Scott Lively Ministries

Transgenderism and the Occult

My spiritual path started with childhood Roman Catholicism and has led through many diverse realms of Christendom to what I describe today as a Bible-centered pre-Roman, small “c” catholic Christianity with a Hebrew-roots orientation modeled on the Apostles – most especially Paul. My eclectic religious education includes a Bachelor’s degree from Western Conservative Baptist Seminary (now called Corban College), a Juris Doctor of law from Trinity Law School (associated with the Reformed perspective) and a Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) from the seminary of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God (where I studied directly with its founder, Dr. Richard Anderson, as my doctoral adviser and published my dissertation in textbook form under the title “Redeeming the Rainbow: A Christian Response to the ‘Gay’ Agenda.”

My para-church ministry as a “missionary to the global pro-family movement” has been welcomed into hundreds of churches around the world, representing at least 40 denominations, and by such eminent leaders as Cardinal Janis Pujats of Riga, Latvia, who invited me to co-teach a class for Catholic seminarians, and Archpriest Dimitry Smirnoff of Moscow (Patriarch Krill’s head of family policy) who interviewed me on his national television program. I’ve shared church and conference platforms with many great Evangelical leaders and have spoken even in a number of “mainstream” denominational, Messianic Jewish and home-based churches. All this was by the grace of God, and I give Him all the glory.

However, from the age of 12 to 28, I left Christendom to explore the world of New Age Paganism, and along that path I got (lightly) involved with a variety of cults, including Scientolology, Rosicrucianism, the “Moonies” (in whose company I attended inaugural events for George H.W. Bush in D.C.) and the Brotherhood of the Spirit (a hippie commune led by a man famed for riding his Harley through town in a suit of armor). I read numerous occult books and made other casual forays into dark places.

The cult I spent the most time investigating (with increasing alarm), however, was the Theosophical Society, whose religion of “Theosophy” was held by one of my closest friends in Portland, Oregon, in or around 1980. There was (and is) an active Theosophical Society reading room in northwest Portland, and this man was an avid student of the writings of Alice Bailey, practitioner of “white magic” and acolyte of founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a Russian mystic whose chief German followers Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List (I would later learn) played a major role in shaping Adolf Hitler’s warped spirituality. Long before the Nazi Party emerged, these men published Blavatsky’s magazine “Lucifer” in Germany, featuring a swastika on the cover, and Lanz’s own magazine, “Ostara,” was Hitler’s personal favorite. I’ve written extensively about these matters in the second chapter of “The Pink Swastika” (4th Edition) titled “Homo-Occultism.” The Nazi Party and the modern LGBT movement not only sprang from the same occultic soil in Germany, they were intertwined!

We tend to think of “occultism” as ancient – and indeed many of its forms do have ancient roots – but the “science of occultism” is a creation of fairly modern times. Per Wikipedia, “The term occultism emerged in 19th-century France … associated with various French esoteric groups … and in 1875 was introduced into the English language by the esotericist Helena Blavatsky … but by the 21st century was commonly employed – including by academic scholars of esotericism – to refer to a range of esoteric currents that developed in the mid-19th century and their descendants. Occultism is thus often used to categorize such esoteric traditions as Qabalah, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Wicca, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, New Age, and the Left-hand path and right-hand path.”

These “esoteric traditions” happen to share a common occultic perspective on “androgyny,” more particularly the belief that binary sexuality is a mistake or flaw of Creation that will eventually be “cured” by the re-blending of males and females into a unisexual form. Importantly, this is an essential doctrine of Luciferianism and the reason why Baphomet is depicted as both male and female. If you have the stomach for it, take a few minutes to view “theblogofbaphomet” and see both how this reblending is envisioned by the occult world and how deeply integrated it is with “Queer” culture.

It is no accident that statues of Baphomet are being installed in cities around “Christian” America at the same time America’s children are being indoctrineated with the Luciferian religious hostility to “binary sexuality.” All of this is both occultic in nature and a fulfilment of the LGBT agenda, which I have long contended includes “transhumanism.”

I believe Satan’s agenda in simple human terms is to cause human beings to voluntarily replace every natural thing created by God with something artificial created by ourselves. This was the essence of the serpent’s promise/prophecy in the Garden of Eden – that the knowledge of good and evil would make us gods, so long as we substituted His wisdom for our own reasoning. God essentially confirms this interpretation in His decision to banish Man from Eden “lest he reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).

Paul’s masterwork of systematic Christian theology, his Letter to the Romans, explains this further, showing in Chapter 1:18-32 that human degradation begins with “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness,” leading to “worship of created things,” which results in a “reprobate mind,” evidenced by extreme sexual deviance, specifically exemplified by the toeva (or “abomination” per Leviticus 18:22) of homosexuality, producing a culture of apostasy, moral chaos and death.

Importantly, Paul closes the chapter by restating that this is all volitional on the part of humans: “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things are worthy of death, they not only continue to do these things, but also approve of those who practice them.” I believe that final phrase highlighting “approval” relates to consensus-based public policy by human decision-makers. That is, in fact, the culture of the Antichrist Kingdom, defined by human lawlessness and “strong delusion” (2 Thessalonians 2.)

“Are we there yet?” clamor today’s “progressive” generation from the back seat of the globalist armored car, plowing almost effortlessly over the remaining mobs of freedom-loving rebels. These deluded reprobates believe that their non-binary, white-ness purged, perfectly egalitarian social justice utopia is about to be achieved. But we who still love and trust God know they are victims of their own humanist hubris, and the “freedom” they think they want is satanic slavery.

Is there any hope for them? Only if we have the courage to keep telling the truth despite the cost.

The conquest of demons and ‘pharmakeia’

First published on WND, 1 /29.2024 — To purchase this book, click the cover graphic.

My primary foray into the scholarship of demonology is a three-book series under the title “Dynasty of Darkness.” The first volume, “Antichrists of the Ancient World,” is complete and published at my bookstore. The second, “Antichrists of the Modern Age,” is a close-to-complete book-in-progress. The third, untitled, is in the research phase. The series proceeds from a few basic premises, including:

1. that God’s designation of the Pergamum Altar in Revelation 2:13 as “the seat of Satan … where Satan dwells” was meant literally;

2. that all the demons, including Satan, can only enter the physical realm through such “portals,” of which there have been many, including the Temple of Marduk in Babylon (which name means “Gate of the gods”);

3. that unlike God’s righteous angels, who can take human form themselves (Hebrews 13:2), Satan and his fallen angels can only fully operate in the world by physical possession of humans (or lesser created beings per Luke 8:32-33);

4. that Satan wants always to be in possession of someone in order to advance his agenda in the world; and

5. whomever Satan is in possession of at any given time is – essentially – the “Antichrist” of that moment (totally distinct from the “antichrists” mentioned in 1 John 2:18, which are merely Jesus-denying human apostates in a church context).

