The prosperity preacher who met the camel and the needle in prison

A man runs up to Jesus on the road, kneels, and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. He has kept the commandments since he was a boy. Mark says Jesus looked at him and loved him, then told him to sell what he owned and give it to the poor. The man's face fell, and he walked away sad, "for he was one who had great possessions". Jesus watched him go and turned to his friends with the line about the camel and the needle.

Jim Bakker spent much of his career finding a way around that line. He died on Monday, Oct. 5, at 86. In the 1980s he and Tammy Faye built PTL into a network that reached 14 million homes. His message, in a 1980 book, was that "God wants you to be rich," and he sold it as $1,000 "lifetime partnerships" to about 150,000 people, far more than his hotel could hold. In 1989 a jury convicted him of fraud.

Prison changed the reading. In a federal cell he made a deeper study of Jesus' hard words about wealth. It left him "physically nauseated," he wrote, to see he had been "contradicting Christ," and after his release he called the book I Was Wrong. The disciples felt the same shock when they first heard the camel line, and they asked who, then, could be saved (verse 26). Jesus didn't soften it.

Mark 10:27Jesus, looking at them, said, "With men it is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God."

Then the story got harder to tell. Back on television from Missouri, Bakker sold buckets of freeze-dried food for the end times. In 2020 the state sued him for pitching a "Silver Solution" as a possible COVID-19 cure, and he settled with $156,000 in refunds. So did the confession count? Jessica Hahn, the woman at the center of his sex scandal, said her anger gave way to forgiveness and that she came to believe he had changed in prison.

Paul told a Corinthian church busy ranking its preachers to "judge nothing before the time" (1 Corinthians 4:5), since the Lord will bring hidden things to light and show what each heart was after. Mark never says what became of the rich man either. The last thing we know is that he walked away sad, and that Jesus loved him. Bakker's turning was real on paper and unsteady in practice. That is as far as anyone reading his obituary can honestly go, and the rest belongs to the God who can thread the needle.