Vol. XV • 1993       http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v15n1p03.htm

Satan Against Man: The Fierce War, the Victory in Christ
Ellen Myers

   Introduction

In 1974 the Journal of Christian Reconstruction featured a very thorough scholarly symposium on Satanism. Its lead article, Rousas John Rushdoony's closely reasoned "Power from Below," is just as pertinent today as it was then. He wrote that

modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes ... led to Darwin and the doctrine of evolution. This doctrine [militated] against any higher world. Power from above was thus eliminated from the universe, in both its Christian and its pagan versions. ... modern man became involved in a desperate search for power from below. [This quest] also became political, and a new breed of leaders from below began to dominate the twentieth century - Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and their paler counterparts in the democracies.... The result has been the rise of magic, witchcraft, Satanism, and related interests. Satanism is not new, and its past history is an ugly one, but the new Satanism is the most vicious yet, and potentially the most dangerous. Power from below ... is thus very much a part of modern man's faith. ... We can only expect, until this faith is shattered, a steady intensification of violence, crime, and revolution. ... (The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, I, 2, pp.7-10).

Rushdoony ends his magnificent article by warning that only full submission to the sovereign, triune God of biblical creation and His Christ can prevail in this battle of the ages. This paper will also proclaim our victory over all the hosts of spiritual wickedness in Christ. In Christ we "crush the head of the serpent" (Genesis 3:15) here and now, and for eternity

   Escalation of Murder and Violence

Violence and murder have multiplied all over America in the last twenty years, and they occur increasingly among our young people as early as in elementary school. Here are a few random examples out of many:

(1) Two unidentified teenagers robbed a 15-year-old student at a Wichita, Kansas, high school of his brand-new tennis shoes at gunpoint in a school hallway shortly after classes were dismissed (The Wichita Eagle, September 7, 1991).

(2) In Indianapolis public schools random searches with metal detectors began earlier this school year; three guns have been confiscated. A 7-year-old student brought a handgun to an elementary school. In earlier searches officers found two sawed-off shotguns, one of them loaded, a handgun and five shotgun shells, several small knives, and canisters of Mace. Many public schools today use metal detectors, rip out lockers and require students to carry see-through sacks, or teach students to hit the floor when gunfire is heard (USA Today, November 12,1991).

(3) At Walter Colton Junior High in Monterey, California, a murder plot was discovered involving 11 boys ages 11 to 14 who wanted to stop a bully (The Wichita Eagle, November 24, 1991).

(4) An argument among students at a New York City high school escalated into gunfire, leaving a 16-year-old bystander dead and a teacher seriously wounded (The Wichita Eagle, Nov. 26, 1991).

Juvenile street gang warfare, once confined to the slums of New York or Chicago, is rampant today all over America. It is no wonder chat many hundreds of thousands of families, especially Christians, are sending their children to private schools or educate them at home. (Incidentally, when this latest movement began, Dr. Rushdoony traveled all over the country to defend home schooling families in court.)

We have more and more "serial killers" like Henry Lee Lucas, on death row in Texas for murdering eleven people; David Berkowitz who killed six and wounded seven more, claiming demonic guidance, in 1976-77 in New York City; John Wayne Gacy Jr, convicted in 1980 for killing 33 young men over seven years; and Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered many young women and was finally executed in Florida in 1989. In February 1992 Jeffrey Dahmer, 32, was tried in Milwaukee for murdering fifteen men whose corpses he sodomized and dismembered, keeping the heads in a refrigerator and the hearts in a freezer Sometimes he ate their flesh.

Most ominous is the increase of gruesome murder and torture related to the occult. Young people are constantly exposed to the occult by heavy metal bands and songs with names like Child Molesters, Christian Death, Eternal Nightmare, Highway to Hell, The Number of the Beast, Voodoo Church, etc.; by literature on how to torture and kill in the name of Satan, like Anton Szandor LaVey's Satanic Bible; by occult movies like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Believers, The Exorcist or The Omen (Passantino, p.109; Wedge, p.89). It is appalling that even small children have easy access to these programs by way of video replay on their home TV screen.

