Blog post HOW I CHOOSE WHAT TO DISMISS Draft

In the spring of 1992, several young male students at an Assembly of God Bible college in Sacramento, California, were confused about all those women passages.

If you were raised in a conservative Evangelical church, you know the ones―women should be silent in the church; women were created second and were the glory of man rather than the glory of God; first God, then Jesus, then the man, then the woman; women must submit to their husbands; women should not teach; women should pray and prophesy with their head covered as a sign of submission; women would be saved in childbirth; women should have long hair; women must not wear certain clothing, etc., etc.

For two thousand years, those passages have supported male bias against women in academia, science, art, theology, and even sainthood. That constant disrespect is religion. It’s not love.

The issue was never discussed in our Bible college because one of the professors was a woman, and most of the leaders had mothers, wives, and sisters in ministries. However, one day, one of the students pounded his desk and demanded to know how to resolve the issue of women having authority when an inerrant Bible says they should not.

I had heard it all since 1965, and by 1992, when I was a student at the school, I had resolved all my issues with those passages and the apologetics trying to explain them away.

The Bible is authoritative, I decided, but not inerrant. Can we be brave and say it out loud without choking?

The Holy Spirit was promoting women to authority and ministry despite first-century biases that stuck women back at Genesis 2-4 for all time. Perhaps thwarting God was resisting the call of the Holy Spirit and not rising above the demands of first-century domestic expectations.

One of the students was from a typical, patriarchal church in Romania. Ruben took me aside one day and shared a story about a woman in his church who had a prophetic gift. She would occasionally approach a member and give them a word of knowledge or prophecy. Finally, the pastor told her to knock it off. She was exerting inappropriate authority.

For about a year, she obeyed him, but one day she warned him that she had a word for him. He was not thwarting her, but the Spirit of God, and if he didn’t release her from this ban, he would die in the next few weeks. His brains would be smeared upon the wall.

The pastor blew her off and continued the ban. Sometime later, while he was walking down a street lined with a wall, he was crushed against it by a car, and his brains were literally smeared upon it. Ruben’s story didn’t change my belief at all, but it certainly emphasized the seriousness of not separating culture from genuine revelation in the Bible.

The Bible college resolved the debate that was circulating among the students by banning all discussion of women and authority. The last word from the president was that suppressing women was an “act of the flesh.”

Second problem

I first learned Hebrew at the kitchen table of a wonderful rabbi in Lexington, KY, named Bernard Schwab. After about 9 months, he had me sit in his kitchen to read and translate Genesis 1-4. As I read, I was stunned. I laid the Torah in my lap and said, “Oh my gosh, there are 3 or 4 different documents here.” In Hebrew, they stand out.

The rabbi harrumphed and made a quick denial, the kind I had made to others in the past, but I had seen it, and I couldn’t unsee it. That revelation, combined with my interest in science, anthropology, and paleontology, I had some rearranging of theological furniture to do. Add an article in Bible Review explaining the contrasts in the stories,[i] and I was directed to a new hermeneutical path.

Can we accept that things that aren’t historically true are true in many other ways? There are profound truths in both Gen. 1 and Gen. 2-4 that we might miss if we don’t try to imagine the issues the ancient authors faced in their lives.

Problem three

The Torah commandments about food also became an issue for me. There’s Leviticus 11:1-8:

11 The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ² “Say to the Israelites: ‘Of all the animals that live on land, these are the ones you may eat: ³ You may eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud. ⁴ There are some that only chew the cud or only have a divided hoof, but you must not eat them. The camel, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is ceremonially unclean for you. ⁵ The hyrax, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is unclean for you. ⁶ The rabbit, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is unclean for you. ⁷ And the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. ⁸ You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you. (NKJV)[ii]

But wait. There’s a passage in Mark where Jesus berates the Pharisees for missing God’s point and instead following “traditions made up by men.” Verses 7:14-23:

¹⁴ Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. ¹⁵ Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.” ^[16]

¹⁷ After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. ¹⁸ “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? ¹⁹ For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)

²⁰ He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. ²¹ For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, ²² adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. ²³ All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

Why are the disciples so...what was that? Shakes head, rechecks the passages. Dull! But didn’t the Lord say to Moses and Aaron…? Is Jesus calling us to read the Bible using common sense? Isn’t that a slippery slope? Who are we to cherry-pick God’s holy Word?

Consider the difference when Jesus refers to various passages: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago…but I tell you…” (Matthew 5:21-44)

Compare with, “It is written.”

OK, maybe that’s a stretch. So, let’s compare “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34) with “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”

Back to the law again. Not grace, not the current fulfillment of Joel 2:28, “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.”

Jesus has shown us clearly that he doesn’t always respect the law, even the Mosaic Law, where passages begin with “And the Lord said unto Moses.”

What does Jesus respect? The Ten Commandments, faith, kindness, mercy, loving your neighbor, passion, truth, forgiveness, humility, loving your neighbor, gratitude, resting in confidence in God, giving, helping the poor and disenfranchised, restraint on anger, restraint on luxurious living. Did I mention loving your neighbor? These virtues are how we genuinely, beyond words, love the Father.

Conclusion

Yes, Jesus is inviting us to view the Scriptures through a screen of common sense. We all cherry-pick Bible passages, whether we admit it or not. Catholics support the doctrine of transubstantiation with John’s “eat my flesh, drink my blood.” Protestants prefer the phrase, “do this in remembrance of me.” Holding both truths in tension is not compromise. Rather, we grow in maturity, from a Christian needing to be spoon-fed rules to an adult ready for the meat of the word.

In Genesis 2 and 3, Adam and Eve were intellectually naked toddlers restricted to a garden until they ate from the forbidden tree. They quickly grew in cognition―the ability to read, write, sing, invent, build, and destroy. That quantum leap is similar to the shock of outgrowing the rules of the law so that we can understand the meaning of worshiping “in Spirit and in truth.”

One way to please God is by growing up. We are under grace, not law. We are better disciples when we swap rules about clothes, hair, and gender for love and respect.

“²⁰ Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: ²¹ “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? ²² These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. ²³ Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” (Colossians 2:20-23)

[i] Reis, Pamela Tamarkin, “Genesis as Rashomon,” Bible Review 17.3 (2001): 26–33, 55.

[ii] All scripture passages are New King James Version taken from biblegateway.com.

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Because of my Pentecostal background, I often write about contemporary political prophets. Ordinarily, I would hesitate to raise my pen against an anointed soul who is frequently lifted high “in the Spirit.”

If God honors them, so should I. But I’ve had many of my own prophetic experiences regarding personal and national topics, and I’ve been a charismatic since 1965, so although I’m not necessarily the brightest bulb on the shelf, I’ve had the experience to earn a seat at the table for discussions on this significant and controversial phenomenon.

In 1971, I had a prophetic dream that predicted that Nixon would be swept out of office. I was only half-plugged into the news at that time. I wasn’t sure what to make of it because I’m no prophet, leader, minister, or psychic, and I sure had no reason to suspect that Nixon would not finish his second term, but in 1974, Nixon was pressured by his own party to resign.

In 2017, I had a dream revealing that America would reject Trump for a second term. A couple of hundred recognized, networking prophets with large followings were predicting that he would win. Elijah List prophetess Kat Kerr, a genuinely charming woman, said that Trump would have two terms, his VP would have two terms, and that president’s VP would have two terms. Twenty-four years straight of Republican rule. I wrote a couple of them and told them about my dream, but I am no influencer with a large following. Never was, never will be. My effect was like pouring a cup of water into Lake Erie.

For those who take the Bible literally, as I and many others do to a point, political prophecy feels normal for a nation with a strong charismatic presence.

The Hebrew Bible describes Israel as a monotheistic theocracy with court prophets, diviners, and seers. Even the apostate pagan kings had prognosticators. Some would slaughter a sheep and read signs in the warm liver. Others would throw arrows on the ground or read tea leaves.

Yahweh’s prophets were forbidden such practices. They were limited to the ruach elohim, and if their prediction did not happen, the Mosaic Law demanded that they be executed. That may sound brutal, but Moses realized the influence that “prophets” can have on the king and the nation. Listening to the wrong voices could bring ruin.

My latest ponderings about the contemporary phenomenon of political prophecy, promoted by a coterie of men and women who accept the title of apostle and prophet, were inspired by pawing through my archive of two books and a decade of newsletters from Nita Johnson and her daughter Ricci Wilson.

Nita claims to have been called to be a national prophet while sitting in her living room in 1980, when she was around 30 years old, but her early contacts with divine messengers occurred when she was 8 and 9. There is nothing about the vision she shared that would make me think it was false. She saw the seal of the United States appear before her, turning around and around and coming almost in front of her. Then she saw a Bible with fingers thumbing through the pages. Next was a cross, coming at her like the first two visions until it was large and in front of her. A voice quoted Galatians 5:1 about liberty in Christ.[i]

I caught up with her in the ’80s and began to collect her prolific writings. She prophesied judgment on America for the gays, for unspecified political corruption, greed, and grievous errors in child protection―things that have always been with us and in fact, have been worse in the past. She also predicted punishment by floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and drought, all things that could be explained by climate change, and all the same kind of apocalyptic ruin seen by psychics and UFO abductees. She’s right in the sense that blindly ignoring the warnings of science can produce ruinous results, but Nita received her pronouncements from angels, and they didn’t mention climate change.

In her books and newsletters, she was not particularly partisan. I followed her diligently until Dec-Jan 2009 just to see if her predictions would come to pass. The theme of her messages was “Prepare.” Prepare for what? For war, for enemy attack. She specified over the years that I followed her that China and Russia would attack the U.S., that we would be unprepared, and that we would fall like a house of cards. However, years later, she assured us that due to the actions of her ministry, President Bush #2, and 2 others who were unnamed, God’s wrath had been somewhat appeased.

In her Dec-Jan, 1998 newsletter, she shares two specific visions of enemy attack, given to her and to a fellow minister named Larry Bailey of Shreveport, LA. Bailey’s revelation was that the only redemption was to cast all the liars out of the land, get rid of all that is false. Nita’s vision was even more grim.

“While I was still wondering what to do, another bomb came sailing through the sky falling just a short distance behind the lighthouse. This time the lighthouse exploded under the impact of the bomb and fell shattered into a heap of ruins. Then the Holy Spirit spoke to me saying, ‘I’m about to put out the lighthouse to the nations.’ He wasn’t speaking of the Church, but of America, who has been responsible for sending more missionaries out to the nations than perhaps any other nation in the history of the Church.”[ii]

There isn’t time or space to elaborate on this point, but President Trump has eviscerated every department in the US government that was meant to keep us strong. We are squandering munitions on an unnecessary war, and our Chinese experts and cybersecurity teams have been fired.

Nita had another startling prediction. Hitler is coming! In November 1998, she was ministering in Mobile, Alabama. As she stood looking out over the water, she saw a vision of a face and heard voices crying out that Hitler is coming. Then that turned into the face of Satan. In November 1999, she had a follow-up vision and wrote, “I saw Hitler and his army coming upon America to take over and to occupy our country.”[iii]

Does Nita know that two Trump insiders have stated that Trump is “fascist to the core?” That ICE agents are as sadistic as the brown shirts in 1930s Germany? That corruption in the Trump administration is staggering? Trump and his kin are looting America, and the GOP is trying to find a way to cheat to maintain power in November’s midterm election. Our constitution is hanging by a thread while the oligarchs of the Heritage Foundation plot to establish an authoritarian, RW presidency.

There’s one more note to pull from Nita’s newsletters. Jesus warned us about the lure of titles. There is a lot of attention in these writings about apostles, prophets, Ezekiel’s army, the Mighty Men of David, etc. She wrote how a new apostolic age would bring glory to the Church. Fellow pastor Neville Johnson agreed. “The Lord was saying to me, a new era a new Apostolic Age was dawning. A new apostolic reformation was beginning to get underway.”[iv]

And he was absolutely right. The New Apostolic Reformation became a network of so-called pastors, prophets, and apostles, all with a combined ministry of thousands of followers. They are all Trumpers, their jesus is a diehard Republican, and their prophecies exalt the Right, while the Left is “the enemy.” Their dialogues with the Spirit sound like a Fox News script. These are the very people who claimed that Trump would win the 2020 election. When it didn’t happen, they began to prophesy that a miracle would occur and Trump would be reinstated. When that didn’t happen, some claimed that the election was stolen and that Trump was our real president. No wonder Trump keeps claiming the election was stolen.

Some years later, Nita did warn against being too fond of titles. She never claimed one for herself, but if you go to her website today, you’ll see that they are full-bore MAGA. Below are some links you can check.

https://worldforjesus.org/article/the-mysteries-of-trump-part-1-and-2-nita-johnson-2-16-21/

https://worldforjesus.org/article/trump-and-melania-glory-vision-1-3-21/

https://worldforjesus.org/article/jesus-all-is-well-that-ends-well-a-new-understanding-nita-johnson-1-6-25/

https://worldforjesus.org/article/watch-desantis-and-you-will-see-what-i-am-doing-with-my-nation-ricci-johnson-wilson/

And that, gentle reader, is the best argument ever against the establishment of Christian Nationalism. Christians can be well-meaning, sincere, talented, and devout, but still be arrogant, cruel, overzealous, blasphemous, and just plain stupid.

DANGERS

To maintain their audience, these ministers need constant attention and donations.

People are hungry for more visions. There can be pressure from peers, the lure of ambition, and competition.

OT prophets lived in the city where they prophesied. Although there were no influencers, there were false prophets. Still, the true prophets knew what was going on in their world. Some prophets, like Steve Schultz, founder of The Elijah List network, feel they must not watch the news, meaning they must not watch any news that doesn’t reflect a conservative viewpoint. Prophecy must be tethered to reality. We all love our news silos, but prophecy must be judged, and that means knowing what is really going on. Prophets should listen broadly to the news.

I recall seeing a video in which Hank Kunneman prophesied with great authority and gravity that “the man in God’s hand will never be impeached.” Well, Trump was impeached twice. Maybe their Geez-us doesn’t understand the difference between impeachment and conviction. The hapless GOP senators who voted to convict were primaried. It ended many careers.

It is a matter of ethics that a judge recuse himself from cases where there is a conflict of interest. A RW influencer has recently confessed that some podcasters are paid to boost certain political points of view. Prophets who receive donations from political groups cannot be trusted. The temptation of pay-to-play must be formidable.

Prophecies of doom and apocalypse are a specialty entrée of evil spirits. They feed off negative energy. Even if China and Russia are going to attack us, the solution is the same. Good intelligence, a strong military led by competent officers, lawmakers who do what is right, and honest news. You don’t need to be a prophet to understand that Trump has weakened us to the point where we are a house of cards. We are being warned by former military officials, former ambassadors, great journalists, former conservative pundits, attorneys, and former lawmakers that the lights are flashing red. Many of these speak more truth than the new apostles and prophets.

Right and Left, Conservative and Liberal are categories that have always been with us. Yes, we profoundly annoy one another, but any attempt to remove one party is dangerous, selfish, and wrong. We need the debate, the different perspectives. But both can have character and compassion. Dark money kills all that is good. Those donors would promote the devil himself, and in fact, they do hire his reps all the time. Elect people who know what they’re doing, not partisan clowns.

SOLUTION

There’s no need to march around with crosses and flags. Rather, vote the liars out. Impeach the rotten judges.

Billionaires pay taxes.

Repeal Citizens United.

Do what is right. It is the second commandment in the Bible. (Gen. 4:6)

Send experts to governmental office.

Prophets refuse insider tips about coming policies. Prophesying tips as if from God is an abomination.

Prophets refuse donations from groups they may speak for or against.

Appoint experts to top positions. Quit listening to billionaire pressure.

Quit listening to prophets and psychics.

Restore the guardrails.

Teach kids how government works. They are our future. There should be RW and LW debates in High School.

Repent.

Last but not least, resist Christian Nationalism. There are good reasons why our founding fathers put a wall between church and state. The marriage of the two corrupts them both.

SOURCES

[i] Johnson, Nita. The Ever Speaking Voice of God. Self-published, 1997. Contact worldforjesusministries.org.

[ii] — — — — — — , “Proclamation of War, 9/01/97,” in Prophetic Insight and Family Focus, Issue 9, Dec-Jan 1998. In later newsletters, Nita claimed that her Gathering of the Eagles brought enough repentance to America to reestablish His covering of protection. As of 2008, war was “set aside.”

[iii] — — — — — — , “Hitler is Coming,” in Prophetic Insight and Family Focus, Mar-Apr 2000, 3,4.

[iv] Johnson, Neville, “The Dawning of a New Age,” in Prophetic Insight, Book 2, Issue 8, May/June.

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I strongly recommend that the reader visit Part 1 of this two-part series, but both posts can stand alone if need be.

On the writing platform Medium in particular, there is a lot of “deconstructing”―people rethinking long-held beliefs and tenets, especially about fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. I’ve been through that process myself, and I’m all for it―to a degree. I’m certainly not the theological fundamentalist that I used to be, but neither have I spun off into New Age or some vague new paradigm. Nor am I awash in doubts or new questions about the nature of God.

The way I stay grounded in my faith is to see Jesus Christ as the Shepherd and the Gate to the sheepfold, just as he claimed to be. The sheepfold is the Kingdom. It’s within us, it’s where we want to be, it’s the place of safety and blessing, it’s the place where we have the guidance of the Kingdom to make the most of our lives and to get in tune with the music of heaven here on Earth. The fence of the sheepfold comprises the words and teachings of Jesus. Those words are the hill I will die on, even if I sound like a doctrinal troglodyte.

Jesus told us clearly that hell is a very unpleasant place, a place of regret, where there will be a blazing furnace, darkness, separation from all that is good, and wailing and gnashing of teeth, (Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13). There are plenty of intimations of hell in both testaments that should give us pause in thinking that we are so wise we can refashion hell and judgment into something more convenient and more to our liking.

In my first post, I traced how Dr. George Ritchie’s testimony inspired Dr. Raymond Moody, a medical doctor, and Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist. From there, research branched out in several directions under the auspices of professionals such as psychologists Dr. Kenneth Ring, Karlis Osis, and Erlandur Haroldsson, theologians J.P. Moreland and Gary Habermas, and many others.

Two events drew Dr. Maurice Rawlings, M.D., into near-death research. He was intrigued by the work of Moody and Kubler-Ross, but more importantly, he was shocked into his own pursuit when one of his heart patients coded in his office. Rawlings immediately began chest compressions. He writes that when a patient recovers from compressions, they usually say, “Stop, you’re hurting me.” This patient, however, said, “Don’t stop. Every time you quit (to reach for his other equipment), I go back to hell. Don’t let me go back to hell.” After several episodes of regaining consciousness, he asked, “How do I stay out of hell?” Rawlings told him to pray, but the man didn’t know how. He demanded that Rawlings pray for him, so while thumping on his patient’s chest, he uttered something akin to the sinner’s prayer.

This patient recovered. When Rawlings approached him with pad and pencil, asking, What did you see over there? What did hell look like? The answer was, “What hell, I don’t recall any hell.” He did recall seeing his mother and stepmother. He never met his mother, but he astonished his father by recognizing her in a photo.

As a cardiologist, Rawlings was able to interview patients as soon as they were resuscitated. He noticed a disturbing pattern among the one in five patients who record an NDE. If a patient who has a negative event is not interviewed immediately after resuscitation, they may forget what they experienced. He encountered so many negative cases that he wrote two books about his findings. In the second one, To Hell and Back, he challenged the findings of Ring, Kubler-Ross, Moody, and other researchers who interviewed near-death experiencers days or weeks after their death event. Rawlings claimed that they do the whole discipline a disservice by emphasizing the positive incidents and making hell less real.[i]

In one of his cases, a 23-year-old man inherited a heart block that afflicted his brother and father. As he was on the operating table, he coded. In his words, “I was floating, pitch black, moving fast. The wind whistled by and I rushed toward this beautiful, blazing light. As I moved past, the walls of the tunnel nearest the light caught fire. Beyond the blazing tunnel a huge lake of fire was burning like an oil spill. A hill on the far side was covered with slabs of rock. Elongated shadows showed that people were moving aimlessly about, like animals in a zoo enclosure.”

The young man recognized one of his friends there, but there was no wave or smile. “They were taking him around the corner when he started screaming. I ran, but there is no way out. I kept saying ‘Jesus is God.’ Over and over I would say, ‘Jesus is God.’”[ii]

Rawlings’s patient got a second chance by calling on Jesus and God. Some of these rescues from hell demonstrate that even a brief memory of some distant Sunday School song can make the difference between being trapped forever in hell or being snatched out.

Howard Storm’s NDE has been around for decades, but now you can look him up on YouTube and hear the man describe what he went through. He was an art professor, an atheist, and full of pride about his accomplishments. He was in the hospital when he died, but he wouldn’t accept that the body he saw there in the bed was him. He heard his name being called in the hallway. Thinking that the shadowy figures urging him to come away with them were hospital staff who were taking him to surgery, he followed them. He should have been surprised that they were walking him to the OR, but he felt pretty good at the time. He ignored their snide remarks and comments like, “Hush, it’s too soon for that. You’ll scare him off.”

To make a long story short, he wound up in a gray, dull space where he was brutally attacked. As he lay helplessly on the ground, a voice in his head urged him to pray to God. He didn’t believe in prayer and didn’t know how. All he could remember was a phrase or two like “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” or snatches from The Lord’s Prayer. Then a Sunday School song occurred to him. “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

As he repeated the few bits of prayer and sang that song, the creatures attacking him dissipated. He lay there unable to move and finally cried out, “Jesus, save me.” Suddenly, he was in the presence of God. Jesus was touching him, and the touch brought healing. His final message in the video resonates with so many other NDE messages: it’s all about learning to love. “That is the curriculum.”

Since there is a limit on words and a cap on reader attention, I’m going to point to a few compelling podcast testimonies about the existence of hell, but also of God’s redeeming mercy.

Janie Duvall interviews a former atheist claiming to have seen several levels of hell.

She also interviewed a real “rounder,” a term used by Dr. Raymond Moody for a hardened criminal. This man came from a family of Wiccans, was a Wiccan priest himself, and was serving a 70-year prison sentence for shooting and robbing someone. When Kenneth McDonald found Christ during his NDE, or rather when Christ found him, his change was so radical that the prison gangs tried to kill him.

Those stories are the tip of the tip of the proverbial iceberg. If you Google hell NDEs on YouTube, you will find plenty of stories to listen to. Having said that, I want to end this post with the message that Howard Pittman brought back for the church from the other side of the veil. There’s a lot to learn from this one incident.

