Jul 15, 2013

Demons of Religion

Or why the Church needs another Great Awakening                                                                
                                                         

Thomas R. Horn

I saw the Lord sitting upon his throne, and all the host of heaven standing on his right hand and on his left. And the Lord said, “Who shall entice Ahab king of Israel, that he may go up and fall at Ramothgilead?” And one spake after this manner, and another saying after that manner. Then there came out a spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, “I will entice him.” And the Lord said unto him, “Wherewith?” And he said, “I will go out, and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” —2 Chronicles 18:18b–21a

While the pages of nearly all books on spiritual warfare abound with examples of people becoming possessed or demonized by entities as a result of deviant perversion, drug use, violence, occultism, or other depravations of immoral behavior, including infidelity and witchcraft, the most powerful instruments of satanic bondage by far witnessed during our thirty-plus years of executive ministry were connected to something much more dangerous than personal failings. The superior enemies to which I refer are demons of religion that infest institutional Christianity.

This is not a daring statement.

Just as a lying spirit filled the mouths of the prophets in 2 Chronicles 18, and just as Jesus confronted unclean spirits inside the synagogue (Mark 1:23) and connected some of the priestly leaders of the Temple to the strongest power of Satan on earth (John 8:44; Matthew 13:38 and 23:15), robust echon daimonion exists today from the lowest to the highest levels of denominational establishment among institutional members who are possessed (whether they perceive it as such or not) by luciferian ambition. This will come as no surprise to seasoned spiritual warriors, as it is the result of a common military strategy. The church represents the single establishment on earth capable of undoing Satan’s plans, and is therefore the natural enemy of the kingdom of darkness and the epicenter against which all spiritual wickedness must ultimately be focused. The church, through its hierarchies and institutional constructs, is therefore the primary target for infiltration by agents of darkness wherever human weakness allows for penetration by daimonions. Among others, the apostle Paul recognized this specific danger, warning the church in Corinth that “false apostles” were masquerading among them as ministers of Christ. “And no marvel,” he revealed, “for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:13–15).

Consistent with this phenomenon, Father Gabriele Amorth, a renowned exorcist in Rome whose book, Memoirs of an Exorcist: My Life Fighting against Satan, was released in 2010, admits to the existence of “satanic sects in the Vatican where participation reaches all the way to the College of Cardinals.” When asked if the Pope was aware of this situation, he replied, “Of course.” Other Catholic priests—some deceased now, including Father John F. O’Connor, Father Alfred Kunz, and Father Malachi Martin—were likewise surprisingly outspoken on the secret satanic influences in the Vatican. In a two-hour presentation, Father O’Connor gave a homily titled “The Reign of the Antichrist,” in which he described how sinister forces within the institution were already at work before his death to provide for the coming of Antichrist. In this sermon and elsewhere, O’Connor outlined the catalyst for this scheme unfolding as a result of “conspirators” within the church whose plan, called “Alta Vendetta,” would essentially take control of the papacy and help the False Prophet deceive the world’s faithful (including Catholics) into worshipping Antichrist (see the book Petrus Romanus for much more on this.)

O’Connor was not alone as whistleblower to the occult presence within the Vatican’s ranks. Eminent Catholic theologian and former Jesuit priest, Malachi Martin had privileged information pertaining to secretive church and world issues, including the third secret of Fatima, which Martin hinted spelled out parts of the plan to formerly install the dreaded False Prophet during a “Final Conclave.” On this, Martin’s claim that a secret group—made up of Western plutocrats called the “Assembly” or the “Superforce”—had infiltrated the highest levels of Vatican administration and was working on an occult plot may have led to involvement by operatives of the same group concerning his untimely, some say “suspicious,” death in 1999.

Ten years earlier, before “something pushed him” and Malachi Martin fell and later died, he had become increasingly candid about what he said was Satanism among certain cardinals and other clergy in league with a secret diabolicus that began following the “enthronement of the fallen Archangel Lucifer” in the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963.

Whether Martin was killed and his death covered up for revealing the plan to use the Catholic Church as a launching pad for a luciferic novus ordo seclorum may never be known. One year before he died, however, Martin’s very good friend, Father Kunz, was brutally murdered in his church in Dane, Wisconsin. Kunz had been investigating the same Satanism among “priests” that Martin had warned about, and had told Martin in the weeks before his murder that he feared for his life. When Kunz was found with his throat slit, Martin went public that the “luciferians” had killed him because he was getting ready to blow the lid off their conspiracy.

