[Section Editor’s Note: The following contains an excerpt from “A Torchlight for America,” Chapter 7, titled: ‘Ending The Health-Care Crisis,’ from the section ‘The Merchants of Death’ pages 143-145.]
By The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
There is a scripture in the Bible about a woman Jesus met who was possessed of seven devils. Jesus cast the devils out of this woman, and as the devils were coming out they rebuked Jesus for casting them out, what they thought, ahead of time.
They knew that the work of Jesus was to cast out devils, but they thought they had a longer time to inhabit the woman. They were coming out but they were angry as they were coming out and they were giving Jesus a hard way to go.
›When Jesus comes into the world he comes to heal the people of Satan’s work. He comes to restore us to health and well-being. He comes to reconcile man with the divinity of his own nature. He comes to reconcile man with God. We all are possessed of devils. Each of us is possessed of these seven devils and seven devils only means the tremendous powers of evil that are absolutely destroying our lives.
What we want you to do is make up your minds to cast seven devils out of self. Make up your minds to adopt a new life with the ever-presence of truth and God.
The first devil you have to cast out is ignorance. The Bible teaches, “My people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge … (Hosea 4:6) Ignorance is the No. l destroyer of the human family.
Another devil right along with ignorance is pride. You are proud of your ignorance, therefore truth cannot come to free you of your ignorance, because pride stands in the way of your receiving the truth. Pride keeps your ears from opening that your heart may receive the truth.
And even though Jesus said you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free, he also said that it is the organ of hearing that allows you to receive the truth. He that hath ears let him hear. It is precisely this organ of hearing you must use now to hear the truth and obey the directions that are good for your life, your body and spirit.
Once we get rid of ignorance and pride, we must work on getting rid of arrogance, greed, avarice, lust and selfishness. Then, on the physical level, we must stop eating pork. We must stop drinking alcohol, using tobacco, drugs, and we must stop eating a host of other bad food. These are all little devils that we must drive out of ourselves.
According to the Bible and the Qur’an, the eating of swine is forbidden. (Leviticus 11:7) The Honorable Elijah Muhammad writes, in How To Eat To Live, that the pig is “the foulest of animals. It is so poisonous that you can hardly poison it with other poisons. It is so poisonous and filthy that nature had to prepare it with a sewer line and you may find the opening on its forelegs.
It is a little hole out of which pus oozes. Its poison is that of a live nature, in the form of a parasitic worm that is called trichina. This is why, as some say, pork has to be cured. But it can never be cured. It is a foul and poisonous animal that is infested with worms and pus, the eating of which destroys the beauty of the body’s appearance and turns the body into a house of filth, vulnerable to every manner of disease.
Just look at the appearance of those who eat a lot of pork and observe how they act. Remember, you are what you eat. The only reason our people came to eat pork was because during slavery this was the only meat the slavemaster would give us to eat.
The slavemaster would give us the worst pieces of the hog, the intestines, the feet, the snout and the tail. This filthy practice became the main dish in what is now called soul food. We are destroyed for our lack of knowledge and our rebellion against the will of God.
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