By Rev. Jerry Stephenson, Ph.d
Russia has attacked Ukraine and the fear of World War III is upon many of us. Is the world coming to an end? This is the million-dollar question. Avaricious End Times preachers must be having a field day as they begin to target weak and vulnerable people who are desperate for answers. The scare tactics these televangelists employ to profit at their golden altars are anything but Godly.
Some will be quite brazen, giving an exact date the world will end, pretending that God has personally spoken to them. These greedy, for-profit prophets will peddle the fear of Hell and demand that people must pay them to get saved from fire and brimstone. After all, Heaven is like a velvet rope at the famed nightclub Studio 54 – it costs a pretty penny to get in, and who you know matters.
These End Times charlatans aren’t much different than the notorious Jim Jones People’s Temple cult, where gullible followers pawned everything they owned to move to Guyana. They were promised that if they followed their anointed leader, God would reward them by swooping down from Heaven and carrying them off to a better place. Of course, we saw how that turned out as over 900 people met their death by drinking a toxic brew of poison-laced Kool-Aid.
I wrote a book, America Was Not Built Upon FEAR, in which I discussed how these so-called televangelists invent lofty promises and feign “speaking truth”. In reality, they are spinning insidious lies to separate fearful, uneducated people from their hard-earned money. They are nothing but fork-tongued serpents slithering into peoples’ lives promising truth and delivering toxins.
Don’t listen to these exploitative phonies. Their holy robes and fanatical proclamations hide their genuine intentions. After all, Matthew 24:36 says, “the angels in Heaven or the Son of man does not know when the end of time will be.” So how would these disingenuous televangelists know the world is ending if the Bible they claim to follow explicitly says that the end of the world is unknowable?
I am never shocked by what these televangelists say to steal a buck from the bewildered. I am now waiting for them to tie their terrible message into the well-worn idea that God is punishing the world for sin, like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, LGBTQ people will be mercilessly targeted and smeared by these fear-mongering frauds. They will use guilt, shame and hate towards anyone that they can scapegoat.
But do not fear, for the God of Creation loves you no matter what these fake Christians bellow as they beat their Bibles in arrogance and ignorance. They are devoid of real love and only seek to take of advantage of people to enrich themselves. They say they are preaching “The Word”, but the only word they truly care about is “money.” Don’t be a sucker by letting them suck money out of your pockets and into their bloated bank accounts. They represent greed, not God.