Because Kenneth Hagin is the grandfather of the Word of Faith Movement and many of his teachings are used widely within Christendom today, I thought how doing a critique of his books would be eye opening for the body of Christ. I am starting with his book the Believer’s Authority and in this series of articles, my aim is to expose the roots of Word of Faith Teaching that come out of this book.
I don’t want people to think I don’t have a Biblical precedent for doing this article series, so to begin with let’s look at 1 John 4:1. It tells us, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” Every book of the New Testament except Philemon gives us healthy warnings to be on the alert for potential false doctrine in the church. One of the goals I have in this blog, is to look at the doctrinal beliefs held by different Christian media authors, and compare our findings with Biblical doctrine. From our results we will determine if the teachings are Biblical or not. For the last few years, I have been interested in learning about the doctrine of the Word of Faith Movement to examine it, to see if there are any deviations from the word of God. Now, I am here to share my findings with you.
Hagin’s book The Believer’s Authority is 70 pages with indications of false doctrine on almost every page. I wanted to begin with Hagin’s teachings to expose the root beliefs of this movement because many of the fundamental Word of Faith doctrines began with Hagin and for many years have crept in and fooled the unsuspecting churchgoer widely across mainstream Christianity. I hope what we will uncover today will open your eyes to what you may have heard taught over the years and give you the firmness of conviction to stay away from these teachings and possibly even warn others to get free from these dangerous deceptions.
Did Hagin Really See Jesus?
Hagin bases much of his book on interpreting what is going on in a vision he has of Jesus who appears to him and speaks to him. The question is, “Is it really Jesus?” If the Jesus of Hagin’s vision is real he would have words and actions that match the words and actions of the Jesus of the Bible. Hagin misinterprets what goes on in the vision and builds on one false idea after another stemming from the wrong assumptions he makes from his vision.
Hagin makes the claim in different videos, and in his writings that he has had 7 or 8 visions of Jesus beginning in 1951. The vision this book is based on is one from 1952. Hagin didn’t write his book until 1967 which is 15 years or a decade and a half after the vision. It is important to consider if the vision is the basis for the book or if scripture is the basis for the book. Did Hagin’s view of his vision shape his understanding of scripture or did his understanding of scripture shape his view of his vision? A Biblical approach to understand his vision would mean we start with the Bible and examine one idea at a time related to the vision to see if each of the ideas from the vision are Biblical or not. An unbiblical approach would place the Bible on the back burner and the ideas from the vision front and center. Since the Bible is the test for prophecy and vision, we must keep the Bible front and center for proper discernment, while we look at the information from his vision one piece at a time. Now that we have determined the best approach, let’s get started and jump right in.
Hagin starts talking about his vision in chapter 5 under the subheading “The Demon Jesus Refused to Deal With”. The first questions we can ask are-Did Jesus refuse to deal with the demon or did Jesus have a choice? How did Jesus go about refusing to deal with the demon? Hagin clearly said in his writing that Jesus refused, but let’s read how Hagin describes this vision of Jesus. Hagin describes that Jesus appeared to him and spoke to him for about 90 minutes about the devil, demons, and demon possession. He says at the end of the 90 minutes a monkey like demon appeared between him and Jesus and put out a smoke screen between them and began jumping around crying out in a shrill voice saying “Yakety-Yak! Yakety-Yak! Yakety-Yak!” He says he couldn’t see or hear Jesus and wondered why Jesus didn’t do anything to help him. He began to worry and said, “I almost panicked. I became so desperate I cried out, “In the Name of Jesus, you foul spirit, I command you to stop!” The minute I said that, the little demon hit the floor like a sack of salt, and the black cloud disappeared. The demon lay there trembling, whimpering, and whining like a whipped pup. He wouldn’t look at me. “Not only shut up, but get out of here in Jesus’ Name!” I commanded. He ran off.”
