The Hollow Log and the Healing Line: Myths that Shaped a Movement

Hello and welcome to another episode at the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host, minister and friend, Chino Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding, scripture, and truth by Chino D. Ross, YouTube channel. Chino, it's good to be back and to prepare for talking about all things Hobart Freeman and I've been thinking through this after our last podcast and I was thinking it would be really good if you and I could get in the

spirit more and maybe for the next 40 days if you and I could fast. That did come up as a topic from our last podcast. Before I get into that, John, let me just say that the end of this week we have our meeting greet. I'll get to second schedule for the Wyndham Hotel and Warsaw, Indiana for all the people that want to attend. I just want to, this is the last opportunity before we arrive at that event to invite everyone. Please come, bring friends, bring relatives, bring opponents or foes if you want to. I don't really care and I don't think

people will want to come that aren't in agreement but I know we've got a lot of people coming, a lot of people from out of state are traveling. I'll be there staying Friday night and Saturday night. So we'll have our formal if you could even call it that meeting greet on Saturday morning beginning at 10 a.m.

and it will last however long people want it to. We have the meeting rooms reserved for that morning and all that afternoon. But I'll be there the day before and the day after. So I mean we have plenty of time for theological discussions and debates and questions and however people want to go. So that will be the Saturday looking forward to seeing and meeting people. And as you know John with the way you've handled these podcasts, most of these people you never laid eyes on. You don't, you get an email from them but you never get to

see them. You may talk on the phone but you never meet in person. So I'm looking forward to this. Most of these people I don't know what they look like. They know what I look like but I couldn't pick them out in a crowd of two. That's for sure. But we're looking forward to it.

this weekend. So I'm sure people will not remember John, but the last time in our podcast, we were talking about one of the last parameters for divine healing that I wanted to discuss, that it was real critical and played an important part in Dr. Freeman's ministry.

And that is the timing of the healings, once you have prayed, and we had played a clip from a 1974 message of Hobart, that he taught it to glory barn in tidal stepping stones to answer prayer.

And the reason I played that clip is because it makes reference to a particular Bible verse, which became kind of the hallmark verse in Hobart's ministry. And just to review the background of that clip, Hobart said there was a local minister, so that someone, a minister in a church somewhere there in Northern Indiana around the time Hobart was giving this in the early 1970s, who was struggling with doubt in his life and trying to figure out why can't I believe the promises of God, why am I having so many struggles with this?

And so he related this story to Hobart, and then Hobart tells it on the tape. So this minister went on a 40 day fast, will return to that subject here in just a minute.

But at the end of the 40 day fast, this man told Hobart, I heard the audible voice of God. Now let me say Hobart has many stories on many messages where he relays someone else's experience of having heard the audible voice of God.

I can't remember a time Hobart himself personally claimed to have ever heard the voice of God, but this man said that he did. So Hobart said, you know, I wanted to know what did God say?

Man said, I heard the voice of God booming down out of heaven into my bedroom on the 40th day of my fast. And Hobart said, well, what did he say? What did he say?

And the minister said, he quoted to me, Mark 1122 to 24, half faith in God and you know the rest of the passage. And in this citation from stepping stone stands for prayer that we played last time, Hobart's message in 1974, Hobart said, that's become the central verse, or that is the central verse in my ministry, Mark 1124, that when you pray, believe that you have received and you shall have it.

And he's always telling everyone, we've all been to school, we can see several verb tenses there. The teaching is you do your believing when you pray and then you have received at that moment.

And when you might actually see it happen in your life is all in God's hands. And so he says in that clip, I've gotten new cars off that verse. I've gotten a trip to Israel.

You can get anything off of Mark 1124. Um, so when I hear a story like that, when I'm 17 years old, I just, my jaw hits the floor and I go, wow, I've never heard of such a my Presbyterian church.

And so I believe it because who doesn't want to believe a story like that? When a few years go by, you start analyzing each part of that story and you're going, wait a minute, how and when and why and where would God be quoting the Bible to anybody when we all own a copy of the Bible that just does not seem to be scriptural at all for you to have gone on this fast.

And then God is going to quote to you, Mark 11, 22 to 24 when, when you already own a Bible. And then when Hobart says that you, you can get anything you want on this verse, he said, I've gotten new cars.

I got a trip to Israel. Then it goes back to some of our earlier discussions, Sean on proper hermeneutics. What did the original disciples, the apostles, the hearers of that? How did they interpret that?

What did it mean to them? And then you go and look in the book of Acts. You look at their experience and none of them are claiming a faster camel or a bigger wagon with, with nice wheels and rims on it or something.

They didn't see that verse in any materialistic sense. Paul was on his way to Rome and his ship was wrecked. I don't see him naming and claiming anything like God, why not just transport me from the Mediterranean coast in Israel all the way to Rome.

And we can skip all of this sailing and we can skip all the trauma or why not just rebuke the storm and say cease, be calm and when be still. Paul never did any of that.

So again, we're always putting ourselves back in the position of, are we going to believe Paul's teaching and follow Paul's experience? And, and are we going to follow the early apostles? They're understanding of Mark 11, 22 to 24.

They never cursed a fig tree. They never tried to remove a mountain and they never tried to receive any material items. That was the last thing in their mind, material items when they were busy preaching and spreading the gospel.

So those, those issues of that story would cause a problem to me. And then back to what I said, we would return to this man. went on a 40 day fast. You know, I'm not the man I wasn't there, but I'm just going to have to say, I don't believe that story. I don't, I believe either Hobart exaggerated or the man exaggerated it or both. I just don't believe that he fasted for 40 days and for 40 nights. And let me say, there are biblical fast, Moses and Jesus are two that come to mind that I do believe happen

for 40 days because they're in the Bible. But Hobart was very prone for telling a lot of stories about people who went on extended fast. One we may need to discuss in detail later is a 49 day fast that someone went on just on behalf of Dr. Freeman himself. That's another story maybe before another. That is a seven week fast. But I know John off the record after we finished our episode last time, you said, Oh, when you talked about fasting, I should have mentioned Franklin Hall because Franklin Hall was one of the the the pioneers of this whole Pentecostal healing

revival movement that was so well known for his teaching on fasting. My grandfather used to tell me that he as a joke, he would go up to people in his church and he would, you know, after service they're talking and they're, you know, they're all in the spirit after the after the sermon and he would say, Come on, brother, this was really good. Let's pray and fast together. And the look on their face because nobody wanted to do it is the funny thing. They all wanted to go after service and get their favorite dinner. So yeah, it's not something that everybody does. However,

I've mentioned on here before diabetes runs in my family. I studied the science of fasting for probably two years before I tried it. You can find all sorts of studies on the benefits of fasting and what it does to your body because your body, your belly's like a camel's hump.

If you wait long enough and you get into the fasting mode, your body will consume all of that. But what's in there, all of the fat and the toxins and all of the things that your body stores up that not all of it's really good for you, all of that goes through your system.

And my wife can tell you the toxins that are in there make your breath really, really foul once you get into that, into that state. And as your metabolism is going through this, well, the longer you go, your body gets into a state where it's not quite like a near death experience, but your body is tricked into thinking that it is starving to death. That's part of human life and human anatomy. So your body starts to react as though you're dying. And if you have some sort of a chemical change in your brain, very, very odd thing.

can happen, which I won't go into details about this. If you fast, you'll understand what I'm saying. Weird things happen. And especially if you've not done it for many, many years, and you do have all of those toxins, as those groups go through your system, the chemical change in your brain does weird things. Now, I know that there is a Bible precedent for fasting, and I understand all the scripture passages of this. But you have to remember, this was during a completely different era, where, you know, many people didn't eat three times a day, three square meals like we do, and their body was used and accustomed to fasting, and they were

much skinnier than we are today. So what they had is much different than what we have. But when you do this, the fact that, you know, I could say, yes, God spoke to me through a pink elephant during one of these things, and that didn't happen. But if you understand the chemical change that happens in your head when you fast, you might think it's God, but it also could be your brain just doing weird things to you. And that's a fact for anybody that has done it. However, all of this said, if you fast for three days, you're going to understand how ridiculous a 40-day

fast is. With all of us porky people, I wish Franklin Hall would come back. People could just fast just to lose some weight. I'm no expert on fasting. I do believe in fasting. I do believe it's there's a biblical precedent, but I'm with you on the timing of it. John, I've never fasted longer than three days. I've done that on a few occasions. I've done a whole lot of one day fast.

But, you know, people are going to like what we're saying that we're critical. They say, well, the guy said he went on a 40-day. People have said things their whole life that aren't true.

You know, because someone said it doesn't make it true. A 40-day fast, you know, I know. I just I just have to shake my head and say, no, I simply don't believe that the guy did it.

The funny part of it is all of this history that we're talking about, as you mentioned Franklin Hall, it kind of surrounds this. He and William Branham would get up before their revivals. I've got an audio clip of this, but he would say, what are we going to begin with brother Branham?

And William Branham would sheepishly say, oh, money. Yeah, we're going to start with some money. Let's pass the ties basket. That's how their meetings would start. So they collect all this money. Well, then these people were trying to do what Hall said, and they were trying to fast. And they went nuts. I mean, literally they went nuts. They started believing things that weren't true, believing seeing things that weren't there. And that was the premise for what became the laterane revival. It William Branham and Franklin Hall were the catalysts. So you had the fasting and Branham had this weird, I'm going to get into this at some point in the podcast.

Branham had this weird connection to the spiritualist camps. And he was teaching a spiritualist version of Christian. entity that he learned from his mentors. Those two combined created laterane. And if you fast and get the people where they're just their brain shutting off, they're not thinking they accept it willingly.

