Author’s note: This article was originally posted May 20, 2013. I believe the admonition issued here—to “watch” and discern with the armor described in Ephesians 6:12—is all-important because we face today ever-increasing deception by our chief enemy.

Demonic Divide

Dark, spiritual forces in high places are at work. There is no groundbreaking revelation in that statement regarding life in this nation and the world today. However, the true nature of the demonic delusion being foisted upon us is something even the most biblically mature will continue to miss if spiritual antennae aren’t properly attuned.

Additionally, it’s time like no other before to put on the “whole armor,” as outlined by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6:12–18. I perceive a troubling schism developing amongst the brethren. I refer to those who watch—like the Lord commanded (Mark 13: 37)—end-times developments in what many believe are the closing hours of the Church Age.

Reports increasingly come at us of behind-the-scenes activities that appear to be, to say the least, bizarre. I’m talking about things the equivalent of claims/reports of the US government actually planning and carrying out the assassination of John F. Kennedy—and of George W. Bush’s administration being behind the planning and attack on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.

I’m certain you’ve read some of the many mind-boggling reports—all written/presented as if they’re unassailable truth. These accounts spring from fly-on-the-wall sources that give the impression that they personally witness the making of plans to imprison believers or to implant us all with computer chips while we sleep, or…whatever the conspiratorial imagination can conjure.

I will already have angered those who send such email with that word-portrait, no doubt. But before my thoughts on your side of the issue raise your blood pressure with words of anger, “I’ll never send him another article,” please hear me out. There is the other side of the developing schism. It, too, is harmful to the task of being a watcher on the wall.

I’m talking about the mindset that writes off as complete lunacy every report issued by the likes of Alex Jones crossing their computer screens. To fold up the antennae of discernment and simply lump all things that don’t slip smoothly through one’s anti-conspiratorial filter, just might, in my view, constitute a deadly delusion in the making.

The rift I sense developing between those who “watch” during these fleeting days of the age is inflicted by the father of lies himself. It’s all part of the great spiritual wrestling match Paul warns about in Ephesians 6:12. The devil likes to pit one side against the other, and it’s easy for him to do if spiritual armor isn’t the battle gear of choice.

One side of the divide most often sees only collusion of governmental diabolists at every level, thus is understandably accused by the secular world and fellow Christian watchers alike of being “conspiracy kooks.” Those on the other side of the divide too often, because of fear of guilt by association, run away from any talk of collusion of the human conspiratorial kind, sometimes failing to recognize the ways Satan directs his human minions to plot his end-times mischief.

The apostle Paul must have, with his words of Ephesians 6:12–18, been given his inspired thought particularly to give to this generation so near the return of Jesus Christ. Each Christian should daily put on the “whole armor of God.” This, obviously, hasn’t happened, and it likely won’t.

The vast numbers within the Body of Christ are turned inward, or in directions other than watching and yearning for the Lord’s return to put an end to this evil world-system. If we’re honest, we must say that the Body of Christ as a whole today isn’t even pursuing the Great Commission Jesus left to us: to carry the gospel to the whole world and to do what He taught and instructed.

We must not seek out only the strange, secretive, evil doings in the dark underworld of governmental collusion so as to make the findings shocking or exciting. Neither should we think that such collusion doesn’t exist at all and point to all reports as lunacy. Let’s not wrestle violently, angrily against each other, but combine, with reasoned purpose, against our true foe. Here is how to dress for the battle that will surely grow more intensive by the hour as the Rapture of the church approaches:

“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

“Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.

“And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” (Ephesians 6:10-18).

 Wtjames1@swbell.net

“America’s pastime,” as baseball is termed, seems to also properly define this nation’s obsession as we approach July 4, 2026. By that, I mean the obsession with pride.

And I’m specifically referring to gay pride, which is made by the mainstream media today to look like America’s pastime so far as keeping this social perversion constantly in their stories.

Despite baseball’s popularity as a sport in the US, it is but a small part of American life, with most people having little to no interest in the sport. The same is even truer of the gay pride activities in our nation. In fact, a significant majority of the US population would even look at things involved with gay pride as being an abnormality—an obsession that for most of American history been relegated to salacious comportment to be shunned. Yet the mainstream media continues to make this wickedness akin to a religious worship requirement for all of us.

And now the great sport of baseball, which has given us beloved American stories such as that wrapped in the movie The Pride of the Yankees, has become interlocked with the once-shunned aberration of homosexuality now known by the perversion of a word once having an entirely different meaning—the word “gay.”

