We’re Watching the Wrong War

Three assassination attempts. A nation drowning in violence. And the one explanation the pundits will not name.

On Saturday night, April 25, 2026, an educated, employed, intelligent young man charged a Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. His name is Cole Tomas Allen. He had a degree from Caltech and a master’s in computer science. He was once named teacher of the month at his tutoring company. His father is an elder at a Bible-believing Reformed church in Torrance, California. As a college student, he was a member of the Caltech Christian Fellowship.

And by his own writing, in the manifesto he sent to his family minutes before opening fire near a ballroom holding the President, the First Lady, the Vice President, and most of the Cabinet, he hated Christians. The president himself, after reading the document, said it plainly: “He was a Christian, believer, and then he became an anti-Christian, and he had a lot of change.”

This is the third attempt on this president’s life in less than two years. Butler. West Palm Beach. Now Washington. There has never been anything like this in American history. And yet every analyst on every cable network this morning is talking about politics.

They are missing the story.

IT WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT POLITICS

I want to say something carefully, because I know how it will sound to readers who have not yet learned to think in two registers at once. What happened Saturday night is not, at its root, a political event. It is a spiritual one. The political dimension is real. But the political dimension is the surface of the water. The current that produced the wave runs much deeper, and it runs in a place most modern people no longer believe exists.

There is a war going on. And it is not happening primarily in Washington.

The political dimension is the surface of the water. The current that produced the wave runs much deeper—and it runs in a place most modern people no longer believe exists.

The apostle Paul was not speaking metaphorically when he said our wrestling is not against flesh and blood. He was describing the architecture of reality. Underneath every cultural collapse, every act of senseless violence, every wave of hatred that defies rational explanation, there is something else moving. Something with intelligence. Something with strategy. Something that has been at this for a very long time.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. — Ephesians 6:12 (KJV)

THE PROFILE THAT DEFIES REASON

Take a hard look at Cole Allen and tell me his behavior makes rational sense.

He is not a man on the margins. He is the system’s success story. Caltech graduate. Working tutor. Master’s degree. Functioning. Articulate. Family connections to a sound church. He purchased weapons legally. He trained at a shooting range. He boarded an Amtrak train in California, traveled across the country, checked into a hotel in the nation’s capital, and walked into a security checkpoint armed to the teeth with the explicit intention of murdering as many Christians and elected officials as he could reach.

Then ask: what makes a young man do that?

Reason does not produce that. Education does not produce that. Resentment alone does not produce that. Mental illness, narrowly defined, does not produce the patient, articulate, theology-quoting manifesto investigators recovered. Something else is in the room.

The Bible has a name for it. The New Testament records it again and again—men out of their minds, beyond the reach of family and physicians, until the Lord Jesus came near. The Gerasene demoniac among the tombs. The boy thrown into fire and water. The Sons of Sceva sent running naked through the streets after they tried to handle a power they did not actually know.

I am not suggesting every act of violence is demonic. I am saying this one fits the profile in ways the secular categories cannot account for. An intelligent man, raised under the gospel, who walked away from Christ and then traveled across a continent to murder Christians in the name of righteousness, whose own family had been disturbed enough by his “radical statements” to know something was wrong—that is not just a political assassin. That is a man who was being moved by something other than himself.

An intelligent man, raised under the gospel, who walked across a continent to murder Christians in the name of righteousness—that is not just a political assassin. That is a man being moved by something other than himself.

THE DIET OF THE SOUL

Investigators are still piecing together what shaped Cole Allen, but one detail in the early reporting deserves more attention than it has gotten. He was an amateur video game developer. He had spent years building a combat-themed game and, at the time of the attack, was developing what he himself described as a “top-down shooter” set in outer space.

I want to be careful here. I am not blaming a video game for what a man chose to do. The blame belongs to the human heart and to the spiritual influence that took up residence in it. But the Bible is not silent about what we feed our minds and spirits, and we have lost the older Christian wisdom that recognized our daily diet of imagery, sound, and storyline forms us in ways we do not consciously feel.

Hours upon hours of simulated killing—of practicing, in the imagination, the destruction of other human images of God—is not neutral. Hours of social media feeds engineered to provoke contempt for whole categories of fellow human beings is not neutral. Hours of news content designed to keep the nervous system in a permanent state of grievance is not neutral. We are spiritual beings. What we consume becomes the soil in which something either holy or unholy will eventually grow.

Angels are strengthened by worship and prayer. Demons are strengthened by hatred, violence, fear, and rage. The currency of the unseen world is not money. It is the orientation of human attention.

The currency of the unseen world is not money. It is the orientation of human attention. Angels are strengthened by worship and prayer. Demons are strengthened by hatred, violence, fear, and rage.

