A 20th century music artiste once sang “I’ve got the midas touch…everything I touch turns to gold”. A very profound self view akin to who a Christian should be: one who cannot be contaminated, but has a cleansing power that refines and purifies all contamination.
The problem with our present day Christian perspective is the attempt to physically order spiritual life. It is important to note that human interactions on earth is vacated by the human senses, but this is not so with human spiritual interactions, whether they celestial or terrestrial: spiritual interactions are vacated mentally by the engagement of the human mind, station of scripture, which in itself is quick and living, not the human senses.
What I mean is that in the attempt by Church leaders to teach their followers on spiritual living, the present day Christian, who should be living a purely spiritual life in the physical, in Christ Jesus, being that the Christian’s life is Christ’s “living in” life: “the life, I live, is no longer I that lives but Christ that lives in me” is taught to watch his physical application of the senses.
In watching, the Christian watches out on physicality constantly, and have majored in judging who is “born again” or who is not; and who will “go to hell” or who will not. No Christian has such competence to validate another man: a servant answers only to his master, and if you are not a master of the person you judge, then you lack the competence to judge the person. For a Christian, Christ is his master, and scripture bears his instructions.
The physical inspection of person limits checking to the outward things: how a person dresses, what he loves to eat, who he mingles with and so many other things that have no bearing with spiritual living. If scriptures says “to be carnally minded is death”, it means that to live out one’s spirituality by carnal observations generates the fear of death.
Yes! The fear of death is death in itself. William Shakespeare said it: “cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never tastes of death but once. It seems to me so strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come”. But the Christian is he who has passed from death to life, and therefore far above every elemental thing.
Till date, no Jew allows a leper near him: lepers are a contamination according to the Torah (the Mosaic scripture) and Judaism (the Mosaic religion). If a Jew is peradventure touched by a leper, he stays out of the Jewish “camp”, out of the “gates” for 7 days, sitting in mourning, and he is washed and verified by the Priest after that before he can be admitted again into the Jewish congregation.
The law governing the interactions of the leper among the Jewish people is such that lepers live out of the camp of the Jews until he is healed somehow; and in being healed, the Priest certifies the leper cleansed and admit-able among the people. However, it is permissible that the leper can enter into the city for certain businesses he has to vacate. The foremost requirement for the leper who has business to vacated within the Jewish community is for him to cover his entire body (head to toes) in “sack clothes”, and he is to walk bent over with a bell held between his legs.
As he approaches the entrance of the city, he shouts out loudly “I am a leper approaching” and ringing the bell held between the legs also loudly. You can imagine the distance he would be given: its a certain clearance, with all eyes on him. In Nigeria, only rich and powerful people enjoy this privilege as honour for their status. What lepers enjoy in Israel is the same our political and military elites enjoy in Nigeria. No wonder we are the way we are, quite unlike the Jews: daring the entire world and standing strong.
This article is give to show the debase state of the Nigerian Christian community because even heads of Churches are caught in the same web of being likened to Jewish lepers. They love the mundane and the material: limiting carnality to the physical, when the Bible talks about a “renewing of the mind”. There was a way Adam, the first man saw things, at first, he was naked but was never ashamed, however, it did not remain that way because he later was ashamed of his nakedness when he “saw” it. What does this mean?
Adam was fabricated to grow in the wisdom of God through learning and experience, but he was not long in this class, he voluntarily changed his class from learning to see by mental sight, which made the physical immaterial, allowing Adam to live shamelessly in nakedness, to learning to see by physical sight, which made man see materially and loving the mundane. So life is not about what you do, but how you “see” what you do. You cannot tell yourself a lie. You can only live in self denial. This is why I see the Nigerian Christian as a worse “Adam” than our politicians.
Yes! We know that even the rascalities of our political leaders is encouraged and prayed on by our religious leaders. Our politicians work their politics with our Church leaders. It was the Church leaders who nationally proclaimed the rejection of the “Buhari/Tinubu ticket” and played it down when Professor Osinbajo was nominated. No one care to understand the will of God in the “Buhari/Tinubu ticket”. The story of how Tinubu met Buhari in 2010 and Buhari rejected him is with us. He went again in 2012, this time, in political retirement, he agreed.
Tinubu literally marched Buhari out of retirement, used him to build a political structure, adding muscles to his own structure. It was a sound political mathematics. Now I ask, which Nigerian politician thinks the way Tinubu thinks. In the face of Tinubu, Buhari is a puppet President. Tinubu, like Obafemi Awolowo, is the “best President Nigeria…” is waiting to have. I have severally traced his political contributions from fighting to sustain the spirit of a democratic victory in “June 12” to the development of our party politics until he achieved something novel: the defeat of a ruling party and the demystification of the “power of incumbency”.
The bad governance of the present administration was from the inability of Professor Osinbajo to command the required political loyalty and respect to vacate the same strength of purpose and fear President Buhari is known for. In the 3years of this administration, we are witnesses that Mr President had hardly stayed in with us. Not of his fault, but what could he do when his life was targeted. He fought to stay alive. His life was targeted in the Gambia during the Yaya Jammeh struggle.
