The Prince of this World

Image by Sebaso

As it is, you do not belong to the world,

but I have chosen you out of the world.

That is why the world hates you.
~John 15:19

Now the prince of this world will be driven out.

~John 12:31

Do not love the world or anything in the world.

If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.

~1 John 2:15

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this:

to look after orphans and widows in their distress

and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

~James 1:27

John makes it very plain: the ruler of the earth is Satan. It may be a conditional rulership, but it is rulership nonetheless.

Now it is very easy, and I have done the same thing in the past, to think of Satan as not so much a real entity as a symbol. In other words, that there is not a real power over this world called Satan, it's a metaphor for human sin and perhaps general misfortune. It is very reassuring believe that there is no uncanny power outside of the normal human propensity to be bad. It is however harmful and dangerous NOT to understand the great power of evil. Satan, however you wish to rationalize him, is the prince of this world. To me, nothing else explains the condition of the world and the clear distinction between this world and the world as God would have it be.

This power extends to corrupting people and institutions who call themselves Christian. You don't think he would leave that alone, do you? The fact that there are people who proclaim themselves Christian on television yet hate the poor and the unfortunate, people who proclaim themselves Christian who rob the poor and the unfortunate. Self-proclaimed Christians who bring forth condemnation for others despite being explicitly forbidden from judging others by the one they claim to follow. Of course they don't follow or know him. After the original disciples of Jesus, the ones who inherited that mantle of "apostle" started understanding less and less of what Jesus taught and more and more of a human gospel, that is how they could wantonly murder people who disagreed with their version of the Good News. For centuries the Church did just that, murder persons of opposing views. Any man who seeks the death of another man is under no circumstances really an apostle of anything but evil.

And so 2000 years after true apostles like James and John, we have a condition where virtually every Christian church is a false church, a human church, which follows human and worldly wisdom and not the wisdom of God because they don't have it and probably don't want it. This is not to say that no one in such a church is really a Christian. However, one would think that a true Christian would look into God's word more closely and listen to God better than to belong to a human, and dare I say it a demonic, false church. However I do not doubt that there are some such.

How did Satan accomplish such a master stroke, of turning the supposed church of God into his servants? There were innumerable twists of the knife and twists of minds that made it possible, but there are a few blows that can be called the most crucial:

1.) One is the Protestant heresy that believing that Jesus died on the cross for your sins is the important matter, and once you believe that, you are saved even if you live in a worldly manner. John and James were both clear on this: you are expected to live and act as God wants you to. Granted, all men stumble, but you are expected to apply yourself to obeying God more than doing anything else in your life. A branch that bears no fruit is to be cut off, cut off from God. Whether you believe Jesus died for your sins or not.

Also, if you follow Jesus because of fear of hell and not because of the glory of God, you don't really know him or God. This is what is being sold: fear and self-interest. Saving your own bacon. Not the glory of God.

2.) The next one is closely related, the idea that the purpose of Jesus on Earth was for him to be a primitive Old Testament blood atonement sacrifice. Jesus and indeed many of the prophets spoke directly to the futility of blood sacrifice to wash away any sins whatsoever. And yet Christians who do not practice these barbaric rituals do insist on the importance of this one. Why did JESUS HIMSELF say he came, according to John?

“You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born

and came into the world is to testify to the truth.

Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

~John 18:37

What is the truth? God is, Jesus is. Elaborating a bit, the purpose of Jesus coming to the Earth was to bring those human beings who God has foreknown into alignment with God's will. So that they know the will of God and act on it - this is the meaning of the Spirit entering people, which in John is depicted as happening to the disciples before the crucifixion (therefore the idea that the crucifixion was necessary for the Spirit to enter people is wrong.) This is the core of the Truth who Jesus was, a means of bringing human beings back to knowledge of and obedience to God through himself. This they do, not by believing in a simplistic creed of blood redemption, but by having God's spirit enter them and following what the Spirit says and what Jesus said to do during his ministry.

