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A pastor bitten by a snake while handling a serpent in a demonstration of faith is revaluating his life and belief after a close brush with death.
Cody Coots, a pastor at Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus’ Name church in Middlesboro, Kentucky, was bitten by the snake and refused to be taken to hospital.
According to Metro News, Coots instead demanded he be taken to the “mountaintop where God would judge whether he lives or dies.”
The pastor whose church is inspired by the biblical verse Mark 16:18 which reads, ‘They will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them,’ was instead forcefully taken to hospital by defiant congregants.
Blood could be seen all over his shirt as he was being rushed to hospital.
At the hospital, doctors reported to the defiant followers that the snake nearly severed the pastor’s temporal artery and he would have been dead in minutes.
This is not the first time this has happened at the snake-handling church.
According to the news outlet, the pastor’s father, Jamie Coots, died after he was bitten by a rattlesnake in 2014.
Another pastor, David Brock, also died after being bitten in 2015.
Three years earlier before David Brock’s death, Pastor Mack Randall Wolford also passed away after being bitten by a timber rattlesnake in 2012 in Virginia.
Metro News reports that during sermons the pastor “often picks up snakes from a box and carries one or two of them aloft while he preaches.”
