Satan is the Author of the New Normal

As a filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan is best known for his directorial work.   He directed The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), to list a mere three of his better known films.   He also wrote these films and was one of the producers of Signs.    His oeuvre is characterized by suspense-filled storylines that incorporate supernatural themes often with a dramatic plot twist towards the end.

 

My favourite Shyamalan film to date, however, is one that came out ten years ago under the title Devil.  Shyamalan wrote the basic story and produced the film, but Brian Nelson wrote the screenplay and John Eric Dowdle directed.   It is on the short side being only slightly over an hour and a quarter long.  That it was generally panned by those reviewers whose opinions I respect the least merely confirmed my admiration for it.   Since the film is ten years old a spoiler alert is probably unnecessary, but just in case, be warned that in the next paragraph I am about to give the entire plot away.

 

The story is narrated by one of the characters, a Roman Catholic Hispanic security guard (Jacob Vargas) who works for the high rise building where the main events take place.   The narration starts at the beginning, although we don’t learn the identity of the narrator until part-way through.   He tells about a story that he had heard as a child about the “devil’s meeting”, in which the devil would come to earth, gather together a number of particularly bad sinners in one place, and torture and kill them off one by one, leaving the worst for last, before dragging them off to hell.   Knowing the story, he is the only one able to recognize what is happening all around him.  Someone hurls himself from the top of the building, signaling the arrival of the devil.   Then five people get stuck in the high rise’s elevator.   At the same time the communications system comes down with a few quirky bugs.   The people in the elevator can hear the people in the security monitoring station but not the other way around.   Meanwhile, the people in the station can see what is going on in the elevator except when it blacks out at intervals.   It is during those intervals, of course, that the people in the elevator are killed off, one by one.    The police detective (Chris Messina) who was already there to investigate the suicide, is called in to try and figure out who is committing the murders.   Needless to say, he pays little heed to the security guard who tries to tell him the devil is doing it all.   He is not himself a religious man and, indeed, when he is introduced in the film, we learn that he is bitter against the very idea of God because on an incident five years earlier when a driver in a hit-and-run had killed his wife and son.   This comes up in the context of a conversation with a Christian friend or colleague who is trying to persuade him to let go of his bitterness, forgive the killer, and turn to God.   Not being open to the security guard’s interpretation, he attempts to use his detective skills to figure out what is going on, but latches on to the wrong suspect.   The trapped people are killed off, until his suspect is the last one left, seemingly confirming his theory.   It is at this point, however, that one of the other people in the elevator, an old woman who had died earlier, comes back to life and reveals herself to be the devil.   The last of the devil’s prey, thinking that it is the end for himself, uses the communications system which suddenly comes back online to confess his having been the hit-and-run driver who had killed the detective’s family years before.  The devil, who can no longer claim the repentant sinner, vanishes.   The film’s conclusion has the detective take the survivor into custody.  As he drives him away he informs him that it was his family that had been killed in the hit-and-run.   Then, reflecting on the conclusion of the security guard’s narration – that the story is actually a reassuring one, because “if the devil is real, God must also be real”, he tells him he forgives him.  

 

I will point out, in passing, the rather amusing and delicious irony that in Hollywood, of which it would be very difficult to imagine an environment more hostile to Christianity, it took a Hindu storyteller  to be able to get away with making a movie that preached as overt a Christian message as this one.

 

That the reality of the devil is proof of the greater reality of God is precisely the message that is most needed today.   We are living in the year of the “new normal.”    While this expression was coined to describe the intolerable new rules that have been imposed upon us in the name of fighting the bat flu it is has not escaped the observation of those paying attention that conditions under the new normal bear a remarkable resemblance to those which the environuts have wanted to make permanent for decades.   The cynical among us might be forgiven for suspecting that, having failed to convince enough people to go along with their anti-freedom, anti-community, anti-family, anti-faith, anti-human agenda with the Bogeyman of anthropogenic climate change, they slapped a scary new label on the latest strain of influenza, lied through their teeth about how dangerous it is – it is more dangerous to people over 65 with multiple co-morbidities but less dangerous to people under 65 with no such conditions – and found success with their new Bogeyman.   It is also evident, for anybody willing to see what is right before their eyes, that there is a close connection between the new normal of the pandemic measures and the other major news item of the year, the “Year Zero” assault upon Western institutions, civilization, and history by Cultural Maoists.   When George Floyd became the one person infected with SARS-CoV-2 this year to have his death attributed to anything other than COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter and Antifa took this as their pretext to hold racist, anti-white, hate rallies in cities throughout the Western world, rallies which typically broke out into violent, destructive, riots, the public health officers who had imposed the new normal on us, gave their imprimatur to all of this while telling all of the rest of us that we still had to follow the social distancing, lockdown, protocols.