I believe I comfortably vindicated these hypotheses in my first volume, which traces the succession of (likely) Antichrists in the Bible from Cain through the Old Testament and Apostolic ages and then examines the secular history of the first four centuries of the Christian Era until that satanic portal was destroyed in an earthquake. The second book resumes the documentation of satanic influence associated with that portal from the point at which it was excavated in Turkey by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and reconstructed in Berlin in the late 1800s, where it stands to this day. This documentation includes mention of Hitler’s personal recreation of the altar at his Nuremberg Rally Complex, and that of Barack Obama, upon which he gave his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. (And, yes, I am stating that I think Obama was and is the best candidate for the final Antichrist, whose identity will not be officially established until the “restrainer” is taken away per 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12.)

This article, however, goes beyond these themes into the area of my current research, which includes a new hypothesis – that inanimate matter can also serve as a form of “portal” that allows demons to influence and torment, if not fully possess, humans. The best example of this is “pharmaceutical” drugs. Biblically, the Greek word “pharmakeia” is directly associated with and even translated as “sorcery,” which makes this hypothesis – and even some aspects of the phenomenon of Animism (spirit inhabitation of inanimate objects) – more plausible. (A partial list of verses addressing pharmakeia/sorcery includes 2 Kings 9:22, Isaiah 47:9, 12, Micah 5:12, Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 18:23.)

My first inkling of this as an actual possibility arose from the stark similarities of two drug-induced suicides of young people in the Springfield, Massachusetts, area during our sojourn there as founders of the Redemption Gate Mission. Someone had illegally home-brewed a batch of “Xanax” that somehow drove these two kids to hang themselves. The thing was, however, that they did not know each other, and the deaths were totally unrelated in human terms. Reportedly, both were young women, both engaged in common household tasks who each suddenly stopped what they were doing, went to an upstairs room and immediately hung themselves. Whatever caused them to kill themselves and in the same exact manner was a mystery – but one that led my wife and me to speculate that the drug itself was the cause, and if so, that a specific demon or category of demons used that drug to gain access to these victims. That caused us to start looking more closely at the correlation of specific drugs with specific behaviors – which was easy to do because the “hood” we lived in was filled with addicts of various types.

One of the first things we noticed was that whenever one of our regulars at the mission switched their drug of choice, their behavior radically changed. They exhibited a different form of craziness common to other users of that drug. We also noticed the high correlation of drug use with mental illness, especially schizophrenia – one common symptom of which was hearing voices that told them to do things.

More significant is the growing body of hard data linking Big-Pharma-brewed psychiatric drugs with mass murder and suicide. Not surprisingly the “fact checking” offered by the cover-up kings leading our public health agencies try to dismiss and/or spin the facts to protect their Big-Pharma sugar daddies, but (just as with the COVID cover-up) the stats gathered by independent qualified truth-seekers don’t lie

Now, none of these sources mentions a correlation with demons. That would be a bridge too far for their credibility with the secular public. But genuinely Bible-believing Christians know that the spiritual realm, and its wars, are real (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

I personally survived spiritual warfare that involved drug use – in my case marijuana, of which I smoked mountains in my teens and 20s. I was also, concurrently, an alcoholic for 16 years (from the age of 12) and took other, harder drugs as often as opportunity allowed. I didn’t recognize my situation as demonic oppression in those years, but I was fearfully aware of the deterioration of my mental health the longer my psychological addiction to “weed” continued. I did come to realize I was in a form of bondage that was beyond my ability to escape despite many serious, sometimes desperate attempts. Something sinister was working to keep me enslaved which I was powerless to defeat on my own.

Without mentioning demons, Alcoholics Anonymous’ first three steps to recovery state: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable, Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity [and] Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

In the end, when I had nowhere left to turn and the survival of my young family hung in the balance because of my failures, I finally risked the final option that random Christians had for years urged me to take – and I asked Jesus Christ to come into my heart and change me. That triggered a chain of events with God’s fingerprints all over them, that culminated two weeks later in my total surrender to Christ. Alone in my room at a secular drug and alcohol rehab center, I got down on my knees and relinquished all control over my life to Him. In rushed the Holy Spirit like a mighty wind, and I was instantly healed and delivered of even the desire for those substances. On Feb. 1, I will celebrate 38 years of deliverance.

My demons were conquered effortlessly by Christ, who promises the same to all who call upon Him in sincerity of heart. And the Bible says He, in His own perfect timing, will conquer the demons currently running rampant throughout this world. We who are spiritually aware enough to know we ARE spirits temporarily occupying these bodies of flesh should always be mindful of these realities – and learn what we can about the spiritual world for our own self-protection and to be of service to Christ in helping others avoid – or escape – torment and enslavement.

Updating My Pet Conspiracy Theories

First published on WND, 1/22/2023

It may only be that I’m proving the old saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but I am one of the rare few who don’t shun the label “conspiracy theorist.” Conspiring with others to serve mutual self-interest comes about as easily to human beings as breathing – as any criminal court docket in America will show – and experience has shown that the more rich and powerful a person is, the more likely he or she is to try to secretly control the outcome of things in business, politics, religion … heck, any area of human endeavor. If conspiracy is happening all around us all the time, even in the lower strata of society where people have fewer ways and means to get what they want, it stands to reason it’s a major league sport among the elites.

What’s actually bizarre and unnatural is the social stigma against theorizing about conspiracies. Where did THAT come from? The only people who benefit from that are those very same elite conspirators whose worst nightmare is public scrutiny that pokes holes in “official narratives.”

And so, in the interest of public service – and in self-defense to the potential charge I’m just an angel-jumping fool – I’d like to update you on a couple of my own pet conspiracy theories that have recently been bolstered by news reports, and add a new one to my list.

1. A leading purpose of the massive invasion of military age men across our southern border is to feed a planned military draft to fight America’s (impending) next big war. I first went public with this conspiracy theory in early May of An Alternate Theory on Open Borders.” I followed in it July 2023 with my article “Milestones on the March to WWIII” when the first solid evidence for it emerged in the news.

Two months later, ZeroHedge did a piece citing more evidence.

And then starting in October of 2023, the corporate media (an arm of the Deep State) started actively dismissing the draft as a possibility in carefully scripted terms, which, to me, bolsters its likelihood.

Today as I write this, a Twitter comment is running as a news item on Citizen Free Press emphasizing that perhaps the most critical component of the volunteer military – multigenerational military families – are now telling their sons not to join.

And lastly, Tucker Carlson is on record (since September) predicting the October Surprise of the 2024 election will be war with Russia, and a possible suspension of elections under martial law. I think he’s right, and it’s the illegals who will be conscripted en masse – as an alternative to deportation, and a means of earning citizenship.

2. Vulture capitalist tactics in service to China are in play on the west coast. This conspiracy is a little more on the wild side, and I can’t pin down exactly when I first went public with it other than to say it was in off-the-cuff comments in one or more of my 2020 Prophecy and Politics live-stream shows about BLM/Antifa rioting.

