Last month, Jim Bakker wrote on his blog:
On New Year’s Eve 2010, God showed me that the coming month of March would be a “Major March”. A time of major upheaval but also a time of extreme answers to prayers and blessing for Gods people. In addition to the New Year’s Eve warning, God again brought a warning while taping our television broadcast, that a 9.0 magnitude earthquake was coming, this was a week before the earthquake hit Japan. We are now witnessing the apocalyptic events in Japan that were undoubtedly a part of both of those warnings. More earthquakes and major events are coming to Japan very soon. California and the area from Illinois and Missouri to Arkansas will have major events in the future. Keep you eyes on the Ring of Fire.
On July 12, 2005, God showed me New Orleans under water. Forty-one days later, on August 29, 2005, hurricane Katrina hit.
In 1999, God showed me 31 things that will come to pass shortly and most already have.
Then, weirdly:
…I do not claim to be a prophet…
Bakker, of course, is to most people simply a figure of fun: an archetypal Elmer Gantry, forever discredited by his sexual indiscretion, lavish lifestyle, and conviction and imprisonment for fraud (not to mention his kitschy religious aesthetic). However, he has been making something of a comeback with help from Rick Joyner. In a blog entry from last week, Bakker discussed his TV show:
…Rick Joyner is with us this week, and he emphasized that even in God’s judgment, He always desires to show His mercy.
…Rick went on to say there will be a shaking first. The economic unraveling is the grace from God to give us a reset where we can start again. There will be a period of time when our dollar won’t be worth anything, but we have another source. We have a kingdom that is above all of our natural circumstances and every Christian is going to have to come to the kingdom.
Rick said he talked to Bob Jones (another Prophet) the Sunday after the big quake hit in Japan, and Bob said “it’s coming to California.” This confirms what the Lord showed me in the “31 Things” he gave me in 1999. When the Lord speaks something like that, He will usually confirm it with two or three witnesses.
Joyner, in turn, has been promoting Bakker in a series of fear-mongering and apocalyptic videos, as noted by Right Wing Watch.
Their alliance is actually long-standing; Joyner’s Morningstar Ministries also runs Heritage International Ministries, which controls the Heritage Grand Hotel at the site of Bakker’s ruined Heritage USA project. The hotel was recently the location for an investiture ceremony of a strange “chivalric order” of which Joyner is a member, along with William “Jerry” Boykin.
Of course, if you’re constantly firing off general prophecies of doom, you’re bound to score the occasional hit. The misses can be filed away: in 1998 Bakker published Prosperity and the Coming Apocalypse, in which he warned that the millennium bug (Y2K) may well “be a highly plausible explanation for what the Bible refers to as the black horse of famine and economic chaos”.
And speaking of dodgy prophecies, it’s now more than two years since David Wilkerson last promised us “fires raging through New York City” that “will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut” as God destroys “the secular foundations”.
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