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100K Member Satanic Temple Opening Chapters All Across America To ‘Battle Christianity’

Since its founding, The Satanic Temple has waged a highly active campaign to demand greater separation between church and state, and to challenge the privileged relationship Christianity has with government.

Published

10 years ago

April 19, 2016

Geoffrey Grider

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Since its founding, The Satanic Temple has waged a highly active campaign to demand greater separation between church and state, and to challenge the privileged relationship Christianity has with government.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” Ephesians 6:12,13,16 (KJV)

“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;” 2 Thessalonians 2:3 (KJV)

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the Laodicean Christian church continues on it’s self-defeating path of preaching the powerless ‘love gospel’, and looking for their ‘blessing’ promised them by charlatans like Joel Osteen, Lou Engle, Rick Warren, and Kenneth Copeland, the Satanic Temple is on the rise. The prophesied darkness is coming as the Church of Jesus Christ continues it’s falling away into apostasy. The war is real, the battle is hot and the time is short, to the fight, Christian!

Robert Eggers’ period horror film “The Witch” has been one of the surprise hits of 2016. It’s even gained a second wind since its February 23 release: the first weekend of April it played on 666 screens around the country, raking in an additional USD$465,000.

The tale of a Puritan family turning on each other as they attempt to root out the supernatural evil plaguing their farm, the film won Eggers the award for best director at Sundance – and even frightened horror master Stephen King.

The Satanic Temple of Detroit: Unveiling of Baphomet

GRAPHIC WARNING: This is HARD CORE Devil worship, and it took place in Detroit on July 25, 2015 at the unveiling of the Baphomet monument. This is the spirit that is now rising in America as Laodicean Christianity is powerless to stop it. Please be prayed up before viewing this.

But neither of these accolades has generated as much buzz as an endorsement from The Satanic Temple (TST), a satanic political movement that first appeared in 2013.

In December, TST and A24 studios began collaborating on a four-city tour called The Sabbat Cycle, which consisted of screenings of the film followed by politically driven satanic rituals. The stated goal of The Sabbat Cycle was to inspire a “satanic revolution.”

TST believes that the separation of church and state is currently under attack by radical religious conservatives. They also believe there is a silent majority that opposes this agenda, but remains too apathetic to do anything about it.

The Sabbat Cycle was an attempt to raise political awareness by piggybacking on “The Witch”’s appeal. This is part of larger PR model the group has used since its inception, in which the shocking and the frightening are used to lure media attention to their cause.

As a religion scholar, I find TST fascinating. Not only do their campaigns raise serious questions about the First Amendment and religious pluralism, they also challenge the public to think about what counts as a “religion.”

To learn more, I attended the Sabbat Cycle at its Austin stop, and spoke with attendees about their religious and political views.

Political movement, religion or both?

A cornerstone of their campaign has been tongue-in-cheek “stunts” intended to show how government institutions favor Christianity in ways that would never be tolerated for other religions.

Pastor Joel Osteen’s Full Sermon “The Power of ‘I Am'”

Pay attention, Christians, this is the Christian CRAP being preached to people that think they are going to take on the forces of darkness and win. In a battle between powerless Joel Osteen and his followers against the Satanic Temple and their followers, who do YOU think would win?

TST first made headlines in 2013, when it held a rally in Florida, ostensibly to congratulate Governor Rick Scott for passing a bill that would allow students to read “inspirational messages of their choosing” at assemblies and sporting events.

While Scott probably envisioned the law permitting Christian students to offer public prayers and Bible readings, it could not, constitutionally, specify what sort of “inspirational messsages” were allowed – including satanic messages. And so the rally featured a sign declaring, “Hail Satan! Hail Rick Scott!”

Whether or not TST is a “real” religion has been a subject of debate. But some members insist that while the movement is atheistic, the group, like other religions, has a shared set of values, concerns and symbols (like Satan as a symbol of rebellion).

Religion or not, no one can question TST’s appeal or its sincerity about its political goals.

Today TST has 17 chapters in the United States and Europe and claims an estimated 100,000 members – a figure based on the purchase of membership cards and various forms of online support.

Masters of media attention

TST chapters across the country have launched campaigns demanding the same religious rights and privileges afforded to Christianity.

These have included the creation of satanic coloring books for distribution in schools in Florida and Colorado; bids to erect satanic “nativity scenes” on government property in Florida, Michigan and Indiana; offering prayers to Satan at a high school football game in Seattle; and demanding that a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol be accompanied by a monument to Baphomet (a goat-headed idol associated with witches’ sabbaths).

