“Every day that I was with you in the temple, you did not lay a hand on Me; but this is your hour, and the power of the darkness” (Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verse 53).

The text above is the verse that I am most concerned with in this little article. But, to see the context I would recommend that you read the verses which lead up to it. For those who have no access to a Bible, I am reproducing those verses here. They record some of what happened when the authorities and Judas Iscariot confronted Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane:

“While He was still speaking, a crowd arrived, led by the man called Judas, one of the Twelve. He approached Jesus to kiss Him. But Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” Those around Jesus saw what was about to happen and said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear. But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And He touched the man’s ear and healed him. Then Jesus said to the chief priests, temple officers, and elders who had come for Him, “Have you come out with swords and clubs as you would against an outlaw? Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on Me. But this is your hour and the power of the darkness. Then they seized Jesus, led Him away, and took Him into the house of the high priest”.

(Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verses 47-54

Of all the sacred texts, this verse is surely one of the most tremendously encouraging. On a superficial reading you may think this teaches exactly the opposite and you want to say how ‘negative’ it is to speak about darkness as having any power. Or maybe you think it implies that darkness and light are like two equal and opposite dualistic forces battling it out in this world. But if you read it in its context with the eyes of faith, and understand its true meaning, you will see how it really shows that God is in control of absolutely everything — even (especially) the most seemingly outrageously evil things. This text actually shows that nobody ever outwits God. So let’s go into it…

The Illusion of Autonomy Amongst Untransformed People

History has been full of puffed-up narcissists imagining that they are acting autonomously in this world by getting their dastardly work done. They always think they are in control of everything, including the narrative they have created. But this is an illusion on their part. They are not free people but pawns in a theatre which is beyond their understanding. One automatically becomes a pawn of God when one raises oneself up against Him. This is what these foolish people will never understand. All the big contemporary political players, the presidents and prime ministers, the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Rothschilds, the Gates’s, the Faucis, the Kissingers, the Schwabs, the whoevers — they are all just pawns in God’s theatre of creation. You do not need to be concerned about their crazy plans for the world. They may well come to fruition but they will not last for long. They all think they are autonomous. But all they are doing is bringing God’s plans to fruition, despite the  inherent darkness of the perpetrators. Now here is the truth: God just “sits in the heavens, laughs, and scoffs at them” (Psalm 2, verse 4). All the conspiracy people (bless their cotton socks), when they are not rabbiting on obsessively about chemtrails and 5G, are running around like headless chickens going on about how Schwab says this, Gates thinks this, Soros does that, etc. Those names are just patsies imagining that they run this world but all that has happened is that they are being permitted to be pawns in the run-up to the judgement on this world. No need to get your knickers in a twist about them. They can never do more than they are permitted by the true Power who overrules them, uses them and will eventually judge them. Always bear in mind that there is only one real conspiracy: The conspiracy to prevent people from realising who the Christ really is! All other conspiracies are subordinate to that one overarching conspiracy.

One needs to be very clear about all this. All the pathetic world players that you see in the news are nothing more than patsies and pawns in a process which will be their downfall. They are the architects of their own demise, empowered and energized by Satan but used by God. Everything they do is merely through permission from the Divine. If that was not the case, then God would not be God! Even in normal circumstances, all these world players are allowed to do their thing but nevertheless are always under some kind of Divine restraint. There are just two occasions in the history of this age when they are allowed to do their thing but with all Divine restraints deliberately removed. The first of these is in our text, when all the powers of darkness, both human and demonic, were allowed to rain down their evil on the Christ, as I will elucidate below.

When All Restraint of Evil was Deliberately Removed (#1)

Christ was born into this world so that He could be treated as the scum of the earth who was betrayed by all and who even one of His closest disciples would deny. His humiliation had to be complete: Spending a night in a Roman garrison with those rough, decadent soldiers doing whatever they wanted to Him. He was beaten to a pulp, He had his beard ripped out (Book of Isaiah, chapter 50, verse 6), and surely other considerably more unspeakable things must have happened (use your imagination). He was crucified on a stinking rubbish dump and utterly forsaken — for out of that humiliation would come the pinnacle of redemption (for that is the nature of the spiritual paradox), as I will show below. He was God, yet, in some extraordinary manner, He set aside all the power of that ‘Godness’ — emptied Himself of it — in order to perform the task which He came here to do. Thus, Christ,

“existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be held onto, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross”.

