Jonathan Cahn and the Foot Washing Controversy

0:00 Hello everyone, I'm Stephen Strang and welcome to this episode of The Strang Report on the Charisma Podcast Network today, Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine's Day. And today I'm going to just share with you about some controversial things to opine, to give you my experience after all these years over 40, over 40 years of covering the Christian community, really covering the culture.

0:41 You know, the culture is covered by journalists who report the breaking news if there's a fire or an earthquake, that kind of thing, if there's an inauguration or a funeral of head to state, you know, the normal journalism things. And there's journalists who cover sports. We just came through the Super Bowl and I'm going to talk about that in just a minute. But also there's financial reporters. Most of the journalism is very, very liberal. I know I started my career in secular journalism and I saw it even back then. And of course it's now to where NBC is almost like a propaganda tool of the Democratic Party.

1:22 Now that's a discussion for a different day, but I'm just saying there are some alternative media that have risen up daily. Wire comes to mind, Blaze to some extent, Fox News, even people like Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly, all of whom used to be on Fox. Now they're independent journalists and there's a rise of that. Mike Shapiro and others are a welcome to bring the news from a conservative point of view and we applaud that. In fact, it's brought some balance to journalism in a way that we really, really need. But there's a gap. The gap is the spiritual aspect.

2:05 The spiritual world that we don't see is as real or more real than the physical world that we see. But the general population doesn't believe in that. In fact, a lot of people say they don't even believe in God. Most people in our culture still have some basis of believing in God, but they just don't live it out. And what we do at Charisma Media, and what I've been doing over the years with Charisma Magazine and all the other magazines that we've published and now Books is to try to fill this gap. There are some others who are doing it. They generally tend to be small and they don't have a big, big platform.

2:49 And some of them, sadly, are either cessationists who don't even believe that the gifts of the spirit operate today, or they are going more and more liberal. It still isn't popular in evangelical circles to go out and outwoke, but there are steps in that direction. And it's very concerning to me. So when you watch my podcast every Tuesday and Thursday at 4 p.m., I'm bringing you people who I know personally, who I interview. I know a lot of people. I have a lot of sources. I'm able to text or call just about any of the Christian leaders today.

3:29 In fact, on something totally separate, I talked to the head of one of the largest denominations. It just, it was something that I was wanting to check out. And I texted him to ask him and he called me a few minutes later. I had that kind of access. I'm not bragging about it. I'm just saying that I have a perspective that I think is important to you. So yes, we need to keep up with the sports news and the financial news and the conservative news, et cetera. But really, what is the Lord saying about some of these things? And there's a lot, it seems like the left bans together better than the Christians do.

4:11 In fact, somebody said that the left, they don't like each other, but they work together. The Christians all like each other, but they don't work together. Now that's the cliche, but I think there's a little bit of truth in that saying. And we need to be able to work together because things are getting worse and worse. So we had an example with the Super Bowl. Now if you know me personally, you know that I'm not much of a football fan other than the Florida Gators. And when it comes time to the Super Bowl, I always tune in because it's always a good game and it's part of our culture. In fact, you almost need to watch the Super Bowl to see the ads. Some of them are very funny and some of them are good and some of them are horrible, but you have to watch for the ads, which is what I'm going to talk about today.

4:58 So the other night I watched the Super Bowl. It was a great game. The Kansas City Chiefs won it in the last three seconds of overtime. Only the second time, the Super Bowl had gone into overtime and I was there rooting and for patching my homes and the Kansas City Chiefs and I was very glad that they won. Now during the Super Bowl, there were two Christian commercials. There were a lot of commercials that weren't godly at all. The halftime show was not godly at all, although it did seem to be a little more tame than some of the ones in the recent past. But there's a group called He Gets Us.

5:39 It's some people who have put a lot of money behind getting up the message that Jesus Christ gets us, that Jesus Christ is relevant and they've done different things over time and I have a lot of respect for what they do, but they did two commercials. The one was kind of pictures of different people that you might love or not love that weren't particularly lovable. It was what I would call what we've come to expect from He Gets Us. That did not get a lot of controversy. What did get controversy was another commercial about washing feet. Now you have to know a little bit about the Bible to even know what washing feet means.

6:21 It's not part of our culture, but in the Middle Eastern culture, in Jesus' day, people walked on dusty roads, they wore sandals. When they would come to somebody's house, their feet were dirty and it was the custom that a servant or sometimes the host would wash their feet and it was an act of service. And the last supper, the last time that Jesus had supper, the first communion, if you want to call it that, the night before He was betrayed, the night before He was crucified, or the day before He was crucified, Jesus took a towel and washed His disciples' feet.