You know, I'm going to, I've got a few excerpts from Franklin Hall, even though this is not about, this is not a podcast about fasting or maybe it is. Maybe that's what it's turning into. But he just had the weirdest ideas about fasting. So his wife, sister, hall, um, he said that if you would fast, you would not be sick. There were three things you could accomplish. You could eliminate sickness. You could eliminate tiredness and you could eliminate human body odor. Those are the three things that would happen through fasting. So here is, here is Franklin Hall. And he had, I guess, a church down in Phoenix,

Arizona. Uh, sister, hall has had no sickness. That's his wife in 18 years. Yeah, right. It reminds me of Hagen saying, yeah, not a headache in 50 years. It just depends on how you define a headache, I guess. Um, she has had no tiredness in 15 years.

How about that? Yeah, I'd even been tired in 15 years. I guess it depends on how you define tiredness. Then they have a testimony from a sister, Thelma Moore from San Francisco. Here's her testimony. She said, I wore the same hose for six months without washing them.

And they never did get stiff and they never had any unpleasant odor about them. So I mean, no deodorant, no food and no sleep. And this was kind of a gospel he was teaching. Um, he said when his, and this is what he said when you'd come into a meeting, when his disciples would raise their right hand in the meeting, they would say, hello, Jesus. And the Holy Ghost would descend on them. When they would raise the left hand and say, hello, Jesus, then they would smell the fragrance of Jesus. Now, take a deep sniff. Hall told an audience

in Phoenix. Doesn't that smell good? Have any of you folks got a dog at home? Well, if you've got a dog, you'll have to watch out because when you get home, you'll just smell different.

Oh, you can take the fragrance with you and it will go all over the lot. It gets in your home and it also makes your home bug proof. It makes you a Holy Ghost exterminator.

There's Franklin Hall for you. And it's funny because if you listen to these guys back in the fouries and fifties, again, they're, they're teaching crowds to fast and it's a manipulation tool. They don't believe whatever comes out of their mouth. But in today's world, many of the things that they were able to convince people of you would never be convinced.

and stuff it. So what has happened is the modern leaders have said, this is our heritage, this is where we came from. You look all through the New Apostolic Reformation, they always reference these quote unquote gods generals.

If they were to take some of the speeches from these quote gods generals and hand them out today, people would run screaming. They would say, this is nuts, I'm not gonna be in this anymore.

And you know, John, that's the thing that's so shocking about Hobart Freeman's ministry, his followers, if they will just take a step back and think about it, Hobart's messages were not Bible teachings. They were stories that he recycled and regurgitated and then supported these stories with, you know, aversitude taken out of context.

And that is what a Hobart Freeman sermon would be. You know, I've heard many where he always will say, you know, turn to such and such passage and he'll read it. And he can literally go for 60 minutes and never refer to that passage again.

He's simply telling stories of, as you reference, and maybe it was, was it Robert Slyardin or somebody who came up with his phrase of gods generals and that's where I learned even the names of these people, whether it's, you know, Brannum or Roberts or Jack Coe or AA Allen, Gordon Lindsay, Franklin Hall, Dowie, you know, all of these people, Hobart just told these stories, but he had read these stories himself from someone's ministry publication.

He would tell stories about Guy Bevington. I don't know if you've ever done any study or anything on Bevington, but I think there was a book written called Remarkable Miracles. And you see, whenever they had the gory barn, one of the long time attendees of Faith Assembly was a brother named Hank Platt.

Hank Platt actually was, came from the brethren background, the same as Hobart, and actually was a member of Hobart's little house church in Claypool, way back in pre-carrismatic days. So Hank Platt opened a bookstore, sat on a concrete slab, as you pulled up to the gory barn, it sat right there to the right, and it was called the Upper Room Bookstore.

And he just kept it stocked with all of this charismatic literature, this old Pentecostal stuff that Hobart was always referencing. And so Bevington and his book Remarkable Miracles was one Hobart would talk about frequently, but the story that he would tell about Bevington was normally the story about Bevington crawling in a hollow log and staying for 10 days, fasting, and praying. And you would hear these stories. And I'm telling you as as a new believer, as a young person, you just ate this stuff up because you just thought, man, I never heard any of this in

my denominational church that that anyone would be so committed to crawling a hollow log and stay there for 10 days. Now, why does it have to be a hollow log? And so critical thinking, you know, years later, go, wait, wait, wait a minute. How many hollowed out logs are big enough to hold a man? Number one, number two, who could, who could dare endure the insects and synopids and spiders and bugs that would be crawling all over you in every orifice of your body as you're living inside that hollow log for 10 days? Nobody ever stood up at faith assembly and said, wait a minute.

The madness has to stop. Nobody is going to stay inside a hollow log for 10 days. Hope art would tell that story that Bevington would go in the hollow log, stay there for 10 days, and he could just pray heaven and earth together praying and fasting and living inside a hollow log.

