Mt. Meeker, Colorado –
Send not to know for whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. – John Donne
Many Christians assume that Armageddon and the Apocalypse are synonymous. Up until about 25 years ago, I was one of them. The Apocalypse is the final sequence of events leading to the end of the world. Armageddon is the decisive battle between good and evil. A case could be made that they are contemporaneous, but I think it most unlikely. After great trials, good does win the battle of Armageddon. The Apocalypse is the end of the earth as we know it. I came to think that Armageddon is likely the prelude to the opening of the great era of peace after the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart. The Apocalypse is prelude to the final judgment – and the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth – in which the satan, all his demons, and all the damned are chained for all eternity. They will have no further influence or relevance.
I have always insisted (as has always been emphasized to me) that this is NOT the end. The (capital ‘A’) Antichrist is NOT near at hand (though there may be some foreshadowing archetypes), the Great Apostasy is not yet (though a dress rehearsal is in progress), and all the Apocalyptic tropes that some so love are not yet to be.
I wrote the title and the first two paragraphs of this piece on Thursday, Oct 5, two days before Hamas’ butchery in Israel. We crossed the border from metaphorical to current reality two days after I began this piece.
This is not business as usual in the long-troubled Middle East. The eruption of support for the butchery in supposedly sophisticated cities throughout the world and among the trendy left elites who love to pretend to moral superiority marks this as a decisive struggle between the forces of good and evil. The battle lines are shaping between the Judeo-Christian forces who, under God, built Western Civilization, giving liberty and conscience full freedom on one side and the axis of evil of radical Islam, atheists, and leftists serving as acolytes of the satan on the other. In the global battle that has already begun, there can be no compromise: one side must win and the other lose.
The elite classes, in government, public institutions, media, academia, and entertainment are scrambling to figure out how to handle their obvious support and enabling of terrorists. Some are doubling down and openly supporting Palestinian terror. These are mostly college kids and some news people – not the brightest of the leftist pack. Others are desperately trying to establish some sort of moral equivalence between the brutalized and the brutalizers. Still others are trying to pass off weird forms of revisionist history to deny the obvious. Perhaps the most pathetic are those lefties trying to convince people that all this is Trump’s fault. (I am not joking about this. I have read several screeds by clowns who are geniuses in their own minds blaming Trump and pretending that Biden, Clinton, Kerry and the Democrats never did what they did in plain sight. I saw one particularly unhinged rant that this was all because Trump cancelled the nuclear deal with Iran.) Some really stupid, vainglorious people make up a history that never was to justify their support of murderous butchery.
Whatever excuses, deflections and justifications are used, this is become a moment of profound moral clarity. The world is divided up into people who will use and justify brutal atrocities to get their way and those in the Judeo-Christian camp who will NOT accept that atrocities are acceptable means to gain even the noblest ends.
What is striking about current American policy-making is not just how bad it is, but how insipidly banal and childish it is. It is as if we are suddenly governed by arrogant, mouthy high school sophomores – who mess up everything they touch but always blame someone else.
In 2008 a friend connected to the RNC was trying to recruit me to help with communications, crafting pithy arguments that would pop with voters. I declined for three reasons: 1) I had almost as little regard for and confidence in John McCain as I did for Barack Obama; 2) the activist media already took great pains not to report on compelling arguments made by conservatives. They are advocates, not journalists; 3) I feared we had reached a tipping point where the stupids were already the majority. If so, we would just have to let their toxic policies crash and burn and rebuild from the ashes they were leaving. It is folly to expect a people who do not know how freedom was won or is maintained to hold onto it.
Now comes a moment of moral choice that requires no great philosophical, theological, or historical sophistication. Do you support the torture and murder of innocents, and even the gruesome execution of babies to achieve your goals? Yes or no. If you do, you have chosen evil. If you do not, you may still be sinful, but you have not joined the legion of satan’s acolytes. Do your comrades in arms choose the evil, gruesome methods? If they do, will you embrace evil to maintain your standing with them or will you come out from among them? The conscience of all is being illuminated right now.
Many liberal Jews are now shocked to find what they thought were allies cheering over the butchery of their kinsmen. Many honest liberals who are not Jews are equally shocked. The salient question is whether they are shocked enough to examine how the philosophy they embraced inevitably led to this point. If so, they may recalibrate their hearts and souls to embrace the good. If not, they are doomed to be enablers of evil even if they do not directly participate in it. They can still believe all the things that they heretofore have believed but, when they stand before God, they cannot say they did not know what they were facilitating.
Leftists (not liberals), Islam, and militant atheists are the primary troops the satan has mounted for his assault on God and His people in this decisive battle. It will grow. You can see that in the mass celebrations in almost every capital in the world. The satan’s troops are legion. The devil knows he will ultimately lose. While he would prefer another result, he is content to just take down as many souls of the humans he loathes as he can in the process. Again, you only need look at all the mass celebrations of inhuman butchery to see how well he is accomplishing that particular aim.
