NOTE: Whosoever might happen to read these notes must realize that this is the revelation I got from the messages, some readings by Message Pastors and the Holy Writ. God bless you. Amen!
Who Is William Marriom Branham (Malachi 4:5-6, Rev 10:7)
As a Christian, I realize that I don’t know everything; and that’s so right. And never will I stand up and say I do. On the other hand, that which I have said, I know it is right and I am not about to take it back. The reason I can talk like this, is because I will keep my mouth shut until I know what I am talking about.
[Laodicean Age]
61 Now, this angel that comes in this day, I want to... I've got something written here; I'd just like to read it. But he will be known the last part of the age. And because we are so close to that, so close to that Light age, that probably he's on earth now. We don't know him. He will be a--a mighty prophet that will be rejected by the church world, for they will go right on in their sins and finally be spewed out of the mouth of God, out of the mouth of God's Presence. I believe it will be one like Elijah. I'm going to give my reasons why. Now, let's just turn over here in the Book of Malachi, just a moment. I'm going to give you why I think it will be one anointed with the Spirit of Elijah. Now, I want you to put on your--your grace cap now. Malachi the 4th chapter, now, listen as I read, and you in your Bible. Now, think real close now for the next few minutes now, 'fore we go into the church age.
70 [A brother says, "Luke 1:17"--Ed.] Luke 1:17. Thank you, brother. That's right, Luke 1. Mark... Luke 1:17, instead of 2. I want to get the 14th, that's where... That's it, brother. That's exactly right, Luke 1:17. All right. Now, now you can mark it down. Now, what it is, it's out of the blessings of the Lord, that it was blessed.
Now, we realize that that wasn't John, 'cause it wasn't the dreadful day of the Lord, was it? And neither did He burn the earth. So it must've meant a preview, or--or another future coming of John--or of--of Elijah. Is that right? 'Cause He said, "I'll send Elijah, and I'm going to burn the whole earth, and I'm going to just clean it off, and you'll walk out upon their ashes." That's the millennium; we know that. After the atomic bomb shall blow it from pieces, then there'll be--the earth will straighten up. And there'll be a great day here on the earth, and the church will reign with Jesus on the earth for a thousand years. Is that right? "But before that great and dreadful day of the Lord, when it's going to be blowed up, I'll send to you Elijah the prophet." Is that right? So it did not mean John the Baptist in that state, because the dreadful day of the Lord wasn't then: two thousand years off. Is that right?
Now there is a two-fold fulfillment of this spirit of Elijah. It is a very short little scripture, but God does not have to talk all day to get something said. Intellectuals can write volumes FROM WHAT GOD SAYS IN ONLY A FEW SHORT WORDS. ONLY THE HOLY GHOST CAN REVEAL THE DEPTH OF TRUTH THAT IS ACTUALLY HIDDEN IN THE WORD OF GOD WRITTEN BY HOLY MEN OF OLD INSPIRED BY GOD FOR THAT PURPOSE. God is His Own Interpreter of the Word.
Now Malachi was the last Old Testament prophet of Israel and he closed his writings with the words we are using for the text.
[Revelation part 1]: The spiritual condition of the 7 churches typed or represented the spiritual condition of a certain age of time in the dispensation of grace. The church at Ephesus was as different from the church at Laodicea, as night is from day. Ephesus was the seed church. It was on fire for God, but Laodicea was lukewarm. Now as we stand at the end of the grace age every one of the things that Laodicea was rebuked for are present in this very hour of time. This is an age of materialism, and luke-warmness toward God. Almost everyone you meet claims to be a Christian, but one cannot help but notice that the fruit of the Spirit of God is absent from the lives of most of them. Why? These so called Christians do not have the reality of the new birth in their lives. In the first century of Christianity, a person would not dare admit they were a Christian unless they had the genuine product. In other words, something inside them that was so real it would even cause them to stand for Jesus Christ in the face of martyrdom.
But in our day, being called a Christian is good for business, life partners and politics. It doesn't matter what church, for the spirit of this age promotes going to the church of your choice. But there is only one church, and it is a universal body of true believers that hold an apostolic revelation in their hearts of the word of God, and they are not a denomination. The true body of Christ (the church) is made up of people from every nation, that all believe the same thing concerning the basic doctrines of the word of God.
Now the faith of the fathers is recorded in the pages of this precious old Bible. God’s purpose in sending that Elijah spirit was to get His children back into the book of all books where the faith of the fathers is clearly taught. That is why every “spoken word book” you might read preached by the prophet it will point you back to the bible. The Holy Ghost wrote this book, and it was the Holy Ghost that caused Bro. Branham to preach what he did, from this book, (the Bible) and if he were still with us today, preaching, he would still take his text from the Bible like he always did before. Now this Bible we carry is the sole source of authoritative scripture and there is no other books all equal in authority with the holy Bible.
Mal. 4:5-6 reads “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to THEIR fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” There are two things that stand out, both in the first, and the last advent. It is FATHERS, and CHILDREN, then CHILDREN, and FATHERS. Saints, you have to realize that in the mind of God every prophecy is as a finished thing. Everything was spoken from the positive point of view, for with God, there is no doubt, nor hope so. Many of those Jews that looked for Elijah, failed to understand that it was only the Elijah anointing that God was going to send. This anointing always dealt with apostasy. It was a God identifying spirit that always led men to repentance from out of apostasy. Now let’s look at the words heart, and fathers. Well the physical heart in man is only an organ that pumps the blood of life through the physical body, so this can not be turned to anything.
But many a time you hear something with your ears and it just seems to have a quickening effect within your innermost being. I am sure you all have experienced that. Also sometime you would hear something that would cause a little feeling of fear or fright within you, something of a negative nature. Either way though, you hear it with your natural ears first, and your mind must then decide whether it is of a benefit to you or not. In other words, your mind is like a transmitter, transmitting something that your whole being is affected by, and that is why those Judiastic fathers reacted as they did. I believe you are beginning to see what John’s preaching did to those old Judiastic fathers. For hundreds of years they had been on the same old repetitional merry go round, spiritually speaking, and all the time they were getting farther and farther away from God with their traditions, and their interpretations of the scrolls.
But then word came to them, that there was a wild man down by the river, preaching about the kingdom of God. This caused their ears to prick up. What they were hearing was not necessarily a joyful report on their part, for they would first of all; question the authority of any man who would do what John was doing. Naturally the most prominent ones hesitated to go themselves, to investigate, but they did not hesitate to send others of their number to stand in the crowd as spies. Day after day, John stood at his post of duty down by the Jordan, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As time passed and the news spread, they were coming by the droves, and John was baptizing them right and left, as they repented and confessed their sins. Now, who was being baptized? It was not the fathers, yet. It was the down and out class of Jewish society. Spiritual dropouts, you might say. Jesus spoke of how publicans, harlots, and sinners believed John’s preaching, repented, and was baptized, and entered into the kingdom, and said to those others, But you are left without. It was not the Judiastic fathers that first came to him. It was the down and outers, that had just about lost all hope, spiritually speaking. Because of apostasy, spiritual death had set in, so God made the first move. He sent John (Elijah anointing) with a message to restore something, and that something was spiritual reality, and hope in God. John built that highway for the Lord while standing right there in the old Jordan River.
It did not matter how high, nor how low they were; according to man’s standards, or how crooked their lives were before. When John raised them out of the water, the high ones were made low, the low ones were elevated, and the crooked lives were straightened out. That is how the mountains and hills were made low, and the valleys lifted up, and the crooked made straight. It was a highway in the hearts of repentant sinners, where the Lord would have full right of way. God was not coming down, to ride up and down a highway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea; He was coming to dwell in the hearts of a people that had been made ready to receive Him. Who were they? They were the children of Malachi 4:6. It is true that they were the children genetically, of that Jewish society, but that is not what gives them that identity in Malachi’s prophecy. Their Malachi identity is that they were going to be children of God. Potentially they already were, in the mind of God, but the manifestation of it came about there at the Jordan River (Isaiah 40).
