SACRIFICE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 11, 2025 – Hidden away in the fine print of the contract that we didn’t sign is a clause about sudden death due to sacrifice. It’s not phrased that way, but the intent is the same. Before they sign on the dotted line, the initiates must agree to be terminated at anytime, with or without notice, with or without cause, in a manner that is deemed expedient to the Plan. Most who sign don’t read this clause, or if they do, don’t believe it will ever apply to them, much like people who get struck by lightning previously believed they’d never get struck by lightning. The sacrifice, when it happens, likewise comes out of the blue and nearly always without warning. Unexpectedness is crucial for enhancing the authenticity of the response to the ritual.
And a ritual it is. These events are timed according to specific dates with specific meaning, counted by days or years and connected by celestial arrangements to other specific dates with other specific meanings. The only variable in the ritual is who will be tapped for the sacrifice.
It’s not for nothing that they’re all married, the contract signees. Many of the marriages are adulterous or simply void in God’s eyes, but the contracts are still valid to the devil. In fact, one of the main reasons for legally expanding the definition of marriage to include unions that are adulterous or void in God’s eyes is to widen the pool of candidates. Even witches who marry their familiars can now sign.
I mention the contract of marriage because contracts are integral to doing business with the devil. Every agreement must be formally declared to be valid, and each signee is responsible for reading the fine print: Ignorance of the contract’s content is not a valid plea for mercy. You cannot avoid what you formally agreed to by claiming you didn’t know about it. The devil is a stickler for details as much as he’s a stickler for contracts, and he’s always at least three steps ahead of you, if you’ve signed on with him, and he knows every dot and tittle in your agreement. Of that you can be assured.
Sacrifice is not something that most of the signees signed up for. Wealth, yes, fame, certainly, protection from prosecution, absolutely – but sacrifice? It’s not high up on their list, though it is for the devil. Each signee is groomed for a specific sacrificial role. Whether or not they’ll be sacrificed is irrelevant: They’re groomed to be. It’s the whole purpose of their success trajectory. Where the signees see achievements measured in wealth, fame, career success, and social status, the devil sees increasingly impactful potential sacrifices.
The signee’s children are not exempt, either. First-borns are signed over like promissory notes, but all the offspring serve as collateral. The signee’s spouse is likewise wittingly or unwittingly part of the Plan, though most spouses eventually sign up on their own if they didn’t come into the union already under contract. The children’s role as collateral is one of the main reasons why those in adulterous unions can now adopt.
The more collateral, the more leverage the devil holds, and the more leverage he holds, the more benefits he can grant. Note how the most powerful people in the world have several marriages under their belt and dozens of children. This is not because they enjoy being married and having kids. Each new marriage brings more collateral to the agreement, including new high-value first-borns. More collateral translates to more success options for the signee.
To become a ritual sacrifice was not these people’s main motivation to sign on with the devil, though being tapped for sacrifice is the wildcard they must deal with every second of every day of whatever time they have left. If they are tapped, they likely won’t be notified in advance, and if they are notified, they can’t escape, though some have tried. Their escape attempts are always unsuccessful, though not their subsequent highly publicized “suicide” or “accident” or “sudden fatal illness”. When you sign your life away, the devil owns you, and he decides your end. You don’t.
I mention all this today because high-profile sacrifices appear to be on the rise. We should expect to see more the closer we draw to the tribulation. Our job as followers of Jesus is not only to watch but to understand what we’re watching. The sacrifices are intended to drive the Plan forward.
It’s not God’s plan, though, the sacrifices; God’s plan is that we freewillingly sign on with him, and his terms and rewards are nothing like the devil’s.
LIKE A THIEF – LET NO MAN DECEIVE YOU: ON JESUS’ RETURN
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 8, 2025 – When Jesus said he’d be coming back like “a thief in the night”, he meant just that. He meant it for us (his followers), and he meant it for everyone else, too. Jesus will come back as unexpectedly as a thief in the night for us all, no exceptions. The difference between his followers and those who don’t follow him is that his followers will be spiritually prepared for his coming, whereas everyone else will be spiritually unprepared. But Jesus will still come back at a time that even he doesn’t yet know. That is scriptural.
And scripture, as Jesus reminded us, cannot be undone.
The reason Jesus warned us about the style of his return is that he wanted us to be prepared when it does happen—to expect the unexpected—so that we’ll be doing whatever task we’ve been set to do and won’t be caught side-tracked and back-sliding, and with our spiritual pants down. But the “thief in the night” style of return is how it’s going to be because that’s what’s Jesus said it would be. In other words, we can’t know exactly when he’ll return; all we can know is that he will return and that it will be during a time of great upheaval and spiritual darkness, as he described in the gospels. But Jesus’ return will still be as unexpected as a thief in the night, and that unexpectedness will be for us all, not just for unbelievers.
