THE RETURN OF THE “GODS”
They served their idols, Which became a snare to them. They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons.. Psalm 106-36-37
I visited some neighbours recently who have some pigs and the sows had just delivered some very cute piglets. The neighbours had done a great job making a wonderful shelter and putting in place great bedding but it was evident that the pigs had no respect for this and the sows had dug big holes, created a terrible mess with the piglets and there was dirt and mud everywhere. The sows and the piglets were completely filthy but they looked very happy. It occurred to me that it is foolish to try to stop a pig from being dirty. That is the nature of pigs. You can clean them up and make them look pretty but then they will dig up their shelters and make themselves dirty again. There is something in the nature of pigs to want to be dirty, dig up the ground and cause a lot of mess.
It struck me that trying to stop pigs from being dirty is a metaphor for what we are facing today in societies that have turned away from God. It is no use expecting that bad people are somehow going to become good. Our very nature is to be bad – just like the pigs! As Winston Churchill said: “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
God understood this from the beginning and had no plan to make bad people good but through Jesus, to give us the opportunity for new life, otherwise we just want to keep rolling around in the dirt and mud, like the pigs.
When the highly placed Jewish ruler, Nicodemus came to see Jesus in the dead of night, Jesus told him something that still, after 2,000 years, is hard to comprehend. He told Nicodemus: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3). Jesus went on to explain:
“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:5-8).
So, it is no use us trying harder, to live a life that is impossible except that we are born again. There is a path to new life that is both simple and complex. The most important element is to repent – turn around 180 degrees from your old life, be baptized into new life, and receive the Holy Spirit. This is what happened to 3,000 people in Jerusalem on the day that Jesus’ followers had the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit touch their lives in Jerusalem, on the Day of Pentecost, after Jesus’ ascension to heaven.
The Bible documents the human condition over several thousand years and reveals a repeating story that is clearly part of our very DNA – rebellion against God. However, it is not just rebellion against God (which is bad enough) but a strong inclination towards other so-called “gods”, just like pigs wanting to be dirty. While we in the West have turned away from the idea of God and gods to instead worship “the science”, nonetheless, the specter of the ancient gods impacts our scientific and rational societies today, although mostly it is not recognized.
As you read the Old Testament, there are many important lessons for us in the present age (human nature doesn’t change even though technology does) and the significance of the ancient “gods” cannot be ignored.
One of the most important themes that runs through the Hebrew Bible is God’s faithfulness and lovingkindness as He chooses a special people for Himself – starting with Abraham, then Isaac and Jacob (renamed Israel by God). This special people, God says, will “bless all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:2-3). God blessed Abraham and the succeeding generations and even the evil act of Joseph’s brothers (Jacob’s sons) selling him into slavery, was used by God for good, as Jacob and his entire family were saved from famine in Egypt (Genesis 45). Many generations later, an Egyptian ruler came to power who “did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8) and put the children of Israel (the Hebrews) into harsh slavery. In response to prayers from His people, God sent a “prince of Egypt”, Moses, to bring His people out of slavery as recounted in the Book of Exodus.
The story from that point on is a roller coaster with lots of downs and a very few ups. Always lurking in the background are the “gods”, which the children of Israel seem to turn to when times get tough or even when times are good. When we read about these “gods” today, we tend to brush over these parts of the Bible as just ancient superstition but could it be that these ancient “gods” still impact us today? The answer, according to Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, is “yes” in his new book: “The Return of the Gods”
Cahn is a Messianic (believer in Jesus) Jewish rabbi who leads the Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, New Jersey. He came to international prominence with his best-selling book “The Harbinger” published in 2012. In that book Cahn outlined 9 warnings or “harbingers” sent to ancient Israel before its destruction. His thesis was that the United States, as the only other country apart from Israel that was dedicated to God at its inception, also faces a catastrophic downfall unless the country turns back to God. He takes the events surrounding 9/11 and reveals some remarkable information behind some of the most significant of what he identifies as 9 modern “harbingers” or warnings for the US. You can see the main ideas from this 30 min YouTube video made in 2014
Cahn subsequently has published another 5 books, which I have read and are deeply thought provoking: The Mystery of the Shemitah, The Book of Mysteries, The Paradigm, The Oracle and The Harbinger II.
