Promises Pt. 03

"But not prosperity at the expense of anyone else! And does it have to be financial wealth? What is wrong with giving to others of our love and compassion and receiving a bountiful return of love and compassion from those to whom we gave. Wouldn't that be more satisfying than living on your own with your riches and no friends?"

"In my other work helping the disadvantaged I have found that treating people as an equal, instead of talking down to them will, in the majority of cases, win their respect. Show respect, show love, and that love and respect will be returned. Promoting yourself as being better, 'look at me, look at me, you too can be like me, all that you need to do is tithe and speak in tongues.' It's attitudes like that, because of your conceived exalted status with God, will not earn you the respect that you so desperately seek, and all of the money in the world will not buy you that respect, particularly if you flaunt your riches."

"I don't want to sound as if I'm trying to teach you your job, but we all have a personal relationship with God and part of that personal relationship is the ability to talk to God any time that we want, and about anything that we want. It is also part of that relationship with God that if it is against His teaching, He has the right to deny our request. For instance, if my mother is terminally ill and, even if she were to survive this illness, her quality of life would be one of misery, one of unbearable agony, and I prayed to God for a miracle healing, as your church would do, it's big on 'miracle healings' although I have yet to see any empirical evidence of success, but I digress. If God has decide that the best thing for my mother would be for her to have comfort and relief from pain during her final days, no amount of prayer for a miracle healing would be successful, wouldn't that be so, Pastor Mayotte?"

"If it is God's will, yes, but I believe that God can heal miraculously."

"But if it is your desire and not God's, doesn't that mean that He hasn't answered your prayer, hasn't acceded to your wishes, your wants?"

"The Bible tells us that God grants our wishes!"

"But only if it is also His wish. What if it is your mother's wish to be relieved of the pain that she is suffering, so that she could die in peace? For you to pray against that wish and against God's wish will hardly be successful, would it? You can't see the point, can you? You believe in miracles, but it would be a miracle if God grants a wish that is contrary to His own wishes, wouldn't it?"

"Well, yes."

"So the overlying consideration in all of this, is that we should be mindful of what is the best for the person that we are praying for. Dying is a part of life. A peaceful death is also a part of life."

"Another thing that struck me when I was watching some of your famous 'healers' was that when they were praying over the victim, I mean ill person, they were shouting such things as 'God, I order you to drive Satan from this person's body', God I command you to loose the evil one from this person'. Now I've heard these people described as powerful healers, but the thing that gets me is that it goes against what Paul said in Romans about 'who am I to tell God what to do?' Who are these people to order God to do their bidding? A prayer request doesn't sound as good as an order to God, does it? It's not as spectacular, and that's what's needed, the spectacular."

Mayotte said nothing.

"I think that it's about time we have a look at baptism. Pastor Mayotte, on what passage of Scripture do you base your insistence on 'full immersion' baptism?"

"In the Bible it tells us that after John the Baptist baptized Jesus, he 'came up out of the water'."

"But doesn't that passage and all other passages tell us that John was baptizing with water, not in water. If you look at the document in front of you, you will see that there are no cited Scriptures in green, none that state categorically that Jesus was baptized by full immersion and none that state that he baptized by full immersion, in fact you will note that there are no passages that stated that Jesus actually baptized anyone. If Jesus was standing ankle deep in the River Jordan and John baptized him by anointing him with water, and when it was finished Jesus walked up the river bank, wouldn't he be coming up out of the water?"

"I suppose. . ."

"And when the disciples baptized the three thousand people in that upper room at Pentecost, they would have needed an awful lot of water to baptize by full immersion, wouldn't they? After all each person would remove a certain amount of water when he or she came up out of the water."

"I suppose so."

"More than could have fitted into a bath tub providing there was one there?"

"They could have had someone fetching water."

"From where? There wasn't a lot of water around Jerusalem at that time was there? You have to remember that there was no reticulated water at the time, and that when people wanted a bath they went to a public bath, which wasn't, as far as I can ascertain, in the upper room of that house at Pentecost."

"I don't know."

