- 6/3/2025
John and Chino examine how Romans 14:23—“Whatsoever is not of faith is sin”—was weaponized by Hobart Freeman and others in the faith healing movement. They explore how this verse was taken out of context and used to pressure believers into rejecting basic health care, including glasses, medicine, and even baby powder. This created a high-control environment where personal suffering was spiritualized, and questioning doctrine was equated with rebellion.
As the discussion unfolds, they contrast these modern misuses of Scripture with the balanced teaching of the New Testament. Chino shares firsthand stories of manipulated theology, Freeman’s tragic legacy, and the fear-driven culture that still impacts former followers today. The result is a sobering exploration of how biblical distortion can have life-and-death consequences.
00:00 Introduction
01:01 Healing as a New Gospel: Dowie, Freeman, and the Dual Atonement
03:59 Misuse of Scripture and the Collapse of Biblical Context
09:18 Communion, Healing, and the Lopsided Gospel
13:46 Physical Disability and the Faith Healer’s Dilemma
17:28 Tragedy and Denial: Family Stories of Failed Healings
24:46 Romans 14:23 and the Legalism of “Faith”
33:37 Medical Neglect, Positive Confession, and Death
42:12 False Miracles, Real Consequences
54:02 The Mole That Killed: A Daughter’s Grief
1:02:00 The End of Freeman: Judgment or Mercy?
1:05:00 Closing Reflections on a Dangerous Doctrine
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSpezVG15TVG-lOYMRXuyQ
– Visit the website: https://william-branham.org
– Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilliamBranhamOrg
– Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@william.m.branham
– Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wmbhr
– Buy the books: https://william-branham.org/site/books
As the discussion unfolds, they contrast these modern misuses of Scripture with the balanced teaching of the New Testament. Chino shares firsthand stories of manipulated theology, Freeman’s tragic legacy, and the fear-driven culture that still impacts former followers today. The result is a sobering exploration of how biblical distortion can have life-and-death consequences.
00:00 Introduction
01:01 Healing as a New Gospel: Dowie, Freeman, and the Dual Atonement
03:59 Misuse of Scripture and the Collapse of Biblical Context
09:18 Communion, Healing, and the Lopsided Gospel
13:46 Physical Disability and the Faith Healer’s Dilemma
17:28 Tragedy and Denial: Family Stories of Failed Healings
24:46 Romans 14:23 and the Legalism of “Faith”
33:37 Medical Neglect, Positive Confession, and Death
42:12 False Miracles, Real Consequences
54:02 The Mole That Killed: A Daughter’s Grief
1:02:00 The End of Freeman: Judgment or Mercy?
1:05:00 Closing Reflections on a Dangerous Doctrine
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSpezVG15TVG-lOYMRXuyQ
– Visit the website: https://william-branham.org
– Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilliamBranhamOrg
– Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@william.m.branham
– Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wmbhr
– Buy the books: https://william-branham.org/site/books
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:00Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast.
00:00:37I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at william-branham.org.
00:00:43And with me, I have my co-host, minister, and friend, Chino Ross,
00:00:48pastor and the voice of The Understanding Scripture and Truth by Chino D. Ross' YouTube channel.
00:00:54Chino, it's good to be back and to talk about all things divine healing.
00:00:58There was this point of time in which the gospel itself shifted.
00:01:05We've talked about the combination between the dual atonement when they combine salvation with healing.
00:01:11And all of that started way back with latter rain.
00:01:14But I don't know that we've talked much about this.
00:01:16Over time, as people like John Alexander Dowie became famous with his divine healing doctrine,
00:01:25F.F. Bosworth, who was out of the Dowie cult, was mentoring everybody in the post-World War II healing revivals.
00:01:31Eventually, they started dubbing it the gospel of divine healing because it was accepted, widely accepted,
00:01:39by many of them as the dual atonement.
00:01:41And so, this new and different gospel came forward.
00:01:46But in hindsight, as you're looking through the newspapers and examining it,
00:01:50it gets really odd because there seems to be severe limits on what is possible for healing and what is not.
00:01:58Yet it's advertised as it'll heal everything that you have, will heal all of your afflictions.
00:02:02And I grew up with people who were in this for years claiming that that's one of the reasons why they stayed in it
00:02:09was because this is where you come if you want to be healed.
00:02:11And when anybody leaves, their first thought is, well, if you leave, how are you going to be healed?
00:02:17I got asked that question, and people I know got asked that question.
00:02:20And we're like, well, they're doctors, they're medicine, God heals.
00:02:25But they think it's exclusive to the cult.
00:02:29I'm certain that was the same way with Hobart Freeman.
00:02:31But as we're getting into this one, and especially in the episodes that are coming,
00:02:37healing wasn't a certainty, but yet it was branded as the religion that offered the healing.
00:02:45So, this gets to a bit of irony with this episode.
00:02:48Yeah, I guess with Hobart's group, John, it was a certainty.
00:02:53You know, whatever you pray for, Mark 11, 24, believe that you already have received, and then you shall have it.
00:02:59It's not without purpose that we've spent a lot of time on Dr. Freeman's views of faith and physical issues.
00:03:08And you would think with someone who taught as often as he did on faith and healing,
00:03:16that he would have had a well-thought-out biblical theology on the subjects.
00:03:21But he actually didn't.
00:03:23As I've tried to highlight before, for a man who taught hundreds of messages on faith for healing,
00:03:32hundreds of messages on healing,
00:03:35in his mind trying to cover all of his bases,
00:03:40he just left so many things uncovered.
00:03:43It was not a, you know, when you go to seminary and you study the doctrine of inerrancy
00:03:51or the doctrine of canonicity or something,
00:03:55you know, your professors do a thorough job of it.
00:03:59They're looking at it from all angles, from all issues.
00:04:02They're answering any possible objections to it.
00:04:08They're covering the historical data.
00:04:10They're covering the biblical data.
00:04:12And by the time you're done, I mean, you don't know everything,
00:04:15but you feel like that was a thorough treatment.
00:04:18Well, with Hobart, it wasn't that way at all.
00:04:21As I've said before, and I hope people have picked this up,
00:04:25he was, he just was an expert at proof texting.
