The Message on Trial - Part 3

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This article is one in a series on Allistair Francis' defence of the message - you are currently on the topic that is in bold:

• Overview
• The Message on Trial - Part 1 - The Initial Defence
• The Message on Trial - Part 2 - The Counterattack
• The Message on Trial - Part 3 - The Counteroffensive
• The Message on Trial - Q&A - Questions & Answers
• The Message on Trial - Part 4 - Finding the Balance

PART 3: THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE

This article is a responses to Allistair Francis' video - "Discouraged by the Message and the Prophet — The Message on Trial P3"

VIDEO SUMMARY

This is the third installment of Pastor Allistair Francis's series responding to criticism of William Branham and the Message movement. Unlike Parts 1 and 2, Part 3 is explicitly a response to the written rebuttal of his first video.

We specifically informed him of our critique via email and Francis acknowledges the critique early in the video, expressing surprise at how quickly it was produced, and spends several minutes speculating that it may have been generated by artificial intelligence ([2:37–3:19]).

The video covers several broad topics: an extended defense of the cult accusation using Walter Martin's five-marker rubric, a cultural relativism defense of Isaac Noriega, a repeat of the "appeal to personal experience" strategy, a lengthy theological questions barrage directed at critics, an extended appeal to emotion describing happy Message believers worldwide, and a closing theological section arguing that the Message contains personal spiritual mysteries that critics simply "don't get."

Two significant features distinguish this third installment. First, Francis explicitly reaffirms — for the third consecutive video — his refusal to engage with the documented evidence, stating: "I already know what I believe and I don't need to go and prove myself and my faith wrong with anything" ([10:33–10:43]). Second, Francis makes one of the most revealing statements of the entire series regarding Branham's authority, declaring: "We do not see brother Branham as above the Bible but rather as part of the Bible" ([26:10–26:17]).

What remains unchanged across all three installments is what Francis does not do: directly address the documented evidence — the specific failed prophecies, the story changes, the fabricated meetings with world leaders, or the verifiable historical inaccuracies. The closest he comes is a single acknowledgment, buried inside a sarcastic barrage, that critics have "trapped us" with "a bridge, a brown bear, and a cloud and many failed thus sayeth the Lord's" ([1:30:29–1:30:39]). He makes no attempt to explain any of them.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND REBUTTALS

Preliminary Observation: Francis Responds to the Rebuttal — By Not Responding

The opening minutes of Part 3 are revealing. Francis acknowledges receiving the written rebuttal of his Part 1 video and admits he was "quite amazed that it was so soon and such a lot of work was put into it, critiquing the entire transcript of my words" ([2:19–2:27]). He then speculates it may have been written by AI ([2:37–3:08]), describes a young man who showed him how AI could generate counter-arguments for his side ([2:44–2:58]), and muses that this could result in "an AI versus an AI and no Holy Spirit in there whatsoever" ([3:16–3:19]).

This sets the pattern for the entire video. Rather than addressing the specific arguments in the rebuttal — the documented logical fallacies, the identified contradictions, the unanswered evidence — Francis dismisses the rebuttal as potentially machine-generated and moves on to repeat and expand arguments already addressed in Part 2. The irony is that dismissing an argument based on who (or what) produced it rather than whether its claims are true is itself a textbook logical fallacy: the genetic fallacy. If the rebuttal contains errors, those errors can be identified regardless of whether a human or an AI wrote it. If it contains valid points, those points remain valid regardless of origin.

Argument 30: The AI Dismissal

THE CLAIM:

At [2:37–3:19], Francis suggests the rebuttal may have been produced by AI, noting a young man showed him how AI could generate counter-arguments. He claims: "At times, you can almost sense a non-human response to things like, you know, saying like, 'I'm siding with the atheist.' That's craziness, right?" ([3:28–3:38]).

REBUTTAL:

The Genetic Fallacy.

Whether an argument was written by a human, an AI, or a team of researchers is completely irrelevant to whether the argument is true. If the rebuttal identifies a logical fallacy, the fallacy either exists or it doesn't. If it documents a failed prophecy, the prophecy either failed or it didn't. If it points out a contradiction, the contradiction either exists or it doesn't. Dismissing an argument based on its origin rather than its content is the genetic fallacy — the very same error Francis accuses the critics of making when they "label" him.

The Irony.

Francis spends three videos complaining that critics label and dismiss Message believers without truly engaging with them. He then does precisely this to the rebuttal — labeling it as potentially AI-generated rather than engaging with its actual claims. If he believes the rebuttal is wrong, the most effective refutation would be to show where it is wrong, not to speculate about how it was produced.

The Deflection.

This is also a subtle way of dismissing the rebuttal without ever having to explain why he cannot answer its specific points. If the audience believes the arguments are just AI-generated noise, they have no reason to take them seriously — regardless of whether those arguments are valid.

> Fallacy Identified: Genetic Fallacy / Ad Hominem Circumstantial.

Attacking the perceived origin of an argument rather than its content. The truth of a claim is independent of who or what produced it.

Argument 31: Willful Ignorance — The Third Affirmation

THE CLAIM:

For the third consecutive video, Francis reaffirms his refusal to read the critical material. At [10:33–10:43], he states: "I already know what I believe and I don't need to go and prove myself and my faith wrong with anything. I don't need to do that. Nobody in his right mind will do that." He adds: "I'll read as people send me stuff" ([10:47–10:51]) but makes clear he will not independently examine the evidence.

He also compares the "willfully ignorant" label to being called "brainwashed" by atheists during his school years ([5:01–5:28]) and asks: "Do I now have to go study all of science from every accuser's perspective to give due diligence to make sure what I believe is firm and believable? Absolutely not." ([5:24–5:35]).

REBUTTAL:

Three Videos, Same Confession.

Let the record be clear: across three consecutive videos totaling over six hours of content defending William Branham against documented criticism, Francis has consistently, repeatedly, and unapologetically declared that he has not read — and will not read — the evidence he is supposedly rebutting. This is no longer an incidental oversight. It is not a time constraint. It is a doctrinal position: "I will defend this man without examining the charges against him." Francis is not a defense attorney who hasn't had time to read the prosecution's brief. He is a defense attorney who has announced, on the record, that he refuses to read it — and expects the jury to acquit anyway. This is not faith. This is intellectual malpractice.

The Atheism Comparison Is Misguided.

