Reflections On Prophet TB Joshua At 46

In Nigeria’s recent history, June 12 has become a very special and important day. It
has become a symbolic day that reminds Nigerians of their history of many shattered
dreams, of a fact that the ordinary folk of this country cannot even be allowed to
become what they want to become, to choose the leaders that they want to choose
for themselves.

June 12 is also the birthday of a remarkable

Nigerian, a man whose type graces this world once
in an epoch. On June 12, this year, Temitope
Balogun Joshua, Nigeria’s healing pastor,
extraordinary preacher, prophet and humanitarian,
turns a mere 46 earth years. But it is only God
Almighty Himself (judging by the profundity and
wisdom exhibited by Joshua) who can tell the real
age of this prodigious man of God.

Until I watched the story of Nigeria’s beleaguered

dwarves on Prophet TB Joshua’s Emmanuel TV early
this year, my attitude to organised religion had
been one of total indifference, if not downright
hostility. And who could really blame one for this? If
the general attitude of many of our today’s
religious people and their leadership is anything to
go by – and I mean of every popular religion in this
country – then, it is time to consider Satanism as an
option!

It is also impossible for any serious African, a student of history and one who has
taken pains to research into Black history and avail himself of facts, of the role that
religion (particularly Christianity and Islam) played and still plays in the subjugation of
the Black race, not to be bitter towards and suspicious of anything religious. This is
only human.

The world, for instance, annually celebrates the very unfortunate fate of the Jews in
the concentration camps of Auswitch and Birkenau. But nobody ever mentions the
horrendous massacres and enslavement of the Bakongo of five centuries earlier and
the fate of the last Mani-Kongo who even transmuted to Dom Afonso I, from Nzinga a
Mvemba, on conversion to Christianity, thinking he was dealing with honest people of
God.

Today, the ongoing genocide in Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan is there for all to see. But what
is the so-called civilised world doing about this evil and well-orchestrated decimation
of Black African populations in that country? Why are even other independent African
nations pretending to be doing something, whilst the long-suffering people of Darfur
are steadily wasting away?

Because of the long history of struggle for survival of the Black race and the many
terrible things that have happened to our people in the past and still continue to
happen, many African elite have turned sceptical to matters of religion. This cynicism
is aptly captured by the battle song of one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution,
(1791-1804) Jamaican-born Bookman Dutty, now famously referred to as “Bookman’s
Prayer”.
That revolution, begun almost half a century earlier by Maroon leader, Francois
Makandal, was carried to a successful conclusion by Black fighters, under Jean-
Jacques Dessalines. Unfortunately, the struggle came to a tragic end when the White
agents of Napoleon Bonaparte tricked the last leader of the revolution, a mulatto
named, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Toussaint was promptly shipped to exile in France
where he was executed by means of starvation and cold.

The revolution was thus extinguished and since then, Haiti, the first independent
Black nation on earth has never been allowed to be the same. And neither has
Nigeria, either, since our so-called independence – this Nigeria of ours, the one Black
nation on this earth with the capability and enough resources, human and material, to
strike out on its own. The deepest roots of Nigeria’s myriad of problems lie in matters
of race and religion.

For me therefore – and like I believe, for many of my kind – Jesus Christ merely
became a symbol of Western deceit, cheating and thievery. Everything about the
Christianity into which I was born irritated me completely, until I discovered Prophet
TB Joshua’s brand of practical Christianity. In the name of the same Jesus Christ that
one viewed with great suspicion, the man heals the sick, preaches the gospel in his
own unique way, gives without any reservations whatsoever and sees deep into the
future and even into people’s private problems, to reconcile feuding families, among
other things.

I have continued to study this man and my interest in his activities, are growing by the
day. He demonstrates Christian virtues like no other pastor I have come across, does.
Well, if all this is what Jesus Christ is all about, then I should review my opinion of Him.
Like I have said here before, his miracles are simply mind-blowing, which have led
many to accuse him of witchcraft and sorcery. I believe people who are saying this
need some enlightenment for, like Prophet Joshua himself often says, “What people
don’t understand, they criticise…”

But anybody who has taken pains to study the principles of some occultic practices
would know that with Joshua’s many diverse capabilities, it is not possible to combine
darkness and light, at the same time. This is a simple fact of nature. No one occultist
could combine the many capabilities of Prophet TB Joshua – not even great masters
like Abramelin the Mage and Aleister Crowley could. Such endowments as he has
exhibited, coupled with his personality, can only come from an enlightened soul,
directly connected to and tapping from the highest source of Light. Those who have
taken the trouble to study the man at close range would understand what I am talking
about.

