Answer to an Ebola Blog

I was happy to see Mr. Steve McSwain’s blog: Ebola Doctor’s Prayer: “God Saved My Life! Really?”, which was posted on the Huffington Post. Though I am a full believing Christian pastor I basically agree with his assessment of Dr. Brantley, the man who claimed he was healed by Jesus of the Ebola virus and then came home to get the treatment he needed to get ‘saved’ from death.That God likely did not heal him, me and The Outcast Eagles website whole-heartily agree. And, that the educated physician, who is probably endowed with more intelligence than us, is the carrier of maddeningly ignorant beliefs, we also agree.

But to say that the confused beliefs of a doctor and those Christians like him means that God does not exist, or is just sitting about twiddling his thumbs while letting stupid people continue to live and hundreds of innocent people die, we can not agree.

Contrary to the prosperity-believing Christians and their way of believing, Jesus never promised a follower that everything would be hunky-dory in this life. Just the opposite. He warned that those of your own household would be your worst enemy; disciples would suffer persecution and tribulation, even death; to some he instructed give up your dough and just follow him; as for others he warned it will even appear that I don’t love you. This bad news is at the heart of the Good News. Modern Americans don’t want to hear it!

Some are calling Doctor Brantley a coward for coming home – maybe he is. I know Jesus got upset when a rich guy called him ‘good master’. He chided him and said, God is the only good one. We must listen to God carefully. Who is good, really!? But Jesus showed he had guts for all of us. Didn’t he?

Steve you wrote: “Did God not see them [the victims of Ebola] as worthy of being spared, too? Did they not have enough faith or enough people praying for them to summon his attention? Or, was it just their time to go? And, if so, shouldn’t we be amazed at God’s miraculous ability to bring into contact with a deadly virus all whose time has come?”

It’s not a matter of good guys and bad guys. Simply put, it is a matter of who gets out of here alive – and God has always been up front by what he means by life – it’s life everlasting.

I knew where you were coming from when you wrote:
“Maybe it is just me but I am growing more and more disturbed by the trite and troublesome explanations we Christians give for God’s involvement in the world. I can certainly understand the doctor’s sheer delight at having his life given back to him. I know that feeling of gratitude, too, and better than most, having had my own recent brush with the Grim Reaper when a clogged artery resulted in a heart attack.”

I had a similar experience with my type 1 diabetes. My blood sugar over 1,000, the hospital staff saved my bacon. There was a real tough, little female doctor that got me on track so I could live a while longer, but I wouldn’t insult that spit-fire doctor or her staff by saying God saved my life as if they had nothing to do with it.

Jesus did not deal with people by using tired clichés. He is the most radical man ever. Everything he says and does is original, profound, boggles the mind at first.

The leaders of that day, believers and unbelievers, relied on clichés of law and religion just as the Catholics, Evangelicals and Charismatics do now. Dr. Brantley’s faith is likely a confluence of the silt of religious platitudes, rigid dogmas and stone-cold legalisms.

The Ebola Crisis, as all the judgment that is hitting the earth, is radical. We’ve been told for the last century that this day would come and now it’s here. Technology and travel has shrunk the world into a global village. This was not only prophesied in the pages of Daniel and Revelation and by Jesus, but by Orwell, H.G. Wells, Anthony Burgess, Hegel, Nietzsche, Toynbee, et.al. And we have turned it into a cliche’ so that it means nothing. It seems every show on TV is apocryphal and routine.

God’s prophecy includes all the Christians and their churches, Israel itself, hypocritical conniving governments East and West, we who are destroying the planet, greedy economics, Kafkian laws and Freudian sciences, the drug deception, all fantasy religions resurrected and new, and the universal arrogance of the anti-christ spirit which leavens everything we hear, boasting that it knows better than God. All of them converge and swirl and mingle in our boggled minds while we are dumbed down by the cliche that prophecy has become.

There are those who believe and know the truth, that “To live is Christ, to die is gain.”

Yes, the innocent may be few and far between; they are the few, the un-proud, the beleaguered, the sad, they are the Christians. They are anywhere and everywhere, some are in Liberia and Sierra Leone, some in the U.S. of A., even China, I suppose. They are those who have admitted their guilt and every day plead nolo contendere.