Healing Claims, Positive Confession, and the Results That Never Came

Music 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 is good to be back and to talk about my favorite subject, which is deliverance. We've talked about it quite a bit so far. There are just so many different angles to look into this thing.

And literally this was at the heart of what destroyed so many lives. And I don't think we could have the next... We could probably spend off a whole series of podcasts on just deliverance and still not even skim the surface of how wrong it is and how bad it is.

I've mentioned in the last few podcasts, it's really staged deliverance that we're talking about here. The Bible talks about deliverance, it talks about delivering from demons. But what they're teaching is staged deliverance. And for me, those two things are not equal.

And one of the ways we'll dissect it today, I think maybe the next episode we might get into the occult side of it. But today we're going to talk about just simply some of the conundrums, the double standards that are happening within deliverance.

Usually when you see a deliverance minister, they're on fire for God and they're teaching that you can't. You can overcome all of these demons and then later in life, they themselves usually do not overcome these demons.

I think Dr. Freeman, in my opinion, he fascinated, he was fascinated with everything related to demons and deliverance. And as I said earlier, this was especially characteristic of the early years of his ministry.

And by early years, I would really date this from 1968 to 1972. He was fascinated to the point of obsession with demons and deliverance. And he spent a lot of the early years of his ministry talking about it, teaching on it, he ended up writing a little bit about it, and we'll get to that a little later in the podcast today.

But I think he fancied himself as some type of expert when it came to demons and deliverance. And I think he felt that he had a deliverance ministry, and he had been influenced as we saw on the last couple of interviews we've done, by Important.

Deliverance ministers of his day, like Derek Prince and Don Basham, and when Wurley that we talked about last time in Frank and Idomé Hammond with their book Pigs in the Parlor. And I've always in hindsight just smiled and thought how appropriate that when Hobart went to Dallas, Texas in June of 1966. And this was his real introduction to William Brannum and Kenneth Hagen and the word of faith and everything that was current at that time in the charismatic movement. He went to a deliverance seminar. That's that it was not a healing, a prophecy, a gifts of the Holy Spirit seminar, although those things

were all obviously discussed. Gordon Lindsay had advertised it as a deliverance seminar because, you know, this whole topic of Christians and deliverance and can of Christian have a demon and does a Christian need deliverance. This was nothing new with Hobart Freeman by any means. This had been going on for years prior to that, you know, for all of the first 50 years of the 20th century, at least, and maybe earlier, I don't know. But by the mid 1900s and the second half from 1950 to 2000, this was and has been a huge issue. And Dr. Freeman was front and center and hot and heavy in all of it. And for some reason,

it really appealed to him. We've looked earlier at the subject of divine healing. I know why that appealed to him because of how sickly he was as a child as an adult. He had a severe heart condition. He had two deformed legs, one from polio when he was just an infant and the other when he was run over by a highway department truck. The other leg was damaged in that accident. We looked at his preoccupation with prosperity and that's because he was so poor in his life when he was a seminary professor at gray seminary. And I realized this

is, you know, early 60s like 1961, but he had $4,000 a year income. And that was probably a decent income in 1961. But, you know, you couldn't drive a Cadillac or an old 98, any of those big led sleds back in the day, you know, that would be beyond his paycheck. And those were things he ended up driving. So you could tell that was something he wanted to do. Why he was as fascinated as he was over demons and deliverance, I'm not really sure. Again, I don't know enough about his childhood and his upbringing to try to

to guess at some connection there. But he portrayed himself on all of his cassette tapes

when he would talk about demons and deliverance and they are of course just replete with his personal stories. He portrayed himself as duplicating what was seen in the Gospels and Acts and the way storytellers like Kenneth Hagen who was a master storyteller and that's really who I think Hobart learned his storytelling from.

And Hobart Freeman who was an excellent storyteller the way these guys communicate is they don't really teach the narrative of scripture. They don't get you to a passage like Kenneth Hagen and Hobart Freeman's favorite Mark 11, 22 to 24.

They don't really get you to a passage and teach you the background. Rather they hone in on those verses and say what they want to say and then they begin telling stories. And it just becomes so confusing to the person who is not understanding how this sermon is being crafted

and how the doctrine is being taught to you. It almost becomes warp and woof. It's part of the whole fabric of the story that the passage in the Bible. You know, it's to me John almost a little analogous to a study Bible.

And I've talked about this in my teachings before. There have been a lot of study Bibles which have been produced and that is a Bible that will follow a certain English translation such as the King James translation or the new international version or some other one.

It will have the text of that English translation but then either in the margin or in the footnote it will have commentary. And so probably the most famous study Bible was Scofield's study Bible that came out in the early 1900s.

So and that was just profoundly influential on the evangelical movement. Someone like Dr. Charles Ryrie who was a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary did the Ryrie study Bible. And I believe his text was a new American standard then a SB Bible.

And then the NIV whenever it was published there was a study Bible. And study Bibles were great and wonderful. All they are is a commentary. You know, they are that man or that committee if it's a group of men.

