Weeks after surviving what he claimed was a near-death experience in which he was comatose for 10 hours, Fresh Fire USA leader Todd Bentley claimed he traveled in the spirit to the gate of Hell during the ordeal and saw people who had died prematurely, including suicide victims, and their souls were the most tormented in Hell.
In his comments made on New Year’s Eve at Rick Joyner’s embattled Morningstar Fellowship Church, Bentley delivered what he said was a message of hope from God for people who he argues are marked for premature death by the devil through afflictions like suicidal ideation and terminal illness.
He claimed God told him the reason why he had the near-death experience was so he could receive the message that 2025 would be “the year of the resurrection.”
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“I could hear groaning, prisoners groaning. I could hear the shrieks and the screams of people that were in the worst, deepest, darkest [place]. And there was a prison on the other side of [the gate of Hell],” Bentley said.
“I wasn’t permitted to go through the gate, but I looked up at the gate and the Lord said, ‘There’s something in your right hand.’ And he gave me the Scripture Psalms 102: 19 and 20 that the Lord looks down from the sanctuary in Heaven to hear the groaning of the prisoner to release those appointed for death.
“He goes, ‘That’s why I brought you here because you have the key, and you have the authority to confront and cancel death.’ And we’re getting ready for 2025 to be the year of the resurrection,” Bentley claimed.
He said during the experience, the Lord showed him a “blood red crayon” in his right hand and he “knew it was the blood of Jesus.” He was then shown a book of death with names listed in it, and he was told to use the crayon to strike off names from the book.
“He [God] said take that blood red crayon and X off the names of the people appointed for death because the spirit of death wants to take them prematurely. And I looked in and people whose names were on there, and it wasn’t so much names I remember but why people were appointed for death, like suicide,” Bentley continued.
“That people were so mentally ill they thought the only way out of their torment was to commit suicide. And so they were appointed for death. And there were already many others that had already taken their life [by] suicide and thought they could be free of all the pain and mental illness, and they were the most tormented in Hell,” he claimed.
The most recently published statistics on suicide from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in 2022 when 49,476 Americans died by self-inflicted means. There were also 1.6 million suicide attempts that year.
Bentley further claimed he saw others who had died from drug overdoses and terminal illnesses like cancer.
“I started to cross names off the list, and I realized there were many with sicknesses and diseases … incurable conditions, things you could never be healed of medically, and [the] Lord said you have authority over those,” Bentley said.
“The devil thinks they’re appointed for death, but you have the authority to cancel that, and this is why you’re here. And I remember right after this experience there was more to it, but the most important part was the Lord was in His resurrected glory.”
Last month, Bentley, who a team of leaders declared in 2020 was “not qualified” for leadership due to multiple “credible” allegations of “ungodly and immoral behavior,” including predatory sexual activity, said in a health update shared on Facebook Live that he has been “resting” since suffering “seizure-like” symptoms which rendered him unconscious for 10 hours on Nov. 23, 2024.
He said the last thing he remembered before the medical emergency was getting ready to watch wrestling on pay-per-view.
Bentley’s appearance at Morningstar Ministries comes as the leaders there, including founder Rick Joyner, face three lawsuits blaming the ministry for the sexual abuse former volunteer and ex-police officer Erickson Douglas Lee allegedly committed against multiple young boys who participated in one of its youth programs.
In one 40-page lawsuit filed last August, one of Lee’s victims, John Doe No. 1, and his parents accused Joyner, along with several top officials of the organization and multiple other staff members, of gross negligence for allegedly covering-up multiple incidences of sexual abuse in the ministry.
John Doe No. 2 made similar allegations in a lawsuit filed on Sept. 3, while John Doe No. 3 filed a similar lawsuit against the defendants on Sept. 5 regarding the abuse that took place from August 2021 through January 2023.
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