Metro Weekly

Pastor Says He Went to Hell and Heard Rihanna’s “Umbrella”

A pastor known for his TikTok videos claims his spirit visited Hell in 2016 and he heard pop music playing there.

Rihanna and Pastor Gerald A. Johnson (center) – Photoillustration: Todd Franson. Original images by the Island Def Jam Music Group and Gerald A. Johnson, via TikTok

A pastor, well known for his TikTok videos, has claimed to have visited Hell, where he had his ears assailed by pop music, including Rihanna’s 2007 hit “Umbrella.”

Gerald Johnson, the head of Gerald A. Johnson Ministries, claims in a recent TikTok video that he thought he was having a heart attack in 2016, and his spirit “left my physical body.”

Instead of going upwards to Heaven — despite all of the purported good things he’s done as a pastor — he traveled to the center of the earth, where hell is located. 

Once there, Johnson claims he saw a man, burned from head to toe, with eyes bulging, on all fours like a dog, with a chain around his neck, and a demon holding the chain.

He also claimed there was a separate section in Hell where music was playing.

“It still baffles me to this day,” Johnson says in the video, which has since received more than 4 million views on TikTok and has been cross-posted to YouTube, where it’s gained an additional 44,000 views. “It was the same music that we hear on the Earth, but as opposed to entertainers singing it, the music, demons were singing it. It was some of the same lyrics we hear here.”

 

He continues, “I knew that, on earth, a lot of the lyrics and the music in the songs are inspired by demons.”

He claimed that when some musicians do drugs to unlock their creativity, they can open a portal to Hell, through which demons will whisper lyrics that allow Satan to control humans.

“Here, music is to get over a breakup. ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ ‘I bust the windows out your car,’ or, ‘under my umbrella,’ whatever,” he says, referencing song lyrics by Bob Marley, Jazmine Sullivan, and Rihanna.

“There, every lyric to every song is to torment you as to the fact that you didn’t worship God through music when you were on the Earth,” he continues. “So it’s like you had a chance to worship him in church and at home and through music, but you chose to worship Satan by repeating the lyrics that he inspired to come into the earth.”

Johnson subsequently claims in the video to have had a face-to-face encounter with Jesus, who chastised him for failing to sufficiently forgive those who had wronged him in life, and told him of the importance of forgiveness in order to free one’s soul from the burden of those resentments. 

“Hell is a real place. … God doesn’t send people to Hell. People send themselves to Hell,” he says. “And whatever’s still left inside of you, that God has been trying to get out of you, that you die with, that’s going to determine where you go. God’s going to want to know: Did you learn to love well? Did you learn to forgive well? Did you serve me well? Did you do something greater than your life? Did you do anything that has eternal significance, or is everything selfish?”

Representatives for Rihanna do not appear to have commented on the pastor’s claims. 

Rihanna released two tracks last year in support of the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The first hit, “Lift Me Up” served as the lead preview from the movie’s soundtrack, reached as high as No. 2 on the U.S. music charts, and earned an Oscar nomination for “Best Original Song” when the nominations for the 2023 Academy Awards were announced, reports Entertainment Weekly.

The 34-year-old singer is also set to perform during the halftime show at the 2023 Super Bowl, which features a matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, in Glendale, Arizona, on Sunday, Feb. 12.

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