A Dangerous New Age of ‘Worshiping the Will’

It is easy to forget, given the all-consuming focus on coronavirus, but just weeks ago, America impeached its president. Democrats, by calling on false witnesses, relying on hearsay and criminalizing intentions, brought standards for impeachment to a historic low. Neither Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation nor the House Intelligence Committee found any impeachable evidence against President Donald Trump, but these facts did not matter. Radical leftists keep repeating the lie that he colluded with the Russian government to undermine U.S. security—and the lie that he threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if it did not investigate Joe Biden’s family. In the end, this shameful absurdity ended on February 5, when the Senate acquitted the president.

Lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff said this during his closing arguments at the impeachment trial: “You can’t trust this president to do the right thing—not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country—you just can’t. He will not change and you know it. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”

The Merriam-Webster definition of slander is “the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations, which defame and damage another’s reputation.” Representative Schiff slandered the president. Yet millions of people believed him. Why? They are impervious to reason. They don’t see the world in terms of logic or objective facts. As I will explain, they use a very different and extremely dangerous standard to govern their decisions.

When the Senate voted to not call additional witnesses to the impeachment trial in January, protesters gathered outside the Capitol building and called for the overthrow of America’s system of government. The group Refuse Fascism—a joint venture between the Democratic Socialists of America and the Revolutionary Communist Party usa—organized these protests. One man used a megaphone to tell the crowd, “You can’t rely on the elections that they are rigging.” Then he led a chant, “Donald Trump is guilty; the whole system is guilty.”

The Revolutionary Communist Party usa is a Stalinist organization that wants to abolish the U.S. Constitution and create a nation called “The New Socialist Republic in North America.” This group only has a few hundred members, but these revolutionaries sound alarmingly like Representative Schiff and former President Barack Obama.

Last November, Mr. Obama advised politicians to be more underhanded in their attempts to “fundamentally transform” America, because “the average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” (Read about this in my cover story from our March issue, “America Has Been ‘Fundamentally Transformed,’” at theTrumpet.com/21850.)

The average American doesn’t think we have to “completely tear down the system,” but Mr. Obama does. And because of blatant lies being told by the radical left, more Americans are starting to think like him.

What is happening in America? A haze of deception enshrouds our nation. It is stunning how easily journalists, politicians and other figures today deceive people. We must understand the spirit behind this deception, as it is far more dangerous than most people realize!

Hitler’s Will Worship

Adolf Hitler started World War ii, a war that killed 60 million people and inflicted some of the worst suffering in history.

Hitler believed that if you tell a big lie and repeat it enough, people would believe it. He wrote in Mein Kampf, “[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

That may sound strange, but it did happen to the German people. Hitler and his followers told people that the German Army did not lose World War i on the battlefield, but instead had been stabbed in the back by the Jews. There was no evidence for this claim, but Hitler repeated it until people fell for it. He also blamed the unfair and ruinous Versailles Treaty and held the West responsible for the political and economic turmoil plaguing the Weimar Republic. Germans came to believe Hitler, elected him chancellor and supported his pogroms against the Jews. The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

We have not learned from this history as we should. Could something similar happen today? Could it happen in America? Could someone stir up a political revolution simply by repeating a blatant lie over and over and over till people come to believe it?

Well, this has already happened to a shocking degree!

Hermann Rauschning was the president of the Free City of Danzig in Germany from 1933 to 1934. He briefly joined the Nazi movement before breaking with it. He had many conversations with Adolf Hitler that he later wrote down in his book Hitler Speaks.

He wrote that during these various talks, Hitler talked a lot about the psychology of lying. “What you tell people in the mass in a receptive state of fanatic devotion will remain. Words received under a hypnotic influence are radical and impervious to every reasonable explanation,” Rauschning recalled him saying on one occasion (emphasis mine throughout). On other occasions, Hitler said, “We are now at the end of the Age of Reason”; “A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of intelligence”; “There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or the scientific sense.”

Rauschning called Hitler a “master enchanter.” Hitler had an intense fascination with occult magic. Much of what he told Rauschning about “a new age of magic interpretation” came from the German occultist Ernst Schertel. Schertel’s book on magic was one of the most heavily annotated books in Hitler’s personal library.

Hitler’s annotations of Magic: History, Theory and Practice include highlights such as “the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’ has disappeared,” and “quite a lot is gained with [magic]: namely the possibility to intervene in this structure, that is to say change the world according to our will. But this is magic, and on this basis we are able to create reality where no reality is.”

Hitler believed that he did not need to rely on reason, intelligence, reality, absolute truth or God. Instead, he worshiped his own human will and believed he could create his own reality.

Consciously or subconsciously, many people today believe the same thing. They just keep lying until they convince themselves and those around them that they are right.