 

In the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of the Book of Revelation, St. John records his vision of the new heavens and the new earth after the end of history, the defeat of Satan, and the Final Judgement.    In that vision, the New Jerusalem, of which an extended description is given, descends from heaven to earth.   The significance of this inspired glimpse of the eschaton, is that in eternity future, after evil has been defeated once and for all, heaven and earth will be one.

 

What we are seeing today can best be described as a Satanic inversion of that vision.   The new normal, in which the whole world becomes a prison, in which such good things as family gatherings, getting together with your friends, throwing parties, having large weddings and funerals, celebrating Easter and Christmas, assembling in Church, singing God’s praises, partaking of the Sacrament, and basically all normal social and physical interaction are forbidden to us, outward symbols of bondage and slavery – masks – are required of us, and every violent and criminal act on the part of “antiracist” thugs and terrorists is encouraged, is hell arising to swallow the old earth.

 

There are many who, recognizing the horror of the totalitarian new normal being imposed upon us, attribute it to human conspiracy.    While all of these events certainly give every appearance of fitting into some grand master plan, and unquestionably human agency is involved, the problem with this interpretation, which is, indeed, the problem with all conspiracy theories of this nature, is that are simply too many human agents with too many conflicting interests and goals, for the ultimate, overarching, agenda to have been caused by a single group of human schemers.   The intelligence which is clearly directing these human agents must be a superhuman one.  

 

St. Paul, in the eleventh chapter of his Second Epistle to the Church in Corinth, writes:

 

For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.   And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.  Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works. (vv. 13-15)

 

The ministers of Satan in these verses are the people who have been troubling the Corinthian Christians, claiming an Apostolic authority that was not their own, and questioning that of genuine Apostles like St. Paul.   It would be most reasonable, however, to expect that what St. Paul says about them here, that they follow Satan’s example of disguising himself as being on the side of light, is also true of his other servants.  

 

This is the pattern we are seeing everywhere in the establishment of the new normal.     Tremendous evil is being done and passed off as good.    Locking people in their homes, criminalizing social contact, driving local retailers and restaurants into insolvency, selling future generations into slavery with the record public debt being accumulated, training people to fear human contact, snitch on their friends, family, and neighbours, and bully strangers into conformity with the most ridiculous of petty rules and restrictions, all of which is the kind of evil associated with totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, is being done in the name of “saving lives”, even though it has driven suicide rates up and likely caused more deaths due to loneliness among the nursing home population than the actual virus, which has not itself produced any significant amount of excess mortality this year.   Those who are deliberately stirring up violent, and sometimes explicitly genocidal, rage against white people, claim to be fighting “white supremacy” and “Nazism” even though they themselves are the only real racism problem in Western civilization today.    As for the environuts, their real agenda, which is to get people to stop reproducing and start dying so that there will be far fewer people on the earth and those few far poorer, they hide behind the mask of saving the planet, which has survived millennia of climate change including Ice Ages and periods a heck of a lot warmer than the one they claim we are entering through excess carbon dioxide production.

 

They are disguising themselves as angels of light, just like their master, the devil.

 

Earlier this month Dr. Bruce Charlton had the following insight into what has been going on this year:

 

Currently, as of 2020, the ideological-religious Litmus Tests - i.e. the three major planks of acute, 'emergency' Leftism - are, in order: 

1. To believe in the deadliness of the birdemic and the need for societal lock-down-social-conditioning-masking-etc; which schema justified the Leftist totalitarian global coup, and the consequent near-annihilation of Church Christianity, across all denominations.

2. To assert the antiracist ('MLB') agenda. Indeed, not explicitly to repudiate this ideology is (in practice) sufficient evidence of Leftism.

3. To believe the Anthropogenic Global Warming/ Climate change ideology - which is the basis of the UN Agenda 2030 and the 'Great Reset'. These are intended to lock-into-place the New Normal.

If you support any of all of these; you are objectively on-the-side of mainstream, global, totalitarian Leftist Establishment: which is the side of Satan and against God. And obviously, therefore, you are anti-Christian - despite whatever you may believe or assert. (bold indicates italics in post)

 

I concur entirely.

 

Which brings us back to the moral of our Hindu filmmaker’s Christian horror movie.   If the devil is real, and he is, God is real too.   Not, however, in some dualistic sense, as in the Manichean heresy, where good and evil are equals which require each other.   God is more real than the devil, indeed more real than any part of Creation, for He is Eternal Being.   Everything else that is derives its being from Him.   The devil is a created being, and like all created beings, was created good.   He lessened his own being, when he corrupted his nature through sin.   To side with him, is to take the side that has been doomed to defeat from the very beginning.   Although the pressure to conform to Satan’s new normal is immense, to do so is the ultimate self-destructive act.

 

Don’t side with the devil.