Nothing better describes Democrat rule in the deepest blue cities than the phrase “government by organized crime.” It struck me that what was (and still is) happening in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle looked a lot like the (allegedly) deliberate property devaluation tactics I had seen in Boston (in my home state of Massachusetts) where corrupt Democrat officials seemed to intentionally cluster social services such as methadone clinics and homeless shelters in select neighborhoods that were lusted after by vulture capitalist co-conspirators. After businesses and the middle-class residents fled, property values bottomed out and the vultures swept in, assisted by pot-sweetening “enterprise zone” tax incentives. All the crooks on both sides of the private/public partnership got richer.

In November, my theory got a bit of a boost when “China’s Xi Jinping Arrive[d] in San Francisco to Fanfare, Protests” where Obiden himself flew in to meet him. Somehow the entire area was cleansed of its infamous patina of human feces for Comrade Xi (affectionately known by all the crooks of the Purple Uniparty as “Old Deep-Pockets”), along with the thousands of public defecators the city had long claimed to be impossible to relocate, along with their tents, shopping carts and mountains of trash. Doing the impossible was apparently necessary in this case, for Xi to see what he would be buying when the values fully cratered.

3. Hidden technologies are behind the switch from fossil fuels to electric batteries. The more I study the history of geo-politics, the more I realize that very few things the common people believe to be sudden or spontaneous technological or social developments actually are what they seem. Sometimes even true or partially true conspiracy theories that arise about these changes are part of the cover story.

Case in point is the theory that the globalist “climate change” doctrine is a purely fabricated political pretext for establishing and justifying a centralized one-world government. I think that IS true as regards to global government, but I think it’s partially a smokescreen when it comes to the transition to electric batteries, whose justification is falsely and deceptively linked to climate change doctrine, to hide the true plan and agenda.

What I mean by that is the top-strata elites who really run the show have no intention of powering this change with costly and dangerous lithium batteries over the long term, but already have technology in the works that will only be introduced once the electric battery infrastructure is fully in place and the shocks to the “fossil fuel” economy have been mitigated by years of collective psychological preparation and jobs re-training. Their true agenda is profit, and lots of it.

The only real evidence I have for this (besides my gut instinct) is a story I first saw today about the Chinese development of purportedly very safe and virtually perpetual nuclear batteries the size of a coin, strong enough to power a cell phone for 50 years, that can be strung together in series to increase their potency. To me this seems perhaps the biggest technology news of my lifetime, being presented almost as a news sidebar – a curiosity rather than a global game changer (and a potential cash cow for China) that could allow Xi’s outlay for the “purchase” of our west coast cities to seem mere “chump change.”

I had privately hypothesized that the advanced technology being hidden by the elites related to nuclear fusion, but now I think they’ve decided to reveal their actual hand and this is it. Time will tell. Until then, it’s just another conspiracy theory you can entertain or dismiss as you please.

Mapping the Swamp

In my recent article “The Swamp Rangers vs. Barack’s Borg,” I announced my revival of The Swamp Rangers network I had begun to form back in late 2020 in anticipation of a contiguous second term for Trump in which the biggest task of the MAGA movement would be draining the swamp.

It’s time to resurrect that project and start mapping the swamp in earnest. Thankfully, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to accomplish this but only to start linking together the great work that has already been done by others and look for ways to add to the collective conservative awareness of how Barack’s Borg is organized and functions. The goal is to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works [and workers] of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:10).

We’re starting with two of the most destructive swamp creatures in D.C. – the power-couple of anti-Trump Lawfare Queen Mary B. McCord and her shady and secretive husband, Sheldon Snook, whose possible role in some major dirty deals has just been exposed by Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse, inspired by a piece at The Gateway Pundit. Gotta love all this great teamwork on display.

First lets look at a short profile on McCord at Conservapedia, which has done a lot of swamp mapping for us: The site calls her “he singular epicenter of every D.C. construct to remove Trump, including: the 2016 DOJ-NSD FISA submission, the 2017 White House coordination (Rice, Ruemmler, Monaco), the 2017 targeting of Flynn (w/ Yates), the 2018 Schiff/Nadler impeachment, the 2018 FISA Court review as an outcome of IG Michael Horowitz, the installation of ICIG Michael Atkinson, the changing of CIA rules for whistleblowing (impeachment predicate), and currently the 2023 Jack Smith investigation. Mary McCord is the binding guide. [Mary McCord’s husband was in charge of the counsel to Chief Justice John Roberts.]”

Much more entertainingly, James Howard Kunstler names McCord and fellow swamp creature Lisa Monoco as “the poison spiders in the DOJ web of veteran seditionists” in his recent piece “Poison Spiders at the Center of the Web”. [We’ll need to add spiders as a category on our Swamp Rangers website.] Kunstler also summarized the steamy swamp romance of sweethearts Fani and Nathan, but Howie Carr offered an even more entertaining commentary on that.

Next let’s point out that McCord and especially Snook have largely escaped public scrutiny up to this point. A politically neutral profile I found of the couple emphasizes their efforts to shield their private life from public eyes.

But now lets let the Conservative Treehouse article expose what it is, perhaps, that they’ve been most desperate to hide: their likely role in the Dobbs leak scandal at SCOTUS!

“Sheldon was working for the counsel to John Roberts. The counsel to the chief justice has one job, to review the legal implications of issues before the court and advise Justice John Roberts. The counsel to the chief justice knows everything happening in the court and is the sounding board for any legal issues impacting the Supreme Court.

“In his position as the right hand of the counsel to the chief justice, Sheldon Snook would know everything happening inside the court.

“At the time, there was nothing bigger inside the court than the Alito opinion known as the Dobbs Decision – the returning of abortion law to the states. Without any doubt, the counsel to Chief Justice Roberts would have that decision at the forefront of his advice and counsel. By extension, this puts the actual written Alito opinion in the orbit of Sheldon Snook.

“After the Supreme Court launched a heavily publicized internal investigation into the leaking of the Dobbs decision (Alito opinion), something interesting happened. Sheldon Snook left his position. If you look at the timing of the leak, the investigation and the Sheldon Snook exit, the circumstantial evidence looms large.

“Of course, given the extremely high stakes, the institutional crisis with the public discovering the office of the legal counsel to the chief justice likely leaked the decision, such an outcome would be catastrophic for the institutional credibility. In essence, it would be Roberts’ office who leaked the opinion to the media.

“If you were Chief Justice John Roberts and desperately needed to protect the integrity of the court, making sure such a thermonuclear discovery was never identified would be paramount. Under the auspices of motive, Sheldon Snook would exit quietly. Which is exactly what happened.”

I take this as vindication for my own conclusion immediately upon hearing about the leak, that Roberts was the leaker. It would be nice to see a bit of lawfare from our side to prove it definitively – because proof of that could potentially be grounds for a Roberts impeachment. Few efforts would help drain the swamp faster that THAT. Frankly, I think Roberts would resign if events let us down that path.

I’d like to add a few words about Lisa Monoco, whom Kunstler named as the other spider at the center of the DOJ web. Like McCord, Monoco majors on pushing the “dangerous rise of white supremacy” narrative in here role as deputy attorney general. Much as I am loathe to subject people to MSNBC, here’s a recent example of her fearmongering to Americans still enslaved to the “mainstream” media.

