X-Ray Glasses for the Soul: From Fantasy to Faith - Chino Ross

Hello and welcome to another episode of 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, Channel Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding, scripture, and truth by Channel D Ross YouTube channel. Channel it's good to be back and to talk all things Hobart Freeman and Branhamism and laterainism and hopefully you stayed dry. We had I guess everybody who's in Kentucky and even up to Ohio that area they're just they're aware that the

flood is just really really raising the river levels and here in Jeffersonville I had dinner or launch down at a foot of spring street and you can see the waters coming all the way up the banks and they've got the flood gates up and streets closed and we've you can't see it because it's behind this wall but we our house has a storm sewer drain right behind the house and when it gets extremely bad it starts coming up that storm sewer so I've had to tear into one of the walls behind here but hopefully where you are hopefully you stayed

dry. Yeah we are totally fine we sit on a high hill in the middle of a hay farm so the water can't possibly get to us. I've never wanted to live on a creek or a stream or a river because of this very point even though the houses you know when you get to live on a creek or a river it's wonderful you know for 20 years at a time until one of these historic floods come and we definitely have I mean here in Frankfurt where I live in a capital of Kentucky it is a

historic flood flood levels for the Kentucky River. I'm also as you know a fishing guide a professional fishing guide John so I'm always looking at the falls of the Ohio and what the lower gauge is reading down there on the Ohio River because I do a lot of guiding and fishing down there and I see it's just you know completely out of control but yesterday we went downtown Frankfurt to help some friends of my wife and I saw a guy leaving his house in a boat that's how far all of these houses were underwater he was in a little small John boat

and here he comes up the road until the water ends and the asphalt begins and he had that little John boat loaded down with cardboard boxes so I and another person went over there to get the boxes out of the boat and put them in the back seat of his truck and the boxes were heavy and they weren't taped shut so I peaked inside and they were full of bourbon.

So I said, you guys definitely prioritize, don't you? When it comes time to evacuate, you prioritize, they were all full of bourbon, but no, we're fine here. You know, I saw a guy prioritize when I was in, I was working in downtown Louisville and I had stopped at this coffee shop and they had it set up where you could sit inside or outside.

No, sitting outside. I watched this hippie guy wearing some really ragged blue jeans come up on a skateboard. So he came down, he came towards me, he's the reason I noticed him, he came towards me on the street, on the street facing me and he gets all the way to where I'm sitting and then he goes over about half a block and then he sits right there on the curb.

So he's sitting there, no shirt on, you know, right in the middle of downtown and I thought, okay, he's either drunk or he's, you know, something, something's going on. So I sat there and I'm sipping my coffee, I'm working on my computer watching him.

And pretty soon I watched this Budweiser truck drive up, drove up right next to him and he sat there and he watched the Budweiser guy come and opened the back of the truck, got his cart and he put stacks of beer on the cart and started wheeling it into the building.

Well, before I could stop it, before the guy could stop it, this guy took his skateboard and he had a stack of beers, tall as him, put it on the skateboard and just headed down the road.

So he was hauling it too, but his way of doing it probably wasn't as upright and as honest as what you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, he really had a set up there, didn't he?

It was quite a sight to see, it was unbelievable and the Budweiser guy, you know, just chased him down the road. It was like a scene from a comic book or a cartoon, you know, newspapers, but, you know, talking about the flood, so it kind of ties into what we are talking about today.

We're talking about the hard times that really made Hobart Freeman, William Brown, I'm some of the others. I was having a similar conversation last week, I guess it was, about some of the IHOP KC people, they all, they like a good sob story.

And William Brannum's sob story, interestingly, tied to the flood stage in 1937. So it was hard not to think of that while I was sitting looking at the river rising and watching entire trees go down the river as I'm eating, and they're, they're barreling down the river.

They're really fast, they're the swift the river is right now. But Brannum got a lot of mileage out of it, and historically, I wanted to know as I'm examining my faith what parts of it are true, what parts are not.

Historically, you can go back and you can line up through a chronological timeline. You can line up the things that he said compared to history and see what is what. Well, I found that I had to separate the truth from the fiction because there were large parts of his sob story that were true.

They definitely happened and it was easy to see that they happened. But at the same time, we're talking about a flood that decimated this area. Louisville, Kentucky, Jeffersonville, Indiana, just completely almost, Jeffersonville was almost wiped off the map at that point.

So it wasn't just his sob story. It was everybody's sob story. And that was a 1937 flood. That was the 1937 flood. And if you go on the Ohio River, I've taken a few videos of this, but they've got the high water mark of the 1937 flood on one of the, I guess it's a lighthouse or something over there.

It's on the river. But you know, he got a lot of mileage out of that. But historically, I started to compare what he said because it was also tied to his divine, he call it his divine commission.

