God's Two Minute Drill?

I'm still wrapping my mind around Todd Bentley. I haven't watched any footage of the revival as of yet, but I got a snippet of his preaching in this YouTube of Bentley at Toronto via Phoenix Preacher.

He reminds me a bit of Mike Warnke, the Christian comedian/preacher of the 1980s, whose backstory of Satanism and drug-dealing proved to be fabricated. I'm not suggesting that Bentley's checkered pre-conversion past is made up, but his exuberant preaching style reminds me of Warnke, who was a hot commodity on the CCM circuit in the 80s before his keister got fact checked. Such colorful histories make for great "testimonies."

What concerns me about Bentley is his view of God, which seems a notch away from mine.

In the YouTube piece at about the 4:30 mark, he talks about a vision where he's snatched up out of a church service he's attending; "I'm in heaven on an operating table and ... I think I'm in an autopsy room or something." He gets tied down to the table by four angels, sawed him open with a miter saw, gutted him, and start taking small white boxes and stuff Bentley like a turkey; here's my stab at a transcript-

...and I heard the verse "I desire truth in the inward parts."
I said "God, what's happening here?" and He said

"Todd, this is something that I'm doing in the church today. It's an acceleration. I'm supernaturally imparting the character, the revelation and the knowledge that I need the church to have so that they can do the work that I need them to do, because the laborers are few."

He said "I don't have the 30, 40 years to prepare a vessel.  Moses, 40 years, 80, years, I don't have that; I'm doing something quick. There's going to be people who get saved and I'm going to open them up and supernaturally place inside of them ten years of knowledge and wisdom and even character because of the fruits of the Spirit. These boxes represent character attributes."

Can that happen? Yes; I'm not one to put God in a box.

Is that happening? I think not. I don't think that God has to run a two-minute drill in order to equip His people. God is beyond time and knows what He'll need down the line.

It's long been a shtick among preachers, especially those of a premillennial take on things, to focus on now being the time; you can't tell when Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back soon, so we need to save all the people we can before they all get left behind when the Rapture comes. Pentecostal premillennialists will add the idea that signs and wonders will kick up a notch when the end is near, and the end must be near if all that stuff is happening.

However, this seems to be going beyond that and portraying a God who's having to run a no-huddle offense. That seems to run counter to the classic concepts of God as omniscient and omnipotent; He can act in a hurry, but shouldn't need to act in a hurry.

Later on in the tape, Bentley talks about a major manifestation of the Spirit at his hotel room after the conference and notes that things were so intense, the room above his caught fire. God's not a god of collateral damage; He or His angels can work at point X without harming point Y next door or above it.

I can live with people getting "slain in the spirit" and getting healed miraculously; it happened in the Bible and has been know to happen from time to time today. A lot of people will train their fire at such Pentecostal stuff, but I don't think that's the problem with Bentley in the long haul.

What I see as wrong with Bentley is that he pictures a God that's a loose cannon. Yes, like the line about Aslan, God isn't safe, but He's good, but the God I've grown to know has that cannon firing with laser-beam precision. He doesn't need no steenking spotters to direct fire.

Bentley's version of God is running late, creates collateral damage and has to make up for lost time. It looks a lot like the god of Open Theism, where their deity has an unclear view of the future and may have to call an audible now and them when things don't go by plan. It may well be that some of his visions are more internally inspired than divinely inspired; Bentley seems to be missing the mark on that vision story.

You can't run a hurry-up offense all game long without a lot of substitutions; people burn out after a while. The same tends to happen with people who buy into that the-future-is-now mentality and through everything into furthering the revival.

Having a sense of urgency about serving the Lord's not bad; it beats the heck out of the rest of us, who are mostly sitting on our hands. I recall the quip from DL Moody about liking the way he did evangelism better than the way the critic didn't do it. However, such revivals have a way of burning people out, especially when the rhetoric and prophecies about a grand future for the move of God start to not live up to reality.

Revivals are fun, but we have to come back from the mountaintop and live our daily lives. It's living out things in a sustainable level that will be difficult for the revivalists to do and what scares me a bit about Bentley and company.

It's OK to huddle, to think, to absorb and take time to discern. It's easy to jump into the next New Thing, especially if you're in a charismatic culture that thrives on such stuff; it's hard to check whether a preacher's visions are from God of from last night's burrito, especially when you're conditioned to be open to New Things.

However, such new things need to be of God if they're to be followed. Bentley might cite a nice piece of scripture from Psalms in his vision, but it doesn't mean that his vision may well be a personal collage of CSI and badly-done Arminian theology.

God can use flawed characters, but we need not follow every burrito-burp; check out how a teaching meshes with Scripture and what you already understand of God before taking a preacher at face value. They're human.

In Bentley's case, his God is a bit too much of a loose cannon and has a bit too much emphasis on immediate response and action. He might be used by God in some ways, but I'd be leery of taking stock in him as a pastor and someone to follow.

I left a Vineyard church  here in metro Lexington we were looking at making our church home when they started to get too hyped up about the Lakeland Revival; I don't quite trust Bentley and I don't trust pastors who put too much trust in him. That's not to say that good things aren't happening in Lakeland; I just can't quite buy into Bentley's theology for the long-haul.

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[Max]

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http://youtube.com/watch?v=p9Kv7XRaKw8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6O0p4ZDnDoQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gZ-7beRITYM&feature=related
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aHIyFmJTRsM&feature=related

Rom 16:18 For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.

Eph 5:6 Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.

2Cr 11:13 For such [are] false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore [it is] no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness