Can mere materials be conductors of spiritual properties?  Can physical articles be transporters of metaphysical qualities?  Do spirits follow material objects?  Negative would be the Rationalist’s response to all those questions, but spiritual science proves otherwise, as the classic book of metaphysics, the Holy Bible, well shows.

In 538 BC, Belshazzar the last king of Babylon, lost his life and his throne overnight in circumstances mystically connected with some religious materials that were booties of war that his predecessor and grandfather had carried into the palace after conquering Jerusalem.  One evening during an elaborate state party about forty-eight years after the confiscation of those religious articles, the incumbent young king who was a third regime later, called for those tokens of victory in war, those religious souvenirs from the conquest Jerusalem, those holy vessels, and commenced to drink wine to the praise of his gods.  Only thereafter was it realized that a Force, an intelligent Spirit, had followed those vessels into the palace, even though the Force had seemed dormant in those many years. 

The Spirit with whom those material objects were associated, materialized Itself in the banquet hall in the form of the part of a man’s hand, and commenced to write a sentence of death on the palatial walls: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”  It meant, “O incumbent king, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.  Tonight, you shall die.”  That same night, that king died.  That mystical hand had never been sighted in connection with those materials until then.  In other words, what the previous victorious ruler had carried into his palace had not been mere souvenirs from war, after all (Daniel 5:1-31).

A more memorable case to the New Testament believer would probably be the account of clothes from the spiritual personage of Paul, that carried with them a potency from their source to their subsequent addresses, effecting in those new locations the same benign influence that the person of their origin was used to exercising over his space; physical aprons that carried ‘something’ spiritual from their source to the persons and places they went.

¹¹ God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, ¹² so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them. (Acts 19:11-12, New International Version).

Some articles, especially when they originate from a spiritual source, carry ‘something’ of the dark or blessed nature of their origin to their new place.  In other words, every article is not merely a souvenir, no matter what the town-crier says, which is unfortunately based on the long or short sightedness, the natural or metaphysical perceptivity of that announcer.

When the ark of God was captured in war by the Philistines, they took it into the temple of their god Dagon, meaning to add the powers of that new God to the powers of their Dagon, to increase spiritual potency.  Unfortunately, they had brought two unlike currents together, and there was a spark that destroyed the older idol power (1 Samuel 5:1-12).  Something followed that ark into its new abode; something characteristic from its old source.  If every material were just an innocent article, why would God warn, for example, “Nor shall you bring an abomination into your house, lest you be doomed to destruction like it…” (Deuteronomy 7:26, NKJV).

If my theological proposition thus far be not incorrect; if revered objects constitute altars where next they are moved; if an altar has the power to influence the persons who have raised it or others in the environment where it has been raised, what do you sincerely make of the news that, as trophies of war, as memoirs from the ‘capture’ of the Boko Haram stronghold of Sambisa Forest, the ISIS flag of the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau and, according to other sources, as well as his particular invocations-Koran, have been captured and presented to President Muhammadu Buhari? 

May I speak in the form of a question: Is it a surreptitious spiritual motion adding an ISIS dimension to that leader’s operations? It is being wondered in the press if those were the actual or fake emblems purporting to have derived from that Boko Haram leader.  All the same, something of that nature was presented to that person in that place, not so much unlike the mystic flag that the Saudi Arabians had also presented to the same person early in the year on the occasion of the international Islamic conference in Abuja at that patron’s instance.  

I only ask, urging my reader to think with me.  Sometimes I see some of what every other person does not, for which at times I get called names; some good, some bad.  All the same, I and my team at our weekly altar have not let it pass without prayers; a prayer that you might also wish to accent to: May every strange Boko Haram altar being subtly raised in the palace of Nigeria by means of those revered articles of the warriors of Ishmael, be destroyed.  May the glory of the God of the Ark of Israel destroy every Dagon advancement.  May Dagon hereafter lose his limbs and his place and authority over the people of Nigeria. May the destruction to befalls idols follow those tokens, condemn their voices, and take their priests.  Amen. 

We shall celebrate the capture of Sambisa so long as that ‘victory’ is not a strategic relocation of those ‘terrorists’ into from one battle front to the Middle Belt states of Kaduna, Taraba, Gombe, Nasarawa, where the carnage against Christians has assumed a grave dimension.

 

From The Preacher’s diary,

January 2, 2017.