BUT SATANS COMING TO GET ME!!!!!!!!!

WAAAAAAAH.

I swear some of you guys could teach liberals lessons on playing the victim.

If God is omnipresent and omnipotent AND is protecting you, then being attacked is no different than not being attacked.  Unless God isn't one of those things.  Everyone claiming that Satan caused X problem in their life is basically calling God a weak loser.  What kind of all knowing and all powerful God wouldn't be able to protect their faithful?

Every hour of every day but I think that's normal. The world is getting worse at the same clip. Stay strong brothers and sisters in Christ for we know not the hour of the Master's return!

We have more kids and young people than I can remember in our church.
But too many pastors don’t teach the word.

Romans 11:4-6
King James Version
4 But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.

5 Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace.

Matthew 24:12-14
King James Version
12 And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

13 But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

Revelation 12:9
King James Version
9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

This is a little harsh. Modern prosperity makes faith harder because the old struggles to survive every day just aren't there anymore. Yes, theology in modern times is kind of a shitshow, and some over-simplified version of Christianity has mass appeal. In their defense, over-simplified versions of pretty much any religious or political idea are the versions that have mass appeal.

That said, I will say, as a non-Christian, I don't really understand the theology in play here. In my community, if things are fucked for you, you pray to G-d for support and go fix them yourself the best you can. You look inside yourself for what you need to improve. You don't blame some external spiritual force for being actively out to get you.

Saw the date this morning while doing some banking and had the exact same thought.

I think its full-on spiritual warfare and it's ramping up.

This video talks about 5th gen warfare. It also occurred to me that it's a perfect description of spiritual warfare.

If a secular person was to describe spiritual warfare, I think it would be described as this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p10G1m3ZfU

Something is wrong, you can't put your finger on it but you know its wrong.

I have had those kind of attacks on every part of my life but for me it was a few years ago.  I tend to think both Christians and non Christians are being attacked now.  Covid spreading across the world, the decline of our country with the lawlessness we've observed over the last couple of years, the riots, the burning cities, things I never thought I would see in America, and then for it being condoned and accepted, even promoted by one political party.  The destruction of our economy, the inflation, many drowning in debt, financial stress, this is all a kind of attack.  Even a casual observer can see things are getting worse.  The FBI investigating Catholics as extremist would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

This was very well said.

+1

could there really be ANY other explanation for what we are seeing now than a supernatural one???  I mean the levels of blindness to truth (idiocracy) is off the charts.  There is no worldly explanation for the amount of insanity.  None.

The so called "spiritual attack" has always puzzled me.

Its very clear in James 1:14-15 WE are the source of our own temptations. Thats internal. Not external.

Im aware satan and his minions are at work in the world, but Im not so narcissistic to believe they're attacking me personally. Im little fish.

I always look sideways at people who claim to be under spirutual attack from the debil

What the hell is a spiritual attack?

Somebody tries to take your liquor.

I refuse to answer OP's question on the grounds that something might decide to take it as a challenge.

I've never been more at peace even though spiritual warfare rages all around. I now know past hardships were not meant to break me but to strengthen my soul.

I think we are going through a render unto Caesar what is Caesars and render unto Christ what is Christs phase on our spirit and those who are saved are really being forced to look at what foundation they have built their lives upon (as a believer is God the Head of your household or is Caesar?).

For the unsaved I think their discernment is getting weaker and their hearts are hardening, this is truly saddening because a persons attention span is very short nowadays and ones patience even shorter.

But as a believer seeing events unfold is something I never thought I would witness and the sky at night has been amazing. What a time to be alive.

The Armor of God works especially well in dark times.

covid all but destroyed our church. went from a regular congreation of maybe 60 to less than 20 regulars.

God is the ultimate protector of those that belong to Him, but that doesn't mean he want allow troubles to come to each of us.( read the book of Job) God uses all things for his glory, even satan is used by God constantly. The ultimate protection for the Born again Christian is eternal salvation. We are sealed in Christ and nothing can remove us from His hand.

