Signs

It was not an easy decision to come to, but I see no other way. It was not spur-of-the-moment, or something I decided on lightly, but once I combed through all the aggregate data, once I took all the nuances and subtleties into consideration, I realized it had to be done.

From now on, whenever I am giving a talk, whether in a church or at a conference, I will be wearing oven mitts on my hands. Yes, you read that right. I will be wearing oven mitts. The big, quilted kind, the kind that only has the thumb hole, and no fingers, because I realized it’s the only way that someone couldn’t freeze-frame a nanosecond of an hour-long sermon, and accuse me of being a Luciferian who was secretly sending out hidden hand signals.

Sometimes you have to counter absurdity with absurdity. It’s the only way to contextualize the utter inanity of it all.

My inbox has been flooded of late, and the theme seems to be consistent. Intrepid amateur sleuths are combing through the archives of other men’s sermons and discovering the hidden hand signals.

You have individuals who were doing nothing more untoward than rolling a booger between their thumb and index finger being accused of flashing 666 to the cameras and being labeled Luciferian plants.

No further inquiry needed, no query into whether or not their message is Biblical, or if they are preaching the gospel, they rubbed their eye with their middle finger forty minutes into their talk, and that’s all the evidence we need to declare them sullied, compromised, and forsaken.

We can’t allow for the possibility that they scratched behind their ear just because they had an itch. It had to be something more, it had to, and now we will expose them for all the world to see.

Our duty as believers, if we aspire to be as the Bereans, is to examine and study the Scriptures every day to see whether or not the teaching we are hearing is true. A very important distinction, and one that we seem to have glossed over wholesale.

As Paul preached to the Bereans, they weren’t watching his hands, and they weren’t looking at his fingers. They weren’t trying to find a “gotcha” moment they could then plaster on the internet and accuse him of being of the devil. They were studying the scriptures to see if what they heard coming out of Paul’s mouth was in harmony with the written Word.

When we allow our overactive imaginations to look for signs that aren’t there, rather than diligently study the Scriptures to see whether or not truth is being spoken, we run the risk of accusing and besmirching the righteous and ignoring the treacherous and deceptive.

The only thing you need to identify deception is to know the truth. Study the Scriptures, know them, let them take root and spring to life inside of you. Then, when you hear something not of Scripture you will know it for what it is instantly. You won’t have to go blind watching video footage of someone hoping that they rub their chin or pick their nose so you can expose them. You will nourish your spiritual man with truth, thereby growing, maturing, and realizing how comically irrelevant freeze-framing someone’s hand gesture to make it seem like they were doing something they likely weren’t is. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.