00:04:29And as I've always taught my students,
00:04:31a proof text without a context is a pretext for nonsense.
00:04:35And he was famous for that.
00:04:39I called it last time, biblical hopscotch.
00:04:41It's just cherry picking where you find a verse that says what you want it to say.
00:04:48And I know this sounds a little redundant and elementary,
00:04:52but it is not exclusive to Hobart Freeman or William Branham.
00:04:56So many of the ministers out there in the,
00:04:59this new movement will do the same thing.
00:05:02And not even in this movement, just in any movement where they're taking a passage
00:05:06that is not in its original context and making it fit the sermon topic that they're on.
00:05:13The one we talked about earlier, because we talked about eyesight and glasses,
00:05:18they love 2 Corinthians 5, 7, for we walk by faith and not by sight.
00:05:24So that is just sprinkled into messages all the time.
00:05:29Maybe the, the location will be given 2 Corinthians 5, 7, maybe not.
00:05:36Maybe it's just a verse for we walk by faith, not by sight.
00:05:38And you can tell with the, with that language, that's probably a Bible verse.
00:05:44Even if you're not told where it is for, we walk by faith, not by sight.
00:05:49That sounds like a Bible verse and it is.
00:05:53And so when Hobart would teach on healing, he would say, now you cannot go by your
00:05:58physical eyesight symptoms.
00:06:01You can't look at symptoms.
00:06:03You can't go by what you see in the natural realm.
00:06:07You have to walk by faith because the Bible says, and then he'll quote 2 Corinthians 5, 7.
00:06:12And as I said earlier, that's not what the apostle Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 5.
00:06:20Maybe it didn't matter to Hobart what he was talking about.
00:06:24I don't know.
00:06:25Maybe it doesn't matter to other people, but it matters to me.
00:06:29And it should matter to a student of scripture.
00:06:32Who was Paul talking to?
00:06:34What did he say?
00:06:35And in what context was it said?
00:06:37And if people will read the context, they see Paul is contrasting the life that we live
00:06:45now in the flesh versus the waiting for our resurrection body.
00:06:51In other words, it's all a context of looking forward to literally life after death, not how
00:07:00we can see better or ignore circumstances now, but it's literally looking to the next life
00:07:07for Paul says right now, because we don't have this glorified, resurrected body that God
00:07:13has promised us that we will have one day because we don't have it.
00:07:17We're just having to walk by faith.
00:07:20We're just having to walk by faith.
00:07:22But one day we will not have to do that because we'll have our glorified, resurrected body.
00:07:28And so I just find it remarkable that Hobart didn't even like to talk about the next life.
00:07:33He wanted to say everything is promised for the here and the now, and then he would use
00:07:39a verse that is talking about the afterlife.
00:07:43So as I said, he did not have a well-crafted biblical theology of faith and healing.
00:07:51Yeah, and it almost becomes like talking in circles because as I mentioned in the last
00:07:55episode, there's so many ministers in this type of movement that they'll just, they'll
00:08:00preach a sermon and then just rip some quote that they can remember out of the Bible, rip
00:08:04it out of its context, and then wedge it into their sermon, try to make it fit.
00:08:09But the part that I didn't mention last time is they also like to emphasize words within
00:08:15whatever they've ripped out of its context.
00:08:17So in this case, sight.
00:08:19They're talking about glasses.
00:08:20They're talking about sight.
00:08:22And yes, if you understand the meaning of what Paul is saying, we walk by faith, not
00:08:27by sight, it's talking about your actions, where we're acting according to faith, not
00:08:31actually walking.
00:08:33But you don't find Hobart taking the literal interpretation of the word walking.
00:08:38Otherwise, they would have had a walking church and just walked across America while they preached.
00:08:42So they also like to emphasize certain words and make it fit.
00:08:46And, you know, in the end, it turns into, I had an English teacher that the phrase that
00:08:53he always went to that also made me laugh, he would say, these people have constipation
00:08:58of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth.
00:09:00And that's honestly what this turns into, because you can't talk sense or reason with somebody
00:09:06that is purposefully abandoning sense and reason to hold up their ideologies and their
00:09:12beliefs.
00:09:12And that's essentially what was happening here.
00:09:15And because he's so locked into faith and healing, then his message becomes very lopsided.
00:09:22As you said earlier in the podcast today, you know, it's not really a salvation message.
00:09:27It's a healing message.
00:09:30And I have said before that one of the ways to identify the lopsidedness of this in Hobart's
00:09:38ministry and teaching was whenever they had a communion service.
00:09:41I even gave a list of some of the titles a few weeks ago in a podcast where when it came
00:09:49time for a communion service, then Hobart would invariably, I don't know of an exception.
00:09:56There probably was where they had a communion service and he did not teach on healing.
00:10:02But I'm not aware of one because whenever the message would begin, you could tell from what
00:10:09he said that they already had preparations made for the communion, which would be observed after his
00:10:17message.
00:10:18And he would start the message by saying, you know, we're going to celebrate the communion
00:10:22of the bread and cup.
00:10:23And so because of that, I'm going to give a message on our full redemption, on our full
00:10:30redemption.
00:10:31And then he would go into healing.
00:10:34And, you know, when I when I was young in my teenage years, in my early 20s, because I
00:10:41had come out of a church, an Orthodox, conservative, Bible-believing Presbyterian church, which was
00:10:49actually better than the faith assembly brand that I went into.
00:10:53But because I'd come out of that, we had had communion services as well.
00:10:59And however, in our communion service, the minister up front would normally teach some
00:11:04type of message on Jesus' death on the cross and our forgiveness of sins and the gift of
00:11:11eternal life that we had been given.
00:11:13That's normally what I heard.
00:11:14That's probably normally what Hobart had heard and what he as a Baptist minister had
00:11:19preached.
00:11:20So now that he is charismatic and now that he has this faith and healing message, he says,
00:11:26I want to tell you the other half of the story.
00:11:29I don't want you to have an incomplete redemption.
00:11:32I want to tell you about our full redemption.
00:11:35And our full redemption is Isaiah 53.
00:11:39He bore our sicknesses and our illnesses and by his stripes were healed.
