Do Godly People Need Help Reading the Scriptures?

I am often asked what I think of the Blood Moons theory, which is tied to religious leaders, notably John Hagee, who use a convoluted analysis of certain passages from the Bible to convince Christians that the Second Coming is imminent and will happen in their lifetimes, something that many Christians have believed since the days of Christ. Something that will be true, at least for a future generation.

Many pastors over the last centuries have preached that, based on this or that Biblical passage, Jesus must be coming during their lifetime, sparing Christians the pain of death in this or that generation. People looked to these religious leaders believing that they had a special gift of prophecy and staked all their hopes in their words, often putting aside their own plans for their future and for the future of their nations, even though there were serious issues that went unresolved as a result of their abandoning their earthly duties.

I want to point something out.

If you are a godly Christian with a thorough knowledge of Jesus’ teachings, you know that you don’t have to follow “godly men” and their interpretation of the scriptures. If you are not a godly person with such knowledge, then you are spiritually and intellectually incapable of properly identifying a godly person. You have no idea what that means and a man with a strong personality will mesmerize you like a mother mesmerizes a baby with a lullaby

I responded thusly to one of those who asked me about the Blood Moons theory.

There have been numerous blood moon tetrads since about the year 800 and none of them were accompanied by events more significant than other events in times of no blood moon tetrads.

I believe that God wrote the Bible for ordinary people and does not send signs that need to be interpreted with specialized knowledge and analysis. He knows that to give us such abstruse signs would put us in the hands of a few shrewd men claiming to have such knowledge and that they would exploit us for their own purposes, and worse, for Satan’s purposes, just as the Neocons exploit soft-headed Christians constantly for the purpose of supporting war by designating as leaders certain men who claim to be Christians and whose behavior suggests they are “godly” when in fact they are deceivers whose wars invariably redound to the deaths of Middle East Christians. It has happened over and over again and some Christians have never observed the obvious pattern of this deceit.

I grew up in a fundamentalist home and saw all sorts of pastors and evangelists pretending to know things that they did not and making dated predictions that did not materialize.

I remember one itinerant evangelist by the name of Oliver B. Green from Greenville, SC who preached in the 1950s.

He had a stentorian voice, like John Hagee, and mesmerized his audiences, who came to hear him in his big circus tent. He put on quite a show, always jumping onto the top of his pulpit and gesticulating wildly at least once during his sermon to make a point. He once said that some had complained about his acrobatics and warned that they might be considered blasphemous, but he said “this is my pulpit.” My dad said that was an arrogant thing so say and that since Green was using the pulpit for God’s work, it was God’s pulpit, not his.

Years later I saw a pamphlet in my parents’ bedroom titled: “Why Man will Never Reach the Moon” written by none other than Oliver B. Green. That was a few years before man did reach the moon.

Green’s arguments were all taken from the Bible and they proved beyond a doubt that man would never reach the moon.

At the time I found these arguments to be far fetched and yet I hated myself for doubting the truth as written by this godly man, whom I had been taught to honor.

Even after man reached the moon, taking that small step for a man, my parents never wavered in their faith in Oliver B. Green. He was still a man of God.

That is the mechanism by which we are misled.

Yet the stakes have never been higher. Our Christian brethren are dying throughout the Middle East thanks to the credulity of American Christians in particular, the one group these Middle Easterners are looking to for their salvation from the horrors and atrocities they face. It is high time for godly men to do their own thinking, and their own praying.

Let’s not be misled again, for God’s sake.