In all the books, he reveals hidden meaning in the Hebrew scriptures that warn us about the path we are on in the West, and particularly the US, which like ancient Israel, has rejected God. His new book, published last month is called The Return of the Gods and was suggested to me by one of the readers of the Sons of Issachar Newsletter. The suggestion was timely as I have been trying to put together various pieces of the puzzle to answer the question: how did we get here? In last week’s “Sons of Issachar Newsletter”, I proposed that it was rejection of God that lay at the heart of the spiritual, moral and economic crises that we find ourselves in. Undoubtedly, this is correct but what I had failed to see was that the rejection of God, had allowed “the return of the gods”.
A 28 min interview with Jonathan Cahn, which summarizes some of the ideas in the book, is worthwhile viewing in this recent YouTube clip
Cahn proposes that behind everything and transforming our culture, there is something that goes back to ancient Mesopotamia and their “gods”. He says that there are entities that are spirits that have returned to America and currently are impacting the US. The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians (in a section following instructions about right living):
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Mostly, we ignore these spiritual dark forces, which are invisible but make their impact in our lives and throughout society in myriad ways.
Cahn points out that in ancient times, every culture had “gods”. The Bible says that behind these “gods” were spirits, referred to in the Old Testament as shedim. This Hebrew word is used only twice (Deuteronomy 36:17 and Psalm 106:36-37) and its meaning is a “malevolent spirit that lays waste, devastation and brings destruction”. These shedim are where the Jewish people turned, when they forsook God. In the New Testament, the Greek translation of the same Hebrew word is daimonios, rendered in English as demons. Cahn makes the point that:
“When the Israelites offered up their children as sacrifices, they were doing so on the altars of specific gods. Likewise, the idols to which the Gentile world offered up sacrifices represented specific deities, gods of the pagan world. …… Likewise, the gods that the Gentiles worshipped and sacrificed to in the first-century Roman Empire, gods with such names as Jupiter, Apollo, Vesta, and Bacchus were not simply the imagined or invented characters of pagan mythology—but were connected to spiritual entities, the daimonia, demonic spirits. From the Old Testament Hebrew to the New Testament Greek, the revelation is clear and consistent—behind the gods of the pagan world were the shedim, the daimonia, the spirits. Worship is connected to spirituality. Spirituality is connected to the Spirit or to spirits. And spirits, as revealed in the Bible, can be either of light or of darkness. Spirits of light are called angels. Spirits of darkness are called demons. And while angelic entities are, by nature, joined to the worship of God, demonic entities are, by nature, at war with the worship of God.”
Cahn notes that you find in the ancient writings the idea of “demonic possession”, which often is highlighted in the New Testament, where evil spirits were cast out by Jesus and His disciples. However, beyond these individual cases, he contends that entire cultures and civilizations can be under demonic possession. This was the case with most Western pagan civilizations until the demonic powers were overcome through the spread of the gospel, which brought Christianity to Europe. In effect, the demonic powers were “cast out” by believers, resulting in European cultures being “exorcized”. However today, as Western civilization increasingly rejects the God of the Bible, the shedim/daimonios can return, as spoken of by Jesus in Matthew 12:43-45. The “gods” may have disappeared but the spirits behind these “gods” are increasingly having a free hand in Western society.
He writes:
“In the mid-to late twentieth century America’s departure from God became increasingly discernable. The nations of western Europe were in the midst of a similar departure. The falling away would continue through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, unabated, deepening, widening, increasing in magnitude and momentum. This time period, the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, represented the most widespread and massive falling away from the Christian faith and morality in the entire two-thousand-year history of the Christian age. The falling away would go hand in hand with the return of the ancient spirits”.
At the heart of Cahn’s book are the “Dark Trinity”, which were the gods of Israel’s apostasy and he believes are just as relevant to our societies today.