He didn’t actually see hell. He was an active church member and a preacher. When an aneurysm burst, and he was hemorrhaging internally, he knew how to plead with God for a reprieve from sudden death. He resisted a sweet, musical voice that told him he could have perfect peace and security if he would just stop breathing. Instead, he was brought to the gates of the third heaven by two angels. It was there, and not inside the gates, that he would make his case for a longer life. He saw 50 souls go in, but according to a radio interview I heard long ago, the vast majority “went the other way.” As he stood before the gates of the city, recounting all the good things he had done on Earth, he expected a warm welcome. God’s answer was a stunner.

Howard pointed out the sermons he had preached, the volunteer sheriff service he had provided, the abused children he had fostered, and everything else he could think of. God answered “in a voice that sounded like thunder.”

“Your faith is dead! Your works are in vain. The life you have lived and offered to me as a life of Christian service is an abomination that I rejected in the Pharisee. What made you think that I would accept it from a Laodicean-type Christian? In fact, untold millions are living the same kind of life that you lived, and they stand in danger of my everlasting wrath.”

“I couldn’t believe he was talking to me. I’m a teacher, I’m a preacher. I just told him about all my good works.”

“You didn’t do those works for me. You did them for a false god.”

“Lord, I worked for you. I called you Lord every day.”

“Yes, you called me Lord, but you didn’t make me Lord.”

God revealed to Howard that the false god was SELF. He was so rattled that the angels took him aside for a bit to calm him down. When he came back, he asked for nothing and said nothing, just listened. God’s tone was more compassionate. He sent Howard back with a 5-point message:

1. This is the age of the Laodicean church. (Wealthy, comfortable, self-interested, professing with the mouth, but not living the Life.)

2. Don’t underestimate the devil. Take him seriously as a powerful, anointed adversary.

3. If you want God’s power in your life, you’ve got to walk the life, not just talk it.

4. The days of the Coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah, and we have reached that point where mankind’s main priorities are wealth and pleasure, wealth and pleasure.

5. Matthew 3:11, 12: Quoting John the Baptist, ¹¹ “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹² His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” We need the Holy Spirit in this age, but take both aspects of that seriously, too.

I could fill an entire post with recommendations of books to read about the afterlife, including hell, but it would be pretty dry. I understand that few have the time or the focus to listen to the many YouTube videos available about the topic. My two posts have not resolved that issue. If there is anything to take away from this series, it’s that heaven and hell are real. Your impending death is real. Eternity is real. Stop living as if you are immortal and consider the words of Jesus―love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you can’t love a God that you don’t believe in, at least love your neighbor―meaning everyone else―and at least make the world a better place.

[i] Rawlings, Maurice S. To Hell and Back: Life after Death―Startling New Evidence. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1993) 73.

[ii] ----------. To Hell and Back, 72.

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In a Bible study some time ago, I expressed a concern for lost souls, saying, “I wish I could convince people that there’s a hell.” For decades, I have been hearing and reading about negative NDEs. Whether you believe in hell or not, if it’s real, you may experience the horror of dying and finding yourself there, which is absolutely the worst thing that could happen to any human being of any place or era. That person may wish they had never been born.

The pastor countered with, “I would rather convince people that there is a loving God, full of mercy and grace, who would receive the sinner into His arms and change their life.” The pastor was absolutely right, of course, but so was I. If I gave you a $100 bill that was blank on one side, you wouldn’t be able to spend it. It takes the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to find a godly balance between the raw truth about hell and the Father’s breathtaking love for all humanity.

If I recalled all of the warnings of Jesus about hell and the potential “death” of the soul, this post would be a book, so I have to cherry-pick my resources carefully. I’ll start with Jude,

²² “And on some have compassion, making a distinction; ²³ but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.”

Inveighing against leaders using the new Christian movement for lawless gain, Jude, the brother of James, launches right into the fear aspect, calling up reminders of the Israelite generation that perished in the wilderness, the fallen angels, “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day,” and Sodom and Gomorrah. Although God’s mercy is great, the consequences for sin and unbelief can be serious.

Since the Hebrew Bible is mostly about God’s rule over His people on Earth, it has little to say about hell or the afterlife, but depictions of a negative afterlife are not wholly absent. Psalm 49 assures those who live carelessly, though they be rich and popular,

“This is the way of those who are foolish,
And of their posterity who approve their sayings. Selah
¹⁴ Like sheep they are laid in the grave;
Death shall feed on them;
The upright shall have dominion over them in the morning;
And their beauty shall be consumed in the grave, far from their dwelling.”

And Job 18:13 and 14,

It devours patches of his skin;
The firstborn of death devours his limbs.
¹⁴ He is uprooted from the shelter of his tent,
And they parade him before the king of terrors.

Two oft-quoted passages in the Old Testament are Daniel 12:2 and Isaiah 26:19, which not only speak of a glorious afterlife but also of a supernatural resurrection for the righteous. The wicked awaken and arise to everlasting shame.

Modern near-death experiences have actually raised a lot of debate about whether all the deceased go to a peaceful, loving Light Being who forgives all trespasses, no matter how egregious, or if there are penalties for wrongdoing not dealt with before death.

There have always been reports of NDEs throughout history, but Dr. Raymond Moody, Ph.D, MD, sparked the trend of conducting actual research on the phenomenon. He was originally influenced by a conversation with near-death experiencer Dr. George Ritchie. Even before he entered medical school in 1972, Moody was well into his research. In his famous book, Life after Life,[1] he stated categorically that after hundreds of interviews, he had not heard a word about the classic understanding of heaven, hell, angels, or punishments. However, due to the popularity of his first book, Moody was inundated with new stories. He added a brief preview at the end of his first book, pointing to more to come.

His second book, Reflections of Life After Life, begins with a chapter called “New Elements.” Moody now heard tales of extraordinary downloads of knowledge, a beautiful, peaceful city of light, a river, and fountains, much like what is described in the Bible. On the other hand, one woman described washed-out, gray, bewildered, shuffling souls who continually looked down and seemed depressed. Others spoke of “dulled spirits,” bound to earth because they needed to let go of attractions here or on account of unresolved issues.

Chapter 2 was titled “Judgment,” in which Moody’s patients recalled the shame they felt over parts of their life review. They not only saw their behavior as the Light Being saw it, but they felt the pain they caused others. Most came back with a whole new attitude about life. Moody makes it clear that although he heard no stories of a fiery hell, most of the people he interviewed were normal folks who committed the same misdeeds we all do. He never met “a real rounder.”[2] I’ll deal with the rounders in a later post.

The stories of those who attempted suicide got Moody’s attention. One resuscitated patient recounted that he got the feeling over there that if he succeeded in killing himself, there would be a penalty because he would be “throwing God’s gift back in his face…killing somebody else would be interfering with God’s purpose for that individual.”[3]

Moody records the regret of survivors of suicide. Nothing was solved on the other side. They had to endure seeing the pain and shock of those left behind, as well as experiencing a repeating loop of the despair that caused them to take their own life. When he asked them if they would try suicide again, all said no.

I pulled my copy of Angie Fenimore’s memoir off the shelf. It is so full of stunning revelations, it’s hard to know where to begin. She came from an extremely dysfunctional family full of tragedies, alcohol, depression, and drugs. Her own life spun off in all the wrong directions until one day, she attempted suicide. After her life review, she found herself on a dark plane with some teenagers who had taken their own lives. There was no joy there, no beauty, love, or connection, just dullness.

She was then whisked to a new plane that was called Purgatory. There she met with both the Father and the Son. It was also grim and gray there, full of adults (no children) who were as dulled out as the teenagers. They were so engaged in self-pity that they had no thought for others. They were unable to see the presence of God that Angie saw. “Everyone I saw was wearing dirty white robes. Some people’s were heavily soiled, while others’ just appeared dingy with a few stains.”[4]

A voice came out of the darkness, “Is this really what you want?” Angie perceived herself to be in the presence of God and naturally wanted to plead her case. “But my life is so hard…” God’s response, “You think that was hard? It is nothing compared to what awaits you if you take your life.”[5] The depressing information didn’t stop there. “So sad, they were so young and so dead. As I watched them filing in by the dozens, I was told that most of us who are dying now are going to a place of darkness.”[6]

The good news for Angie is that she fully recovered and turned her life completely around. She was informed that the difference between those who get a second chance and those who go straight to a negative eternity depends on their “willingness.” I assume that meant, depending on one’s response to the life review.

Angie is not the only near-death experiencer who saw souls trapped in an unpleasant liminal afterlife. The story of Dr. George Ritchie began in September 1943, when he was a twenty-year-old private recruit in the Army. He caught a severe case of pneumonia that killed him. In Chapter 5, Ritchie meets the Son of God and gets a unique tour of the afterlife. He saw that some souls would not move on because they wanted to manipulate the same situations and people that they controlled on Earth. There were suicides, following the people they grieved and begging for forgiveness. Others were chained to their earthly addictions. Then he was taken to a plane where souls were in constant, hate-filled battle. Lack of forgiveness and a desire for revenge drove these souls to punch and gouge each other, but of course, in an immaterial world, harm could not remain.[7]

Ritchie did return to his body, which at that time was covered with a sheet in the morgue. He was able to obtain the medical education and license he had obsessed over as a disembodied spirit, and, of course, he now had a special message of healing to offer the world. That’s the good news to share today. If you’re reading this post, you’re still alive. You have time to ask yourself, have I learned to love? Is my life selfish and self-centered? What would the Judge of all the Earth say to me if I died today?

Is there actual fire for some in hell? I have a lot more to share on this topic. I not only have a shelf full of classic afterlife books from the 1900s, but there are also plenty of YouTube interviews on the topic. Anyone who wants to assess whether or not there’s a hell can search online and access books, movies, and contemporary podcasts.

I’m going to distill more of these stories in my next post, but first, there’s an important takeaway in Angie Fenimore’s book that we need to consider. Why have so many people been sent back since World War II? One reason is that methods of resuscitation have improved immensely, and the ability to share information and stories has exploded. There is possibly one more reason. Angie was told that the Earth is being prepared for the Second Coming of Christ.

If Jesus appeared in the air tomorrow with tens of thousands of his saints and angels, would you be ready?

[1] Moody, Raymond A. Life after Life. (Harrisburg, Stackpole Books, 1969) 89, 90, 123.

[2] _______. Reflections on Life After Life. (New York. Bantam Books, 1978) 39.

[3] Ibid., 44.

[4] Fenimore, Angie. Beyond the Darkness: My Near-Death Journey to the Edge of Hell and Back. (New York: Banta Books, 1995) 96.

[5] Ibid., 102.

[6] Ibid., 130.

[7] Ritchie, George A. Return from Tomorrow. (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1978) 47-67.

Check out my website www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Image by the author using ChatGPT. The young women do not look like the persons mentioned in the story, but all else is spot on.

This is my own true story.

It was the end of the spring semester at the University of Washington. I was a flaky, insecure 20-year-old art student with an unimpressive GPA who had acquired a summer job in the cafeteria of the Safeco Insurance building. Despite my Catholic upbringing, I was an agnostic who was actively searching for God. The previous semester, I had taken World History. One of the requirements was to read “The Sermon on the Mount,” three chapters in the book of Matthew. It rocked my world. If there is anything to Christianity, I thought, this is how it should be.

From my Catholic education, I knew the story of St. Augustine, how he heard a child’s voice one day saying, “Take up and read. Take up and read.” A book was sitting next to him, so he picked it up and read Romans 13:13, admonishing him to change his profligate ways. It helped to convert him to Christianity, turning his life completely around.

After reading “The Sermon, ” I sat in my dorm room and mentally shouted, “St. Augustine, where are you now?” I cried a bit, knowing there’s no possible answer to our questions, then fell asleep from grief. I awoke with a dream that seemed for all the world to be an answer from the saint himself, but I scarcely dared to hope that it was real. In short, it was an invitation to become a Bible expositor in my future, but at the time, it was just incomprehensible and utterly improbable. By finals week, I had dismissed it.

Before the last exam in May, 1965, I found a part-time summer job in the cafeteria of the Safeco Insurance building in the U. district. A crazy Pentecostal lady who worked there full-time turned my life upside down by giving me a copy of The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson. Although I was taking accelerated French during the summer and she had never graduated from High School, I began visiting her on weekends, taking the bus from the U. district to Ballard on Saturday, attending church on Sunday, and heading back Monday morning. Despite her poverty and her status as a divorced mother, she had a reputation for evangelism, preaching, and teaching those around her. She was intelligent, dynamic, and able to quote a thousand Bible verses, all in the KJV, of course. I listened to all the stories about the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Despite my Catholic upbringing, nothing supernatural had ever happened to me…well, except maybe that dream. And, well, there was the crazy urge to quit smoking after I committed my life to Jesus. Oh, and the day I was rock climbing and got stuck on the wall and started whispering “Jesus” in panic. But at the time, I didn’t associate any of that with my new Christian experience.

One Saturday night, while visiting Darlene, I was lying in bed asking God how anything so weird and supernatural could ever happen to someone like me. By way of answer, I saw a vision in light just above my head. It was the Scripture “Luke 3:16.” I jumped up, turned on the light, grabbed my Bible, and read, “John answered them all, ‘I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.’” So, after the Sunday night service, as I actually knelt at the metal chair in the church prayer room, surrounded by some ladies willing to ‘pray me through,’ I had that promise with me. I did pray in tongues. It didn’t feel supernatural or fiery like I hoped it would, but I accepted it by faith.

Darlene and I decided that it would be cool if I moved in with her so she could mentor me. We prayed all summer that my roommate Carol would come back from Olympia, WA, and tell me that she wanted to move out or something. I didn’t want to leave her holding the bag, having to pay the rent by herself. I didn’t want to be selfish.

Nothing happened all summer. Carol returned, and I had to face the music. One night, I wandered into the living room of our basement apartment. Carol was fast asleep in her bedroom. I got on my knees and prayed a prayer of dedication to God and told him that tomorrow morning I would tell Carol. I prayed that it would be alright and not a bad testimony. I didn’t want to be a stumbling block to her.

In the morning, I broke the news. Carol told me that during the night she had had a dream. She and I and an angel were standing in the living room. The angel was very tall, wearing a white robe with a rope sash. It wings. It was talking to Carol in a language she didn’t understand, but she knew exactly what was going on. She nodded, then she and the angel shook hands. The angel put his arm around my shoulder, and he and I went out the front door. Carol told me later that he was so tall he had to duck. So, when Carol awoke that morning, she knew that I would be leaving and that she had assented to it the night before.

How do I know that the entity I left with was really an angel and not just a spirit guide? Or a demon, or an alien, or Uncle Joe? Why do angels need wings, why wear white robes? I’ve never interviewed one, so I can only guess, but I suspect they have wings to show they don’t fly around in saucer-shaped vehicles that crash. It’s an iconic manifestation of an entity made of light, similar to the likeness of the Holy Spirit as a white dove. Interesting that we think of both angels and the Holy Spirit in terms of having wings.

As for white robes and all, that simply distinguishes them from other spiritual entities. Angels don’t have slanty black eyes or bald heads or one-piece space suits. They don’t claim to be from another star system. Beyond that, I imagine they just want to look angelic. Angels manifest as tall. Most aliens, especially the grey aliens, manifest as short.

The main thing to know about angels is that they unabashedly acknowledge the God of the Bible and the Son of God, Jesus Christ. They don’t allow us to worship them, nor do they suggest that the only divinity in the universe is what humans contrive. Aliens and spirit guides often tell their charges that there is no God, no heaven, no hell, no judgment. They say like attracts like, which often turns out to sound a bit like hell. There’s no life review unless you’re going to reincarnate.

Many positive NDEs are awash in love. The deceased person sees the Light Being, or they get a glimpse of the Happy Place, but there will still likely be a comprehensive life review. People return knowing that how they live their life matters.

Some see hell first. That gets one’s attention.

The day that the angel escorted me out the door in Carol’s dream was the beginning of many future adventures with God. And decades later, I did eventually accept St. Augustine’s invitation to be a Bible Expositor. I already had a BA in Fine Arts, but while my kids were still very young, I started on an 18-year educational quest resulting in a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a specialty in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

My education did not in any way compromise or threaten my faith. My belief in miracles and the power of prayer is as strong as ever. If anything were to endanger my faith, it would be the unanswered questions that arose during the years I attended fundamentalist churches.I thank God in heaven for the experiences I had in those wonderful churc

hes, but they did not answer my questions about inconsistencies in the Bible.

This story can also be seen at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/my-angel-story-1a6e3216da09?postPublishedType=repub and at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-angel-story.html.

Check out my website, www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools from 3^rd through 6^th grade. Although committed to my faith, I had a tendency even before college to shake my fist at heaven and demand, “Why?” Why do women have to wear hats, veils, and scarves to church? Why can’t we go past the altar rail? How can you judge people when you are so distant? I just wasn’t impressed with the 200-year-old appearances of the Virgin Mary on a foreign hillside to shepherd children. People need God here and now.

In High School, three of us gals would sit at lunch and discuss religion. One was a Unitarian, one a Mormon, and I was still a devout Catholic. We were all committed to the belief system in which we were raised, and we were all aware of that bias. When I had a question I couldn’t answer, I went to the priest, fetching that wisdom back to our philosophical coterie.

College is usually where it all falls apart, and that happened to me. It dawned on me that all I knew about God was what I learned in school and from this priest or that. Again, I shook the fist toward heaven and declared, “Everyone is looking for you, and no one knows how to find you. If you want me, you find me. Come out from behind that pink cloud. You need to be down here helping this messy world.”

One day in my dorm room, I cried out to St. Augustine, whose own experience I had read about in High School. After lying down on my bunk and falling asleep, I awoke with what I believe was a compelling but incomprehensible prophetic dream. St. Augustine was in it and invited me to get a top-tier education. This was deep in my agnostic era before I knew anything about the Bible. I absolutely had no academic ambitions at the time.

God answered my challenge by sending me a crazy Pentecostal woman who had prophetic gifts and an evangelistic heart. At work one day, she gave me a copy of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade. He was an Assembly of God pastor who ministered comfortably in a rural mountain church in Pennsylvania. One day, the Holy Spirit gave him a new challenge. Instead of judging the evil deeds of a New York gang, which he read about in Life Magazine, he was to go to New York and witness to them. The result of his obedience to this very uncomfortable call was an organization called Teen Challenge. It not only converted entire New York gangs to Christ, it contributed to the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.

I cried my way through the book. When I was done, I told the Lord, “If this book is real, and you can prove that these kinds of things can happen to me, you got me.”

Years of Evangelical church attendance followed, but questions kept coming. “Why did you make women be second-class citizens? Why do you call women to teach, write, go to the mission field, and be leaders when you said all those things about women and their required submission to men? Why did Jesus rebuke his disciples for being so spiritually dull in thinking that food can defile a person when Yahweh yells about it in Leviticus and threatens death if priests eat certain things? Why are there two different versions of how David met Saul? Etc.

All my training for decades demanded a belief that the Word is Holy, Unchanging, Inerrant, God-breathed―all of it, every idea, with no contradictions, no cultural screens. If you wanted to teach in an Evangelical Bible College or get a book published by a Christian publishing house, you had to dismiss all the science about the progression of the human genome from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. All the geologists who spend their careers studying the age of the Earth are wrong. The Bible says so.

So the questions kept rolling in like the eternal tides, and answers came, but they were difficult to grapple with. I had to admit the really crucial, uncomfortable gut-wrenching possibility that Paul and Moses could have expressed something that didn’t come straight from God. Something from their culture. Something from the peer pressure Paul was receiving from other church leaders who were being hounded by Roman rulers and Jewish persecutors.

Peace has come to me in resolving these biblical conundrums. The answers gelled throughout eighteen years of biblical education, ending in a Ph.D., allowing me to set aside my angst about the inerrant Bible. Here are some of the conclusions I came to believe:

The Law of Moses was based on former Mesopotamian law codes written by pagan kings to keep order among their own walled cities and communities. The laws made perfect sense in the second century BCE. There is a reason that Jesus sometimes quoted Moses with the introduction, “It is written,” and sometimes quoted him saying, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago…but I say unto you…”

The Bible doesn’t have to be inerrant to be genuinely inspired. There are contradictions in both testaments. Get over it.

Biblical authors did not float around in a constant bubble of revelation. I don’t dismiss the visions, dreams, divine revelations, miracles, spiritual gifts, and authority from heaven that they genuinely had, but they were men and women living on this side of the veil and subject to pressures and biases that we all succumb to. We don’t have to pretzel-stress the Scriptures to make them fit our expectations of perfection.

Deconstructors like to claim that Jesus didn’t come to establish a church but rather a body of believers. Nonsense! A body of believers needs a vehicle for worship, sacraments, giving, good works, guidance by trained leaders, etc., the same way a soul needs a body to function here on Earth. The institution of the church is the container. The Body of Christ within is what Jesus founded. One is the side dish. The other is the entrée. Both are important.

God never intended to micromanage the process of church government. He doesn’t care who owns the building, how many deacons or deaconesses, elders, presbyters, pastors, prophets, apostles the church allows. He doesn’t care if in baptism one is dunked or poured upon. These things are what Lutherans call adiaphora, practices that are neither commanded nor forbidden. From its very institution in the first century, the church has changed in doctrine and practice. What God really cares about is a change of heart.

Common sense! It’s the sweetener that makes Christianity appealing and productive throughout all the ages and in every culture. In my Lutheran church, I taught my students the Muffin Method of Hermeneutics. Would you rather have a plate with discreet piles of salt, baking powder, flour, and egg, which is a metaphor for cherry picking which scriptural hill we’re willing to die on, or would you prefer to eat the blended product, holistically processed properly in an oven? Or would a frozen dinner be your cup of tea?

We’re afraid of common sense because it’s the slippery slope, the sure path to losing our faith. In fact, a dollop of common sense has boosted my faith from shaking my fist at a confusing God to liking him as well as loving him.

We’re better witnesses for the goodness of God if we shake loose the bonds of inerrancy. It doesn’t have to be a slippery slope. How can we know what to dismiss when God’s shouts are so intimidating? Easy. We go to the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, and to Matthew 25. Jesus revealed that the Father seeks those who will worship him in Spirit and in Truth. That means the right attitude is far more important than our material customs. He pointed out the most important command of all, which is in both testaments: to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He gave us the golden rule: to treat others the way we would want to be treated. He would approve of the general morality of the Ten Commandments. All these passages are the Spirit of the Law.

The movement today called Christian Nationalism is an attempt to restore the Protestant, White, Evangelical church to the legal status of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. The Evangelicals who are pushing this doctrine are also expecting a great revival in which millions of souls are swept into the kingdom. However, the frozen, legalistic cruelty of this movement, the hubris, the clamoring for power and donations, is going to have the opposite effect. Millions who might consider a Christ-like Christianity will think, “If heaven is full of those guys, count me out.”