You still have time. Just look at the push for digital currency. If that clearly isn't a path to Mark of the Beast I don't know what is.Yet people I know that have rejected Christ that know about end time prophesy still don't see it coming. Its sad yet interesting  to watch.

AMEN!

I've been feeling the increased attacks lately as well. Satan knows his time is about up. We can all look around and see what Jesus told us the end times would look like and consist of. It's happening. Our redemption draws near!

If I were the Devil.  Close enough and written in 1965

Ours personally seemed to really ramp up right before Christmas, but throughout our congregation it's been rough for about a year

That assumes a lot about the nature of reality that you can’t  actually know.

But yeah, blaming an external force for your feelings of temptation to sin is probably not the right approach.

Was Job not attacked by the "debil" ?
1 Peter 5:8

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

The temptations that we feel are from original sin. In the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve knew not of evil until they disobeyed God. Up to that point, there was only good. The evil came from Satan. Then they realized they were naked. They gained the knowledge of knowing good and evil.

Absolutely.

The demoralizing attacks on Christians is coming straight from the top.

Putting a dementia riddled old pedophile in charge of the nation, and then filling his ranks with transvestites and nut jobs.

Imprisoning those who stepped forward to call out the traitorous fraud inflicted upon us.

Labeling us domestic terrorists for standing up to the pedophile agenda in schools.  

Attempting to entrap us over plastic firearms accessories.

Attacking us with bio weapons and forcing poison in our veins.

The spiritual attacks are non stop.

And possibly the most demoralizing and frustrating part of the whole thing, is when you turn to your own community and they shun you and tell you you're crazy and need to stop resisting.

It's maddening.   These are truly the times that try mens souls.

Perceived perpetual persecution is part of the framework.  OG victim badges, if you will.

Don't be surprised by this , consider Judas Iscariot, one of the 12, hand-picked by Jesus. He was an eyewitness, he was there when Jesus walked on water, he saw Christ feed the 5,000, and he saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead. He still rejected Christ, let that sink in.

Yes

Reminds me of John 20:29
Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Ineffective as in those consciously doing nothing to build up the Body of Christ.

I am a nonpracticing Catholic that thinks the church has left me rather than me leaving the church.

Mark 1-24 demon possessed people attend church. Why do you think that? To received and learn the word of God? They are there to attack and oppress. Oppress whom? other demon possessed people? No, Christian's.

Does denying evil come from God or?

Little fish is how we got all of this by the way. Kinda ironic you used that term.

You want to feel spiritual warfare? Go pray at an abortion clinic. I'd make sure I'm right though.

You are very good at proving my point!
If the cops are there to "protect" us and we still are harmed by criminals, that protection is not very good and is not complete.  Are you saying God's protection is not very good like the protection of cops???
If something is protected, they are prevented from harm.  Not just some of the time, that would not be protection.  Let's look at the definition of Protection:

"to cover or shield from exposure, injury, damage, or destruction"

So when God says he will protect you (not "try to protect" or "protect most of the time") the result should be complete and total protection, meaning nothing ever gets through.
Yet, when you read this thread many Christians seem to be feeling the "spiritual attacks" of evil forces (Satan/demons).  How are they feeling that if they are protected?
The bible itself promotes this contradiction.  It states many times that God will protect you, yet it also talks about times you don't have protection.  Heck, the book of Job is basically a bet between God and Satan and Job was certainly not protected.

Imagine the cops swearing to protect you, then talking to your local Gang and saying "Hey migradog is a pretty tough guy, do whatever you want to him, we won't intervene for awhile".  That is not Protection!
While you're being shanked by the gang, are you feeling protected by the cops?  No!

Another scenario would be me watching someone else's kid for a weekend.  The parents of that kid ask me to protect the kid because there are bad people in the world.
If I protect that kid 99% of the time but let something horrible happen in that 1% of the time, the kid was not protected.
If the kid had his arm broken by playground bullies and the parents came back and I said I protected the kid most all of the time except that incident where bullies broke his arm, the parents would say their kid was not protected by me because I did not "cover or shield from exposure, injury, damage, or destruction"

An all-powerful being promising to protect people but letting bad things happen sometimes is a contradiction.  It's that simple.  There are hundreds of explanations for why this happens but they are mental masturbation, it's that simple.  The Bible is full of contradictions and issues and people try to explain it away but the simple fact is that the Bible flat out contradicts itself many times and there is no easy explanation for believers.  Christianity is full of logic loops trying to explain away the evil in the world.  