It's their belief or their understanding of that chapter or that passage. So there's nothing wrong with that. Inherently there's no different in reading their comments in a study Bible as in reading an actual commentary on say, for instance, a book of Mark.

But I've always realized the problem in people carrying their study Bible. and using that as your normal Bible in church is over the process of time, you can't remember what you read from the actual text of Scripture, and that's the Bible. You can bet your life on that and what you read down there in the footnotes, which may be right many times most of the time, often it is, but it may be wrong too. And so in your mind, you conflate the two. And I actually had someone just the other day tell me something, he does not carry a study Bible, but he carries a

Bible that, you know, at the beginning, maybe of the book, it'll have just a little introduction. I'll tell you this is a date of the book and the author and the recipients and tell you some things about it. And again, there's nothing in the world wrong with that except when you carry that to church all the time as your Bible. And then you're saying, well, and you're trying to tell someone something and you're saying, well, now the Bible says such and such, it is, it happens more often than not, than what they're quoting is not what the actual Bible says,

but what the study portion of the Bible says. And that's where you have to be careful. So it's analogous to me to the way these men would teach their messages. They're teaching a verse.

They're definitely teaching the verse and they're reading the verse and they're quoting the verse and they're referring to it. But then they have so much commentary on it and the commentary is not really commentary. It's a story that they tell. They'll say, now see this person here in Jesus Cassus demon out. Well, let me tell you and then they go and tell a story from their lie.

And of course, they're trying to base their story on that portion of the Bible. And this is what Hobart was always doing, but I just think he saw himself duplicating what was done by Jesus in the Gospels and Acts. He tried to, you know, say, look, this is nothing difficult.

Every believer has the power and authority to lay hands on people, heal the sick and cast out demons. And it's, it's very easy to do. But I think people need to be very careful when they're listening to ministers like Freeman and people still hearing today or Hagen or all of the plethora of ministers out there today. Be careful when you're listening to the stories that they tell because sometimes the stories become the scriptures. Whenever I first began researching, I wanted to know why it is exactly what you're saying. Why do they quote these commentaries rather than just

go directly to the Bible? I grew up listening to sermon after sermon after sermon where they would talk about the Bible and they would always begin with brother Brannum said and then they would talk about the Bible passage. And it never made sense to me. I always wanted to just open up the Bible and read it. What I don't care what they say it says. What does it actually say?

And it's Um, cases it got so far off the mark that the unders, I don't believe Brandon actually read his Bible. So he would quote these passages that did not really exist. And he would say, the Bible says, and he would say this thing that's not in the Bible.

But I would hear ministers saying it too, and they would preach it as though it was. So we're a learning additions to scripture that didn't exist, but be learning somebody's else idea about those things, right?

So I began studying all of the different history, historical elements that was in the background. And I think, based off of what I could tell, and this is just my opinion, it seems to be an answer to the fundamentalist movement.

When Christian fundamentalism began to rise, they were fighting what they thought was cold, stale religion with liberal views. And people weren't, the idea was they weren't as excited about the Bible as written. So they're coming up with different ways to interpret and look at it.

So the answer to this is we need to make it more exciting. So they're the radio preachers, the ministers, the speakers, evangelists, they all tried to make it more exciting. And that's good to a point, but there comes a point where you can only do so much before now your stuff, your content is no longer exciting.

So it went beyond that. They started preaching different ways to make it exciting. And people were listening to the outside stories more than they were the Bible. So in effect, what they were arguing against the fundamentalists or the other side of the half, the non-fundamentalists, that argument now applied to them.

So they had went into their very own error from what I can tell. In the early 1900s, there was a four volume work entitled The Fundamentals. I think R.A. Tory, Ruben Tory was the editor of that.

And yeah, you're exactly right, that that was an attempt to combat the liberalism, especially that had come from Europe and especially from Germany. Whenever I saw Hobart refer to biblical stories, and he did, and I would say contrasting him with random, he definitely knew his Bible, he knew his Bible really well.

He was very, very astute on quoting passages. The quotation was really on target. I mean, he had all the words, he had the chapter, he had the verse. And that's good. I'm all in favor of knowing your Bible and being able to quote it.

But in the wrong hands, you can tell that can be dangerous. Wish everyone would memorize various portions of the Bible, because then when you don't have your Bible with you at work or traveling, you can recite things to yourself.

That's wonderful. But we know in the temptation of Christ in Matthew 4, Satan, who also knows the Bible. It will very well, he quoted to Jesus a verse out of Psalm 91, and it was accurately quoted, but he was misapplying it.

That was the whole problem. He was telling Jesus, you can, in essence, just do whatever you want to do and you can force the Father's hand. If you throw yourself off this pinnacle of the temple, God, because of this verse, you see, he had a verse.

He definitely had a verse because of this verse. This verse has to work. It's always accurate. It's 100% infallible. So it has to work. There's no two ways about it, those though you yourself fall, and he has to send his angels, lest you dash your foot against the stone.