Now John did not make them children, but he prepared the way for them to become children of God. That is what got the attention of the fathers. They had to find out what was really taking place down there. When those Judiastic fathers began to come into the crowd, he started blasting the tops of those mountains. With one huge blast he brought down a bunch of them; “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” John could not have cared less about honoring anyone but God. Therefore He said also, “Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance; and think not to say within yourselves, (Be sure you get this point here.) We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.”
John knew that because of their natural heritage, these Jewish fathers were depending on the fact that they could say, We are Abraham’s seed. We believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We keep the law of Moses. But who are you? I’m just a voice. Hallelujah! The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord. You hear the same spirit speaking in our day. I have heard people say, My mother was a saintly old Methodist, and so was my grandmother. Therefore I was born a Methodist, and I will die a Methodist. What was good enough for them is good enough for me. Listen to me, people, No born again child of God will say that, for we know that God does not judge us, nor favor us, just because our parents were a certain way. This is an individual walk with God. Your genetical background does not mean anything to God, as far as your soul’s salvation is concerned. Yes, those fathers came out to look John over, believing all along that they were children of God, just because they could trace their heritage back to Abraham to whom God promised a blessing to him and his seed after him. Saints, do not ever forget what the scriptures say about Abraham; He believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, and that is the only was any of us can stand before God, righteous simply by believing His word.
We do not inherit righteousness from our parents, and neither do we earn it by any of our works; it is imputed to us when we believe properly. Not just any old man made doctrine, but the revelated word of God. So John called those big shot religious leaders exactly what they were, a generation of vipers. They did not know the first thing about the new covenant that was ready to be put into effect. Only those that were truly repenting, and being baptized, would be receivers of that new covenant. The only way any of those Judiastic fathers could ever become children of God, was to repent, and be baptized, for just simply being able to say, We are children of Abraham, would no longer be looked upon as having any spiritual benefit.
There was a day when God would honor them as believers, if they wrote the law upon little emblems, and hung it on the door posts, and so forth, so they could see it both going in and coming out of their homes, and they honored it as God had instructed them to do. But here is a new dispensation coming into effect, with a new covenant that will replace the old one, and now God will only honor it. Notice what Paul wrote to the Hebrews about it, chapter 8; verses 6-13. We will not read it all now, but you can later. In verse 6, he speaks of how Jesus is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” On down farther we read, “I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: and they shall not teach every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.”
Now, notice verse 13. “In that he saith, A new covenant, He hath made the first one old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.” In other words, God took His law down from the door posts, and was putting it in through the door of man’s heart into his innermost being. But it has to pass through the mind before the heart can receive it, and that is what God was preparing this lower class of people for. They were to be the children of the new covenant, when the old covenant was cut off completely. What do you think John meant when he said, God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham? He was talking about revelation faith from among those stony hearts. am not making a new covenant with you; I am simply announcing that the time is at hand for God to do it. John was not seeking to make a name for himself; he was only fulfilling something that God had raised him up to do. Now that did not keep some of John’s followers from trying to make him something more than what he was, but John himself did only what he was anointed to do. Those religious fathers who had always been in charge of every religious activity resented John, and resented what he was saying. No, let me rephrase that. They hated John, and they hated what he was saying even more, but there were some tender buds standing there, that would soon spring forth into life, taking the place of those trees that were being cut down. They did not know that, but God knew it. God knew what was going to be said that day, even before He ever created the world. Therefore to those Jewish fathers John was saying, Until now, you have read Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalms, and all the law of Moses and you have twisted everything to fit into your traditions, but from this day on, you will have to submit yourselves to God in a different way in order to be accepted to Him (fruits of repentance).
Did they do it, you may say? No, because they had another spirit on them. It was not the Spirit of Jehovah that had led them into all those religious traditions. It was not the Spirit of Jehovah that caused them to have murder in their hearts. They washed their feet and hands, and went through all those Levitical purification exercises, but their hearts were far from the God that gave those laws, therefore their religion was vain. They had clean hands and feet, clean pots and pans, and they said all the right things, but God was looking for some people whose hearts could be made clean also, and those fathers were too proud of their traditions and accomplishments to humble themselves, so they rejected God’s new covenant, and pronounced their own destination by doing so. That left the way clear for God to raise up some other men who would one day be looked upon as fathers, but first, they would be “the children” of Malachi 4:6, in the first advent of Jesus Christ.
Judiastic fathers were so proud to listen to John. They loved being referred to as Dr. So and So, Rabbi So and So, and all of that. Religion is full of that sort still today, but not true Christianity. We are living in a new era of time. God will never call another young man to enroll in a Bible school to study theology. As a matter of fact, God has never called anyone to do that, but I will have to say, We have passed through an era when God worked through such men, allowing some of them to be carriers of certain Bible truths that were to be restored to His true body of believers in due time. This gospel did not start out being preached by the great learned men of that first age, and it will not end up being preached by that kind either. Let me read you a few verses from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, and we will see what he had to say about the wisdom of learned men. (1:19) “For it is written. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believed.” The preaching that gets men saved is something more than just a bunch of theories hatched out in a seminary someplace. Divine revelation is not something that can be published in three, or six month courses, and sold for so many kwachas. It is free to all who will receive it, and it is preached by some of the most uneducated men upon the face of the earth, and no matter who preaches it, nor how much anointing they have, it still takes the Holy Ghost to make it a revelation to you. Notice verse 26. “For ye see your calling brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” Why did God choose to work through such simplicity? Verse 29, tells us exactly why. “That no FLESH should glory in His presence.” If God allowed degrees of education to have any bearing on the effectiveness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, then men who attained to certain levels of achievement in life would have somewhat to glory in aside from the pure grace and mercy of God. Hallelujah!
I am so glad that God is no respecter of person. If He was like we have a tendency to be, then all the educated and important people in the world would have first chance at God’s bountiful gifts, and the rest of us would just simply have to get at the end of the line and beg for crumbs. That is not to say that there is not enough of God for everyone, but I think you know what I mean. It just simply comes down to the fact that God receives more glory working through weak and seemingly unimportant vessels. Praise Him! No wonder Jesus said, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Notice that next verse, (Matt. 18:4) “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” That lets us see why those ecclesiastical fathers could not become children of God. They just simply could not humble themselves and come God’s way. They could not accept the idea that God would speak to the people of Israel without going through them first. I can just see some of them, with their head high, and their chest puffed out, “Who does this wild looking critter think he is? We have gone to school for many, many years to learn all the law and precepts of God, and this fellow, with no educational background, comes walking out of the wilderness claiming to be the voice of God. What kind of fools does he take us for? Does he really think anyone will believe him?” Brothers and Sisters: You have probably heard that very kind of boastful talk in some of the places God delivered you from. They still do it. The blind will lead the blind, as long as this dispensation stands.
The religious Pharisees, Zealots, Scribes and those holier than thou Essene Jews, that dwelt in caves down by the Dead Sea, who in the natural seemed to be the holiest, the purest, the most undefiled by the world, the most dedicated to God of all were the fathers of Malachi 4:6 in the first advent of Christ. Now the Children were the nobodys, the down trodden. Now if you do not see who the fathers and the children were in that day, you will never be able to receive a true revelation of who they are here at the end of the age. I will say this also; If you do not know what the faith of the apostolic fathers was, you will never know whether you have been turned back to it or not. In other words, you just simply cannot pick up a few remarks here at the end time and be looked upon as a revelated son of God, if you are void of understanding concerning all that proceeds a true revelation. John the Baptist knew what he was looking for. He was only carrying a message sent forth to separate them from apostate religion, and get them ready to receive the one that would initiate a new covenant with them. That was God’s way of rescuing a spiritual seed from an apostate system of death. John separated them from their old religious system, washed them up, got their minds open, and their spiritual eyes cleared up so they could begin to look forward to a greater unfolding of the purpose of God. After Pentecost, when the church really got its birth, and the new covenant was in full force, certain men from the ranks of the new covenant children began to stand out as leaders in the church. Peter took the lead on the day of Pentecost, when false accusations were laid against those who had just received the Holy Ghost, but there was James, and John, and Stephen, and many others that stood to defend the faith of this new covenant that Jesus had activated and made effective by His death, burial, and resurrection.
