Oprah has ALL the answers!

Back when I first started this blog, I spent a lot of time ripping on Oprah Winfrey. I later moved on to blogging about more weighty matters, but I have been meaning to get back to Oprah for awhile. In fact, I still have an active Oprah tag. For a quick synopsis of some of my previous work on Oprah, see the links below. A lot of these are old articles from my early days of blogging when I was more incendiary, but I still affirm the basic principles of enunciated in these older posts:

• Could Oprah Winfrey be the Antichrist?
• Oprah and the New Age
• The One World Religion in the Making

In fact, one of my old articles on Oprah's silly comments about God's jealousy even became the core of a chapter on the subject in my work on reconciling difficult Scripture passages, The Book of Non-Contradiction.

Back when I used to suggest that Oprah was prime material for the Antichrist, I only meant this in the sense that the false "feel good" religion she preaches would be of the same sort we would see peddled at the End of Times—as well as the fact that the kind of cultic influence she has on her followers would be of the same nature as the influence the Antichrist would wield. It was a comparison by simile.

However, following Oprah's speech at the 2018 Golden Globes - for which she was lauded with nothing short of idolatrous adulation - and the subsequent speculation that she would run for president in 2020 - I am starting to think that the comparisons I have drawn may be more than just simile.

I am not positively suggesting that Oprah Winfrey is the Antichrist, and there is always a bit of "tongue in cheek" present whenever I discuss this. But I do see the trajectory Oprah's career has followed, with the virtual mind-control she exerts over her followers and the uncritical praise she elicits from pop-culture, as something very much in the mold of the spirit of Antichrist—especially as her immense social capital begins to morph into political capital.

Oprah and the New Age

Oprah Winfrey is a well known proponent of mystical, New Age ideologies. There is nothing new about celebrities being involved in New Age mysticism, but in Oprah's case it is especially dangerous because she is such a well-respected figure, commanding the admiration and I would even say obedience of millions around the world.

I have spoken before on the tragedy of Oprah's falling away from the Christian faith due to a tragic but simple misunderstanding of the phrase "I am a jealous God" from the Old Testament; at least, this is the reason she herself cites for her apostasy. But how did she go from baptist skeptic to New Age ideologue, and what exactly are her current New Age connections?

According to Oprah, this transition happened because of a book entitled Discover the Power Within You by "Unity" minister Eric Butterworth. The Unity Church movement, like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, uses your standard Christian vocabulary - God, Christ, the Bible, etc. - but means things totally different by these terms than orthodox Catholics or even conservative Christians would understand by them. For example, "Christ" means the divinity in all people; the historical Jesus is a great teacher who exemplifies the full expression of what it means to discover the "Christ" within you. Prayer is seen as a rejection of negative energy, and so on and so forth.

Oprah, upon reading this book, said, "This book changed my perspective on life and religion. Eric Butterworth teaches that God isn't "up there." He exists inside each one of us, and it's up to us to seek the divine within." This universal immanence of God within all of us, excluding His transcendence or any moral demands upon the human subject of God's indwelling, inform all of Oprah's spirituality. 

She has used her fame and the forum of her television program to promote this spiritual vision; in fact, if one takes a topical look at all of the guests on her show over the years, it could be argued that the majority of them have been dedicated to promoting this New Age vision. Take the example of Gary Zukav. Zukav was a physicist who began delving into New Age spirituality in the 1980's, culminating in his best selling book The Seat of the Soul (1989), which taught that the human being was evolving to a point where the existence of the soul would be known and felt empirically - that just as humans evolved to use reason, so they would evolve, and were evolving, to master the powers of the soul. The utilitarian "use" of the souls powers would be as natural as the use of sight or speech. Zukav claimed to be able to possess this ability and taught that others could as well through "moving beyond the limitations of the five senses." 