Francis compares being asked to examine Branham criticism to being asked by atheists to study "all of science." The comparison does not hold. An atheist asking a Christian to disprove all of science is asking someone to abandon their worldview. A fellow Christian asking a Message believer to examine whether Branham made specific, verifiable false claims is asking them to test a prophet — exactly what 1 Thessalonians 5:21 and 1 John 4:1 command. The critics are not atheists. They are not asking Francis to abandon Christ. They are Christians — many of them former Message believers who loved the Message and lost everything when they discovered the truth — asking Francis to verify whether a specific man told the truth about specific historical events. Equating this to atheistic attack mischaracterizes what the critics are actually doing.

"Nobody in His Right Mind Will Do That."

Read this statement again. Francis is saying that examining evidence that might challenge your beliefs is irrational. He is saying that the person who investigates before committing is mentally deficient. By this logic:

• The Bereans of Acts 17:11 — commended as "more noble" for searching the Scriptures to verify Paul's claims — were insane.
• Martin Luther, who examined Catholic teaching against Scripture, was out of his mind.
• Francis's own father, who studied the Message specifically to prove it wrong before accepting it, was irrational when he began that study.
• Every convert who ever examined Christianity before believing was a fool.

Does Francis not hear himself? He has declared that the very thing Scripture commends — testing, proving, searching — is the mark of mental instability. He has called the Bereans crazy. He has called his own father's method wrong. He has told his audience that examining evidence is insanity — which conveniently means they should never examine the evidence that might set them free.

If the Message is true, examination should strengthen it. The fact that Francis treats examination as existential threat tells you everything you need to know about what the examination would reveal.

> Fallacy Identified: Willful Ignorance (affirmed for the third time) / False Equivalence / Anti-Intellectualism.

Comparing examination of specific historical claims to atheistic assault, declaring that self-examination is inherently irrational, and positioning ignorance as a spiritual virtue.

Argument 32: "Those Who Leave Go to a Dark Place"

THE CLAIM:

At [12:08–19:36], Francis describes his experience with people who have left the Message. He claims they "go off into a place, a dark place of hate and of obsession" ([14:02–14:08]), that "their lives fall apart, their children backslide so badly, their homes are no longer intact. They're alone. They're isolated" ([14:28–14:38]). He says they end up "trolling message people" for a "dopamine hit" ([19:01–19:07]). He claims they go to denominational churches where "it really doesn't satisfy them" ([18:47–18:50]), and that they become so "intellectual" they "can't even get along with other people" ([18:13–18:23]).

REBUTTAL:

This Is Fear-Based Persuasion.

Francis is telling young people — his stated audience — that if they leave the Message, their lives will fall apart, their families will disintegrate, their children will backslide, and they will end up alone, obsessed, trolling the internet for dopamine hits. This is not pastoral care. This is fear-mongering designed to discourage honest inquiry. Every high-control group uses this exact tactic: "Leave, and destruction follows." The Jehovah's Witnesses say it. The Mormons say it. Scientology says it. The pattern is consistent across groups that prioritize loyalty over truth.

Survivorship Bias.

Francis is reporting only the cases he sees — people who remain in his orbit after leaving, people who contact him, people who argue online. He does not see the thousands of former Message believers who quietly transitioned into healthy church communities, rebuilt their lives, and moved on without looking back. Those people have no reason to contact Francis. His sample is inherently skewed toward the small subset of leavers who are still visibly processing their departure. The thriving ex-Message community — people who left and flourished — is simply not visible from his vantage point.

The Causation Is Backwards.

Francis attributes the struggles of those who leave to the act of leaving. This is grotesque. Many people who leave the Message were already struggling — often precisely because of the Message environment. Abusive pastors. Legalistic control. Broken relationships caused by shunning. Families torn apart when members dare to question. Women treated as second-class. Young people crushed under burdens of dress codes, entertainment restrictions, and fear of "missing the rapture." Their struggles after leaving are often the continuation of damage done while they were in the Message — damage that the Message caused and Francis now blames on their departure. This is the logic of the abuser: "Look how broken you are since you left me." No. They were broken by you. Leaving was the first step toward healing.

"Dopamine Hit" — The Characterization Is Telling.

Francis reduces people who share their stories to addicts "trolling for dopamine hits." These are people who lost their communities, their families, sometimes their marriages — because they followed evidence where it led. Many of them speak out precisely because they don't want others to suffer what they suffered. Dismissing them as seeking "internet validation" does not address their documented evidence.

The Verifiable Counter-Evidence.

Thousands of former Message believers worldwide have found fulfilling church homes, stable families, and vibrant faith after leaving. Many have shared their stories publicly. They are not in "dark places." They are in the light — the light of a faith no longer dependent on defending the indefensible. Francis's narrative is not merely uncharitable. It is a lie. And he is telling it to young people to keep them afraid.

=> Fallacy Identified: Survivorship Bias / Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc / Spiritual Terrorism.

Using a biased sample of difficult departures to characterize all departures as destructive, confusing correlation with causation, and leveraging fear to discourage examination. This is a control tactic, not a theological argument.

Argument 33: "Jesus Was a Cult Too"

THE CLAIM:

At [19:22–22:07], Francis argues that Jesus and his disciples met every definition of a cult: "By every definition previously given, Jesus and his disciples were a cult to the very extent that their leader Jesus was martyred and his cult members in inverted commas lied about everything and created a new cult religion" ([21:49–22:07]). He notes that Jewish people and atheists still view Christianity this way.

REBUTTAL:

The Equivocation Is Deliberate.

Francis is trading on two entirely different meanings of the word "cult," and he knows exactly what he is doing. In its neutral, sociological sense, a cult is simply a new religious movement — and yes, early Christianity was that. In its modern usage, however, "cult" refers to a group with specific harmful characteristics: authoritarian leadership, suppression of dissent, information control, shunning of dissenters, claims of exclusive truth, and exploitation of members. When critics call the Message a cult, they are using the second definition and pointing to documented, specific behaviors. Francis responds by switching to the first definition — which is irrelevant to the charge. This is not confusion. This is sleight of hand.4

Jesus Invited Testing — Francis Forbids It.

Here is the difference Francis desperately wants you to ignore: Jesus invited scrutiny. He said, "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not" (John 10:37). He pointed to evidence — miracles, fulfilled prophecy, the testimony of Scripture — as grounds for belief. He engaged with critics publicly. He answered the Pharisees' questions. He told Thomas to put his fingers in the wounds. He did not tell his followers to ignore evidence, refuse to examine charges, or view testing as disloyalty.