Ironically, like Nigeria his country, Pastor Joshua has not been allowed the peace of
mind he deserves, to continue his good work of charity by, of all people, his fellow
Christians. I just read an interview granted a magazine (or is it newspaper now?) by
Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the current President of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria,
PFN, in which he declared that Pastor Joshua is not of God. Pastor Oritsejafor was also
quoted as having demanded to know who Prophet TB Joshua’s mentor is.

Let me begin by asking Pastor Oritsejafor who his own mentor was and who his own
mentor’s mentor was. Secondly, by whose authority were both himself and his
mentors ordained pastors? Having said that, by whose authority has he declared that
anybody is not of God? Hasn’t his own Bible told him yet that judgment is only for the
Most High Himself? Well, if a man should disobey the Biblical injunction simply
because he is the president of a Christian group and pass judgment unto his fellow
man – something that is an exclusive preserve of God – then, he is not doing God’s
will. By that very token, he is not of God!

It is amazing that anybody who lays claim to being a pastor of God (like Pastor
Oritsejafor of the PFN does) should be talking about mentoring in matters of the faith
as if talking about some rookie artisan being shepherded into ‘freedom’ from his
master’s workshop. Such drivel simply speaks volumes of the man who utters it. It
reveals the depth of vulgarity to which our ‘modern’ men of God have allowed the
gospel of Jesus Christ to sink.

Anybody who boasts in God’s vineyard about his mentor and such other inane
subjects as earthly endowments has simply not imbibed the lessons of Christ’s
personal life. Jesus Christ the Son of God could have been born a prince, if He so
chose. On the contrary, God made man, decided to come into this world, the son of a
wretched carpenter born in, of all places, a manger and side-by-side animals! He had
neither an earthly mentor, nor did the Bible tell us that He had doctorate degrees in
sacred theology and dogmatic philosophy.

In His divine wisdom, God chooses whom He crowns king and decides whom He
endows with any gift He likes – and we all have our different gifts. Anybody who
challenges this wisdom of God Almighty blasphemes against Him, by querying His
authority.
So, why would God choose a humble, even innocent, or bucolic Temitope Balogun
Joshua for the enormous anointing he has received? Why didn’t He pick one of those
blue-blooded, Oxford-trained peers of the realm?

One cannot exactly tell and neither can anybody else, for that matter. However,
having watched Pastor Joshua very closely these past few months, followed with keen
interest, the documentaries of his early ministry and his teachings and other activities
on Emmanuel TV, physically witnessed his Sunday healing and miracle services at the
Synagogue Church and had numerous private audiences with him, I have been
privileged to glean a few facts and to learn a very important lesson about faith, from
this soldier of Christ.

As humans, we usually crack in the daunting face of adversity. In fact, at some point,
many of us not only give up on God, we even dare to turn against Him. In the case of
Prophet Joshua, the harder the battle to survive, the greater his loyalty to his God
appears to be. I have never seen anybody with such unshakable faith in what he
believes, such optimism that may even look to an observer during those his ministry’s
early years as mere folly.

Anybody who has seen that documentary on his early ministry, of his first church (a
miserable looking shack, with about 20 worshippers) and the optimism with which he
prophesied how the whole world would soon come to Synagogue Church, would
simply be awed by the power of the living God and testify to His glory. A little later
during those early years, Prophet Joshua who leads by example went down to such
fine details as personally cleaning the toilets of the church for three long years. As he
says, “In order to be able to manage success, I had to first learn how to manage
poverty”. As bad as things were then, Pastor Joshua was always seen ministering to
his flock with a broad smile, even as his first, second and third churches, drowned in
flood waters.
In contrast to those humble beginnings, today’s Synagogue Church of All Nations is an
intimidating edifice that has become one of the world’s biggest tourist destinations! If
there is anything I have learnt from the story of Pastor Joshua, my interactions with
the prophet and his church, it is the humility and faithfulness of God Almighty Himself,
towards those that maintain abiding faith in Him, in the face of all odds. This is what
Prophet TB Joshua always teaches: “Of all graces, FAITH honours Christ the most; of all
graces, Christ honours FAITH the most.”

Those who today want to give Christianity a highfaluting image and discriminate
against their fellow men either do not know, or simply forget its humble beginnings.
The cross, the banner under which all of Christendom gathers derives from an ancient
mystical symbol, which many may refer to as (sorry for that derogatory word) pagan.

The Celtic cross, a religious symbol seen all over Britain, Scotland, Ireland and Wales,
has a long history that presages Christianity itself. Its four arms are interpreted as the
four elements of earth, wind, water and fire. It also represents the four directions of
the compass – north, south, east, west – and the four parts of man – mind, soul, heart,
and body.