No one knows bow many occult crimes actually occur Dr Al Carlisle of the Utah State Prison System has given an estimate of between 40,000 and 60,000 ritual homicides annually in the United States, 600 in the Las Vegas area alone (Steiger, p.1). Carlisle thought that even if only half this number is correct, it indicates that we are simply not aware enough of what is happening.

Can this stunning estimate be true? Shawn Carlson and Gerald Larue write that of about 240,000 missing child reports made each year, more than half are errors (no missing child after all), or else the children quickly return. Some 119,000 minors are abducted by estranged parents or relatives, or are runaways or "throwaways" no longer welcome at home. Based upon an estimate by a National Child Safety Council spokesperson they assert that only 140 children are abducted by strangers, about half of whom are eventually recovered, "and none of whom have been the confirmed victims of a devil-worshiping ritual murder" (Passantino, pp. 144-145). This extremely low number is certainly misleading because it does not specify the number of runaways or "throwaways" included in the 119,000 minors cited above, and it is from their ranks that victims of satanic rituals are most likely to come (cf. Wedge, p.45). As we enter the 1990s, an estimate of many hundreds of victims nationwide per year does not seem exaggerated, and it is in line with a September 1986 Scripps Howard News Service report that some 800 crimes linked to devil worship were then under investigation by police nationwide (Wedge, p.142). In addition to crimes against people thousands of possibly satanic animal killings and bizarre mutilations are reported all over the country.

   Spectacular Satanic Ritual Murders

The Charles Manson and Zodiac murders of twenty-odd years ago were but a foretaste of greater violence in search of "power from below," as predicted by Dr Rushdoony. Here are a few of the most monstrous examples:

During the summer of 1985 the infamous "Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez, terrorized Southern California. He was eventually captured and convicted of thirteen murders and thirty other crimes including robbery, sodomy, oral copulation, attempted murder, and burglary. His favorite metal music band was AC/DC, his favorite album their "Highway to Hell," his favorite song on it "Night Prowler" (Passantino, p. 106).

Also in 1985 Sean Sellers, 16, brutally killed his mother, stepfather and a convenience store clerk in Oklahoma. It was the culmination of Satan worship he began in the third grade. His occult involvement included membership in a satanic coven, practicing the rituals of The Satanic Bible, playing "Dungeons & Dragons," writing Satanic symbols in his own blood, and drug taking. Convicted of the murders in 1986, he reportedly became a Christian on death row (Wedge, Chapter 1).

In 1984 Richard Kasso, 17, a high priest in a satanic group in New York state, killed another 17-year-old boy during a satanic ritual, Altogether he stabbed the victim into the head, neck and chest seventeen times and gouged out his eyes. After his capture and before hanging himself in his cell, he told authorities that "the Devil had ordered him to kill" his victim. His group had met and burned, tortured and sacrificed animals in satanic rituals for several years (Wedge, pp.46-47).

In 1987 Steven Newberry; a learning-disabled youth of 19, was brutally beaten to death near Carthage, Missouri with baseball bats as a satanic sacrifice by three 17-year-old high school students. They "had selected [him] because he was mentally slow, overweight and awkward; they felt he was inferior and his death would be of no importance." They confessed that "they beat Newberry until he resembled the Black Friday lyrics, I mangle their faces till no feature remains"' (Mandelsberg, pp.119-120).

On March 14, 1989 Mark Kilroy, a 21-year-old American college pre-med student on vacation, disappeared on a busy street in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. A prolonged search for him led the Mexican police to the Rancho Santa Elena near Matamoros, where they found his grotesquely mutilated remains and those of fourteen other young men. The victims had been boiled alive, castrated, beaten, shot, and slashed. The brains and hearts had been cut out of the corpses. These satanic ritualistic sacrifices were made over a period of some nine months. Kilroy and most of the victims had been picked at random. The murders were carried out under the direction of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a 26-year-old Cuban-born American citizen. Constanzo made up his own satanic cult mainly from Palo Mayombe, a West African black sorcery cult, with some details borrowed from Santeria, another branch of witchcraft practiced by his mother, and from the popular American occult movie The Believers. Constanzo promised his drug-smuggling followers supernatural protection from law enforcement. He may have had customers for drugs and black magic among high-ranking Mexican government officials and entertainers. Constanzo and his male lover were killed as police were about to arrest them (Mandelsberg, pp.406-438; Passantino, pp.150-151; Steiger, pp.5-7; also see Wedge, Chapter 12, on Santeria and Palo Mayombe).

