THE FRUSTRATION OF SATAN Chapter 5

THE ANOINTED ONE ARRIVES EGYPT

Diana, devil and goddess of Ephesus, had seldom felt so good - not even when the Ephesians offered her human sacrifices. She supervised the massacre in Rama and environs, and was sure that all babies had been killed – including the Anointed One. The smell of human blood, the cries of the bereaved, the agony of the people, were the ultimate aphrodisiac to her.

Dagon, devil of the Philistines, watched her excitement with interest. Dagon reached out to her and said, “Princess Devil, do not leave the substance and chase shadows. This was to kill the Anointed One and I hope we did.”

“Well,” Diana growled. “We sealed up the entire place and we did not leave any baby alive – not one. It was a comprehensive job, you devil. All demons were involved. The party is still on. Reveling in the blood of that number of children and adults is rare. You can still hear the sound of humans lamenting. Serves the them right. That idiot called ‘Romanus’ almost spoilt the party. Thank wickedness! He left. That was the job of Baal. Baal is something else. If Romanus had summoned up courage to talk with Herod, Herod would have changed his mind. He was on the verge of doing that but we kept him from discussing the matter with his wife. And I had ten thousand demons chanting ‘Do it! Do it!’ in his mind. It was a delicate job!!!”

“Even after all the hate programs that the Big Boss loaded on Herod’s hard drive?” Dagon said. “That man is just plain human. Humans do not seem to follow anything through. They are like chickens, jumping from one picking to the other. They change like the wind. But we pulled this one off. Have you talked with Lu?”

“Not yet? I figure he monitored it. Lu’s network is rock solid,” Diana said. “But he has not been too happy lately. This entire matter has unsettled him more than anything. You he had been expecting it for eternity and now things appear to be slipping out of his paws.”

“Well lets call him all the same and find out if we lived up to his billing. He is a hard devil to please,” Dagon said. He reached for his handheld and punched it. Lu answered instantly.

“Big Boss did you like the smell of blood in Rama?” Dagon said.

Lucifer, son of the morning, grunted, “I followed it through and think it was a tidy job. Many of those human cubs would have given us great trouble as adults. On that score we did well, pretty well!”

“Well, do you think we got the Anointed One?”

“No, we did not,” Lu said with a sigh. “There were no angels there. No resistance. That was unusual. More so, like the man who did the funeral oration said, it was written in scripture ‘Thus saith the Lord; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.’ So we simply did what God said over a thousand years ago that we would do, without knowing it. That is what pains me. I always think we are taking the initiative only to find out that God saw it millenniums ahead. That was why I set up the Bible Research Group but they do not seem to find these things out until they have been done. If I knew the meaning of that verse we would not have killed the babies. Even though, like I said, some of them would have given us great trouble in later life. Their deaths dimmed the stars in the horizon. But doing what God said we would do, oh well…”

Dagon hit his (Dagon’s) horns against the wall, “Oh Lu! So we came blank. The Anointed One is still on the loose? How do you know? No one got out of there.”

Lu permitted himself a chuckle, “No one who did not abide under the shadow of the Almighty got out of there. The Anointed One and his earthly family operate under the shadow of the Almighty. No one can see them except the Almighty steps aside to let them be seen – and that He seldom does for people under His shadow.”

“How is that?” Diana queried.

“The Almighty is light and a consuming fire,” Lu said patiently. “A fire has no shadow. But when the fire overflows, you can call part of that fire a shadow. Now that is it. He is brighter than everything in creation and therefore can have no shadow. The shadow of the Most High is, therefore, fire. You cannot look into it and you cannot see it. Even I cannot see into the shadow of the Almighty. But I have a plan…”

“But can human’s see them?” Diana persisted.

“Sure humans can see those under the shadow of the Almighty, but the demons who live in the humans would not be able to see them. Even the humans can do nothing to them. Two demons have actually filed intelligence gathered from the conversation of two soldiers that the Anointed One left the night before the massacre. The familiar spirit in a soldier called Julius and the one in another called Brutus reported the conversation. A man called Joseph, with a wife, name unknown and a baby. The man is a carpenter, this checks out and explains while the pillar of fire was lifted in Rama before the massacre. On that night the familiar spirits only heard voices and did see anything. So they reported voices.”