00:11:43So when I first heard that, you know, that's very appealing and intriguing to me.
00:11:49I'm thinking, wow, I didn't know that Jesus had died for that as well.
00:11:54So now I'm getting the other side of the picture.
00:11:57But the problem that I began to see later on, well, there were many problems I began to
00:12:02see, but one was the lopsidedness of it.
00:12:05Let's assume that that is true.
00:12:07Let's assume Hobart's view on healing and sickness.
00:12:11Let's assume, for sake of argument, that is true.
00:12:14Then to give us a full redemption, I need to hear 50% of messages on healing and 50% on
00:12:21salvation of the soul.
00:12:23You know, I need a balance.
00:12:25Didn't get it.
00:12:26It was completely lopsided where he just wanted to talk about physical healing for the body.
00:12:36And he always put down, as I've said before, verses like John 3, 16, he would say those
00:12:44Christians are only John 3, 16 Christians and Pentecostal people are only Acts 2 people.
00:12:52But we are Romans 8 people, the matured, manifested sons of God.
00:12:57You know, we are the third.
00:12:59And he always had three categories of people.
00:13:01You could just be saved.
00:13:02And that is like, that's just common mill.
00:13:07That's just common run stuff.
00:13:09That's just, that is just basic elementary.
00:13:13That's boring.
00:13:14Who would want that?
00:13:15And that's the gift of eternal life.
00:13:17And he would say, oh, that's not much.
00:13:18Acts 2, well, that's a little bit better because now you can speak in tongues and now
00:13:23you can have lively worship.
00:13:25But we're that third group of the manifested, matured sons of God.
00:13:29So it was just so lopsided in his presentation.
00:13:34And I think that that lopsidedness, honestly, as you look at Dr. Freeman's life, was probably
00:13:40brought on by his own physical needs.
00:13:42Hopefully in the next podcast interview that we can do next go around, John, I'm going
00:13:49to get us back to what's going on in Hobart's life in the fall of 1984 and what's leading
00:13:55up to his death.
00:13:57And one of Hobart's big, big, big issues was the fact that when he was an infant, he
00:14:02had contracted polio.
00:14:04So he had a right leg that was several inches, at least an inch and a half shorter than the
00:14:10left leg, which was a real inconvenience, no doubt about it.
00:14:14A great source of embarrassment, no doubt about it.
00:14:17And even more so a source of embarrassment when you transfer from a Baptist preacher to
00:14:25a faith and healing preacher and you're limping around all the time.
00:14:29So everyone can be prepared.
00:14:31Next go around, when we get back to talking with one another, we'll talk about growing
00:14:36out legs and short legs.
00:14:38So we'll put that on the back burner for next go around.
00:14:42I know you probably know where I'm headed with this immediately when I say it, but whenever
00:14:46I was growing up in the Branham Tabernacle and abroad, we would always come back to the
00:14:52Branham Tabernacle for special occasions or for family meetings.
00:14:56But my grandfather would, the way he offered his Sunday school to the quote unquote class,
00:15:04it was basically a sermon before the sermon and all sermons were about Branham.
00:15:08So you got to sit and listen to my grandfather tell stories about Branham and then they would
00:15:14play the recording from Branham from 1947 to 1965.
00:15:18And in those stories, my grandfather would often tell how there were just lines and lines of
00:15:24people that would come up with one leg shorter than the other one.
00:15:28And they'd sit them on the stage and Branham would, you could just watch that leg grow right
00:15:32in front of the crowd.
00:15:34And as a kid, you're thinking, wow, that's some cool stuff.
00:15:37Until years later, you start seeing this being exposed by the modern people who understand
00:15:43the stage trick that they're doing, how they, they shift the torso just a little bit,
00:15:47sit them on stage and people looking at the side of them can't see that they're twisted.
00:15:52And then you can pull the legs and what they're doing is they're shifting the torso.
00:15:56But apparently Branham did this.
00:15:58I'm surprised they didn't get Hobart Freeman on stage so that they could show him increasing.
00:16:04But you're right.
00:16:05As a faith healer, that turns into a huge problem because how can you tell everybody that they
00:16:11can be healed by faith if you yourself can't be?
00:16:14And interestingly, this became a huge problem for William Branham.
00:16:18When William Branham's first wife got sick with tuberculosis, Branham was in the height
00:16:25of his healing ministry.
00:16:26He had this panel truck that he was going around targeting Pentecostal groups and preaching
00:16:33in Pentecostal circles.
00:16:34He actually became somewhat famous in Pentecostalism.
00:16:37Then his wife died of tuberculosis and they held healing services for her.
00:16:42I've got an article about it on the website.
00:16:43Well, what do you do with this as a faith healer when your wife just died?
00:16:48She did not get healed and she believed the same doctrine that he's preaching.
00:16:52So what Branham did was he rewrote, completely rewrote and erased that part of history, rewrote
00:17:00his stage persona to include her as a story, as a milestone in his life of later accepting
00:17:08the Pentecostal faith healing doctrine.
00:17:11So he just erased it entirely.
00:17:14But Hobart, in his age, he couldn't do that.
00:17:16So it's a little bit odd that he was able to hold everything together, having that all
00:17:21of his life, you know?
00:17:23Yeah.
00:17:23And so here's another story along that line I could share, John.
00:17:27The way Hobart, the way all those people really dealt with things that did not manifest
00:17:32as they should, they just ignored them.
00:17:34And it was just a subject that was not brought up.
00:17:38Here's a great example.
00:17:40And I mentioned this months and months ago, probably a year ago, when we were talking about
00:17:44Dr. Freeman's son-in-law, Bruce Kinsey.
00:17:47So Bruce was married to the middle daughter of Hobart and June, Kathy Freeman.
00:17:53And their firstborn son, whose name was, they had named him Brent, he was born with severe
00:18:02respiratory problems.
00:18:04Well, Bruce and Kathy prayed for their son, and then they called dad on the phone.
00:18:11And Hobart relayed this little brief story I'm going to tell you from the pulpit, because
00:18:17I've had people, I had a man just the other day say, I was sitting there and I remember Hobart
00:18:23saying this.
00:18:24So when Hobart stood up, you know, he has this grandson who has just been born the day
00:18:30before.
