Every Knee Will Bow - But For Whom?
The traditional gesture of honor, historically also one of subjugation, is being radically redefined in front of our eyes.
One of my favorite movies as a kid - my mind still unchurched and unchecked with imagination - was Superman II.
It’s the rare superlative sequel to the original 1978 film, in which Christopher Reeves’ Superman agrees to sacrifice his powers to start a relationship with Lois Lane, unaware that three Kryptonian criminals he inadvertently released are conquering Earth.
One of the three released criminals, General Zod, is played by the inimitable Terence Stamp, who repeatedly commands the Man of Steel, the President of the United States and ultimately all the world to “kneel before Zod.”
Some refuse, some obey, but it’s only when Superman appears to take a knee in defeat that Zod - courtesy of Superman’s unmatched power - is summarily destroyed and outcast from Earth forever.
The commands of Zod aside, there was a time when the inhabitants of Earth would take a knee for only the most solemn of gestures: a marriage proposal, in the presence of royalty, and, most appropriately, in prayer and supplication before a holy God.
The familiar tradition of a man proposing on one knee - asking for the woman’s hand in marriage - comes from medieval knights bowing before noblewomen.
The knee itself is a symbol for willful submission, to those whom we esteem more highly than all others.
It was a gesture reserved culturally for highest royalty and spiritually for our most sacred worship.
But nowadays, and certainly with increasing frequency since 2020, our society has frequently bowed the knee instead to all manner of evil and perversion, from the Marxist cultural revolution of Black Lives Matter to this cringe-worthy moment of a sorta famous woman kneeling before a not-so-famous not-so-woman.
Yes, Drew Barrymore kneeled before a man who was on TV solely because he wears makeup and a dress and debased herself - and her fellow biological women in the process.
Think of it: for decades but with increasing frequency (and rabidity since #MeToo) we’ve been told over and over again how women are independent and women are brave and women are superior and women are the future.
Yet, simultaneously, we were also told that we don’t really know what a woman is and that women aren’t the only ones who can get pregnant and that women run the world and, no seriously, what exactly is a woman?
Ms. Barrymore, who identifies as a thrice-divorced woman, didn’t merely kneel to any random individual, mentally ill or otherwise.
She didn’t even perform the act, at least not just, for a transsexual whose greatest cultural contribution to date has been advocacy to “normalize” the genital bulges of the gender dysphoric population.
No, Barrymore kneeled to a movement, one increasingly totalitarian in its ideology, one that seeks nothing less than an Orwellian submission to an untruth - “This man is actually a woman” - in declaration of its truthfulness.
Barrymore kneeled to the mob in a brazen act of doublethink intended to normalize what is perverse and marginalise those who refuse to bow the knee.
While performed in a way that was meant to come off as empathetic and playful, the symbolism is unmistakable.
After all, we pray on our knees.
We plead on our knees.
We grovel on our knees.
We beg for forgiveness for our sins while on our knees.
It’s a gesture of self-debasement, one that is intended to communicate humility, even servility to the other party.
Yet somehow, in recent years, kneeling has become a physical (and often controversial) act of demonstrating submission to ideologies we might otherwise resist and or even find abhorrent.
But it wasn’t always like this.
Historically, kneeling to bow at the feet of another was common practice in the ancient world, a universal sign of submission, honor, and respect.
For this reason, it was once expected that people would kneel in the presence of kings. Even taking a knee before anyone of higher authority to whom they sought a word or favor, simply because it was culturally normal to do so.
Beyond this portrayal of humble reverence, however, is the distinct connection between kneeling and worship.
Kneeling has been called “a ritual expression of the willing surrender of the life of the worshiper to God. By kneeling down the worshipers [go] voluntarily down to the dust, from which humans were created, surrendering their lives to the Lord in prayer...”1
Unsurprisingly, there is no lack of examples of people kneeling in Scripture.
Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture… Psalm 95:6-7
…that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.. Philippians 2:10
By Myself I have sworn; truth has gone out from My mouth, a word that will not be revoked: Every knee will bow before Me, every tongue will swear allegiance.
Isaiah 45:23
"Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him." 1 Kings 19:18
Note in both Isaiah 45:23 and 1 Kings 19:18 - which Paul later quotes in the New Testament as an example of God’s election - how the bowed knee is connected directly with the mouth of confession.
Or what about when Christ Jesus, the perfect spotless Lamb of God, was dying a criminal’s death as Roman soldiers knelt before Him in mock worship:
And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! Matthew 27:29
Clearly, the enemy understands what many of God’s people apparently don’t - that taking a knee, whatever the intentions of the kneeler, is intimately and divinely understood as a human tool either for worship or disobedience.
George Washington, the father of the United States of America, knew precisely what it meant to kneel.
