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FROM GOD OR FROM THE DEVIL? A PRIMER ON PROPHECY
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, June 21, 2025 – I wrote recently about the Malachy prophecy of the popes, which I do not believe is from God. However, just because it’s not from God doesn’t mean that some organizations aren’t following it like a script even while publicly denying they’re doing so. Furthermore, just because a prophecy isn’t from God doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It might happen, though it typically doesn’t occur as anticipated and usually unfolds as a deception.
God’s prophecies are foretold well in advance and emblazoned across the heavens for all to see, whereas the devil’s are sequestered in underground caverns and revealed only to a select few. Jesus was famous for fulfilling the requirements of prophecy to a “t”, openly stating (in case anyone had any doubt about what he was doing) that he did what he did in fulfillment of prophecy. He rode into Jerusalem on a colt because scripture foretold that the Messiah would do that. He allowed himself to be anointed with oil by one of the Marys because scripture said the Messiah would be anointed in that way. He even allowed himself to be nailed to a cross because prophecy dictated that the Messiah must be crucified. Jesus did whatever God advised him to do, and God used scripture as a blueprint for his directives to Jesus as well as to everyone else.
But how can we tell if a prophecy is from God or from the devil? Being born-again, we have discernment to varying degrees, depending on the measure of God’s Spirit in each of us. Still, the devil and those who serve him can be tricky, and God permits them to try to trick us, either as a test or as a teachable moment when we fail.
There are a few key characteristics to look for when determining the source of a prophecy. One of the main ones is the timing of a prophecy’s fulfillment. God created time and controls time, just like he controls everything else. He also controls our perception of time and its passage. So, prophecies that have a clear time delineation (like the 42-month reign of the beast mentioned in the book of Revelation, or Satan being bound for 1000 years) cannot and should not be taken at face value, any more than the “half an hour” of “silence in Heaven” that precedes the blowing of the first trumpet should be considered as literally a half-hour. These are perception times only, or time taken in the context of longer or shorter passages of time. Their actual duration will only be known when the prophecies occur. Paul says that a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day when it comes to God and his timing. We cannot literally believe that all time and space were created in six Earth days, or perhaps it was six Mars days, or Jupiter days, or Saturn days?…
Why doesn’t God give us precise times for his prophecies? Does he not know when they’ll occur? Of course he knows; God knows everything. But God also needs to get all his ducks in a row, which requires our patience. He also wants to see our authentic response to situations, and for this he needs the element of surprise. How else can he tell whether we genuinely want what he’s offering or are just saying we want it? Even Jesus didn’t know exactly when his ministry would start, and after it started, he didn’t know exactly when his “hour” (his death) would come; he was only informed a few weeks beforehand, during the transfiguration. He then informed his disciples, though they appeared to dismiss the revelation, not really understanding at the time what Jesus was telling them. God clouded their understanding for a reason, just as he clouds ours on occasion.
Thwarting the devil’s plans is yet another major reason why God keeps the timing of prophecy fulfillment hidden. Imagine if the devil knew in advance the exact hour and day of the start of the Final Judgement. He would use that time to prepare and orchestrate Armageddon-like world-wide disasters (we have the technology to do that now) to trick people into running to him for help. Desperate to survive, they’d be willing to give him anything in exchange for safety, even their souls.
Keeping the precise timing hidden is a hallmark of God’s prophecies, for the reasons listed above as well as others. Conversely, prophecies that come from the devil are generally time-stamped and location-specific because that’s what people want in a prophecy. The devil thrives on giving people what they want, especially when it’s against their best interests. People generally want to feel in control of their lives as much as possible; knowing that an event will occur at a certain time and place gives them the feeling that they’re in control, if only to prepare appropriately for whatever’s coming. The devil exploits this weakness in humans, plying them with false prophecy after false prophecy, with an occasional semi-hit to keep them coming back for more.
The devil’s prophecies are also almost exclusively negative, drawing on the call to darkness lurking within most people’s souls. Just as light attracts light, dark attracts dark, and the darker the revelation, the more people are drawn to it. This is why the dark sections of the book of Revelation are so popular and the “light” sections less well known. Some people read the New Testament not for the Gospel message but for the end-times prophecies on mass destruction. That’s not to say that the book of Revelation comes from the devil; I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that the darker passages garner the most attention, whereas the passages about visions of Heaven are mostly overlooked.
Along with being time- and location-specific and characteristically dark, prophecies that come from the devil have an “off” smell to us born-again believers. People who are not born-again are nose-blind to the “off” smell of the devil’s lies, the way that most voters are nose-blind to the “off” smell of politicians’ promises during an election campaign. To be honest, the smell isn’t something you can logically describe; you just know it when you smell it. Call it discernment; call it intuition; call it a gut feeling – whatever you want to call it, it’s real and it’s accurate.