Zukav was first featured on Oprah in 1998 and since then has appeared on her show 35 times, which is more than any other guest. Oprah says Zukav's book is her favorite book of all time "except the Bible"; by her own admission, Oprah keeps a copy of this book by her bedside. Another favorite New Age author of Oprah is Eckhart Tolle. Oprah summarized Tolle's teaching as about religious experience primarily, "God is a feeling experience and not a believing experience. If your religion is a believing experience, then that's not truly God." (source). In her insistence on religious experience over objective religious fulfillment in any beatific vision, and her belief in universal divine immanence in all humanity, Oprah is nothing other than a New Age modernist.

With her audience of 22 million, mostly female, adherents, Oprah's propagation of these views has tremendous consequences. Christianity Today once called her one of "America's most influential spiritual leaders" (source). For most of you, this is old news; but is important to know, especially if you know a Christian friend who is taken by Oprah. She is a false messiah and a very dangerous priestess of modernism.

Related: Oprah and the Big Questions of Life

The "jealousy" of God

"Zeal for your house consumes me" (Psalm 69:9).

In a now famous statement, Oprah Winfrey once spoke on her Baptist upbringing and how it was that she lost her faith in mainstream Christianity, ultimately in favor of New Age thought. She related about ten years ago:

"I was raised a Baptist and we were too hung up on traditional ways. I was sitting in church and heard that God is a jealous God. I asked 'Why?' Come on-let's get over it!" (source)

What Oprah eventually concluded was that a loving God could not possibly be jealous, since jealousy is a purely human affection, and a particularly petty one at that. Therefore God could not be a jealous God, as the Bible states. The god Oprah eventually settled on is a god that does not care what people think about him - he is aloof and all-embracing, and certainly not jealous by any stretch.

It certainly cannot be denied that God calls Himself "jealous" in the Old Testament; in fact, right in the Decalogue. The prohibitions against idol worship in the first commandment are concluded with the statement, "I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous." What is this jealousy that God attributes to Himself and which Oprah thinks so little of?

Let's begin by looking at this verse quoted above in Exodus 20:5, "I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous." (Lat. (ego sum Dominus Deus tuus fortis zelotes) .Notice two things here: first that the original Latin word is "zelotes", the same word that is used in the New Testament to describe one of the Apostles, Simon the Zealot. This shows a connection between the ideas of "jealousy" and "zeal" in the Scriptures; the connection is a semantic connection in meaning, as well as an etymological connection, as I will demonstrate.

Second, notice that the designation of God as "jealous" follows immediately upon the warnings against idolatry, suggesting that God wishes us to understand this attribute of His nature specifically against the backdrop of the sin of idolatry.

Regarding the first point, the connection between "jealousy" and "zeal", we need to first understand that both of these words come from the same source, the Latin word zelus, which itself comes from the Greek zelos, which sometimes means jealously in the negative sense but also emulation, rivalry or zeal. It is quite interesting that this one root can have two opposing derivations - a positive and a negative aspect of jealousy. We can be jealous "of" or jealous "for"; to be jealous of means to envy something we do not have; to be jealous for means to desire to retain something good one already has, as we shall see. On the great etymology website Etymology Online I found this interesting comment on Indo-European words origins for "envy" and "jealousy":

"Most of the words for 'envy' ... had from the outset a hostile force, based on 'look at' (with malice), 'not love,' etc. Conversely, most of those which became distinctive terms for 'jealousy' were originally used also in a good sense, 'zeal, emulation.' " [Buck, pp.1138-9, source]

We know of course as a theological truth that God cannot be "jealous" in the petty, human way. But Scripturally we see this to be the case as well if we understand God's "jealously" more in keeping with the root word than with the common English usage; that is, as "zeal." This is the type of zeal expressed by our Lord when He drove the money changers from the Temple, of which the Scriptures said, "Zeal for your house will consume me" (Ps. 68:9, John 2:17). See how God is said to be zealous/jealous "for" something?

