The holdup was annoying. The noise in the market was way more annoying, especially the chant from the Bible store. “Buy your Bible at just 200 naira! Men, women, children, just 200 naira. Young man with the blue shirt, lady in the white skirt, just 200 naira!”
She was late to the meeting at Sapele road with members of the executives of Revelation Ministries and some architects and executives of Clay World. Efosa the head architect was already at the church secretariat at Sapele road and they were all waiting for her, the president of clay world. It still sounded unbelievable to her but it was real. There were more magazines and media houses that wanted to interview her but Monalisa Agbaje paused all interviews for now as it was time to work. Sealing and delivering the Revelations Ministries deal was going to send a message to her mother in-law that she had not made a mistake making her president. And the fact that Lisa was aiming for maximum profits too was going to be an added bonus. But first, they had to approve the building plan from the architects, agree on the building costs and then sign papers. After that, they had less than eight months to set up a church structure that would house more than 5000 members. That number made Lisa cringe and she knew she had a huge task ahead of her.
“An atheist building the house of God!” Those words rang in her head over and over again and she couldn’t get that annoying smirk on Pastor Phillip’s face out of her head. She was looking forward to seeing him again and putting him in his place. She was going to school him so much on the stupidity of his religion even Judge Chinwe would be proud of her.
Finally the cars in front of her started to move and she followed suit. She was just glad she was away from the noise coming out of the Bible store. She checked her watch as she approached the round-about and it was almost 1pm. She had to go and pick Daniel at exactly three. She never wanted him to take the bus as she didn’t trust the drivers of the school bus. Even though Daniel always wanted to ride in the bus with his friends, she forbade it.
Sapele Road was clear and in less than 4 minutes, she was at the huge secretariat of Revelations Ministries. It was a two story building, even bigger than her own house. She could see Agnes’ car and Efosa’s. She could also see the car belonging to Peter Okoli the Director of building on Clay world. She parked her car beside Efosa’s car as someone came out to receive her. It was the Treasurer Evangelist Ovie Orhobo smiling with an outstretched hand as she got down from the car.
“Good day Madam”, Ovie greeted as she received his handshake.
“Good day sir”, she smiled. “I am so sorry I am late the traffic at ring road is terrible”.
“That’s ok”, Ovie nodded as he led her into the secretariat. “We were just about to start”.
The secretariat was filled with armed security guards in the frontage and this made Lisa Chuckle. If their God protected them so much, why did they need physical protection? She wanted to ask Ovie but felt it was too early to start an argument.
The entrance of the Secretariat led to a conference hall and she saw Efosa with two of the members of his Architectural team and Mrs Agnes. She also met the very weird Secretary Osas Ojo and one other man she had not met before. She looked around for Pastor Phillip but he wasn’t there.
“Where is Pastor Phillip?” She wondered.
“In his Office upstairs”, Ovie replied. “He will be joining us later”, he assured her. “This is Babatunde”, Ovie introduced one of the men, “he is a building engineer in our church and is here to help us make a decision”. She shook hands with Babatunde.
“So I have about eight different plans and designs…”
“Can we pray before we begin?” Osas cut Efosa short with her strange and coarse voice. Immediately she said that, she exchanged glances with Lisa and the president of Clay world flashed a thin smile. This was to provoke her and she knew it. She focused her glance on the secretary hoping to make her feel uneasy, but instead she was the one who felt uneasy. Osas had deep eyes. She couldn’t explain it but her look was a mysterious one. She wore a blue Ankara top and a black pair of pant trousers this time and her shoes where a black high heel that looked very expensive.
“I don’t pray Mrs Ojo”, Lisa replied as politely as possible but something about Osas scared her. She couldn’t tell what it was but she tried as much to act like she wasn’t scared.
“Then you can wait for us outside…”
“There will be no need for that secretary”, Pastor Phillip joined them to her biggest relief. “I am here to steal Mrs Agbaje away”.
“She’s supposed to be in this meeting”, Ovie argued.
“Of course”, Pastor Phillip replied. “But the first agenda of this meeting is about buildings and designs and I don’t think that interests the President of Clay world the slightest, does it?”
They all turned to her. “Of course not”, she agreed.
“When the engineers and the architects are done choosing a design, we will be in my office”, Pastor Phillip instructed. “Signing papers is our job”.
They watched as Pastor Phillip took Lisa up a staircase until they disappeared from their sight. She was glad she was out of there. “How did you know I wouldn’t be interested in the designs?” She wondered as they approached Phillip’s office.
“I read your Profile”, he replied. “You read marketing in the University of Lagos, did you not?”
“Of course”, she smiled as they entered his office.
Pastor Phillip’s Office was a beauty. It had a place where couches were arranged and that was where they sat. He had a big table with a huge mac system in front of it. He had a small refrigerator with lots of books arranged by it.