Francis does the opposite.

He tells his audience that "faith is absolutely in spite of evidence." He says examining criticism is something "nobody in his right mind" would do. He refuses to read the documented evidence. He dismisses critics as trolls and dopamine addicts. He warns that those who leave go to a "dark place." This is the behavior of a cult — not the behavior of Jesus. Francis is not defending Christianity. He is proving the charge against the Message by the very way he defends it.

The Defense Undermines Itself.

If being called a cult means nothing because Jesus was also called one, then the label is meaningless and Francis should not be troubled by it. But he clearly is troubled — he spends a substantial portion of Part 3 rebutting it. His own extended defense demonstrates that the charge carries weight, even by his own estimation. The lady doth protest too much.

> Fallacy Identified: Equivocation / Self-Defeating Defense.

Using two different definitions of "cult" interchangeably to deflect from specific concerns, while demonstrating cult-like information control in the very act of defense.

Argument 34: "Every Denomination Is a Cult by That Definition" — The BITE Model Refutation

THE CLAIM:

Throughout [19:19–34:28], Francis argues that the word "cult" applies equally to every Christian group. He begins with a vague internet dictionary definition — "a social group with extreme devotion to a person, an idea or a belief system often characterized by unusual practices, insularity, and strong control over members" ([19:37–20:04]) — and then claims this describes early Christianity, Lutheranism, Methodism, and the Baptist church just as well as the Message. He draws a direct parallel: "In Luther's day, all the Lutheran studied the works of Luther and the Bible. And the Lutheran church gives more authority to Luther's works than the works of other Christians around them at the time" ([28:30–28:45]). He extends this to Wesley and the Methodists, and argues that even Baptist churches police their members' attendance at other churches ([32:31–32:49]). His conclusion: "I don't know, are they all cults in their denominations?" ([32:02–32:05]). He claims the Message is simply younger than these other movements — "the message is like 60 years old, these others are over a hundred years old" ([33:40–33:50]) — and that with time, the distinction will disappear.

REBUTTAL:

Why Francis Chose a Vague Definition. Francis's argument depends entirely on using a definition of "cult" so broad that it swallows every religious group on earth — including the early church itself. If every group with a founder and distinctive beliefs qualifies as a cult, the word becomes meaningless and nobody can be criticized. This is not an accident. Francis chose this definition precisely because it achieves the result he wants: flattening every distinction between the Message and mainstream Christianity. But modern cult scholarship does not use vague dictionary definitions. It uses structured, evidence-based frameworks — and the most widely recognized is the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control.

The BITE Model.

Developed by Steven Hassan (MA, Cambridge College), a former member of the Unification Church ("Moonies") and author of Combating Cult Mind Control, the BITE Model identifies specific, observable mechanisms by which high-control groups recruit and retain members. "BITE" stands for Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, and Emotional control. The model was built on the academic work of psychiatrists Robert Jay Lifton and psychologists Edgar Schein and Margaret Singer — all researchers in coercive persuasion.

It has been widely used in cult research, published in professional journals, and applied in forensic and legal settings. This is not a vague internet definition. It is a recognized framework with specific, observable criteria used by mental health professionals and cult recovery specialists.

The BITE Model does not ask "do you have a leader?" (every group does) or "do you have distinctive beliefs?" (every group does). It asks: does the group systematically control behavior, information, thought, and emotion in ways that suppress individual autonomy and make it psychologically dangerous to leave?

When applied to the Message and compared to the denominations Francis cites, the results are not remotely comparable.

1. Behavior Control. The BITE Model asks whether the group regulates members' physical reality — clothing, hairstyles, diet, relationships, leisure, finances — and whether it discourages individualism and imposes rigid rules. In many Message churches, women are required to wear long skirts or dresses and are forbidden from cutting their hair. Television, movies, and sports are discouraged or outright prohibited in many congregations. Dating and marriage outside the Message is strongly discouraged. Women's roles are rigidly defined based on Branham's teachings. Lifestyle choices that would be considered normal in mainstream Christianity — a woman wearing pants, going to a movie, cutting her hair — are treated as spiritual failures. Francis himself acknowledges dress code variation church to church ([39:13]) — but the fact that any dress code is enforced based on the words of one man, with no denominational accountability, is itself the point. By contrast, Lutherans, Baptists, and Methodists enforce no dress codes, no hair regulations, and no entertainment prohibitions. Members are free to make personal lifestyle choices without spiritual consequence. A Baptist woman who cuts her hair short or watches a movie is not questioned about her salvation. The difference is not one of degree — it is categorical.
2. Information Control. The BITE Model asks whether the group uses deception, discourages access to outside information, discourages contact with former members, compartmentalizes insider vs. outsider doctrines, or relies extensively on group-generated propaganda. In the Message, members are actively discouraged from reading critical material about Branham. Former members who raise questions are labeled "bitter," "backslidden," "in a dark place," "obsessed," "trolling for dopamine" — Francis himself does this in this very video ([14:02–14:08], [19:01–19:07]). The primary information diet is Branham's 1,100+ recorded sermons, which function as the lens through which Scripture itself is interpreted. Francis explicitly states Branham is seen as "part of the Bible" ([26:10–26:17]). Critical websites like Believe the Sign are dismissed without engagement. Francis's own three videos total over six hours and never once address the specific documented evidence — the failed prophecies, the fabricated stories, the verifiable historical inaccuracies. Instead, he tells his audience not to look: "I already know what I believe and I don't need to go and prove myself and my faith wrong with anything" ([10:33–10:43]). By contrast, Lutheran, Baptist, and Methodist seminaries teach students to engage critically with their founders and their critics. Luther's anti-Semitic writings are openly discussed and repudiated by modern Lutherans. Baptist seminaries teach hermeneutics, church history, and comparative theology. Members who leave a Baptist church are not systematically labeled as having gone to "a dark place." There is no equivalent of "don't read that — it's poison." In mainstream denominations, information flows freely and critical engagement with the founder is considered healthy scholarship. In the Message, critical information about Branham is treated as spiritual poison, and people who share it are characterized as damaged, dangerous, or demonic.
3. Thought Control. The BITE Model asks whether the group requires members to internalize doctrine as truth, uses loaded language that constricts knowledge and stops critical thinking, discourages rational analysis, labels alternative belief systems as illegitimate, and instills a new "map of reality." The Message is saturated with loaded language that functions as thought-stopping shorthand: "the Message," "the Bride," "the Token," "the Squeeze," "the Third Pull," "the Rapture," "the Tent Vision," "denominational" (used as a pejorative), "the Opening of the Seals." These terms create an insider vocabulary that makes complex theological questions feel already settled. Black-and-white thinking is pervasive: you are either "in the Message" or "in denomination" (which is spiritually dead). Questioning Branham's claims is reframed as "attacking God's prophet" — a thought-stopping label that makes critical inquiry feel like sin. Francis demonstrates this pattern throughout: he does not say "I've examined the evidence and found it unconvincing"; he says he does not need to examine it because he already knows what he believes. By contrast, in mainstream denominations, theological debate is encouraged. Multiple interpretive traditions exist within each denomination. Lutherans have vigorous internal debates about ordination, liturgy, and social ethics. Baptists disagree publicly about Calvinism, eschatology, and church governance. Questioning Luther's theology does not make you "anti-Luther" — it makes you a theologian. There is no loaded vocabulary that shuts down inquiry. In mainstream denominations, asking hard questions about the founder is called theology. In the Message, asking hard questions about Branham is called apostasy.
4. Emotional Control. The BITE Model asks whether the group manipulates emotions through guilt and fear, promotes phobia indoctrination about leaving, uses shunning, and teaches that there is never a legitimate reason to leave. This is where Francis's own video provides the most damning evidence. He spends an extended section ([12:08–19:36]) describing what happens to people who leave: they go to "a dark place of hate and of obsession" ([14:02–14:08]); "their lives fall apart, their children backslide so badly, their homes are no longer intact. They're alone. They're isolated" ([14:28–14:38]); they end up "trolling message people" for a "dopamine hit" ([19:01–19:07]); denominational churches "don't satisfy them" ([18:47–18:50]). This is textbook phobia indoctrination — the BITE Model's term for instilling irrational fears about what happens if you leave. The message to anyone watching is unmistakable: if you leave, your life will be destroyed. Shunning of former members is widely reported across Message congregations. The emotional cost of questioning is enormous — you risk losing your family, your church community, your entire social world. By contrast, members who leave mainstream denominations are generally wished well. There is no systematic narrative that people who leave a Baptist church "go to a dark place" and have their lives fall apart. Former Methodists are not described as "trolling" current Methodists for dopamine. There is no phobia indoctrination. There is no shunning. A Lutheran who becomes a Baptist does not lose their family. In mainstream denominations, leaving is a life transition. In the Message, leaving is described as a catastrophe — and the people around you are primed to treat it as one.

