Touch not my anointed

It is very exciting for someone to know that he is secured anywhere he is. It is more so, if the security is not from man but from the Almighty God. With confidence and absolute boldness, God declared that the sun will not smite His children by day or the moon by night. All through history, no man has contested this claim of God, and no man will do so.

I used to visit the women of easy virtue and minister to them. I was surprised when one of them told me one day the huge amount of money they made daily. Her pain was that they spend virtually everything on personal protection. Her reason was that in their peculiar business, competition is very rife, and it is between the old and young prostitutes. The old ones are not happy with the young ones, who they envy and accuse them of snatching their customers. The result is that all of them, ancient and modern, guilty or not, patronize native doctors for protection and for getting customers.

“Touch not My anointed,” is God’s warning to Satan and his agents. It is not an appeal, but a command to him. A command is issued by a superior authority to the people under him and it must be obeyed. Satan has no choice but to obey this command, otherwise he will face the wrath of God.  He may harm any other person but not the children of God.

This privilege is not for everybody. It is for a particular set of people – God’s children, so long as they are loyal to Him. It raises the question, “Who are they?” It is possible for a youth to claim that a certain rich and well-known man is his father, especially if the two of them have a common surname and are from the same compound. With that deception, the youth may be obtaining favours from the public. 

It is not so with God. His promises can be claimed only by His obedient children, who are in different churches. These are the people who realised one day, through His Word, that they were sinners. They repented of their sin and surrendered their lives to the Lord Jesus and started to live a life that is acceptable to Him. May I point out that “God’s anointed”, does not mean Pastors. It is for all believers, whether they are pastors or not, who God has set apart for His use. They do not do what they like, but what He directs them to do.

How can Satan attempt to touch, one may wonder, the people God has set apart? He can do so by leading them into sin and simplifying it as if it is the normal lifestyle. He lied to Eve about God. Contrary to what God had told her and Adam, that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit, he told her that they would not. They ate it and it brought death to us. The good news is that Satan cannot force us to sin. He deceived them to sin, knowing that it separates us from God and it makes us to be strangers to His promises. Our ugly situation will not change if we live in sin and still claim God’s promises. Those who know us as believers, may lose confidence in God as well as the veracity of His Word.

Satan may afflict believers, also with sicknesses, so as to hinder them from effective performance of the work God has given them. Satan’s attack on them is thus an attack on God. It is unfortunate that when we are afflicted with any sickness, we may lie on our beds satisfied with the drugs given to us in the hospital, without fighting back.

I have not forgotten the question my good friend, now late, Prof. Francis Onofeghara, past Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Port Harcourt, asked us during a Bible study. “Which is easier, to rush to the hospital when you are sick, or to bow before God in your house and claim your healing?”

Satan can bring us affliction also, in various other ways. It can be by the death of our family member or of someone very close to us. It can be also, by recession in our business. The overall effect is for the believer to be blaming God and angry with Him instead of being angry with the culprit.     

Knowing our rights and enforcing them is the prerequisite for our success and spiritual growth. May we not forget what I wrote in this column many years ago, how in Enugu Campus of the University of Nigeria, one of the children of the Deputy Vice Chancellor then resisted the threat of a student to beat him.

“You can’t beat me, my dad is a Prof,” he told the student. And upon hearing that, the student had to beat a retreat. Oh, that all God’s children will learn from this and realise that our father is greater than all university professors put together! Oh, that we will know that Vice Chancellors and Chancellors, who know God, bow before Him, the God that warns Satan and his agents, not to touch us! Oh, that we will realise that if a boy in the secondary school could know and assert the personality of his dad, we must do better than him, realising that we have a far much bigger dad than his.      

God’s warning to Satan, not to touch His children, is for our protection. If we commit sin, Satan will protest before God that he is not touching His obedient children, but the disobedient ones. “These men I am afflicting used to be Your obedient servants, and I didn’t touch them. Now, they have compromised their faith, hence I am touching them,” he will argue. Mothers wrap their children with a cloth when the children are sick or the weather is cold, covering every part of their children’s body. At midnight, a child may bring out one of his legs from the covering. It may or may not be deliberate. The effect is the same, it may affect his health. There is nothing the mum will do. May we remain covered under God’s canopy!   

Some people have ignored this serious warning not to afflict believers and they paid bitterly for it. Satan made King Saul to disobey God’s instruction and in consequence, he lost his crown. In his bid to kill David, the man after God’s heart, he lost his life. Goliath, the Philistine Army General, perished for fighting the children of God. It was not his fellow Army General that God used in killing him, but David, an idle civilian, who leaned on the believers’ weapon of warfare, which is not carnal but mighty through God.

Lawyers tell us that nobody can benefit from something he is not aware of. If there is a publication that a certain amount of money will be given to someone who performed a certain thing, and someone who was not aware of the offer performed it, he will not be given anything. To be benefitting from the promises of God, we should be aware of them through consistent reading and studying of His Word.

If a believer sins, the first thing he must do is to repent of it and then he will plead with God for forgiveness. He will be free then to claim God’s promises and He will answer him.

For further comment, Please contact: Osondu Anyalechi:  0909 041 9057; [email protected]