00:18:32He's got severe respiratory problems.
00:18:36I don't know what it appeared to Bruce and Kathy to be, but when he ended up dying 36 hours
00:18:44after birth, that was the, what the coroner said.
00:18:47He died of severe respiratory problems, but they could tell there's something not right with
00:18:52this newborn.
00:18:52They prayed and there was no change.
00:18:55And so what do you do?
00:18:56Well, you call the head man, you call Hobart Freeman, your father and your father-in-law.
00:19:02And so they called Hobart.
00:19:05Hobart stood in the pulpit and said that he had rebuked that spirit of death.
00:19:11And he said that child, which was his grandson, he is delivered and he is free.
00:19:16And of course, everybody praise the Lord, clapping, hallelujah.
00:19:20Thank you, Jesus.
00:19:21Praise the Lord.
00:19:22And Hobart goes on and preaches his sermon.
00:19:24Well, in 36 hours, Brent was dead.
00:19:27And so, of course, what I want to know is what was said in the pulpit at the next service?
00:19:35Well, you can already guess.
00:19:37Nothing.
00:19:39That's the problem with these people.
00:19:42They're not honest.
00:19:43They're not transparent.
00:19:44They have this doctrine that they refuse to give up on even when the facts of reality contradict it.
00:19:53The child is dead.
00:19:55You said he's free and delivered from a spirit of death.
00:19:59No, he died.
00:20:00So I don't know if it's a spirit of death or what it was, but I mean, he's as dead as a boat anchor and there's nothing you can do about it.
00:20:10And I'm sure there was some attempts because there always were with those people to raise the debt.
00:20:16You know, you try an hour or two and if it doesn't work, eventually, you know, you call the proper authority.
00:20:22Some people held them for longer than an hour or two.
00:20:25I've heard the stories about that.
00:20:26And 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.
00:20:39The Bible does talk about faith.
00:20:41It does talk about healing, but it doesn't teach these issues in the way that Hobart Freeman did.
00:20:50His views became extreme.
00:20:52He 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.
00:21:03But 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.
00:21:14You know, those passages, as we talked about before, were not fairly and adequately dealt with.
00:21:22And 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.
00:21:43In 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.
00:21:52A whole lot of people think that it happens at the beginning.
00:21:56What would be wrong for me as a teacher or lecturer is to just make fun of their view or to cast it in the worst possible light.
00:22:08What 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.
00:22:20And it's the only fair way to highlight what you think is the correct view.
00:22:27So my point in going down that rabbit trail is Hobart owed it to the people to deal with the fact that Epaphroditus was sick and he left him sick somewhere and didn't even hesitate to say, I've left Trophimus sick at Miletus.
00:22:44He 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.
00:22:54You know, you go through all these mental gymnastics where if you're part of faith assembly, that's exactly what you would do.
00:23:00You would never say, well, I left them at home sick.
00:23:03You would say, well, I left them at home because they're trusting God.
00:23:07You know, I left them at home because they've claimed the promises.
00:23:10You would never just say what needs to be said.
00:23:14And 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.
00:23:25A verse that Hobart loves to use that I don't think we have brought up yet is Romans 14, 23.
00:23:32Here again is this biblical hopscotch.
00:23:35Paul says in Romans 14, 23, whatsoever is not of faith is sin.
00:23:40Wow, did he use that verse.
00:23:44So if you're going to the doctors, that means you're not in faith.
00:23:48That means you're sin.
00:23:49If you're wearing glasses, that means you're not trusting God.
00:23:52That means you're in sin.
00:23:53If you're using a cane, that means you're not in faith.
00:23:58That means you're in sin.
00:24:00They would just quote that verse.
00:24:03Oh, whatsoever is not of faith.
00:24:05Whatsoever is not of faith.
00:24:07And people, you know, the problem with this kind of teaching is it's brainwashing because you hear it so much and you hear it out of its context that you just grew up in the cult thinking whatsoever is not of faith is sin.
00:24:24And then you look at what you're about to do, you know, buy some medicine or take a pill for your headache or whatever.
00:24:30And you go, well, that's not faith.
00:24:32So I'm going to be sinning when I do that.
00:24:35But can we just say this?
00:24:37Do we know what the context of Romans 14 is?
00:24:40It 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.
00:24:51He's talking about the weak Christian who has all these scruples.
00:24:55He can't eat this.
00:24:56He can't celebrate that day.
00:24:58He can't wear sodomite shoes.
00:24:59He can't wear pants.
00:25:01He can't wear prostitute purses.
00:25:03He can't, can't, can't have all these things.
00:25:05And 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.
00:25:13He said, you're sinning and doing that.
00:25:16Hobart 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.
00:25:30You have proven that you are a weak, weak Christian man, and you have no faith in your life.
00:25:38And I would say probably, John, not one in 10 people even knew the context of Romans 14, 23.
00:25:49Not one in 10 bothered to read it.
00:25:52And, 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.
00:26:15Instead 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.
00:26:35It'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.
00:26:42Pretty much everything that you've said was Message Doctrine 101.
00:26:47Wow.
00:26:48William Branham 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.
00:27:04One of them that he invented was, he would often say this, the Bible says that you are born in sin, shapen in iniquity, came into the world speaking lies.
00:27:15And he would go off into these tangents about how everybody's a liar and God saves us, or whatever was the spiel.
00:27:21But what he did was, he took two different verses, Psalms, I think it's 51, I was born in iniquity, shaped in sin, as my mother conceived me, can't remember the exact verse.
00:27:34And then there's another psalm where it says, the wicked are estranged from the womb, and they go astray speaking lies.
00:27:40So he combined one that's 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.
00:27:53That's where it gets really, really odd when you think about all of this.
00:27:56And my mind goes down these weird tangents as you're talking, because I have so many memories just flooding my head.
00:28:03But you talked about the spirit of death.
00:28:07Hobart was talking about the spirit of death.
00:28:09It is the 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.
00:28:22And there's nothing biblical about a spirit of death.
00:28:25This does not exist in the Bible.
00:28:28And in fact, you probably know the passage, but in Deuteronomy, I think it is, God says, I'm the one who brings life.