Attack From Within

We are seeing bold, blatant lies like the Russia collusion hoax become a bigger and bigger part of today’s political landscape. This dangerous trend began long before the impeachment trial.

Reporter Michael Hastings published a book called Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama’s Final Campaign. In it, he described the intriguing personal effect that President Obama would have on the journalists covering him on the campaign trail. On television, Hastings said these reporters “lose their minds sometimes. They start behaving in ways that are juvenile, and amateurish, and they swoon.” Because the media swooned over President Obama, he was able to amass enormous power to silence dissent. The media were simply unwilling to challenge him.

Many of Mr. Obama’s beliefs were unknown before he was elected because the media didn’t vet him. The press has a lot to answer for in the way they abetted this man and his ambitions!

Now, many of the same journalists who swooned over Barack Obama view everything President Trump does as proof of corruption and evil. The same people who conspicuously overlooked wrongdoing by the Obama administration are now manufacturing criminal accusations against the Trump administration. They are continually exposing their own rank bias and utter blindness.

We must be concerned about this. Without a free and truthful media, a republic cannot survive!

Radical Democrats are demonstrating that there is virtually no limit to what they will do to attack the president and undermine the last election—and the next one. Representative Schiff even suggested during the impeachment hearings that President Trump might offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next presidential election. This is unhinged fear-mongering, devoid of any evidence! What is this man talking about?

Isn’t this exactly what Hitler was describing? These people believe that if they say it, it is true! If they will it, then everyone should believe them.

This is deeply troubling. Bible prophecy shows that will worship is going to lead to fierce, intense suffering—even worse than it did in World War ii.

The Bible’s Warning

The Apostle Paul wrote about this very subject: “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels [demons, it should read], intruding into those things which he [has] seen [that is the correct translation], vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind …. Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship …” (Colossians 2:18, 23).

This is exactly what Hitler was talking about—will worship, but on another level—“magic interpretation … in terms of the will.” Hitler said, This is how it works now: Your logic, facts, evidence and truth won’t stop us. We follow a “magic interpretation” today. Will worship is impervious to truth! That is the new age Hitler wanted to usher in. There is no absolute truth, it says. Don’t look to the Bible for answers. Just have a magic interpretation of things. The implication is, Just follow our will!

Paul reveals what happens when you worship the human will: It leads to essentially worshiping demons! That is because the human mind is so vulnerable to Satan’s broadcasting, deception and influence, especially when full of vanity. Following a human will really means following Satan’s will!

British journalist Melanie Phillips makes a good point in her 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power that the ability to think rationally comes from God. “Western science grew from the novel idea that the universe was rational; and that belief was given to us by Genesis, which set out the revolutionary proposition that the universe had a rational Creator,” she writes. “Without such a purposeful intelligence behind it, the universe could not have been rational; and so there would have been no place for reason in the world because there would have been no truths or natural laws for reason to uncover.”

Satan and his demons reject God’s authority. They do not believe in absolute truth; everything is relative to their will. Christ said the devil “abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).

When human beings reject God’s truth, they start worshiping their own opinions. They start thinking like Satan. When this type of thinking becomes entrenched enough, people stop even caring about the difference between true and false. They start trying to magically “create reality where no reality is.”

This thinking is taking over America’s political scene! Can you recognize it?

The radical left is casting aside the foundational law of the land, telling us that it is just getting in the way. We don’t need that old law, they insist. We know what justice is. You can trust us!

Such reasoning paves the way for tyrants! Tyrants hate facts and truths that limit their power. So they ignore reality in favor of their own “magic interpretation” of the world. Every tyrant is a tool that the devil can use to cast God’s truth to the ground (Daniel 8:12).

We must recognize the evil spiritual force behind this push to undermine the law!

Tearing Down the System

The late Herbert W. Armstrong pointed out that the difference between Adolf Hitler’s Nazism and Joseph Stalin’s communism was simply the difference between national socialism and international socialism. The term “Nazi” is an abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Though the Nazis disliked the Communists, the two ideologies are pretty similar, and Hitler and Stalin cooperated at the start of World War ii.

You can learn a lot about how the radical left operates by studying Hitler and Stalin.

In 1956, Mr. Armstrong wrote that Russia was waging psychological war on America. “A psychological warfare of propaganda, infiltration, subversion, demoralization—it is a warfare that has attacked our minds and our moral and spiritual values, rather than our bodies and our earthly possessions. … It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence!”

Like the Nazis, Communists believed that the end justifies the means. In other words, they can do whatever they will, and the results will justify it. How terribly dangerous and disastrous! Look at the results: In pursuit of a twisted, anti-Bible, anti-God goal, they committed unspeakable atrocities!

