TB Joshua is dead.
Na wah, o.
We will all die someday and so those who have been saying, dying at the time he did may be God’s judgement, are to my mind, missing the point completely.
They say God never appointed him Emmanuel, God being Emmanuel. They say he was a false prophet. Me, I personally never believed anything TB Joshua said but that is beside the point. People have said his exponential church growth had some diabolical attachment…they’ve said so much.
Now, a few years back, I was with my partner in the office when he got a call from a friend of his, from Zimbabwe, I think. Who asked that he help him procure TB Joshua’s holy water for an ailment he had been told could only be cured by drinking that holy water and maybe wiping himself down with it.
We’d heard that this friend was very ill, had stopped going out and was not letting people visit him.
Up until that time, I had never taken TB Joshua seriously, never paid more than a passing interest in the man I had dubbed a fake; never listened beyond a few moments to his preaching, you know at least to confirm to myself that he was fake. Everything about him just didn’t sit well with my faith. So when this Zimbabwean friend called, desperate for this holy water to be procured for him and sent to Zimbabwe or was it South Africa? Not sure now.
I began to think, maybe a prophet truly is without honour among his brethren…foreigners were benefiting from a man we were thumbing our noses at.
Anyway, my partner and I began to make enquiries into the so called holy/miracle water sold at the synagogue. We sent our staff there to get the water because this African friend of ours said his life depended on it. Though we weren’t sure the nature of his illness or disease, the desperation with which this man sought the water made us equally desperate to get it and send to him the best way we possibly could.
We didn’t get it, it was always sold out every time our staff made the journey to synagogue to purchase it.
That was when I began to tune in to TB Joshua but you see the more I listened to him the more of a charlatan he seemed to me. The more I watched his videos on Facebook, seeing the huge crowds, seeing foreigners thronging the synagogue, participating in the daily/weekly airing of the services, the more confused I got.
Me not professing to have the kind of faith the likes of Pastor Chris Okotie have to openly lambast TB Joshua, I grumbled underground because I realised that there are millions of people worldwide who held TB Joshua’s words as the word of God…perhaps that’s the reason they dubbed him Emmanuel.
While I was doing my checks on TB Joshua, I was told the story of a family friend who had developed a skin condition that left her skin looking like scales. It was so difficult to get rid off and so debilitating that she had been moved from one hospital to another with no cure until she was taken to synagogue, there she claimed she got her healing.
I never saw this family friend when she was ill but I had seen and heard other relatives and mutual friends talk about her sickness and how close to death she was.
When she got healed, the same group of persons came telling of how it was a miracle and how this family friend has been swearing by the God of Emmanuel, ever since. Their testimony still didn’t make me think TB Joshua was a saint or miracle worker.
To everyone his faith, I think and so, rather than openly castigate TB Joshua, I simply chose to to ignore him like before.
The fact that TB Joshua died under mysterious circumstances may not even be due to God’s wrath; we all have an appointment with death and no one knows when it’ll be their turn. Pastor Adeboye lost his son, just last month, does it mean God was angry with him?
Babies die, women who’ve been looking to have children for years, die while giving birth to the child they’ve so longed for, is God angry they got children behind His back?
Coronavirus hit the world like no virus on this scale and no man or woman of God saw it coming, does it mean they are all fake prophets, pastors and imams?
Nobody saw TB Joshua’s death, even he, prophet that he called himself, didn’t see a host of things coming his way, certainly not his building that collapsed killing some 150 souls in September of 2014.
He had made predictions that many people faulted for their inaccuracies, these and more are reasons why people think his sudden death is God’s revenge mission. I won’t claim to know God’s ways of handling charlatans or devotees, for that matter. God is God by Himself, He doesn’t need my ideas to remain sovereign.
I only pray his family will find comfort and peace in this period as a lot of things will begin to unravel around the mysterious man we called TB Joshua.