Modern people scroll through hours of dehumanizing content every day and then wonder why their souls feel dark. We marinate in simulated violence and then act surprised when somebody marinated long enough actually picks up a weapon. The spiritual realm is not deceived even when we are. Every hour of our attention is feeding something.

THE SECOND HEAVEN

To understand what is happening in our nation right now, you have to understand a piece of biblical reality the modern church has largely stopped teaching: the second heaven.

Scripture describes three heavens. The first heaven is the sky we see—the atmosphere where birds fly and clouds form. The third heaven is the throne room of God, the place Paul was caught up to in 2 Corinthians 12, the dwelling of the Father and the glorified Christ. Between them is the second heaven—the spiritual atmosphere over the earth, the realm where angels and demons contend, where prayers ascend and warfare is waged, where the ruler of the power of the air, as Paul names him, holds sway over those who are not in Christ.

Daniel 10 is the textbook passage. The prophet prays for twenty-one days. An angel finally arrives and explains the delay—he had been resisted by the “prince of Persia,” a demonic principality assigned over a nation, until Michael the archangel came to his aid. Twenty-one days of warfare in the second heaven, fought over the prayers of one man on his face in Babylon.

Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. — Daniel 10:12–13 (KJV)

Most American Christians have never been taught this passage seriously. We treat angels and demons as iconography—cartoons on a child’s shoulder. The Bible treats them as the actual operatives of an actual war that actually decides what happens on the surface of human history. Nations have spiritual rulers assigned over them. Cities do. Movements do. And the prayers of God’s people do not bounce off the ceiling. They ascend through that contested second heaven, and they shift outcomes there.

This is the war Cole Allen walked into. This is the war I am asking you to take seriously.

WHY I KNOW THIS IS REAL

I do not write any of this from theory.

In April of 2005, I died. For more than thirty minutes, my heart did not beat. The medical record is on file. And in that interval, my soul was not unconscious. I was elsewhere. I was with Jesus Christ—the One whose face I cannot describe in any language we have, whose love is the substance of which everything in this world is only a shadow.

But before I reached Him, I passed through territory I will not describe in detail because nothing I tell you would do it justice. I will say only this: there are presences in the second heaven that hate every human soul with a focused, intelligent, ancient malice we cannot fathom from this side. They are not stupid. They are not random. They have been studying us for thousands of years. They have the wisdom of the ages, the experience of every fall they have ever orchestrated, every war they have ever fueled, every soul they have ever pulled into the dark. What they do not have is God. And it is precisely the absence of God in them, combined with the memory of what they once were, that makes their hatred for those of us still loved by Him so total.

I have now interviewed more than six hundred validated Christian near-death experiencers. Many of them have seen what I saw. None of us came back with the same testimony by accident. The second heaven is real. The war is real. The strategy is real. And the church’s long Western season of pretending otherwise has cost us more than we know.

The second heaven is real. The war is real. The strategy is real. And the church’s long season of pretending otherwise has cost us more than we know.

WHY THREE ATTEMPTS. WHY NOW.

Now we can ask the question I posed at the beginning. What is unprecedented about three attempts on one man’s life in less than two years really telling us?

It is telling us that the strategy has shifted. The kingdom of darkness is not omniscient, but its commanders are not fools. They watch. They calculate. They redeploy. And they know they are losing ground in places that matter to them very much.

In Iran, Muslims are coming to Christ in numbers that have no precedent in the modern era. House churches are multiplying. Visions of Jesus are reported nightly. In Africa, the church is exploding—whole nations being shifted in a single generation. In China, despite every effort to crush it, the underground church now numbers, by some estimates, more than a hundred million believers. In Asia, in the Middle East, in pockets of the formerly Christian West where revival is breaking out, souls are being pulled out of the enemy’s territory at a rate his strategists almost certainly did not plan for.

What do you do when you are losing? You attack the leadership of whatever stands in your way. You attack the structures that protect the work. You attack the cultural conscience that lets the work proceed.

In the United States right now, the principal cultural firewall against open persecution of Christians and against the unrestricted advance of every spirit-of-the-age agenda is, like it or not, the protections written into our laws and championed by leaders who still take religious liberty seriously. I am not making a partisan argument. I have served Christ under presidents of both parties and intend to outlive several more. I am making a spiritual one. The enemy of our souls would prefer leaders who do not consult Christians, do not protect churches, do not defend the conscience rights of believers, do not stand in the way of the agenda the second-heaven powers are pushing. The enemy would prefer leaders who passively let evil reign while smiling for the cameras.