"Take my word for it there wasn't. They would all have had to troop off down to the public baths, but they couldn't have, could they, because the Bible doesn't tell us that on the afternoon of Pentecost the disciples led the three thousand from the upper room down to the baths and baptized them. There is another thing to consider in this scenario, a room big enough to fit that many people, would hardly be an upper floor of a normal house, would it Pastor Mayotte? But we aren't supposed to think about minor details like that, are we, we are supposed to just accept that it happened as the Bible tells us."

"Tell me Pastor Mayotte, was baptism, the way you believe that John was doing it, was that a common practice around that time?"

"It must have been."

"And just where did you get that information? It isn't mentioned anywhere in the Old Testament."

"It must be somewhere I just can't remember where."

"Don't just take my word for it, check it out for yourself in your concordance, the very first reference to baptism is Matthew Chapter 3 verse 7. If the initiation, and baptism is an initiation, for Jewish males was circumcision, and Jesus had been circumcised which we are told he had been, why would he need to be baptized?"

"Baptism is a cleansing, a washing away of sin, of preparation for the spiritual life ahead."

"The cleansing side I can understand, because the High Priests, before they could enter the temple, needed to cleanse themselves. They did this by immersing themselves, but why did Jesus need to be cleansed? Wasn't he without sin? What needed to be washed away? After he was baptized did Jesus speak in tongues?"

"I don't know."

"He mustn't have because the Bible doesn't ever mention it, it doesn't say 'Jesus, following his baptism, came up out of the water speaking in tongues', does it Pastor Mayotte? In fact, nowhere in the Bible does it mention anyone being baptised and coming up out of the water speaking in tongues, does it Pastor Mayotte?"

Silence.

"So what we have here is a practice whose justification is one contextually inaccurate passage where we are told, that following his baptism, and the Gospel of John doesn't mention his baptism at all, he 'came up out of the water.', following his baptism with water, not in water."

"Every other mention of baptism in the New Testament is also that it was 'with' water and not 'in' water, and nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that we have to emerge speaking in 'tongues'. Wouldn't that appear to be a false teaching, Pastor Mayotte?"

"We teach the true 'word of God' and nothing you or anyone else can say will convince me otherwise!"

"So, I'm wasting my time discussing theology with you, is that what you're telling me, Pastor Mayotte? I will have to live in the hope that the members of the jury and those members of your church gathered here today, are a little more open to teaching."

Mayotte glared at him, but the jury seemed less threatened and those in the public gallery were whispering quietly to each other.

"I didn't want to do this but I will. "Pastor Mayotte, I have heard one of the 'awesome man of God' type preachers at your church preaching on the so called 'End Times', just what are the End Times, Pastor Mayotte?"

"That is the time before the second coming of Jesus when we will be carried up in the 'Rapture' to take our place in Heaven."

"Sounds really, really, great doesn't it Pastor Mayotte? But forgive me for being a tad confused here, if everyone is taken up in the 'rapture' why is Jesus coming back to Earth?"

"To save those who are left behind."

"And if those people, presumably the Jews and Muslims who don't recognize Jesus, don't want to be saved, wouldn't Jesus' second coming be doomed to fail?"

"They have to be given the chance!"

"Just what Scripture is all of this based on Pastor Mayotte?"

"It's all in the book of Revelation."

"Really? Do you know that I have read the book of Revelation from beginning to end and I can find no mention of the 'Rapture'"?

"It is when all those who have died will be raised from their grave and taken up into heaven."

"Oh now I see it. It's only the dead that will be taken up, not the living at all. Or is God going to kill everyone so that He can raise them up, even though He has told us that he will never destroy the earth and all living things? I can see a real problem with that. Consider if you will, Pastor Mayotte, a person dies and is cremated and his ashes strewn on the ground around a great tree. The ashes are absorbed into the ground and become nutrients that the tree feeds on and, in the way of all trees, some of those nutrients are converted into wood, some are carried into the leaves where, by the process of photosynthesis they are converted into energy. Now along comes a timber feller and cuts down the tree, the small branches are put through a muncher and turned into mulch to be used on a garden somewhere. The amount of the cremated person in that mulch would be infinitesimal."