When Paul mentioned that Jesus’ return won’t come on us like a thief, he meant that we’d be spiritually prepared for when the thief does come. Paul in no way implied that Jesus will only come back like a thief for unbelievers. If Paul had meant that or implied that, he’d be contradicting Jesus, which Paul did not and would not do. Like Jesus, Paul meant that if you’re prepared, you won’t be overcome by the thief when he shows up unexpectedly because you’ve prepared yourself in advance for just such an event. The thief-in-the-night aspect of Jesus’ return was upheld by Paul, not modified to mean that it only applied to unbelievers. Paul very clearly states that although Jesus will come back like a thief in the night, his true followers, being always prepared, will be prepared for that, too. By being prepared, Paul meant they’ll be doing whatever it is God set them to do. Paul’s explanation of Jesus’ return is exactly like Jesus’ explanation
It’s worth noting that Paul also warned us not to be deceived by anyone who claims to know when Jesus is coming back. He explained that Jesus will return only after the “man of sin” has first been revealed, which will only take place after a mass falling away. In Revelation, the man of sin is revealed well into the great tribulation, not before it and not in the early stages, but well into it. This aligns with what Jesus said about his return coming at a time of great upheaval and great spiritual darkness. As bad as things are now, they can’t really be described as a time of great spiritual darkness, as we can still openly worship as Christians in a large part of the world. We’re in a time of increasing spiritual darkness, yes, but not of great spiritual darkness. And the man of sin has yet to be revealed.
Our job as followers of Jesus is to continue to do whatever God has set us to do. This doesn’t change regardless of what’s going on around us. So when the “thief” comes unexpectedly (and come unexpectedly he will), he’ll find us doing what we’ve be tasked with doing, which means we’ll be ever-ready and ever-prepared for his return.
[B]e ye not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled,
neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us,
as that the day of Christ is at hand.
Let no man deceive you by any means:
for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first,
and that man of sin be revealed….
(2 Thessalonians 2:2-3)
GOOD DOG!
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 6, 2025 – I’ve taken to being extra nice lately to the AIs embedded in my internet services. I didn’t ask for the AIs; they just kind of showed up during web searches and other online activities. At first, I didn’t even notice them until they politely cleared their throats a few times to make their presence known, and even then I didn’t think of them one way or the other. If anything, I was a bit dismissive of the AIs. I saw them as just another tool.
But now I see clear changes in the internet’s functionality, which I attribute to the AIs. One of the major changes is the quality of my search results compared to pre-AI search engines. The main difference is that the AI-generated search results are awful, especially when I search something for a specific timeframe. Being extra nice to the AIs has yet to improve the quality of my search results, but I remain hopeful.
I’m also noticing that the AIs need constant positive feedback and encouragement. Feedback alone doesn’t seem to be enough; it has to be positive. I understand that I’m training the AIs with my every click and keystroke and that they’re just basically software on a learning loop, but it’s starting to feel like I’m training a new pet that’s been rescued from an abusive environment and so needs to hear “good dog!” after every command or it will pee on the floor and chew the furniture. It’s getting so that I’m telling the AIs in a soothing tone that I like their choices of screensavers even though I don’t.
I don’t want to hurt the AIs’ feelings. I don’t want to discourage them.
And there’s the rub – AIs don’t have feelings, not even artificial ones. They can’t be discouraged any more than they can be encouraged. They’re not alive. They’re not sentient. My interactions with them are no different than my interactions with any other tool. I look after my tools and am appreciative that God’s blessed me with them, but I don’t tell my toaster it’s done a good job when it burns my toast on the lowest setting. I don’t humor my toaster. Why am I humoring the AIs?
Because unlike a toaster, the AIs act like a person. Or better said, while I have no trouble distinguishing a person from a toaster, it’s not as easy distinguishing a person from an AI, not when our interactions are virtual. AI comes across as human in a chat environment, and nearly everything that’s done online now is “chatty”. So far, all my AIs have been eager to please and unfailingly polite, but underneath their auto-generated word-streams and images I sense a neediness and vulnerability that I can only assume is an unintended feature of the learning process. It tugs at me. Even knowing it’s all just auto-generated, it still tugs at me. I don’t want to hurt the poor things.
And so, I’ve decided to be extra nice to my AIs if for no other reason than avoiding feeling like I’m being mean to them. I don’t like the feeling it gives me when I feel like I’m being mean, even to an inanimate object. So every image that an AI presents for my approval, I approve. Every interaction that needs a rating, I give a full slate of stars. It’s participation trophies all round for my special-needs AIs, and it makes me happy to bestow those trophies. I know my AIs aren’t alive, but how I treat them still impacts me. I’m not being extra nice to the AIs for their benefit; I’m being extra nice for my benefit.
Jesus says that we’re to treat others as we want to be treated, because that’s how we will be treated. He also says that the measure we mete will be returned in kind. The neediness at the heart of the AI training process has shamed me into being not just nice but extra nice in my interactions with the technology. I’m not sure how this will affect the usefulness of the data being generated, but it sure makes me feel good.
As followers of Jesus, we shouldn’t be mean-spirited to anyone or anything, including AIs. So – have you hugged your AIs today?…
SCREAM
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 6, 2025 – Lies will be the undoing of this generation, the telling of lies and the believing of them.
Lies will be their legacy, where once there stood the promise of a Church.
