Jim Bakker Goes Full Circle

Jim Bakker Goes Full Circle - Todd Strandberg - http://www.raptureready.com/category/nearing-midnight/

 

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the name Jim Bakker. He is known for hosting the evangelical Christian TV program "The PTL Club" in the '70s and '80s - up until 1987, when his empire came crashing down amid a sex scandal and charges of financial fraud.

 

The Bakker scandal got rolling when Jessica Hahn claimed that Bakker had manipulated her into having sex in a hotel room in 1980, back when she was a church secretary. At the time, Bakker was married to Tammy Faye. A $279,000 payoff to buy Hahn's silence only made matters worse.

 

The Charlotte Observer then reported that PTL Club's fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 were used to sell $1,000 "lifetime memberships" entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA. Bakker only built one 500-room hotel even though tens of thousands of memberships were sold. Much of the money paid Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.

 

The Bakker's lavish lifestyle was their final undoing. As part of the prosperity gospel, they believe in living high on the hog. It was reported that they owned several expansive and expensive homes - two in Palm Springs alone. PTL paid for an endless succession of maids and security guards. Their five pooches had an air-conditioned doghouse. Once, when the Bakker's needed their clothes in California, the church paid $100,000 to fly their wardrobes in by jet from North Carolina.

 

Tammy Faye was never charged with any crime. The feds threw the book at poor Jim. In 1989, Bakker was convicted on 24 counts of fraud, sentenced to 45 years in prison, and fined $500,000. A year later, another Jury found Bakker liable for almost $130 million in damages in a lawsuit filed by former contributors to his ministry.

 

Things turned around for Bakker when in 1991 another federal judge gave him a shorter 18-year prison sentence. That allowed him to be paroled after only serving nearly five years of his sentence.

 

For a while it appeared that Bakker had turned over a new leaf. Before going to prison, He told the judge, "I have sinned." In his 1996 book, I Was Wrong, he admitted that the first time he actually read the Bible all the way through was in prison. He wrote that he realized that he had taken passages out of context and used them to support his prosperity teachings:

 

"The more I studied the Bible, however, I had to admit that the prosperity message did not line up with the tenor of Scripture. My heart was crushed to think that I led so many people astray. I was appalled that I could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful that God had not struck me dead as a false prophet!"

 

Tammy Faye Bakker never returned to the world of sanity. She filed for divorce from Jim in 1991. An attorney in the divorce proceedings said Tammy Faye Bakker couldn't stand being separated from her husband or suffering the uncertainty of when he would get out of jail. She started a gay-friendly church that was way ahead of its time. I'll never forget being at the 2007 Christian Booksellers Association convention. Terry and I were there to promote one of our books, and right across from our table was a video of her. Tammy was talking in an absolutely incoherent langue, and we had to listen to this chatter for several hours.

 

The last thing I remember reading about Jim Bakker is that he was going to do some type of missionary work for the rest of his life. To my surprise, a few years ago, I just happened to be flipping through channels; and to my great surprise, I saw Jim with his new wife Lori, and they are co-hosts of "The Jim Bakker Show."

 

I'm all for people having a second chance at life. We worship a God who is in the business of repentance and new beginnings. The Jim Bakker Show looked alright until I spotted the buckets of freeze-dried food which Bakker was selling to his audience in preparation for the end of days. Apparently, another belief that Jim gave up with the prosperity gospel is the Pretribulation rapture.

 

In recent days, Bakker had provided the press with fresh material to dig up his old scandal. On his show, he suggested that if you want to survive the Apocalypse, the best thing you could do is buy one of his cabins in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. You can also pick up a six-pack of 28-ounce "Extreme Survival Warfare" water bottles for $150.

 

I just cannot believe that Christians would allow the disgraced Bakker to get back into the real estate business. The people who watch his show are old enough to remember his previous stunts. Bakker hasn't changed, but the world has. He just shows that the time is right for the World's Greatest Con Artist to appear.

 

Of them the proverbs are true: "A dog returns to its vomit," and, "A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud" (2 Peter 2:22).