The Vision Didn't Fail, He Did

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Jesse Smith went back to his six-question video and decided the answers needed more support. In Part Two he argues the angel of Revelation 10:7 is human, not heavenly. He lists eight reasons the Trinity is false. He turns God's own instructions to Elijah into proof that prophecies can fail without penalty. And he answers a long, careful viewer comment with the same moves we saw in Part One: shift the burden of proof, invent an exception, then question the questioner's character. Let's look at the evidence again.

The Vision Didn't Fail, He Did: A Second Response to Jesse Smith

I responded to Jesse Smith's first video back in April. He listened to his own answers again, decided a few of them needed reinforcing, and released a Part Two. I appreciate that he keeps engaging. Most people in his position would not. But reinforcing an argument is not the same as fixing it, and several of the new points he raises actually make the original problems worse rather than better.

He focuses his additions on questions one, two, and three, and then spends the second half of the video answering a long comment from a viewer named Jeffrey Porter. I will take it in that order.

"The seventh angel is earthly, not heavenly"

In Part One, Jesse Smith's answer to "where is William Branham vindicated as a prophet" was Revelation 10:7. I pointed out that this assumes the very thing it needs to prove. In Part Two he tries to strengthen the verse itself, arguing that the "angel" of Revelation 10:7 cannot be a heavenly being, because "God does not use Heavenly angels to save human beings," and because "many times in scripture humans or Godly men were called Angels such as David and Paul."

There is a kernel of truth buried in that claim, and I want to examine it before I show why it does not do the work he needs it to do. David is compared to "an angel of God" three times in the historical books, always as a compliment paid to him by someone else (1 Samuel 29:9; 2 Samuel 14:17, 14:20; 19:27). Paul reminds the Galatians that they received him "as an angel of God" despite his bodily illness (Galatians 4:14). Both are real verses. But notice what kind of statement each one is. Every one of them is a simile, "as an angel," used by another person to praise someone's wisdom or presence. Not one of them is scripture identifying David or Paul as holding the office of "angel." Comparing a man to an angel is not the same thing as scripture designating him one.

Now look at what kind of figure the "angel" of Revelation 10 actually is. He is not introduced in isolation. He is the seventh in a sequence of trumpet-angels running through chapters 8 through 11 of Revelation, and the six before him are agreed on all sides to be heavenly beings. The angel of chapter 10 himself is described "clothed with a cloud," with "a rainbow... upon his head," a face "as it were the sun," feet "as pillars of fire," one foot on the sea and one on the land, lifting his hand to heaven and swearing by the eternal God (Revelation 10:1-6). That is not the literary register of a human messenger. It is the same apocalyptic, cosmic imagery used for every other angelic figure around him in the vision. Reclassifying just this one angel as human, in the middle of a sequence of six heavenly ones, is special pleading dressed up as exegesis. And even if it were human, we are back exactly where we started. Showing that the word "angel" can describe a human somewhere in scripture does not show that it describes William Branham here. That is still the question on trial, not the verdict.

Eight problems with the Trinity, and a citation that does not exist

Jesse Smith devotes a large section of Part Two to summarizing eight arguments from his book against the doctrine of the Trinity. I am not going to relitigate the whole doctrine of God here. But three of the eight deserve a direct answer, because they are not really arguments about the Trinity. They are arguments about history and citation, and those can be checked.

A citation that doesn't exist

His opening proof text: he says the Trinity "adds to the Bible," citing "Proverbs 35:6 and Revelation 22:18-19." Revelation 22:18-19 is a real warning against adding to that book's prophecy. But there is no Proverbs 35:6. The book of Proverbs has thirty-one chapters. The verse he almost certainly means is Proverbs 30:6, "Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar." I mention this not to score a cheap point off a slip of the tongue. I mention it because he calls this "the most decimating argument to the failure of the Trinity Dogma," and it is worth double-checking your most decimating argument before you preach it.

The Council of Constantinople, misread

More substantively, his fifth point: "the early trinitarians did not affirm the Holy Spirit was divine until the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD." This gets the history backwards. Constantinople in 381 reaffirmed the Nicene statements from the Council of Nicaea in 325 and added explicit language on the deity of the Holy Spirit "which had come under attack in the period since Nicaea." Read that description carefully. It says the doctrine came under attack after Nicaea, not that the doctrine did not exist until Constantinople defended it. The two are not the same thing. A challenge arose in the intervening decades from a group history calls the Pneumatomachians, "fighters against the Spirit," who denied the Spirit's full deity. The council responded by creedally spelling out what was already the church's conviction, in the face of a new controversy. Saying trinitarians "did not affirm" the Spirit's divinity until 381 is like saying a family did not believe their house belonged to them until the day they finally produced the deed in a property dispute. The belief was not new. The formal defense of it was.

