from www.worldwatchmonitor.org Nigeria: ‘Government is Boko Haram but without bomb’, says church leader

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January 20, 2020 By World Watch Monitor NigeriaBoko Haram, Fulani herdsmen, Islamic State West Africa Province, Leah Sharibu, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria

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A mother sits mourning the death of her husband after Boko Haram attacks at Dalori village on the outskirts of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria on 31 January 2016.

Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, is visiting the United Kingdom this week to discuss trade and investment amid increased criticism from church leaders back home who say the government is effectively enabling attacks on Christians in the country.

“They [the government] are using the levers of power to secure the supremacy of Islam, which then gives more weight to the idea that it can be achieved by violence,” Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto told the charity Aid to the Church in Need earlier this month. “With the situation in Nigeria, it is hard to see the moral basis they have to defeat Boko Haram.”

The bishop spoke out after the beheading of 10 Christians by the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) on Christmas day and an attack by the Islamist group Boko Haram on Christmas eve in which seven people were killed.

“The only difference between the government and Boko Haram is Boko Haram is holding a bomb,” the bishop said, adding the Buhari government had created the environment in which Islamist groups like Boko Haram could thrive.

“It is not a lie that this government is favouring Islam,” said Rev. Gideon Para-Mallam, a prominent evangelical leader in Nigeria, pointing at how Buhari’s political appointments are all Muslim while Nigeria’s population is a nearly even balance of Christian and Muslim.

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There have been too many unfulfilled promises, he toldNigeria Everyday. Para-Mallam has been an advocate for the release of Leah Sharibu, a Christian teenager who was abducted by Boko Haram almost two years ago and is believed to still be detained by the group. Last year Buhari promised her family he would do all he could to bring her back. “If the government is truly committed to ending some of these impunities, the crises and the attacks on Christians would have stopped, a lot more could have been done to achieve this,” said the pastor.

Nigeria is 12th on Open Doors’ 2020 World Watch Listof the 50 countries where it is most difficult to live as a Christian, which was released this week. Just as in 2019, Nigeria’s score for violence was at maximum, due to attacks by Islamist Fulani militants, Boko Haram and other armed groups. Some 1,350 Nigerian Christians lost their lives in the violence.

What About Creation, Flood, and Language Division Legends? www.answersingenesis.org

Chapter 17

What About Creation, Flood, and Language Division Legends?

by Troy Lacey and Bodie Hodge on January 18, 2020

 
 

When we understand and embrace God’s Word, we will know the difference between the truth and the lies, and we won’t be deceived.

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Introduction

Nearly every culture around the world has a creation legend, and just as many have worldwide flood legends, and, believe it or not, there are even many language division legends around the world in different and diverse cultures.

In today’s highly secularized culture, there are attacks on the Bible using these legends. Those who do not trust what the Bible plainly says often speculate that the Bible’s discussion about creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel are just more legends and determine that the Bible cannot be trusted. What these attackers fail to realize is that these legends are a great confirmation of the Bible and that the Bible retains the true account recorded by God in His Word. From a historical perspective, these legends make perfect sense and are consistent with a biblical worldview, but it is hard to explain all these legends from a secular evolutionary worldview — people supposedly evolved and slowly filled the earth with a gradual changing of languages and no global Flood. Why then should we find so many common threads in so many accounts from all over the world? The evolutionary explanation fails to provide a reason for commonality, whereas the biblical one does.

The Nature of “Legends”

Of course, many of these legends have been distorted and have become highly mythologized and embellished over time; and these embellishments are to be expected as people dispersed from Babel and the knowledge of God and mankind’s early history was forgotten or turned into folklore. Many have common themes involving mankind being created from clay; a remnant understanding of God (i.e., a “god”) as angry with mankind for some reason; large boats (or rafts) being constructed to survive a coming flood, often foretold to the hero by this “god”; animals being collected by the hero in order to survive the coming deluge, and so on. Many of these legends sometimes still bear striking resemblances in many particulars to biblical accounts.

Many, though, are drastically different and show corruption from an original account, as one would expect from an orally passed-down story. Others show details that seem to be in direct contrast to the biblical accounts of creation and the Flood. We see numerous examples of “gods” being killed to create the physical earth and/or heavens, mankind given power by the “gods” to create the animals, mankind re-creating the earth after the Flood, animals that rescue people from the Flood, and so on. Some of these may be the result of distortion over time, while others may be a deliberate attempt by post-Babel peoples to reshape the world and the “gods” in their own image. Romans chapter 1 clearly shows that human hearts and minds willfully suppress the true God and make up one in their own image, or in the image of animals (see also Genesis 8:21; Exodus 32:4–8; 1 Kings 12:28–33; and Jeremiah 17:5–9).

Legends from Genesis 1–11 That Confirm the Bible

There is no way to exhaustively cover this topic in such a short article, as there are literally hundreds of books detailing these creation, Flood, and language division legends. Rather, ten of each will be discussed in the following tables.