God’s Patience is not Infinite

I just had some disturbing news.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you may know that the pastor of my last church was arrested for molesting his niece over a period of years. He was supposed to be tried today, but he got a continuance until August 20. That will be one year to the day from the first morning I woke up in my new home, far from Miami.

The charges indicated that she was less than 12 years old when he started. As I understand it, she told a friend of hers last year, and somehow things escalated. A friend of mine says the pastor confessed in front of the church last summer, and he was arrested in September.

Prison is bad at its best, but it is said to be worse for child molesters. If you’re a child molester, everyone feels morally superior to you, and they feel entitled to mistreat you.

The pastor and his wife were not good to me. They didn’t just reject me. They were nasty about it. The pastor accosted a friend of mine in the church parking lot long after I left and started screaming at him. He got way too close, and my friend threatened to give him a beating.

That’s what things were like.

The church was a cult. When members fell out with the pastors and left, everyone else was discouraged from talking to them. When I left, I found out which church friends were real. The others cut me off and even unfriended me on Facebook, as if merely seeing my Facebook posts would poison their minds.

I told people the church was going to dry up and disappear. At best, I said, they would end up meeting in someone’s living room. The pastors had terrible pride issues. They did things to drive people away, and they got angry when members made suggestions.

The “house prophet” kept “prophesying” that the church would grow, we would get a new building, we would see miracles, this one would have twins, that one would be healed of cancer, and so on. A real prophet would have told them they were blowing it.

Obviously, the church did not survive the arrest. It ran on fumes for a bit and then expired.

Today I found out things have gotten even worse. The pastor’s wife has brain cancer. She is said to have only weeks to live, and I am also told her mind is going. I also heard that the molestation started when the victim was six.

A friend of mine called and told me. I said, “It’s like that family is being destroyed.” He said the person who told him had said the same thing.

It’s like they’re being erased from the planet. What is happening to them is astounding.

Their son is a mess. He’s a petty criminal, and he has all sorts of emotional problems. He ridicules Christianity. He seems to be included in the destruction.

Their daughter seems okay. She married a very nice guy. He’s a preacher. They live over a thousand miles away.

I know what their problem is. They don’t confess. They and others in the church got mad at me when I talked about the connection between misfortune and a lack of repentance. They were 21st-century charismatics. They only wanted to hear about money and miracles. People accused me of blaming others for their problems. Actually, that was correct. We do cause our problems, including cancer and other diseases. But people don’t want to hear it. They want to hear that nothing is their fault.

My mother’s sins made her sick and killed her. She smoked for 50 years, and she died of lung cancer. Using addictive drugs is a sin. AIDS is almost always caused by sin. The sin of gluttonizing puts people in motorized wheelchairs, blinds them, and costs them their feet. It ought to be obvious that sin causes problems. It also prevents God from fixing our problems and healing our diseases.

Many times, I’ve asked God if I should pray for the pastor and his wife, and the answer has always been “no.” The reason? They won’t listen. Their problems are caused by their own decisions. They’ve decided to close their ears, so praying won’t help them. They don’t need miracles. They need to have their minds changed so God’s power can flow through them. God doesn’t change people’s minds. He applies persuasion, but he doesn’t interfere with our free will. His name is Jehovah, not Geppetto.

A person only has so much prayer time, and if you waste it on the proud and stubborn, you will neglect people who can actually be helped. Satan sends us time-wasters who don’t really want to change.

You would expect Christians to do better than this. I’m not surprised that the church failed, because that was obviously inevitable. I’m surprised that this couple’s lives are being completely destroyed. Even a Christian who is off course will usually get a fair amount of help from God. I’m shocked at how little help they’re getting.

Sure, he’s a pedophile. But God helps pedophiles that open up to him and repent. His wife may be brassy and difficult, but she’s not an axe murderer. Whatever their failings are, they acknowledge God. Apparently, it’s not enough to protect them from catastrophe.

We should be afraid of God. Look how badly things can go when we toy with him.

I’m so glad God has helped me to receive correction. He saved me incredible suffering by teaching me about confession and repentance. I didn’t figure it out. I was an idiot who loved sin. He had to show me. I was doing my own thing, screwing my life up as much as possible. I would have continued had he not given me knowledge I didn’t deserve.

I can’t say it enough. Hell isn’t full of sinners; it’s full of people who don’t listen. Heaven is packed to the rafters with sinners. It’s full of murderers, thieves, whores, sodomites, and every other type of transgressor. It’s full of guilty people who confessed and repented. Hell is full of people who thought they knew best. And many of them are very, very nice people who treated others well.

Pride and denial may not take you to hell, but they can bring hell up to meet you while you’re here on earth. They caused Job’s problems.

Scary stuff.

I don’t think I’ll ever pray for my former pastors again, but I will be praying for the people they bamboozled and abused. The Bible says that when the dragon was cast out of heaven, it drew a third of the stars along with it, with its tail. I know a lot of people who have been misled by preachers, and there is more hope for many of them than for their former pastors.