Just before he died in a tragic accident, our old friend David Wilkerson wrote about similar activity within evangelical institutions:
A number of [former] witches are... warning that Satanists are infiltrating the church—especially charismatic churches. Some of these [are] telling of a diabolical plot by evil witches to enter congregations posing as super-spiritual Christians.... Many of these evil witches, they say, are already firmly established in numerous churches, controlling both the pastor and congregation and causing great confusion, wickedness, divorce—even death. We have received many letters in our office from people who say they believe their pastor must be under some kind of demonic influence—and I believe many of these letters are very legitimate.

Wilkerson, who at one time was a member of the same organization we served, was correct in asserting that some of those who pose as super-spiritual Christians, department leaders, some online 'discernment' ministries, pastors, and even state office holders and denominational headquarters executives are in fact instruments of evil. Thankfully, there are other church members, pastors, and leaders who, as sincere believers, have become increasingly aware of this sinister invasion into organized Christianity by daimonions and in recent years have made special efforts to teach their congregations how to identify the differences between “religious spirits” and the true faith. Simply put, the words of Jesus that “ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16) have never been more important. These instructions of Christ should also serve as a warning to all believers to monitor their own motives, to examine their hearts, if truly they are altruistic or if in fact they are energized by selfish ambition, because the latter is the “Luciferian key” to becoming demonized.

While serving within the institutionalized church, we certainly witnessed both types of “believers” and have strong memories of the spiritual differences between the two. Recently, while searching for a particular document we had placed in an old photo album some time ago for safekeeping, we took an unexpected stroll down memory lane in this regard. We had gone through at least a dozen books of images and old newspaper clippings, seeing members of churches we had pastored and records of events frozen in time from nearly thirty years inside the organization. Finally, between dusty storage bins and spiderwebs, we found what we were looking for. We placed the coveted item among the research notes for our new book, then returned everything else to the closets.

That should have been that, but for the next week, the old memories in those boxes kept calling to us about things and friends from the past—people who represented the true mission of the church and were wonderful examples of what it really means to be a Christian. Their names would not be recognized by most today—dedicated believers like O. R. Cross, Henrietta Stewart, Lorraine Morgan, Wyoming Rosebud Dollar, C. K. Barnes, Eugene and Evelyn Fuller, Annie Walton, and others of the New Testament clan.

And then there was another group hiding in plain sight among the believers, sometimes even leading them—the ones the Bible calls “clouds without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots” (Jude 1:12).

Among this second class were—and still are—some fantastic heretics we have known.

Take our old friend Carlton Pearson, for instance. When we were pastoring near Portland, Oregon, during the eighties, our church was the host for TBN’s West Coast broadcasts and special events in which some of America’s top evangelists—including Carlton—appeared almost nightly for a while. In those days, the church was in flux. The Great Generation with its faith of the fathers was getting older, and errant doctrines made delicious by these nasty end-time agents known as daimonions were finding more and more willing hearts who were having the time of their lives abandoning solid theology in exchange for such teachings as the “Doctrine of Inclusion” (in which nobody goes to hell), eventually branding such false prophets as heretics (including Carlton Pearson) among thoughtful evangelicals. We can tell you that Carlton didn’t start out that way. He was a sweet man with a heart of gold who unfortunately lost his way and embraced delusion. God only knows how many he has since led astray.

Then there were those who adopted things far worse than “Inclusion”—for instance, “Kingdom Age” theology (also known as Reconstructionism, Kingdom Now Theology, Theonomy, Dominion Theology, and most recently, Dominionism), which singularly has wrought some of the most far-reaching destruction within the body of Christ this century.