This was part of why he became who he was and why he's the fabulous cult leader, right? So I started categorizing, well, what parts were true and what parts were fiction. And I came to learn that yes, there were a lot, large part of what he said was true.

And it really did happen. Some of it affected him. But a larger part wasn't true. Didn't happen as he said. And there were a lot of conflicts in the way that he said it.

He might tell it one way to one audience in a different way to another audience. And that became the mythology. And the real sad part about this is these guys, like Branham, like Freeman, they love to create the mythology because for some reason, people have itching years to hear the mythology part.

And they focus on it rather than on the Bible. So it is a huge distraction for these listeners and these audiences to do this. They almost, some of them, they come because they believe in Christ, they're Christian.

But they have become so distracted by the mythology that no longer is what they're being taught. Christianity, it's Christianity plus this mythology. And sad to say, but it just distracts people from the Bible and learning what is the truth.

And I think this goes a long way to prove a point that I have often said and strongly believe, John. And that is that people do need to know their minister. They need to know that person that is talking to them.

And normally, it's a pastor. You need to know something about your pastor. I've been a little critical of the ministers who spend too much time talking about themselves. I just think you have to find that happy balance.

I know one particular man who every time he stands in the pulpit, he just wants to tell you, what he ate last- night and what they did yesterday and you know it takes up five or ten minutes of the beginning of the message and I don't think that's necessary because I always have felt all of the people sitting out there in the congregation they also had a nice dinner last night and did things yesterday and they don't really care about your life you know they're more they care about what they did so I don't think that's what we need to know but we do need to know some of the background

to the people teaching us and it can't happen in these um in these you know huge mega churches because you don't ever really get to know that person I mean he can tell stories but if you don't really know him and he doesn't spend time with you you don't know the validity of any of that I think I have mentioned before one of Freeman's early followers who actually goes back to the housing the church and the house in Claypool this was before the barn before Jerry Irvin's garage they met in Hobart Freeman's house in Claypool Indiana the house under the

water tower church in the home and he goes back this far and I think he was around college age and he said you know I went away to college from you know that little church and went and got a degree in the Bible because I wanted to understand where this guy was coming from with all of this teaching and after he had gotten his Bible degree came back to the church because his parents and siblings were members of the church and then he ended up I believe this is a way he told me the story he went away and got another degree this time in psychology to understand what makes this

man tick and he never could figure it out but my point in saying that is we do need to know the people over us and who even who even attends a church John who even shows up at a church with that being one of their early thoughts I know I didn't when I was a teenager you just kind of expect it's almost like all of us just give the minister a blank check and we give him 100% benefit of the doubt and you should give him some but not 100% that if he's a minister and he

standing up front in the pulpit then he has to be good and he has to be right and that is so far from the truth that is just assuming something that we should first of all be able to be certain about rather than assume it so you do need to know some things about your minister do you need to know stories about him every day obviously not but you need to check into his background and maybe maybe his background will help explain His current ministry and message right now.

So last time you and I were talking about Hobart's wealth and health gospel, he came from a real poor childhood and background. So to me, when I know those things, when I know how poor his family was and how he grew up with nothing, how he became a businessman, became successful and had a nice income and a nice car.

And then he got saved, became a Baptist minister and his congregation said, always, God will keep him poor if you'll keep him humble. And then he comes into the word of faith movement that is teaching this wealth and health gospel.

It makes sense to me how deeply and quickly he gravitated toward a prosperity gospel, where if you already came from a well-established family with education, with income, with a middle-class house and middle-class car and all of that, then hearing these things about prosperity wouldn't ring so loudly in your ears.

I just don't think that they would. That's what we talked about last time. What I want to come to in our discussion today is the childhood sicknesses and injuries and illnesses that Hobart Freeman had to deal with.

Because again, I think this is part and parcel of this whole health and wealth gospel. I've said it before, I've said it before many times, that when you look inside the walls of these churches, these word of faith churches, you see that they do attract a lot of the down and out of society, not 100%, but they do attract a lot of them.

You don't have astrophysicists and chemists and Supreme Court justices, and you don't have those kinds of people, because I hate to say it, but it's so true. They're not going to fall for all this baloney that the rest of us have fallen for in our past lives.

They're not going to fall for that, because number one, they don't need all of this false teaching as we found it to be about prosperity and healing. They are already fine in their life, at least in the prosperity realm.

We know you can't buy good health, but they're smart enough to know that this kind of stuff just doesn't seem right. I told you the story last time when my dad, who was educated businessman, came into our little charismatic church and saw the pastor trying to cast a spirit of drunkenness out of a guy who wandered in and the guy wandered back out just as drunk as we walked in.

