Graham Cooke
Moriel received the following question:
Has Moriel heard of the allegedly “prophetic” ministry of Graham Cooke from Manchester, England who presently is in leadership in a church called “Mission” in California?
Jacob answers:
Manchester, England, where Moriel has an affiliated church in neighbouring Reddish and where I once lived doing evangelistic ministry in the Jewish community (and where my grandfather was born), is a spiritually destitute city that does not need to export preachers, it needs to import them., But the climate and affluence are much nicer in California (where Moriel also has an affiliated church). Graham Cooke apparently left from a church in South Hampton (where I sometimes speak at the local Calvary Chapel). Graham Cooke was not a well-known figure in British evangelical circles before he left for America at the apparent expense of his marriage and, because , of that, his witness to the lost.
Graham Cooke was divorced as a Christian by a Christian wife, Heather, after she refused to support his desire to leave England for California. This alone precludes him from being eligible for leadership in the church according to God’s Word (1 Timothy 3:5). He should have made his marriage, not his ministry, his first priority and not ventured into ministry without the support of his wife. If she was rebellious against the Lord and not a helpmate to her husband, he should have waited for God to deal with her, which the Lord is quite capable if doing if he had indeed been called to the USA. What we instead have is someone promoted as one who helps others to understand the true nature of God when he has not lived out God’s most fundamental principles in his own life. As Paul writes to Timothy “if a minister cannot manage his own household he cannot possibly manage God’s”. This is Graham Cooke.
Listening to Graham Cooke’s YouTube false teaching on prophecy, however, we quickly realize that this man is scripturally ignorant and spiritually deluded. The fact that despite this very obvious ignorance of New Testament doctrine, there are those wanting their ears tickled with such soothing fantasy is nothing less than pathetic; he is clearly a false teacher who invents ludicrously blatant error.
This foolish, contra-scriptural, and pseudo-spiritual rhetoric he manufactures is vaguely resembelent of the heresey of Rob Bell and is not surprisingly endorsed by other propagators of false doctrine such as King Watch in New Zealand who, among other things, reject Israel’s history as a paradigm to interpret church history (as is plainly taught in 1 Corinthians 10) and hold it to be false and to be rejected. Such empty babbling should only be the domain of cults, not of professing Evangelicals.
Mr. Cooke teaches the erroneous fallacy (which in his delusional ignorance he seems to believe himself) that God’s judgment ended at the cross and there is no judgement now until the Great White Throne. This is, of course, total mirth. From the Acts of the Apostles (the first New Testament book written after the cross until the Book of Revelation), we see the judgment of God on Ananias and Saphira. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul uses the term “judgment”(krino) as a divine means of “correcting” (pedeou) His children. We see the judgment of God to take place upon the church of Thyatira with the slaughter of her children prior to the Great White Throne, and we likewise see God using deception as an instrument of judgment in 2 Thessalonians 2. There are multiple passages that ‚ prima facie dismiss Graham Cooke’s empty religious rambling for the utter nonsense it is. Like all of his ilk, he takes certain passages out of context and in isolation from co-text as a proof-text of his preconceived doctrinal inventions which are devoid of valid exegetical substance. His argument directly contradicts what the Word of God tells us.
His most essential problem is that he is trying to convey and communicate a view of God that is simply not scriptural. Graham Cooke describes coming to know God in his true person and character so that one sees that God is happy. The full character of God is contained in Jesus (Colossians 2:9) and Jesus is described to us as “a Man of sorrows acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). A time of predicted joy will indeed come, but how can God be happy when most of His creation is going to hell without the salvation He offers and when most of His own people Israel still reject their own Messiah?
Graham Cooke is a false teacher, a deceived and theologically ignorant man who deceives others, and a man with no scriptural right to be in the ministry of Christian leadership. Looking at the tragedy of his marriage, the rubbish he teaches certainly did not do him any good. Neither will it profit others, only deceive them with un-scriptural foolishness they imagine to be Christian by thinking with their emotions and confusing their feelings with authentic scriptural spirituality. As James’ epistle warns us:
“Let Few Of You Be Teachers For Teachers Will Be Judged More Strictly Than The Rest”. (James 3:1)
James Jacob Prasch
(Moriel)