7:08 And Peter didn't want Him to wash his feet if you know the story and Jesus insisted and He said, well, that's the case, you need to wash the rest of me as well. But He went around and washed the feet of His disciples. So here's what happened. Jesus knew that Peter was going to deny Him. In fact, He told Peter that. He also knew that one of them was going to betray Him. He told them that too. So He washed the feet of Judas Iscariot, who just a few minutes later, certainly not more than an hour or so later, betrayed Him into the hands of the people who crucified Him. And Peter denied Him three times.

7:51 This and throughout the centuries, this has become a symbol. There are some denominations, not too many, but there are some denominations who've actually made this part of their ritual, maybe at a special time, maybe New Year's Eve, something like that. I have participated in foot washing only twice, and it was a very moving experience. So here I'm giving you the background for this commercial. And the commercial was really kind of like still pictures, and we're going to look at some of them, we're going to analyze them because there have been Christian people who have been very, very critical of the fact that the feet, in fact, let's watch it and we can kind of talk through it.

8:33 So the first one, okay, we can see that, okay, let's slow it down. Here is a cop washing the feet of someone. You have to kind of use your imagination, but this person might have been a Black Lives Matter type person. Here are some very funky looking teenagers, the washing the feet. Okay, let's go on. You know, you have to kind of use your imagination. Here is, is that maybe a cowboy washing the feet of a Native American?

9:18 And the next one. Okay, here must be an abortion clinic. And a young girl who's pregnant, and a lady who's probably a protester. You know, maybe she's a nun, although she's got on jeans, but she is washing the feet of that young lady who's considering getting an abortion. Let's go on. You know, you can only use your imagination on who those people are. And it's, you know, a very messy house, kind of a poverty setting.

9:59 These are not the rich and powerful type people. You know, again, clean air now, is that someone in the oil business washing the feet of someone who is into, you know, kind of radical climate change? You know, again, it's, you know, they use some artistic license to make you think. And all this happens very, very quickly. Let's go on. Okay, here's kind of a transient type of person. We're repeating some of the pictures. Here we go. It looks like it's a Muslim lady.

10:41 Maybe that's a Christian washing her feet in a neighborhood setting. Okay, here's, they're saying, shut him up. We, they're yelling at people. Maybe somebody's preaching and they're saying, shut him up. And in that setting, what does that say? Does something about hate on the ground? What's hate? Okay, then there's, yeah, under the bullhorn is kind of no censorship.

11:23 You know, there's too much of these pictures. Okay, here's a black man and a white man. Looks like they're kind of getting ready to wash each other's feet. Okay. This must be kind of a transgender person. It's kind of unclear who it is. And that's obviously a priest because he's got a kind of dressed in clerical garb with a cross washing his feet in kind of a beach setting.

12:07 Okay, now I think. In fact, if you want to see this, you can go on the, he gets us website or you could actually just Google it and see the whole thing yourself. It's got some kind of haunting music behind it. It was a minute long commercial. There's only a certain limit to what you can do in a minute. And I think these people were masterful to pack all this in because you had to kind of use your imagination. It happened very, very quickly. You couldn't really, I mean, we analyzed it much more slowly than the average viewer would have.

12:50 But you get the idea that these people who normally aren't the ones that you would serve need to be served with the love of Jesus. And but because some of them are very anti-Christian, there are some who are saying that the people behind this are actually going woke. I totally disagree. The only thing that I would have done differently is I would have avoided using the word hate because that's come to mean something else. The left has kind of taken that word and it kind of means anything that's biblical as hate, which is exactly the opposite. In fact, the whole message of the commercial is opposite.

13:35 But I think it's a powerful message. And I think that it's sad that a lot of Christians are so narrow minded that they can't see the bigger picture and can't see that we have got to show the love of Jesus no matter what. Washing someone's feet does not mean that you approve of everything that they do. I think where we have to draw the line. Just where we let them start defining our theology and what's right and what's taught and our public policies and those kinds of things based on the other kind of worldviews that are very, very different than the biblical worldview. So my hat off to the people behind this, I've been told that it's the Green family.