Check out my website, www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

This story can also be seen at https://medium.com/the-spirit/the-muffin-method-of-hermeneutics-how-to-love-god-and-like-him-too-47de23abe319.

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In 2010, I had just finished Russell Targ‘s autobiographical book, Do You See What I See? Memoir of a Blind Biker. Targ did extensive work on the CIA’s remote viewing program in the 1970s and 80s. He is a believer in ESP and a variety of other arcane paranormal phenomena.

Targ shares three compelling afterlife stories. One tale involves an Icelandic sailor who drowned decades previously. His body washed ashore and was badly mutilated by birds and dogs. Although he was buried in the local cemetery, his thigh bone was discovered later built into the wall of a home. When the owner of the home was present at a seance, the ghost appeared and indicated that he wanted his thigh bone back. He revealed its location, and sure enough, it was there.

One must ask, what did he think he was going to do with it? It was claimed from previous seances that he still had a craving for alcohol, tobacco, and colorful speech. If there is a happy place called heaven, this guy did not go there. Nor is he locked up in a fiery hell as we Christians would think, but neither is he having much fun in the afterlife. He is hanging around Earth, craving things he can no longer access.

By the way, I do NOT recommend attending seances or believing everything some disincarnate entity communicates. Some are demons pretending to be the ghosts of the deceased, and demons lie.

Another story involved a medium who was asked to locate a Grand Master chess player. Iceland is particularly fond of chess. An experimental match was called for between a deceased Master and a living one. The living person won, but other Masters verified that the game was played at a Master’s level. I wonder if the deceased chess whiz hangs around chess competitions wishing he could play, or if he just couldn’t resist an unusual opportunity to demonstrate his prowess.

The most compelling story was the one where Targ’s little granddaughter was lost in the wilderness for 3 days. A psychic declared that she was OK and was being taken care of by a nice lady. When Haley was found, she said a little girl stayed with her and guided her to her present position. After a historical investigation by the Targ family, the ghost girl turned out to be a child who was murdered by a cult many years previously. The mother was, in fact, still alive and in prison.

This would be another of numerous cases in which the spirit of a child still manifests as a child, as if the souls of children never grow up in the afterlife. Modern tales of NDE’s would indicate otherwise. For example, a woman who had a miscarriage 12 years previously might meet a 12-year-old child in her NDE who would identify as her son or daughter. A deceased teenager 12 years later would appear as an adult.

I am happy to read that Haley was found, especially since Russell Targ lost his lovely and brilliant daughter to cancer when she was only 40-years-old.

It would not be surprising that children manifest in the spirit world the same age they were when they died. The question it raises for me, however, is in the case of reincarnation, all souls seem to be adult, even if they are in a living child’s body. They are not just temporarily adult, but they have been adults for eons. They even have a spirit name that follows them from lifetime to lifetime.

Children who remember past lives struggle to express the images they see with their current, infantile vocabulary. They are also unable to replicate the language of their former lives, although the memories and names are still available to them.

The case of the murdered child had a double happy ending. The mother in prison was informed of the rescue and was beside herself with relief and happiness. The odds are great that she had been blinded and controlled by the cult leader and was manipulated into killing the child, perhaps by claiming that the girl was demon-possessed.

The blessing of the fruit of that whole rescue encounter suggests to me that the “nice lady” indicated by the former psychic was either manifesting as her young self to accomplish this task or that she was allowed by benevolent forces to aid in the rescue and manifested as a child for the comfort of Haley. Hopefully, her afterlife is a little more positive than that of the sailor.

My studies in the paranormal have altered my thinking a bit. Below are some newish ponderings:

The invisible world is far more complex than my Catholic and Evangelical training led me to understand. I think that when Jesus said, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” (John 14:2), He may have meant various levels of afterlife existence. I find it unlikely, and frankly repugnant, that a fiery hell is the fate of all unbelievers. On the other hand, Jesus did say in Matthew 7:13-14,

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. ¹⁴ Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

I take the biblical warnings of hell seriously. There is an abundance of NDE narratives online where people describe horrific, hellish scenes. Still, perhaps for most deceased persons, the metaphor of worms that don’t die indicates the regret that souls feel when they find themselves powerlessly floating about with no purpose, no joy, and no presence of God.

The metaphor of “fire that is not quenched” (Isaiah 66:24 and Mark 9:42-48) could refer to the cravings that cannot be satisfied. A ticket to this sphere of eternal regret would be the recompense of selfish, damaging, unethical behavior. God is merciful, but heaven is not meant to be a replica of earth with all the evil and deception we see down here.

I also believe that Jesus Christ is truly the Door to the Holy City. No one will get in without Him. He may allow souls in who had no chance of knowing him on earth. There are billions upon billions of such humans, going back tens of thousands of years and perhaps way longer than that, but ultimately, Jesus is the Doorway. He walked on Earth with us to assure us that His followers needn’t fear death or ruin. He is the part of the Trinity that rules the domain of judgment.

Mankind has crossed and conquered many frontiers since the day our species stood upright and began to function on a higher intellectual level---agriculture, wheel and axle, architecture, writing, global navigation, atomic bombs, disease, outer space---we’ve made such great strides in the material world. We’ve had to be open to change, to new ideas, new paradigms. The invisible world is, in a way, a new frontier, one we have only begun to explore in depth since the end of World War II.

I believe it is important to dedicate our children and ourselves as parents to God’s kingdom. In fact, I think dedicating them in the womb is not too soon. The universe is a complex and not always benign place, but God offers us the promise of protection and favor.

This story was originally published in 2010 at Little Girl Ghost Saves Lost Child (janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com). It can also be seen at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/little-girl-ghost-saves-lost-child-e3e936746b02 and at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-ghost-of-murdered-child-saves-lost.html.

For another ghost story, see https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2023/04/flight-610-june-1951-ghosts-claim.html and check out my website www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Some years ago, my husband Ted and I spent his last day of a break from teaching by driving into the Sierras. The following day, it would be back to long weeks of grading. We took a nice walk by a river. Then we drove up a highway and decided to make a small town in the middle of the piney woods our goal. On the map it was quite simple. Turn off Hwy XX onto a paved road, stop at this quaint little town for a cup of coffee, continue through town on the same road, loop back to Hwy XX, and go on home. I’ll call the town Pittsville, because I have some not so nice things to say about it. Not only did we have the map to guide us, we had “The Babe,” Ted’s GPS. How could we lose?

It turned out that Pittsville was not a cute little town with barns and antique shops. It was the armpit of the Sierras, full of broken down houses and rural looking people. Two kids playing outside were quite stunned to see us driving by them on their one-lane street, the main street in what you might call a town, except the only business in town was a rough-looking bar.

So we programmed the Babe to get us out of there. She sent us onto a dirt road on the other side of town. It was a rough road. We bounced along until we came to a bridge with a sign recommending that only four-wheel drive vehicles proceed further. On the other side of the bridge was a grade so steep, we knew our car would never make it. So, we turned around and bounced back to town, past the two kids and an old dog.

Ted tinkered with the Babe, and she started sending us around in circles to get us back to that road. “Recalculating. In .1 miles, turn left.” I began to envision a paranormal horror story where two naïve flatlanders wander into a dark portal where the town’s roads all close in on themselves and you can never get out again. I told Ted, “Either the Babe has turned to the dark side and she’s trying to kill us or she’s just stupid.” In my imagination, the flatlanders battle evil for three days and finally bust out, bringing the two kids and the dog with them … just as the earth is opening up and swallowing the town of Pittsville.

Ted tinkered some more. We passed the two kids and the dog a third time. I was praising God at that point that I hadn’t ordered a diet coke for lunch. The Babe led us onto a decent, unpaved Forest Service road that wound and snaked through the trees seemingly forever. As the sun began to fade below the horizon, we broke out onto Hwy XX. Just as my emotions were beginning to register on the crab-o-meter, we were home free.

Driving down the freeway, I couldn’t help but think of how the doctrine of inerrancy is often like The Babe. It’s useful, but it has a dark side, not because it’s stupid but because it’s mechanical. It can’t think, can’t change, can’t breathe or stretch, can’t apply common sense. It’s an old wineskin, rigidly locking the church and synagogue into attitudes, particularly about science and women, that are millennia old.

I had just finished reading an autobiography written by Theresa of Avila. She is one of two women that the Catholic Church has designated as a Doctor of the Church. Toward the end of her life and ministry, many of her own churchmen were questioning her travels and activities. In 1571 she wrote, “It seemed to me, considering what Paul says about women, how they should stay at home—people reminded me lately of this, and, indeed, I had heard it before---it might be the will of God I should do so too. He [Jesus] said to me: Tell them they are not to follow part of the Scripture by itself, without looking to the other parts also; perhaps, if they would, they would like to tie My hands” [source: The Autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila, Tan Books, 1997, p. 447]. She has brought to light one of the conundrums of inerrancy, that it is usually applied to just this Scripture and not to that one. Not to both blended or held in tension together.

As if to bring home the point, I had also recently watched an Independent Lens documentary on an African woman who has transformed her nation (in this case Kenya), a woman who has won a Nobel Prize for showing decades of innovation and courage in educating her people, showing them a better way of life. She was one female leader standing against a selfish, brutal dictator, pillaging his nation to enrich himself and his cronies. The women who followed her were beaten and their families were thrown in prison, but in the end, the dictator fell and the nation moved to a multi-party democracy.

I believe that to marginalize the potential leadership of women in the church, society, education, and government is averse to the commandment that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves and is truly an abomination in the sight of God. I believe that obedience to the Spirit of God in the issue of promoting women in pastoral and denominational leadership is more precious to our Lord than big churches, high praises, or years of service.

I understand the hesitation to pick and choose which words in the Bible reflect genuine revelation and which are written through a cultural screen. Jesus was always counter-cultural and counterintuitive. The first shall be last, those who exalt themselves will be humbled, the greatest among you will be servant of all, what you eat cannot defile you, become like little children---the grown men who followed Jesus had to reimagine themselves and retool their thinking. My would history prof in college called it a change of thinking cap. If one is very uncomfortable with ambiguity, this leap from one paradigm to another is almost impossible.

Think of someone trying to get from one end of a large city to another. There are three kinds of travelers. The first is unfamiliar with the city, so they need a map. They diligently study it because without their exact adherence to the directions, they know they’ll get lost. There is also a traveler with a good sense of direction, who has a minimal familiarity with the neighborhoods and freeways. They can get off course but recover without pulling the map out and completely redirect themselves. The third driver knows the city so well that they no longer need to refer to the map. If they make a wrong turn, they can easily correct. The application of traffic rules and common sense brings them to their destination.

I believe that God is looking for male denominational leaders who are as courageous as the many women of the world who suffered years of persecution, often from men who want to hide behind small portions of Scripture to promote an agenda that really comes from the human flesh. It’s OK to weigh and sift the scriptures and ask, “Does this make sense? Would Jesus approve? Is this the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?

What a victory for the devil. Suppress half the Christian army in the very name of God. Or, convince Christians that to please God, they have to live culturally like people did in 10 AD or 1800 BC. That the outer shell of religion, covered with cultural barnacles, is more important than inner purity, forgiveness, and compassion for others.

What Jesus said to St. Theresa was profound. We tie God’s hands and thwart the will of the Spirit with this small portion of Scripture or that, not blending the whole. I like to call my approach The Muffin Method of Hermeneutics. You take a bowl of salt, butter, flour, sugar, and baking powder and blend it. The ingredients themselves, sitting on a plate, do not a muffin make.

Check out my website https://janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

This story can also be seen at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-babe-and-doctrine-of-inerrancy.html.

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Long ago in the 1960s, I was in a Pentecostal church where the visiting preacher referenced Philippians 4:2, “I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.” The preacher added, “I call ‘em You Are Odious and Soon Touchy.” The congregation howled with laughter. We could all recall catty church spats among men as well as women. It may be unfair to require someone to change their opinion or judgment on a matter, but it’s not unreasonable to ask for a willing compromise. That means that one or the other combatant has to blink, to surrender their demands, to let it go.

A disciple of Christ who is soon-touchy has everyone tiptoeing around them, not wanting to set off that BP spiking lecture or the cold shoulder pout. You-are-odious people are quick to judge, lacking the ability to see themselves in the mirror, or hear how obnoxious and toxic their attitude is. In his plea for the women to reconcile, Paul is calling for humility more than total agreement. Attitude, more than agreement on every matter or opinion, is what it means to be “in the Lord.”

When God destines one for power, there will be a humbling first. Consider the name Israel. Isr is the Hebrew root for leader or prince. El refers to the title of God, so Israel means “Prince of God” or “He Rules with God.” Jacob had to wrestle with an angel all night to win that name. The angel wasn’t competing with him. God could have sent a whirlwind to wrap Jacob up like a sausage in that tent and throw him on the nearest sand dune. Rather, he wanted to demonstrate Jacob’s persistence and inner strength.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” (Genesis 32:28 NIV)

Before he departed, the angel left a little gift for the beloved Patriarch. It wasn’t a financial bonus of a bazillion sheep or a ride on a luxurious flying carpet. It was a wound in his thigh that caused him to limp for the rest of his life, signaling that a proud arrogant, condescending Israel is not the Prince that God was looking for. He didn’t create a master race, and he doesn’t want us to think there is one.

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

The character that God was trying to establish in the nascent tribe of Israel would be incomplete without the first humbling of Egypt to remind them that they were not a ruthless, dominating, global overlord like the Assyrians. Needing Egypt’s help in famine and the later bondage were part of the divine plan. They had to learn what it was to be small and helpless before they would be worthy of the divine gift of a powerful, privileged statehood and land.

If power and special privileges are abused, the end will also involve a humbling. Northern Israel was taken into captivity by Assyria in 721 BCE and ceased to exist as a state with a king. Judah’s turn was in 586 BCE when Babylon carried off all the royalty and artisans of the land. The Second Temple era began when Cyrus the Persian allowed thousands of captives to return to their land, but the longest diaspora came in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the Second temple. Fortunately, God’s covenant is eternal and his plans for Israel were simmering over the centuries for something bigger and better than what they could ever imagine. The history of Israel has been like kneaded dough that rises, is punched down, rises again, and is punched down before it’s baked into the blessing that is bread.

What applies to Israel applies to all of us. Most Christians think that Genesis 1-4 is about the literal creation of the universe, but I see it as a theologically freighted metaphor to combat Mesopotamian creation stories and their myths about gods and goddesses. Adam is made from the dirt, like all the other “nephesh,” living creatures, therefor he cannot be a god because he was “formed” by God. Eve came from Adam, so she could not be competition to Mesopotamian mother goddesses who bear children and create things. If Genesis was written when ancient Sumerians and Babylonians were building ziggurats, (as I believe), then two new immortal characters were introduced into a creation narrative that bore no resemblance to ancient gods.

Humility was embedded into prophecies about the coming Messiah. Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Zechariah foretold,

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9 NIV)

That word “lowly” or “humble” is what caught my attention during our church’s pre-Easter liturgy. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem with the crowds throwing their cloaks on the ground and shouting “Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord,” he knew that he was the Son of Man of Daniel 7 and that his ride into the city on a donkey was the fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy. He did not gallop in on a horse, nor was he wearing fine clothes, rings on his fingers, waving a sword, and with any army at his back.

The Messiah, the King of Israel, the son of God, was born in a stable to an ordinary family. He taught his disciples that pride would not lead to exaltation. He demonstrated by washing the feet of his rashest follower, Peter. He welcomed children. He decreed love and compassion. He spurned the request of James and John, the sons of thunder, to sit at his right and left in his kingdom. He let himself be crucified so he could be raised from the dead, showing all his disciples that they too will have immortal life through him.

Jesus enjoined his disciples to not acquire titles (Matthew 23:8-10). He said that when we give to the needy, don’t let the left hand know what the right is doing, meaning don’t let yourself think that you are a very fine person who will acquire brownie points in heaven (Matt. 6:3). When attending a public meal, his followers were to find the lowest seat rather than demand to be seated near the host, for,

For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. (Matthew 23:12)

The surefire sign of an unhealthy situation is a controlling spouse, pastor, cult leader, or a politician who wants to demand or legislate religious righteousness to the point of cruelty. Genuine Christianity is a way of being rather than the institution. It is based on relationship with God and with others. Jesus gave us two sacraments: baptism, reflecting a commitment between an individual and God; and communion, meant to be shared in community with other worshipers.

If there is an Antichrist before the Second Coming, he will be the opposite of humble. He will be rich, arrogant, unsympathetic, and ambitious, and will utterly lack a conscience. Being normal humans, all of the twelve apostles were ambitious. They knew they were special. All wanted that appointment to sit on thrones of judgment in the new kingdom. None of them signed up to become like a little child. Humility is such a difficult lesson for us to learn, they had to be told in various different ways over and over.

Image by iStock Photos

Humility will save a nation. America has an election coming up in November (maybe). Think about voting for the candidate who most reflects Christ, not by wearing silver crosses around the neck or just quoting Scripture, but by all the unexpected, counterintuitive ways that Jesus taught us.

Check out my website www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Kaitee Lusk used to live in Citrus Heights, California, my former city of residence. I found out about her through Rick Defer, a Sacramento man who got my attention with his own miraculous story. You can read about his astonishing story here. Kaitee’s daughter accepted Christ at the age of 2 1/2. Heather attended the same High School as my two boys, and like my eldest, she was valedictorian of her class. I never met Kaitee in person, but I have spoken to her by phone and corresponded with her. The story below can be found in her book, Eternal Makeovers, (Redemption Press, 2014).

Her adventure may seem hard to believe at first, but Kaitee sent me newsletters with photos of her and staff and members of the Marcos family. She’s the real deal.

This miraculous journey began in July, 1989, with a coveted invitation to a Christian conference (Lausanne II) in Manila. Flight arrangements were made to come and go by way of Korea. Before the trip, her pastor’s secretary made a joke about Kaitee stopping in Hawaii on the way home to see the Philippine’s President, Ferdinand Marcos. He was ill and in a hospital there. Kaitee joked back that if it was God’s will she just might do it, but actually, she didn’t even know who Marcos was. The secretary filled her in, but assured her that no one would be allowed to gain entrance into Marcos’s room.

However, in the following days, Kaitee felt very strongly that God was calling her to do that very thing. He told her, “Marcos needs Me. He’s asking for Me and is crying to Me for help.” He also told her that Marcos would not be able to speak to her, but he would understand everything that she said. He told her that others were to read the Gospel of John to him for 7 days. The man I mentioned above, Rick Defer, helped Kaitee with the funds she would need to change her reservations to include a stop in Hawaii. Of course, she was told that there were waiting lists a mile long for people wanting to stop over in Hawaii. Kaitee told the airline that she needed to see someone there who was critically ill. They told her to keep calling, especially when she got to the Philippines.

Kaitee was to travel with other missionaries. If she got to Honolulu, she would meet up with Claire, a woman who lived there whom she met at a previous event in Washington, D.C. Travel was fraught with peril. Their flight out of Sacramento was cancelled, so they were routed through Los Angeles and Seoul. Most of their luggage went on to Manila without them. The plane almost crashed in Korea, causing a day’s delay. At the Ambassador Hotel, they experienced riots, firebombs, tear gas, and rocks. Finally, the exhausted team arrived in Manila.

After some anxious maneuvering, Kaitee got her miracle ticket to Hawaii. When the conference ended, she met up with her friend Claire. They immediately began their attempt to gain entrance into Marcos’s hospital room. To make a long story short, they were repeatedly told by guards and nurses that no one gets in to see Marcos except doctors and immediate family.

The First Lady would not return their call. Kaitee was running out of time, and the ladies were about to give up. She prayed one last prayer with Marcos’s guard Alex. Afterwards, he thought that he could give her Col. Arturo Aruiza’s phone number. Being Marcos’s right-hand man, he might be able to pull some strings.

Kaitee called him and told him that God had sent her from Sacramento to deliver a message to President Marcos. Amazingly, he responded, “I believe you.” She gasped, “You do?” He said that he had letters on his desk from several people around the world who said the same thing. “The difference between you and them,” he said, “Is that you are here and they are not.”

Col. Aruiza connected the ladies with Dr. Maria Teresita Zagala, Marcos’s physician of 25 years. She was a devout Christian, and was open to Kaitee’s story. Kaitee and Claire rushed to the hospital to meet Dr. Zagala and Irene Araneta, Marcos’s daughter. Claire had to stay out of the ICU room. Kaitee and six others were in the room when she delivered her message.

Marcos had a breathing tube, which was why he was not able to speak to Kaitee, but he responded to her message with amazement, then smiles and tears. Kaitee assured him that God loved him and had heard his cry. She talked about how a baby in the womb pushes from darkness into light. Marcos was in a similar position. He was needing to be birthed into the light. Jesus was the light. He indicated with his eyes that he was willing to repent of all sin and ask Jesus into his life. Kaitee led him in a prayer, then gave him a Bible. She told him that someone would be reading it to him for 7 days. Kaitee found out years later that 7 was Marcos’s favorite number. All in the room took mention of 7 as a sign that Kaitee really did hear from God. All were in tears at the end of the interview.

In time, Irene Araneta and Col. Aruiza both accepted Christ, as did Marcos’s son Bong. The major portion of Kaitee’s experience with the Marcos family and entourage can be found in Kaitee’s book. Although the other people who were called of God to deliver that message may regret that they never got to Honolulu, the very fact that they wrote those letters undoubtedly played an important part in Kaitee’s success.

Marcos had a reputation of being a repressive dictator. Almost everyone knew about Imelda’s closet full of shoes. He is not one who would garner sympathy as he died. But God heard his sincere heart’s cry, and Kaitee heard God’s call, the call of a lifetime.

Check out my website www.janetkatherinesmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

This story can also be seen at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/ferdinand-marcos-deathbed-miracle-911a4826ca60.

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Rev. Don Piper’s Resurrection

Don Piper was a Baptist minister who attended a convention in the Houston area in January, 1989. He went there hoping to learn more about starting a new church. On the way home, while crossing a bridge with a protective railing, a prison truck driven by an inmate crossed over to his lane and landed on top of his car, crushing both car and driver. Don Piper died instantly, with gruesome damage to head, thorax, and limbs. Another minister from the same convention was part of the resulting traffic jam, so he and his wife walked forward to see what happened. He didn’t particularly know Rev. Piper, but he felt that he could aid with prayer and comfort. What he found was a very mangled Don, still in the car, and covered with a tarp to hide the gruesome body. No one was attending to him because he was dead. beyond all question. He couldn’t be moved until the coroner officially declared him dead. Rev. Gentiles crawled into the car through the back, lifted the tarp, laid a hand on Piper’s shoulder and began to pray.