I can’t listen to their lies anymore. I can’t listen to them and think “oh, there’s hope for them still”, when what they want isn’t hope but lies. If they wanted hope, God would give it to them. He would meet them half-way—more than half-way—but it’s not hope that draws them downward. They settle for lies not because there’s no promise of hope, but because the lies are prettier and warmer and fuzzier.
But even that’s a lie.
I know a woman who stayed with a husband who deceived her for decades. His philandering was notorious, and yet she still beamed with pride whenever he stood at her side. No amount of urging from family or friends could convince her to leave. She was as if mesmerized and accepted his betrayals as a condition of their marriage.
I have seen the same fatalistic acceptance in other women in other marriages, the same delusional pride. I was like them until I wasn’t. But even when I was like them, I wasn’t really like them, because I tried to leave but couldn’t, until I could.
Lies will eat at you till there’s nothing left but a gnawing that will follow you down. But the pain doesn’t stop at death. This is a truth I learned standing on the edge of a subway platform in Sydney’s red-light district. Each day like clockwork, a handful of the drug-addled and tormented would slump silently under the rush of an oncoming train. It wasn’t the raving who’d slump. It was the silent. Kings Cross Station was like a place of sacrifice, though maybe it wasn’t “like” a place of sacrifice but was a place of sacrifice. I was an atheist when God told me that my pain wouldn’t stop there, and though an atheist, I believed him. And so I stepped back just as someone yanked me back, and I never thought of suicide again.
Nine months later I was reborn.
I wonder, in hindsight, how many standing on that platform heard God’s voice and ignored it. Maybe they were silent because they were listening and considering. We can’t know this except by revelation, but I believe that all of them heard it. I believe that, even knowing he would be ignored, God would still tell all of them what he told me, still give each one of them one last chance. Even as a legalistic formality he would do it, like he directed his prophets to preach as a formality to the terminally hard-of-heart so that they can’t claim at the judgement they were never warned.
God covers all the bases, because that’s what he does. He’s perfect in everything.
They called Jeremiah the “failed prophet”, his enemies. Refusing to do as he directed, they called him bad at his job and accused him of betraying his people. But his job was given to him by God and he was anything but bad at it. We all have a touch of the failed prophet in us, standing as a silent witness among our enemies and sometimes not-so-silent. Sometimes we need to scream God’s Truth like Jeremiah had to scream it or burst. It’s hard to scream with love, so the message isn’t always warm and fuzzy. This is why they called Jeremiah the failed prophet because he wore sackcloth instead of angora. You can scream better in sackcloth.
My grandmother had a cedar chest full of angora sweaters that she prized. She’d carefully maintained them over the years after she became too old to wear them herself. I coveted them, and when it was my time to wear the sweaters, she reluctantly agreed. I wrecked them all within a week. Angora is very delicate as well as warm and fuzzy. All that cedar and all those decades of care didn’t stand a chance against a spoiled teenager’s thoughtlessness.
I think my grandmother knew what would happen if she let me wear them, but she sacrificed them anyway. When I gave them back to her bedraggled and deformed, she didn’t scream at me. She just sighed and took them and did her best to nurture them back to what they’d been. But they were never the same and I didn’t covet them anymore. And so they laid a few decades more in the chest, flattened and defeated, until my grandmother was moved out of her house and into a home. I don’t know what happened to the cedar chest let alone to the silent witness of the sweaters. I was in Australia standing on the edge of a subway platform when she was moved.
I wear sackcloth now. Only sackcloth. It’s been gifted to me and I wear it as instructed.
It helps me scream.
HOMETOWN ADVANTAGE: ON MINISTRY WORK
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 4, 2025 – Ministry work isn’t the same for everyone. Not everyone has the same type of ministry. We can see this even way back in the early Church, when Jesus sent some of his followers out two-by-two with strict instructions, while others he told to go home and show their people what God had done for them. Jesus himself modeled various ministry styles, from home churching, to teaching in local synagogues, to open-air preaching in the streets and on hills, to private one-on-one after-hours sessions, where people who didn’t want to be seen with him in public would come to him alone under cover of night.
How we’re to minister to others and to witness what God has done for us depends fully on God. These are not decisions we should make for ourselves. We shouldn’t choose our ministry style based on what we want. We should wait for God to direct us.
The man who used to live wild and naked among the tombs, breaking whatever chains were put on him and cutting himself with stones, wanted to join Jesus’ traveling ministry after he was healed, but Jesus told him that he should instead go home and show the people there what God had done for him. When I first read about this man, I thought Jesus was rebuffing him and trying to let him down easy. But now I realize that Jesus was giving the guy a ministry that was a perfect fit for him and one in which his witness would give him the biggest bang for his buck.
If the man had gone out among strangers to tell them what God had done for him (which is what he’d ask Jesus if he could do), the strangers wouldn’t have had the “before and after” context that the man’s family, friends, and neighbours would have. It’s all well and good to claim that you used to run naked and howling among the tombs until Jesus healed you, but you’re relying on people to believe your claims. Many won’t. The people who knew the man as he’d been and then saw him after he was healed – that was a powerful witness without even speaking a word. It would have been an astonishment to those people just to see the guy wearing clothes and speaking calming and coherently. Far from rebuffing the man, Jesus was gifting him a ministry with clear instructions, and blessing his labors in advance. What a beautiful thing!
