(There is a special message at the end of this article for those who might happen to read this and do not have Jesus in their life and are looking for peace and a way to better understand the present-day insanity and confusion.)

Let me begin by noting that this is actually a hopeful commentary.

Yep, I really said that.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, Despair is defined as:

1. To lose all hope.
2. To be overcome by a sense of futility or defeat.

Couple this with deceit: The practice of causing people to accept as truth that which is untrue and/or (as is standard operating procedure today) intentionally alter the facts in order to create a false narrative – to purposefully lie.

They are the ultimate evil tag team.

As has been accurately stated by numerous people in the past: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” Facts determine truth.

One of my favorite lines from the second Jurassic Park movie was one of those indisputable truths that emerge from unexpected sources. Jeff Goldblum’s character stated: “There is only one version of the truth.”

I completely agree. Truth is not relative. It is truth.

In the Book of Proverbs Chapter 6, God warns anyone who has ears to hear:

“There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community” (Proverbs 6:16-19).

I originally thought to add emphasis to the points related to deception and its co-workers in the above passage from the Proverbs, but then I realized how closely related all of them are to “deceit” and “despair.” The first, in sufficient quantity, begets the second.

Unfortunately, a vast majority of people, many of whom have already entered into the workforce and will or have already become today’s “leaders,” have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the existing culture of deceit and despair, falsehood and lies that have been carefully crafted by those who either knowingly or unknowingly cooperate with the very real forces of evil.

Many (but not all) have been intentionally deceived in the currently existing “educational” systems at all levels. They have now become little more than (“ensurance” agents of hell). Many are just indoctrination agents to “ensure” that the propaganda of the “father of lies” is presented as “truth” in order to deceive and to ensure despair. Propagators of deception; they are themselves deceived.

“Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:22-23).

Because they have rejected God’s Word, they do not heed His ominous warning:

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight” (Isaiah 5:20-21).

“Woe” in God’s Word results in horrible consequences for the practitioners of evil.

One of the most successful tactics of deception has been to create a false perception that the “devil” is just some red-skinned, horned mystical figure that lugs a pitchfork around with him and that projects an image of silliness and harmlessness.

In that man-created configuration, he would be something (or, more accurately, someone) to be laughed at and then brushed aside, except as a prop used for increasing Halloween costume sales.

But the reality is very far from that man-made “mirage.”

God has carefully presented the Truth in His Word as to who and what Satan is, where he came from, and what his goals are.

And then, there are those who worship and follow him. Frightful beyond measure.

He is described in God’s Word as the devil, the deceiver, the father of lies, and hater of God’s most precious creation. And that most precious creation is us.

He made that preciousness clear by sending His son Jesus (who is God in the flesh) to pay the penalty for the sins that we are all guilty of, and He explained why Jesus had to come as the Sacrificial Offering to purchase all who will receive His free gift of Grace.

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

The consequences of sin are death (Romans 6:23), and someone had to pay them. Someone who was completely without sin, innocent and pure, and that Someone is Jesus Christ, who did so willingly so we might live.

What more could He have done to prove His love for ALL people?

In His Word, God makes the existence of His plans for believing mankind known.

“For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future'” (Jeremiah 29:11).

Through His Love and Grace, He also provides a glimpse into what He has planned for all who will come to Him in penitence and humility, and that it is wonderful beyond our present limited ability to comprehend.

“But as it is written: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him'” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Because of God’s Grace and these promises, Satan directs his fierce and vicious hatred toward the objects of His love, and there is no limit to the depths of his hatred and the depravity he will inspire people to descend into.

The deceit and resulting despair that this evil gives birth to have become a cacophony of shrill, constantly pulsating noise designed to block out reason and disguise Truth.

“But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13).

It is by these methods that the “New World Order” proponents have created an environment of fear and hopelessness in order to inundate and overwhelm people so much so that they are distracted from the true Source of all Hope.

In worldly terms, there is no getting around this evil or beyond its devious effects on every aspect of daily human activity.

Just when things seem like they couldn’t get any more perverse or disgusting, they get more perverse and disgusting.

That is exactly how evil has designed its plans to work in a God-rejecting world.

Despair hangs over the world like an overcast and gloomy day in order to create the false perception that there is no hope.