This is also the basis of the Jewish Tetragrammaton, represented by the Hebrew
letters, Yod, He, Vau, He, with the last He, bearing a dot, symbolising completion, just
like the shoot of a dormant seed. Those four Hebrew letters, together, spell out
Yahuvah, or Jehovah, the elements that emanated from the Divine Essence at the
point of Creation, as documented in the first chapter of Genesis. I had written
extensively about this in the past and the correlation between this Biblical account of
the beginning of space-time and the Quantum Theory in particle physics is indeed
amazing!

One and the same concept runs through most major mystical-religious concepts of all
civilisations, worldwide, from ancient, so-called primitive African and Amerindian
cultures, to Indo-Chinese, European and Arabic cultures and more. This universal
symbolism is seen in the Popol Vuh, the Holy Book of the Quiche Maya of South
America. It is the Yin and Yang of Taoist China, also symbolised by the Dance of Shiva,
in the Indian Sanskrit.

Back here, in Africa, this same symbolism is seen in the ancient drawings of the
Dogon of Mali, as it is in Ghana’s Adinkra culture. It is the Creation Snake that Wole
Soyinka talks about in his “Idanre and Other Poems”, which the Igbo celebrate in the
New Yam festival, the basis of their four market days and their lunar calendar,
depicted by the Uli motif of the kola nut head.

Ancient Egyptians equally celebrated the feast of Eostre in honour of the goddess of
fertility and the endless cycles of the death of winter and the birth of spring. The
Romans borrowed the same practice and baptised it Saturnalia. It is this very old
belief, depicted by the image of the Egyptian Ankh or the Crux Ansata, which found its
way into Judaeo-Christian theology, that the first Christians adopted and celebrated as
Easter, directly borrowing its name from the goddess: “Unless the grain falls into the
ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it brings forth much fruit.” (John
12:24).

To think that the symbol of the very basis of the Christian faith, the death of Jesus
Christ on the Cross of Calvary and the power of New Life in the Risen Christ, had its
humble beginnings in the faiths of peoples we would now rather turn up our noses at,
as pagans, is a lesson in God’s own humility and mysterious but wise ways. It teaches
us never to look down on anybody but rather, to embrace all. From the high priests of
quantum physics, to the lowly African chief priests and sages, to our modern, “funky
pastors”, we should have nothing but respect for our fellow man, for it is only God
Himself who can tell who worships Him in truth and in spirit.

This is another major lesson that Pastor Joshua teaches everyone with his unique
ministry. At the Synagogue Church, you find people of all races and creeds. You find
the very rich and the very poor, the homeless, beggars, everybody, side-by-side. You
even find grandmasters of the occult that have come to receive deliverance. Nobody
discriminates against anybody and people are actually encouraged after receiving
their healing, to go back to their respective churches or mosques.

I am yet to see this in other Pentecostal churches and this ecumenism, I believe, is the
message of Christ’s mission while on earth.

It is absolutely impossible for a man to be ‘upright’ and ‘evil’ at the same time, just
like we are yet to see one who I tall and short all at once. Also, while we may not be
able to easily fathom the machinations of the human mind, we can see a man’s
actions and hear his utterances.

We can therefore reasonably gauge an individual’s personality from his traits and
utterances or what we may generally call his or her character from the consistency
with which those tendencies would have persisted over the years. If a man has
maintained a certain stance all his life, it would indeed be difficult, if not impossible,
to ‘learn an old dog new tricks’ as the Americans would say. “Even so, every good tree
bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit… a good tree
cannot bring forth evil fruit… “(Matthew 7:17-18)

It could thus be inferred that those who indulge in running down Prophet TB Joshua do
not seem to have seriously pondered nature and the several basic principles that
govern it. Their reason for criticising that which they apparently do not understand,
appears to be either simple ignorance or sheer malice.

All of these people that bandy false tales about the man and his church have
apparently never been to The Synagogue Church to investigate the rumours they
have heard. Anybody who does so, or even merely follows the activities of the church,
beamed to audiences worldwide through Emmanuel TV, would see the glaring truth.
No evil man would be capable of faking the personality of Prophet Joshua – his self-
denials, his love for man and nature, his charitable disposition, his prophecies and
healing and the fact that he does them in the name of Jesus Christ - and above all, his
highly inspired interpretation of the Gospel.

Like I have said here before, apart from his amazing miracles, two striking qualities
mark Pastor Joshua out as you encounter him are his disarming humility and childlike
simplicity, as well as the depth of wisdom in his preaching and interpretation of the
Bible.

The man’s entire life is a study in humility. Despite his enormous capabilities, you
sometimes even catch him in excitement as he himself watches with the rest of the
congregation when some of these miracles happen. He would often remind you that
he is only a medium of communication, a servant. “I am not the healer, but I know the
healer: Jesus Christ is the Healer.”
Down to even his private life, I doubt if there is any PFN pastor in this country who can
meet the very high standard of discipline that Prophet Joshua has set for himself, for
all to see. The man lives right inside his church and hardly step out of the premises
because 24 hours, seven days a week, he is always available to thousands of people
that throng the Synagogue Church from all over the world – the sick, the distressed,
the widowed, the poor, everybody, people with all kinds of personal and communal
problems, even financial problems.

