10/07/2019
Does EXTORTION ever happen in your High Demand Group?
October is the anniversary month of when turmoil began for this godly family. Please consider if this unsettling account sounds similar to your story:
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A young, single, and godly woman, age 24, is living with her godly family while attending college, volunteering, and writing Internet blogs about God. This young woman and her entire family can be described as one word, “INTENSE”. The intensity of each person in the family is the same in each area of their lives including: studying about God, teaching about God, student life, work life, volunteer life, etc. Their intensity for God is seems to exceed anyone else you can imagine. If you have ever admired a godly man, a godly woman, a godly family, this is the family. If you have ever admired a godly family almost as if they were Super Christians, this is the family.
One day someone introduces this young woman, over the Internet, to a small church about 1000 miles away filled with brethren who seems just as intense. The church’s pastor suggests, that the young woman is very committed to God, but TRUE Christians need to abandon everything, including their family, education, existing church, and literally everything about their present life if they TRULY love God and TRULY want to maintain their salvation. The pastor invites the young woman to move across the country and live with TRUE brethren “Seeking the Lord”. The brethren all seem to be “Super Christians” and explain that you cannot righteously judge their church without first living with them for a time.
(How would you respond?)
To prove her commitment to God, the young woman abandons everything and moves across the country to “Seek the Lord”. Her family is devastated after speaking firsthand with number of families from all over the country who have lost all contact with their college age children after their college age kids move in with the group. After someone joins the group the members begin speaking in cryptic phrases like: “The Burden of the Lord is to cause division with family” and “Having fellowship with unsaved family would be a grievous sin of such criminal weight that it endangers such ones to be expelled from the safety of the cleansing blood.”
(How would you respond?)
The young woman is also in turmoil over the conflict of abandoning her family in order avoid grieving the Holy Spirit by fellowshipping with the works of darkness. The TRUE brethren keep reminding the young woman that the pastor is a TRUE prophet of God and is lovingly sharing the TRUE burden of God. Also the pastor continues to counsel her that she would risk losing her salvation because of the sin of familial idolatry if she returned to her family or her old life.
(How would you respond?)
Within 2 months, the pastor tells the young woman that God has spoken to him declaring that God has confirmed that the young woman will be his wife and God-ordained helpmate for life. As the young woman ponders this, she knows she is expected to accept this as truth because any rejection of this would be like rejecting God’s clear word from a TRUE prophet. The pastor then presents the young woman with an unusual marriage proposal: “Will you let me lead you to the gallows?”
(How would you respond?)
The pastor explains that the TRUE path for the young woman to be able to have a peaceful relationship with her family again without risking her salvation is: For the woman to help her family understand two things: This group are TRUE brethren and her family must be willing to begin submitting to the TRUE teachings of God’s TRUE church. If she can succeed in this endeavor, then and only then will she have a peaceful relationship with her family because everyone would be TRULY saved. She also sees that almost half of the brethren in the group do not have a peaceful relationship with their families because these brethren have not yet been successful in helping their family members acknowledge the words of God through these TRUE prophets.
(How would you respond?)
The pastor decides to write a series of emails to the young woman’s father which would stress the importance of her father blessing their marriage and the necessity for her father and mother to stop resisting the TRUE bride of Christ. Below is an uninterrupted section from a multiple page email containing an EXTORTION threat from the pastor to the young woman’s father as part of his request blessing to marry his daughter.
(How would you respond?)
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“____ is my God-ordained helpmate for life. Oh how thankful I am to God, and I do not desire to do anything without your blessing. Yet I know, sadly, you may react toward this request more intensely and wickedly than when it became known that she desired to come here. I wish this would not be so! Would you give me your blessing?
____, if you turn and slander us to the remnant, I must warn you. We will not, under God, withhold the facts about you and your wife _____ _____ (amidst other outrageous and blasphemous things which were committed.) Oh how I wish I would not have to share this! But if you slander us, I cannot allow you to do that. The whole truth must be known. I will not cover your sins that you can misrepresent our actions. If the remnant knew how you have been treating _____, they would be shocked, and they would understand her and our behavior heretofore in an entirely different light.
____ please, I beg you, don’t sin against God and resist us anymore! Please consider these things.”