14:20 I didn't actually research that, but that is certainly consistent with the kind of evangelistic outreach that they have done over the years. And I'm very, very glad. And listen, they did it to get discussion going and they were successful right here in the middle of the Super Bowl with everybody eating pizza and chips and drinking soda or whatever. The gospel was inserted good for them. We need more examples of that. Usually the cost is so very, very high that it doesn't justify it. But these people felt that it was worth the investment. And I think that they got a very good return on their investment.

15:02 Now there are comments. I want to know if you agree with me, don't agree with me, write your comments. I'll answer some of them later when I read over them, but I'm interested in what you have to say. In fact, I didn't say it earlier, so I'll say it now and then I'll say it later. If you don't subscribe to the Strang Report, you need to do so and you need to hit the little bell so you're notified when we're online. Our viewership has partly because I guess we've been dealing with some controversial things like the International House of Prayer and some other issues. It's gone way, way up. Now I want to talk about one of the prophets of our time.

15:43 This is not a surprise to you that I would commend to you. Jonathan Kahn, he is the author. This is his latest book called The Josiah Manifesto and this is his previous book called The Return of the Gods, which is continuing to sell and sell and sell. And he basically says that the ancient gods, the pagan gods, are coming back with a vengeance because there's kind of a vacuum as the West kind of gets away from its Christian roots. And Jonathan Kahn is a prophet for our day. Now he's not the kind of prophet that gets up and says, someone's going to win the election or that someone's going to get a new house.

16:30 There are some prophetic ministries that will have a personal ministry and feel that the Holy Spirit touches them. And I believe that there's a very valid part of that. I wrote about that in my book, Spirit-led Living in an Upside Down World. There is a valid gift of prophecy. He is more a prophet that says this is the biblical base. And if you don't follow him on social media, you need to because he will deliver a message and in just a few hours, it will get tens of thousands of responses. And he did this in about two very, very powerful things.

17:13 And I'm going to refer to it. I'm not going to actually play it. Apparently, his material is copyrighted as it should be, just like his books are copyrighted. But he talked about the fact that there are those who are coming against Israel and the Abrahamic covenant in which God said that he would bless those who blessed Abraham and he would curse those who cursed Abraham. And by extension is Abraham's children who are the Jewish people. And what's happened recently with the war with Hamas, where Hamas brutally attacked Israel on October 7th and killed well over a thousand Jews in one day.

17:55 It was the worst day in history since the Holocaust of the number of Jewish lives lost in a single day. Now you would think that the whole world would rise up in condemnation, but exactly the opposite has happened in many ways. There are many people who condemn Israel and say that Hamas was justified in what they did. One of the people who did this was a member of the parliament in the country of Turkey. Now Turkey is what the Bible would have called Asia Minor. That's where the book of Ephesians or the Church of Ephesus is there in modern day Turkey.

18:40 And the seven churches in the book of Revelation, if you know much about the Bible, Turkey is a huge country and it's secular, but it's also Islamic. And he showed a diplomat who got up to condemn Israel. In other words, he was going against the Abramic Covenant and he actually placed a curse against Israel. Now you have to read the translation underneath. We're going to show it on the screen of the man giving this speech in parliament, a fairly normal kind of thing. Here's Jonathan Khan showing a little bit about Turkey and we're speeding through to the part where he actually showed this.

19:32 Here's the man giving the speech and you can see it says, you will not get rid of a guilty conscience even if you can get rid of a guilty conscience. You will not be able to escape the torment of something. It's like a curse that he's putting on Israel. And then I want you to watch what happened. He says the torment of history, even if you escape the torment of history, you will not be able to escape the wrath of God, Allah. Then right after that happened, look at what happened.

20:23 You see him at the podium. He collapsed dead at the podium. Now this is a very dramatic thing that happened and Jonathan is giving his perspective as a prophet for our generation. Now there are many people who raises their voice against Israel or against the Jewish people that it's not this traumatic, that this should get people's attention, that this man cursed Israel and immediately fell dead. Then he also in the same video goes into the fact that Pope Francis has come out with blessing same sex unions.

21:09 Now this is a step short of blessing same sex marriage, but if couples want to come before a priest or a bishop, they can get a blessing. The Catholic Church is famous for giving blessings of various kinds. And there are people who are saying, well, this is no big deal. They give a blessing for everything else. But it's a step in that direction. And Jonathan Kahn is calling out Pope Francis as this being apostasy. In fact, he had someone in a certain position that was very much against this and he moved him out of this position and put somebody who was very, very left leaning.

