By Bayo Oluwasanmi
Things have never been so bleak for believers today. The world is going through unprecedented economic challenges. Security in an increasingly insecure world is one of today’s most sought often – and elusive – commodities – security for the future, security for vocation, and security for protection. We’re bombarded with legislated immorality and confused political leadership.
People who boast to know Christ especially the pastors do not actually believe he is the only way to salvation. Many people planned to ruin their lives. Yet, many a life ends in ruins. Some pastors are craftily cunning like the Satan in their attempts to destroy the moral fiber of God’s children. Their deviance from God’s ordained pattern for love, sex, marriage, and family is both attractive and inviting.
Recently, three pastors made headlines across the globe about the wildly unorthodox demonstration of how some believers can be controlled by their pastors. According to a report in Times Live, Pastor Lesego Daniel of Rabboni Centre Ministries in Garankuwa, South Africa, made his congregation of about 1,000 eat grass followed a sermon in which he explained that Jesus had many other disciples than the 12 listed in the traditional Bible who were doing new things which were considered unconventional at the time. The minister who is popularly known as “miracle man” said eating grass is part of ritual to show that humans can be controlled by God’s spirit.
A Kenya Pastor, Pastor Njohi told his female congregation not to wear underwear when they attend his church “so God can enter their bodies easier.” According to the Kenya Daily Post, Reverend Njohi of the Lord’s Propeller Redemption Church in Dandora, Nairobi, reportedly banned women from wearing underwear during his services so people can be “free in body and spirit” in order to receive Christ. Njohi is also said to have warned his women members of the “dire consequences” if they did not follow his orders. The women were reported to have adhered to the new rule and attended the church’s following service without any undergarments. They were also advised to check their daughters were not wearing anything under their outer clothes.
Pastor Allen Parker of the Virginia White Tail Church, Virginia, USA, passed a new law where the congregation was asked to serve the Lord the way God created them by worshipping in the nude. According to ABC 13, Pastor Parker said some of Jesus’ most important moments happened while he was naked. “When he was born he was naked, when he was crucified, he was naked and when he arose he left his clothes in the tomb and he was naked,” he said. If God made us that way, how can that be wrong?” The church now describe itself as “Family Nudist Community.”
The naïve will play with fire and get burned. The foolish will take the bait – and find that every kick offered by the pastors also contains a kickback. It is the filth of unfaithfulness for the so called “men of God” to engage in spiritual terrorism against their congregations. A well, or fountain, offers pure water for personal use. The water that runs through the street is basically sewage. The pastors are feeding their sheep sewage.
Religious indoctrination is a powerful and potent Weapon of Mass Deception (WMD). It deals with virtually every facet of human relationships. These maxims deal with folly and wisdom, pride and humility, vengeance and justice, laziness and initiative, poverty and wealth, enemies and friends, lust and love, anger and anxiety, masters and servants, life and death.
The three pastors and so many others have re-evangelized the world by preaching a diluted version of the Gospel. They have become wealthy through deception and distraction. They have become a spiritual opposition to all that the Gospel stands for. They are prime examples of pastors who are jailbirds and desperadoes who thrive in thieving and grand scale larceny.
The pastors are guilty of eisegesis. Eisegesis is reading into the text what is not there. They read their own feelings or thoughts into the Bible. By this theological treachery, they based their teachings and interpretation of the Bible on something the Bible or Scripture is not about. How can the pastors reconcile eating of grass, women coming to church without underwear and bra, and worshipping in complete nudity to the teachings of the Scriptures?By preaching the opposite of injunctions of the Lord, they are the real enemies who try to lure away men and women from God. Instead of comforting the persecuted, they are tormenting them. Instead of freeing the prisoner, they imprison them. Instead of drawing people into the light, they lead many into the darkness.
They have traded their congregants’ peace for anxiety, joy for hopelessness, and humility for selfishness. Their congregants are less confident in God in the face of uncertainty. The people have turned from their spiritual independence and reliance on God to become dependent and appendages of the pastors.
The pastors have turned God to be god of terror that must be offered sacrifices to withhold or ward off sickness, death, and destruction from the congregants and their families. They shamelessly deceive and entertain evil. They multiply the miseries and tragedies of worshippers and demand the impossible from them. The people feel brutally betrayed, hopeless battered, and desperately lonely. Instead of rejoicing, they have been thrown into a pit, a spiritual slavery if you will.
They continually use the Bible as a tool to transform evil into good. They have rephrased and reshaped its contexts and contents as weapon to exploit, oppress, and extort. In the midst of tragedies faced by their congregants, they look for simplistic answers and quick fixes and other Band-Aids to cover their gaping wounds.
The situation with many Christians today is grim and dim. It looks like darkness will prevail. They are confused how to navigate the narrow strait between chaos and deception. In such a strait, the wisest are perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The increase of wickedness in the church thwarts them with fear, discouragement, and confusion.
If the spiritually imprisoned parishioners continue to feed steadily upon a diet of confusion and distortion and extortion being served by their pastors, they will permanently be victims of danger, spiritual lethargy, and anxious thoughts, and being led astray. They will ultimately become fools of self-destruction.
Every wise course of action to pursue is contrasted with a fool’s course of action to avoid. The pastors are rebelling against God and they will end up destroying themselves. They will fall beneath their own load of sin and will be trapped by their own sin.
My warning to the simple-minded, the gullible, the naïve, and the vulnerable worshippers is: Don’t play with matches – especially Satans that masquerade in cassocks. Carry a book of matches with you whenever you go to church to keep that warning fresh in your mind and heart. Listen to the God inside you – he writes with a pen that never blots, speaks with a tongue that never slips, and acts with a hand that never fails.
The cathedral is famous for its ornately carved columns. Most of the churches today are spiritually empty hollow sphere – the Lord is here, but God is hard to find!
*** There is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the Lord. – Proverbs 21: 30
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© CC BY-NC-ND 2014