I don't believe that ever happened. I don't believe Bevington ever went in a hollow log and stayed for 10 days. Maybe he found a hollowed out stump and sat on it for a while. Maybe he went in a hollowed out tree for an hour and prayed, but living inside a hollow log for 10 days, a guy praying heaven and earth to get, I just don't believe that it happened. Well, and depending on the man's size, which it had to been fairly small to get in the log in the first place, your body only lasts for three days before you die if you don't have water. I don't know that it's really that possible,

but people will believe anything, and especially if you tell it to them in the name of religion, they just shut off critical thinking and it shouldn't be that way. These guys have learned that you can manipulate the masses and you can tell them anything that you want to prove your point even if it's pure nonsense. But if you mention the name Jesus when you do it, they'll listen to it and pay attention. And we need more people to just say, wait a minute, I'm thinking about this and I'm realizing that what you're telling me is complete nonsense. Yeah, you say Jesus and you

bring a Bible verse and tack that on to the end of it. Yeah, I'm all four people standing up and saying no, my wife is not very comfortable going to visiting different churches with me. You probably would not even be comfortable with me, John, because I'm telling you, I try to follow decorum and I don't want to cause a scene, but I am just afraid that if I was in Visiting a church and some ministers stood up and started telling a story about a 40-day fast and a hollow log and And then taking all these Bible verses out of context. I don't I

Should just get up and leave but knowing me. I would probably just raise my hand and say I object You know, I object to this nonsense is going on I wish we would have people that had the boldness to do that and And stop the madness that's happening in these churches and the biggest name of all of God's generals Quote unquote with Smith Wigglesworth You know the English minister the second half of the 1800s and early 1900s Hope art would regale you with stories about Smith Wigglesworth Stanley Fraudsham had written a book the Apostle of Faith which I'm sure

Hank Platt had in the bookstore and Stanley Fraudsham became one of the early leaders of that latter reign movement by the way Both of these were assemblies of God guys in England both Wigglesworth and Fraudsham And another book called ever increasing faith was written telling all of these stories of Smith Wigglesworth He raised like 16 dead people But we don't have any verification of any of that And I can't even remember a message of Hobart I even heard you the few weeks ago, but I don't know the title to it But it was in the very it was a later message of Hobart. So it's not back in his

Footloose and fancy free early days. It was much much later But Hobart said the very beginning of the message he said hey, I just finished rereading a Smith Wigglesworth book And it's either Apostle of Faith or ever increasing faith one of those two and He said I had forgotten but I was reminded of the story that all Smith told One time he had gone to bed at night gone to sleep And all of a sudden he was awakened and he was just awakened because he felt a presence an evil presence in the room And he raised himself up in the bed and he looked over in the corner of his bedroom and

He said oh It's you devil and he just went back to sleep and and Hobart Hobart's message was that's how That's how Smith handles Satan He had such authority and power over the enemy That even when Satan appeared Visibly in the corner of his bedroom Smith just brushed him off and said oh, it's only you devil and then just went back to sleep And you know, we hear those stories and again, no, no, I hear a story like that and um I know that never happened that that story never happened

Smith may have had too much to drink the night before or something. But that story never happened. Satan, as he appears in scripture, is not a being that you trifle with. If you read the first couple of chapters of Job, if you look how Michael, the archangel, had to deal with Satan concerning Moses' body and the little epistle of Jude, he's a formidable foe, and he does exist. He is real. But Smith's Smith's treatment of him is like a cartoon that, oh, I see the devil, like a little m over in the corner. Oh, it's just you, devil. Well, I'm going back to sleep. And he just goes

back to sleep. And the devil, I guess, is so afraid of Smith that he just vanishes after that. These are the types of messages you get, believe it or not, believe it or not, from Hobart Freeman.

These are the types of messages you get. You get story after story of the apostles, the Lord or the apostles of the devil, the generals of the devil, whatever you want to call them, that fill the pages of books like the all things are possible. There is William Brandham with the halo. I think that's R.W. Shambok. And that's David Terrell, I think right there, praying for somebody. This book will give you the stories of all of these people cast in the best light. I think generally done from press releases in their own ministries. That's what I was raised on

early and listening to Dr. Freeman. Later on, he would not refer to these guys as much, but the first 15 years of his ministry to his discredit. He based so much of his teaching on the ministry and stories and experiences of these guys when he should have been spending his time basing his teaching on the Bible. And at the same time, exposing these guys for what they were. But I know when Hobart left the Southern Baptist convention and then left the brethren church and joined the charismatic movement, you know, these were new stories to him as well. And they just simply swept

him off his feet. And he simply to his discredit, he dropped all critical thinking and he believed every one of these. And then what made it what complicated things for the followers of Dr. Freeman is he did have the tendency to later in life try to teach a little more correctly and a little more precisely. But he never expunged these old stories and ministers. So there was always this dichotomy in people's minds. I know I had it in mind. You know, you're teaching the Bible and you're teaching you're the one who has the end time.

