Playing God, The Lust for Power – Part 3

Playing God, The Lust for Power—Part 3

“Ye Shall Be as Gods”

Like Finis Dake in God’s Plan for Man^[1] televangelist Benny Hinn claims that Adam and Eve were super beings who could fly faster and higher than birds, even into space, and outswim the best fish under water: “Adam was… the first Superman… with one thought he would be on the moon… he could swim [underwater] and not run out of breath and so did his wife… they were both super beings.”^[2] Consider the following from other Positive Con­fession leaders:

Man was designed or created by God to be the god of this world (Robert Tilton, Kenneth E. Hagin, Charles Capps).^[3]

We have all the capabilities of God (Kenneth Copeland).^[4]

Creative power was in God’s mouth. It is in your mouth also (Charles Capps).^[5]

We are in God; so that makes us part of God (Kenneth Copeland).^[6]

Satanist leader Michael Aquino stated with conviction on the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” “We are not servants of some God; we are our own gods!”^[7] In at least partial agreement, Ken­neth Copeland and Paul Crouch insist on TBN that they are indeed gods. “You are a little god,” declare Copeland and Benny Hinn on TBN. “I am a little god!” exults Paul Crouch on international television, and condemns to hell the “heresy hunters” who say this teaching isn’t biblical.

Rodney R. Romney, pastor of Seattle’s First Baptist Church, embraces and teaches almost the entire spectrum of occultism that we are exposing. In his book Journey to Inner Space: Finding God-in-Us Romney writes, “To know God, to love God, and to understand God is finally to realize one’s own godhood.”^[8] The book has been republished with all its heresies intact since we exposed it in The Seduction of Christianity. In that part of the book which he says he “received” from “the higher source” by “listening”^[9] (like the “two listeners received” God Calling), Romney records these words from “God”:

Through prayer and meditation the individual divinity of your being unites with omniscience, and the microcosm becomes one with the macrocosm… this sacred place of your inner knowing… is the stepping-stone to the stars.^[10]

To teach that man is God, a god, or equal to God, and that faith is a force that works according to certain laws, differs little from atheism. Either way, there is no being in the universe who is man’s superior. So it is in the New Age movement.

Freemasonry, too, in its secret rituals, promotes this central lie of the serpent. In his explanation of the 18th degree, Rex R. Hutchens, 33rd degree, states with approval, “The most ancient mythologies speak of men made gods.” In the lecture for the 23rd degree, Albert Pike commends Pythagoras for having taught “the necessity of personal holiness to qualify as man for admission to the society of gods.” The ritual for the 31st degree deter­mines whether the candidate “deserves to dwell among the gods.” The candidates’ escort is the Egyptian god Horus. Isis, Horus’ mother, is the first to speak. Eventually the god Thoth “reports that a majority believe the man worthy to dwell with the gods.” Osiris “ren­ders the final judgment,” giving his approval as well.^[11]

The Mormon Church has its own variation on this theme: “As man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become.” Mormonism’s “God” is an exalted man who, like the candidate in Masonry, attained to godhood through much effort—and every Mormon male hopes to do the same. In 1974, the late Mormon President Spencer W. Kimball declared:

In each of us is the potentiality to become a God…. Man can transform himself… he has in him the seeds of Godhood that can grow. He can lift himself by his very bootstraps.^[12]

Notes

1. ↑ Finis J. Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Dake Bible Sales, 1977), p. 35.
2. ↑ Praise the Lord Show, Trinity Broadcasting Network, December 25, 1991; as cited in G. Richard Fisher and M. Kurt Goedelman with W. E. Nunnally, Stephen F. Cannon, and Paul R. Blizard, The Confusing World of Benny Hinn (Personal Freedom Outreach, 1997), p. 134.
3. ↑ Robert Tilton, God’s Laws of Success (Word of Faith Publishing, 1983), pp. 170-71; Kenneth E. Hagin, Plead Your Case (Tulsa, 1985), p. 3; Charles Capps, God’s Image of You (Harrison House, 1985), p. 34, etc.
4. ↑ Kenneth Copeland, “Questions and Answers,” in Believer’s Voice of Victory, June 1986, p. 14.
5. ↑ Charles Capps, Seedtime and Harvest (Harrison House, 1986), p. 53.
6. ↑ Copeland, Believer’s Voice, June 1986.
7. ↑ From a written transcript of the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” February 17, 1988.
8. ↑ Rodney R. Romney, Journey to Inner Space: Finding God-in-Us (Abingdon, 1986), p. 26.
9. ↑ Ibid., p. 121.
10. ↑ Ibid., pp. 138-39.
11. ↑ Rex. R. Hutchens, 33rd degree, A Bridge to Light.
12. ↑ Salt Lake City Tribune, September 18, 1974; October 7, 1974.

Read Part 4