As a Baptist minister, Rev. Gentiles didn’t really believe in healing prayer, but he recognized the voice of God who commanded him to pray, so pray he did, and sang, and as a result damage to head, chest, and lungs somehow just disappeared. The minute Don Piper died, he was in heaven, and that was for an hour and a half. There he met friends and relatives who had gone on before him. They greeted him with great joy and escorted him to the very gates of heaven.

One of his greeters was a friend from High School, Mike Wood, who was a popular, athletic kid and a devout Christian. He was an early influence on Don Piper because of his consistent example. He died in a car wreck when he was 19. Don was devastated and often wondered why such a promising young man should die so young. He writes,

“Now I saw Mike in heaven. As he slipped his arm around my shoulder, my pain and grief vanished. Never had I seen Mike smile so brightly. I still didn’t know why, but the joyousness of the place wiped away any questions. Everything felt blissful....I saw Barry Wilson, who had been my classmate in high school but later drowned in a lake. Barry hugged me, and his smile radiated a happiness I didn’t know was possible.” Source: Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven, Kindle, (Grand Rapids, Revel, 2004, 2014) pp 39, 40.

The Legendary Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Book of Job and several Psalms in the Hebrew Bible echo the dark and dreary Mesopotamian/Canaanite view of death. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh’s beloved friend Enkidu receives a premonition of his death in a dream. He and Gilgamesh had angered the gods by cutting down the sacred cedar of Lebanon and killing the guardian monster. Ishtar sent the Bull of Heaven, and they killed that, too, so Enkidu was sentenced to death by the gods. He describes his immanent fate to Gilgamesh. This passage can be found in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET), 1950, p. 87, but a more lay-friendly version is found in The Epic of Gilgamesh by N. K. Sandars, Penguin, 1983, or the full text online. Enkidu shares a dream with his friend and partner Gilgamesh which demonstrates the dark vision of the Canaanite and afterlife.

“As Enkidu slept alone in his sickness, in bitterness of spirit he poured out his heart to his friend. ‘It was I who cut down the cedar, who leveled the forest, I who slew Humbaba and now see what has become of me. Listen, my friend, this is the dream I dreamed last night. The heavens roared, and earth rumbled back an answer; between them stood I before an awful being, the somber-faced man-bird; he had directed on me his purpose. His was a vampire face, his foot was a lion’s foot, his hand was an eagle’s talon. He fell on me and his claws were in my hair, he held me fast and I smothered; then he transformed me so that my arms became wings covered with feathers. He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back.’”

The legend tells us that the people there, including the kings of the earth, sit in darkness, eating dust and clay. The kings are servants now. Priests, acolytes, temple servers, all shared the same fate. Eresh-Kigal is the Queen of the Netherworld, and Belit-Sheri is the recorder who keeps the book of death. Enkidu awoke in terror. He began to sicken and eventually die. Gilgamesh, who was two-thirds god and one-third man (ANET 88), could do nothing to help, and in fact, became terrified of death himself.

Gilgamesh went on a quest to find eternal life. This gift was denied him, but, in some renditions of the legend (actually a later appendage), he did have one more opportunity to communicate with his friend. Gilgamesh lost a magic drum and drumstick into the Netherworld, so he sent his good buddy there to rescue it. But the Netherworld would not let Enkidu return to earth. Turning to ANET (pp. 98, 99) we read, (and I’m going to smooth this passage out a little),

“Father Ea did intercede for him (Gilgamesh) in the matter. He said to Nergal, the valiant hero: O valiant hero, Nergal, open forthwith a hole in the earth that the spirit of Enkidu may ussue forth from the nether world, that to his brother he might tell the ways of the nether world. Nergal, the valiant hero, hearkened to Ea, forthwith he opened a hole in the earth. The spirit of Enkidu, like a wind-puff, issued forth from the nether world. They embraced and kissed each other. They exchanged counsel sighing at each other: ‘Tell me, my friend, tell me my friend, tell me the order of the nether world which thou hast seen.’

‘I shall not tell thee, I shall not tell thee. But if I tell thee the order of the nether world which I have seen, sit thou down and weep!’ ‘I will sit down and weep.’ ‘My body, which thou didst touch as thy heart rejoiced, vermin devour as though it was an old garment. My body, which thou didst touch as they heart rejoiced, is filled with dust.’ He cried ‘Woe!’ and threw himself in the dust, Gilgamesh cried ‘Woe!’ and threw himself in the dust.”

There are some mutilated lines here. Enkidu reveals the fate of several souls in the nether world. Some are able to drink water, others eat bread. But those who died on the field of battle and were not properly buried find no rest there. Those who have no family to offer libations for them can only eat “the lees of the pot, crumbs of bread, and offals of the street.”

The Monroe Institute

OK, I know, the above legend is a figment of someone’s imagination. BUT the great guru of astral projection Robert Monroe had an experience in his ethereal wanderings that reminds me of that legend. As he became more and more adept at leaving his body, he kept a journal about what worked and what he saw. The result was three books. The first was Journeys Out of the Body, in which he describes various locales or levels. Level II is where many souls linger that have not resolved their attachment to desires and emotions. Being in that level unhinges both libido and emotions, so that it takes a lot of control not to partake in that environment. He tells us that it is not a pleasant place. You can actually read more about that level in the story of Dr. George Ritchie, who was escorted by Jesus Christ himself on a tour of the afterlife as his body lay in a military morgue, covered by a sheet.

A friend of Monroe, Dr. Richard Gordon, died at the age of seventy, so in one of his OBE excursions, Monroe went looking for him in the afterlife. He seemed to be guided to a room in what may have been an institute of some sort. A voice beside Monroe told him to stand there and the Dr. would see him in a minute. There was a group of men in the room being spoken to by a young man around 22 who seemed to be explaining some scientific theory. After a minute, the young man turned and saw Monroe, but then went back to his conversation. Strangely enough, as Monroe stood in the doorway waiting to see his friend, whom he didn’t recognize due to the age difference, the atmosphere got hotter and hotter until Monroe could no longer stand it. Thinking that he had missed seeing his friend, he was forced to leave (p.101-108). Much later, he complained to his guides that he didn’t get to see his pal. They retorted that he did see him, and the doctor saw Monroe but just didn’t respond. “The doctor will see you in a minute” was apparently the joke. That suggests to me that the friend was not really in a good place.

Another of his friends died, and again Monroe went looking for him. In both cases, an unseen hand guided Monroe to the correct site. “After about an hour of preparation, I finally made it out of the physical, and began to travel rapidly through what seemed to be nothing but darkness. I was mentally shouting Agnew Bahnson!, again and again as I traveled.

“Suddenly, I stopped, or was stopped. I was in a rather dark room. Someone was holding me very still in a standing position. After a moment of waiting, a cloud of white gas seemed to blow up through a small hole in the floor. The cloud took form, and someone told me it was Mr. Bahnson, although I could not see him too well, or identify his features. He spoke immediately in an excited and happy way.

“‘Bob, you’ll never believe all the things that have happened since I’ve been here.’ There was no more. At a signal from someone, the cloud of white gas lost its human form and seemed to recede back into the hole in the floor” (p. 112). That story reminded me of the Gilgamesh tale where Enkidu seeps up through a hole in the ground, which is why I included it in this post.

Monroe put his best interpretation on these scenarios, but the fact is that there is a growing mountain of evidence that many crossing over into death see gardens, meadows, beautiful colors, relatives who are easy to recognize, buildings, animals, streams, rivers, etc. A cloud of white gas coming up from a hole in the floor into a dim room does not sound auspicious to me, no matter what the voice said. For some reason, all communication with his friend was curtailed.

Monroe traveled through many threatening and confusing regions in his astral projections. There were sexually seducing spirits, threatening entities whose territories had to be passed through with great care, and lost souls who wanted to be rescued. He met spirit guides who assured him that there were no angels, no demons, no heaven, no hell, no God (e.g. p. 116). Not once does he stop to question the veracity of the things that he saw and heard over there. He doesn’t consider that uncountable numbers of people have seen angels, demons, God, Jesus, heaven, hell, and even foreign gods sitting on thrones. He is certainly not the only mortal who has gone into death’s dimension and returned to tell about it. (There are too many books on NDE’s to even mention here.) He never stops to ask the question, could my friend have gone to hell? And if my friends have gone there, am I really exempt?

Conclusion

Almost everyone who has received some guidance from another dimension totally trusts the guide. If it’s paranormal, they assume it has to be true. Other people might be sucked into a huge deception, they say, but not me. I’m special and wise, called to be a messenger of truth.

Think about it this way. If you, as an untrained, unprofessional spy, decided to go off to Europe and look for traitors and enemies of your country, how long would it take for the real spies to turn you inside out and eat your liver? Not long, I would guess. And those human spies are amateurs compared to demonic entities who are cut off from all goodness. Spirits are too often the enemies of all mankind. We cannot withstand our enemies if we don’t understand them. Robert Monroe’s OBEs were fascinating, but suspiciously negative and vague. Don Piper’s experience was clear and positive. There really was a city, a wall, and a beautiful gate. All that happened parallels what one would expect who was living according to the Bible.

Monroe would say that Piper was caught up in a ‘belief system.’ That means that poor Don Piper would never move on to become whatever the ultimate spirit existence is, but what he experienced there would satisfy me for eternity.

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This story can also be seen at

https://medium.com/p/b33367a4c8ec?postPublishedType=initial and at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2023/07/finding-friends-in-afterlife-three.html.

Introductory statement

This story was written by a remarkable Spirit-filled woman named Kaitee Lusk, who interviewed former firefighter Rick Defer and added the account of his near-death-experience (NDE) to the collection of miracle stories in her book Eternal Makeovers, Pleasant Word, Winepress Publishing, Enumclaw WA, 2006. Rick told me about her when I met him at church one day in Citrus Heights, California in 2007. Several of us listened to his first hand account of the day he was electrocuted at work in 1980 and was clinically dead for a full half hour. He showed us the scars. There was a clear dent in his chest, and his hands still bore witness to the burns from that unfortunate day. He also told me Kaitee’s amazing story, so I contacted her by email and she sent me the narrative below, copied and pasted from her book manuscript. She added her own account of receiving a call from God to go to the Philippines. Her stunning story of leading Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to Christ on his deathbed is also in her book. You can read about it here.

Rick’s story, written by Kaitee

A bit of introductory background: Rick’s biological father graduated from San Quentin the same year Rick graduated from High School. He never really knew his father, but his mother and step father did their best to raise him well. Rick spent some time in juvenal prison as a young man. He married 3 times. He had full custody of a son from the second marriage and was determined to be a good father. The woman from the third marriage helped him raise the boy. After he married Linnea, she rocked his world by becoming a Christian. Rick also accepted Christ.

To my surprise, however, my acceptance did not change me as quickly and as dramatically as Linnea. I still went to football games on Sunday instead of going to church. I still had a rather foul mouth and continued to drink and carouse just as I had before. But things did begin to change rapidly after that. When the fire department retired me because of several medical disabilities, we decided to move out of Los Angeles. Since we enjoyed the mountains and the snow, Linnea and the children surveyed the Tahoe area. There was something “unique” about the old town of Truckee that I couldn’t resist. So, after buying a house in Tahoe Donner, I went back to get our family and we moved into our wonderful new home in 1978.

But things didn’t stay “wonderful,” and in the spring of 1980 Linnea and I were divorced. This third divorce was much more traumatic than the others were because as a Christian couple we were not supposed to divorce, but when you accept Christ, he doesn’t take away your free will. We chose to divorce. We split the money we had between us, and after giving Linnea the business we had, I left and took a job with North Tahoe Transit Mix. It was a good job and I was doing quite well until October 8, 1980 when I drove a 50-foot boom truck to a job site at the top of Tahoe Donner on Alder Creek Road.

After pumping concrete into the house foundation, I accidentally ran the boom into a 7200-volt feeder line that feeds electricity to upper Tahoe Donner. I had been standing on the ground on top of wet fill dirt with the control box between my hands. When the boom hit the feeder line, thousands of volts bolted into the control box and against my chest. The impact threw me to the ground where, according to witnesses, for five minutes I thrashed around like an open-butted fire hose as electricity snaked through my body. People at the job site tried desperately to get the box off my chest but couldn’t. The line finally burned through, releasing my body from its power and some people ran to check me out. There was no pulse nor breathing or movement of any kind.

I found out later that the electricity entered my body at the sternum, traveled through and out of my right groin and upper thigh and also exited from the inside of my right knee and both feet. I had been wearing steel-shank and steel-toed boots, which spread the electricity completely around my feet burning them severely.

After checking for respiration and finding none they decided I’d been electrocuted the moment the electricity hit me. So they attempted no CPR, no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and left me for dead. Someone ran to a neighboring house to call for help. Some minutes later paramedics arrived from Tahoe Forest Hospital. After listening to witnesses and checking me out, they too, decided that after all this time (about 30 minutes) I was long gone. There was no CPR, no resuscitation, no defibrillation, and I was officially pronounced dead. I actually was, but I didn’t know it.

Incredibly, as I lay there, I was enjoying a feeling of love, peace and serenity I’d never experienced before. Though I saw no bright lights or anything like that I envisioned or had a knowledge of “Giant Hands” holding me very still and firmly. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was being “cradled” just like a baby in a mother’s womb. I was contented, comfortable, and filled with joy as I floated in these Giant Hands. I experienced no pain, no panic, and had an unfathomable knowledge that everything was okay. Though I didn’t think of heaven or anything like that I had this inner recognition that was so strong I just knew I was in the arms of the Lord. As I basked and reveled in those Giant Hands everything suddenly went blank and though I have no personal recollection of coming back to life, the paramedics and others gave me a recount of what they saw.

After pronouncing me dead they said that I suddenly sat up, threw off the sheet that had been placed over me, and started talking to the paramedics (After 30 minutes without oxygen). My sudden “resurrection” caused no small reaction among those still at the scene. Though totally stunned and in awe, they began giving me first aid. A young paramedic later told me that I didn’t like some of the things he was doing and that I reached up, grabbed him by the throat and then told him that he was embarrassing his profession by the way he was treating me. He reported I gave him a little instant first aid lesson, and he said, “Okay,” and I let go of his throat.

After finishing their immediate treatment, I was transported to Tahoe Forest Hospital. According to witnesses there I looked and acted very normal except for my burns. They said I was talking coherently and even cracking some jokes. From there Fixed Wing Aircraft transported me to Sacramento’s UCD Medical Center. When I woke up the next morning, I still couldn’t recall anything except being “cradled” in those Giant Hands. Those secure and wonderful giant arms! From then on I remembered everything that happened to me and could’ve almost wished I were back in those arms.

When I saw all the bandages, the IV’s monitoring the pulse in my feet, the electrical devices at my chest to monitor my blood pressure and pulse, I was overcome with emotion. I looked like I was literally “wired for sound.” The physicians were astounded by the fact that my pulse was normal. My blood pressure was perfect, 120/80, and even my internal functions were perfect. They could find no medical explanation for that. For me there was only one explanation — that when God protects you, He protects you.

The next day, three young pastors, Eric, Tom, and Rob, from Church on the Lake in Incline Village, came to visit me. The doctors had given me large doses of drugs to ease the pain, but they weren’t working. After visiting awhile, we joined hands for a prayer. Eric and Tom were holding my bandaged hands, and Rob put his head on my right shin with both hands on either side of his head. Eric was the first to pray and within seconds I had the most astounding experience. I felt a very warm tingly sensation start at my feet and work up each leg up through my torso, into my arms and my head and out my hands. And, once again, I knew the Lord — by His Holy Spirit — was enveloping me because that same feeling of peace, serenity and knowledge come upon me as I had experienced when he cradled me.

The pain in my chest, groin, feet, and hands disappeared. It was awesome! I was so astonished I opened my eyes in disbelief! When Eric finished praying, they each looked at their hands. They were red with the heat that had come through my body! Even Rob’s forehead was red. We were all astonished because Eric and Tom were holding bandaged hands; they hadn’t even touched my skin while they were praying.

Later that day, the orthopedic surgeon and a herd of interns came into my room. UCD is a teaching university, and my doctor was talking quite a bit about my “unusual” case (“Unusual” is easier to say than “miraculous”). He shared with them how astonished they were that I was even alive. After that they determined they were going to amputate both my legs about 7.5” below my knees. I tried negotiating with them on that idea because it was just my feet that were burned. I saw no reason to cut off so much of “good” leg. To my dismay I was quickly informed that it was the best length for the best fit for my future prosthetics if I were to walk again. But, he also said that because I had numerous exit areas on my right leg that they would examine the option of saving it together with some of my right foot. That decision would be made during the surgery. Since he didn’t seem very optimistic, I fully expected to have both of my legs amputated when I came from the operating room. To my surprise, however, only my left leg was amputated 7½” below the knee and my right foot was only one half amputated.

For the next 16 days I traveled in and out of the burn unit for treatment. However, there was no treatment to erase the “after-shocks” — words like freak and cripple — that haunted me wherever I went. I had deep emotional feelings about where my life was going. What kind of life would I have? What was I going to be able to do? Would I ever ski again? I was missing part of my left leg and one half of my right foot was amputated and disfigured. Would a woman ever love me? Could she look at me and not notice the ugly scar on my chest where the electricity entered and scared hands? I became so focused on my deformities that I became more of an emotional cripple than a physical one.

Within approximately two weeks after the amputations (and much sooner than anyone expected) I left the hospital. Why was I in such a hurry? Well, I happened to be coach of a soccer team that my son was on and wanted desperately to be at their championship game. My friends said that just seeing me there on the field gave them immeasurable inspiration.

Losing the path

A few months later I developed an addiction to my pain medication. Without realizing it I had been doubling and tripling the dosage. When we take drugs, we need to recognize that medication, regardless of legality, are often addictive, and you find yourself not thinking clearly anymore, resulting in a transition from the doctor’s prescription to illegal drugs. Marijuana was my first. I was quite apprehensive and fearful of cocaine but had no fear of marijuana because I’d experimented with it before. It helped with some of the pain and nausea that was initially corrected by the prescribed drugs. But I began feeling guilty, and during my next visit to the doctor, shared with him that I was smoking “dope.” He said if it helped with my pain and nausea, and I didn’t have any other side effects, to go ahead and do it.

So, I rationalized that it was okay. After all my doctor affirmed it was OK, and I was a cripple and in a lot of pain. The problem was that the insurance company certainly wouldn’t pay for marijuana, so I had to buy it. Little by little, I found myself not caring, slipping more and more into illegal behavior and further into the criminal world. The young man who first talked me into drugs now offered to sell half of my stash to pay for it as my medication. So, now all of a sudden I became a dealer.

Smoking marijuana can cause you to like the feeling it gives you, which adds to the irrational behavior of continuing to smoke it. Not too much later, my son-in-law offered me some cocaine, and I took it without even batting an eye. This quickly pushed me into a much deeper involvement in the criminal community. Satan had really found a way to trap me and penetrate my Christianity. Jesus saves us, but He doesn’t take away our free will!

Somehow, I couldn’t stop loving the Lord, and I continued to pray, but I was far from Him. The drugs had severely short-circuited my prayer life. There were no answers, no blessings while I was doing drugs, and eventually I lost my home and my car. I had no job, no support from friends, family, or church. After going through many different kinds of hospitalizations and withdrawals, I came to what I call the final event. I was taking a drug prescribed by a psychiatrist known as Emempromine. This was supposed to help me quit my cocaine habit, but I became addicted to his prescription as well.

One wintry day I ran out of Emempromine. I thought I was coming down with the flu, but it didn’t take long to realize that I was entering withdrawals. I called the doctor and explained the circumstances. He agreed that I was one of the “unfortunate ones” to have that kind of side effect from Emempromine, but if I could get down to the hospital, he’d give me a prescription for another drug to counteract his previous prescription.

New horizons

One thing became abundantly clear. I was not capable of getting to the hospital. There was a raging blizzard outside, and all I had was a bicycle. I was trapped like a hamster in a wheel inside of a cage. So I told the doctor “No thank you” and that I wouldn’t be calling him anymore, and I prepared myself. I’d gone through withdrawals before and I knew what to expect. I stripped down to my shorts and brought in some firewood placed a bucket on the coffee table, turned on the TV, and was ready to face it for however long it took. At the end of four days and nights of intense vomiting, pain, anger, depression, and all of the emotions that one could imagine, I suddenly remembered the book of Luke and the story of the “Prodigal Son.” I had my doubts as to whether or not the Lord would take me back, but I had nowhere else to go, and I was so purged and so exhausted after dozens of hours of vomiting into a bucket, that I lay back on the couch and said the following prayer, “Father, I’m so tired. I don’t have the energy to give you one of those fancy “thee and thou” preacher prayers. I just want to come back to you and I need some help. Amen.”

To my astonishment when I woke up eighteen hours later the blizzard was over, the sky was blue and dotted with puffy white clouds, and I had not frozen to death. As I shook the cobwebs out of my head, I remembered my prayer and realized that God had answered it. He knew my heart and knew I’d been sincere. I had an overwhelming feeling that I needed to do something to show an act of faith and an act of repentance for His mercy. At first, I didn’t know what, but I had to do something, so I began gathering things around the house that were drug related — cocaine vials, mirrors, razors, baggies (I found some that still had drugs in them), and pipes for smoking marijuana. Amazingly, instead of smoking or snorting the drugs, I found my desire for them had disappeared. I held them in my hands and opened the door of the stove, which had a new fire in it, and said, “Lord, this is my physical act of repentance and my thanks for hearing me.” I threw all of the drug paraphernalia into the fire. This was the first day of the rest of my life.

Approximately two weeks later I began to see those “Giant Hands” move in my behalf in a new and awesome way. One of my stepdaughters happened to contact my son, which led to my getting into a conversation with Linnea. One thing led to another, and, incredibly, after five years of being divorced I found myself sleeping on her couch when the house foreclosed. Almost immediately those Giant Hands began molding a new love for me in Linnea’s heart. Within a very short time they drew us into a new and better marriage than I ever imagined. However, though I now had a new future, I still had my drug-related past clinging to me like the “placenta” after a baby is born. It needed to be dealt with and discarded.

During my drug-related escapades I was arrested on several charges (9 felony counts) and I still had to face the consequences for those.

