Suppose I found out that you were starving and in need of food. It just so happens to turn out that I am the owner of 3 Michelin Star restaurant. So I give you at no cost a free membership pass to my restaurant. This membership allowed you to enter the restaurant 24/7 and eat the best meals you would ever have in your life. So later that evening I show up during the dinner hour and see your car parked out front. I think, great he’s here, and I go inside to find out how you like the meal. But you are nowhere to be seen. And as I walk through my kitchen, I look out my back door to see your feet sticking up out of the dumpster behind the restaurant. I think, oh no, the poor guy must have lost his cell phone or wallet. As I call out your name to ask if you need any help you respond, “No thank you.” I respond then “What’s up?” And you reply, “There’s still meat on some of those bones and I want to make sure I get all I can possibly get!”
That may seem farfetched except that was a fad in the Charismatic movement just a couple of years ago. It was called “Grave Sucking.” Look up the term on the internet, and you will find Christians promoting the idea that by lying over the graves of rotting corpses of once famous Christians, you could absorb the Holy Spirit power left in their bones!!!!
If ever God did a face palm it would have been then. Even famous pastors and their wives were into this. The living God of all the universe placed within us an unending source of power, The Holy Spirit, and they were turning to rotting graves to get power. (And worse yet, that was based upon 1 severely misunderstood story from the Old Testament). The unspoken theology is that rotting bones are a good source of the Holy Spirit!
Why do Charismatics fall for such nonsense? Why is it that we are so willing to check our brains in at the door when it comes to wanting to appear to be spiritual? Sometimes I seriously believe that we should be called the Galatian Movement instead of the Charismatic Movement:
- Galatians 3:3 NASB – 3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
Time after time we want human flesh to replace the role of the eternal living God in our lives. Whether it be an anointed president or a rotting corpse. Honestly, there is no difference according to the apostle Paul:
- Romans 7:16-19 NASB – 16 But if I do the very thing I do not want [to do,] I agree with the Law, [confessing] that the Law is good. 17 So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good [is] not. 19 For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.
As soon as we stop trying to be perfected by human flesh, both living and dead, a new way of perceiving the world around us opens up. But that is the subject for some other posts down the road.
So until then, Love Much My Friends . . .
Unspoken Theology 