So my dad, I was so embarrassed to be honest with you because I so much wanted it to be true that everything has a demon behind it, and even against the person's will, as long as you have enough faith, all you have to do is, you know, exercise your dominion and authority, practice your deliverance ministry on this person's forehead, and I wanted that to be true so that my dad would go, wow, look, that really worked, but it didn't work, and I was really disappointed, at that time, but you know, as I grew up and looked back on it, I realized that's not the way these things happen. Is there such a thing as a spirit of alcoholism? Maybe there is, but there's just a whole lot of people that go drink because they want to drink, you know, there's also what Paul calls the works of the flesh, and one of those is just drunkenness, and he doesn't say anything about, it's a spirit that calls dead, he said, it's a flesh that calls dead, it's your fallen nature that calls dead,

and you can lay hands on that person from now until doomsday, and they're not going to be delivered from any demon, because they don't have a demon, they have works of the flesh, and they simply aren't dealing with it. So, you know, for me at my 18-year-old self, unfortunately, I had Bible knowledge and had verses memorized, but I didn't have the life experiences that my old man had. You know, he was a paratrooper in the army, he was a college basketball player, and you know, he looked, this guy laying hands on a stranger and casting out a spirit of alcoholism, you know, my dad was like, I believe that when I see it, and he didn't see it, so he didn't believe it.

You know, it's kind of funny, because people in these movements have been trained and manipulated to mix what they call the spirit world, and a lot of times it is just fantasy, but mix that with everyday life, and so everything becomes a spirit. If you stump your toe, it's the spirit of stump toe, man. It gets to a ridiculous level, but they do the same thing with everything. I was thinking, as you were talking, you were talking about how you heard the minister, and you didn't want to hear what he had for dinner last night, and the small talk, basically, you don't want to hear the small talk, you came to hear the gospel, right?

And I was just thinking, there will be listeners who are listening to us, who said, would say in the comment feeds, did you not just have small talk before you introduced this podcast? But see, the difference is, you're going to hear a sermon, and you're going to hear about Jesus, you're not coming to hear about the minister, what we're doing is not a sermon, but I have had people do the same thing with me on other podcasts.

They want to think of everything as either it's a sermon or it's a battle of the spirits, and so they see me as this, if you're in the cult, you see me as this enemy spirit who's attacked.

you. So I too get the get the spirit label for the audience who can't see each end I was holding up his fingers in the sign of a cross to keep me keep the evil John away from his soul, you know.

But you know, it really turns into a problem because like I said with the mythologies, now you enter into the fantasy world where you are you're manipulating people to create their own mythologies. The cult leader has one why don't I have one too. And I had the conversation with another guy and we were talking about who was there's a game when I was a kid of Dungeons and Dragons.

It becomes like a game of Dungeons and Dragons, but it's for adults when you go to these churches. I'm fine with a little small talk, you know. I'm definitely in a minister sermon. I just think you got to find the balance. I do want to know something. I want to know a lot about him, but I need to find that out in my personal interaction with him, not just from his sermon because to your point very much John, the reason that people go to church, the reason they should is to hear the gospel or to hear God's word taught and explain to them. Then we can hang around afterwards and I would

love to that that's my point. I would like to get to know the minister. I think that one benefit of all of this stuff out there now in YouTube world with all of these ministers that have fallen, people have finally begun to become a little more cautious and far less gullible.

Just because it's the church on the corner of Pine and Broad Street and there's a minister up there, you have no idea who that man is, his character, his background or anything. You need to go in with your eyes wide open and with a willing heart but with a guarded mind. And you just have to do that and it doesn't matter who the minister is. I'm not offended at all when someone approaches me that way. I'm willing to listen to you but I have my guard up or something. Well, you should because if you don't know me, yeah, that's a reasonable way to go in to any kind of religious

setting or service. And a big service has been done by the fall, I think, of all of these charismatic as well as non-charismatic ministers and it's open people's eyes to the fact, wow, some of these guys have been in the pulpit long term and look at this history of misbehavior in their background that is now being exposed. Why did I sit here this whole time? Well, I think the problem is people sit with an uncritical attitude and you need to go in with a critical mindset to discern what's being said. So yeah, there just needs to be a balance. I don't

want to hear everything. about your daily life minister, I do wanna know some big things about you, who you are, what's your education, where were you trained, what's your background, what's your marital status, what's your criminal record status, yes, I would like to know all of those things.

And as people deserve to know all of those things, anybody who sits in any of my meetings deserves to know every bit of that. And for ministers to say, oh, no, I don't wanna share that.

Well, it's gonna come out. If the bad stuff is there, as we know, it's gonna come out. So if we can go further down our line, let's look at a little bit in the background of Hobart Freeman concerning his childhood.