Jesus was gone from the scene, and so was John the Baptist, but those Christians (the children of that day) had something in their hearts that kept them going on. Of course we understand that the gospel was first preached to the Jews, and God let it continue to be administered to that nation of people for several years, but He saw that the spirit of that old Judiastic system would never change, (He knew it all along by His great foreknowledge, but He allotted them sufficient time and opportunity, in order that they would be without excuse) so He began to unfold this great redemption plan to the Gentiles. The covenant He had made with Abraham would be fulfilled. Not only would Abraham have a natural seed, he would also have a spiritual seed. All who believe God’s word, and walk with Him in truth are the spiritual seed of Abraham (Colossians 2).
What those Scribes and Pharisees were holding onto in the days of Jesus, was all God required from their forefathers who had followed the law of Moses out of a pure heart that desired to please God, but after Calvary, no salvation was wrought by keeping the law of Moses. The scriptures make it very clear that, in the first advent of Malachi 4:6, only those who were turned to children by the word of God, were accepted of God.
Therefore I say to you saints in the name of Jesus that in the second advent of Malachi 4:6, only those who are turned back to the faith of those first century, apostolic fathers, by the word of the Lord delivered in this age, will be accepted of God. The Word of God delivered to us by that Elijah spirit in this age was supposed to turn children to fathers. Now the prophet William Marrion Branham is the fathers of Malachi 4:6. He was sent by God when God knew it was light to fulfill his scriptures, with that Elijah anointing, to preach against apostasy, identify the one true God, and turn our attention back to what Peter, James, John, Paul, and all those early church fathers preached. He did that for me, and for a lot of you. Now you should not follow the man but follow the word of the Lord that he was trying to get us back to.
Bro. Branham, who came to this age with that Elijah spirit, to turn us back to those apostolic truths, was not a tare, but those who glorify his flesh, instead of following the truth he stood for, are tares without a doubt. He delivered the word of God to this generation, and you can do with it whatsoever you choose. You can either follow that truth and be one of the children of God that he was sent to restore to the truth, or you can be a tare. One thing I do know for sure, is that all who are truly children of God in this day and hour, will see Paul, Peter, James, John, and all of those apostolic fathers who defended the faith in their day, and they will love the man that pointed them back to the truth, and will defend his character, image, and purpose, but they will worship God, according to the apostolic truth that he pointed them back to. Let us read Malachi 4:6, for it is important that you remember what we are dealing with, so you do not miss the main points. Talking about the Elijah that was to come, it says, “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, (that was John the Baptist) and the heart of the children to their fathers, (that was Bro. Branham) lest (or before) I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Now that is what we are looking at. Bro. Branham was that Elijah which was to fulfill the second part of that prophecy. It is only necessary that we understand what is meant by turning the heart of THE children, back to THEIR fathers. I have tried to help you see that the fathers of John’s hour were the last of the old law age covenant teachers. That is why they had to be made to see what John was doing, even though they could not find it in their hearts to repent and become a child, a child of God. Looking at the history we see, that as Jesus came back to Jerusalem just before He was crucified, every day He would go into the temple and preach. But then, one day, as He was leaving, going out over the Mount of Olives with His disciples, He looked back at that beautiful city, and the temple, and wept over it.
In Luke 13:34, you read where He said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.” Why would He say that? Simply because every time He went into the temple to preach, here would come that bunch of Pharisees and elders, questioning Him as though they really wanted to learn something, when really, all they wanted to do was trap Him. They wanted Him to say something they could use against Him. These are the ones that delivered Him to Pilot, to be crucified. Now a tare is a make-believer, a child of the devil, pretending to be a child of God, and the churches are full of them today, but there were none of them among the ranks of the believers in the book of Acts, for those early apostles guarded against any attempt of Satan to pervert that true gospel, so he had to wait until after they all passed off he scene, before he could actually successfully sow his tares in this field of God. (The church) as early as 54 A.D., Paul wrote to the Thessalonians concerning that man of sin that would come upon the scene in the end of the age, and stated even then, that the mystery of iniquity was already at work (Ephesian Church Age).
Then in 90 A.D. John wrote, in his little epistle, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whither they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” John thought the end was getting close, because he saw that spirit of Antichrist at work, but little did he know that it was only the beginning of what God would allow Satan to do for the next 1900 years. It was really in the second church age, that Satan actually succeeded in placing his tares in the congregation of the saints. How did he do it? Without those staunch guards of the faith to detect them, make-believers, falsely converted to the faith, were able to slip into the fellowship, and naturally, after they were in, the same Holy Ghost that fell on the true seed, also fell on them, and they could shout and dance right along with the rest of them. But they never could receive a true revelation. Instead, they began to inject their own ideas little by little until the church was plunged headlong into the period known as the Dark Ages. It did not happen suddenly; it actually took several hundred years for it to reach its worst hour of time. You know, that according to the 2nd parable of Matthew 13, once that tare spirit gets inside, it will grow just like the true crop, and actually the Lord said, “Let them all grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” (you can get all this in the exposition of the 7 church ages)
Why did God allow Satan to get by with a thing like that? It puts true believers to the test. Will they walk with God, or follow the crowd? Those tares were allowed to attack, and pervert every true doctrine of the New Testament church, and the first thing they went to work on, was the one God revelation. They got that perverted into a trinity. The new birth experience (the baptism of the Holy Ghost) was changed into a formalistic ritual, and a holy way of life was pushed completely out of the picture. That does not mean that everyone was like that, for God has always preserved seed, but the ruling spirit in the church was like that, for it was tares running things during those Dark Age years. No true child of God would throw out the truth, but when your are outnumbered so badly, all you can do is live your own convictions, and let the rest do what they want to do. Therefore coming out of the Dark Ages was Martin Luther, a monk that God revealed an apostolic truth to. The just shall live by faith instead of by the word of the pope. Now remember, God was not restoring the faith of the fathers, He was restoring His children back to it. It took almost 500 years for Satan to rob the church of that true faith, and God has now been in the process of restoring His church back to it for about the same length of time. It was the restoration of God’s children to these apostolic truths that brought the Dark Ages period to its end, for every scriptural truth is light, and people simply cannot dwell in darkness, and light both at the same time. No, Satan had his millennium of darkness, and now the church of the living god has been restored to the light. The vast majority of world religion is still in spiritual darkness, but God’s true church is walking in the light of His word once again, HIS NAME, HIS WORD, HIS WORKS. God restored the church back to the faith of the fathers by degrees, just like she left it. The church did not go from light to darkness suddenly, so God did not bring her from darkness to light suddenly. He restored her to one truth at a time, and He did not have to use a tare to carry that truth. Luther was not a tare himself, but the moment he started to preach faith, the tares started gathering around him, Hallelujah!
We have faith. Hallelujah! Faith is wonderful. You see, the tares will rejoice right along with the saints, and they will grow right along with the saints, but they can never become children of God. Once a tare, always a tare. You may have heard people say, I used to be a child of the devil, but now I am a child of God. But that is not correct. A person that was foreknown of God, was never a child of the devil; that person, before they come to a true salvation experience, is simply a servant of the devil, a prisoner, you might say. That is why they are referred to as LOST; they are lost from their heavenly Father. That does not mean that God does not know all about them; it simply means, that such a lost soul does not know where his true family is, and God always makes the first move, to draw that lost soul to Himself. Alright, so the tares began gathering around those true children of God that had embraced Luther’s revelation, Oh, this faith is wonderful, but we had better get organized, so that we can better administer it to the world. It has never been the true children of God that founded these religious organizations; that tare spirit does that, in order to keep the truth they have from moving any further, or to keep those who have a certain truth from moving any further with God.