Well, I enrolled in a vocational rehabilitation school, started working again and in my spare time. Believing the Lord would protect me, I did some undercover work for four police agencies. After two years I was finally called to trial for my previous arrests. The four police agencies — Washoe County Narcotics Unit, Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, Placer County Sheriff’s Office, and the DEA, testified that they had never seen anyone more dedicated and more fruitful in helping them. The detective from Washoe County Narcotics testified that over 18 criminals and many drug offenders were prosecuted as a direct result of my activities. According to the police I was also the key factor in a murder case that would never have been solved had I not stood up as a witness. Through all of this, the Lord was loyal to me. I was never harmed even in the smallest way, and the nine serious counts pending against me were all dropped. I was allowed to plead guilty to one count of possession of marijuana and given a probation of up to five years. I served two of those and then was miraculously kicked out of the system as completed. Some time later, in checking my records, I found that they had been “expunged,” as if they had never happened. The same thing happens when you give your heart to Christ — the past is “erased” — as if it never happened.

If any man is in Christ, he is a “new” creature. The old is passed away and behold all things become new.” (2 Cor. 5:17)

******

Check out my personal website www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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All Bible verses are NKJV taken from biblegateway.com.

This is a 3/2026 update and edit of an earlier post.

Setting the parameters of discussion

First, the term antichrist is a biblical construct, so only the Bible can define it. It’s actually a Judeo-Christian meme, rooted deeply in Old Testament prophecy and history as well as in New Testament theology. The fact that the title of Christ is in the word Antichrist does not prevent us from searching out similar historical themes in the Hebrew Bible where spiritual and cultural forces are horrifically anti-God.

The OT/HB deity established a theocracy in Israel, so the prophets were very political. Jesus unmoored His kingdom from earthly politics by declaring that the kingdom of God is within you and His kingdom is not of this world (Luke 17:21; John 18:36). Nevertheless, the Antichrist, if there is one individual called that, will be both religious and political, and that is part of the blasphemy of the antichristal system, the marriage of spirituality and earthly, carnal power politics. The prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism can both slide into that category.

In fairness, any article about a charming, ruthless man rising to global power can be great clickbait. The apostles of Christ were divided as to whether there would be one man on the cusp of Christ’s return or whether there would be many over the years, which would change the terms from singular to plural, change the definitions, and disconnect antichrist from the Second Coming. Because the first century believers were looking for the Antichrist in every persecuting, brutish leader, John taught that any person who denied that Jesus was the Son of God who died and rose to redeem the world was a antichrist. Government officials who persecuted Christians, like the Roman emperors, Jewish leaders, or false apostles were antichrist. By the time John wrote his accounts, there were already many such (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 1:7).

Paul, on the other hand, believed that a singular man (sort like Herod the Great or Hitler) would arise and have an apocalyptic effect. First, there must be a “great falling away,” and “the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” Paul called this man “the lawless one” (NKJV) twice in this letter; he will reign over a lawless era. He will verify his claim to deity by doing many signs and wonders (dabbling in the occult?). Thereby he will deceive all those who do not want to hear the truth. Christ will destroy this man and his followers when He returns, (2 Thess. 2:1–12).

Literalist Christians are watching events in Jerusalem to see if the place where the Jewish temple stood would fall out of Muslim hands and into the net of the Antichrist. There’s a lot of specific detail there to be fulfilled if we take the Bible as inerrant (I don’t). I would dismiss any connection of these verses to the United States if I weren’t reading every day absolute gobsmacking news about President Donald Trump. I just read that some of our troops are being told that the Iran invasion (of March 2026) is God’s divine plan because Trump is God’s anointed to bring about Armageddon and the Second Coming. This is pretty much what a modern Antichrist would look like.

If we add the Revelation of John to the recipe, there is the mark of the Beast, 666, planted on the forehead of the deceived. Is it literally a brand, like what they do to cattle, a chip that can be seen if swiped by a machine, or possibly a hat with a logo? This beast is revealed in Revelation 13. He has aspects of a leopard, a bear, and a lion, all powerful predators. He has great global influence, suggesting money and power that came straight from the devil himself. The Dragon gave authority to the Beast, who caused people to fear that he could not be stopped or defeated in war. He will be boastful, will blaspheme God and the temple, and will persecute God’s people. All who are not written in the Book of Life will worship the Beast and the Dragon. They will be allotted a certain amount of time to wreak ruin upon the world, and then it will end.

The Prediction Game

In the second half of the twentieth century there were many predictions about the immanent rise of the Antichrist, but they came from people who were partly or totally into channeling spirits. The situations that I know of and have blogged about are Jeane Dixon, Ruth Montgomery, Vance Davis, and an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Bayside, New York. Although the NT does encourage gifts of the Holy Spirit like prophecy and word of knowledge in which God speaks and acts through those endowed with the gift, the Holy Spirit doesn’t chat with us or speak through Ouija boards, tarot cards, or dead people.

Anyone who traffics in spirit communication or messages from “aliens” knows that revelations of great disasters are common. Often there is a date involved. The day passes, the event does not happen, and people forget all about the prediction. All the above predictions of the Antichrist are contradictory, meaning that some or all of them are inaccurate, so I’m not going to declare in this post that we are in the End Times and the Antichrist is here. And if he is here today, or if one arises soon, I would not expect every prediction referring to him, biblical or otherwise, to come to pass. Certain generalities could be expected in any global dictator.

I have often wondered why Hitler wasn’t THE Antichrist, which would suggest that the return of Christ should already have happened, but then in our own era, it dawns on me that perhaps every generation has its own Antichrist, an apocalyptic upheaval, unleashing events where the stakes are so high that no one can avoid choosing a side.

Lastly, an antichrist is more than a typical narcissistic dictator like so many I’ve seen in my lifetime. An antichrist specifically opposes God’s Judeo-Christian believers, either by persecuting them or subverting them…turning them away from God’s word and will with honey smooth religious statements that point to something just off to the side of what God wants. And then off to the side of that. He will rock the world.

Look for These Signs

He’ll be a slick speaker. Did you see the movie The King’s Speech? When older brother Edward VIII of England abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry American Wallis Simpson, younger brother Bertie inherited the crown to be George VI. Bertie had a profound speech impediment, so an Australian speech expert coached him to be able to make his coronation speech. I recall the lines when Prince Charlie and his royal father were watching Hitler make a fiery speech on TV. Charlie asked, “What is he saying?” Bertie answers, “I don’t know, but he’s saying it rather well.” That is so on brand with God, Who often uses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty.

The lies may be very subtle and mixed with truth. If we can expand the definition of antichrist to encompass any figure who opposes all that God is and wants for us, we can look to Genesis 3 for our first antichrist entity. Long ago I saw a Frank and Ernest cartoon where they were in a museum looking at an old pair of sneakers on a pedestal. One said to the other, “Belonged to the first snake.” Fairly insightful humor. An interdimensional humanoid serpent with full ability to communicate with an adult human appeared on the scene and questions Yahweh-Elohim’s motives by sly inuendo. “Hey, he really told you two to not eat of the tree?” Like, gee, why would any reasonable deity do that? Eve responds, “Yeah we can eat of any tree in the Garden but we can’t touch this one or we die.”

Odds are Yahweh Elohim didn’t mean that Adam and Eve would die physically, because if they are the only humans — in the narrative, which may be metaphorical rather than literal and historical — and they don’t know the difference between right and wrong, their free will and immortality aren’t much use. They are like toddlers in understanding, and they can’t leave the garden to test what choices they would make. So the tree is a metaphor of humans becoming self-aware and capable of higher reasoning. The serpent wasn’t wrong. If they were the first humans ever, (which they weren’t), and if they dropped dead because of their disobedience, God’s whole plan would have died with them.

An antichrist may dabble in the occult and be supported by “prophecy” and miracles. The Israelites were about at the end of their wanderings in the wilderness. After 40 years, they were at the edge of the Promised Land ,  of inheritance, of rest, of identity as a coherent people to be reckoned with. Balak son of Zippor, King of the Moabites, stood between the wanderers and their goal, and he was terrified of them because he had seen what they can do in war. He wasn’t a bloody dictator. As far as we know, he was a typical politician, perhaps like half our US congress, but he was determined to block what God had clearly set in motion, and he was going to use magic rather than weapons to do it. The expert he called upon for support was not a warlord but a sorcerer/prophet.

Balaam is summoned from the north, but he was warned by an angel to speak only what Yahweh would tell him, (Num. 22:20 NKJV). Balak took Balaam to the top of a mountain where they made 7 altars and offered bulls and rams, but the curses just wouldn’t stick. The magic of a petty politician backfired. What came forth instead was a flood of love and protection along with a prediction of a near Messianic figure who would rule in power over the region. Israel would be great. But right afterwards, Israel fell on its face. What brought them down? What almost crashed the program? Moabite women! Where weapons of war and the strongest curses failed, women, feasting, and sex got the morally spineless men worshiping the god of the Moabites. They still entered the Land, but not before a plague of judgement thinned their ranks.

An antichrist will be boastful and have great political power. Every Christian and Jew should be conversant with the Messianic personage in Daniel 7 because it depicts an Antichrist literally, and the Christ to come, with victory given to the Messianic Son of Man who comes before the Ancient of Days. God is sitting on a throne with wheels of fire. A fiery river flows out from beneath the throne. But the scene would be incomplete without the ancient adversary. Verse 7:8:

“I was considering the horns, and there was another horn, a little one, coming up among them, before whom three of the first horns were plucked out by the roots. And there, in this horn, were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking pompous words.” Horns represent earthly power or strength of character in the Hebrew Bible. Movers and shakers get horns.

This person could represent someone like Herod the Great, who died shortly after the birth of Jesus Christ. I copied the paragraphs below from a recent article on Herod in Bible History Daily, Biblical Archaeology Review:

“King Herod the Great ruled Judea from 37 B.C.E. until his death in 4 B.C.E. Outside of Judea, the Greeks and Romans found his charm (and his extravagant benefactions) irresistible. He generously endowed the Greek Olympic Games, sponsored building projects in prestigious cities such as Athens and Rhodes, and erected public buildings, palaces, and even entire cities, some of which still astonish visitors.

“At home, however, King Herod was despised for his ruthless oppression and cruelty. His many endeavors came at a considerable cost to his Jewish subjects through heavy taxes. He executed his wife, Miriamme, because he suspected her of adultery. And he may be most well-known by biblical scholars for his order to kill all children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem shortly after the birth of Jesus.”

“I was watching in the night visions, And behold, One like the Son of Man, Coming with the clouds of heaven! He came to the Ancient of Days, And they brought Him near before Him. Then to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, That all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, Which shall not pass away, And His kingdom the one Which shall not be destroyed.”

This passage is why Jesus referred to Himself as the Son of Man. According to the historian Josephus, Herod not only died soon after he ordered the babies to be slain, he died a horrible death, screaming in pain because his genitals were being eaten by maggots.

An actual antichrist will have no respect for the law. There is a man described in Paul’s letters that caused the Christian community to wonder if this Roman emperor or that one would be the personage preceding Christ’s return, but as the Parousia was delayed and the generations came and went, it seemed as if law-abiding leaders were the exception rather than the rule. We can assume, then, that there will be something unique about the Antichrist’s disdain for law. He will have power to turn weaker souls from doing what is right to joining him in his corruption. Obviously, he will offer the weak a bountiful supply of money and status.

Conclusion

So what can we say about an antichrist who might appear in our day?

• He’ll be a great speaker with an appealing voice. Someone easy to listen to.

• He’ll be a braggart. Arrogant.

• He will be good looking and charming, but utterly selfish.

• He’ll weasel himself into positions of immense political power, but it won’t last.

• He’ll be a master deceiver, a skilled liar, a con artist, and a sociopath with no care for his effect on the world.

• He’ll be antisemitic. He’ll either persecute Christians or he’ll subvert them with promises of power and favor. He’ll have power to deceive the very elect.

• He will either openly or deviously allow people to think he’s a god or a savior of some kind.

• He’ll be religious, but not sincerely. He’ll be open to help from the occult.

• He’ll have an anointing to spread his wickedness like cancer.

Like I wrote at the beginning, perhaps there isn’t just one. If the men that I would label antichrist aren’t IT, and there’s still The Big Guy yet to come, holy heaven help us.

Check out my personal website www.janetksmithpersonal.com, where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Source: Vance Davis with Brian Blashaw, Broken Promises: A True Story of Courage and Belief (Mesa, Arizona: White Mesa Publications, 1995)

Vance Confronts one Devil of a Boogey Man

Vance Davis, leader of the Gulf Breeze Six, NSA cryptologists who went AWOL in June, 1990, was about 16 when he had a very significant dream. He found himself in a huge, spooky cavern where two teams were playing. He was coach of one of them. It wasn’t exactly a game; the stakes were serious, losing was unthinkable. Suddenly one of his players seemed to fall into a hole and disappear. He sent in another. That one vanished. Then another. Soon he would run out of players. He turned around and saw one of the most charming women he had ever seen. Before he could collect himself, she ran into the game and vanished also. There was only one thing to do. Run in after them and see if he could figure out what happened to them. So Vance ran onto the field and tumbled down the same hole.

It was a cobwebby cave with bread ovens full of charred corpses. A LIFE magazine lay on the floor. It was dated Jan. 17, 1964, 9 months before he was born. “On the cover was a picture of Pope Paul VI kissing the rock at the Chapel of Primacy at the Sea of Galilee” where Jesus allegedly gave Peter charge over the founding of His church. (Mind you, Vance was not a Catholic and knew almost nothing about the Bible. I would be shocked if he knew anything at all about Paul VI.)

The lovely lady he saw on the bench was tied to a stalactite. He untied her, but she quickly vanished. Vance hears a voice, turns to see an exquisite, perfect man with blond hair and a white suit. He said, “Come join me, Vance, for your power and strength could serve me well.” Then he tempted Vance with all the worldly wealth and goods that he offered Jesus in Matthew 4 of the Bible.

Vance sensed that something wasn’t right. He asked Mr. Perfect, “Who is Lord?” Answer, “I am.” Vance shouted, “In Jesus’ name, show thy true self, Satan!” Suddenly Vance knew he was in the presence of pure evil. He was given Satan’s true name [satan simply means ‘adversary.’] The entity threatened Vance with death if he did not submit. He said, “You chose to follow Jesus during the War in Heaven, and helped to cause my defeat. Now you have come back to overthrow my power here on Earth.” (Why would the Devil confess to all this?)

Vance answered with what almost sounded like another voice, calm and strong. “I have chosen my path and it’s not with you.” Wow, he realized that he himself just said that. The beast was enraged. They lobbed balls of energy at each other. “I felt a strength and resolve come over me that I had never felt in real life. I created a glowing ball of white energy in my right hand and threw it at this being. It hit him squarely in the chest and tossed him across the room. He ricocheted off the wall and hit the floor. The energy had clearly stunned and hurt him, but he rose to his feet.”

Satan was winning. Mr. Perfect with compelling blue eyes was now a short, hairy beast. “They have allowed your training and powers to come to earth with you, Old One,” growled the hairy one, “But it is not enough. Now it is time for you to die!”

Red balls and white flew back and forth until Satan was about to deliver the fatal coup de gras. “Ask for me, my brother,” whispered a new voice. “I will help, but you must ask.” Vance used the last of his energy to scream, “In the name of Jesus, get me out of here, please!” Suddenly he awoke to see his mother comforting him.

This dream undoubtedly had components in it that were way beyond what Vance would know to do or say. It’s great science fiction, but it’s kind of trite and corny. Wowser, this impressionable teenage boy is being told he was maybe an archangel from the dawn of time, fighting at the side of the Son of God in some ancient cosmic battle. Do I believe that he had that dream? Perhaps he did. Do I believe that everything “satan” told him in the dream was true? Nope.

Flattery can be very subversive. Vance set himself up for this kind of event with that Silva Mind Control training. In Part 3 of this series, he was being prepped to follow the Ouija plan because he was convinced that he was some kind of special Jedi warrior with a hero’s destiny. He was idealistic enough to die for that noble cause. In the lives of the Gulf Breeze Six, the tale that they all proclaim is true is as whacky and paranormal as anything you will find in science fiction.

If the devil can’t convince a good person to do bad things, he will try to make those bad things look good. If people think “God” is commanding them, there is no limit to what humans will do in his name. That’s why the Bible warns us to “test the spirits and see if they are God.” 1 John 4:1-3,

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.

There are various possibilities as to the source of this dialogue. 1) Vance may have written it himself, or 2) it may have come from God to arm him with his best weapon against dark forces, or 3) it may have come from the Enemy to pump up Vance’s ego and prepare him to view himself in later years as a chosen, End Times warrior. Later, when entities claiming to represent heavenly forces speak through the Ouija, Vance can look back and think, yes, I was chosen for this moment even from my youth. Now it all makes sense.

Thrown into the mystic casserole are notions of the pre-existence of the soul, the age-old war in the heavens (a very biblical concept), and warrior spirits that are incarnate to join The Last Battle. If Vance really didn’t make up this dream script himself, it’s quite an ego booster. It seems a little odd that if Vance has incarnated for that battle while the Apostle Paul, the prophet Zechariah, the 4 Gospel writers, and Timothy, all of whom came through the Ouija board, are left incarnate so that they could all talk to a group of young, theologically untrained, spiritually naïve cryptographers through a Ouija Board. But Vance, the Old One, has come back to enjoin the battle on Earth.

Channeling Disaster Predictions

Almost every nationally known channeler or fortune teller begins their enterprise by making some exceedingly accurate predictions. Jean Dixon predicted JFK’s assassination. It did no good, of course, because no one listened, but she hit enough bulls’ eyes to garner national attention. In the end, as she became hyper-mystical, her predictions became less accurate. She predicted that a comet would hit the earth in 1985, which didn’t happen.

Edgar Cayce predicted that Japan would sink into the sea and Atlantis would arise, and the poles would shift. One thing that every abductee researcher notices is that aliens manipulate their contactees with predictions and scenes of horror. Ninety-four percent of all humans will be eaten. There will be a nuclear war by such and such a date. Earthquakes, floods, alien invasion, riots… you need us. Without us you will not survive.

The entities of the Board knew how to gain Vance’s attention and possibly that of government administrators. They predicted an earthquake in Iran in which over 300,000 would be killed. It happened. They predicted a terrorist bomb in New York (the first World Trade Building bombing?), the Gulf War, the break up of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, and the European Union, all of which happened. They warned of danger to a shuttle mission, which may have saved it from exploding.

These are the kinds of nuggets that the CIA eats for breakfast. Presidents thrive on it. The channeler of such tidbits becomes an overnight celebrity. The entities actually know the future and seemed willing to share it with us for our benefit. They were the good guys, the ones we could work with and count on.

What lies ahead? What lies!

It’s really hard not to get sucked into a drama like that. Do I think the Gulf Breeze Six were dumb to believe the entities of the Board? Not at all. The spirits knew everything about all of those young people. They knew their past, their future, what to say, which buttons to push. They supported their cause with signs and wonders. They were really good at what they did.

Some predictions were exaggerated. For instance, when they were told to go AWOL, they wanted to go to California. A spirit named Safire vetoed that because in 1996 there would be an earthquake in Los Angeles measuring 14.6 (if the scale went that high, which it doesn’t). Seattle? Nope. There would be earthquakes there and then Mt. Rainier would blow between ’93 and ‘95. East coast? Nope. Earthquakes there. New York would suffer a bad one, destroying a portion of the city (p. 113).

None of those events came to pass. In 1994 southern California had the North Ridge quake, which was registered as 6.7/6.9. Because the quake occurred at 4:30 a.m., only fifty-seven people died. Many more would have been killed had it happened later. It was a terrible event, with billions in damage, but it’s what California does.

Other predictions: THE US STOCK MARKET WOULD CRASH. IT WILL RISE TO 4000 BEFORE THE EVENT. MARTIAL LAW DECLARED IN ALL MAJOR CITIES LIKE NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, CHCAGO, PUTTSBURGH, ETC. GOVERNMENT CLOSES BORDERS WITH CANADA AND MEXICO. U.S. AIR SPACE RESTRICTED. 1 AIRLINER SHOT DOWN, 302 PEOPLE LOST. A MAN WILL DECLARE HIMSELF TO BE MESSIAH IN 1998. Etc.

The poles will shift, 50 scientists will go missing, special people will emerge around the world to teach truth by 2000. The seven thunders of the Bible will be revealed. The New World Order will be the new religion. Upheavals of the earth near Florida would reveal lost cities. Bible treasures would be found [like the ark of the covenant perhaps?]. A meteorite will hit the Pacific Ocean by 2005, causing significant damage and flooding (They didn’t mention Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans nor the 2004 9.1 off Sumatra.)

Anti-Christ on the Horizon

The most compelling prediction, besides that they had to leave Germany because a bloody war would soon break out between Europe and the U.S., was that the Antichrist would arise in Europe, start a new religion, and establish the New World Order. The Six were all chosen to be warriors in this End Times scenario.

A final letter was dictated from the heavenly messengers. Each one took turns adding something. Just a taste of what was said:

From Mark, “If you listen to this letter…you who claim to be of Christ our Lord…then you will harken unto these words that follow…then leave all and search for the elect and their followers as they are of Gods chosen leaders…” (Right. Lead the CIA on a snipe hunt.)

From Simon Peter, “This is but the last warning from us that teaches of Christ without bloodshed…the elect were chosen…but volunteered when the world was new…follow those that are humble in spirit but ferocious in Christs words…You of the world listen carefully…the time is now to wake up your spirits and heed the warning…I am the last to speak to you ever…now the elect take over the mission of the apostles…God speed.” (Vance and the Six are it. The very Last Warning. Dismiss to your Doom.)

From John, “And it was said in the end that a great shout would be heard around the land…then all would see the trembling of the great king of whore…then from the back cometh a great cry of the chosen of God and the mighty warriors led by them….from the earth cometh the elect to render the great king a murderous heart toward the one called Jesus…” etc. (Why is John lapsing into King James English? That’s how they talked in the 1600s AD.)

And so, goaded by pleas allegedly from on high, the intrepid group made their plans. With the help and encouragement of sweet Mary and the boys from the Bible, they headed off to Atlanta and the rest of their lives.

I can’t hardly blame them, considering who they were and what they knew. They were trying to do the right thing. They just fell into a really slick, well-played demonic scam. U.S. government officials, be warned. Nothing useful will ever come through a Ouija Board, a séance, or any paranormal practice. You politicians, when you appropriate the so-called revelations of people listening to spirits, you put both the nation and your own soul at risk.

What really would have helped the Twin Towers and the city of New Orleans in 2005 is if the people in power had gotten off their ignorant, self-interested behinds and listened to the lower level experts who were predicting those disasters based on solid information. Neither disaster had to happen. The Gulf Breeze Six weren’t stupid. Stupid is seeing what happened to them and dismissing it as unimportant.

