Coming to the Lord in weird ways

[Lief_Erikson]

If anyone came to the Lord in a strange way, or has heard from the Lord in a strange way, feel free to relate it here!

I am also starting this thread as a continuation of a discussion from another thread.

Dear Lief,

The show Paranormal State on A&E is what got me interested in spiritual warfare. I watched the show and was excited to see them praying the St.Michael prayer, using Holy Water and St. Benedict medals (the main guy in charge is Catholic).

But. . .I had a hard time reconciling that with the fact that they use mediums and psychics, do something called “dead time” in which they communicate directly with the entity, and sometimes one of the pagan members of the group does pagan rituals.

One big problem with that show is that it teaches people to copy what they’re doing. Teenagers especially like to mess around with that stuff, and it can lead to big problems.

After seeing the show, I went googling to learn more and found myself on the SPCDC website, where it became very clear to me that what I was reading there was true.

I put myself through the seven steps to self-deliverance, and I think I recommend those steps to someone on CAF at least once per day. I can’t say enough about how doing those steps changed my life. Did I have demons? Who knows. I didn’t have stuff flying around my house, and I didn’t have any sort of aversion to holy objects, but since doing the steps, I’ve become a much better Catholic.

As Fr. Amorth says, the confessional steals more souls from Satan than exorcism takes bodies back from Satan.

It is amazing the way God works in our lives to bring about a closer relationship with Him. I would never have guessed that He’d get my attention through my curiosity in a ghost hunting show such as Paranormal State.

That’s a lovely story . Praise the Lord!

I’m completely with you about the Lord being able to draw us toward himself in weird ways. I came to Catholicism because of reading about the thousand years in Revelation .

That’s not quite true. I read the prophecy there and I feel that the Lord illuminated it to my understanding in a very wonderful way. I realized, abruptly, that the Protestant interpretation of Christ physically reigning on the Earth with his physically resurrected saints for a thousand years was eroneous, because the scripture says the souls of the saints will come to life and reign with Christ for a thousand years. And Catholic tradition has countless stories of the power of saints and prayer to saints emanating from that time period. They continue afterward, but when faith was so much more widespread, obviously there were bound to be more.

I also realized that the Medieval Ages was a literal thousand years in which Christianity, in the form of Catholicism, consumed the entire known world. And as Christ’s kingdom is a spiritual kingdom, Christ therefore ruled the known world. And it’s the known world that the scripture often refers to, when it says “the world.” Because in 2 Maccabees, it says Alexander the Great came to reign over the entire world, and in Daniel it says the Roman Empire devoured the entire Earth, and in the Epistles, Paul said that the Christian message had gone throughout the entire world (It had traveled throughout the Roman Empire and much of Asia, throughout the known world). So if we used the word “world” in the same way they used it, we could say that Christ reigned over the entire world.

After the thousand years, the scripture says Satan will be unbound and will deceive all the nations of the Earth. If one believes in Catholicism and is not an extremely leftist thinker, it will be clear that an enormous deception did indeed follow the Medieval Ages. First the Reformation, then the Enlightenment, then the Modernist movement, then the Post-Modern movement, plus the consumerist, secularist and feminist movements, etc. I could go on and on. The world today is called the “post-Christian age,” whereas secular historian William Durant labeled the thousand years of the Medieval Ages, “the Age of Faith.”

And as I examine history more closely, I find that the Medieval Ages were nowhere near so horrible a time to live as many people would have us believe.

I won’t consume this thread with a massive history lesson about the Medieval Ages and transition to the modern era, but anyway, I found these connections fascinating. They didn’t lead me instantly to Catholicism. It took quite a while for me to get there, from that first step. There have been many, many other steps. But that reading of Revelation was what got me started.

That moment of illumination was preceeded by my feeling a deep hunger for deeper intimacy with God’s kingdom. I prayed and prayed that the Lord would bring me into his kingdom more fully and reveal the truth of his kingdom to me more fully.

Getting this realization about God’s Medieval kingdom, followed by the realization about the way God intended his spiritual kingdom to operate (Catholicism) was a stunning answer to my prayers.

I prayed that the Lord would confirm to me that this was his message, and he has done so repeatedly, through countless means. I did a lot of research into Catholicism, and as I did, I found beauty, evidence and logic that far transcended that which I had in Protestantism. I also found in Catholicism the completeness of all that I’d loved in Protestantism. I can’t describe how incredible I find Catholicism, today.

But it’s odd that reading about the millennium from Revelation should have been the original push that directed me into a journey that ended in Catholicism. So I know what you mean about the Lord operating in weird ways . Wonderful ways, and weird. As it says in Isaiah, “My thoughts are higher than your thoughts, and my ways than your ways, declares the Sovereign Lord.”

