Driven Into Darkness

KILMARTIN SERIES: 4

In this series, we are looking at how unclean and perverse spirits can easily take hold in a place and turn it away from The Lord. We are taking Kilmartin in Argyll as an example; largely because we live there, but also because it is a focal point where faith in God, once dominant, is being seriously challenged by unbelief, Humanism and New Age philosophy.

And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
They will pass through it hard-pressed and hungry; and it shall happen, when they are hungry, that they will be enraged and curse their king and their God, and look upward. Then they will look to the earth, and see trouble and darkness, gloom of anguish; and they will be driven into darkness.
[Isaiah 8:19-22 NKJV]

Yesterday, I walked the dog as I usually do through the Glebe field and waited for our small terrierist to obey my instructions (it takes a while), I read the descriptive sign on the ground by the Glebe Cairn and saw that the cairn had been ‘excavated’ by Canon William Greenwell, a well-known archaeologist and Church of England priest. At that moment, I believe that The Lord gave me a vision, showing that various archaeological diggings and investigations in the area released many ‘dead’ and ‘dark’ spirits from their imprisonment to trouble the present day.

Some, I am sure, will consider such visions fanciful, but — as one not given to visions — when I have experienced such phenomena, they have proved to carry a great evidence of truth. However, discount them if you will, there is a powerful confirmation of circumstance there.

The ‘they’ of Isaiah 8:19 are not specified — Matthew Henry names them as ‘those that seek to familiar spirits, and regard not God’s law and testimony’ — but they speak to us; they speak to our natural selves, encouraging us to seek ‘mediums and wizards’. Why? Because there is no light in us. If we have any measure of His light, then it will shine upon the ‘trouble and darkness’. This is great news, for we need our Lord’s light in these troubled times more than ever before. Without it we are ‘driven into darkness’. These dark and ancient forces will cower and flee before the name of The Lord.

What we must realise and accept is that we live in a time of great darkness. The light of our Lord is being challenged and vilified at every turn. Again I say, why? My belief is that the spirits of darkness, buried in the deepest parts of the earth have been awakened by man’s probing and digging — in the spirit as well as the physical realms — and our curiosity about the distant past threatens to engulf the present.

How often have we heard that our God is a god of now — a very present help in time of trouble? Exactly. We know it, and need to be aware that the dead spirits of the past are powerful also and are surrounding us and seek to consume our very essence, converting us into their substance. It is happening and thus we must be ever on the watchtower, and also turning to our Lord in prayer

"Also the sons of the foreigner who join themselves to the LORD, to serve Him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be His servants -- everyone who keeps from defiling the Sabbath, and holds fast My covenant — even them I will bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on My altar; for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations."
[Isaiah 56:6-7 NKJV]

The only way to get into the relationship of ‘asking’ is to get into the relationship of absolute reliance on the Lord Jesus. “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him.”
[from ‘Disciples Indeed’ by Oswald Chambers]