Check out my website www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Vance A. Davis, with Brian Blashaw, Unbroken Promises: A True Story of Courage and Belief, (Mesa, Arizona: White Mesa Publishers, 1995).
Email exchanges with Don Ware
http://www.philipcoppens.com/gulfbreeze6.html
http://www.umf.net/umf/data/text/MANU.TXT (Update, site not found)
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=18268 ; http://xdell.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html (site not found)

(The above is a 12-part interview on Youtube in which Art Bell interviews Vance Davis and Richard Hoagland on Sept. 2, 1998.)
https://saucerlife.com/2022/09/30/the-gulf-breeze-six-part-one/ Aaron Gulyar, The Saucer Life podcast.

The Ouija board

One day in the summer of 1990, a group of young cryptologists working at a listening post for the National Security Agency in Augsburg, Germany were arguing about religion and psychic phenomena, so one of them bought a Ouija board and convinced his friends to play with it. Mind you, at this time, they were all happy with their jobs and had no beef with the U.S. government. One of them, Vance Davis, had read a book on Silva Mind Control when he was a teenager and had become adept at meditation. He was able to bring forth an alien-looking guide named Kia who allegedly was the commander of 5 ships belonging to aliens called the Alliance. She had sufficient power to heal a congenital problem with Vance’s feet. He acquired additional psychic powers at that time, which he felt caused the military to advance him to the position under the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade. He had also had a very compelling dream as a young man that convinced him that he had some kind of special destiny. You can read about it in Part 4.

According to the Six, a female entity named Safire, who claimed to be a woman who had lived in Georgia, came through with an agenda. She was a ghost, but was working with the “good guys,” the Alliance, who have been fighting with The Others for centuries. The Others are the aliens who abduct humans, who are deceptive and manipulative (Davis, 56). The six were told that aliens have been working with the U.S. government, but they also worked with the Sumerians, the Pharaohs of Egypt, and Hitler.

For me, the importance of this story is the connection between ghosts (Safire), aliens (Kia), and paranormal spirits. Maybe they’re all the same thing. Understanding the connections is the emphasis of my personal research. The five men and one woman who grew fascinated with the message of the Ouija were just young, talented truth seekers. They always prayed before they used the board, thinking that they could shield themselves from deception. But that’s like driving 90 mph on a windy two-lane highway and thinking prayer will keep you safe.

If Sgt. Annette Eccleston had any doubts about the board, they were swept away by the next character to come through, claiming to be Mary. At first, she addressed Annette as Martha, calling her sister. That would be Mary the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. When asked who was Lord, Mary answered “Father God” rather than Jesus. That was a tell that they should have caught, but these six were trusting and naïve. A page later in Davis’s book, Mary was messaging as if she were the Blessed Virgin. (Davis, 71) The two Marys were not the same person! (Demons can say Jesus is Lord if they have to, but they won’t claim that “Jesus is MY Lord.”)

Power to predict, power to deceive

The entity Timothy (from the biblical book) told them the Tribulation was near and they had been chosen to begin a spiritual awakening that would prepare mankind. Who could resist such an important task? Davis wrote, “Some of this was coinciding with dreams and visions that I had experienced since I was young; visions of the End Times, of civilization turned upside down, visions of suffering and fear...and visions of courage and hope. (Davis, 70) The pattern in this series is clear...spirits are demons who can impersonate Bible characters. They have power to heal or hurt, and can accurately predict the future. The Six were astonished and mesmerized by several accurate predictions.

Timothy told them that the U.S. government was going to fall in the next 10 years and would be replaced by the New World Order, something the six had never heard of but which was a favored meme of TV evangelist Pat Robertson, who wrote a book on it. If that prophecy were true, that would put the NWO takeover smack in the middle of President Clinton’s Democrat administration, confirming another pattern, that spirits love Republicans and hate liberals. The fact that this and other major disastrous predictions did not take place may have something to do with Davis fading from public view after a 1992 and 1998 interview with radio personality Art Bell.

More dire prophecies kept the six enthralled...New York City destroyed by a small nuke, martial law declared, riots in the streets, crashed economy, suspension of civil liberties, wars in Europe and the Middle East, one world currency, etc. “The stage will be set for the grand entrance of the Antichrist.” (Davis, 87) Unlike Ruth Montgomery’s Antichrist, the GB6 one will come from Europe, was young and already moving in circles of power. In 1998, he would announce that he is the Messiah. He would be hailed as the Peacemaker by all, including the Pope. (Didn’t happen.)

One of the alarming predictions that helped the Six decide to go AWOL was that the Army would begin marking soldiers in 1995, so the spirits wanted them all out of Germany by then. Davis actually thought that there was a powerful anti-democratic cabal in the military that needed to be exposed. Perhaps this is how crazy conspiracy theories get started.

The 6 took copious notes on these messages, totaling over 1500 pages. “Safire” told them to abandon their post and go hide out in the U.S. She assured them that all would be well in spite of the fact that desertion of a post in a time of war could result in a very long prison sentence.

They asked if California would be a good place to settle, but Safire told them there would be an earthquake in 1996 that would be 14.6 (higher than the Richter scale). The Northridge earthquake in 1994 was rated 6.7. Safire was wrong. They were told they couldn’t go to Seattle because there would be a major earthquake there that would signal the imminent eruption of Mt. Rainier. The major cities would all be under martial law after 1996. Oops, wrong again. Earthquakes on the east coast and in NYC. Weather changes, floods, disasters, and a great Shift...no, not the Earth tipping on its side, but the magnetic poles were going to shift.

Captured!

The group managed to land in Chattanooga, Tennessee in July, 1990. The exact date is disputable, but on July 9, one of them was stopped for a broken headlight. A check of Pfc. Michael Hueckstaedt’s I.D. indicated that he was wanted for desertion. The authorities arrested him and quickly found 4 of the 6 at the home of Anna Foster. (Heuckstaedt swears that he did not tell them where to find them.) It turned out that Spc. Kenneth Beason had known her when he was in training at Curtiss Station in Pensacola, and he was in love with her. She was a divorcee with a daughter who happened to be best friends with Laura, daughter of Ed and Frances Walters (another Gulf Breeze UFO story that you can read about here).

Anna had a roommate named Diana. When Vance Davis met her, he recognized her from a vision of his soul mate that he had had years before. They soon fell in love. The 6 had been told to leave town before Friday, pick up supplies in Texas, head for the mountain states to continue their spiritual advancement, and prepare for what was to come. Love caused them to linger.

Anna and teenage daughter “Kathy” were put in handcuffs along with the men, but the local police talked the FBI into removing the handcuffs and letting them go. “Kathy” spent the night with the Walters.

Annette Eccleston was rounded up at her sister’s house, and all were spirited off to Ft. Benning. There they were kept in old, dusty cages in solitary confinement. They could not call anyone. They all felt that they were going to disappear and not be heard from again. They turned their copious notes over to the authorities and pleaded for the predictions to be given to the president. One important prediction was that in 1998 a false messiah would arise. The year was 3 times his number, 666. Another prediction was that Israel should not enter into the Gulf War or there would be terrible consequences. Israel did refrain from getting involved.

Meanwhile speculation created a media circus. There were tales that they came to murder the Antichrist, that they wanted to talk to Ed Walters, that they belonged to a cult called The End of the World, that they just wanted to see their families because they were tired of the military, that they came home because of messages from a Ouija Board. Some of it was true, some false, but what was actually true sounded so crazy that it was impossible to separate the rumors from facts. Davis assured Art Bell in 1998 that there was no End of the World cult, and they did not come to assassinate the Antichrist.

On July 23, 1990, a letter arrived at various media stations from an anonymous source claiming that if the 6 were not released that some extremely sensitive information would be released to the public. “Free the Gulf Breeze Six. We have the missing files, the box of 500+ UFO photos and the plans you want back.” My own private speculation about that material is that it had something to do with the planning for the beginning of the Gulf War and the fact that “Safire” confirmed that the U.S. was “in cahoots” with the aliens.

Davis claimed that the tide turned for them due to family pressure and the fact that a CNN camera man climbed a security fence at Ft. Benning, Georgia and took pictures of them. Also, a Colonel in charge of The Army Times was told to not publish anything about the 6, but he did anyway. So on Aug. 7, the story was outed, and so was the blackmail letter.

Mysterious release

In the end, Senator Dole, George Bush, Sr., and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all agreed that the 6 should be released with a general discharge (Aaron Gulyar podcast). Some powerful personalities objected enough that the 6 were fully demoted and had pay deducted. Military and intelligence insiders were stunned that deserters with high clearances would be released like that. Their release is one of the ongoing mysteries associated with the story of the Gulf Breeze Six, but there was no evidence that any of them intended to pass classified information to inappropriate people.

Beason eventually married Anna Foster. Frances Walters married Anna’s ex-husband. By the time Davis published his book in 1995, he was married to Diane and had several kids, so his life wasn’t entirely ruined. For Anna Foster Beeson, the affair was bitter sweet. “They destroyed my reputation,” she wrote, “my daughter’s mental state, and my trust in the American system of freedom and fair play.” The plan of the Ouija entities for them all to go hide in the mountains didn’t work out. They mostly went their separate ways and faded into obscurity.

Why were demon spirits allowed to derail these vibrant young lives? In the case of Vance Davis, his Silva Mind Control meditations opened the door to the paranormal. Yes, it’s exotic, subversive, almost irresistible, seemingly so useful, but in the end it ruins what was already good in a person’s life. As for the other young adults, there is a lesson here about Ouija boards. Nothing good can come through them. They can quote Scripture, mimic Bible characters, appear as aliens or angels of light. 1 John 4:1-3:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Biblegateway.com ESV

As with Jeane Dixon and her crystal ball, the Ouija entities made some startling hits with their predictions, which caused the Six to trust them, but as with all spirit communications, there were major misses as well.

A website called The Unbelievable Podcast has a list of Vance Davis’s predictions. Many of them are just wrong. There are plenty of real crises to worry about without stressing about things that won’t happen. How could Davis not catch the twin towers falling in September 11, 2001? You can see the list of predictions here.

This story is also published on Medium at https://medium.com/p/4f54cffa7fcb and at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2023/04/predicting-antichrist-3-gulf-breeze-six.html.

Check out my website at www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, NY, Bantam Books, 1965, 6th printing, 1966.
— — — — -, Here and Hereafter, NY, Fawcett Crest, 1969, 6th printing, 1987.
— — — — -, A World Beyond, Greenwich, Conn., 1971.
— — — — -, The World Before, NY, Fawcett Crest, 1976.
— — — — -, Strangers Among Us, NY, Fawcett Crest, 1982, 2nd printing, 1983.
— — — — -, The World to Come, NY, Three Rivers Press, 1999.
Bart Barnes, “Ruth S. Montgomery Dies,” Washington Post, June 19, 2001. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2001/06/19/ruth-s-montgomery-dies/acc648f3-9bcb-44fb-82ae-01d9c426b592/

A genuinely illustrious journalistic career

Ruth Montgomery was an ambitious, well-connected journalist in Washington, D.C. before she began writing books. One of her early titles, Hail to the Chiefs: My Life and Times with Six Presidents, 1970, suggests much about her career. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, she worked with psychic Jeane Dixon, sharing Jeane’s predictions in Ruth’s syndicated columns (see Part 1 of this series). Jeane’s horoscopes and election predictions were undoubtedly a great windfall to Ruth, whose columns were read by millions, and Ruth’s exposure enhanced Jeane’s reputation. Who isn’t curious about the near future or the next big earthquake? Ruth’s Washington Post obituary makes for compelling reading, but there isn’t space or time in this post to list all of her accomplishments and books.

Among several books that Ruth wrote in the 1960’s was A Gift of Prophecy, about Jeane Dixon and her famous prognostications. In that book, Ruth claimed that she herself had no prophetic capabilities. A meeting with psychic Arthur Ford changed all that. She became fascinated with the world of the paranormal, New Age religion, psychic phenomena, and contact with spirits. She produced a series of books by automatic writing, allegedly dictated by a Guide named Lily and Arthur Ford after his death. There were cameo appearances of spirits called the Group or just the Guides. She was certain that her husband Bob began to drop in after his death in 1993.

Ruth never claimed to have seen any of these entities, but every morning she was at her typewriter with fingers poised to receive messages from beyond.

In Part 1, I tried to show that Jeane Dixon wowed the world, her friends, the military, and a politician or two with predictions of deaths, assassinations, fires, earthquakes, health issues, and future marriages and divorces, but her practice of mixing divination with what she thought was Christian prophecy ran her gift off the road and into the swamp. Her misses were significant and ruined the credibility of her gift. There is a difference between biblical prophecy and divination. In both testaments of the Bible, divination was the work of demons and was forbidden to God’s people. Divination is exciting and exotic until it isn’t, because demons aren’t our friends, and it never ends well. Tragically, Ruth fell into the same trap. Her books are so far afield from accuracy or from any semblance of science that today they are fairly irrelevant.

My goal in this series

For this blog post, I read six of Ruth’s post-Dixon books, all of which were about New Age Religion and the catastrophic Shift of the Earth’s axis by the end of the twentieth century.

My primary goal in this series is a focus on four famous people, Jeane and Ruth, Vance Davis, and an apparition of Mary in Bayside, NY. Four unfortunate people got snared in a web of hearing from deceptive religious spirits about the end times and horrendous disasters that would shortly manifest, including the rise of the biblical Antichrist. The topic of the Antichrist is spirit clickbait, irresistible to seekers of future knowledge, but in the end they get so silly that the alleged prophet is utterly discredited, and the people who supported and promoted them are embarrassed. We have a wonderful opportunity to examine these four prognosticators from decades ago whose predictions are way overdue.

Besides warning people about the dangers of crystal balls, Ouija boards, and automatic writing, I want to dissuade government officials, politicians, and military officers from seeking information from sources that have proven to be manipulative and unreliable. Our national security is at stake here. These contacts begin well, but deteriorate into dangerous misinformation and misdirection.

Another danger, which I’ve written extensively about, is prophecies from so-called Christian prophets who are listening to the same demons but who don’t use crystal balls or seances. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Dubya, and Trump all hearkened to psychics and pseudo prophets. Thus far, it hasn’t been disastrous, but it hasn’t been helpful either. The Christian prophets are actually far more dangerous than the New Age psychics. We should question a Holy Spirit that sounds like a script from Fox News. Jesus is always a Republican, Democrats are “the enemy,” heaven’s angels danced in the street when Trump was elected, and God’s mighty justice is always going to expose all the corruption on the Left. The Right will bring God, Christmas, perfect justice, prayer, puppies, and noble leaders to the Republican administration. (Update: Fox News, whose founding president, Roger Ailes, was so vile that Fox eventually forced him to resign, leans so far Right that that there is a revolving door between Fox and the Trump White House staff.)

If a bunch of US generals put the same confidence in those prophets that Nixon put in Jeane Dixon, it could seriously imperil U.S. security.

As I began to read Ruth’s later books, I was amazed that there was no word of Jeane Dixon. The obituary referenced above informed me that Ruth noted a lot of errors in Jeane’s predictions, some of which were recorded in A Gift of Prophecy. You can read some of them in Part 1. Ruth argued with the publisher, wanting them to delete the blunders, but they refused. It caused a total break between Ruth and Jeane, even after 9 years of collaboration.

The Newsweek article cited above reported that Jeane’s predictions got so inaccurate that Nancy Reagan thought she had lost her powers and hired a different astrologer.

A World Beyond, 1971

This book was written by automatic writing from Jan 4 — May 7, 1971, allegedly dictated by deceased psychic, Arthur Ford, spirit guide, Lily, and “the Group.” There is no mention of A Gift of Prophecy or Jeane Dixon. The spirits in this book love Richard Nixon and Republican values but don’t mention his resignation or the crudeness and corruption of his administration. Neither did Dixon.

P. 13 — Arthur tells Jeane that Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within because there is no God on a throne. The “stuffy preaching” is wrong. (You have to wonder if “Arthur” is in a place where there is no throne because it’s elsewhere, at a higher level.)
17 — Ruth’s religious aunt Mabel was disappointed on the other side to not find angels as she expected. (In a later book, the spirits will acknowledge angels and archangels and devils.)
28 — You don’t see God, you feel Him, (which is unlike many modern Near Death Experiences in which people claim to have seen Jesus, angels, the gates of a heavenly city, or a Being of Light.)
31 — Salvation is striving and the hope that one can develop enough to be worthy of joining with God. (Compare that to Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”)
40 — Hell is when the ghost finds himself in the company of other greedy souls like himself/herself. Not a happy afterlife.
41 — Karma is about us redeeming ourselves. Salvation is hard work and can take hundreds of years. (There’s never a clear picture of a heaven.)
64 — There’s no sign of a devil, just lower vibrations, (contradicted in a later book.)
68 — Dinos vanished because they began to intrude onto the habitat reserved for humans and other animals. (It’s odd that Ruth, the intrepid reporter, did not vet the science in this claim by the Guides. Dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time, but the spirits know that most of Ruth’s followers won’t know or believe that.)
76 — Babies decide to die, including miscarriages. (Imagine the emotional torture that communication would cause in an expectant mother, or one who had just lost a living infant. Your baby didn’t want you, and in the spirit world, it was mature enough to make that choice.)
74, 84 — There’s no life review, (in contradiction to many NDEs).
103 — Souls on a higher plane are unavailable.
113 — Learn your mantram, learn to meditate, breathe, aum. (This activity opens portals to the entire spirit world. I would rather study the Bible and learn to pray. God hears every prayer, even if you’re not sure he’s there, and Christ offers us “peace that passes understanding.”)
122 — Suffering in life may result from sin in another life. (It’s hard to catch up with it all.)
142 — Finally mention of the New Testament concept of GRACE! “Arthur” describes it correctly, but the concept isn’t revisited again in any of the books because the people where he is didn’t take advantage of grace while on earth.
154 — Atlantis will rise within the next decade, which would be the 1980s. Both Art and Ruth were Atlanteans. In a previous incarnation, Ford was also the father of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Ruth, and Montgomery was Ruth. Ford as father of the four died before Jesus preached. (Flattery and ego puffing will get you loyal followers. Yes, demons do that.)
168 — Jordan will be swallowed up by Syria and Israel and will cease to exist as an independent country. (Update 2026: Sorry, Ruth, Satan’s dream has always been that Israel would cease to exist, but it is still there and so is Jordan.)
Before 2000 the axis of the earth will shift, changing weather. (We can see that that didn’t happen, either, since it’s 2023. However, glaciers are melting fast due to global warming.)
There will be great peace shortly after 2000. (Oops, wrong again.)
172 — Jesus didn’t cast demons out of anyone because there aren’t any. What he did was to restore the conscience over the subconscious. (This is a nice New Age concept, but the NT describes clearly that Jesus delivered people from demons, so denying those accounts is exactly what the devil would say to subvert the Bible’s veracity.)

The World Before, 1976

176 — The early chapters are too silly to even repeat. For example, Moses was a Lemurian bringing the Law of One to Israel. Joseph was a Lemurian, too. Job was an Atlantean. (Later chapters will be all about who was an Atlantean and who a Lemurian.)
179 — This book tells us all about angels and archangels, but they still have no wings because everyone over there travels by thought.
181 — Archangel Michael “one of the reigning princes under the Creator. He was also a brother of Christ. Michael was ‘the tone bearer as Lucifer was the light bearer.’”
183 — Atlantis sank about 10,000 BC. Chap 13 is all about planetary influences on the deceased and is too silly to repeat. (Visits to other planets would be very much like finding yourself in hell.)
Chap 14 — Predictions. Many are too vague to assess.
254 — The Guides missed why Nixon would not finish his term. There was no word about corruption or the Pentagon Papers scandal. They claimed it would be a health reason. (Were the spirits hoping that the real reason wouldn’t be evident to Ruth’s readers and they could slip past it without a lot of bad publicity for the GOP? Nixon resigned in disgrace.)
257 — Atlantis will arise near Bimini, and Lemuria will arise in the ocean. (Ruth and psychic Edgar Cayce were apparently hearing from the same spirits.)
260 — There will be a big war in the 1980s.
261 — Thinking people are more conservative than liberal. The spirits warn the US to send a man to the White House who will “bounce the loafers and chiselers off the welfare rolls.” (A man like Reagan who talked about the welfare queen? Did Reagan get some of his talking points from Ruth’s books? Did these books frighten people into voting for Republicans?)
264 — The UN will move away from NY. (Didn’t happen.)
265 — An Ethiopian (Abyssinian) man is dangerous. He’s not the Antichrist here but said he could destabilize Africa.
269 — California will split at the San Andreas fault, “permitting the outer section to go into the sea.” Before that, Vesuvius will erupt around the close of the century. (Vesuvius last erupted in 1944.) Manhattan, Hawaii, and the east coast up to Newfoundland will vanish. So will Japan and some Pacific islands. (Demons love to broadcast apocalyptic disasters because they gain energy through our fear. They may also get a good laugh out of human credulity. Why didn’t Ruth consult a geologist?)
272 — The Antichrist will be born soon, post 1976, in the US. He’ll have dark hair and blue eyes. His influence will begin to be felt around 1995 or 1996 shortly before the Shift. He would be very young then, and Ruth will later call the Guides out on the math.
275 — There’s no real heaven, hell, or purgatory. We create those by our thinking and living. (Do we create karma? Or maybe there is no karma. It’s confusing.)

