Jim Bakker Goes Full Circle
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the name Jim Bakker. He is known for hosting the evangelical Christian TV program “The PTL Club” in the ’70s and ’80s — up until 1987, when his empire came crashing down amid a sex scandal and charges of financial fraud.
The Bakker scandal got rolling when Jessica Hahn claimed that Bakker had manipulated her into having sex in a hotel room in 1980, back when she was a church secretary. At the time, Bakker was married to Tammy Faye. A $279,000 payoff to buy Hahn’s silence only made matters worse.
The Charlotte Observer then reported that PTL Club’s fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 were used to sell $1,000 “lifetime memberships” entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA. Bakker only built one 500-room hotel even though tens of thousands of memberships were sold. Much of the money paid Heritage USA’s operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.
The Bakker’s lavish lifestyle was their final undoing. As part of the prosperity gospel, they believe in living high on the hog. It was reported that they owned several expansive and expensive homes — two in Palm Springs alone. PTL paid for an endless succession of maids and security guards. Their five pooches had an air-conditioned doghouse. Once, when the Bakker’s needed their clothes in California, the church paid $100,000 to fly their wardrobes in by jet from North Carolina.
Tammy Faye was never charged with any crime. The feds threw the book at poor Jim. In 1989, Bakker was convicted on 24 counts of fraud, sentenced to 45 years in prison, and fined $500,000. A year later, another Jury found Bakker liable for almost $130 million in damages in a lawsuit filed by former contributors to his ministry.
Things turned around for Bakker when in 1991 another federal judge gave him a shorter 18-year prison sentence. That allowed him to be paroled after only serving nearly five years of his sentence.
For a while it appeared that Bakker had turned over a new leaf. Before going to prison, He told the judge, “I have sinned.” In his 1996 book, I Was Wrong, he admitted that the first time he actually read the Bible all the way through was in prison. He wrote that he realized that he had taken passages out of context and used them to support his prosperity teachings:
“The more I studied the Bible, however, I had to admit that the prosperity message did not line up with the tenor of Scripture. My heart was crushed to think that I led so many people astray. I was appalled that I could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful that God had not struck me dead as a false prophet!”
Tammy Faye Bakker never returned to the world of sanity. She filed for divorce from Jim in 1991. An attorney in the divorce proceedings said Tammy Faye Bakker couldn’t stand being separated from her husband or suffering the uncertainty of when he would get out of jail. She started a gay-friendly church that was way ahead of its time. I’ll never forget being at the 2007 Christian Booksellers Association convention. Terry and I were there to promote one of our books, and right across from our table was a video of her. Tammy was talking in an absolutely incoherent langue, and we had to listen to this chatter for several hours.
The last thing I remember reading about Jim Bakker is that he was going to do some type of missionary work for the rest of his life. To my surprise, a few years ago, I just happened to be flipping through channels; and to my great surprise, I saw Jim with his new wife Lori, and they are co-hosts of “The Jim Bakker Show.”
I’m all for people having a second chance at life. We worship a God who is in the business of repentance and new beginnings. The Jim Bakker Show looked alright until I spotted the buckets of freeze-dried food which Bakker was selling to his audience in preparation for the end of days. Apparently, another belief that Jim gave up with the prosperity gospel is the Pretribulation rapture.
In recent days, Bakker had provided the press with fresh material to dig up his old scandal. On his show, he suggested that if you want to survive the Apocalypse, the best thing you could do is buy one of his cabins in Missouri’s Ozark Mountains. You can also pick up a six-pack of 28-ounce “Extreme Survival Warfare” water bottles for $150.
I just cannot believe that Christians would allow the disgraced Bakker to get back into the real estate business. The people who watch his show are old enough to remember his previous stunts. Bakker hasn’t changed, but the world has. He just shows that the time is right for the World’s Greatest Con Artist to appear.
Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud” (2 Peter 2:22).
–Todd
Exposing Earth Worshippers
Observers of these times through the prism of God’s prophetic Word shouldn’t be deceived by the wiles of the devil. Climate change isn’t the primary concern of the globalist minions, neither demonic nor human. The concern of the minions is primarily to seduce as many of earth’s inhabitants as possible into believing that humankind is destroying Mother Earth.
These minions don’t believe it for a second. But, they are determined to convince the world that planet Earth is a delicate organism that must be worshiped because she is the sustainer of life.
The globalists’ goal is to work to bring the earth’s total inhabitants to less than 500,000,000 people. They–the globalists–are to be, of course, the ruling class among this sustainable population of earth dwellers.
The real objective of the would-be rulers of the planet, make no mistake, is to be as gods–the same status Lucifer promised the first man and woman they would attain in the Garden.
Climate change has again raised it’s luciferic head in the never-ending attempt to foist the same old global-warming lie that has been on Satan’s seducing agenda for recent decades. We note that at the beginning of the following report, the appeal is to the female gender in rolling out the lie. Satan is if anything consistent in his maddening methodology.
The United Nations Climate Change Secretariat released its first ever annual report this week, in which it held up its “Gender Action Plan” as a key to increasing the participation of women in responding to global warming.
“Climate Change is the single biggest threat to life, security and prosperity on Earth,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa at the roll-out of the report.
“This annual report shows how UN Climate Change is doing everything it can to support, encourage and build on the global response to climate change,” Espinosa said, adding that “UN Climate Change’s mandate is to lead and support the global community in this international response, with the Paris Agreement and the Convention being the long-term vehicles for united global climate action.” (“U.N. Says Climate Change Is ‘Single Biggest Threat to Life, Security and Prosperity on Earth’,” Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty, by Thomas D. Williams PhD, Rapture Ready News, May 5, 2018, raptureready.com)
UN Secretary-General António Guterres added to the never-ending mantra that climate change is going to destroy us all if action isn’t forthcoming by those who love Mother Earth.
He warned that climate change is the “defining challenge of our time…yet it is still accelerating faster than our efforts to address it. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are higher than they have been for 800,000 years, and they are increasing. So, too, are the catastrophic effects of our warming planet – extreme storms, droughts, fires, floods, melting ice and rising sea levels.”
Makes no difference that every bit of the foregoing has been debunked. It is irrelevant with these Mother Earth protectors, apparently, that remarks that include findings from 800,000 years ago are totally unsearchable. It is the same thing that William James the philosopher first said and Hitler’s propagandist Josef Goebbels seized upon: Tell a lie long enough and loud enough and soon it will become accepted as truth.
One fact about the human creature Lucifer instinctively knew from the beginning of his seduction: People, in their fallen condition, will for the most part, choose to worship anything rather than the God who created them. Like Lucifer himself, they want to view themselves as godlike and do things their own way.
Psalms chapter 2 tells that the globalists wish to break free from the bonds of Heaven–from the governing hand the Supreme Being exerts on their capability to do what is right in their own eyes.
These human minions, spurred on by the demonic minions, work incessantly to convince the rest of us that we must look at the earth as our sustainer of life. We must treat her with great reverence. We must, in effect, worship her.
The lie includes the charge that those who do not follow this ecological-religious ideology–for example, Christians who don’t look at planet Earth as a living organism that must be treated as deity–are sinners of the first order. We won’t be among the elite 500,000,000 who ultimately will be privileged to inhabit the planet in order to make it sustainable.
We who follow God’s Word do have respect for the environment. We do want to do the best possible job of protecting this world that was made for us to live, work, and play upon. But, we don’t consider it a goddess to be worshiped.
The Lord says the following regarding the attempts by the globalist types to construct worship systems other than true worship of the True God:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. (Romans 1:18-25)
–Terry