Super Tuesday, the biggest political event in the presidential primary season is upon us. If past is prologue, expect a greater turnout among people who identify as republican than those who identify as democrat.  Expect a large evangelical turnout. Expect that Nikki Haley, for all her grit and gumption will lose every event on Tuesday.  And expect that many self-described but utterly discredited “prophets” will dust off their failed predictions of 2020 to state what is clear to most Americans already:  That Donald J. Trump (sometimes known as John Barron or more recently “the defendant”) will secure the republican nomination for President and will likely be re-elected to the White House on Election Day (which the MAGA machine calls “Judgment Day.”) If that characterization doesn’t send a chill up your spine, then I don’t know what will.

This post is about lies; lying eyes, lying spirits and the so-called prophets who believe them.

Many of us believe we can tell if we are being lied to by looking at someone in the eye. Usually there is a pupillary response when someone lies (a stress response), or they avert their eyes. Lyin’s eyes. I often find that when someone prefaces a comment by saying “To tell the truth. . .” it means they are lying. But maybe not always, so that is a caveat, and an important one in this post,

The enemy

In the spiritual realm, there are angels and demons. Orthodox Christianity believes this.  Buffy and Twilight fans swear by it.  Dungeon and Dragons devotees depend on it.  The taxonomy of demons (not to be confused with fallen angels) is built around their function.  There are unclean demons; demons that inspire people to set fires; demons of fear; demons of hate; demons that inspire serial killers; demons that cause certain psychological or physical health issues in some cases, perhaps in those cases where people are powerless to overcome addiction to controlled substances and they take their lives or die of an overdose, and there are lying spirits (I Kings 22:19-23) just to name a few.  There are spirits who “specialize” in sowing doubt and disbelief. I’ve known of cases where someone says they want to believe that God loves them, but for some reason they just can’t. These are spirits that either loudly broadcast lies to groups in society (as Hitler did to justify invading Poland in September 1939) or these spirits whisper poisonous thoughts in a gullible or vulnerable person’s ear.  In the words of musician Todd Rundgren who explains what happens–with license–in poetic terms:

One of them plays a piccolo in my ear
Another one makes me smell things that aren’t there
And they know where to hide
And they know everything that’s inside

of my head

Tiny demons, inside me

One of them ties a lasso around my heart
Another one makes me nod when I drive the car
And they won’t ever leave
But they won’t show their faces to me”

 Demons have personalities.  They can be dramatic, and almost humorous at times. They are sometimes fairly entertaining, but we are warned in the Bible not to patronize them.  They love to groom people, gratify themselves through their host. They are able to trip a person up when the poor soul least expects it. Some demons enjoy pontificating and prophesying, though they never quite get thing right.

The problem

The Holy Spirit of God is the true source of prophecy, and the Holy Spirit is percolating among the faithful, and perhaps the unfaithful as well, even now.  The Spirit of God is like the wind that blows where it will. So, prophecy can indeed be genuine.  Absolutely! But what I am seeing (reading) is patently outrageous. There are people who claim to hear God’s voice who assured us that Donald Trump would serve two consecutive terms in office. He did not. You cannot promote yourself as having apostolic authority and then say “my bad” if things don’t work out as you predicted. People have God using phrases that Steve Bannon is credited with inventing (like “deep state.”)  If I recall correctly, another “prophet” claimed God revealed to him who won the World Series in 2020 before it happened.  One person earlier this year says that God gave him the details of a new armored personnel carrier or other combat vehicle that the U.S. Army was developing (including the color of the vehicle.)  Some people swear that God uses words like “swamp” and accuses liberals of being “communists.”  SMH. Can God do these things? Certainly. The question is, would He? And that’s a fair question.

If you follow these predictions regularly, you’ll learn that these “prophets” are political conservatives who support Donald Trump (as they say God does as well.) So, either they are on the side of the angels, or their imagination is providing them with conformation bias. Many of them assure us with divine authority that the numerous accusations against Citizen Trump are nothing but false persecution, what Mr. Trump calls another “witch hunt.” However, if one takes time to carefully read the grand jury indictments (as published here in the case of the classified document scandal), one would find statements of fact as well as the specific law which is alledged to have been broken. True, President Biden also unlawfully possessed classified documents in his garage at his home in Delaware, but that is another violation for prosecutors to pursue and it does not excuse Mr. Trump from doing the same.

Dreams-never quite as it seems

Some people who call themselves prophets place an inordinate and prophetic “spin” on their dreams. Once again, God does sometimes speak to us in dreams as He did to Joseph in the Old Testament, for example. Inventors and academicians sometimes find solutions to intractable problems while dreaming. Sometimes the dreams may arise out of our subconscious. Perhaps, this is our superego trying to connect with our ego? But as Freud once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes a dream is just a dream–a random discharge of hundreds of thousands of neurons in our brain.

In times when conspiracy theories swirl around furiously like dry leaves in autumn, or in times where the stakes are high and the demand for critical thinking is the highest, or in a world of deep fakes (see photo of DJT at right), the only thing we can truly depend on is the Word.  The apostle John tells us in his first epistle (letter) in Chapter 4, Verse 1 to test (δοκιμάζετε) the spirits who are plying us with information.  The word “test” means to “try,” to “prove.”  The verse does not say “Believe what you hear if it makes sense to you, and then run with it.”  This word also means to scrutinize, or appraise something in a broader sense.  Bring a ring with a stone in it to a pawn shop or jeweler and tell them what you think it is and what you think it’s worth.  Every merchant will take out his loupe (magnifying glass) to examine it very closely.  Some stones are genuine, but others are counterfeit.  It’s the same with prophecy.

Yet, the apostle Paul plainly states “Do not despise prophecies,  but test everything; hold fast what is good.” In this passage from I Thessalonians 5:20-21, he agrees with John. The wheat must be separated from the chaff.

In 2 Thessalonians Chapter 2, St. Paul writes of the distant future (but perhaps the time in which we live today) and states:

The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

Afterword

Don’t believe the lie; lying spirits, lying tongues, lying eyes.  Consult with other people, even skeptics.  Get a council of advice.  Weigh what you hear against the Bible.  Do you really think that God is a Dodger fan? Does He think you need to know what color the Army is using to paint the next generation of vehicles?  Do you think that Donald J. Trump is the Chosen One, God’s anointed?