 

[beckycmarie]

After the thousand years, the scripture says Satan will be unbound and will deceive all the nations of the Earth. If one believes in Catholicism and is not an extremely leftist thinker, it will be clear that an enormous deception did indeed follow the Medieval Ages. First the Reformation, then the Enlightenment, then the Modernist movement, then the Post-Modern movement, plus the consumerist, secularist and feminist movements, etc. I could go on and on. The world today is called the “post-Christian age,” whereas secular historian William Durant labeled the thousand years of the Medieval Ages, “the Age of Faith.”

Oh wow - I never considered that the 1000 years could have been that millenium before the orthodox split followed by the reformation 500 years later. Something to think about!

 

[Lief_Erikson]

Yeah, I was thinking more from the time of Constantine to the Reformation. Constantine was the one who legalized Christianity, and it was from Constantine on that almost all of the rulers became Christian, and Christians came to dominate society rather than suffer at its hands. Orthodoxy, also, didn’t make anywhere near so many errors or so grave of errors as Protestantism did, and Protestantism led, indirectly, to the Enlightenment and all the modern non-Christian movements. Orthodoxy didn’t lead to any decline of Christian faith, any massive fragmentation of Christianity, or any decline in Christian political or social power. I think of it as more of a “clean wound,” like a cut to the shoulder that damages the operational unity of the body, but doesn’t carry any infection. Protestantism, on the other hand, led to the destruction of Christendom, and when Christendom dissolved, all the false ideologies of our age had room to proliferate.

Here’s a historical description of the time of the Reformation:
historyguide.org:

By the beginning of the 16th century, the medieval Church and all that it represented, entered a period of profound crisis. By this time, the Church was nearly fifteen centuries old. Throughout its history the Church always had to confront problems both within its organization and from without. But by 1500, these problems rose to the surface and the Church would shake at its very foundation.

Here are other descriptions of the Reformation, from the same source:

In the end, the Reformation smashed the medieval synthesis and destroyed the unity of the Christian matrix. Any hope for religious unity was now hopelessly impossible, as the events of the late 16th and 17th centuries will demonstrate. The Church was shattered, witchcraft flourished, and Protestantism itself fragmented into numerous sects. Meanwhile, the power of monarchs increased and, according to Max Weber, the Reformation justified the "spirit of capitalism. By 1560, a Protestant Reformation had clearly been made . . .]

Between 1560 and 1715, Europe witnessed only thirty years of international peace.

historyguide.org/earlymod/lecture6c.html

It’s about a thousand years between Constantine and the Reformation.

A number of Protestants connect the description in Revelation of the Beast reigning for 1,260 days to the Catholic Church’s reigning for 1,260 years, and they see the decline of the Catholic Church as marking the end of the reign of the Beast.

They see the 1,260 days as referring to 1,260 years because in Ezekiel and Numbers, the Lord gave prophecies in which he made each day representative of one year.

Anyhow, there is an interesting spin on this that I’ve noticed.

Revelation 12:5-6 says:
5And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.

6And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

So, while there is the passage later on about the Beast reigning for this period of time, there also is a passage saying that the woman (The Catholic Church has said she could represent the Church) would be in a place prepared for her by God where he would feed her for this period of time.

Later on, in verse 11, it says:
14And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

My NIV text note (which comes from an interdenominational group of Christian scholars) says that time, times and half a time refer to the thousand two hundred and sixty year period.

So we have that time as a period of protection and nourishment for the Church, a time where it soars as on the wings of an eagle, a time where it is in a place of refuge (that’s what my NIV text note says the wilderness refers to).

Historically, from the year Constantine (305) was crowned king to the year the Protestant-Catholic split was made final at the Council of Trent (1563), 1,258 years passed. Rounded, that’s 1,260 years.

Some scholars don’t feel that that specific year was the time when the Catholic-Protestant split became final, though, and they instead just point to that whole decade, the 1560s, as having been the decade the split in the Church became permanent. That’s because so many major events occurred in that decade that created the split.

The source I referenced above, historyguide.org, mentioned 1560 as a general date from which the Reformation became “inevitable.”

British scholar David MacCulloch wrote that, “The end of the 1560s marked a watershed in the Reformation,” citing the many traumatic, divisive events of that decade.

It’s pretty clear from scholars that the 1560s was the pivotal decade in which the Reformation’s division became permanent. If we just go by the decade rather than by a precise year, 1,260 years wouldn’t have to be rounded.

It is quite possible, in my view, that the thousand years is simply a round number and the 1,260 years was given as a more precise number.

There are a few other relevant scriptures that refer to the thousand years, that I know of. Daniel 7 refers to the kingdoms of men being given over to the hands of the saints after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is generally seen by Christians as having been the Fourth Beast of Daniel 7. 2 Thessalonians also refers to a “man of lawlessness,” and I think that the rebellion referred to there is the modern rebellion that began with the Reformation.