Dominionism is a form of hyper-Calvinism (though supported by both reconstructionists and nonreconstructionists) that ultimately seeks to establish the Kingdom of God on earth through the union of politics and religion. Though ravenously popular among most talking heads for the Religious Right, combining religious faith with politics as a legislative system of governance such as Dominionism would do, hearkens the formula upon which Antichrist will come to power. Note how in the book of Revelation, chapter 13, the political figure of Antichrist derives ultranational dominance from the world’s religious faithful through the influence of an ecclesiastical leader known as the False Prophet. Similar political enthusiasm exists among Dominionists despite the fact that neither Jesus nor His disciples (who turned the world upside down through preaching the gospel of Christ, the true “power of God,” according to Paul) ever imagined the goal of changing the world through supplanting secular government with an authoritarian theocracy. In fact, Jesus made it clear that His followers would not fight earthly authorities purely because His kingdom was “not of this world” (John 18:36). While every modern citizen—religious and nonreligious—has responsibility to lobby for moral good, combining the mission of the church with political aspirations is not only unprecedented in New Testament theology—including the life of Christ and the pattern of the New Testament church—but a tragic scheme concocted by sinister forces that seek to defer the church from its true power while enriching insincere bureaucrats.

But while great heresies like Dominionism and Inclusion are, or should be, self-evident, other contenders for the most spectacular doctrines of devils in the church today would have to include the Prosperity Movement, Ecumenical Modernism, and Dual Covenant (wherein Jews do not need to accept Jesus as Messiah) espoused by some surprisingly well-known modern evangelical preachers. Yet those aged voices that called out to us recently from our fading boxes of memories also reminded that while it’s easy today to get an “amen” while condemning the big lie of Dominionism, the most insidious doctrines are those “smaller lucifers” that are often harder to perceive. For instance, how easy it is (and was) to see through the glaring examples of self-serving and lavish lifestyles that some of our old televangelist friends sought support for, while overlooking or even excusing Luciferianism (selfishness) that is measured in the tiniest of portions, minute amounts so cleverly concealed within subtle and popular doctrines today that they are nearly impossible to detect.

Ask any evangelist who has tried to take the gospel outside the four doors of the local assembly what we mean by this and hear them repeat stories of how quickly certain church members arose to resist the plan and grumble over the resources that could otherwise be used to benefit them. This is the cancer that two decades of Prosperity preaching, inward focusing, and “me-ism” have produced. Of course, most of these anti-evangelists wrap their Luciferianism in nifty religious phrases like Judas Iscariot did when he pretended to care for the poor but secretly wanted to steal the value of the oil that was used to anoint the feet of Jesus (John 12:1–6). These types resemble Judas in another way as well: They don’t even know how they are thus being used as fleshy gloves, the earthen hands of that invisible spirit, the master of waterless clouds operating within or behind them that hates true fishers of men. But for those with eyes to see, the father of lies always gives himself away through his envy of others, seeking what he can gain from—not what he can give to—believers and religion, then pretending something is wrong with those he cannot control, those who get things done like Jesus did, constantly attacking and disparaging them while he himself accomplishes nothing but division, diversion, and destruction.

Perhaps you have seen this spirit in the actions or heard it in the mouths of people you thought were your partners. When once you (or somebody you knew) had nothing more to give them, they turned away from you—or worse, against you—and revealed the awful truth: Their religious spirit had only ever come for what it could get, gain, take, and absorb, and then it turned “to kill and to destroy” (John 10:10a).

Nearly a decade ago it was, in fact, one such incident that formed the final straw leading to the decision by my wife and I to leave the religious institution we had been devoted to for decades, a church organization that at least on the state level had become so criminally corrupt (an investigation regarding possible federal charges against the organization is, at the time of the writing of this series, under consideration, and we have been contacted by authorities as potential material witnesses) and infiltrated by deceptive spirits that we could no longer be part of it. But the specific situation that finally “broke the camel’s back” and led to our resignation was referred to a few years ago at Raiders News Update and then by several other major news sources under the critical editorial by me, “New Testament Theology, According to the Vampire Lestat.” A portion of that article reads:
I suppose when most people think of actual demonic manifestations, they recall images such as Linda Blair slithering snake-like along the floor in the movie The Exorcist. To be honest, during the experiences I had with exorcism, superhuman strength similar to that fictionalized in popular films and vampire lore was manifest only once. The greatest encounters I had with evil supernaturalism by far (and which I may document when the time is right), which was confronted on more than one occasion by myself, my staff, and my family, was a “spirit of religion” that wielded significant influence among church-institution leaders.