Keep in mind that the devil’s prophecies can also come to pass; just because prophecies originate from the devil doesn’t mean they won’t happen, though if they do, they tend to happen not quite as anticipated. The prophesied golden age manifests as rule by an iron fist. The proffered fame and fortune manifest as a life of drug-addled wealth-fueled degeneracy surrounded by other drug-addled wealth-fueled degenerates. The promise of immortality manifests as eternity in the lake of fire. So you can’t say the devil didn’t keep his promises; you just didn’t read the fine print and so filled in the blanks with your own hopeful assumptions.
TL; DR: Prophecies form the basis of our hopes and fears for the future. If they’re from God, it’s a slam-dunk that they’re going to happen; we just don’t know exactly when. Prophecies from the devil, on the other hand, are typically time-stamped, feeding our need to know and to be in control of our lives. However, the devil’s prophecies rarely occur, and if they do, they’re never quite as expected in a negative way. To paraphrase Jesus, you can’t get fruit from a thistle. If you want to know what the future holds, stick with God’s promises and God’s promises only.
PRAYER FOR GOD’S CHILDREN
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, June 9, 2025 – God is the consummate father, protecting and watching over his children throughout their time here on Earth. We’re not spiritual latchkey kids, we children of God; we’re not left to fend for ourselves while our heavenly Father is off elsewhere delivering judgement or rescuing stray sheep. No. God is perpetually with us through his Holy Spirit. At no time are we left alone.
For those who love God, his presence is a comfort. For those who hate him, it’s a threat.
And yet, being children—and even with our Father’s constant presence—we’re prone to stumbling into tricky situations, either through our own naivete, our own stupidity, or as a God-mandated test. In other words, we either bring these tricky situations on ourselves by our poor choices, or God will allow them to be brought on us to gauge where we are in our spiritual development. But unless our hour has come (that is, unless it’s time for God to take us Home), our heavenly Father will always intervene to help us in our trials.
God’s intervention can take many forms, depending on the type of danger and our initial response to it. The form it most frequently takes is shielding us, either supernaturally or physically or both, until the danger has passed. God did this most famously for baby Jesus when he was under a death threat by Herod’s kill decree. God also later intervened for Jesus, supernaturally shielding him so that he could walk unscathed (and seemingly undetected) through the enraged mobs at the temple and in Nazareth. These are just a few instances of God’s interventions that are mentioned in scripture, but the truth is that God intervened every day, all day, to protect Jesus, just as he intervenes every day, all day, to protect us.
Being whisked away and kept hidden is essentially the default position of God’s children whenever they face danger, particularly if they haven’t brought it on themselves. For the latter part of his ministry, Jesus basically lived his life on the run, as did the members of the early Church, for whom living in hiding, physically and miraculously, was the status quo. God keeps his children, then as now, either on the run or safely tucked away until the threat had been removed or their hour had come. As we know from the New Testament, being a member of the early Church was essentially a death sentence in some regions—but oh, what a glorious Homecoming! There’s no better way to lay down your life than in full service to God.
As the age draws closer and closer to the prophesied time of the end, we born-again believers should expect a revival of the days when we were hunted, imprisoned, and executed, though truth be told, the hunting, imprisoning, and executing hasn’t stopped for the last nearly 2000 years, even with the state-engineered institutionalization of Christianity. Genuine believers have always been a target if not for ‘permanent removal’ then at least for conversion from spiritual wrongthink, or what the worldly church calls heresy. Inquisitions, which were essentially church-and-state-sanctioned witch hunts of born-again believers who refused to come under the papal yoke, spanned nearly a millennium. And today, if I were to show up in certain Muslim-ruled countries with Bible in hand, I’d be forcibly ejected, imprisoned, or even in some cases stoned to death. We don’t have to wait for the coming of the so-called Anti-Christ to be persecuted; anti-christs have never stopped persecuting the Church since its establishment by Jesus. This is why it’s so crucial to remain always under God’s powerful protection.
In scripture, God promises us that he will never leave us or forsake us, and Jesus adds that he, too, will be right here with us. Both God and Jesus are keeping their promises, but neither of them ever mentioned that we’d have an easy go of it here on Earth, even with their constant presence. Being children of God and followers of Jesus pretty much paints a bullseye on us spiritually and socially, a branding that separates us from those who aren’t children of God or followers of Jesus and makes it socially, politically, and even legally permissible to ridicule and openly hate us. Jesus had to contend with the ridicule and hatred, and he warned us that we’d have to contend with it, too, though it’s a small price to pay for admission into God’s Kingdom on Earth, also known as Jesus’ Church.
Let whoever will mock me. I don’t hear them. It’s just so much background noise that has no meaning or value to me and blends in with all the other meaningless and valueless background noises that form the soundscape of a place that is not my home. Earth was never meant to be our home. It’s a place of testing, a place we’re just passing through, a temporary haven made for us by God but increasingly taken over by forces bent on destroying God’s creation, including us. Yet even amidst the constant noise and progressive encroachment of our turf by the enemy, we have the only peace that matters, thanks to the comforting and perpetual presence of God and Jesus.
