The Final War

I feel deeply for soldiers and I know that this is something God put in my heart, for I have had very little acquaintance with soldiers. The military is not something I am naturally drawn to, but I am interested in taking a peek at many types of human experiences. My imagination paints a horrible, heart–wrenching landscape when I read accounts about war.

Thankfully, it's not all bad. Christians have told of fellow soldiers who died on the battlefield, with the glory of God shining on their faces because they knew Jesus as their Saviour, and they saw their Heavenly Home welcoming them in their last moments. How sweet death is for those who have made their peace with God through Jesus Christ and have nothing to fear about what lies beyond.

Most aspects of war are tragic, though. I've looked at photos of soldiers who have lost limbs or their faces are terribly scarred from battle injuries, and have thought of the very real possibility that, through the power of Jesus Christ, those missing parts can be restored, the scars can be healed, both on the inside and the outside, because Jesus lives, and by His wounds, according to His Word, we WERE healed.

He healed the maimed when He walked the Earth, and even when He was arrested at Gethsemane. He restored the ear of one of the men who came to arrest him, after Peter tried to defend Him with a sword. I wonder if Malchus returned to Gethsemane the next day and examined the spot where he was struck, remembering the pain and the blood that poured down his neck and stained his clothes. If he returned to the garden, he may have still been wearing those bloodied clothes when he found that severed ear in the churned up dirt. I wonder if he picked it up and marvelled at it, while touching his new ear that was given him by the Man he came to arrest. I wonder if he had felt power surge into him, as that holy hand touched his head, and I long to be used as an extension for that holy hand to touch the shatttered lives of many more.

I've seen men who suffered from what was called "shell shock." The mind of one man was gone; he never recovered from his stint in the army and was on disability for the rest of his life. Another gentleman of my acquaintance functioned well enough, but every now and then, he would have a seizure similar to epilepsy, suddenly ceasing to talk, staring off sternly and intently at another world, making strange noises under his breath. Humans were not designed to witness horror or to participate in it. We were designed for love, and anything that violates that leaves an ugly imprint upon the psyche.

I feel for the hardships that soldiers endure during war, that they don't always get fed adequately, that they sometimes don't get enough water to drink, that they are often too hot or too cold, that it is hard to get cleaned up, and that they are often very weary, tired enough to wish they were dead, if that would give them rest. I grieve that they get wounded and experience pain, and that they see friends get killed, and that they see civilians suffering and can't do anything about it, and that they do things themselves that they are ashamed of afterwards.

I am sure that the innocent casualties of war rarely feel sympathy for soldiers, having suffered at their hands, and I feel for them, too. But theirs are not the issues I am addressing in this particular article. God loves all of humankind, even soldiers who kill other people, whether their cause can be deemed as just, or is an expression of imperialism.

Regardless of what side of a war they fight on, war is horrific for everybody, unless they are psycho and got involved in war for the opportunity it gives them to cause pain, humiliation, and death. That is probably not the case with most soldiers. I feel the saddest for those who are conscripted and really are too gentle in nature to be involved in killing other people.

I feel sad for those who died feeling alone and afraid and had no wonderful place in Heaven waiting for them because they rejected Jesus as their Saviour. I feel sad for them because their torment did not end, but was ramped up to beyond anything they could ever imagine when they went to the place that is reserved for those who chose, until the end of their lives, to serve Self, instead of God, rejecting the only Way that God made back to Him and their original Home.

Everybody is engaged in a war, whether they are involved with this world's military or not. It is a war for our souls, a war between good and evil. It is not a war of opposing forces that are equal in power, contrary to the doctrine of yin and yang. The Bible says to overcome evil with good. Many times, it looks like evil rules and evil wins out, but that is only an illusion cast by satan and his hordes as part of their psychological operations. The Bible says that they who are with the righteous are MORE than they who are with the wicked.

Consider what the Bible, which is God's record of history, prediction of the future, and operating manual for mankind, tells us about God and satan. God created everything; nothing came into being on its own. Satan is merely a created being and incapable of originality. He can only take something that God made and twist it to serve his own ends, and the same goes for all the angels who followed him into rebellion. God knew in advance everything that they would do and nothing takes Him by surprise. Whatever ambushes satan sets up, God had His own counter-ambushes planned and prepared well ahead of time.

Satan's power is very limited, compared to God's power, which is infinite and not the slightest depleted, no matter how much of it is implemented for His use. To understand this better, when I was going through a very difficult time, God gave me a picture of Him sitting on His Throne, but all I saw was His huge foot, and satan appeared as an insane, little squirrel, madly (and futilely) chittering away at His big toe.

Jesus said that He casts out demons with the finger of God. Again, this presented a picture to my mind of God sitting on His Throne, but this time, I saw only His hand. Satan and his hordes were amassed in front of Him, and all it took was one, slight twitch of His pinkie finger to toss all of them to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. God doesn't need angels to fight His war on evil, or humans either, but He involves us to teach us to fight evil, which builds our character, and to give us opportunity to gain eternal rewards.

This war on evil is a battle that happens both on the inside of us and on the outside. We need to fight the sinful impulses of our flesh, to assert the victory of Jesus Christ that is applied to our soul when we yield to Him, and also to stand up against evil that occurs in our environment, asserting the authority and power that He has mandated to souls who have received His redemption.

As Christians, when we die, we no longer will fall into temptation to sin, and we will have the delights of Heaven to enjoy forever, but we will fight a final battle at the end of the millennial reign of Christ on the Earth. The Bible says that satan will be confined in the bottomless pit during the 1000 years, then loosed to deceive the nations for a time, testing to see who will choose to serve Self, even though they lived in a nearly perfect world where justice always prevailed. At the end of this period, all the unsaved dead will have their bodies reassembled, to fight God together with all the demons and fallen angels in one last ditch effort to topple God from His Throne, and all the saints of God will come against them, with Jesus, the whole assembly riding on white horses, to end the rebels' mischief forever.