The Bottom Line.

Francis wants to flatten the distinction between the Message and mainstream denominations by using the broadest possible definition of "cult" — so broad it includes Jesus and the apostles. The BITE Model refuses to let him do this. A Baptist can cut her hair, watch a movie, read a book criticizing Baptist theology, visit a Lutheran church, leave the Baptist church entirely, and maintain every friendship she had — without anyone telling her she has entered "a dark place" or that her children will backslide and her home will fall apart. A Message believer who does the equivalent risks losing everything. That is the difference the BITE Model measures. And it is a difference Francis's vague internet definition was specifically chosen to obscure.

> Fallacy Identified: False Equivalence / Definitional Manipulation.

Using a definition of "cult" deliberately broad enough to include every religious group in history, thereby erasing the specific, measurable differences between mainstream denominations and high-control groups. When evaluated against the BITE Model — the standard used by cult researchers, forensic experts, and the legal system — the Message exhibits patterns of authoritarian control across all four dimensions (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion) that are categorically absent from the Lutheran, Baptist, and Methodist churches Francis compares it to.

Argument 35: The Walter Martin Rubric Response

THE CLAIM:

At [22:28–53:18], Francis takes on the five-marker rubric used by Believe the Sign to classify the Message as a cult (Authority, Christology, Salvation, Community, Biblical Interpretation). He argues:

• Authority: "We do not see brother Branham as above the Bible but rather as part of the Bible" ([26:10–26:17]). He compares this to Lutherans following Luther and Methodists following Wesley.
• Christology: Claims they have never distorted the deity of Christ and are accused of being "Jesus only" ([34:49–34:51]).
• Salvation: Claims they believe in grace-based salvation, not works-based salvation ([35:25–36:01]).
• Community: Claims Message churches are not even united: "Show me five message churches who 100% agree on everything" ([38:44–38:54]). No head office, no central authority.
• Biblical Interpretation: Claims all Christians interpret differently and it is "phenomenal hubris" to think anyone can interpret without distortion ([47:40–47:57]).

REBUTTAL:

"Part of the Bible" — The Most Revealing Statement of the Series.

Francis says Message believers do not see Branham as above the Bible but rather as part of the Bible. This statement alone satisfies the cult rubric's "Authority" criterion. The Bible is a closed canon — 66 books, accepted by the Christian church for over a millennium. To claim that a 20th-century preacher's teachings are "part of the Bible" is to functionally elevate him to the level of Scripture. No mainstream Lutheran claims Luther's works are "part of the Bible." No Methodist claims Wesley's sermons are canonical Scripture. They are valued teachers — not extensions of the biblical text. Francis has, in attempting to minimize Branham's authority, inadvertently confirmed the very charge he is defending against.

The Luther/Wesley Comparison Fails Again.

Lutherans study Luther. Methodists study Wesley. But neither group claims their founder was a divinely sent prophet whose word must not be questioned, whose teachings unlock hidden mysteries sealed since the foundation of the world, or whose ministry constitutes "part of the Bible." The comparison is one of degree, and the degree is the entire point. Message believers do not treat Branham the way Lutherans treat Luther. They treat him as an infallible prophetic authority — which is exactly the charge.

The "Disunity" Argument Is Self-Defeating.

Francis argues the Message cannot be a cult because churches disagree with one another: "We are completely sovereign assemblies who don't see eye to eye" ([39:01–39:08]). But this actually confirms the cult critics' point rather than refuting it. When each independent pastor has unchecked authority over his own congregation with no denominational accountability, no oversight structure, and no mechanism for members to appeal to a higher authority, the result is precisely what critics describe: hundreds of isolated, authoritarian micro-communities. The lack of central organization does not disprove the cult charge — it explains why cult-like behavior varies so dramatically from church to church, and why abusive pastors face no accountability.

The "Everybody Interprets Differently" Argument.

