Return of the god's...
It's not often that I am so impacted by an article, that I feel the need to share it with as many people as possible; especially if it is written by a non-Christian. Yet, recently I was sent such an article by journalist and author Naomi Wolf that "knocked my socks off," as the saying goes.
Apparently, she had just finished reading Jonathan Cahn's book, Return of the God's. Jonathan is a Messianic Jew, which means he is a Christian. He is also a pastor and author. Although she admits that she doesn't completely agree with his conclusions, the book answered a question she had not been able to satisfactorily answer herself: Why is there evil in the world, and why has it become so prevalent?
The article is rather long, so I have edited it significantly. Hopefully I have not lost the gist of her message: Because America has turned its back on the God of the Bible, He has allowed evil to rush into our spiritual vacuum.
In an essay last year, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness. I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past three years using all my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present.
I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched from being based at least overtly, on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion, and hatred, overnight, en masse — without referencing some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency.
When ordinary would-be-tyrants try to take over societies, there is always some flaw, some human impulse undoing the headlong rush toward a negative goal... But none of that fracturing or mismanagement of normal history took place in the global rush to “lockdowns,” the rollout of COVID hysteria, of “mandates,” masking, of global child abuse, of legacy media lying internationally at scale and all lying in one direction of thousands of “trusted messengers” parroting a single script, and of forced or coerced mRNA injections into at least half of the humans on Planet Earth.
I reluctantly concluded that human agency alone could not coordinate a highly complicated set of lies about a virus and propagate the lies in perfect uniformity around an entire globe, in hundreds of languages and dialects. Human beings, using their own resources alone, could not have turned hospitals overnight from having been places in which hundreds of staff members were united in and collectively devoted to the care of the infirm, the prolongation and salvation of human life, the cherishing of newborns, the helping of mothers to care for little ones, the support of the disabled, to killing factories in which the elderly were prescribed “run-death-is-near (Remdesivir)” at scale.
Also look at the speed of change. Institutions turned overnight into negative mirror images of themselves, with demonic policies replacing what had been at least on the surface, angelic ones. Human-history change is not that lightning fast. The perception of the rollout, the unanimity of a mass delusion, cannot in my view be explained fully by psychology; not even as a “mass formation.”
What we have lived through since 2020 is so sophisticated, so massive, so evil, and executed in such inhumane unison, that it cannot be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics. Something else, something metaphysical, must have done that. And I speak as a devoted rationalist.
I concluded that I was starting to believe in God in more literal terms than I had before, because this evil was so impressive; it must be directed at something at least as powerful that was all good.
Because we have turned away from our covenant with YHWH — especially we in America, and we in the West, and especially since the 1960s — therefore, the ancient “Gods,” or rather, ancient pagan energies, that had been vanquished by monotheism and exiled to the margins of civilization and human activity — have seen an “open door,” and thus a ready home to reoccupy, in us. ...the Hebrew Bible refers to what in Hebrew is rendered “shedim” or negative spirits (in modern Hebrew, this word means “ghosts”) These spirits, powers or principalities were worshiped in the pagan world in many guises — from the fertility god Baal to the goddess of sexuality Ashera or Ashtaroth; to the destructive idol, Moloch.... the ancient world was everywhere consecrated to these dark or lower entities, and that worshippers went to the point of sacrificing their own children to propitiate these forces.... the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, rendered “shedim” as Daimones. This word is rendered also as “spirit personifications;” we receive this word in English today, as “demons.”
pagan worship and pagan forces... were never overcome by the embrace in the West of Christianity; but rather that they were pushed to the margins of Western civilization; weakened by our covenant with YHWH, or with Jesus, depending on whom we are.... potentially powerful forces have been dormant for two millennia, by the Western Judeo-Christian covenant. And that they have now taken this opportunity, of our turning away from God, and they have returned.
Those are “the Gods” to whose sacrifice the Children of Israel constantly stray, disappointing and enraging our Creator. Those are “the Gods,” with their child sacrifice and their graven images, against whom our father Abraham rebelled and taught his descendants to rebel. Those are “the Gods” whose acceptance of child sacrifice – a real thing, a barbaric, culture-wide practice that continued for centuries in the tribes and civilizations surrounding the Children of Israel — was supplanted by animal sacrifice; this was an evolution in human civilization that is represented by the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, when the child on the altar is replaced miraculously by a ram provided, at the last moment, by the Lord God.
The sheer amoral power of Baal, the destructive force of Moloch, the unrestrained seductiveness and sexual licentiousness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the primal forces that do indeed seem to me to have “returned.”
