By Bob Allen
A well-known black Southern Baptist preacher says he believes the election of President Obama may have been foretold in Scripture.
Dwight McKissic, pastor of the 3,000-member Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a former trustee at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a blog celebrating next Monday’s Martin Luther King holiday that he believes the prominence of African-American leaders like King, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Fred Luter, the first black president of the Southern Baptist Convention, are no accident.
“My thesis is: A study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament regarding Noah’s sons and their descendants will indicate that the children of Ham would experience political and spiritual empowerment and renewal before the coming of the Lord within a Judeo-Christian context,” McKissic wrote.
“Are we in the midst of witnessing, ‘Princes coming out of Egypt, and the Ethiopian stretching out their hand to God?’” he asked, quoting Psalm 68:31. “Could President Obama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pastor Fred Luter, Justice Clarence Thomas, Ms. Condoleezza Rice, Lecrae and Kofi Annan be partially fulfilling this verse (to name just a few)?”
McKissic recalled receiving an e-mail from a white Southern Baptist pastor after the election of Barack Obama suggesting that if white Southerners had known what was coming they would “have picked their own [expletive] cotton.”
“Africans were brought to the United States to pick cotton, not to pick presidents, and certainly not to be elected president,” McKissic said. “If the slave masters realized that Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Richard Allen, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King and many of the men and women who voted for Sen. Obama were in those slave ships, the ships would not have been allowed to leave the docks of West Africa.”
McKissic said he agrees with the late radio Bible preacher J. Vernon McGee’s reading of Genesis Chapter 10’s genealogies of Noah’s three sons as foretelling the development of the races of mankind in history.
McGee believed the world’s first great civilization, coming out of Africa, represented descendants of Noah’s son Ham. That lasted until the time of Abraham, introduced in Genesis 11 in the lineage of Shem, followed by the ascendancy of Western civilization underway during Jesus’ lifetime.
“Apparently, we are currently in the period in which the white man has come to the front,” McKissic quoted from McGee’s Thru the Bible commentary on Genesis, published by Thomas Nelson in 1981. “It seems to me that all three are demonstrating that regardless of whether they are a son of Ham or a son of Shem or a son of Japheth, they are incapable of ruling this world.”
McKissic said he began reflecting on McGee’s theory when it appeared possible that then-Sen. Obama could be elected president in 2008.
“Understanding that the sons of Ham ruled 2,000 years, the sons of Shem ruled 2,000 years and for the past 2,000 years the sons of Japheth were ruling, it triggered the question in my mind, what would happen at the end of 2,000 years of European/Japhetic Rule?” McKissic wrote. “I thought of only two possibilities: (1) The return of Jesus; or (2) The return of a son of Ham to political leadership.”
McKissic said President Obama “is undeniably a son of Ham, or Africa.” He recalled one gathering of an African-American Baptist convention years ago where the keynote speaker opened his address with the words, “The sons of Ham have gathered.”
McKissic said many find the idea of a direct African descendant being elected president of the United States “staggering and astounding to many.”
“Many of us disagree vehemently with his abortion and same-sex marriage policies, but we must admit he was God’s sovereign choice for this position,” McKissic said. “He certainly provides poetic justice for America’s racist past.”
“Many Americans of all colors and political persuasions thought that they would never live to see the day that the son or daughter of Africa would become president of the United States of America,” McKissic said. “I was no different.”
“Yet, in the back of my mind, I was cognizant of McGhee’s view of racial history, and I was also aware of Psalm 68:31,” he said. “Therefore, it was not totally out of the realm of possibility from my perspective.”
“When the Bible speaks of Ethiopia, Egypt and the land of Ham, it is talking about the entire continent of Africa,” McKissic explained. “On the earliest maps, the entire continent would be labeled by one of those three names.”
“In this obscure verse, God was showing David something,” McKissic said. “I’m not saying this with certainty, but it appears that David was saying that descendants of Africa would have a political impact beyond Africa. David said Princes shall ‘come out of’ Egypt or Africa. Africa would be their roots, but their ‘shoots’ would be elsewhere.”
“Perhaps this is the reason that Barack Obama’s dad is not from Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas or Tennessee,” McKissic speculated. “Who would have ever thought that America would have a president named with a Hebrew and African name: Barack Obama?”
“President Obama’s name and his dad are directly out of Kenya,” he said. “Kenya is just below Egypt and at one time Egypt engulfed that whole area. Princes, political leaders, kings, nobles and dignitaries will emanate from, or come directly out of Africa. They will have a political impact according to the Psalmist.”
McKissic noted that Martin Luther King said in an interview with BCC in 1960 that he believed America could have a black president in 40 years.
“He missed it by eight years,” McKissic said. “If Dr. King could see it, I believe the Hebrew writer of Psalms could also see it.”
McKissic isn’t the only high-profile Southern Baptist linking Obama with Bible prophecy. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, says in a new book that he doesn’t think the president is the Antichrist, but his policies may be setting the stage for that figure to arise in the near future.
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