Less than 24 hours after publishing our Prophetic Intelligence Briefing on the National Day of Prayer for Houston in which we predicted that evangelicals would claim the hurricane was a judgment from God, the following item came across my desk.
Pentecostal televangelist Jim Bakker was joined on his television program by Pastor Rick Joyner. They declared that Hurricane Harvey was God’s judgment on the city of Houston. They used the devastation to say that the storm had nothing to do with climate change because “the real issue with the weather and everything else on the earth has to do with sin and wickedness… The whole earth will cry out because of the shedding of innocent blood,” he said. “That’s what throws nature off more than dumping CO2 or anything.”
“I have felt — and I was afraid to share it with anybody — that this flood is from God,” said Jim Bakker. “It’s a judgment on America somehow. Am I off?”
Bakker declared, “This flood is from God, it’s a judgment on America,” and Joyner agreed, noting, “these kinds of things don’t happen by accident.”
Joyner said that Key West, Florida, had been hit by a hurricane “on the day they’re supposed to have the Day of Decadence parade” and another hurricane hit New Orleans right before it hosted another Day of Decadence festival. “Coincidence? I don’t think so,” he said. “We have to stand up against the perversion of our times and call it what it is.”
Bakker agreed, saying that the former mayor of Houston “ordered all the preachers to turn in their sermons before they preached them. Just remember, God gets the last word. God gets the last word. Be not deceived, God is not mocked.”
Ironically, Jim Bakker was convicted of 24 counts of mail and wire fraud after being accused of defrauding followers of $158 million.
Meanwhile, speaking on his radio show, Minister Kevin Swanson said: “Jesus sends the message home, unless Americans repent, unless Houston repents, unless New Orleans repents, they will all likewise perish.”
And radio presenter Rick Wiles, said: ‘Here’s a city that has boasted of its LGBT devotion, its affinity for the sexual perversion movement in America. They’re underwater.’
“Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of unprepared souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows. When he was suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks and herds, servants, houses, children, were swept away, one trouble succeeding another as in a moment. It is God that shields His creatures and hedges them in from the power of the destroyer. But the Christian world have shown contempt for the law of Jehovah, and the Lord will do just what He has declared that He would—He will withdraw His blessings from the earth and remove His protecting care from those who are rebelling against His law and teaching and forcing others to do the same. Satan has control of all whom God does not especially guard. He will favor and prosper some, in order to further his own designs; and he will bring trouble upon others and lead men to believe that it is God who is afflicting them.” The Great Controversy, page 589.