Submitted by Terence Blackett
One of the greatest historical deceptions of all times is the refusal of mainstream Christianity as well as secular society to accept and advocate the original Black pre-eminence and presence in the Bible. This historical seismic rift created a fabrication of diabolical proportions which has ebbed and flowed for the last 4000 years right up to our present time.
Jesus’ First Advent came at a critical time when the final 2000 year epoch of human history was to begin the process of bringing home the lost sons and daughters of Israel back into a harmonious relationship with their God (Yah) – that they had long forgotten and had rebelled against for centuries. This process would eventually culminate with the sealing of 144,000 – 12,000 from each of the 12 Tribes who will not see death, but will be translated at the end of human history – when Jesus will appear the second time in the eastern sky with over a trillion angels enshrouded with majesty that no eye has ever beheld.
Meantime, the house of God remains in a pile of rubble. The walls broken down. No agreement to be found. The sanctuary defiled. The priests and prophets lie – preaching and teaching to their own means and the followers seem to like it so. While the vast throng of God’s people are living in deception, apathy and disbelief because godliness and righteousness is enshrouded (wrapped up) in fickle, baseless religiosity with no real knowledge of God in the land.
In the Christian world, 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated time of the week. The division within the church world is split down the middle between the Black church and the White church. The sad reality is that the division is not based on issues that are fundamentally theological in nature but rather on a lack of acceptance of the historical connotations and the legacy of a supremacist exegetical form of Christianity that was unleashed on Blacks in an attempt to scientifically control and manipulate a nation of people into a position of subservience and socioeconomic control. This divide, conquer and rule principle has even dulled the appetites of many who merely see Christianity as a tool the White man has used as a sabre of oppression to subjugate and force control of the minds of Black folks – a successful form of intrigue which still bears damnable fruit today.
This vicious lie took on dimensions long before the evolution of Christian religious modernity. The modern Ashkenazim Jew – PALESKIN converts (as far as 1100 years ago) a people (from the cold tundra-lands of Western/Eastern Europe) worked feverishly to assimilate and control all the nations of world (as far back as the Crusades) and to finally say they were whole again (with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948) – but that has been a colossal deception of gargantuan proportions swallowed by well-meaning Christians (both Black and White alike) and held up as a totem pole to be revered and worshipped like Moses’ serpent which was held up in the wilderness. Yet the 10 Tribes of millions of true Jewish/Israelite peoples are still very much scattered at large in every nook and cranny of earth (people particularly of Black ethnic origins) covering the landscape of earth – many still living under the weight of servitude and oppression.
Jesus had warned that upon “this Rock” He would build His Church (many still believe it is the Catholic Church) – who through Satan’s insidious work for thousands of years has built a counterfeit, corrupt, subversive monolith which tries to resemble the real thing and would fool the world into accepting the phony for the authentic. Moses was warned in Exodus 20: 25 that “if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.” Every since then man has sought to carve out their own altar of stone in the hope that it would be acceptable to God – not realising that God won’t accept anything other than the genuine or what He has asked for.
Samuel L. Williams, former pastor of the 650-member Friendship Baptist Church and former chairman of Atlanta’s Human Relations Committee who was also academic dean at Morehouse College in Atlanta said – “White America would rather see this nation destroyed than give up white racism. The worst institution in America today is the white church. It has more hypocrisy per square inch than any other. And no impression I have received in the past five years has made any difference.”
C. Eric Lincoln defines in his book “The Black Church in the African American Experience” (Durham Duke University Press, 1990) – how “the Black Church” in America is seen as the independent, historic, and completely black-controlled denominations founded during slavery. Although there have been African-American believers in denominations governed by white Americans – the Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran churches, for instance – Lincoln’s definition includes 7 major historic Black denominations: the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church; the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (A.M.E.Z.) Church; the Christian Methodist Episcopal (C.M.E.) Church; the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated (N.B.C.); the National Baptist Convention of America, Unincorporated (N.B.C.A.); the Progressive National Baptist Convention (P.N.B.C.); and the Church of God in Christ (C.O.G.I.C.).
I however believe that as was aforementioned in my opening remarks on this issue that writers, theologians and academics are still blind-sided as to the part that ethnicity played in the Holy Scriptures from its inception – given that “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married an Ethiopian woman.” God then struck Miriam with leprosy. Why? Consider this possibility. In God’s anger at Miriam, (Moses’ sister), God says in effect, “how would you like to be pale-skinned Miriam? Then, I’ll make you pale-skinned.” So we read, “When the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, like snow” (Num. 12:10). The question we must all ask – “How does God view color?” Also, in determining any religious orthodoxy, what part does race, gender or social creed play in its makeup?
Racism in any form is still a difficult “reality” to define far less comprehend given the fact that we are all potentially – ‘human beings’. In the book of the Acts of the Apostles, God convicted Peter of his religious racism in a vision and told him to accept the Gentiles as brothers in Christ. “Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Acts.10: 34-35). Paul also wrote that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28). God made us and He made the color of our skins, and He saw that His work was good.
Even outside of mainstream Christianity, denominations like the Mormon church have long held that a visible code of religious bias and bigotry towards people of color even though the Bible reveals that Abraham married an Egyptian; Joseph, the son of Jacob (later called Israel) married an Egyptian woman Asenath and bore Ephraim and Manasseh; Moses married “an Ethiopian woman”; and most importantly Judah married a Canaanite (BLACK) woman that Jesus Himself is a direct descendant of. So for me what beggars belief is – how can Mormons say that Hamites couldn’t have the priesthood when the Israelites themselves were at least (for the sake of anthropological argument sake) ONE-THIRD Hamitic?
In the closing phases of a post-Apartheid South Africa, it was interesting to see the Dutch Reformed Church offer a public apology for the devilish curse of religious racism towards the oppressed majority – words that still echo some 20 years later but where little has really been done to heal an age-old rift between two altars of stones where the sacrifices of religious ceremony is still being offered to appease a God who wants nothing more than for all men to come into the unity of the faith.
I close with those famous words offered to the peoples of South Africa but words echoed down through the hallowed hallways of 400 years of separation, segregation and ethnic sanction of a race of people who continue to still be maligned because of the color of their skin: – ”We confess with humility and sorrow the participation of our church in the introduction and legitimation of the ideology of apartheid and the subsequent suffering of people..”
In conclusion, let me also echo the words of Jesus as they came forth from the mouth of Abraham Lincoln on June 16, 1858, where more than 1,000 Republican delegates met in the Springfield, Illinois, statehouse for the Republican State Convention.
At 5 p.m. they chose Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. At 8 p.m. Lincoln delivered his address to his Republican colleagues in the Hall of Representatives. The title of his speech came from a sentence in the speech’s introduction, “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,” which paraphrases a statement by Jesus in Matthew 12:25.
Lincoln’s friends believed the speech was too radical for the occasion. His law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that Lincoln was morally courageous but politically incorrect and possibly suicidal. Herndon said Lincoln told him he was looking for a universally known figure of speech that would rouse people to the peril of the times.
The speech began:
“Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Convention.
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure; permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South. Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
The question the modern Church must now ask – can we ill-afford another hundred years of the same old divisions or isn’t time to heal the rift and have one altar upon which we offer our sacrifices?
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