I'm truth and yet you referenced all of these lunatics, all of these literal lunatics, and you referenced them in such a positive light, and you've never gone back and corrected any of that. You've never gone back and said, I reject everything about these men and their ministries and messages.

Hobart never did that. He tried to hold on to both, and it just created, you know, I think it created a lot of tension in people's minds under his ministry. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

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You know, you mentioned Smith Wigglesworth and one of the problems, everything that you just said is completely accurate. One of the problems is that people don't really examine the quote unquote God's general before they start accepting doctrine.

And it becomes like doctrine alphabet soup. I'm gonna get this little doctrine from this guy who's a complete nut job. I'm gonna get this doctrine from this other guy and he's clearly filled with the devil or he's lying to us.

They don't care because they don't repeat the ministries and as it was presented by whoever is the God's general, but they pick and choose what they want to from them and make a completely new stage act.

That's basically what they're doing. Smith Wigglesworth had this physical assault type ministry. I don't know if you're aware of this, but people would go up to him to be healed and he was allegedly smack him, punch him, kick him.

And you know, you look back on these guys and there's two thoughts that come to mind. If you're critically thinking, there are two thoughts that come to mind. If you're not critically thinking, oh my gosh, the power of God, this guy just kicks somebody's boot in the side of their face and kick the devil out of them.

But I don't think like this and neither should any human being think this way. But think about the poor person who's coming to be healed who's already suffering in pain. They're coming, some of them in wheelchairs, they go up and here's this guy that's gonna punch him in the face.

Well, the guy punching, the guy swinging, how? What can you do this to a person who's hurting? You're going to inflict more pain on the person sitting there, and I don't see any Bible precedent for punching somebody in the face to punch the devil out.

But then you start to read others' other gods' generals, like John G. Lake, who had several different people that was working with him to trick others into thinking that he was actually healing people.

You can get on the internet and you can type in critical examination of John Lake and you'll find all of these examples. He had people who were family members that were healed like 14, 15 different times of the same thing remotely.

They would telegram in before his meeting so that it would get there like the next day, and he would say, I prayed for them remotely, and they got healed remotely, and it's the same person doing the tricks, and allegedly he was doing the same thing to help John Dowey do his stage act.

So you've got all these people that are having fakery. Well, I know if a person comes to my healing line and they're suffering in pain, I'm not going to punch them, but if there's somebody who's planted in the meeting who can get up and pretend to be healed after a punch them, I might, if I was a scoundrel, I might.

So you have to take all of this with a grain of salt and realize that not everything is as it seems, these guys weren't good guys. The doctrine that they were bringing wasn't biblical.

And then you really start to question people who build their ministries off of picking and choosing doctrines from these guys that are complete scoundrels. You're exactly right about Smith. He would punch people in the stomach, people who had stomach cancer or some stomach condition.

He would hit them so hard that he would knock them down or knock them over or move them back several feet. And his little cute way of defending that when people would say, well, how can you be so brutal?

He said, you have to be brutal against the devil. All of these illnesses were a demon inside them. And so you have to hit the devil hard. But just as you said, John, there's no biblical precedent for that.

Jesus never hit anybody. The apostles never hit anybody. Hobart used to talk about Jack Co. He would go around and see a big goiter on a lady's neck. And he would have him up there and he would slap those goiters off their neck and off their face and off their shoulders.

Hobart told of Jack Co. Slaping off goiters, well, that never happened. He never did it. But here's the problem. The problem for Hobart followers is, you know, the blame goes back to Hobart. He told that story.

And so people just believed him. He never checked it out. He never doubted it. He never questioned it. He never had any critical thinking of his own. He just believed those things. So what we have been saying in this last podcast, John, is that the healings...

If people are going to see a healing, it needs to be after the precedent that we've already seen in Scripture. We've talked about the types of illnesses. The types of illnesses healed in the Bible were very severe and significant.

What we have been talking about is the timing of the healing. Healings in the Bible happened right away. They just did. They happened right away. So here's the situation, Hobart knew what the Bible taught.

Hobart knew that the Bible taught that the healings in the Gospels and the Book of Acts were instant or they were immediate. But because he didn't want anyone to expect that from him because he knew it didn't happen in his own life, Hobart began the process of looking long and hard to find exceptions.

And he became adept at looking for tracking down delays in healing. So he would talk about Mark 1124 when you pray, believe you have received and you shall have it. And then he would say, I prayed for you now, accept your healing by faith and go walk it out.

He was famous for saying if you prayed ten times for something, you prayed nine times in unbelief. By the way, he got that statement. He exaggerated it. He got that from Smith Wigglesworth. You can find Smith Wigglesworth saying, if you pray twice for something, then you prayed one time in unbelief.

Whenever someone came for a prayer from him for the second time, he'd say, did not pray for you yesterday, well, to pray for you a second time would be unbelief. So Hobart got that very idea from Smith Wigglesworth as well.

But Hobart looked long and hard for delays because he knew with the Bible tall. All you got to do is read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Acts and you see when Jesus or the apostles or the early church prayed for people, did they get healed?