Francis argues that since all Christians interpret the Bible differently, accusing the Message of distorted interpretation is meaningless. But the rubric does not merely say "interprets differently." It identifies selective or distorted use of Scripture — cherry-picking texts to support predetermined conclusions while ignoring texts that contradict them. When Francis himself says "faith is absolutely in spite of evidence" while the Bible commands "prove all things" (1 Thessalonians 5:21), that is a textbook example of selective interpretation. The charge is not that the Message has a unique perspective. The charge is that it systematically suppresses the Bible's own corrective mechanisms — testing, proving, searching the Scriptures — to protect a specific man's authority.

> Fallacy Identified: False Equivalence / Inadvertent Concession.

Comparing the Message's treatment of Branham to Lutheranism's treatment of Luther while inadvertently revealing a far more elevated view of Branham ("part of the Bible"). Using church disunity as a defense while actually confirming the absence of accountability structures that enable abuse.

Argument 36: Isaac Noriega — Cultural Relativism

THE CLAIM:

At [44:18–47:22], Francis responds to criticism of his relationship with Isaac Noriega by invoking cultural differences in pastoral practice. He asks: "Does any white people from Canada and North America know what it's like to pastor a Spanish church of Latino people near the border where your people live among cartels?" ([44:42–44:57]). He argues that different cultures require different pastoral methods and it is wrong to "swipe everybody with a broad brush" ([47:19–47:22]).

REBUTTAL:

The Charge Is Not About Culture.

The criticism of Isaac Noriega is not about cultural differences in worship style, service length, or dress customs. It is about documented concerns — controlling behavior, legalism, and practices that caused harm to real people. Francis reframes the charge as a cultural misunderstanding when it is, in fact, a moral one. Abuse is not a cultural practice. Controlling people's personal decisions is not a cultural adaptation. There is no culture on earth where abusing congregants is an appropriate pastoral method.

The "Border Town Among Cartels" Characterization Is Factually Misleading.

Francis frames Noriega's church — Tabernaculo Emanuel, also known as Golden Dawn Tabernacle — as if it exists in some dangerous frontier environment where extreme pastoral measures might be understandable. In reality, this church is located in Tucson, Arizona — a perfectly normal American suburban city with a metropolitan population of over one million people, a major university, and all the infrastructure of any mid-sized U.S. city. Tucson is not a border town. It is not a cartel stronghold. It is roughly 60 miles from the Mexican border. Moreover, the church's services are now predominantly conducted in English, undermining the premise that this is a uniquely "Spanish church of Latino people" requiring culturally distinct pastoral methods that outsiders simply cannot understand. Francis's attempt to paint the church's environment as some kind of dangerous, culturally alien setting — to make criticism of Noriega's practices seem like naive cultural imperialism — does not survive basic factual scrutiny.

Francis Still Does Not Address the Substance.

In Part 1, he was confronted with his own written words calling Noriega "the Word made flesh" and the man through whom he "known Christ." In Part 3, he still does not address this directly. He does not explain why he wrote those words. He does not retract them. He does not explain how he reconciles praising Noriega in the most exalted possible terms while claiming to oppose the very behavior Noriega's church is documented to have practiced. He simply pivots to a broader argument about cultural sensitivity.

Cultural Sensitivity Does Not Equal Moral Relativism.

Acknowledging that churches in different contexts face different challenges is reasonable. Using that acknowledgment to shield abusive pastors from criticism is not. If a pastor in any culture is documented abusing his authority, the response should be accountability — not an appeal to cultural complexity as a reason to look the other way.

> Fallacy Identified: Red Herring / Moral Relativism.

Reframing documented abuse as a cultural sensitivity issue and using the complexity of cross-cultural pastoral work to avoid addressing the specific documented charges.

Argument 37: Scandals Are a Human Problem, Not a Message Problem

THE CLAIM:

At [53:48–59:02], Francis argues that "as long as there are people who gather together as a group, there are going to be predators among them" ([53:51–53:56]). He notes that psychopaths gravitate to religious leadership, and this has been "the curse in the Christian church from the very inception" ([58:03–58:06]). He concludes: "This is not a message thing. This is a human thing" ([58:50–59:00]).

REBUTTAL:

The Distinction Critics Actually Make.

No one claims the Message is the only religious movement with scandals. The charge is more specific and more serious: the Message's structure — independent pastors with unchecked authority, no denominational oversight, no appeals process, shunning of dissenters, and an epistemology that discourages questioning — creates conditions that are uniquely hospitable to predators and uniquely resistant to accountability. In a Baptist denomination, a pastor accused of abuse faces a denominational board, an investigation process, and institutional consequences. In the Message, as Francis himself has emphasized, churches are "completely sovereign assemblies" with no central authority. When abuse occurs, there is nowhere for victims to turn.

====The Pattern, Not the Instance.==== Francis is correct that isolated scandals can occur anywhere. But critics are not pointing to isolated incidents. They are pointing to a pattern of abuse that correlates with the Message's specific structural features: authoritarian pastoral control, discouragement of questioning, treatment of those who leave as spiritual failures, and the theological framework that places the pastor-prophet above scrutiny. When the same pattern of abuse shows up across independent Message churches on multiple continents, the explanation is not random chance — it is shared structural features that enable and protect abusers.

Francis Himself Acknowledged This in Part 1.

In his first video, Francis admitted that some Message churches exhibit "cultish behavior," controlling members' personal decisions and treating dissenters like they "have leprosy." He said he was "the hardest on Message people" about this. If the problem is merely a universal human tendency unrelated to the Message, why did he single out Message churches for criticism in Part 1?

====> Fallacy Identified: Tu Quoque / Special Pleading.==== Arguing that because all groups have scandals, the Message's specific structural enablement of abuse is irrelevant, while ignoring the correlation between Message-specific practices and documented patterns of harm.

Argument 38: Malachi 4 vs. Malachi 3

THE CLAIM:

At [59:02–1:05:14], Francis argues that John the Baptist identified himself only as Malachi 3:1, not Malachi 4:5–6. He claims: "All these anti-Branham people have absolutely no scripture that identifies John the Baptist as Malachi 4" ([59:33–59:40]). He says Branham, unlike John, "literally identified his ministry as that of Malachi 4:5 and 6" ([1:03:24–1:03:33]) and invites listeners to accept or reject it.

REBUTTAL:

The Scriptural Evidence Francis Dismisses.