But we know Jesus didn't fall for that, even though it was an accurate verse, it was being misused and misapplied. So John, when you and I, and we read our gospels, I do see demons being cast out of people.

100%, there are blind demons. There are deaf and dumb demons. These are evil spirits. Jesus identifies them either himself as a spirit or the gospel writer who's telling the story will say that such and such brought their son or daughter who had a dumb spirit.

So I trust what Matthew or Mark or Luke or John said. So sometimes they're identifying the spirit. Sometimes Jesus is identifying the spirit and either he or the early church or one of the apostles, they cast that spirit out.

But when I compared Dr. Freeman's, not only his teaching, definitely his teaching, but when I even just compared his practice, or my practice or anyone's practice that I knew, when I compared his practice to Jesus and the early church, it just didn't square.

The two didn't line up. Whenever Jesus said, come out, you unclean spirit, guess what happened? It came out and the person who was formally blind, now they can see and they were deaf and dumb.

Now they can hear and speak and they were mentally crazy like the gathering to Moniac in Mark five. He's sitting there closed in his right mind and he's ready to start following Jesus. This is the same person who you couldn't even bind with chains before.

So something real had happened in that man's life and Mark describes it and Jesus agrees it's demonic. What happened? He was set free from an evil spirit. But when I would watch Dr. Freeman or we could name anybody, John, any of these people, when I watched their practice, I didn't see those results.

And especially with Dr. Freeman, he would pray for people and then it was all, if you didn't see something happen, first of all, he's assuming. that their problem is demonic and it's called an origin, and that's a whole another story, maybe part of what we'll get into today, but that's assuming that it's demonic. How do you know that? You know, you have to have some kind of special gift or revelation from God to know that. And so he's a, so I'm assuming that because of what he said, demon, you spirit of whatever come out, that

that's what he felt it was. But if you don't see any, what they would call manifestation, such as vomiting or crying out or something, then it was always now brother, sister, you take this by faith. Remember, deliverance is a walk, deliverance is a walk. Now you go and walk this out. And Jesus never said that to anybody. They experienced just like I argued before, John, that when Jesus prayed for people for illness, they received sight, strength to blame legs.

They received it immediately. Lepers were cleansed. And when Freeman would say, now, this is a proof text for things don't happen immediately. They had to go and show themselves to the priest and as they went on the way, the 10 lepers were cleansed. Remember the story and only one that Samaritan returned to thank Jesus. But I say, look, if you're using that as a proof text for healing, not being always immediate, it happened within 10 minutes, 30 minutes. It happened the same day. You can't use these as texts for, oh, yeah, brother, I've been waiting for my polio heel, my polio foot to be healed for 16 years. There's

none of that in the Bible. And neither, neither are there stories like that where someone has to walk out their deliverance. You know, they have their blind. And it's caused by a demon. And they're going to walk it out for the next two years.

My point that I'm simply trying to say now is even though Hobart fancied himself as a deliverance minister, when I compare his practices of casting demons out with Jesus practice, they just did not square.

And I would say that it's not uniquely Hobart Freeman with that issue. If you go through the list of deliverance ministers or so-called deliverance ministers, like I said before in earlier podcasts, it's stage deliverance. It's not really what the Bible talks about. They combine that with positive confession. Be healed, the demon comes out of you.

Now, you still got it. Go home and confess or you'll figure out that it's still in you. Really, they don't make it that plain, but that's what they're trying to say. And the sad truth of this is, if you read through some of the historical accounts and I've gone through everywhere from newspapers to even, there are some critic books that do exist about deliverance ministries. The ones who were there with the people will tell you that, yes, It's these people, they claimed that they were delivered of the demon of a broken leg.

For example, or the demon of a person who could not walk. I question whether that's a demon in the first place, but the problem is, they, one newspaper article in the title, it says, they came in on stretchers, they left home on stretchers.

And that's really what was happening here. They were told to go home and positively confess. However, everyone who wasn't on one of those stretchers saw the people confess I'm healed and they went home telling people we had this massive number of healing.

So you've got two sides of the crowd. One crowd doesn't get healed. They go home. They're aware that they didn't get healed. You have to be aware. The other side, they're going home, thinking, oh my gosh, we just witnessed the greatest miracle ever.

And that turned into the legend. And so the legend turned into a mythology. And once it hit the mythology level, you really have this weird cult that's not quite Christian. And then there's this gray area that I've been looking at.

You have people who went home and healed, to be healed, knowing that they had what they, you know, had what they came to the meeting for. Because this other weird scenario where people are so mentally controlled that they go home sick with the same exact thing, thinking they're healed, not understanding why their body is rejecting the healing.

And they're thinking, oh my gosh, I've done something wrong, I've got sin in my life. And they start to see demons that aren't there. And they go back to the deliverance minister. So it's like a, it's like a never-ending vicious cycle that they get entered into.

