The Irreconcilable Conflict
An ancient controversy between light and darkness is escalating so that evil will reveal itself in the world
After I wrote my last Substack post, The Inevitable Demise of Tyranny, in which I mentioned that many people are questioning how such evil can be happening in the world, how these psychopaths are able to get away with so much for so long, I continued to reflect on these topics.
At some point last weekend, someone put a book with some pamphlets on my doorstep. I almost threw it away as unwanted solicitation, but something told me to pull the book out of the plastic bag and open to the table of contents.
I realized it was a book from the SDA church, The Great Controversy: From Conflict to Peace, by Ellen G. White. While I don’t subscribe to this religion or any organized religions as I prefer to have a direct, living, intimate relationship with God, I also know the importance of recognizing important spiritual messages when they show up through diverse messengers.
My eyes immediately went to the chapter called, The Origen of Evil. Sometimes Divine messages literally arrive at the doorstep!
I flipped quickly to the chapter and read the first paragraph:
To many minds the origin of sin and the reason for its existence are a source of great perplexity. They see the work of evil, with its terrible results of woe and desolation, and they question how all this can exist under the sovereignty of One who is infinite in wisdom, in power, and in love. Here is a mystery of which they find no explanation. And in their uncertainty and doubt they are blinded to truths plainly revealed in God’s Word and essential to salvation.
In reverence of this moment of Divine Providence, I sat down with the book and a pen to dive into this chapter that was speaking to the questions of my own heart and mind.
The author writes that the definition of sin is given in the Word of God as “the transgression of the law” and “a principle at war with the great law of love which is the foundation of the divine government”.
The law of love being the foundation of the government of God, the happiness of all created beings depended upon their accord with its great principles of righteousness. God desires from all His creatures the service of love… He takes no pleasure in a forced allegiance, and to all He grants freedom of will, that they may render Him voluntary service.
But there was one that chose to pervert his freedom. Sin originated with him.
White goes on to describe the perverted desire for self-exaltation, Satan’s endeavor to win people’s service and homage to himself through deception.
The service and exaltation of self, contrary to the Creator’s plan, awakened forebodings of evil in minds to whom God’s glory was supreme.
(Satan) claimed that in aspiring to greater power and honor he was not aiming at self-exaltation, but was seeking to secure liberty for all the inhabitants of heaven, that by this means they might attain to a higher state of existence.
All the powers of his master mind were now bent to the work of deception.
The very work which he himself was doing, he charged upon those who remained true to God.
This is exactly how psychopaths work in interpersonal relationships and groups.
They’re only serving themselves, yet they claim everything they do is for their target, that they only want to help and protect. They are master deceivers.
If the target questions or brings up the abusive and deceptive behavior, they will flip it around and confuse the target. Sometimes they will even accuse the target of doing the very things that the psychopaths themselves are doing but pretending not to be doing.
White describes why God permitted Satan to carry out this deceptive work:
It was necessary for his plans to be fully developed, that their true nature and tendency might be seen by all.
… his (Satan’s) influence over them (the heavenly beings) was strong.
He had artfully presented his side of the question, employing sophistry and fraud to secure his objects. His power to deceive was very great, and by disguising himself in a cloak of falsehood, he had gained an advantage. Even the loyal angels could not fully discern his character or see to what his work was leading.
… it was difficult to disclose to the angels the true nature of his work. Until fully developed, sin would not appear the evil thing it was.
Holy cannoli, let’s stop for a moment to allow that to land. Is this not exactly what’s happening in the world on a massive scale now?
It’s so hard to expose deceit because the nature of deception means that someone is confused into believe something that’s not true.
The more sophisticated their art of deception is, the more difficult it is to point it out to others who are under the influence of the trance. They don’t want to hear the warnings or see the truth, even if they do know deep down that something is off.
The deceivers gain a fraudulent advantage and control over others by pretending to be something they’re not, by misrepresenting their true intentions. This is why they’re so evil. Many people are unable to see through these falsehoods when they’re performed so skillfully.
These appear to be the plans and actions of evil humans, and it may even seem that they must be brilliant to carry out such a work of deception at this global level. But actually they aren’t even that smart. They’re just copying the classic tactics of the Evil One. This is why it seems They’re All Following the Same Playbook around the world.
Some of us are wondering when is enough going to be enough with all the falsehoods and deception taking place in our countries and abroad. Then I read how White explains that it’s hard to point out evil to those who can’t see it when it’s not fully developed.
It takes time for evil to be fully revealed.
She expands on this topic:
Satan had made it appear that he himself was seeking to promote the good of the universe.
The true character of the usurper, and his real object, must be understood by all. He must have time to manifest himself by his wicked works.
The whole universe must see the deceiver unmasked.
Evil must be permitted to come to maturity.
Meanwhile on Planet Earth, the deceivers tell us that their control measures and plans for further digital slavery is all for the public good and security.
