Faith or Sin? Romans 14:23 Weaponized for Divine Healing Cults

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-Brandom.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 talk about all things divine healing. There was this point of time in which the gospel itself shifted. We've talked about the combination between the dual atonement when they combine salvation with healing and all of that started way back with laterane, but I don't know that we've

talked much about this. Over time, as people like John Alexander Dowey became famous with his divine healing doctrine, FF Bosworth, who was out of the Dowey cult, was mentoring everybody in the post-World War II healing revivals, eventually they started dubbing it the gospel of divine healing because it was accepted, widely accepted by many of them as the dual atonement, and so this new and different gospel came forward. But in hindsight, as you're looking through the newspapers and examining it, it gets really odd because there seems to be severe limits on what is possible for healing and what is not. Yet, it's advertised as it'll heal everything that you have, will heal

all of your afflictions. I grew up with people who were in this for years claiming that that's one of the reasons why they stayed in it was because this is where you come if you want to be healed, and when anybody leaves, their first thought is, well, if you leave, how are you going to be healed?

I got asked that question and people I know got asked that question and were like, well, they're doctors, they're medicine, God heals, but they think it's exclusive to the cult. I'm certain that was the same way with Hobart Freeman, but as we're getting into this one and especially in the episodes that are coming, healing wasn't a certainty, but yet it was branded as the religion that offered the healing. So this gets to a bit of irony with this episode.

Yeah, I guess with Hobart's group, John, it was a certainty, you know, whatever you pray for, Mark 1124, believe that you already have received, and then you shall have it. It's not without purpose that we spend a lot of time on Dr. Freeman's view.

use of faith and physical issues. And you would think with someone who taught as often as he did on faith and healing, that he would have had a well thought out biblical theology on the subjects, but he actually didn't.

As I've tried to highlight before, for a man who taught hundreds of messages on faith for healing, hundreds of messages on healing.

In his mind, trying to cover all of his bases, he just left so many things uncovered. It was not a, you know, when you go to seminary and you study the doctrine of inerrancy or the doctrine of canonicity or something, you know, your professors do a thorough job of it.

They're looking at it from all angles, from all issues. They're answering any possible objections to it. They're covering the historical data. They're covering the biblical data. And by the time you're done, I mean, you don't know everything, but you feel like that was a thorough treatment.

Well, with Hobart, it wasn't that way at all. As I've said before, and I hope people have picked this up, he was, he just was an expert at proof texting. And as I've always taught my students a proof text without a context is a pretext for nonsense.

And he was famous for that. I called it last time biblical hopscotch. It's just cherry picking where you find a verse that says what you want it to say. And I know this sounds a little redundant and elementary, but it is not exclusive to Hobart Freeman or William Branham.

So many of the ministers out there in this new movement will do the same thing and not even in this movement, just in any movement where they're taking a passage that is not in its original context and making it fit the sermon topic that they're on.

The one we talked about earlier, because we talked about eyesight and glasses. They love second Corinthians five seven for we walk by faith and not by sight. So that is just sprinkled into messages all the time.

Maybe the location will be given, second Corinthians five seven, maybe not, maybe it's just a verse for we walk by faith not by sight. And you can tell with that language, it's probably a Bible verse, even if you're not told where it is for we walk by faith not by sight.

That sounds like a Bible verse and it is. And so when Hobart would teach on healing, he would say, now you cannot go by your physical eyesight symptoms. You can't look at symptoms. You can...

can't go by what you see in the natural realm. You have to walk by faith because the Bible says, and then he'll quote second Corinthians 5.7. And as I said earlier, that's not what the Apostle Paul is talking about in second Corinthians 5.

Maybe it didn't matter to Hobart, what he was talking about, I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter to other people, but it matters to me, and it should matter to a student of scripture who was Paul talking to?

What did he say? And in what context was it said? And if people will read the context, they see Paul is contrasting the life that we live now in the flesh versus the waiting for our resurrection body.

In other words, it's all a context of looking forward to literally life after death, not how we can see better or ignore circumstances now, but it's literally looking to the next life where Paul says, right now because we don't have this glorified resurrected body that God has promised us that we will have one day because we don't have it, we're just having to walk by faith.

We're just having to walk by faith, but one day we will not have to do that because we'll have our glorified resurrected body. And so I just find it remarkable that Hobart didn't even like to talk about the next life.

He wanted to say everything is promised for the here and the now. And then he would use a verse that is talking about the afterlife. So as I said, he did not have a well-crafted biblical theology of faith and healing.

And it almost becomes like talking in circles because as I mentioned in the last episode, there's so many ministers in this type of movement that they'll just preach a sermon and then just rip some quote that they can remember out of the Bible, rip it out of its context and then wedge it into their sermon, try to make it fit.

But the part that I didn't mention last time is they also like to emphasize words within whatever they've ripped out of its context. So in this case, sight, they're talking about glasses, they're talking about sight.

And yes, if you understand the meaning of what Paul is saying, we walk by faith, not by sight, it's talking about your actions, we're acting according to faith, not actually walking. But you don't find Hobart taking the literal interpretation of the word walking.

Otherwise, they would have had a walking church and just walked across America while they preached. So they also like to emphasize certain words and make it fit. And in the end, it turns into, I had an English teacher that the phrase that he always went to that also made me laugh, he would say, these people have constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth.

