Mike Bickle, director of the International House of Prayer, says Christians are experiencing increasing levels of bias against their beliefs, even persecution—a trend he says is foretold in Scripture.
“I’m convinced it’s already starting in a mild way,” Bickle says. “For the folks who are getting hit, it doesn’t feel mild, but it’s a small number right now. But I see that number increasing dramatically.”
Bickle says his book, God’s Answer to the Growing Crisis, details the Psalm 2 prophecy from 3,000 years ago:
“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us'” (Ps. 2:1-3, ESV).
“The kings of the earth” and “the rulers” who will come together, Bickle says, are “the leaders of the culture, not just smaller political leaders and the kings, but the leaders of academia, the media, marketplace, economics, military, sports—all of those rulers of the culture, they will come together, not 100% of them, but enough of them for David to say, ‘They will come together.'”
What those leaders will do, Bickle says, is work together to “plan and scheme.” Their goal is laid out in verse 3, where King David “in essence says they’re going to drive the influence of the Word of God out of the culture.”
“Now he doesn’t use the words ‘the influence of the Word of God,'” he says, “they’re going to break God’s bonds off the people, and cast away God’s cords. God’s bonds are God’s cords. To the secular mindset, God’s Word is bondage, and it stifles our human potential—old archaic laws in the Bible that are keeping us back from our full potential and sexuality and spirituality and everything else.
“The kings of the earth are going to plan—together with the rulers of the culture—to take the bondage of God’s Word, from their point of view, and break it off of cities and nations, break it off the culture,” Bickle says. “That means to get rid of, dismiss the Word of God in the public square in every way possible. And that has really accelerated in the last 12 months and then much faster in the last 12 weeks.”
Bickle says this increase is due in part to the internet, which, he says, “has given language and accessibility for all kinds of people to voice their opinions and in essence to validate and embolden the people who are like them. … People who would have never thought of certain things are now not only thinking about them, they’re enraged about them, and they see themselves as experts on them.”
Bickle also says that the internet, in some ways, represents the restoration of the unified language displayed in the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11. He says the height of the tower was not the issue, but rather that “there’s enough sin in humans that when they get together, and they share their knowledge and experience and they embolden each other in sin, they will get to the top of the heavens, they will touch the demonic realm. … at the end of the age, right before the Lord returns, the human race has entered into a realm of darkness and interaction with demons beyond any time of history.”
For more from Mike Bickle on how biblical prophecy ties in with what Christians are experiencing today, listen to this entire episode of the Strang Report podcast here. Be sure to subscribe to the Strang Report on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. {eoa}
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