I think we played a long time ago, John, a clip at the end of one of Dr. Freeman's teachings where he was having his so-called words of knowledge for healing. And he would, you know, he's standing before a group of 2,000 people.

And this is just to kind of back up what you just said. He's standing before, you know, a large audience of people. And I've poked fun at and I will continue to do it, his so-called word of knowledge.

And you know, I think that God can give someone a special word of knowledge. Bible does talk about that. I'm not ruling any of these things out. I'm just saying they're not as common as Hobart would have us to believe.

And they certainly weren't operating in his life as he would have people believe. But he'd say, the Lord has shown me, there's someone here, you know, with who has injured their left hand. And you know, I just, even when I first heard that, because that was probably on a 1982 message, you know, I was already delivering myself for Freemanism and it took me a while.

It didn't happen overnight, but I was already on the way out the door as it were. Because I would hear something like that and I'd say, I don't see any kind of word of knowledge in the Bible that is so vague and general.

And then I'd say, you know, I hate to question Hobart integrity and sincerity. However, that's pretty easy to do when you got 2,000 people and say someone has an injured left hand, I'm looking for something that seems like it's what the Bible says, where you actually can name the person and their disease and point right to them.

We know there's a lot of alleged cases of that too, and I think there's hanky-panky that's gone on behind the scenes with that. But with Hobart, it was vague, and then they would say, you know, he'd had three people come up and say, yeah, I injured my left hand, you know, it was a farming accident last week.

And so Hobart would lay hands and say, be healed in Jesus' name, now go walk out your healing. So, everything ever happened. That's the whole problem with this. Let me rephrase that, rarely did anything happen that I am aware of, that I am certain of.

And yet it was just a blanket teaching and a blanket statement as soon as we pray for you, you're healed. Now walk your healing out, as you said, or as soon as we cast this spirit out, the spirit's gone.

You are free. But now brother, you know, you have to walk this out, deliverance I heard all the time is a walk. I never read Jesus saying deliverance is a walk. I just saw him delivering people.

Now, he did say, once you are delivered, you do need to fill your life up with good things because a spirit can come back and bring seven demons worse than himself. It does say that, but that's not the same as saying delivered that this initial deliverance experiences a walk.

We're talking about two entirely different things there. So I don't know, Dr. Freeman just got weird. I do believe that there are, that a case of blindness today could be caused by demonic activity.

I would have to believe that because I see it in the Bible and I don't think demons have gone anywhere just when John put the last period to revelation. I don't think demons said, oh, we can no longer afflict people or live in the world any longer today.

Demons are still in the world. Could a demon cause deafness and dumbness? Of course it could, but does it cause every case of deafness and dumbness, surely not. Surely that is not what the Bible is saying.

Could a demon cause such and such condition in a person? I mean, who are we to say no, that could never be? This is a complicated complex area. I would never step out on a limb and say, there's no such thing as a demon today that could cause blindness.

I mean, think of the amount of knowledge you would have to say, have, possess to be able to authoritatively say, there is no blindness in the world today ever caused by demonic spirit. But the reverse is also true.

who think of the authority you're claiming to say, I know this person and that person, the other person who's blind, it's caused by a demon spirit. I just thought Hobart got weird, got weird.

He was weird from the beginning and became weirder and he went way beyond with the Bible taught. So here is a for instance, Sean, the subject of alcohol and alcoholism. Now Hobart did not believe that Christians should drink any alcohol.

We've talked about that before and that runs contrary to Paul telling Timothy to drink some wine. So the Bible already repudiates Freeman's view that no Christian can ever drink alcohol. Now the Bible has a lot of things to say about not being drunk.

So that is what the Scriptures teach. Don't go drink to the point of intoxication. Bible has tons of things to say about that. But alcoholism, this is a chronic problem in America's been a chronic problem in human history from what?

The days of Noah, he drank too much wine and he got drunk. This has just been a chronic problem. And by the way, I'm not an alcoholic and I've never had that problem. I have my own problems.

We all have sin in our life. We all have shortcomings and problems and issues and situations and things that we need to do better with or overcome. But alcoholism is not one of them for me anyway.

But alcoholism, I got tapes of Dr. Freeman's where guess what alcoholism always is. Oh, that's a spirit. Alcoholism, that is a spirit. And if you really listen to these guys' teachings, especially Dr. Freeman, and I'm going to prove it by reading some things either today or next go around, pretty much every vice in our life.

If you couldn't say it could be a demon, you will say it is a demon. Every vice is a demon. So to me, rather than saying alcoholism could possibly on occasion be caused by a demonic spirit, I think you would be, I mean, surely well within your bounds to leave open the possibility that alcoholism could be caused by a spirit.

But when you start teaching about spirits and alcoholism, what you're really communicating to people is that all alcoholics have demons. And the only way to cure yourself of alcoholism is by demonic deliverance. So to me, as I listen to Hobart ranting and raving about every possible thing is a spirit, to me it was almost like you're looking for formulas and you're looking for easy shortcuts to free yourself from something.