And that's honestly what this turns into, because... You can't talk sense or reason with somebody that is purposefully abandoning sense and reason to hold up their ideologies and their beliefs. And that's essentially what was happening here.

And because he so locked into faith and healing, then his message becomes very lopsided. As you said earlier in the podcast today, you know, it's not really a salvation message, it's a healing message. And I have said before that one of the ways to identify the lopsidedness of this in Hobart's ministry and teaching was whenever they had a communion service. I then gave a list of some of the titles a few weeks ago in a podcast where when it came time for a communion service, then Hobart would invariably, I don't know of an exception. There probably was where they

had a communion service and he did not teach on healing, but I'm not aware of one because whenever the message would begin, you would, you could tell from what he said that they already had preparations made for the communion, which would be observed after his message. And he would start the message by saying, we're going to celebrate the communion of the bread and cup. And so because of that, I'm going to give a message on our full redemption, on our full redemption, and then he would go into healing. And when I was young in my teenage years and my early 20s, because I had come

out of a church in Orthodox conservative Bible-believing Presbyterian church, which was actually better than the faith assembly brand that I went into. But because I'd come out of that, we had had communion services as well. And however, in our communion service, the minister up front would normally teach some type of message on Jesus' death on the cross and our forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life that we have been given. That's normally what I heard. That's probably normally what Hobart had heard and what he, as a Baptist minister, had preached. So now that he

is charismatic and now that he has this faith and healing message, he says, I want to tell you the other half of the story. I don't want you to have an incomplete redemption. I want to tell you about our full redemption. And our full redemption is Isaiah 53. He bore sicknesses and our illnesses and by his stripes were healed. So when I first heard that, you know, that's very appealing and intriguing to me. I'm thinking, wow, I didn't know that Jesus had died for that as well. So now I'm getting the other side of the picture. But the problem that I began to see later on, whether

or many problems I began to see, but one was lopsided in this of it. Let's assume that that is true. Let's assume whole barge view on healing and sickness. Let's assume for sake of argument that is true.

Then to give us a full redemption, I need to hear 50% of messages on healing and 50% on salvation of the soul. You know, I need a balance. Didn't get it. It was completely lopsided where he just wanted to talk about physical healing for the body. And he always put down, as I've said before, verses like John 3, 16, he would say those Christians are only John 3, 16 Christians and Pentecostal people are only Acts 2 people. But we are Romans 8 people, the matured manifested sons of God. You know, we're the third. And he always had three categories of people. You could

just be saved. And that is like, that's just common mill. That's just common run stuff. That's just that is just basic elementary. That's boring. Who would want that? And that's the gift of eternal life. And he would say, Oh, that's not much. Acts 2. Well, that's a little bit better because now you can speak in tongues and now you can have lively worship. But where that third group of the manifested matured sons of God. So it was just so lopsided in his presentation.

And I think that that lopsidedness, honestly, as you look at Dr. Freeman's life, was probably brought on by his own physical needs. Hopefully in the next podcast interview that we can do next go around John, I'm going to get us back to what's going on in Hobart's life in the fall of 1984.

And what's leading up to his death. And one of Hobart's big, big, big issues was the fact that when he was an infant, he had contracted polio. So he had a right leg that was several inches, at least an inch and a half shorter than the left leg, which was a real inconvenience. No doubt about it. A great source of embarrassment. No doubt about it. And even more so, a source of embarrassment when you've transferred from a Baptist preacher to a faith in healing preacher and you're limping around all the time. So everyone can be prepared next go around when we get back

to talking with one another. We'll talk about growing out legs and short legs. So we'll put that on the back burner for next go around. I know you probably know where I'm headed with this immediately when I say it. But whenever I was growing up in the Brannum Tabernacle and abroad, we would always come back to the Brannum Tabernacle for special occasions or for family meetings.

But my grandfather would, the way he offered his Sunday school to the quote unquote class. It was basically a sermon before the sermon, and all sermons were about Brannum, so you got to sit and listen to my grandfather tell stories about Brannum, and then they would play the recording from Brannum from 1947 to 1965.

And in those stories, my grandfather would often tell how there were just lines and lines of people that would come up with one leg shorter than the other one, and they'd set them on the stage, and Brannum would, you could just watch that leg grow right in front of the crowd. And as a kid, you're thinking, wow, that's some cool stuff.

Until years later, you start seeing this being exposed by the modern people who understand the stage trick that they're doing, how they shift the torso just a little bit, set them on stage, and people looking at the side of them can't see that they're twisted, and then you can pull the legs and what they're doing is they're shifting the torso. But apparently Brannum did this.

I'm surprised they didn't get Hobart Freeman on stage so that they could show him increasing. But you're right, as a faith healer, that turns into a huge problem because how can you tell everybody that they can be healed by faith if you yourself can't be?

And interestingly, this became a huge problem for William Brannum. When William Brannum's first wife got sick with tuberculosis, Brannum was in the height of his healing ministry. He had this panel truck that he was going around targeting Pentecostal groups and preaching in Pentecostal circles. He actually became somewhat famous in Pentecostalism. Then his wife died of tuberculosis, and they held healing services for I've got an article about it on the website. Well, what do you do with this? As a faith healer, when your wife just died, she did not get healed and she believed the same doctrine that he's preaching.