The parable of the leaven, and the Roman church

His book also connects the parable of the leaven in three measures of meal (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:21) to the doctrine of the Trinity, reading the "three measures" as the Roman Catholic Church smuggling in the teaching of three persons. I want to be careful and fair here, because allegorical readings can sometimes illuminate a text. But this one is not drawn out of the passage. It is read into it. Nothing in Matthew 13 or Luke 13 mentions the Godhead, the number three in relation to persons, or the Roman church. The "three measures" is simply the standard-sized batch of dough in a first-century household, the same measurement used elsewhere in scripture for ordinary baking (Genesis 18:6). Turning a domestic detail into a coded prophecy about a fourth-century church council is not exegesis. It is numerology wearing exegesis as a costume, and it should trouble us regardless of what we conclude about the Trinity itself.

The water baptism formula, undone by its own proof text

On water baptism, Jesse Smith argues that Matthew 28:19, "baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," actually teaches baptism in the single name of Jesus, because the Father's name is Jesus, the Son's name is Jesus, and the Holy Ghost comes in Jesus's name. I want to note the shape of this argument, because it undercuts itself. Matthew 28:19 is his own source verse for the doctrine. But to get to his conclusion, he has to override its plain wording, "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," which names three distinct persons, and read it instead as "in the one name that belongs to all three." That is not translating the verse. It is overruling it while still citing it as the proof text. If a verse has to be reinterpreted against its own grammar to yield your doctrine, that verse is not really supporting your doctrine. It is being managed around.

Elijah, Hazael, and Jehu: the example that argues against him

This is the most interesting new argument in Part Two, because it is the one most worth sitting with. Jesse Smith points to 1 Kings 19:15-17, where God tells Elijah to anoint Hazael king over Syria, Jehu king over Israel, and Elisha as prophet in his place. He notes, correctly, that Elijah personally anointed only Elisha. Hazael was told by Elisha, years later, that he would become king (2 Kings 8:7-15). Jehu was anointed by proxy, a member of "the sons of the prophets" sent by Elisha to do it (2 Kings 9:1-10). From this, Jesse Smith concludes that "God can interpret his word any way he wants," and that this licenses flexible, after-the-fact readings of William Branham's unfulfilled visions.

Look closely at what actually happened in that story, though, because it proves the opposite of what he needs it to prove. Hazael did become king of Syria. Jehu did become king of Israel. Elisha did receive the prophetic mantle. Every single thing God told Elijah would happen, happened. Nothing failed. Nothing was reinterpreted after the fact to rescue a miss. The only thing that varied was the human hand carrying out each part of a multi-generational commission, which is a completely different question from whether the outcome itself came to pass.

Now compare that to the Brown Bear vision. William Branham did not receive a multi-part commission to be carried out by others over time. He made a first-person promise about his own action:

"I'm going to get a brown bear... you find out if that's right or not... that's Thus saith the Lord."

No successor shot the bear for him. No later fulfillment substituted for the missing one. The vision was not accomplished through a different agent. It simply did not happen, ever, by anyone. First Kings 19 is a story where everything God said would occur, occurred. Using it to excuse a vision where nothing occurred gets the lesson exactly backwards.

The India vision, now with two ways to be right

On the vision of 300,000 in India, Jesse Smith adds a second possible fulfillment to the one he offered in Part One. It might have happened at the 1954 Bombay meetings, where the mayor's estimate was around half a million. Or, he now suggests, it might have been fulfilled later, by other Message preachers who visited India after William Branham "went off the scene," with their combined attendance eventually adding up to 300,000 collectively.

I want to name plainly what this is. It is not evidence. It is the construction of a second escape hatch in case the first one does not hold. A specific, falsifiable claim, "you will see 300,000," has now been given two entirely different possible fulfillments, decades apart, involving different people, that can be swapped in as needed depending on which one is easier to defend in conversation. A prediction that can be satisfied by either outcome A or outcome B, chosen after the fact according to whichever is more convenient, is not a prediction anymore. It cannot be tested, because there is no way it could have failed. That is not humility about an uncertain fulfillment. It is building a second exit before anyone has even challenged the first one.

Read against Part One, the ground shifts under his two strongest claims

Setting Part Two directly against Part One turns up two more changes worth naming, because in both cases Jesse Smith's position on the exact same question moved between videos, without him acknowledging that it moved.

