Strong City

(Los Lunas, NM) Today is the last day my father, Wayne Bent, will take water in prison. Tomorrow he goes on “total fast” which means he will be taking no water or nutrition of any kind voluntarily.

I am expecting that Monday or Tuesday the prison attorneys will go into court seeking a court order to force-feed my dad. I’ve learned that the prison legal department wants to do this in secret, behind closed doors and off the record. I told my father this yesterday, and he demands a public hearing in open court. He wants the truth in regards to his fast clearly laid out on the record. He feels that if the state is going to compromise his bodily integrity against his will, at least let their attorneys show their faces in open court.

I put together some notes from my visit with my father yesterday, describing his convictions pertaining to his fast as analogous to events recorded in the book of Daniel. Unless the state succeeds in doing their dirty work in private, I imagine my father will convey these thoughts before the court.

Daniel chapter 2 describes the dream King Nebuchadnezzar had of an image made of different metals. My father told me this represents the many facets of God. No one can claim absolute knowledge and authority in describing God to others, and defining or limiting how others are to relate to Him. This is holy ground, belonging to God alone.

In Daniel chapter 3, King Nebuchadnezzar made an image all of gold. This was different than the image he saw in his dream (Daniel chapter 2), where the image was composed of many different metals. Now Nebuchadnezzar was making an idol, and commanding everyone to bow to his image of God. This story is identical in principle to what the state has done in my father’s case.

A huge amount of focus in our church is centered on the belief that we must each hear God’s voice for ourselves, and obey and follow God’s personalized instructions to our heart. The state attacked our church because my father refused to trample on the instructions God gave the two minor witnesses who came to him with their God-given requests. He was ridiculed in court by the District Attorney for not contradicting the requests of these two young ladies and running them out of his house. To do such a thing would have been to go against everything he teaches and believes.

The state effectively declared our church’s religious faith heretical and unimportant. Behind the smoke and mirrors of criminal sexual contact with minors lies the declaration the state has been making to us all along: “Your God and your religion doesn’t matter; you have to worship God as we say, or else we will put you in prison.” The state has set up an image of God, demanding that we worship God according to its dictates. It was the same with King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image on the plain of Dura.

My father feels convicted that accepting food from the state is analogous to bowing to the golden image the state has set up for everyone to worship as God. By continuing to accept food from the state after they have proven that they have no intention of following their own laws, my father would be acknowledging the authority and supremacy of the power that has usurped the prerogatives of God, but is not God. No; he will eat God’s food, prepared and served to him by his church family. He won’t eat food sacrificed to the idol of state supremacy over the religious conscience of the individual.

My father is in the place of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three Hebrew worthies who refused to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol. If he doesn’t bow down by accepting food sacrificed to this idol, he faces the possibility of death by starvation or further abuse at the hands of the state. But he will not compromise. He is making this stand on religious grounds and is willing to die, if necessary, to be true to his moral convictions.

When I was a little boy, my father taught me that only people who were guilty of being bad had to sneak. My father hasn’t hidden a single thing about his church or his ministry, having broadcast abroad everything about his beliefs and practices on world-wide television.

Let the state show up in open court and explain why they want to violate his bodily integrity by force-feeding, and let my father, Wayne Bent, speak for himself.

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