God is love. He operates on love. He advises us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and warns us that whatever we do to our neighbor, He will consider it as being done to Him. Wow! Is God serious? If we were serious in obeying Him, this world would be heavenly to live in.
A Defiant World
But the world today is practically the opposite. Crime is everywhere. Disorder stalks all of us. People disgruntled with our government and culture riot through our neighborhoods destroying shops, burning cars, attacking law enforcement, threatening to bring chaos to everyone. Lies and fraud dominate practically everything.
Politicians argue against each other with slanderous venom. One cannot trust anything they say. Even the evening news is full of it. Incredible darkness and gloom has blanketed our entire world. Is this what God wants? Our world is very much compromised by disrespect, gossip and calumny.
Living in the twenty-first century is as close to living in hell as anyone could imagine. I sometimes wonder if we are living in the end times.
Who Is to Blame?
What makes us so opposed to what God wants? We can blame it on the devil. Jesus called the devil the “prince of this world” (John 14:30). The devil is smart enough to beguile all of us. The devil was created to be the bright “Morning Star” (Isaiah 14:12), a glorious angel, but he chose to reject God’s grace and now brings darkness rather than light into the world.
God promised incredible happiness to those who love Him and obey Him and harsh punishment for those who refuse. Why does the human race refuse to believe Him? Lay it at the feet of the devil. His darkness has ruined life for all of us, and when God finally decides this rebellion against Him has gone far enough, who are we going to blame for the punishment our wickedness surely deserves? We’ll lay it once again at the feet of the devil.
The devil is also known as the accuser (Revelation 12:10). He inspires controversy, argumentation and distrust everywhere. He brought darkness and distrust to Eve, the very first human he encountered, and he lied to her. He caused both Adam and Eve to think God was defrauding them when God denied them the fruit. They ate the fruit with catastrophic consequences for themselves and for all their progeny, including you and me.
The Devil’s Release
Revelation claims that the devil was bound for 1000 years right after the new Christian Church was established. The inference is that the Church could grow strong and well-rooted without interference from the devil. This teaching is very much distorted by Millennialists, but I think it did happen pretty much as Revelation predicted.
The Church officially started, of course, in A.D.33 when Christ was sacrificed, but the Church was still persecuted until A.D. 313 when Constantine ended the persecutions. But then something significant happened. In 380, under Emperor Theodosius I, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire by the decree of the emperor, which would persist until the fall of the Western Empire.
One thousand years from that point would be A.D. 1380. At that time events were already operating that eventually resulted in both the Reformation and in the demise of The Holy Roman Empire. This issue of linking Satan’s release to the Reformation is such a confrontational subject that most writers hesitate to venture an opinion on it. I offer my opinion because I see an even more deadly cloud of darkness settling down on the human race in our twenty-first century.
Historical Perspective
Let us step back in our minds and try to view the situation of the Church before the Reformation. We all know that Jesus founded the Church upon the apostles, and the apostles answered to Jesus. They understood the Catholic Church, specifically, to be God’s Church, which will teach humans how to worship God as He desires. The Reformation broke the unity of that Church into many national congregations that are autonomous from each other.
In some cases (particularly England), having the sovereign leader of a nation as head of those protesting Christian groups wasn’t so troublesome to people five hundred years ago as it is today because nations on both sides of the Reformation believed in Jesus Christ. It would be more troublesome today because of the lack of faith. Sovereign nations would now want a world that is a utopia of human design. The goal of this utopia is to establish a one world government without borders, having one economy and one world religion professed by all members of that utopia. In his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari argues that globalism is the end point of human evolution.
Cosmic War
Reza Aslan has written a series of books on religious wars. One of his books is How to Win a Cosmic War in which he describes a cosmic war as a “conflict in which God is believed to be directly engaged on one side or the other. It is like a ritual drama in which the participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in heaven.” Aslan and Harari appear to be modern thinkers defining the globalization movement.
At the same time as Luther’s challenge to Church authority, the Spanish were active exploring the New World. It all started in 1517 when Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. Two years later, he defended his theses during the Leipzig Debate.
That same year in Mexico, the Aztecs celebrated Ce Atal, an important astrological event in their lunar calendar when they expected the return of the god Quetzalcoatl, who, as their legend states, was forced to leave the throne in A.D. 890.
