That I may Know HIM - A Devotional

Day 34 : THE NEXT AGENDA

Did you receive the December 26, 2011 message, “The Spirit of Sudan”?  Did you read the prophetic caution it also carried, that the date January 12, 2012, had been “marked for a surprise attack in an unsuspecting location” by the Islamic jihadists in Nigeria?  Did you pray the prayers it called for?  Then you are part of the success story I am about to tell.  My consolation was this: if God would reveal the date and the plot in advance, then it was His purpose to destroy that plot; if prayers would be useless, He would not have called us to pray.  Two days ago, it was January 12, 2012, and that threat was real.  Text messages crisscrossed the country that evening, alerting of an impending bloody night-time Islamic jihadist plot, and calling for prayers. When from the King’s own courts I got one of those messages, followed up with a call, the seriousness of the matter did not need further stress. Here is a sample of some of those cross-country SMS’s I received from multiple sources:

“Please pray for destruction of all plans of the evil one even as arrangements to kill Christians this night and tomorrow in Kano and Kaduna [in northern Nigeria] are being concluded.” 

“In view of the satanic bombing in our country, Christians are urged to pray by midnight tonight for one hour.  Let us raise a collective cry to God for His judgment against those terrorists.  He will hear and heal our land.  From CAN [Christian Association of Nigeria) Abuja.  Pass on to 10 Christians.”

You probably also got a copy of those SMS calls to prayer. Some of them called for the immediate emergency evacuation of pastors from the north in view of the threats that night and the next.  I deleted those, for their uncomfortable hints of panic.  It has been two days since.  Thank God for the prayers more and more people are being stirred to pray, which makes the cloud not as threatening and as heavy as it has been hanging since last year, even though our brothers and sisters up north still have to walk their paths with palpable caution.  This morning I received information from a pastor in one of the northern cities.  He was thankful for the prayer support so far, and testified to some of those Boko Haram jihadists having been arrested in his city from a hideout where they had been putting together the bombs for their plot.  He also reported confessional pointers to some of those to whom bleeding fingers have previously pointed as patrons of this evil in the land.

A reverend clergy from Ibadan in western Nigeria today drew my attention to the declaration on TV by Alhaji Asari Dokubo, former chieftain of one of the Niger Delta southern Nigeria militia groups that he would fight in defence of President Goodluck Jonathan. I missed that news on TV, but I told the reporting man of God that I hear the voice of Jacob in that apparently plausible southern Nigeria defence of a southern kinsman and President.  Sometimes some eyes see something different in what everyone else is looking at.  Sometimes it happens to me.  More than two decades ago, Alhaji Asari Dokubo used to be Brother Melford Goodhead of the Deeper Life Bible Church.  Today, he is a passionate Muslim, trained in Iran, scheming by every ‘democratic’ and populist means to Islamise the southern Nigeria Niger Delta, after having retired from active participation in the ostensible armed struggle for economic justice and the control of the natural resources of that region. The details are not for now.  The same person cannot take sides against his own Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) in a fundamental battle between that sacred House and its heathen foes - the dispensable ‘pigs’ who comprise the other House of War (Dar al-harb) with which it is naturally in “a perpetual state of jihad, of holy war”   (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/daralislam.html).

The attempt has since been to provoke a civil war, which, against all prognostications and provocations, has refused to start in this season. Part of their plot, as carried in one of their recently leaked manifestos, was to vandalise some of their own Islamic facilities in the south, as if it had been a southern retaliation.  Even that has not yet worked. In this military Second Phase of the grand Agenda, my spiritual instincts smell a ploy to also try to use one of their own,  a celebrated Niger Delta agent, to be ready to offer a spark believably in the name of a defence of a Niger Delta kinsman and Federal Government President.  Firstly, the potential in such a ploy to draw divisive sectional sympathy is attractive, especially since the religious red line seems so reluctant to be ignited. Secondly, being the first of the many Niger Delta warlords to make such a public statement, and being the apparently reformed dissident with some popular acceptability, he could naturally emerge as the leader of all the other creek armies in the event of the anticipated escalation.  Sounds to me as ‘Option B’ in a not recent plan.  Either way, the nation would go down the same Islamic drain by Boko Haramites of a different design.  Even if the Church were now to take up arms in justifiable self-defence; even if anyone were to go to war in defence of President Jonathan, Alhaji Asari is not the messiah the south needs.