00:28:35I'm the one who brings death.
00:28:36And Paul says somewhere in the New Testament, he says, to live is Christ and to die is gain.
00:28:44Well, if you die and you gain, does that mean you're gaining the spirit of death that's from Satan?
00:28:49So it's like a different religion these guys have created.
00:28:53But 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.
00:29:06I had a lady just tell me, I guess it was two weeks ago, talking about the Branham cult.
00:29:12She was so mentally trapped, even after leaving and escaping, and she'd never been in that religion.
00:29:18But she was scared that she would say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, question the wrong quote unquote prophet.
00:29:26And suddenly, she would be smacked, gobsmacked by this spirit of death.
00:29:31And I just had to sit back and tell her, you know, that doesn't really exist.
00:29:36This is not a real thing that you're afraid of.
00:29:38Have 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?
00:29:52You can learn this and more on William Branham Historical Research's website, william-branham.org.
00:29:59On the books 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.
00:30:14You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements.
00:30:20If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the Contribute button at the top.
00:30:26And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.
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00:30:38I 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, healthy or relatively healthy churches.
00:30:47They say, I still can't shake this idea that if I say anything against Dr. Freeman, touch not my anointed and do my prophets no harm.
00:30:58And I just tell them, look, I've been saying things against Dr. Freeman for over 40 years, and I'm living a wonderful, happy, and healthy life.
00:31:06And he died sick and miserable 40 years ago.
00:31:09So look at the statistics, look at the empirical evidence, and forget all this threatening business.
00:31:17And I also tell them, I said, actually, that's turned upside down.
00:31:21What the New Testament really teaches is for the ministers not to dare harm the sheep for whom Christ has died.
00:31:30That's actually what it says.
00:31:32Now, 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.
00:31:45We have too many examples of what happened to those people.
00:31:48But there are no Moseses today.
00:31:51There are no Elijahs today.
00:31:52There are no Apostle Pauls today.
00:31:54And for you to think you are shows, you know, what a deceived soul you really are.
00:31:59They did come across that way, like I'm just as important as these Old Testament or even New Testament biblical figures.
00:32:07But that's simply not true.
00:32:09So I say, look, Paul, Peter said in 1 Peter 5 that the shepherds, the under shepherds, are to be examples to the flock and not to lord over God's heritage.
00:32:20This is God's heritage.
00:32:21And let's look at who died, William Branham, in a head-on car collision and Hobart Freeman of multiple illnesses.
00:32:30And let's look at who's still alive, you and me and a whole lot of other people.
00:32:36So if you want empirical scientific data, you know, there it is.
00:32:41We have been saying what we've been saying for years and we're living a good and healthy life.
00:32:47But that is a tendency that people still struggle with.
00:32:52And I guess it just, you know, me saying that doesn't cure them of that problem.
00:32:57I think it just takes time.
00:32:58It takes meditation on God's word.
00:33:01It takes, I don't know, looking at the empirical dad and say, yeah, Cheno's been doing this for 40-something years and he's still smiling and alive.
00:33:10And so, and I haven't grown a second or a third head yet, you know, I'm still living my life and Hobart died.
00:33:18And, you know, no, I'm not, you know, I'm not boasting in the fact Hobart died and I'm still alive.
00:33:24I'm just saying, let the facts speak for themselves.
00:33:27And even more important than that is go to the Bible and see what does the Bible say.
00:33:33But back to Freeman's views, yeah, they just became too extreme, not balanced at all.
00:33:40I think early in Freeman's ministry, he was happy to have a message of divine healing, hoping that he could be healed of his polio and be healed of what became a terminal heart condition, suffered many heart attacks in his life.
00:33:55And he was never healed of either one of those.
00:33:57That should say a lot to people.
00:33:59But I think he grabbed a hold of the message, hoping that it would work for him.
00:34:07And there is definitely healing taught in the Bible.
00:34:10There's healing taught way over in James 5.
00:34:14Is any sick among you?
00:34:15Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.
00:34:21And the prayer of faith will save the sick.
00:34:23That's long after Jesus.
00:34:24That's doesn't that's not given in any connection with the apostles.
00:34:29It's just given in the connection of a local church, elders in a local church and a sick person.
00:34:35So there is definitely a message of faith and healing in the Bible.
00:34:39It's just not Hobart's message.
00:34:41He didn't even, to give you another, go down another path.
00:34:46He didn't even address, you know, normal causes and natural cures for things.
00:34:53Everything had to be some stupendous miracle.
00:34:56So when we were talking about dental care last time, even though Hobart never from the pulpit said,
00:35:03I 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.
00:35:16And it's it's sin to seek help in any other direction.
00:35:21Now, where he wasn't thorough in that is, as we said, with teeth, does that prohibit brushing your teeth?
00:35:32You know, does that prohibit flossing your teeth?
00:35:35Does that prohibit using mouthwash for the germs in your mouth?
00:35:42You know, he would never address that.
00:35:44And so people will end up in different places.
00:35:47Let me just give you a good example.
00:35:48I can remember something from my church 40 years ago.
00:35:52I was a young minister and pastor.
00:35:54And so we definitely had a lot of the Hobart Freeman healing influence in our church through my ministry still at that time.
00:36:03And so we had young women.
00:36:05We had lots of we had lots of young families in the church, lots of young women who had young children.
00:36:12So we've got infants in the church.
00:36:14And I'll never forget.
00:36:17And this was early.
00:36:18I was still in to too much of Dr.
00:36:22Freeman's doctrine.
00:36:23And I'm in my early 20s.
00:36:25But I 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.
00:36:38But there became an issue, you know, in our church, you the issues you want to be or, you know, big, huge issues.
00:36:46And normally it's little tiny things, stupid, stupid things that pop up in a church and just divide everybody.
00:36:52And, you know, what the issue was in our church, it happened with the women having these all these young babies and the issue became Johnson's baby powder.
00:37:04And how that came about, you know, I'm the leader of the church and I it takes a while before I catch wind of this and I just put an end to all this nonsense.
00:37:16But how that came about was we had an old lady.
00:37:21I mean, when I say old, I mean, at that time, she was way younger than I am now.
