Ancestor Worship - A Counterfeit of True Worship

If you are African, you probably know somebody who worships, consults, or prays to their ancestors. In fact, chances are, you probably do that yourself. When things are not going well for you, like when you are sick, or have lost your job, or somebody you love has just died, you may may visit a sangoma (inyanga, traditional healer, etc) to advise you what to do. More often than not, the sangoma will tell you that the ancestors are not happy. They want you to perform some ritual like slaughter a goat for them, or have what is called ingoma, where you will dance yourself into a trance until the spirit of the ancestors come upon you.

This is not strange. All humans seek their gods when things are not going well for them. Africans believe their ancestors are their gods. They should have answers to life's problems. They believe that those that brought us into being, our parents, our ancestors, our gods, must be able to help when we have problems. So, many Africans who grow up without knowing their father feel lost. When they are grown up, and things are not going well, they go out looking for their father, and their ancestry. There is even a popular program on TV called Khumbul'ekhaya that helps people connect with their lost families. When life is not making sense, it is a correct human response to seek the ancestors, except the devil hijacks the exercise. In the end, there are no answers.

In seeking answers from their ancestors, humans need to trace their ancestry. Unfortunately, the devil made sure they did a superficial job of it. They sought their ancestry going back three or four generations at most. When one does that, you end up with a stunted genealogy and ancestry. For example, if I were to seek to discover my ancestors, I will establish who my father's father is, and then who my father's father's father is, and I will continue with this process until I cannot go backwards anymore. So when I do that, I discover that my ancestry goes back to Adam, the first man. But I also have to ask, who was Adam's father?

The answer leads me to the Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The interesting fact is that this Father God, actually made Adam in his own image, in the same way that I am in fact the image of my human father, who is an image of his human father, who is also an image of his father before him. So when you do that exploration, you are forced to go back to the original image of the first Father, who is God, who the scriptures tell us created us in his own image, in his likeness.

So, true ancestral worship is the worship of the one True God, from whom we have all descended. In the Book of Daniel he is referred to as the "Ancient of Days". Although our humanity descended from Adam and have inherited his inclination to sin and all the problems that come with that, we need to look further back and recognize that God the Creator is our true Father. If our ancestry ends with Adam, or our great, great grandfather, we assume that our ancestors did not have a beginning, but they did, so we have to go to the One who brought the first human, Adam, into being.

Here is the point I am making with this piece if you have missed it: True Worship is ancestral worship, and true ancestral worship is worship of the One ancestral Father of us all who is in Heaven. Any worship of a human father or grand father is idolatry, because it replaces the one True God with a human father, who is a counterfeit of our origins.

So to all my African brothers who still worship your human ancestors, please realize that the search for your ancestors is false if you stop 3 or 4 generations into your past. If you do, you have a very small history. Your true history and ancestry reaches back to a man called Adam, whose Father was God, who created the heavens and the earth. This God is the Father of us all, and he is our real ancestor worthy of our worship. It is him we must worship, because it is only in him that we live, move and have our being. Who you thought was your ancestor is in fact not your ancestor, they are pretenders to the throne. Even the people of Israel thought Abraham was their true ancestor, and Jesus, who was God, told them that "before Abraham was, I am". My friend, before your ancestors were, God is!

My human ancestors and yours are dead and buried. But our real ancestor is a "Living God". He is called the "Living God" at least 70 times in the bible because he is not dead like our human ancestors. Our ancestors died of their cancer, they died in their poverty, they died by accident, and they remained dead. They can't help you with your cancer, with your poverty, or to escape death, because they could not help themselves. The next time you go to your doctor he may ask you if any of your ancestors suffered from cancer or heart disease. Do you know why? That's because if it killed them, it will probably kill you too. That's what you inherited from them. They could not save themselves from it.

But, when Jesus was killed, he walked out of the grave before his flesh decomposed. He is alive, and he alone has life, and can give you life. He was born a human so that our humanity can be transformed, and you are included in that. He came so that there will be no more death, no more pain, no more sorrow. You too, can share in his live. You can join millions of African believers who have discovered this fact.