Lastly, let me remind my readers that all these facts I’ve raised today suggest the hidden hands of another deep state group of far left lawyers who like to operate from the shadows while coordinating tightly with the Obiden regime: the SPLC. I’ll close with this link to my WND column of June 6, 2021, “The group behind the attack on the MAGA Movement.”

The plan to put Barack Obama back in the White House

First published on WND, 1/12/2024

Talk is heating up again about “Big Mike” Obama being the Democrats’ choice to replace Joey the Scapegoat when they finally pull the plug on his sham presidency. Arguments against that possibility always seem to focus on Michelle’s glaring lack of qualifications, but they miss the point that that IS the point – everyone will know that it’s all a charade to put Barack back in the White House (in person this time and not via his drooling avatar, Joe.) It also won’t hurt “her” chances among the Groomer generation of Dem voters that the Joan Rivers “curse” still casts transgender shade on the former first lady. BUT her true role in 2024 would be as Barack’s shoehorn past the Constitution – and the more obvious that strategy is, the better the Dem turnout will be (the actual turnout, not the true blue cemetery vote that’s always 100%).

If they were to be honest in their political ads (ha!), they’d come right out and say it: “A vote for Michelle is a vote for Barack, the only Democrat with a realistic chance of beating Donald Trump.”

I’ve always recognized that Joe Biden was Obama’s puppet, moved into front-runner status as the best of bad options after Trump creamed the entire field of Dem primary candidates in February of 2020, including the designated winner, Pocahontas Warren. I predicted Biden would get the nomination just a few hours after the Democratic Primary debacle that blatantly cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination – for the second time! – the first time in 2016 triggering Bernie-Bot Seth Rich to give the establishment Dem secrets to Wikileaks, which led to his assassination, presumably by the Clintons.

The Purple Uniparty knew it was in for big, unavoidable trouble by resorting to a coup to prevent Trump from fulfilling the second term he would and did clearly win by right in 2020. They needed not just to put a fully loyal placeholder in the White House, they needed someone to take the fall for all the foreseeable and unforeseeable disasters that would follow. Joe Biden neatly fit the bill – being as criminally liable for scandal and jail time as any of his fellow Ukraine profiteers would be under a wised-up Trump Justice Department – and being then in the early stages of some form of obvious cognitive decline. When that brain condition fully ripened (for real or by staged exaggeration) he would become the perfect patsy for all the evils his regime would have foisted on the American people (at Barack’s direction). Further, his “diminished capacity” would provide a fail-safe defense to prosecution. He’d skate away smoother than Ray Epps for crimes infinitely worse, carrying all the blame for all the crimes right off with him into the nursing home.

I first started publicly detailing my conspiracy theory, and Barack Obama’s role in it, back in August of 2021 in my article “Afghanistan and the Obama Birthday-Bash Head Fake.” In that first iteration, I showed how the Kabul hostage crisis mirrored Clinton’s staged but botched Benghazi crisis and how that event could open a path for Obama’s return to the White House. It didn’t, but the analysis of its potentiality was and is still sound.

In my WND column of Oct. 25, 2021, I went further and predicted a scenario through which Biden could be removed with the least damage to the Democratic Party, writing, “I’ve long predicted that Joe will be the scapegoat for whatever goes wrong. Obama himself pretty much telegraphed Biden’s usefulness as a scapegoat. As quoted in Politico during the primary, ‘One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”‘” Quite a useful trait and personal history for a patsy candidate, eh?

That scenario involved a creative reading of the 22nd Amendment, about which I wrote: “Obama [would] be called out of retirement and retake the world stage … returning [him] to the White House by whatever sequence of resignation, appointments and resignations would best work to retire Biden, minimize a Harris presidency, and place Obama back on the throne. All accompanied by a unified chorus of legal experts and media pundits spinning a new interpretation of the 22nd Amendment regarding presidential term limits (e.g. it only limits ‘two elections’ after all – not an appointment to VP by Harris, followed by her resignation and reappointment to VP by Obama). That battle would most certainly go to the Supreme Court, where, conveniently, Obama’s main man John Roberts (the guy who killed all the pro-Trump election fraud lawsuits) is still chief justice.”

On May 6, 2022, I published my article “The how and when of a Biden resignation” in which I predicted the controlling powers would stage a Biden “stroke” as the most effective method for removing him quickly and smoothly without any public expectation of any public statements by Biden himself. He would become an immediate object of national sympathy, whose tragedy could be fully milked for its political value, including painting the MAGA movement as heartless brutes for the inevitable expressions of (at minimum) relief from many quarters. I still expect that will be their go-to exit strategy when the time comes.

Now that we’ve turned the corner into 2024, I’m carrying all the factors in my past analyses forward and acknowledging that the most likely scenario for getting Barack Obama physically back into the White House is a Michelle Obama candidacy. The other scenarios are not dead, just slightly diminished in probability.

However, it just might be that the Michelle run is being floated as a fall-back plan to the end-run-past-the-22nd-Amendment scenario. If they stroked out Biden long enough before the Primary, they would have time to politically recover if the Supreme Court blocked Obama from replacing Biden directly. And, frankly, that lawfare effort could actually bolster the fall-back plan by making the Michelle campaign a more obvious work-around to put Barack back in de facto power.

One way or another, the elites are going to do whatever it takes to prevent Trump from getting back into the White House. But just as important to them, is that Barack Obama remains the head of the deep-state snake. Time will soon tell what God will allow as a result of this cultural war, but one thing is certain: The process is going to be intense for this nation, perhaps more than at any time since the Revolution that birthed us.

The Swamp Rangers vs. Barack’s Borg

In my recent column “God vs. the devil in American constitutional law,” I promised to follow up with strategy to fight the normalization of Satanism in the courts – but the courts are only a small part of the problem, so I’ve decided to take on the larger task of defeating Satan’s main man, Barack Obama, and his culture-war Death Star I call Barack’s Borg. I’ve intentionally mixed these science fiction metaphors because the real life threat we face combines the most formidable features of both into one virtually unstoppable menace to humanity.

First a quick sitrep on the state of our rebel alliance. The winner-take-all battle to reclaim America from the Marxists over the coming year is certain to be the most fiery and intense since the Revolutionary War. Donald Trump’s MAGA armies have already swelled considerably beyond their prior peak in the election season of 2020 and early 2021, and he is clearly an unbeatable force in the Republican Party. The lingering after-effects of the globalists’ Plandemic continue to embitter and galvanize the larger conservative movement and fill it with a steely resolve to depose the malign usurper Biden and his rotten-to-the-bone coterie.