Why then did Jesus have to be crucified? There are many reasons, but among the most important is that Jesus said he was Life and that those who were in him would not die. Now many of his disciples would have to face death for following him, as many true followers even faced death at the hands of Christians so-called during inquisitions of various kinds. This he set an example for himself. He died for the Truth, and yet he lived.

To believe that the purpose of Jesus on the Earth was to be a human lamb for the slaughter, in order to satiate some Old Testament deity's desire for wrath, is also very convenient for those who do not wish to do as Jesus did and said to do. If you are covered by the Blood, you can go on being a child of Satan. This is very much as Satan wants it. What he wants least of all is for anyone to start following what Jesus actually said: loving enemies, not lying, not judging, not stacking up riches, not being concerned for the opinions of other men but only for what God says. The ideology of salvation by belief and blood sacrifice is extremely convenient for a worldly church, but it's not what Jesus said.

3.) Blasphemy in the name of Christianity. There is nowhere in the Bible a mention of any Trinity, yet virtually all Christian churches believe in it. Why? Well the answer is very simple if you understand who it is who has the real authority in such churches. In a stroke of pure genius (nobody ever said the devil was dumb,) the real relationship between Jesus and the Father was twisted to make Jesus co-equal to God. Jesus in the New Testament and specifically in John repeatedly denies such a thing. The opening of John, "the word was God" has been misunderstood to mean that Jesus is part of the same godhead as God the Father. Jesus himself repeatedly refutes such an assertion in the body of John.

"Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself;
he can do only what he sees his Father doing,
because whatever the Father does the Son also does."
~John 5:19

Jesus himself confirms the ancient commandment, the Shema:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating.

Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, 

“Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this:

‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is ONE."

~Mark 12:28-29

This and loving one's neighbor are the greatest commandments, he said. No others are as great as these. Yet Christians violate the first one every Sunday. Moreover, although the Sabbath Day is not that important in itself, Jesus gave no permission to change it to Sunday. It was Saturday when Jesus observed it, and he made no comment about changing the day. It was changed to Sunday to satisfy human desire, to have the Christian Sabbath on the same day as the day of a pagan god.

So what is the true relationship of Jesus to the Father. He himself said it: that he did pre-exist the world with the Father and that he created the world by the Father's power and permission. He is the Son of God, and the mediator between God and men. He is not however himself God, and the body of Jesus' statements confirm this.

By making Jesus God, the truth is twisted and the majesty of the Father is ignored. Thus by making Jesus God, Satan seeks to undermine the Father who is the only true God. The unity of spirit between Jesus and the Father does not mean they are the same: this unity is what Jesus refers to when he says "when you have seen me you have seen the Father." Not that Jesus is the Father, but he exists in perfect harmony to God's will and would not ever say or do anything that was not the will of the Father. In this sense, seeing him IS seeing the Father because the Father is expressed in fullness through him.

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is ONE. The false doctrine of the Trinity defiles the truth of this first and most sacred commandment. As one would expect a church run by the prince of lies to do.

Of course the Church is hardly alone in bending the knee to Satan. Satan's people are everywhere seen, and God's own children scarcely heard. The oppression of the Earth and it's people should be more than adequate testimony to the fact. We have people in positions of wealth and authority who say that human beings have no right to even a drink of water, we have people who despoil the Earth for all time for their own profit. But don't be confused by them: whoever lives to satisfy the senses and does not serve God, whoever judges and is wrathful, whoever lies, whoever loves wealth or worldly power, whoever has no compassion, whoever is violence or endorses violence in any form, whoever does not seek to admonish himself and have God's admonishment, is not God's, whoever he may say he is. The Pharisees are alive and well, and call themselves Christians. They call themselves many other things as well: businessmen, political leaders, wise men, preachers, members of the media. Satan was once called the Prince of the Air: he is the Prince of the Airwaves and of cable as well.