Yes. When did they get healed? Right then, either in the snap of a finger or in a very, very short, brief period of time. But because Hobart knew that that had not been his experience and he did not want people to expect that, he didn't want them to expect to see what happened in the Bible happened when he prayed for them.

What happened in the Bible to happen in his church services, then as I say, he looked long and hard for any delays. And so he found a few in Luke chapter 17 and he would always tell these stories.

He would say, now, if you don't see a healing right away, well, hold on to your healing, confess it, act it, walk it out by faith and endure it because not everybody in the Bible was healed instantly.

And he had this clever way of taking people to certain passages. So he would say, remember the 10 lepers in Luke 17, and we know the account, 10 lepers came, they asked to be healed, Jesus told them, go show yourself to the priest that would involve a little bit of a trip to get from point A to point B. Jesus was simply following the Old Testament, Levitical Law, where only the priest could, they couldn't cure someone, but only they could pronounce the leprosy gone.

And therefore this person would be allowed to come back into the community of Israel and no longer have to live alone or in a leper colony. So Hobart said, now look at the 10 lepers, were they healed instantly?

No, he said they took it by faith. And as they went and showed themselves to the priest on the way, they were healed. And of course we know the story, one of them returned to thank him.

The healing of the blind man, in John 9, Jesus formed some little concoctions of mud, put it on the blind man's eyes and said go and wash in the pool of saloam. And we read that he went, he washed, and then he came sing.

So Hobart, Hobart was always trying to show there is a biblical precedent for this delay between when you pray and when you receive your actual healing. Another case would be in Mark chapter 8, Jesus prayed for a man and then after he got through praying, he said, what do you see?

And he said, I see men as trees walking, Jesus prayed for him again. And what did he see? He saw men clearly. And you could even go to the Old Testament and find examples like name in the Syrian that the prophet Elijah said, go dip seven times in the Jordan River and you'll be cleansed of your leper seat.

And so what's praying from this then was a very convenient doctrine of Hobart Freemans that for lack of a better word, we would just call his manifestation doctrine. And oh my, that big long five syllable word manifestation was a favorite word of Dr.

Freemans. He used it in his definition of the Trinity. He used it in the manifestation of the sons of God, matured sonship, Romans 8, Laterane, but where he used it more than any other place was healing.

That was part of the terminology. That was a part of the cult terminology. I don't know if it's to the same degree or if it even exists at all. and other healing groups, but for the people at faith assembly, they were, they had been prayed for. And now I'm just waiting for my manifestation. It was just big word. And, you know, when I first began hearing Freeman's tapes, I mean, who uses a word manifestation?

It's just a big word. You use it rarely. You use it occasionally, but it was the cult language. It was one of the main words that you had to learn there. And I can remember first hearing that word and someone waiting for their manifestation. I said, you're doing what? I don't even know what that means. You know, it's not clear. It's not clear to the uninitiated. It's only clear to those in the group. You're waiting for what? I'm waiting for my manifestation. What does that even mean? Waiting for your manifestation?

You know, it's a big word. It's a complicated word. You know, it's like in Mary Poppins, what does supercalifragilistic espiala docious mean? That's a big word. What do these big words mean? They couldn't say I'm waiting for my healing because they got their healing according to Mark 1124 Freeman interpretation when they were prayed for or when they prayed for themselves. So they can't say I'm waiting for my healing. They can't say I'm waiting to feel better. They can't say I'm waiting for the answer because you receive all of that Mark 1124 Freeman interpretation when you pray. So what are these people supposed

to say? They say, well, I'm waiting for my manifestation. And again, John, you know, I'm the first to admit I fell for all this hookline and sinker as a 17 and 18 and 19 year old. And here's a danger of not being able to critically think and not being able to say, no, wait a minute. Yeah, you gave me some examples of a delay. The lepers, they were going to show themselves to the priests. They were healed on the way. And one of them came back. The man went to the pool of salon and washed the mud off his eyes. And then

he could see after that, critical thinking would say, yeah, I see all that. That's in the Bible. I accept all that. But we're talking about a period of time like that. We're not talking about Hobart claiming his polio leg is lengthened and he's holding on year after year after year after year. We don't see any of that. That's why I said the healings in the Bible are either instant or they're immediate. And by immediate, I mean, they're going to happen in a few minutes, an hour at the most. They're going to happen that day. You're

not going to be holding on for years waiting for your manifestation. It was a manipulation of the Bible to his own doctoral advantage. But that is not what the Bible is actually teaching in these cases.

I'm a fan of science fiction, as you can tell from the Millennium Falcon that's on my back wall. But not many people know this. I'm also a huge fan of the Old Westerns. I love bananas, a gun smoke, and a wide variety of the old movies.

Well, in those shows, you've always got to traveling a liquor salesman guy that's doing exactly what the faith healers are doing. They go into a town, they give them this step right up. This will cure all your ailments, and the unsuspecting crowd takes whatever's the elixir.

