What this is about
The author of this site heard these remarks repeatedly from the pulpit of a modern church. He paraphrased them from memory and asked that no one be named or guessed at. The preacher wished “instant death” on those who disagree with him about theology. He said God should remove the spider and not just the cobwebs. He said God will destroy those who disagree with a called person like him, and that those who disagree are opponents of the church. He often mocks the “dead” church, and the Reformers, Martin Luther above all.
His thesis: “A pulpit that prays for the instant death of those who disagree with it is not speaking in the spirit of Christ. When James and John wanted fire to fall on those who rejected Jesus, he turned and rebuked them.”
What this page is not doing
It does not name or describe any preacher or church. It does not deny that God judges; he does. It does not say doctrine is unimportant or that error should never be answered. It does not say whether anyone is a Christian, and it does not tell anyone whether to stay in or leave a church.
The short answer
- The preacher’s case uses real texts. The psalms ask God to slay the wicked. Elijah called down fire. Ananias and Sapphira fell dead. Paul said “let him be accursed.”
- Read in context, none of them licenses the prayer. God acts, or vengeance is handed to him. The targets are persecutors, impostors, or people turning others from the faith, never fellow believers who disagree about doctrine.
- Jesus refused exactly this request. The village had rejected Jesus himself, over a religious dispute, and Elijah was the disciples’ precedent. He rebuked them anyway.
- John changed. The man who wanted fire on Samaritans later went to Samaria and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come on them (Acts 8:14–17).
- Scripture tells pastors what to do with opponents: correct them gently, warn them, and in serious cases separate from them, always hoping to win them back. Death is not on the list.
- The Church is not one man. Christ is its head. Paul publicly opposed Peter, and the Bereans checked Paul’s preaching.
- By the logic of the spider, Luther was the spider. So were others whom earlier churches wanted removed, and every church that removed its dissenters is now judged by its own heirs to have been wrong.
The preacher’s case, fairly stated
The full dossier gives the other side first, in nine arguments. The psalms pray against enemies: “Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God” (Psalm 139:19). Elijah called down fire on the king’s soldiers, and God sent it (2 Kings 1:10). The earth swallowed Korah, who rebelled against Moses (Numbers 16). Ananias and Sapphira fell dead before Peter (Acts 5). Paul struck the sorcerer Elymas blind (Acts 13). Paul said of false teachers, “let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8), and of Alexander the coppersmith, “the Lord reward him according to his works” (2 Timothy 4:14). The martyrs in heaven cry, “How long … dost thou not judge and avenge our blood?” (Revelation 6:10). And error harms souls: a shepherd should want the wolf gone.
Read each one whole, and a pattern appears. The psalmist hands vengeance to God, and the same psalmist fasted for his enemies when they were sick (Psalm 35:13). Elijah’s fire came from God, on soldiers sent to seize him for a king who worshipped Baal, and Jesus refused to repeat it. Peter did not pray for Ananias to die. Elymas was blinded “for a season,” for trying to stop a Roman official believing, and the official believed. Paul’s “accursed” includes Paul himself if he preached another gospel. Two verses after Alexander, Paul prays for those who deserted him: “I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge” (2 Timothy 4:16). The martyrs were murdered, and they asked God. And when Paul foresaw wolves coming into the church, his answer was to warn “night and day with tears” (Acts 20:31).
Who was the target?
Six of the hard texts. For each, who was the judgement aimed at?
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Not one of these texts targets a fellow believer who disagrees about doctrine. That is the one case the pulpit prayer is about.
“What manner of spirit?”
Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, to die. A Samaritan village refused him, “because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:53). Jews and Samaritans disagreed about where God should be worshipped (John 4:20), so the village’s refusal rested on a religious disagreement, and it was Jesus himself they refused. James and John, whom Jesus called “the sons of thunder,” asked: “Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?” “But he turned, and rebuked them … And they went to another village” (9:54–56).
The Authorised Version adds Jesus’ words: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” These words are missing from the oldest manuscripts, and most modern Bibles leave them out or put them in a footnote. But the rebuke itself is in every manuscript, and Luke says the same thing elsewhere: “the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (19:10). Notice too that the text never says “another spirit.” It says the disciples did not know what was moving them.
In Luke 9 John wanted fire to fall on Samaritans. In Acts 8 he went to Samaria and “prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost.” Later he wrote: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8).
Which wisdom?
Paul calls “another spirit” the companion of “another Jesus” and “another gospel” (2 Corinthians 11:4). Scripture tells us to “try the spirits” (1 John 4:1), and describes the Spirit of God by what he produces: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23). James sets two kinds of wisdom side by side. One is full of “bitter envying and strife,” and “is earthly, sensual, devilish.” The other “is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy” (James 3:14–17). And he says: “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (3:10).
Six things a pastor might say about someone who disagrees with him. They are composed by the page and quote no one, except the spider remark. Which wisdom does each come from?