There is no time when they’re not with us, whether we’re conscious of it or not. There is no time when they’re not with us, though there will come a time when none of us will be here anymore. God’s final intervention will be Jesus returning in glory with his angels to gather together the last of God’s children and take them Home. Once they’re safely whisked away, God and Jesus will also leave, never to return here again.
May you not be among those left behind. This is my prayer for you – that you not be among those left behind when the last of God’s children go Home.
Amen.
For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavillion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock. (Psalm 27:5)
ON GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, June 9, 2025 – I understand why Jesus started his ministry work by spending 40 days and nights alone in the desert. I also understand why John the Baptist lived most of his life in the wilderness, and why so many prophets throughout the ages have chosen to live alone and in isolation, not just away from the “madding crowd” but from everyone, especially religious people. By “religious people”, I mean those who claim to believe in God but actually only hold to a belief system made up of rituals, recitations, pageantry, creeds – learned behavior, not something that emerges organically from God’s Holy Spirit living in a soul. Holding to a belief system is not genuine worship. All religions are premised on holding to a belief system, which is how you can distinguish genuine faith from religion. People who genuinely believe in and worship God aren’t religious, and their belief is not a system but evidence of the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in them.
I understand why Jesus started his ministry work in total isolation and why John the Baptist and others like him chose to live in the wilderness, not just retreat to it on occasion. The world is a hectic, frantic, and noisy place perpetually at odds with God and constantly reaching out to turn you this way and that, to lure you off the straight and narrow. But as noisy and frantic as the anti-God crowd is, the religious crowd is even more frenetic and shrill.
So many people now claim to be prophets, to be hearing from God—to have a dream or a vision or a word—but it all smacks of self-promotion. From the pope and headliner televangelists all the way down to obscure YouTubers with a handful of subscribers, they’re in it for the money, and if not for the money, for the power, and if not for the money and/or the power, then for their ego, forcing your back against the wall to get you to agree with them. Yet for all their pomp and bluster, they’re not pointing you to God and Jesus, they’re pointing you to themselves and their donations button. That’s one way to know they’re false prophets.
Not everyone’s voice needs to be heard when it comes to God and his Word. God himself is a ‘still quiet voice’, not a pushy one, not a shrill one, and not even one that demands our attention, though no-one deserves our attention more than God. Yes, God does command on occasion, but he mostly invites. He doesn’t push himself on anyone and has never once forced anyone’s back to the wall, demanding they agree with him. Nowhere in scripture do we see God pushing himself on anyone. Jesus didn’t push himself on anyone either, which set him apart from the false prophets and rabble-rousers that thronged the streets and public houses of the dying Jewish state, vying for people’s attention and money.
Yes, I understand why a genuine prophet needs to get away from the racket, because it is a racket in every sense of the term. It was a racket back in Elijah’s day and it’s a racket now. Too bad we can’t deal with the false prophets the way that Elijah did (or better said, the way God did), but that’s not what Jesus wants us to do. Taking our cue, as always, from Jesus, we know just to get away when it’s time to get away.
And how shall we do that? Shall we live like the homeless, brazenly setting up camp on a busy sidewalk or quietly tucked away at the far end of a park? Shall we roam restlessly from place to place, never spending more than a night here or there, or should we hunker down maybe at a monastery and stay long enough to bring a garden from seedling to harvest? Where can God’s children go to get away from it all? Where does God want us to go?
Jesus went to the desert, to wilderness places, to mountaintops. Sometimes he even just walked across large bodies of water, alone. I don’t think the location really mattered; it was the isolation factor that mattered, the solitary factor: the one-on-one time with God. Because that’s what the world wants to take away from you more than anything else – your God-given right to be in God’s presence and spend alone-time with him. They don’t forcibly take that from you; they try to convince you that it isn’t possible or isn’t desirable or simply isn’t for you (and here’s something much better!), but nothing’s better than alone-time with God. You cannot convince me otherwise.
Jesus couldn’t be convinced, either, which is why he was always going off by himself to pray and advising us to pray alone. It’s hard to get alone-time with God when people are hanging around, though it can be done. Jesus did it on the cross.
Moses also famously preferred alone-time with God above all else. He scaled a burning mountain not once but twice, enduring 40 days and nights without food or drink or sleep to be in God’s presence, though I’m guessing it didn’t feel to him like 40 days and nights. That’s how it is when you’re in God’s presence; you lose track of time, or better said, you lose the perception of the passage of time. And when he could no longer go up a mountain to be alone with God, Moses built a tabernacle according to God’s specifications and spent alone-time with God there.
Thanks to Jesus’ sacrifice, we no longer need to go to mountaintops or tabernacles or into designated spaces to be alone with God. We don’t have to stand with our eyes closed or our hands clasped or upraised. Jesus said there’d come a time when such formalities would no longer be required. We can be alone with God—that is, we can pray—anywhere and at anytime.