Very well, so we can say that if God is jealous, it is not in the petty human way that we mean when we use the word jealously in the context of malice or envy, but rather more in the context of zeal. So we have a God. whose jealousy is understood in terms of zeal "for" us. What does this mean exactly? For this answer, we need to go back to our second point: that the designation of God as "jealous" follows immediately upon the warnings against idolatry.

This gets to what I said above about jealousy "for" something being a desire to retain a good already possessed. This type of jealousy flows from the possession of a true good and a consequent desire to see that good preserved. This desire for the well-being of the good puts one in conflict with anything that detracts from the goodness of the object/person, or which could deprive the lover of the object loved. The Scriptures use this phrase to describe the affections of a man for his wife when there is a suspicion of real (or imaginary) adultery, that is, when he feels he has "lost" his beloved to someone else:

Num. 5:11-15: Then the LORD said to Moses, "Speak to the Israelites and say to them: 'If a man's wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him by sleeping with another man, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure- then he is to take his wife to the priest.

Knowing that the Lord's covenant with His people is spoken of in marital terms, and that idolatry is spiritual adultery (see Hosea 1:2), we should not be surprised then if this language about God being "jealous" is used in connection with the worship of idols and false gods. This is in fact the case all throughout Scripture, beginning in the Decalogue with the first commandment and continuing on throughout the whole of the Old Testament. Consider the following verses, noting the connection between jealousy and idolatry:

Ex. 34:14: Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

Deut. 4:23-24: Be careful not to forget the covenant of the LORD your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything the LORD your God has forbidden. For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. Deut. 6:14-16: Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; for the LORD your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land. Do not test the LORD your God as you did at Massah.

Deut. 32:16-17: They made him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols.They sacrificed to demons, which are not God - gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers did not fear.

Jos. 24:19-20: Joshua said to the people, "You are not able to serve the LORD. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins. If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you."

Psalm 78:57-59: Like their fathers they were disloyal and faithless, as unreliable as a faulty bow.They angered him with their high places; they aroused his jealousy with their idols. When God heard them, he was very angry; he rejected Israel completely.

Ezk. 8:2-4: I looked, and I saw a figure like that of a man. From what appeared to be his waist down he was like fire, and from there up his appearance was as bright as glowing metal. He stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head. The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood. And there before me was the glory of the God of Israel, as in the vision I had seen in the plain.

Nahum 1:1-2,14: An oracle concerning Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The LORD takes vengeance on his foes and maintains his wrath against his enemies...The LORD has given a command concerning you, Nineveh : "You will have no descendants to bear your name. I will destroy the carved images and cast idols that are in the temple of your gods. I will prepare your grave, for you are vile."

The message here is undeniable: we can only understand the jealously of God for His people against the existence of competing loyalties that distract us from God and drive us from Him, in Israel's case literal false gods. God is passionately intent on possessing us and on not sharing us with other gods or rival loyalties. This is to be understood in the same way that a husband or wife is "jealous" of their spouse, insofar as they desire his/her highest good, are privy to a special, exclusive relationship with one another, and demand/expect this exclusivity to be respected and honored by the virtue of marital fidelity.

Is there anyone out there so foolish as to say that a man's jealousy to the exclusive marital relationship with his wife against other competitors is the same as the petty, vain jealously of, say, a man who covets his neighbor's new car? The latter seeks through envy to possess something lacking; the former seeks through charity to preserve a good from corruption or loss. It is in this second sense that we must understand God's jealously - a jealous zeal for His people, due to His great love, which is in hostility towards anything that would take us from Him, knowing that our true and highest good lies in communion with our Creator. This is the divine zeal with which God pursues souls.

Does Oprah care? Not really. The statement of hers listed above about her confusion over God's "jealously" is really no reason to disbelieve in God; it's a simple misunderstanding, a stumbling block, a block which she uses to justify her desire to seek not that which is true but that which is gratifying to the flesh. Her statement reflects not an argument against a Christian God, nor even a real doubt; just a difficulty - one that could have been cleared up with ten minutes of study.

