BETHEL, NAR, AND THEIR COUNTERFEIT REVIVAL

 

In Counterfeit Kingdom, Holly Pivec and Douglas Geivett have written:

•    [Bill]Johnson and [Chris] Vallotton are regarded as apostle and prophet, not only at Bethel in Redding, but over the international Bethel Church movement. They also claim to be giving new “revelations” to the global church, critical truths the church once had and later lost. These lost truths are now being restored by Johnson, Vallotton, and other “apostles” and “prophets” so that all Christians can develop miraculous powers.

Kris Vallotton had written:

•    There is a new epoch season emerging in this hour. Much like the Protestant Reformation, there is another reformation coming that will unearth the very foundation of Christianity. This move of the Spirit will absolutely redefine your ideologies and philosophies concerning what the Church is and how she should function.

Vallotton claims that he has come to this conclusion through his personal experience and not Scripture, unlike the Reformation. However, Scripture claims that we shouldn’t go beyond what the Scriptures have presented:

•    I have applied all these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brothers, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another. (1 Corinthians 4:6)

By going beyond the Scriptures in things that pertain to God and man, they have opened the door to an anything-goes “Christianity.”

Instead, we should glorify our God by speaking His Words:

•    whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 4:11)

Well, perhaps Vallotton is a prophet of God. If He is, then every one of his prophesies should have been accurate:

•    “But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’— when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)

However, Vallotton has been wrong, most famously by prophesying that Trump would be re-elected to a second term. Nevertheless, according to Pivec and Geivett, he continues to head the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry—a three-year, full-time program with 2,600 students.

Spiritual pride is highly seductive. The Bible provides many warnings against it:

•    Thus says the Lord of hosts: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’” For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to see and to hear his word, or who has paid attention to his word and listened? “I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds.” (Jeremiah 23:16-18, 21-22)

To listen to Vallotton and an increasing company of self-proclaimed Apostles and Prophets is to disregard the Word of God. Therefore Isaiah had written:

•    And when they say to you, “Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn [light]. (Isaiah 8:19-20)

The false prophets had always provided an attractive message, not one of repentance. Consequently, Johnson’s and Vallotton’s New Apostolic Reformation claims 750 million followers worldwide. What a contrast to the martyred Prophets of God who preached an unpopular message!