I always laugh a little bit inside when I read about the “No Praying” restrictions in certain religious sites, like at the Al Aqsa Mosque on the temple mount in Jerusalem where, by law, only Muslims are “allowed” to pray. As a born-again believer, I can pray just walking down the street or sitting on a bus or sometimes even during a conversation. I don’t appear to be praying, but I am. And because I can pray anywhere and at anytime without anyone except God and Jesus knowing I’m praying, I could surely pray at the Al Aqsa if I went there. So I laugh a little bit inside me when I hear about the “no-prayer zones” in Jerusalem and at other sites that are sacred to the world, like abortion clinics. For us, there’s no such thing as no-prayer zones. They simply don’t exist, no matter how many signs are erected or by-laws enacted or police officers assigned to enforce them. We can pray anywhere and at anytime without appearing to pray, and no-one can stop us.
Which leads me to conclude that maybe getting away from it all isn’t always necessary. Sometimes, yes, but not always, not when we can be alone with God even in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Laws against praying don’t apply to those who follow Jesus and his advice on how to spend alone-time with God. It’s one of the many gifts, rights, and privileges God has given to his children, and the world cannot—dare not—intervene.
ON GENUINE BELIEF AND FALLING AWAY
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 30, 2025 – It’s difficult for us, as born-again believers, to hear about people who’ve turned their back on God. I’m talking here specifically about people who once claimed to believe that Jesus was the Messiah and then at some point decided they didn’t believe it anymore. This is not a new phenomenon—people falling away from what they claim to have believed. Jesus himself, during his ministry years, had to deal with people falling away from following him.
For me, as someone who shifted from atheism to belief in an instant, falling away is not something I anticipate ever doing. My belief (as is yours, if you genuinely believe) is a spiritual guardrail and safety harness designed to keep me from falling away. My belief (as is yours, if you genuinely believe) is external to me and separate from me; not something of me but something that’s taken up residence in me. My belief (as is yours, if you genuinely believe) doesn’t come from me; I didn’t self-will it. Temporally, my belief preceded the “I” in “I believe”.
You cannot be born-again and not believe, because genuine belief is a manifestation of the presence of God’s Holy Spirit. Jesus pointed this out when he told Peter that no-one but the Holy Spirit could have revealed to him that Jesus was the Messiah. Genuine belief is a revelation and direct evidence of God’s Holy Spirit working through a believer. You cannot truly believe in God and truly be a follower of Jesus unless God’s Holy Spirit dwells in you, which only happens through genuine spiritual rebirth. People who say they believe but who aren’t genuinely reborn don’t really believe, as their belief is self-generated, self-willed, and doesn’t come from God. Belief that is self-generated, self-willed, and doesn’t come from God is weak and therefore will not last. This is why so many people who claim to believe ultimately fall away.
Genuine belief is not something you have to work at achieving; it’s the state of being spiritually reborn and precedes the consciousness of both the belief and the rebirth. I believed before I realized I believed, just as I was reborn before I realized I was reborn. First came the rebirth and the belief; then came the consciousness of the rebirth and the belief.
The trend of people falling away from God has been accelerating in recent years. Scripture tells us that the trend will continue to accelerate until the only believers left here on Earth will be genuine ones. It’s nearly impossible for us, as born-again believers, to imagine falling away. Most of us are like Peter, insisting that we’d never betray Jesus, though even as the words leave our lips we know we’ll be tested on them. Just like Peter was tested, we’ll be tested, and some of us won’t do so well, just like Peter.
Still, no matter how badly we fail and how spectacular our faceplant, Jesus will be right there with us, offering to pull us back on our feet if we want him to. Like God, Jesus will never leave us or betray us.
May we never leave or betray them.
HOLY NIGHT
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 12, 2025 – If we follow God’s directive for the timing of the Passover (which we need to do as born-again believers), it starts tonight. That means the act of remembrance that Jesus directed us to do in remembrance of him should be done tonight, without fail. When Constantine corralled a group of elites into creating a religion called “Roman Catholicism” in the early 300s AD, he purposely changed the timing of the Passover so that it wouldn’t coincide with the timing of the real Passover, or what he snidely referred to as “the Jews’ Passover”. He didn’t want Catholicism to reflect anything done by the Jews. And so Constantine purposely changed the timing that Jesus asked us to perform the act of remembrance, and it is this changed timing – fake timing – that most Christians adhere to today.
As born-again believers, we need to do exactly what Jesus directed us to do, and what he directed us to do was to keep the Passover as God directed, not as Constantine directed. We need to keep the so-called Jews’ Passover, and that starts tonight.
We keep the Passover because Jesus directed us to keep it, but he also directed us to keep it in a very specific way. We’re to offer up unleavened bread as a token of Jesus’ sacrificial body and wine as a token of Jesus’ atoning blood. How we choose to keep the Passover beyond that is up to us, but it must, by a directive straight from Jesus (who got it straight from God), include the act of remembrance that Jesus showed us. And it must happen on the first night of the Jews’ Passover.
As born-again believers, we’re holy by virtue of the presence of God’s Holy Spirit with us, a Spirit given to us by God at our rebirth that signifies our spiritual adoption by God. When God gave us his Spirit, we became his children. The abiding presence of God’s Holy Spirit with us separates us from everyone else, the way it separated the children of Israel from the heathens around them during their final days in Egypt and their 40 years of wandering in the desert.