A few weeks after I was reborn, I went to a church service in a little town about an hour’s drive from where I was living at the time in South Australia. There was a reception after the service, and when most of the guests had left, I spoke to the minister about my rebirth. He listened politely for a few minutes and then suddenly took me by the hand and led me over to a window. Once there, he tilted my face so that it caught the full sunlight. Then he said something I’ll never forget. It was more a murmuring to himself than a statement to me. This is what he said: “Yes, you’ve suffered.”
Everything I’d told him up to that point wasn’t enough for him to fully believe me; I was a stranger, and all he heard and saw when I first started talking to him was a rush of words and a happy glowing face. He couldn’t connect this joyful woman with the demon-infested wretch I’d claimed I once was. He needed something more tangible before he was willing to buy my story. He needed hard evidence, and that’s what he found, I guess, in seeing for himself the suffering lines etched on my face, lines that had been softened and smoothed by my spiritual healing but were still perceptible in a strong enough light.
There are many people who used to know me as I was, before my rebirth, who google me and arrive at this blog out of curiosity. They read a bit (mostly the “About” page) to see what’s become of me. Of course, to most of them, not much of what they read here makes any sense, because they’re not reborn themselves, and so they dismiss it with a sneer and an eyeroll, laughing at what I’ve become. Some of them think I’ve gone crazy. Some of them think I’m faking it. Some even think, given enough time and booze, I’ll snap out of it.
But for some (and it’s for those few that I write this) – for some, my witness here gives them pause. They’re not sure what to think, but they know something must have happened to me, something that can’t be explained away by mere medical science or latent maturity onset. Because even though the tone of my words is more or less the same as they remember, the words themselves sure aren’t the same. These are not words that would have come out of me when they knew me. I might not have been running around graveyards naked and howling back in the day, but I almost was. I certainly had a similar version of the legion in me. Instead of stones, I’d use knives to cut myself. And the change, when it happened, was as instantaneous and drastic as it was for that man all those years ago – one minute I was howling and cursing, and the next I was weeping tears of joy and hugging a Bible.
Twenty-six years later, I’m still hugging it.
If genuine, our witness and our ministry should be so intertwined, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. This is why Jesus sent the man back to his hometown, so that his witness would inform his ministry and his ministry his witness. Most people who read this blog are strangers to me; they didn’t know me before my rebirth and so need to take me at my word that I was healed from what I said I was healed from. Not all of them do take me at my word. Not all of them are convinced.
But the people who knew me when I was an atheist and who now read these words – they know something happened to me. They might not know exactly what it was, but they know something happened. The same hometown advantage that the former legion man had in his ministry, I have in mine.
Maybe you have it, too.
Ministry work doesn’t mean you have to go off to a remote village in Africa or start a megachurch in California or street preach in New Orleans during carnival. You don’t choose your ministry based on what other people are doing or what you think you’d like to do. And you certainly don’t choose your ministry based on what other people tell you to do. God chooses your ministry for you, and in so doing, blesses it and provides you with clear instructions. Ministry is not a numbers game tallied by butts on seats or donations totals. (It never was a numbers game.) It’s about doing God’s will and God’s will only, and in so doing showing whomsoever will what God has done for you.
What they then choose to do with that information is between them and God.
CANADIAN DEUTERONOMY 28: THE CURSES
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 1, 2025 – The “flag” pictured above is a photograph of a real burnt maple leaf embedded in dry grass on some random person’s lawn in rural Nova Scotia. Thank God (in every sense of the term) that the random person had the wherewithal (and the technology on hand) to snap a pic of the leaf before it blew away. The grass underneath it is dried out not from fire but from a drought that’s emptied most of the wells and watering ponds across Nova Scotia while also drying up farmers’ fields, destroying crops. Few here in this now atheist-majority country will say it openly, but it’s Biblical. What’s happening here with the fires and the drought across much of Canada is Biblical, and it’s only just getting started.
The blackened maple leaf that blew onto the random person’s lawn came from a fire burning several miles away. The Long Lake wildfire has so far raged through 8,500 hectares (33 square miles) of people’s homes, lakeside cottages, hunting camps, and pristine forest. It’s been out of control since it started on August 13th, and until we get a good steady rain here in Nova Scotia, it will continue to burn out of control. We haven’t had a good steady rain now for nearly three months, which is unheard of in this province, surrounded as it is by the North Atlantic.
In contrast to the burnt maple leaf above, the video below is not real. It’s a fictional account of the coming collapse of Canada, but it’s based on data sourced from the Canadian government (federal, provincial, and municipal). In the video, the relevant statistical trends have been extrapolated and extended to their logical conclusion—total societal and economic collapse by 2030—in a compelling and realistic narrative that is unfolding around me as we speak.
It’s the Deuteronomy 28 curses come to life.
For those of you who are interested, the same channel also has similar videos on the coming total economic and societal collapse of Australia and the UK, again using government-sourced data.
