The Elijah Who Already Came
The Elijah Who Already Came
A little while ago, a friend sent me a clip from one of Donny Reagan's Youth Question and Answer sessions. Donny Reagan pastors Word of Life Church in Johnson City, Tennessee, and he desperately wants the young people in his church to stay in the Message. You can hear it in his voice.
The subject of the Youth Q&A (part 30, 2026-02-10) was a question from a young person:
Why do we believe Brother Branham is anointed with the spirit of Elijah?
I was asked that same question many times while I was in the Message. So I want to answer the young person who asked it, and I want to do it the way I wish someone had done it for me.
Gently. Carefully. From the Bible.
The whole case Donny Reagan builds that night rests on one idea... that Jesus promised an Elijah to come... what the prophet Malachi promised was still out ahead of us in the last days... and that William Branham filled that slot. Pull that one card, and the tower comes down.
So let's look at the card.
The passage that answers the question
Donny Reagan takes the youth to Matthew 17, and he's right to. It's the clearest place in the New Testament where Jesus talks about the coming of Elijah. Here is what he read to them:
And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. (Matthew 17:11)
He landed hard on the tense. Shall come. Future. And that's true. Standing there on the road down from the mountain, Jesus uses the future tense, and Donny Reagan tells the young people this proves the restoring Elijah was still to come.
Then he moves on.
I wish he hadn't. Because the very next words out of the mouth of Jesus settle the whole matter. Let's not stop where Donny Reagan stopped. Let's read the next two verses.
But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist. (Matthew 17:12–13)
Read that again slowly. In verse 11, Jesus says Elijah shall come and restore. In verse 12, in the same breath, He says Elijah is come already. And in verse 13, Matthew tells us plainly how the men who were standing right there heard it. "Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist."
The coming Elijah. The restoring Elijah. The one the scribes were waiting for. Jesus says He has already come, and He is John.
That's not my conclusion. That's the conclusion the Holy Spirit wrote into verse 13. The passage resolves itself in three verses. It doesn't leave a gap. It doesn't leave a slot open for someone two thousand years later. It closes.
One additional point. While Donny Reagan's interpretation of the use of the future tense seems to be reasonable, is there another reason that Jesus used the future tense?
Jesus agreed with the scribes in their understanding of Malachi’s prophecy that Elijah was to come (future tense) and accomplish his preparatory work. They were right in what they predicted, even though they failed to recognize when that prediction was fulfilled. But when Jesus uses the future tense to refer to Elijah’s coming, he is simply quoting the verb in the same future tense in the Septuagint version of Malachi 4:5. The Septuagint (often referred to as the LXX) is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was the authoritative version for Greek-speaking Jews. It’s the version that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament quoted when they referred to the Old Testament. It was the Old Testament of the early Christians.
The future tense, therefore, doesn’t mean that Jesus is foretelling another return of Elijah. He was simply quoting the scripture verbatim. Thus this passage cannot be used to argue for a future coming of Elijah.
The wedge that isn't there
Here's what has to happen for Branham to be the end-time Elijah. Somebody has to ignore the fact that Jesus was simply quoting scripture as written. Somebody has to pry verse 11 apart from verse 12. Somebody has to take the "shall come" of verse 11 and push it out twenty centuries, while quietly leaving verse 12 back in the first century where it belongs.
But there's no wedge in the text. Jesus put verses 11 and 12 side by side on purpose. He raised the future-tense expectation and then, in the same sentence, told His disciples it had already been met. That's the point He was making. The scribes were still watching the eastern sky for Elijah, and the Elijah they were waiting for had already come and gone, and they missed him.
Now, Donny Reagan puts a challenge to his critics. He gives out his email address and he says, in effect, "Tell me what John the Baptist restored us back to. Send me the answer." It's a good showman's move. It sounds unanswerable.
