<\/p>\n
We are in a great spiritual battle but many of us have left our primary weapon, the Sword of the Spirit,at home<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Four hundred years is a long time. Prior to John the Baptist’s emergence from the Wilderness of Judea, God’s prophetic voice had been silent since the days of the prophet Malachi back in the 5th Century BC. Silent they may have been, but those intervening years were certainly eventful: history went trundling on in its not-somerry way. They were violent years when great powers dominated God’s Land. The four generals of Alexander the Great had parcelled up his empire between them and the Seleucid dynasty based in Syria had had a particularly dreadful influence on Israel not only politically but also religiously.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n We are in a great spiritual battle but many of us have left our primary weapon, the Sword of the Spirit,at home Four hundred years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[60],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1007,"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/1007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordmagazine.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}