Jesus Himself identified John the Baptist as the fulfillment of the Elijah prophecy: "If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come" (Matthew 11:14). The angel Gabriel told Zechariah that John would go before the Lord "in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children" (Luke 1:17) — quoting Malachi 4:6 directly. To say "no scripture identifies John the Baptist as Malachi 4" requires ignoring Luke 1:17, where Malachi 4:6's language is applied to John by an angel before John was even born.

The Self-Identification Problem.

Francis makes much of the fact that Branham identified himself as Malachi 4:5–6 while John identified himself only as Malachi 3. But this argument cuts the opposite direction from what Francis intends. In biblical precedent, genuine prophets were typically identified by others — by God, by angels, or by other prophets — not by self-proclamation. John's humility in declining titles is viewed as evidence of authenticity. A man proclaiming himself to be the fulfillment of major end-times prophecy should be subjected to more scrutiny, not less. Deuteronomy 18:22 provides the test: did his prophecies come to pass?

The Unfalsifiable Framework.

Francis presents this as a simple matter of belief: "It's up to you whether you want to accept it or not" ([1:03:36–1:03:38]). But Branham did not merely claim a spiritual mantle — he made specific, testable prophecies that he said God gave him. These prophecies can be verified. They either came true or they didn't. The question is not whether someone feels Branham was the Malachi 4 prophet. The question is whether his prophetic record supports or undermines that claim, and that is precisely the question Francis refuses to examine.

> Fallacy Identified: Cherry-Picking / Self-Defeating Argument.

Ignoring Luke 1:17's direct application of Malachi 4:6 to John the Baptist, and inadvertently highlighting that Branham's self-identification, unlike John's humble deflection, is exactly the kind of claim that demands rigorous testing.

Argument 39: The Theological Questions Barrage

THE CLAIM:

At [1:21:00–1:31:06], Francis delivers an extended barrage of theological questions aimed at anti-Branham critics: What was the original sin? Who is the man of Genesis 1:26? What are the seven seals? Who are the two witnesses? What is the seventh seal? Who is the woman of Revelation 12? What does hell look like? What is the correct baptism? He demands: "Now that you have trapped us, you have us with a bridge, a brown bear, and a cloud and many failed thus sayeth the Lord's. Can you please tell us and guide us into the truth?" ([1:30:29–1:30:39]).

REBUTTAL:

The Gish Gallop of a Man Who Cannot Answer.

This is desperation dressed as offense. Rather than addressing the specific, documented, testable charges against Branham — the bridge story, the brown bear, the cloud, the failed "Thus Saith the Lord" prophecies (which Francis himself names!) — he fires off dozens of unrelated theological questions in rapid succession. The strategy is transparent: if critics cannot provide satisfying answers to every mystery in the book of Revelation, they supposedly have no right to point out that Branham lied about meeting King George, fabricated a story about Gandhi, and made prophecies that flatly failed. This is not argument. This is smoke screen.

The Devastating Concession Buried Inside the Attack.

Stop and read Francis's own words: "a bridge, a brown bear, and a cloud and many failed thus sayeth the Lord's." He knows. He knows what the evidence is. He can name it. And across six-plus hours of video, he has made zero attempt to explain any of it. Not one word about why the Municipal Bridge story changed. Not one word about why the brown bear prophecy wasn't fulfilled. Not one word about the documented fabrications. Instead, he buries this admission inside a sarcastic tirade and hopes no one notices that he just confessed the prosecution's entire case while refusing to offer a defense.

This is the moment the trial ended. Francis has admitted the charges and declined to answer them. Everything else is noise.

Francis's List Is a Fraction of the Evidence.

Even in naming the evidence, Francis dramatically understates its scope. He mentions four categories — a bridge, a brown bear, a cloud, and failed prophecies. The actual body of documented evidence runs to hundreds of items. Beyond those four, critics have documented:

• Branham's claim to have been visited by the Magi as an infant in a log cabin — a story with no corroborating evidence that changed across tellings.
• His claim to have been a professional boxer — with an opponent whose identity shifted between retellings.
• His claimed meetings with King George VI of England — for which no palace records or contemporaneous evidence exist.
• His claimed encounter with Mahatma Gandhi — an event with no historical corroboration whatsoever.
• His claim that Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia fulfilled his 1933 prophecy — a prophecy whose earliest documented record postdates the events it supposedly predicted.
• The shifting details of the Municipal Bridge story itself — not merely that the prophecy is questionable, but that the number of men who died, the circumstances of the vision, and the timing changed across multiple retellings.
• Documented discrepancies in his own biographical narratives — details about his conversion, his early life, and the death of his first wife that contradict one another across sermons.
• The 1963 cloud photograph — not only whether it constitutes supernatural vindication (which Francis conceded in Part 2 it does not prove publicly), but whether Branham was even present at the location when the cloud was photographed.

And these are only the most prominent examples. Believe the Sign and other research sites have catalogued dozens more. Francis named four items out of an evidence base that runs to hundreds of documented discrepancies — and he still could not address even those four. The sarcastic tone of his acknowledgment — "Now that you have trapped us" — reveals that he views this evidence as a rhetorical trap rather than a legitimate body of facts requiring honest engagement. He is right that he is trapped. But the trap was built by Branham, not by critics. The critics merely documented it.

The Red Herring Is Obvious.

Whether a critic can explain the identity of the 200 million demons, the nature of the new Jerusalem, or the meaning of the sea of glass is completely irrelevant to whether William Branham told the truth about the Municipal Bridge, his encounter with a brown bear, or his "Thus Saith the Lord" prophecies that failed. These are entirely separate categories of inquiry. One involves speculative theology about mysteries the Bible leaves open. The other involves testable historical claims and prophetic declarations that can be verified or falsified. The inability to answer the first does not insulate the second from scrutiny. A juror who cannot explain quantum physics can still convict a man of theft if the evidence is clear.

The Burden-Shifting Is Absurd.

Francis demands that critics provide a complete alternative theology before they are allowed to question Branham's claims. By this logic, a person who discovers their accountant has been embezzling must first produce an entire alternative corporate budget before they're allowed to press charges. A patient who catches their doctor lying on their chart must first earn a medical degree before they can complain. A customer who discovers their mechanic charged for work not done must first become a certified technician before they can ask for a refund. The ability to identify that a specific claim is false does not require omniscience about all things. This is not a standard anyone applies anywhere — except when protecting a prophet from examination.

