Benny Hinn, the virulent false teacher whom many were hopeful had smartened up and ceased his theological quackery last year when he was said to have repented of his prosperity gospel (hint, he actually didn’t), is still going at it full bore.
This was on display during an interview with leaders Daniel Hagen and Ben Fitzgerald of Fire Church, a Hillsong-ish church with a greater degree of Pentecostal twist, based out of Australia.
The interview covers a lot of ground, mostly the usual sophistry of charismatic gibberish, but one part caught our attention – a segment where Benny Hinn pretty much likens “the anointing” of God to some kind of dark spirit that stirs up a pastor to feel and act upon sinful thoughts and causes them to let their freak flag fly with strange women after they preach powerful sermons.
Benny says:
“I was thinking of a pastor that I knew, who would preach with a mighty anointing. And I knew that man really, really well. He would preach with a mighty anointing and then he would go and sleep with women after the services. That was discovered years later, naturally. And I went to him one day, and I said, ‘How can you do that?’
Now this is before I even understood how the anointing works. I said, ‘How can you do that – you could preach with such power and after the service walk into the room and sleep with a girl?’ And he, of course, began to weep and told me how he was molested when he was young and on and on and on. That did not really impress me or convince me of anything.So I’m asking Oral (Roberts) this is after years later…I said, ‘Oral, tell me. How can a man preach with such power, when you sit there and you are amazed by the ministry that he’s given to you, and afterwards go sin against God – within hours he’s with a woman?’
Oral looked at me without hesitation and he said, ‘The anointing.’
I was in shock. I almost fell out of my seat. I was alone with him in his home. I said, ‘The anointing?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘Please explain.’
He said, ‘When the anointing comes on a person, it stirs up the emotions. It stirs up the body,’ – and then he said something powerful – ‘and it stirs up every weakness within him that’s not under control.’ Listen to this. He said, ‘It stirs up everything in that man good and bad.’
I said, ‘Run that by me again.’ He said, ‘It’s quite simple…if a man has a problem with adultery, and that weakness is not under control, it will be stirred under the anointing. That after God uses him he will go and do something like that man did.'”
They discuss a bit more related to this in the aforementioned longer post, but you can see the main relevant snippet here:
The idea that a man can be up on stage, preaching powerfully, doing miracles, healing the sick and casting out demons, all the while living a hellish life of deep sin and roiling fleshly perversion is not something new to the charismatic church. In fact, by every indication it is widely accepted to be something they hold in tension.
We saw this most recently with the whole Todd Bentley scandal. Even though Todd was caught over a period of years engaging in sexual shenanigans – cheating on his wife during the Lakeland revival, going up on stage drunk to blather about how he raised 14 people from the dead, and manifesting signs, wonders and healings while angels fluttered overhead, as feathers made of crusted jewels and gold dust swayed in the breeze and gently drifted downward to land at Todd’s hallowed feet, or whichever other weird spiritual kinks they believe transpired there – damned near every charismatic leader still thinks that was a legitimate move of God.
Even Michael Brown still maintains, even since the second big scandal has blown up, that Todd is supernaturally gifted by God, because for him and for Benny Hinn here, the two things are unrelated. You can be anointed by God and still engage in patterns of unrepentant sin. You can be anointed by God and have a service where you miraculously heal the lame, regrow left arms and cure pancreatic cancer, then leave the stage to slink away to procure the services of prostitutes for some foul deeds done in the dark places of passion, and then rinse, wash, and repeat the next day for as long as the revival lasts. All the while being ‘powerfully anointed’ by God.
For those who have bought the lie, there is no correlation between being holy and being used by God, no correlation between hidden treachery and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and this bit from Benny Hinn proves it.