Now to the crux of this commentary.

So, where is this “hopeful” I mentioned earlier?

The primary tactical goal that the globalists are engaged in is to create despair on a worldwide level that is so debilitating that they are able to convince people that they alone have the answers to all the world’s ills. In other words, deceive people into embracing their evil scheme and to turn away from the only Source of Hope that truly does exist.

That hope is the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and they are all one.

Hope is only as good as He in Whom it is placed.

Prophecy that has already seen fulfillment is the indisputable proof of His Sovereignty over the present and His guarantee for the future.

It is the Signature of God.

In Him, there is no shadow of turning. He never fails to keep His Word.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17).

The Godless world system IS against you, and its goal is despair and domination.

“Put no more trust in man, who has only the breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he?” (Isaiah 22:22).

If you have a belief, hold a position, or have an opinion that is in harmony with God and His Word, even if the entire world is against you, you are in the majority.

If you have not already done so and you are in despair, turn to Jesus, Who can sever the chains of slavery to evil and hopelessness:

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

The special message I promised you:

For anyone who may read this article and has not trusted in Jesus Christ and therefore has no hope or peace in your life:

You can have hope. You can have the peace that Jesus has promised to all who have made Him their Lord and Savior. The peace that passes understanding.

It requires that you come before God on His terms.

And, what are His terms according to His Word?

• Genuine repentance (turning to God instead of continuing to reject or ignore Him).
• Confession of sins (that you are a sinner and acknowledge that to God).
• That you understand that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).
• To acknowledge to God that you are unable to pay that debt.
• Belief that Jesus Christ paid your death sentence for you on the cross.
• To believe that Jesus is the Way, the only Way, that God has established by which humans may be saved from the consequences of their sin and rebellion.

God has made it absolutely clear that there is no one who comes before Him, under His terms, that will be refused.

• No one: no race, no color, no country of origin, regardless of any previous belief system: no one.
• No matter what your past sins have been, God can and WILL forgive you because He says He will.
• Salvation is available to everyone without any exceptions.

If you put all your trust for salvation in Jesus, and Him only, you can follow that prayer up by simply saying, “Thank you, Father God, for hearing my prayer and saving me,” because we can trust Him to keep His Word. He always has. He always will.

“Truly, Truly, I say to you that he who hears My words and believes the One who sent Me has eternal life and will not be condemned. He has crossed from death to life” (John 5:24).

There are no answers and there is no hope in the world by governments, organizations, politics or politicians. There are only lies and deception. But you can have the Truth and the peace you seek.

The answers are in the Word of God—The Bible. If you ask God, with all your heart, He will hear you.

“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

Pro Salvator Vigilans

To contact me: canoeman96@gmail.com

Introduction to the Prophecy Wars Series

“Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come” —Jesus Christ (John 16:13).

“What is truth?”—Pontius Pilate (John 18:38).

“And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God. And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:9-10).

As a Christian, I cannot read or write the passages from John 18 and Revelation 19 above without a thrill of joy or tears of gratitude.

Yet between them, I put Pontius Pilate’s famous—and tragically ignorant—question emanating from the classical Roman relativism of his day. Perhaps he came to grasp Truth while he still had breath. I hope so.

The question “What is truth?” and its premise—”truth cannot be known”—reveals the fundamental logic behind what I call in this four-part series of essays the “Prophecy Wars.”

What I plan to do in this series is:

1. Describe the nature of the Adversary’s warfare against prophetic truth across the ages;
2. Articulate a 5-stage battle tactic first described in Genesis 3;
3. Apply that tactic to warfare, specifically against the Scriptural doctrine of the pretribulational rapture, and
4. Finish with some personal observations from “inside the battle” that I hope provide some clarity.

None of these objectives are easily attainable, especially in a short-essay format, but I am giving them a prayerful attempt. There is much, much more that has already been written and taught by better minds than mine, and much more to be said. However, I hope to articulate some strategic and tactical insights and suggestions for Christians as we rapidly approach the terminus of the Age of Grace. Knowing how the Age of Grace ends is critical to finishing our race well.