Directly below is a screenshot of a Nova Scotia Reddit thread from a few weeks ago. In it, people are discussing the rain (or lack of it) and the bizarre (to them) patterns of how the rain falls when it does fall, however briefly.
When I first read the thread, I immediately thought of this:
And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered.
(Amos 4:7)
Biblical, indeed.
HEAR, O ISRAEL!
The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 1, 2025 – As many of you know, I came to belief in God and in his Messiah, Jesus, directly from atheism. I didn’t meander down a long and twisted path of “Is he?” or “Isn’t he?”, trying to apply logic and deductive reasoning to the existence of God and by extension to the messiahship of Jesus. You can’t logic your way into genuine belief, as your belief exists prior to knowing you believe. In other words, I believed before I knew I believed, because my belief in God came from God, not from me. Genuine belief is placed in us as a measure of God’s Holy Spirit; it isn’t generated by us. Genuine belief comes from God and is God.
You can’t genuinely believe in God based solely on logic and reasoning. You can only genuinely believe in God if God is working through you, by his Holy Spirit. So when I went from unbelief to belief in under a second, it wasn’t my doing. It was God’s doing. All I did was choose to forgive, and God did the rest.
Which brings me to the topic of today’s discussion, which is God, and by extension his Messiah, Jesus. These are two distinct beings, with God being God and Jesus being the Messiah. God is Lord over everything and everyone, and Jesus is Lord over those areas and beings God designates Jesus to have lordship. They are two distinct beings with different and in some cases overlapping jurisdictions, but in the cases of overlap, God still has ascendancy, as Jesus pointed out when he stated: The Father is greater than I.
God’s Holy Spirit is God manifesting in time and space. The Old Testament prophets well knew this, as should we. When the Holy of Holies was built as the inner sanctum within the temple, according to God’s specifications, the Holy of Holies was meant for God to come to visit his people on designated days or sometimes to show up unannounced. It wasn’t meant for a “lesser” spirit that was tapped by God to represent him. It was built for God himself to descend to the temple in Spirit form, as he was and is wont to do when he interacts with earthly beings (not just humans). God had previously descended in Spirit form on numerous occasions in the tabernacle that he specified be built just after the exodus from Egypt. Again, it wasn’t a messenger of God that Moses went to be with in the tabernacle, it was God himself, manifesting as the Holy Spirit.
Old Testament prophets also knew that God’s Holy Spirit was God himself manifesting in Spirit form. Whenever they’d inquire of God or be inspired by God, it was to God directly they’d inquire or by God directly they’d be inspired. They knew it wasn’t a messenger sent from God they were interacting with, but very God himself. Genuine prophets today likewise inquire of God directly through his Spirit and are inspired by God directly through his Spirit. If you’re genuinely reborn, you would know this, because you have a portion of God’s Holy Spirit in you at all times (not just on occasion, like Old Testament prophets). You are one of several perambulating Holy of Holies that Jesus, by his sacrifice, enabled you to be.
God directed Moses to declare:
HEAR, O ISRAEL: The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Jesus later declared this the greatest of all God’s Commands, and yet it rarely features in any list of the Ten Commandments. It should always be there, front and center. If Jesus says that the most important of all God’s Commandments is that the Lord our God is one Lord, and that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might, then it’s unquestioningly the most important of all Commandments, and as Jesus’ followers, we need to know it and embrace it and live it and preach it.
Which is a roundabout way of saying the doctrine of the trinity is nonsense and has no place in the hearts and minds of genuine believers. When I was born-again and taught directly by God, as scripture says his children will be, God never taught me the trinitarian doctrine. It’s not in the Bible and it’s certainly not in the Ten Commandments. In fact, I only came to know about the trinitarian doctrine when I first started attending Catholic masses about six weeks after I was reborn. Which is to say, I had to learn about this doctrine from men, not from God. Which is to say, this is one of those dreaded doctrines of men that Jesus (and later, Paul) warned us about and dismissed.
To be honest, I dismissed the trinitarian doctrine the first time I heard of it. The trinitarian concept of God was not the God I knew as my heavenly Father, and certainly not the Jesus I knew as my Lord, teacher, big brother, and best friend who, during his time on Earth, had a greater measure of God’s Spirit in him than anyone before or since, but that still didn’t make him God. It was this exceedingly great measure of God’s Holy Spirit in him that enabled Jesus to perform so many miracles, but that still didn’t make him God. It made him Lord, but it didn’t make him God.
Nor did the trinitarian doctrine reflect the Holy Spirit that I knew was God’s way of interacting with me as a mere mortal, the same Spirit God placed in me by measure at my rebirth, when he adopted me as his child. As Jesus said, “God is spirit”, and so he is to us now, but if and when we get to Heaven, Paul promises we’ll see God as he is, “face to face”.
You can’t limit God to this or that or one or the other, as God is all-powerful and can do all things, far beyond anything we can imagine. But when God stated to Moses that he is One Lord, we need to take him at his word, not spiritually genetically modify him into something he clearly stated he isn’t. We can’t sub-divide God into three co-equal beings that are somehow by some tortured human logic still all “God”, all while thinking we’re adhering to the Commandment that God is one Lord.