In February, 1519, Hernando Cortez arrived on the coast of Mexico in a fleet of eleven ships manned by 100 sailors and 500 soldiers who had sixteen horses and ten cannons. Cortez soon got into trouble and started on a march of conquest on November 8, 1519.
Reformation
In 1520, Luther, in defiance of Church authority, publicly burned a Papal Bull describing his 95 thesis as heretical. He also burned a copy of Canon Law. In 1530, Luther published his Confessions of Augsburg insisting his thesis were not heretical. The next year, 1531, Protestant nobles formed the Schmalkaldic League in opposition to the Holy Roman Empire. This spelled the end of Christendom, the political empire of Christian nations. About five million Catholics left the mother Church and professed Protestantism.
That same year, on December 9, 1531, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego and through him launched the mass conversion of virtually the entire Amerindian population in Mexico, some eight million souls within ten years. The Reformation was a very bitter episode in Church history, and a there are still bitterness and prejudices operating today because of the trauma of what happened. But I am focusing on the timing of these events.
Some authors, such as Resa Aslan, write about a celestial war between God and the devil. They are correct. There is such a war. God is never going to surrender His sovereignty to a renegade angel. The devil wants to defeat God’s chosen Messiah so the devil can reign. We humans are the combatants in this war. But God is not fighting. Instead, God sent the woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary to defeat the darkness that the prince of this world uses to defeat God, as God foretold when He set the enmity between Satan and the woman. We humans perform deeds under inspiration of God or the devil, and these deeds comprise the actual skirmishes in this war.
This Battle Today
Beginning with her Miraculous Medal apparitions to Catherine Labouré in 1830, the Blessed Virgin has frequently used simple souls to urge the world to stop offending God or He may decide to chastise the world. The secular culture has consistently rejected these appeals and, under the influence of the devil, argued that God isn’t interested in this world or in the conversion and welfare of human beings.
This message was not just about sins against chastity but about far more wicked trends like broken marriages, abandoned children, pedophilia, same sex attractions, transgenderism, and public pressure to have all these life styles legitimized and protected, not to mention other problems like violence and theft. The modern world has never before displayed such arrogant defiance of God. This is all due to the darkness the devil has spread as part of his own defiance of God.
I see a historical relationship between the timing of the Virgin Mary’s various warnings starting in 1830 and the voyage of Charles Darwin to Galapagos to work out his theory of evolution. He left on his voyage in 1835. His book On the Origin of the Species, was published in 1859, followed by The Descent of Man in 1871. Our culture has capitalized on Darwin’s theories to destroy confidence in God’s revelation that He created the world and created man to love and serve Him.
The Virgin Mary appealed several more times warning the world the devil is making sure people no longer believe God’s revelation. The devil, in defiance against God, wants to turn the minds of men against God so they can serve the devil.
Darwinism
Carl Linnaeus published his first work on taxonomy (the classification of animals) in 1735. At that time most humans believed that man was special because of his humanity. Linnaeus also held that belief. Nevertheless, Linnaeus decided to classify humans along with animals because their skeletal bodily structures were similar.
This was not questioned by the scientific community as they added more and more newly discovered apes into the same genus as man until people began to object to it on theological grounds. Today people of faith object to this classification while non-believers use it to destroy belief in God. I don’t know of an easy solution for it other than that the classification is based on bone structure and DNA, while much of what makes humans really human is not being studied by anthropologists.
At the same time a large proportion of Christians become convinced in Millennialism, the idea that many early Christians were held captive by the papal Church for 1000 years until the Reformation finally freed them.
Conclusion
If Darwinism continues to be championed by the world and continues to be taught to all our children, they will all eventually lose interest in Christianity, and the religion of Jesus Christ might disappear from the world. That would be the triumph of the Antichrist, the Abomination of Desolation, because the prince of this world is now reigning. The Antichrist’s apparent triumph against God’s Church will finally launch God’s retribution against the wicked world so thoroughly hostile toward Him.
However, the teaching of Millennialism causes a problem: no matter when the end is predicted to come, the world will not end until the biblical 1000 years are over. It may look like the prince of this world has outfoxed the Lord, but that cannot happen.
When the end comes, it will be over in a heartbeat. “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be found out” (2 Peter 3:10).