The War Against Prophetic Truth Across the Ages

There has never been a time when God’s prophetic declarations were not under Satanic attack. “Spiritual warfare,” generally speaking, focuses strategically on what humanity believes. The great passages so central to the Good News of Christ, including “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16), “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31), “The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38) and many others all center on the transformational act of believing the Word of Christ and the journey of progressively-refined faith in Him that is more valuable than gold (1 Pet. 1:7).

Belief and faith require an object—the Person of Christ—Who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). And the war is really all about that.

Interestingly, the seven passages I cite here are not just declarative. They are also prophetic in the sense that they describe a program of redemption that would extend not just through the entire Church Age but also right through Daniel’s 70th Week and the Millennium to follow. These prophetic truths not only lay out God’s New Testament redemptive arc concerning all who would believe as a group; they are also promises to individuals who, one by one, come to believe the testimony of Christ and thereby become beneficiaries of and participants in the promises of God in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20). In both aspects—group and individual—the fundamental battle is influencing what people believe.

There is a give-and-take in God’s attempts to reach humanity. He invites Israel to “Come, let us reason together” ^[1] (Isaiah 1:18). God meets us where we are but calls us to walk onward (and upward) with Him. Paul similarly “reasoned”^[2] with the Jews in numerous instances (Acts 17:2, 17: 18:4, 19; 19:8-9; 20:7, 9; 24:12, 25). He also engaged Gentiles intellectually (Acts 17:16-32; 18:4; 19:9-10, etc.). This was debate; dissent was listened to and often handled in relatively serious and intellectually honest ways. When minds were closed and threatened, persecution broke out against Paul—driven by outrage, fueled by panic, energized by demonic opposition. The Good News of Christ crucified and resurrected was offensive to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23).

This sometimes honest appeal to intellectual integrity in pursuit of eternal truth and redemption throughout the ages has been under continuous assault. Satan may not be able to keep God from meeting and challenging humanity, but he has certainly tried to alter the terms of engagement. As the centuries and millennia have passed, he has attempted to control this warfare by working to shape the battlefield itself.

Moreover, while the Adversary has never been able to stop God from uttering His prophetic Word or the testimony of Jesus from being lived out, adhered to, and shared, he has enjoyed remarkable success at provoking humanity to question the existence of the God Who prophesies and promises, as well as to question whether there is any truth at all. Beyond this strategy are the tactics of distortion and opposition, but these are not quite as powerful, though they have been used frequently.

Perhaps the best way to understand how this warfare has unfolded is to briefly examine the concept of “dialectic” and its evolution from the days of classical Greece until now.

“Dialectic” as a concept has evolved over the millennia from formal, logical reasoning in Greek Stoicism (e.g., Plato’s Dialogues, especially featuring Socrates. Cicero of Rome also wrote all of his philosophical works in dialogue form) through Erasmus of Rotterdam in the Middle Ages. Socrates, Plato, and their intellectual heirs saw truth as something that emerges after an intellectually honest argument between opposing sides. In addition, the Jewish mind has valued a good argument for millennia. Of course, conflicts of interest, fear, love of power, and a host of other soul-sicknesses led to intellectual dead ends such as Pontius Pilate’s “What is truth?”

Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) employed a “transcendental dialectic” to argue that nonphysical principles could not be understood in physical terms. This was an important departure point: How can one pragmatically talk about the unseen God? Kant’s conclusion was that the existence of God cannot be proven or even taken as an a priori assumption, let alone truth. For Kant, God was merely an idea; everything was ideas, existing only in the mind. Scripture very clearly disagrees.

I don’t mean to assert that humanity’s departure from knowable truth began with Kant—it really began with Adam—but his ideas were an important waypoint some seventeen centuries after Pilate’s fateful brush with the Truth and the Life. Kant ended up being a signatory philosopher in support of the French Revolution, justifying its violent excesses; he considered it the crowning achievement of his life.

The historical idealist Georg Wilhelm Hegel then recast his mentor Kant’s “dialectic” as negating any given idea and using the resulting contradiction to “transcend” to a higher, more pragmatic realization. The State was supreme for Hegel: Any value or identity held by humanity came from the State as it represented the collective will of the populace. In addition, Hegel rejected transcendent, universal truths. Citing revolution as the only way to improve the human condition, Hegel is regarded by many as an important figure in the development of progressivism.

