The persecution of Christians is more subtle than in Roman times, when it was absolutely clear that you were being killed for your faith. Satan has become reluctant to send throngs of crowned martyrs into heaven, and has instead refined his strategy to where your persecution garners little attention and ends up looking like “love” or “common sense” whereas it is actually a direct attack on Lord Jesus Christ.

In Roman times, Christians were commanded to give fealty to pagan gods, often by placing incense on hot coals within a pagan temple. If they refused, they were tortured and killed. There was no doubt why they were being persecuted, and I imagine there are millions of these martyrs in heaven (one estimate I have heard is 11 million).

Satan’s job is to send souls into hell, not glorify them in heaven, so for these times he has modified his approach. He is disinclined to give anyone the opportunity for a direct confession of the faith that leads to immediate death and glorification. Instead, he persecutes you through his human henchman for any other stated reason besides Christ, but make no mistake that he is behind the persecution and aims for you to compromise your faith in a way that causes you to lose your soul and inspire others to do the same. If you are inhibited to worship Lord Jesus Christ by even one minute due to a government directive or mob action, you are being persecuted, and must see through the false façade to gain courage and make a stand for your faith. Here are the three fake reasons that can be used…

1. Health: “We’re not persecuting you for your love of Lord Jesus Christ, but you’re putting people’s health in danger.”

We saw this vividly with the COVID pandemic, and I must say this was one of Satan’s most clever tricks. His main aim with COVID was to terrorize the world population into taking dangerous black magic vaccines to weaken people’s trust in God or simply cause them to die before repentance. One method to accomplish this is to shut down churches through government mandates that also applied to secular businesses (to help give plausible deniability that the Church is not the main target). Another method is to darken spiritual leaders with fear that venerating icons or communing from a common spoon, key practices of the Orthodox faith, will “put others in danger” and lead to a terrible physical death that is seen as an outcome worse than losing your soul for eternity.

I must remind you that many Christian martyrs died during the Iconoclasm period (8th and 9th centuries), when evil rulers tried to ban icons, and yet in 2020, without a whimper, huge swaths of the Orthodox Church voluntarily removed icons from their churches without any protest. What an incredible feat by Satan! It’s obvious that Satan can “learn” like we can learn, because he tried to remove icons a millennia ago but failed, and here he was able to do it, albeit temporarily, and not a single martyr died for icons and not one Bishop was excommunicated. Within most confessions, he also got them to adopt zany health practices like mask-wearing, standing six feet away from each other, and neurotically applying alcohol to their hands until they’re dry as a bone. I was in the Armenian Church when COVID first hit and a practice called the “Kiss of Peace” was modified to become “The Awkward Bow from Six Feet Away.” The demons had a good laugh.

Bill Gates is already preparing for the next pandemic, and maybe he’s a prophet because he seems to be able to predict the future, so I would expect another health crisis where various Churches will be even more aggressive in modifying practices to the point where essential dogmas are discarded and souls lost by choosing to be a friend of the world instead of Lord Jesus Christ. Woe to those leaders who hurt the Orthodox Church and attack the Body of Christ in the name of going along with a fake pandemic to preserve “health”! Whatever the case, when you are inhibited from going to your church to worship Lord Jesus Christ because of a health scare, you are actually being persecuted for your faith.

“During the [Roman] persecutions Christians dealt with horrific tortures of the body, however there was no interference on the mind or the soul. On the contrary, during the martyrdoms of [the Christians] of the end times we will [also] have interference on the soul and the methods [of torture] will be far more satanic. And this because they [the system of the Antichrist] will introduce inside of you chemical things [mind altering drugs] to paralyze your mind, your will power, will distort your sentiments and will disorient your mind.” —Elder Athanasios Mitilinaios

2. Hate Speech: “We’re not persecuting you for your love of Lord Jesus Christ, but your religious beliefs are hateful and hurting the feelings of disenfranchised groups, especially homosexuals.”

