There will be no announcement.
No siren. No warning label on the content you are consuming. No moment where something inside you rises up and says pay attention, something is being taken from you right now. The enemy has never worked that way and he is not going to start. He is far too skilled at his craft to announce himself before he has finished what he came to do.
Jesus knew this. Which is why the very first thing He says when His disciples ask Him about the end times in Matthew 24 is not a description of catastrophic events. It is a warning about deception.
“See that no one leads you astray.”
Before the wars. Before the famines. Before the cosmic signs. The first and most urgent concern is this. People are going to be misled, and most of them will not realize it is happening until it is already done.
That warning was not only for a generation two thousand years away. It is for anyone sitting in front of a screen right now.
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The Movie That Showed The Enemies Hand
I was in a theater recently watching a film called “Disclosure Day”. The premise centers on alien contact, government cover-ups, and the slow public awakening to the existence of extraterrestrial life. As a piece of filmmaking it is competent. As a piece of spiritual architecture it is one of the most deliberate things I have seen in years.
As I watched, something started to clarify that I could not unsee once I saw it. The aliens in this film are not presented as threats. They are presented as wounded. As misunderstood. As an ancient, advanced intelligence that has been trying to help humanity for centuries, kept away from us by corrupt government agencies who feared what their presence would mean for existing power structures. The film’s emotional current runs entirely on sympathy for these beings. By the third act you are meant to feel that humanity has been the aggressor and these visitors have been the victims.
And I watched the audience around me receiving it.
Here is what I want you to understand. I am not here to debate the existence of extraterrestrial life. What I am here to say is that I recognized the shape of the argument being made inside that film because it is the oldest argument in Scripture. A higher intelligence approaches humanity and says: the ones in authority over you have been keeping something from you. Ancient wisdom. Hidden knowledge. A truth that will elevate you beyond what you currently are. All you have to do is open yourself to receive it.
That is not a science fiction premise. That is Genesis 3.
The Snake Has Always Been the Protagonist of His Own Story
A thief does not introduce himself as a thief. He introduces himself as a friend, as a liberator, as someone who has your best interests at heart and has been waiting for the right moment to share something with you that will change your life. He positions the one who set the boundary as the real villain. He makes the restriction feel like oppression and the transgression feel like freedom.
'Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” ' - Genesis 3:1 ESV
This is not a new strategy. It is the only strategy the enemy has ever used because it is the one that works.
Matthew 24:24 is specific in a way that should make every believer sit up straight.
“For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”
Signs and wonders. Not obvious frauds. Not transparently evil presentations that any discerning person could identify immediately. Genuine signs. Real wonders. Experiences compelling enough that even people who know better are at risk of being pulled in.
And verse 11 adds something we need to sit with. “Many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.” Nobody said a false prophet has to stand behind a pulpit. A false prophet is anyone or anything that speaks into your life with spiritual authority and points you away from the truth of God. That can be a preacher. It can also be a filmmaker. A musician. A cultural moment carefully constructed to make you feel that a particular door, one God has told you not to walk through, is actually the most enlightened choice available to you.
The Grooming of a Generation
Hollywood has been doing this work for decades and it has been patient about it. The normalization of occult themes, the sympathetic portrayal of dark spiritual forces, the steady cultural rehabilitation of entities that Scripture identifies as fallen, none of this arrived suddenly. It came gradually, incrementally, wrapped in entertainment and aesthetics and the social pressure of not wanting to seem unsophisticated or fearful.
The beings I believe are behind this cultural current are not new either. Scripture calls them the Watchers... Fallen angels whose history is more ancient and more specific than most church curricula ever address. Their goal has never changed. It is not your body. It is not your comfort. It is not your political allegiance or your socioeconomic position. It is your soul and your separation from the God who made you. The prince of darkness will not make himself known to you as darkness. He will come, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 11:14, as an angel of light. That is not a metaphor for subtle evil. It is a description of a being capable of presenting himself as something genuinely luminous, genuinely compelling, genuinely worth following.
The Flood Came While They Were at Dinner
Matthew 24:38-39 contains what I believe is the most sobering image Jesus ever painted of the end times. Not the wars. Not the signs in the sky. This…
“For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away.”
They were unaware.
Not because the signs were absent. Not because Noah had not been building something enormous in plain sight for decades. But because the ordinary rhythms of daily life, the eating and drinking, the weddings and the celebrations, had lullabied them into a state where the urgent had been crowded out entirely by the immediate.
There is a war going on that has nothing to do with geopolitics or social movements or the economy. It is a war for your soul and it is being conducted through the most ordinary channels of your daily life. The content on your screen. The music in your ears. The cultural current you swim in without noticing you are being moved by it.
Nobody will shout to tell you that you are under attack. Most people will never realize the prison they walked into until it is far too late to identify the door they came through.
Pay attention to what is entering through your eyes. Not with paranoia. With discernment. There is a difference between the two and that difference may be the most important skill a believer can develop in the days we are living in.
Stay tuned. We are just getting started. The Watchers are next.
Next Monday we go deeper into who the Watchers actually are, where they came from, and why most of the church has never heard of them. Do not miss it. Forward this to someone who needs to read it today.
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