I Had a Hard Time Believing Jack Hyles Was Really a Reprobate
At first, it seems the late Jack Hyles is a man of God and a champion of the Christian faith. It's been 20 years since he died at the age of 74. It's a very touchy, controversial subject on whether or not Hyles was a man of God or a wolf in sheep's clothing. Hyles, like the late Alberto R. Rivera (who was never a former Jesuit priest), is a man who gets hailed as a hero but ends up having lots of dirty secrets. The life story of Rivera as a so-called former Jesuit priest was later exposed in a book called "The Alberto Rivera Story" by the late Roy Livesey. Later, Hyles' decades of deception were unwrapped and I myself had a hard time believing that he, like Rivera, was a fraud. It was hard to believe that a fundamentalist Baptist like David W. Cloud of Way of Life Literature would label Hyles as such. Was Hyles just truly maligned with misinformation by some magnificent Jesuit scheme or Jesuit-engineered demolition job or was he truly a man of Satan pretending to be a man of God? It would be very foolish to criticize the Roman Catholic institution for all its sexual immoralities by covering up scandals in the Baptist and Protestant circles. True, Baptist and Protestant sex scandals aren't that plenty but covering them up makes one no better than Rome covering up her scandals.
Cloud himself may be a Calvinism sniper while I do consider himself a brother. Cloud still considers many Calvinists who have true signs of conversions as family. I do still read through Cloud's site every now and then even if he did catch the Pokemon is satanic hype back in the 2000s. In his article "The Women Who Knew Jack Hyles" also reveals the following by his own daughter:
My dad pastored a church that evolved into a 50,000-member cult. It operated and still operates under the guise of an independent fundamental Baptist church. But those who have left, the followers who have tried to leave, the outsiders, even the media (it was on 20/20 last year) recognize that it is clearly a cult.
“Every member was in complete obedience to my father. They didn’t dare disagree or be disloyal, for fear of being publicly ridiculed or punished or banished for doing so. They didn’t go on a vacation without asking my dad’s permission, and if he had said to drink the Kool-aid, I’m not kidding, they would have.
“My dad lived a double life, one of a righteous family man and of a dynamic speaker in the public eye, but [another] one of sordid sexual secrets privately, secrets that only my siblings and me and my mom knew. He hated my mom. Hated her. Treated her terribly. Abused her. And even turned his own children against their mother. We hated her. He told us she was crazy. We thought to make him happy, we would hate her too. Our home was so full of turmoil, hatred, stress, strife, and as a little girl, it was isolating, it was intense, and it was frightening. He had affairs. He had a mistress for many years, the wife of a Sunday School teacher. He built her family a beautiful home right around the corner from our house. You could see their family from our back door. It was craziness, living one way, preaching another.
“My older brother became another version of my father. He pastored a church in Texas and was found to be having affairs with 14 different women. He divorced his wife and married one of the 14. My father tried desperately to cover it up. He moved him to another church where he was found to have had 17 affairs with different women, and he just recreated what he had seen my dad live. And my dad did nothing but cover it up.
“I felt like I had one main responsibility as a child. It was simple, but daunting, and that was to keep all the secrets, and there were so many.
“You see, he had taught us that the best way to please God was to please him, because he was God’s man. He taught us that to please him we had to keep all the secrets. We could never even tell our best friends what went on in our home, because we might be the cause of the destruction of his ministry. I literally feared for my very life if I ever told what went on in our home, for fear that it would hurt his ministry. I was so afraid, and the greater the secrets, the greater my fear, and the greater my determination to keep quiet.
“He was very wealthy. And even to our adult years, he owned us. He owned our homes, our cars, our furniture. He owned our lives, and we didn’t dare cross him, because we were too afraid we would lose everything. He died a multi-millionaire. He left nothing to his children. He left everything to the organization, which my younger sister and her husband now lead. [This was before Jack Schaap got caught in adultery with a teenager.] And they still perpetuate his legacy: the strict rules, the undying loyalty, and they still try to keep all the secrets” (Linda Murphrey’s testimony at the TEDxOjaiChange event in Ojai, California, April 5, 2012).
