Doesn't Mark 16 encourage Christians to handle snakes? What do you say about that?
In Mark 16 -- if we accept the passage as genuine -- Jesus predicted that believers would be unharmed by snakes. This was fulfilled in Acts 28, when Paul, though bitten by a viper, did not suffer any ill effect. Mark 16:20 records that Jesus' predictions were in fact fulfilled. There is (logically) no reason that others would have to suffer snakebite, much less to intentionally receive snakebites in order to prove their faith.
Yet many Bible believers handle poisonous snakes to demonstrate their faith. For example, last century, "Little George" Hensley, an illiterate Tennessee preacher, took a large rattler out of a box and ordered the congregation to handle it or else 'be doomed to eternal hell.' Yet he so neglected his family that he eventually resigned as a preacher, and eventually reassembled his whiskey still. This led to imprisonment for manufacturing moonshine. Little George became a model prisoner on the chain gang. He remarried, and in all was married four times. Hensley died July 24th, 1955 of snakebite, refusing medical treatment. (He had already been bitten hundreds of times.)
Since 1910, there have only been about 80 deaths from "spiritual" snakebite. Today roughly 2500 Pentecostals handle snakes. How do they explain their (occasionally) being bitten? What do they say?
(1) God is punishing sin. (This was a common rationalization in the earlier 20th century).
(2) God allowed the bite to prove the snakes were in fact deadly, and not harmless.
(3) He wanted to test people's faith.
(4) He was providing an opportunity to show his healing power. (As the snakebite victim now needed help!)
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