Second story
A man from Colombia who was abducted in 1997 and experienced what he describes as a miraculous encounter with God during that kidnapping believes he was “infused” with the reason why evil spirits are at war with humanity.
It is presented here for your discernment — as intriguing as it is bold [see previous story]. “By being thrown out of Heaven, they turned from light into darkness and were separated from the light at the beginning of Creation,” says musician-turned-missionary Marino Restrepo, now of California, upon whom we reported earlier this week [see story]. “The fallen angels knew that man would occupy the spaces they lost in Heaven.”
This, he writes in a book, causes extreme demonic rage — the attempts at keeping us from attaining Heaven.
Claims Restrepo, who now preaches around the world, “If a saint occupies the place of a fallen angel, then that explains their ferocious battle not to be replaced. The celestial army, by Divine design and through the action of the messenger angels, is in charge of fighting the ongoing battles being waged shoulder to shoulder with the saints here on earth in order to help them achieve celestial glory.”
“The spaces left empty by the fallen angels will be filled by the saints to complete the salvific plan of restoring paradise,” Restrepo writes. “St. Paul states in the First Letter to the Corinthians (6:3): ‘The saints will judge the angels.'”
It is one of many potent observations in a book, From Darkness into the Light, that details Restrepo’s conversion after he was imprisoned in a cave for 15 days. Bound and hooded, the Colombian, who had worked in Hollywood merchandising and had lived a life in the fast lane prior to his abduction by former drug lords, suffered bites from insects and bats before he was released months after his conversion in the cave.
That occurred, he says, when the Lord came to him in an incredible Voice and showed him his entire life in a series of lucid visions.
While he says it would take “volumes” to describe all he was told, Restrepo has detailed much of it in his book — with his insights on evil coming to us at a time of the year when we are especially attuned to the battles raging in spirit around us.
It is at the least a view worthy of consideration at this moment in history which the Colombian says he was told by the Lord is worse than the days of Sodom.
“Humans lack knowledge of the real presence of the devil in their lives,” he states. And the Church does not properly teach about the workings of evil because it has sought to “please the world” and has become “protestantized due to fear of being ridiculed by the world which looks for what is politically correct rather than what is the right devotion,” he observes.
“The teaching of Christ concerning the evil one is so extensive in the Gospel that the Lord says it is absolutely absurd that the Church could ignore these teachings,” he argues.
“Satan knows how short and transitory our earthly life is. He knows he has to use the vital moments of our existence to exact the greatest damage so that when we reach a mature age, we no longer have the strength to change. In retrospect I can see the urgency of Satan using our youth and vitality to keep us active without rest day and night.”
Restrepo says he learned that every unconfessed sin, every transgression for which there has not be reparation, “is guarded by demons,” explaining how darkness builds around us and comes down through generations. “When we decide to confess our sins, we inadvertently arrest all the activities of the devil in our lives,” he poignantly observes.
Satan’s special target: priests.
“The soul that most appeals to the devil is that of a priest, religious, or consecrated layperson because bringing them down violates the sacred tabernacle of Our Lord,” asserts Restrepo, who now ministers in 21 countries. “A great sacrilege is committed as if the spirit of evil has entered the tabernacle itself. By giving his life to the Lord, the consecrated soul is turned into a tabernacle of God. There are a lot of priests, religious, and consecrated laity who become trapped in the most abominable sins after having lived an exemplary life. The spirit of evil presents a brilliant argument of justification to the devotee who had previously been out of his clutches, making him believe that he needs to relax from such discipline since he is only human.”
Though many priests were highly trained and well educated in philosophy and theology, held high degrees, and received the benefit of extensive teachings in Rome, the Holy Land, and in the best universities around the world, “sadly, many were, nonetheless, ignorant of the supernatural life,” writes the author. “Seemingly, the more educated they were, the more estranged from God. According to the Lord, our Church is plagued with a record number of disloyal clergy in this day and age.”
While exposing priestly transgressions that threaten our children is obviously crucial, Restrepo argues, however, that what priests do in their personal lives should not be a preoccupation. “Satan’s trap is to entice Catholics to focus on the sins of the Church in order to weaken their faith until they become his slaves. If we fix our eyes on Jesus, we will be saved but if we concentrate on the sins of priests, nuns, or any believer for that matter, we will never be able to detect the Presence of God in our Church or any other church.”
The sacraments of the Church, he was shown, are so powerful that “if they were performed with reverence, motivated by love of God, they would conquer a gigantic portion of the devil’s territory.”
No stranger to evil, Restrepo rubbed up against it first-hand, watching friends succumb to drugs and becoming involved in all sorts of occultism during his “hippie” youth and then later as a musician-turned-businessman in Los Angeles. Tragedy haunted his acquaintances and girlfriends.
We pay for our original association with Satan, Marino argues, “by walking in his territory as though married to the enemy, which is this material world. Our entire life is based on divorcing ourselves from that reality by rebuking the relationship that we contracted due to the devil’s temptation of Adam and Eve.”
“The Lord showed me intergenerational inheritance,” he adds, “the strong force that binds those who walk in sin, who walk over the territory of evil. In addition to suffering the consequences of our own sins, we also carry additional baggage — the sins of our ancestors.”
The soul that no longer possesses sinful flesh recognizes the Creator as Lord and has rebuked the devil, he preaches. But if such a soul is not in a perfect state of purity nor illumination, it is not in a purely holy state. What we must strive for, says Restrepo, is rehabilitation of the “spiritual body that is impure because of the imperfect relationship between spirit and flesh during the period of grace.”
In order to find the Divine, we have to achieve “maximum” purity.
What Jesus seeks, writes the former drug user and occultist, is for us to establish “a perfect communion between flesh and spirit and to understand first and foremost something basic about the wisdom of our spiritual existence.
“Heaven, hell, and purgatory and this material world exist at the same time on the spiritual plateau. Therefore, we have to be conscious that in this very moment and at the instant at which we were conceived in the wombs of our earthly mothers, we are standing in eternity.”
It is writing like this that makes it more than a dramatic story of conversion. It is a book of unusual insights and writing like this — with a tone that manages to be both admonishing and uplifting, tough and soft, as is God:
“I can testify to His infinite love, an immense love that would calcify our existence if we would receive it all at once,” Marino writes. “That is why the mystery of the nearness to God is gradually unfolded and why He brings His creatures into His Arms dispensing His love little by little like a drop of water that trickles towards the sun and ends up evaporating before the incandescence of the heat by fusing itself in its rays.”
[resources: From Darkness into the Light]
10/26/06