"The large pieces of timber would be taken to a sawmill or a pulp mill where it will be transformed into either pulpwood, or usable lumber for the use in building, furniture manufacture or whatever. And the off-cuts sold as firewood to be burnt in a wood-fired heater. The amount of the cremated person in that timber would also be infinitesimal."

"Now I suppose you are going to tell me that, at the time of this so-called 'Rapture', God will extract from the garden mulch, from the plants that grew in it, some of which might already have been eaten, from the furniture or the building, and from the fire ash thrown on the garden or in the garbage and subsequently into some land-fill somewhere, and take all of those infinitesimal pieces of that cremated person, all of those bits of inanimate ash, reassemble him and raise him to heaven?"

"God can perform miracles."

"But why? Isn't it enough that the soul of that person has already gone to God? After all didn't Jesus come onto this Earth to save our spiritual being and not our physical? Wasn't he the Spiritual Messiah and not a physical Messiah? Why would we need our bodies in heaven if it is enough that our souls are saved, after all bodies take up a lot of space, they have to be fed, they create waste that needs to be disposed of, none of which is a problem with souls."

"A phrase often used in funeral services is 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust', the inference being that the body of the deceased is being consigned to the dust of the earth from whence man, in the form of Adam, came."

"But it says in Revelation that we will be raised up."

"It also says in Revelation that the angels will place a seal on the foreheads of one hundred and forty four thousand people, twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, and that these will get a guernsey in the hereafter, but I have to ask myself; 'They are all Jews, so where does that leave the interpretation of John 3:16 that the Christian church uses to exclude from Heaven anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus?' Where does that leave the Scripture that tells us that Jesus is 'the way the truth and the life' and the only way to heaven is through him? I also have to ask myself; 'why should I bother trying to be good when my ancestry is not from the tribes of Israel at all? My ancestry is Celtic, and the Celts were around before the learned Bible scholars, that you quote so freely, tell us that Adam and Eve were created. And, if a hundred and forty-four thousand people were all that were going to heaven, I'm sure that there must be at least that number who are more worthy of admission than I am'."

"There are others! It tells us in Revelation that there are people who have repented their sins and have washed their robes until they are gleaming white, in the blood of Jesus."

"But these people were servants of God, they were not allowed into the temple of heaven, just as only those chosen could enter into the inner sanctum of the temple in Old Testament times. It tells us in Revelation that the only people assured of a place in Heaven are those who wear the seal of God on their forehead, the others are made to suffer greatly and only those whose name is in the 'Book of Life' will get another chance. Then at the end of Revelations it tells us that there will be no temple in heaven because God is the temple. First you have a temple and then you don't, which is it to be?"

"Do you know what Pastor Mayotte, and you will probably call me a heretic because of this, but, on reading Revelation again recently I wondered whether the writer wasn't hallucinating in some way, if he hadn't been smoking some roadside herbage, because it doesn't make sense to me at all. It is supposed to be about the end of the World, but there are people left, it tells us that a third are killed, followed by another third, followed by another third. No I might not be a brilliant mathematician, but I calculate that if you take a third of a third of a third, you are left with around 30 percent. And we are told that not all of the physical world is destroyed."

"A question for you Pastor Mayotte; in the beginning God made Adam and Eve without sin, to be perfect, in his own image it says, is that not true Pastor Mayotte?"

"Yes."

"And then he gave them a free will, to be tempted, to give in to temptation, in fact to be no longer perfect, is that not so Pastor Mayotte?"

"That is correct."

"And after the flood of Noah's time God acknowledge that man is evil from birth and vowed never to again destroy the earth because of this, as He had done"

"That just means that there won't be another flood."

"Oh, so we are splitting hairs now are we? What you are saying is that God won't use a flood to destroy the earth because of man's imperfection, He would merely use another method? Seems rather a childish act, don't you think? If however one was to interpret this passage just a little differently, the emphasis on the destruction rather than the method, a different message emerges."

"I suppose so."