When I started to have doubts about my faith I read through the bible twice cover-to-cover.  Reading through the bible as an adult really cemented my doubts.  If I had encountered one or two contradictions I might have tried to explain them away, but the whole bible is in contradiction with itself in it's themes and changing story.
None of it makes sense when taken as a whole.  There are a ton of little things (like the differing age of Jehoiachin and If Mary and Joseph went from Bethlehem to Nazareth or the reverse in the gospels).  I will focus on the big ones:

Does God want the best for us, if so millions of people in the Bible had the worst happen to them with no redemption.
God many times caused peoples hearts to be hardened, or caused them to do evil, or killed them outright.  This doesn't work with Him being a loving God and us having free will.  What if you were that Palestinian who's heart was hardened?  You didn't have free will and got killed and sent to hell (when hell was eventually invented).  How does this work?
God killed millions of innocent babies in the flood, what's up with that?
God says he hates lying, yet he puts a lying spirt on many people.
The Bible clearly says you will be punished for the sins of your Father and also that you won't be punished for the sins of your Father.
Why is the flood story taken almost verbatim from the Epic of Gilgamesh which was written long before Genesis?
God is a very different person in the Old Testament and New Testament.  He is a destroyer of his own people and also loves and protects his people at different times.
The genocides in the Old Testament are in direct conflict with the spirit of love and peace of the New Testament.
When God lays out the Law in the Old Testament and says many times the Law will last forever... Except he sends Jesus who upends the Law and refutes much of it.
God makes several covenants with his people and is supposed to be all-knowing, yet something goes wrong and he breaks those covenants multiple times.
Why doesn't God mention the trinity once in the Old Testament?
The afterlife is mentioned a few times in the Old Testament (Sheol) then everything changes to Heaven and Hell in the New Testament.
1 Samuel 28:7-20 is a tough one.  A witch raises Samuel from the dead and talks to him.  That's a hard one to explain...
It is said multiple times in the bible that nobody can see God, yet multiple people also see God in the Bible.


If you research the actual writing of the Bible, you see that the whole new testament was written decades and centuries after Jesus died by people who lived in a different land (Greece) and used each other as sources.
NOBODY WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTIMENT EVER MET JESUS!
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written anonymously and given author names hundreds of years later.
Mark was the first of the gospels and didn't include Jesus' resurrections at the end (Mark 16:9-20 was added later by scribes to better match Matthew and Luke, it is not in the original manuscripts).  The different endings of the Gospels are very hard to explain away (did the women tell the disciples or not?  Mark vs Matthew).
From a historical perspective there is way too much evidence that the Greeks used the story of Jesus to advance their new religion which is why his story evolves through the writings in the New Testament when read in chronological order.

I was a Christian for 30 years.  I have heard all the arguments and apologizing for what I wrote above.  There eventually became way too many issues for the sole written record of the all-powerful creator of the universe to be this full of contradictions.
The Bible should be perfect if it is our only guide to what God it.  Yet it totally

All these loops tend to come back to the Epicurean Paradox.  It just doesn't make sense...

Yes, even an idiot heathen sinner like me can see it.

It ain’t gonna get any easier either, at least in this life.

Best post in this thread.  Count it all joy.  Put in a way ARFcommers are more used to:  "You only start taking flak when you are over the target."

When people say, "Satan," they really mean his kingdom.  Satan has legions of demons obeying his commands.  The Devil most likely does not literally get involved other than to issue orders to his minions.

Not so much on a personal level , but as a nation it is full scale war .   The evil in the world currently has the upper hand ,  they are winning .  Our illustrious POTUS claims to be a virtuos , religious man , so reconcile that in ones mind .