The “Independents” have been red-pilled on the realities of election fraud, government censorship and groupthink narrative enforcement, the J6 “Fedsurrection,” the evil and interrelated conspiracies of Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Media and other metastasized cultural cancers. American Jews have been rudely awakened by the global Hamas uprising to the anti-Semitic Frankenstein they created for themselves among America’s hard left and youth and are now steering politically rightward in shocked survival-mode. Thanks to the brilliant tactic of Florida and Texas shipping illegals to the deep blue “sanctuary cities” (one of soon-to-be ex-presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’ several redeeming acts), American blacks are rising up as an unexpected but powerful voice against “open borders” – heavily to the benefit of President Trump whose name is virtually synonymous with “border security.”

Even among the Democrats, there is a growing buyer’s remorse about the social cost of hard-left policies and weariness in fighting for a regime whose “woke” definition of “Our Democracy” looks nothing like what their own grandfathers and great-grands fought and died to preserve. Sure, there is a large infestation of hardcore Marxists among the D’s who also hold most of the leadership posts – but much of the rank-and-file is less committed to that agenda, and several of the party’s constituent parts are increasingly susceptible to poaching by the GOP. The two factions that will remain most true-blue are the abortion-obsessed feminists and the LGBT supremacists – whose common agenda is unchangeably anchored to the perpetuation and progression of sexual anarchy (which is itself the antithesis of their self-defined first-principle of “sustainability.”)

Cognitive dissonance is killing the Dems, but what holds their contemptible coalition of co-conspirators together in spite of its personal consequences is the deep-state machinery the Clintons and Obama created during their presidential administrations (Obama having the incontestable dominant role in that political menage-a-trios).

Barack’s Borg is a sociopolitical cybernetic conglomerate integrating a vast number of government agencies, including especially key divisions in the Departments of Defense and State and their intelligence arms, with NGOs, corporate media, a plethora of private corporations, foundations and associations such as the Chamber of Commerce and various sports leagues, “Pope” Francis’ Vatican, most “mainline” Christian denominations, and a dizzying number of other centers of power and influence, large and small, across the entire spectrum of human interrelations.

Barack’s Borg cannot be stopped by any internal factors because is a self-perpetuating machine with countless fail-safe redundancies, every component of which is in actual spiritual slavery to himself, the Overmind, who in turn answers only to the actual “Big Guy” (the one with a red cape and horns – not the drooling puppet Biden). After decades of assembling his creation (at Harvard, the U.S. Senate, the Oval Office and now the Kennedy stronghold of Martha’s Vineyard), all the while posing as an Angel of Light, his Borg is the manifestation of the satanic kingdom on the earth – a “beast” government (in shadow form for now) intent on absorption and enslavement of everything outside itself.

In the “Star Wars” universe, the first Death Star was defeated by stealing the construction blueprint that exposed its weaknesses. In the “Star Trek” universe, the Borg was defeated by jamming its internal communications signals and then bringing all weapons to bear on the unshielded whole (which was the same way the second Death Star was destroyed – as well as the alien mother ship in “Independence Day”).

Hollywood has given us the strategy to defeat Barack’s Borg. We need to ferret out and expose the operational schematic as a join project of all right-thinking humanity – identifying all the component parts of the machine, their relationships to each other and the assets under their control. And then we attack the weakest links – and the machine as a whole – with every weapon we can collectively bring to bear.

I will admit that this is not a new idea for me. This mission – in a more protean form – was the reason I created Swamp Rangers back in the Fall of 2020. I believed Trump would win (which he did) and then carry on a purge of the Marxists from the government (which he could not do because of the Marxist coup that ousted him from the White House and installed Obiden instead.) I intended Swamp Rangers to assist in the purge, but after the coup there was no opportunity to pursue the mission, so I let it go dormant.

The revived Swamp Rangers will be a network of independent agents devoted to the task of “mapping the swamp” by identifying the co-conspirators of Barack’s Borg at every level, documenting their roles and relationships, and submitting their findings to the Swamp Rangers HQ for vetting and inclusion in an open-source website that exposes it all. For example, in my last article, “Time to take the gloves off in 2024,” I reiterated my theory that Chief Justice John Roberts was the Dobbs leaker. In response, a reader emailed me a note to investigate Mary B. McCord, whose husband works for him. Exposing connections like this is, of course, a staple of conservative media, but what’s lacking is an open-source, user-friendly clearing-house of this information, organized like a combination flowchart and encyclopedia. Building that will be the Swamp Ranger mission for 2024.

If you’d like to be a part of this or for more information, visit the Swamp Ranger website (which has not yet been updated since 2021), or just contact me by email at sdllaw@protonmail.com to become a Swamp Ranger member or non-affiliated Ally. I suggest you frame your email like a job interview and stress any suitable skills you may have to contribute to this all-volunteer enterprise. Swamp Rangers is under the umbrella of my church, but is not overtly religious in nature. Fighting evil is the first duty of all humanity, and creedal differences shouldn’t get in the way of practical realities in defending God’s universal truths and the virtue-oriented civilization He blessed us with.

Time to take the gloves off in 2024

First published at WND, 1/1/2024

When the romantic idealism of the golden rule meets the cold reality of lawless barbarism on the cultural battlefield – who wins?

This weekend I had an email exchange with a long-time supporter who started it by saying the conservatives should fight fire with fire in the left’s campaign of “lawfare” against Trump by going after Biden in the same way. My initial response was to err on the side of idealism, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court is virtually certain to declare efforts to keep Trump off the ballot unconstitutional, and on matters of high principle we shouldn’t descend to the tactics of our enemies – playing “tit for tat” was the phrase I used.

After further consideration, however, I decided he was right because America’s days of counting on high idealism to prevail over corrupt special interests are largely gone now, and an increasing plurality of decision makers at every level are not guided by principle but by practical political realities (or their own rank partisanship).

In no place is that fact more disconcertingly true than the Supreme Court where Chief Justice John Roberts thwarted all efforts to expose and punish the blatant and massive Dem and RINO election fraud of 2020. The most charitable interpretation of his actions was that he played politics to de-escalate an existential social crisis – but more realistically he played goalie for the globalists to stop Trump and his conservative Christian and populist base from scoring a decisive win.

(I still believe Roberts was the one who leaked the Dobbs draft to sabotage the effort to repeal Roe v. Wade – funny how the Dobbs culprit is still “unknown.” And look what he, the justice with direct juridical oversight of the District of Columbia, continues to allow regarding the grotesque treatment of the J6 political prisoners! If Roberts had the juice to deny justice for Trump again, I think he’d use it – though I suspect he doesn’t.)

American high idealism, which had always been grounded in a strong national consensus about biblical values, peaked in the 1950s but has been steadily declining ever since. Watch virtually any movie from the ’40s and ’50s and you’ll see those ideals on display as the basic assumptions of society – assumptions such as “truth will always win out,” and “you can count on most people to simply ‘do the right thing’ if you give them the chance.” The “right thing to do” was always the Christian thing to do. Not any more. Instead we have a divided society in which the remnant of Christians and traditional conservatives fight as if our ideals still hold sway over decision makers while the left operates by the Marxist precepts that “might makes right” and “the end justifies the means.” All our cultural battles reflect this contrast, and our side is losing because the decision makers have chosen “pragmatic” over “principled” reasoning to resolve disputes.