[The Restoration of the Bride Tree] Do you know why they can never move any further with God? When they organize, they write up their bylaws and articles of faith, and that is all they will allow, in their organization. Every one of them looks at themselves as exactly what God wants his church to be like; therefore they leave no room for God to add any further revelation of His word to them, so they rally around what they have, for a while, and then death and decay begins to strike their system. But all the while, they are affecting some people that are true children of God, and even though death strikes the system, the truth they organized around, never dies. It was the same pattern all the way through the Reformation. God would reveal an apostolic truth to a chosen vessel, Luther, Calvin, Knox, Wesley, and on down the line, and the followers of that man’s teaching would take that truth, and build a denominational fence around it. That is exactly the way the devil wanted it. That is how these daughters of that old Roman Catholic whore were defiled. Now do not get disturbed at me for saying that, for it was the angel talking to the apostle John, in 96 A.D., that first called her that. He showed John the final judgment of that great whore, before the whore ever even came into existence.
You can read it in Revelation 17:1-5, and you will see there, that this great whore had some daughters, for she is called, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. Those daughters are all of the religious organizations that have come out of the Reformation movement. When those daughters embraced a truth that separated them from the old Roman Catholic mother system; they were clean and pure, but before too long, that old tare spirit would get in, take over, build an organization, and cause the whole thing to commit spiritual fornication with the world. That made them harlots; they were no longer in a place where a holy God could entrust, nor impart divine revelation to them. Methodism, founded off of John Wesley’s holiness teaching was built into the most wonderful, and largest Protestant denomination upon the face of the earth, and that brings our little summary up to around the dawning of the 20th century, a point in time when Laodicea was just about ready to be activated. Laodicea is the age of materialism, the industrial age that has lifted the standard of living from where it remained you might say, for hundreds of years, to where it is today, in only a few short years.
God had restored the church little by little, back to the apostolic truth that she had let slip away from her, but the tares were still running things. Here was all those beautiful truths that the New Testament church was founded upon, all fenced in and divided up, and if God did not do something those tares would sap the very life out of those true children of God that were scattered around in those systems. He could not perfect His church as long as it was divided up like that, and He could not call her to glory before she was perfected, so what did He do? Hallelujah! He raised up a prophet messenger, and anointed him to call His children out of those places, and lead them to see that the true church of the living God is not divided, nor built into a denomination. Who was that prophet messenger? His name was William Marrion Branham, born under very unusual circumstances, in a simple little cabin near Burkesville, KY. He was not a theologian. As a matter of fact, he did not have very much of society’s formal education, but he did have the hand of God upon his life from the time that he was a very small boy. We will not go into his life, for that is recorded in ever so many publications that can be obtained [u can read, my life story, a man sent from God, a prophet visits RSA].
What I want you to see from this message, is what his ministry fulfilled in the redemption process of God. We do not need to lift up his flesh, in order to lift up the purpose of God that his ministry fulfilled. I truly thank God for the day He allowed me to get across this message, for as I read the books, he pointed me right back to the apostles Paul, Peter, James, John and all of those other New Testament writers. He made that Bible that I once was afraid of, talk to my soul. Hallelujah!
It was in the year 1933, when Bro. Branham, as a young evangelist, was baptizing some converts in the Ohio River that God spoke to him, and commissioned him for his role in the fulfillment of Malachi 4:5-6, of the Old Testament. We started our message with this scriptures, because it is the most quoted, and seemingly the least understood of all scripture, among the following of this humble servant of God that fulfilled exactly, what he was called of God to fulfill. While he was baptizing, there in the river, just like John the Baptist, he heard a voice say, Look up. Look up. When he looked up, there was a great light hanging right there over his head. Then a voice spoke, and said, “As John the Baptist was sent to forerun the first coming of the Lord, so are you sent with a message that shall prepare the way for His second coming.”
What he would do, had to be worded a little different than what John did, for John was sent to introduce a physical man. But Bro. Branham was not able to introduce a physical man. It is the message Bro. Branham delivered to this generation, that is forerunning the second coming of Jesus Christ. John prepared the way and actually introduced a physical person in which dwelt the very God of all creation. There in the Jordan River, that day, stood both messengers of Malachi 3:1, one messenger introducing another one. But when you look at Brother Branham, you do not see two physical messengers. You see one messenger, with a message from the throne of God, sent forth to this generation, for the purpose of calling God’s people out of denominational bondage, and allowing them an opportunity to dress themselves up and get ready to meet the Lord. All of this had to be accomplished before the Lord would return in person to smite the earth with a curse, as Malachi 4:6 states, (or to smite all wickedness with judgment) Gentiles have never been privileged to know Christ after the flesh, but they can know Him, for He is living in the pages of a book, but the book has to be read under the leadership of the Holy Ghost, in order for the reader to see Him, and before Brother Branham came upon the scene to cry out against it, Satan’s shrewd tactics prevented that.
God’s people were more or less forced to read the Bible through the eyes of their denominational system. Those who were so blessed as to see one God, and water baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, were blinded to most of the other great truths of this new covenant that was introduced by the Lord Jesus Christ in His first advent, so that left God without a crop that He could reap from the pure seed that was sown. All of those first age Christians understood that, but they were not the crop that God would harvest, they were the seed, so to speak. When you plant a seed, you make sure you plant the kind of seed that you want a multiplied reproduction of at harvest time, and you cultivate and care for that crop until you do everything you need to, to get it ready to be harvested. Therefore I ask you, Do you think God, who is the author of perfection, would plant a church in the earth different than the kind He intended to harvest? That would be a careless perversion of His own law of reproduction, and only the devil is a perverter. But any person with spiritual insight could plainly see, that the church of 1933 was not like the church in the book of Acts. It was a long way from it, even after almost 500 years, since the Reformation started. What was the answer? How would God ever get an exact reproduction of that first age church? There was only one way, short of starting all over again. (And there was no scriptural provision for that.) He would have to do something to get the end time church back to believing exactly what that first age church believed. There is scripture for that, Malachi 4:5-6, our text. But who was there in the land that had a universal voice of authority, of the caliber that could turn the universal body of Christ around, and get them all going in the same direction? The Pentecostals had the greatest light, but that was still not what the church of the living God was to reflect back to Him. Some of those Jesus name Pentecostals that had the same evidence as the trinity element, were so set in their way, and so sure that they were what God wanted: they referred to the trinity as false brethren. When some of them came out to investigate Bro. Branham, they were heard to say, IF THIS MAN TRULY IS A PROPHET, WHY DOES HE ASSOCIATE WITH THESE ASSEMBLY OF GOD TRINITY PEOPLE?
They were like Peter, before God sent Him to the house of Cornelius. You must remember he was not the messenger just to the Pentecostals; he was the messenger to the whole age. God still had children in all those denominational systems, and they had to hear their call to come out, and be separated from man made traditions. As Bro. Branham preached from place to place, the big bishops and presbyters came out to look him over. They would sit there so proud, but they would see a display of the power of God that they just simply could not understand, and you would see tears come into their eyes as the light of God reflected from that man. I am not talking about the light of truth that he preached. Do you know what happened? They looked right into that light, and it was so bright, it blinded the. Why? They were tares. They were sold out to a tare system. The light of truth did not blind God’s true children that looked into it. No, it illuminated their souls. What was he doing out there? He was delivering a message first to call God’s children out of those systems, and secondly to turn them back to the faith of THEIR fathers.
He was one of the end time children that were to be turned back to the faith of the fathers. God raised him up from among the ranks of those who were to be turned back, and placed an anointing upon him that had never been displayed in that magnitude upon any man, since it was displayed in the life of Christ without measure. That still did not change the fact that he was one of the end time church children. God raised him up at a time when a lot of the predestinated children were getting so fed up with manmade traditions; they were ready to become spiritual dropouts. I had just about come to that place myself, before I received the Holy Ghost.