So what Brannum did was he completely rewrote and erased that part of history, rewrote his stage persona to include her as a story, as a milestone in his life, of later accepting the Pentecostal faith healing doctrine. So he just erased it entirely. But Hobart, in his age, he couldn't do that. So it's a little bit odd that he was able to hold everything together, having that all of his life. So here's another story along that line I could share, John, the way Hobart, the way all of those people really dealt with things that did not manifest as they

should, they just ignored them. It was just a subject that was not brought up. Here's a great example. I mentioned this months and months ago, probably a year ago, when we were talking about Dr. Freeman's son-in-law, Bruce Kinsey. So Bruce was married to the middle daughter of Hobart in June, Kathy Freeman. And their firstborn son, whose name was, they had named him Brent, he was born with severe respiratory problems.

Well, Bruce and Kathy prayed for their son and then they called dad on the phone and and Hobart relayed this little brief story. I'm going to tell you from the pulpit because I've had people. I had a man just the other day say I was sitting there and I remember Hobart saying this.

So when Hobart stood up, you know, he has this grandson who has just been born the day before. He's got severe respiratory problems. I don't know what it appeared to Bruce and Kathy to be, but when he ended up dying 36 hours after birth, that was the what the coroner said. He died of severe respiratory problems, but they could tell there's something not right with his newborn.

They prayed and there was no change. And so what do you do? Well, you call the the head man. You call Hobart Freeman, your father and your father-in-law. And so they called Hobart. Hobart stood in the pulpit and said that he had rebuked that spirit of death. And he said that child, which was his grandson, he is delivered and he is free. And of course, everybody prays the Lord clapping. Hallelujah. Thank you, Jesus. Praise the Lord. And Hobart goes on and preaches his sermon. Well, in 36 hours, Brent was dead. And so of course, what I want to know is what was

said in the pulpit at the next service? Well, you can already guess. Nothing. That's the problem with these people. They're not honest. They're not transparent. They have this doctrine that they refuse to give up on even when the facts of reality contradict it. The child is dead. You said he's free and delivered from the spirit of death. No, he died. So I don't know if it's a spirit of death or what it was, but I mean, he's dead as a boat anchor. And there's nothing you can do about it.

And I'm sure there was some attempts because there always were with those people to raise the dead. You know, you try an hour or two. And if it doesn't work, eventually, you know, you call the the proper authority. Some people held them for longer than an hour or two. I've heard the stories about that. And again, it just goes to show how extreme these views can be if you don't have a well thought out biblical theology of faith and healing. The Bible does talk about faith.

It does talk about healing, but it doesn't teach these issues in the way that Hobart Freeman did. His views became extreme. He even parted company with all the other faith teachers. And he was critical of them because he said, you know, they use God and the doctors. But Hobart would not make any reference to the fact that Paul both healed the sick and told Timothy drink some wine because you have often infirmities.

You know, those passages, as we talked about before, were not fairly and adequately dealt with. And one of the things you do as a professional teacher or researcher is even if this evidence, this statistic, this person's opinion is not yours.

You have to give a fair presentation of their view. In other words, whenever I have a certain view on the timing of the rapture, I think the rapture of the church happens at the end of the tribulation.

Whole lot of people think that it happens at the beginning. What would be wrong for me as a teacher or lecture is to just make fun of their view or to cast it in the worst possible light.

What you want to do is take your opponent's position and put it in the strongest possible light that you can because that's the only fair thing to do to your opponent and it's only fair way to highlight what you think is the correct view.

So my point in going down that rabbit trail is Hobart owed it to the people to deal with the fact that a pathriditis was sick and he left him sick somewhere and didn't even hesitate to say, I've left Tropham is sick at my leaders.

He didn't think, well, now wait a minute, that'd be a bad confession, you know, because he's claimed his healing and so by faith he's healed and so he is healed and so I can't say that he's sick, you know, you go through all these mental gymnastics where if you're part of faith assembly, that's exactly what you would do.

You would never say, well, I left them at home sick. You would say, well, I left them at home because they're trusting God, you know, I left them at home because they've claimed the promises.

You would never just say what needs to be said. And so when I compared Hobart's very poorly thought out views on faith and healing with what I actually read in the New Testament, you know, I just knew that it didn't square.

A verse that Hobart loved to use it, I don't think we have brought up yet is Romans 14 23. Here again, is this biblical hopscotch, Paul says in Romans 14 23, whatsoever is not a faith is sin.

Wow, did he use that verse? So if you're going to the doctors, that means you're not in faith, that means you're sin. If you're wearing glasses, that means you're not trusting God, that means you're in sin.