Strangers Among Us, 1979, 2nd printing ‘83

A Walk-in is claimed to be an old soul who inhabits a body that is willingly given over by a person who either cannot maintain life in it or just wants to give it up and return to the immaterial world. The inhabiting soul skips childhood and infancy.
36 — Ruth has friends who claim to be Walk-ins. They tell Ruth that in the New Age “this warring planet will become unified, with one government, one language, and one currency.” (She is describing the New World Order, the bane of conservative conspiracies, as if it’s a good thing. Who thinks that the NWO would be benevolent rather than a ghastly global tyranny?)
40 — Ruth gets a little doubtful, but the Guides assured her they only tell the truth.
42 — Ouija boards and table tipping, talking to the dead, are fine if used for serious spiritual growth and not as a game. (Fact: nothing good will come from any of those activities. It’s like saying that smoking is fine if you keep it down to a pack a day.)
64, 65 — When the Shift happens, the Earth will tip over and the oceans will slide over the land. So many souls will arrive, a deluge of souls, that will be difficult to assimilate.
68 — The 1960s and 70s were so awful because hordes of Atlanteans reincarnated and are causing trouble.
72 — “In the 1980s will come wars of devastating ferocity.” (They again miss the very real rise of Al Qaida.)
75 — The Shift will occur by the end of the century. The revolutions of the Earth will slow, the Earth will shudder, then it will flip. (The end of life as we know it. Great clickbait.)
191 — Nuclear WW III will be set off around 1986 in Ethiopia. It will spread like wildfire thru Africa, eventually engulfing most of the nations of the Earth in the flames of war.” (In a later book, the Guides explain this error away.)
196 — At the time of preparing the 1976 manuscript, the Guides predicted that President Carter would be followed by another Democrat president who would raise taxes to where the middle class would literally take up arms. When Carter was succeeded by Reagan, the Guides explained that they missed Reagan’s win because they looked too far ahead to the Democrat president who would ruin the economy with welfare spending. They applaud that Reagan cut back big government and cut taxes. These prophecies may have influenced many people to vote for the Republican.)
201 — Ethiopia will kick off the (nuclear) war about 1986.
203 — There would be food riots in cities due to the Shift.
204 — “A storm of unparalleled violence will sweep the Western Hemisphere, ripping out sections of the earth itself, and altering the surface areas of the western United States. Some of California will go into the sea, as we have previously foretold, and damage will be unprecedented in the Western world, for it will not be confined solely to the American West.”
219 — The Antichrist. Ruth is writing in the early ’80s here due to many reprints of her book, so she challenged the Guides as to why the info about the Antichrist wasn’t correct. He was not born in the Middle East. The Guides blame Ruth for being a bad receiver. She should have caught the math error and corrected the 1976 MS before it went to publication. Ruth bought their explanation! So, the Antichrist was actually born in the eastern seaboard state of (she wouldn’t say) and lived in a suburb of Washington DC in Maryland. He will be popular, garrulous, good looking, ambitious.
221 — By the turn of the century, he will be ready to “assume world management.”
222 — He will have sway for the first two decades of the twenty first century. He will pretend to be pious. “He’ll make trouble for all who speak out against him.” “Realizing how frightened people will be of anything that seems like God’s anger at man, he will seize the cloak of divinity, claiming that he is the anointed son returned to rescue mankind from evil.” (Interesting that she has accurately described Donald Trump.)
247 — After the death of the Antichrist, there will be a New Age, with one world government and one world currency.
251 — Two years after the death of the Antichrist, the child will be born that will receive the Christ spirit. He’ll be a Walk-in, like in the first incarnation.
253 — The new baby Jesus will not the same Jesus soul as before. That tidbit came as confirmation from her Walk-in friend Michael. After the Antichrist, the Shift, and the birth of the Christ child, the millennium will be fine, peaceful, with people caring and looking out for one another. Arms will be almost non-existent. (The first claims are blasphemy, because they deny the divinity of Jesus. The last prediction is laughably inaccurate. There are more arms in America today than people. Mass shootings happen on a regular basis. But then, Trump hasn’t died yet.)

The World to Come, 1999

Bob died 1993 after 52 years of marriage. Ruth died 2 years after publication of The World to Come, in June, 2001, so there was scant time to retract or retool the nonsense in this book.

Her blind Guides still made no mention of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaida, the World Trade Center bombing, the twin towers catastrophe of September, 2001 to come, or the Iraq War. The whole book was about the Shift, when the earth tips on its side because of too much ice piling up at the poles. A Walk-in president will move populations around to save some, but there will be chaos afterwards as those who don’t die would vie for food and resources. Then will come the Antichrist, the birthing of the baby Christ, the happy millennium to come where there is peace on earth. The Lemurians were already gathering on earth to help through the process and teach mankind spirituality.
19 — The Shift is going to be delayed. Rather than around 2000, it was to be 2010 or 2015. (That timeframe would make Obama the enlightened Walk-in and Trump the Antichrist.)
20 — The Apostles have reincarnated. (I guess they’re coming back to be here for baby Christ. However, the Bible promises that He would come again as He left, in the air with thousands of angles: Acts 1:9–11; Matt 16:27; 24:31; 25:31; 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17)
34 — Her late husband Bob tells her they need to be ready for “an avalanche of souls” pouring into the afterlife when the Shift happens. (Her books have a lot of repetition.)
43 — Her guides reiterate that a way to prepare is to get involved in what we call New Age religion with eastern practices, like communion with the dead. (As usual, no warning here about opening dangerous portals.) She did not want to write another scary book about the Shift. She had already written about it and her readers were terrified.
46, 47 — The Walk-in is a completely different soul with a different personality .(So a spouse is no longer married to whomever they originally exchanged vows with. Amazing how many famous people were Walk-ins.)
56 — The Walk-in has already come to prominence. They denied that it was Ross Perot.
58 — “As the Shift occurs the vibrations will be speeded up to a much higher frequency. The axis will remain steadfast, but the land and water masses will slip, not sideways, but in a rotating movement that will make the sun appear to stand still to those on Earth as the Shifting occurs.”
64–66 — First they give a very biblical explanation of Satan and the angels, particularly the fallen angels, which is a contradiction to what has been written before in A World Beyond (p 17), where there are no angels or devils. (If angels and devils do exist, why not a God on a throne?) Then the Guides affirm that the Christ spirit fell on Jesus at his baptism, but deny his divinity. He was just a highly developed soul who gained favor in past lives. (This is blasphemy. I’m not sure how they would explain his death on the cross.)
67, 68 — Mankind became more spiritual, so the Creator decided that the damage in the Shift would not be so bad. Parts of California will survive, and New York City will survive, western Europe will be “much less battered.” They tell Ruth that her books are helping to save the world.
The horrible war in the late 80s? Oh, sorry that was an error. We mistook all the souls that would die from AIDS.
70, 71 — No more AIDS. The Shift will cleanse the Earth of today’s strife and bias. (Funny they didn’t see the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in 2016–2023. But the Guides would probably attribute that to the rise of the Antichrist.)
74 — Some of the higher areas of Japan will survive, but Central America will suffer due to seas on both sides.
76 — Florida will be small islands, California will lose some of its land, Lemuria will arise, and so will Atlantis.
80 — Jesus did not establish a religion. The Romans did that. (Nope. When Jesus broke the bread with his disciples and condemned many of the rituals of the Mosaic Law, he established a new religion with a new emphasis, and He commanded His disciples to go out two by two and spread the message).
91 — The advanced “space beings” are aware of the Shift. It’s due to ice build-up at the poles and causing an imbalance.
106 — The Antichrist review, in 1993 he was graduated from college for some time. Has his eye on the presidency. By ‘94 he was in a minor government position. He’s either 35 or close to it at the time of writing.
There are multiple chapters of who was a Bible character in a past life. Too silly to repeat.
150 — After the death of the Antichrist, the Christ will be born in a human body. Lemurians will return to teach us how to be spiritual.
153 — Earth’s golden era.

The ultimate lesson in this book is, spirits are not our friends and listening to them will send you with the lemmings over the cliff. New Age and Gnosticism begin with the Bible, then twist away from it, adding this, omitting that, with the result of discrediting the actual revelation of God. Throwing in predictions of the Antichrist got a lot of attention. In the 70s to the 90s it got to be quite a fad, so the topic will not end with this post.

This post can also be found at my blog: Predicting the Antichrist 2, Ruth Montgomery (janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com) and at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/predicting-the-antichrist-part-ii-ruth-montgomery-06e6f52faedb.

Check out my website, www.janetksmithpersonal.com, where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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In the post-midnight hours of Sunday, Jan 25, 2026, my friend Ted Rice had another paranormal encounter. Ted is the psychic and abductee about whom the book Masquerade of Angels was written. It’s out of print, and hugely expensive on amazon, but you can still buy an autographed copy from Ted. See information below. He spent decades in New Age practices, even founding a church with a friend in Atlanta, but later in life his experiences led to him revisiting his southern Christian roots. Dr. Karla Turner wrote the book about his mystic journey and UFO researcher Barbara Bertholic became a good friend and mentor.

Ted wanted to share his experience with a couple of friends because he felt it was a deliberate lesson to be passed on. We have a small chat group on Messenger, so later on Sunday he contacted “Fringe” of @fringedotcom on X and me on Messenger to see if we could set up a group phone call. Fringe (she doesn’t like her real name out there) set the call up. Syncing our schedules was a challenge, but Ted was insistent that we talk soon before some of the details slipped away. He is 83 at this point, not in the best health. Using AI, Fringe worked with Ted to create the photo above. Her account of our discussion can be seen here.

Sometime after midnight, Ted awoke to see the wall of his bedroom open up. It had a shimmery quality, like heat rising off hot pavement. Five “shadow people” came through, maybe 6’ or 7’ tall, all looking alike, all moving in unified motion together. He couldn’t tell if they had any gender. They were slender, like aliens—skinny arms, legs, and torso. They all wore the same uniform; it was a dark metal gray, all one piece from head to toe. It had shiny scales that glittered like sequins. They had eyes, but also triangular masks, gray, but lighter than the uniform, with rounded corners on their faces. In later discussions, there was some confusion as to what the masks covered.

Two remained by the door, one came partially forward, and two approached Ted in bed. They telepathically informed him that they came in response to his request for more information. Ted could not recall making such a request. Apparently, what they wanted to show him was some aspect of their invisibility technology. They moved in unison as if they were one entity refracted through a prism. When they turned this way and that, their appearance changed. From one view, they were almost transparent. Turn more, and they vanished. Another view made them seem solid. The whole encounter lasted 3 or 4 minutes.

Ted was not abducted, probed, or hurt in this encounter, which is actually unusual. When it was over, he went back to sleep, also not according to pattern. Another anomaly is he feels he recalls the whole encounter. Too often, he awakens in the morning with bruises and anger, but has no recollection why. Such encounters have diminished in the past couple of years as his faith in Jesus Christ has become stronger.

Our military probably has invisibility technology. The Chinese certainly do. You can read about it here.

Ted’s encounters caught my attention several years ago because they demonstrate the connection between the paranormal phenomena and so-called alien activity. I’ve been studying that for years from a theological standpoint. I can now add technology, some of which we mortals are close to mimicking.

I have questions

First of all, how many were there? The fact that they moved in unison is intriguing. Were there really 5 or just 1 telescoped by technology? I’ve no doubt that Hollywood could create the same effect, but my question is simply rhetorical because we just don’t know.

Did these tall entities want to brag and tease us mere hoomans about their cool abilities, or did the NHIs (non-human intelligences) feel it was time to motivate us to achieve a new way to torture each other? If motivate, from where would the permission structure originate? Did a panel of spirits send these 5 or do entities have whistleblowers like humans?

Who are these spirits, where do they come from and what do they want? Ted believes they are demons and that the whole benevolent space brother scenario is just deceptive theater. These entities can turn on a dime and be brutally malevolent.

Why did they pick Ted Rice for this display? Why not Jeremy Corbell or Luis Elizondo or Jacques Vallee? The answer to that question may have to do with Fringe and her many thousands of followers as well as her connection with other researchers. For instance, one of her UAP/abduction research colleagues, X/Twitter poster @TomMontalk, responded to Fringe’s X post by saying that around the time Ted had his experience, he was experiencing contact and was asking about invisibility technology. Coincidence?

Ted got the last word in our discussions:

I don’t know what I am. My mission, which I have felt strongly about, has been to expose those hidden under the misconception of alien space brothers. People have and still are into the ideology of a superior race coming to save and make our planet and its inhabitants better. I think God wants us to follow his instruction as to how we should live to accomplish this rather than some foreign element bringing confusion and lies. I have to imagine what our world would be like if all humans, especially our world leaders, lived by the Ten Commandments.

Jesus has forgiven us our mistakes and sins and has left us a method of living that will work for humanity to have a peace-loving planet. We don’t need outside interference to have this.

I will continue to do my best to expose this hypocrisy.

Amen, Ted. Jesus said He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No hall of mirrors, conflicting magic, or mystical rabbit holes.

But wait, there’s more!

Yesterday, Saturday January 31, Ted came through with Part 2. I quote,

Possums, during my nap this afternoon I received an interesting dream. The subject of this dream you all may have thought of before. I actually hadn’t thought of it in the way I saw it in this dream.

Anyway here is what I saw: I saw a middle-aged Caucasian woman with dark hair in a bun. She wore a dress that represented the late eighteen hundreds. It was barely above the floor as she moved about. She sat down at a table with what appeared to be 3 well-gentlemen. She bowed her head and closed her eyes as if in a deep state of some sort. Shortly after she began this mental strain, the teacup in front of her slowly. without any human hands touching it, lifted into the air and settled across the room on another table. Then it vanished right before their eyes. The woman remained in her trance-like state. Only the gentlemen witnessed this. Immediately, as if being replayed, I viewed the event differently. A shadowy figure practically impossible to detect for me, lifted the teacup and slowly carried it across the room placing it on the same table. As the figure moved with the teacup, it became more visible for a brief moment. It had a human-like shape but was sort of dark. Once placing the cup on the other table. it covered it with a tiny cloth causing the cup to appear that it vanished. It hadn’t vanished but it couldn’t be seen under this cloth. It was invisible.

Possums, this was definitely in a dream state. I don’t recall being anywhere but in my bed asleep. I don’t recall any entities being in the room with me. It tells me how Uri Gellar could bend spoons, Mrs Blavstsky could levitate objects and how UFOs can vanish right before our eyes. It’s all technology.

If you are interested in a copy of Masquerade of Angels, they cost used $75 or more now on amazon because the book is a classic and copies are running out. Or, you can contact Ted, who will sell you a new autographed copy for $75, which covers tax and shipping. Email: teddywayne789@yahoo.com; Paypal: TedRice@tedrice1; Venmo: Ted Rice@Ted-Rice-11.

Check out my website www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.

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Sources

Ruth Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon, (New York: Bantam Books, 1966).
Rene Noorbergen, My Life and Prophecies: Her Own Story as Told to Rene Noorbergen (New York: William Morrow, 1969).

Bible quotation from www.biblehub.com, Berean Standard Bible.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050324045253/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7276868/site/newsweek/page/3/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “Nixon and Dixon,”Newsweek National News, March 23, 2005.

Bio info

She was a super psychic, but not a prophetess. The famed prognosticator Lydia Emma Pinckert, aka Jeane Dixon, was born on January 5, 1904 and died at the age of 93 (or 79, depending on your source), on January 25, 1997.

She was a psychic from her childhood. A gypsy with a horse-drawn covered wagon read her palm and was excited to see a star of David and a half-moon. She gave Jeane a crystal ball. Jeane was a devout Catholic, very intelligent, and by the printing of the second book about her, she was knowledgeable of Old and New Testament scripture as well as Catholic dogma. As a young adult, she was an attractive young actress. Her wealthy future husband, James (Jimmy) Dixon, was smitten with her almost at first sight. Together they hobnobbed with affluent elites in the arts, society, military, and government. Jeane was an energetic worker, writer, business woman and speaker. She was known for good deeds and great counseling.

Jeane’s greatest hits

Jeane describes the many ways that insights and predictions come to her. Much of it is simply New Age psychic practice: thought transfer, quick visions, interpreting channels in the crystal ball, finger tipping, numerology, palm reading, holding a deck of cards, a kind of remote viewing, elaborate visions, or dreams (Gift of Prophecy, 29, 99). With this gifting, she saved several marriages and a few lives. Those who ignored her economic advice lost money. If they followed her very improbable predictions, they gained financially. She could tell you which ticket would win a prize or which horse would win a race. She helped find a missing child.

Some amazing predictions as described in this first book about Jeane include accurately forecasting the date and location of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. She also envisioned the death of John’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the plane crash in which Ted Kennedy was injured and others were killed. Other deaths foretold were that of actresses Carol Lombard and Marilyn Monroe, former Secretary General of the U.N., Dag Hammarskjold, and Mahatma Ghandi.

In 1941, she insisted that her own husband Jimmy cancel his plans to travel by air to his destination, but take the train instead. He resisted, but complied. The plane that he would have been on crashed (Gift, 35). She predicted the unexpected division of India into two different countries, Pakistan and India. She foresaw China going Communist, and she knew that after Lyndon Johnson’s one full term as president, the Republicans would capture the White House in 1968. The spirits that followed Jeane Dixon from her childhood clearly had big plans for her.

A few boners in the first book

Not all of her prophecies hit the mark, which she readily acknowledged. Many of her forecasts having to do with politics and world affairs were so vague that you can’t tell if they came to pass or not. Other prognostications could be matched by a good CIA analyst. These predictions didn’t age well:

• Russia will beat the U.S. to the moon (Gift, 185).

• In the decade of the 1970s, “the two-party system as we have known it will vanish from the American scene.”

• “After that (a race war) came even blacker clouds, representing a horrible war in which many Asian and African nations whom we have helped with foreign aid will join with red China to close on us and, like the barbarians in the vision of ancient Rome, try to destroy our way of life. This will occur during the 1980s, and because of a new kind of germ warfare, many will die like ants” (Gift, 191).

• A world holocaust will bring great peace to the world by 1999 (Gift, 186).

• “Sargent Shriver and Richard M. Nixon have excellent vibrations for the good of America and will serve their country well. The former, however, must guard against assassination attempts” (Gift, 187).

• Dixon totally missed the blatant corruption of Nixon’s second term, the indictments, convictions, staff resignations, the scandal of the Pentagon Papers, and Nixon’s resignation. I am perceiving a pattern in this kind of research that spirits love Republicans and don’t mind if they’re law breakers. Ironically, I was a very unsophisticated, economically challenged, young adult in in 1971 when I had a compelling dream in which I spoke to Nixon, addressing him as Mr. President. I saw him sitting on a stump and weeping from fear and regret. A stump in the Old Testament is a sign of a fallen ruler or nation. Then I saw him in the waves of the shore almost being swept away. When scandal after scandal found their way into the news, there was a headline in a paper that actually read, “Another Wave Rolls In.” Dixon may have missed the mark with President Nixon because the two of them had a mutual admiration for one another. A Newsweek article (Isikoff and Hornball) found by MSNBC on the Wayback Machine describes a meeting in the Oval Office:

• “The president also had at least one documented Oval Office meeting directly with Dixon—a 36-minute session on May 4, 1971. The tape of that meeting may provide insight into why the president was so keen to hear her forecasts. In the meeting, also attended by her acolyte, Woods, Dixon tells the president in an excited voice how she had just met with antiwar protesters who were gathering in Washington. She told how she had recounted to the protesters what happened during her first international interview in 1949. She was asked about ‘a young man that God was gonna make great.’ Dixon explained that she had meditated on this for a while. Then 10 days later it started to come to her. ‘And I got your channel,’ Dixon told Nixon. ‘It is because it is God’s plan for you, for you to be president of the United States.’ Dixon explained how she had told all this to the protesters, telling them ‘that the Lord intended Nixon to be great … He’s here now to lead us to Christ, the prince of the universe.’”

The coming of Antichrist

In Montgomery’s book, Jeane describes a series of ecstatic visions, beginning on July 14, 1952. As she lay in her bed looking out an east-facing window, she saw a bright, glowing orb that reminds me of the “sun” at the Fatima event. A snake began creeping up onto her mattress. It looked east, then at Jeane, then east. She felt an immense intellect and a sense of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”

The steady gaze of the serpent radiated “love, goodness, strength, and knowledge,” and seemed to be telling Jeane that we must look to the east for wisdom and growth (Gift, 174). As I read that passage as a young adult, I wanted to scream, “This is the same serpent that seduced Eve in the garden with the same promise, Doofus!” Yet, from 1952 until the publishing of Montgomery’s book in ’65, neither Jeane nor the Catholic Church made the connection to Genesis.

Vision #2 was in 1958 while she was lighting candles in St. Matthews Church. She had a vision that involved a statue of Mary and the church pews full of people from all nations. “A remarkable peace overcame me, and I knew that a council of our church would soon bring together under the roof of the Holy See in Rome the religions and nationalities of all the world” (Gift, 176).

This is not the first or last time that Jeane would predict a global, unified religion. I mention this vision because global religion and antichrist go together. World peace, all religions becoming one, brought together by a man with such extraordinary magnetism and authority that the nations of the world will hail him as a messiah of sorts. I personally don’t believe for a minute that this kind of event could ever happen without the most aggressive and oppressive regime the world has ever seen, but that is Satan’s dream, to rule the world and replace Jesus as Messiah. I’m not going to lose any sleep over the possibility of it happening. The rise of an Antichrist is biblical, but I don’t think Jeane’s visions are going to help us recognize him. [Update 1/2026: Now I’m losing sleep because the US is living it!]

The third vision occurred on Feb. 5, 1962 and began with a dimming of the light in her bedroom. Not a good sign, that. Pharaoh Ikhnaten and Queen Nefertiti delivered a baby to the world, a child of the east, born on that day, whose “great force” will be felt in the 1980’s, and “during the subsequent ten years the world as we know it will be reshaped and revamped into one without wars or suffering” (Gift, 181). As of the year 2023, world peace is illusive, and the closest thing we’ve had to an Antichrist is former president Donald Trump, who is very close to indictment at this writing for trying to overthrow the U.S. government and making secret payments to two porn stars shortly before the 2016 election. [Note: beginning in 2014, or even earlier, Donald Trump had a large coterie of “prophets” exalting him to messianic status.]

Jeane Dixon loved God and the Catholic Church and her fellow humans, so I make no judgement as to her eternal fate. However, because she mixed orthodox Christianity with psychic practices excoriated in the Hebrew Bible, she was awash in what Pentecostals would call religious spirits. Her predictions were often ridiculously wrong because they weren’t from God. Fortunately, Jeane retracted her first interpretation in the next book about her, My Life and Prophecies, identifying the child of the east as the antichrist.

Psychic events are not uncommon

• My charismatic friend Linette went through a period where she would sense the impending death of various people. She found it depressing and asked the Lord to make it stop. She didn’t have those premonitions after that. You can read more about Linette here.

• When she was young and single, my grandmother was given information about her future husband by a psychic at a fair. The prediction turned out to be accurate. Years later, a similar person predicted the death of one of her sons which also came true.

• My marriage was predicted by a psychic reading my mother’s palm. The same person assured her that my brother, who was engaged, would not marry but that I would lead a “beautiful life.” All happened as predicted.

• Psychics find kids, dogs, and Russian submarines. Remote viewers see all kinds of weird things in the murky invisible world, including strategic military targets. I’ve no doubt that Russian and U.S. psychic spies peek in on each other all the time.

• In Acts 16:16-18, there was a psychic woman who annoyed the Apostle Paul and his colleague Silas. “Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.’ She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!’ At that moment the spirit left her.” The men of the town were so angry, they dragged Paul and Silas to the city magistrates, who flogged them and put them in prison.

• Years ago, an Assembly of God pastor in Lexington, KY accurately predicted “a big new job” for me when I wasn’t even looking for one. He was right. Weeks later, I was working in the Ferry Building of San Francisco, where I met my husband. I’ve seen plenty of Pentecostal prophecy since 1965 and none of it had to do with psychic contrivances, horse race bets, apocalyptic disasters, or what movie star is going to die next.