We are holy by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit with us, but tonight is the holiest of holies as far as nights go, because tonight we do as Jesus directed: we do it exactly at the time he directed, and we do it exactly in the way he directed. Nowhere else in the gospels does Jesus give us a directive that is so specific in its timing and content. And because the directive is time- and content-specific, it needs to be done exactly as written.
We need to keep the Passover tonight in remembrance of Jesus, as he directed us to do, and we also need to keep it in remembrance of the first Passover, when God, as he’d promised, “passed over” the children of Israel, leaving them unharmed while killing the first-born of every other human and beast in Egypt, sparing none.
This is a profoundly holy night, by directive of both God and Jesus, and it must be kept as such.
ISRAEL 2.0
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 28, 2025 – According to the results of several recent DNA studies, a large and increasing percentage of people today who identify as Jewish are not descended from Biblical Hebrews but from a mish-mash of other peoples, including Eastern Europeans, Iranians, and even Russians. If these results are accurate, it at the very least raises some compelling questions about the validity of claims regarding Jews’ Biblical right, based primarily on genetics, to the so-called Promised Land.
It is not, however, the role of this blog to get involved in geopolitics. Jesus never got involved beyond the odd comment now and then, and so I don’t get involved, either. But he did advise us to watch, and that I do, and what I see in the ebb and flow of the fortunes and misfortunes of the past and present state of Israel is fascinating. The drama never seems to end (although we know it will some day), with Israel perpetually painting itself as the victim perpetually owed special status and reparations of one sort or another. And woe betide anyone who comes against that resurrected state, not because God is fighting its battles, but because the devil is. You don’t want to go up against the devil, because whatever he does, he’s gotten prior permission from God to do, which means that if you fight against the devil you’re essentially fighting against God.
Not a smart move. Not gonna win that war.
Which is why Jesus steered clear of geopolitics. Let the fallen and the worldly duke it out among themselves. We in the spiritual Kingdom of Israel have better things to do.
And we are the spiritual Kingdom of Israel. We are the prophesied remnant whose pedigree is unquestionable. Israel 2.0 is not a geopolitical realm but a spiritual one, and the entrance to that realm is by rebirth, not natural birth. In the Kingdom, our natural genetics are all over the place, which is fine (and scriptural) because genetics don’t matter here. All that matters if that we’re genuinely born-again. Rebirth – and rebirth alone – constitutes the basis for citizenship in Israel 2.0.
Despite being the valid inheritors of God’s Biblical promises, we claim no right to any land or worldly wealth here. In Heaven, literally endless land and wealth await us, but here on Earth we’re promised only that our daily needs will be met and that we’ll have access to the appropriate resources when required. We are the prophesied poor and afflicted remnant, so we should expect to be poor and afflicted, though never destitute, never without hope, and always blessed. You would think that being poor and afflicted would negate the being blessed part, but miraculously it doesn’t. There’s joy solely in the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, and if you’re genuinely reborn, God’s Spirit is always with you to a certain measure, sometimes more and sometimes less. The greater the measure of God’s Spirit, the closer you are to God and the greater your abiding joy.
In the end, then, it wouldn’t really matter even if 100% of modern Jews were found to be genetically identical to the Hebrews of Old Testament times. Your genetics don’t grant you entrance to the prophesied Israel 2.0; the presence of God’s Holy Spirit does.
ONE OF A CITY
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 20, 2025 – We born-again believers are the rarest of rare breeds. Even though, as Jesus promises, God will give his Holy Spirit to anyone who asks in sincerity and in truth, most people – including self-identifying Christians – have given God’s offer a hard pass. Sure, they want the peace and the joy that come with being a card-carrying member of the prophesied remnant (who wouldn’t?), but they don’t want the persecutions. They don’t want the afflictions. They don’t want the poverty. They don’t want to give up all the things they would naturally and without effort give up as a believer.
And they don’t want the whispers.
Jesus well knew those whispers, even from his own family. On one occasion, his mother and sisters came to ‘rescue’ him in Capernaum as if he were suffering a mental illness episode, and his brother James goaded him for not publicly revealing himself as a prophet. First-born males at that time were traditionally afforded a position of honor, respect, and privilege within the family, but Jesus, from these two brief glimpses into his home life, appeared to have foregone the familial deference. He had instead become an object of pity and ridicule, foreshadowing what we all experience as born-again believers amidst unbelievers.
Tie me to a stake and burn me, but I would never not want to be born-again, I would never not want God’s Spirit in me, no matter the cost. There is no temptation or threat that would make me turn my back on God and deny Jesus and return to the earthly hell of living without God’s Spirit. I’ve done my time as an atheist, and I’m forever done with it. Offer me all the wealth and power in the world, and that still wouldn’t be enough. Offer me beauty sufficient to launch ships and bring down nations, and even that wouldn’t turn my head. I already have all the wealth and power that has any value, through the abiding presence of God’s Holy Spirit, and I’m holding out for the promised perfected beauty that comes with my place in Heaven and lasts not for a time or a lifetime, but forever.
