BBB:Tammy and Jimmy

   The reason we have made little comment on the Swaggert and Bakker
scandals is two-fold. In the first place, we are not interested in the
private lives and private transgressions of any Christian leader
(professing or possessing) except where they touch the final authority
of the Holy Bible (AV). After all, "all flesh is grass," and any sinner
can find a "chink" in the armor of any other sinner (Rom. 3:1- 4) if he
looks long enough and hard enough. Muckraking and going through
dumpsters is not our ministry and never has been. We only take issue
with a sinner where he takes issue with THE BOOK.

   Well, here is Swaggert. He finally learned the doctrine of eternal
security was TRUE and that he had been teaching heresy himself for
twenty years. His own experience was the best teacher. All the folks he
thought could have "lost it" weren't any worse than he was, and he
didn't lose it.

   Here is Bakker, breaking down under pressure (and God knows anyone
would under that kind of pressure) and weeping and bawling. He is at
last facing reality, which neither he nor his wife were even acquainted
with one time in twenty years. Like all Charismatics, they lived in a
dream world (Kuhlman, Goreman, Hagin, Roberts, Ewing, Coe, Osborne,
Branham, et al.). Here comes the ship back home, and you have to go
down to the dock and unload it. I feel sorry for him. Outside the
courthouse in North Carolina where he is being tried, an angry, retired
New Jersey construction worker (who had sold his home to move to Fort
Mill, South Carolina, to be close to PTL) shouted, "NAIL HIM TO THE
CROSS! CRUCIFY HIM! I came here to live for the sole purpose of PTL. I
was robbed. He did me wrong" (USA Today, Aug. 8, 1989).

   No, he didn't.

   Any man or woman on the face of this earth with an IQ of ninety or
more had no more business supporting PTL or the 700 Club or Oral
Roberts or anything like them than they had supporting the PLO or Jim
Jones.

   The people who sinned against Jimmy and Tammy were the deluded,
half- crazy suckers who supported them. They ruined them with money. No
Christian with the spiritual discernment of a primary in DVBS would
have thought that Jimmy and Tammy were "ministers," evangelists,
counsellors, comforters, advisers, preachers, teachers, or guides. You
would have to have only one oar in the water to send PTL a copper
quarter. Anyone who would mistake that program (or anything like it
now) for a "Christian" operation ought to be thrown in the county jail
till they get their pilot light turned back on. The tragedy of Jimmy
and Tammy is that any professing Christian could have been stupid
enough to send them a DIME.

   "Down home" we say that when they took Tammy's makeup off, they
found Jimmy Hoffa. I don't know of a Bible believing Christian in
America that took either of them seriously from the day they started to
the day they were arrested. Cicciaro ought to serve the sentence. It
might teach him something about Christian stewardship of God's money.