This battle will grow until it engulfs the whole world. The left is committed to a philosophy, bankrupt intellectually, that requires them to force their version of “morality” on all. They have no philosophy or morality, just a pale simulacrum of one. It is designed to hide the reality that when you boil it down it is just the naked will to power by any means. They have chosen to become children of the father of lies – and want to force you to do the same. In agonized moments of grief, I wonder why. Even if they succeeded, all they would gain is brutal misery with the devil “progressively” whittling them down until he could destroy the soul of the last man standing. The devil has raised up a global death cult. It is baffling and horrifying to see so many angrily cheering on the brutal deaths of Jews, completely oblivious to the reality that they are cheering for their own destruction in the process.
Watching the elite leadership class in this country argue that the answer is to give more aid to the Palestinians (who have ALWAYS used such aid to buy bombs and rockets, not infrastructure and prosperity) and to give Iran support up to and including the means to make nuclear weapons, tells me the official leadership class is dead, incapable (and unwilling) to protect its own people, much less spread the blessing of liberty to others. All they are capable of is indulging the very fantasies that have led us to this point in the first place – only harder.
There are many Muslims who want peace, but Islam is NOT a religion of peace. All one has to do is actually read the Koran to know the truth of this. All the quote-lines used to try to make it sound like a religion of peace are from the sections on how to deal with fellow Muslims with whom a sect is in conflict. For non-Muslims, the prescription is conversion or death. The only wiggle room is how long infidels may be given to convert.
Hard, life-altering decisions must soon be made among Islamic countries. Those who genuinely desire peaceful coexistence (possibly Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) must find some compelling interpretation of the Koran that actually forbids monstrous violence against non-Muslims despite what the Koran, itself, actually says – or they must abandon Islam. If they hold to Islam without such a compelling re-interpretation, their governments will be destabilized and, ultimately, fall under pressure from populist sentiment. I don’t think that particular circle can be squared, so Islamic governments which want genuine peaceful co-existence must either ruthlessly crush purist radicals, abandon Islam, or become purist radicals themselves. Either of the first two options guarantee a civil war within Islam, itself and the third option guarantees a decisive war with all the non-Islamic world. Purist radicals increasingly believe that the time to establish the global caliphate, as the Koran directs, is now. Though not quite as immediately obvious, the rest of the world is in the same sort of zero-sum environment. The choices we make now are permanent.
Powerful, elemental forces have been unleashed at a time when the world is already unstable and weakened. The powerful forces will grow. All are now forced to choose whom they will serve, light or darkness. Many elitists have already chosen. I guarantee you this: if you choose based on what you think will give you the most personal or political advantage – or which side you think is winning, you will lose everything, including your soul, if you do not repent. This is the great separation of the sheep from the goats. We are all now in God’s winnowing fan.
In the next year I expect a lot of nations to fall and a lot of borders to collapse, to be rewritten later. The pressures brought to bear by global strife will bring with it mass economic destruction. To be clear, this is NOT prophecy. This is purely analysis of the type I have done all my life – and had many clients pay me to do. By next year at this time I expect a substantial terraformation of the global landscape.
We are not alone. We have God. But we no longer have the Christian institutions we have long relied on. They are gone or become pagan, at best, or satanic, at worst. Once again God calls a people to Himself from a hostile world. The Church will stand. Christ guarantees it. But the hierarchy is in great turmoil, unable to provide the leadership to carry us through. That is because, as I have long said, God intends that this be the hour of the ordinary man. A rejuvenated Church, freed from those who want to repudiate Christ and Scripture, will become a great ally later in the crisis. But for now, if we wish to endure, we must choose God and declare ourselves openly.
To that end, I am in the midst of a significant bolstering of CORAC. From the beginning, I designed CORAC as a means for people to work together in collaboration as the old institutions fell by the wayside. All the scary stories and headlines are just the rumbling of the old institutions collapsing. We do not follow the old institutions that have been corrupted by the greed and vanity of men without chests. We have focused on giving people the tools they need to survive – and thrive – as the old order passes away. That means we work together to do a lot of little things, for doing little things well is how a society is knit together. To explain in more detail what those changes are and how you can become a part of this volunteer network, we will hold a global ZOOM meeting on Sunday, Oct. 29, at 4 pm ET (3 CT, 2 MT and 1 PT). You are all invited to check in.
When contemplating the Ascension of Christ, I often think of the joy of the Apostles as they realized that what they thought was the end was actually the beginning. Once again, we are at a great beginning. As always, it begins at Calvary. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and you will become the vanguard of the renewal of the faith and face of the world.
The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong,
But to those who follow the Lord with fortitude and fidelity
Next week I depart for my tour through the south and southeast. After taking a break for the Christian holidays with family, I will resume the tour in January, starting in Florida and moving up the East Coast, then back through the Midwest and northern Mountain states. If you would like to schedule a visit, contact my scheduler, Gina, at ginaw@coracusa.com. Events hosted by CORAC members are always without charge. If a non-member wants to host a meeting, the fee is $350. The gigantic loophole here is that there is no charge to join CORAC. So join first and then contact Gina to schedule a meeting.
Yes, the world is unsettled and much is falling apart. But I will keep my appointed rounds with faith and fidelity. When I can’t anymore, for whatever reason, I trust that God will show me what He requires next. So I say to you, until the Lord shows His mighty hand, keep tending your garden. You want Him to find you hard at work in His service rather than sitting in your armchair waiting for Him to clean up the mess we have all made when He checks in on you.
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on Twitter at @JohnstonPilgrim
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