The dream about angels I (again, Donna Howell) had wasn’t the first time the Lord has rattled me lately. Another moment was equally radical, but it happened so fast—and while I was wide awake. It was unlike anything I had previously experienced, and it couldn’t be chalked up to a dream or any kind of “imaginings” because of the speed at which it occurred and the multiple tiers of revelation it immediately brought.
It was about 7 o’clock in the evening. My husband, James, was talking about mowing the lawn. I was engaged in the conversation, which, for my part, involved trying to figure out who was going to watch the kids during work hours the next day so James could tend to our too-tall grass.
Without any warning whatsoever, from nowhere at all, absolutely right in the middle of a sentence about grass and childcare, my mind’s eye was taken to the floor of a dark, murky, underwater place. Some kind of arm—I’m not sure if it was biological or mechanical—reached out and swept away a giant layer of mud from the surface of an enormous, transparent container. Within it, the face of a being was looking off to the left, eyes wide open and alert. The instant the muck was brushed aside, the being inside the container sensed the movement and snapped its attention forward, focusing its intense gaze upon me.
“…kids will be at the babysitters for a couple hours,” my voice trailed back in.
“You okay?” James asked.
I nodded, and the conversation went on. I decided at that moment to keep to myself what had happened, because my “sensible” and “logical” side said I had in some way allowed my mind to wander, and that’s all it was.
But that wasn’t all it was.
I saw that face for what can only be described as a fraction of a second…but I will never forget it. For days, it haunted me. And, before my sentence to James about a babysitter even had a chance to end, there were, just like the angel dream, “layers” of meaning. Unlike the angel dream, the layers were unpacked within my understanding all at once, in that very instant. It was like my psyche had been involved in a file download, multitasking conversations about lawns and babysitters while the download carried on in the background, then the file opened in a pop-up window that showed me multiple angles of theological significance.
It—and I want to say “she,” based on the gentility of the facial features—was immensely beautiful. She radiated something behind her bluish skin that trumps the glow enhanced by any beauty product our terrestrial scientists have ever created. Her eyes were such a vision that the English language denies a sufficient description: something like a flame to a moth, having the ability to draw in with a single look. She didn’t have hair, but she wasn’t bald, either; from her forehead back, a sort of skin-covered crown grew up from her skull, surrounded by what appeared to be two or three wavy, kelp-like hair tendrils. If I hadn’t known any better, and this entity were to approach me on land—if I wasn’t Donna Howell who knows Jesus as her personal Savior with the discernment and wisdom God gives His people through the Word—I would easily have worshiped it. Others who do not have spiritual discernment certainly would have as well. That is how commanding a single look was.
But there was something else.
In the eye contact, for the fraction of a second we held it, there was a vengeance…a thirst for blood. If there hadn’t been unbreakable material between me and the being, it would have taken me down. And it had been ready for such a feast for ages. Nothing about it was sleepy. It didn’t need to be awakened or stirred. This thing had been alive, awake, and alert for thousands of years, just waiting for the layers of muck to be removed and herald the dawn of its release. When it turned its eyes on me, the evil, supercharged retaliation of its imprisonment was evident in its piercing stare. It hated God and anyone who followed Him.
In an instant, when my thoughts cracked back into reality, I knew things about this being that I don’t know how I knew. I have since explained it as “layers of knowing.” Words can’t express the “download” of information into my thoughts, but the moment I saw the being in the water, I just inherently recognized that it was an angel bound at the bottom of the Euphrates (Revelation 9:14).
Since seeing “her” for the first time and reflecting on what I actually saw that day, it has occurred to me that she looks like she could easily be a female attendant of Dagon’s retinue, at least based on our cultural association to him as the god over the fish-people. With that in mind, she could have been Dagon, himself, in a form that we would recognize to be female, as those old-world gods are frequently known to appear as either male or female. Dagon was the prized Canaanite deity of Nineveh, the city to which God sent Jonah with a warning for its people as recorded in the book of the same name. The possible association between the entity I saw and the city God threatened to destroy in forty days if they didn’t repent is not lost on me. Far more astounding, however, is Derek Gilbert’s explanation that Dagon was the “chief god of the Amorite kingdoms in the middle-Euphrates region”![i] (Though, Derek went on to explain, Dagon wasn’t actually the fish-god, as erroneously represented in history books.) Further, according to some Ugaritic temple remains, he was, at times, acknowledged as the father of Baal![ii]
But whoever I saw—no, whatever I saw—it was a vile, corrupt, beastly evil just waiting to rise out of the sea and wreak havoc on land in apocalyptic proportions.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEOS
“THE LIES OF MEN AND GODS–EPISODE 2”: What’s Behind Flying Seraphim, Reptilians, And Portals Opening Above Mountains
“THE LIES OF MEN AND GODS–EPISODE 1”: The Vatican, Aliens, and Government Elites. Is It All a Coincidence?
As with the later angel dream, Allie was the first person I told. After I recounted the details to her, she said, “It sounds like something very evil is about to be unleashed upon the earth.”
Then, in a phone call I had with SkyWatch colleague Wes Faull later that day, in which I shared with him what I had seen, he responded with the same exact words as Allie: “It sounds like something very evil is about to be unleashed upon the earth.”
“For God speaketh once, yea twice…in a dream, in a vision…”
I had, in my own thoughts, been reminded of the title of that old novel by Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, about a malevolent carnival that arrives overnight in a small town, enticing and then trapping its victims with its evil rides and attractions. Allie had essentially responded with her own “something wicked this way comes” sentiment, followed by Wes Faull. Many since have done likewise.
The dream that Allie shared relayed a sense of warning regarding society’s willingness to follow authority figures without discernment. Those within the Church assume that when the great day of evil is upon us, they will rise to the occasion and defend truth, recognize wickedness, and take a stand against the enemy. However, my dream reflects that the Church will be misled in that terrible day.