Well, even if I doubt Oprah Winfrey will read this and repent, perhaps it will help someone else who has been deluded by Oprah's poison to see just a little more clearly.

Oprah is "foolish twitter and twaddle"

Many other Christians are growing alarmed at Oprah's 46 million strong "church," and the evangelicals are starting to condemn her en masse. Take this little blurb from Religion News Service:

In recent months, Southern Baptist newspaper editors also have written editorials declaring "It's time for Christians to `just say no' to the big `O'" and calling her a source of "foolish twitter and twaddle." And Charisma, a prominent charismatic and Pentecostal magazine, ran a story in its July issue with the headline "Oprah's Strange New Gospel.'"

Read the whole article here.

The One-World religion in the making?

Have you heard of this new "Church," which had over 300,000 attendants on its first service and now has over 2 million? It is deceiving millions and indoctrinating Christians in New Age teaching. Guess who runs it? You guessed. These are somewhat long, but worth viewing. I'd keep my eyes in this person, and also on this false prophet Eckhart Tolle, a minion of hell.



Here's a video exposing the occultic background of Oprah's spiritual advisors, Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson (though it is a promo for a book):



On Oprah's tremendous influence and New Age interests...



Finally, here's an interesting video documenting how Oprah and Denzel Washington ask spirits to possess them before they go in front of the camera:



I have gone from only being 50% serious that Oprah could be the antichrist to being about 75% serious.

Could Oprah be the Antichrist?

Please take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, because I am probably 60% joking with my comments here on the possibility that Oprah Winfrey is the Antichrist mentioned in the Bible. But then again, that means that I am 40% serious. As you scroll down on the sidebar, you will see a link that says "Antichrist Revealed," in which I speculated that Oprah Winfrey was the Antichrist and Dr. Phil was the False Prophet mentioned by Revelation. I here want to update that assertion a little, because Dr. Phil seems to be losing some of his steam and I don't think he is the False Prophet; but Oprah has gained in momentum, power and influence, and I think the possibility that she could be the Antichrist has gone up tremendously in my mind.

The Scriptures say that the Antichrist will be one who teaches false doctrine and will blaspheme the truth (Rev. 13:5-7). It's words are described as "haughty," something that fits Oprah well. Consider this story from June, 2007 in which Oprah and her entourage arrived at the luxury store Hermes in Paris after the store was closed and demanded entry. When a security guard explained to her that the store was already closed (something that was verified by security cameras), Oprah pulled the whole, "Don't you know who I am??" routine, but was still denied entry.

The following week, she blasted the store publicly on her show, using it as a forum to vent her personal outrage. The store began to get angry calls and emails from Oprah devotees the world over. The store tried to do some emergency PR, and Oprah ended up dragging the president of the corporation on the air to discuss the "incident." Did they reconcile? Not at all! Hermes CEO Robert Chavez was forced to listen to more of Oprah's angry tirade at the incident and apologized several times, saying he was sorry for one "rigid" employee "who wasn't aware of Oprah's stature, and expressed his regret at the incident."

So wait a second, Oprah gets turned away for trying to get into a store that is closed, and the CEO of the company ends up apologizing to her? She is certainly tyrannical in the prerogatives she assumes for herself and in her quick resort to her program to speak about her personal, petty grievances.

Another incident: when Martin Luther King's widow Coretta Scott King passed away a year ago, thousands of people waited all day in the rain to pay their last respects. But when Oprah Winfrey showed up, they shooed all the people away and closed the memorial so Oprah could go in alone.

