WHY DARK SPIRITS BATTLE FOR THE GOLAN HEIGHTS
Today, people have no problem believing that old hotels, civil war hospitals, abandoned theme parks, or antique houses where people were once murdered, are haunted. We want to believe in the paranormal. But, speak of the seraphim, cherubs, archangels, angels, watchers, four living creatures, seven spirits, demons, powers of darkness, spiritual wicked beings in the atmosphere all battling against God and heaven and for the souls of men, and people think it all to be novel and sensational. The minds of the secular have been trained by our secular world to consider the Bible as religious literature and its characters as fairies or concocted characters for stories. However, for the true believer, the Holy Scriptures are an everlasting treasure that tells us the truths of the beginning, God, devil, man, Eden, life, death, heaven and hell, and eternity. We can and do know, that there are spirits, places can be and are haunted, although not by murdered victims or departed souls, but by deceiving spirits to distract the living from the biblical truth of dying, death, and eternity in one of two places. This being true, is it possible that wars are haunted? Are wars on earth caused by phantom powers in the atmosphere?
Is there really a supernatural link to the battle for the Golan at the border of Israel and Syria and Lebanon? Is the political and military struggle for the real estate bordered by the Sea of Galilee and the Hula Valley on the west, the Wadi Raqqad to the east, the Yarmouk River in the south, and Mount Hermon on the north a satanically inspired and sinister struggle set in motion from the dark spirits in the atmosphere? If so, why?
Israel regained the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in 1967 with modern Israel’s victory and control of the Golan, the first time since one-thousand years before the days of Yeshua, over 3,000 years ago. That is amazing! And, how Israel won is miraculous. But, if we use the term miracle, we must include a consideration of angelic help for Israel, that is, God helped Israel -for some reason, which then suggests that if God helped Israel then dark powers were helping Egypt, Syria, Jordan and other enemies of Israel. Can that be true, especially since Israel is not a regenerate community of believers, a holy kingdom of saints.
During the Six-Day War Israel tripled her land area, including the Sinai, all of southern Israel called the Negev, the West Bank, the Old City East Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and the Golan Heights. The high place of the Golan is a 9,200 foot mountain called Mount Hermon, some think the mountain of the Transfiguration. Two-thousand years before Yeshua’s transfiguration on Hermon (if, that was indeed the place of His transfiguration), the mountain was considered by the Babylonians (who held the Jews captive in the land of Babylon) as the mountain of the divine assembly, their chief God being EL. Near one-thousand years before the Babylonians, about 1450 BC Israel came to the land under the command of General Yehoshua and they were to take that land from the immoral Amorites. Living among the Amorites were the nasty giant-worshippers of Gezer where I recently participated in an archaeological dig (see pictures). Archaeology actually tells us more about these people and places than we get from the Bible, yet, archaeology agrees with the Holy Scriptures concerning the folk living at Gezer. The Gezerites were so dark and evil that neighboring peoples greatly feared the Amorites; one nation called Sumer in Mesopotamia (today, Iraq) built a wall 170 miles to keep out one family of the Amorites, called the Tidanu or Tidnim. The wall was called bad martu muriq tidnim or “wall that keeps Tidanu away.” The wall was breeched and the Amorites came to rule the whole country, peoples that today are called Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt.
The Babylonians who took Israel captive in 609, 597 and 586 BC were the most renown and infamous of the Amorite dynasty. “Bad boys” is too trite. The Amorites were cultic devil-worshipping humans devoted to pagan gods, their chief gods being Yarikh and Marduk dwelling on Hermon (Lipinski, Edward. El’s Abode: Mythological Traditions Related to Mount Hermon and to the Mountains of Armenia,” Orientalia Lovanien sa Periodica 2, 1971: 19). Ezekiel, Daniel, Shadrach, Mishach, Abednego, and other Jews in Babylon certainly knew of the evil Chaldeans. Later, Havvakuk wrote of the fierce and impetious Chaldeans. Even Moshe knew of the Amorite cultic practices for he wrote of King Og of Bashan who was left of the Rephaim, his bed of iron nine cubits long and four cubits wide (Duet. 3:11). The king's bed was a cultic one, where his cohorts engaged in ritual copulation to bless the land, and his bed the same dimensions as that of Marduk in his temple in Babylon. Moshe was suggesting that Og was one of the giants (Rephaim), related to the god Marduk, an inspired ‘god’ by the devils of Babylon. Joshua said the same, “Og king of Bashan, one of the remnant of the Rephaim, who lived at Ashtarot and at Edrei and ruled over Mount Hermon and Salecah and all Bashan” (Joshua 12:4,5 ESV).