The Brown Bear vision: from "it was conditional" to "he failed it"

In Part One, the subject of the sentence is the vision itself:

"Brother Branham's vision about the Brown Bear was conditional, not unconditional... just like the Brown Bear vision was a conditional promise of God."

On that account, nothing failed. A condition simply was not triggered. In Part Two, the grammar changes, and so does the theology:

"God stayed with Brother Branham after Brother Branham failed the Brown Bear vision. The vision didn't fail, Brother Branham failed the vision, because it was a conditional promise of God."

Branham is now the one who failed, through some unnamed disobedience, and the "conditional promise" language gets layered on top of that failure rather than standing in for it. These are two different explanations for the same missing bear. One says there was nothing to fail. The other says a man failed it. Running both at once, as Part Two now does, is not a deeper understanding of the vision. It is having it both ways.

From "no failed visions" to "we can't prove they failed"

Part One is unambiguous:

"The answer is no. And Brother Branham had no failed visions or prophecies."

Part Two backs off that certainty considerably:

"There was some prophecies that Brother Branham wasn't sure about if they'd been fulfilled... they cannot prove these prophecies did not come to pass, nor can I."

Notice who carries the doubt in each version. In Part One, doubt belongs entirely to the accusers, and they are simply wrong. In Part Two, the doubt now includes William Branham himself, "wasn't sure," and Jesse Smith, "nor can I." The claim has moved from "these all came to pass" to "you cannot prove they did not," which is a far weaker claim asked to do the work of a far stronger one. This is the same stretch of video where Jesse Smith concedes, after being pressed by Jeffrey Porter, that his original five-point "requirements of a prophet" list never once mentioned Deuteronomy 18:20-22, the actual test at the center of this whole debate:

"You're right, I didn't list Deuteronomy 18:20 on my list... I believe Deuteronomy 18:20 is a requirement, but if Jeffrey looked at my list, it's assumed."

The central biblical test was missing from the original case for William Branham's prophethood. It only surfaces once a viewer points out that it is not there.

The response to Jeffrey Porter

The second half of Part Two answers a long, thoughtful comment from a viewer named Jeffrey Porter. Whatever you think of his tone, Jeffrey Porter's underlying questions were careful, specific, and fair. I want to walk through how Jesse Smith answered three of them.

On the missing 1933 prophecies

Jeffrey Porter pointed out that the famous 1933 prophecies are not referenced in any print material before the 1950s, despite an existing trail of William Branham's own published material reaching back further. Jesse Smith's answer is that he "did not have proof they were recorded beforehand, but that doesn't mean they were not genuine," and he tells Jeffrey Porter he is "jumping to false conclusions" because "you weren't there for sure."

This again reverses the burden of proof, the same move I flagged in Part One regarding the Municipal Bridge vision. William Branham is the one who claimed these prophecies were spoken in 1933. The burden of showing that rests on the person making the claim, not on the skeptic to prove a negative twenty years after the fact. "You weren't there" cuts both ways. Neither was Jesse Smith, and neither was I. The question is not who was standing in the room. The question is what the documentary record shows, and Jeffrey Porter's point stands: there is no trace of these prophecies before roughly two decades after they were supposedly given.

On the word "revise"

Jeffrey Porter raised William Branham's own 1960 statement about "revising" old prophecies before publishing them, and asked where the scriptural precedent is for amending a prophecy after the fact. Jesse Smith's answer is that William Branham "only used the word revised twice in the entire 18 years of sermons," so "it's most likely he didn't understand the full meaning of it," and probably meant "revisit" instead.

This is an invented meaning with nothing behind it but necessity. The plain sense of "revise... bring them up to date" is to edit and update, which is exactly the practice Jeffrey Porter's question is concerned about. There is no linguistic evidence offered for the substitution, no dictionary citation, no parallel example. The word is simply swapped for a more comfortable one because the comfortable one avoids the implication. When a plain word creates a problem for a position, and the fix is to declare that the speaker probably meant a different word without any evidence for it, that is not a translation issue. That is a rescue.

On "Thus saith the Lord" reversing itself

Jeffrey Porter's sharpest question was whether progressive revelation can be reconciled with William Branham's repeated use of "Thus saith the Lord" throughout his ministry, given that his teachings changed. Jesse Smith's answer contains an important concession, and then an equally important sleight of hand. He grants that William Branham's teaching on the first seal, the White Horse Rider, changed. He originally taught it was the Holy Spirit. Later he taught, under "Thus saith the Lord," that it was the Antichrist. Jesse Smith resolves this by declaring that the later "Thus saith the Lord" statement is simply the accurate one, and that there are "no contradictions" among the "literal" original "Thus saith the Lord" prophecies specifically, as opposed to teachings.