00:37:26But at that time, she felt like an old lady to me.
00:37:30She did not have a husband, did not have any children.
00:37:33She was just a single lady in the church.
00:37:36Found out later, did not know this at the time.
00:37:39I was kind of frightened later, but she had no teeth, none whatsoever.
00:37:42I did not know that at the time because she had dentures.
00:37:45But 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 going to use some baby powder.
00:38:06And she said, oh, whatsoever is not a faith is sin.
00:38:09That would be sin to use any of this baby powder on these babies.
00:38:13So I catch wind of that.
00:38:16That is Freeman doctrine.
00:38:18That's where this type of extreme, excessive teaching will take you.
00:38:24It 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.
00:38:35And so I said, you know, stop, stop all that stuff.
00:38:38You know, let those mothers do what the baby's crying.
00:38:41The baby's uncomfortable.
00:38:43Let them use baby powder.
00:38:44I don't care.
00:38:45That's not, you know, who wants to argue over that?
00:38:48But that had become a point of contention in our church.
00:38:51And 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, especially when it comes to mothers, young children, nursing mothers.
00:39:08You get all these other people in the church who become experts on it, who may be men who don't know any about nursing babies, who will pontificate on the correct procedure or what is allowed or what is not allowed.
00:39:23And of course, you and I, John, I just throw my hands in the air and say, where is the gospel of Jesus Christ?
00:39:29That's what we're supposed to be talking about here in church.
00:39:32But 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.
00:39:51Jesus said they're all summed up in love.
00:39:53If you love your neighbor, you're not going to kill him.
00:39:55You're not going to steal from him.
00:39:56He goes back down and the people say, no, this is not good enough.
00:40:00Go back up and tell us what we should do to save ourselves.
00:40:04And so they go back up and they get the Mosaic law, which is a very, very strict code of conduct.
00:40:09And these religions, it's the same way.
00:40:12What Jesus did on the cross is not good enough.
00:40:14They want to turn back and they want to say, what else should we do to save ourselves?
00:40:19Because that's not good enough what Jesus did.
00:40:22Let's just take a common thing like a headache.
00:40:24You know, when I first got in this walk, you know, a headache that is somehow an attack of the enemy.
00:40:32That is oppression of the devil.
00:40:34That's straight out of the pit of hell, a headache.
00:40:38And so the way you deal with a headache is you claim it by faith.
00:40:42And I can remember as a 17, 18 year old, I would have an occasional headache and I would claim my healing by faith.
00:40:49And, you know, I still had a headache.
00:40:52That was the problem.
00:40:53I still had a headache.
00:40:55And so, you know, Hobart didn't deal with natural things.
00:40:59Everything had to be super spiritual and supernatural.
00:41:05Headaches are caused by things like stress.
00:41:07They're caused by not enough sleep.
00:41:10They're caused by dehydration.
00:41:13They're caused by the glare of the sun.
00:41:15And if you've been out in the sun all day, you know, there are all kinds of natural causes for things like that.
00:41:22And there are all kinds of natural remedies such as get some more sleep or become more high graded.
00:41:30But all of those things were just short circuited.
00:41:33I mean, you just pull the plug on all of that and say, nope, you've got to claim your healing by faith.
00:41:38So if you popped an aspirin or an ibuprofen, you know, that was just, it was whatsoever is not a faith is sin.
00:41:45You know, they run right back to Romans 14, 23 B.
00:41:49And it was, you know, not only was it wrong teaching because it did not take into consideration just our normal life,
00:41:59normal causes, normal aches and pains and normal cures for those.
00:42:04But then it just sullies the whole healing picture that we have in the Bible.
00:42:11So take the subject of blindness.
00:42:16Jesus and Paul and the other apostles, they definitely healed people that were blind who could not see.
00:42:25That's not even a healing.
00:42:27That is an absolute miracle because of the optic nerves and everything going on in the brain and your perception,
00:42:37your depth and your peripheral and the color involved and all of these combs and things in your behind your eyes that connect to your brain.
00:42:47That's not like someone had, I don't know, cancer.
00:42:53And again, that that's a healing.
00:42:55But that's miraculous that if you had cancer and you are healed supernaturally,
00:43:00then those cells that are cancerous cells that are destructive in your body,
00:43:04they have been killed or eliminated by God.
00:43:08And now you no longer have it.
00:43:09These are tremendous miracles of healing.
00:43:14And they almost trivialize these things by saying, oh, you have 20, 40 vision.
00:43:20Well, you can't wear glasses.
00:43:22You know, you have to believe God for your eyesight.
00:43:24And that's not what the Bible is talking about.
00:43:28All kinds of people have all kinds of vision issues.
00:43:33But in the Bible, they were blind or in the Bible, they were lame.
00:43:37Take the guys, the several cases where in the book of Acts, people were healed from lameness.
00:43:43Those people were lame from birth.
00:43:46It wasn't that they had stubbed their toe or their knee was out of joint or they had a swollen ankle.
00:43:53They were lame.
00:43:54And so when the apostles prayed for them, they didn't say, now, look, I'm going to pray for you.
00:43:59And then I want you to believe that you're healed, confess that you're healed, act like you're healed.
00:44:06So, you know, if you really aren't 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.
00:44:16It is just absurd the position that Hobart Freeman's healing teaching put people in.
00:44:25Because when the apostles said, you're healed, get up and walk, that's exactly what the people did.
00:44:31They were healed and they got up and walk.
00:44:33When Hobart prayed or all these other ministers out there prayed, the people don't get up and walk.
00:44:39But 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.
00:44:47Or if you can't see better yet, you're not allowed to use glasses.
00:44:51So not only, I mean, it's a double whammy against you.
00:44:55Not 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.
00:45:06They take all of that away from you.
00:45:09So, I mean, it was just a terribly, terribly unscriptural healing message that literally wrecked people's lives.
00:45:19And 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.
00:45:32He 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.
00:45:44And that is skin care or a visit to a dermatologist.
00:45:48Then he would take these miracles that had happened, for instance, to Moses, who was 120 years old when he died, Deuteronomy 34.
00:46:02And as far as we can tell, he had 20-20 vision.
