You have probably heard the news about the pastor of the world’s largest church, Dr. David Yonggi Cho. He was recently convicted of embezzling $12 million dollars from the church that he founded in 1958 and served as its senior pastor until his recent retirement. He was given a three-year suspended sentence (no jail-time) and was ordered to repay $4.67 million dollars to the church.[1]
This is not the first time Dr. Cho has been implicated in some type of financial scandal, but it is the first time he was actually convicted in a court of law.[2] This news has been tremendously painful for me to hear, as it has been for countless others around the world who respect Dr. Cho and what he has done.
While there is no getting around the troubling character of this news, there are a few mitigating details that some commentators are not including in their reports.[3]
A Bigger Picture
We should note that Dr. Cho has reportedly given more than $170 million dollars to his church over the past 55 years, while he is accused of embezzling out $12 million dollars. His book sales, speaking engagements . . . all of the accoutrements of his fame . . . have been incredibly lucrative, and he has apparently given most of it back to his church. Does this make embezzlement ok? Absolutely not! But . . .
He did not actually take for himself the $12 million dollars that he was convicted of embezzling. The facts of the situation are that his son, Hee-jun, desired to sell some stock to the church and presented his father with a proposal that was more than 1,000 pages long. Cho did not read it; he simply approved it. This was a tremendous mistake, seeing that the stock that his son sold to the church was worth four times less than he sold it to the church for. This caused the church to incur a $12 million dollar loss.[4]
Cho’s real error was trusting his son, who had proved himself untrustworthy over and over again. And it does seem that over the years Cho has not been diligent to maintain a clear enough line of demarcation between church funds and personal funds. At any rate, this is a sad situation, to say the least.
But this begs the question, what went wrong? How was this even possible? This man has been a vessel through whom God has saved, healed, and delivered hundreds of thousands . . . if not millions . . . of people around the world. How could such scandals even be associated with his name?
Is Power the Problem?
One of the most popular answers to this question that I’m seeing pop up on various social media outlets is that he became too powerful. Several people are quoting Lord Acton: Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Is this what happened to Dr. Cho? Did he simply become too powerful? And if so, is this not a lesson to the rest of us, that we should be wary of success, of power . . . that we should not aspire to have too great of an impact upon the world, lest we meet our demise in the process as well?
I don’t believe this is the answer at all! Think about it: if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then God would be the most corrupt being in the universe! How is it that God can be simultaneously all-powerful and absolutely righteous? The answer is simple: God has absolutely no corruption because he has absolutely no lust.
Power doesn’t corrupt; lust corrupts, and absolute lust corrupts absolutely. Power is not the problem; lust is the problem.
Lust is inordinate desire that is in opposition against God’s love. Lust is both the act of desiring anything that God does not desire for you and of enjoying anything that God cannot enjoy with you.
In order to desire for myself that which God does not desire for me, I must first believe that what God desires for me is insufficient to meet my needs and to satisfy my desires . . . and I must believe that I am more qualified to know what I need than God is. And in order to enjoy that which God cannot enjoy with me, I must first believe that what God has in store for me as I dwell in his presence is inferior to what I can experience if I dwell in the flesh . . . and I must believe that I am more qualified to satisfy my desires than God is.
John defines lust as the the love of the world, and identifies it as the antithesis of the love of God. If anyone loves the world, says John, the love of the Father is not in him. John goes on to explain that the love of the world consists of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. John deals with lust in the 2nd chapter of his epistle, and then begins the 3rd chapter with these words: Behold what manner of love the Father has lavished upon us. We cannot even begin to behold the love of God until we the lust in us!
The problem with power is that it gives opportunity to the deep lusts that reside in our hearts. Power provides opportunities for lust that are found in no other context. The most dangerous thing in the world is a lustful man or woman who becomes powerful. When Lord Acton said that great men are almost always bad men, he was not putting his finger on the evil of power, but on the pervasiveness of lust. The evil power of lust has found a way to sink its sharp talons into the greatest of men and woman in history, and the results have been devastating. This is why it is so popular in our day and time to conclude that the eschewal of power is the only effective strategy for the avoidance of corruption, and this is also why the demise of Dr. Cho has provided an opportunity for the wholesale critique of the phenomenon of the mega-church and the prolific pastor. In short, the problem with Dr. Cho was that he became too powerful . . . more powerful than a human being should ever become.
It is neither my place nor my intention to point the finger at Dr. Cho. None of us knows what it’s like to stand in his shoes and carry the responsibility that he has carried for 55 years. I believe with all of my heart that God has used him in tremendous ways and that what God has done through him will survive this scandal. But I am saddened by even the report of these things and that his name is associated with them. And I believe that we can learn a real lesson from this turn of events . . . a lesson about what lust can do to us. Even trace amounts of lust in our hearts can find opportunity to spring up in an instant and cause great trouble. I believe that there is much more to be said about how to overcome it, how to create safeguards against it, and how to create a safe environment in which we may become as fruitful as God would have us to be . . . and as powerful . . . without becoming even the least bit corrupt.
References:
1. The news of this case has spread like wildfire. You can read commentaries on the case in Christianity Today, John Piper has commented, The Gospel Herald, Charisma News, and the list goes on and on.
2. A group of his elders accused him of embezzling 20 million dollars in church funds in 2011, and he has been accused of privatizing church assets.
3. For instance, Ed Stetzer states: “In addition to spending three years in prison …”
4. See http://www.charismanews.com/opinion/42918-setting-the-record-straight-on-david-yonggi-cho