Watch what rule just got written into existence. Whichever version carries the phrase "Thus saith the Lord" automatically wins, retroactively, over whatever it replaces, and any earlier teaching without the tag simply does not count as a real claim. That sounds tidy until you realize it makes the phrase untestable. If "Thus saith the Lord" can be attached after the fact to whichever version turns out to be the final one, then the phrase is not marking a fixed, verifiable claim from God. It is marking whatever the current position happens to be. A label that only ever gets applied to the winning answer, after we already know which answer won, is not doing the work of verification. It is doing the work of branding.

On the "Gentile prophet" and Malachi

Jeffrey Porter observed that the book of Malachi opens by naming its audience as Israel, and asked how that squares with a claim that its promises are for Gentiles. Jesse Smith's response is to point to Isaiah, which is also addressed to Israel and Judah (Isaiah 1:1) but which Paul later applies to the Gentile church, quoting Isaiah 25:8 in 1 Corinthians 15:54. Since Isaiah's opening address to Israel did not prevent later application to Gentiles, he argues, Malachi's opening address to Israel should not prevent it either.

This proves too little to help him. It shows that a book addressed to Israel can sometimes contain material the New Testament later applies more broadly. It does not show that Malachi 4:5-6 specifically is that kind of material, and it cannot substitute for actually making that case from the text. More importantly, it skips past something we already know. The New Testament itself tells us who fulfilled Malachi's promised Elijah, and names him directly: John the Baptist. Jesus said so in Matthew 17:12-13. The angel Gabriel said so before John was even born.

Which brings me to the strongest point in this whole exchange, and it comes straight from the passage Jesse Smith relies on. He argues that Malachi 4:6 describes two separate comings of Elijah, centuries apart, because it names two different turnings, "the hearts of the fathers to the children," and "the hearts of the children to their fathers." He assigns the first turning to John the Baptist and insists the second turning still needs a "Gentile Elijah," which he identifies as William Branham.

But look at how Luke's Gospel itself quotes this exact verse about John the Baptist, before John was even born. The angel Gabriel tells Zechariah that his son will go before the Lord "in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord" (Luke 1:17). Gabriel takes both halves of Malachi's couplet, the fathers turning to the children and the children turning to the fathers, rephrasing the second half as "the disobedient to the wisdom of the just," and assigns both of them to John the Baptist's single ministry. Scripture itself does not split Malachi 4:6 into two prophets separated by two thousand years. The inspired commentary on the verse, delivered by an angel, folds both halves into one forerunner, John. That is not a Message interpretation and not a Believe the Sign interpretation. That is what Luke's Gospel says the verse means, in the one place in the New Testament where an angel explains it for us. We deal with this in greater detail in our article on Malachi 4:5.

Reading a Hebrew poetic couplet, which restates one idea from two angles, as two separate events in two different centuries is not required by the text. It is required by the need to find a second Elijah, and Luke 1:17 closes that door before William Branham was ever born.

The turn to accusation

I want to close on something I noticed happening more in Part Two than in Part One. When Jesse Smith runs out of scriptural ground, he pivots to character. Jeffrey Porter is told his research reflects that he is "clearly duped." Believe the Sign's work is called "the weakest shoddiest research I've ever seen." Critics are accused of excusing tattoos, R-rated movies, and rock music, none of which Jeffrey Porter raised at all. And in a moment I think Jesse Smith did not fully weigh, he tells Jeffrey Porter that he is "more like Eve" for believing the Trinity, since Eve merely added one word to God's command in the garden.

I would ask him examine that comparison rather than let it pass, because it cuts against his own position more than mine. Eve's sin was accepting an addition to what God had already spoken. Every claim I have raised across both of these articles, the Trinity's actual history, the meaning of "revise," the timing of "Thus saith the Lord," the reading of Malachi 4:6, the fate of the Brown Bear vision, asks the same question in each case: did God actually say this, or was something added to what he said? That is not an insult. It is the test Jesse Smith himself invoked. It deserves an answer about the evidence, not a redirection toward the character of the person asking.

None of this required cleverness to find. It required going back to the plain words on the page, William Branham's own, Jesse Smith's own, and scripture's own, and letting them stand next to each other. When they do, the case does not hold up any better in Part Two than it did in Part One.

Notes

Scripture citations follow the King James Version except where another translation is named.

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