And people start to recognize that it's not changing them at all. They just might get a little bit drunk, but it's not really helping them at all. And they didn't use the word manifestation, but anybody who's trying to sell you something that they know doesn't work and trying to convince you to give them money for this thing that they know doesn't work.

Whenever the crowd starts to revolt, well, you come up with some word, whether it's manifestation, whatever it is. Go home, it'll just take you a while. I'll be long gone by the time you figured me out.

And then you'd have Marshall, Matt Dillon, just brighten after trying to catch the guy because he's swindled the town or their money. Well, that's what these faith healers were doing. They would come into town, same exact thing, and positive confession, manifestation, whatever they wanted to call it.

Whenever the elixir didn't work, then they would say that this is the way it, this is the way it is. You got to go home and you got to wait. And I, I didn't go back far looking for exactly specifically that, but I did as far back as Dowie.

And Dowie was doing the same kind of things. FF Bosworth, who was in the Dowie, called Mentored Brannum. And they actually, somewhere if I can find it, I'll throw it on the screen. I don't know if I can find it, but they had this pamphlet that they would give out in the divine healing meetings.

How to keep your healing because so many people were revolting. You need this pamphlet. And if you do any of these things, it's your fault. And essentially the owners of your healing is on you, not on me.

I just give you the healing. If you don't do the right things, you're going to lose your healing. So that's the way this was. And it's no different than the snake wall assessment. Yeah. And Hobart said the same thing.

He had tapes on how to keep your healing or, or what to do. So you don't lose your healing. All of these just magical incantations and formulas. Nothing that has any sound biblical basis at all.

And I can remember asking is I would, he just love the word manifestation. And that's probably a new word for you. But the followers of Hobart Freeman and Faith Assembly will realize the prevalence of that word.

It was a favorite word for Dr. Freeman to use because it served his. It served his theology well because let's. face it. When people were prayed for there, they weren't any better. You know, they looked the same.

They weren't any better. So you've got to come up with some way for your Westerns, at least that guy could get out of town. For Hobart, he couldn't get out of town. He was there with the people and they were there. So he had to look, as I said, long and hard, and find any cases in the Bible, like name in the Syrian. He had to go dip seven times.

So what? He went and did it, and then he was healed. He didn't have leprosy anymore. So go ahead and give me whatever it is you want your incantation. Tell me to go show myself to the priest. I'll be happy to do it. As long as on the way there, I'm going to get healed.

You know, on all these cases, even though there is a small delay in time, notice every one of them got healed. And in Hobart's manifestation scheme, nobody got healed. So I was always asking

because I am a little sarcastic by nature, but I tried to get to the root of the matter. And I would say, well, answer me this question. What's the difference between holding on, as Hobart did for his polio leg, holding on for 18 years, waiting for your manifestation, and not being healed at all? What's the difference between those two? There's no difference at all.

What's the difference in waiting for 18 years, holding on and then dying, never getting it, and never getting it? There is no difference at all. What's the difference in it? What's the difference between a person who does not take off their glasses, does not ask for healing, does not pray for healing, and 10 years later, their eyesight is just as bad as it was 10 years earlier. What's the difference between that person and the person who claimed their healing, who took off their glasses, who waited 10 years and can't see any better? I can't see any difference

between the two except one of them got to have glasses for the last 10 years and be able to see and the other person didn't. So there's no difference between not getting it at all and never been asking for it to begin with and praying for it and never getting it. There's no difference.

The net result, the final outcome is the same. What I feel sorry so much for in the people's lives, though, John is just incredible tension and terror. Terror that they fell as they waited for their manifestation. They knew once they prayed, you know, I can't pray again because that would be unbelief. Mark 1124 says, when you pray, Hobart would say, not when you get the answer in the manifested realm, when you pray, believe that you receive and you shall have it, you do your research.

eating and praying back then, and whenever it's manifested, he says, that's always in God's timing. And so he had literally brainwashed, literally brainwashed the people, following Hagen, Kenneth Hagen's interpretation of Mark 1124, and put these people in such a position of terror and tension, knowing, well, I'm healed according to Mark 1124, but I'm still dying. I'm still hurting. I still can't see the growth is still there, whatever, it's still there, and these people are waiting for their manifestation. So here's me talking from a practical point of view of what this whole manifestation doctrine did. This is what it brought into the picture for people who had minor

issues. I just would ask people who followed Hobart Freeman's teaching on, believe you have received, and you shall have it, Mark 1124 manifestation, just to think about this and process this. For minor health issues, this manifestation doctrine simply gives your body time to heal itself.

So for a person who's got a cold, and I think a cold, a headache, the flu, those are probably the most common things that people claimed by faith they were healed from at faith assembly.

So you've got a cold, and so you're not going to take any medicine, you're just going to live as normal, you claim your healing, and you're healed. And so you wait three or four or five days, five days, and guess what? Now I'm finally healed, I'm feeling better. What's the difference in someone who did not claim by faith or healing, and five days later they're feeling better too? Why?

