AROME OSAYI AND THE ALLURE OF ESOTERIC CHRISTIANITY (PART IV)

“The Perils of Pursuit of Supernatural Power”

By Akin Ojumu

The visible Church is suffering from a deadly disease: an unwholesome preoccupation with supernatural power.

As has so often been the case throughout human history, the average churchgoer today is fascinated by the miraculous. Consumed by the desire to witness spectacular manifestations, many Christians chase after anyone who claims to possess unusual spiritual abilities or to live a “naturally supernatural” life.

Beneath this obsession lies something far more sinister than innocent curiosity. Much of the modern Christian fascination with supernatural power is rooted in unbelief—a refusal to rest in the sufficiency of God, His Word, and His providence. The relentless pursuit of miracles, signs, wonders, secret revelations, and extraordinary experiences often reveals a heart that is not content with God as He has made Himself known.

At its core, this quest for power is an ancient temptation: the desire of mortal men to become like gods. It is the craving to possess power, command spiritual forces, access hidden knowledge, and rise above the ordinary limitations of human existence. Instead of humbly worshiping the sovereign God, men seek to appropriate His glory and place themselves at the center of spiritual attention.

This obsession with supernatural experiences has eclipsed devotion to Jesus Christ and His Gospel. Fabulous stories of drinking tea with God, attending meetings in heaven, receiving lectures from angels, and traveling through spiritual dimensions are treated as more compelling than the historical testimony of those who actually saw Jesus Christ live, die, rise from the dead, and ascend into heaven.

Subjective tales have displaced objective revelation. The eyewitness accounts preserved in Scripture are increasingly pushed aside by unverifiable claims of private encounters. The written Word of God is treated as insufficient, while the dreams, visions, impressions, and mystical adventures of self-appointed prophets and apostles are presented as indispensable.

This exposes the tragic condition of much of the visible Church. No matter how passionate, emotional, or outwardly devout many churchgoers may appear, they possess little regard for God’s Word. They are impoverished in the most basic truths of Scripture—the truths that anchor faith securely in the harbor of God’s grace, love, sovereignty, and providence.

Those who truly love God surrender themselves to His will. The evidence of genuine faith is not the ability to produce supernatural spectacles. True faith rests its hope and confidence in God, trusting that He is able to govern every circumstance of our lives—including pain, suffering, failure, disappointment, temptation, setbacks, and even the consequences of our sins—and work through them for our temporal and eternal good.

Few contemporary religious figures embody this obsession with power more dramatically than Arome Osayi. He presents himself as a spiritual power conductor—a man from whose body supernatural energy supposedly flows into others.

With the manner of someone belonging to a rare spiritual elite, Osayi has repeatedly narrated extraordinary stories of heavenly visitations. He has claimed to have been summoned, along with a select group of powerful men, to attend an exclusive meeting with Jesus. He has also spoken of an earlier journey to heaven during which he allegedly spent ninety days receiving lectures.

Such claims are not incidental to his ministry. They are central to the spiritual identity he has constructed around himself. Through the repeated narration of secret encounters, heavenly summonses, supernatural journeys, and inaccessible revelations, he cultivates the image of a man who possesses knowledge and access unavailable to ordinary Christians.

This is the language of spiritual elitism. It encourages followers to believe that they are dependent upon a specially endowed intermediary who can enter heavenly realms, receive hidden information, and return with divine instructions for everyone else. Such claims create precisely the kind of atmosphere in which personality cults flourish and unquestioning followers are exploited.

The video clip under consideration is another example of Arome Osayi presenting himself as a conduit of supernatural power. In a theatrical display designed to impress his biblically uninformed admirers, he describes the power supposedly flowing from his body as noisy, boisterous, forceful, destructive, and capable of affecting people without his speaking a word.

In his own words:

“What I want to show you now is power. So, what I will do here, I will just stand here. Then if I stand here for five minutes, power will begin to move from my body. I won’t say anything. Power will begin to leave my body and affect these people—maybe one or two of them. Alright. And then you will know how power is. It is noisy. It’s boisterous. When it acts, when it moves, it moves with so much energy. It can break things. It can destroy things. It can release things. It can remove things. The power is coming. It’s coming stronger, I sense it. It’s surging! It’s surging! It’s surging! Surging! Surging! Surging!”

