A RESPONSE TO SOME READERS OF MY OP-ED: GOD’S PRIVATE JETS AND LIMOUSINES

As a principle, I try not to get into a back-and-forth with my readers, believing that after having my say in a full-length article, readers should be free to agree or disagree with me. After all, they take the precious time to read, and what is more, send word back. I would be content to learn from them or to simply know their mind on the issue at stake. In this as in a few other instances, however, I have been unable to follow my own counsel due to the all-important role that a tawdry, self-serving prosperity-and-miracle-driven Pentecostalism—not to be confused with Christianity in general or any attempt at a spiritually uplifting existence in the search for the ineffable—plays in the mass lobotomy, the near-total brainwashing of our people.

As Shakespeare famously pointed out in The Merchant of Venice, "the devil can cite Scripture for his purposes." So I have had scripture cited to justify plain robbery by pastors in priest's clothing. Making me wish to ask my interlocutors what Philip asked the Ethiopian he saw reading the book of Isaiah: “Understandeth thou what thou readest?” It seems to me that my interlocutors do not care for that warning that the letter killeth. Thus, they stick with the literal interpretation of the Bible as their ill-trained, really illiterate, pastors who hide under the promise of miracles and prosperity to avoid grappling with the difficult questions of theology and doctrine, of the nature of Godhead and the eschatology of life after death. Thus, they conveniently ignore the fact that Christ rode triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey, not atop a golden chariot. Christ, which is God made man—if my interlocutors believe their own Bible—chose to be born in a manger and not in a palace, and to a carpenter and not to a king. Yet he was the king of kings, meaning that for him prosperity wasn't a matter of the flesh but of the soul.

One of my interlocutors so mistakes this simple message that he misquotes the Bible and claims that Christ came so that the poor may be rich! He should have added, so that they may all own Mercedes Benz cars and private jets! Here is what Jesus said: I came so that you may have life and that more abundantly. In other words, eternal life; not countless material possessions. And didn't he warn his followers not to worry about what they would eat or drink, or what they would wear, just as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field do not worry? And why did he choose that ultimate test of sacrifice, poverty and charity for the rich man in Matthew 19? Why did he insist on good deeds for the poor—“the least of my brethren”—as the test of the truly deserving of heaven—for those who believe in heaven and hell—if not because the things of Mammon are not what he means by prosperity?

And somehow, my interlocutors seem to think that only those pastors that either own or aspire to private jets are men-of-God; the only ones who are winning souls in near and far places. Meaning that the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Church worldwide, and the Pope, are not men-of-God since they do not own private jets. And, of course, it goes without saying that Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah and Pastor Tunde Bakare, are definitely not men-of-God since they deplore such craven materialism as the Oritsejafors and Adeboyes and Okonkwos, etc. mistake for proof that their God is not a poor God. And so they justify private jets as if all of a sudden time is so much of the essence that Nigerian pastors, the only true apostles left on earth, must be able to fly anywhere at a moment's notice to secure death-hour conversions of the heathens before Christ's second coming! As if even then they would not have to use the same airports as commercial aircraft. As if Nigeria's private jet-loving pastors could fly their planes and land them on the very roofs of the homes of the souls needing such death-hour salvation! I could go on and on to show the dubiousness of those claiming that just by anyone's self-proclamation as a man (or woman) of God, he or she becomes the Lord’s anointed. And that then, he or she can do no wrong. What is it that Jesus says in Matthew 7 of those who supposedly preached the word with signs and wonders, but who really were false prophets? That on the last day, many shall come to him saying, "Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?" And he shall say unto them, "I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

For really, the matter is very simple. Sin is a matter of morality, not of law, even if law and morality may occasionally be coincident. It is a matter, as Peter has it, of knowing what is good and failing to do it. The moment we cannot tell the man of God apart from the man of the world, then both are IN the world and OF it. Is that the definition of Christianity—a Christ-like living—that my born-again interlocutors enjoin on themselves and would also enjoin on the rest of us? I should like to think not!

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culled from Ogaga's facebook page