As a Christian, I realize that I don’t know everything; and that’s so right. And never will I stand up and say I do. On the other hand, that which I have said, I know it is right and I am not about to take it back. The reason I can talk like this, is because I will keep my mouth shut until I know what I am talking about.
[Laodicean Age]
61 Now, this angel that comes in this day, I want to... I've got something written here; I'd just like to read it. But he will be known the last part of the age. And because we are so close to that, so close to that Light age, that probably he's on earth now. We don't know him. He will be a--a mighty prophet that will be rejected by the church world, for they will go right on in their sins and finally be spewed out of the mouth of God, out of the mouth of God's Presence. I believe it will be one like Elijah. I'm going to give my reasons why. Now, let's just turn over here in the Book of Malachi, just a moment. I'm going to give you why I think it will be one anointed with the Spirit of Elijah. Now, I want you to put on your--your grace cap now. Malachi the 4th chapter, now, listen as I read, and you in your Bible. Now, think real close now for the next few minutes now, 'fore we go into the church age.
70 [A brother says, "Luke 1:17"--Ed.] Luke 1:17. Thank you, brother. That's right, Luke 1. Mark... Luke 1:17, instead of 2. I want to get the 14th, that's where... That's it, brother. That's exactly right, Luke 1:17. All right. Now, now you can mark it down. Now, what it is, it's out of the blessings of the Lord, that it was blessed.
Now, we realize that that wasn't John, 'cause it wasn't the dreadful day of the Lord, was it? And neither did He burn the earth. So it must've meant a preview, or--or another future coming of John--or of--of Elijah. Is that right? 'Cause He said, "I'll send Elijah, and I'm going to burn the whole earth, and I'm going to just clean it off, and you'll walk out upon their ashes." That's the millennium; we know that. After the atomic bomb shall blow it from pieces, then there'll be--the earth will straighten up. And there'll be a great day here on the earth, and the church will reign with Jesus on the earth for a thousand years. Is that right? "But before that great and dreadful day of the Lord, when it's going to be blowed up, I'll send to you Elijah the prophet." Is that right? So it did not mean John the Baptist in that state, because the dreadful day of the Lord wasn't then: two thousand years off. Is that right?
Now there is a two-fold fulfillment of this spirit of Elijah. It is a very short little scripture, but God does not have to talk all day to get something said. Intellectuals can write volumes FROM WHAT GOD SAYS IN ONLY A FEW SHORT WORDS. ONLY THE HOLY GHOST CAN REVEAL THE DEPTH OF TRUTH THAT IS ACTUALLY HIDDEN IN THE WORD OF GOD WRITTEN BY HOLY MEN OF OLD INSPIRED BY GOD FOR THAT PURPOSE. God is His Own Interpreter of the Word.
Now Malachi was the last Old Testament prophet of Israel and he closed his writings with the words we are using for the text.
[Revelation part 1]: The spiritual condition of the 7 churches typed or represented the spiritual condition of a certain age of time in the dispensation of grace. The church at Ephesus was as different from the church at Laodicea, as night is from day. Ephesus was the seed church. It was on fire for God, but Laodicea was lukewarm. Now as we stand at the end of the grace age every one of the things that Laodicea was rebuked for are present in this very hour of time. This is an age of materialism, and luke-warmness toward God. Almost everyone you meet claims to be a Christian, but one cannot help but notice that the fruit of the Spirit of God is absent from the lives of most of them. Why? These so called Christians do not have the reality of the new birth in their lives. In the first century of Christianity, a person would not dare admit they were a Christian unless they had the genuine product. In other words, something inside them that was so real it would even cause them to stand for Jesus Christ in the face of martyrdom.
But in our day, being called a Christian is good for business, life partners and politics. It doesn't matter what church, for the spirit of this age promotes going to the church of your choice. But there is only one church, and it is a universal body of true believers that hold an apostolic revelation in their hearts of the word of God, and they are not a denomination. The true body of Christ (the church) is made up of people from every nation, that all believe the same thing concerning the basic doctrines of the word of God.
Now the faith of the fathers is recorded in the pages of this precious old Bible. God’s purpose in sending that Elijah spirit was to get His children back into the book of all books where the faith of the fathers is clearly taught. That is why every “spoken word book” you might read preached by the prophet it will point you back to the bible. The Holy Ghost wrote this book, and it was the Holy Ghost that caused Bro. Branham to preach what he did, from this book, (the Bible) and if he were still with us today, preaching, he would still take his text from the Bible like he always did before. Now this Bible we carry is the sole source of authoritative scripture and there is no other books all equal in authority with the holy Bible.
Mal. 4:5-6 reads “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to THEIR fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” There are two things that stand out, both in the first, and the last advent. It is FATHERS, and CHILDREN, then CHILDREN, and FATHERS. Saints, you have to realize that in the mind of God every prophecy is as a finished thing. Everything was spoken from the positive point of view, for with God, there is no doubt, nor hope so. Many of those Jews that looked for Elijah, failed to understand that it was only the Elijah anointing that God was going to send. This anointing always dealt with apostasy. It was a God identifying spirit that always led men to repentance from out of apostasy. Now let’s look at the words heart, and fathers. Well the physical heart in man is only an organ that pumps the blood of life through the physical body, so this can not be turned to anything.
But many a time you hear something with your ears and it just seems to have a quickening effect within your innermost being. I am sure you all have experienced that. Also sometime you would hear something that would cause a little feeling of fear or fright within you, something of a negative nature. Either way though, you hear it with your natural ears first, and your mind must then decide whether it is of a benefit to you or not. In other words, your mind is like a transmitter, transmitting something that your whole being is affected by, and that is why those Judiastic fathers reacted as they did. I believe you are beginning to see what John’s preaching did to those old Judiastic fathers. For hundreds of years they had been on the same old repetitional merry go round, spiritually speaking, and all the time they were getting farther and farther away from God with their traditions, and their interpretations of the scrolls.
But then word came to them, that there was a wild man down by the river, preaching about the kingdom of God. This caused their ears to prick up. What they were hearing was not necessarily a joyful report on their part, for they would first of all; question the authority of any man who would do what John was doing. Naturally the most prominent ones hesitated to go themselves, to investigate, but they did not hesitate to send others of their number to stand in the crowd as spies. Day after day, John stood at his post of duty down by the Jordan, “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As time passed and the news spread, they were coming by the droves, and John was baptizing them right and left, as they repented and confessed their sins. Now, who was being baptized? It was not the fathers, yet. It was the down and out class of Jewish society. Spiritual dropouts, you might say. Jesus spoke of how publicans, harlots, and sinners believed John’s preaching, repented, and was baptized, and entered into the kingdom, and said to those others, But you are left without. It was not the Judiastic fathers that first came to him. It was the down and outers, that had just about lost all hope, spiritually speaking. Because of apostasy, spiritual death had set in, so God made the first move. He sent John (Elijah anointing) with a message to restore something, and that something was spiritual reality, and hope in God. John built that highway for the Lord while standing right there in the old Jordan River.
It did not matter how high, nor how low they were; according to man’s standards, or how crooked their lives were before. When John raised them out of the water, the high ones were made low, the low ones were elevated, and the crooked lives were straightened out. That is how the mountains and hills were made low, and the valleys lifted up, and the crooked made straight. It was a highway in the hearts of repentant sinners, where the Lord would have full right of way. God was not coming down, to ride up and down a highway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea; He was coming to dwell in the hearts of a people that had been made ready to receive Him. Who were they? They were the children of Malachi 4:6. It is true that they were the children genetically, of that Jewish society, but that is not what gives them that identity in Malachi’s prophecy. Their Malachi identity is that they were going to be children of God. Potentially they already were, in the mind of God, but the manifestation of it came about there at the Jordan River (Isaiah 40).