BAAL
The first of the dark trinity is Baal – means the possessor, the master or the owner. His mission was to drive Israel away from God and to cause the nation to forget God. This now is evident in America which through the Founding Fathers has a maxim “One Nation Under God”. In the US, gradually God was replaced by Baal - when prayer was forbidden in schools in the 1960s, the 10 Commandments were removed from the walls of key institutions and the presence of God was driven out of the culture. The removal of God from education and popular culture resulted in these areas being overtaken by pagan and immoral forces. It is interesting that the Second President and US Founding Father, John Adams, said of the US Constitution: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
A symbol pointed out by Jonathan Cahn is the image of a young bull, which the Children of Israel made and worshiped when Moses went up onto Mount Sinai. A massive sculpture of a young bull was erected outside the New York Stock Exchange in December 1989 and now is located in New York’s financial district. This is a symbol of Baal and was placed as a sign of financial optimism. Cahn sees it as indicative of the modern worship of Baal, which has resulted in vulgarity and carnality and replacement of truth with subjectivity. With the spirit of Baal came the overturning of eternal truths and standards based on God’s laws. With Baal worship also comes the worship of nature, which now often is personified as Gaia – mother earth. This can be clearly seen in the “climate cult”, which has taken over almost every Western country. Cahn outlines many “Baals” in America today in various forms. He says:
“So Americans now served and were mastered by the Baals of money, pleasure, success, acceptance, sexual gratification, addictions, work, comfort, the internet, self-fulfillment, self-obsession, and countless other gods and idols—the Baals of the modern world.”
The ancient gods – the Baals were created with the work of human hands. The new Baals involve the merging of man and machine to become gods. To further the link to Baal, Cahn notes that following the destruction of the ancient temple of Baal by ISIS in 2015, a replica of the ancient arch of the temple of Baal appeared in New York City in September 2016, demonstrating the pagan transformation of the US.
ISHTAR
Ishtar/Ashtoreth (or to the Greeks Aphrodite) is the second of the dark trinity and one of the oldest goddesses having first appeared in ancient Sumer. She was called “Queen of Heaven” and was associated with Venus. She was the goddess of sexuality, passion and pride. She was also the breaker of rules and conventions, the goddess of sexual promiscuity. Her temples in the ancient world were essentially houses of prostitution. The Book of Judges links the Baals and the Ashtoreths (Judges 10:6). Cahn sees the arrival of the spirit of this goddess in America via the sexual revolution in the 1960s where pagan values overturned biblical ones. What was branded “the new morality” was actually a very ancient, pagan one. The result was the destruction of marriage, rise of pornography and the deification of sexuality. There also has been sanctification of the forbidden as evident in the rise of so-called “pride” events. Additionally, Ishtar is connected with intoxication and the rise of the drug culture currently is destroying the West with increasing pressure for legalization of mind-altering substances.
Another side to Ishtar is “transformation” and the transformation of male into female and vice versa is another sign of the rise of the spirit of Ishtar in modern society, together with the emphasis on LBGTQ+.
MOLECH
Molech is the third part of the “dark trinity” – the destroyer and so horrifying was his nature that he is called “the abomination”. The Bible makes reference to Molech, a god who entranced Israel so that at various stages when the Jews turned away from God, there is reference to having their children “pass through the fire to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21). This euphemism actually is the horrific practice of child sacrifice, which was widespread in the early civilizations and also practised by Israel when the nation fell away from God, to embrace worship of Molech. Of course it is not hard to see the modern link with today’s abortion industry, which profits from baby parts and has overseen more than 60 million babies “sacrificed” in the US since the Roe v Wade decision by the US Supreme Court in 1973. “Molech” has had a field day throughout the communist countries and the former USSR and China have probably been responsible for the “sacrifice” of hundreds of millions of babies. Cahn notes:
“Baal ushered in Ishtar. And it was Ishtar who ushered in Molech. Her mythologies were filled with unrestrained sexuality yet with no apparent thought of, desire for, or connection to children. Her indulgences led not to life but death.”
In a summary of the impact of the “dark trinity”, Cahn writes:
“The spirit of Baal had caused America to believe that departing from God would bring it freedom. The spirit of Ishtar had convinced it that if it abandoned its moral safeguards for instant gratification and sexual abandon, it would find fulfillment. And the spirit of Molech had promised to grant it the blessings of an unhindered life if it would only allow him to take away its children. Baal, Ishtar, and Molech, the dark trinity of Israel’s fall, had again seduced a nation and an entire civilization”.
