¹²Bright morning star (KOTK Bible: shining star), how you have fallen from heaven, thrown to earth, prostrate among the nations! ¹³You thought to yourself: ‘I shall scale the heavens to set my throne high above the mighty stars; I shall take my seat on the mountain where the gods assemble….^14band make myself like the most high’.

Isaiah 14:12 and 14b – The Revised English Bible

¹Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, with Satan (KOTK: an enemy) standing at his right hand to accuse him. ²The angel said to Satan (KOTK: the enemy), ‘The Lord silence you, Satan (KOTK: you enemy)!….’

Zechariah 3:1-2a – The Revised English Bible

¹Jesus was then led by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil (KOTK Bible: slanderer)

Matthew 4: 1 – The Revised English Bible

¹⁰Finally, find your strength in the Lord, in his mighty power. ¹¹Put on the full armour provided by God, so that you may be able to stand firm against the stratagems of the devil (KOTK Bible: The false accuser).

EPHESIANS 6:10-11 – The Revised English Bible

^8b….the son of God appeared for the very purpose of undoing the devil’s (KOTK Bible: slanderer) work.

1 John 3: 8b – The Revised English Bible

Picture courtesy of Pexels – Andrea la Bruja del Caldero

Almost every day now, I find myself reading about something that fills me with horror of what’s become of our world. In fact, some days, it almost feels like an assault on me individually. It’s almost as if someone’s watching me and saying: ‘Let’s throw this horror at him; he’s bound to react to that one!’

As recently as just over three years ago, some of the following things would have been unthinkable:

• The latest statistics show that our UK official mortality figures are 935 deaths higher every single week, than they should have been, based on previous levels. Does anyone care enough to try to find out why? No. It’s suggested that the increase is as a result of the backlog in the NHS. Unfortunately for those promulgating this theory, a similar percentage of excess deaths is repeated in virtually every major Western country. No-one wishes to consider whether many of these extra deaths may have been directly caused by the mRNA jabs. The evidence is mounting daily that this may well be the case. The government and the organisations like the MHRA which are supposed to protect us, have their ears stopped and their feet in clay. May God have mercy on their souls.
• There’s now a great deal of evidence, as well as many harrowing individual stories, to show that a great number of the elderly, who were sent from hospitals into Care Homes during the first wave of COVID, were medicated with a mixture of benzodiazepine, Midazolam and opioid morphine. Midazolam is the drug which is used to kill ‘death row’ prisoners in some states in the US. The combination of these drugs is used as ‘end of life pathways’, euphemistically referred to by the NHS as ‘palliative care pathways’. The use of Midazolam increased by a factor of four during the first year of COVID, and there’s evidence that Matt Hancock, Health Secretary at the time, placed a massive order for this drug, before giving the instruction to remove older people from hospitals and into Care Homes, to make room for anticipated increases in COVID hospitalisations. It’s hard not to suspect that we’ve witnessed murder by state decree of many thousands of elderly and vulnerable people. May God have mercy on their souls.
• Last week, we were told about the case of the 19-year-old girl known only as ‘ST’. Her parents are prohibited by the Court from revealing her name. The NHS wished to put her onto the same end of life drugs, as they said she was going to die imminently from a rare disease. ‘ST’ fought them through the courts. She was found by two qualified psychiatrists to be of sound mind and capable of making rational decisions; her argument was that she should be allowed to extend her life by going overseas for specialist and experimental treatment. Her view was that she wished to fight to preserve her life, up to her very last day. The judge found that she was not capable of making her own decision for the simple reason that she was not prepared to accept the advice of her medical team. She was put on the same end-of-life drugs, against her wishes, and died a few days later. It must be said that all the evidence points to her having been murdered by the NHS, with the active co-operation of a judge. The same people who see nothing wrong with this, are screaming for the legalisation of assisted suicide, on the grounds of ‘bodily autonomy.’ May God have mercy on their souls.
• Almost every day, there are stories about very young people (well below the age of consent) being given ‘puberty blockers’ to enable them to ‘change gender’ (as if such a thing were possible). Many of these people end up also having surgery to their breasts and genitalia. And there have been several stories of people who later in life feel that if only they had received proper medical assistance for earlier mental challenges, rather than being actively encouraged into irreversible surgery, they would never have agreed to it. Furthermore, schools are behaving as if the parents have absolutely no right to know anything about their children. This is a good example of both physical and mental abuse of vulnerable people. May God have mercy on their souls.
• As if these stories were not enough, we also have educational authorities in several countries now teaching children as young as 3 how to masturbate and ‘explore their sexuality’, again without the parents being allowed to know what’s going on in the classroom. If you doubt me, follow up this most disturbing link to what’s happening in Wales (and many other parts of the UK and Europe):

