The Battle Of Armageddon

A man’s true environment is in his Imagination, so that “All that we behold, though it appears without, it is within, in our Imagination of which this world of mortality is but a shadow” (Blake, Jer., Plt.71). Everything in our world contains within itself the capacity for symbolic significance, so no matter what is taking place it’s a symbol telling you what is taking place within you. This whole vast world is yourself pushed out so that it is the image that is alive within our Imagination that really overwhelms us.

Now tonight let us turn to the one great book, the Bible. We are told there will be a finial battle…there will be a great and last war at the end of the world called Armageddon. The world thinks it’s going to take place on the outside, where races are put against races and nations against nations and so on. You’ve heard it…you’re old enough some of you to have heard that the First World War was that war and then came the 2nd World War. There are always wars, always conflicts, but that is not Armageddon. Armageddon is the battle of ideology…and it doesn’t mean Communism against Democracy or Socialism against Capitalism…hasn’t a thing to do with that. The battle takes place in us.

When we look into the world today and see the unrest, if you really understood what is taking place in a very large group in this world, you would rejoice…if you knew scripture. He said, “Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth. I have come not to bring peace but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, and to set a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes are those of his own household” (Mat.10:35). It certainly doesn’t mean our children pitted against us, hasn’t a thing to do with that. But here you’ll see, as it’s described in scripture, it’s the young against the old. It is simply the true understanding of the Word of God against the traditions of men. And then you hear it, after having built up all these structures by which you live, and you thought by these structures you would earn the kingdom of heaven, and so you would simply acquire merit. Then comes one who has experienced the story of God and he tells you as it actually happens and he knows that the entire story, the life of Jesus Christ, is a spiritual autobiography of everyone who is redeemed. So he tells it, knowing that everyone is going to be redeemed, and therefore everyone is going to have this as his own spiritual autobiography. Well, when you hear it, the conflict starts within you, and that’s the battle of Armageddon.

Neutrality is impossible. You can’t patch the little piece of new cloth to the old. It is either all or nothing. You can’t possibly put the new wine that you’re now receiving into the old bottles and say, well, I’ll go along with him just so far, but I will not give up my belief in an external God to whom I bend my knee and cross my body when I stand before what represents him upon the wall. So the battle is on…until finally within oneself the story unfolds and then the victory is God’s. It’s over. You should have no other God but God, and his name is I AM. “This is my name forever. By this name I shall be known throughout all generations” (Exod.3:14). Choose this day whom you shall serve…we chose this day the Lord. All right, now prove it in your behavior and prove it in your life. To whom will you turn if you’ve chosen correctly and chosen the Lord? And I tell you from experience this story of Jesus Christ is the actual spiritual autobiography of the individual who is redeemed; for the entire story unfolds within him as though there were no other, just himself.