“The Return of the Gods” has a lot of detail about major modern cultural events, including “pride parades” and their link to the “rise of the gods”. It is worthwhile reading Cahn’s book which is a significant contribution to understanding the spiritual forces that have led us to our current crisis. He also provides great insights into the significance of the dates of various major decisions such as legalization of homosexuality, overturning of defense of marriage and the legalization of same-sex marriage. He writes about the transformation of society as the “gods” force compliance:
“In their newfound dominion, the gods moved upon government and corporate organizations to force their employees to attend indoctrination sessions into the ways of wokeness and the new codes of ethics, expelled students from schools and universities for affirming the existence of male and female, forced parents to transition their children, brought lawsuits against shopkeepers for refusing to violate their faith, and compelled others to give homage to the sign of the rainbow. Many were mystified by the transformation overtaking their culture. But the phenomenon was ancient. The gods were doing as they had done in ancient times. They would not rest until every knee had bowed down before them and every tongue confessed that they were the new and undisputed lords……The new totalitarianism was a sign that the gods had achieved their dominion. They had successfully transformed a Christian civilization into a pagan one.”
Cahn says that
“..the Bible foretells that in the last days there will be a great falling away from the faith, a great apostasy. It is now taking place. It also foretells that in the last days evil and immorality will increase and persecution will come for Christians, for all who hold true to the ways of God”.
The answer to the challenge of the “return of the gods” is God Himself, the God who inhabits eternity. We were made to seek and find Him. As Augustine of Hippo wrote in his famous Confessions:
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
If we do not find the true God, we will end up serving and worshiping other “gods”, whether we realize it or not. Jesus, or Yeshua in Hebrew (meaning the Lord is salvation), provided the path to freedom from the bondage of the “gods” of the ancient world. He still provides “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6) today.
STORIES THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION THIS WEEK
A Globalist Takes over as PM in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is in a mess and definitely no longer united. Scotland wants to become an independent socialist country and Wales can’t be far behind. Who knows what will happen in Northern Ireland? The once great empire is reduced to rubble under the weight of “running out of other people’s money”, as identified long ago by Margaret Thatcher. After only 49 days as the UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss self-destructed but correctly declared on her departure from No. 10 Downing Street that:
“We simply cannot afford to be a low growth country where the government takes up an increasing share of our national wealth”.
I liked the comment of a UK Telegraph columnist, Sherelle Jacobs, who said “broken Britain has become Italy – without the good weather”!
Unfortunately, the UK like most of the West has become addicted to government handouts and state intervention in everything. It’s only 6 months since it was reported that Boris Johnson wanted to cut up to 91,000 civil service jobs to save money. Of course these civil servants are still in place and a conservative estimate of the cost of these “excess jobs” would be more than £4 billion per year. However, rather than reduce the number of bureaucrats, there will be an inexorable increase as no government seems to have the will to reign in government spending. Just look at the US today!
With this background, you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and now UK Prime Minister. Now it is hard to feel sorry for a man whose wealth is estimated to be greater than King Charles and whose wife’s family are the wealthiest in India. Rishi’s father-in-law is N.R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian founder of Infosys who is a widely admired globalist leader and co-chaired the World Economic Forum in 2005. He is often referred to as the “Indian Bill Gates”. Murthy now is involved in a range of prestigious philanthropic endeavours including: the Rhodes Trust, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Public Health Foundation of India and the IESE, the graduate business school of the University of Navarra. Sunak’s personal wealth and family connections became an issue in 2021 when it emerged that his wealthy wife Akshata Murthy, was paying no UK income tax.
Rishi comes from an Indian family background, although his mother and father were born in east Africa. His father Yashvir was born in Kenya and his mother in Tanzania. His grandparents were born in the Punjab region of India but had migrated to east Africa. Rishi was born in 1980 in Southhampton, England after his parents migrated from east Africa. His father was a medical practitioner and mother a pharmacist and they gave Rishi a great start in life with a high school education at the elite Winchester College, founded in 1382 , a school older than Eton and with the great motto: “manners makyth man”. After education at Oxford University where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, Rishi did an MBA at the Stanford University Business School on a Fulbright scholarship and met his wife Akshata Murthy. After Stanford, Rishi was employed by Goldman Sachs, working in hedge fund management before setting up his own business, where he seems to have become extraordinarily wealthy. He was elected MP for the safe Conservative seat of Richmond in 2015. It was notable that entering cabinet in 2019, he took his oath on the Hindu “holy” text, the Bhagavad Gita and now is the youngest UK Prime Minister in 200 years. He has all the hallmarks and training of a technocrat and is sure to move the UK in a globalist direction. His party is now 33 points behind the socialist UK Labour Party but the next general election can be as late as January 2025 and so he has some time to introduce various technocratic policies. I think that we can anticipate higher UK taxes, which already are high and huge amounts of money shoveled into the failing NHS. Soon, President Zelensky will be at the back of the line!