And I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe in the power of prayer. I believe in the power of faith. God doesn't intend for us just to go through our life and try to figure our way out of every situation.

We should depend on Him. We should pray if we have a problem in whatever area, but it's a gross oversimplification, I think of this whole area of the real presence and activity of demonic spirits.

It's a misapplying of passages, and it's just an oversimplifying of things to encourage everyone to think that the problems that you have in your life are demonic and origin. I think it's possible that a problem in your life, some of the problems in your life may be, but that's between you and the Lord to figure that out.

But these deliverance ministers don't really leave it like that. They're there to tell us, I'm an expert. God has shown me this, and of course they use their selected passages, and you need my help and my authority in order to understand these things and rid yourself of them.

And this has just put people, in my opinion, is put people in the worst bondage. I think when we look at these stories of people coming to Jesus, we don't know the state of these people's hearts like Jesus did, we don't know.

So when you've got people coming to a deliverance minister today, you don't know the state of those people's hearts. I mean, I think when the people are crying out for help from Jesus, he knew the state of their heart.

He knew they were sincere, and he also knew, in the cases of demonic deliverance, he also knew that the cause of their problem was demonic. He knew that, and they came with a genuine heart, desperately seeking help.

But I wonder how many people who have all kinds of issues and chronic problems in their lives have gone to people like Hobart Freeman, and they too are desperate. They're desperate for solutions to, you know, the problems in prophecies and failures they have in their own life, and they're going to Dr. Freeman, wanting prayer for deliverance, and since they're asking for that, he's just assuming that demons are the cause because he's the one who's been teaching them for all these months and years.

They're, who demons are more behind every bush. So when you hear someone constantly saying that, what can you deduce in your own mind, but the fact that I've got a problem, guess what, it's probably caused by a demon because I'm hearing demons are the source and calls of everything, but Hobart doesn't know the real state of that person.

He knows that they're seeking help, but maybe it's not demonic, maybe it's organic, maybe it's chemical, maybe it's the flesh, maybe it's these are things they just need to deal with. Maybe it's, maybe the subject really is Christian discipline.

Maybe the topic should be Christian growth and Christian maturity. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with a demon spirit at all. You know, maybe it's just a tendency a person has that has created a habit that now has become just routine for them.

And because it is so ingrained in them, because it's just who they are, that this has to be a demon. Hobart would generally say, if it's got that kind of hold on you, it just has to be a demon.

But, you know, I think that's going way beyond what the Bible actually teaches. 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?

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I think for me, the biggest lesson to learn is that when you're in one of these types of ministries that's a very black and white mentality, it's always black or white. It's always going to be, here's the thing that I say it is.

And if you're wrong, you're going to hell. That's usually how they present it. But there's a lot of gray in between. And for me, I'm a person who explores and lives in the gray.

So I don't always fit in well with everybody and their different belief sets. I lean more towards the liberal side of things than I do on certain issues. Then I do the black or white mentality.

One example of this is, I think it's in Mark 9. There's a person who's convulsing, foaming at the mouth, grinding his teeth. Literally the Bible is describing a seizure happening. And the authors, not having our medical science, they said this is a mute and deaf spirit, but they just described a seizure.

There are passages in both Luke and in Matthew that describe the same scenario, and they talk about seizing. So in one case, the author wrote it as he saw it, and in the other cases, they're labeling it a seizing.

Well, in today's world, we know what a seizure is. Now, that's me thinking in the more liberal side of things, but what you just said is accurate. I can't put everybody else in the same box.

Maybe it was a demon. I have no way to prove that it wasn't a demon. And that's what the Bible said it was. So maybe it is, or maybe it's the author's perspective. There's just multiple ways to look at it as what I'm trying to say.

When you get in the mentality that my way of looking at it is right and yours is wrong, you have just isolated yourself from further knowledge and further progressing yourself into a better understanding.

I realized very early on when I was coming out of this, that that was exactly how I had been trained to be. I chose what I believed and everybody else was wrong. And I had to go through a long session of humility for about two years learning what everybody else believed.

I think I mentioned this with you. I went through about two years working with apologetics, defending the Bible. And I was learning not only what the apologetics had to say, but also what the other side had to say.

And in some cases, I found the other side actually was more correct than the apologetics and vice versa. And what it did was it broadened my way of looking at things in such a way that I don't, you can look at it in multiple angles and it doesn't have to be a right or wrong question.

It can be a, I just simply don't know question. And that's literally where I landed. If it's something that I can't explain, I'll just say, well, I don't know. I have no way of knowing.

I'm not going to try to force you into my box because I'm pig-headed. And in the end, that's really what it comes down to. Hobart Freeman, everyone like him that gets in that mentality.

They're just pig-headed. And there's no shame in saying, I don't know. There's no shame in that at all. Because most of us, there's more we don't know than we do know. You know, whenever I stand up and teach, I try to tell, remind myself, and this is a pathetic fault, but it is so true that the only things I know are what are in my little tiny brain.