If you're using a cane, that means you're not in faith, that means you're in sin. They would just quote that verse. whatsoever's not a faith whatsoever's not a faith and people you know the problem with this kind of teaching is is it's brainwashing because you hear it so much and you hear it out of its contacts that you just grew up in the call thinking whatsoever is not a faith is sin and then you look at what you're about to do you know buy some medicine or take a pill for your headache or whatever and you go well that's not faith so I'm going to be sinning when I do that but can we just say this

do we know what the context of Romans 14 is it is so remarkable that Hobart would have the audacity to even use a verse from that chapter because in that chapter Paul is talking about weak and strong Christians he's talking about the weak Christian who has all these scruples he can't eat this he can't celebrate that day he can't wear sawdumite shoes he can't wear pants he can't wear prostitute purses he can't can't can't have all these things and Paul is saying if you go through your life with all of these things you can't do you have no faith in

your life he said you're sinning and doing that Hobart flipped that on his head John and forbade all these things then misuse the passage where the passage itself is saying no you Hobart Freeman because you have all of these scruples you have proven that you are a weak weak Christian man and you have no faith in your life and I would say probably John not one in ten people even knew the context of Romans 14 23 not one in ten bothered to read it and you know I don't want to be too mean here but those who did know the context or did bother to read it

still because they had heard that quoted out of context so many times they just knew somehow Romans 14 23 has to be a medicine doctors eyeglasses dentist kind of verse instead of a verse that Paul meant it to be and that is those of you who have all of these little scruples and these laws and legalisms he said you're not walking in the faith that a Christian is supposed to walk in and therefore you're walking in sin in your life it's funny when I sit and listen to you talk about Hobart Freeman because it sounds exactly like you're talking about my grandfather or others

pretty much everything that you've said was message doctrine 101 well William Brannum would often he would invent these Bible verses and as a kid when you're hearing them and knowing that we put more emphasis on what he said than we did the Bible we just blindly accepted these brand new Bible verses. One of them that he invented was he would often say this, the Bible says that you are born in sin, shape, and in inequity came into the world speaking lies. And he would go off into these tangents about how everybody's a liar and God saves us or whatever

was the spiel. But what he did was he took two different verses, Psalms, I think 51. I was born in inequity, shaped in sin as my mother conceived me. I can't remember the exact verse. And then there's another Psalm where it says, the wicked are a strange from the womb and they go astray speaking lies. So he combined one of this about the wicked and one that's about the good. And in the end, what happened is he created a religion and a religious framework where the ministers speak lies and they don't care about it.

That's where it gets really, really odd when you think about all of this. And my mind goes down these weird tangents as you're talking because I have so many memories just flooding my head. But you talked about the spirit of death. Hobart was talking about the spirit of death. It is though number one indoctrination tool and manipulation technique by these faith healers that there's this mysterious spirit of death demon that's going to come and get you and snag you out of your bed and throw you down dead. And there's nothing biblical about a spirit of death. This does not exist in the Bible. And in fact,

you probably know the passage. But in Deuteronomy, I think it is God says, I'm the one who's brings life. I'm the one who brings death. And Paul says somewhere in the New Testament, he says to to live as Christ and to die as gain. Well, if you die and you gain, does that mean you're gaining the spirit of death that's from Satan? So the whole, it's like a different religion. These guys have created. But what it did to the people who were trapped in it and sadly, long after they escape, they fear things like this mysterious spirit of death

that's going to somehow come claim them. I had a lady just tell me, I guess it was two weeks ago talking about the brand of cult. She was so mentally trapped, even after leaving and escaping. And she never been in that religion. But she was scared that she would say, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, question the wrong, quote unquote, profit. And suddenly she would be smacked, gobsmacked by this spirit of death. And I just had to sit back and tell you, you know, that doesn't really exist. This is not a real thing that you're afraid

of. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition 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.

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I hear most of the time, John, from these people who have been free from Freemanism for a long time, and who are in, I'm sure, healthier, relatively healthy churches. They say, I still can't shake this idea that if I say anything against Dr. Freeman, touch not my knowledge and do my profits, no harm.

And I just tell them, look, I've been saying things about against Dr. Freeman for over 40 years, and I'm living a wonderful, happy and healthy life. And he died sick and miserable 40 years ago.

So look at the statistics. Look at the empirical evidence and forget all this threatening business. And I'll also tell them, I said, actually, that's turned upside down. What the New Testament really teaches is for the ministers not to dare harm the sheep for whom Christ has died.

That's actually what it says. Now if you're some great person in the Old Testament, like Moses, who was a great person and who was the mouthpiece of God, the spokesman of God, it was not healthy to criticize Moses.

We have too many examples of what happened to those people. But there are no Moses's today. There are no alligis today. There are no Apostle Paul's today. And for you to think you are shows, you know, what a deceive soul you really are.

They did come across that way, like I'm just as important as these Old Testament or even New Testament biblical figures, but that's simply not true. So I say, look, Paul's Peter said in 1 Peter 5 that the shepherds, the undershepherds, are to be examples to the flock and not to lord over God's heritage.

This is God's heritage. And let's look at who died William Brannum and a head on car collision and Hobart Freeman and a multiple illnesses and let's look at who still alive you and me and a whole lot of other people.

So if you want empirical scientific data, you know, there it is. We have been saying what we've been saying for years and we're living a good and healthy life. But that is a tendency that people still struggle with.

