In 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the composer Elgar was reaching a peak in his musical career. He wrote two new works to mark the jubilee, “The Banner of St George” and “The Imperial March.”

The website devoted to chronicling his works comments that both these pieces “captured the mood of public confidence and national celebration, and were immediate and considerable successes.”

How the mood of a nation can change in the space of just four royal generations. How that mood is reflected in public taste!

Neither the jazz age nor rock music were conceived till well after Victoria’s reign. During that reign, which saw the rise to power of an island nation, Great Britain, to become the greatest empire in world history, music reflected the public taste. As the Elgar website implies, that public taste at the peak of empire was based on a “mood of public confidence.”

That was a confidence based on national greatness, on sharing with the world the massive blessings that God had, seemingly overnight, showered upon the British peoples.

That mood of “confidence and national celebration” and especially of a general acknowledgment that the Eternal God was the source of those blessings, may well have been enhanced by Victoria’s conviction, along with a number of her advisers and generals, that Britain was the birthright nation referred to as such in Scripture.

Today, that mood of public confidence in things British, in the awesome achievements of empire, has long fled the British Isles. Replacing it is a general state of national malaise, reflected in a politically correct rejection of all that once made Britain great. It’s a malaise rooted in national self doubt—doubt about what it really means to be British—a doubt reflected in the progressive destruction of the whole fabric of British society, a society that was once the envy of most non-British nations during the 19th century and for at least half of the 20th century.

One indicator of the ugliness of today’s collective British mood, its national mindset and its morals is its music industry. Most particularly this was recently reflected in the British public’s choice for the best British album of the past 60 years. In a social media poll conducted by that doyen of the British record industry, His Master’s Voice, the British public was asked to vote to establish the most popular “musical” album of the past 60 years with which to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee.

According to the poll’s authors, “The month-long poll, hosted by hmv to mark the Diamond Jubilee, met with a remarkable response from music and film fans alike, with 54,545 votes cast and more than 330,000 posts on Facebook. In one of the largest ever surveys of its kind, driven primarily by social media, people were able to select their favorite … albums through a Facebook poll application specifically built for the occasion” (PRWeb, May 28).

The result?

The 1980s heavy-metal band Iron Maiden’s album The Number of the Beast was the hands-down winner!

With that result, given the hundreds of musically superior—let alone mentally uplifting—musical albums produced in Britain during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth ii, one does not have to wonder at the perverse spirit that dominates a large portion of the British public mind in the 21st century. It remains to be seen whether the Queen will be forced to have her eardrums pounded and her senses addled by having to sit through a Diamond Jubilee live performance of this trash.

Yet, there may be something more sinister to this than first meets the eye. Objective students of the history of the development of the music industry since the 1970s know that same industry is riddled with minds that are deep into the occult, satanism and peddling perverse sexual themes.

It may well be, at a time when so much evidence abounds as to the imminence of the fulfillment of so much Bible prophecy surrounding a prophesied beast power, and his mark, coming to the fore, that such an outcome as this massive poll has produced is not pure coincidence.

Jesus Christ spoke of the “prince of the power of the air.” Herbert Armstrong described how Satan “broadcasts” his perverse thoughts into the unwitting minds of human beings. One of his most powerful tools for broadcasting his perversity is music.

Jesus Christ personally contended with and overcame Satan during the early part of His ministry. Christ’s superiority over Satan is reflected in the Bible prophecy which speaks of Satan being bound by Jesus Christ and the saints for a thousand years at Christ’s soon-coming return. These examples confirm that it takes the superior power of the Holy Spirit residing in Christ and the saints to contend with and overcome his perverse broadcasts.

It is certainly not beyond the sheer cynicism of such a powerful satanic spirit to use perverted music to influence and cater to the denigration of a nation’s mindset. Is this what we truly witness in this massively overwhelming result in the hmv poll?

If so, it is a fearsome thing for the British public to become so negatively influenced in mind by that power as to lose its grasp on that which once reflected good and sound taste in the expression of its culture. There can be only one outcome for such minds dominated by such a destructive spirit, and it is not a healthy outcome. It is, rather, a great sign of a nation in rapid descent to its own self-destruction.

You need to read our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy to appreciate the reason for Britain’s past greatness, the facts behind its current moral and spiritual decay, and what truly lies ahead in terms of the prophesied outcome.

There never was a more vital time than this year of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee to gain and to hang on to this vital knowledge. Read it with an open mind. It just may work to further open your mind as to how to understand, contend with, resist and overcome all of the negative tendencies that are presently ripping the heart out of the once great British culture.

That book, together with our booklet The Key of David, will project you forward beyond Elizabeth ii’s Diamond Jubilee to the time when a king will reign on that same earthly throne for a thousand years, believe it or not—not from London, England, but from the city of peace, Jerusalem!