Now John did not make them children, but he prepared the way for them to become children of God. That is what got the attention of the fathers. They had to find out what was really taking place down there. When those Judiastic fathers began to come into the crowd, he started blasting the tops of those mountains. With one huge blast he brought down a bunch of them; “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” John could not have cared less about honoring anyone but God. Therefore He said also, “Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance; and think not to say within yourselves, (Be sure you get this point here.) We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.”
John knew that because of their natural heritage, these Jewish fathers were depending on the fact that they could say, We are Abraham’s seed. We believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We keep the law of Moses. But who are you? I’m just a voice. Hallelujah! The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord. You hear the same spirit speaking in our day. I have heard people say, My mother was a saintly old Methodist, and so was my grandmother. Therefore I was born a Methodist, and I will die a Methodist. What was good enough for them is good enough for me. Listen to me, people, No born again child of God will say that, for we know that God does not judge us, nor favor us, just because our parents were a certain way. This is an individual walk with God. Your genetical background does not mean anything to God, as far as your soul’s salvation is concerned. Yes, those fathers came out to look John over, believing all along that they were children of God, just because they could trace their heritage back to Abraham to whom God promised a blessing to him and his seed after him. Saints, do not ever forget what the scriptures say about Abraham; He believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, and that is the only was any of us can stand before God, righteous simply by believing His word.
We do not inherit righteousness from our parents, and neither do we earn it by any of our works; it is imputed to us when we believe properly. Not just any old man made doctrine, but the revelated word of God. So John called those big shot religious leaders exactly what they were, a generation of vipers. They did not know the first thing about the new covenant that was ready to be put into effect. Only those that were truly repenting, and being baptized, would be receivers of that new covenant. The only way any of those Judiastic fathers could ever become children of God, was to repent, and be baptized, for just simply being able to say, We are children of Abraham, would no longer be looked upon as having any spiritual benefit.
There was a day when God would honor them as believers, if they wrote the law upon little emblems, and hung it on the door posts, and so forth, so they could see it both going in and coming out of their homes, and they honored it as God had instructed them to do. But here is a new dispensation coming into effect, with a new covenant that will replace the old one, and now God will only honor it. Notice what Paul wrote to the Hebrews about it, chapter 8; verses 6-13. We will not read it all now, but you can later. In verse 6, he speaks of how Jesus is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” On down farther we read, “I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: and they shall not teach every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.”
Now, notice verse 13. “In that he saith, A new covenant, He hath made the first one old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.” In other words, God took His law down from the door posts, and was putting it in through the door of man’s heart into his innermost being. But it has to pass through the mind before the heart can receive it, and that is what God was preparing this lower class of people for. They were to be the children of the new covenant, when the old covenant was cut off completely. What do you think John meant when he said, God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham? He was talking about revelation faith from among those stony hearts. am not making a new covenant with you; I am simply announcing that the time is at hand for God to do it. John was not seeking to make a name for himself; he was only fulfilling something that God had raised him up to do. Now that did not keep some of John’s followers from trying to make him something more than what he was, but John himself did only what he was anointed to do. Those religious fathers who had always been in charge of every religious activity resented John, and resented what he was saying. No, let me rephrase that. They hated John, and they hated what he was saying even more, but there were some tender buds standing there, that would soon spring forth into life, taking the place of those trees that were being cut down. They did not know that, but God knew it. God knew what was going to be said that day, even before He ever created the world. Therefore to those Jewish fathers John was saying, Until now, you have read Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalms, and all the law of Moses and you have twisted everything to fit into your traditions, but from this day on, you will have to submit yourselves to God in a different way in order to be accepted to Him (fruits of repentance).
Did they do it, you may say? No, because they had another spirit on them. It was not the Spirit of Jehovah that had led them into all those religious traditions. It was not the Spirit of Jehovah that caused them to have murder in their hearts. They washed their feet and hands, and went through all those Levitical purification exercises, but their hearts were far from the God that gave those laws, therefore their religion was vain. They had clean hands and feet, clean pots and pans, and they said all the right things, but God was looking for some people whose hearts could be made clean also, and those fathers were too proud of their traditions and accomplishments to humble themselves, so they rejected God’s new covenant, and pronounced their own destination by doing so. That left the way clear for God to raise up some other men who would one day be looked upon as fathers, but first, they would be “the children” of Malachi 4:6, in the first advent of Jesus Christ.
Judiastic fathers were so proud to listen to John. They loved being referred to as Dr. So and So, Rabbi So and So, and all of that. Religion is full of that sort still today, but not true Christianity. We are living in a new era of time. God will never call another young man to enroll in a Bible school to study theology. As a matter of fact, God has never called anyone to do that, but I will have to say, We have passed through an era when God worked through such men, allowing some of them to be carriers of certain Bible truths that were to be restored to His true body of believers in due time. This gospel did not start out being preached by the great learned men of that first age, and it will not end up being preached by that kind either. Let me read you a few verses from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, and we will see what he had to say about the wisdom of learned men. (1:19) “For it is written. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believed.” The preaching that gets men saved is something more than just a bunch of theories hatched out in a seminary someplace. Divine revelation is not something that can be published in three, or six month courses, and sold for so many kwachas. It is free to all who will receive it, and it is preached by some of the most uneducated men upon the face of the earth, and no matter who preaches it, nor how much anointing they have, it still takes the Holy Ghost to make it a revelation to you. Notice verse 26. “For ye see your calling brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” Why did God choose to work through such simplicity? Verse 29, tells us exactly why. “That no FLESH should glory in His presence.” If God allowed degrees of education to have any bearing on the effectiveness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, then men who attained to certain levels of achievement in life would have somewhat to glory in aside from the pure grace and mercy of God. Hallelujah!
I am so glad that God is no respecter of person. If He was like we have a tendency to be, then all the educated and important people in the world would have first chance at God’s bountiful gifts, and the rest of us would just simply have to get at the end of the line and beg for crumbs. That is not to say that there is not enough of God for everyone, but I think you know what I mean. It just simply comes down to the fact that God receives more glory working through weak and seemingly unimportant vessels. Praise Him! No wonder Jesus said, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Notice that next verse, (Matt. 18:4) “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” That lets us see why those ecclesiastical fathers could not become children of God. They just simply could not humble themselves and come God’s way. They could not accept the idea that God would speak to the people of Israel without going through them first. I can just see some of them, with their head high, and their chest puffed out, “Who does this wild looking critter think he is? We have gone to school for many, many years to learn all the law and precepts of God, and this fellow, with no educational background, comes walking out of the wilderness claiming to be the voice of God. What kind of fools does he take us for? Does he really think anyone will believe him?” Brothers and Sisters: You have probably heard that very kind of boastful talk in some of the places God delivered you from. They still do it. The blind will lead the blind, as long as this dispensation stands.
The religious Pharisees, Zealots, Scribes and those holier than thou Essene Jews, that dwelt in caves down by the Dead Sea, who in the natural seemed to be the holiest, the purest, the most undefiled by the world, the most dedicated to God of all were the fathers of Malachi 4:6 in the first advent of Christ. Now the Children were the nobodys, the down trodden. Now if you do not see who the fathers and the children were in that day, you will never be able to receive a true revelation of who they are here at the end of the age. I will say this also; If you do not know what the faith of the apostolic fathers was, you will never know whether you have been turned back to it or not. In other words, you just simply cannot pick up a few remarks here at the end time and be looked upon as a revelated son of God, if you are void of understanding concerning all that proceeds a true revelation. John the Baptist knew what he was looking for. He was only carrying a message sent forth to separate them from apostate religion, and get them ready to receive the one that would initiate a new covenant with them. That was God’s way of rescuing a spiritual seed from an apostate system of death. John separated them from their old religious system, washed them up, got their minds open, and their spiritual eyes cleared up so they could begin to look forward to a greater unfolding of the purpose of God. After Pentecost, when the church really got its birth, and the new covenant was in full force, certain men from the ranks of the new covenant children began to stand out as leaders in the church. Peter took the lead on the day of Pentecost, when false accusations were laid against those who had just received the Holy Ghost, but there was James, and John, and Stephen, and many others that stood to defend the faith of this new covenant that Jesus had activated and made effective by His death, burial, and resurrection.