I’m not a politician, but I ran twice for governor of Massachusetts as a missionary to the political arena of my home state – the second time (in 2018) thwarting what I believe was a Purple Uniparty strategy to use a landslide re-election of RINO Charlie Baker as a springboard to sabotage Trump from inside the 2020 GOP presidential primary field in parallel to the plan to put Pocahontas Warren in the White House. My article “The Impending Bum-Rush of ‘Joey the Scapegoat'” details those facts.

Those forays into politics taught me two liberating truths I’ve propounded ever since in my advice to issue advocates and candidates.

First let me remind everyone that the political arena is by definition and unchangeable necessity a place of compromise. A politician can take some uncompromising stands and get away with it – if they are flexible on other issues – but by and large its about trading votes like baseball cards to the extent your constituency will tolerate it. In that arena special interests are a huge factor, and the bigger their war chest and higher their passion, the more their agenda must be factored in.

Here’s the first liberating truth regarding issue politics: Politicians will always try to placate special interests, even if they don’t agree with them, by giving them something, even if its not all they demand. If our side has no true counter-demand on the table, that’s almost always a win for the special interest. Most importantly, the demand cannot just be to preserve the status quo because the politician’s impulse to compromise is almost impossible to resist. And so, the most frequent outcome in such contests is a “baby step” toward the special interest that preserves the politician’s ability to still claim victory for his constituency. But the net effect is always a shift to the left.

The only way to prevent that leftward slide as a virtual given in politics is to always meet a demand for leftward movement with a true counter-demand for rightward movement, so that the politician’s most expedient “compromise” is to preserve the status quo, while our chance for getting a baby step or more in the right direction becomes an actual possibility on every vote.

The second liberating truth regards candidate politics: Establishment political machines control the outcome of elections by controlling the field of candidates. And, as we know, the “establishment” is the Purple Uniparty whose red and blue factions often decide together well in advance who the winners will be. Often the planned outcome for the GOP is to “take a fall,” a la Bob Dole and John McCain.

Their systems for operation are essentially uniform and designed to 1) discourage all “outsiders” from running, 2) keep all “insider” candidates under the control of “campaign consultants” (handlers), and 3) use the campaign process and experience to shape the candidate into a lifelong servant of the machine (e.g Mitt Romney and Joe Biden) instead of a servant of the people.

In rejection of that slave-system of the elites, I bucked all three aspects by interjecting myself into the 2018 GOP primary, being my own campaign manager (until my great conservative Jewish friend and fellow political maverick Greg Neffinger offered to serve that role) and making opposition to the Massachusetts GOP political machine a centerpiece of my campaign. My article “How I Beat Election Fraud” details that story and introduces my ERET policy for defeating the slave system itself. ERET stands for Every Race, Every Time. It forcefully rejects the initiative-killing mantra used by the establishment that one should only ever “run to win” and the companion lie that only people with “professional” campaign advisers can win. We should have people running in every race in every election cycle if for no other reason than gaining experience and making the other side spend money and manpower it would otherwise use on more important races.

I’ll end this piece answering my opening question. The Golden Rule is to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If I were a mentally enslaved leftist, I would want someone to free me from my self-destructive insanity. So I say we should – politically speaking – go to war like we mean it, fighting fire with fire (within well reasoned legal and ethical boundaries – e.g. no “swatting”) until they have nowhere left to turn but rationality or dormancy. And if we do THAT – with tough love and not vindictiveness – the Golden Rule WILL prevail.

A Place to Lay My Head

First published in The Lively Letter, 12/29/2023

When I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ back in February of 1986, it was because I had finally hit rock bottom in my sixteen year addiction to drugs and alcohol. My downward spiral started when, in response to a minor vandalism spree I carried out the very first time I got drunk (at 12 years old) my mentally ill father destroyed my bedroom with a sledgehammer, including my prized television set I had bought with the proceeds from my paper route. Standing there in shock and shame amidst the shattered glass and chunks of sheet-rock I knew deep inside that my childhood was over and I no longer had a home in that family. That house became just a crash-pad to me from that day forward as I wandered further and further out into the world for longer and longer periods of time.

Just before I turned sixteen, my father had an armed standoff with the state police in that house, over an incident triggered by my having dropped out of school, and he was hauled off that day to the mental hospital for the rest of his life. I no longer had even a crash-pad because my Mom had to move herself and my five younger siblings to a smaller house she could afford, and there was literally no place for me. I became permanently homeless then, in the sense that I’ve never since considered anyplace I’ve lived “home,” and my lifestyle has ever since been “nomadic.”

Eleven years, a failed short-term marriage, and thousands of hitched-hiked miles later I found myself literally in the deep woods on the Oregon coast in a comically pathetic effort to break free from my addictions by “going natural.” Sitting for days under a sheet of plastic in Oregon’s infamously relentless rain, reading “Walden Pond” for clues on survival, I had an epiphany about finding purpose in life by finding a family in need to devote my life to – seeing no purpose or hope in the life I’d been living. A few months later I met Anne in Portland where she struggled to survive her own failed first marriage with two young children to raise. The long version of that inspirational story is published as a chapter in my book of testimonies about God’s miracles: My Life in His Hands.

My days as a homeless drifter ended when I moved in with Anne a few months later in fulfilment of the inner pledge I’d made. We married and had two children of our own before my continuing addictions brought that relatively stable and healthy life to the brink of disaster. It was only then that I was willing to do what all those Christians had advised who’d I’d encountered along the way: “Ask Jesus to come into your heart.” I finally did, and He saved and healed me miraculously and completely, never once to suffer another twinge of desire to drink or take drugs since that day.

I never lost my nomadic nature, however, nor wanted to. I came to learn that my name, Scott, means “wanderer,” suggesting a divine hand even in that. Anne has ever since been the focus of my domestic inclinations: home is wherever she is, and I have simply taken her along with me in my wanderings around the world: 66 countries at present count for me, about 55 for her because many of my short term “culture war” missions had to be solo.

In the interim years, from my 12 year old crisis point until meeting Anne, my Mom represented “home” to me, even though she no longer provided me a living space, and even though were we never really close after my end-of-childhood experience.

Today those two most important women in my life are both suffering health crises. My Mom, for whom I now exercise power of attorney, is in long-term care with incrementally worsening dementia, and Anne, for whom I have become primary care-giver (contrary to my lifetime of innate selfishness) being incrementally crushed to death by her own spine in the slow-motion process of severe, untreatable degenerative scoliosis. But praise God, she remains a cheerful trooper and still has some personal mobility.

Anne’s condition has put an end to our nomadic lifestyle in the sense that we can no longer pick up and move to a new house, state or nation at will (which we did about every two years) in pursuit of our missionary goals. Instead, we’re rooted now on our son Sam’s farm, which he bought specifically as a long-term homestead to raise his now four daughters (a fifth on the way). (He literally delivered the last two himself at home when – both times in the dead of night – the midwife was late.) Sam’s choice is an intentional rejection of nomadism for himself – and a great blessing to Anne – and Me.