Only last week while I was with him, his aides came to tell him that a batch of over
100 South African who he had hurriedly spent all day ministering to so they could
return home, had missed their flight. They were caught in the notorious Isolo traffic.
When he told me he would have to cater for these people fro two days, I was surprised
- but that’s the kindness of the man we are talking about. At first, I could see he was a
little disturbed, but then he shrugged it all off in his usual ‘God will provide’ manner.

Instead of collecting and amassing fortunes like those who accuse him of evil, Joshua
the pastor, the father figure, keeps giving away. If that man were after money and the
material things of this world, I doubt if any human being alive today would be half as
rich as he could get, given the capabilities of a man with his healing powers and
ability to prophesy for the whole wide world as well as individuals, with pinpoint
accuracy.

On one particular occasion, I had been at The Synagogue Church all day, going
through archival material at the Emmanuel TV studios while waiting to see him. There
were hundreds of visitors from around the country and the world over, with various
pressing needs to whom he must minister, individually. He still eventually made out
time to see me quite later in the night, with his usual apologies.

When I returned the following day to continue my work where I stopped, he was
already down in his office. When I asked after the army of visitors of the previous day,
I was told he saw them all and only retired to his private quarters by about 7am! This
kind of timetable is routine for a man who has no life of his own. When I expressed
shock when I first found out where he lives, he resignedly asked me: ‘Where do you
want me to leave my people and go?’

In his tiny office that may not even be big enough for the personal assistants of some
of our ‘funky pastors’, the prophet, too busy to even stand up sometimes, eats his
meals, prepared from the same source that he serves - even street beggars. The man
who lives by example is yet to outgrow the standard he set for himself in the very
early years of his ministry when he had to do everything by himself. Till date, he still
joins his disciples and staff in manual work like carrying bags of food meant for the
needy.

This same discipline runs right down his family. His unassuming but very graceful wife
is often seen at the church’s supermarket, queuing like everyone else, to buy her
needs. I very much doubt if any General Overseer’s wife would do that elsewhere.
(Hm! ‘General Overseer’!) Meanwhile, his first child, an undergraduate law student in
the United Kingdom– now a grown young lady – shares the same traits as her parents
and runs the same errands as the rest of his disciples, when on vacation. By their
fruits, ye shall know them…

It is important to point out these facts because no man who is possessed of negative
forces would radiate the kind of peace and harmony that Prophet Joshua does, which
affects everybody and everything around him, even little children. His uncommon and
very large capacity to forgive cannot flow from an evil soul, and this appears to be one
loophole that some of the people who were once close to him now exploit to try to run
him down. Unfortunately for them, Prophet Joshua, a man of vision, is a meticulous
keeper of records.

As is well known to all, every action in life exacts its own reaction. This is a
fundamental law of nature, perfectly captured by Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of
motion and summarised by the third law: “Action and reaction are always equal and
opposite.”

Those who associate Prophet TB Joshua with occultism certainly do not know what
they are talking about. Every occultist pays a high price as he ascends the ladder in
his hierarchy and lack of genuine peace is one of those great prices. Two occult
masters who went through deliverance at The Synagogue Church, Mozambique’s
Agostinho Jefue (pronounced Jack) and ‘Professor’ Nathan Chukwudi Okakpu of
Nigeria, who described himself as a grandmaster of science beyond material, both
confirmed this.

On the other hand, a holy man achieves that bond with the Holy Spirit such that he
becomes part of everything. Nothing can escape his eyes or ears, for every part of His
being – his eyes, his ear, his hands, his thoughts – become God’s tools. With God’s
tools, you can only do good things, for the benefit of man and to His glory.

This is what is very difficult for the prophet’s critics to understand what Eliphas Levi, a
grandmaster of the 19th century and one of the greatest occultists of all times, tries to
describe in the AXIOM 9 of his second principle of the ‘Theory of Magic’: “The will of a
just man is the Will of God Himself and the Law of Nature.”

It should be more worthwhile for these critics of Prophet Joshua to humble themselves
and study his life and learn from his wisdom, rather than listen to the folly of their own
minds. What God has bestowed upon His chosen servant, no man can take away, no
matter whom.

At 46, this writer wishes Prophet TB Joshua many, many more years of service to God
and to humanity – ad multos annos!

Chiji Okafor
The National Life

SOURCE: http://www.modernghana.com/news/223201/1/reflections-on-
prophet-tb-joshua-at-46.html