I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not.
A study commissioned by the National Geographic Channel found that 36 percent of Americans believe that UFOs exist. The same percentage said they believed that aliens have visited Earth. Seventy-seven percent said there is evidence that Earth has been visited, regardless of whether they’d made up their minds on the question one way or the other.[i]
To compare, the Barna Group found in 2017 that while 73 percent of American adults call themselves “Christian,”[ii] only 10 percent have a biblical worldview.[iii]
That may seem surprisingly low to you, but it was a slight improvement over their 2009 survey. The prophet Hosea would feel at home on the streets of America today. God’s people are truly being destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Some Christians believe we’re wasting time on UFOs that’s better spent preaching the gospel. We’ve been criticized by some for helping to spread the ET meme. With all due respect, it’s time to wake up and smell the ozone. That ship has sailed.
It’s simple math: A third of America’s adult population—about eighty-one million people—believe ET has been phoning home from a domestic area code, and only 10 percent of us—about twenty-four million—believe in God as He is described in His book. In other words, doctrinally sound, Bible-believing Christians are outnumbered in America by ET believers three to one.
Christians should be disturbed by this. Something has changed in our culture since the end of World War II. Hollywood and the media have pushed the idea that visitors from the stars make Earth a regular vacation spot. The messaging has been effective. Popular science fiction has become, as Dr. Michael S. Heiser terms it, “televangelism for the ET religion.”
There is another aspect to the phenomenon that we’ll discuss in this series. Every four years, ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) disclosure activists—yes, that is a thing—get excited that an outgoing or incoming American presidential administration might finally open the books on the government’s secret UFO investigations. The recent Pentagon report was the result of Trump so ordering, though the major details were not provided to the public as yet. The idea that “official disclosure” of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence would happen in 2016 was ignited by the role of John Podesta as chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Podesta, an adviser in the Clinton and Obama administrations, is known to be a believer in the existence of ETIs, and emails from Podesta’s Gmail account released by WikiLeaks added fuel to the fire. The UFO research community was stunned to learn that a former NASA astronaut reached out to Podesta more than once to arrange a meeting with President Obama about “nonviolent ETI from the contiguous universe.”[iv]
That didn’t happen, but it raises an important question: What if Fox News breaks into its programming one day soon to announce that an extraterrestrial craft has just landed on the White House lawn? Setting aside the military questions (like, how it got past our air defenses), Christians need to be prepared to respond to such a report.
Why? Because the media beats the UFO meme like a two-year-old with a new toy drum. The public is being primed to accept the arrival of ET, and the propaganda pushed by Hollywood and the media includes the idea that we’d need to rewrite the Bible as soon as the saucer lands. We’d be told that the crazy-haired guy on cable was right all along[v]—our distant ancestors weren’t visited by God and His angels, you see; they were just too primitive to see advanced ETIs and their technology for what they were.
The truth is just the opposite: Westerners, indoctrinated by the cult of scientism, don’t recognize divine imagery from the ancient world for what it is. We see a UFO where Mesopotamians of 2,600 years ago would instantly recognize a royal throne and its divine guardians.
Hardly a day goes by without a news site somewhere serving up clickbait of a fuzzy UFO video or an out-of-place “artifact on Mars.” Nothing is ever proved, but it keeps the flickering flame of hope aglow. This Chinese water-torture approach to ETI disclosure is frustrating for UFO believers, but it’s effective. See the statistics above—one in three Americans believe, and with far less evidence than we have—in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Even the Vatican is hedging its bets to stay ahead of the disclosure meme. In 2014, Pope Francis indicated his willingness to baptize an ET if one landed in St. Peter’s Square and expressed that wish.[vi]
Please understand that we’re not saying we believe evidence of alien contact exists. We do not. As Christians trying to emulate the example of the people of Berea, who listened to Paul and then carefully compared his words against Scripture, we should be discerning in all things with the Word of God as the final authority. And His Word gives us a theological framework to accept a disclosure event without deleting a single jot or tittle—even if, as we believe, such a “disclosure” will be a lie.
You see, your status on this planet and in the universe is not affected by a green-skinned entity in a silver jumpsuit suddenly appearing on the White House lawn—or an angel of light manifesting on the Temple Mount, for that matter.
You are created in the image of God. In this series, we’ll explain what that really means and why it matters in this context.
When we compare God’s silence on the possibility of extraterrestrial life to the volumes written by the prophets and apostles about powerful, dangerous entities who already share the planet with us, it’s clear that Christians should pay less attention to theoretical ETIs and pay more attention to the all-too-real principalities, powers, thrones, and dominions that Paul warned us about—especially since the latter are working very hard to persuade us that they’re the former.
To that end, in this series we’ll follow a chain of evidence and suggest, for the first time anywhere to the best of our knowledge, that the modern, “ancient alien” gospel has its roots in a very old supernatural source—and we’ll name the entities involved. This enemy has tried to claim the Earth and all that lives on it literally for thousands of years.
The enemy is not extraterrestrial, although it’s part of their deception to convince the world, like Baudelaire’s generous gambler, that they don’t exist—at least not in the way they’re described in the Bible.
Demonic? Actually it’s much darker than that.
The modern preachers of their false gospel probably don’t recognize it for what it is. That’s by design. To these otherworldly entities, humans are at best useful idiots. At worst—well, when they tell contactees that their only desire is to serve man, just remember: That might be the title of their cookbook.
Doctrine in this ET religion is built on scraps of evidence, some of it contradictory, and since there is no central office to enforce orthodoxy, believers are free to read into their “gods” just about anything they want.
1 comment:
SO like, if those UFO's beam up our current problem folks that are Traitor's within USA, cool!
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