Baseball itself has, with the infusion of so-called analytics nonsense, become a perversion of what it once was. And I am one who, as a boy, and later while I could still see – Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and all the greats- before being blinded by a hereditary retinal disease – loved every second of every inning.

My uncle and aunt used to take me to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis to see ol’ Stan the Man Musial and the Cardinals—on Sundays. This was a thing my mom opposed because Sundays were to be for Sunday school and church, not sports activities that took me away from Seventh Street Bible Tabernacle in Pekin, Illinois. But she sometimes relented because I was “the only child” those almost eighty years ago, and her brother insisted I see his favorite team. (Thanks, posthumously, Uncle Jesse and Aunt Deloris!)

Baseball now has, in my blind guy way of “seeing,” become unrecognizable. The analytics, to me, are nothing but wokeness foisted upon the sports world. It is political correctness, a thing that has been used to help change America into being also unrecognizable in comparison to the 1940s and 1950s when I went with my uncle and aunt to see the Cardinals.

But it is much more than that. It is prophetic stage-setting for the biblical description of the time of Tribulation Jesus Christ described through the prophet John in the book of Revelation. And the evil intrinsic to this change from America’s Judeo-Christian conception is ensconced within one of two pillars of Satan’s attack to make the change happen.

The two pillars are found in the Apostle Paul’s “perilous times” warning of 2 Timothy 3.

Paul prophesied that, in the last days, perilous times will come. The one term he gives in that prophecy regarding the evil today is wrapped in the statement: “For men shall be…without natural affection.”

The first of these two pillars of evil we see full-blown today is abortion, when mothers let their children be murdered in their wombs, and the second is homosexuality, which God’s Word calls “unnatural” and “an abomination.”

This wickedness represents “without natural affection.” And the current powers that be in Major League Baseball are in the middle of the attempt to change the national pastime into perilous times like Paul described.

Their going along with the gay pride evil, by strong-arm urging all the MLB teams to wear the rainbow caps to show support for that perversion, tells where this generation places us within these perilous times:

California State Senator and rabid gay activist Scott Wiener is the epitome of a typical woke cry-bully. He is perhaps best known as an advocate for the “kink community” and his defense of gender treatments (hormones and sex change surgeries) for children. He is also a militant supporter of sexualized LGBT propaganda in public schools…

[Senator Wiener’s words:]

“On San Francisco Giants Pride Night — also the tenth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre — several players defaced their Pride caps with a biblical passage that has been hijacked by homophobes to ‘take back’ the rainbow from LGBTQ people. The players could have displayed this passage any night of the year but chose to do it only on Pride Night.

The Giants, sadly, took no action in response, which is inconsistent with the Giants’ longstanding support for our LGBTQ community. Major League Baseball then warned the players that MLB rules bar defacement of uniforms. The Giants should publicly commit to enforcing rules around uniform defacement and should not effectively create a homophobia exemption to those rules…”

The state senator acts as if the players broke some kind of law. Baseball club rules are private business arrangements, not statutes that require the frantic complaints of a homosexual Karen. That said, Wiener’s response to this event is quite revealing.

Biblical scripture references are not “defacement,” at least not of anything sacred. But to Wiener, the act is the same as if someone burned a Bible or a Koran. The woke seething over such a minor thing makes it clear that the LGBT movement is not a civil rights movement; that ended decades ago. Today, the LGBT movement is a political supremacy movement, and prominent athletes have every right to openly oppose it.

The pride event featured a number of LGBT promotions, including 10 same-sex married couples renewing their vows before the first pitch (what this has to do with baseball is unclear). Interestingly, the crowd turnout for Pride Night games has been crashing in the past couple years. (“Democrat Politicians Seethe after Baseball Players ‘Deface’ Pride Night with Bible Verses,” Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, RR News June 18, 2026)

The three pitchers on the San Francisco Giants team who had placed Bible Scripture on the Gay Pride caps undoubtedly are in for persecution in these perilous times. But bless them for standing against the perversion of God’s lawful righteousness. The Lord’s pride is no doubt upon these athletes, one of whom had the Genesis 19 verses reference on his cap. (Genesis 19:1-25).

Here is the bottom line of that story of God’s judgment and wrath:

“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground” (Genesis 19:24-25).

Pray that America awakens from continuing down the same path as Sodom and Gomorrah.

Wtjames1@swbell.net