Letter to the Philippians, chapter 2, verses 6-8

Theologians can argue about the minutiae of those amazing words if they are so inclined (which, of course, they are!). I will just leave them to it. I do not have any time for pedantry. But it is pretty obvious what those words mean. Yet people get so worried about using a ‘religiously incorrect’ word or two, or displeasing their pastors, that they dare not state the obvious. There is much mystery here. Leave it at that! I have no idea how it was even possible for God to be manifested in human flesh. That in itself is a puzzle enough. But His becoming a man did not undo His ‘Godness’. Do not ask me how; but it obviously didn’t. I don’t need some inadequate formula to state that. I just accept the mystery for the mystery that it is.

It is similar to what was being revealed in a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah concerning the treatment of Christ: “Just as many were appalled at Him—His appearance was disfigured beyond that of any man, and His form was marred beyond human likeness” (Book of Isaiah, chapter 52, verse 14). Now, you might say, “How is that possible with God?” I can only answer, “Because Jesus really was human”. Occasionally, an inkling of the fullness of His ‘Godness’ would suddenly be revealed, stunning or offending everyone around Him when it happened. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 8, verses 26-27, where He quieted the wind and the waves; or another example in the Gospel of John, chapter 18, verse 6, where, when He said, “I am He”, to those who came to arrest Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, it is said that “they drew back and fell to the ground”. That is Divine power! Nevertheless, He set aside all the fullness of the power of His ‘Godness’ when He walked the earth as a man, so that ultimately He could be humiliated and increasingly assailed by the forces of darkness as His crucifixion loomed — all for an extraordinary purpose, as we will see below. [There is a remarkable contrast in play here. For Christ set aside the fullness of the power of His ‘Godness’ to make Himself into a servant. Yet, Satan, who was created as a servant (Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 14), made himself out to be God, attempting to usurp God’s power. There is a strange and wonderful beauty in that contrast which must surely be deliberate on God’s part].

When Christ said in the Garden of Gethsemane to the authorities who came to arrest Him (and ipso facto to the demonic discarnate entities who lay behind their dastardly actions), “This is your hour and the power of the darkness” (Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verse 53), those mass forces of darkness were already beginning to assail Him in every way possible. Also, in the Garden of Gethsemane, a short time before saying those words to those arresting Him, it is noted in the Gospel of Luke that, “having been in agony, He [Christ] prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verse 44). That was evidence of those massed forces of darkness already assailing Him before He had even reached His mock trial or the horrors of the cross. You can see clearly here how the fullness of the power of His ‘Godness’ had been set aside in order for Him to have been able to be “in agony”. Truly, as the text in Philippians says, He had “emptied Himself” of the fullness of the power of His ‘Godness’.

Those evil powers, both human and discarnate, concentrated their venom on that one innocent man, who even the Roman state had declared to be innocent of the charges (Gospel of Luke, chapter 23, verses 13-15). On Him, all the darkness of this fallen world in an evil age — human and discarnate — would amalgamate and congeal into an inconceivable mass of evil and force of destruction focused solely on that one innocent Man, under the permitting hand of His Father. No mere human can understand the full extent of that assailment and no mere man could withstand it but would have been physically and spiritually destroyed. That is why only He could accomplish the task — God taking on human flesh — the uniqueness of which can be seen in the seven-sealed scroll able to be opened by Christ in the first five verses of chapter 5 of the Book of Revelation.

So, for a time, Christ (from a human standpoint) was utterly crushed by forces of darkness, the might of which cannot even be conceived by a mere human mind. Readers need to understand that the sheer malevolence, ferocity and ruthless barbarity of Satan and his demonic realm has no parallel even in brute human terms. No matter how many horror movies you watch, you cannot even begin to grasp the horrific nature of what the Christ went through towards the end of His life at the tender age of thirty-three years.