Jesus was gone from the scene, and so was John the Baptist, but those Christians (the children of that day) had something in their hearts that kept them going on. Of course we understand that the gospel was first preached to the Jews, and God let it continue to be administered to that nation of people for several years, but He saw that the spirit of that old Judiastic system would never change, (He knew it all along by His great foreknowledge, but He allotted them sufficient time and opportunity, in order that they would be without excuse) so He began to unfold this great redemption plan to the Gentiles. The covenant He had made with Abraham would be fulfilled. Not only would Abraham have a natural seed, he would also have a spiritual seed. All who believe God’s word, and walk with Him in truth are the spiritual seed of Abraham (Colossians 2).
What those Scribes and Pharisees were holding onto in the days of Jesus, was all God required from their forefathers who had followed the law of Moses out of a pure heart that desired to please God, but after Calvary, no salvation was wrought by keeping the law of Moses. The scriptures make it very clear that, in the first advent of Malachi 4:6, only those who were turned to children by the word of God, were accepted of God.
Therefore I say to you saints in the name of Jesus that in the second advent of Malachi 4:6, only those who are turned back to the faith of those first century, apostolic fathers, by the word of the Lord delivered in this age, will be accepted of God. The Word of God delivered to us by that Elijah spirit in this age was supposed to turn children to fathers. Now the prophet William Marrion Branham is the fathers of Malachi 4:6. He was sent by God when God knew it was light to fulfill his scriptures, with that Elijah anointing, to preach against apostasy, identify the one true God, and turn our attention back to what Peter, James, John, Paul, and all those early church fathers preached. He did that for me, and for a lot of you. Now you should not follow the man but follow the word of the Lord that he was trying to get us back to.
Bro. Branham, who came to this age with that Elijah spirit, to turn us back to those apostolic truths, was not a tare, but those who glorify his flesh, instead of following the truth he stood for, are tares without a doubt. He delivered the word of God to this generation, and you can do with it whatsoever you choose. You can either follow that truth and be one of the children of God that he was sent to restore to the truth, or you can be a tare. One thing I do know for sure, is that all who are truly children of God in this day and hour, will see Paul, Peter, James, John, and all of those apostolic fathers who defended the faith in their day, and they will love the man that pointed them back to the truth, and will defend his character, image, and purpose, but they will worship God, according to the apostolic truth that he pointed them back to. Let us read Malachi 4:6, for it is important that you remember what we are dealing with, so you do not miss the main points. Talking about the Elijah that was to come, it says, “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, (that was John the Baptist) and the heart of the children to their fathers, (that was Bro. Branham) lest (or before) I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Now that is what we are looking at. Bro. Branham was that Elijah which was to fulfill the second part of that prophecy. It is only necessary that we understand what is meant by turning the heart of THE children, back to THEIR fathers. I have tried to help you see that the fathers of John’s hour were the last of the old law age covenant teachers. That is why they had to be made to see what John was doing, even though they could not find it in their hearts to repent and become a child, a child of God. Looking at the history we see, that as Jesus came back to Jerusalem just before He was crucified, every day He would go into the temple and preach. But then, one day, as He was leaving, going out over the Mount of Olives with His disciples, He looked back at that beautiful city, and the temple, and wept over it.
In Luke 13:34, you read where He said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.” Why would He say that? Simply because every time He went into the temple to preach, here would come that bunch of Pharisees and elders, questioning Him as though they really wanted to learn something, when really, all they wanted to do was trap Him. They wanted Him to say something they could use against Him. These are the ones that delivered Him to Pilot, to be crucified. Now a tare is a make-believer, a child of the devil, pretending to be a child of God, and the churches are full of them today, but there were none of them among the ranks of the believers in the book of Acts, for those early apostles guarded against any attempt of Satan to pervert that true gospel, so he had to wait until after they all passed off he scene, before he could actually successfully sow his tares in this field of God. (The church) as early as 54 A.D., Paul wrote to the Thessalonians concerning that man of sin that would come upon the scene in the end of the age, and stated even then, that the mystery of iniquity was already at work (Ephesian Church Age).
Then in 90 A.D. John wrote, in his little epistle, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whither they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” John thought the end was getting close, because he saw that spirit of Antichrist at work, but little did he know that it was only the beginning of what God would allow Satan to do for the next 1900 years. It was really in the second church age, that Satan actually succeeded in placing his tares in the congregation of the saints. How did he do it? Without those staunch guards of the faith to detect them, make-believers, falsely converted to the faith, were able to slip into the fellowship, and naturally, after they were in, the same Holy Ghost that fell on the true seed, also fell on them, and they could shout and dance right along with the rest of them. But they never could receive a true revelation. Instead, they began to inject their own ideas little by little until the church was plunged headlong into the period known as the Dark Ages. It did not happen suddenly; it actually took several hundred years for it to reach its worst hour of time. You know, that according to the 2nd parable of Matthew 13, once that tare spirit gets inside, it will grow just like the true crop, and actually the Lord said, “Let them all grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” (you can get all this in the exposition of the 7 church ages)
Why did God allow Satan to get by with a thing like that? It puts true believers to the test. Will they walk with God, or follow the crowd? Those tares were allowed to attack, and pervert every true doctrine of the New Testament church, and the first thing they went to work on, was the one God revelation. They got that perverted into a trinity. The new birth experience (the baptism of the Holy Ghost) was changed into a formalistic ritual, and a holy way of life was pushed completely out of the picture. That does not mean that everyone was like that, for God has always preserved seed, but the ruling spirit in the church was like that, for it was tares running things during those Dark Age years. No true child of God would throw out the truth, but when your are outnumbered so badly, all you can do is live your own convictions, and let the rest do what they want to do. Therefore coming out of the Dark Ages was Martin Luther, a monk that God revealed an apostolic truth to. The just shall live by faith instead of by the word of the pope. Now remember, God was not restoring the faith of the fathers, He was restoring His children back to it. It took almost 500 years for Satan to rob the church of that true faith, and God has now been in the process of restoring His church back to it for about the same length of time. It was the restoration of God’s children to these apostolic truths that brought the Dark Ages period to its end, for every scriptural truth is light, and people simply cannot dwell in darkness, and light both at the same time. No, Satan had his millennium of darkness, and now the church of the living god has been restored to the light. The vast majority of world religion is still in spiritual darkness, but God’s true church is walking in the light of His word once again, HIS NAME, HIS WORD, HIS WORKS. God restored the church back to the faith of the fathers by degrees, just like she left it. The church did not go from light to darkness suddenly, so God did not bring her from darkness to light suddenly. He restored her to one truth at a time, and He did not have to use a tare to carry that truth. Luther was not a tare himself, but the moment he started to preach faith, the tares started gathering around him, Hallelujah!
We have faith. Hallelujah! Faith is wonderful. You see, the tares will rejoice right along with the saints, and they will grow right along with the saints, but they can never become children of God. Once a tare, always a tare. You may have heard people say, I used to be a child of the devil, but now I am a child of God. But that is not correct. A person that was foreknown of God, was never a child of the devil; that person, before they come to a true salvation experience, is simply a servant of the devil, a prisoner, you might say. That is why they are referred to as LOST; they are lost from their heavenly Father. That does not mean that God does not know all about them; it simply means, that such a lost soul does not know where his true family is, and God always makes the first move, to draw that lost soul to Himself. Alright, so the tares began gathering around those true children of God that had embraced Luther’s revelation, Oh, this faith is wonderful, but we had better get organized, so that we can better administer it to the world. It has never been the true children of God that founded these religious organizations; that tare spirit does that, in order to keep the truth they have from moving any further, or to keep those who have a certain truth from moving any further with God.
