We have periodically checked in on the disgraced televangelical preacher Jim Bakker from selling doomsday pancake mix to exploring how supernatural demons are undermining Donald Trump. Now it appears that Bakker has found — and is offering for the low price of only $45 — a “point of contact” with God. You guessed it . . . it is a coin with Trump engraved in gold with the face of King Cyrus.
The pitchman on “The Jim Bakker Show” is Lance Wallnau, who says that he has been checking with God and has been told that the Almighty is behind Trump a hundred percent.
The Biblical connection is strengthened on the reverse side with the Biblical quotation from Isaiah 45:1 — “Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kinds of their armor, to open doors before him so that gates shall not be shut.”
He told viewers:
“… This coin is our point of contact. When I asked the Lord, “Why the coin?” The Lord said, “Because when you take the coin, it’s a point of contact. So your faith is being released with a million other believers to pray [for] protection and peace and wisdom and counsel over the president of the United States and over his family. That’s our point of contact every day when you see it.
Remember: God put something in your hand that you have a role in.
…
That’s why we’ve got to pray, because they think we’re crazy, but we’re actually the sane ones.And so we’re praying. We’re gonna pray. The teaching that is here, this coin is a point of contact, this 24-karat gold-plated coin. And, by the way, I couldn’t copy the Sanhedrin model. I told them I would do an original. So we found a nicer picture of the president. We have our own version of it.
But what we want to do is, we want to be able to start. Jim, this movement. We’ve got 16 months. This battle for the future of America has already started. 16 to 18 months. We’re already in it. We’re in the battle right now. We need to be praying now and not captive to gloom or anxiety or fear, but for channeling our optimism in the direction of God’s begun a miracle; let’s keep that miracle going.“
No, Mr. Wallnau, I do not think you are crazy. It is far worst than that. You are grifting with God. Indeed, the fact that you were not smitten down on live television could be viewed as disproving the existence of God. For my part, it only makes me want to believe more in the concept of eternal punishment (perhaps being forced to eat all of the doomsday pancakes sold to the gullible on “The Jim Bakker Show”).
By the way, “gold platted” simply means a thin layer of gold covering a cheaper metal. It is not “gold” that rises or falls with the market. Indeed, thee Federal Trade commission classes “gold plate” at .5 microns and many grifters call things below .5 microns as “gold platted.” Thus, these coins cost very, very little to make. The rest of that $45 goes to Wallnau or others looking for a “point of contact” with windfall profits.
One can only hope given this passage from Matthew 21:12-17:
Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”
Shouldn’t Jim Bakker be rotting in a jail cell somewhere after bilking people out of millions of dollars?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qFYjkFCxiE
Found this video of Diane.
I see a lot of negative comments. It looks like you have missed the point. The “point of contact” is simply a reminder to pray for our President. All the other things said by critical scoffers are nonsense. You used to bad mouth Bakker when he had telethons. You said he “took money from poor little old ladies”. He did not. Now this.
Other programming pays the bills by commercials. Baker is presenting options for people that will bless their lives, and in this case remind them to pray for a president who has stood for the church and Christians like no one else in a long time.
Heck of a guy. And what’s a little fraud among good “Christians”:
http://fortune.com/2018/05/07/televangelist-jim-bakker-prepper-selling-real-estate-water-bottle-apocalypse/
Excerpt:
Jim Bakker slipped out of most people’s collective consciousness after he fell from grace following a sex scandal and his 1989 fraud conviction. But the disgraced televangelist is back, focusing on the apocalypse and urging people to buy both real estate and eye-poppingly expensive “extreme survival warfare” water bottles from him to prepare.
Bakker, who served five years in prison for 24 counts of wire and mail fraud and conspiracy, is selling cabins in Missouri’s Ozark mountains, telling followers the area (which he calls Morningside) will be “the safest place to live” when the Apocalypse hits. Prices for the cabins weren’t disclosed, but you can rent one for as little as $85 per night right now.
“Where are you going to go when the world’s on fire? Where are you going to go? This place is for God’s people. … We need some farmers to move here,” Bakker said on a recent episode of The Jim Bakker Show, whose website carries the tagline “Prophecy and End Time News.”
A little summary/timeline about the “good” Jim Bakker:
https://www.bnd.com/living/magazine/article210624889.html
we need a reminder to pray for the president in the form of a $45 gold plated coin? every time the dude opens his mouth – we are reminded to pray. Lord Help Us. don’t need a overpriced trinket for that.
Are you high or something? How can you believe that BS that you just spewed?
test
L4D says–Success! I love the new avatar colors. Go Perdue!
“test”
You failed.
Exodus 20:4-6
You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations of those who reject me. But I lavish unfailing love for a thousand generations on those who love me and obey my commands.
How appropriate, is the worship of Mammon now officially our state religion? It has been on the sly for ages. It is the main motivator in our society, our sell to the world.
Why not enshrine it further?
Great catch, Bruce. Bakker didn’t say which god he was having a point of contact with. He did have a gold coin in his hand. And he said that if we bought the coin from him, then we would have a point of contact with that same god. So it must’ve been Mammon Bakker was babbling about.
Salutations from Late4Dinner
Bakker claimed that being in prison was like “being in the land of the living dead.” If there’s a hell, he’s may be in for a rude awakening:
Luke 16:13 “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
Just sayin’.
That is the problem with leftists. Leftism replaces God or another moral force. We see that with the crazy leftists on this blog and on the street.
Bakker claimed that being in prison was like “being in the land of the living dead.” If there’s a hell, he may be in for a rude awakening:
A correction.
“Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.
The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.
The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
The same kind of defect, the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension, was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the satanic temptation of the “nuclear umbrella.” It was equivalent to saying: Let’s cast off worries, let’s free the younger generation from their duties and obligations, let’s make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of defending others-let’s stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East, and let us live instead in the pursuit of happiness. If danger should threaten us, we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb; if not, then let the world burn in Hell for all we care. The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error: the belief that the defense of peace depends not on stout hearts and steadfast men, but solely on the nuclear bomb…
Today’ s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!”
Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…
By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.
In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation.
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.
The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies…
For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion.
But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.
It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.
The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of happiness, “a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States, reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world, or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?
Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis–race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain “equality”–the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today’s free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance–the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. The free people of the West could reasonably have been expected to realize that they are beset · by numerous freely nurtured falsehoods, and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily. All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every society. This is especially true of a free and highly developed society, for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily unthinking selfishness, are pulling tight that noose…
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. Templeton Prize Lecture, 10 May 1983 (London).
i liked One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
I also have a bootleg translation of a book (“samiszdat”) which they never fully released in English by him around here somewhere…… 200 years something or other…. people didn’t like it
Estovir, tell us how this seriously long post relates to Jim Baker’s coins.
God is commemorative gold coin. Never forget God. Don’t leave home without It. (L4D)