My vision of this entity at the bottom of the Euphrates illustrates that this “terrible day” might already be unleashed upon the earth. Both culture and the Church have a great deception coming. Only the Remnant will have eyes to see and ears to hear (Matthew 13:16–17).
So I come around to where Allie began: Are you awake?
The Cult of Western Christianity
Wow… What a provocative, inflammatory title for such an early chapter of our book. What could we possibly be thinking? How could we—full-time authors and researchers dedicated to serving in a conservative Christian ministry—dare suggest that Christianity would in any way resemble a cult?
Right off the bat: A cult is “a system of religious beliefs and ritual;…a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also: its body of adherents.”[iii] This is precisely what the Western Church has become, as we will endeavor to reveal throughout the following pages.
Before we dive in to begin our comparison of the cult to concerning trends in Western Christianity, we should take a brief moment to consider what it is we are actually comparing the Church to. Although our ultimate point of comparison will be to look at the word “cult” as it is defined by biblical values, if we want to proceed without confusion this early on, we need to dissociate from some popular thinking.
When we hear the word “cult,” mental imagery that floods the mind tends to be a messy conglomeration of Manson Family members slaying pregnant Sharon Tate in the name of Helter Skelter; women and children trapped in burning buildings in Waco, Texas; or thirty-nine lifeless bodies, wearing brand-new Nike Decades tennis shoes, lying on cots in a posthumous journey behind the comet Hale-Bopp. Perhaps the memories aren’t as local, and we think of almost a thousand bodies lying dead from drinking what many later thought to be poisoned Kool-Aid (it was Flavor Aid, in actuality) in Guyana, or the thirteen deaths and fifty-eight hundred injuries from a toxic nerve gas release on a Tokyo train line. Or, in an age when shocking shifts are rapidly taking place in the practices of human sex-trafficking and pedophilia, maybe what flashes through our heads is David Berg’s blasphemous, objectifying, sexually explicit, and pedophilic artwork of The Children of God comic books…
Such concepts related to the word “cult” would understandably lead readers of this book to recoil against our assertion that Western Christianity “looks like” these examples. One might naturally offer the rebuttal: “No, our Sunday-morning gatherings do not lead to bloody crime scenes, gassed subway lines, poisoned drinks, or anything of the sort. We don’t resemble that at all! How can you even dare to make that comparison?” In response to this and similar potential statements, questions, or retorts, we’ll remind our readers of an ominous truth:
The Apostate Superchurch of the End Times will be the grandest, bloodiest cult in world history, and the “Christian Church” will be a huge part of it!
The beginning of every deviant cult looks polished, safe, doctrinally reasonable, and wholesome to its members, just as the Western Church appears to many today. A vast number of cult cases from English-speaking areas of the world started as Christian ministries based on Christ-centered doctrine, but they slowly drifted farther and farther off-track over time, usually because some manipulative leader is in it for his or her own wicked, narcissistic gain. If the enemy can do the same thing with the Christian Church across the globe, he can effectively set the stage for Antichrist to show up and assume leadership over a perverse Christianity, just as the Bible says he will do!
Based on what’s described in apocalyptic Scripture, the Christian Church during the End Times will be split into two groups:
- The Apostate Superchurch, which will be found guilty of twisting the Word of God with counterfeit scriptural interpretation that amounts to the ultimate blasphemy. This cult will remain out in the open and legal under the religio-political reign of the Man of Sin, and in order to appeal to everyone alive on the earth at the time, it will be a global super-religion combining key aspects of all faiths into one—including Christianity. Drs. George W. Westlake and David D. Duncan, in their college textbook Daniel and Revelation, acknowledge this, describing Antichrist’s Church of the End Times as “many, many faiths and religions the superchurch has blended together to achieve [the] world unity”[iv] necessary for him to be established as a worldwide leader, capable of making social and political decisions that complement every background, culture, and conviction.
- The Remnant Church, made up of Christian disciples who are well-versed enough in the Bible to recognize Antichrist as the imitation he is. This group will be persecuted and driven underground or into hiding, and many of its members will be mercilessly executed.
The number of deaths resulting from Antichrist’s rule while he is in leadership of the idolatrous Apostate Superchurch is literally going to be a worldwide, cultic massacre—a bloodbath unlike anything planet earth has ever witnessed on its own soil. Antichrist will demand global compliance with his religion, and anyone who refuses to submit to this Satan-in-the-flesh will be put to death (Revelation 13:7–8, 15).
Remember a few paragraphs ago, when it seemed nothing less than irrational to compare the Church to a “cult” like the Manson Family, David Koresh and his followers in Waco, Texas, or the Peoples’ Temple movement in Jonestown, Guyana?
Yeah… It is going to be much, much worse.
And right now, the institutional, public churches across the Western world are readying the stage for the Man of Sin to walk right in and take over, fooling folks of all religions, including Christianity and Judaism. The only way this wouldn’t happen is if Christians lived like Christians ought…but they don’t.
UP NEXT: The “Apostate Superchurch” Cult of Antichrist
[i] Gilbert, Derek, in a text exchange November 24, 2020.
[ii] Favara, A., “Dagon,” in J. D. Barry, D. Bomar, D. R. Brown, R. Klippenstein, D. Mangum, C. Sinclair Wolcott, … W. Widder (Eds.), The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press; 2016).
[iii] “Cult,” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc.; Kindle ed., 2014), locations 111635–111637.
[iv] Westlake, George W. and David D. Duncan, Daniel and Revelation: An Independent-Study Textbook (Springfield, MO: Global University; 2013; 4th Ed.), 227.
Category: Featured, Featured Articles