“I do like you”, he said when they were seated on one of the couches
“Why?” She smiled.
“I don’t know”, he replied. “You strike me as a very smart and learned woman. For you to be president of Lady Beatrice’s company, you really have to be smart”.
“Plus I married her son”, Lisa joked and they both laughed for a while.
“So”, he sat up staring into her eyes. “Why do you hate Christians so much?”
“I don’t hate Christians”, she denied. “I pity your foolishness”.
“You think it is foolishness serving God?”
“I think it is foolishness believing in the existence of a supreme being that no one has ever seen”. She argued. “I think it is foolishness to claim that the world was built in seven days by a supernatural being by just saying the words. That is fairy tale stuff!” She laughed.
“Is that what you think?”
“You say God exists and he is a loving God and yet there are lots of starving children everywhere. How come God takes credit for beautiful things like the rainbow and yet he doesn’t take credit for starving children and natural disasters such as earthquakes that kill so many innocent people?”
“What makes you think they are innocent?” Phillip smiled.
“So anyone who dies is a sinner?”
“Let me explain something to you Mrs Agbaje”, Phillip cut in. “When Adam fell, sin came into the world. And so did evil. Every evil you see today is as a result of Adam’s sin”.
“So God can’t end the evil in the world?” She laughed. “Is he that powerless?”
“Ending evil in the world is a complicated matter Mrs Lisa”, he replied. “Human’s classify evil. We grade them and see killing as greater than lying or stealing as greater than blasphemy. But anything that is against God’s perfect nature is evil to him. Sin is sin and to God no one is greater than the other. So If God is to eliminate Evil from the world, things like earthquake or ISIS or any other evil, then we will all be dead. Because liars will perish as well, as well as thieves and anyone who goes against God’s perfect nature will be eliminated which means all of us will not be alive”. He explained.
“So there is no middle ground?”
“There is no middle ground Mrs Lisa”, Phillip continued. “Human beings have classified sin but to God sin is sin and evil is evil. See why God can’t wipe all evil from the world?”
“So we are just going to continue…”
“Evil will be taken away from the world on the last day where all men shall face judgment”, he cut her short. “The killer and the thief alike. The liar and the adulterer alike and anyone who is found wanting shall be sent to the…”
“Let me just stop you there”, she came in. “What kind of God sends someone who tells a lie to burn in lake of fire forever?”
“Hell fire is a choice”, Phillip replied. “It is not about the level or the degree of the crime, it is about who this crime is against. Like I have been saying, God is a pure and perfect God and anything that goes against his pure and perfect nature is sin. If you smacked my face Mrs Lisa, I probably wouldn’t do anything about it. But if you smacked a higher person, say the president of Nigeria, you will be charged for felony and will serve time in jail. Now talk about sinning against someone who is infinitely holy like God. It is not about the crime it is about who it is against. In our world we have classified crime, a killer gets a higher sentence than a thief and we are applying this same flawed knowledge when it comes to God and this is totally wrong. To God, evil is evil and if he takes away earthquakes and sufferings then he also has to take away liars and thieves and blasphemers”.
“How about those who kill for God…?”
“How many times have you heard that a Christian took up arms for God?”
“The Catholic Calvary”, she replied.
“The Catholic Calvary had a flawed knowledge of what Christianity meant”, he replied. “Plus they were politically corrupt and let their quest for power and dominance cloud their judgment. They weren’t a true representative of Christianity. How many Catholics have you heard killed in the name of Christianity in recent times?”
“How about ISIS? Al Qaeda?”
“I can’t speak for Islam”, he smiled.
“Is this the point where you say Christianity is the only true religion?”
“Christianity is not a religion”, he disagreed, “and I agree with you when you say the world would be a better place without religion. Christianity is simply a way of life, the Jesus way of life. Christians are followers of Jesus Christ and we are not supposed to call ourselves Christians, people are supposed to see our works and call us Christians. But let us assume Christianity is a religion…”
“Isn’t the fact that there are so many religions in the world today proof that maybe you all are just jokers?” She swooped in.
“Ok, let us see this way”, Phillip smiled. That smiling face was really getting to annoy her. Like he was lecturing a kid who had no idea what was going on. She hated to feel like she was below someone and it was starting to feel that way. “If you put a class of 500 people and give them a very complex math problem to solve, most of them would probably get it wrong. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a right answer. All that is needed is to show these people who got these answers wrong the right way to do it. So how do we arrive at the truth about God? We can use a framework and this framework must have three main characteristics. The first is Logical Consistency which simply means that the claims to a belief system must be consistent and must not contradict itself. For instance, take Buddhism as a case study. The main goal of a Buddhist is to rid himself of all desires. But the desire to rid yourself of all desire is a desire itself, which is very contradictory. A belief system must also have empirical adequacy which is evidence to support it and finally it must have Existential relevancy which means it must address the big questions of life. Mrs Lisa, it might surprise you to know that there is absolutely no problem on earth that you can’t find a solution in the Bible. Christianity answers every question in life which you can’t confidently say about other religions.