   Satanism in History

As Dr Rushdoony pointed out, satanic violence is nothing new in history. Its ultimate origin is Satan's temptation of Adam and Eve in Eden and man's fall (Genesis 3), for rebellion against God's Word "is as the sin of witchcraft" (1 Samuel 15:23). It has marked all the great idolatrous, demon-worshiping societies of antiquity, for "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God" (1 Corinthians 10:20).

In ancient Babylon Chaldean sorcerers developed charms and a spiritual poisoner's art much like voodoo. Self-mutilation (including castration) was a Babylonian religious virtue. Human sacrifice "became an important feature of Babylonian religion. ... When building houses, devotees would hollow out shrines for one or several of the Igigi (the pantheon of gods and goddesses) in a wall. To protect the shrines (and the houses), they would place an infant in an earthen jar and seal the jar into the wall as a sacrifice" (DeParrie and Pride, p.41).

In Assyria those who refused to declare allegiance to Assyria were treated as insurgents and flayed alive, crucified or impaled if captured. Henry Layard, who discovered several important Assyrian cities, found an inscription on the walls of the Northwest Palace at Nimroud, the Assyrian city of Calah, which gave the details of how king Assurnasirpal treated conquered people. The young men had their hands, feet, noses, lips or ears cut off; old men's heads were stacked in tower-like piles in front of their cities; children were burnt alive. The rest of the palace showed similar inscriptions, carvings of people being tortured, and gargoyles of hideous demons (DeParrie and Price, pp.48-49).

The religious customs of ancient Canaan included the same monstrous anti-human cruelty. For instance, in Canaanite Baal worship "children ... were put into a leathern bag and thrown the whole height of the temple to the bottom, with the shocking expression that they were calves and not children" (DeParrie and Pride, p.71).

The Aztecs practiced exceeding torture, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. They sacrificed 20,000 victims in four days during the dedication of the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, and as many as 50,000 annually. When rain was needed, they drowned children, walled them up in a cave, or exposed them on a mountaintop. The more they cried, the better the chance of rain. To ensure a good harvest, the Aztecs threw victims into a fire or furnace, pulling out their bodies with hooks before they were burnt so they could rip their still beating hearts out of their chests (Deparrie and Pride, pp.107-108). Similar cruelties are reported about the Mayans (DeParrie and Pride, pp.114, 115).

Many eyewitness reports of North American Indians' horrible cruelty towards strangers exist, for instance, on the death by slow torture of Colonel Crawford in 1782 (Loudon,pp.10-12); on the slow torture killing of a peaceful European settler (Loudon, pp. 22-23); on the horrible killing of farmer Frederic Manheim's family in October 1779 (Loudon, pp.58-59); on the killing of several peaceful settlers in the Appalachian mountains in 1754 (Loudon, pp.78-82); plus many eyewitness accounts of scalpings and similar torture killings.

Known individual murderers of the past acting under explicit demonic influence include the French nobleman Gilles de Rais, marshall of France in the fifteenth century. He celebrated Black Masses at his castle and abducted, sodomized, tortured and murdered many young boys, offering their blood to Satan. For this he was finally burned at the stake (Passantino, p.84).

The Marquise de Montespan, mistress of King Louis XIV of France, had infants killed at Black Masses to Astaroth and Asmodeus, demons of love and lust. The victims' blood was baked into wafers she slipped into the king's food in order to keep his affection. The plot was discovered in 1679 (Passantino, p.84).

Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on July 2, 1881, was addicted to the occult for years and acted under the guidance of demonic inner voices when killing the President (Steiger, pp.83-89).

Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and Jack Ruby; the nightclub owner who killed Oswald, were involved in the occult (Steiger, pp.89-92).

According to a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, the defense attorneys for Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, considered defending him by pleading that he had been possessed by the evil spirit of a deceased Arab nationalist. While in prison, Sirhan asked to read the occult classic book The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky, which was also the favorite of Frank Jacson-Mornard, the assassin of Leon Trotsky (Steiger, pp.92-94). Blavatsky was a famous Russian-born occultist at the turn of the century who founded the cult of theosophy, wrote under the guidance of "ascended Tibetan masters" and helped inspire the Nazi movement which was rife with occultism.

   Notable Thinkers and Leaders Influenced by Demons

Rene Descartes, as Rushdoony mentions, initiated modern philosophy, which takes not God but the thinker's own thought as its explicit starting point and operates by systematic doubting of all things. He was induced to develop this new philosophical "method" by three consecutive dreams in Ulm, Germany, the night of November 10, 1619 (cf. Copleston, p.75). He himself later spoke of the dreams' being demonically inspired.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain openly stated that he wrote his master work, the 1,200-page book Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jalirhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) while possessed by a demon. Published in 1899, this book profoundly influenced the Nazi movement. According to Chamberlain's autobiography he also wrote his books on Wagner, Goethe, Kant, Christianity and race theory during demonic trances. These trances were so deep that when the books were finished he often could not recognize them as his own. They all bear a remarkable coherence and unity of inspiration (Shirer, pp.152-154).

Karl Marx, who gave us Communism and its many millions of victims, turned against God and became a Satanist when a university student. This may be deduced from his poem "Invocation of One in Despair" and especially from his drama Oulanem, a name which is a satanic inversion of Jesus' name "Emmanual." (Reversals of Christian symbols, prayers, ceremonies and Biblical names are typical of black magic.) Oulanem hates all mankind and wants to drag it down with him to the abyss of darkness. He sees men as "clockwork ... Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined" (Wurmbrand 1986, Chapter 1). This is Satan's deepest desire as well (Job 1 and 2; John 8:44; 1 Peter 5:8; Revelation 12:12).

Other Communist leaders were also under obvious demonic influence. At the age of 16 Lenin tore his baptismal cross from his neck, spat on it and stomped on it, a satanist ceremony (Wurmbrand 1986, p. 49). Stalin believed in Christianity till the age of 15 when he wrote his first poem beginning "Great is the Almighty's providence." He entered an Orthodox seminary to prepare for the priesthood. There he read Darwin's Origin of Species, rejected the faith and became a Communist. The first pseudonyms he used were "Demonoshvili" ("the demoniac"), and "Besoshyili" ("the devilish") (Wurmbrand 1986, p. 54). Genrykh Yagoda, chief of the GPU (now KGB) in Stalin's early years, had icons of Christ and the saints placed in the vestibule of the bathroom of his estate near Moscow, so that he and his comrades, after stripping naked, "could use them as targets for revolver practice before going in to take their baths" (Solzhenitsyn 1978, p.173; Wurmbrand 1986, p.60). Marshall Thkhachevsky, top army commander under Stalin shot in the 1930s, "had a picture of Satan in the east corner of his bedroom, where the Orthodox usually put their icons" (Wurmbrand 1986, p.56).

Communist torturers were aware of the satanic roots of their deeds. Lutheran Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, imprisoned and tortured for the faith for fourteen years in Rumania, personally saw the faces of the torturers shine with rapturous joy and heard them cry out while torturing Christians, "We are the devil" (Wurmbrand 1985, p. 37). Indeed "We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12).

   Underreported Contemporary Political Mass Murders

The unspeakable barbarities committed by the Nazis have been extensively reported all over the world. The same increasingly applies now to the Communist holocaust with its dozens of millions of innocent victims, though American news media coverage has been comparatively slow and scanty. However, the twentieth century has witnessed other atrocious political mass murders which received little if any publicity.