We saw that he was poor, and I think that that led to this over emphasis on a prosperity message. Then if we look at his childhood sicknesses, and injuries, and problems he had growing up, then again, I think what I can see, as I got to know Hobart by listening to these stories from his early messages, is that he preached a whole lot out of his own background and need, rather than what the scriptures actually say.

So if you had a minister come on the scene, who comes from a normal stable background, the parents were normal and stable, and so they had enough money, nobody's poor in the family, and they were taught just general personal responsibility in life, they graduated from high school or college or whatever, they have a normal amount of education, they have a normal approach to life, they have a normal health history, if we could find some normalcy in this, John, we would probably find a minister who has a much better chance of himself being normal and being able to deliver a normal message.

But if you come to the pulpit, and your background is a lifelong background of sicknesses and illnesses and injuries, then when you come into the word of faith message, which Hobart did in the summer of 1966 in Dallas, Texas, and you're hearing people like Gordon Lindsay and like Kenneth Hagen teaching prosperity and teaching healing, you're gonna gravitate to that right away.

So for instance, in Hobart's life, if you listen to the messages which I have, you pick up, even though he doesn't harp on them, like he does certain other stories, you do pick up, you hear things where...

On occasion, he had these different health setbacks earlier in life, one that I can remember were his kidney stones. So he's told this story a few times, even though it was not one of the major ones, but in the late 1950s, so this is prior to his conversion to Christianity in 1952, he was experiencing, he said two solid years of pain in his abdomen or over on one of his sides.

And, you know, he found out, I mean, that's way back in early medical science days for him. He found out that it was kidney stones and he said they cut me half into and he said, I have the scars to prove it.

From one side, all the way to the other side, he said, I have the scars to prove it. I was in the hospital, he said, for three weeks. And so that was a traumatic experience for him prior to his conversion and prior to his charismatic experience.

He said in a message in the summer of 1976 that all of that pain had just recently come back and he was thinking it was kidney stones again and whether it was or not, I don't know, he never commented later, but he said the pain lasted for several weeks and then it went away.

But if you do a little study on kidney stones, you find out that some people are definitely more prone to them than others for sure because I have done some studies on this. One of my employees just went through a kidney stone battle about a month ago.

And the other thing is a lot of it has to do with diet. And so this brings up this whole other subject in this healing message, John. And that is this, how much of our illnesses, our sicknesses, how much of those are due to naturally calls things, versus how much are due to simply a satanic or demonic attack.

And these were to faith services, and their services, everything is demonic. Everything is satanic. And there is not a balanced discussion of people's lifestyle, their eating habits, are you getting enough water each day?

If you don't, if you just drink soft drinks and you're not drinking water, you're not hydrated with water. One of the main causes of kidney stones, those things will calcify inside you and you will have kidney stones and you will have problems.

I don't ever remember Dr. Freeman teaching any kind of balanced series or messages on stressing, emphasizing the need for a good, healthy diet. He would always just super spiritualize everything and say as long as you, pray over your food, everything is fine.

That's not balanced and that is definitely not biblical. You know, when we look at the health crisis that we have in the United States today, just look at the absolute overwhelming of the healthcare industry and a lot of that has to do with American diet.

You go to other countries, they don't have the same cardiovascular diseases we have, they don't have the obesity. We didn't have the obesity we have in our country now when I was a child, because you did not have McDonald's on every corner.

You know, you just didn't have it. You can't stop progress. I mean, that's just, that's what's happened in society today. You can't go back on that. But what I'm saying is as a Christian, you have to take normal, responsible, personal measures to safeguard and protect yourself.

And it's in every area. It's in every area of our health. And so Hobart didn't, he never dealt with that. Everything was treated as an attack from Satan. Didn't have anything to do with your diet.

Didn't have anything to do with your hydration. Didn't have anything to do with your exercise routine. You know, I feel sorry for people who have a desk job their whole life because, I mean, if you do, you do.

That's your job. So you have to make extra effort that people in the olden days didn't because it was an agrarian society. You know, you worked hard every day, no matter what your job was.

So you'd have to go to the gym. You didn't have to worry about exercise. All of these things, I'm simply saying, are now needed and they're new because of how society has evolved. And Hobart's teachings definitely did not stay up with that.

But if I could give one really good location, and I'm not even gonna ask for you to play this job, I'm just gonna give this to people and then I'm gonna relay what Hobart said here.

But if you remember, this series that he taught entitled Exortations from Exodus, that was the last main series he was teaching in the summer and the fall of 1984 before he passed away in December of that year.

