Bishop Edir Macedo and Homosexuality
By Julio
Severo
The official
website of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) announced that its
founder, Bishop Edir Macedo, has a stance different, in the homosexual issue,
of the position of many evangelical leaders in Brazil.
 |
| Bishop Edir Macedo |
According
to the website, Macedo said, “God does not want nothing by force. And we in the
Universal Church do not impose anything on anyone… There are many evangelicals,
ministers and churches raising a flag against the homosexual movement and
against homosexual marriage. I ask: would Jesus do it if He were living in our
time? I do not believe that He would do it, because in His time there were
homosexuals and Jesus did not speak anything. Jesus did not raise a flag,
saying, ‘Look, you should speak up against homosexuality, that it is forbidden,
that it should not be done.’”
Macedo
presented his view immediately expressing a contradictory information, because
there is imposition at UCKG — concerning offerings. Many of the services of
this strange neo-Pentecostal church are dedicated to impose on the members’
consciences that with no big offerings, there is no blessing. Even though it is
not a legal pressure, it is a psychological imposition and manipulation. The
result of the psychological pressure is offering money flooding the UCKG safes
and making its biggest leaders rich, including Macedo, who rolls in money at
offerers’ expense
Actually,
Jesus made an abundance of miracles of healing and deliverance, but you never
see Him saying, “If you want to receive a miracle, take part in the Miracle
Campaign, with an offering (psychologically compulsory, as usual) from 50
percent or more of your income. You need to sacrifice your pocket!” No, with
Jesus no one needed to empty his pockets and fill others’ pockets. But
everybody received miracles. With Macedo is different: only those who fill his
pocket are worthy to receive miracles. Big sacrifices, big miracles. His
theology is an aggressive prosperity theology.
As to
Macedo’s politically correct view that Jesus did not speak up against homosexuality,
this perspective, which is not originally from him, has been expressed by
progressive Protestants (progressive in Brazil is another designation for
socialist). Rev. Carlos Bezerra, who is considered an ideal politician by the liberal
sensationalist tabloid Genizah, said in 2013:
“How many
times did Jesus speak about homosexuality? I answer: Never… Were homosexuals in
the top list of people most confronted by Him?”
Bezerra
is also a state representative and the most prominent leader of PSDB in the São
Paulo state. (PSDB is the social democratic party in Brazil. Even though PSDB
has opposed the ruling socialist Workers’ Party, PSDB founder Fernando Henrique
Cardoso is a close friend of Bill Clinton. In the last Brazilian presidential
election, David Axelrod, a Marxist strategist who was the top Obama adviser,
came to Brazil to build the political image of the PSDB candidate. So the
political fight in Brazil has been anti-U.S. leftists against pro-U.S.
leftists.) It is with his conviction that Jesus has never condemned
homosexuality that Bezerra never mobilized PSDB to hinder several homosexualist
laws furiously advancing in the São Paulo state, ruled by PSDB.
Answering
Macedo, who is imitating Bezerra, you could also say, “How many times did Jesus
speak about child abuse? I answer: Never… Were child abusers in the top list of
people most confronted by Him?”
Should
you remove the gay agenda and child abuse from Christian concerns just because
Jesus never mentioned them directly?
Jesus
just did not attack head-on the homosexual agenda because this was not the
obsession in the Jewish society where he preached the Gospel. Each generation
has its own challenges and special attention. Without the Holy Spirit to guide
us in God’s Word, it is impossible to give an answer to these challenges and
special attentions. In this point, it is important to give attention to
Luther’s words, “If I declare openly, with the loudest voice and the clearest
expression, each portion of God’s truth, except precisely the tiny portion that
the world and the devil are, in this time, attacking, then I am not really confessing
Christ, however much I may cry aloud that I am confessing Him.”
Did
Jesus speak or not against homosexuality? If you believe God’s Word, the answer
is yes.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 ESV)
Jesus
is the Word. When you read Leviticus or Romans condemning homosexual acts, it
is Jesus speaking. When you read the Old or the New Testament condemning homosexual
acts, it is Jesus speaking.
In
this point, some could conclude that Macedo is following some crazy prophecy or
revelation that made him stray from God’s Word. Actually, Macedo rejects all
prophecy and revelation for today. He believes that such manifestations of the
Holy Spirit were available only 2,000 years ago and that today prophecies and
revelations are demonic. Regarding to prophecies and revelations, he follows
the cessationist
heresy.
So if
a prophecy or revelation comes to Macedo saying “Macedo, stop supporting the socialist
Workers’ Party. Stop advocating abortion. Stop joining liberals to attack my
servants who warn about the gay agenda” his answer will be, “Shoo, Satan! I
expel you from my life with all your false directions.”
I
believe in Christian revelations and prophecies as gifts given by the Holy
Spirit to equip his church. But do I need these gifts to reject the socialist
Workers’ Party, abortion and the gay agenda? Of course, I do not. I have never
needed these gifts to know that socialism, abortion and the gay agenda are malignant.
And
how to say that fighting these malignant agendas has no part in a prophetic
manifestation in the last days? A prophecy in Malachi 4 says that before the
great Day of the Lord, He will send Prophet Elijah, whose ministry was to fight
the worship of god Baal, which was rife with baby sacrifice — equivalent today
to abortion — and homosexual priests — equivalent today to the current
condition of homosexuality, which is considered sacred by dirty laws.