During World War I the Turks slaughtered well over a million Armenians, a holocaust which has yet to be given due prominence in news media and history books. This writer first learned about it from an Armenian friend whose family had been fortunate enough to escape. Dr. Rushdoony's family came to America pursuant to this same massacre.

Very little mainstream news coverage is being given to the greatest holocaust of our century, the 28 million unborn babies murdered by abortion in America between January 22, 1978 (the U. S. Supreme Court's infamous Roe v. Wade decision) and January22, 1992. Instead the American news media are overwhelmingly backing the abortionists.

The American news media allotted very little coverage to the brutal starvation, torture and execution of about three million Cambodians by the communist Khmer Rouge between April 1975 to January 1979. One exception was an editorial in the New York Times of July 9, 1975 which described Cambodia under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot as "a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor and with medical care virtually nonexistent. ... the barbarous cruelty of the Khmer Rouge ... can be compared with Soviet extermination of Kulaks or with Gulag Archipelago." A few articles on what was happening in Cambodia finally began to appear in 1978 (Bozell and Baker pp.153-165).

On the morning of March 15, 1961, some fifty places over a 400-mile front were attacked as part of a plan carefully prepared by the communist-backed terrorist "liberation movement" in Angola, then a Portuguese colony The terrorists, primed with drugs, alcohol and native witchcraft, butchered over 200 Europeans and some 800 Africans. Women and children were raped, cut up and mutilated. Unborn children were cut out of the wombs of their still living mothers. A young girl of 18 was crucified on a tree and her breasts cut off while she was still alive. An Italian priest, Father Graziani and his assistant Tiburcio, were tied to stakes and bestially tortured for two days before being killed. In the town of Quitexe the men were castrated and killed, and most children had their eyes gouged out and died most likely from the resultant hemorrhages. In Luvro the owner of the local saw mill, his wife, two small sons and several others were tied to planks of wood and sawed in half lengthwise while possibly still alive. These are only some examples among many; the photographs of the corpses of the victims are stomach-turning (Portuguese-American Committee on Foreign Affairs pamphlet). The American news media reported this event minimally if at all; at the time they vociferously promoted the "liberation" of European colonies like Angola.

Similar crimes were committed in Yugoslavia on a much larger scale by the Croatian "Ustashi" between 1941 and 1945. The Ustashi were a para-military organization under the command of Dr Ante Pavelic, head of the government of Croatia made independent by the Nazis. Between April 1941 and August 1942 the Ustashi killed some 600,000 Serbs (Petrovic, pp.24-25), and altogether perhaps 7-800,000 Serbs before the end of World War II. Whole villages with their inhabitants were burned, Orthodox churches torn down, cemeteries dug up, and many thousands of Serbs exterminated in mass concentration camps (Miljus, Chapter VIII). Serbs were hanged, shot, their throats were cut, their skulls were cracked with clubs or hammers, they were thrown into pits, driven into rivers to drown, their eyes were gouged out. Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte later reported having seen a basket filled with twenty kilograms of human eyes displayed by Ante Pavelic as a gift from his faithful Ustashi (Miljus, pp. 186-187; Petrovic, pp.43-44). Outright satanic tortures included thorn wreaths nailed to victims' heads, live burial, and crucifixion (Petrovic, p.12). In the village of Susnjari 20 children surviving the mass murder of the adults were tied to planks of wood and fed feet first into burning hay stacks. Luka Avramovitch and his son were crucified and burnt in their house at Mliniste (Miljus, pp.52-53). In Svinjici the Ustashi captured the Orthodox priest Dane Babitch, buried him in the ground up to his chest and danced savagely around him. Every time one of them came close to the martyr, he tore away a piece of his flesh with a knife. After several hours of this torture, when the priest's body had lost all human form, they left him there as an example (Miljus, p.93). Many other similar atrocities were committed. The news media at large never reported this holocaust.