There is no temptation and no threat that would make me not want to be born-again. And I know I’m not alone in knowing this. I know that you, my brothers and sisters reading this, feel the same. I know that your grounding in God is not skin deep, is not for upvotes and likes, is not just for the time being until (what appears to be) a better offer comes along or the price of being a Jesus follower becomes too high or too inconvenient. I’ve seen the superficial believers fall away to other beliefs as easily as someone picks the pie rather than the pudding in a cafeteria line-up. But we don’t pick God; he picks us. We are the pie in the cafeteria line-up, the apple pie, the apple pie of God’s eye.
You will not know what it means to be truly alive until you’re born-again. We are one of a city, two of a family, as rare as hen’s teeth and for many just as mythical: “Who are these born-again believers that you speak of? Bring them to me! I wish to examine them!” The curious and curiouser approach me cautiously, as you would a rare bird borne by a storm far from its native habitat. They’re afraid to startle me into flight and so weigh their every word. We talk about the weather. We talk about the past. We talk about the weather again while they search my face for clues to a mystery they’re certain I must be hiding. I watch them searching, though I hide nothing. They cannot see what they cannot see.
It’s not my doing. It’s God’s.
**********
There is no threat or temptation that would make me not want to be born-again. I have thrown down this gauntlet. I have stated my position: It will not change.
“Jesus is King!” God is my everything.
I patiently await your response.
PAPAL BULL*
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 17, 2024 – Sometimes the headlines are so obvious, they write themselves. In this case, the pope fired off his latest shot at God and his Church by claiming that all religions are a pathway to God and that we’re all children of God.
Both of these claims are so obviously and laughingly and sadly false – and so easily verifiable as false by even a casual reading of scripture – we can only assume that what the pope said, he said to elicit a violent response from believers.
I initially didn’t want to respond to his latest provocations, any more than I respond to any of his other drivel. The “all religions lead to God” line is so out to lunch, it’s on the same level as “water isn’t wet”. Would you actually try to argue with someone that water is wet? No, you would ignore whoever said it wasn’t and just assume that person is either pulling your leg or is mentally deficient.
But God put it in my heart today to respond, so here I am.
Jesus said that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no-one comes to the Father except through him. In other words, Jesus and God are a package deal, with Jesus – and Jesus only – being the doorway leading to God. Sikhism leads to God only if you entirely reject Sikhism, just as Buddhism leads to God only if you entirely reject Buddhism and Islam leads to God only if you entirely reject Islam, and so on and so on for every belief system that is not the One True Belief exemplified and taught by Jesus in the Gospels. Zero exceptions.
The pope knows this. Of course he does. But the pope doesn’t answer to God; he answers to the devil and is on the devil’s payroll, so when the devil feeds him the drivel he’s to spew on command, he spews it, no questions asked.
As for everyone being God’s children simply by virtue of existing – John had something to say about that:
“Behold, What manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” (1 John 3:1)
We are adopted into God’s holy family at genuine spiritual rebirth – adopted out of the world that doesn’t (as John rightly points out) know or understand God and therefore doesn’t know or understand us. We are not born children of God; we are reborn children of God. We are born creatures of God, and should be grateful even for that, but oh – what a privilege and an honor to become God’s children by the inrush of God’s Holy Spirit at rebirth – to be invited into the holy fold with Jesus and his saints and all of God’s holy angels! There is no higher or rarer or more joyous calling.
So, no – we (meaning the general population of the world) are not all God’s children. Unless, of course, when the pope says “God”, he really means “Satan”. That he’s intentionally conflating God and Satan actually makes sense, given the history and purpose of the Catholic church. In which case, yes, all religions (other than the One True Way) are indeed pathways to Satan (a.k.a. the pope’s god), and all who are not of the One True Way are in fact children of Satan (a.k.a. the pope’s god).
Scripture soundly supports this.
That is my response to this latest provocation and attack on God’s Church. As for the pope and anyone who supports his evil institution, I’m beholden (thank you, Jesus) to end with: “Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they’re doing.”
(* A papal bull is a form of public decree issued by a pope. It’s also more of the same BS from the usual suspects.)
TWO SHIPS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 27, 2024 – Every once in a blue moon, I run into people I used to know before I was born-again. Some of these people I *knew biblically* for shorter or longer periods of time; others were just friends. In every case, as soon as they spot me and recognize me and run over to me and we start talking, they immediately start cursing.
I don’t mean they yell at me; I mean they start peppering their conversation with the “f” word. After a few minutes, every second word is “f”.
It happens every time.
It’s a curious phenomenon that I attribute to the demons responding to the Spirit in me. Interestingly, even they (my former lovers and friends) notice that they’re uncharacteristically cursing a blue streak. Some openly wonder at it and apologize, while others appear to try to compensate for it by talking that much faster, which just results in their dropping that many more f-bombs per minute.