00:46:04He 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, Acts 19, and all you had to do was lay them on a sick person or demon-possessed person, and they were healed or delivered.
00:46:28That is a phenomenal miracle that Luke said happened regularly with the apostle Paul when he was in Ephesus.
00:46:34Hobart would take these extraordinary miracles and almost like flatten them and democratize everything.
00:46:41Where, well, if Moses saw it, if Paul saw it, if it happened to Peter, it can happen to all of us.
00:46:47And that is simply not the way that it was.
00:46:51And so when we come to these issues of just the regular care of our body, whether it's 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.
00:47:10And so skin care, he didn't talk about it, but do you think anyone could go to a dermatologist?
00:47:18Absolutely not.
00:47:19I'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.
00:47:30I 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.
00:47:42They have very dark skin, which naturally protects him from the sun.
00:47:45As you know, for most of my adult life, I have been a charter captain, a professional fishing guide.
00:47:52So I have been on the boat, on the water and in the sun for most of my life and my skin shows it.
00:47:59And so I've had to see a dermatologist on an occasion and have a thing or two removed because the problem is, if you don't, I'm going to give you an example here in a moment of a tragic example from a young lady and her father that she has shared with me.
00:48:17What starts out as just a simple, common basal cell mole can and does become melanoma.
00:48:29Melanoma. 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.
00:48:43What happens is that's cancerous. It's very, very dangerous.
00:48:47And once that happens, guess what? You don't live and you don't survive.
00:48:53So I don't know what their position was on sunscreen. I think we fair skinned people need to use sunscreen.
00:48:59The sun's going to damage you. Hobart probably would say, you know, look, either a you don't need to be out there.
00:49:08You need to be studying 14 to 16 hours a day like I do.
00:49:12Or B, if you go out there in the sun, just trust God. Just trust God.
00:49:17That's not the way these things work.
00:49:20You have to use some common sense and not everybody has used common sense.
00:49:27You know, you were talking about the difference between the healings that were in the Bible and the healings that are in these groups.
00:49:33One 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.
00:49:44Whenever Lazarus was raised from the dead, there would have been all over the news.
00:49:49It would have made world news, man, because here's a guy that just raised from the dead.
00:49:52Or whenever the lame was made to walk, you would have reporters on the scene.
00:49:57Look, this is the thing that just happened.
00:50:00I 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.
00:50:14I have yet to find one single article that substantiates an authentic healing by a divine healer.
00:50:22Now, 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.
00:50:32When William Branham had his greatest, they called it the most powerful display of divine healing in world history when he toured through Canada.
00:50:42The newspapers followed his trail trying to find one single person, and they, you know, they were told that there were thousands, so they thought they'd just go, you know, print stories of authentic healing.
00:50:55They were unable to find one single person, and they identified this guy named Alfred Pohl who worked with Branham in the campaigns, and they started talking with him.
00:51:06Well, show us these healings, and the guy was so distraught because he said,
00:51:12I know personally many people that they were told that they were healed, and their families have now left religion altogether.
00:51:20They're atheists because their family member just went home and died, and he said it was a challenge for his faith.
00:51:27He actually sent the reporters home and said, I have yet to find one person myself, and I was here on stage with these guys.
00:51:33And that's the kind of movement that produced this thing from Hobart Freeman.
00:51:38There's, yes, God heals, the Bible says it, but not in the way that these guys present it.
00:51:44You don't leave off your sunscreen.
00:51:46You don't leave off all of your—I'm still laughing at the baby powder.
00:51:50You don't tell the kids that they can't—the mothers that they can't use baby powder on their children, man.
00:51:55That's just wrong.
00:51:55In what world is that right to do that?
00:51:59But 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.
00:52:10That's how far they'll go to try to find something.
00:52:13And in the end, the baby's still going to have a rash.
00:52:15Yeah.
00:52:16I like the way you said it, John.
00:52:17God does heal, but you don't find it in these big healing crusades.
00:52:21And you would think that just accidentally they would have healed five or six or something, even if it was an accident, but they didn't.
00:52:31I'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 100,000 authenticated, verified healings in his ministry.
00:52:47And I have seen, John, on your website, in your archives, that actual, that whole little quote and phrase is found in Gordon Lindsay's Voice of Healing magazine way back in the mid-1960s.
00:53:03And Hobart, we know, went to that deliverance school in June of 1966 down in Dallas.
00:53:09And he heard these statistics because that's just what everybody was reporting.
00:53:14And so he heard it, couldn't verify it himself because it's not verifiable.
00:53:19And so what did he do?
00:53:21Irresponsibly, he just repeated that.
00:53:24And then the next person says, you know what?
00:53:27Don't you realize John G. Lake saw 100,000 authenticated healings over a five-year period in his church in Washington?
00:53:34And then the next person says, don't you know that John G. Lake saw 100,000?
00:53:40You know, that's 55 healings a day over a five-year period for 100,000 healings that they're authenticated?
00:53:49Of course they're not.
00:53:50You know, show us the medical records.
00:53:52Show us the reports.
00:53:53Of course that's not true.
00:53:54What 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.
00:54:23This is a grown woman, an adult woman, but who was very young back in those days, so she's a grandchild, a granddaughter of that person.
00:54:35Her father, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Freemanite, as so many of them were, if I have the story correctly, would go and have his hair cut professionally at a barber shop.
00:54:49He 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.
00:55:03Well, 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.
00:55:16He did not do anything about the mole.
00:55:18The 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.
00:55:35It became melanoma, the man, it's just a terrifically sad story, how Hobart deceived these people and cost these people their lives.
00:55:53This is another one of the statistics that maybe nobody even knows about, because it didn't happen back prior to Dr. Freeman's death.
00:56:00This was long, long after his death, but because his teaching was still embedded in these people's hearts and still echoed in their minds,
00:56:10they 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,
00:56:19maybe you can't even believe to be raptured or to be saved.
00:56:22That was the dilemma, the horns of the dilemma that Hobart had them hooked on.
00:56:28And so this man's health began to deteriorate, because obviously that mole had turned into something worse.
00:56:36He eventually decided to go to the doctor, to the hospital, and this is where it becomes really tragic.