   What the Atrocities Reveal

Even this brief, piecemeal account shows striking similarities between atrocities far apart in time and space. For instance, the torture killing of Serbian Orthodox priest Babitch by the Ustashi in Croatia in the early 1940s is very like the torture killing of Colonel Crawford by North American Indians in 1782, and of Catholic priest Graziani and his helper Tiburcio in Angola in 1961. The Ustashi and the Arigola terrorists gouged out victims' eyes, as did 17-year old satanist Richard Kasso in New York State in 1984. Crucifixion took place in ancient Assyria, in Croatia in the early 1940s, in Angola in 1961 (and of course in Rome at the time of Christ). Victims were burned alive from antiquity till the twentieth century. Finally, the victims are generally chosen at random or by categories; no personal enmity is involved.

Underlying all torture killings is the murderers' bizarre desire to strip their victims of their human identity by extreme mutilation, as with Steven Newberry in Carthage, Missouri in 1987, with the Matamoros, Mexico satanic murders in 1989, with Canaanite children hurled to their deaths from a high temple wall in leather bags as calves rather than children hundreds of years before Christ, and with the 28 million children mutilated and murdered by abortion in America since 1972 while being called "fetal tissue" rather than children. The torturers themselves become dehumanized as they exercise power from below.

Because this craving to eradicate human identity is so universal and so anti-human in essence, all atrocities listed above and the myriads like them throughout history have a common source deeper than man. Scripture teaches that this source is Satan with his fierce hatred against God and against man created in God's image and likeness. From the fall in Eden to this day the goal of satanic principalities and powers is the torture, mutilation and destruction of man. They want men to serve them in agony even after they die. Isaiah Oke, a Nigerian witch doctor who participated in the most sadistic rituals of his craft, confirms this ultimate aim of the satanic host. He describes the slow, exquisitely painful death of a randomly chosen man whom he helped sacrifice to the Orisha (demons). The torture was inflicted so the victim's soul might plead its agony before the orishas in the spirit world on behalf of the political success of the military leader who had commissioned this sacrifice (Oke, Chapters 14 and 16). Not only the ultimate satanic purpose of human sacrifices but also the perversion of the torture and death of Jesus Christ is evident here. Oke was later set free from his bondage to the demons in Christ (Oke, Chapters 25-26). This same satanic purpose is also explicitly carried out in the torture murders of Matamoros, Mexico, whose leader followed the guidance of West African witchcraft. Only by satanic inspiration could Karl Marx ascribe this same goal of Satan, the final destruction of mankind in the abyss of darkness, to the anti-hero of his drama Oulanem. The torturers enjoy the agony of their victims as Pastor Wurmbrand testifies. Such enjoyment is anti-human and inspired by the wrath of Satan and his host against man. The bodily harm he instigates pictures what he is really after: the eternal damnation of men's souls in hell with him (Matthew 25:41; 1 Peter 5:8; Revelation 12:12).

   Christ's Victory

Man can defeat the satanic principalities, but he cannot do so in his own strength. In his own strength he can only pacify them for a while at the cost of self-humiliation and the sacrifice of others. Any compromise with them really means to be on their side and to serve them. As Dr. Rushdoony points out at the conclusion of his article, "Only a full-orbed and intelligent orthodoxy, stressing the sovereign and triune God, the doctrine of creation, and the sovereign grace of God in salvation, can do justice to the fact of power from ahove. Anything short of God's total claims is a deception" (The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, 1:2, p.10).

Christian martyrs for the faith have demonstrated this truth throughout the Church's history. In describing his experiences in communist prisons, Pastor Wurmbrand writes of the great saints he met there, heroes of the faith who equal the Christians of the first centuries and go gladly to die for Christ (Wurmbrand 1985, p.47). He saw Christians "with 50 pounds of chains on their feet, tortured with red-hot iron pokers ... starving, whipped, suffering from cold, and praying with fervor for the communists. This is humanly inexplicable! It is the love of Christ, which was shed into our hearts" (Wurmbrand 1985, p.57). He says that "Other prisoners and even the guards very often wondered at how happy Christians could be under most terrible circumstances" (Wurmbrand 1985, p. 59). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Christ in the Soviet Gulag through the testimony of a prison doctor murdered the next morning, and he blessed prison for having been in his life because he was converted there (Solzhenitsyn 1975, pp. 612-617).

