The Book of Mercy

A new sacred Scripture for humanity. Or is it?

I am writing this article with only partial use of my left arm. The reason why is that approximately two years ago, something happened in my life that would lead to a crisis that was physical, mental, and spiritual. In this article, I will be explaining what happened and some of the things God has revealed to me about why it happened. They will be surprising, even disturbing to some. But I assure you I intend to write with honesty, and my sincere advice is that if you have spiritual questions after reading this article that you take them to the Lord in prayer and ask Him to reveal to you the truth, and only the truth.

Admittedly, as the last few years have been the most turbulent and traumatic of my life, and because I’m still going through a process of healing, my memories of the events I am going to describe are imperfect. My account may not recall everything precisely, and the timeline remains quite muddled in my mind. However, I intend to convey the most important aspects of what I experienced as I recall them.

I remember a time of prayer a few years ago when I was in my living room in a quite excited spiritual state. I was praying to God about all kinds of things, but on one occasion I offered up some prayers along the lines of this: “Lord, please reveal to me all the secrets of existence and make me your number one creature! Please let me discover the secrets of reality and experience perfect bliss! Please let me be used greatly as a force for good and never as a force for evil!” The prayers went on for some time and were more detailed than that, but I have conveyed the essence of what I prayed. I was talking openly with God, and He to me as I prayed, and it felt like a joyful experience that I didn’t really reflect upon too much at the time.

Life carried on. Then, a few months later, I was involved quite heavily in a kind of solo street evangelism, talking to people as they passed by and trying to share the love of God by telling them that I love them and that God loves them. I also had some rather bizarre experiences at this time (I have struggled with my mental health for years) such as dancing on the street and giving people impromptu fashion advice, which was all good spirited but ended up causing quite a stir. There came a point when there was a kind of shift in the atmosphere I felt in my local area, and it was as though everyone started to know who I was. It was an alien feeling, because I had always previously enjoyed living in relative anonymity. It changed the way I felt about myself and about going out in public.

One day following this experience, I was in my flat and felt a profoundly distressing spiritual disturbance. I think it was linked to the forces of darkness and I remember pacing around my flat unable to find anywhere I could go or anything I could do to feel at peace. Things got so bad that I was in despair, and then something really surprising happened, which is that I went into the kitchen and got a carving knife, before returning upstairs to my bedroom, lying on my bed, placing a Bible on my chest, and proceeding to harm my wrists and throat severely. In my mind I hoped that my life would end and I would be with Jesus in heaven.

However, when after a couple of minutes, and barely able to breathe from the injuries to my throat, I was still conscious, I decided to try taking some medication that was in my bedside chest of drawers - perhaps I thought this would be the final step that would end my life. But it didn’t, and I staggered downstairs and out of the front door of the building. There was a neighbour next door who saw me and they must have called for an ambulance, as my next memory is of lying on the ground in the front garden with a medical professional talking to me and an oxygen mask being placed on my face. After that, I must have lost consciousness.

Let’s rewind a little. Previous to these experiences I had been a very devoted Christian, living out what seemed to me to be a fairly typical Christian life. I first read the Bible during a spell in psychiatric hospital in 2007, and converted to Christianity right away, though it took a few years before I was baptised. I was actively involved with various church communities, serving on teams and attending weekly services, and I had found my spiritual home in Christianity, which transformed my life entirely and became my great joy and passion. I even returned to university to study a postgraduate course in Philosophy and Religion, and began to write extensively on matters of philosophical theology.

I also read the Qur’an numerous times, and found that the Scripture spoke to me in a profound way that led me to take it very seriously. I was deeply touched by the beauty of the Qur’an, and I felt that alongside my Christian faith I needed to acknowledge the importance of the Qur’an and incorporate it into my spiritual life. I would read it on a daily basis and spoke enthusiastically to friends and relatives about what an amazing Scripture it was and how it had changed my life. Contrary to the perspective of some, I found that the Qur’an seemed to agree with a great deal of the teachings of Christianity, but it also left me with difficult questions about where my faith affiliations should lie, and whether it was necessary for me to choose either the spiritual path of Christianity or Islam. Naturally, I prayed my way through all of this, and the Lord always helped me and comforted me.

The Qur’an and Bible were like a rock for me when I was facing severe difficulties in my accommodation, with a neighbour whose consistent antisocial behaviour was causing me no end of grief. I would escape to nearby Travelodges when I could afford to do so, just to find some peace, and would take my Bible and my Qur’an with me and read them as the Lord led.