Three assassination attempts in less than two years against a sitting president who, whatever his personal flaws, has positioned himself as a defender of religious freedom and against the persecution of Christians, is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. The attempts have come from three different men with three different surface motivations. The shared signature underneath is the same. Hatred that defies reason. Violence aimed at a target that holds a particular spiritual significance. A pattern that the natural eye cannot quite explain.

Three attempts is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. The natural eye cannot quite explain it because the strategy is not natural.

WHY THEY HATE US

The fallen angels hate human Christians with a particular venom, and it is important to understand why.

They were created before us. They saw the throne. Some of them stood near it. They had glory we cannot imagine, and they threw it away in pride, and now they cannot get it back. Then they watched the Father stoop down and pour His own breath into clay—into us—and call us sons and daughters. Then they watched the Son of God Himself take on our flesh, die for our sins, and rise to seat us with Him in heavenly places. Everything they lost, He has freely given to people they consider beneath them.

They cannot bear it. The envy is bottomless. The hatred is exact.

This is why their assault is not random. They target what God loves. They target churches. They target Christian families. They target nations whose laws still bear some imprint of the gospel. They target leaders who shelter believers. They target the testimonies of those who, like the men and women I interview every week, come back from the threshold of death saying yes, Jesus is real, and yes, He is coming again.

They especially target the witness. Because the witness is what is breaking through right now. The witness is what is pulling souls out of their hands by the millions across the global South.

AND YET, THE REMNANT

Here is where I must remind you, and remind myself, that this article is not finally a story about the darkness. It is a story about the light the darkness cannot put out.

On the same Saturday night that Cole Allen charged that checkpoint, a Secret Service officer took a round in the chest and stood up because of a vest he had put on that morning. The same Saturday produced a president who, by his own admission afterward, was unusually conciliatory and called for unity. The same Saturday produced churches across this country gathering on Sunday morning to pray. The same Saturday produced a teenager somewhere in Iran who watched a vision of Jesus and gave Him her life. The same Saturday produced one of my own readers reaching out in the middle of a dark night and whispering, “Jesus, I cannot do this without You.”

Both kingdoms are advancing. That is the dichotomy of this hour. The line between them is sharpening, and that is a mercy, because in clearer light more souls can see what they are choosing.

When Elijah collapsed under the juniper tree certain that he was the only one left, the Lord answered him with a number. Seven thousand. Seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal. Seven thousand the prophet did not even know about. The remnant has always been larger than the remnant feels. And the remnant is what the second heaven cannot conquer, because the remnant is held by the One who has already conquered.

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. — 1 Kings 19:18 (KJV)

WHAT THIS ASKS OF US

If the war is spiritual, then the response must be spiritual. We have, for too long, been responding to a spiritual crisis with cultural tools. We have argued. We have posted. We have voted. We have rallied. None of those things are wrong, but they were never going to be enough, because they were aimed at the surface of the water.

Pray. Not as a slogan. As a strategy. The angel that came to Daniel was dispatched the moment Daniel set his heart to seek God. Twenty-one days of warfare in the second heaven were fought over the prayers of one man. What might be fought over the prayers of a million?

Worship. Out loud. In your home. In your car. In your church. The atmosphere of worship is the atmosphere demons cannot tolerate. They flee where Jesus is exalted. They are starved where He is praised.

Guard your gates. The gates of the eyes and the ears and the imagination. Cut off what feeds the dark. Pour in what feeds the light. Read your Bible until it is the loudest voice in the room. Turn off the simulated violence. Step back from the algorithmic rage. Refuse to keep paying tuition to the school of bitterness.

Stand for the persecuted. Pray for our leaders, all of them, by name. Pray for Cole Allen’s soul. Pray for his shattered family. Pray for the agent who took the bullet. Pray for the president who has now stared down three barrels. Pray for the global revival that has the second heaven shaking. Pray for the wall of saints in your city to thicken until the powers cannot find a seam.

And do not forget that you are not alone. Seven thousand. The remnant the prophet did not know about is here. You are part of it. So am I.

A FINAL WORD

I have been to the other side. I have seen what waits for those who belong to Christ. I have also seen the territory that lies between, and the powers that contend over the souls of human beings. I will tell you what I tell every audience that will listen: this hour is not what the analysts say it is. The story is bigger. The stakes are higher. The combatants are not who you think they are. And the One who has already won the war has not relinquished a single inch of the ground He paid for in His own blood.

Three attempts in less than two years is not the end of the story. It is a clarifying signal. The enemy has overplayed his hand. He always does. And the remnant is rising.

Stay with Christ. Worship loudly. Pray fiercely. Love your enemies and refuse the lies. The morning is coming.

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