“Hate speech,” a term invented by Jews to control and tyrannize the Western population, may be used in the future against Churches that forbid gay marriage, block boys from attending services in a state of cross-dress, or insist on transgenders to repent from their life of sin. Once the media maligns a Church—and we know that this will mainly happen to the Orthodox Church since most other confessions are going along with the world when it comes to cultural matters—the government may deny their tax-exempt status, pushing parishes into bankruptcy. Or in countries like Europe, they may shut down the Church outright just like how they send German grandmas to jail if they deny the Holocaustâ„¢ over tea and butterplätzchen. Or during a war they may put out an executive order that shuts down a Church by fiat for being a “threat to national security.”

We’re already seeing a shade of the latter with the Church I’m in, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Writers connected to sodomy-loving globalist outfits are painting the Church as an anachronistic home to monsters who are not capable of living a progressive lifestyle in a big multicultural city with gay pride parades. Whatever the case, when your Church is being attacked because of its opinions and hatred of sin, and not necessarily its dogmas or doctrines, it is actually being persecuted for its faith.

“Under the cover of this deceptive, fair-seeming exterior, which is leading many into delusion, there is actually everywhere now taking place a most powerful hidden persecution against Christianity, appearing in the most various forms. This persecution is far more dangerous and terrible than the former open persecution, for it threatens a complete devastation of souls—spiritual death.” —Archbishop Averky

3. Fascism or extremism: “We’re not persecuting you for your love of Lord Jesus Christ, but your Church is actually an operation run by a fascist government or organization that happens to be Orthodox.”

We see this being successfully applied in Ukraine to devastating effect for the flock. All Church activities in the country are in the process of being completely shut down because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is spiritually connected to the Moscow Patriarchate. The false accusation is that the Moscow Patriarch is an agent of Putin, a realpolitik operation. The truth is that it’s the Church that originated from Saint Vladimir, the baptizer of Russia in 988, who took the faith from the Byzantines as a safe deposit of the teachings of Lord Jesus Christ, with holy sacraments that are necessary for the salvation of our souls. Human beings who are in the Church are sinners and make mistakes, but the Orthodox Church itself is the bedrock of faith in the True God.

How easy will the United States government be able to apply this trick to Churches in the United States? First they will come after the Russians, and then it will be the Serbs since they are brothers of the Russians, and then it will be anyone else with ethnic origins and long beards who don’t support the U.S. government’s foreign policy that is looking more like a scheme of genocide perpetuated by Jews against the world’s goyim. Whatever the case, when your Church is being accused as a “foreign agent” of extremists or fascists, it is actually being persecuted because of its faith.

“…in Pitesti [Romanian communist prison] there was a fight between the spirit of good and the spirit of evil. It was not just the persecution of a regime against some people… It was really the battle between God and the devil. In relation to this, I said in my sermons that the whole history of humanity is a fight between God and the devil, and that our heart is the battleground. But it is not dead ground; it is living ground, and it can decide the victory—whether God or the devil will reign in our hearts…” —Father George Calciu

Conclusion

In modern times, when faith is weak, and people are ready to halt all worship of the Lord because of manufactured scares, Satan’s achievement of getting Churches to modify their practices or close outright is not that impressive. Nonetheless, these closures and blasphemies against the sacraments will hurt those who want to maintain the right faith and participate weekly in church life without first getting permission from secular health authorities who are obviously in bed with those who pay them the most money.

Until you see nationwide repentance and the arrival of martyrs who are willing to die for the fact that their church doors are closed, we will see more attacks by Satan. He will likely use multiple tactics simultaneously to hammer the Churches into submission, demoralize the faithful, and cause them to adopt secular medical practices to the detriment of their souls. God always looks after the zealous, so may our faith be strong enough to be included among His remnant, who will endure and persist until the end no matter the tribulation.

Read Next: The Synagogue Is Ramping Up Their Attacks On The Orthodox Church