21:49 Then some things happened. And in his video, which I encourage you to go on YouTube and watch, in his video, he goes into this. And what happens is Pope Francis is from Argentina. He was the bishop over Brannis Aries. And in Brannis Aries, there's a statue of Peter and you see it right there. It's been there for many years. And as Pope, Pope Francis is in the line of Peter. The Catholics consider that Peter was the first pope. And so he's in apostolic progression all the way down to the present.

22:33 So here is the statue. And then on Pope Francis' birthday in the month of December, there was a lightning strike at this statue in Buenos Aires. Even though, okay, do you see the halo? It's kind of like a metal halo. Halo insinuates it as holy. And Jonathan Cahn goes into this whole thing. And then, see, he's holding the scepter. And then in his hand, if we can see that, do you see the keys to the kingdom are in his hand? Okay, this is before the lightning strike. Now there's lightning rods all the way around. You know, the lightning happens all the time.

23:15 And there was lightning rods to try to, you know, draw lightning away from these things. But this was when Pope Francis did the same-sex blessing. And it was on his birthday. And Jonathan Cahn believes that this has prophetic significance. And I felt it was important enough to bring it up and to mention it on my podcast today. And I hope that you will, okay, if you'll notice on the picture. This picture, my producer just pointed out to me, this is after it. And you see that the halo is gone.

23:55 And then also the keys, you see the keys there. And then here they are, they're gone. And the hand is just like burned to a crisp. Jonathan Cahn goes into all this. He's very eloquent, much more so than I am. But I just felt that this was important. And it was my way to call attention to his video. I'd like to know what you think. Please put your comments below. But I believe that God is speaking. You know, the secular culture believes that God is not even... They don't put any importance at all on God's will, God's plans and purpose, displeasing God, blaspheming about the closest they come is saying that there's acts of God that are things like hurricanes.

24:45 And maybe in this case, a lightning strike. But like I said earlier, the spiritual world is more important than the physical world. It's more real than the physical world. It's the part of us that's going to live forever as our spirit. Our bodies will die. This world as we know it someday will be passed away, maybe a long, long time from now. But we believe that's going to happen. Well, I need to wrap up this podcast. I will tell you that my next podcast, my guest will be Dr. Michael Brown. And he and I are going to do a deep dive into what's happening in Kansas City at the International House of Prayer.

25:25 A lot of things have happened since I've done a podcast on it a few days ago. I'm going to be issuing a statement at that time too, so you don't want to miss that. That's on Thursday, the 15th at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And then, of course, it's on YouTube and Rumble and all the other platforms after that. If you know somebody that would enjoy this podcast, be sure to forward it to them. We're wanting more and more people to sign up. Our list is growing. And I think that it's important that we deal with these spiritual topics and try to understand what God is saying and how we should respond as believers.

26:09 We need to not just be passive and just sing in the sweet by and by and pray our prayers and cross our fingers and hope something good happens. No. God has put us here, filled us with the Holy Spirit to be salt and light. So this is the end of my podcast. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you'll subscribe if you haven't. I hope you'll sign up. And I hope that you'll share this with others and be sure to leave comments below. Thank you for watching The Strang Report today. I'm Stephen Strang. God bless you. Do you ever feel discouraged?

27:01 Do you need hope? The world is so upside down that even if you believe there's power in the Holy Spirit, sometimes you need to be reminded that greater is He that is within us than He is in the world. My new book, Spirit-led Living in an Upside Down World, was written to give you hope, to remind you of things you know, to explain spiritual truths that you didn't understand or maybe have forgotten. I draw on my decades of covering the worldwide move of the Holy Spirit to give you examples and stories of great men and women of God from Jack Hayford to Catherine Coleman and many others explaining spiritual gifts and telling stories of victory in the face of trials and temptations.

27:48 I wrote this book for you and I want you to read it. It's easy to read with lots of practical stories to help you. It is not a theological treatise on the Holy Spirit. In a way, it's a self-help book looking at the spiritual side of life. So if you long for more of God and to experience the power of the Holy Spirit and the power to rebuke the spiritual attacks in your life and boldness to stand for God, when the cancel culture wants you to sit down and shut up, then my book, Spirit-led Living in an Upside Down World, is for you. You can find the book wherever Christian books are sold, including Amazon.com or Mychorismashop.com.

28:34 Remember, the Holy Spirit is here to help us now and for all the days ahead, no matter how upside down the world gets. Enjoy the book and God bless you.