I am very Christian and incurably Presbyterian in my outlook and identity, though until the Presbyterian Church of Ghana wisely adapted its liturgy to our Traditional African Culture, with some necessary modifications, of course, I had delightfully worshipped my Christian God with a branch of the Assemblies of God Ministries. I believe in the verity and veracity of prophecy, but I generally tend to be skeptical about the diarrheal practice of prophetic divination or epiphany among many of the one-man, or for that matter, one-man, churches in the country which clearly aim to make many a congregant inordinately dependent on prophecy and the men and women who claim to be uniquely endowed with the “magic” of prophecy, a patently unsavory situation which is strikingly akin to some of the worst forms of drug addiction.
We have all, nearly each and every one of us, witnessed more than our fair share of this “divine” magic in the lead-up to Election 2016, and ought to have been sobered up by the legion off-sides and wide misses that these prophecy preachings entailed in the end. Still, in principle, I am not inclined to kick against the substantive essence and relevance of prophecy. I just take the bulk of them with the proverbial pinch of salt and, those that I choose to mind, buckets full of the same. And it is in the latter vein that I pay heed to Rev. Isaac Owusu-Bempah’s widely reported 17 prophecies for the year 2017. One is tempted to ask: Why 17 prophecies? Why not 2017 prophecies, for instance? On this score, as well, I tend to be gingerly reticent. For, as the age-old maxim goes: “When Mr./Mrs. Somebody was bidding farewell to his/her God, nobody else was standing within earshot.”
Since Prophet Owusu-Bempah is clearly not forcing his “divine revelations” down the throat of anybody but the voluntarily willing, why bother to take issue with the man? Besides, after all, don’t we all as citizens of one country with a common destiny need all the protection necessary to continue to keep our blessed portion of “God’s Acre”? For when all has been said and done, this is essentially what our proverbial homeland Ghana is about, when one stops to critically think about the same. Or isn’t it? Anyway, two of the seventeen prophecies reportedly delivered by Pastor Owusu-Bempah that caught my attention, perhaps because they also received prominent media play, predicted the occurrence of a terrorist attack in the country this year, and the staging of a coup d’état geared towards the violent overthrow of the yet-to-be-inaugurated Akufo-Addo Administration.
Well, hearing the pathologically cynical and the equally pathologically megalomaniacal likes of National Democratic Congress’ General-Secretary, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, vow to have a convincingly trounced President John Dramani Mahama rule the country with a parliamentary minority, one cannot but conclude that President-Elect Akufo-Addo represents a level of danger and animosity in the jaundiced imagination of the key operatives of the so-called ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) the likes of which may well have never been experienced in our postcolonial history. And so one supposes that it may be quite safe to admonish the key operatives of the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
There are already two legally and clinically certified Muslim-Arab terrorists on furlough in the country from the U. S.-controlled Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba, who were dumped here via a backdoor agreement between the lame-duck Obama Administration and the Mahama regime; and so it is not altogether farfetched for anybody, prophetic preacher or laity, to speculate that a fertile ground may have already been prepared for some form of fireworks of apocalyptic proportions in the country in the offing. We also really don’t know what politically related assurances had been proffered by the Obama Administration to the key operatives of the Mahama regime.
Even more significantly, what went wrong. And what corrective measures had been put in place in anticipation of the same. In other words, like him or hate him, Prophet Owusu-Bempah’s “prophesy” may have quite a remarkable chunk of choice meat on the bone, the controversial image of the leader-founder of the Glorious Word Ministry International notwithstanding.
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