And he only got through 9 or 10 or 11 messages, Exortations from Exodus. And on the second message in that series, entitled Children of Providence, Children of Providence, beginning at the 28 minute mark, people wanna go find that message you can listen or you can hear and I'm gonna relay what he says.

But what he's starting to do at that point, he's using Moses deliverance from the river in Egypt by the daughter of Pharaoh, that providential protection that God gave Moses where all of the male children under a certain age had been ordered to be killed by...

Pharaoh and Moses' mother did not want to see him die, put him in a little basket of bull rushes and put him out in the river. And it just so happened that Pharaoh's daughter found Moses.

This was a providential hand of God on Moses' life to preserve him. So with that being the background, what Hobart is going to do, which is really, really interesting, he sees himself as a new Moses.

And he sees the hand of God's providence on his life. Now to be fair to Hobart, he does say around this 28-minute mark, he does say to everyone there, I'm sure that all of you have seen the hand of God earlier in your life, preserve or protect you when you could have been killed or seriously injured in God protected or preserved you.

He does say that to everyone, but as Hobart was very prone to do, he really wanted to focus upon himself. And he wanted to show how he and his early providential protection under the hand of God is like a modern day Moses.

And so he gives these statistics, Sean. He said at six months of age, so this would have been in 1920 when Hobart was born, six months of age, he said, I had double pneumonia, which is just horrific, which you normally don't survive as a child of six, an infant of six months and you have pneumonia in both lungs.

Ten months later, at 16 months of age, he contracted that dreaded disease before Jonas salt came along with the polio vaccine of polio. And he was bed fast for months on end with polio.

And again, we don't know much about polio today. We don't think about it because there is a vaccine. And in America, you just don't see people contracting polio when they're a child. But as we know from history, that was a dreaded childhood experience for anybody who had polio.

And many times you would die from it. Hobart did not die from it. He did recover from it. But he had a severely short right leg, an inch to two inch right leg shorter than his left leg.

And that was his lot for the rest of his life. That happened at 16 months of age. At 10 years of age, he almost drowned. So he's told this story several times. But in this particular message, he's just hitting the bullet points one after the other.

But he was in a swimming pool. He did not know how to swim. He had polio, but he had recovered from that, just had the short leg. And he was out where the chain would go across.

the swimming pool from the shallow to the deep. And he said he would let go of the chain and go out in the deep and go down to the bottom and then push off with the good leg on the bottom, come back up and grab the chain.

And he said one time he went out further than he realized, pushed off when he came up and reached, he couldn't find the chain. And he said he was down for the third and final time gonna drown when a playmate who thought he was out there and the deep end just horsing around and came underneath him, picked him up on this guy's shoulders and shot him up out of the water just to frighten him and scare him.

And he said it pushed me close enough to that chain that I was able to grab it and keep myself from drowning. 13 years of age, he was run over by a factory truck out on the road and crushed his left leg.

So he's got the damaged polio right leg, the left leg crushed, he said it was down to the bone just to skin and muscle and tissue all flayed open. And so he said I had that to deal with.

That he's giving you all of the illnesses and injuries from his childhood. And then the big deal was cardiovascular disease. So then the last thing he mentions in this list of illnesses and problems were his heart attacks.

And he had had several serious heart attacks. One thing people probably don't realize although it is on an earlier message and I could find which one it was, but Hobart was a heavy smoker for 18 years.

And I can actually provide the very message that he says that on. I'll look forward here in a minute. But from age 14 to age 32, Hobart was a smoker, that's 18 years. From age 14 to age 32, he smoked.

And as we all know, smoking is bad for your lungs and bad for your heart. Of course, Hobart gets converted in 1952. And as I mentioned last time, people wanna quote, second Corinthians 517, if any man is in Christ, he's a new creation.

And all things are passed away. And all things are become new. But Paul's context there, the old things that have passed away is that he's talking about our alienation from God. And we have now been reconciled to God and brought nigh by Jesus' blood.

That doesn't undo everything automatically that's happened in our life before. If you were a man who was five feet, four inches tall and always wished you were six feet one inch tall, conversion to Christianity doesn't change your height at all.

Doesn't give you more hair on your head. You won't get to play for the Yankees or for the Lakers. or you know, you can wish all those old things my lack of hide and athleticism had passed away.

Now all things are new. That's not the way this works. So my point being, if you have had damage done to your lungs and your heart, yes, it's possible that God can heal you from that in your conversion experience or some later time. But it's also very possible that that is not healed just because that is what the body sowed and what the body sows. As we know, the body is often going to reap. 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.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You know, my mind goes in funny directions whenever you're talking. We've had that conversation offline, but when I was a kid, I was not allowed to read comic books. That was part of the Brannum cult religion. Comic books were evil for whatever reason. Batman and Robin were not heroes in the minds of these ministers. They did not want you to catch the spirit of Batman.

