A pastor who nearly died after a snake bit him during a sermon has sensationally vowed to keep handling snakes. Shocking pictures show Cody Coots fighting to stay alive in hospital while on life support.
His face and airways were left badly swollen and bruised after he allowed a timber rattlesnake to bite him during a sermon.
Cody knew better than anyone about the dangers of handling snakes as he took over his congregation from his father, after he died from a snake bite during a sermon in 2014. In disturbing footage taken from the sermon in Middlesboro, Kentucky, Cody looks clearly unstable after the snake lunged at his ear, and he asks the congregation to take him to the mountaintop where God would judge whether he lives or dies. Fortunately, one of his congregation saw sense and took him to a hospital instead, where doctors said the snake came close to severing his temporal artery, which would have almost certainly killed him.
Cody said he will not stop handling snakes. He said: ‘These snakes are part of the Bible, and I’m going to put that before anyone. But if you’ve not been raised up in it, you’ll look at it like “Man, those people are crazy”. ‘I’ve seen a lot of people bitten, I’ve seen them suffer, I’ve seen them come close to death.
‘But I do believe that if you get bit and you have to suffer, that there was something wrong, either that you didn’t move when God told you to, you went against what God said, I do believe that.’