There will be no rapture and no 1000 year Millennium. When the heavens and earth disappear, none of us humans in our physical bodies will survive. Every single human and every demon alike will all be caught surprised and unprepared, and every one of them will be present at the final judgement.
12 thoughts on “The Prince of This World”
The devil being chained for 1000 years (meaning a long time not literal) has not happened yet. The Emperor making Christianity the state religion is a weak argument for satan being chained for 1000 years. The devil was clearly very active during these years 380-1380.
Hello Mark,
Thanks for reading my article and for commenting on it. I think I can come up with a very fast answer to your contention that the Catholic Church, being the state religion of the Roman Empire, and in league with the state, could not diminish the devil’s interference with the spread of God’s Gospel.
Think about what a state imposes religion implies. Everyone must conform to that religion. If anyone works against that religion, this is a criminal offense. The, devil in that case, is handicapped in spreading confusion about the faith because state authorities will go after him.
If there was only one faith attributed to God, of course, that is the way to keep that faith unadulterated, but there are in the world many faiths attributed to God. There are at least three forms of Judaism, two forms of Islam, quite a few forms of Orthodox Catholicism verses Roman Catholicism and more than 1500 Protestant sects all disagreeing with each other.
We all heard about The Inquisition, when Spain tried to keep the faith conformed to the Church’s original teaching. This was a civil attempt to keep the faith unadulterated during medieval times. But the world today has moved far beyond those times. If .someone came up with a new religion today, something that contradicted what you are convinced is true, I’m sure you and just about everyone else would resent that intrusion by the state into what should have been your own free choice.
I think all of this confirms my point: Having Catholicism the state religion during the millennium really did insulate the faith from other opinions that usually would have weakened it.
‘Anti-Christ’ – DANIEL 11:36 – ” The king of “SYRIA” will do as he pleases. He will boast that he is greater than any God, superior even to the Supreme God…..Footnotes: 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 and Revelation 13:5-6. Reference: Good News Bible GNT P.S. Most other Bibles published state “only king from the north.”
Put on the armor of God, St. Paul tells us. Good advice.
Speculation on time frames, dates of key prophesied biblical events and, heaven help us, guessing when Our Lord will return offer no profit. They rob us of precious time to repent and prepare ourselves for eternity.
Time well spent, indeed.
Hello Shieltiel and Walt,
Thank you both of you for reading my essay and for your comments.
I agree that too much speculation on prophecies robs us of precious time to change our ways and prepare for eternity. Also prophecies come from every direction even from the time of Shieltile in the Old Testament. So I don’t spend too much studying all prophecies. But some attention to prophecies is time well spent; otherwise God would not send them. I think we are now living in the end times and the end could occur any day now.
I focus on the three angels with the warnings in Revelation (Rev. 14: 6-13). I think the three angels are The Blessed Virgin. God can send any angel to announce these warnings, but if the wicked world really is at the end of God’s patience, why would God want to terrify them with a display of his power? I think he would want to appeal to them through the image of their mother who is weeping because she can barely hold back the arm of punishment. If they refuse to respond to that, well – well what? She mentioned trying to hold back the arm of her son in many of the apparitions. Since the wicked world will not pay attention to her pleas, they deserve everything they get.
It’s not merely humans that God is appealing to. It’s devils also. Even though they are already judged, God still expects them to obey, and if they obstinately refuse and continue to misguide humans to refuse obedience also, heaven only knows what’s in store for them.
Consider what has been happening since 1830, the era of the three angels. Blessed Mother has not made a public apparition since the mass conversion of the Aztec Indians in 1531. Her list of fifteen latter day apparitions began in 1830 when she appeared to foster Devotion of the Miraculous Medal. I remember that devotion when I was enrolled into the Miraculous Medal in my youth, There have been fifteen additional apparitions since 1830, many of them well known like Lourdes, Fatima, Quito, Akiba, Cuapa and Kibeto.
All of them should have reported by our secular news media honestly because they are real events and are important for the welfare of the vast horde of humans living on this planet. Most of my readers have probably never heard on them because the media, controlled by the influence of devils, does not want humans to be aware of these things.