And I guess it just, you know, me saying that doesn't cure them of that problem. I think it just takes time and it takes meditation on God's word. It takes, I don't know, looking at the empirical dad and say, yeah, Chino's been doing this for 40 something years and he's still smiling in alive. So, and I haven't grown a second or a third head yet, you know, I'm still living my life and Hobart died. And, you know, no, I'm not, you know, I'm not I'm boasting in the fact Hobart died and I'm still alive. I'm just saying let the facts speak for themselves and even more important than

that, go to go to the Bible and see what does the Bible say. But back to Freeman's views, yeah, they just became too extreme, not balanced at all. I think early in Freeman's ministry, he was happy to have a message of divine healing, hoping that he could be healed of this polio and be healed of what became a terminal heart condition suffered many heart attacks in his life. And he was never healed of either one of those. That should say a lot to people. But I think he grabbed a hold of the message, hoping that it would work for him. And there is definitely healing taught in the Bible.

There's healing taught way over in James 5. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him and anoint him with all in the name of the Lord and the prayer faith will save the sick. That's long after Jesus. That's not given in any connection with the apostles. It's just given in the connection of a local church, elders in a local church and a sick person. So there is definitely a message of faith and healing in the Bible. It's just not Hobart's message. He didn't even give you another go down another path. He didn't even address, you know,

normal causes and natural cures for things. Everything had to be some stupendous miracle. So when we were talking about dental care last time, even though Hobart never from the pulpit said I forbid you to go to a dentist, it just became understood that anything that has to do with the physical body is somehow covered by the atonement and it's it's sin to seek help in any other direction. Now where he wasn't thorough in that is as we said with teeth, does that prohibit brushing your teeth? You know, does that prohibit flossing your teeth? Does that prohibit using

mouthwash for the germs in your mouth? You know, he would never address that and so people will end up in different places. Let me just give you a good example. I can remember something from my church 40 years ago. I was a young minister and pastor and so we definitely had a lot of the Hobart Freeman healing influence in our church through my ministry still at that time.

So we had young women. We had lots of young families in the church, lots of young women who had young children. So we've got infants in the church. And I'll never forget, and this was early.

I was still in to too much of Dr. Freeman's doctrine and I'm in my early 20s, but I can show you though, even though I was still into it, there was still, I just had some common sense to me that helped me eventually see the light and gravitate away from all of this, but there became an issue in our church.

The issues you want to be are big, huge issues, enormous little tiny things, stupid, stupid things that pop up in the church and just divide everybody. And you know what the issue was in our church?

It happened with the women having all these young babies and the issue became Johnson's baby powder. And how that came about, you know, I'm the leader of the church and it takes a while before I catch wind of this.

And I just put an end to all this nonsense, but how that came about was we had an old lady. I mean, when I say old, I mean, at that time she was way younger than I am now, but at that time she felt like an old lady to me, she did not have a husband, did not have any children.

She was just a single lady in the church, found out later, did not know this at the time. I was kind of frying later, but she had no teeth, none whatsoever. I did not know that at the time because she had dentures.

But anyway, she thought it was her calling to set all these young mothers straight in the church who were failing God in their faith walk because these babies had a little bit of a rash and these mothers were gonna use some baby powder and she said, oh, whatsoever's not a faith is sin.

That would be sin to use any of this baby powder on these babies. So I catch wind of that. That is Freeman doctrine. That's where this type of extreme, excessive teaching will take you.

It takes you down all these paths, trying to find all the things you must outlaw to make sure you're in line with divine healing, faith message of the Bible. And so I said, stop all that stuff.

Let those mothers do what the baby's crying, the baby's uncomfortable. Let them use baby powder. I don't care. That's not, who wants to argue over that? But that had become a point of contention in our church.

And I'm sure that could be, I'm sure I will hear from people after saying that of things I've never thought of or heard that became points of contention in all of these faith groups.

Special. When it comes to mothers, young children, nursing mothers, you get all these other people in the church who become experts on it, who may be men who don't know anything about nursing babies, who will pontificate on the correct procedure or what is allowed or what is not allowed.

And of course you and I, John, I just throw my hands in the air and say, where is the gospel of Jesus Christ? That's what we're supposed to be talking about here in church.

But because of these extreme views on faith and healing, we end up having to go down rabbit trails like this. To a person who reads and understands the Bible, and understands that Moses went up and God gave him 10 commandments.

And they were fairly simple, really good commandments. Jesus said they're all summed up in love. If you love your neighbor, you're not going to kill them, you're not going to steal from them. He goes back down and the people say, no, this is not good enough.

Go back up and tell us what we should do to save ourselves. And so they go back up and they get the mosaic law, which is a very, very strict code of conduct. And these religions, it's the same way.

What Jesus did on the cross is not good enough. They want to turn back and they want to say, what else should we do to save ourselves? Because that's not good enough. What Jesus did.

Let's just take a common thing like a headache. When I first got in this walk, a headache, that is somehow an attack of the enemy. That is a pressure of the devil that's straight out of the pit of hell, a headache.

And so the way you deal with a headache is you claim it by faith. And I can remember, as a 17, 18 year old, I would have an occasional headache and I would claim my healing by faith and I still have a headache, that was a problem.

Plus, still had a headache. And so, you know, Hobart didn't deal with natural things. Everything had to be super spiritual and supernatural. Headaches are caused by things like stress. They're caused by not enough sleep.

They're caused by dehydration. They're caused by the glare of the sun if you've been out in the sun all day. You know, there are all kinds of natural causes for things like that and there are all kinds of natural remedies such as get some more sleep or become more highly graded.

