Friday, October 10, 2025

somewhat contra Julie Roys on Twitter, Mark Driscoll's stories haven't gotten more fantastical (let me show you tales from 2005 and 2008), he's talked about prophetic dreams, having visions, and God killing people as an answer to his prayer now and then across twenty years

Julie Roys has tweeted that Mark Driscoll's stories keep getting more fantastical.

Wow, 
@PastorMark's stories just keep getting more fantastical.
0:03 / 0:36
From 
Terri Green
4:57 PM · Oct 9, 2025
Terri Green
@TerriGreenUSA
This is a NAR falsehood. Mark Driscoll, claims he “had a prophetic vision” and “saw Charlie Kirk ascend into the sky like a magnet and …saw a bunch of pieces of metal gathering and being collected up under that magnet.”
9:44 AM · Sep 29, 2025

at 00:46 of the audio Driscoll described how, during worship, he had what he hoped was a prophetic vision of Charlie Kirk ascending to heaven as the martyr and saint that he was and he was a magnet drawing up metal to him as he ascended.  

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Driscoll has not been reading books by Larry Hurtado or Andrei Orlov discussing the Enoch-Metatron traditions as background for how a high Christology is explicable in early Christianity by way of reference to human figures being elevated by Yahweh.  This is more Rick Joyner stuff. 

But I grew up Pentecostal and moved away from it as I began to learn more about (and disagree with) Latter Rain and post-Latter Rain ideas, which may have connections to the New Apostolic Reformation stuff.  Anyway ... I mention this background to pivot to a personal observation, Mark Driscoll has had fantastical stories for a long time.

I was once on the Mars Hill Theology Response Team decades ago and was required to listen to all of the February 2008 Spiritual Warfare material, I transcribed about three quarters of it

I heard "I see things" for myself. It was one of several nails in the coffin of my membership.  I not so long ago asked why Mark "I see things" Driscoll didn't "see" what his buddy Robert Morris had done to a 12-year-old girl back in the 1980s now that Robert Morris has pled guilty.

I actually forgot about the "I prayed and God slayed" story Mark Driscoll shared from the pulpit in 2005 until I'd read Jessica Johnson's Biblical Porn!  I had to go back and look up the sermon from the Genesis sermon series and that led to a post.

The relevant material is as follows:

http://download.marshill.info/files/2005/06/26/20050626_judah-and-tamar_sd_audio.mp3

JUDAH AND TAMAR
Part 37 of Genesis
Pastor Mark Driscoll | Genesis 38 | June 26, 2005
07:21
“Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar.” We’re gonna deal with her. She is gonna be a very important story. “But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the LORD’s sight;” – so God smoked him – “Put him to death.” What does that mean in Hebrew? He killed him. Metaphor – he killed him literally – metaphysically challenged. The guy is dead, okay. Oh, that’s troubling. That’s the point. Stop whatever you’re doing. He’s gonna kill you. That’s the point. I know some of you have this wrong view of God as a big sky fairy, lavender tights, lemon yellow half shirt, herbal tea. I know you say, “We love that fairy, Jesus, that hippie Christ. We love that guy.” 
 
Look, that’s the god up on Broadway today for the parade. This is the real God, all right. This is the real God. This God gets ticked, and he kills people. And some of you say, “Oh, but that’s the Old Testament – his junior high years. He was immature and emotional. And now we have the New Testament God, and he’s all grown up now.” God kills people in the New Testament too.