The body just threw it off. It's so interesting. God hasn't made our body in such a way that it doesn't help itself. He has made our body in such a way that it very much will help itself.

Now, no, the body can't open a blind eye or heal a lame man. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about minor issues where people claim their healing, and then they stand up at faith assembly and say, I just want to praise the Lord. I want to give a testimony. I had a bad cold three weeks ago, and the Lord healed me from it. And we find out, yeah, a week later, the Lord healed you from it.

That's not the Lord healing you from that. That is your body taking care of itself. So there is one problem I have with a practical problem with this manifestation issue. And here's a practical problem of a much more serious nature. What if your case is not a minor?

one. One of your cases is a serious one. Then do you know what this manifestation false doctrine of Hobart Freeman does for that person? Because you claimed it and you're waiting for your manifestation, now this great time delay gives time for this condition to become much, much worse. Where if you had dealt with it early on, if you had gone to the doctor, if you had taken medication for it as an enormous human being would, as Timothy did for his stomachs sake, he drank some wine rather than it would just keep on having stomach problems

and just pray that one day the Lord will finally manifest your healing. None of this manifestation insanity is in the New Testament. It's purely in the mind and theology of a now dead Hobart Freeman who never received the manifestation by the way of any of the things he had claimed healing for. But my criticism that I'm leveling now against him in that message, John, is that it calls people their life. They waited too long. I gave you a story not that long ago that a woman gave me up her father who had a little growth on his face. The barber

noticed rather than getting it attended to right then, he let it go. He finally did decide, I need to go have this looked at and guess what? It was too late and he went through, I believe, five years of, you know, excruciating experience, having things surgically cut and removed and all kinds of treatment in the hospital and biomedical science. But here's the problem it was too late. People who have a hernia that they need to go get that addressed. That is an easy fix. I know someone now who has been suffering from a hernia for years and

he's waiting for his manifestation. That's not biblical in the Bible when people were prayed for for something like a hernia, they got healed right then. And when you give time for this manifestation doctrine to play it out, it self out, then the woman who felt a little lump in her breast, the person who had some kind of growth, they noticed in their stomach, what's happening is you're waiting for the manifestation. You're giving time for that to grow larger and larger until it gets to the place. It's inoperable. Now it's terminal, now there's nothing can be done about it. And that's exactly where Hobart's manifestation doctrine

of healing took people. It took them right down to the store and for some people passed it. And that is the exact danger of the snake. both salesmen. While you were talking, I looked up because I remember Brandon talking about the manifest doctrine forever. You know, he's got the manifest sons of God, but he also talked exactly what you're saying about manifesting. And if you sum all of the different variations of that word, manifest, manifesting, all of this, it's over 3,500 times on just the recordings we have access to here. So this was a concept that was deeply taught throughout Lateranian

Hobart Freeman picked it up from any one of the hundreds of people that Brandon influenced. But the problem with the word specifically is that it was the ability to trick the people to take what they physically felt or physically saw wrong with their bodies and move it out of the physical realm into the so-called spiritual realm where they could pretend to ignore it. If he's manifesting, he's waiting for this thing to happen to you that sadly isn't happening to a lot of people and they died. But as they're going home and they're believing that this thing's going to manifest itself into a healing, and then the family watches

as they die, the sad part is, many of those people who watched the family member die, they had also taken away the physical view of this situation and moved it into the spiritual. So when the person died, well, they died believing so they went to heaven and they don't have this problem anymore. And then they still accept the doctrine as though it's true. They have taken it into the spiritual realm. They've taken the same snake oil elixir as the rest of them. And it's so sad when you think of the number of people that have died. It's just awful.

Yeah, it's completely intellectually dishonest for the people you just mentioned to have watched someone endure and then die and then they continue to hold onto that doctrine. You know, you're just being dishonest to yourself and to God and to others and to scripture. You need to pause and say, there's something wrong here. What they were trained though, however, John is to say, oh, there must have been something wrong in the person. They must not have believed.

They must have had sin. They're, you know, they're always blaming it on the person. Rather than go back and say, there's something wrong about our healing doctrine. That's where the problem lies. The problem doesn't lie in the person's life. The part, the problem lies in your erroneous doctrine of divine healing. But people are simply terrified to give that up. I don't know exactly why because it doesn't work. History has shown it doesn't work. They have just been so brainwashed in their mind that they sincerely and truly feel that they will have sinned in God's eyes

if they ever give up this false doctrine of healing. So they're just going to continue to hold on to it and they really don't care about the consequences. Absolutely. Well, reminder about the gathering, weekend. So if you're wanting to come to it, the details I'll put them into the description of the video and the description of the YouTube. So if you're interested, you can find your information there. So if you've enjoyed a show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at www.WilliamDespranum.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic

Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kendo, and Audible.

You can find us at www.WilliamDespranum.org.