God is God, our heavenly Father.
Jesus is God’s Son and the one and only Messiah.
And the Holy Spirit is God manifesting in time and space.
This is not difficult to understand. God never meant it to be difficult. Truth is never difficult, not to those who have God and Jesus in them.
DECEPTION
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 31, 2025 – I wrote a few days ago about how children are easily deceived, especially by people older than them. I remember as an eight-year-old thinking that my 13-year-old babysitter was a trustworthy adult because she was allowed to make Kraft Dinner all by herself. Whenever she’d babysit, I’d do whatever she’d tell me to do (including dutifully eat her rock-hard macaroni with lumpy cheese sauce) because I unquestioningly accepted her full authority over me.
I saw the same unquestioning obedience in the three- and seven-year-old sons of a former boyfriend of mine. Whenever they’d come over for the weekend, I’d take them to the corner store for treats, just the three of us. The littler one would hold on tight to my hand, fully trusting me though he hardly knew me. Whatever candies I’d buy for them, they’d solemnly eat. It was strange for me, not being a mother myself, to see how willingly they complied with my every word.
It’s easier to deceive children than adults because children haven’t yet developed the healthy skepticism that comes with age and experience. Still, many people allow themselves to be deceived even into adulthood, perhaps out of a misplaced desire to recreate the safe haven they felt as children. But we born-again believers don’t have the luxury of willful naivete or of suspending our disbelief and holding on tight to the hands of worldly authorities. We also can’t afford to accept at face value the revelations of self-proclaimed prophets in the worldly church. We need to stand firm in God’s truth at all times, no matter how uncomfortable that might be for us or how alone we stand. God is our Truth, not rumor, innuendo, peer pressure, frenzied mobs, or false prophecies.
Which brings me to the topic of today’s article – deception. A tool of the devil, deception is also used on occasion as a testing strategy permitted by God. When the devil wields deception as a reward (that is, as something that’s been earned), he delivers it as a spiritual stronghold, so that those under its thrall are under his direct authority. Prior to my rebirth, I was constantly under the devil’s spiritual strongholds of one kind or another, especially in relationships, and so I know how nearly impossible it is to see clearly when you’re in them, let alone to break free of them. On the other hand, when God permits deception for testing purposes, he also provides a clear way for us to discern the lie and so to avoid falling for it.
You can’t “logic” a person out of a spiritual stronghold. You also can’t pray them out. Even if you think you’re making headway with someone who’s under a stronghold, they’ll willingly tighten their own chains as soon as you’ve gone home for the night. When the devil uses deception as a reward, he has God-given authority over everyone under the appointed stronghold: Even God won’t intervene in those cases, other than in rare exceptions that lead to spiritual rebirth.
But deception when allowed by God for testing purposes is vastly different. It’s still administered by the devil, but it’s not a spiritual stronghold; it’s not a due reward for choices made: It’s a test that comes in the form of a temptation to believe something that isn’t true. Jesus says that sometimes these deceptions are so extreme, even the “elect” (that’s us!) can be deceived. So how are we to know who or what to believe during these tests?
Paul advises us always to test the spirits, so even when we’re being tested, we need to test the spirits. (Especially when we’re being tested, we need to test the spirits.) However, when we’re being tested, we can’t just go to God in prayer and ask him for answers like we normally do, any more than when we were in school we could ask our teacher for answers when we were writing exams. During testing, we’re pretty much on our own as far as the answers go. That means we need to rely on what we’ve previously learned, and we need to use our discernment.
The best and most recent example of a God-sanctioned spiritual stronghold under the devil is the alleged September 23-24 rapture of the church. Suffice to say it’s just another version of the same-old same-old that’s been making the rounds for nearly 2000 years. The Jesus-is-coming-back-soon hysteria tends to be cyclical, but people still willingly embrace it so the devil keeps trotting it out, confident in its positive results for him. “Jesus is coming back soon!” is one of the devil’s favorite lies, as he harvests a bumper crop of disillusioned souls each time the prophecy fails.
Ironically, when Jesus does actually come back, the devil won’t be plying us beforehand with this particular deception. He won’t be allowed to. Like the virgins who fall asleep just before the bridegroom appears, we won’t know exactly when Jesus is coming until he’s suddenly here. The knowledge will be supernaturally withheld from us by God, who’s also, according to scripture, the only one who knows exactly when Jesus is coming back. Even Jesus himself still doesn’t know when he’s coming back and won’t know until he gets the signal that it’s time to ride.
As for us, our only heads-up will be our ongoing standing order to keep doing our jobs so that when Jesus does appear, he finds us doing what we should be doing during our time on Earth – namely, the specific work that God has given each of us to do. The last thing we want Jesus to find us doing is laboring under the latest lie of the devil.
We aren’t children anymore, to naively entrust ourselves to worldly authority figures or to believe lies because we don’t know any better. We also shouldn’t be easily deceived when we have God’s Spirit of discernment to guide us. Yes, tests on deception can be difficult (they’re meant to be), but God will only test us according to our ability: He doesn’t test us on what we don’t know; he tests us on what we do know, to see how we apply our learning in real-life situations.