That's not, though, I don't know anything outside of what I know. Now, I know that sounds like I'm just repeating myself, but I remind myself how much knowledge, what is out there that's not in my brain?

It's a hundred trillion times what is in my brain. So you just have to remind yourself, even when you think, you might know a lot. You really don't. You only know what you know. And you don't know what anybody else knows.

You only know what you know. And I'm a huge believer in the inerrancy of scripture. You know, I'm probably a little more black and white than you. But but I'm well aware of of the gray areas, the nuances involved. And I think what helps me become aware was just being intellectually honest with the situation. I was aware of these passages. Hope are used about healing.

And you know, he said prayer faith always heals the sick all the time. You know, there are no exceptions or only conditions. There are no exceptions to the promises, only conditions. And so he had everyone trained to believe the Bible taught that if you pray in faith, well, first of all, that every sickness is no sickness as God's will. It all comes from Satan.

And if you will pray in faith every time you will be healed. And that sounds really good. But what I began doing is just looking at what are the facts. You know, I know what the verse is saying, but what are the facts? I don't I don't see people being healed all the time. Those are the facts. So what are we going to do with the facts? And if you really want to talk about the facts and you look at Hobart Freeman himself, he was never healed of any of those serious conditions that he had. Never, not one, not polio, not the other leg run over, not his heart condition,

nothing, not his eyes going dim. You know, people just as you age, you don't have the same vision you used to have. That's just life. He did not believe in life just being life. He just thought, you know, whatever health you had at 20, God absolutely guarantees you at age 70 because of some verses and some 103. You know, it's some beautiful verses there. He renews my youth like the Eagles.

That's some poetic writing. I don't and it and it means what it means. And it and it has a meaning. It doesn't mean nothing. It has a meaning. But it also does not mean everything Hobart said that he will literally renew everything in my life and health at age 70 and reverse it to back to back to when I was 20. There's no way that can be true. Number one, if that were true, I would see an example of it. And I have seen no human example of it. None, not one single human being.

So, and so then that would tell me, John, that I'm probably misreading this verse. This verse has been misinterpreted and mistalked to me and has then therefore calls me to misread this verse. We talked about the Mark 1123 verse a few weeks ago. It very clearly says that if you will say to this mountain, get up and get out of here. It'll do it.

I mean, that's what the verse says. However, I've never known a single human being to ever do that. So that would tell me, I probably need to go back and reevaluate how I'm understanding that verse.

And that is something that Dr. Freeman was never willing to do. Why? Because, as you said, he was pigheaded. He was never willing. I'm willing, if you know, surely, come on, this is just human good sense.

If you beat your head against the wall long enough, the wall is not cracking. You need to figure out another way to go through life. Hobart just insisted that he could eat whatever he wanted to eat.

And there'd be no consequences. And he had a verse for that. First Timothy 4, he said, as long as you pray over your food, God has promised to bless your food. But yeah, well, what's your definition of food?

Is it McDonald's 24 hours a day? You know, 12 months out of the year? There's so many other things, as you said, John, they're gray areas. I don't even call them gray areas as much.

I just call them, you just got to use common sense. When it says that God will, if you pray over your food, he will bless that food.

You know, you can't tear up church hymnals and eat them and say, well, I'm going to pray over it first. And God has to bless this. There's no way that will work. And then of course, Hobart would say, well, of course, you're just being dumb, Chino.

Well, I mean, I gave you an exception to that. So surely there are other exceptions. So if you listen carefully, Hobart was big on this eating and this first Timothy 4 thing. He said, because he had been a cardiac patient, see?

And he was on a very restrictive diet. Whenever he was, became charismatic through his nitroglycerin in the trash can, he said he can still hear those pills hitting that trash can to, you know, that day that he was preaching on it.

And by the way, he was never healed of his heart condition. He died of that. But he was so excited over that. And now I can eat whatever I want to eat. And so he would boast.

I'm talking about you could tell anytime someone is telling these stories. You can tell they have a personal reason behind it. And, you know, I was always relatively thin in my life. My parents were thin.

My grandparents were thin. So we don't have, you know, we don't have, we don't have issues with gaining weight. That's not because we're better or more spiritual or less demon oppressed. That all has to do with genetic history and some other stuff.

And so many things we can't even explain. You know, people need to just shut up thinking they have explanations for everything because we don't have explanations for everything. But he would boast about, now I eat my bacon and eggs every morning.

And I'm not worried about cholesterol. And he would mock. people who were counting calories. He said, he would say, that's a spirit. That's demonic if you're counting calories. There are people that might tend to be a little heavy.

So, you know, they have to watch what they eat. I'm not one of those people that have to do that, but there are people that do. That's not demonic, that's just being smart. If you don't watch what goes in, you know, you're gonna swell up like a bling if you are predisposed in that area.

He would malt people, John, who would drink 2% milk. He said, oh, that's just the worst, most watered down stuff. That's horrible. And he said, it's a lack of faith. And he would say that people were sinning who did that.

