I just got an email from a brother in Christ,
like other emails I've received.
The main point went like this:
"I came across some videos of [insert pastor's name here]
who was claiming that examples of the Mandela effect
are evidence that we're in the period of great deception,
and these shifts are related to activities at CERN."
"I was curious what you thought."
Are we in the last days?
Certainly.
Are Bible prophecies moving things into place?
Absolutely.
Are CERN and the Mandela Effect somehow a part of this?
You want my perspective?
Hi, I'm David Daniels from Chick Publications.
To sum up, there is a 17 mile long machine,
a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
which has cost over 9 billion dollars, so far.
The LHC is located at CERN, the European Council
for Nuclear Research.
It's housed underground in Meyrin, Switzerland,
straddling Switzerland and France.
It has a Hindu Shiva idol between a hotel and a laboratory.
You can see it on Google maps.
Shiva is the god who destroys to create
in the violent cosmic dance called Ananda Tandava.
The circle, the destruction and recreation,
work into the imagery of what the scientists are trying to do
at CERN.
What they say they want to do is find and capture and use
the "god particle," or Higgs boson.
In other words, they are evolutionists who want to explain the universe
and creation without God.
Nobody debates these points about them.
However, some people also believe that the LHC opens
a portal through time.
Or else they say it links parallel universes.
They say there are signs of this by changed objects and events
in the past.
But for some reason, they say, it does not affect human memories.
So according to this belief, people can have a memory
of an event or an object.
That, they say, is reality.
But when they look for physical evidence of those events
or objects, it won't be the same
as what they remembered.
They say something has changed.
As proof, some of them say "Everyone knows Nelson Mandela
died in prison in 1983."
Others say they have "proof it was 1991."
But on December 5th, 2013, Nelson Mandela died.
His huge funeral on December 15th was on many TV stations.
So these people claimed that something changed in time.
They blamed the LHC at CERN.
Their story, that Mandela's death was moved forward in our history,
was dubbed, "The Mandela Effect."
Now they claim that many times we "know" something to be true,
but physical evidence doesn't match our memory.
And that's because someone changed time, or
opened a portal to a parallel, similar universe.
Here's what I really think.
The "Mandela effect" is actually a simple thing called
"misremembering."
That is having a memory of something
that didn't actually happen, or didn't happen the way
we think it did.
There are 10-20 popular examples of this "Mandela Effect."
You can look them up online.
One has to do with the Berenstain Bears book series,
by Jan and Stan Berenstain.
Back when my wife and I ran a feeding ministry,
we had a pediatrician for our son.
His name was Dr. Berenstein.
He had a set of the Berenstain Bears books
in his waiting room.
The difference in spelling between his name and the authors'
was so obvious to us that we noticed it, talked about it,
and joked about it with Dr. Berenstein.
By the way, September 28, 2017 marks 55 years
since the first Berenstain Bears book in 1962,
according to their son,
Mike Berenstain, who is alive today
and has taken over writing them.
He remembers his own name pretty well!
So Debbie and I couldn't be fooled into believing
Berenstain was ever Berenstein, because we had
a big event in our lives that caused us
to notice the difference.
But many people misremember the name, because
1) it's not common, 2) Berenstein is the usual sound, like
Frankenstein and Gertrude Stein, 3) they may not have paid attention
to the correct name, and thus 4) they could have mispronounced it
and remembered it incorrectly.
In the same way, if something is slightly different, but it is not
1) pointed out at the time or 2) significant enough
for you to remember, it is a candidate for misremembering.
The same is true about their "memory" of
the lion lying down with the lamb.
People actually say that someone went back in time and
changed the King James Bible.
The verses in question occur twice in Isaiah.
Let's look at Isaiah 11:6.
"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them."
Now look at Isaiah 65:25 "The wolf and the lamb shall
feed together, and the lion shall
eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be
the serpent's meat..."
Did you notice that it said the wolf shall "dwell with"
and "feed together" with the lamb, but not "lie down"?
But it's the leopard who shall lie down with the kid.
All the elements are in Isaiah 11:6, but in different places.
Why do people remember "the lion lying down with the lamb," then?
This could be from "memory overload."
There have been many popular songs,
lots of them secular, but a few religious ones, too, that say
"the lion will lay down with the lamb."
I might have even sung one of them in the 60's in elementary school.
So when I read the Bible starting in 1980
and found it was the wolf, not the lion,
it stood out for me.
Did you notice in those two verses, how one also had "the young lion"
and the other had "the lion" mentioned in the same verse
as the wolf, as well?
"Too much information" can be very confusing.
But isn't there a scripture that connects the lion and the lamb?
Yes, there is.
But it isn't what many expect.
Revelation 5:5-6 "And one of the elders saith unto me,
Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda,
the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and
to loose the seven seals thereof.
And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne
and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood
a Lamb as it had been slain..."
The Lion and the Lamb.
They may also have been affected by CS Lewis in his book
The Last Battle, where the lion Aslan
is then seen as a lamb.
Then as I mentioned, there are all the songs about
"the lion and the lamb" that make people misremember
Isaiah's prophecy.
Maybe they didn't actually read Isaiah, anyway.
So all these influences made them think the prophecy
was actually about a lion, lying down, with a lamb.
And on it goes.
But the truth is, God is the Lord of all time.
God knows when things will happen, from the beginning to the end.
And what He declares, stands.
No one can change it.
Isaiah 46:9-10 says,
9 Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else;
I am God, and there is none like me,
10 Declaring the end from the beginning,
and from ancient times the things that are not yet done,
saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:
Solomon also, by inspiration, in Ecclesiastes 7:13 said,
Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight,
which he hath made crooked?
Jesus even told His disciples, just before He ascended into heaven.
"...It is not for you to know the times or the seasons,
which the Father hath put in his own power" (Acts 1:7.)
Times and seasons are not in man's power.
They're in God's power.
We don't need to worry about man's experiments
changing the past or the future, which GOD has established.
But there is something real about the Mandela Effect.
The Mandela Effect has the real effect
of getting Christians to stop talking about the gospel,
and to spend their time talking about something that cannot save
a single soul from hell.
Remember, since Satan can't un-save us,
he tries instead to distract us.
I don't want to be distracted.
I want to bring the saving knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ
to as many as I can.
Jesus continued in Acts 1:8:
... ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem,
and in all Judaea, and in Samaria,
and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
I don't want to be concerned with Mandela.
I want to be concerned with saving souls.
So, instead of stuffing my head full of alleged Mandela Effects,
I stuff my pockets full of tracts to give out.
I hope you will, too.
God bless you, and have a wonderful day.