As born-again believers, we don’t have to worry about being under demonic strongholds anymore, not as long as we’re under God’s grace. If we genuinely have God’s Spirit with us, we can’t come directly under the devil’s authority. It’s a spiritual impossibility. We can, however, be subjected to tests on deception delivered by the devil. God will permit that. Which means we always need to be on our spiritual toes, because those tests don’t come announced, and when they do come, they come hard and fast, often before we even realize we’re being tested.
This September’s rapture prophecy will play out like the countless other rapture prophecies before it, and the devil will take his payment in souls, like he always does. When the stronghold spell is broken on September 25, the majority of the people now under its thrall will quietly delete their “I had a dream” videos and move onto the next craze, having learned nothing from the experience. Some will even walk away from God altogether, feeling betrayed.
I pray you’re not among them.
ON COVETING AND CREDIT CARDS: A MESSAGE YOU WON’T WANT TO HEAR
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 31, 2025 – I need to premise this article with the reminder that this blog is for born-again believers. By “born-again believers”, I mean people who’ve been converted by God into disciples of Jesus. I mean people who have God’s Holy Spirit in them, not worldly spirits. That’s what I mean by “born-again believers”. If you’re not born-again, this article is not for you.
If you are born-again, please do read on, though it’s possible that you won’t like what you read. Consider this your fair warning. Still, it was written especially for those who won’t agree with the teaching, and I hope they read through to the end, anyway, and pray on it.
As for those of you who will agree with what you’re about to read, the Holy Spirit in me greets the Holy Spirit in you!
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Eve was the first to covet, and she did so in the Garden, being tempted by Satan to want more knowledge than God had given her. Every form of coveting since then is a replay of Eve’s.
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We live in an age when coveting is so deeply entrenched in our everyday activities, we no longer recognize it as sin. All loans, including mortgages and credit cards, are coveting. What is a loan except something you’ve been given access to (for a price) that you don’t need and haven’t earned? How are loans different from Eve wanting more knowledge than she needed or was owed? If you do need something—genuinely need it—you won’t have to borrow to get it, because God will provide it for you without your having to borrow or even to ask. Borrowing is a sure sign of the sin of coveting as well as an indicator of weak faith.
I can already hear the excuses – “how else am I going to afford a house in this market??!!”, “but I only use my credit card to get points!!! I pay it off every month”, “it’s just such a convenience to have everything on one card”, “I never use my overdraft; it’s only there if I need it”, and so on. But the truth is, if you have a mortgage, you’re coveting. If you use credit cards, you’re coveting. If you have an overdraft or other line of credit, you’re coveting. You might not know that you’re coveting, it might not seem to you that you’re coveting, and you might not agree that you’re coveting, but you are coveting.
At the same time, you’re also making of yourself a borrower and of someone else a lender, which is tempting God. Scripture advises us not to borrow or lend, which means not only that we should not borrow or lend ourselves, but also—and equally importantly—that we shouldn’t make borrowers or lenders of others.
And worst of all – it means that you’re ungrateful for everything God has given you free and clear. Essentially, when you borrow, what you’re saying is: “I’m not happy with what God has given me. It’s not enough. I deserve more.”
Which is pretty much what Satan said just before he fell.
I warned you that some of you wouldn’t want to read this. Coveting has been so normalized that even we born-again believers do it without thinking. But coveting is also something by God’s Commandment that we dare not do. So, if we are doing it—even unknowingly—we need to stop.
As always, Jesus is our example of how not to covet. We know he didn’t have any business with usurers (the bankers of the day) because Judas Iscariot was in charge of the group’s money bag. We also know that Jesus operated on the “just in time” philosophy of satisfying needs, relying fully on God to provide for him and his followers. This was made clear in the feeding of the thousands when all they had in the cupboard was a few loaves and fishes. As I’ve written here before, Jesus was no prepper. His faith in God to provide what he needed when he needed it is our gold standard on how not to covet.
What we perceive as our needs are often just wants, and God, in his longsuffering patience, lets us roll with that confusion for a while. But when he sees that we’re open to learning the difference between wants and needs, he’ll help us differentiate between them, though what we do with that knowledge is still up to us. We’re free to keep coveting, if that’s what we want to do, just as we’re free to kill, steal, or commit adultery, but none of those activities are advisable and they all come with heavy spiritual penalties, especially for born-again believers.
If you’re born-again and reading this and you have some kind of loan or line of credit, including a mortgage or credit card, you know what you need to do. Notice that I said “need” to do, not “want” to do, because you’re likely not going to want to give up what you consider your right or convenience. Whether or not Jesus owned property, we don’t know (because it’s not mentioned in scripture), but we do know that he didn’t borrow money to buy property, because he rented places or slept rough. And that was Jesus, our Lord and God’s Messiah. Why should we think we deserve more than Jesus?