> Fallacy Identified: Gish Gallop / Red Herring / Burden-Shifting / Inadvertent Confession.

Overwhelming critics with dozens of unrelated theological questions to avoid addressing specific, testable, documented evidence — while explicitly acknowledging that the evidence exists and declining to address it.

Argument 40: Prophecy Creates Useful Urgency (Repeated)

THE CLAIM:

At [1:31:27–1:39:16], Francis repeats and expands his Part 2 argument that failed prophetic timing served God's purpose. He claims all the healing revival preachers — Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jack Coe — believed the Lord's coming was imminent in their day. He asks: "Don't you think having that would be very likely that he would even predict that the closing of all things would occur in his time?" ([1:35:46–1:35:57]). He asks whether God "needed him to do exactly what he did to put a desperation into the world, the Christian church at the time" ([1:36:48–1:36:58]).

REBUTTAL:

This Was Addressed in Part 2, and It Remains Fallacious.

The distinction between general urgency and specific prediction has not changed. Billy Graham saying "Jesus could come any day" is eschatological urgency — undated, general, and shared by Christians throughout history. William Branham saying specific events would conclude by 1977 — a claim he said was based on "divine inspiration" — is a dated, falsifiable prediction. Branham himself acknowledged the distinction, saying in the Laodicean Church Age book: "let me predict (I did not say prophesy, but predict) that this age will end around 1977." Yet he also said it was made with "divine inspiration." He cannot have it both ways: either the inspiration that led to the date was divine (in which case the date matters), or it was not (in which case why should anyone trust it?). Moreover, separate from the 1977 prediction, there are actual "Thus Saith the Lord" statements that clearly failed — the brown bear prophecy, the India crusade where he promised "tens of thousands times thousands being saved," the healing of Donny Morton, and others documented in detail. The 1977 prediction is only one item in a much larger pattern.

The "God Needed Him To" Argument Worsens.

Francis now goes further than Part 2, explicitly suggesting God intentionally used Branham to create urgency through claims God knew were false. This makes God the author of a deliberate deception — using a prophet to deliver false dates as a motivational strategy. This is not a defense of Branham; it is an accusation against God. The biblical God says of Himself: "God is not a man, that he should lie" (Numbers 23:19). If Branham's "divinely inspired" prediction was God-inspired, God deceived. If it was not God-inspired, then Branham — a man who claimed to be God's end-time prophet — was unreliable on a matter of enormous consequence to his followers. And this problem compounds when one considers the separate "Thus Saith the Lord" statements that also failed: these were not hedged as predictions but spoken directly in the name of the Lord, and they did not come to pass.

The Parent Defense Collapses.

Francis says Message parents who lived with extreme urgency, sold possessions, and didn't plan for their children's futures "were not bad people" ([1:37:57–1:38:00]). No one claims they were bad people. They were sincere people who acted on what they were told by a man claiming to speak for God. The tragedy is not their sincerity — it is that they were given a specific prophetic timeline that did not come to pass, and now their children are being told to ignore that fact.

> Fallacy Identified: False Equivalence / Special Pleading (repeated).

Conflating general eschatological urgency with Branham's specific, dated, "divinely inspired" 1977 prediction, and attributing deliberate deception to God as a defense strategy. The 1977 prediction is also distinct from Branham's separate failed "Thus Saith the Lord" prophecies, which compound the problem further.

Argument 41: Appeal to Emotion — Happy People as Proof

THE CLAIM:

At [1:05:14–1:20:54], Francis delivers the most extensive emotional appeal of the three-part series. He describes vibrant worship across South Africa — the colored community's singing and dancing ([1:13:46–1:14:47]), indigenous African believers who "sing with conviction, with expression, with emotions, and with revelation" ([1:16:04–1:16:06]), "little kids dancing together in step and just joy of salvation being expressed" ([1:16:23–1:16:27]). He declares: "This is not cult people" ([1:16:31–1:16:33]). He claims: "We are generally a very, very happy people, both men and women, both boys and girls" ([1:06:26–1:06:33]). He describes traveling the world and finding happy Message believers on every continent.

REBUTTAL:

This Proves Nothing.

No critic doubts that there are happy, sincere, vibrant Message congregations. No one claims that every Message church is miserable.

But happiness is not a test of truth. People can be genuinely happy in any number of religious contexts — including those built entirely on false claims. Mormons are famously happy. Jehovah's Witnesses at their assemblies radiate joy. Members of the Unification Church wept with happiness at mass weddings. Jim Jones's followers sang and danced at Peoples Temple. Heaven's Gate members filmed cheerful farewell videos before committing mass suicide. Sincerity of worship has never been a reliable test of doctrinal truth. The appeal to happy worship services does not address the documented evidence.

This Experience Is Not Unique to the Message — Not Even Close.

Everything Francis describes — vibrant worship, tight communities, joyful children, lives transformed by faith — exists in equal measure, often in greater measure, outside the Message:

In Pentecostal churches across Africa, believers dance, sing, wave handkerchiefs, and worship with conviction and joy that makes Western Christianity look anemic — without William Branham. In Baptist churches across the American South, families gather for generations-long traditions of faith, raise moral children, and live by the Word — without William Branham. In Catholic parishes in the Philippines, believers process through streets with tears of devotion — without William Branham. In non-denominational churches in South America, converts from poverty and addiction testify to radically transformed lives — without William Branham. In Presbyterian congregations in South Korea, believers who endured war and persecution worship with profound depth — without William Branham. In underground churches in China, where faith costs everything, Christians exhibit courage, commitment, and joy that surpasses what most comfortable Western believers will ever know — without William Branham.

The Holy Spirit is not limited to the Message.

The fruit Francis describes is the fruit of genuine faith in Christ, not the fruit of following one man's teachings. When Francis presents these experiences as evidence for the Message specifically, he is claiming credit for the universal work of the Holy Spirit. This is not humility. This is theft.

The Emotional Manipulation Is the Point.

Francis's lengthy, passionate descriptions of beautiful worship are not incidental. They are strategic. They are designed to make the audience feel that questioning the Message means rejecting all of this beauty — the dancing children, the singing congregations, the transformed lives. But this is a lie packaged as an argument. Leaving the Message does not mean leaving Christ. Leaving the Message does not mean leaving worship. Leaving the Message does not mean leaving community or joy or faith. It means examining whether specific claims made by a specific man are true. The beauty of worship in South Africa does not vindicate the Municipal Bridge story. The joy of children dancing does not explain the failed "Thus Saith the Lord" prophecies. The conviction of African believers does not make King George's non-existent meeting real.