"Then why, right throughout the Old and New Testament and especially in the book of Revelation, we are told in no uncertain terms, that God, the God who loves us unconditionally, the God who forgives us our sins, the God that allows our imperfections, recognizes those imperfections even, is going to punish us for those self same imperfections, is going to bring the world crashing down around our ears and to only save a few of us, when that goes entirely against what the Bible teaches us? Can you explain that Pastor Mayotte?"

"I believe the Bible is the word of God and I believe in the Bible and if the Bible tells us that will happen, then it will happen."

"When will all this happen, Pastor Mayotte?"

"Soon, the signs are all around us that the end of the world is near at hand."

"Wasn't it Jesus who said that even he didn't know when it would happen?"

"Yes."

"So how come you are so sure that it will happen?"

"Because the signs are there for all to see! There is disease everywhere!"

"Have you not heard of the great plague that spread from Asia to Europe in the 14th Century and lasted until the 17th Century, and that wiped out a substantial percentage of the world's population? In Europe alone, between 1634 and 1665 around 25 million people died of the plague, which was half of the population at that time and no-one knows how many died in Asia where it all began. Surely that would have been enough to trigger the end of the world?"

"Or the 19 to 29 million of the indigenous population of Central and South America that died as a direct result, or indirectly because they were no longer able to fight, from the Small Pox epidemic after it was allegedly introduced, deliberately, by the Spaniards, surely that would have been enough to trigger the end of the world?"

"Or what about the Influenza Pandemic that occurred in the early part of the last Century, and that killed around 50 million people Worldwide, surely that would have been enough to trigger the end of the world?"

"So you think that the HIV/AIDS epidemic, that is sweeping the world as we speak, is a sign of the 'End Times'? The percentage of peoples affected by this is small in comparison with the epidemics and pandemics of the past. The world didn't end then, and hasn't come to a screeching halt now because of these. If you look at the positive side to all of these incidents, disease became the catalyst for improvements in our treatment of disease."

"Disease isn't the only sign, there is war." Mayotte said, hopefully.

"Okay, let us look at war. Between 18 and 225 million military personnel, depending on whose figures you accept, were killed in wars over the last Century, surely that would have been enough to trigger the end of the world? This doesn't include the 60 to 180 million non-combatants who were also killed, surely that would have been enough to trigger the end of the world? Added to that there was between 21 and 36 million victims of democide or genocide that died in the various wars throughout the last century, why weren't they enough to trigger the End of the World?"

"Think about it Pastor Mayotte, there have been between 180 and 320 million military personnel killed, and that is just the major battles, there were thousands of minor skirmishes in that time, in wars over the last 2000 years, why weren't they enough to trigger the end of the world? The war we are witnessing at present is a drop in the ocean compared with previous wars, so how can you use that as a sign of the End Times?"

"Right after the death of Jesus was the 'Great Jewish Revolt' from 66 to 70AD, this was during the life time of the disciples, in which between 1 and 1½ million people died, a fair slab of the population in that place and at that time. This was the incident mentioned by Jesus in what has become known as the 'mini Apocalypse' when he told them to 'head for the hills', it wasn't a prediction of the end of the physical world but the end of the spiritual world that the Jews knew, the destruction of the Temple and the slaughter of the Jews in Jerusalem and at Masada. Jesus said that he would come again but he never said that the whole world would be destroyed."

"Then there have also been massive loss of life in natural disasters such as the two recent earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan, which by the way wasn't the most destructive natural disaster in history, or the other 7 plus million people killed in Natural Disasters in the last 1000 years, surely that would have been enough to trigger the end of the World?"

"There are people in this world who look at the prognostications of Nostradamus and say; 'Gee he was so right, wasn't he amazing.' While others will look at those very same prognostications and say; 'I don't see that as having come true at all.' It is the same with the various prophecies in the Bible, some people will read them and say; 'Weren't the Prophets amazing!' while others will look at the very same prophesies and see nothing of the sort. Taking 'instant coffee' Scripture to justify the 'End Times' predictions is the same, except for one thing, and that is that Jesus warns us against the many false prophets who will tell of the signs of the end of the world. Are you not one of those when you preach the end times?"