But look what it does. It quietly assumes the very thing in question, that the restoration of Matthew 17:11 is a separate ministry still out in front of us. Jesus already told us who the restoring Elijah was. He was John. If Donny Reagan wants to know what John restored, the answer is in the passage he was reading: John turned hearts and made ready a people prepared for the Lord. That was the restoration the scribes were promised. Jesus said so.
You don't have to out-argue the challenge. You just have to keep reading the chapter.
"I am not Elijah"
There's one more knot, and Donny Reagan is honest enough to raise it himself. When the priests asked John the Baptist point blank, "Art thou Elias?" John answered, "I am not" (John 1:21). Yet Jesus said John was Elijah (Matthew 11:14). So which is it?
Donny Reagan solves it by inventing two Elijahs. He says John was the "first part" Elijah but not the "latter part" Elijah, and the latter part is still coming. That's clever. But go find that distinction in your Bible. It isn't there. It gets added to the text because the doctrine needs somewhere to put Branham.
The real answer is simpler, and it's already in Scripture. The priests were asking John if he was the literal Elijah, the man himself, come back down from heaven in a body. That was the Jewish expectation from Malachi 4:5. John told the truth. No, he was not that man. He was not Elijah personally.
But the angel Gabriel had already explained exactly what John was. He would go before the Lord "in the spirit and power of Elias" (Luke 1:17). Not as Elijah. In the spirit and power of Elijah. That's the same thing Jesus meant in Matthew 11. One Elijah role. One fulfillment. Two men telling the truth, and no second prophet required.
The same thing happens with the "two halves" of Malachi 4:6. Donny Reagan notices that Luke 1:17 quotes only part of the verse, and he decides God must have reserved the other half for a prophet two thousand years down the road. But an angel paraphrasing a verse is not the same as an angel rationing it out. That's an argument built on a silence. And you cannot build a prophet on a silence.
We deal with Malachi 4:5-6, Matthew 17:11 and Luke 1:17, among others, in great detail in our book, Under The Halo.
Now, the closer
I've saved the most important thing for last.
Everything above is about one man, Elijah. But the sermon reaches further than that. Donny Reagan takes the seven "angels" of the seven churches in Revelation and teaches the youth that these are seven human messengers, spread across seven ages of church history, ending with Branham as the seventh, the messenger to Laodicea. The whole scheme of seven church ages is presented as revealed truth. As something that came down from heaven to a prophet.
I believed that too, once. So I want to tell you what I found when I went looking for where it actually came from.
The seven-church-ages framework was not revealed to William Branham. It was borrowed. The architecture of it, the chart of church history divided into these successive periods, comes straight out of the writings of Clarence Larkin, a Baptist dispensationalist who died in 1924, in books like Dispensational Truth. We know Branham had Larkin's work in his library. The photograph exists. And the historical scaffolding leans further still, onto Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Watchtower, the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Branham told his people the revelation came to him directly from God. The Church Age Book is honored among Message followers for exactly that reason. It is supposed to be a direct download from heaven.
It wasn't. It was assembled from the very "theologians" and "commentaries" Donny Reagan warns the young people not to trust. The framework he holds up as proof of a prophet is a framework the prophet got from other men and then presented as his own from God.
I don't say that to wound anyone. I say it because it's true, and because you deserve the truth more than you deserve to be comfortable.
To the young person who asked
You asked a sincere question. It deserved a sincere answer, and here it is.
The strongest passage in the whole sermon, Matthew 17, is the one that answers your question all by itself. Jesus raised the coming of Elijah and then told His own disciples that Elijah had already come, in John the Baptist. The men standing there understood him. There is no second Elijah waiting in the last days, because the text closes the door in verse 13.
And the great system of seven ages and seven messengers, the one that puts Branham at the end of the line, did not come from God to a prophet. It came from Clarence Larkin and Charles Taze Russell to William Branham.
You are allowed to check these things. Read Matthew 17 to the end of the paragraph. Read Luke 1:17. Look up where the church ages came from. Your salvation was bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, and it does not depend on a prophet from Jeffersonville. It never did.
Come, let us reason together.
Footnotes