This
is, Prophet Malachi prophesied a restoration of Elijah’s prophetic ministry for
the last days. Oh, I forgot that Macedo does not believe in prophecies…
If
Macedo is not following prophecies and revelations, so whom is he following? In
the homosexual issue, he is following Bezerra, who is liberal. But Macedo’s
embrace of socialism is not new. Even though he today condemns pastors raising
a flag against the gay movement and homosexual “marriage,” he is famous for his
political endorsement of Brazilian socialist former and current presidents Lula
and Dilma Rousseff. For years, Macedo has been raising a Workers’ Party flag at
UCKG.
Using
the same Macedo’s rule of measure, I ask: Would Jesus do it if He were living
in our time? I do not believe that He would do it.
Although
he declares that UCKG does not impose anything on anyone, apparently no UCKG
minister remembers it in election time, when they impose on their congregations
the choice of just candidates handpicked by the UCKG national leaders. And when
these candidates are elected, their work has to be aligned with the UCKG big boss’
commands. If the big boss raises the Workers’ Party flag, everybody else are
supposed to follow him.
I
ask: Would Jesus do it if He were living in our time? I do not believe that He
would do it.
And
coincidently the Workers’ Party (WP) main flag has been abortion and
homosexuality. With this flag, WP attacks any individual opposing abortion and
homosexuality. In fact, every socialist will make the same attack. This is the
reason Ed René Kivitz and other Brazilian progressive Protestants advocate gay
rights and attack Assemblies of God minister Silas Malafaia and others in their
conservative stances against abortion and the gay agenda. In the same vein,
Carlos Bezerra of PSDB and Macedo of UCKG make the same attacks.
I
liked more when UCKG, in the late 1970s, had an aggressive focus on delivering
people from the oppression of Afro-Brazilian religions — which are very similar
to voodoo and Santeria and, according to the Bible, are witchcraft. Today, the UCKG’s
aggressive focus is to take money from people and invest in the fortunes of
UCKG Solomons, who abound in greed, but are pauper in wisdom and Christian
love.
During
the 1980s and 1990s UCKG was conservative and pro-life. In 1993 a UCKG
newspaper in São Paulo declared,
According to the Bible teaching,
God gave free will to every human being. In other words, he gave to each
individual the ability to choose what he wishes to do with his life. But the
right to grant and take the life of an individual belongs only to God. First Samuel
2:6 says: “The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings
down to Sheol and raises up” (ESV). No case of rape, or a
risk of a child to be born with physical or mental deficiency, entitles a human
to take somebody’s life. The Bible teaches that all is possible to him who
believes (Mark 9:23). Therefore, the cases that in the science’s eyes appear to
be impossible become possible in God’s eyes.
In
1996, Folha Universal (the official UCKG newspaper in Brazil) said,
This procedure (abortion), often
insane, besides provoking the death of a small being, who has no minimal chance
of defending himself, can lead its committer to death. Well, no one has a right
to take the life of other individual.
Yet,
afterward UCKG began to get near WP and support abortion. Before the election
of Lula for the Brazilian presidency in 2002, Bishop Rodrigues, who was one of
the UCKG founders, made political pilgrimages among evangelical leaders,
proclaiming, “We have the obligation to dedicate ourselves in the Lula
campaign… So let us embrace a new way of doing politics. It is action
socialism.”
Rodrigues
even asked forgiveness from Lula for the years UCKG had opposed him.
In
2003, he committed another fatal sin: he asked forgiveness from Afro-Brazilian
religions’ adherents at the Brazilian Congress floor for the “opposition” UCKG
had made against them. No much later, Rodrigues was swallowed by the vortex of
WP’s political scandals.
The
Brazilian religion that most embraces the homosexual sin is Candomblé, with
other Afro-Brazilian religions and witchcraft. When Rodrigues, as the top UCKG
representative in the Brazilian Congress, asked forgiveness from these
religions, he gave a green light to the demons of these religions, including
demons of homosexuality.
All
that is needed now is for UCKG and Macedo to ask forgiveness from Luiz Mott,
the most prominent leader in the homosexual movement in Brazil, for all the
demons of homosexuality they expelled from sorcerers during decades.
Yet, to
those who are surprised at Macedo now raising the flag of opposition to
evangelicals fighting the gay agenda, it is worthy to remember that the UCKG
founder has carried, for years, the disgraceful flag of explicit abortion
advocacy. In 2013, Macedo said, “I support abortion yes, and I say it without
fearing the consequences, and if I am sinning, I commit this sin fully aware,
yes!”
In
the official biography “O Bispo: A História Revelada de Edir Macedo” (The
Bishop: The Revealed History of Edir Macedo), published in 2007, authors
Christina Lemos and Douglas Tavolaro reveal what Macedo says:
“I support the right of a woman to
choose… I support abortion, yes. The Bible also does it… A woman needs to have
the right to choose.”
Now,
he supports homosexuals having a supposed right to choose homosexual “marriage,”
to the detriment of the natural family.
Therefore,
his new stance on homosexuality should be no surprise, because it is just a
natural progression of somebody who chose the advocacy of the legal slaughter
of the unborn. It is the “progress” of decadence.
I
suppose if Macedo lived in the time of King Ahab and Jezebel, he would have given
them support. How do I know it? Because he has supported modern Ahab (Lula) and
modern Jezebel (Dilma).
As to
Prophet Elijah, who made so much opposition to Ahab and Jezebel, Macedo would
say: “God does not want nothing by force. There are many ‘prophets’ raising a
flag against Baal worship, baby sacrifice and homosexual priests…”
Macedo,
who began his ministry expelling demons, now needs abortion and sodomy demons
expelled from him.
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