YeKengalé

Dutch Sheets genuinely believes that there was massive widespread fraud in the recent US elections and that once these illegal ballots which were cast for Trump but through some illicit method repurposed for Biden are discovered, and he expects they will in the next few days, the election will be declared for President Trump who will be given another 4 years in office and save America from an aborted revival due to socialist government suppression of the church.

Dutch is not alone in this expectation. Almost every major ‘prophetic’ voice in the American charismatic movement shares his perspective (you can subtract a few mostly black voices).

My assertion in my penultimate blog, Poetic justice, that the American evangelical church writ large, Cessationist and Charismatic finally in lockstep, minus those voices mostly from independent black churches, have become utterly morally bankrupt and / or utterly manipulated and deceived, does not then seem in the least far fetched.

Rather than excavate the beliefs and values that have created this deep fissure in the architecture of American Christian identity, (that is a very meaningful exercise but for another day), let me rather make some statements that will honor the God of the church – The Lord Jesus Christ.

What does one do in the valley of shadows….when one’s light, one’s vision fails? TD Jakes has a video on the net called The Peaceful Transition of Power. This is from 2019 and did not apparently have this specific US election in mind. He spoke about the light that blinds rather than facilitates vision, such as with Paul’s Damascan encounter…. how greater light can throw one into confusion rather than bring clarity (especially when one thought they were serving God in zeal only to discover that they were fighting for the other side, working against God’s purpose).

The scripture teaches in fact that prophecy (like intellect) is designed to ultimately fail and the only three things that are destined to remain are faith, hope and love. Let me say a word about the least of these.

Genuine Christian faith is not doctrinal. It does not depend upon some textual formula or creed asserted or accepted by a believer, regardless of how we tend to ground our faith in the doctrinal positions of our church traditions, teachings and leadership. It is not logical – in that its strength does not derive from scholarship, study or any purely academic discipline, although we purport to strengthen faith through appeals to philosophical, historical, theological and other such arguments or quasi-arguments. It does not come from head but heart.

Genuine Christian faith is relational. It binds together a community (both in heaven and earth) in cords of mutuality. It is better characterized ‘trust’ in our present language usage. It is personal…not abstract. It is eternal/holistic not individual/egocentric/sectarian (let that be a subject for musing for the fundamentalist).

After all is said and done, people exist and must relate…and if the Christian faith only offers another sword of division to further splincter the human spirit rather than offer through the light of Jesus’ life and teaching, a path to experience heaven’s golden streets – the paths of righteousness: the avenues of joy, forgiveness, humility, blessing, compassion, kindness, truth and grace, then it is just as well we abandon it as the agitant our perceived enemies – the secularists, believe it to be, for we would not be able to prove to them otherwise.

So regardless of whose vision, whose champion, whose expectations are dashed; whose thinking demands revision, who is hurt or downcast, disappointed or confused: somebody’s world will need to be reconstructed – somebody’s villain will have to be recast in a different role, somebody’s map of reality will need to be adjusted….and high passions might not allow that process to begin any time soon….but we will all be here. There will continue to be people, of every hue and stripe, of all manner of persuasions, in every type of life condition: rich and poor, black and white, old and young, needy and arrogant, religious and non religious, educated and ignorant, wise and foolish. able and handicapped.

Let Christian faith light the way for healing, for blessing, for redemption. Let it illuminate the path of hope, the path of love, regardless of our pre-persuasions. And if not, then let it be snuffed out and cast aside as worthless. Delusion has no eternal value and very little earthly use.