“So when you have that framework, it will help us answer the four basic questions of life. Origin, Ethics that is how we are supposed to live, meaning which is our purpose in life and finally Destiny”.
“Hold on a moment”, Lisa giggled. This was obviously getting bigger than her and she was beginning to wish she had come more prepared. She had shut him up in their last meeting and so did not envisage a response of this magnitude from him. “The thing about Christianity is that they feel they hold the key to absolute truth. Everything must be done the Christian way and that is just totally insane”.
“I know that is a bitter pill for you to swallow Mrs Lisa”, Phillip replied, “but yes, everything should be done the Christian way. You said we feel we hold the key to absolute truth but first we need to know if there’s anything like absolute truth. There are people who believe that there are no such thing as absolute truth. For instance, Postmodernism affirms no truth at all”.
Lisa giggled.
“They say nothing is true! But at least they believe that single statement is actually true. They believe postmodernism is true. We also have the relativists who say truth is relative. But one might be forced to ask if that statement is absolutely true. So if it is absolutely true, which they believe, then in the end, one can’t deny absolute truth exists.
“But one thing you atheists cannot live with is the narrowness of absolute truth. One plus one is absolutely true whether in Nigeria or in China. So also what is wrong is wrong. Black is Black there is absolutely no middle ground. Truth is not impacted by sincerity or desire, no matter how sincerely one embraces stealing it is still stealing. And no amount of acceptance can make something like homosexuality right. Even though 90 percent of the world today accepts it as correct it is still wrong according to the Bible.”
“So what proof do you have that the Bible holds absolute truth?” She wondered with keen interest. This was not a debate, he was lecturing her and that was the most uncomfortable part of this conversation.
He chuckled. “Now that is a very technical question. Logic helps us understand why some spiritual claims should be embraced and others disposed. And we are going to use logic which actually goes against pluralism. Pluralism claims that all truth claims even those that oppose each other are valid. They also claim all roads lead to the same end, applying it to religion, a Pluralist can claim all belief systems are true and all religions lead to God which is a very flawed view. A thing cannot be X and non X at the same time. Christians believe that Jesus is God. Islam and Judaism don’t, this means that one is right and two are wrong because Jesus cannot be God and not God at the same time. Spiritual truth is like a maze, one path leads to the truth, the others to a dead end that is why all faiths might look similar at the surface but differ in so many ways in their core doctrines.
“So does the Bible hold absolute truth? First we need to answer the core question all you atheists can’t stop asking. Does God exist?”
“Aha!” Lisa was getting way more excited than she anticipated.
“I think this question is actually the easiest to answer and I wonder why people even argue about this”, he went on. “The answer lies with you and me. Do we exist? If yes, then how did we come to exist? You do not get something from nothing. And you cannot deny you do not exist because you have to exist to deny your own existence. No one in the entire world has ever demonstrated that you can get something out of nothing which means this world, you and I, the air we breathe, and the oceans must have come out of something. An external being is responsible for our existence”.
“The Universe”, Lisa came in. “The Universe is the external being”.
“But you will agree with me that all scientific evidences point to the fact the Universe itself had a beginning and call this the Big Bang theory”, he was quick to reply. “Now if the Universe had a beginning, then it simply means it is not eternal. Something created that Universe. Anything that has a beginning must have a cause and that cause has to be an external creator. And this as a whole rules out Atheism as a valid belief system”. He smiled. “Interestingly enough, this also rules out all pantheistic religions. They believe that the universe is God and that the Universe is eternal and this is simply false. So Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and all other pantheistic religions are ruled. Now what are the characteristics of this creator? He is supernatural, which means he exists outside his creation. He is incredibly powerful, Eternal because he exists outside of time and space, Omnipresent because someone who created space cannot be limited by it, he is Timeless and Changeless because obviously, he created time, he is personal because the impersonal cannot create personality, he is necessary because everything depends on him since he created them and he is Intelligent. It may surprise you to know Mrs Agbaje that these are the characteristics of the God of Judaism, Islam and Christianity which are the only core faiths left standing after my assessment.”
Lisa stared at Phillip and she couldn’t deny she was impressed. She had never listened to a Christian with such knowledge and for a while she thought all what he said made perfect sense, but finally she decided she wasn’t convinced. Phillip just needed a stronger Atheist to go against him, maybe Judge Chinwe? She would have loved to see her biggest mentor shut him up, but till then, for the first time in her life, she had met a Christian smart enough to go toe to toe with her. But this was not about the debate, it was about the truth. Was Phillip right?