In the Battle of Valley Forge, Washington is said to have knelt in prayer and supplication in December 1777 after some 11,000 Americans were forced to retreat 25 miles from Philadelphia and set up camp at Valley Forge.
It’s an account that inspired a famous painting of our first President taking a knee to the King of the Universe.
Yet somewhere along the way, taking a knee became reconstructed and went from an act of willing reverence to an act of protest or even forced submission.
Like when small white children are forced by threat of injury to kneel before an older black student and recite the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”
Or in the wake of the death of George Floyd - who took a knee of his own - white people in Houston knelt down and asked for “forgiveness for years of racism.”
Or when white women are approached on the streets of New York City and told to get on their knees in worship and admit they have “white privilege.”
The summer of 2020, like no other in recent memory, bombarded our national and global psyche with images of mostly white folks - Prime Ministers and Congressmen and women, police officers, FBI agents, you name it - kneeling in honor of non-whites from Los Angeles to London.
Perhaps the protogenesis of this practice can be traced back to early post-Revolutionary America when Josiah Wedgwood, a British ceramics maker and abolitionist, created a medallion with an image of a kneeling slave in chains asking, "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"
The image later became an international symbol of the abolitionist movement.
Civil rights leader Michael King Jr. - more commonly known by his adopted name, Martin Luther King Jr. - took a knee while leading a prayer vigil on Feb. 1, 1965 outside the Dallas County Alabama Courthouse. King took the pose after about 250 protesters were arrested for parading without a permit.
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose white mother gave him up for adoption to white parents whom he recently suggested were racist, is credited with launching a national movement when he began taking a knee during the National Anthem before games to protest Floyd’s death in 2020.
So when we see an image like that of Barrymore kneeling before a man dressed as a woman, it’s not hard to understand that both modes of worship and protest are in view here: worship of the currently in-vogue practice of transsexualism and protest against those who disapprove of such practice.
In ancient times, falling on one’s knees before another person was a gesture commonly associated with encountering an angel and, understandably, being overcome with the urge to kneel in worship.
We see this most vividly in Revelation 19, when the Apostle John, overwhelmed with his vision of the marriage supper of the Lamb, falls at the feet of an angel, who quickly corrects him:
Then the angel told me to write, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” So I fell at his feet to worship him. But he told me, “Do not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who rely on the testimony of Jesus. Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”
Revelation 19:10
Paul also wrote to first-century believers in the Roman province of Colosse to warn of those who would promote the worship of angels :
Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind,
Colossians 2:18
Why all the warnings about worshiping angels if it were not possible for us to make the same mistake? Are we better than those in the Colossian assembly, or the Apostle John, for that matter?
Why has the act of kneeling been so visibly intertwined in the media with race? Is there any historical precedent for such a phenomenon?
And more to the point, is it possible we are being conditioned to view the act of kneeling - once reserved for God and royalty - as something else? Or for someone else?
Recall that when the Devil took Jesus up to a high mountain to view all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, his only objective was to get the Son of God to fall on his knees and worship him. That, ultimately was what he wanted from the God-Man.
And he didn’t get it.
"All this I will give you," the Devil said, "if you kneel down and worship me."
“Away from Me, Satan!” Jesus declared. “For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.’”
Matthew 4:9-10
So instead, the Adversary has been working for millennial for the Great Delusion that is prophetically and most certainly coming, and without a doubt, angels will be involved.
Simply stated, I believe the kneeling phenomenon is a global preconditioning exercise, one in which the world is being prepared to kneel in the presence of angelic beings and ultimately one (fallen) angel in particular who the world will be compelled to worship in the very near future.
Angels, after all, are mentioned 27 different times throughout Revelation. Satan himself draws one-third of the angels to Earth for this coming battle. Whatever your views on the book of Revelation, the unveiling of Jesus Christ clearly involves an angelic presence.
Equally as certain is that the Antichrist will demand nothing less than the worship of his subjects.
And they offered worship to the Dragon, because it was to him that the Wild Beast owed his dominion; and they also offered worship to the Wild Beast, and said, "Who is there like him? And who is able to engage in battle with him?"…And this Wild Beast exercised all the authority of the first beast and caused the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. Revelation 13:4, 12
We also know those who refuse to kneel and worship the Beast will be beheaded for their refusal to do so.
Then I saw the thrones, and those seated on them had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image, and had not received its mark on their foreheads or hands. And they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.
Revelation 20:4
Until then, the "god of this world"2 is content with teaching the masses how to kneel on command, and for increasingly arbitrary reasons, like when this hashtag trends or that public figure calls for protest. Training an entire generation to kneel at the whim of societal pressure and political expectation.
That’s all this is.
A warmup sesh.
For the real thing.
Choose this day, then, whom you will worship. Today is the day of decision.
Before you no longer have a choice.
2 Corinthians 4:4