I’ll give you two places you can look when you go home, Acts 5, Ananias and Saphira. A married couple go into church. They withhold part of their tithe, and God kills them in the church, right? And it says, “Great fear sees the whole church.” Offering went through the roof. They made budget. It was amazing. People are like, “Put the keys in there, Martha, and the credit cards and whatever. Here, put these shoes in – whatever he wants. He seems to be in a mood today.”
The other is in 1 Corinthians 11 where it says people are taking communion without repenting of sin, so they die in the church. Can you imagine that? You’re coming up for communion, you and your girlfriend who woke up together this morning to come to Mars Hill. And the two of you are walking down the aisle, and you’re like stepping over all your drinking buddies, like, “Who am I?” “What happened?” “They didn’t repent.” Like, “Oh, well, let’s go back to our seat then.” You know, this is – he kills people. He does. He kills them. He gets sick of them. He gets sick of them and says, “You keep sinning. You won’t stop. I’ll stop you. You’re dead.”
Okay, this guy’s about 18 years of age. He’s done. He just got out of high school. He was getting ready to go to Cancun, you know, for his big graduation party. This guy was just gonna go to college; just joined his frat; 18 year old kid – done. He’s thinking, “Oh, you only live once. You’re young. Have fun. Have a good,” – dead.
10:16
Okay, now some of you, this bothers you because you’re evil and it scares you. I understand. It’s supposed to. The scary parts are to scare you. It’s crazy how that goes together. You’re supposed to look at it and go, “He kills evil people. I’m an evil person. Oh, no.” That’s the point – supposed to scare you into repentance, go straight. [10:42] Now God still does this. This will sound terrible in addition to many other things I will say. But I still believe that God kills people, and sometimes I pray for it.
10:50
I’ll give you an example – and I don’t. High mercy counseling – a gift. I know. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d definitely be in the counseling. So, I’m meeting with this high school kid a few years ago. His mom and dad were Christians. He and his brother were Christians. They went overseas for many years into a foreign culture to preach the Gospel and start and church and have people meet Jesus. And they were there for many years.
Well, the whole time, his dad was having this escalating online sexual relationship with another man here in the United States. And next thing you know it, dad doesn’t say anything to his boys or the mom or to the church or to the ministry – nothing. He just secretly empties the bank account, gets on an airplane, flies to the United States to go be with his gay lover. I think it was in New York City. And then sends a letter or an email or something back to the family saying, “Good luck.” And the boys get it. They’re like, “What happened to dad?” “What? Dad left the family. Dad’s in New York. Dad emptied the bank account. Oh, I thought we belonged to Jesus.”
11:52
Now they had a hard time leaving the country. They’re flat broke. They’re totally shocked. The family’s destroyed. All the new converts are wondering is Jesus really God? Does he really change lives? Everything’s thrown into mayhem. I’m meeting with the teenage kid, and he says, “What is all this?” He says, “You know, it’s got me doubting whether or not God pays attention anymore, God cares. We get all these people. They’re getting ready to deny their faith. We’re flat broke. My mom’s heartbroken. My dad’s got all the money, living life, doing what he wants.” He said, “Where’s God in all of this?” [12:21] I said, “Well, here, let’s do this. Let’s pray that he either repents or God kills him – your dad.” 
12:27
So, we prayed together. I prayed mostly. And I said, “Okay, here’s the deal. Let’s pray that he either repents, and if he’s never gonna repent, then God will just kill him.” So, we prayed. He says, “Okay, now we’ll see what happens.” About a week later, dad dies of an instantaneous massive heart attack. No history of heart disease in his family. He’s in good health. No seeming cause or trigger. His heart literally exploded in his chest cavity. He died instantaneously.
 [emphasis added] Now all of a sudden all those people go, “Oh, yeah, God does deal with sin.” So the mission gets saved. The churches get saved. You know, everything gets preserved.
13:08
You know what? Some people will never change. Not everybody’s going to heaven. Not everybody lives happily ever after. Not everybody makes a turn for the better. Some people just keep going. And God knows their heart, and with certain people, he looks at them and says, “That’s it. You’re only getting worse. You’re never gonna get better. You’re dead. I’m killing you. It’s over.”
13:30
Some of you need to realize that it is a terrifying thing, the Bible says, to fall into the hands of the living God. When you’re dealing with a holy, righteous, just God, and you’re just absolutely defying him repeatedly and mocking him, there does come a point with many people where he’s just done because sin leads to death. And if you keep sinning, you’ll either die in your sin, or he’ll kill you for your sin. But one way or another, you’ll die.