The War on Cows Comes Close to Australia
It must only be a matter of time before cows are declared an existential threat. A memo must have gone out from Klaus or one of his henchmen or henchwomen to notify Western leaders that this was the year for a war on cows. It is extraordinary that something that it is self-evident - cows are no threat to us - can be re-positioned by the technocrats as “cows are our greatest threat” and we blindly say as a society - well the experts must be right! The UK and a number of European countries have declared the need to drastically reduce cattle numbers to “save the planet” and now the war on cows has come to New Zealand. Trying to put a positive spin on it, the NZ Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern (the former President of the International Union of Socialist Youth) said:
"The proposal, as it stands, means New Zealand's farmers are set to be the first in the world to reduce agricultural emissions"
when she spoke to reporters on a New Zealand dairy farm earlier this month. She could have also said that they’d be the first farmers in the world to go broke! Of course New Zealand farmers who have no interest in politics are not stupid and so the Federal Farmers (a national group representing New Zealand farmers) said that the policy would “rip the guts out of small town New Zealand”. That sounds like farming talk to me!
Cows have been targeted because it is claimed that they emit methane and there is pressure by the globalists for New Zealand to target cows because agriculture contributes half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. What no-one says is that these emissions are miniscule for a country of 5 million people and would just be a rounding error for a small Chinese city. Undoubtedly, Australia will be next as Anthony Albanese, Australia’s great socialist helmsman, much loved by the climate change crowd, will have received Klaus’ memo as well. There is definitely a war against cows and even in our local country town, high school students were recently given dried bugs to eat as part of the campaign to alert them to the coming “crisis”. Farmers will need to start becoming political and like the Netherlands farmers, organize pickets to parliament. It is clear that the long-term aim is to move farmers off their land and the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset where we will own nothing - are rushing towards us at the speed of (to be discontinued) a bullet train.
China Expands its Belt and Road Initiative – Next Stop Taiwan?
Following President Xi’s successful 20th CCP Congress which concluded this last week, he was “elected” to a third 5 year term as general secretary of the CCP. He also has selected allies as members of the Politburo Standing Committee. China watchers have noted that all 7 members of the Standing Committee are Xi loyalists and it seems that his war on “corruption” has rooted out anyone in leadership who disagrees with him. He had his predecessor, Hu Jintao, escorted from the Congress hall because Xi was said to be “concerned about Hu’s health”. There is an interesting analysis of this incident sent by a newsletter reader and is worthwhile viewing.
China’s quest for global control continues via the Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Amazingly enough this week, the German government announced the sale of a 24.9% stake in the crucial port of Hamburg to a Chinese state-owned company COSCO shipping. More than 138 countries are signed up to China’s BRI. The German port deal with China demonstrates an extension of Chinese influence in the West and it has been reported that even the German foreign ministry itself expressed concerns warning that the deal “disproportionately expands China’s strategic influence on German and European transport infrastructure as well as Germany’s dependence on China”. China has obtained enormous international leverage via the BRI and so is unlikely to encounter any significant opposition when President Xi decides to reunify China and “invite Taiwan home”. According to a recent article in the Spectator magazine, this “invitation” could come soon. The magazine quotes a Japanese, China analyst Seki Hei who believes that the “reunification” of China is a central platform of President Xi’s third term. He is quoted as saying:
“There are quite a few people inside the CCP who are against Xi Jinping….Xi won over those opposing voices and secured support for his third term by promising, among other things, to solve the Taiwan problem. Unification with Taiwan was the fundamental justification which Xi offered for the need to extend his rule for another term.”
There is no doubt that with the West’s focus on Ukraine and Western powers extended with the supply of weapons and materiel to the Zelensky regime, it may be a propitious time for “reunification”.