But I was at my grandmother's house and I found this old stash of comic books that they had apparently had before they joined the message. And I'm just, you know, I'm a kid. I'm fascinated by this. So I sneak in the bedroom with it and I'm opening up and reading it. Well, these were comics from the probably from the 50s. I mean, they were old, old comic books. The pages were kind of falling off as I was turning them. Well, you read the story, which was really good, but then you get to the advertisements in the comic books. And even as a kid, I was like scratching my

head. You got to be kidding me. Really? In the 50s, when during the height of this healing revival, when you were talking about, you know, stretching your body, your height, et cetera. Well, I remember reading an ad where they made this tool that you could buy for, I don't know what it was, five dollars.

You could stretch, stretch and become taller. They had the, you know, the Atlas programs where you're doing the push-ups and you too can look like this guy who literally is in the gym 24-7, benching 100 pounds every time he can bench it, probably two or 300 pounds, interesting side note.

That same guy was a hired speaker in one of the brand-um churches in Louisiana. It was Jack Moore's church, the one who was real big and launching Laterane. I found the Atlas program was there, but anyway, they've got all of these different ads in the 50s and they've got things like x-ray glasses.

You too can use your x-ray glasses and you can see through walls. You've probably seen these, right? Yes, I have. So you read through that. And in today's world, here I am a kid in, this is probably the late 80s that I'm reading this.

And I'm thinking this is really stupid. Did people really believe this back then? That's me as a kid, right? But there were kids that apparently did believe it or they wouldn't have advertised it.

So then I open up as an adult, I open up the voice of healing magazines and read through the ads in that from the 50s and well, here's a boy who through faith and power with William Brandham's message Laterane nonsense can see through a handkerchief tied around his head through his plastic eyeball.

And this was apparently a thing. I published this probably two or three years ago on the YouTube site. I actually got people who were out of this movement who defended this and said, no, that boy, I knew him as a man, he could really see through that plastic eyeball.

And the point I'm trying to get at is, whenever all of this was happening and all of these people were trying to really grasp for something, anything that can help them with their healing, they're willing to believe anything because they're in desperation.

And in so much that whenever these guys you mentioned Hobart acting like Moses, well, there were so many people that did this. There were, you know, you've got Dowie who claimed to be Elijah and he pointed to the last chapter of Malachi and said, this is me.

Charles Parham did the same thing. This is me. Frank Sanford, he's kind of a forgotten name because he really, really was destructive, nearly killed several people. But he also claimed to be Elijah. Then through British Israelism, you had all the cult leaders claiming to be King David.

They were the return of King David in the spirit. And Brandham, when he started his ministry, not many people know this because he is recognized as being one of the Elijah prophets. But when he started, he wasn't Elijah, he started out as Moses.

And he kept telling the story over and over again as Moses was given... two signs, so are you given two signs, which was complete fiction, especially because the Bible talks about the three signs of Moses, not the two signs of Moses.

So the whole thing is fiction, but the point I'm trying to make, and back to the why my head went to this comic book, people were willing to believe it. And especially in that era, whenever they largely, people just didn't use critical thought, they hadn't been, they had not been duped enough to realize that people are out there to get them.

In today's world, they're not going to fall for most of this stuff. It's just not going to fly. Yes. And I'm glad that they won't, John. Hobart never, he didn't go as far as some of those other guys did.

I think at the end of his ministry, he began making statements where it could be interpreted that he was hinting that he was this person or that person. But I guess he was smart enough to know, I can't actually come out and say maybe what I believe about myself because I might be a false prophet or be labeled as one.

But going back to that message on the children of Providence, not only did he say the things that I just said about his illness is, but he kept talking about Moses in this sense.

I'll give you even more. He was saying, God preserved Moses from childhood, from infancy because he had this great plan for Moses' life and he did. He had a great plan for Moses' life and he did preserve him from infancy on.

Dr. Freeman definitely felt, because he did say this, that he was the only one who had been given the, quote, end time message of faith, unquote, whatever that is. I haven't found that anywhere in the Bible that anybody had the end time message of faith.

But he did say that he was the only one who had been given that. So he obviously felt that he was a special and unique person. So he is definitely trying to draw in the people's minds, the parallel between himself and Moses, because he would also go on and say, just like Moses was trained in all the wisdom of Egypt.

Remember, he was raised in Pharaoh's court, just as he was trained in all the wisdom of Egypt. So I, Hobart Freeman, your minister, was trained in all the denominational ways of the Baptist and all of these denominations.

I was trained in there before I left it and became charismatic so that now I have a response to all of that and can go back and combat it. Because other people would say, well, you went to seminary.