 
...
So in Driscoll's account, he prayed that a man he regarded as being in unrepentant sin would either be brought to repentance or that God would kill the man.  Lo and behold, Driscoll claimed that the man died.  We're never told who the man actually was and so we can't be sure the man even existed or was potentially a composite.  By now we've established that Mark Driscoll, particularly in the 2013-2014 period, was capable of directly contradicting himself at any number of points about events and details. 
If the account was recycled in Death by Love it may have been considerably more fuzzy than what was recounted in the sermon above, rather undetailed though even that narrative was.
 Death by Love: Letters from the Cross
Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Copyright (c) 2008 by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Published by Crossway
ISBN 978-1-4335-3533-8
PDF ISBN 978-1-4335-0423-5
Mobipocket ISBN 978-1-4335-0424-3
ePub ISBN 978-1-4335-2121-8

 pages 129-130

... For example, I once met with a young man whose father, a pastor, suddenly left his ministry, wife, and teenage sons to have a homosexual affair with a man he had met on the Internet. He told his teenage sons that there is no God, Jesus did not rise from death, and that there is no such thing as punishment for sin. His sons experienced a profound crisis of faith, and since their dad kept saying that he was happy for the first time in his life, they wondered if God existed, and if he did, whether he cared. To make matters worse, the entire church he had been pastoring was experiencing the same sort of faith crisis. I prayed with one of the sons, asking God to either bring their father to repentance or pour out his wrath on the man as an example. Within days, the father died of an unexplainable, sudden explosion of his heart. [emphases added]

While we can't make a definitive connection of this timely death to the wrath of God, it is in keeping with what we see in instances like Genesis 38 where God kills the two sons of Judah because of their wickedness. 
See also ... 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_73.html

Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Christus Victor (Part 3)

[you can find a video version of the presentation here]

19:19

On occasion I see things. I see things. Like I was meeting with one person, and they didn't know this but they were abused when they were a child and I said, "When you were a child, you were abused. This person did this to you, physically touched you this way." They said, "How do you know?" I said, "I don't know, it's like I got a TV right here and I'm seeing it." They said, "No, that never happened." I said, "Go ask them. Go ask if they actually did what I think they did and I see that they did."  They went and asked this person, "When I was a little kid did you do this?" and the person said, "Yeah [slowly], but you were only like a year or two old. How do you remember that?" They said, "Well, Pastor Mark told me." I'm not a guru. I'm not a freak. I don't talk about this. If I did talk about it everybody'd want to meet with me and I'd end up like one of those guys on TV, but some of you have this visual ability to see things.

20:13
There was one woman I dealt with, she never told her husband that she had committed adultery on him early in the relationship. I said:

"You know (she was sitting there with her husband), you know I think the root of all this is Satan has a foothold in your life because you never told your husband about that really tall blond guy that you met at the bar. And then you went back to the hotel, and you laid on your back, and you undressed yourself, and he climbed on top of you, and you had sex with him, and snuggled up with him for a while, and deep down in your heart (even though you had just met him) you desired him because (secretly) he is the fantasy body type."

I said:
"You remember that place, it was that cheap hotel with that certain colored bedspread. You did it--you had sex with the light on because you weren't ashamed and you wanted him to see you and you wanted to see him."

She's just looking at me, like ...

I said, "You know, it was about ten years ago." I see everything.
She looks at her husband.  He says, "Is that true?" She says, "Yeah. He was 6'2", blonde hair, blue eyes. Yeah."

Some of you, when you're counseling, you will see things. You will literally get the discernment to see things. I can't even explain it. It doesn't happen all the time.

Sometimes your counselee, they will see things. I found this with people, I'm, okay,-like, "I'm gonna ask the demon questions, you tell me what they say."  They don't say anything. I say, "What do you hear?" and they say, "Nothing, but I'm seeing stuff."
"What, oh, oh. What's that?"
"I'm seeing, you know, when I was little, my grandpa molested me. I didn't know that."

