Fr. Richard OMOLADE

Prophets and fortune tellers or soothsayers are fond of making predictions and claiming they were revealed to them by God.  With happenings in the world, a good observer of nature and world politics can make educated guesses and hit home. Sometimes the predictions are far off that one wonders if God spoke to them at all. Well, God may have spoken, and the medium didn’t understand what God had said. Why do people anticipate such predictions? It is simply because people want a sense of stability or certainty that they can plan with. We want a happy ending and expect that many prophecies will go in that line and if the prophecies are dire, we expect that the Men of God will know the solution to the problem and help to avert it.  Sometimes we want something badly and we look for confirmation of it from the mouth of a seer.  Such prophecies are reassuring even in our delusion. What is the way forward?

It has been said that the best way to predict the future is to prepare for it now. If we make adequate preparations and work assiduously, we can actualize the future of our dreams. The better future is thus within the reach of the prepared. The opposite is also true, “People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan” and in their unpreparedness and indolence the future they fear materializes and they are terrified and left in disarray. With enough data to process the quantum of information at our disposals, machines can accurately predict a lot of things, such as the possibility of rain, the amount of yield a farm will produce, the probability of an asteroid hitting the earth. It is such probability that is within the human reach that helps expert to predict behaviour and the likelihood that an offender will do it again. But sometimes they fail to predict things correctly and then talk about things at variance from the normal population.

Human behaviour is extremely difficult to predict even when you feel you know someone, but what you know is always a good indicator to rely upon, but the future is much more complex because you are dealing not just with one person, but with many people and probably with issues of economics, weather, finance, security among others. Consequently, the wise don’t wait for seers to tell them what the future will look like, they design it and work to actualize it. No wonder, it has been said that “foresight is a matter of studying the present, learning from the past and understanding the needs of the future.”

Today, many pastors and seers are charlatans looking for relevance and not content with being motivational speakers, they would like to be viewed as shapers and movers of people’s destinies. These people exploit people’s vulnerabilities and desires for the good things of life and gave forecast that build essentially on people’s hopes for a better life. If you want a better future, you must wake from your dreams and face reality. Sadly, many people are filled with their dreams and are unable to think critically about life until they are left behind. Life and indeed, better life favours the prepared and not just those who desire it.  Thus, the accusation that religion is the opium of the Masses is true because many men of God have usurped people’s religious attitude and inclinations to foist certain things on them and then claim they are from God.

In the Bible, the prophets were mouthpieces for God. They spoke not their own words, but God’s word. The message they proclaimed was never theirs, but God’s and  they delivered it the way God wanted it delivered, no wonder, it roused nations and people to repentance and personal and collective transformation. Having called people to the worship of God or make me feel good worship that is the bane of today’s Churches, pastors must motivate people to rise up and face reality. They must also equip people to shape the reality around them and bring about desirable changes that uplift people and add value to life.

Regrettably, it seems only pastor’s purses are being transformed. They have vested interest but no real knowledge, then they cajole the masses to believe their words and then live in fear until they run to the pastors who for a fee deliver from their phantom fear of the future. The saying is worth holding onto, “Those who have knowledge do not predict. They utilize their knowledge, transforming it into action plans by building up the future piece by piece. On the other hand, they who predict, have no knowledge, they spoke fear and doubt, they advertised the medicine and motivate you to purchase the product of someone else’s knowledge.

The time has come for us to build a knowledge-based society where knowledge transforms our systems into manageable parts and information driven by tested data combine with knowledge to lead us to the future of our imaginations. This future is possible, and it is within our reach, but we must first wake from our dreams, leave behind unfounded predictions and face the reality.