NATHANAEL

The Death of My Son Exposed the Small God I Had Been Taught to Believe

8th July 2016

Was another ordinary day. I ran errands with my son before picking up his older sister from school, later that day. Evening came, i fed both my children, bathed them, and put them to bed by 7pm. At eight o’clock, I heard a noise coming from their room. When I checked, I found Nathanael convulsing.My husband and I rushed him to hospital and throughout that drive, with my son convulsing in my arms, I did the only thing my theology had equipped me to do. I decreed and declared. “You shall live and not die.” “No weapon formed against you shall prosper.” I rebuked satan. I commanded him to take his hands off my son. I spoke every formula I had been taught, because in the world I had been formed in, words were weapons, confession was power. If you believed correctly and spoke the right words, God was obligated to respond and give you whatever you wished.At the hospital, the doctor managed to stop the convulsions. But shortly after, I watched her walk toward the machines and calmly asked me to step outside. Something had gone terribly wrong. At exactly ten thirty that night, she came out of the emergency room and said: “I am sorry, mum. We are well past our usual resuscitation time.” I never heard anything else she said as i pushed past her to see my child. He was unrecognisable with tubes covering his whole body. My child was gone!

By this time, our church family had joined us, and after my son was declared dead, we started praying for a resurrection. I say “prayed,” but I now understand that what we did was not prayer. Prayer is a humble address to God. What we did was speak to death, speak to Nathanael, speak to everything else, except God. It went something like this: “Nathanael, come back in Jesus name. We cancel you spirit of death, we refuse your report. We speak life back into your body Nathanael.” In hindsight, I see how erroneous this was. While I believe one would not be out of God’s will to pray and trust Him for a resurrection, we were not asking God to bring him back to life. We were issuing commands. Prayer is speaking to God in humility, understanding that He is only obligated to do as He wills, even as we trust Him regardless of the outcome.

We decreed. We declared. In faith we believed ,but the boy never came back to life. The mortician had been standing in the room throughout. He had likely seen this many times before, people holding on to their departed ones. He waited patiently and, after about two hours, wheeled Nathanael to the mortuary. That is how my boy was taken from my arms. In the days that followed, I had to take medication to dry my milk, as Nathanael was still breastfeeding. The church was good to us in the ways it knew how to be. Our church family carried the entire burden of the burial. They visited, they sat with us, they wept with us. A brother offered to witness the postmortem. Several women went with me to the mortuary the next day so I would not have to face my dead child alone. The pastoral team was present throughout. Truly, we were not alone. God’s people were there for us.

I say this clearly because what follows is not a disregard of the kindness we were shown. For instance, One dear sister prayed over me at my house and asked God aloud, “Why did you punish Wanjiku with this burden? She has served you so diligently.” Another asked me directly whether my tithing was up to date. Another told me with great sincerity that she did not understand why God had entrusted my husband and me with the death of our child, but that we should rejoice, because God had chosen and trusted us with the loss. I sat with those words telling myself, I never wanted to be entrusted with the death of my child, i wanted my child alive.I wanted to raise him, i never wanted this kind of entrusting. What my church friends did not know, what I could not yet say, was the storm that had begun inside me. Why had God failed me? Why had our decrees as a church failed to bring Nathanael back to life?

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Who I Was

I was not a casual believer. I showed up to church consistently, even with my young children, even when it was inconvenient. I prayed and fasted often. I wish today I could fast half as much as I fasted back then...hahahaha. I knew the formulas. I knew how to bind principalities, cancel demonic assignments, and stand on a scripture until something moved. I knew how to command things to my favour. I knew how to make God do as i pleased(really!!). And yet the results had not come. According to the logic of Word of Faith theology, the formulas were sound, the Scriptures had been quoted correctly, and the teachers were reliable and anointed. Therefore, the only possible point of failure was me. That is the cruelty of Word of Faith theology because it has no room for failure, for defeat, for discouragement, for a child’s death. What it does is place failure at the feet of the believer. It is only the believer’s faith, obedience and spiritual performance that can be found wanting.

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The Teacher, the Door, and the Question That Changed Everything

In the months that followed, I thought that Bible school might help me understand God, because it had become clear to me that I did not know Him. So I enrolled in a Word of Faith Bible school here in Nairobi. I can see now looking back, that this was a setup by God, though I did not recognise it at the time. The things this school taught included, speaking things into existence, the believers authority, decreeing and declaring desired outcomes, extracting promises from Scripture and speaking them at situations etc. These were teachings I had once embraced without examination. Now as i sat through these classes, they felt wrong in a way I could not yet name. Nathanael’s death had done something to my theological foundations. One day, my teacher said something that cracked everything open. She told me that I needed to examine what door I, Nathanael’s mother had left open for satan to enter and take my son’s life. “God cannot lie”, she said, “He promised long life. Therefore, for your son to have died, you, Wanjiku, must have opened a door.” ( In another article, i will share the event that made me leave this school mid-way never to return).

I want to be fair to that teacher. She was not being cruel, she was being consistent with a theological framework she trusted and taught. The problem was not her character but the theology itself. And because I had lived inside that same theology for years, I initially received her words as I had been conditioned to and turned inward, searching for where I had failed as a mother to warrant my son’s death. But as I sat with those words over the weeks that followed, a different question began to form. Not the kind my teacher had intended, but the one that would eventually lead me to encountering the living God for the first time in my Christian experience!

I began to ask myself: How weak is this God? If Satan could enter a home and take a child simply because his mother had left a spiritual door open, what kind of God had I believed in? If the enemy could override a promise from God through a believer’s oversight, then who was truly sovereign? The Word of Faith framework had handed me a God who could be outmanoeuvred, a God whose purposes could be frustrated by human failure and demonic opportunism. I began to feel a deep conflict growing inside me, because the God I was encountering as I read the Scriptures for myself was nothing like the God Word of Faith had taught me. He was nothing like the God my Bible school presented, and nothing like the God I had been taught since my youth. The Scriptures were introducing me to the true God, the One enthroned on high, who does as He pleases, who never faints and whose understanding has no limit. The only wise God, the God who consults nobody and receives counsel from no one. The God who commands the morning and assigns the dawn its place. The God who does all things according to the counsel of His own will. This is the God who comforts the brokenhearted and does not blame them for failing in their spiritual diligence, if there is even such a thing. I began to see a God who was moved by my pain. He was not accusing me of failing as a mother by not being “spiritually vigilant enough”. The God of the Bible was not the Word of Faith God I had been taught from my youth up to this point.

In next week’s Part 2, I will unpack what the Bible actually says about God’s sovereignty, expose the error of speaking things into existence and commanding situations, examine what Psalm 91 truly promises, show why the teacher’s logic cannot stand, and share the God I finally encountered when my entire theological system collapsed.

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