“Yeah, I picked that intelligence up too,” Baal joined the conversation. “I always had reservations about our chances for success. Remember we tried that in Egypt when we calculated that God had told that crazy man ‘Abraham’ that his children would be in Egypt for 400 years. So at the 400 years mark we ordered the killing of all male children. But Moses escaped and the most annoying part was that Pharaoh, our servant, ended up paying for his upkeep - while we were celebrating that we had killed him at birth. Then Moses zoomed off to the wilderness, met with God and came back more trouble than we could handle.

“As for the Anointed One, they are headed to Egypt. Our Bible Research Tower believes the portion in God’s word that says, ‘Out of Egypt, I have called out my son’ could refer to that. I have also discovered from the intelligence that they are headed there. Joseph told Julius that much.”

“So why did Julius let them go?” Dagon asked.

“An angel appeared to him taking the shape of his late father and told him not to kill the baby because he is the hope of humans. I tried to meet Julius in the dream too, but Angel Michael shut the door. Normally Julius is a brutal man but also sentimental. That is the way it is. He balked.”

“Egypt?” Diana screamed. “That is our territory. We would smoke him out. Let us put the gods and devils of Egypt, Ra and Amun to work.”

“Hmmm! They are already working,” Lu grunted. “We could not even smoke out Elijah, even though he was in Jezebel’s home town. We searched everywhere for him. We are still strategizing though. We will come up with something. I do not know what?”

Dagon turned and took Diana on a stroll, “I think the Big Boss is too pessimistic. He has not recovered from the Esau syndrome.”

The Esau syndrome shook the devil’s kingdom. Lu had known that Esau had the birthright and that he was his father (Isaacs’s) favourite son. So he mobilized all demons to steer Esau’s mind away from God as a way of scuttling God’s plan. He got the daughters of the land to successfully seduce Esau and he married them. Lu threw a party that the Abrahamic mission had been truncated.

The day after the celebration, Esau sold his birthright. Three days after that Isaac became blind. Lu summoned another meeting of devils and asked whether any demon was responsible for the blindness of Isaac, and they all said they were not. Lu became suspicious. Then Isaac sent for Esau to bless him. Esau left. Lu was monitoring the events from close quarters. Then Jacob went in and took the blessing with his trick. Lu, a master trickster, could not fault his scam. But Lu had lost all his investments in Esau. The idiot human had sold his birthright without Lu being aware. Isaac went blind so that Jacob could be blessed. Lu lost woefully.

“We will see the Anointed One sooner than later,” Baal said. “I am keeping tabs on all his relatives. I am sure that soon one of them would travel to visit him in Egypt. We are also searching everywhere in Egypt. The Intergalactic Telescopic Microscopic Devise is beamed permanently on Egypt. We are searching every inch of soil.”

Lu nodded in satisfaction.

Meanwhile Joseph and his wife heard of the massacre in Rama on the third day. Mary could not be consoled. She had noticed that for her baby did not eat well for days. She did not know why. He was not sick. She wept because she had so many friends and relatives in Ramah who gave birth at about the same time or a year earlier.

Joseph took the baby out of the cot and tossed him into the air. The baby smiled. “I thank God for sparing his life.”

“Yes, God be praised for ever,” Mary said. “I am sure that that soldier saw Jesus. But God delivered us out of his hands.”

“I also think he did or, perhaps, God covered his eyes. Mary, we are down to our last shekels,” Joseph said. “We do not even have an idea of where we will stay in Egypt and where we will work.”

“He who watches over Israel does not sleep nor slumber,” Mary replied.

Just then they came across a prone body on the road. “Look at that Joseph. It is a corpse!” Mary exclaimed.

Joseph looked at the prone figure for a while and then noticed a hand twitch. They were the only ones on the lonely road. They did not know that the road was plagued by bandits and had since been abandoned.