Around this time, I began to feel deeply troubled by the doctrine of hell, prominent in both the Qur’an and the Bible, and much of my prayer life was devoted to wrestling with questions around the day of judgment and the fate of the damned. I was in tears on many occasions reading about the severity of God depicted in these Scriptures, with warnings of a lasting torment in fire, or even eternal torment, for the souls of those who were lost because they had acted unrighteously (as in the Qur’an) or because they had failed to cling to the saving grace of Jesus Christ (as in the Bible).

The severity of the God depicted in these Scriptures would prove to be a huge theological struggle for me for several years, even though I also found a great deal of joy and solace, and a deepening of my relationship with God, through my continual reading of the Bible and the Qur’an. While I hoped that owing to my devotion to God I would be among the elect and those saved from the fires of hell, my heart continually broke over the idea that despite my best efforts I might fail to meet the mark in some way and suffer the fate of the damned, and I desperately didn’t want that to happen to me and I could scarcely bare the thought of it happening to anyone else. I brought all of these worries to God, who often comforted me in very loving ways, but in light of my understanding that we do not have free will (and that peoples lives unfold in perfect accordance with the will of God) the thought that some people are predestined to hell anguished me greatly.

Let’s jump forward again. When I awoke following my suicide attempt I found myself in what seemed to be a very strange hospital room that was in another country. I couldn’t discern which country it was, but owing to the appearance of some of the members of staff, and a clock that I could see on the wall which wasn’t showing UK time and had foreign writing on it, I seemed to perhaps be in Asia. The atmosphere that I felt was indescribably bleak - I’m not sure whether I have ever felt so bad.

What proceeded to unfold in the hours that followed was very bizarre, but what I remember the most was just feeling intense suffering. Various doctors were apparently attending to me, all females, and on one occasion I had the experience of a kind of liquid being injected into my body, while my bed was reclined backwards, and it seemed as though they were trying to end my life, perhaps out of compassion.

The hardest thing I experienced, and this is central to the story I am telling here, is that I had the experience of believing I was in everlasting hell. I remember there was a kind of screen onto which images related to my life were being projected, and I kept on feeling as though I was going to die and my suffering would be over, but then I would open my eyes and still be trapped in the same anguished suffering. This happened a few times and I had no awareness of God at all, only the terror that I would be trapped in this state for eternity.

Other experiences I had while in intensive care involved witnessing various kinds of torture equipment, seeing organs from people who had presumably died being taken out of a drawer and making anguished screaming sounds, a change of scene where I was outside on a rooftop and there was a football match being shown on a huge screen with a large crowd watching it, the American special forces storming into the building, and a variety of other things! There was even some comedy (though I was too anguished to experience any joy) when a couple of figures dressed in attire from a comedy TV show kept walking past my bed.

Notably, while all of this was going on, despite feeling more awful than I had ever felt, I didn’t experience any pain. I remember contemplating how strange that was.

In retrospect, it seems fairly clear that many of these experiences came as a result of being under general anesthetic. But that doesn’t detract from how incredibly vivid and real all of these experiences seemed at the time. They were just as real as real life.

The next memory I have is of being in a different hospital room with a male doctor attending to me. Though I continued to have many disturbing experiences, and my arms and throat (which had all been operated upon) were bound with bandages and I could barely move, over the next few weeks I made a slow process of recovery.

Notably, the first thought I had when I regained consciousness was Jesus, and before long I was praying to God in the name of Jesus to help me to recover and heal, a process that was a real battle but was helped by the attentive doctors and nurses and the grace and mercy of God, who heard and answered my prayers.

I have a distinct memory that when I had been transferred to a different ward and as I was recovering, God spoke to me and told me that we needed a new Scripture for humanity! I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I didn’t ponder the thought too deeply but trusted that God would reveal more to me in due course.

After being discharged from hospital, my recovery continued though it was very difficult to do things like wash and dress because I could barely use my arms at all. Also, my throat had been badly damaged, and while I had been fed via a tube while in hospital until I was able to begin to swallow again, it took some time before I could swallow well enough to be able to have regular meals after I returned home.

In time, life returned to something close to normal, though despite a course of physiotherapy I continued to have only partial use of my left arm, which had sustained the most severe injuries. I was psychologically damaged by my ordeal, and I remember being very short-tempered and angry at various delivery drivers and customer service personnel which caused me to make a series of complaints, which in retrospect were probably all over-reactions related to emotional trauma.