“I think we should stop here for now”, he suggested. “I don’t want to overload you for now”.
“You are a smart man Pastor Phillip”, she admitted.
“See? I don’t have an IQ of a chicken like you suggested the other day”, he laughed and she joined him.
“You read philosophy?” She inquired.
“Nah”, he replied. “I had always loved planes and space craft. So I wanted to be an astronaut. I graduated from Harvard with top honors in mechanical engineering and then I had a master’s degree in mathematics. Then I applied to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S and after the training, I was the only African that was selected”.
Lisa flung her mouth open in disbelief. “So what are you doing here?” She wondered.
“God called me”, he replied. “So you see, even without Revelations ministries I would still be able to afford suits of 50 thousand naira and even more”.
She was impressed. She had to admit she had never met a man like this before and it was just their second meeting. At least this was an interesting Christian. But she had another pressing question. “I used to be Christian, you know?” She informed him.
“Really?” He asked with keen interest.
“I was born into a Christian family. My father was a trader in Maiduguri and my mother was a teacher. I was the only daughter and I had two younger brothers, Michael and Stephen. Two handsome and troublesome boys”, she recalled with the hint of a smile. “One Sunday, I was 11, Michael was Nine and Stephen six. We went to our local church and I recall the worship section of the service. It was one of the best we had in a while and when our pastor took the mic he made a statement and he made it so convincingly, he said God was right there with us. And it was hard to argue with him”, she took a deep breath. “I felt pressed. I needed to use the rest room and it was outside the church I ran out. As I was in there I heard the explosions. Four big explosions and even the earth under my feet shook”. She paused for effect. “I ran out of the toilet and the smoke and soot almost blinded me”.
“I am so sorry”, Pastor Phillip apologized as her eyes got wet.
“I woke in the hospital and I heard the news”, she went on. “Four suicide bombers and everyone died. My parents, my brothers, the pastor, everybody in there. And the first thing I remembered after I was given the news was what the pastor said. ‘God is here’. And I kept asking myself, if God was really present why did that bomb go off?”
Phillip took a deep breath. “I think the question you should ask is, why did you feel pressed at that point in time?” He asked. “God was trying to save you”.
“And Michael? What about Stephen and my parents? Why couldn’t God save them? Is he that limited that in a church of over two hundred people, he could only save one?”
“You still have a purpose on earth…”
“And Stephen doesn’t?” She was raising her voice. “Stephen was six! Are you trying to tell me he had fulfilled his purpose? There were babies in the church all of them dead, if they had no purpose, then why did your God bring them into the world?”
“Proverbs 3 verse 5”, Phillip replied. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”. He quoted. “God created our minds, we can never understand him or his ways…”
“Ah!” She cut him short. “So this is the point where you can’t offer a logical explanation and you tell me that God works in mysterious ways that we can’t understand?”
“But he does”, he argued.
“Whenever you Christians are backed to a wall that is always the rubbish that comes out of your mouths”, she said irritated. “If you can offer me…”
The knock on the office door interrupted them and they knew exactly what that meant. “It is time to sign papers”, Phillip announced as they both jumped to their feet. She quickly wiped her eyes as Phillip opened his office door revealing the scary looking Osas Ojo standing outside. Those eyes! There was something about those eyes that Lisa couldn’t place.
“We are waiting for the two of you downstairs”, she announced.
“Go ahead”, Phillip instructed Lisa. “Need to get some other documents”.
Lisa didn’t want to walk with Osas, she was more comfortable with Pastor Phillip but she had no choice. She walked slowly towards Osas who stared at her without a hint of smile on her face. The secretary hated her! She could tell, but why? As they walked down, she began to wonder why she had met these people. No one had ever intimidated her like Phillip did and no one had ever scared her like Osas. Why Phillip intimidated her, she could tell but why did Osas scare her?
“Death is the way”, Osas said out of the blue and it made Lisa’s heart jump.
“What?”
“Death is the way”, she repeated. “The only way someone like you can find out the true existence of God”, she said with her very coarse voice. “There is nothing Pastor Phillip would say that can change your mindset but death will. What you see after death will convince you but then it would be too late”. She suddenly stopped just before they got downstairs and stopped Lisa too by grabbing her gently on the shoulder. “Let me advice you Monalisa Agbaje. Don’t die like this, because if you do, that last breath is longer than just a split second. Your whole life flashes before your eyes and it will make you realize that all this knowledge you think you have, is nothing. You will realize you were just a great fool”.
Lisa swallowed.
This chapter was edited by Glory Uwanna Kenneth.
NOTE: the next chapter "sheep among wolves" will be posted on the 14th of October. Please keep in touch.
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