Inherit the Earth; Don’t Earn the Wind

People have offered prayer and kind words concerning my sister’s situation. I don’t want to turn the blog into a reality show about someone’s bad decisions, but I felt I should write a little more.

During the week of Thanksgiving, it was my misfortune to speak with her, and she claimed she had broken her collarbone. Such things do happen, but–to be realistic–going to the hospital and complaining about a sore shoulder is a good way to get drugs. In any case, according to the courts, she has been given a continuance based on a shoulder injury. My best guess is that the injury is nonexistent or self-inflicted, and that she has managed to parlay a lie into a two-month reprieve. But you never know.

Anyway, thanks.

Last night I got a text about the pastor of my former church. Apparently, he was having back problems so severe, he was crying and screaming. The person who texted me used the phrase “falling apart.”

He has other problems. He’s diabetic, he has one artificial knee, and he has a blood disorder which would be fatal but for regular treatments. He also had kidney stones that had to be blasted out, during the same time period in which God healed two of my kidney stones miraculously. The person who texted me attributed the ailments to the exodus of the older armorbearers, who used to pray for the pastor.

I am hesitant to point to people’s problems and claim God has cursed them. Some people try pretty hard and still have hard lives, and many, many evil people have it easy. Also, I don’t want to invite judgment by suggesting I’m better than other people. I have plenty of stuff to work on. Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that when your body deteriorates consistently over a period of decades, it means something is wrong with your relationship with God. Especially when you’re a minister. A person in a holy office should be able to get good results from prayer.

That church is a plantation. They might as well hang a sign over the front that says, “Arbeit macht frei.” They cheat employees and con the poor out of offerings they can’t afford, and they brainwash people so they won’t speak out, leave, or even acknowledge the truth.

They tell people positive thinking and hard work will save them, except when it comes to money. If you want money, you have to give the pastors exorbitant offerings out of your lack, even when it means ignoring your just debts. If you do that, well, sure, God’s supernatural power will kick in, to make you rich! Otherwise, it’s all self-help.

Moses learned about self-help at the spring of Meribah. Eve learned about self-help when she performed the first act of drug abuse, in an attempt to gain supernatural wisdom. Nebuchadnezzar learned about self-help when God drove him mad and let him live like an animal for seven years. Self-help does not exist. You can do little things for yourself, with effects that are limited in power and duration. But you can’t give yourself a blessed life.

The Nazis put signs reading “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) at the entrances of camps like Auschwitz. That’s interesting, because the death camps were Satanic parodies of the temple in Jerusalem. At the temple, animals were sacrificed and burned to make God forget men’s sins. In the camps, God’s people were sacrificed and burned, in the hope that man would forget the Jews.

This is why God doesn’t like cremation. He knows that when the bodies of his people are destroyed, men will rise up later and deny they existed. God would not permit Joseph’s bones to remain in Egypt, where they could be lost. Even after Joseph’s death, the bones served a purpose.

The Nazis claimed their slaves would gain freedom through work, but no matter what the slaves did, they lived in servitude, lack, and defeat, and their ultimate destinations were fire and pits. I don’t know how the parallels could be more clear.

Satan works hard. Is he going to end up free?

The work we do outside of God’s will is vanity. It is futile. It is waste. It accomplishes nothing, except to bring us closer to hell. Like prosperity preachers, the Nazis kept the Jews busy with promises of good things that would never come. They worked, like hamsters on wire wheels, and they never advanced, except toward destruction.

The temple was not a place that celebrated work. It was a place that celebrated the fact that God had done the work for us. It celebrated grace, which is unearned divine help. It’s only natural (on more levels than one) that the Nazis praised the power of human effort in their diabolical slaughterhouses. Their teaching was the opposite of the truth.

Any church that glorifies human effort is screwed up, and any pastor that teaches that nonsense, while milking the poor like cattle, is likely to find that there are serious gaps in his divine protection.

I don’t think the folks who run that church believe in God. Maybe they do, but my impression is that they don’t. I don’t see how anyone can believe in God while cheating employees and teaching get-rich-quick doctrine which has been proven to be false. If these awful teachings appeared to work, I could understand how believers could teach them, but they don’t produce results. The people at the church were poor when they showed up, and they’re still poor. The church itself is poor. How long do you have to stand in the rain before you realize it’s time to go in the house?

I don’t pray for this man to be healed, except through repentance and faith. If God healed him miraculously today, he would surely take it as a sign that everything he’s doing is okay. He needs a change of heart, not a physical healing that doesn’t affect his beliefs.

I keep praying God will drive the leadership out of that church and replace it, and my faith says it will happen. There is no clique or family whose comfort justifies oppressing and misleading thousands of people. They know what they’re doing wrong. It’s not rocket science. If they were blameless, I’d feel differently, but I can’t see any way to excuse what they do.

The church–the body of believers all across America–is extremely sick. We are declining rapidly. God gives us teaching after teaching, and sign after sign, and we keep throwing it away. In a sane world, the charismatic movement would have put an end to Satan’s rule. So much power fell on us. But we’re using it to buy jets for Kenneth Copeland and Paula White instead of transforming people’s hearts. There is no gift so powerful we can’t corrupt it.

We are truly amazing. God dealt with Adam face to face, and Adam fell. God gave the Jews prophets and priests and blatant signs, and they fell. God gave Christians the Holy Spirit, living inside us, and we fell. There is probably nothing God can do to protect us from our own stupidity, short of abolishing free will.

The news for the human race is bad, but the news for you is very good. The Titanic is sinking, but you can get into a lifeboat whenever you want. Many people you know are going to die and burn, and you can’t save many. That’s terrible. But you don’t have to join them.

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