What Satan can do to a human soul in extremis is beyond human imaginings. If you want an image of one tiny part of the sort of suffering which the demonic realm can inflict, when the fifth trumpet is said to sound in chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation, the resulting demonic infestation is so horrific in its spiritual and psychological torment of humans that it is said, “In those days people will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, but death will escape them” (Book of Revelation, chapter 9, verses 1-6). Try to imagine that multiplied an infernal amount in the attack on Christ before and on the cross itself. Bear in mind the glorious irony that the more suffering they inflicted on Christ, the more they were contributing to their own destruction and the salvation of the cosmos — not to mention the massive deception that was pulled on Satan, who was made a laughing stock through that (Letter to the Colossians, chapter 2, verses 14-15)!

This is what the Father had prepared for the Christ, and this is what He came to experience. On the cross, for all the world to see, the perfect Christ became the focal point of all evil, both human and demonic. Such forces would have crushed an ordinary man. Even the Christ, for an instant, knew what it was to experience a sense of complete separation from the Divine. We cannot conceive how this could be possible, but we have the proof of it in a couple of Christ’s terrible exclamations…

First, in the Garden of Gethsemane, He said, “My soul is engulfed in sorrow to the point of death” (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 26, verse 38). In many ways, Christ’s experience in that Garden tells us so much about the atonement — about Christ’s vicarious suffering in our place as He identified with the experience of humans. Here He is identifying Himself with all the anguish and despair which lies at the core of the human heart when it is not wearing its mask of respectability and is not immersed in diverting entertainments. When He says, “to the point of death”, he is not merely referring to physical death but to the pangs of spiritual death, which He was on the cusp of suffering — again, as part of His vicarious experience on our behalf. God in the flesh entered into all the experience of humanity as forsaken and alienated from God. Obviously, He was not actually forsaken and alienated but underwent the experience of it.

The second saying which proves Christ’s experience of separation from God is this: “My God, why have you forsaken me!” (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 27, verse 46). In other words, He knew what it is to experience the pangs of “the second death” — that utter desolation of soul which will be the experience of all those who die having wilfully chosen to reject completely any desire for a relationship with the Creator or with His Son, the Christ (as I have discussed elsewhere when talking about the ‘second death’). In those words — “My God, why have you forsaken me!”, which involved so much more than merely quoting the first verse of Psalm 22 — He was expressing in extremis that separation which humans experience from God because of the Fall at the beginning of human history. He was not actually separated from God as that would be an impossibility as He was Divine Himself (now there’s a mysterious spiritual conundrum for you!). But He suffered that separation as a necessary experience of atonement on our behalf.

The big question which arises here is this: why did He undergo all this hellish experience? The answer is that it was a vicarious act. He experienced this on behalf of all those who would be His disciples, so that they could become such and be released. It was not for Himself or on His own part. But “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin [like a sacrificial sin-offering in the Old Testament] on our behalf, so that in Him we might be accepted as righteous by God” (Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 21). The same idea is written here: “He became a curse for us” (Letter to the Galatians, chapter 3, verse 13; see also the Letter to the Romans, chapter 8, verse 3). That completely sinless, perfect Being was treated as if it were He who was guilty of our moral failure. But it was all so that we who follow Him would be regarded as being righteous. That is what the oft-heard saying means to be “washed by the blood of Christ” or by “the blood of the Lamb”, or “released us from our sins by His blood” (for example, Letter to the Ephesians, chapter 1, verse 7; chapter 2, verse 13, First Letter of Peter, chapter 1, verses 2 & 19; Book of Revelation, chapter 1, verse 5b; chapter 7, verse 14; chapter 12, verse 11). “The blood of Jesus” or of Christ or of the Lamb is a ‘buzz-phrase’ in the Bible referring to His vicarious experience on the cross, though it does need explaining if it is to be understood by those not familiar with it, or it just becomes another unintelligible cliché which only preaches to the choir. He was the sacrifice on our behalf. He took upon Himself what should really have been our experience at the hands of the demonic realm and in what I call the ‘Cosmic Vortex’ of Divine ‘fury’. It is a hideous but beautiful exchange.

