LITTLE GODS OF HAUGHTY HEARTS (PART I)

“Ambulance Chasing Spirituality”

By Akin Ojumu

In the United States, the expression, Ambulance Chaser, is a derogatory term reserved for unscrupulous personal injury lawyers who monitor the radio frequencies of the Emergency Medical Services listening for reports of accidents. 

As soon as a 911 call is received reporting an accident and an ambulance is sent to the scene, the ambulance-chasing lawyer sets out in hot pursuit of the ambulance. Upon arriving at the scene, he proceeds to recruit the accident victims as clients for potential personal injury lawsuits. He briskly hands out business cards and makes unabashed promises of huge sums of money in personal injury compensation.

Ambulance chasers have a bad reputation amongst their peers. They are often looked upon with scorn by reputable personal injury. As the scum of the earth of the legal profession, these bottom feeders of the American justice system soullessly hound accident victims for their own personal gain while the victims are still to process the harrowing experience of surviving a ghastly accident.

Guess what? Contemporary Christianity has its fair share of ambulance-chasers. Wolves in pastors’ clothing parade themselves in the aisle of the Church as extraordinarily powerful men and women of God. These are the religious ambulance chasers who parachute themselves into the messed-up lives of desperate people in seemingly hopeless situations promising solutions to all of life’s problems.

Just like the ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers of the American legal system, the ambulance chasers in the Christian Church victimize the victims of vicissitudes of life with false claims of pseudo-profound abilities and deep insights into secret things of God. Devoid of any scruples or the slightest hesitation, they exploit for gain those who are already casualties of life’s vagaries at a time they are most vulnerable.

How they love to brag about their uncommon affinity with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Judging by the way these impostors portray themselves, you can easily mistake them for the fourth person of the Trinity. Professing to have the DNA of God, some of them even claim to be little gods themselves. In their reprobate minds, they believe they are equal with the Almighty.

Being the little gods that they are, they claim to have godlike powers. As equals with the Creator, you often hear them boast of being able to speak things into existence. Unlike the rest of us who humbly come before God asking for our daily bread in prayers, when these little gods pray, all they do is to command, decree, and declare.

Kenneth Copeland, who is the Chief proponent of the little gods nonsense, has even gone as far as making the following blasphemous claim:

“When I read in the Bible where He says, ‘I AM,’ I just smile and say, ‘Yes, I AM too.’” 

That’s right. Kenneth Copeland is God Almighty. The demon-possessed little man with scary eyes is the I AM THAT I AM.

Now, whenever anyone dares to challenge these their outlandish claims of equality with God and supernatural powers, the response of these human deities is to throw John 10:34 back at the person. “The Bible says, ‘We are Gods,’” is their common refrain.

“Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34).

Ripping Bible texts out of their proper contexts and twisting them to mean something entirely different from their original intended meaning is the forte of charlatans. Religious ambulance-chasing scoundrels successfully perpetrate their deceptive schemes by skillfully misquoting Scriptural passages and cleverly misappropriating God’s Words to bolster their false claims. The reason they succeed is because the vast majority of their target audience are impressionable biblically illiterate folks who are easy to con.

Take the John 10:34 passage for instance. These men who claim to have the DNA of God which makes them little gods base their blasphemous assertion on a passage of Scripture which is actually a passage where the Lord Jesus quotes from Psalms 82:6 in response to the Jews who were mad because He calls Himself the Son of God.

You may be asking, “So, what exactly do John 10:34 and Psalms 82:6 mean when they say, “You are gods?”

As always, the answer lies in the context. If these vile false teachers really take the time to understand the context of Psalms 82:6 and John 10:34, I doubt they’d use them to support their atrocious claims. For one, the context of Psalm 82 is God’s rebuke of unjust rulers who tilt the scale of justice in favor of the high and mighty to the disadvantage of the lowly and insignificant.

Psalm 82, and similarly Psalms 2 and 58, focuses on the injustices that result from tyrannical reign of people in power. The imagery of the Psalm is that of the Almighty God presiding in the assembly of earthly leaders. These are people whom God has raised up to be rulers on the nations of the earth and to whom He has given authority over their people.

We’ll take it from here next time.