And speaking of usurpers, many people still believe the basement dweller isn’t a usurper but rather the rightful occupant of the White House, who, for some reason addressees the press and public from a stage in another location, where fake windows with screens reveal out of season footage of the gardens. Our Commander in Chief posts on Twitter about the military options he was given to launch warfare tactics at another country because that’s totally normal to announce ahead of time.
Thousands of pages from Pfizer released by the FDA (yes, the documents the corporation tried to keep hidden for the next 75 years) are showing that they knew they were killing and harming people within the first few months of this mass medical experiment, yet still they continued to double down on the slogan, safe and effective. And despite all of this truth out in the open for all to see, they’re still pushing to inject children with this poison. Worse yet, children are already getting injected and some states are trying to lower the age of consent, while encouraging kids to take the drugs without their parents’ consent.
Young athletes and famous people of all ages are suddenly dying all over the world in the recent months. Other athletes in the peak of their physical shape are dropping out due to sudden onset health issues, often related to the heart. What is the one thing all these people have in common?
We are also starting to see warnings of skyrocketing death rates. Several months ago, an Indiana life insurance CEO said there was 40% increase in deaths among working people aged 18-65. Recently, Todd Callender, an attorney specializing in disabled rights and mortality risks informed us that a leaked military database shows that there was a 1100% increase in deaths among military aged 18-40 in 10 months during 2021.
DuckDuckGo blocked a video search I did to find that interview, calling it “safe search”:
Dr. Lee Merritt, a US Navy surgeon said through 2020 there were only 20 deaths among all active duty military personnel related to COVID. “With the vaccine program we’ve ostensibly killed more of our young active duty people than COVID did.”
Yet none of this seems abnormal to many people, even at at this stage of things.
“He must have time to manifest himself by his wicked works.” (The Great Controversy, Ellen G. White)
With many people still not understanding the nature of the increasing deceptive acts taking place around the world, it seems that evil has not yet come to maturity. Apparently it needs more time to reveal itself through increasingly more wicked acts.
We are being permitted to watch this ancient story unfold, in real time, on the global stage.
We are being shown the consequences of turning away from Divine Law. While we have seen the mask cracking under the pressure of the truth, we still have not yet seen the full reveal.
We are certainly living in a time of exposure, a revelation of all things.
Those who are promising freedom through a transgression of Divine Law are inducing others to sin in order to satisfy their distorted desires.
White describes Satan’s transgressions against God’s law:
Satan leads men to justify themselves and to seek the sympathy of others in their course of sin.
He had claimed that the transgression of God’s law would bring liberty and exaltation; but it was seen to result in bondage and degradation.
Are we not witnessing the results of two plus years of bondage and degradation around the world, all the while disguised as for the public good and so we can get our freedoms back?
As White describes, in the Great Controversy between dark and light, it was hard for the heavenly beings to see the deception in Satan’s tactics and words. There was no way of showing them the truth without letting the evil increase and mature into its full expression so all could see.
In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, through his pilgrimage to understand the nature of the human soul and the cosmic order, Dante expresses that God’s greatest gift to humans is liberty.
Liberty is a helpful filter when evaluating what is good vs. what is evil.
Liberty and control are two opposing values. Liberty leads to sovereignty. Control leads to slavery. Liberty allows for free will and control imposes compliance with someone else’s will.
Is the person, group, situation or philosophy based on liberty or control?
We ought to look deeper than the words being used, as the deceivers have mastered skillful manipulation with language.
Some of the people calling for “democracy and freedom” are pushing compliance with a dangerous medical experiment. They insist that everyone around the world must take it “so we can all get back to normal”.
They don’t care that so many people are dying from the experimental drugs. They don’t care that people are left with horrible life-altering injuries either. They just want you to comply. When they call you selfish for not bending your free will to their demands that you take these drugs, you have uncovered an act of evil.
Liberty and control are incompatible values.
When we hear that we must all unite as one, this too sounds nice, but it’s an empty platitude. Discernment is necessary lest you find yourself in harm’s way, uniting with evil and participating in something that brings your own demise.
Uniting with psychopaths is dangerous because they want to destroy you.
Uniting with their enablers is also precarious because they will turn on you, doing the bidding of the psychopaths.
Uniting with people who manipulate language to disguise the nature of their actions, will led to deception.
Uniting with people whose values are opposing yours, will lead to betrayal.
Uniting with people who don’t take responsibility for their actions, will lead to inevitable harm and pain.
Light and darkness do not unite, for they have an irreconcilable conflict.
We see this conflict in the world and also in the individual human soul. We can either choose an act of love or an act of evil, but not both at the same time.
When the Pope says that taking the harmful, experimental injections is “an act of love”, what kind of disordered love is he speaking of?
Dante’s journey through Inferno was one of necessity, so he could discover the nature of his disordered desires.
He described his spirit, “bruised by cowardice, which many a time so weighs a man’s heart down”. Having wandered from what was true and straight, Dante found himself lost in the darkness, racing toward death while still alive.
Many of us found ourselves in a similar place as Dante in 2020, when all this began.