And what about skim milk? I mean, that is almost nothing but water. I love skim milk. It took me a little while to get used to 2% in skim milk. And I've had whole milk.

And we lived earlier in a place in our life in New England where there was a dairy farm down the road. We literally walked down there and got the milk fresh out of the cows.

And it was just, it's wonderful. Of course, it's wonderful milk. And when you drink it, you know, the top third of the jug is nothing but cream. And the bottom of it is the milk.

And you mix that all together and that is delicious. And, you know, that's the way people have had milk before it was pasteurized and homogenized for centuries and centuries. But look at the society in which we live.

You know, we don't, we don't go out and, you know, work on the farm seven days a week, 10 hours a day. We have a different lifestyle. Do you think you can change your lifestyle and become sedentary like we Americans are today and not change your diet and you can pray first Timothy four that would be foolish to think that.

But Hobart was proud of and guess what Hobart died with? He died with diabetes and he might not have had that. You know, I don't know his health history. We all have different health histories and prone to death that and the other.

I don't know what his parents had, but I just know that he was always boasting about what he could eat and people were, they had no faith and they were being influenced by demonic spirits to think that you have to count your calories.

You know, I remember seeing, this just brings to mind a flashback, John, from pre-Freeman days. So this just goes to show you, there were other people teaching some of this crazy stuff about demons.

As long as you keep demons away from you, you'll be fine. I remember, I don't know who taught this. This would have been 1975. But I remember somebody was teaching the practice of casting out calories because they were in a delivery.

ministry. They probably like to eat. They probably were overweight. And I think I know, but I'm not going to say the name of the woman who did this. It was a woman, but she taught that you could cast out calorie. So you say, well, what is that? You know, what are you talking about there? Well, you see that nice, huge slice of German chocolate cake in front of you. And you really want to eat it. But you're already overweight. And when you go past the refrigerator, you really don't go past it anymore. You stop every time and open and take something out of it. And you really want to

eat that piece of cake. And so what they were trained to do is you could lay hands on the cake and cast out spirits of calories. This is where this kind of crazy teaching would lead people.

Rather than teaching people self discipline, Christian maturity, which is always what Paul is teaching in the epistles, you know, he's not saying, watch out for having a demon of this that or the other. He's saying, grow in the graces of the Holy Spirit. And that does take time.

And he lists the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And then he lists the contrary. And what does he call them demons? No, no, he calls him the works of the flesh. He said, these are things that you're fleshly appetite will want to give into. And it's not a demon. No demon is causing that. That's just what your flesh wants to do. And you need to practice the virtues of the Holy Spirit versus the vices of your flesh. So the casting out of the calorie would be you really want to eat that.

Here's a shortcut to self discipline. Here's a shortcut. You can cast out a spirit of calorie. And so that German chocolate cake has what? 480 calories, maybe 720 in one slice. And you really want to eat it. So you cast calories out of it. And then you consume it. You know, Hobart didn't ever teach that. But his teaching was so similar. And I think it all comes from probably the same train of fault that there are demons simply behind everything. And if we can either protect ourselves from or free ourselves of spirits, these are shortcuts. And then we can

just go ahead and live the life we want to live. See, I'm no longer pigheaded in that mindset. So I leave myself open to interpretation. And I'm actually going to go back because of that. I'm going to go back and say Hobart might have been slightly correct. But only when looked at the situation in this particular way. So I've mentioned before, I'm diabetic. I was pre-diabetic when I began the podcast. And I have fully transitioned. I don't like skin milk, but I have to drink it. And I'm actually now drinking almond milk, which is a step.

even closer. I understand the reasons why, exactly what you said. I understand the reasons why if I were just to be sedentary like I am, continue drinking the whole milk, it would mess me up. However, I also am a person, whenever I eat Oreos, I really like to dunk those things. And I'm going to tell you that in this one instance, Hobart may be correct because if you're an Oreo dunker and you're trying to use skim milk, it is the devil. So I'm going to say it like that, but there's a point that you made that I want to go back to.

You're talking about his own inability to heal himself. This is the commonality between him and Brannum and among all of these different people who are doing this deliverance ministries. The one biggest one, which we've talked about before, FF Bosworth, who wrote Christ the healer, I was working with the foremost expert historian on FF Bosworth. And I were sharing some research together when he said, John, you're not going to believe what I found. And I said, what? He sent it to me. I've got a copy of them on my website. You can read it. But his

death certificate, he died of heart failure. He had cardiovascular problems. He had pulmonary edema. He had heart disease. He had all of these things were the cause of his death. But the contributing factors was he also was diabetic. So I've had people tell me because I have developed into diabetes, I've I've left the faith. I've caught the demon. But every single person that I look at who was in this type of ministry, they all have health problems because why they're humans. Yes, exactly right. And the FF Bosworth book was one of the books that Freeman would recommend without reservation all the time. Christ the healer. I think maybe