The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) reinforced the religious freedoms outlined in the First Amendment. When the Supreme Court ruled that RFRA applied only to the federal government and could not be applied to the states, many states passed their own versions of RFRA. Several of TST’s campaigns involve using RFRA laws to claim religious accommodations for satanists.

For example, since 2014 TST has invoked state RFRA laws in Michigan and Missouri to demand a religious exemption from laws dictating that those who seek an abortion need to review literature or endure a waiting period.

In January, TST’s Tucson chapter demanded that the Phoenix City Council include them in public prayers offered before their council meetings. The council responded with a new rule that only chaplains from the police and fire departments may offer the prayers before meetings. (TST has threatened to sue.)

Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman has argued that James Madison would have supported the Tucson satanists. Madison was concerned that individual rights could be threatened by a “tyranny of the majority,” and saw laws guaranteeing individual rights as “paper barriers” that offered no real protection. Only a diverse coalition of minorities could effectively check a majority and protect individual freedom.

“We do not seek followers, but collaborators”

It was exactly this sort of coalition that TST spokeswoman Jex Blackmore hoped to forge through events like the Sabbat Cycle.

In Austin, Texas, Blackmore took the stage before a screening of “The Witch” at the Alamo Drafthouse and explained that the film was a “microcosm of a patriarchal theocratic society that results in satanic revolution.” In Blackmore’s reading of the film, the titular witch was driven to witchcraft by Puritan oppression.

Afterward I got to chat with Drafthouse employee and film buff Laird Jimenez about this assessment. He noted that “escaping patriarchy” is currently part of a cultural zeitgeist that includes films like Oscar-winner “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which depicts women escaping – and then overthrowing – a patriarchal warlord.

Following the screening, everyone migrated to a bar and music venue called The Sidewinder, where TST held their ritual. Members from the Detroit and San Antonio chapters began setting up and handing out satanic American flags painted in only black and white. I mingled with a small crowd of Satanic sympathizers and the curious. Leather jackets, tattoos and pentagrams were in abundance.

During the ritual, a speaker played an excerpt from a speech by Baptist pastor Dr. Jeff Owens, in which Owens warned his congregation, “Satan does not want you to do what he wants you to do. Satan wants you to do what you want to do.” (Other eyewitness accounts of the ritual can be found here and here.) Owens had been warning that Satan uses people’s pride and selfish desires against them, but the ritual imposed its own interpretation onto his message: To TST, Satan represents moral autonomy and personal responsibility.

Blackmore eventually appeared from beneath a hood and took to a podium to deliver what can only be described as a “satanic jeremiad.” She warned that Christian theocrats were taking over America and that those present – atheists, satanists, fans of heavy metal and punk music – were allowing it to happen: “There’s too much apathy and not enough resistance!”

She told the audience, “We do not seek followers, but collaborators.”

Afterward I spoke with some young people from the crowd. One explained that he was attracted to Satanism because “It’s about knowledge,” not dogma.

Another, Jonathan – who identified as a witch – seemed the most likely to be sympathetic to TST’s politics. He said that when he attended high school in Virginia Beach, his classmates targeted him for openly identifying as a Pagan. Someone even pretended to be him and called in bomb threats to his school. The events attracted the attention of Detective Don Rimer, a notorious “occult crime expert,” who confiscated all of Jonathan’s books on witchcraft as evidence. There was an attempt to forcibly commit Jonathan to a mental institution.

I asked Jonathan if he thought TST was really a religion.

“Definitely,” he said, “Some people treat Christianity as a hobby. But no one thinks it’s not a real religion.”

Can the satanists win?

As the event wound down, I was able to interview Blackmore. Like Marx, Blackmore saw her revolution as inevitable: the Christian Right would naturally drive people to rebel against it.

She told me that she’d recently met a French journalist who said that nothing like TST could happen in France. The French model of laicité – a much more ingrained version of America’s professed separation of church and state – leaves nothing to rebel against. By contrast, TST wants to challenge the popular belief that America is a “Christian nation.”

Many TST members and allies I spoke to described strict Christian upbringings. In Blackmore’s assessment, progressive cities like Austin are paradoxically the most apathetic about resisting the Christian Right because people in progressive cities feel they are unaffected by religion-influenced laws. Blackmore saw “The Witch” as an opportunity to get more people involved and hasten their political revolution.

But Jonathan pointed out that this dialectic can swing both ways: revolution begets counterrevolution. For example, in the 1970s, the New Christian Right formed, in part, as a response to the perceived excesses of the 1960s.

Likewise, there is a risk that an openly satanic presence in American politics will energize the very forces TST opposes. Right wing news sites such as Breitbart.com and LifeSiteNewshave given TST heavy coverage precisely because their rhetoric can be used as fodder for antiabortion activists.