Dixon was unique

What made Dixon different from the average psychic was the firehose quantity of impressions she delivered, the specific accuracy (at least through the 1960’s), the elite crowd she serviced, and the national importance of her visions, which led to gaining the attention of the government and the military.

Because she was a devout Christian, praying every day and taking communion often, she thought herself a prophetess akin to the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. Why would she doubt for a second that all her revelations came from God, especially if the Catholic Church didn’t rebuke her for her methods? Perhaps the Catholic Church enjoyed the reflected fame they received from the famous and popular Jeane Dixon.

The Holy Spirit does not speak through crystal balls or numerology. Jeane is more of an extraordinary psychic with Christian beliefs, receiving her information from religious spirits who would readily deny the divinity of Jesus Christ if asked. Once the spirits impress our government officials sufficiently to have them hungry for more exotic information, these spirits can lie, deceive, misdirect, and misinform.

Today’s Christian prophets are no better. Their god is always a Republican. Democrat agendas always bring economic ruin, making them the enemy of the nation and of God. Liberal policies must be resisted because they are invented by the devil himself to hinder God’s people and His divine plan on the Earth. The Lord has nothing good to say about a Democratic president or senator and nothing bad to say about a Republican. All corruption comes from the Left and the Deep State, supported by evil millionaires or billionaires like George Soros and the corrupt Clinton gang, but Republicans are the flag waving patriots. Apparently the Creator is not “our” Father in heaven, but “their” Father. In many pulpits, if you vote Democrat, you’re destined for the hot place.

This whole viewpoint is absolutely demonic. Genuine Christian prophecy, borne of the Holy Spirit, does not promote a specific political party, especially one that caters to the rich, despises the poor, and looks away from crime. God’s prophecies are not unmoored from reality on the ground. So-called prophets who run with a word that God did not send are walking on very thin ice because they are committing blasphemy.

The topic of my next post will be about Ruth Montgomery, who also predicted end time disasters and the appearance of the Antichrist. As the series continues, I’ll write about an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Bayside, NY and about Vance Davis, one of the Gulf Breeze Six.

This story can also be seen at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/predicting-the-antichrist-part-1-jeane-dixon-458e9cf46b73 and at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2023/04/predicting-antichrist-part-1-jeane-dixon.html.

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I have expended a lot of energy on previous posts on my Blogger site (https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com) demonstrating the alleged Blessed Virgin Mary’s rise to power and influence from the 1500’s to today. I blogged about the profound differences in personality, method of operation, and theology between Bayside Mary and Medjugorje Mary. I’ve suggested that none of these Marys were the mother of Jesus, but were a demonic manifestation and deception associated with UFO technology and delusions, the purpose of which is to cause us to look away from our Savior Jesus and look rather to a sweet, charming but hollow substitute.

In this post (updated 1/2026) I’m going to suggest the very root of Mary’s identity. Please understand, I am NOT bashing the Catholic Church, but I am ingsuggesting that it has been seduced by a charming, cunning, convincing phantom, one who knows exactly how to push buttons, manipulate, play on emotions, sentiment, beliefs, and fears, and how to create drama and crisis in order to push the hesitant over the edge toward compliance. More than Jesus or God the Father, Mary seems determined to insert herself into human history, especially during our global crises. And she wants her name on everything. Many UFO abductees could relate. The Catholic Church should have known better, but ‘Mary’ is really good at what she does. She has snookered devout children, committed adults, men, women, priests, saints, bishops, popes, lay people, some Protestants, and godly Catholic theologians.

It has taken me about three years of study on the topic to finally come to a firm enough opinion to openly call a spade a spade. And in my thinking, ‘Mary’ is the paranormal Queen of spades.

It’s important to understand that when one is actually seeing a ghost, demon, alien, or biblical personality, what you see is not necessarily what you get. A good example is found in Derrel Sims’ book Alien Hunter: Evidence in Light, (2018 p. 252). Sims counseled a male abductee who was being pressed to do something he found repugnant. The beautiful female entity appealed to him in a sweet voice until he resisted a little too long. Then she morphed into a familiar male alien who began to inflict pain on his victim. The lesson there is that sweet Mary may not be a female entity at all. The beautiful garments, the motherly voice, the crown with stars, etc. could all be a screen. If humans can create amazing illusions with our tecnology, demons can even more.

I found myself so overwhelmed by the thousands of messages on the website for Bayside, NY (www.tldm.org) that I ordered the whole series of locutions in a six-volume set. I may be plodding my way through these six books until I’m 85. As of now, I’m only into Volume 1, 1970 to 1973, and I’m about halfway through. What I have already read is both riveting and appalling. Below are some samples of BVM’s declarations in the first part of Volume 1, representing about 1 year. There just wasn’t space for more in this brief essay.

The Eagle

The eagle is plucked. He will not rise again. [July 15, 1970]
Veronica saw in vision the eagle [the U.S.]. It was most frightening, for the eagle was a blackened, charred skeleton. [Sept. 7, 1970]

This is a repeated theme with Bayside Mary. The U.S. is seen repeatedly as plucked, flattened, charred, and defeated. If we say our Rosaries, we might survive beneath her mantle.

The Chastisement, Also Called the Ball of Redemption, a Comet That Will Hit the Earth

I saw men, women, and children all rushing panic stricken along a road, fleeing some devastation of horror…Along the roadways I saw blackened bodies, charred bodies! I screamed, “No! No! Save us, Mother of God! Please save us!” [Aug. 14, 1970]
I have come to warn you, My children. The hour grows short. I roam the nations crying for souls, for the Chastisement is imminent. Repent! A blackened moon…a bleeding sun…holes in the earth…high waves…screaming voices…all quiet…cities leveled. [Sept. 7, 1970]
I saw large ocean waves, extremely high — at least twelve feet, along the coast. The huge waves arose very high. Large holes and wide cracks appeared in the earth. I could see tall buildings seemingly drop into these holes. It was most frightening. [Dec. 26, 1970]

BVM specializes in terrifying threats and images, just as abusive parents do and as aliens do to their abductees. Aliens feed on victim emotions, and the horrendous threat frightens many of us into thinking that we need their help to survive as a planet.

If mankind rejects Mary and her Son, life on earth as we know it will end. Earth is going to be struck by a comet which would kill millions. Mary wails repeatedly throughout the 1970s and 80s about the millions of souls that will fall into hell when it hits. Jean Dixon, a Catholic seeress, made a similar prediction and put the date at 1985. In fact, if Earth were hit by a comet or planetoid, all life on earth could end. That prediction was 43 years ago as I write this.

The Power of the Rosary to Protect, Save Souls, and Repel Darkness

My Rosary will be the light of the world. [July 1, 1970]
My Rosary can hold back the darkness. My Rosary can reach out and save those souls already going down to the abyss. [Aug. 5, 1970; Sept. 14, 1970]
Keep your Rosary about your neck — not for decoration, but to pray, to have it always with you.
Pray always. Save souls, your Rosary in your hands. [Sept. 7, 1970]
Those who remain true to My Rosary will not be touched by the fires. [Oct. 6, 1970]

Thus, we participate in the salvation of souls, using the Rosary as a tool. This has NO foundation in the Bible. We actually should never cease to pray for the unbeliever, but this statement exalts the Rosary as a tool to make that happen, putting Mary in the front and removing the work of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God from the process.

Mary commands, begs, pleads for her children to wear scapulae and medals (designed by herself and revealed to various saints to glorify herself, p. 24) as well as a St. Benedict medal and Rosaries around the neck at all times because agents of Satan are everywhere. The implication is that our Baptism, our walk with God, and our faith in Jesus Christ is insufficient to protect us when doom hits and evil walks the streets. Very few Catholics wear Rosaries and scapulae around their necks. I recall a season in my life when I wore one. Since the talismans were for putting the wearer under Mary’s protection, I guess we Protestants and adherents of every other religion would burn up and be one of the millions falling into the abyss.

The Antichrist

Mary claims repeatedly that the Antichrist, the man of perdition is in America and Armageddon is at hand, p. 39, 54, 55, 76. “He will proceed on into Egypt and Israel and will bring Russia from the North.” [Feb. 1, 1971] Like a classic cult leader, Mary tells her followers to wear their sacramentals and bar their doors against any people that they don’t know.

Remember January 21, 1971. This was the day, My children, when the man of perdition came to your city and entered your church. [Feb. 11, 1971]

**January 2026 update: I did a recent web search on the date above and the only thing of note that turned up was that Donald Trump took over his father’s real estate business that day and named it the Trump Organization. At this time, President Trump has turned our old allies NATO against us and has invited Russia to join his new peace council. Could this apparition be pointing to Trump as the “man of perdition?”**

Keep the armor on you — your Rosary, your crucifix around your neck, or you, too, will receive the stamp of the man of perdition…Armageddon! Armageddon! [May 30, 1971]

Compare Mary’s armor to Ephesians 6 in which the followers of Christ put on the armor of God. To suggest another armor is to promote another gospel! And Paul the Apostle tells us that only demons will do that, (2 Corinthians 11:4). So who actually was the Antichrist?

Later in the volumes, Mary will wail that the Antichrist and the forces of 666 are actually in the Vatican. She doesn’t seem to be pointing to any of the popes, except of course, the evil anti-pope planned to replace Paul VI, who will be incapacitated or killed.

Mary as Co-Redemptress

Remember, My children, Heaven and earth will pass away — all will be as white. But I hold the key to the Kingdom given by My Son. No one will come to the Father but through My Son. Stay under My mantle, My children, you will find peace. Reject Me or My Son, and the end of life as you know it will be hastened. I am the Advocate of Peace, the Mediatrix between God and man, abundant with graces for the asking. I am now the guardian of the cross. I stand beneath the cross; I shed My blood beneath the cross. [Sept. 7, 1970]
As My Father’s Advocate from Heaven, I tell you that your days are counted. Your country as you know it will be destroyed. [Apr. 10, 1971]

In these statements, Mary has usurped six titles and descriptors of Jesus Christ, the very things that make Him the Savior/Redeemer. In the Bible, Jesus has been given the keys of the kingdom (Rev. 1:18; 3:7). In Rev. 9:1 a fallen angel was given a key “to the shaft of the abyss.” Perhaps this is the key that BM was given. We are sheltered beneath the Father’s wing, and Jesus is the one who gives us peace, (John 14:27). He is our Advocate before the Father (1 John 2:1). He is the Mediator between God and man, (1 Timothy 2:5), and Jesus alone shed the blood that atones for sin. Mary’s blood is not required, thank you. Mary has inserted herself between mankind and Jesus, the first line in the salvation process. She has gradually replaced our need for Him. And Catholics think they are not actually worshiping Mary!

Mary’s Immaculate Heart

Resist the knife that threatens to cut Holy Church asunder, for my Immaculate Heart will triumph over all evil. [Aug. 14, 1970]

Mary would have her followers commit their lives as they rise in the morning and as they go to bed at night to the protection of her Immaculate Heart. There is so much more to say about this, but I did cover the subject in my other Marian posts.

WW III

Through the 1980s, followers were warned that there will be a third World War. These warnings can still be read on her website www.tldm.org (These Last Days Ministries). Believers must put a crucifix on the front and back door of their homes for protection. There would also be diseases that would have children dying in their mother’s arms. The Ball of Redemption was a constant threat.

Mary’s Title as Light Bearer

Candles must be carried at all vigils, to be lighted at the time of twelve to herald the new day of the Feast. As candles are lighted, this prayer is to be said,

Mary, Light of the world, pray for us!
Our Lady of the Roses, pray for us!
Mary, Help of Mothers, pray for us!

Over and over again. [June 19, 1970]

At the first publication of these blasphemous statements, Pope Paul VI should have had his representatives contact Veronica and commanded her to stop. The Gospels clearly tell us that Jesus Christ is the Light of the world (John 1:4,5). We should pray to the Father in His Name. There is no other Name by which we may be saved (Acts 4:12). But who could resist Mary, Lady of the Roses and the Help of Mothers. It sounds so sweet, like vanilla pudding. The repetition of the prayer is a mantra that energizes the Mary spirit and makes an environment for her to possess the intercessor.

Be not guided by fear, but by prayer. Fear not the darkness, for I carry the light. [Sept. 14, 1970; Mar. 24, 1971]
Yes, I am truly the Mediatrix of peace, the Mediatrix between God and man. I have been given the light by my Son to hold back the darkness. [July 1, 1971]

Who is the Light bearer in the Old and New Testament? The name Lucifer means “light bearer.” Yes, I could go into a linguistic study of Isaiah 14:12–15, NKJV, where the name is first found, but that is not necessary, because this is Lucifer’s private joke, a little chuckle between himself and his demons. Veronica is not a linguist, so he is communicating on her level and that of the average Catholic. Apparently, no one caught the irony. The ‘Mary’ entity may actually the devil himself.

This article can also be seen at The Virgin Mary of Bayside, NY (janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com) and at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/the-virgin-mary-of-bayside-ny-62a807be175a?postPublishedType=repub

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I love posting about Genesis 1-4 because it’s a bottomless well of insights about the development of human cognition and our relationship with gods and God. I should mention, as I’ve done in previous posts, I believe the stories are divinely inspired and weighted with truths we should explore, but I don’t take Gen. 1-4 as an accurate historic account. Now, hold the cabbages just a minute my churchy friends. Let me explain.

Not My Point, but Let’s Review

Italics represent specific Hebrew words: in Genesis 1 God just speaks. The heavens and earth appear. Adam and Eve are created on the 6^th 24-hour day together, male and female, and it’s all good. In Gen. 2, the earth is not fully developed because mankind hasn’t appeared yet (2:5). God forms Adam out of the same dust/mud/dirt that he makes the animals. God makes him a living creature using the same Hebrew word for the animals (2:19), but not all is good yet. Something important is missing. Yahweh Elohim settles Adam in the garden alone. After an unspecified amount of time in which he names the animals, God builds Eve, but not out of mud. In Gen. 1 God is Elohim. In Gen. 2 God is Yahweh Elohim. In Gen. 1 Elohim creates the “heavens and earth.” In Gen. 2 the author writes about the “earth and heavens.”

The change in style occurs in the second half of 2:4. You think the scribes that put this book together in final form were so dense they didn’t recognize the difference? These two documents were sewn together with the same deliberation that a quilter joins disparate pieces into a whole blanket, but they are not the same literal, historic account. I was a church attending, Evangelical Christian for 15 years before I understood any of the above, and then the epiphany only came as I read and translated the Hebrew for my Jewish rabbi mentor.

For my educated, scientific readers, yes, yes, I believe in Intelligent Design, Old Earth and hominids evolving over time, but please set all that side for a bit. I want to draw from the narrative as it was written as if it were a hundred percent true, and I want to make it apropos for today, so bear with me.

The First Threat

In the Garden, Adam and Eve have perfect adult bodies and full language capability. They’re allegedly immortal, but they’re stuck in this interdimensional death-free space that doesn’t fully connect with the earthly world they are supposed to inherit according to Gen. 1. I remind you that when Cain killed Abel there were humans that would have killed him simply because he was alone and not supported by a clan or family. They were fully human and were never part of the Garden that Adam’s family were expelled from.

The new couple can’t possibly fulfill the mantle of authority laid on them in Gen. 1 if they are naked and don’t know the difference between right and wrong. They are like toddlers. We speak of ‘original sin.’ Do we impute sin to 2 year olds? Adam and Eve are like aborigines in Paradise Lost. They need to grow up, explore the world, adapt to new environs, multiply and fill the earth. Remember, the Garden isn’t really Eden. The Garden is in Eden. Was Eden also death free? Adam’s whole job in Gen. 2 is to tend the Garden for Yahweh Elohim.

Enter a new voice in the Garden. Adam and Eve had a commandment to obey, but the serpent sidled up to Eve when she was pondering what her existence was all about. Apparently, Adam was not far away (3:6). First, the serpent wasn’t ugly, or Eve would have screamed and run. Second, he must have had legs to stand on because the curse had him slithering on the ground. Third, he wasn’t human, but he wasn’t really a serpent either. He had a voice, he spoke perfect…er, whatever they spoke back then. (Hebrew didn’t exist yet) Still, something about this other-world entity was serpent-like.

Some of my Evangelical readers may be shocked that I write about UFOs and demons. Jesus had a lot to say about demons and the devil. He warned us many a time to fear only the eternal ruin and death that Satan can wreak and not mankind. Well, guess who rules as one of the worst entities of the UFO world? A mean, ugly creature called a Reptilian.

This entity knew how to manipulate the new humans. After all, how would they know who to trust? Nothing bad had ever happened to them. They didn’t know what bad meant because they didn’t know the difference between good and evil. The serpent didn’t lie to them. He planted a seed of doubt about God’s intentions in telling them not to eat the fruit. He told them they wouldn’t die if they ate the fruit. And they didn’t drop dead after all. He told them they would be like gods, knowing good and evil, and he was right…to an extent. This promise was a little exaggerated. Kazzam! In a moment their perception and understanding became fully adult. The serpent is looking pretty good at this point.

Folks, please. This passage in the Bible is a metaphor. There’s no food that’s going to make us wise. The Genesis author is writing about mankind coming into full cognizance and intellectual potential, which means they are accountable for the wrong that they do.

Kerpow! (no disrespect intended) Mankind develops quickly. Sex, kids, animal husbandry, agriculture, religious ritual. Shazzam! Within a relatively few generations, the descendants of Cain invent cities, writing, metallurgy, art, music, and war.

The voice in the Garden didn’t deny the existence of Yahweh. It questioned His motivation, His benevolence. It made alluring promises, so many promises for results right now. Power, knowledge, status, “wisdom.” Right now. Jesus said that the devil is the Father of Lies. He’s really good at it. Adam and Eve were not stupid, in a state of sin or rebellion, or mad at God. They were blindsided by something more complex and malevolent than they could comprehend, and mankind has been confused ever since about who to believe and who brings “life” as well as riches, health, children, safety, and guidance in everyday life. The thing is, the invisible entity with a reptilian essence lies, and does it very well.

The Second Threat

Quite a few years ago, one of my Assembly of God friends retired from her nursing career. Her husband retired from teaching, so between them they had a nice nest egg to live on. She and other congregation members invested a lot of their money in a fund run by one of their fellow church members. He had been in the church for a long time, so everyone knew him and knew his godly testimony. When they came to him for financial consultation, he would often pray with them. The problem turned out that his fund was a Ponzi scheme, and this man, who led a nice life in an elite, gated community, was a scam artist. My friend was not stupid, sinful, or mad at God, but she lost $350K to this shyster.

Christians are an especially easy target for such schemes because lies and malfeasance just aren’t on their radar, but scammer Bernie Madoff and his family members collected billions from universities, Jewish charities, banks, and average citizens while the SEC looked the other way. Con artists don’t look like sleazebags. They are charming. You can’t help but like them. They are your best friend, until they aren’t. When they lie, they are really, really convincing. They usually wrap their sausage of lies in a skin of truth.

So, the second biggest threat to human existence is our ability and willingness to lie to one another to gain political and financial advantage. Why are lies and slanders so dangerous? Because they can manipulate and transform society and can lead to dangerous governmental policies. Malevolent men and women can lie with great passion to gain positions of power.

I have always been half interested in the news, but ever since the summer of 2015, I’ve been an absolute junkie. I doomscroll all morning, reading a vast array of sources, including books. I have both conservative and liberal friends, and after a decade of watching the MAGA machine roll over the U.S., after listening to all the arguing, hearing the vast divide between RW and LW news sources, I’m convinced that among those producing the news, there are those who still care about journalistic integrity and those who would report anything true or false if they were required to. Among the voters, there are RW brains and LW brains which process not only different information, but would process the same information completely differently. We have shared this country since the 1700s, and have butted heads from the beginning. It seems that we’ve always been close to 49/51 on our differing viewpoints depending on the economy. That’s just not going to change.

There have always been scurrilous politicians, greedy millionaires, egregious bigots, and lying journalists. The absolute illogical belief, encouraged by political parties and media, is that one side or the other commits all the corruption, does all the lying. But if one party uses their temporary access to government power to lie, cheat, and steal, you can bet they’ll accuse the other party of doing everything that they themselves are doing, and they’ll do it with great passion and posturing. If they got there by cheating, they won’t give up their privilege easily. That right there is a good indication which side is which. The good guys will cede power when it’s time. The bad guys won’t. The bad guys will keep the voting base in a blender of fear and hate, creating enemies on which to focus so the voters don’t focus on what the politicians are doing with their levers of power.

Because of the contemporary surplus of information and the resulting confusion about whom to believe, people resort to voting for their pet issues…the price of eggs, abortion, the Ten Commandments on school grounds, the appointment of RW or LW judges, tax cuts, immigration, etc. In our times, Americans will put up with a lot of corruption if they can vote their pet issues into existence, because they’ve heard for years that the other side is worse. Character still counts, but media disinformation makes everyone look like a fool, a criminal, or a pedophile.

I can’t offer a good solution to this problem other than to encourage people to read broadly.

It’s intriguing to me that the Bible essentially begins with mankind being lied to and seems to end with a confrontation between a deceptive antichrist and the returning Messiah. The Apostle John seems to believe that the antichrist was a movement rather than a specific man. A good case can be made for that. The Apostle Paul was looking for a man whom he called “the lawless one” or “the man of lawlessness,” (2 Thess. 2:3-4). I believe that Paul was hearkening back to Daniel 7 which describes the Son of Man coming into His full kingdom authority (vv. 9-27). Verses 19-22 describes a boastful, conquering king who will “try to change the set times and laws.”

End Times?

Evangelical Christians like to say that we are in the End Times. We may be indeed. If that is true and Paul is right, then a man will arise before the Second Coming of Jesus who will oppress God’s people. But what if rather than oppressing God’s people he just subverts them with really convincing new ideas? What if he claims that he is the righteous one, that he is the patriot, that he is the Anointed One, that only he can save the world? Would you be ready for that?

I am the first to admit that understanding the news today is complicated. It’s almost more than the average, busy person can wrap their head around. But Jesus said that if the blind lead the blind, they all fall into the ditch. The ditch is there. In our day, it’s called dictatorship or autocracy. To maintain our democracy and avoid falling into the antichrist’s honey trap, we can’t be blind. Don’t think that God will appear and inform you whom to vote for. God didn’t save my charismatic friend from the scammer, and if we don’t use our brains to properly educate ourselves in both the Bible and the news, we won’t be ready for the profound deceptions that the End Times will bring.

This story can also be seen at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/mankinds-greatest-threat-is-revealed-in-genesis-cda1dd19af74 and at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2026/01/mankinds-greatest-threat-is-described.html

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