After using Oyegun to “cut Tinubu to size”, Saraki, first referred to his nominee for Vice President, and a sitting Vice President on watch for Mr President, as “a mere Commissioner” because Osinbajo asked him to see him to deliberate on the position of the APC on the matter of the national assembly leadership. It was the same Saraki, Atiku, Kwankwaso, themselves Muslims, who were interested in the presidency of Buhari that first rejected the “Buhari/Tinubu ticket”, but it was the heads of Churches that worked to promote the interest of these Muslim men. God is not against any man, he calls all men to repentance and has appointed a day to judge the quick and the dead.
So, my point here was not to draw your attention to the Jewish “leper law” but to show you how degraded the mentality of Church leaders in Nigeria has become. I have no business with both the Torah and Judaism. I desire to clearly show an example of how carnal and strenuous laws are and how it was the duty of Jesus Christ to make lives yoke easy and their burdens light.
Jesus was a full blooded Jew, by the Mosaic law and by his maternity. In fact he was the only Jew in the entire universe who went about touching lepers freely and not been contaminated by them, but rather, his touches cured and healed lepers in the Palestine of his days and the Priest confirming the cleansing. If Jesus had insisted on keeping the instructions of the Torah, he would have healed no leper. He would have avoided them. He came as the Second Adam, to bring mankind to “see” as the First Adam first saw before he “re-saw”, thinking he is “wise”.
In all his acts, he kept a message in focus: “I have not come to condemn the law, but to fulfill it”. Has the law been fulfilled? Yes! It was when Jesus hung on the cross and cried out ” it is finished!”. Nothing about the law any longer stands to them that believe. Faith took over preaching grace. “The words that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life”. Faith takes of this word and make you hear from the spirit. This is spiritual living.
So that we do not continue to wallow in the foolishness of trusting our Church leaders, who have completely replaced the Holy Spirit in Nigeria, and of doing what they ask to be done. I have shown how our political class agreed to build this present republic upon the injustice of June 12. Bola Tinubu kept the consciousness that led up to our present reality. He has proven his capacity bringing Lagos back to reckoning.
A Kenyan radio presenter, who worked in Nigeria for many years during the military era returned to Lagos during Dangote’s daughter’s wedding and what he said the Lagos Third Mainland bridge and development in the city awards Tinubu a credit from me. Go to Saraki’s Kwara, he could only raise his voice because of armed robbery in Offa. A time ago he was stoned in an Ilorin mosque. Saraki would have respected Tinubu as a Vice President and the “cabal” we heard of would have known it would not be business as usual.
It is time to open our eyes as Nigerians and see among our politicians who has the spirit of excellence, investment friendly and feared politically in the same capacity as President Buhari to be team mate with Mr President come 2019 presidential election. This candidate is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Jagaban Borgu.
This will be a just reward for a democrat who, gave up his senate presidency for Abiola’s presidency, gave up his Vice Presidency for peace, in spite of how historic facts in the “Abiola/Kingibe ticket” – a lie of our history, he spent his and himself to sustain the righting of the South West Presidency of Abiola, he kept a vibrant opposition for our 4th Republic, he clearly advanced our partisan democracy by and large, he has always led at the front, and he is the best candidate, now, to be trusted to vacate the remediation of the second arm of the injustice done by the June 12 1993 annulment – “the Muslim/Muslim ticket”.
The Nigerian Christians must learn the life and walk of Jesus. He always heard from his inside, he learnt from nobody, he refers always to “the father who sent” him. Your pastor lies to you when putting a division between you and a Muslim. He is actually making it impossible for you to evangelize the Muslim. We are all in our classes on earth and this is about our personal capacities. No one is s right or wrong, we are all growing in knowledge. Our sense of right and wrong stems from our carnal representations of spiritual things: like Adam seeking leaves to cover his nakedness in the face of his need for redemption.
So our differences is from how we all see with our eyes. I see the possibility of Nigeria moving towards the advance democracies and making impact in global business world, effecting the awaited leadership for the black race. Forgive President Buhari for being politically naive and failing as a Party leader, allowing people like Saraki to have a say in how our lives are ran. I hold him guilty for mu failed account with SGBN. He still owes me for taking that bank under.
He will never want Tinubu to ascend to the presidency because he knows that he and others like him will be jailed. But we have a duty as a people, Nigerians, to take what will benefit us. A professor is okay for our Vice President but he enjoys no political loyalty and respect. He is seen as a “boy”, let’s accept and demand for his master. Let’s replace the Professor with an investor. Let’s replace political deficit with political surplus and insist on righting the injustice to the second arm of the June 12 1993 robbery – that of the ” Muslim/Muslim ticket”.
Thank you folks.
Ini Akpan Morgan is an architect, author, writer and political commentator. He can be reached via “time.subsidaries@gmail.com