At first, it felt like just a wayward family member. However, the abuses done by Hyles are very well-documented as Rivera's abuses such as financial fraud. Like Rivera, Hyles lived a double-life and conned many Christians into believing they were men of God. It turns out that Hyles was very sexually immoral. Rivera's sad story also revealed that he was also a sexual reprobate. Both Rivera and Hyles had led an anti-Catholic cult instead of a Christian church that preached against the Vatican. Both of them were also involved in fanciful conspiracy theories that get gullible Christians. Back then, I used to subscribe to the conspiracy theories of Chick Publications and Jesus-is-Savior. I really had to say goodbye to both sites because of how toxic they have become. I'm amazed at how both Rivera and Hyles had decades-long deceptions that have continued to fool the average Christian today.
I'm not writing this to renounce the whole fundamentalist Baptist movement. Cloud is still a fundamentalist yet he's far saner than Hyles. I still respect some King James Version Only or KJV Only pastors as long as they don't quarrel with those who aren't KJV Only. Paul David Washer mentions that Calvinism in itself shouldn't be an issue. I can still respect non-Calvinist preachers as much as non-Calvinist preachers can respect Calvinist preachers. Some fundamentalist Baptists reject Calvinism while they honor John Calvin's contributions or Charles H. Spurgeon. Some fundamentalists still cite some Calvinist preachers, honor the Calvinist scholars that gave them their beloved KJV, all the while they still disagree with Calvinism. I'm still perfectly fine with non-Calvinists such as Harry A. Ironside and Aiden W. Tozer. John F. MacArthur cited Ironside and Tozer in his book "The Gospel According to Jesus". What I'm going against is when certain Baptists end up buying the heresies of Hyles such as easy believism. Hyles' rotten fruit had a lot of fake converts who prove they never were truly converted. I'm not saying that Christians will be sinless. However, the abuses done in Hyles' pulpit really gives one the right to doubt that they're truly saved. Most of the preachers who took over proved themselves to be no better than the Roman Catholic priests. Roman Catholic priests are obviously wolves in sheep's clothing to the saved. However, fake pastors are even more dangerous because they may appear to be brethren when they aren't. It's so easy to refuse to join the Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) movement while it's so hard not to discern when a Baptist church is actually apostate. I could easily refuse to work together with a Catholic priest or a Seventh-Day Adventist or Pentecostal pastor. However, I'd really be more easily fooled by a man of Satan who is dressed up as a Baptist pastor. Satan's ministers can both be obvious and not obvious to the believer. That's why I really was misled by so much foolishness for more than ten years in my Christian life!
Hyles is really no better than the late Tony Alamo, a Pentecostal pastor. Alamo's ministry was already proven to have been cultic as well. Alamo himself was proven guilty of his sexual abuse with multiple underaged women. who he took as "wives". Alamo eventually died in jail. Some tried to make it look like Alamo was a victim of some Jesuit conspiracy. Some may be trying to say that Hyles was too a victim of a Jesuit conspiracy. It's already becoming a lame excuse for some fake preachers to say they're victims of a Jesuit conspiracy. I don't deny that some frame-ups could be a Jesuit conspiracy. However, not all of them are Jesuit conspiracies as some nutjobs like Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church, David J. Stewart of Jesus-is-Savior, and Alex Jones of Infowars would want you to believe. It's no surprise that Stewart endorses that nutjob, Anderson, as a "faithful preacher". It's no surprise Anderson appears in Infowars as well. Infowars may speak some degree of truth but most of it are just flat-out lies such as their anti-vaccination stand. It's no surprise that Texe Marrs is also allied with Jones. True, they may speak against the Vatican but they tend to do it at the cost of making Roman Catholics too angry to listen to the Gospel.
Hyles is no different and should no longer be endorsed as a hero of the faith. I may not be devoting myself to writing all about every false prophet out there. Still, I would write only about those that had misled me in my growing up years in the Christian faith and Hyles was one of them.
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