“We have got to help him,” Joseph said to Mary. Mary nodded and for the first time noticed that they were the only ones on the road. The man had been beaten to a state of unconsciousness. He lay prone in his own blood. He had wounds all over his body.

Joseph reached into his bag and removed oil and wine. He poured oil on the man’s face and prayed for him. He then tried to sit him up. The man opened his eyes and muttered something in the Egyptian tongue, which Joseph did not hear. Then he did as if trying to protect himself from further beating. He was feverish. Then he looked into Joseph’s eyes and Joseph smiled at him and nodded signifying that it shall be well. The man sighed and relaxed. Then he appeared to slip again into unconsciousness. Joseph checked his heartbeat - it was beating well. He thought the man might have been robbed because he was stripped bare of everything except his clothes. Even his shoes were gone.

As Joseph bent down to pick up the man, they heard footsteps behind and in front of them. Robbers! About ten of them closed in on them, but Joseph pretended not to notice them and lifted the man unto his mule. The man opened his eyes and said, “Mut shakkran” (thank you). It was one of the few words of Egyptian that Joseph understood. Joseph replied, “Salam Tak” (May God heal you).

He turned to Mary, “I guess I would have to walk and lets hope we find help soon.”

The robbers, all of them armed with swords and daggers, stood a short distance away watching them. Then the leader of the gang said, “We are robbers. Are you going to cooperate and handover all your properties or not? Your lives or your properties, choose one!”

Joseph stood his ground, “Brothers, I am here with my baby and a sick man. I am taking the sick man for treatment and I need all the money on me to pay for his hospital bills. What remains I will use to buy food for my baby. I have no plans for you.”

He turned to Mary and said, “Let’s go!”

As he turned to go, the men let out a cry and surged forward. At that instance, there had horse hooves pounding the street furiously and they were suddenly surrounded by fierce-looking Egyptian soldiers. “Nobody moves! Everybody stay where you are!” The commander bellowed, he had about fifty men with him and their sword and spears were out and ready.

They rounded up the robbers. They moved over to the sick man, and the commander said to him, “Ramsy!” He looked at the man and smiled. The commander put his hand on his head, then he ordered the soldiers to put him on a spare horse and rush him away to treatment.

The commander turned to Joseph and asked him in Hebrew, “Who are you?”

Joseph replied, “I am Joseph. This is my wife, Mary. That is my son.”

The commander looked at them for sometime and said, “You just saved my brother’s life. I am Asim. I will take you to my father, I am sure he would want to appreciate you.”

Joseph turned to his wife. She shrugged. They left with the soldiers.

Asim talked all the way. He told them how the Egyptians had become quite hospitable and the centre of global industrialization. He spoke to them about the great pyramids of Egypt, and wanted to know how long they intended to stay in Egypt. Joseph replied that they had not thought about it, but it may take a little long. Asim said they would be their guests for so long as they wanted to live in Egypt.

It turned out that Asim’s father was one of the lords of Egypt. He welcomed them into his expansive house and made a feast for them. His wife was so happy with them and kept hugging them and the baby. She cuddled the baby like her own baby and effused how great and handsome a baby he was. Ramsey, Asim’s father, thanked them for saving his son’s life and said his son was with a friend when he was attacked. The friend ran to him and told him and he dispatched his first son and the soldiers to rescue his brother. He spoke fluent Hebrew.

“Where to you intend to stay?”

“We do not have a place yet?” Joseph answered.

“Well I have houses in most cities in Egypt,” he replied. “You can live in any of them. Just tell Amis the city you want to live in and he will get you a house in that city. For so long as you are in Egypt, you will be my guests. Meanwhile I will give you a thousand shekels of silver to shop for yourselves.”

Mary gasped and held Joseph’s hands tightly. All the money they made in a year could not amount to half of that amount. Then they thanked the man and praised God.

(An upcoming book by Pastor Anietie Ukpe. Just allowing my imagination to rumble. This is not by revelation please. Watch out for Chapter Five)