“The Lord knew exactly what was in my mind. I was thinking, Why didn’t He do something about that? Why did He permit it? Jesus looked at me and said, “If you hadn’t done something about that, I couldn’t have.” That came as a real shock to me—it astounded me. I replied, “Lord, I know I didn’t hear You right! You said You wouldn’t, didn’t You? “He replied, “No, if you hadn’t done something about that, I couldn’t have.” I went through this four times with Him. He was emphatic about it, saying, “No, I didn’t say I would not, I said I could not.” “I said, “Now, dear Lord, I just can’t accept that. I never heard or preached anything like that in my life!” By Hagin’s reaction we know just what Hagin’s Jesus is saying. It is not that his Jesus would not do something about the demon, but that he could not! In other words it was not a choice that Jesus made to not help, he simply couldn’t help him. Hagin’s Jesus didn’t refuse to do something about the demon. His Jesus said I didn’t say I would not help, but I could not help. Not that I wouldn’t, but couldn’t. The Jesus of Hagin’s vision did not have a choice, because he couldn’t deal with the demon. Hagin is rightly surprised, and astounded, and says, “Now, dear Lord, I just can’t accept that. I never heard or preached anything like that in my life”.
There are so many reasons why this quote should tell us that this is a false vision Hagin had of a fake Jesus, but I will start with just a couple eye opening reasons. The first is if Jesus couldn’t do anything about the demon, does that mean Jesus never could do something about any demon? Jesus has to be the same today, yesterday, and forever. The same Jesus who defeated all the powers of darkness on the cross is the same Jesus that is alive in heaven today. Because the same Jesus who defeated every spirit of darkness at the cross would need to be the same Jesus who would have interacted with Hagin and the demon that jumped between him and Jesus, we know that Hagin’s Jesus is completely weak and powerless in comparison with the Jesus of the Bible. Looking at the Jesus of the Bible you have a Jesus according to Colossians 2:15 which reads, “When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.” Friends, that victory was an eternal victory.
Furthermore, Hebrews 9:12 reads, “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, HAVING OBTAINED ETERNAL REDEMPTION FOR US”. Hebrews 13:20-21a speaks of an ETERNAL COVENANT, and says, “Now may the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, that is, Jesus our Lord, 21 equip you… ”. The covenant Christ made with God on our behalf was an eternal covenant. The victory of the cross is by the shed blood of Jesus, speaking of the eternal redemption. The eternal blood speaks of a victory over the kingdom of darkness and the eternal redemption, eternal covenant, and eternal blood give us an eternal victory.
In addition to the victory of the cross, throughout Jesus’s life, he maintained victory over the devil as he never gave into any temptation from the devil and therefore never became subject to any kind of submission to the devil, but has always maintained all power and authority and supremacy over the devil. Hagin’s Jesus makes no sense in that he can’t battle one demon when the Bible tells us of a Jesus who defeated every spirit of darkness.
To build on this narrative, Hagin has set up the first four chapters of the book to say that Jesus transferred or delegated all of his authority to the church when it says nothing of the sort in the Bible. Later we will look more closely at how Hagin intertwines and conflates the meanings of the words transfer, delegate and confer to mean the exact same thing, when transfer, delegate, and confer have different meanings and how Hagin uses these words, they either oppose the reality of the Sovereignty of Christ, or he uses the words interchangeably to make the way he uses them to not seem so hard to believe. To be brief, this idea that Jesus transferred his authority to the church is foreign to every New Testament scripture that we have. Nowhere in the Bible does it say anything about Jesus giving his authority away to the church. By saying that God gave the church the responsibility to do something about the devil, and removing the responsibility of Jesus doing something about the devil, Hagin can then blame the believer if they are not healed, blame the believer if they have money problems, blame the believer if they have any hardship or difficulty and blame the believer if they want someone like a pastor to pray for them. Hagin does a whole lot of blaming in this book, and I will get into uncovering more of that later. This book fuels not only the healing movement, the name it and claim it or the blab it and grab it movement, but also the spiritual warfare movement seen today in churches across America.
Do We Really Share Christ’s Throne With Him And All The Authority of Christ’s Throne?