I said, "Well, let's not assume it's true. Go ask your grandpa." Grandpa says, "Yeah [slowly], when you were little I molested you." Grandpa was assuming they'd be too young to remember so he'd only molest grandkids up until a certain age. But they saw it. Supernatural. It's a whole other realm. It's like the Matrix. You can take the blue pill. You can take the red pill.  You can go into this whole other world and that's the way it works.

So I say tell me everything you hear, tell me everything you see and sometimes I see things, too. I see things, too.  I've seen women raped.

I've seen children molested. I've seen people abused. I've seen people beaten. I've seen horrible things done. Horrible things done.

I've seen children dedicated in occult groups, and demons come upon them as an infant by invitation and I wasn't present for any of it but I've seen it, visibly. [emphasis added]


Upon occasion when I get up to preach I see, just like a [makes "whif" sound] screen in front of me, I'll see somebody get raped or abused and I'll track `em down and say, "Look, I had this vision, let me tell you about it." All true.  One I had, I was sitting in my office at the old Earl building.  This gal walks by, nice gal, member of the church. This was when the church was small.  And there just like a TV was there and I saw the night before her husband threw her up against the wall, had her by the throat, was physically violent with her and she said, "That's it. I'm telling the pastor." And he said, "If you do, I'll kill you." He was a very physically abusive man. She was walking by and I just saw it. Just like a TV.  I said, "Hey! come here for a sec. ... Last night did your husband throw you against the wall and have you by the throat, physically assault you and tell you if you told anyone he would kill you?" She just starts bawling. She says, "How did you know?" I said, "Jesus told me." I call the guy on the phone, "Hey, I need you to come to the office." Didn't give him any clue. [He] comes in. I said, "What did you do to your wife last night?  Why'd you this? Why'd you throw her against the wall?" And he gets very angry, they're sitting on the couch, he says, "Why did you tell him?"  I said, "She didn't, Jesus did." Jesus did. 

There are people who are hyper-spiritual total freaks. They make stuff up.  They hear from demons. They pretend to have insight and discernment and there are some people who have real gift of discernment, and I'm not saying I'm 100% always right with it, but some of you are gonna have gift of discernment and you need to, you need to grow to learn in the use of that gift. Sometimes people will hear things. Sometimes people will see things.


And yet for all those super-powers he didn't see what Robert Morris pled guilty to having done just last week in court.  I bluntly asked why there's no evidence that any of Mark Driscoll's self-described visions seem to have led to a documentable arrest or the capture of an abuser.  

It is still worth asking, as Driscoll seems eager to ramp up the possibilities of a connection to the late Charlie Kirk, why it seems as if Mark Driscoll has quietly scrubbed Robert Morris' role in his 2014 resignation from Mars Hill and launching of The Trinity Church in Scotsdale, Arizona.  

There are people who are hyper-spiritual total freaks who make stuff up.  They pretend to have insight and discernment.  Whether they hear from demons is not even a necessary question.  Jeremiah 23:16 has a warning about certain types of prophets and we'll just go King James for this
Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD.
See also my old post Dream Divination in the Ministry of Mark Driscoll: A Survey of Primary Source Accounts as well as Dream Divination in the Ministry of Mark Driscoll: Driscoll on the rarity of his interpreting other dreams as an implicit baseline against which to appreciate his reliance on dream divination in his own ministry.  Even across his Mars Hill years Mark Driscoll had tales of having prophetic dreams, having a prayer answered by God killing someone (who? Driscoll has never said), and claims to have witnessed child molestations.


Thursday, October 09, 2025

Duo Palissandre performs Atanas Ourkouzounov's Reflet I and Reflet II

I first heard the Reflet pieces a couple of decades ago on a disc that is probably wildly out of print and was an import.  But I liked the pieces and Duo Palissandre has released a CD of the guitar duets of Atanas Ourkouzounov, which lets you hear I, II and IV.