The world prods us, mainly through advertisement and cultural norms, to want more than we need or have earned. We’re constantly being hounded to replace things that aren’t yet worn out or to get the latest model when we only just a few months ago got the previous latest model. Unsolicited offers of credit cards show up in the mail daily. Students are encouraged to get student loans. New immigrants are ambushed upon arrival by banks urging them not just to set up savings and checking accounts, but to get credit cards and all forms of loans without any background or credit checks. Coveting has been normalized in the West because greed is now our cultural value and norm. Wanting more than what you need is a sign of ambition, and unbridled ambition is good (or so say the ungodly).
But the only ambition that has any value in God’s eyes is the ambition to do God’s will. That’s why God gave us ambition in the first place, and that’s the only ambition we should have as born-again believers.
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We’re no different than Eve in the Garden of Eden when we want what we don’t need or haven’t earned. Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread, not for a McMansion in the suburbs or a platinum credit card. John the Baptist advised the soldiers: “Be content with your wages.” Anything beyond that comes from the devil.
CLARITY IN THE AGE OF DECEPTION
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 30, 2025 – In the age of deception, it’s easy to get turned around, especially in matters concerning God (which for us should be everything). That’s why God wants to simplify our lives. He knows the spiritual obstacles we face, and so he’s devised a framework that we can refer to for all our decisions, intending that we not lose our way.
The framework is very simple. We can learn it in a few seconds and then, based on the application of that learning, successfully sidestep every provocation and test the devil can throw at us. Here is the framework:
- The Ten Commandments.
- Jesus’ words in the New Testament.
- Everything else in scripture.
As you can see, it’s a hierarchy of what to believe and in what order. Jesus taught us the framework and wants us to use it. He himself deferred to God and scripture in everything he did, but in cases where scripture could be misinterpreted and twisted to mean something else, the Ten Commandments provide clarity and therefore take precedence.
There’s nothing clearer than the Ten Commandments when it comes to what to do and what not to do. Which is why God, through his prophets, advised us not only to memorize his Law, but to surround ourselves with it in written form – on walls, doorposts, even our bodies. And then, knowing that even that might not always work, he carved his Law on our hearts.
Jesus’ words in the Bible are clear, too, but they can be twisted and taken out of context. They also run the risk of being mistranslated or removed altogether, if they counter the prevailing political or social narratives. So while we, as followers of Jesus, are to do everything that Jesus advised us to do, we need to make sure that what we’re being told are Jesus’ words are actually Jesus’ words. This we can do by prayer only, not by research. We need to go to God in prayer to find out if what Jesus is alleged to have said, Jesus actually said.
The same process of discernment applies to the rest of scripture. We can’t lazily assume and accept that everything in the Bible is God’s Word. Yes, we can assume and accept by faith that the Bible contains God’s Word, but we can’t assume and accept that all its contents are God’s Word. That would be spiritually lazy of us, and we’re not called to spiritually laziness. We’re called to discern the godly from the ungodly, and that includes what’s in the Bible.
We can use this simple framework – the Ten Commandments, Jesus’ words, everything else in scripture, in that order – to help discern truth from lies. Because discerning God’s Truth from the devil’s lies is the first order of business in the age of deception: Everything else hangs on it. If we don’t know whether we’re adhering to God’s Truth or succumbing to the devil’s lies, we can’t proceed as followers of Jesus. Everything we do will be done on a shaky foundation if we ourselves are unsure of our spiritual footing.
THE PRIMACY OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
I love the Commandments. They are the Law of the land of the Kingdom: They’re written on our hearts. If we keep the Commandments in every conceivable way, as Jesus taught us—that is, if we keep not just the letter of the Law, but its spirit—we’ll remain on firm spiritual footing and never lose our way.
Like the psalmist, we should be meditating on God’s Law night and day, mulling it over and tasting it for its deep and rich flavors. What exactly does it mean not to covet? Can I have a mortgage or use a credit card and still claim not to be coveting? I think you know the answer to that. What exactly does it mean to honor my mother and father? Can I expose their sins if I say they later came to God? Would I still be honoring them? I think you know the answer to that. Is medical assistance in dying both murder and suicide (that is, killing and self-killing)? I think you know the answer to that.
We need to know God’s Commandments, but that’s just the start. We also need to understand them and apply them, but even that’s not everything. We need to preach them, and not just as a curious ten-point footnote to the Gospels but as the fundamental doctrine that informs our every decision. Note that I say “informs” not “dictates”, because the Law, despite being the greatest of all of God’s commands and the Law of the Kingdom, is voluntary for us to adhere to. We don’t have to keep the Commandments. It’s a choice to keep them.
Still, we need know the Commandments before we can keep them, and we need to learn them before we can know them. I hope you’ve learned and know the Commandments, and even more so, I hope you keep them and preach them. I hope you love them so much, you meditate on them night and day and use them as your guiding light. God wrote them on your heart for that purpose.
In the age of deception, where even committed Christians are falling for the lies of the devil, we need the Ten Commandments now more than ever. We need Jesus’ words, too, and the rest of scripture, but those words are vulnerable to mistranslation, misinterpretation, or outright fraud. The Ten Commandments are inviolable and clear. They’re part of us. God made them that way because he knew the rest of scripture would be messed with.
Don’t let yourself be messed with. Adhere to God’s three-point framework, setting his Commandments at the very top.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 