Why can't we? You know, you have hired. Training, why can't we go get some education? Oh, you don't need it. I already have it. God has prepared me from all these years back in my youth and childhood and adulthood.

He has already prepared me so that I am, I don't know, you know, I'm gonna be your Moses. So yeah, he most definitely made that comparison. So you've got Hobart walking around, limping around, all these medical conditions, desperately wanting this faith message and healing message adheres from Kenneth Hagen.

He's definitely wanting that to be true because if that's true, he won't have a short leg anymore. He won't have this heart condition anymore. He won't have to deal with wearing glasses anymore. His hair won't have to thin.

We'll talk about that in another podcast where he goes off on Psalm 103. He won't have to deal with the pain of kidney stones anymore. He is desperately wanting this healing message to be true.

But in wanting that so badly, he just overemphasized everything because he was poor and because he was sick as a child. This is what I'm saying because those were two things he brought along with him and he couldn't help it.

If you're poor and sick as a child, you're simply poor and sick as a child. But because he was, he brought those with him into his Christian experience and then I believe because people have asked me, how do you explain Hobart ending up the way that he did?

I believe that this helps explain his overemphasis on things. He was a man who was very sick. He just was. And if you came into this, a healthy person, you are definitely going to appreciate the healing teaching

and the healing verses, but you're not going to just end up in a quagmire there. You're not just going to camp out there and talk about it over and over again. So I remember in the mid 1970s, if you find messages taught during that period in Hobart's ministry, he must have just talked to someone he knew up in Canada because he made reference to the fact that this brother and it might have been Maxwell Huayet who was in Toronto, I'm not for sure.

But this brother up in Canada has just counted how many promises are in the Bible and there's 7,487 promises and you just need to start claiming the promises. Hobart read the Bible like it was, I don't know like it was a magic charm, like it was a gimmick book.

Like you can really find 7,487 promises, but their promises about, you know, your washing machine can be healed and your body can be healed and you can drive a new... car and you can be prosperous and, you know, John, there's just show you how strange this kind of approach to the Bible is, this proof text mechanical approach rather than a contextual organic reading of the Bible. That's not the way Hobart did it. He had an idea in mind and then he searched the Bible to find texts that would prove that. There is a verse. I think

it is in the prophecy of Amos where Amos said, this is thus sayeth the Lord, I will give you cleanness of teeth. Well, Hobart did not believe in going to the dentist, did not believe in any type of medical, you know, practice. All of that was leaning on the arm of the flesh.

And I can remember, you know, as I've said, I bought into it wholeheartedly as a 17 year old. By my early 20s, I'm beginning to have problems with some of it because I was looking for consistency and I was looking for logic and reason. And I thought, well, the arm of the flesh, okay, I can understand the doctor would be leaning to the arm of the flesh and the dentist would be leaning to the arm of the flesh in the hospital. Okay. And the bank for loaning you money. Okay. And the insurance company. Okay. Well, what about your HVAC

guy or what about the car mechanic? Isn't that the aren't that isn't that the arm of the flesh too? You know, where are you going to draw the line when you can ask for human help and when you cannot ask for human help? I never saw a clean demarcation in Hobart Freemans theology. And although Hobart never used that verse in the prophecy of Amos, I've heard other people use it. They say, yep, God promised to give me cleanness of teeth. So I don't have to go to the dentist. So I have two responses to that. Number one, open your mouth and let

me just look in there. I bet it doesn't work. Number two, do you know what the background? You know, that is a horrible verse to claim cleanness of teeth is actually an Old Testament phrase for he is going to what he's promising is judgment on the nation of Israel. And you will have so little food to eat, you won't need to clean your teeth. That's the context of the verse. That is the context of the verse. If you don't have anything to eat, you don't need to brush your teeth because there's nothing there. So that's just a case, a test case

example of how Hobart Freemans ministry, he never did that himself, but how his teaching in his ministry calls people to run to the Bible and find a verse that says what they want it to say and pull it completely out of its context and end up with, hey, I got a Bible verse right in the Old Testament that forbids me going to dentist because God God has promised to give me clean teeth.

I'm trying not to die laughing because you wouldn't want to be around me if I didn't go to the dentist man. There's some people myself included who really, really need it, so that's unbelievable.

But in the end, the mythologies that they created, the sad part of and the truth of this is that the men who and some women who rose to authoritarian control over their sects, they created a mythology that was to the destruction of the people.

But in the end, in many cases, it's also to their own destruction. They're literally trapped in prisons that they themselves created. Yeah. And let me just John give you the verse. That is in Amos 4 and verse 6, if people want to go look that up.

I don't want to leave people hanging. The other thing I said I would quickly go give you is Hobart being a smoker for 18 years. That is on the tape entitled perplexing problems about prayer.