00:56:44You've already suffered this whole time period, and eventually these people have to decide,
00:56:51am I going to cross the line now and sin and go to the doctor?
00:56:55I've already suffered this whole time.
00:56:59Now, should I cross the line or not?
00:57:02Human tendency to want to live.
00:57:04And so you go against what you've been taught.
00:57:07You go against your own conscience, and you go to the doctor.
00:57:13And so he went through five years of serious surgeries, bless his heart, all to no avail, all to no avail.
00:57:26By the time he got professional medical help, it was simply too late.
00:57:32And this has happened time and time again.
00:57:35There are only a few people who simply refuse to go to the doctor and die in their bed at home.
00:57:43That has happened.
00:57:44That does occasionally happen.
00:57:47More times than not, the way I have seen it work out is people will hold on as long as their body can endure.
00:57:54And they're in such terrific pain.
00:57:56They finally say, well, I'm going to go to the doctor.
00:57:58And they go to the doctor.
00:58:00And 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.
00:58:09You know, you have a terminal illness.
00:58:11And 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.
00:58:30To watch him agonizing, who was a good man, who was a good man, who was a good man, who was a good man, who was a good man, who was a good man.
00:58:42And she said, my siblings and I have a hundred and fifty emails from my father over the last five years of his life.
00:58:53And as he was keeping us up to date on progress, prognosis, how he felt, what was going on.
00:59:01And I just wanted to and I and I asked her, can I read any of this?
00:59:07And she said, yes, no names involved.
00:59:09But what I want people to see as we wrap up our our interview today is I don't even know how to put it into words, just the the desperate desire to live.
00:59:22That this man had the fear that he's battling, but yet he knows I've got to stay with what Dr.
00:59:32Freeman taught me, I've got to stay with my positive confession, because if I don't do this, I'm going to die.
00:59:37He stayed with his positive confession and he died anyway.
00:59:41But here is just one paragraph in one of these hundred and fifty emails that he was sending to his children to keep them updated.
00:59:51And here's what he said. I am not backing off.
00:59:55I pray, believe and confess.
00:59:58You know, you've 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.
01:00:06They're in they're in this hocus pocus 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.
01:00:21He doesn't care about the particular words that we're using.
01:00:24But he said, I pray and believe and confess that the pain is gone.
01:00:29The infection is gone.
01:00:31There is no more cancer or sign of cancer in my body.
01:00:36In Jesus name, I pray, speak, decree, confess in Jesus name that God got the margin of this cancer, that I am cancer free.
01:00:49I command the enemy's hands off of my head in Jesus name.
01:00:57Commanding, rebuking, claiming, confessing.
01:01:01You know, it's this it's a false gospel.
01:01:03I mean, it is a false gospel from the get go.
01:01:06And proof of it is all the people that tried to go down this path didn't work and they end up dying.
01:01:11And I'm so sorry to this young lady and to her siblings.
01:01:14I believe her mother is still a survivor.
01:01:18You know, my condolences to to the whole family.
01:01:21And I don't blame this man.
01:01:23He was simply doing what he was taught.
01:01:26But he was he was taught by a false teacher who ended up dying himself.
01:01:33I said this, I believe, to this young conclusion.
01:01:36Now, when I got the news that Hobart had died, he died on a Saturday.
01:01:43I'll tell all the details of this more on a future podcast.
01:01:46I 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.
01:01:57I had to get my information in other ways.
01:02:00So he died on a Saturday.
01:02:01I didn't find out until Friday.
01:02:04And when I found out he was dead, you know what I said and thought, praise God.
01:02:10And no, I was not rejoicing that Hobart suffered.
01:02:14I think he died a terrible death physically and mentally and emotionally.
01:02:21I'll share more about that in a later podcast.
01:02:24I don't rejoice over anybody suffering.
01:02:26But I was very glad that he was if you're not going to change my first prayer prayer would be, Hobart, please change your view on all this so you can save yourself and save other people.
01:02:39If you're not going to do that, then what else can happen for God to protect his church but for the man to be removed?
01:02:48William Branham was removed in a very traumatic, dramatic way.
01:02:53Hobart Freeman was removed in a very dramatic, traumatic way.
01:02:59I hate it for his sake and for his family's sake.
01:03:02But still, John, 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.
01:03:13You know, there's really not a good, happy way to end this.
01:03:16But I knew that we were doing an episode on divine healing and into the weeds of how the healing works.
01:03:23And there is no happy ending to that.
01:03:26That's just, it is a sad story no matter how you look at it.
01:03:29I remember after leaving the cult, I started reading through all of these magazines put out by Gordon Lindsay, the Voice of Healing magazine.
01:03:37And 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.
01:03:46And one day, I'm actually going to do a compilation of that, I think, and put it out because it's eye-opening.
01:03:51There was one lady that stood out to me.
01:03:54She 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.
01:04:04And to the casual reader who's duped by all of this, they're like, praise God, this woman just, they saved her life.
01:04:13But to the person who's not trapped in this, you're thinking, well, wait a minute.
01:04:18How did the healer possibly know she had cancer?
01:04:21It didn't affect her in any way.
01:04:23She went up, obviously, because she wasn't feeling well, but that's not how you detect cancer.
01:04:29And 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.
01:04:39And everybody's thinking, well, wow, she got healed of cancer.
01:04:42And 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.
01:04:53And 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.
01:05:04I 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.
01:05:18But yet they continued to try to hope for their feeling for the worst thing that they suffered with for the rest of their lives.
01:05:25You know, I know on both sides.
01:05:27I 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.
01:05:38There'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.
01:05:45And they didn't create the cult of Peter and go follow him instead of Jesus.
01:05:50That's not how it worked.
01:05:51So, not a good way to end it.
01:05:54It's a sad story, but to be honest, I think it needs to be sad at the ending of this.
01:06:01Because this is a false gospel.
01:06:03It's a false teaching.
01:06:04Not only has it ruined lives, it has killed many, many thousands of people.
01:06:09So, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.
01:06:15You can find us at william-brannum.org.
01:06:17For more about the dark side of the NAR, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR.
01:06:23Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
01:06:26Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
01:06:56Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
01:07:26Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
01:07:29Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.