As Dante descended down the levels of Inferno with his guide, he observed how sin deforms what was once beautiful. He also realized that sin distorts one’s perception of what’s real and false.
Through this journey, Dante discovers what is true liberation. He learns to re-order his desires and discover true love of God. He chooses this of his own free will upon growing and developing deeper self-awareness.
Eventually Dante makes his way up Mount Purgatorio and then into the spheres of Paradiso. There he writes that the essence of heavenly bliss is dwelling in the Divine Will, “In His will is our peace.”
Dante also expresses in Paradiso that a vow given freely is a sacred act. God does not force us to align with His will. He gives us the free will to make that choice.
This is related to the sacred act of voluntarism.
Interestingly when I looked up the definition of the world voluntarism to be sure I was using the correct term, I found this astounding example regarding the “forceful model” of requiring federal employees to take the experimental drugs:
Adopting the forceful model… Sometimes, the deceivers tell us exactly what they’re doing. Of course they still cloak it in manipulative language to confuse people. I copied that text to find the original article, and discovered that the very next paragraph reads:
Like other vaccine mandates that the nation has been using for over a century, individuals are free to make their own choice -- but if they want to learn or work in certain institutions, then they need to take the necessary steps to reduce the risk they could pose to others in transmitting a deadly disease.
Individuals are free to make their own choice.
We are going to force you, but it’s your choice. This is the kind of Cognitive Dissonance language that scrambles brains.
Many deceptive snakes will tell us that we must follow their will yet they will cloak their motives with pretty language that mimics the truth but covers the lie.
They aim to extract our trust in order to tempt us into sin and lead us astray from our Creator. They are adept at using language that speaks to our greatest desires. Kaa illustrates this perfectly in this 3-minute clip from the Jungle Book as he aims to speak to Mogilby’s desire.
You can hear this play upon your desires trick straight from the horse’s mouth in this clip from the series, Lucifer. They created his character to be likable and helpful, which is another layer of deception from the Prince of Darkness.
When we as individuals align our personal will with Divine Will, we feel a sense of peace, even in the midst of a storm.
When we are in moments of turmoil, both individually and collectively in the world, this is usually a sign that we have strayed from Divine Will. We have indulged in some variation of disordered love.
Dante writes:
The soul’s love strays if it desires what’s wrong (wrath, envy, pride), or loves with too much strength (avarice, gluttony, lust), or not enough (sloth).
Dante emphasizes that we are not to get rid of desire, instead we are to purify it. We need desire in order to know ourselves, to know God and to choose what is good and right.
When we get our desires in order, we liberate ourselves from being our worst enemy.
Evil needs to deceive us, to confuse us that good is bad and bad is good, in order to get our participation in sin. It calls liberty control and control liberty. It distorts our perception of what is true and false by enticing us into transgressions against our own soul.
One of the purposes of Dante’s poem was to look up and gaze. Dante wrote,“No one can gaze upon the world without a taste of Him”.
As we look at what’s happening in the world, it appears to be God’s Will, allowing evil to reveal itself so all can see and understand.
We suffer when we don’t understand why awful things are happening, why such evil people are ruling, deceiving and coercing people to sacrifice themselves, and when we feel like there’s nothing we can do about it.
With no end to the tyranny in sight, evil continually escalating, and most things completely out of our personal control, I think it’s really important to guard one’s mind against the intrusive thoughts that can cause a loss of the hope and faith that eventually something good will come of this.
On the other hand, I also know that it’s important not to indulge in toxic hope, where we keep investing hope in a potential future with an abusive or manipulative person that we hope will change and treat us correctly, but the person isn’t changing. The same toxic hope could apply to the old systems and structures of our world that are now clearly falling apart. When we want to see something other than what really is, and when we hold onto that fantasy or illusion, it will inevitably lead to suffering because, sooner or later, the reckoning with the truth will come.
The tyranny won’t collapse until it has fully revealed itself.
Meanwhile, we have the opportunity to restore our relationship with self and with God.
I think God is always speaking to us through synchronicity. The intense emotional experiences of fear, anxiety and especially loss, when we are cut deep with pain, somehow open the door to a heightened awareness of connection with the Divine.
In the moments of emotional intensity, we have the spontaneous invitation to become more present. In a state of presence, the meaningless distractions that consume our attention fade away and the meaningful becomes magnified. We might notice what we didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, before.
I feel like this is also the gift that is being offered to us all now through the chaos and tribulations, through this Great Controversy taking place in the world. Perhaps it’s all a calling back to God. This return to the Divine involves a journey of personal purification along the way.
Evil resides in the heart of man through selfishness and man is willing to serve and exalt himself. Every sin begins in a man's heart, and his character, way of speaking and acting reflect his heart. The man can only pretend to be different from his heart for a short time, as he quickly regains control and dictates his actions. People know the heart of man by his words, actions and choices.
This is a wonderful piece Meredith, thank you for writing it. You have such great insight--it helps me make connections and see patterns. I love how you wove The Divine Comedy into the narrative. Telling thru story is especially powerful.