It is an absolute impossibility to defeat God. All that God made, He designed for love. Those creatures that chose to go against their design immediately set off a self–destruct mechanism within themselves. It's like trying to boil water in a toaster. A toaster is not designed to hold water, so if it is plugged into a power source, and water is poured into it, the toaster will short curcuit because it was designed to toast bread, a dry substance, and it will electrocute the fool who ignored the operating instructions.

Haylel, which was satan's name before he turned against God, was the most intelligent of His creatures, but satan's intelligence, even when it is connected to his followers' intelligence and cunning, is far less than God's intelligence and wisdom. Not only that, God can confuse them and make them forget things, such as what happened the last time they pulled a certain stunt and why it failed, so that they make the same mistakes again. There are many things that God can do to toy with demonic powers and there is nothing that their intelligence and abilities can do to counteract it and prevent His set plans from succeeding.

Satan's original name came from a root word that means "praise" or "celebrate." He led the praise and worship in Heaven. He thinks that God gets His power from praise because the glory of God increases during praise and worship. It does not increase because God is getting stronger. He doesn't need to get stronger; He is the Almighty, unlimited in power. The manifestation of His glory increases because part of God's nature is that He is humble. He likes to feel that He is welcome, that He isn't intruding, though He will intrude, if He feels it is necessary for the good of His creation. His brightness increases, His Presence becomes weightier in the created realms the more gratitude and sincerely welcoming invitation He receives from His creatures.

As I said, God's power is not diminished in the least, no matter how much it is expended. He is infinite. But satan tries to gather as many souls as he can, not only to make them forever miserable, but also to harness their "energy," to absorb it into himself, thinking that then he will be strong enough to defeat God.

He is in for a big shock because he refuses to face the truth about his limitations and God's unlimitations. The Father of Lies, lies to himself most of all, not only because of his ambitions, but also because of desperation. He knows that God has sentenced him to be cast in the Lake of Fire to be tormented forever, when God has finished presenting the evidence to all of Creation of the justice and necessity of His decision.

I think of the unhappy condition of soldiers who died in war and found themselves in Hell afterwards, and how at the end of Time, they will fight one last battle, lose it, and then be cast into the Lake of Fire with satan and his angels and demons to suffer forever. Life is so short compared to eternity. What a waste to expend it on serving Self, a grotty existence, never becoming who we were really meant to be, a carrier of the glory of God on the Earth and to rule with Him in Heaven over all His angels and the rest of Creation. Even the lowliest of humankind have the high privilege of achieving that potential, if they so choose.

Satan's machinations have been making the war on mankind more and more bizarre. In our current era, we are facing questions about humanity. Is a being still human, if they have animal or demon DNA? Are they still human, if their DNA has been altered by nanotechnology? Are they still human, if they have been fitted with prosthetics that are linked to their brain? Are they still human, if their brain is linked to a computer? Are they human if they are clones? I think that the answer to all of these questions is – yes, they are still human and they can be redeemed by the Blood of Jesus because He died for mankind. It just might be harder for them because of how satan has interfered with their ability to make good choices, but God's grace is sufficient to triumph over that, if those altered people will take hold of His strength.

In regards to clones, do they have a soul? I believe that they do, but that it is not the same soul as the person from whom they were cloned. The originals were just donors of genetic material, just as ordinary conception originates with two people of the opposite sex donating genetic material to form a body for a new (and separate) being.

Clones might think that they are the original soul because of being programmed to believe this and because they are so similar to the original. They are likely programmed to think that it is their duty to carry out the will of the original, or what they perceive as the will of the original person, but it is the duty of all souls to carry out the will of the Father of all spirits who gave us our life. Scientists cannot generate life from nothing. They can only use what God made, and then tweak it or twist it, according to their agenda.

We all came from God. All of us humans lived inside of God and wanted to come to Earth to glorify Him. Most of us changed our minds about that when we came into contact with evil, reeling from the shock of it, but it is a wonderful thing when we let ourselves be persuaded to turn back to God.

I think that He showed each of us the circumstances into which we would be born, and even if those were painful situations, we all accepted our assignments because we knew that He could give us the power to overcome our disadvantages. It is a stunning thought to consider that some of our people accepted an assignment to be a clone or a chimera. Sheesh! What a legend those people will be in Heaven who choose Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, in spite of how difficult it was for them to do it.

How much human DNA is required to be considered human? I don't know, but God does. Probably because of this end times challenge, the Bible tells us to preach the Gospel to every "creature." Sometimes, we might not know if we are speaking to an animal with some human features or a person who looks like an animal, or a very sophisticated android that looks like a regular human. Even if it's a robot, preach the Gospel anyway; it gets recorded and could have the opportunity to reach human ears.

I am sure that there will be people who will read this article and think the last paragraphs are completely bizarre, but hold onto your hat; this technology is about to explode upon the public scene and become common knowledge. Laws have already been passed pertaining to gene–manipulated creatures, such as in the UK where it is against the law to harm or kill a chimera.

God can heal deranged DNA. He can take out the contamination and bring forth completely human attributes. I believe that this is part of the "greater works" that God has assigned for His end time Church. Nothing is too hard for Him, there is nothing that He can't do, as long as it does not violate the Law of Love.

The only safe haven against all this demonically–inspired stuff is God, our Creator, through Jesus Christ, who is God made flesh to live among man, to teach us His ways and be a perfect example of righteousness, then die upon a cross, taking upon Himself all our sins and the punishment for them, so that He might win us back from satan one by one, as each of us turns away from our sins to Him and receives His forgiveness. To God be the glory!