These quotes have not aged well for Storms and Brown. They reveal the far deeper problem with thinking that your proximity, or familiarity, somehow trumps what they actually teach. Now Brown my bristle at this and say well how was he to know. That is exactly the point! We don't know. Brown and Storms interacted with Bickle for forty years and always thought they knew his heart. They thought he was a fine man, biblically orthodox, humble and Christ exalting. They had no idea that he had two multiple years relationships with minors, one while a married pastor. They had no idea that after those he lured a 19-year-old into his bed by telling her that God told him his wife would die so they could be together and then manipulated her for four years while establishing IHOP. They had no idea that he falsified the entire prophetic history of IHOP along with two other sexually deviant false prophets in Bob Jones and Paul Cain. Now, I also did not know any of these details but I did not have to because I never tried to make judgments about his heart. I only judged his teachings. Beloved, when we are discussing any prominent teacher or wannabe prophet and those defending him resort to the specious fallacy argument of proximity remember that the human heart is wickedly deceitful above all else and desperately sick. We are instructed to test everything as it relates to teaching because out of the abundance of the heart does the mouth speak. Throughout the debate Storms and Brown repeatedly used this fallacy as a primary device to claim the people in question were not false. Remember that the "I know their heart" defense is just as false as the teachers they are defending.
Reverend Anthony Wade - July 19, 2024
