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by Kevin Pauley
"If you are not careful to obey all the words of this law, which are written in this scroll, by fearing this glorious and awesome name--Yahweh, your God-- He will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, severe and lasting plagues, and terrible and chronic sicknesses. He will afflict you again with all the diseases of Egypt, which you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The LORD will also inflict you with every sickness and plague not recorded in the book of this law, until you are destroyed.” - Deuteronomy 28:58-61 HCSB
India was once one of the most evangelized nations on earth. Thousands of missionaries from England and the United States have gone there for several hundred years. Nevertheless, India has steadfastly refused the message of the Gospel and has maintained a culture that possesses as many gods as it does humans. The result?
- According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in India, 5.1 million people are HIV positive – the largest number of people living with HIV outside South Africa.
- There are an estimated 200,000 children with HIV who are under 15 years old in the country, while some 50,000 to 60,000 children are born with HIV each year, despite the fact that drugs now exist to immunize such children.
Imagine losing 8,500 people a day – every day and to know that the very same long, slow lingering and painful death awaits you around every corner. Imagine watching the gradual collapse of your nation because so many people have died that no one is left to maintain the most basic of infrastructures.
The AIDS pandemic is so bad that when a CEO of a multinational corporation recently visited employees in South Africa and asked them what they would like from their company, their response was a hearse! They had so many hundreds of their family members dying of AIDS that a hearse to carry the bodies to grave sites was their number one priority!
AIDS has decreased life expectancy by two decades, dissolved families, crippled the workforce, disrupted marginal infrastructures, impeded the health and educational development necessary to rise above extreme poverty, reduced economic growth, halted productivity, weakened the government, undermined national security and invited armed conflict.
All these numbers…it may seem overwhelming, mind-numbing. However, the Ransomed hold to the strange notion that even one preventable death is too many. One life snuffed out because of a preventable disease is a tragedy.
The principle of divinely sent plagues is not a popular one and many will likely mock such an archaic and outmoded view. I simply ask that you consider that I have lived on the continent of Africa and seen this process with my own eyes. I have seen what happens when a nation turns from Christian principles and toward devil worship with its ritual violence, substance abuse and promiscuous sex.
I am afraid I am seeing it again.
Kevin Pauley is a pastor and writer. He lives in Illinois with his wife, Lynn, their five children and two dogs. His internet address is Berea.
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