Osayi plainly wants his audience to believe that this power comes from God. Yet the character of the power he describes bears little resemblance to the biblical ministry of the Holy Spirit.

As established in previous installments of this commentary series, God is not the author of confusion but of peace and order. The biblical evidence of the Spirit’s presence is not uncontrollable behavior, theatrical exhibitionism, or the exaltation of a human personality. It is an increasingly Christlike life.

Even when genuine spiritual gifts operated in the early Church, those exercising them remained morally responsible for their conduct. This is one of the clearest principles governing Christian worship: the activity of the Holy Spirit does not abolish personal responsibility or suspend self-control.

The Apostle Paul declared that “the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets.” In other words, spiritual activity does not turn a person into an involuntary instrument who is unable to govern his speech or behavior. The Spirit of God does not overpower believers in a manner that renders them irrational, disorderly, or morally unaccountable.

Those who are genuinely filled with the Holy Spirit speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. They sing and make melody to the Lord. They give thanks to God. They submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. These are coherent, purposeful, relational, and morally responsible actions.

The Spirit-filled believer is not spiritually intoxicated. He is spiritually governed.

The Holy Spirit does not come to make a spectacle of Himself. He does not construct a cult of personality around a preacher. Where the Spirit is genuinely at work, Christ is exalted, the Gospel is clarified, sin is confronted, believers are sanctified, truth is proclaimed, and the Church is edified.

The power of God is not validated by noise, hysteria, theatrical excitement, or claims that energy is surging from a preacher’s body. Scripture nowhere presents the servants of God staging public demonstrations merely to prove that they possess spiritual power.

When God grants miraculous power, its purpose, timing, and operation remain subject to His sovereign will. Divine power is not a substance stored in the body of a minister, waiting to be released on command for the entertainment of an audience. It is not man’s power. It is God’s power.

When a minister becomes the central attraction, Christ has been displaced. When the preacher’s alleged ability to make people fall, shake, scream, laugh, convulse, or lose control becomes the chief evidence of his anointing, the congregation is no longer being directed toward Jesus Christ. It is being directed toward the supposed spiritual potency of a man.

The Holy Spirit was not given to enhance the celebrity of ministers. He was given to glorify Christ. Any manifestation that obscures Christ, diminishes Scripture, suspends discernment, produces disorder, or magnifies the preacher bears little resemblance to the biblical ministry of the Spirit of God.

The religious system promoted by Arome Osayi is better described as Christianized mysticism than Biblical Christianity. It centers on transcendence, esoteric knowledge, secret encounters, extraordinary spiritual experiences, and the exaltation of a specially enlightened individual.

This is the recurring pattern of religious mysticism: an elite figure claims access to hidden realities, while ordinary followers are encouraged to depend upon his revelations, experiences, spiritual techniques, and alleged authority. Biblical Christianity rejects this arrangement.

Christianity is not a mystery religion governed by an initiated spiritual aristocracy. There is no elite class of Christians uniquely authorized to obtain secret knowledge from God and deliver it to inferior believers.

The Church does not need super-apostles who claim, through dreams, visions, heavenly journeys, special revelations, prescribed rituals, ascetic disciplines, or acts of self-abasement, to reveal the hidden agenda of God.

God has spoken finally and supremely through His Son, and the authoritative testimony concerning His Son has been preserved for the Church in Scripture.

The Christian’s confidence must therefore rest not in the unverifiable experiences of self-appointed mystics, but in the completed work of Christ, the written Word of God, and the sanctifying ministry of the Holy Spirit.

Any teacher who diverts believers from these foundations—who replaces Scripture with secret knowledge, Christ with spiritual celebrity, and sanctification with supernatural spectacle—must be rejected as a false teacher.

The Church does not need noisy power conductors. It needs faithful preachers who tremble before the Word of God, proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ, expose error, call sinners to repentance, and direct all glory away from themselves and toward Christ alone.