Objection: Faith Preachers Pronounce Mean Divine Judgments on Those Who Disagree

SOME faith preachers have done that, and it makes me cringe when I see it.  I’ve been around a while and I’ve seen quite a few doom prophecies over the years made against critics of divine healing by preachers whom they attacked.  In many cases, the attackers claimed that the faith preachers preached “a different gospel” and are therefore heretics.  Claiming that their brothers in the Lord, who confess the risen Jesus as coming in the flesh as well as they do, are actually hell-bound certainly isn’t very nice.  But that never warrants retaliation in kind.  Jesus taught us to love our enemies.  Paul’s hope was that the opposers would come to their senses, not that they would incur horrible judgment on themselves.

I’ve been called some things, too, but I’ve never pronounced any kind of supposedly divine judgment on my detractors.  Instead, I’ve been nice to them and have spared them the public humiliation they tried to bring on me.  I ended up getting along with a couple in my area (at the time) because they came to see after getting to know me better that I wasn’t an apostate after all.

This objection makes the mistake of overgeneralization by implying that because some faith preachers heap woes upon their detractors, that ALL do it.  I don’t, and I’m a subset of ALL, so not all faith preachers do this – particularly not the wise ones!

If you as a faith person are attacked personally, respond in love.  If the doctrine you preach is what is being attacked (that’s different), you need to respond with correct doctrine, not with a personal attack, which would say to the world that you are ducking the issue because you know you don’t have a good answer.  (After reading this book, I’d hope that you WOULD have a good answer!)