Does this sound strange? That God still allows humans to be influenced by devils? Believe me: he still allows devils to tempt us, and he still demands us to resist temptation. This is the human/devil condition until the end of the world. It’s an uneven match because humans don’t realize it and don’t try to resist temptation early enough. And so, we all will wind up in very serious trouble with God when the Father has decided he has had enough.
What should we do? I would advise all of us humans to resist temptation and to block efforts by our culture to neutralize god’s revelation because, if God decides to reprimand our culture, we are all going to have to endure the results of it.
Pingback: FRIDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit
Not a great time to be quoting Reza Aslam ..
Hello Stephanie,
Thank you for reading my article and for making a comment on it. I first became aware of Aslan in 2014 when his book “Zealot” came out. I got the book and wrote a book review about it. This led me an earlier book “How to Win a Cosmic War,” which came out in 2009. I wrote a review on that book also.
Aslan is very handsome looking young man, highly educated in religious studies and presents a fine persona of himself, but he is a non-believer, very much like Carl Sagan who also wound up a non-believer, I figured Aslan would try to make a name for himself after watching his interview on Fox news, and here he is right now deeply involved in a cultural clash with the Christian backbone of the American government.
I thought something like this might happen because I had spent some time trying to warn people about the building up of interest in globalization, a one world government of one nation with no borders, operating through a one world economy, professing a one-world religion etc. Sounds interesting, but I can assure everybody that if that one world religion is not exactly what God wants for HIS world, pursuing it will lead to disaster,
Aslan wrote about religious wars because he is convinced that religious differences have ushered in the most brutal wars in history. I agree with him, but religious wars are fomented not by humans with contrary opinions. They are instigated by the Devil in his revolt against God. It should be obvious to anyone professing any religion that God is never going to surrender his sovereignty to a renegade angle. That war will end when that angel repents and ask forgiveness, which I understand is unlikely in the Devil’s case so God has to put an end to this war himself.
God has already indicated very clearly that He will end this war, destroy the whole world and create a new world free of any grief and suffering and judge every sovereign person and separate them into the righteous who will forever live with God in heaven and the wicked whom God will punish in everlasting hell. Why doesn’t the world believe this? God already ended the human race once before and will do it again to far more guilty people who know what God wants and still refuse to comply with it.
The reason I quoted Aslan is because I thought he hit the nail on the head when he defined Cosmic war in his book “How to Win a Cosmic War.” A cosmic war as described by Aslan “is a religious war. It is a conflict in which God is believed to be directly engaged on one side over the other . . . a cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which the participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in heaven. A cosmic war” is a battle waged not against opposing nations or their soldiers or even their citizens but against Satan and his evil ministers.”
I think this is exactly what Cosmic War is. And God will end this rebellion Himself. We do not need to actually fight the battles in this war, but we should try to convince the rebellious not to make war against God. And I would not advise any human being to consciously wage war against God. I was surprised that Aslan did not elaborate any further about Cosmic War in his book, and now, of course, I am disappointed that he didn’t.
So in fairness to Aslan, I did quote him when I thought he was on my side,
Prince of this world->google search “prince savior world” coat of arms has the standing lion that comes from the Lion(England) who has it’s Eagle(US) wings ripped off (war of independence) in Daniel.
Excellent, thought provoking.
Good article, Maurice! You mention the 1000 years beginning around 1380. Why not 1054, when the Great Schism began? To me, this event would have been a great tragedy in Christendom and evidence that Satan had been released. One half of the Church (geographically speaking) rebelled against the authority of St. Peter and western saints of this time, and for a few hundred years thereafter, did not pull punches in their criticism of the East. Thoughts?
Nate: Came upon this in the “Apocrypha” (Not accepted ‘Canon’ in modern times. ) 2 ESDRAS 14:10-12 – “The world is no longer young; it is rapidly approaching old age. The whole history of the world is divided into twelve (12) periods, and the tenth period has already arrived and it is half over; only two and half parts remain (2 1/2 parts.) Reference: Good News Bible GNT
P.S. 2020 is Hebrew calendar year 5780 of their 6000 year calendar. This leaves 220 years until 6000 = 2240 A.D.) Also 12 periods of 500 years = 6,000 years of Hebrew calendar. 2 ESDRAS Chaps:1-16 were written 30 years (556 B.C.) after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Shealtiel, in which the Lord called him Ezra. God Bless, in further discerning these passages that are found only in some of the Bibles published today.