There is a sense in which the title applies to each of us, for God has taken us out of the kingdom of darkness and has brought us into His marvelous kingdom of love. It is particularly true of Joshua Milton Blahyi, however.
I just learned about him by watching a documentary on television two nights ago. Joshua is well-known in Liberia as "General Butt Naked." He was a former leader for the Liberian warlord Roosevelt Johnson during the first Liberian Civil War.. Joshua was a very fierce and violent fighter who may have been involved in thekilling of more than 20,000 people, including women and children. His nickname derived from the fact that he never wore clothing, only his shoes and a rifle. (He believed that his nakedness would somehow protect him because the devil had told him it would.)
He was a member of the Sarpo tribe in Liberia. When he was eleven, he was initiated as a tribal priest and participated in his first human sacrifice. The devil gave him a vision that he would become a great warrior. From the age of eleven to twenty-five he took part in monthly human sacrifices, and during the war he and his cadre of young, naked soldiers raped and killed untold thousands of people.
In 1996, however, as the war was coming to an end, General Butt Naked experienced a theophany in which the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him in a blinding light and told him he would die unless he repented of his sins.
Now he is a fiery evangelist who has gone forth to seek forgiveness from those he wronged so brutally through the years. He says, "I feel very bad, so bad" when he encounters these victims, but he insists that satanic powers had kept him bound. Nonetheless, he is willing to be tried for his war crimes, should that ever happen. One governmental group in Liberia has granted him amnesty in light of his present good works.
Blahyi is now the President of the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries, Inc. He is married and he has three children. In the documentary that I saw it was very moving to watch him go up to people whose family members he had brutally killed and ask them for their forgiveness. In most cases, including one young man whose legs were amputated because the general had shot them, the victims forgave him.
The documentary film is "True Stories: the Redemption of General Butt Naked." I recommend that you watch it. It is a provocative film, to be sure, but it boldly declares the power of forgiveness and the ability of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to set men free, even mass murderers.
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (1 Corinthians 5:17).
