The Emperor's New Clothes is a fairy tale in which the emperor is a vain man overly concerned with his clothes and spends a lot of money on them. Two con men come to town and offer to make the best clothing ever with special properties that make the clothes invisible to those unfit for their job or those that are stupid.
The emperor hires them but they make nothing at all. As people come to check on the progress they see nothing but they fear they must be stupid or unfit for the job so they shower the new clothes with praise.
The emperor finally comes to see the progress and is equally afraid to admit he sees nothing. The entire kingdom eventually praises the clothing and its magnificence. Upon its completion and unveiling in the town square,
only a child speaks out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
Everyone finally admits they see nothing and so does the emperor.
The lie is exposed.
Jude, writing about false teachers, used an analogy similar to the story of the emperor's new clothes when he wrote, "These [false teachers] are the men who . . . care for themselves; clouds without water, carried along by winds; autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted . . .
The Hans Christian Anderson story concludes with the con men exposed as frauds for all to see. And it is the ending of that story that we are seeing today from Bethel Church in Redding, California. This is a "church" which dumps chicken feathers (reported to be angel feathers),
fog, and glitter out of its ventilation system to simulate a “glory
cloud;” it is a church has a supernatural school of healing, and regularly writes and preaches their fables of raising the dead.
This is the church in which the child of Bethel Music CEO, Joel Taylor, was near death when they took him to the hospital to receive treatment. All the boy needed was water. They couldn’t heal the child of dehydration.
This is a church whose leadership claims that they can control the weather, but whose houses burned down when the wind spread the Shasta County fire to their domiciles. Bethel Church in Redding, California is the hub of the faith-healing movement in America. Their main man, Bill Johnson, wrote an article in which he claimed that all believers have the same power and authority as Jesus to heal illness. Johnson said that it's no problem; anyone with enough faith can do it.
The "Sacramento Bee" reported, “On Jan. 31, a woman was approached in the ER at Mercy Medical Center in Redding by two Bethel students from the church's School of Supernatural Ministry. The pair said 'they would pray over the people there and put Jesus in their hearts and this would heal us all and we didn’t need to stay at the ER and could go home,' the woman said in a text message. She asked not to be
identified to protect her family’s privacy.” She filed a complaint with the hospital after one of the students touched her 5-year-old daughter without permission.
ENTER CORONA-V
Now, something has changed their healing ministry. The church is advising the faithful to wash their hands, urging those who feel sick to stay home, canceling missionary trips, and advising its faith healers to stay away from local hospitals. Wait. What? Stay away from the very places they ought to be if they can heal people? This is the thing about faith-healing meetings: the con men have to hold their meetings in places where they control the environment. That's why a hospital isn't the place--they can't control it.
One perceptive person asked, "Why aren't Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn hopping on jets, and going to the nations which are most afflicted to heal them?" It's a rhetorical question; we know the answer. "They are clouds without water, autumn trees without fruit"
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