It’s been very hard for me to adjust to this, but also healing. Sam has broken what for him was a generational curse of “homelessness” and his selfless reintegration of our family on this property has provided for Anne a sense of groundedness I don’t think I would be capable of providing.

Homelessness has not been a curse for me, but a blessing in the sense that I share what I think is a rare experiential awareness with Jesus. When I read His statement in the Gospels that “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” I feel a great satisfaction that my decades of ministry somewhat parallel his time on earth as a man.

Looking back over 2023, I realize that I’ve gotten closer to feeling like I have a physical home than at any time since the crises in my family of origin. I can see that the purposefulness pledge I made in that soggy woodland sojourn that led me to Anne has acquired new meaning as Gramps” to these girls and the primary restorer of this fixer-upper farm, structures and grounds.

But it’s also meant tough emotional challenges as it feels like my wings are clipped as my options get more limited.

I wrote this piece because a few days ago I happened to rediscover the graphic above featuring my poem “Why I Wander” that I wrote during a walk on the beach on the Isle of White in England (although the background picture is the Alhambra Fortress in Spain.) It dawned on me after all these years that the reason I wander also has roots in pain and personal crisis. So I’ve shared this with you as another testimony of God’s goodness and blessing. He really does “make all things work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes” (Romans 8:28).

In 2024 I will continue to serve Him as best I can in whatever circumstances await us, including the transition from a globe-hopping missionary to a home-based historian and motivational writer. All those adventures in Christ we’ve lived – and collected documentation to share – will find their way into print and publication to encourage, edify and enlighten the Body of Christ and hopefully to evangelize many salvation seekers. I thank you in advance for being a part of that through your prayers, financial giving and your own words of encouragement.

God vs. the devil in American constitutional law

First published on WND, 12/27/2023

At the height of my pro-life street activism just after the turn of the millennium, I bought a full-body Satan costume and made a 3-by-6-foot foam-board into a sign shaped like an arrow. It read “Abortion Special: Kill Now, Pay Later” in bold black letters over a background of rising flames. I would go to the abortion clinics in the persona of Satan in the style of a carnival barker drumming up business for the baby killers. In the most memorable of these events, the Sacramento Teens for Life (whom I had been training for months in critical thinking, debate and lobbying skills) joined me for some street theater. They and their pro-life signs were there to represent Jesus across the street from the killing center. The girls all dressed like angels, while I worked the devil’s side.

I was the last to arrive on the scene because I had to change into my costume, so when I got to the abortuary the drama was already unfolding. There were three “pro-choice escorts” on scene: a dominant-and-submissive lesbian couple and a very quiet and reserved black Satanist wearing a pentagram ring, all in their 20s. They were clearly agitated at the presence of the angels, but when the Dom lesbian (not the sharpest tool in the box) saw me walking toward them she literally started jumping for joy, shouting “Satan’s here, Satan’s here!” and then ran up and gave me a huge hug. I had not expected anything like that, but I adapted to it quickly and pretended I had come to their rescue. In character, I shouted a few nasty insults at the pro-lifers.

The clinic buffer laws were in effect across the nation by then, so I was careful to stay outside the boundary, which in this case was the far edge of the driveway in which the pro-abort trio were standing. When the Dom saw me stop there she beckoned me over enthusiastically and I complied, just as the first abortion-bound mom was being delivered by car. We all stepped aside to let the car pass and I noticed that at the sight of Satan, the woman burst into tears, so I yelled out to her: “Come on in! It’s a great day to kill your baby!” (Hoping to change her mind.)

As the four of us were stepping back into the driveway, the Dom leaned close and in a confidential tone said, “That’s not really a good thing to say.” To which I replied, “Isn’t that what we’re doing?” And, by the way, I said all this in a heavy Southern accent, because I had named my character “Bubba,” from the deep, deep, deep South (as in Hell).

For the very first time the Dom got suspicious. She peered intently at me through the eye-holes in my mask, and asked, “Are you an Anti?” I quipped back, “No, I’m on your side!” She then looked at my sign, the import of its message apparently registering in her mind for the first time. “You ARE an Anti!” she stated firmly. But I replied (in a tone of ultimate irony), “Would I lie to you?” Her feeble mind being flummoxed by my faux sincerity, she then ran into the clinic and brought out a 30-something female staffer in scrubs (perhaps the abortionist herself). The woman looked me over for half a second and then turned to the Dom with withering scorn declared, “He’s one of THEM! (you idiot)” – that last part being unspoken.

The Dom then turned indignantly to me, demanding that I get off the driveway. So I stepped back to my original perch and began mocking them all incessantly, perfectly in character, praising them for the quality of their profanity when they swore back at me, while also carrying on my role as the clinic’s marketing barker whenever another car drove in.

This humorous little anecdote, every word of it a true story, contains all the elements of the much more consequential battle of Satan vs. God in American jurisprudence.

America has been in a state of legal and spiritual civil war across this battle line since the rise of Marxism as a global phenomenon in the late 1800s. Marxism, the spiritual and political force behind its religious face of Secular Humanism, has always advanced the satanic agenda, using atheism as a cultural placeholder for the eventual open recognition and worship of Satan himself. The Christian church, assisted by Orthodox Jews, has led the defense of our Bible-based civilizational infrastructure and worldview.

The issue – or rather constellation of issues – over which the individual battles have been fought are all sexual in nature and successive in prominence: normalization of pornography being prominent in the 1940s and ’50s, marital infidelity being prominent in the 1950s and ’60s, heterosexual fornication in the ’60s and ’70s, abortion in the ’70s and ’80s, homosexuality in the ’80s and ’90s, teen sexual “liberation” in the ’90s and 2000s, full-spectrum LGBTism in the ’00s and ’10s, transgenderism/transhumanism in the ’10s and ’20s. At each stage we Christians have lost the battle, and an increasing number of Americans have adjusted to the “new normal.”

Legally speaking, the turning point for the country was in Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, when the U.S. Supreme Court dethroned God and insisted all religions are equal and equally deserving of government recognition. Cultural inertia ensured change would come slowly, but the logically inevitable consequence of open Satanism has arrived. Rather, a relatively harmless, cartoonish form of open Satanism has arrived, a forerunner to disarm the public while the infrastructure of the true Church of Satan is established.

Today’s public face of Satan is really just a leftist version of “Bubba,” with the goal of obscuring truth rather than exposing it. The Satanic Temple organization is a mostly LGBT-populated organization that doesn’t actually teach worship of the demon Satan but just reconditioned humanist ideals designed to appeal to young people and win them to the believe that “Satanism” is benign. Its public program is primarily devoted to provoking and “punking” Christians as a means to demoralize us. The Satanists know that since 1947, an increasingly Secular Humanist-controlled SCOTUS has built for them a full arsenal of legal weaponry to use against us, with most of our defenses being only cultural traditions that pro-Christian judges must diligently parse the law to preserve. Justice Scalia tried and failed to thwart that trend in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), requiring Mat Staver’s Liberty Counsel to write and Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which also slowed but didn’t stop them.