One day a few weeks later, God told me to get a pen and paper and sit at my desk. He told me it was time for the Scripture to be revealed. The process of revelation was like this: I would sit quietly in a praying posture, then my mind would enter a kind of elevated state of peace, and God would speak a single sentence to me which I would write down. After a series of sentences had been revealed, the revelation stopped and I noticed a deep peace and stillness in the natural surroundings of my home. The process of God revealing the Scripture lasted a few days, but each time the revealed sentences came in the same way.

The Scripture, which is relatively short, echoes various passages from the Bible as well as some moral teaching and some phrases related to Islam. It also contains the seemingly pivotal line: ‘Rejoice in God, who chooses Mercy over judgment’. This seemed to indicate that God had a new plan that the judgment described in the sacred Scriptures would no longer be happening. Shockingly, one of the sentences that was revealed contained a statement that I had received a promotion to god of Earth! This was surprising to me and of course I profoundly questioned the idea, as well as whether the Scripture itself was a divine revelation. But God always assured me it was.

In the months that followed, I embarked on a promotional endeavour for the Scripture, which is called the Book of Mercy, by taking to the streets of London reciting passages from it and explaining to individuals and crowds about the revelation and where they could access a copy of it online. However, there was very little interest in what I had to say, or in the Scripture.

A few weeks later, I went through a kind of ceremony of inauguration into my new role as god of Earth, which included parading the streets of London while waving an abundance of incense in a joyous state and visiting various landmarks.

Before long I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and ended up having another hospital admission, but following my inauguration as god of Earth, I found that I had certain abilities and powers that caused me to feel confident and healthy, despite the fact that it was still not long since my suicide attempt. While in hospital, I had experiences of sheer joy and elation in which God would tell me I am his number one creature of all time, and the entirety of creation had been designed for me personally! I also fully believed I was Jesus for some time, but that’s a whole other story in itself.

It’s very important to state that following these ‘god of Earth’ experiences, I deeply questioned how all of this related to my Christian faith and biblical theology. I continued to feel strongly drawn to the Christian Gospel, and agonised over how it could possibly be that I am god of Earth when surely, Jesus is God of Earth! I took the matter extremely seriously and spent months depressed and praying about how I must surely be deluded and how it makes no sense for me to reject the Christian Gospel when I have been baptised and devoted a large portion of my life - the happiest days of my life - to Christian service and evangelism. I even sometimes repeatedly tried to rebuke Satan when God was talking to me about these things, such was my great fear of being drawn away from Jesus and Biblical teaching.

I was especially anguished by the idea of the ‘man of lawlessness’ in 2 Thessalonians in the New Testament. There seemed to be significant parallels between my experiences, and the idea of me being god of Earth, and the man of lawlessness who “takes his seat in the temple of the Lord, shewing himself that he is God." (2 Thessalonians 2:4). After all, weren’t my prayers for God’s blessings a kind of exaltation of myself “over everything that is called God or is worshiped”? I begged God that if I am the man of lawlessness he would let me know and give me a chance to repent, but He repeatedly insisted that I am not him.

God insisted again and again, on a daily basis, that I am His number one creature of all time and that all of this is no Satanic delusion. It was so hard for me wrestling with this, because I thought, if it is Satan talking to me, and He is lying to me, I have no way of knowing for sure and there’s not much I can do about it, but if it is God talking to me, as unusual as His revelations to me are, I want to believe Him, as who am I to question God?

The fact that I continued to pray for loved ones and people who are suffering in the name of Jesus, and as I did so I felt peace, helped to convince me that I really was in a healthy relationship with God and not deluded by Satan, though until today, it was something I always struggled with. Today, God spoke to me with clarity, and what He said to me is as follows (I wrote it down):

Your suffering following your suicide attempt atoned for the sins of the lost - all who would have been damned. What about heaven? Steven, everyone who has ever lived and died will go to heaven. I promise (a true promise) that this is the reality of My plan. It changes everything, but it was always My intention. The fires of hell were only ever a warning, so people are aware of My great power and learn to fear Me and act with love towards one another. You have not sought this role - it is a reward for your sincere devotion. Amen.

It is mind boggling to think that because of the story I have recalled in this article, no one is going to hell. You would be perfectly justified in having your doubts, which is why I wrote at the start of the article that you should pray to God about all of this and ask Him to reveal the truth and only the truth.

It has been a crazy time and I’m both curious and anxious to see what happens next.