One thing is certain. Something extraordinarily evil took place in the suburban Houston, TX home of Andrea and Rusty Yates when Mrs. Yates coolly and methodically drowned all five of her natural children in her own bathtub.

When all the details are sorted out, after blame is subscribed to the various parties, a big part of the evil must eventually be ascribed to the use of prescription drugs. The EOE has been warning the Church for years concerning the growing scandal in Christianity which centers around relying on drugs (especially as a first option, which I call first-fault drug use) in favor of faith, charity and hope in Jesus Christ. Since the terrible incident described above took place years ago things have gotten worse by becoming common so that society has become numb, almost indifferent to just horrendous acts of insanity.

The immeasurably craven murders in Houston serve as a general warning to all churches, pastors and Christians: Beware the drug, the supposed silver bullet remedy for what ails the mind is instead of the sorcery of drugs. Why not try love, helps, understanding, support, true judgment and mercy; the “weightier things of the law” as Jesus called them. Why not try faith that Christ can deliver us from drugs and all our woes and fears by His spirit and presence in our life.

God is speaking to us clearly through this tragedy and the countless ones which are happening every day, everywhere in our cities and towns not only here in America but around the whole earth.

Years ago a young college basketball player, named Lenny Bias, held the greatest promise of any player in the country, but on the very eve of signing a multi-million dollar contract with the Boston Celtics the young star killed himself with an overdose of cocaine. As a sports reporter at the time I wrote a story about God’s judgment and purpose in that tragedy. I knew God had used this dramatic tragedy to show young kids (including my own) how wrongful and wasteful drug use could be. Lenny Bias’ mother was a born-again Christian and, to her lasting credit, she publicly denounced drug use and appeared on national shows many times to tell people that God had used her son as a “sacrifice” to alert the nation’s youth to the scourge of drugs.

By her obedience to God about her son’s untimely, drug-induced death, and by those who spoke up about the truth of drug use, I believe many youngsters, as well as high school and college kids, were spared tragic ends through reckless use of drugs. The afore-mentioned Andrea Yates crime is similar in scope and has an even greater impact on our minds and hearts if we will let God speak to us. I believe God will uses this true life horror story and the mounted number of suicides and tragic deaths like actor comedian Robin Williams’ suicide to alert Christians about the growing problem of psychotherapeutic drug use in not only our workplaces and schools but in churches.

It is hard to believe that legally prescribed drugs from our trusted family physicians and HMOs are threats to our spiritual, moral and physical well-being, but what more do we need as proof? It’s easy for us to disavow street drugs like cocaine, heroin and other hallucinogens as ungodly and potentially deadly. After all, they are sold on the black market behind boarded-up buildings, on street corners where youths dodge bullets from drive-by shooters and in abandoned crack houses where pimps and prostitutes shoot up horse and free base till their brains get fried.

But us family people we get our drugs in brown plastic bottles placed in neat white bags with a sales slip stapled to the outside. A middle-class mother clad in a sterile white smock hands them to us over a sterile counter as we wait in line at the local pharmacy along with a teacher, a stockbroker or a computer engineer who is talking to the cable guy who lives next door. We feel safe and hopeful because everyone is doing it. But do feel good drugs really care whether the user washes his hands, doesn’t sleep with hookers, or has a finely manicured front lawn?

What if using drugs was actually like pointing a loaded gun at one’s head and playing Russian roulette. Andrea Yates, through advice of others, but by her own consent, kept pulling the trigger on her drug gun until one day the chamber that read “Haldol” blew her brains out. Who’s to say that couldn’t happen to anyone else? Is anyone’s excuse to use drugs better or worse than postpartum blues? She was valedictorian of her class, smart, supposedly giving, strong, and according to her sister, a model mother. She should have been safe to use legal drugs. Right??

Suicides are up in the year 2016, in every age group among both male and female populations. Drugs to stop mental health problems are implicated in many of these suicides. If it is true that they are, then what is happening amounts to a crime spree of Pharmacia the sorcerer.

This crime should send shock waves of repentance to race through every pharmaceutical company board room, every drug store, every physician’s office and every household where these drugs are being relied upon as a part of salvation. But it won’t. There is too much money involved now to stop this juggernaut from steamrolling modern society; flattening anyone who gets in its path.

But there is always hope in Christ, and that means there is hope for the Church and this is one of the prime concerns of The EOE the hope and lives of the downtrodden and abused, those who have been thrown to the dogs of drugs, illicit and otherwise. Church shepherds need to stand up and be counted in this critical matter of the sorcery of pharmacia, but few will. Because it is legal they use it themselves because it makes them feel good. But it is unwise at the least. If the world OK’s it, it does not make it right or good or safe.

The world shall be deceived by the sorceries of Satan. It is prophesied time and time again in the prophets of the Old Testament and in Revelation. “And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.” The Greek word for sorceries used here is pharmakeia, from which we get pharmacy and the word drugs. Those times spoken of in Revelation and elsewhere in scripture are now upon us, upon the whole world.

If we know prophecy we should expect that the world will be bewitched by drug use. In recent years the Church was aware that this was happening, but it was believed that the menace was only of the illegal street variety. We could understand it in pagan societies where drugs have been used by sorcerers since the beginning of written history, whether it was the oracle of Delphi, who on some mystery elixir prophesied of victory in battle to a Greek general, or a Hopi Indian babbling under the influence of a baked mushroom, an English gentleman taking leave of his senses in a nineteenth-century opium den, or a hippie babbling Communist jargon while on LSD. But now, in these end times, we have fallen prey to a subtle belief that man has found the true drug to right the evils of the mind.

Our wonderful inventions have found the enlightened drugs; better living through chemistry is our faith. Technology has discovered the righteous way to undo God’s mistakes and adjust the chemical imbalances of the mind. A drug to compensate for life changes, those unfair hormonal upheavals that God forgot to factor in, is invented and produced, there is a whole embattlement of them and in different forms and by competing companies. Each one has the best. Women downing an assortment of “mother’s little helpers” to help get her through her frenzied day are now on the brink of bliss and freedom for the first time in the history of womankind. What deception?

Children in primary school are given Ritalin under the recommendation of school officials who just want misbehaving little kids to be babysat. Need I say more?

If we believe the drug companies and the AMA then sin is merely bad chemistry. Where is sin? Can we any longer tell? It’s not my fault that I’m disturbed; my chemistry is out of whack, that’s all.

If you are depressed, anxious, guilty, stressed out, and not on drugs, don’t be seduced into thinking a chemical silver bullet exists that will dissolve the problem. The underlying reason for those feelings don’t go away when you swallow a pill. Ask the Lord, “What, 0 Lord, is at the root of my problem. Help me to know and be delivered. Create in me a clean heart. Reveal my selfishness to me. Let me trust in you.” Oppression’s and depression can be caused by abuse from without or abuse from within; and often both.

Ask God to be delivered and let Him do it by changing your spirit and giving you a new heart your mind can change and you can be in good mental health. Drugs do not do this. I repeat, drugs cannot do this.