You can start listening at the nine minute mark and you can hear that story. So anyway, yeah, Hobart's teaching was not Bible teaching. It just was not Bible teaching. It was gimmick teaching. If you look over his tape list, he has so many messages entitled how to and then you fill in the blanks, which reminds me of things like how to win friends and influence people, the old Norman Vincent Peel book that Hobart used to talk about early in the 1970s, he had talked about that book.

So I know that had an influence on him, how to lose weight without trying, how to have a million dollars by the age of 30. All of these how-to things, I don't find that in the New Testament.

I don't find Paul preaching a message called how-to anything. But here are just some of the titles I gleaned off of Hobart's list, how to get healed without trying, how to release your faith, how to spell faith, how to resist the devil effectively, how to get the most out of the Christian life, how to know God's will, which was also the title of a book he wrote, how to receive guidance and on and on and on.

None of these seem to be the type of message that the New Testament ministers gave. They just preached the Old Testament how it related to Jesus Christ and the future glory of his coming kingdom and how God, the Holy Spirit, is working in the lives of the early Christians and the church of their time.

If you look at sermons, which are Paul's epistles, if you look at them, this is what he's talking about. He doesn't have any little gimmick sermons, how to get healed without trying. I mean, that is an actual title to one of his messages.

It's just like how to lose weight without trying or how to become a millionaire without trying. We would all like that. Those are gimmicks. That's not a Christian message, a how to kind of message.

And he would also have messages with how many steps it would take to accomplish this. So again, I've just copied down a few for your amusement's sake. Five evidences of faith. You know, are we sure there aren't four or six or 11?

I mean, five evidences of faith. Five conditions to receive the promises of God. Four pillars of faith. Four signs of a believer. Three hindrances to faith. Three keys to overcoming faith. It's like an amway salesman or something.

This is not the way you teach Bible doctrine. You take a passage and you deal with it in its context. Hobart would always have a thought in his mind. Like, I think I need to go preach a message on faith.

You know, I haven't taught one since yesterday. So I need to go preach a message on faith. What's the title going to be? Oh, how to release your faith. Let me teach them how to release your faith.

How do you release your faith? Go ahead and tell me, how do you do that? Are there three steps or eight steps? And does it take five seconds or five minutes? How do you release your faith?

How are you even going to teach on a topic like that? You know, it's just absolutely ridiculous. And that message entitled, how to spell faith. People love that. F-A-I-T-H for sake. All I trust him.

You know, we just come up with all these little gimmicks and shortcuts and we think we're smart and we think we're cute and we think we're funny. And we just have to see a lot of people because people come to church and they hear all of this gimmick teaching and the prophets are doing, you know, let me give you three steps on how to deliver the prophecy.

Here's the three steps to how to do that. I just don't think that's the way Christian ministers are supposed to preach. I think they need to teach doctrine. I think they need to teach the actual passage.

I think they need to teach it contextually and organically and not try to fig find how many supporting passages

to prove my point. If your point is valid, if your point is good, you only need one verse from God's Word because God's Word is truth and that is all you need. You need one.

It's almost as though they're in competition with their opponents that if I can get 12 points on the side of my argument and you only can get nine on the side. that you're defending, then I'm going to win just because I've got 12 and you've got nine.

That's not the way that it works. You win, quote-unquote, if you are telling the truth as the Bible tells the truth. And I add to that, it must be in context. I've heard many, many sermons where the minister would say, here's our verse for today, and then he preached a whole sermon where he tried to wedge that verse into what he was saying rather than wedge what he was saying into the context of the passage. So it's such a mess. But, you know, to your point, Hobart and up Brandham, all of these guys would have been much better if they'd have just walked out and

handed everybody the extraordinary glasses from that comic book. Because that would be obvious, right? People would see it and they'd say, okay, well, this is fake. Let's just move on. But what they did was so insidious because they did the same exact thing. It was their version of the X-ray glasses. But they did it in such a way where it sounded halfway scriptural. And people didn't take the extra step to see, well, is this actually biblical? And is this guy trying to pull one over on me? Whether Hobart was legitimately trying to pull the wool over the people's

eyes, I don't know. But you have to, at some point, you have to just take a step back and say that, you know, critical thinking could have stopped a whole lot of this. So, hopefully, through the course of this, we have taught people not to go get the fake religious X-ray glasses of today.

Yeah, it's just a big danger also, John, in majoring on the minors. I mean, the Bible does talk about faith and healing. But the Bible talks about the Christian life, the Christian virtue, so much more Christ's death on the cross is what the gospel is all about. And that's really what we need to be hearing about for ministers. Instead, they major on the minors and minor on the majors and always had a problem with that. Absolutely. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. From more

about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.