Israel Votes – Again
Israel goes to the polls on November 1st for the fifth time in the past 3 years. Interestingly, Amir Tsafarti reported a few days ago that Israel made a major air strike in Syria focused on a location of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG). The site was a staging post where the IRG brings their sensitive weapons and arranges shipping to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Tsafarti also has an interesting segment on the claims by Russia about Ukraine organizing a “dirty” bomb. A “dirty” bomb is a regular bomb that has in it nuclear waste so that nuclear materials are released into the immediate surroundings. The Russians say that the Ukrainians have over 50,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste and have the scientific capacity to build a “dirty” bomb. It’s hard to know if this is propaganda or not. There has, however, been a change in Russian strategy in Ukraine with a non-stop assault on Ukraine’s energy sector so that more than 50% of Ukrainian energy has been put out of action. The aim, according to Tsafarti, is to freeze Ukrainians during the coming winter.
Israel has had a big influx of Ukrainian and Russian Jews since the start of the conflict with reports of more than 30,000 arriving in Israel. Of course, the major focus for Israel is Iran and all political parties in Israel understand the threat from future Iranian nuclear weapons. The election, only a few days away, will be unlikely to result in a clear outcome because of the nature of politics in Israel and the large number of political parties. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the key players:
Benjamin Netanyahu, who unites all his opponents in hatred, seems best placed, according to opinion polls to lead Likud into a coalition government with himself as Prime Minister. Sixty-one seats are needed in the Knesset to govern and the Likud Party has come closest to achieving this result in recent elections, cobbling together 58-60 seats (out of a total of 120). Netanyahu seems to have a gift of turning coalition partners into enemies and has faced ongoing legal issues related to claims of corruption.
Yair Lapid is the current Israeli Prime Minister who leads the centrist party, Yesh Atid (“There is a Future”). Lapid had been a talk show host but in the last elections his party gained seats and in a power sharing arrangement, Lapid took over leadership of the current coalition government in July this year. His party holds 17 seats in the current parliament. Lapid is a secular Jew and Joel Rosenberg writes of his personal interactions with Lapid in this article published in July this year and is worthwhile reading.
Bezalel Smotrich leads the Religious Zionist Party. He is known for his Twitter tirades and has been compared to President Trump. His small party allied with two other parties and at the 2021 elections, won a combined 6 seats. The latest polls indicate that the Religious Zionist Party could pick up a number of seats with estimates of 14 seats in the new Knesset.
Benny Gantz is the leader of the National Unity Party and former IDF Chief of Staff. In 2019 he joined some other opponents of Netanyahu to form the Blue and White Party. The combined group tied with Netanyahu’s Likud Party in 2019 at 35 seats and this resulted in further elections in 2019 and 2020. In March 2020 Gantz entered a coalition with Likud to form a national unity government. However this was short-lived as Netanyahu failed to hand over the Prime Ministership to Gantz which resulted in another election. Gantz has resurrected his political aspirations after the collapse of the Blue and White Party and the National Unity Party is predicted to win 12 seats in the coming election.
Aryeh Deri is the leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas Party and Aryeh has been a long-term political survivor. His first ministerial appointment was in 1988 and he has had various ups and downs in his career. He was convicted of receiving bribes and handed a jail sentence. Somehow he has returned to politics and his party’s seats are important in any coalition.
There are many smaller parties, including the previous ruling Labor Party, which dominated Israeli politics for 30 years. The smaller parties include the Ra’am Party, the Arab Party which joined the governing coalition after the last election. This caused problems on all sides and the unstable coalition has resulted in new elections, due in just a few days.
It seems unlikely that there will be a knockout blow with any one party dominating in the coming election. Such is the complexity of Israeli politics that a stable coalition that serves a full term seems unlikely. Current polls though show the likelihood of the great survivor, Benjamin Netanyahu, returning as Prime Minister.
Summary
“The Return of the Gods” is a book that provides some insight and perspective about how we have arrived at this cultural and spiritual point in the West. The book is an important resource for those who wish to understand the signs of the times. It provides information about the ancient “gods” and the spiritual forces lying behind them. The book demonstrates that there these spiritual forces impact us today, as we battle not against flesh and blood but “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). Unless we recognize that we are facing a spiritual battle then we can find ourselves in the wrong arena, fighting the wrong battles.