The Final Battle

      Just what exactly is the final battle? Is it the ultimate battle of good versus evil? Could be. Who will fight this battle? Will it be God against Satan? Perhaps, although I do not think so that battle was fought a long time ago. So then, who will fight this battle? It all depends on how you look at it. I know that this sounds evasive but the idea here is to get you to think. You see, you do not need me or anyone else to tell you how you should think. Over the years, there has been too much of that, too much of other people telling us how we should or should not think. Granted, many people do not have a problem with that. You see that in politics all of the time. If you ask someone who they want to vote for, they will tell you “so and so.” Then ask them what they know about the person and they will either tell you that they really do not know or how they hate so and so or they will regurgitate whatever was in the newspaper that morning. There are times in this harried world where it is easier to “follow the crowd” than it is to think on our own. We all do this to some degree. However, there are subjects that are too important to be treated that way. What I am going to do is give you some opinions of mine for you to ingest. You can assimilate and use them if they are relevant for you or you can just discard them. The key here is that you need to formulate your own opinion. What we desperately need is for all of us to think on our own because the final battle will be fought on many fronts.   

     One popular belief has it that God and Satan will be fighting it out, having waged war on each other. That is simply not true. God does not need to fight Satan; he won that war a long time ago. God created Satan and His Son beat Satan at a time when he was sure he had won the ultimate battle, leaving Satan nothing more than a disgraced, fallen angel. There is no doubt that Satan and his legions are waging a war but it is not against God, it is against us. Do not let this frighten you. Truthfully, and this may sound surprising but he cannot beat us any more than he can beat God. The reality of the situation is that we possess all the tools we need to beat Satan and his pathetic minions. God created us in His image and likeness and armed us with all the tools we need to survive against the once beautiful angel. Satan has already been beaten and our ability to beat him was won for us on a cross at Golgotha. Thus, victory is guaranteed, right? Not so fast, my friends. You see, there is one thing that can defeat us; there is one enemy that has the ability to wipe us out. That force is us. We can beat ourselves.

     That sounds ridiculous, does it not? Why would we want to beat ourselves? In theory we would not but in practice, it happens way too often. That is so because this is where Satan is strongest. He can tempt us, mislead us and confuse us. He can get inside our heads and cause great chaos. He is a master at that. His strongest ability is to hide from us, to make us think that everything we do, we do on our own. In that regard, he tells us how to think. A little temptation here, an attack or two on our self esteem there and we are off and running. When you look at some of our actions, we have to consider the possibility that something evil guided us. That is far preferable than believing that we ourselves could do some of those things. Is man a good creature that does evil things or is man an evil creature that does good things? Are we truly evil by nature? No, we are not. Remember, we were created in the image and likeness of God. However, Satan is a formidable enemy. Yes, we do evil things but worse that the acts themselves, is the belief that what we do is okay. For example, it is legal to kill an unborn baby. Hell, everybody does it, right? Well, certainly not everybody but hell is the right term.

     What does any of this have to do with the final battle? Remember what I said, it will be fought on many fronts. On the celestial scale, the outcome is predetermined: God will win. There can be no other way; that is a given. However, that is not true on our physical plane. The results of our battle with Satan is not a given by any means. Although God has given us all we need to win, we do have one Achilles heal- free will. Of course, he gave this to us thinking that we were responsible enough to use that gift properly. Unfortunately, history has proven that we have not been all the responsible with it. We still do things that are pleasing to Satan. Very little attention is paid to God’s commandments. We do not love our brothers and sisters. For that matter, we do not love ourselves half the time. There are wars across the globe and there are wars close to home. Many of those wars are fought in our own heads. Almost anywhere you look, evil is practiced in its many forms. Look at the ever-present drug problems we have. Look at countries where children are starving. The list can go on and on. Despite all of the terrible things we do, God has not given up on us yet. The key word there being: yet. We have to act while there is still time.

     He has sent us many messengers through human history but most have been totally ignored. He sent His Son and we all know how that played out. The Blessed Mother, the Queen of Heaven Herself has come to us personally. That happened at Fatima, Medjugorje and other places as well, all throughout human history. The messages have always been the same: we must get our act together. We must stop war and destruction. We must love our fellow man and we should fight for the freedom of everyone. Also, we must pray for the conversion of Russia. Astonishingly, we have somehow managed to ignore those messages despite their repetitiveness. There is still destruction; there is still war. We continue to find new and improved ways of destroying ourselves, perhaps believing that with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it is all somehow self-restraining. It is not. We are still on the brink of annihilation, closer than ever before. The only thing now is that we do not know in which direction to look when the missiles start flying. Weapons of mass destruction are all over the world now. Big countries and small ones alike all have to power to wipe out most of the life on this planet. Once, we had conventional warfare, assuming mass destruction can be called “conventional.”

     Today, it is no longer just nuclear weapons we have to deal with; we now have chemical and biological ones. Wow, now we have a way to cause mass deaths in an extremely agonizing way. Nope, it will not be quick disintegration; we can now make people suffer for weeks before they die. Isn’t that just wonderful! We have spent more time on finding diseases that kill than we have spent on eliminating the diseases we already have and cannot control. There are still many that we cannot cope with. It is burying our heads in the sand to think that we will not one day suffer at the hands of a madman. With all of the weapons around the world, with all of the unstable regions, it is only a matter of time before some fool feels that his manhood has been significantly challenged and he lets some of those weapons fly. Trust me, we have an ample supply of madmen in the world today. In fact, there has never been a shortage of them. Pick an era; there are always a few around. Also, we have to realize that it is only a statistical matter of time before someone accidentally releases one of them. Remember Chernobyl? By the way, when it comes to nuclear war, Russia is still the horse to watch. The Blessed Mother has asked that Russia be consecrated to her too many times to write them off as anything less than a superpower. To believe otherwise may prove to be fatal.