I seem to make these people nervous. I don’t try to make them nervous; they just get nervous around me. Better said, I make them incredibly uncomfortable. I look like me (or an older version of what they remember) and my voice sounds like me, but our conversation is always very one-sided because I have absolutely nothing to say to them beyond the usual niceties (“How’ve you been?” “How’re the kids?”). They probably feel hurt by what appears to be my coldness, but I can’t for the life of me think of anything to say beyond platitudes. I look at them, and they’re like strangers to me. I can’t even recall what drew us together in the first place.
I’m also acutely aware that they’re aware that I’m born-again. I know they’re aware and I know how they’re reacting to it because I can see it in their eyes. Some of them I told personally; others heard it from others. But they all know, these people who call to me from across the street. None of them are born-again or even Christians. I would know if they were, the way that John the Baptist in his mother’s womb knew that Jesus was in the vicinity, in Mary’s womb. The Spirit in one reacts to the same Spirit in another, and it’s always a joyful meeting.
These unexpected ambushes by past lovers and friends are anything but joyful. How can they be? I’m not who I was, and I thank God for that. I never want to revisit or reclaim who I was. Demon-ridden Charlotte is not a happy memory for me. I was glad to leave it all behind when I was reborn. I know that many people still see me as I once was and expect me to be an older version of that same person, so they’re confused when they encounter born-again Charlotte instead. I see them trying to dig for the old me, but she’s long gone. I can’t share their opinions anymore, or their values, or their hopes and dreams, any more than I can share their bed. I’m not the same person they knew, and they soon find that out after a few minutes of awkward, halting, f-bomb-laden conversation.
Jesus taught us not to retreat from the world but to hold it at arm’s length. We’re not to get involved in the “cares of the world” because those cares can quickly turn into snares that trap us. As born-again believers, we can’t befriend or share confidences with those who aren’t born-again, as I wrote in an earlier article. We can socialize with unbelievers, like Jesus did with the scribes and Pharisees and publicans, but that kind of socializing is difficult with unbelievers who knew us personally before we were reborn. There are simply too many mixed messages and unrealistic expectations. Too many snares.
I don’t dislike the people I used to know intimately; I just can’t be for them what I once was. I am a stranger to them now, and a born-again one at that, and we have nothing in common except a past that I’ve firmly shut the door on. This doesn’t make for much of a friendship foundation.
But I’ll still wave to them across the street. If they see me and wave, I’ll always wave back. If they choose not to wave, I won’t hold it against them.
And if they ever sincerely want to know about God and Jesus, I’m here for them.
ON THE GREAT TRIBULATION AND DRAWING LINES
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 27, 2024 – God is good at drawing lines. He does it all the time. He drew a line between the children of Abraham and everyone else, and then between the children of Israel and everyone else. Prior to that, he drew a line between what was acceptable in the Garden of Eden and what wasn’t, and what wasn’t acceptable in the Garden was unceremoniously expelled. A similar line was drawn between the pre-Flood and post-Flood eras, and between pre-Sodom and post-Sodom (that is, Sodom and no Sodom, respectively).
Then there’s the biggest line God’s drawn thus far, which is the line between everything before Jesus and everything since Jesus, which we know as the Old Testament and New Testament times or the dividing of time into BC and AD. Shortly after that line was drawn, the second temple was destroyed and all of Judaism with it.
I mention lines because there’s a big one in the offing, again to be drawn by God. I’m talking about the line between the end of the pre-tribulation era (what Jesus called the “beginning of sorrows”) and the start of the Great Tribulation. It’s mentioned in the book of Daniel and in the book of Joel. Jesus also talked about it in the Gospels, as did John in his book of Revelation. That line, when it’s drawn, will be the penultimate line. The final line will herald God’s Judgement on the world and its complete annihilation.
But that line – the final one – may still be a long time coming. Only God knows when it will be drawn. The line I want to talk about now is the one that comes before that line, the one that divides the beginning of sorrows from the Great Tribulation, because when that line is drawn, there’ll be no more conversions.
As born-again believers, we need to be aware of when there’ll be no more conversions, as it will be a pivotal point in the evolution of our Church. It will change how we interface with the world and with each other. The Church proper began with the conversion of the disciples on the morning of Pentecost, ten days after Jesus’ ascension. That was the first time that God’s Holy Spirit was given to believers upon rebirth as a constant indwelling presence. And just as suddenly, unexpectedly, and definitively, God’s Holy Spirit will one day cease to be given, and only those who already have God’s Spirit will retain God’s Spirit. Everyone else will retain one or more of the various fallen spirits of the world.
I have not made a secret of my wanting to go home at God’s earliest possible convenience. In that, I’m like Jesus when he said to his disciples: “How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?”, only you’re not my disciples and I don’t mean you personally. I just mean I want to go home as badly as Jesus did. I want to go home not only because of what God’s shown me awaits me in Heaven, but because of the horrors that will be unleashed on Earth once God draws that penultimate line between the beginning of sorrows and the Great Tribulation, and there are no more conversions.