But all of those things were just short-circuited. I mean, you just pull the plug on all of that and said, nope, you got to claim your healing by faith. So if you popped an aspirin or an ibuprofen, you know, that was just, it was whatsoever.

It's not a faith as sin. You know, they run right back to Romans 14, 23B. And it was, you know, not only was it wrong teaching because it did not take into consideration just our normal life, normal causes, normal aches and pains and normal cures for...

for those. But then it just sullies the whole healing picture that we have in the Bible. So take the subject of blindness. Jesus and Paul and the other apostles, they definitely heal people that were blind who could not see. That's not even healing. That is an absolute miracle because of the optic nerves and everything going on in the brain and your perception, your depth and your peripheral and the color involved and all of these cones and things in your behind your eyes that connect to your brain. That's not like someone had, I don't know, cancer. And again, that's a healing, but that's miraculous that if you had cancer

and you are healed supernaturally, then those cells that are cancerous cells that are destructive in your body, they have been killed or eliminated by God. And now you no longer have it. These are tremendous miracles of healing. And they almost trivialize these things by saying, Oh, you have 2040 vision. Well, you can't wear glasses. You know, you have to believe God for your eyesight. And that's not what the Bible is talking about. All kinds of people have all kinds of vision issues. But in the Bible, they were blind or in the Bible, they were lame. Take the guys that the several cases where in the book of Acts,

people were healed from lameness. Those people were lame from birth. It wasn't that they had stubbed their toe or their knee was out of join or they had a swollen ankle. They were lame. And so when the apostles prayed for them, they didn't say, look, I'm going to pray for you. And then I want you to believe that you're healed, confess that you're healed, act like you're healed. So, you know, if you're really on healed, then according to Hobart Freeman doctrine, you would not be allowed to use a cane or you would not be allowed to use a wheelchair. It is just absurd. The position that Hobart Freeman's healing

teaching put people in because when the apostles said, you're healed, get up and walk. That's exactly what the people did. They were healed and they got up and walk when Hobart prayed or all these other ministers out there prayed, the people don't get up and walk.

But then in Hobart's ministry, not only do you not get up and walk, but you're not allowed to use crutches or a cane or a wheelchair. Or if you can't see better yet, you're not allowed to use glasses. So not only, I mean, it's a double whammy against you. Not only are you not healed, but then they take away from you, even these quote unquote crutches to get you through.

until you are healed, they take all of that away from you. So, I mean, it was just a terribly, terribly unscriptural healing message that literally wrecked people's lives and Hobart, because this just was his tendency, then would take it from healing of things that are true diseases like kidney disease or diabetes or cancer.

He would take it from something that is a true disease to something like eyeglasses or dental care or what we can come to next that we haven't talked about yet, John, and that is skin care or a visit to a dermatologist, then he would take these miracles that had happened, for instance, to Moses, who was 120 years old when he died, Deuteronomy 34, and as far as we can tell, he had 2020 vision.

He would take these extraordinary examples from the Bible, Paul's sweat aprons that were taken from his body, sweaty and smelly, but they had been on the Apostle Paul X-19, and all he had to do was lay them on a sick person or demon-possessed person, and they were healed or delivered.

That is a phenomenal miracle that Luke said happened regularly with the Apostle Paul when he was in Ephesus, Hobart would take these extraordinary miracles and almost like flatten them and democratize everything, where with Moses saw it, Paul saw it, it happened to Peter, it can happen to all of us, and that is simply not the way that it was.

When we come to these issues of just the regular care of our body, whether it is brushing your teeth or putting on a pair of glasses or taking care of your skin, that was frowned upon at faith assembly as some type of lack of faith.

So skin care, he didn't talk about it, but do you think anyone could go to a dermatologist? Absolutely not. I'm not even for sure because I never heard anyone talk about it, what their opinion would have been or doctrine would have been when it came to sunscreen.

I just know that we here in America, because we have European ancestry, we have very light skin, we're not built for the sun, like they are in the Middle East or in Africa, they have very dark skin, which naturally protects them from the sun.

As you know, for most of my adult life, I have been a charter captain, a professional fishing guide, so I have been on the boat, on the water, and in the sun for most of my life, and my skin shows it, and so I've had to see a dermatologist on it again.

patient and have a thing or two removed because the problem is if you don't, I'll give you an example here in a moment, a tragic example from a young lady and her father that she has shared with me, what starts out as just a simple, common basal cell mole can and does become melanoma and what happens with melanoma is you go through your several stages and when you get to the final stage, I mean all it is is a mole on your face or on your back or on your neck or head or something.

What happens is that's cancerous, it's very, very dangerous and once that happens, guess what? You don't live and you don't survive. So I don't know what their position was on sunscreen, I think we fair skinned people need to use sunscreen, the sun's going to damage you.

Hobart probably would say, you know, look, either A, you don't need to be out there. You need to be studying 14 to 16 hours a day like I do or B, if you go out there in the sun, just trust God, just trust God, that's not the way these things work.

You have to use some common sense and not everybody has used common sense. You know, you were talking about the difference between the healings that were in the Bible and the healings that are in these groups.