Such spirits are identified in the Bible and in the actions of those who are possessed by them. They produce megalomaniacs who seek to exalt their throne while taking particular delight in enforcing private rules by which they judge the righteousness of others. They compass the world to make one disciple, “then make it twofold more a child of hell than they are themselves” (Matthew 23:15). These incredibly deceptive mummers seek institutional positions where they can nourish Christ-less attitudes among church leadership, teaching their hosts how, as actors, they must suppress their true personality while emulating sincerity so that their victims will accept as real the “character” they portray.

Mastering dialectics thus becomes very important for the mummers to succeed. They must also develop good vocal projection for the stage, physical expressiveness, improvisation, emotional drama, and even be capable of reciting classical texts or Scripture when necessary. Well-rounded mummers will even learn singing and other performing arts, so that their false anointing will appeal to human weaknesses and convince us that they are genuine. Most of all, they need for their words to resonate as believable in order to keep their innocent victims mesmerized, at least until their life-force can be completely drained from them.

Of course, the biggest problem for such vampires is the true power of the cross, and how if they are not careful it will scorch away their cover and reveal the apathy they have for their victims.

SON-light is another problem. Vampires perish if exposed for very long to anything but synthetic illumination.

And of course there are sanctified places where vampires can never go, such as the deepest recesses of a true believer’s soul. The greatest vampire killer of all time once said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28).

I thought of those words recently, during the passing of a dear friend. To protect her identity, I will simply call her Nettie (not her real name).

Like so many true Christians, Nettie had given her life to the ministry of others. As a result, she had very few earthly possessions and certainly nothing to compare with the wealth that is typical of Lestat-like vampires.

However, Nettie did own a home. The appraised value was just thirty-five thousand dollars, so it is easy to see the modesty of her lifestyle in today’s United States.

Still, the place was hers.

Early in 2006, knowing she was getting too old to live alone anymore and that ultimately she would need to be cared for by her daughter, Nettie made a deal to sell her house to the religious institution we both had worked for. Nettie had served tirelessly and without pay for the organization for several decades. As executive director of a particular board, I was familiar with the district office’s interest in acquiring land, and I was there when several properties, including Nettie’s, were approved for purchase. Though Nettie’s was the least expensive, the other properties were owned by younger, healthier persons, not nearly as easy to victimize as Nettie, and so these were paid off immediately and closed escrow posthaste. Nettie, on the other hand waited, and deteriorated, until her body and mind slowly began giving in to the last enemy she faced—death. As the end drew near and she needed money for medical expenses, she asked my wife to check in with the Christian organization’s state office to see when she would be paid.

“Well, since Nettie is going to die before long,” the secretary for the coven’s head vampire stammered, “We’ve decided just to wait, since we’ll inherit the property anyway once she’s gone.”

My wife was in shock. Yet unlike her, I’d been inside the vaults and among the vampires long enough to understand how mummers think. We both cried a few months later when Nettie, still hoping for some crumbs to fall from the rich man’s table, had a stroke and died not very long afterward.

For me, it was the last straw. After almost thirty years in the theatre I decided I would be better off not treading the rafters anymore. I had made some great friends and there are still some vampire hunters in the organization I respect, but the glory days are gone and the theatre’s headquarters had become too infested with spiderwebs, moths, bats, and other creepy things.

Yet I would leave a warning behind for vampires everywhere. For those who would sell their soul to the devil for thirty-five thousand dollars worth of real estate, you’ve done all that you can do to hurt the old woman who will rise up in judgment against you in the day that matters most.

Of course, I suppose until then, you could wring the blood out of the money and use it to purchase some really cool new capes or a row of dazzling lights to keep your audience spellbound.

If the reader picks up on a bit of righteous indignation in the excerpt above, you have perceptively discerned why we came to believe that we had to break away from the institution, if for no other reason than to preserve our own spiritual health. If it also sounds like we were being judgmental, correct again. In 1 Peter 4:17, we read that “judgment must begin at the house of God.” People who care about modern Christianity should consider that a time for such introspection and judgment is long overdue. We are in a battle—a spiritual war for the minds and souls of a generation—and frankly, the time has come for new Martin Luthers to nail their theses on some institution doors where echon daimonion may have become so deeply entrenched as to have literally forged the latter-day “habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird” (Revelation 18:2).
                                                       
In other words, it is time for another Great Awakening.

Read more at - http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/awakening.htm