My 85th birthday is approaching, and I can already see its wrinkles.
Our life has settled down to a predictable, run-of-the-mill, yet sanguine, obstinacy. We’ve been there, done that, etc., etc.
So it truly startled me when a sharp sadness settled heavily upon my heart while reading a recent synopsis of Vladimir Putin interviews by a variety of world-renowned journalist and analysts. The Russian despot, they tell us, began life as a hoodlum, cherishing street fights in his childhood streets of Leningrad.
The pugnacious kid later became ripe fodder for the KGB corps of born thugs who offered him a job perfectly befitting his personality. “Few knew him well,” we are told in the March 26 edition of The Economist. But he was always known as inscrutable and given to quickened grudges, grievances and greedy corruption.
As he rose to power within the fierce battles of a heartless Moscow ruling hierarchy, he also slowly established a Mafia-styled billionaire pack of compatriots sewn into a single-minded cabal of greed-consumed loyalists. Greed and selfishness cemented his unstoppable rule of an always-troubled nation, overly inclined to dominance of any who block their way. NATO was created to counter this tendency to violence, and the United Nations had similar worries of violent dictatorships at the heart of its subsequent establishment in the United States.
Putin is clearly the self-defined godling of a violent, Satanic universalism hell-bent on restoring the former greatness of the U.S.S.R and beyond. On this point, all the above-mentioned Western analysts who personally interviewed and researched him are in total agreement.
Principalities and Powers
It is also generally accepted by those versed in the history and languages of the Holy Bible that God’s greatest enemy, Satan, commands a force of fallen angels-turned-demons populating the regions lying between heaven and earth — the worldly atmosphere. These forces control much of the earth, interfering with and influencing mankind’s comings and goings by individually whispering lies, innuendos, slander, threats, grievances and mere suggestions into their souls on a nonstop regimen.
Spirit to Spirit is where the battles either begin or are warded off by countervailing words of wisdom from our Maker. Those motivated to act upon the advice of demons have likely surrendered to forces about which they haven’t a clue, believing the “truths” come from they themselves.
Not only dictators fail in this regard. Extremists of all varieties buy into the whispered deceptions, reacting in a manner leading them to believe their destructive “causes” are justified. Leaders of any violent movement, whether based on religion, politics, or their social or personal worldview, have convinced themselves of their “rightness” in eradicating nonbelievers.
Note: This line of thought gets to the chilling heartbreak of the Ukrainian tragedy. Putin and his acolytes actually believe they are serving a higher, greater good!
It’s easy to imagine what the misguided leader is being told by these spirits of deception: “Don’t listen to those who oppose you. You know what you are doing is right. You’re the last emperor of the earth’s largest empire and have just begun its restoration. You and a greater Russia will grow together into the most powerful this world has ever seen.”
May God have mercy on his soul. He has sold out to the liar of liars, and we would wish his fate upon no man. For, as we have been commanded by our Lord, we are to love even the worst of our satanically misguided enemies.
Putin is joined by many other tyrants in these troubled times selling out to the “rightness” of false belief systems — all under control of a temporarily triumphant Satan — and will soon work together to turn the earth into a nuclear holocaust. Painful as it is to admit, Armageddon will quickly be upon us. We need not pretend to be prophets in declaring such things. Anyone with even a somewhat clogged brain can foresee a familiar, historical pattern of human warfare becoming worse and worse with each generation.
Descriptions of Armageddon-style conflict — tongues cleaving to the roofs of mouths, for example — can only occur via the blast, heat and radiation of a nuclear explosion (Zech. 14:12).
What To Do?
It is now demanded of we who know these things to double down in prayer, in our cooperative devotion to one another, and to increasingly active lives as disciples of truth. We each have a cognitive list of friends, neighbors and relatives still living in ignorance, disbelief and/or rebellion against the truth!
Why, for example, are you just sitting there reading this article? Don’t you have some urgent tasks tearing at your conscience? Envision their faces (just as I am imagining several at this moment).
Because you’re probably much younger than I, you’re likely at my heels even now, about to take the lead. That is my hope and my prayer!
Let’s all double down on what our Lord commanded us to do. We can’t do much to prevent the evil times soon to come, but we still have enough time and energy to partner in spreading the gospel to all around us who will listen.
Your specific response to this plea will reflect which voice you’re listening to. And your mission field most likely is directly in front of your nose, regardless of where you live. {eoa}
Ronald Dee Mallett of Milliken, Colorado, studied business, journalism, economics and mass communications at Colorado and Denver Universities and post-graduate studies at Stanford on a Ford Fellowship grant. An Air Force vet, former member of Civil Air Patrol and retired multinational corporate executive, he later served as director of jail, prison, nursing home and Mexico outreaches, as well as intercession ministries for over 20 years.
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