On page 17 Hagin writes we are seated with Christ on His throne. He writes “The elevation of Christ’s people with Him into the heavenlies clearly points to the fact that we are to sit with Him, sharing not only His throne but also His authority. That authority belongs to us!” No, that authority belongs to Christ! Hagin uses two scripture passages by twisting them to get us to believe him. The first is Ephesians 1:18-23 which is about the believer knowing the glory of our inheritance in the saints, and his mighty power (Eph 1: 20) “which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places.” He starts by saying Christ is on his throne, and because the body of Christ which is the church is attached to Christ the head, that is supposed to mean the church therefore is sitting on Christ’s throne, because the body is attached to the head. But Ephesians 1 tells us nothing in the whole chapter of the church sitting on Christ’s throne. Nowhere in the whole book of Ephesians does it say anything about the church sitting on Christ’s throne. Where is the church seated? The Bible tells us and Hagin even uses the right scripture to tell us, but he misses the point! Ephesians 2:5-6 says “even when we were dead in our trespasses, (he) made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus”.
As we can see, the Bible simply says we have been seated with Christ in heavenly places. But Hagin is conflating the meaning of heavenly places to mean Christ’s throne. Going back to the quote, “The elevation of Christ’s people with Him into the heavenlies clearly points to the fact that we are to sit with Him, sharing not only His throne but also His authority. That authority belongs to us!” is a blasphemy of raising up mankind to equality with God. Other translations use the phrase “we are seated in the heavenly realms with Christ”, and it should be very simple to understand there is a difference between a heavenly realm and a heavenly throne.
Let’s look at the preposition the Bible uses. We are seated WITH Christ. Logic can tell us we can be seated with friends at dinner tables, but that doesn’t mean we are seated on the same chair together. We can be seated with family on a sofa but that doesn’t mean we all sit on the same cushion. Now, we can assume that with all the people Christ plans on taking to heaven, and all the people there now, there must be a lot of different places to sit in the heavenly realms. If you are in a realm, chances are you are in a larger place than a single seat. There have got to be millions of seats in the heavenly realms, aside from the Throne of God the Father and aside from the Throne of Jesus. So, we can also assume Paul meant exactly what he said when he said we are seated in the heavenly realms and nothing about being seated on the throne with Jesus Christ because Paul could have written the words plainly that we are seated with Christ on His throne, but he did not. Paul simply said we are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms.
There is a single scripture in the book of Revelations about how the Bible says Christ promises the church of Laodicea if they repent, and overcome they will be given the right to sit with Jesus on his throne. This promise was only given to the Church of Laodicea and not directly given to each of the other 6 churches of the book of Revelations. Although it may be possible that Christ means for this promise to be given to every one of the churches, but we should not assume each Christian will receive every one of the blessings given to every church because Christ speaks different blessings to the different churches. We should keep in mind that the whole prospect of being saved and not going to hell is such a huge incredible blessing that will take eternity to wrap our minds around, that Christ freely gives everyone who believes. He bestows blessings as he sees fit.
This blessing of sitting on Christ’s throne is only made for the Laodiceans after they have been physically taken to heaven, after their earthly life is over, after they have fought the good fight, kept the faith, and finished the race. It is after they have been perfected in heaven, and therefore the danger of having sin involved in any decision is taken away. This is not how it is while we are on the earth—we still sin and our decisions are not perfect. It is not talking about something that happens while we are in this present life, nor does it mention being seated with Christ only in a spiritual sense as Ephesians speaks of. Therefore, we cannot take the idea that Christ has seated the body of Christ on His throne with him in heaven in a way that enables us to possess the authority of Christ’s throne to use as we see fit in this life as a fact because there is no sound Biblical evidence for this. We therefore do not share throne authority with Jesus. And with this clarity we see several arguments from Hagin’s book completely fall apart, because he gets a lot of mileage for writing his book from using the faulty ideas just mentioned.
Christ may back us with his authority, but it is a backing only and Christ has full oversight and he remains in control. According to John 1:12 he has backed the believer with the authority to become the children of God, and does not take that away. Rather He tells us to humble ourselves in the sight of God, to lean on God, and depend on God. But just as we are dependent on God to answer our prayers it is not our decision to decide for Christ which of our prayers he approves of answering and which he may want to answer in a different way than we have requested. That authority is not at our disposal, it is at Christ’s disposal. LG
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