I'll just close with one. We didn't get to what we thought we would get to today on the occult. So we've got a whole occult session to look forward to next week. John, but a story I'll close with because it happened. I was there. I was present. It was not at faith assembly. It was at my own little faith assembly, influence church down in Memphis. And I think I've told this before, but it's so fitting here. I'll tell it again because it concerns alcoholism. And what I would say about alcoholism or any other ism, you know, that is a vice that should not be

in the in a Christian's life. And you know, you can overeat just as much as you can overdrink. If we look in if we look in the Old Testament, we have this wonderful book called the Book of Proverbs. And it does not trace overdrinking back to demons ever. It always is encouraging the person to, you know, put down the bottle before you drink too much. In other words, just practice normal self-control. And as a Christian, we should. Doesn't always work out, but we should even have more of an ability because we have God's help with us.

He is on our side to practice self-control. Proverbs will say, don't drink it when it is red in the bottom of the cup and settled on its leaves. I think the King James says.

So that's like 110 proof. It's just common sense advice. It's wise advice from God to help us live our life. And the same is true with anything in our life. Over-eating, over-sleeping, over-doing anything.

Tempted to be whatever. We need to yield to the fruit of the Spirit and not give in to the works of the flesh. That is what the Apostle Paul admonished the young churches. That's what he wrote them about.

He did not say, he did not give this crazy deliverance from demons teaching that Hobart Freeman gave and that Basham and Prince and Winworldly and Frank and I to May Hammond and all the rest of them.

He did not, this is not what Paul told. Paul seemed to believe that although yes, there were certain cases where sometimes something could be called by a demonic spirit and we certainly leave room for that and plenty of room for that.

I'm always looking for what is the thrust? What is the emphasis? Let's major on the majors and minor on the minors and let's go where we know we have scriptural backing and truth rather than where we suspect that maybe we might have some shred.

Paul is always emphasizing, I think the correct thing and that is just for us to with the Holy Spirit's help and through prayer and through study of scripture to seek God's help in all areas of our life when we're lacking.

But to go back to the story, that was really shocking for me. I was a Freemanite at the time. So when I say I was a Freemanite, I had to have been probably 18.

I might have been 17, but I could have been 18 years old. So I didn't have any misgivings, not yet. I was still too young. No misgivings about any of Hobart's teaching and I knew that he taught alcoholism is a spirit.

Oh, it's always a spirit, he would say. And I just, even though I had read my Bible several times by that age in my life, obviously just was not mature and astute enough to have recognized what the Bible said versus what he was saying.

So he said alcoholism is always a spirit and Christians shouldn't drink. And so we had an episode in our church. Our minister was up front. This was a rare time that my father, who was, he was an ex-military, he was, he was a man's man, and he was coming to church with his 18-year-old teenage son to see what it was all about. And the church where we met was in Memphis, Tennessee. It sat on Sweeney Road, which back in that day was the road that ran literally right beside Memphis International Airport. And so there was just a lot of car and foot traffic around.

And during the actual service, this wineau, an alcoholic wandered in the front doors of the church, and I mean right during the service, made his way down, and you could tell from the way he was walking, and the clothes he had on, and the way his speech was slurred, you could tell the man was drunk, and he looked like what we would call back in those days, just the skid row bum, you know, that's what he looked like, probably what he was. But he found his way into the church, and he found his way all the way up to the front row, and he's kind of making a commotion.

So what did the pastor of the church do? He had been trained by Hobart Freeman, and I'm sitting up near the front, and my father is sitting right beside me. So the minister goes, he knows what to do, you know, what would you do if you were Freeman night?

You go lay hands on just like Jesus did in the Gospels, and you cast that spirit out. But you see what's so different is, as I explained earlier today, John, we don't know. He didn't know.

I didn't know what's this man's state of mind as he's coming up there. When we're seeing Jesus cast demons out, those people are coming, knowing they have a problem, and desperately seeking Jesus' help. We have no idea why this guy was there. But anyway, the minister laid hands on him, and with an allowed voice of authority, rebuked and commanded that spirit of alcoholism to come out of this man. So you would expect what? I don't know him just to all of a sudden sober up, and the spittle on his beard to dry up, and he just would now sit down and fold his hands on his lap

on the front row, and be ready to receive the message that the preacher was going, of course, none of that happened. None of that happened. He went out in the same condition that he came in.

And it was embarrassing for me to be honest with you, because, you know, I thought when my minister laid hands on him, something dramatic would happen. That's the way I had been programmed. That's the way deliverance ministers teach it. That whenever you lay hands on the demon comes out, and you're going to see a huge change. Nothing happened. I was embarrassed. You know, my father was there for the first time, and he looks at that and smiles probably to himself saying, yeah, just what I respected, a whole bunch of hokeyness going on in this little Pentecostal church here.

And so I just think there are better ways to understand and better ways to approach these things. And that's what we do here if we unravel the hokey. Thank you so much for doing this.

Thanks for having me, John. If you've enjoyed a show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available in Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.