Because of what Christ has done — sacrificing Himself to be treated venomously by all the forces of darkness as the moral failure that He was not, and undergoing the full weight of satanic oppression, plus experiencing the pangs of the ‘second death’ — those who follow Him are therefore treated as righteous by God. “God made Him who knew no sin to be a sin offering on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 21). Our unrighteousness was accounted to Him (and He fully ‘paid’ the price for it), and His righteousness is thereby accounted to us who follow Him. Beautiful exchange, lovely contrast: He was treated as if He was the epitome of moral failure and as a result of that we who follow Him as His disciples are made righteous through His purity. We are made righteous in two senses: Firstly, we are regarded as righteous if we are bonded with Christ (Letter to the Romans, chapter 6, verse 5), solely on the basis of what Christ did for us in exchange. Secondly, after we become His disciples, we have the Holy Spirit cleansing us and purifying us on a practical everyday basis. It is a win-win situation.

So when He says in our text, “Now is your hour and the power of the darkness”, He was basically saying this: “What you do not recognise is that you are being Divinely permitted to do your thing to the uttermost, without restraint, so that the darkness which you so avidly support can be fully realized with an extraordinary outcome that you have never intended. This is your big moment. The stage is yours. You have total carte blanche to do your dark and abominable things, but you are under MY power, no matter what you do”.

When He says, “the power of the darkness”, it means delegated empowerment. That is the full meaning of the Greek word, ἐξουσία, exousia, there translated as “power”. For darkness has no intrinsic power of its own. The power of the darkness which puffed-up authorities exude and promote is permitted to them to exercise by the One who controls all things, and for whom darkness is merely a tool which He can use so that His goals will be realized. That “tool” includes Satan Himself, who is used by God for His own inscrutable purposes, as one can see very clearly in the Book of Job (chapter 1, verses 6-12; chapter 2, verses 1-7). One sees it clearly here too in our text. “This is your hour and the power of the darkness”.

We are on very similar ground to that on which Christ stood in His dealings with Pontius Pilate who ignorantly claimed that he had power over Christ. Pilate said, “Do You not know that I have authority to release You and authority to crucify You?” Jesus answered, “You would have no authority over Me if it were not given to you from above” (Gospel of John, chapter 19, verses 10-11). Again, this is delegated empowerment. When the authorities begin to come for you because of your faith, you can say exactly the same thing to them: “You would have no power over me if Christ had not granted it to you”.

When All Restraint of Evil will be Deliberately Removed (#2)

I said above that there are just two occasions in the history of this age when the forces of darkness are allowed to do their thing but with all Divine restraints removed. The first was when it was “their hour and the power of the darkness” in the build-up to and on the cross. The second will be when the Antichrist will be revealed:

“You know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but the one who now restrains it will continue until he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed”.

Second Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 2, verses 6-8

So we see that a force of some kind is holding back the “mystery of lawlessness” from coming to its full capacity and thus enabling the Antichrist to be revealed. That has been the case throughout this age, since the ascension of Christ and the resultant casting out of Satan from having access to heaven (Book of Revelation, chapter 12, verses 7-9 & 12) and subsequently being consigned to earth as “ruler of the power of the air” (Letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verse 2) — no longer the usurper “ruler of this world” (cf. Gospel of John, chapter 12, verse 31), but now invisibly dwelling in an etheric dimensional ‘envelope’ which plainly corresponds to the atmosphere around this earth. The forces of darkness have not yet been given carte blanche to fulfil their dastardly desires. But I can assure you that time will come.