Jesus talks about that time as the worst that’s ever been or ever will be. John in Revelation provides a few more details, none of which would make me want to prolong my stay, if I were still here. After each of the horrors is unleashed, the unbelieving survivors, instead of repenting and turning back to God, curse him instead, as if Job’s wife were hissing in their ears, egging them on. But the few believers who do remain will have to be like Job, ever faithful in their suffering and not giving into the temptation to just “curse God, and die”.
There’s a false teaching that’s gained steady traction over the years regarding conversions that will be made throughout the Great Tribulation period, right up until the time that Jesus comes back for his Church. These conversions will not happen because there will be no more conversions after the start of the Great Tribulation. There will be believers, but no new believers, and the Church will continue to dwindle in size, likely all the way down to or below the original number that it was on the day of Pentecost, which was somewhere in the vicinity of 3,000 souls. When Jesus asked: “When the son of man returns, will he find faith on earth?”, he meant for us to seriously consider the implications of that question.
Nowhere in the book of Revelation does it say that anyone repents after the seventh seal is opened and the first trumpet is blown. Nowhere in Jesus’ narratives in any of the Gospels regarding the time of what Jesus calls “great tribulation” does he mention conversions. What he does talk about is the necessity for believers to patiently endure to the end. What he does mention is the proliferation of highly seductive false teachers and false messiahs, implying an accompanying proliferation of highly convincing false conversions and false proselytizing, all leading to an end-times globalized false church.
We’re already, as a Church, neck-deep in false teachers, false messiahs, and false converts. In fact, the entire worldly church, which sprang up like a weed around the True Branch probably the very next day after the Church was planted at Pentecost, is premised on false teachings and false conversions. These, 300 years later, were supercharged into overdrive by the pagan Constantine, when he founded what eventually grew into a pearl-clutching version of the Holy Roman Empire, renamed the Holy Roman Church and its protestant and orthodox offshoots.
We are safe inside the line God has drawn separating his True Church from the worldly church – the Kingdom from the world – but that doesn’t mean we aren’t exposed to the false church’s seducing lies. God permits us to be exposed even as he protects us behind his firmly drawn line because tests must be conducted and loyalties measured. How else are we to solidify and affirm our place and positions in Heaven? It is not and has never been enough simply to state: “I believe” and then to live our lives indistinguishable from the rest of the world, other than for some strategically placed Christian-themed bling. As the adage goes, “talk is cheap”, which is why tests of faith are necessary.
Jesus makes a very clear distinction between the time he calls the beginning of sorrows and the time he describes as the worst there ever was. These are two very distinct time periods, divided by a line drawn by God himself. In describing these two distinct periods, Jesus cautions us that many will try to convince us that the time of great tribulation has already arrived. He tells us to beware these people and not to follow them or be seduced by their rhetoric. In today’s terms, they’re the breathless “Jesus is coming back soon!” crowd or those who are constantly drawing parallels between world events and the mark of the beast or the rise of the anti-Christ. Not being born-again, they’re inhabited and informed by seducing spirits whose sole purpose is to lure believers away, to mislead and misguide us, and ultimately to humiliate and demoralize us into forsaking God.
When God draws that line between the beginning of sorrows and the Great Tribulation, there will be no more conversions, but there will still be a testing of the remnant Church and a falling away of some. Being sealed by God means you have God’s Spirit within you and are protected by God; it doesn’t mean you have an automatic ticket to Heaven. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. We are vulnerable to losing God’s grace right up until our final breath here, otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have advised us to “endure to the end”. He didn’t say “endure until you’re reborn” or “endure until the first trumpet is blown”, he said “endure to the end”. Our hardest tests will come at the end of our time here on Earth, as they did for Jesus. And then our own line will be drawn, the one that God will draw specially for each of us, his children – the line separating us from this life and the one to come.
But our work here is not yet done. We all need to be reminded of this every now and then, just as we need to be reminded to take a break from our labours every now and then. Jesus took breaks, and so should we. But we should never feel that we can retire from active duty and rest on our laurels. The time for rest is not yet, not for us. We don’t rest here. We’ll rest when we get Home.
I do not want to be here when the Great Tribulation begins. It’s bad enough living through the age of the beginning of sorrows, which the world has been in now for a while. The demons are growing ever bolder with the passage of years, and every passing of a believer is shrinking the size of our Church. We need to be very careful not to take God’s grace and protection for granted, but to assiduously, and with what Paul called “fear and trembling”, treat everyone – not just believers – as we would want to be treated, especially and particularly in our thoughts. This is true spiritual warfare. Jesus said that treating others as we would want to be treated is the summation of Holy scripture. In that, as in everything else, we need to take Jesus at his word.
When the line is drawn and the conversions stop, the hardest of all tests will begin for the remnant of God’s Church still on Earth. Pray, as Jesus urged us, not for a long and prosperous life in the here and now but to endure to the end and to be called Home before that horror show begins.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 