2008-10-30

Exodus 32 to CBN

Self-appointed "prophet" and dubiously-doctored Cindy Jacobs recently announced on CBN that she had a vision - a word from God Almighty - that Christians needed to go to New York City and "pull down the strongman" that was blighting our economy.
The Lord further said, “October 29 was Black Tuesday, the day the stock market crashed, and Satan wants to do it again.” We must be proactive in prayer. At the beginning of the year many intercessors began to hear from the Lord that without divine intervention, a major shaking was coming to Wall Street. This would spread until there were food shortages....On September 29 last month, the US stock market went down 777 points in one day. Cindy says it was no coincidence that this happened on the first day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
Okay... While I disagree that God Rosh Hashanah had anything to do with it (other than, maybe, the smartest financiers in NYC were at Synagogue that day), I'm cool with her asking people to pray. I pray for the nation every day - and for people caught up in this economy. Christians are to pray for the welfare of all, and especially their country and its leaders.

But I think Cindy makes some SERIOUS missteps. First, she has this charismaniac idea of territorial spirits - a larger part of a mistaken notion of Spiritual Warfare as something other than sanctification. Here's what she asked people to do:
“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the 'Lion’s Market,' or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”


When people that claim to follow God start getting around brazen cattle, I get nervous.


Here's some video of them singing and marching around the bull.

Dancing and singing isn't enough...they even "lay hands" on the thing!



I'll bet these folks know every verse about dreaded sexual sins. I just wonder if they've ever stopped to read Exodus 32.

I'm not waiting for Moses (or Charlton Heston) to come down the mountain and toss stone tablets at them.

But the idolatry police are about to throw the book at'em!!!

This is what happens when we let orthodoxy become something we "used to do." This is what happens when we're so concerned that everyone's spiritual experience become celebrated that we refuse to be biblically discerning for fear of being "critical." We like to think it's something that only "the left" does...but there's so much of it on the right, too.

With "Christianity" like this, America deserves any and every plague God throws at us.

Learn more about Spiritual Warfare here, here, and here.

Irving Norman had the right idea...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow.

Viola Larson said...

Chris,

Great post. This kind of thinking used to be the bane of my existence when I was doing apologetics in a much more Evangelical church. It wasn't the Church it was the people we were ministering to.

You can not imagine the things people will do who get into a ministry concerned with demons. One supposed ministry broke up two marriages because they insisted the wives were so demon possessed they were dead in their sins--but in reality they were wonderful Christian women.

Your pictures should be a lesson to all Christians.

Unknown said...

FWIW, the notion of territorial spirits is not without biblical warrant...

Chris Larimer said...

Viola,

We are shaped by what we pursue.

So many people spend time pursuing demons and devils that they become demonic.

For myself, I spent WAY too much time chasing after heretics and mainline ministry. It almost wrecked me. Only when I learned [again] to pursue the Potentate of Time that my heart began to be recast. This is the real tragedy of evangelicals in compromised church structures - we are continually tempted by the good (restoring church order, doctrine, etc.) from the best (sitting with our Lord, shepherding His people).

Kevin,

Um... "baptism for the dead" isn't without biblical warrant, too. ; )

I know what you're saying, though. That's why I included a link to the Frame-Poythress critique, which handles the relevant biblical material.