Communists in America have organized themselves into a couple different political parties, but communism is not really a political party. Their goal is to destroy America’s constitutional republic!

Those Revolutionary Communist Party protesters outside the Capitol building were quite honest about their aims. They chanted, “Donald Trump is guilty; the whole system is guilty.” And they lauded a new Stalinist constitution posted on their website, which says: “In order to bring this new socialist state into being, it would be necessary to thoroughly defeat, dismantle and abolish the capitalist-imperialist state of the U.S.A.; and this in turn would only become possible with the development of a profound and acute crisis in society and the emergence of a revolutionary people, in the millions and millions, who have the leadership of a revolutionary Communist vanguard and are conscious of the need for revolutionary change and determined to fight for it.”

The policies that Barack Obama worked to implement had far more in common with these activists than most people realize. But as he said last November, “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality. The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

Most Americans do not want a Communist constitution! So Mr. Obama advises Democrats to lie about their beliefs and conceal their goals. Few media outlets today are covering the radical left’s relentless efforts to tear down the system. Instead, they are obsessed with falsehoods about how Mr. Trump works for Putin.

This movement is lawless beyond words to describe! It is worshiping the will and ushering in a dangerous new age of magic interpretation. And this will worship philosophy is consuming the nation! Where will this lead? Most people don’t realize it, but it will soon become painfully clear that it is leading to unparalleled suffering if we don’t wake up!

We don’t like to think about this, but we must! The type of revolution the radical left is promoting usually causes millions to spill their blood!

Civil War

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in a 2017 Fox News interview, “I think we should take the threat of civil war very seriously. … What you’re seeing with Antifa, what you’re seeing on college campuses, what you’re seeing, to some extent, in the bureaucracy, is a real division of the country. … As a historian, my view is pretty straightforward: One side or the other wins.”

Yet in America’s civil war, neither side will win.

In an article titled “There Will Be No Winners in the Second Civil War,” Newsmax.com concluded: “[M]any people see war not only as imminent, but as virtually inevitable. If that’s the case, we’d better get busy digging ourselves bunkers … and graves” (Aug. 25, 2017).

How serious is this issue? America’s first Civil War cost almost as many American lives as all other American wars combined! But another eruption of violence between Americans would be far worse.

And if the country plunges into infighting, many foreign nations will be ready to pounce. America is the wealthiest nation in history. If it continues to destroy itself, nations like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and others will destroy whatever the civil war doesn’t as they vie for the loot. The American superpower will become history, and a third world war involving multiple nuclear powers will follow!

The Trumpet and, before us, Herbert W. Armstrong have warned of World War iii for over 85 years! This war is prophesied in your Bible. America’s division is hastening the fulfillment of what God forecast thousands of years ago!

Rooted in Christ

To be protected from this coming calamity, we must learn from our history. The Apostle Paul warned not to let any man beguile you with enticing words; you must be rooted in Christ. “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:6-8).

The Good News Bible translates the expression “rudiments of the world” as “ruling spirits of the universe.” Thayer’s Lexicon says it means “to invade, of evils coming into existence among men and beginning to exert their power.” What is worshiping the will? It means being ruled by the demon world! That is what Paul is saying!

There is an evil spirit world, and these spirits have power! Scripture makes this reality exceedingly plain. Read the Gospels, for example, and you see that Jesus Christ went around casting out demons routinely! Where did those demons go? They didn’t die! Millions of them are cast down and confined to this Earth along with Satan the devil (Revelation 12:7-12).

If you are not rooted in Jesus Christ and God’s Word as revealed in the Bible, you are “easily corrupted in the deeper strata of [your] emotional nature.” Satan, “the prince of the power of the air,” broadcasts in moods, attitudes and impulses that make us impervious to reason—if we allow it (Ephesians 2:2).

There is always somebody out there who wants to get us to worship the will. But the only way to escape the devastating catastrophes prophesied to engulf America is to be rooted in truth—based on the Word of God.

Even those who see there is a real problem in America today don’t recognize its full extent. There is an evil spiritual force that seeks to destroy America. That spirit is working in the radical left to fulfill that goal. A great evil spirit is leading these people to accelerate this nation’s death! People are surrendering to hateful, evil thinking. They think they are embracing socialism and communism—but in fact, they are aligning with satanic will!

If you want to prove this more deeply, we will gladly send you a free copy of my booklet America Under Attack. This will help you recognize the dangerous direction this nation is heading.

God doesn’t want people to suffer through the calamities that are coming. Those individuals who respond and heed God’s warning, He will protect. And we must all see that these calamities are prophesied to occur in the very last days of America’s existence as a strong world power—which is actually right before the Messiah comes to this Earth to rule it!