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What Christ did with his enemies, and what pastors are told to do
Jesus said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you … and pray for them which despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44). When Peter drew a sword to defend him, Jesus told him to put it away, and healed the ear of the man Peter had struck (Luke 22:51). As Stephen was stoned, he prayed, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” while a young man named Saul stood by approving (Acts 7:58–8:1). God did not remove Saul. He converted him, and Saul became Paul, who wrote thirteen books of the New Testament. If God had “removed the spider” in Acts 8, the Church would have lost half its New Testament. God says, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).
Scripture gives pastors a ladder for dealing with people who disagree:
- 1Go privately“Tell him his fault between thee and him alone” (Matthew 18:15).
- 2Correct gently“In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance” (2 Timothy 2:25).
- 3Warn twice, then separate“After the first and second admonition reject” (Titus 3:10).
- 4Even then, a brother“Count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother” (2 Thessalonians 3:15).
- ?Pray for his deathNot in Scripture.
Jesus also told a parable about weeds. An enemy sowed tares among a farmer’s wheat. The servants wanted to pull them up, but the master said no, “lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:29–30). Tares look like wheat until the harvest, and the reapers, Jesus says, “are the angels.” So who decides who the spider is? Not the servants, and certainly not a preacher in a dispute about his own teaching.
God’s name, the church, and Luther
God’s name. “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exodus 20:7). Luther’s Small Catechism explains: “We should fear and love God so that we do not curse, swear, use satanic arts, lie, or deceive by His name, but call upon it in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks.” The first thing on the list is “curse.” Asking God to strike down a fellow Christian is using his name to curse.
The church. In the Bible the church is Christ’s body, and he is its head (Colossians 1:18). Ministers are servants: “Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed?” (1 Corinthians 3:5). Paul opposed Peter “to the face” (Galatians 2:11). The Bereans checked Paul’s preaching against Scripture and were called “noble” (Acts 17:11). Even in the stories used to defend a “called” leader, Moses prayed for the sister who criticised him to be healed (Numbers 12:13), and King David refused to let his men kill a man who was cursing him (2 Samuel 16:9–12). Disagreeing with a preacher is not the same as opposing the church.
Luther. In 1520 the Pope’s bull against Luther called him “the wild boar from the forest” trampling the Lord’s vineyard. In 1521 Luther told the emperor his “conscience is captive to the Word of God,” and he was made an outlaw. By the logic of the spider, he was the spider. So were Jan Hus, burned in 1415, and William Tyndale, executed in 1536. Protestants killed dissenters too: Felix Manz was drowned at Zurich in 1527, and Michael Servetus burned at Geneva in 1553. Today every one of those churches says it was wrong. A preacher who mocks Luther stands in a free pulpit because a dissenter was not removed.
A pulpit that prays for its critics to die teaches people to stay silent. Scripture answers: “There is no fear in love” (1 John 4:18). And if a preacher predicts that God will destroy those who disagree, and they live on, “thou shalt not be afraid of him” (Deuteronomy 18:22).
Six questions you can ask of any sermon, starting with your own church:
- Does the preacher pray for his opponents’ repentance, or their destruction?
- Does he correct them gently, as 2 Timothy 2:25 says?
- Does he tell the difference between enemies of Christ and critics of himself?
- Does he leave it to God to decide who is wheat and who is a weed?
- Does he answer to anyone?
- Can a member ask an honest question without fear?
What does this prove?
It is easy to claim too much for this argument. Six claims. Does the argument show each one?
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Check it yourself
Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.
- 1. Read Luke 9:46–56 and then Acts 8:14–25. What did John want in the first, and what did he do in the second?
- 2. Read 2 Timothy 2:24–26 and Titus 3:9–11. List every instruction for dealing with opponents.
- 3. Read Acts 7:54–8:3 and 1 Timothy 1:12–16. Stephen’s prayer, and what became of the young man at his feet.
- 4. Read Psalm 35 whole. Notice verse 13, about the enemies.
- 5. One prayer. Do this one. Think of one person who disagrees with you about something that matters. Pray for him by name, in the words of 2 Timothy 2:25: that God would give repentance and the knowledge of the truth, to whichever of you needs it.
- 06 · Are You With Me, or Against God? The texts used to silence dissent, read whole.
- 19 · Our God Is a Deadly God A sermon line tested against what Christ said he came for.
- 37 · The Pulpit Is Not a Weapon Private verdicts and hinted curses from the pulpit.
- 46 · Ananias and Sapphira What the judgement was really about.
- 62 · Platitude or Command? “Love your enemies” mocked from the pulpit.
- 10 · The Branch Calls the Tree Dead What Luther would make of calling the historic church “dead.”
The full dossier links to seventeen earlier dossiers, grouped by thread.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier states the preacher’s case at full strength and weighs it with you, tests ten hard texts on who acts and who is targeted, reads Luke 9:51–56 phrase by phrase with a manuscript switch, removes the spider of Acts 8 from the New Testament, lets you weed a field of wheat and tares, follows the dissenters whom earlier churches removed, gives an eight-question checklist for any pulpit, and publishes the prompt that produced it all.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →