The Sunday Mail
Pastor Paul Reynolds
“I have a word from God for You. You must listen to what God is saying through me. You must obey what God is telling you to do through me.”
Those words or similar are used, all over the country, every Sunday, by religious leaders claiming to occupy a special place in God’s great plan. They claim to bring new words from God that are not in the Bible.
Or they claim to be the one thing standing between the people in the room and the attacks of Satan.
Attacks that are almost invariably straightforward, sicknesses or personal temptations, and nothing to do with the direct action of Satan whose powers are far more limited than many give him credit for.
The myth these leaders spread and by which they command the attention and money of hundreds of thousands of people is that God isn’t talking to ordinary people like you and me, but he has picked some special people to talk to. The rest of us better listen.
“It’s a good thing you are here,” they tell people, “because if you had not been here your sister would have died of Aids in three weeks’ time,” for example.
As if God was so capricious to be playing with the lives of people, waiting to see if they turned up at the right church before deciding whether to let them die.
Preying on the desperate desire of sick people and their relatives to see healings, and of poor people’s yearning for their families to be taken care of, these leaders enrich themselves.
The irony of it is almost unbearable: that those who allegedly bring financial blessing and physical healing deliver a wealth only of unfulfilled promises and hopes that are not shattered but worse than that: extended endlessly.
Hope is given every week to top up the supply that has depleted during the week through an emotional roller-coaster of a service that has people believing their turn for the miraculous is just around the corner.
But only, of course, if they go to the right church, and most particularly only if they are financially generous to that church.
Back in the Old Testament there was a straightforward system whereby priests came from only one tribe among the Israelites, and high priests were drawn from one clan within that tribe.
There was no use someone coming from another tribe and saying, “Hey!! Pick me! I wanna be high priest, God says it should definitely be me!”
Similarly Moses’ prophetic ministry, verified by miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea and the earth literally swallowing up his opponents (that is verifiable miracles that no-one could argue with), meant that people knew that God spoke through him and gave commands directly to him.
Those priests acted as intermediaries between the people and God, and they could only approach God through the symbolism of animal sacrifices, offered on behalf of the people for the forgiveness of their sins through faith in God. God didn’t invite the people to approach him directly. On the contrary, he told them to go through the priests.
Jesus changed all that.
When the curtain in the temple was torn in two, it was no abstract idea but the ripping up of the dividing curtain between the presence of God in the temple’s Most Holy Place (where none but the High Priest could go) and the people. Jesus’ death meant that we now had direct access to the Father, so Jesus and the apostles instructed that we pray directly to God the Father and go to Him with our problems, wants, needs, struggles, illnesses and sins.
James, in his letter, encouraged people to “ask the Elders of your church to come and anoint you and pray over you for healing”.
The assumption was that this was something you had already prayed to God about, and you weren’t told to go and find a specially gifted person,or find a church with someone who claimed to be a healer.
The writer of the Bible book Hebrews tells us that God spoke at various times and in various ways in ancient times through prophets and the like, “but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son,” (Hebrews 1:2). After God sent his Son, he then sent the Holy Spirit to remind people of what Jesus said, and to convict us of our sins and equip us to serve God.
That’s why we are repeatedly reminded to measure everything we hear from people against the Bible.
It also means that whatever prophet, teacher, or healer I meet who tells me I must listen, they can do no more than help me to understand and apply what God has already said. Otherwise the Bible wouldn’t be enough, as it claims to be — it would simply be a starting point.
Thank God that he has already told us everything we need to know through Jesus the great High Priest, and that we don’t need anyone to be our modern High Priest.
You can contact/follow Paul Reynolds via his Twitter account: @PaulTReynolds