Conservative voices have claimed TST “proves” what they have said all along – that God is with them and their political opponents are literally demonic.

In many ways, TST is the heir to the “New Left” of the 1960s and such figures as Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg. Events like the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in 1967 demonstrated an understanding of ritual and semiotics: the strategic use of religious symbols could change what the Pentagon represented to the public.

But the New Left also intentionally straddled the line between prank and sincerity in order to draw media attention to their cause. It is contested today what effect the New Left actually had toward the goal of ending the Vietnam War and it is similarly unclear what effect TST might have on America’s political center of gravity.

Nonetheless, millennials now outnumber baby boomers. They’re a more diverse generation than their predecessors, and major changes to the political landscape seem inevitable.

Still, supporters like Jonathan remain skeptical of TST’s true viability.

“It’s not that they’re wrong,” he said, “But this is Austin, and look how many people came out? And how many people here are actually going to do anything?” source

Free Bible Program

Bibles Behind Bars Gets Open Door At Williamson County Jail To Send Cases Of King James Bibles After One Mother Asked For Just One Bible For Her Son

Published

22 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Geoffrey Grider

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The Lord Turned One Mother’s Request For One King James Bible Into An Open Door For Hundreds Of Inmates At The Williamson County Jail in Tennessee

What began as a simple and heartfelt request from the mother of an inmate has now become a wide-open door for the word of God inside the Williamson County Jail in Tennessee. A mother reached out to Bibles Behind Bars asking if we could send her son a King James Bible while he was incarcerated. I told her that we would be happy to do that, but making a connection there was much harder than I had anticipated. It took many phone calls, over many weeks, more than a few emails, and no small amount of persistence, but at last we were able to connect with the right person at the facility and obtain permission to send that Bible. Then the Lord did what He so often does, He kicks the door wide open and now we are supplying Bibles to the whole facility!

“For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Luke 19:10 (KJB)

This is why Bibles Behind Bars exists. Not to promote a program, not to build a brand, not to make men religious, and not to hand out motivational literature. We exist to get the King James Bible into the hands of men and women behind bars because “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” The Bible does not need government approval to have power. It doesn’t need academic endorsement, and it doesn’t need modern revision. It needs only to be opened, read, believed, and obeyed. Paul wrote some of his most powerful words from prison. Joseph went from a prison house to a throne. The Philippian jailer met salvation in the middle of the night after an earthquake shook the prison doors open. God has never been intimidated by bars, guards, locks, rules, wardens, court systems, solitary confinements or government facilities. When God wants His word to go in, it goes in. This is the mission of Bibles Behind Bars, this is what your prayers work to accomplish, and this is what the donations you send in are spent on to produce. Come join us in this very important last days work, we need you!

HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page

If God has prospered you, please take a moment to click on the donate button to help us in this monumental task of providing King James Bibles, New Testaments, scripture portions, gospel tracts as well as Spanish Bibles to inmates in jails and prisons from Florida to Alaska, and every state in between. We need your prayers, we need your generous financial support, and we need you to stand with us in the closing days of the Church Age. Thank you so very much, TO THE FIGHT!!!

NOTE: If you need a 501 C3 Letter of Donation for tax purposes, please send your donation to:

NTEB Ministries
1340 N Great Neck Rd.
Ste. 1272-129
Virginia Beach, VA 23454.

Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church

HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page

When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.

But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)

“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB

Donald Trump

The Opening Of The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room In New York City Shows The American People Demand Justice For The Victims

Published

1 day ago

May 12, 2026

Geoffrey Grider

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The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Reading Room Turns 3.5 Million Pages Of Buried Elite Corruption Into A Midterm Weapon Against Trump

The timing could not be more explosive. America is watching a sitting president entangled in a Middle East war, gas prices are biting voters at the pump, the midterms are coming like a freight train, and right in the middle of it all sits a pop-up shrine to the Epstein files in New York City called The Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room.That is not just an exhibit. it’s a political omen.

“Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.” Daniel 5:24,25 (KJB)

The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Reading Room reportedly contains roughly 3.5 million pages of Epstein-related Justice Department files, bound into 3,437 volumes, with a display on the long-running relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. CNA reports that public access to the actual files is limited because DOJ failed to properly redact some victim names, but the visual impact is unrelenting and unmistakable – row upon row of Epstein Files bound records, a public spectacle of what the ruling class would rather keep buried.