More serious is the false spirituality that Oprah fosters on her program. There are many people involved in New Age spirituality, and this in itself is bad. But with the amount of visibility Oprah has (her show has 20 million viewers in 132 countries). Oprah Winfrey will be letting out all the stops on her XM Satellite Radio program this coming year. Beginning January 1, 2008, “Oprah & Friends” will offer a year-long course on the New Age teachings of A Course in Miracles. A lesson a day throughout the year will completely cover the 365 lessons from the Course in Miracles “Workbook.”For example, Lesson #29 asks you to go through your day affirming that “God is in everything I see.” Lesson #61 tells each person to repeat the affirmation “I am the light of the world.” Lesson #70 teaches the student to say and believe “My salvation comes from me.”By the end of the year, “Oprah & Friends” listeners will have completed all of the lessons laid out in the Course in Miracles Workbook.

She also fits the biblical image of the Antichrist in another way. Look at this verse from the Book of Revelation 13:14,15: It [the Beast] deceives those who dwell on earth, bidding them make an image for the beast...and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. Now, Oprah does in fact have an "image" made of her, in two ways. First, in the most literal sense, is the golden "Oprah Sarcophagus" seen at left, by American sculptor Daniel Edwards, who commented on the piece that it "pays homage to the closest thing America has to a living deity." The sarcophagus is modeled after royal Egyptian sarcophogi, which were meant to confer eternal life on the god-kings of ancient Egypt. So, in the truest sense of the word "image," Oprah fits this description of the Antichrist (although Revelation 13:15 also says that the False Prophet causes the image to come to life, which so far we have not seen with this particular statue yet).

But consider, more symbolically, Oprah's relentless self-aggrandizement through the medium of her magazine, "O," which besides being named after her features portraits of herself on every single cover. Just look at the covers of the past several issues of her magazine "O":

And it goes on an on like that, right back to to her first issue in May, 2000. Dozens of magazine covers all featuring Oprah. Who can deny that through this medium she is attempting to get people to "worship" her "image?"

And what about the Bible's warning that the Antichrist causes any who will not worship its image to be slain? Well, consider this: in 2007, a former employee of Oprah's corporation broke away from the Oprah Empire and sought to publish a book which purported to expose the cruelty and greed of the media mogul. Winfrey heard about the intended book and made a few calls to the publishing houses in New York and after that no company would touch the book. So, I guess at least as far as books are concerned, Oprah has the power to "slay" those which criticize her. Even large publishing firms like Random House were so afraid of Oprah's power that they refused to go near the book.

Another case: in 1996, Oprah made a remark about the quality of Texas beef which led viewers to believe that the beef was less than good. So powerful was her word that beef sales plummeted and stocks in Texas Beef became worthless over night, all at Oprah's fiat. Well, it turns out that the accusations Oprah made were incorrect, prompting the Texas Beef Council to sue her for slander. Oprah acted as if her show and info and words were nothing - that her show just put out info and she had no influence on how that info or her remarks were taken by the public. The judge sided with Oprah, but the question remains: does Oprah have a huge influence on what people think and do in America? The obvious answer is yes, she has a huge following and yes, she tries to influence people, which is why she is so dangerous when she tries to influence them into adopting New Ages teachings, like those in the Course in Miracles.

In case you doubt the influence of Oprah, or the devotion people have to her (many want her to run for president), consider these following real quotes from Oprah fans (from Gifts from the Heart, an Oprah tribute site):

"Dear Oprah, I believe in your spirit. You are truly a wonderful woman who has made me laugh, made me cry, made me open my eyes to many things...You have saved my life without ever knowing it. ... You are my hero, to be sure!" - Lisa Pittock

"She was a mother, a teacher and a friend," writes one fan, Sean. "Oprah not only educated me for that hour I shared with her through a glass window, but her warmth made me care for her. It made me want to make her proud."

Can you deny that Oprah's followers are almost religious in their zeal? But perhaps most sinister is this: the Antichrist is a character who mixes false religion with politics. Is Oprah involved in politics at all? I'll leave you with the following images to ponder.



Let's keep an eye on this woman, and on her accomplice here.