“Pleased to Meet You”
In 1968, the Rolling Stones recorded one of their most controversial songs, “Sympathy for the Devil.” I don’t think it was quite what most people took it to be—an effort to make old Scratch a bit more understandable. It was though sort of a rundown of his menacing chaos over the centuries. For example, he was Pilate. He was a Panzer tank commander. He shot JFK.
The song came along, ironically, at the same time many of our nation’s seminaries were trying to gradually erase the supernatural from Scripture.
I’ve told the story many times of the Methodist scholar I engaged with 20 years ago. In one of his published Bible studies, he claimed that Satan as described in the book of Job was not the devil of Christian understanding.
He absolutely was and is.
Yet this urbane scholar, regurgitating nonsense he himself had learned in seminary, was leading a lot of people astray with his teaching that much of the Old Testament is myth or legend.
If we needed more evidence that the devil is a real, ultra-destructive being very much active today, we got it this week from the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington. The couple was to be married, but a “Free Palestine” psychopath shot them to death. Sarah was crawling away when the demon reloaded and emptied another magazine into her body.
Yeah, there’s no devil.
One simply cannot explain the shattering evil that has bedeviled the world since the beginning. These sophisticated scholars insist that believers are imagining things, a bogeyman under the bed, that evil comes from the stray, random person that chooses bad things.
This idiotic worldview hampers our efforts to properly understand reality.
The classic example right now is the encroaching, corrosive anti-Semitism that is murdering Jews everywhere. While the world is indifferent, at best.
It will soon be two years since Hamas demons murdered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 captives. This week I saw a video clip of a Palestinian woman in Gaza shouting that Oct. 7 was the first of many. Shaking her fist, she promised that the Arabs would send their children to murder Jews again and again. In Yemen, Houthi-trained children were screaming the most horrifying, vile threats against Jews. It’s hard to keep up with, and harder to process.
Our world has descended into madness.
And I think this is what Scripture tells us will define the very last days of human history as we have known it. The weird, irrational hatred of Jews globally is the thing that will send it all over a cliff. Slouching Towards Armageddon.
I have long argued that global Media and the political echelon are complicit in the persecution of Jews. Day and night, media rail against Israel. They are tone-deaf to their own hypocrisy. Nick Schifrin, of PBS, said in the wake of the killings:
“In Jerusalem today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the murders on critics of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
As if Netanyahu’s stance isn’t a bullseye remark. PBS itself is a virulently anti-Israel, Pravda-like trash receptacle that trashes Israel on a weekly basis.
We have now reached the stage, however, in which the world no longer is able to step back from the ashes of its own complicity (such as the post-Holocaust world) and actually feel some sense of shame. Today, the anti-Semitism we are seeing is like a rabid wild animal. Unable or unwilling to value human life, we are seeing an SS-like hatred of Jews.
We have entered a new stage of human degradation and filth. The masks are off. The devil knows his time is short and so he is taking as many people with him as he can. He has declared open warfare on the Chosen of God. That he will be roasted for eternity doesn’t seem to deter him at the moment.
Things are going to get worse before they get better. You will have to check yourself, assess your spiritual condition. Stand strong in the Lord. This is what Jesus told us in Matthew 24. Endure to the end. And continue standing with the Jewish people.
The days of Zechariah are upon us.
In “Sympathy for the Devil,” the protagonist, after saying, “Pleased to meet you,” proceeds to try and help the listener understand reality.
“Hope you guess my name…”