Yes, I’m old enough to have known several, even a few who contracted polio from the vaccine.  I had made up my mind about not taking any COVID ‘vaccine’ long before it was even discussed.

Blessings can come from the strangest places.

Don't try this it's the end and quit being a responsible person BS.  My grandpa use to preach this nonesense and failed at 3 marriages and quit paying taxes.  He was never a grandpa to me and I loath religion bc of losers like him.  Be a good spiritual person regardless of circumstances. OP you come across as overly religious and that is gross

Living up to your Libertarian badge.  Libertarians are some of the most anti-God and anti-Christian people I have ever seen.  What is it about God that you as a group hate so much?  Is it the rules and commands of God that send you guys off the rails?

It was the Church not Jesus that has forbidden food and drink.

The Bible says to work while it is light.  I agree that too many Christians are "waiting for the Rapture" and therefore not doing a bloomin' thing to further God's kingdom while they wait.  I often chide a couple of people I know not to let "Rapture Fever" cause them to just drop the reins and stop trying.

The second assumption of the epicurean paradox is wrong.

God ALLOWS evil to exist…. For His Glory.

Everything is for HIS glory. We are supposed to struggle, fail, repent, suffer….it’s all part of His plan now.

There will come a day when everything is perfect-but not now.

Jesus is calling you back.

This is an historical time to be alive. Satan is free to reign on earth right now and the spiritual assault is palpable.

Our Savior’s return is immanent. Repent and prepare for the Great and Glorious day of His return.

This.

Many don't though but I agree that some do. Hey, the world can be a very scary place. The true Christian attitude should be to do everything that you can do and then trust God to supply the increase. If needed.

This whole thing is about God and not so much about the fallible creation.

Some of the posters here don't quite seem to understand that and stay mired down in all the dramatic details about people and their deficiencies which is dumb.

That's it.

@Lurk-king Timely thread OP. I was just telling the folks in my Sunday school class that I feel like my family has been under attack this year. My oldest child caught the big Cold in January and we missed church, then I caught it and we missed church again. I've been having post big Cold heart issues (I'm 36, didn't get the clot shot) and have been in and out of the doctors office more in the past 3 months than in the past 3 years to try and figure out what's going on. The medical bills, although not terribly high yet, definitely don't make things easier right now with inflation and young family needs. Also, it seems like for the past 2 months, every Saturday night a kid or my wife throws up and church is cancelled yet again.

Wife and I also lost 3 pregnancies (would have been our 4th) last year and a FT WFH career change for me didn't pan out. It's tough too right now because my best friend and his wife are about to have their 4th (they started trying when we announced we were going to have 4..before we lost it obviously) and my buddy just got a huge promotion. Super happy for them, just tough to see "what could have been" play out in front of your eyes and realize it's not going to happen for you.

We made it back to church last week for the first time in a while, but now the kids have a cold. Wife and I were going to have a much needed weekend alone together starting Friday after my echocardiogram to rest and reset; the kids were going to my folks' house... but not if they're super sick. This weekend may be another dud.

I'm not saying all this to complain, just to confirm that I have too noticed it's a lot more than usual on top of the normal stressors that come with being a good husband/provider and raising 3 small children. I'm someone that really needs to not "forsake the fellowship of the saints" or else I get melancholy quick. Seems like the enemy does not want us to receive the encouragement we need at this time.

Satan is not as free to reign as many might think that he is. Satan is merely a player who may only play by the Script and these are the facts. He has only the worldly authority that God has given to him. Provisionally.

I've never been under  Spiritual attack in the way that I am now. Most here  know that I've been attacked a lot in the past.  I'm being attacked in areas of my life that I thought I would never have to fight spiritual warfare in.


I'll go ahead and ask for prayer. I am struggling more than I ever have.

Please, please  pray for me

Definitely, and others have felt the same. I am experiencing a sense of emptiness and hopelessness that seems to persist even though I’m seeking God through prayer and Bible reading. I’ve also been attacked with sexual temptation that seems stronger than normal. Worst of all are the doubts that seem to be creeping in about the truth of God’s promises and goodness.