Although the nature of the force restraining the revealing of the Antichrist it is not specifically disclosed in the sacred texts, we can assume that it is an angelic force of some kind, as there are examples of this in the sacred texts (e.g. Book of Revelation, chapter 7, verses 1-3; chapter 9, verses 14-15). We can see that throughout the three-year ministry of Christ on earth, there were forces which were at work miraculously preventing Him from being stoned to death or arrested until the appointed time when it would be allowed by Divine decree (please read these examples in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 11, verse 18; Gospel of Luke, chapter 4, verses 28-30; Gospel of John, chapter 5, verse 18; chapter 8, verse 59; chapter 10, verse 39; chapter 11, verses 53-54). For it was not yet “their hour, and the power of the darkness”, so they could not yet grab Him, injure Him or kill Him. But eventually it was time for that to happen, as we see in our text; and they did with Him just as they wished, but only because it was decreed by the Divine power who overruled their evil so as to use it for good purposes which He intended. Satan and his lackeys thought they were destroying the Christ; but everything they did towards that goal was merely the means by which God brought about human and cosmic salvation!

No One Reading These Words Has Witnessed Unfettered Evil

No one reading this has yet witnessed unfettered evil in this world. If you had been at Golgotha when Christ was crucified you would have witnessed it. If you will still be alive when the Antichrist is revealed (which may be sooner than you think) you will witness it then. But remember, those who will exercise that unfettered evil will merely be ‘filling up the cup of their own iniquity’, making themselves ripe for Divine judgement. Such evil is like a contagion. It will spread across the world like a whirlwind while the love of most will grow cold as they will cheer the arrest, incarceration and extermination of God’s people. Do not imagine that you will be “raptured” out of the world before all that happens. That is a mythological fantasy invented to undermine the faith of the saints, along with numerous other false teachings which go hand-in-hand with it (e.g. the restoration of Israel, the 1000-year reign of Christ on earth, weird beliefs about 666 and the Mark of the Beast, etc.). Sadly, it has become de rigueur for church people to believe these fantasies. (If you want to be divested of these false teachings, please read my commentary on the Book of Revelation and my book about Israel, in which these teachings are dealt with. You will find these free-to-download books here: https://diakrisis-project.com/books-2/ ).

However, in any situation in which, as a child of God, you are being oppressed in any way, remember how Christ said, “This is your hour and the power of the darkness”, to those who imagined they were acting autonomously by apprehending Christ rather than realising that whatever poison they invent, God always uses it as medicine for His people. God permits evil and darkness to flourish so that they will better serve His own inscrutable purposes. None of the dirty players in this world enacts their evil outside of God’s overruling control. This is why this text is such an encouragement. This is why a disciple of Christ does not need to fret about the intentions of men such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab or any other nutty apparatchik in this world. I keep reading about people saying on social media, “They must be stopped!” Oh you of little faith! Every evil move these people make merely fills up the cup of their iniquity and brings the world closer to its final denouement. They cannot outwit God, who is always in control. Whatever they do merely brings them further into spiritual condemnation, as they dig their own eternal grave.

Even when the Antichrist will be revealed and almost the whole world will be fooled by his “power, signs and lying wonders”, it will be an occasion in which “God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness” (Second Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 2, verses 10-11), and so that Christ can return to slay him “with the breath of His mouth and annihilate by the majesty of His arrival” (verse 8).

When Humans Overstep the Mark, He ‘Gives them Over’

God sends a powerful delusion to increase the deception of already powerfully deluded people. When humans overstep the mark in their denial of the existence or power of God so that they actually act against God, He “gives them over” increasingly to their delusions and they become entrenched in the furrow of evil and darkness in which they are mired (see, e.g., Letter to the Romans, chapter 1, verses 21-25 & 28). This is a terrible fact of life. When Christ said to those people in Gethsemane that it was “their hour and the power of the darkness”, that was His sign that they had been given over to their delusion that they were arresting Him of their own volition and they would therefore become even more deeply entrenched in the furrow of evil and darkness which they had ploughed.

I sincerely hope that this will prevent any reader from falling into the same pit. For evil and darkness will increase on this earth until the time that all restraint will be removed and then all hell really will break loose. This is why it is so important to ensure right now that our hearts are in the right place and we are bonded with Christ and protected under His ‘wings’ while the pretended ‘civilization’ of humanity is stripped away and its true colours are revealed.

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© 2021, Alan Morrison / The Diakrisis Project. All Rights Reserved. 
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]