https://www.publicchildprotectionwales.org/sex-education

May God have mercy on their souls.

OK, so those are the facts. And I feel that I can only comment that these issues revolt and disgust me. It takes all my strength to ask God to have mercy on the perpetrators. Mutilating young children is a crime against humanity; teaching small children to masturbate (even in some cases to masturbate each other) is nothing less than the degenerate abuse of vulnerable children. The educational authorities pander to paedophilia, and abandon all responsibility for looking after those who look to them for protection.

These things are all so hard to understand or accept, that it’s perhaps not that surprising that I’m now spotting routine references to evil and ‘The Devil’ at work, causing these things and many others like them.

I’ve written on this site before about the fact that ‘hell’ isn’t a Biblical concept. See here for example:

The look that speaks of hell. A meditation for Good Friday

The reason that ‘hell’ isn’t a Biblical concept is because the words sheol (meaning grave) and Gehenna (meaning a perpetually burning rubbish tip on the edge of Jerusalem) have both been traditionally and incorrectly translated as ‘hell.’ The story behind ‘the devil’ and ‘Satan’ in the above examples is similar. I’ve never studied Greek or Hebrew, (and besides which this isn’t the place to go into all the scholarly detail of this), but I was taught that if a word appears in different ways in different translations, it may imply that there’s a complex translation issue hidden, and we need to grapple with it.

It’s for this reason that I’ve shown under the above sample of Bible references touching on this issue, the different translation for these words that’s been adopted by Chris Sparkes in his ‘Keys of the Kingdom’ Holy Bible.

If you’re interested in what a real Biblical scholar has to say about these things, then see Page xxiv of Chris’s Preface to his Bible, that you can find here:

http://www.keysofthekingdombible.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Preface-to-Keys-of-the-Kingdom-Holy-Bible-2022.pdf

So where does that leave my own theological reflection about ‘the devil’ and ‘Satan’?

When we state that ‘The Devil tempts us,’ I fear that it can sometimes sound as though we’re making an excuse for our own failings: ‘It’s not my fault; the devil tempted me’. I’ve been appalled this week to hear Russell Brand justifying his having had sex with ‘thousands’ of women by saying that he was ‘addicted to sex’. ‘I couldn’t help it, honestly.’

I’ve written before that when our world abandoned Christianity, it left a ‘God-shaped hole’. It would be easy to believe that when people abandoned Christianity, it left us with an appalling list of what seem to be ‘devil-inspired’ things happening in our world.

But actually, we haven’t just abandoned  God. It’s worse than that – many have actively and consciously rejected God and all of His values.

So I’m inclined to the view that a suitable definition of evil and the works of the devil is ‘a total rejection of God and all His values’. I’m not suggesting this is a technically correct translation of these words in Hebrew and Greek, but it may explain a lot, in our world and our time?

That’s a depressing thought, and it leaves the next generation in a dangerous place.

But it also leaves hope. It’s never too late for individuals, and nations, to reverse that process. God is longing to forgive us and grant us a fresh start. And if evil is a rejection of God’s values, then enthusiastically embracing God’s values can help to drive out the insanity, the evil and ‘the devil.’

Ultimately, you see, I don’t think it matters too much whether you wish to view ‘the devil’ as a supernatural being, an ‘adversary’, a ‘fallen angel’, a ‘slanderer’, an ‘enemy’ a ‘false accuser’, or whether you think we’re quite capable of generating ‘the works of the devil’ entirely by ourselves, and without any help from such a figure.    

Heavenly Father, we can never thank you enough for continuing to love us, despite your horror at what we do when we reject you and your values. Help us to see that we cannot live in harmony and happiness without you.

Amen