Hegel’s protégé Karl Marx and fellow traveler Friedrich Engels both applied Hegel’s dialectic to social and economic problems, using Hegelian dialectic as the fundamental logic for a perpetual Communist revolution. While historical idealists such as Hegel emphasized the centrality of social constructs such as the State, historical materialists (Marx and Engels) rejected all such constructs, including language and culture, as superficial and unimportant (i.e., the “superstructure” in their words). The only substantive objects of analysis were “means of economic production” such as feudal, mercantile, industrial—and all of those “structural” realities were to be viewed and transformed only through the lens of class struggle on the grand road to equality through collectivist revolution.

Important to this review as well is Engels’ and Marx’ worship of Darwinism as the master trope of all knowledge: The material world evolved over time on its own, without external (i.e., supernatural) influences.^[3] Ironically, Darwin’s deeply-held racism profoundly influenced Marx’ and Engels’ writings. Communist agitation focusing on race in the postmodern age would have offended Marx and Engels, not to mention Darwin, but the postmodern revolution holds no fealty to the sensitivities of its 19th-century architects. Any inconsistency is allowed as long as the Revolution advances.

While Kant laid the groundwork for the formal negation of spiritual “truth” by arguing that the nonphysical cannot be truly known, Hegel, Marx, and Engels unabashedly rejected “truth,” accepting it only for its usefulness in the “truth<—>antitruth” contradiction in service of moving beyond the need for truth—in service of a war against Christianity. I note all of this to illustrate the insidious devolution of discourse on truth.

The ancient Greeks were noted for their propensity to debate and gave place to dissent. But in more recent times, Europeans and Western Civilization, in general, have ended up marginalizing and then criminalizing debate and dissent altogether, rendering “truth” meaningless and, therefore, unnecessary. Popular culture in the West has driven civil debate and reasoning, so foundational to a vibrant society and the cause of Christ, to the margins. Reasonable discourse on the truths of God’s Word—or any “truth”—is an endangered species. In effect, God isn’t allowed to invite us to “reason together.” God is altogether excluded.

In this way, Satan’s centuries-long drive to criminalize dissent undid the classical virtues of the Greek and Roman civilizations. The same war brought down the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment (which putatively resurrected classical civic and philosophical advances lost during the Dark Ages), and English libertarianism, and a new technocratic Inquisition now threatens to enslave billions to the tyranny of a postmodern global gulag. The stage is now set for “the lie” to replace “the truth” (2 Thess. 2:10-12) and for a battered, darkened world to receive the “man of sin” as a false messiah.

I have focused my review of the war against prophetic truth on post-Enlightenment figures Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Engels. A more realistic and comprehensive description of the order of battle would include many hundreds of names, for the work of philosophers, theologians, and scientists reflect the social milieu in which they live. But the individuals named here stand out like whitecaps on a sea of waves; they can serve as indicators of currents and winds.

And, as James so prophetically wrote regarding those seeking wisdom, anyone not submitting to God in faith “is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed” (1:6). How wonderful God’s promise is: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering” (1:5-6).

That is the only way God’s truth can really be known. The alternative is a wisdom that “descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish,” and it engenders only bitter envy and strife, confusion, and “every evil work” (James 3:14-16). Faith in the promises of God is the only road worth traveling.

“Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace” (James 3:13-18).

———————

Dr. Jeffrey Ady is a retired university professor of Communications and Public Administration, a published author, and served as an ordained minister for 20 years.

Email: KaweahKid@protonmail.com

[1] Heb. yāḵaḥ, “argue together” in the Isaiah 1:18 rendering describes an actual dispute, debate, argument, with the end-state being repentance, redemption and salvation.

[2] Gk. dialegomai, “debate, discuss, dispute”—literally, to speak opposing viewpoints in order to arrive at what is true.

[3] Dr. Jerry Bergman (2021) offers an excellent synopsis of Marx’ and Engels’ reliance on Darwinian evolution as a basis for their collectivist vision: Answers Research Journal 14 (2021): 463–472. www.answersresearchjournal.org/arj/v14/engels_darwin_marx.pdf; accessed Feb. 18, 2023.