{Posted at Bene Diction Blogs on, Aug 12, 2011]
You could admire someone who respects the judgements of the Lord. But being eager to see about 100 or 150 million people die if that is what the Lord wants to see happen? I prefer that "mercy triumphs over judgment."
As I have mentioned, I attended the last event of the Awakening Love Fest conference in Surrey B.C. a couple of weeks ago. The main speaker that evening of July 23 was Patricia King--the former Pat Cocking--who is probably best know as the host of the Extreme Prophetic/Extreme Love television show on religious TV. A Canadian who first became prominent in B.C. but now lives in Arizona, she's delved into NAR-style theology to a certain extent.
She can be a good teacher, but Patricia King's remarks on the evening on July 23 were so off that I will need more than one post to discuss them properly.
That is, if I live through the judgements she is referring to, to post.
She came up to speak, to generous applause, and then alluded to something said earlier by Kenny Blacksmith. Blacksmith, a native leader from, I believe, Quebec, had participated in a "prophetic round-table" in which people shared what they had heard from the Lord. In this segment, Blacksmith had alluded to several prophecies that he had heard about disasters coming to
Turtle Island, a native term for North America.
Intrigued, King double-checked what she had heard. "...A word that Kenny heard about a third of Turtle Island coming under judgement, was it--destroyed?" King said, listening. "One third of the people."
This would be about 150 million people dead. Now in the remarks that followed, she said nothing to discredit, or qualify, or set aside what Blacksmith had alluded to. She just let that sit in the minds of her listeners as potentially plausible, as she addressed the topic of spectacular judgements from God, and how Christians should react to them, moving back and forth using Israel's treatment by Israel as an example.
"[E]verything in me craves the judgments" of God when they are needed, she said. Judgements are God's verdict on "what is right and what it wrong....clearing the air."
"We are, I believe to love the judgements to God in that sense...if he creates a judgement, it is always for us" she said, for our own good.
The Israelites were taken into bondage she said "Because they forgot that they were a covenant people."
"Egypt oppressed God's people and God's people let them. God's people let them because they lost sight of who they were. They could have risen up in covenant authority that they had with God and took their stand."
So the sufferings of the Jews were their own fault? I'd like to follow her logic if she talks to an observant Jew who believes that the Jews remain God's "covenant people". Would she suggest to him that the Holocaust was the fault of the "covenant people" who didn't take a stand? Just a thought.
It follows, then, to my Christian readers, that everything bad that happens to us, either individually or collectively, is our own fault if we are able to "stand up" and do something about it. King is only a few moments into her talk and she lays a powerful guilt trip.
King continues.
"God wants us in this hour to remember who were are, that we are a covenant people," she said. "If you let the oppression come in, it will get more and more severe. You know we need to deal with those things that are coming against us, but we just let the oppression come, and let the oppression come more...."
She returns to the Israelites, and God's judgements against the Egyptians "who held them in bondage, and these judgements were so go for his people [the Israelites] because these judgements against these forces that were holding the in bondage were to set them free into liberty and release them into a promised land". But instead of embracing the judgements, she argued, the Israelites desired that the judgements be withheld because they made the Israelites uncomfortable.
I started squirming too, but not because I don't want to "let my people go" Rather, I remembered that she is talking to a modern North American audience. In no real way can the situation in Canada and United States be realistically compared to the woes of the Israelites in ancient Egypt. If King were preaching in Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Russia, perhaps the analogy would follow, due to the direness of those times. But Obama, as bad as he may be in the eyes of some, is not Pharaoh.
Do you see how she is cranking up the rhetoric too? If you want to have people react in an extreme way of thinking, you need to stoke the flames pretty high.
The Israelites, King adds...
"...were so identified with the system of the world instead of the system of the kingdom that they were called to. And in this hour, God is going to judge the system that hurts, the system that oppresses, the systems of greed, and it's a good thing. It's a good thing, and we need to embrace those judgements and desire them.
But in order for us to love the judgements, we need to remember who were are, because even though we are in the world, we are not of the world, amen? We're in the world, but not of the world and when we separate unto God and remember 'I'm a kingdom child, I'm a Kingdom daughter, you're a kingdom son.'
We are kingdom people before our God and his Kingdom is good all the time. He is a righteous King. His government is perfect. His economic system is excellent--there's nothing like it in the universe and it is good all the time. Everything about God is good all the time, and we are called to live in that Kingdom and identity..."
I am too orthodox to deny that God could sustain his people in a spectacular way if He so chooses. But even if King is merely talking about governmental and economic collapse, there is a difference between being carried through trials to God's glory and having nothing but "roses, roses all the way," as King seems to be implying here.
I'm reminded of an observation that Howard Ruff, a gold bug investment guru of the 1980s, once wrote in a book. He also argued that as part of any investment strategy, people should store food and supplies and live, not in a cave but where civil unrest was unlikely.
I'll paraphrase here. Ruff remembered making his point in a clever way. At a meeting, various investors were talking about how to invest, what economic problems were to happen and such. Then Ruff got up and asked a question. Do you think that in a time of economic chaos and civil unrest, such as you fear, that you will be to come home from your high paying job safely, stop off at home in your car with a full tank of gas, and then go to a grocery store overflowing with useful items and food that you would want?
It was the first and perhaps only time, Ruff writes, that he ever received a standing ovation for asking a question.
Did King address any practrical ways that we can allow God to help us through the judgements that she forsees? You can guess that she did not.
Did she address practical ways that Christians can help the unsaved who are being judged and thereby bless them and help them to repent? No--she prefers to root for the judgements.
As I tried to note by citing Mr. Ruff, while we can count on God to help us during a crisis, it's unrealistic to expect that if the world is being judged around us, Christians won't suffer in some way. Indeed if these are Revelation-type judgements of the type that will kill up to 150 million people as Kenny Blacksmith's friends say--who do you think might be persecuted as a result?
I suspect that if King is around when judgements fall and Christians are blamed and persecuted as a result, then Patricia King will blame any victims who didn't stand on their "covenant authority".
You will already, I trust, have perceived a lack of love for those who would be judged. Did we pray for repentance, our and theirs, so that possible judgement could be averted? It didn't come to King's mind, at that moment, that that is something that would be worth doing.
As long as we are with King in the Old Testament, a couple of things from the OT come to my mind.
Remember in Job where Jonah was told to preach to Nineveh that it faced judgement? Nineveh repented, which put the judgement-expecting Jonah into a snit. But then God explained that Ninevah had repented, and that He did not like the idea of destroying a city that had truly turned from it's evil ways.
Can't the evil systems that King decries be changed through repentance and God's imput? She seems to believe that by her actions in media, making videos and encouraging actors, directors, screenwriters and such to be a good witness. You can't really want God to whisk away all the "evil systems" except the cool Hollywood-related one that your ministry hopes to earn money and attention from. Just a thought.
You've probably thought of
Jeremiah 29:5-7 as well; God is speaking through the prophet to the Israelites exiled in Babylon. Now we know that God would eventuallly judge and destroy the Babylonians when there was literally "writing on the wall," but what does He tell the Israelites to do in the meantime?
He says this:
5 “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
Much better advice than I received from Patricia King on July 23. I think you may agree...