     Our society today is one of extremes. There are those who possess more money than they know what to do with so they buy totally outlandish things while the poor suffer. Food by the ton is discarded on a daily basis while most of the world goes hungry. In America, we have become the I/Me society. We are being led to believe that self-empowerment is the key to life. In other words, we should not look to God; we should instead find the “god within us.” Were it not so bad, the idea would be amusing. Most of us cannot brush our teeth in the morning. Can you imagine us creating a world? Perhaps our biggest fault is our indifference to the plight and needs of others. We shrug off that which we do not want to see. We have become desensitized to the horrors of this world. If the news is too gory, we change channels. Do you know what? You cannot fix a problem that you do not know you have.        

     Poverty, disease, famine. They have been with us from the dawn of time and they will be with us until the final hour, an hour that may be nearer than most realize. The sad part is the big three listed above are all unnecessary. We could stop them all in one day if we so chose. Amazingly, we do not. We will not because we do not see others as our brothers and sisters. We do not even see mankind as a single species. Instead, we see ourselves as many different species. There is the black species, there is the white one, there is the rich, the poor and on and on. If anything, we are not different species; we are a subspecies created by our own arrogance. One has to wonder what would happen if the planet was attacked by aliens. We would all pull together in a hurry, right? Curious, is it not? Yet, despite knowing this, we remain apart. How can creatures that pride themselves on their intelligence prove to be so stupid? The answer to that question lies in the last sentence. The key word there is pride. It is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason.

     Sins, you ask? Oh no, here comes the religious mania! Yep, you knew it was coming. In fact, it has been in here all along. Whatever religion you subscribe to, the fact remains that more blood has been shed in that name of God than for any other reason. Make that all other reasons combined. People who claim to believe in God will go out and slaughter others for believing in the same God only under a different name. We kill for belief system semantics. If we cannot see ourselves as one species, than it is silly to think that we can see into something more complex like religion with all of its little variances and nuances. Yet in the end, religion is all we will have because we will have destroyed everything else. This sounds hopeless. Can it really be?  The only true answer I can give you is: “I do not know. Maybe it is.”  The reality of the situation is that we continue to miss sign after sign after sign that the final battle is near. God has been infinitely patient with us but that will eventually end. That may happen sooner than we think. Then what? 

     Granted, people have been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of it and we are still here. We may or not be any closer to the end than we were 2,000 years ago. However, the signs are there. There are more natural disasters than at any other time. Droughts ravage some states while floods destroy others. Fires race out of control through our woodlands, devouring hundreds of thousands of acres. With all of our technology, we still cannot control nature or the environment, although we have done a top-notch job of screwing it up. At least now with all of our technology, we know which direction to look towards for the deathblow. We find a cure for one disease, and we find a new disease. Some of them, we actually create ourselves. Our indifference to life is staggering, as is evidence by our crime rate and the abortion rate. There is no lessening in the number of murders, rapes and robberies. And all the while, we fail to see who is behind most of our problems. There is only one being that could create this much chaos: Satan. However, I say almost because we have to accept our share of the responsibility. All too often, we do things that we know are wrong. Our consciences tell us that such and such is wrong but we do it anyway because it is fun and we do it in the hope that we will not get caught. This applies to small matters just as well as the big ones. How many sexual affairs have destroyed marriages? That would be an interesting number. Fifty percent of all marriages today end in divorce. Of those fifty, I wonder where adultery comes in? Of course, this is where desensitizing comes into play. In world where atrocities are committed constantly, what is wrong with a little fun on the side? Just because we know something is wrong does not stop us from doing it. You cannot blame Satan for that, although finding someone to blame for our miseries is something we do very well. It is much easier to blame someone or something else than to accept responsibility for our own misdeeds.

     We are poised at the brink of destruction, watching helplessly as those things we have created turn against their creator. Weapons, hate, evil, selfishness, greed and the list goes on. We created these things only to realize too late that they had turned on us. Now we scramble in ninety different directions, hoping to find a quick fix for problems it took us 5,000 years to create. Oddly enough, there is a quick fix. He is called: God. Yet that is the one direction that most people will not look towards. Our well-fed, overindulged egos do not allow us to see that the One who has created us has the ability to solve our problems. All we have to do is pray to God and ask for His help. But we do not because we feel that we have to solve the problem. Remember what I said earlier about this being an I/Me world. In truth, we are too helpless to see our helplessness. Our self-proclaimed “superior” intelligence does little more than illustrate and emphasize our ignorance.

     Does that sound too harsh? The key to the final battle will be for us to realize that we have all the tools we need if only we would look for them. We have to realize that we must look up for the answers for we need that help from above. It is there for the asking and it is very simple. It is ours to have. Perhaps it is too simple for us to grasp; we are a world that likes complications. The more complex something is, the smarter we seem when we learn how to control it. Thus, we create our own level of intelligence. In this world of high tech wonder and amazement, the solution to our problems can be found through simply kneeling and praying. It was always meant to be easy; we are the ones who made it complicated as if solving a complicated puzzle justified our existence. The final battle can only be won when we see the enemy for who and what he is. Satan is the enemy but we are his tools, we are his swords. We are the swords he uses in his battle with God. You see, Satan does have some power. He has the power to take away from God his most precious creation- us!  We must realize this and turn the sword against him. The final battle may well be fought inside of us.            

 © 2000 T. Cooney     

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