Credit: anonymous painter from 16th century, Wikipedia, Public Domain
After the home of Christian apologist and author Larry Alex Taunton, was swatted on March 17, 2025, he cited the Apostle Paul’s infamous passage in Ephesians describing the believer’s true enemy:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12 NASV)
Taunton, 57, serves as the executive director of Fixed Point Foundation. He has debated atheists such as Christopher Hitches and Richard Dawkins and authored three books including The Faith of Christopher Hitchens and The Grace Effect: How the Power of One Life Can Reverse the Corruption of Unbelief
Swatting is a serious and potentially dangerous crime. It occurs when someone calls 911 with a fake warning that a life-threatening situation is taking place at a particular location. The call typically warns that people are also armed and dangerous.
These type of calls require an urgent and armed response from police. In the past, innocent people have actually been killed because of such false claims.
In Taunton’s case, an individual called 911 stating that he had been shot and was trapped inside Taunton’s residence cornered by three armed men, Jon Brown writes in his article for the Christian Post.
When the sheriff’s department responded they come silently with a heavily armed swat team, Taunton who lives in rural Alabama was first alerted at 1 am that something was going on outside his home by his German Shepherd dog. Then he heard a noise outside his house. Thinking it was an intruder, he got up, and with a gun in hand was prepared to repel the individual trying to break through his locked door.
Without too much imagination, you can see how this could have gone horribly wrong. Fortunately, it did not.
Brown writes that it’s part of a trend in recent months where several homes of Conservative and Christians have been targeted by swatting attempts.
Taunton believes he was targeted because of a recent video he posted of his visit to military-styled compound in Cairo, Egypt that had received funding from USAID. He was subsequently arrested and detained by Egyptian security for the visit.
However, the video went viral receiving millions of views.
While it’s easy to blame the individual making the calls, Taunton’s suggests that demonic forces might be behind this type of activity.
Coincidentally, the next day, March 18, 2025, a church in Indianapolis was vandalized with demonic graffiti. During the night someone had sprayed painted messages on the outerwalls of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church’s building and as well the church’s bus.
This included words such as ‘F@@@ the Lord’, ’the devil rules’ and ‘die die die on the outside of the building. The bus had the words ‘666’ etched on it in several places, Church Leaders reports.
Two days earlier, Saturday, March 15, 2025, someone broke into a St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Wichita, Kansas. In addition to causing extensive damage, requiring the church to cancel its Sunday service, the individual also wrote the domain name of Satanic website on an inside wall, the Western Journal reports.
Though these incidents occurred around the same time, I don’t believe people had coordinated these attacks. But I do wonder if they might have been organized by a spiritual foe?
Because the believer’s enemy is spiritual, the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, that “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses” (2 Corinthians 10:4 NASV).
In other words, we can’t use physical weapons in such battles, but spiritual ones, such as prayer and fasting.
OpentheWord.org 
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