One thing that hit me after leaving is, you know, back in the Bible days, they didn't have newspapers and presses and printings and camera reporters and television. Whenever Lazarus was raised from the dead, there would have been all over the new, it would have made world news, man, because here's a guy that just raised from the dead.

Or whenever the lame was made to walk, you would have reporters on the scene, look, this is the thing that just happened. I have yet to find and you know how many tens of, actually, it's probably hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles I've read from any healer in any part of this movement from the early 1800s until today.

I have yet to find one single article that substantiates an authentic healing by a divine healer. Now, I know people who have been healed by God, but these guys that are on the platforms that are saying we healed tens of thousands of people, all of this stuff.

When William Brannum had his greatest, they called it the most powerful display of divine healing in world history when he toured through Canada. The newspapers followed his trail trying to find one single person and they were told that there were thousands, so they thought they'd just go print stories of authentic healing.

They were unable to find one single person and they identified this guy named Alfred Paul who worked with Brannum in the campaigns. And they started talking with him, well, show us these healings, and the guy was so distraught because he said, I know personally many people that they were told that they were healed, and their families have now left religion altogether, they're atheist, because their family member just went home and died.

And he said it was a challenge for his faith. He actually sent the reporter's home and said, I have yet to find one person myself, and I was here on stage with these guys.

And that's the kind of movement that produced this thing from Hobart Freeman. There's, yes, God heals, the Bible says it, but not in the way that these guys present it. You don't leave off your sunscreen, you don't leave off all of your, I'm still laughing at the baby powder.

You don't tell the kids that they can't, the mothers that they can't use baby powder on their children, man, that's just wrong. And what world is that right to do that? What they've done is they've taken it so far to the extremes, trying to find something that they can claim as a healing, even if it's as trivial as the butt on a baby.

That's how far they'll go to try to find something. And in the end, the baby's still going to have a rash. Yeah, I like the way you said it, John. God does heal, but you don't find it in these big healing crusades.

And you would think that just accidentally they would heal five or six or something, even if it was an accident, but they, but they didn't. I'm reminded of what Hobart Freeman often said in pulling this from past history and Dr.

John G. Lake, his church in Washington, where over a five year period, there were a hundred thousand authenticated, verified healings in his ministry. And I have seen John on your website, in your archives, that actual, that whole little quote in phrase is found in Gordon healing, Gordon Lindsey's voice of healing magazine.

And way back in the mid 1960s, and Hobart, we know went to that deliverance school in June of 1966 down in Dallas. And he heard these statistics because that's just what everybody was reporting.

And so he heard it, couldn't verify it himself because it's not verifiable. And so what did he do, irresponsibly, he just repeated that. And then the next person says, you know what? Don't you realize John G. Lake saw 100,000 authenticated healings over a five year period in his church in Washington?

And then the next person says, don't you know the John G. Lake saw 100,000, you know, that's 55 healings a day over a five year period for 100,000 healings that they're authenticated.

Of course they're not, you know, show us the medical records, show us the reports. Of course that's not true. What I would like to end with John is just a brief account of a dear woman who has had much communication.

with me who is I won't mention any names to protect all the innocent but let's just say that her she's a granddaughter of what can I say a pillar in the church at the mother church of faith assembly one of the most important families at faith assembly this is a grown woman and adult woman but who was very young back in those days so she's a grand father a grandchild a granddaughter of that person her father who was a died in the wool freemenite as so many of them were if I had the story correctly would go and have his hair cut professionally at a barber shop he was at a

barber shop one time where the barber said they you know get pretty up close and personal when they're cutting your hair said hey you might want to have somebody take a look at that mole on your face well that was the last time he ever went to a barber shop because that is an enticement to lean to the arm of the flesh quote-unquote so he never went back he did not do anything about the mole the mole probably at that time was a basal cell mole which is harmless but that basal cell can eventually turn into something that is malignant and cancerous and it did it became melanoma

um the man suggested terrifically sad story how how Hobart deceive these people and cost these people their lives this is one another one of the statistics that maybe nobody even knows about because it didn't happen back prior to dr. Freeman's death this was long long after his death but because his teaching was still embedded in these people's hearts and still echoed in their minds they were afraid to get any medical help because if you do that means you're in sin and if you can't believe for healing maybe you can't even believe to be raptured or be saved

that was the dilemma the horns of the dilemma that Hobart had them hooked on and so this man's health began to deteriorate because obviously that mole had turned into something worse he eventually decided to go to the doctor to the hospital and this is where it becomes really tragic you've already suffered this whole time period and eventually these people have to decide am I gonna cross the line now and sin and go to the doctor I've already suffered this whole time now should I cross the line or not human tendency to want to live And so you go against what you've been taught, you go against your own conscience, and you

go to the doctor. And so he went through five years of serious surgeries, bless his heart, all to no avail. All to no avail. By the time he got professional medical help, it was simply too late.

And this has happened time and time again. There are only a few people who simply refuse to go to the doctor and die in their bed at home. That has happened. That does occasionally happen.

More times than not, the way I have seen it work out, is people will hold on as long as their body can endure. And they're in such terrific pain. They finally say, well, I'm going to go to the doctor and they go to the doctor and instead of getting good news like, we're going to make you better.