If Donald Trump thought that starting a war with Iran would get people to stop talking about the Epstein Files, he was way off. Take a look at what just opened in New York City – The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. And no, it’s not AI, it’s goodbye. pic.twitter.com/71l4xOUdWc

— Now The End Begins (@NowTheEndBegins) May 12, 2026

And here is the problem for Trump and MAGA:Epstein was supposed to be their issue. For years, the Epstein files were held up as proof that an elite network of predators, fixers, financiers, politicians, intelligence assets, media gatekeepers and untouchable power brokers had operated above the law. MAGA voters were told that Trump was the man who would expose the rot. But now, with Trump back in the White House, the files are not functioning as a weapon against the Deep State nearly as much as they are becoming a mirror held up to the entire system — including Trump’s own proximity to it. That is politically devastating, beyond politically devastating, actually.

The White House position, as reported by WIRED, is that Trump has been “totally exonerated” on anything relating to Epstein, and Trump has denied wrongdoing. That distinction matters. But politics is not a courtroom, and the midterms will not be decided by evidentiary standards alone. They will be decided by perception, turnout, trust, anger, fatigue, gas prices, and whether the base believes the man they followed is still the outsider taking on Babylon — or has become another administrator of it. The Iran war makes this much worse. Reuters/Ipsos polling reported by Military Times found that 66% of Americans said Trump had not clearly explained the goals of U.S. military involvement in Iran, including one in three Republicans. That is a brutal number heading into a midterm year, because wars become political poison when voters cannot answer the simplest question: Why are we there?

Marist’s May 2026 polling is even more dangerous for Republicans: 60% disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, 61% say U.S. military action in Iran has done more harm than good, and Trump’s overall approval sits at 37%, with Democratic congressional candidates holding a “healthy lead” on the generic ballot. FiftyPlusOne’s May 11 generic ballot average showed Democrats ahead by 5 points, 47.3% to 42.0%. There’s your ‘midterm trap’, right there.

Trump won by turning politics into a loyalty test. But midterms are not presidential rallies. Midterms are about intensity, annoyance, protest, and whether your voters are still willing to stand in line for you when your name is not on the ballot. If even a small slice of MAGA voters stays home because they feel betrayed on war, the Epstein files, inflation, or “America First,” Republicans could lose the House in a wave that becomes a referendum on Trumpism itself.

IT’S MATH TIME: In 2024 Donald Trump Jr. said that the “only people who would want to stop the Epstein Files from coming out are people who are protecting pedophiles”. Today his father the president stopped the full release of those same files. Do the math. @POTUS @PressSec pic.twitter.com/5pQilqOF1M

— Now The End Begins (@NowTheEndBegins) December 19, 2025

And this is where the Epstein files cut deeper than ordinary scandal. Epstein is not just a name. Epstein is a symbol. He represents the black heart of elite corruption: money, sex, power, secrecy, intelligence shadows, compromised politicians, and a justice system that seems to protect the powerful while crushing the powerless. The average MAGA voter does not need a law degree to smell a cover-up. They have been trained for years to distrust official narratives. So when the files come out slowly, awkwardly, incompletely, or in ways that appear politically managed, the base does not simply blame Democrats. Some of them begin asking the forbidden question: Why isn’t Trump blowing the whole thing open? That question is radioactive, to say the least.

The Iran war may rally the most loyal parts of the base for a season, but it also exposes the contradiction at the heart of modern MAGA. “America First” was supposed to mean no more endless Middle East wars. No more nation-building. No more blank checks for foreign entanglements while Americans suffer at home. Yet now the movement is being asked to defend another Iran conflict while gas prices, war fatigue and unresolved Epstein questions all collide. A Quincy Institute/TAC poll of 2024 Trump voters found 58% opposed sending U.S. troops into Iran, 55% were worried about rising gas prices from the war, and support among younger Trump voters was far weaker than among older ones.

This is exactly how the world system works. It doesn’t matter which party is in power, the machine protects itself. The faces change, the slogans change, the color of the hats change, but the machinery of deception keeps grinding. War abroad, scandal at home, files released but not fully usable, truth displayed but not fully accessible, and the people told to keep clapping for the show.

So yes, if the Iran war was ever intended by anyone in Trump’s orbit to draw oxygen away from the Epstein files, it may do the opposite. It may fuse the two stories together into one larger indictment in the minds of voters: a president who promised to drain the swamp now presiding over war, secrecy, rising costs, and unanswered questions about one of the darkest scandals of modern American life. That is the danger for MAGA heading into the midterms. Not that Democrats suddenly become beloved, they absolutely are not. The danger is that Trump’s own voters begin to feel that the revolution became another rerun, another managed production, another deal cut behind closed doors. And once a political movement built on exposing betrayal starts feeling betrayed itself, the reckoning can come fast. And indeed, that reckoning may already be here.

Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church

HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)

“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB

End Times

The Amazing End Times Connection To Gold Melting At 1,948 Degrees, Israel Being Regathered In 1948 And The Jews With The Mark Of The Beast Under Antichrist

Published

2 days ago

May 11, 2026

Geoffrey Grider

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Gold melts at 1,948 degrees and Israel was regathered in 1948, and both these things are connected to the Mark of the Beast and Antichrist in the end times

Israel’s rebirth as a nation in 1948 was not the forthcoming and prophesied spiritual redemption of Israel. It was the prophetic regathering of a people brought back to the land in unbelief, exactly as the prophets said would happen before the Lord would deal with them in the fire of Jacob’s trouble. The modern State of Israel is a miracle of Bible prophecy, yes, but it is not yet a saved nation. They are back in the land, but they have not yet looked upon Him whom they have pierced. They have a flag, a military, a capital, a government, and a homeland, but nationally speaking, they still reject their Messiah.

“And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.” Zechariah 12:10 (KJB)

I find it fascinating that gold melts at exactly 1,948 degrees farenheit and Israel was brought back to the Land in 1948. What’s the connection? Plenty. The Mark of the Beast, as we have shown you many times, is a human-implantable biometric device that will allow the user to engage in buying and selling in the coming global economic sytem under Antichrist, and it will need pure gold to operate. Jesus warns in Revelation 3 to “get the right gold”, the gold that Jesus alone provides and that doesn’t canker, rust or corrupt. Why is that important? Because James tells us that the day is coming, in the Tribulation, when God is going to change the molecular structure of pure gold into something that can and will rust and corrupt. Imagine what that will do to the insides of the bodies with the Mark of the Beast, it will be brutal.

“Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.” James 5:1-3 (KJB)

There is a massive difference between national restoration and spiritual redemption. Israel’s return to the land is prophetic, but redemption cannot come until the Second Advent. Ezekiel saw Israel restored physically before the Spirit of God entered them. The bones came together first, the breath came after.

“Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.” Ezekiel 37: 5,6 (KJB)

The Jews are physically back in the land, but their full spiritual awakening comes by the hand of the LORD. Modern Israel is not the fulfillment of Romans 11:26, not yet. It is the stage being set for it. God had to bring the Jews back into the land so that the prophecies concerning them being scattered one last time under Antichrist could come to pass. Regathered to be scattered is strange thought, I’ll grant you that, but that’s exactly how Isaiah sees it.

“For the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.” Isaiah 28:21 (KJB)

For a brief moment, it will appear that Israel has finally secured her future. The temple system restored, sacrifices resumed, and the world celebrating a new age of peace in the Middle East. Isn’t that what Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords are all about? Isn’t that what Donald Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace is all about? Amazing how many things that are connected with the Antichrist in the near future are also connected to Donald Trump right now. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Halfway through that final seven-year period, the mask comes off. The peacemaker becomes the persecutor. The covenant-maker becomes the desolator. The man Israel thought was protecting them will demand worship from them. Then, lights out. God rains down judgment from Heaven, and only the remnant will make it through.

“And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.” Revelation 14:9-11 (KJB)

That is the essence of Antichrist: he does not merely oppose Christ, he replaces Christ. He offers peace without repentance, security without redemption, worship without God, and a kingdom without the King. Modern Israel is therefore not awaiting utopia, she is awaiting Jacob’s trouble. That trouble will be the furnace through which God purges the nation. The same people who returned to the land in unbelief will be driven into the fire of the time of Jacob’s trouble, not because God has abandoned them, but because God is going to finish what he promised. The Antichrist will deceive many, but he will not destroy the covenant purposes of God. There will be a remnant.

“And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The LORD is my God.” Zechariah 13:9 (KJB)

That remnant will be refined, broken, awakened, and brought to national repentance. Israel’s redemption will not come through the United Nations, American foreign policy, Donald Trump, military strength, rebuilt temple worship, or a peace treaty with the Beast. Israel’s redemption comes when Jesus Christ returns at the Second Advent as the Deliverer from Sion. That is the prophetic bottom line.

“And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.” Luke 1:31-33 (KJB)

Israel in 1948 was restored nationally, but not redeemed spiritually. They are back in the land, but still blind to their King. They have returned to the geography of prophecy, but not yet to the God of prophecy. And because they rejected the true Messiah, they will fall prey to the false one. But the false messiah’s reign will be short. The Beast will rise, deceive, persecute, and demand worship, but Jesus Christ will return and destroy him. The gold will melt, the lies will burn, the remnant will be redeemed, and King Jesus will take the throne of His father David in Zion.