More! While at Gezer I did more than dig; I listened. When the profs and archaeologists spoke I took notes and all of them without exception said that the tunnel we worked in, was for certain cultic, and with my own eyes I saw the high ceiling cut meticulously by its long-ago inhabitants, for giants? When I returned to Neve Shalom in the evenings I spent the remaining part of the day studying and I discovered Gezer was one of the places the Philistines (who had their giants) was repelled by the fighting forces of Israel. Did the Gezerites dig the shaft down, down, down to pay homage to the netherworld? The Amorites did! They lived in the region of Bashan and Hermon the high place, and they thought it to be the entrance to the netherworld. In fact, the Amorites believed they descended from the Titans, the gods of Greek mythology.
Let us fast-forward to Yeshua’s day, to the event when He wanted His disciples to discover for themselves just Who He was. Yeshua brought His talmidim to the foot of Mount Hermon, to a place in His day called Caesarea Philippi, to a mountain where Pan (today, called the grotto of Pan) the goat-god was worshiped -along with myriad other gods. On the shelves carved in that mountain sat idols of these gods. Here, in the presence of these Baals, Kefa/Peter made his great confession concerning Yeshua, "YOU are the Son of the Living God!" Lets fast-forward again to the transfiguration of Yeshua. No one knows the mount of Transfiguration since the Scriptures do not say, but entertaining the possibility of Hermon, Yeshua chose the mountain of Hermon on the Golan to be transfigured into a being of Light pronouncing Himself as God! The God of the mountain of gods.
In Psalm 68:15-18 is a reference to the spiritual war that has to do with God and the gods, told speaking to Mount Hermon, the mountain of Bashan, and Zion, the Mountain of YHWH (much like Shaul/Paul did in Galatians of the two mountain, Sinai and Golgatha). "O mountain of gods, mountain of Bashan; mountain of knolls, mountain of Bashan! To what you watched O mountain of knolls, [at] the Mount that Elohim desired for His abode, also YHWH will dwell forever? The chariots of God are myriads of thousands and myriad of thousands; my Lord is among them; Sinai is in the sanctuary. You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the backsliders/rebellious, that YHWH Elohim may dwell there.
Hermon is the mountain of Bashan and is NOT the mountain of God. Zion is in the OT the mountain of YHWH. Figuratively speaking, Bashan with many knolls or peaks/hills is looking to Zion with jealousy. Zion is where God YHWH desired to dwell –since the beginning of time (Ezek.28). It is possible that in early history the chariots of God led by YHWH came against the gods of that mountain, or is the psalm prophetic of the end times. It is reasonable if only by exclamation that Yeshua may have been transfigured here since He is YHWH leading captives on high, even backsliders to Himself.
Another interesting reference to Hermon on the Golan is in the antiquity Book of 1 Enoch, “And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them and said to one another: Come, let us chose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children And Semjaza who was their leader, said unto them, I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin. And they all answered him and said, “Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this place, but to do this thing. Then sware they all together end abound themselves by mutual imprecation upon it. And they were in all two hundred; who descend in the day of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon and they called it Mount Hermon because they had sown and bound themselves by mutual imprecation sup it." It appears from the famous (although not inspired) book of Enoch that the titans, who may have been the "Watchers" began their rebellion on Mount Hermon before the flood of Noach, Mount Hermon where throughout history, the gods or demons of the Sumerians, Amorites, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans were worshipped. It is also probable that these gods are the ones behind Catholicism, Buddhism, and Islam, and the gods have their eyes fixed on the land YHWH has decreed for Spiritual Israel and their Messiah Yeshua.
In these last days, modern unbelieving Israel will come to anticipate a messiah like unto David, a geopolitical messiah, and they may welcome a god Raphim from Hermon.
Sensational? Fiction? In the beginning was a holy land, Eden where YHWH dwelt in a pristine environment until evil was found in satan (Ezekiel 28). He was exiled from that land. YHWH made man in His image and placed His image in the garden in Eden. That man was beguiled by satan to sin, and man was exiled, although promised a messianic savior to come. YHWH later sought a man in the east and brought him back westward to His holy land and Abraham entered it. YHWH promised the land of milk and honey, His garden to Abraham, and a seed from Abraham to inherit the Holy Land. When Israel sinned both the northern confederacy and later the southern confederacy were exiled. Soon, the seed of Avraham came as YHWH replicated Himself into a human although with purposed limitations using Miriam’s genome. The messiah and son of God, the king of Israel was prophesied to sit upon the throne of David in a land, in a holy city, upon the Temple Mount, the Mountain of Zion. Will the chief of the gods do the same? Allowed by YHWH of course for His mysterious reason, will the gods of Hermon continue to fight in the heavenly realm for the Golan and its chief mountain, Mount Hermon, and produce another messiah-like person, the "instead of" messiah, or antichrist to deceive Israel, to cause Israel to flee the land “to the rock,” and possess the realm of the real estate where in the beginning satan cast his five “I Wills?”
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