As it stands today, U.S. constitutional law is on the side of Satan’s “right” to “the free exercise” of his religion. We dissenters have been pushed out past a “buffer zone” that protects their evil and limits our ability to intervene. That’s the hard sad truth of our national spiritual condition.

But, the high court has the power to overturn the original cases that set this evil train in motion, and for the first time in decades the majority of justices may be conservative enough to do so. I say, let’s fight for THAT potentiality by denying the Satanists their “rights” all the way up the legal ladder, knowing we’ll probably lose on the lower rungs. My next article will be on a strategy for this achieving this outcome.

Mary’s Moment, Christmas Eve

I’ve been email friends for several years with a man named Michael Roane whose spiritual maturity and love for modeling and teaching the biblical worldview has impressed me. He graciously agreed to let me share some of his insights on Christmas, stating that he has no real claim on them because they were given to him by the Holy Spirit. That’s my attitude also, but, as I said in reply “If being the Holy Spirit’s vessel didn’t confer honor, Mary, John, Paul and all the prophets wouldn’t be heroes of the faith.” That started me meditating on the theme of humans being vessels of habitation for spiritual beings separate from ourselves. I woke this morning with that theme on my mind, recognizing that Brother Michael’s influence on me is an example of the biblical metaphor: “iron sharpens iron.”

This is what he wrote:

“ How did Simeon know when to look for the Messiah in the temple? …
Bethlehem is only about eight or so miles from Jerusalem. The shepherds in that region supplied the lambs used in the daily sacrifices at the temple. When a ewe was about to give birth, she would be brought to a place called “Tower of the flock.” This place, which in Hebrew was known as Migdal Eder, was mentioned as far back as the time of Abraham (Genesis 35:21), and is also mentioned in a prophecy of the coming Messiah in the book of Micah. —

“And you, O tower of the flock, hill of the daughter of Zion, to you shall it come, the former dominion shall come, the kingdom of the daughter of Jerusalem.” — Micah 4:8 (RSV)

Once a lamb was birthed, the shepherds would wrap it in swaddling and place it in a manger to keep it from being blemished in any way. When the angel announced the birth of the Messiah to the shepherds on that night, he told them, “Here is how you will know: you will find a baby wrapped in cloth and lying in a feeding trough.” — Luke 2:12 (CJB)

This was all the information that was given to them by the angel, but based upon that, they knew exactly where to find him — at the Tower of the flock, where lambs were swaddled and placed in the manger. Some think this is the place where Mary gave birth to God’s perfect lamb when she and Joseph could find no other place to stay….

“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.” — Luke 2:20 (RSV). Perhaps as soon as the next day or certainly within a couple of days, some of them made their way to Jerusalem, likely to deliver lambs to the temple. They would no doubt have told anyone who would listen about the angels announcement and seeing the baby Jesus. Among those in the temple was an elderly man named Simeon.

“There was in Yerushalayim [Jerusalem] a man named Shim‘on [Simeon]. This man was a tzaddik [a righteous one], he was devout, he waited eagerly for God to comfort Isra’el, and the Ruach HaKodesh [Holy Spirit] was upon him. It had been revealed to him by the Ruach HaKodesh that he would not die before he had seen the Messiah of Adonai [the LORD]. — Luke 2:25-26 (CJB)

…. When Simeon caught wind of the birth of the Messiah and the accompanying visitation of the angels, I can imagine him closely questioning the shepherds about what night it took place. For you see, if he knew that, he would know on what day to be in the temple looking for the baby and His parents based upon the Torah passage in Leviticus 12:1-4. —

The Lord said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, If a woman conceives, and bears a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as at the time of her menstruation, she shall be unclean. And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised [b’rit-milah]. Then she shall continue for thirty-three days in the blood of her purifying; she shall not touch any hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying are completed.

Simeon knew to be in the temple on the fortieth day. This was the day he had waited for ever since the Holy Spirit had spoken to him. Prompted by the Spirit, he went into the Temple courts; and when the parents brought in the child Yeshua to do for him what the Torah required [i.e., redeem the first-born], Shim‘on took him in his arms, [and] made a b’rakhah [blessing or thanksgiving prayer] to God and said,

“Now, Adonai, according to your word, your servant is at peace as you let him go; for I have seen with my own eyes your yeshu‘ah [Messiah], which you prepared in the presence of all peoples —
a light that will bring revelation to the Goyim [Gentiles] and glory to your people Isra’el.”
— Luke 2:27-32 (CJB)…Simeon was the first righteous witness to the coming of the Messiah. Only moments later, Hannah a righteous widow from the tribe of Asher became the second witness (Matthew 18:16).

End excerpt.

What a profound set of insights! Now to my meditative rabbit trail, beginning with Christ’s warning in Matthew 12:43-45 that any man without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is at risk of becoming a vessel for demons.

Years ago in my studies of the occult I encountered a belief in Theosophy of “the Akashic Record,” which it describes as “a compendium of all universal events, thoughts, words, emotions and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present, or future in terms of all entities and life forms, not just human.” These records are supposedly “imprinted on astral light” and accessible through necromancers and mediums.

Amazingly, when I went online to refresh my memory of this occult doctrine for this article I was taken to a Quora chatroom where second in line in the comments section was the very man (D.E.) who many years ago introduced me to the truth of rampant Nazi homosexuality (my inspiration for writing The Pink Swastika – which also exposes Nazi occultism). He was defending the practice of seeking necromancers and mediums – on the grounds that the word translated as necromancer could also be translated as “water bottle” as in a vessel made from the skin of a dead animal. Always a spiritual oddball (pray for him), he was obviously missing the biblical point that necromancers and mediums are vessels of demons trying to reach and influence human beings – forcefully condemned in Leviticus 19:26, Acts 19:19 and Deuteronomy 18:10.

It’s just another example of human beings worshiping created things instead of the Creator whose own memory holds everything they claim inhabits “astral light” and more – and which is all accessible to Christians through the Holy Spirit, as Michael’s insights illustrate.

The fact is that human beings ARE vessels of spiritual entities – light or dark, which brings me to my final point on this day of Christmas Eve. Only one person in all history was BOTH a spiritual vessel in the way all of us are, AND the physical habitation of the fetal Christ Child Himself: Mary, the Mother of God, not in any way a “co-redemptrix,” but nevertheless blessed above all other women, with insights implicitly unique to herself and her role — her advice to humanity metaphorically summarized in the command to the servants at Cana, “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5).

Tomorrow we will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and all the eyes of creation will rightly be upon Him. But tonight our focus should be on the young woman, the spiritual ewe, Mary, sheltered in an animal stall, bearing the stress and pain of labor mixed with the anticipation of unimaginable joy – whom God chose as His vessel and channel into human form. This is her moment! Ave, Maria.

###

See Mike’s work HERE and HERE