from Critical Issues Commentary:
by Bob Deeway
Earlier this year the International House of Prayer (IHOP) sponsored a conference in Kansas City entitled Passion for Jesus that was heavily promoted toward young people. The purpose of the conference was to “cultivate intimacy with Jesus.” In the conference’s second session, IHOP president and director Mike Bickle preached a message based on an allegorical interpretation of a Matthew 25 parable in which he explained his end times theology and “revelation of the bridal paradigm.”
Bickle claims that Jesus cannot return until something drastically changes in the church: “He is not coming any day. He is not coming until the people of God globally are crying out in intercession with a bridal identity under the anointing of the Spirit. If you do not understand what he means by that it is likely because you have read the Bible literally and have never found anything regarding a special anointing that imparts a revelation of a “bridal identity.” In fact, much of Bickle’s terminology will be strange and foreign to most Christians.
In this article I will show that Bickle’s movement is based on allegorized scripture, deeper life pietism, and mysticism, representing a slightly modified version of the heretical Latter Rain movement of the 1940s.
Bickle claims that he began his ministry through the hearing of an audible voice of God in 1983 that told him to start 24-hour prayer in the spirit of the tabernacle of David. He further claims that he erected a sign to that effect and that he himself did not even know what prayer in the spirit of the tabernacle of David was, despite that God had told him to establish it. It turns out that it is “prophetic singing prayers. Once they figured out what it was, IHOP was born.
The Latter Rain End-time Scenario
On IHOP’s Web site is a series of affirmations and denials that appear to distance themselves from the discredited Latter Rain movement. (I explained Latter Rain ideas in a previous CIC article.3) For instance, they deny any belief in the Joel’s Army teaching4, one of the key teachings of the Latter Rain stating that an end-time church would arise with great power and defeat God’s enemies during the Great Tribulation. They also taught that Christ could not return to the “defeated” church they deemed existed in their day.
As I documented, key leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation have picked up the concept and teach the same thing. This teaching is so eccentric that it is unlikely anyone espousing it had not been influenced by those who first proposed it. This is especially so when one considers Bickle’s past associations with prophets like Paul Cain of the Latter Rain era. Therefore I conclude that Bickle and IHOP have indeed been influenced by the Latter Rain despite their denials.
Bickle claims that the church will not only go through the Great Tribulation, but the church will cause it:
We’re not absent for the great tribulation, now listen carefully, the church causes the great tribulation. What I mean by that – it’s the church, it’s the praying church under Jesus’ leadership that’s loosing the judgment in the great tribulation in the way that Moses stretched forth his rod and prayed and loosed the judgments upon Pharaoh. The church in the tribulation is in the position that Moses was before Pharaoh but it won’t be a Pharaoh and Egypt, it’ll be the great end time Pharaoh called the antichrist and the book of Revelation is a book about the judgments of God on the antichrist loosed by the praying church.
In Bickle’s eschatology, the church, with a special type of prayer as the key, defeats Antichrist. The Latter Rain version claimed that a company of prophets and apostles would do it. In both versions an elite end-time church defeats God’s enemies, and Jesus is “held in the heavens” until it happens. Earl Paulk actually wrote a book by that title in the mid 1980s . . . . . .
read the full article here.