[The Restoration of the Bride Tree] Do you know why they can never move any further with God? When they organize, they write up their bylaws and articles of faith, and that is all they will allow, in their organization. Every one of them looks at themselves as exactly what God wants his church to be like; therefore they leave no room for God to add any further revelation of His word to them, so they rally around what they have, for a while, and then death and decay begins to strike their system. But all the while, they are affecting some people that are true children of God, and even though death strikes the system, the truth they organized around, never dies. It was the same pattern all the way through the Reformation. God would reveal an apostolic truth to a chosen vessel, Luther, Calvin, Knox, Wesley, and on down the line, and the followers of that man’s teaching would take that truth, and build a denominational fence around it. That is exactly the way the devil wanted it. That is how these daughters of that old Roman Catholic whore were defiled. Now do not get disturbed at me for saying that, for it was the angel talking to the apostle John, in 96 A.D., that first called her that. He showed John the final judgment of that great whore, before the whore ever even came into existence.
You can read it in Revelation 17:1-5, and you will see there, that this great whore had some daughters, for she is called, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. Those daughters are all of the religious organizations that have come out of the Reformation movement. When those daughters embraced a truth that separated them from the old Roman Catholic mother system; they were clean and pure, but before too long, that old tare spirit would get in, take over, build an organization, and cause the whole thing to commit spiritual fornication with the world. That made them harlots; they were no longer in a place where a holy God could entrust, nor impart divine revelation to them. Methodism, founded off of John Wesley’s holiness teaching was built into the most wonderful, and largest Protestant denomination upon the face of the earth, and that brings our little summary up to around the dawning of the 20th century, a point in time when Laodicea was just about ready to be activated. Laodicea is the age of materialism, the industrial age that has lifted the standard of living from where it remained you might say, for hundreds of years, to where it is today, in only a few short years.
God had restored the church little by little, back to the apostolic truth that she had let slip away from her, but the tares were still running things. Here was all those beautiful truths that the New Testament church was founded upon, all fenced in and divided up, and if God did not do something those tares would sap the very life out of those true children of God that were scattered around in those systems. He could not perfect His church as long as it was divided up like that, and He could not call her to glory before she was perfected, so what did He do? Hallelujah! He raised up a prophet messenger, and anointed him to call His children out of those places, and lead them to see that the true church of the living God is not divided, nor built into a denomination. Who was that prophet messenger? His name was William Marrion Branham, born under very unusual circumstances, in a simple little cabin near Burkesville, KY. He was not a theologian. As a matter of fact, he did not have very much of society’s formal education, but he did have the hand of God upon his life from the time that he was a very small boy. We will not go into his life, for that is recorded in ever so many publications that can be obtained [u can read, my life story, a man sent from God, a prophet visits RSA].
What I want you to see from this message, is what his ministry fulfilled in the redemption process of God. We do not need to lift up his flesh, in order to lift up the purpose of God that his ministry fulfilled. I truly thank God for the day He allowed me to get across this message, for as I read the books, he pointed me right back to the apostles Paul, Peter, James, John and all of those other New Testament writers. He made that Bible that I once was afraid of, talk to my soul. Hallelujah!
It was in the year 1933, when Bro. Branham, as a young evangelist, was baptizing some converts in the Ohio River that God spoke to him, and commissioned him for his role in the fulfillment of Malachi 4:5-6, of the Old Testament. We started our message with this scriptures, because it is the most quoted, and seemingly the least understood of all scripture, among the following of this humble servant of God that fulfilled exactly, what he was called of God to fulfill. While he was baptizing, there in the river, just like John the Baptist, he heard a voice say, Look up. Look up. When he looked up, there was a great light hanging right there over his head. Then a voice spoke, and said, “As John the Baptist was sent to forerun the first coming of the Lord, so are you sent with a message that shall prepare the way for His second coming.”
What he would do, had to be worded a little different than what John did, for John was sent to introduce a physical man. But Bro. Branham was not able to introduce a physical man. It is the message Bro. Branham delivered to this generation, that is forerunning the second coming of Jesus Christ. John prepared the way and actually introduced a physical person in which dwelt the very God of all creation. There in the Jordan River, that day, stood both messengers of Malachi 3:1, one messenger introducing another one. But when you look at Brother Branham, you do not see two physical messengers. You see one messenger, with a message from the throne of God, sent forth to this generation, for the purpose of calling God’s people out of denominational bondage, and allowing them an opportunity to dress themselves up and get ready to meet the Lord. All of this had to be accomplished before the Lord would return in person to smite the earth with a curse, as Malachi 4:6 states, (or to smite all wickedness with judgment) Gentiles have never been privileged to know Christ after the flesh, but they can know Him, for He is living in the pages of a book, but the book has to be read under the leadership of the Holy Ghost, in order for the reader to see Him, and before Brother Branham came upon the scene to cry out against it, Satan’s shrewd tactics prevented that.
God’s people were more or less forced to read the Bible through the eyes of their denominational system. Those who were so blessed as to see one God, and water baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, were blinded to most of the other great truths of this new covenant that was introduced by the Lord Jesus Christ in His first advent, so that left God without a crop that He could reap from the pure seed that was sown. All of those first age Christians understood that, but they were not the crop that God would harvest, they were the seed, so to speak. When you plant a seed, you make sure you plant the kind of seed that you want a multiplied reproduction of at harvest time, and you cultivate and care for that crop until you do everything you need to, to get it ready to be harvested. Therefore I ask you, Do you think God, who is the author of perfection, would plant a church in the earth different than the kind He intended to harvest? That would be a careless perversion of His own law of reproduction, and only the devil is a perverter. But any person with spiritual insight could plainly see, that the church of 1933 was not like the church in the book of Acts. It was a long way from it, even after almost 500 years, since the Reformation started. What was the answer? How would God ever get an exact reproduction of that first age church? There was only one way, short of starting all over again. (And there was no scriptural provision for that.) He would have to do something to get the end time church back to believing exactly what that first age church believed. There is scripture for that, Malachi 4:5-6, our text. But who was there in the land that had a universal voice of authority, of the caliber that could turn the universal body of Christ around, and get them all going in the same direction? The Pentecostals had the greatest light, but that was still not what the church of the living God was to reflect back to Him. Some of those Jesus name Pentecostals that had the same evidence as the trinity element, were so set in their way, and so sure that they were what God wanted: they referred to the trinity as false brethren. When some of them came out to investigate Bro. Branham, they were heard to say, IF THIS MAN TRULY IS A PROPHET, WHY DOES HE ASSOCIATE WITH THESE ASSEMBLY OF GOD TRINITY PEOPLE?
They were like Peter, before God sent Him to the house of Cornelius. You must remember he was not the messenger just to the Pentecostals; he was the messenger to the whole age. God still had children in all those denominational systems, and they had to hear their call to come out, and be separated from man made traditions. As Bro. Branham preached from place to place, the big bishops and presbyters came out to look him over. They would sit there so proud, but they would see a display of the power of God that they just simply could not understand, and you would see tears come into their eyes as the light of God reflected from that man. I am not talking about the light of truth that he preached. Do you know what happened? They looked right into that light, and it was so bright, it blinded the. Why? They were tares. They were sold out to a tare system. The light of truth did not blind God’s true children that looked into it. No, it illuminated their souls. What was he doing out there? He was delivering a message first to call God’s children out of those systems, and secondly to turn them back to the faith of THEIR fathers.
He was one of the end time children that were to be turned back to the faith of the fathers. God raised him up from among the ranks of those who were to be turned back, and placed an anointing upon him that had never been displayed in that magnitude upon any man, since it was displayed in the life of Christ without measure. That still did not change the fact that he was one of the end time church children. God raised him up at a time when a lot of the predestinated children were getting so fed up with manmade traditions; they were ready to become spiritual dropouts. I had just about come to that place myself, before I received the Holy Ghost.
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