Satan and his hosts are already defeated. They cannot prevail over their Lord and Creator, the sovereign triune God of Scripture. They cannot prevail over men who have been crucified with Christ, are born anew from above all powers and principalities, and who abide in Him (Galatians 2:20; Philippians 4:13). "You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he that is in the world" (1 John 4:4). The experience of Pastor Wurmbrand, of Solzhenitsyn, and of former witch doctor Isaiah Oke who was "deliv- ered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:2 lb) confirms Christ's victory and ours in Him.

Abiding in Christ we may endure hard battles, great sufferings, even lose our lives on earth, but the eternal victory is ours. Christ told us "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). He told us that "in the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). "As it is written: 'For your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter' Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us" (Romans 8:36-37). We are surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses of martyrs tried by "mockings, whippings, imprisonment, being stoned to death, sawn in two, tempted, slain with the sword" (Hebrews 11:36-40, 12:1). Therefore we should "run with patience the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2).

The prophecies about the steady intensification of violence and Satanism in Dr. Rushdoony's pioneering article on "Power from Below" are being fulfilled before our eyes. Dr. Rushdoony also correctly stated that Satanism is not new but rather has an ugly history, as shown in scattered examples from past and present. Most glorious and important of all, however, is Dr Rushdoony's emphasis upon our sure victory in Christ, determined by our sovereign, omnipotent God and Creator of all things before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). To Him be praise and thanks for His instruction and encouragement through His faithful servant, and glory and dominion forever.

   Selected Bibliography

Bozell, L. Brent III and Brent H. Baker, eds., And That's The Way It Isn't. Alexandria, VA:
Media Research Center, 111 S. Columbus Street, Alexandria, VA. 22814, Second Printing, 1990.
Coplestan, Frederick, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. 4. Garden City, WY: Image Books, 1968.
DeParrie, Paul and Mary Pride, Ancient Empires of the New Age. westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1989.
Loudon, Archibald, ed. , A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives, of Outrages, Committed by the Indians in Their Wars, with the White People, Vol.1. Carlisle: From the Press of A. Loudon, (Whitehall), 1808. Reprint No.77 by the Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1888.
Mandelsberg, Rose G., ed., Cult Killers. New York, NY: Windsor Publishing Corporation, First Pinnacle Books Edition, July 1991.
Miljus, Branco and Herve Lauriere, Assassins au nom de Dieu. Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions l'Age d'Homme, 1991.
Oke, Isaiah, as told to Joe Wright, Blood Secrets: The True Story of Demon Worship and Ceremonial Murder. New York, NY: Berkley Books, August 1991.
Passantino, Bob and Gretchen, When the Devil Dares Your Kids. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1991.
Petrovic, Rastislav, The Extermination of Serbs on the Territory of the independent State of Croatia. Lausanne, Switzerland: I.S.L., C.P.8049, 1002 Lausanne, n.d.. Received by this writer in 1991.
Portuguese-American Committee on Foreign Affairs, On the Morning of March 15. Boston, MA: The Portuguese-American Committee on Foreign Affairs, 20 Pemberton Square, Boston, MA, n.d. Received by this writer when first distributed in 1961.
Ruabdoony, Rousas John, "Power from Below," in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol. I, No.2 (Winter 1974), pp.7-10.
Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Greenwich, CN: Ninth Fawcett Crest Printing, April 1967.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Guleg Archipelago 1918-1956, Vols. I and II. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973, 1974.
Solchenitsyn, Alekeandr I., The Guleg Archipelago Two. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975.
Steiger, Brad, and Sherry Hansen Steiger, Demon Deaths. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing Group, 1991.
Wedge, Thomas W., with Robert L. Powers, The Satan Hunter. Canton, OH: Daring Books, Box 526SH, Canton, OH 44701, 1988.
Wurmbrand, Richard, Tortured for Christ. Middlebury IN: Living Sacrifice Books, P 0. Box 918, Middlebury, IN 46540, Fourth Edition 1985.
Wurmbrand, Richard, Marx and Satan. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, Second Printing, 1986.
 

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