Can it be so?
That is, are there truly some of the strange aspects to spiritual warfare that a fellow named Perry Stone asserts (in a new general-Christian book called There’s A Crack In Your Armor)?
According to Stone, in his travels he has discovered “that every town and city had its own spiritual atmosphere, and it was necessary for me to mentally and spiritually adjust to each particular setting and learn how to pierce the darkness through the spear of prayer and the weapon of fasting.”
“I began studying familiar spirits and how spirits desire to remain in the region where they have dwelt or among families with whom they are familiar (Mark 5:9-10),” he says. And we tend to believe as much. This is one “strange” aspect: that spirits could oversee areas.
Through the years, in our own travels, we have noted particular places where demonic activity, or an overarching darkness, seems especially intense. It can be a neighborhood, a section of a city, or an entire area. Of note have been places such as San Francisco, Savannah (Georgia), New Orleans, pockets of Upstate New York (where occultism was prevalent), and New York City (note here, especially, Greenwich Village and Chelsea).
Really, every city in the world has its areas of concern, and they usually are connected to what is occurring there, whether glitz and materialism, occult activities, crime, drug use, nightclubbing, pagan burials, or sexual sin. Of course, it can be tough to tell, in some cases, which came first — the oppression or the concomitant darkness (perhaps from ancestral sin).
In the Book of Daniel we see how a principality of Persia held off an angel for days (until Michael intervened).
That concept is thus not so strange, perhaps — not so much strange as unrecognized — but then Stone goes to new unusual aspects, such as his belief that blood attracts spirits. Does blood really have a supernatural dimension?
There was the case, cites Stone, of a fellow who went hunting and never returned. When a search party was sent to find him, they discovered his body near a fallen tree, where he had tripped and accidentally set off the shotgun, removing a portion of his face.
“He was buried, but for some reason his blood-covered shirt was taken to the attic room and stored there for many years. [My father] believed that the only thing in the attic that would attract these spirits was the blood-covered shirt. Remember that some false religions offer blood of animals to draw spirits to them or in hopes of inducing a curse upon someone. Before a person writes this off as fantasy or an overactive imagination, remember that certain things attract spirits. In the Bible God was against any and all forms of idolatry, as idol and god worship was considered the worship of devils (1 Corinthians 10:19-21; Revelation 9:20).
Voices were heard coming from the attic-like room — voices that were loud, profane, and cursed God’s Name.
It may seem bizarre, but do not voodooists and other satanists sacrifice animals for their blood, with the express purpose of attracting or energizing nocent spirits?
The blood aspect is fascinating, in that everything evil has its opposite in good and we know the power of Jesus’s Blood to attract good spirituality.
Stone also claims he knew a former missionary leader in Haiti who was there when John F. Kennedy announced the famous blockade against Cuba (which included other nations like Haiti). Now we get strangest of all.
“He related to me a story that was known at that time among the voodoo high priests,” writes Stone. “He said that ‘Papa Doc’ [the president, widely known to practice voodoo] called into his palace the most powerful voodoo priests, instructing them to create a voodoo doll to represent President Kennedy.
“During the actual ritual, large pins were placed into the back of the head of the doll, with incantations and curses upon the American president and requests [that] a powerful spirit to be released against him and for someone to kill Kennedy.”
There are certainly many spiritual as well as political reasons one can conjecture for that famous assassination. Was voodoo really also in the mix?
Papa Doc himself survived six assassination attempts and, due to a superstition about it, only went out in public on the twenty-second day of each month. It was then, he believed, that his own spirits would protect him. Kennedy, of course, was assassinated on the twenty-second day of November.
[resources: There’s A Crack In Your Armor]
