s going to save the faithful from God’s wrathful judgment of the world, is wholly inconsistent with the compassion we’re commanded by God’s word to have for the enemies of God upon whom that judgment’s going to fall.
The Lord Yeshua teaches in Luke 6:27: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
God’s prophet warns the faithful not to get too joyful about the coming of God’s final judgment, despite the redemption and restoration of the world and humanity to which it will lead, in Amos 5:18-20:
“Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord! Why do you long for the day of the Lord? That day will be darkness, not light. It will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him. Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?”
He’s backed up in that by the Lord Jesus’ description of the time, delivered in Matthew 24:21-22:
“For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again... If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”
We should take a cue for our attitude about the Rapture and the Great Tribulation from all of heaven, which Revelation 8:1 tells us is stunned into a somber half-hour of silence when the Lamb opens the seventh seal and all of heaven is mortified at the imminence of the horror that’s about to begin.
So God’s word tells us the time of the Great Tribulation’s going to be the most terribly and universally destructive time the world or humanity will have ever experienced; a time of such great destructiveness, pain, suffering and death that the Lord Yeshua tells us if it weren’t shortened by God’s compassion, nobody would survive.
Is this something anybody—let alone believers in the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah—should be celebrating, jumping for joy while gaily skipping over the future carcasses of the enemies we’re commanded by God to love, and about whom he himself says on a number of occasions, like in Ezekiel 18:23:
“Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”
“A Total Eclipse of the Heart”
The total solar eclipse last Monday—experienced and regarded simply as a significant cosmic event—was a mind-blowing display of God’s awesome omniscience, omnipotence and elegant cosmic artistry, from a worldly consideration.
As a cosmic event with spiritual implications, however, none of us knows exactly what they may be. I’m willing to hazard a guess the fact it took place on the very day of the eve of the Hebrew biblical New Year, Rosh Chodesh, probably indicates if it has any spiritual significance, it has to do with Israel, and not our own vain imaginations about our own self-importance.
As a visual phenomenon, though—while the world stands with mouths agape and watches the dark globe of the moon pass before the brilliantly glowing orb of the sun—it does symbolically manifest a timeless and universal, spiritual truth: that the best the darkness (with which evil proudly presumes to be able to defeat God) can ever do, is temporarily get in the way of the light of the world.
But it can’t, nor will it ever—thanks to the finished work of the Lord Yeshua completed on the shameful Roman execution stake—succeed in defeating that light and extinguishing it.
Because God’s inerrant and trustworthy word promises us in John 1:5:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
And the same apostle John tells us in 1 John 1:5 (numerically significantly enough):
“God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”
(Photo Credits: TheExplorist.com; © Oct. 1984 General Media Inc.; Steemit.com; Refugecc.us)
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