Through Jones' Colored Glasses

Ladies and Gentlemen, the image above is of the forty-five-year-old Jim Jones receiving the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian award from Pastor Cecil Williams in 1977. This was almost exactly one year before one of the darkest days in American history when the largest mass/murder-suicide occurred on November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project also known as “Jonestown”, in Guyana, South America.

hand in hand, family with family, body on top of body scattered amongst the cleared jungle floor

It was there where nine-hundred and eighteen bodies were discovered, hand in hand, family with family, body on top of body scattered amongst the cleared jungle floor. One-hundred and fifty of those people were children of the ages ten and under; many who were crushed by the weight of their parent’s bodies were not discovered until their parent’s remains were exhumed. Jonestown, a community once bustling, vibrantly loud with the cheering of Jones’ devoted followers, now laid silent, fogged by the stench of a dirty secret. To undercover this secret, hours upon hours of audio from Jonestown were discovered, scoured through, transcribed, and filed by the FBI.

As Christians, we must get to bottom of this secret and the one question that should be asked is, how did one man, who just a year prior had won an award that stood for peace, equality and justice bring about a dark stain in history that plagues our society to this day? The answer though hidden due to the rising socialist struggle in America is simple, Jones was a communist. Jones, the dark-haired self-titled “Raven” stood at a metaphysical crossroads during one point in his life and thought to himself, “How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was infiltrate the Church.” (Q134 timestamp 14:08-14:16)

Behind Jones’ colored lenses, deep inside the clean-cut interior, rested a spirit of indifference, a person who wanted control, power, and godhood. He wanted to create a society where oppression, equality, and peace would thrive based upon a standard that only he could derive. In the post-civil war and bustling civil rights society of America, Jones saw an oppressed subclass of people as the perfect group of people to charm. In his eyes, they were a poor, segregated and uneducated community that was joined by common suffering, a people who only needed a hope to reach for to start a revolution. Despite the binds of slavery in America and upon its abolishment many of the former African American slaves and their offspring had assimilated and identified with Christianity.

As a result, to infiltrate the church and to appeal to this class of people, Jones needed to sound like the church, he must adopt the same language while interposing different definitions. Fortunately for Jones, the Peace Mission Movement—ushered in by “Father Divine”, George R. Baker—had already developed an intricate offshoot to the metaphysical philosophy of New Thought. Father Divine targeted the African-American population and set out to create a divine commune through the idea of “Divine Economic Socialism”. This school of thought teaches that Christ only exists as consciousness, that all men are innately divine, and that this consciousness can be tapped into. Once a prophet or seer of his time taps into this consciousness, it is through their teaching alone that your divine potential can become unleashed and the kingdom of God can be manifested in this physical reality. Jones then took off in 1956 and went under the wing of Father Divine to learn all that he could about this philosophy.

Through three years of Father Divine’s teachings, Jones learned that in order to create social change one must be involved with making a change in the community. The ability to influence change in the political and social climate authorizes the belief to the follower that the leader is divine, that they can make actual changes to this physical reality through a higher level of spiritual consciousness. Thus, under the guise of the New Thought philosophy, Jones was able to get his followers to believe that he was god incarnate. They believed that by his word and his views alone, that all can be made well in the world. Hence, to the communist Jones, this fully-formed philosophy would be the perfect vehicle to create fully devout followers, and it would bleed communist ideology into the church. He was calculated and determined with every political statement made, and even went so far as to adopt a child of a different race and name him after himself to show that he alone truly stood for those oppressed. Jones took advantage of a church in crisis because the Christian church had begun to shrink back from the public sphere. Jones saw this retreat and began to provide for the oppressed and downtrodden with education, meals, passion, and purpose. Jones’ dirty secret was that the things he was doing were not to help those around him, but to leverage himself as a god over them.

Jones with his adopted and biological children

It was during this great revival time of the People’s Temple (1965-1977) in San Francisco that Jones devoted himself to human services ministry to appeal to the needs of many different communities. Jones set up foster care, elderly services, and homes for special needs children. He even gave thousands of dollars to different philanthropic causes. He rallied people, educated minorities, and even got them registered and voting. However, great as these things may sound, underneath the exterior was an ideology that was antithetical to the Christian worldview. Jones was doing these things to leverage himself among the masses. He ideologically sold a Promised Land where Divine Economic Socialism could flourish, free from the inhumane conditions of American capitalism. It is this deception that led to the demise of the People’s Temple, for all things built against God will not stand. The man who was supposed to bring life and the kingdom of God to all the people became a harbinger of death and left a kingdom of lifeless bodies lying in a cleared field. The Jonestown mass murder/suicide is to be a lesson to the Christian church, and to all who deem to cling onto a hope rooted in something other than Christ and His Word.

Matthew 28:18-20 states that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ and that we as Christians are to make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded us. The Word of God is the living water, made necessary to sustain life, freedom, and government. It is by His Word that we are upheld in His universe, by His word that all things come together. It is by His decree that all things come to pass and when we do not obey the Word of the King of kings, His wrath will reign supreme. His justice will set out to conquer all those against His command. A society in ruins is part of the Lord’s justice and kindled wrath. When the church is dismissing societal issues and choosing to step out of the public sphere, society is then left without the living water that is necessary to sustain life, culture, and freedom. We are then left with a church in discipline and a world in flames.

As Christians, we must challenge the empty philosophy of the world, and hold society captive to the Word of God, the whole counsel of God and to breathe the Gospel of truth into our culture. When the Gospel is not being proclaimed in its fullness with the Kingship of Jesus Christ over the dominion of life, we see frustration occur within the masses of our population.

J.K. Van Baalen argued that “The cults are the unpaid bills of the Church.” When the Church divorces itself from speaking into society when Christians stop giving freely that living water, the cult climate forms. It is a prime environment of a people longing for a purpose, ready to be set afire by the striking of one match. All creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God (Romans 8:19), and the downtrodden like dried up vessels line up willingly to be set ablaze, trusting that the fire quenches their thirst with the hopes of being one with the eternal flames of change. However, a society that was once bountiful, dripping with life due to this living water, now turns and descends into a city in decay. When the sons of God are not revealing His truth, the cults then ascend unchallenged like embers jumping from one cultural issue to another.

“J.K. Van Baalen argued that “The cults are the unpaid bills of the Church.””

Christians, we as the Church have failed, and these debts are the Church’s burden to bear. The Sovereign King has a purpose in His wrath, and we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). Let us therefore arise, grab the sword of truth, and cut into the very fabric of the frustrated. For the cults through established doctrines of demons, and the government through overstepping its bounds in the form of legislation cannot create equality among all men. What makes all men equal is the law of God and the fact that we all have failed to live up to it. We sit in the same position as every other man in front of God—as rebels, liars, and cheats deserving of death. However, it is in our equally failed state among all men that Christ the Eternal God came in the flesh and died for His people in order to bring about His Kingdom. Again, we know that all things work together for the good for those who are called according to His purpose. Nevertheless, for those who do not love God, He will be glorified by making a spectacle of their rebellion.