The news they hear is we can try to make you more comfortable, but it's too late. You have a terminal illness. And so this sweet young lady that I have really enjoyed talking to on the phone and communicating by other means and methods said, you know, it was just horrific, you know, having to watch my father, whom I loved, who was a good man, who was a good father to watch him agonize and pain and then slowly die from something as simple as a mole on his face.

Had he had it treated earlier, he would have been okay. And she said, my siblings and I have a hundred and fifty emails from my father over the last five years of his life as he was keeping us up to date on progress, prognosis, how he felt, what was going on.

And I just wanted to and I asked her, can I read any of this? And she said, yes, no names involved. But what I want people to see as we wrap up our interview today is, I don't even know how to put it in words, just the the desperate desire to live that this man had the fear that he's battling, but yet he knows I've got to stay with what Dr. Freeman taught me.

I've got to stay with my positive confession because if I don't do this, I'm going to die. He stayed with his positive confession and he died anyway. But here is just one paragraph in one of these hundred and fifty emails that he was sending to his children to keep them updated.

And here's what he said, I am not backing off. I pray, believe and confess, you know, you got to say all the words, you know, because if you don't, if you say four words.

but it's not the right one. You need to say five. There in this focus, focus witchcraft kind of view that God's going to not answer my prayer if I don't spell the word correctly or if I don't say the right word rather than God looks at our heart.

He doesn't care about the particular words that we're using. But he said, I pray and believe and confess that the pain is gone. The infection is gone. There is no more cancer or sign of cancer in my body in Jesus' name.

I pray, speak, decree, confess in Jesus' name that God got the margin of this cancer that I am cancer-free. I command the enemy's hands all of my head in Jesus' name.

Commanding, rebuking, claiming, confessing, you know, it's a false gospel. I mean, it is a false gospel from the get-go and proof of it is all the people that tried to go down this path.

It didn't work and they end up dying. And I'm so sorry to this young lady and to her siblings. I believe her mother is still a survivor of, you know, my condolences to the whole family.

And I don't blame this man. He was simply doing what he was taught. He was taught by a false teacher who ended up dying himself.

I said this, I believe to this young conclusion now. When I got the news that Hobart had died, he died on a Saturday. I'll tell all the details of this more in a future podcast.

I did not find out until Friday of the following week because I had been kicked out of the faith assembly orbit and nobody would tell me anything. I had to get my information in other ways.

So he died on a Saturday. I didn't find out until Friday. And when I found out he was dead, you know what I said and thought, praise God. And no, I was not rejoicing that Hobart suffered.

I think he died a terrible death physically and mentally and emotionally. I'll share more about that in a later podcast. I don't rejoice over anybody suffering, but I was very glad that he was, if you're not gonna change, my first prayer would be, Hobart, please change your view on all this so you can save yourself and save other people.

If you're not gonna do that, then what else can happen for God to protect his church but for the man to be removed? William Brannon was removed in a very traumatic, dramatic way. Hobart Freeman was removed in a very dramatic, traumatic way.

I hate it for his sake and for his family's sake, but still... Dawn at the end of the day, think of how many more people would have died and been damaged had Hobart been allowed to continue to live.

You know, there's really not a good, happy way to end this, but I knew that we were doing an episode on divine healing and into the weeds of how the healing works and there is no happy ending to that.

That's just, it is a sad story no matter how you look at it. I remember after leaving the cult, I started reading through all of these magazines, put out by Gordon Lindsay, the voice of healing magazine, and in the middle of them you'd find these testimonies that they're giving people testifying to their healing, how they went to this wonderful convention and they got healed.

And one day I'm actually going to do a compilation of that, I think, and put it out because it's eye-opening. There's one lady that stood out to me. She said, praise God, I went to this deliverance meeting and I did not even know that I had cancer, but I would have died if that man had not healed me of my cancer.

And to the casual reader who's duped by all of this, they're like, praise God, this woman just, they saved her life. But to the person who's not trapped in this, you're thinking, wait a minute, how did the healer possibly know she had cancer?

It didn't affect her in any way, she went up obviously because she wasn't feeling well, but that's not how you detect cancer. And to the woman who goes home, she tells all of her friends, her family, I get healed of cancer, I feel so good now, I feel better.

And everybody's thinking, wow, she got healed of cancer. And that spreads throughout the community, churches tell churches, and suddenly whoever is the deliverance minister is famous among all of these people for something he actually didn't even do.

The sad part about it is, I know people who suffered chronic illnesses to the day of their death, waiting to be healed and never got healed. I know other people who did get healed by God, not by the healer, of something that was pretty dramatic, but they also suffered with other conditions that were maybe in some cases even worse than the one they got healed of.

But yet they continue to try to hope for their feeling for the worst thing that they suffered with for the rest of their lives. I know on both sides, I know people that do get healed, but I no longer believe that it's this man that's doing it and it's these rules that they adhere to that's enabling God to heal.

There's nothing in the Bible that says that they had to abide by the rules of Peter when Peter prayed for somebody and healed them. And they didn't create the cult of Peter and go follow him instead of Jesus.

That's not how it worked. So not a good way to end it, it's a sad story, but to be honest, I think it needs to be sad at the ending of this because this is a false gospel, it's a false teaching.

Not only has it ruined lives, it has killed many, many thousands of people. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at www.William-Branum.org.

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

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