Though He promised an ‘everlasting Covenant,’ that does not mean we get to do whatever we desire to do here on Earth. He never said He wouldn’t ever, under any circumstances, give up on humanity as we are, in our current context on this planet. He promised, rather, he would not ever again do away with wicked humanity by water.
He always, rightly, made clear to us that in a living partnership with Him, we are supposed to show our love and our recognition of the privilege of being wedded to His path — through our zealous, difficult, freely chosen, unending actions. God never said, once I choose you as “my people” — then you can do whatever you want. He does not want a codependent or an abusive relationship. He wants a real marriage.
Today, we are in grave danger. I am in dialogue with devout Christians who also feel that we are in a time of similar moral danger, and for similar reasons. Too few in either community, seem to understand how dangerous to a nation, to a civilization, abandoning God can be. I feel that many Jews and many Christians are at risk right now of unduly positive thinking — of thinking that everything is ok; that we will all be automatically redeemed — when it manifestly isn’t ok.
In the absence of God’s covenant and protection, great evil is flourishing. These dark forces now freed into the world around us, feel like the way the world must have felt before Moses ascended Mt Sinai; before a baby was born in a manger.
It feels again like the ancient world felt, under Baal’s, Moloch’s and Asherah’s dark, inexorable, complex and antihuman rule... a world in which humans did not, do not matter. It was – and now is – a world in which children can be slaughtered by their parents, or by the Authorities. It was – it now is — a world in which slavery had and now has no moral valence. Lust and greed were — and now are again — everything. God was not then fully present — and now I argue, God has withdrawn.
The commitment to Judeo-Christian norms and values, which have been the hallmark of the West for two millennia — even when we fell far short of them — has fallen apart altogether. The great genius of America was not that it was consecrated to a specific religion — the genius of our nation included freedom of religion — but our distinction was that we were founded as a City on a Hill; spiritually; we were consecrated, via our ultimate organizational manifestation of human freedom, with its basis in free will — to God. If we withdraw our role in that covenant... pagan entities, long held at bay in the West – are empowered, and rush back in.
Decency, human rights, human values, all of which we thought were innate secular Western values – turn out to be values that cannot be protected enduringly without the blessing of what has been in the West, a Judeo-Christian God. They are all being cleared out of our society, and almost no one — certainly very few people who are not people of faith — are standing in the breach as this takes place.
Now look at our political leaders, our national structures in the West. They went overnight from ethically oriented, at least overtly, to purely nihilistic, organizations. Before 2020, Judeo-Christian norms had not entirely left the West, even though explicit religious language was no longer invoked in its public spaces.
What I mean is that until 2020, Biblical belief systems structured our institutions even though we no longer explicitly invoked God. The Bible is all around us in the West — or it has been — even though we think we are living in a postmodern reality. We have been blind to its influence, for the most part.
Our institutions in the West, have kept the shape of Biblical concepts and beliefs even though Biblical language in public is now against the law, or has fallen away from being a cultural norm.
Since 2020 the world, I feel, has been bathed, infused, bombarded even, with intensely powerful energies that are totally unfamiliar to us in this generation, but that may derive from a pre-Christian, pre-solidly-Jewish time, a time when early Judaism was struggling with the seductive and oppressive entities that always sought to seduce the Children of Israel away from the monotheistic truth, the One God.
The ancient “shedim” are the only “principalities and powers” I can imagine that are capable of manifesting a national, and now a global, network of policy advocates, social workers, graphic designers, Members of Parliament, who are all on board with an escalating euthanasia death cult. The ancient “daimones” are the only entities I can imagine powerful enough in just two years and a bit, to destroy families, to ruin sexuality and fertility, to make a mockery of human rights, to celebrate the end of critical thinking, to march us all in lockstep to worship of technocrats and technocracy; medical cultism and an orgiastic cult of self- and other-annihilation– the ascendancy of a realm on Earth of us doing it all ourselves; regarding ourselves; worshiping ourselves, whoring after only human works; releasing ourselves from all lawful constraints, embracing all lusts and all obedience to non-divine authorities; rejecting mercy; celebrating all narcissisms; treating children like animals whom we own, treating the family like a battlefield; treating the Churches and Synagogues as marketing platforms — this is, indeed what the realms of pagan darkness; or of Principalities and Powers – look like.
This may, indeed, be what Hell itself looks like.
The full article can be found @ https://newspunch.com/naomi-wolf-the-ancient-gods-have-returned-to-earth/