Francis is using real beauty as a shield for indefensible claims.

He is exploiting sincere faith to avoid answering questions he cannot answer. He is weaponizing worship footage to shut down inquiry. This is not apologetics. This is emotional manipulation — and it is particularly cruel when aimed at young people who are already confused and afraid.

> Fallacy Identified: Appeal to Emotion / Non Sequitur / Emotional Manipulation.

Using genuine, moving descriptions of worship to create an emotional barrier against examining factual claims. The beauty of worship neither proves nor disproves whether Branham's specific prophecies came true. Happy people exist in every religion on earth — including false ones.

Argument 42: Anti-Intellectualism — The Quiet Part Out Loud

THE CLAIM:

At [1:57:01–2:01:25], Francis argues that "probably 5% of the message will read" the anti-Branham websites because "the majority of the message are not intellectual people" ([1:57:05–1:57:13]). He says critics "speak like a whole bunch of intellectual know-it-alls" ([2:00:42–2:00:45]) and their "videos sound like... a boring professor" ([2:01:03–2:01:06]). He claims that "the majority of the world are poor, working-class people" who "don't care for your pontification" ([1:57:48–1:57:54]) and that the Message resonates because it is simple.

He concludes by suggesting that the anti-Branham message can only appeal to the educated middle class, while the Message "is going to resonate for generations with working-class, lower-class people" ([2:00:03–2:00:12]).

REBUTTAL:

Francis Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud.

Read what he actually said: the Message will survive because most of its followers will never read the evidence against it. He is not arguing that the evidence is wrong. He is not arguing that the critics have been refuted. He is arguing that it doesn't matter because most Message believers will never encounter it. This is not a defense of truth. This is a confession that the Message depends on ignorance for its survival. Francis has just admitted that if his people did read the evidence, it would be a problem — which is why it's convenient that most of them won't.

The Characterization of His Own People.

Notice how Francis characterizes Message believers: they are "not intellectual people," they "don't care for pontification," they won't read. He frames this as a virtue — simplicity, humility, working-class authenticity. But strip away the spin and hear what he's actually saying: "My people won't evaluate the evidence, and that's why we'll survive." Francis is betting on his congregation's non-engagement with the documented problems — and presenting this as a strength rather than a weakness.

The Strategy of Every Cult in History.

Framing intellectual inquiry as the enemy of faith is one of the most recognized characteristics of high-control groups. Jehovah's Witnesses warn against "higher education." Scientology attacks "suppressives" who ask questions. The Unification Church told members that doubt was Satan's tool. And now Francis tells his audience that critics are "boring professors" whose "pontification" can be safely ignored. The pattern is identical. The message is always the same: Don't read. Don't think. Don't examine. Trust us. Francis is not protecting his flock from wolves. He is protecting his claims from examination — and using his people's limited access to information as a firewall.

The Bible Does Not Despise Inquiry — Francis Does.

The same Jesus whom Francis invokes spoke in synagogues, debated Pharisees, engaged with scribes, and encouraged His followers to understand the Scriptures. Paul, a highly educated man, "reasoned" in synagogues and marketplaces (Acts 17:2, 17:17). The Bereans were "more noble" for searching the Scriptures. Daniel and his companions were the most educated young men in Babylon. Luke, the physician, wrote the most historically detailed Gospel. Moses was educated in all the wisdom of Egypt. The biblical tradition values both simplicity of faith and careful engagement with truth. Francis's implied dichotomy — that working-class people cannot handle evidence and therefore should not encounter it — is neither biblical nor respectful. It is manipulative. It treats his congregation as useful idiots whose ignorance is his asset.

The Unintended Confession.

If the Message can only survive where its followers are insulated from the evidence against it, what does that tell you about the Message? Francis has answered that question for us. He has told us, in his own words, that the Message's survival strategy is information isolation. He has admitted that the examination is dangerous. He has confessed that the less his people know, the safer his movement is. No critic could have said it more clearly.

> Fallacy Identified: Anti-Intellectualism / Appeal to Ignorance / Inadvertent Confession.

Framing the inability or unwillingness to examine evidence as a spiritual virtue, explicitly identifying information isolation as the Message's survival strategy, and betting on congregational ignorance as a defense.

Argument 43: The "Opened Book" — Personal Revelation Beyond Critique

THE CLAIM:

At [1:41:01–1:56:47], Francis describes the Message's true depth as personal spiritual revelation that goes beyond Branham's literal words. He says the church ages are "the map of the development of every individual Christian" ([1:43:47–1:43:55]) and the seals represent personal spiritual battles. He claims: "This is what believe the sign doesn't get. This is what all those people don't get. They think we are people who just preach Branham's message and take it and preach theory" ([1:54:56–1:55:07]). He says: "We actually have a personal, intimate relationship with the word beyond what you people have even heard" ([1:55:15–1:55:22]).

REBUTTAL:

The Unfalsifiable Fortress.

This is the ultimate defense: the Message is not really about the testable claims (which are problematic) but about a dimension of personal revelation that outsiders "don't get." This rendering makes the Message immune to any external critique. The bridge story doesn't matter because the real message is deeper. The failed prophecies don't matter because the real revelation is personal. The historical inaccuracies don't matter because the true seals are spiritual. Nothing that can be tested, documented, or verified counts — because the real Message exists in an untouchable realm of subjective experience.

Every Cult Makes This Exact Claim.

Scientologists say critics "don't understand the tech." Mormons testify to a "burning in the bosom" that trumps all evidence. Jehovah's Witnesses claim a spiritual understanding outsiders lack. Heaven's Gate members knew truths about the "Next Level" that skeptics couldn't perceive. The pattern is identical every single time: when the factual claims fail, retreat to subjective experience that cannot be tested or disproved. This is not evidence of spiritual depth. It is the last refuge of the indefensible. It is what you say when you have nothing else to say.

The Double Standard.

Francis spends hours demanding that critics provide evidence, substantiation, and factual proof for their theological positions. He fires dozens of questions requiring detailed, documented answers. He challenges anyone who cannot explain the identity of the 200 million horsemen or the meaning of the seventh seal. Yet when it comes to the Message's own claims — claims that can actually be tested — suddenly evidence is irrelevant. Suddenly what matters is personal revelation that cannot be communicated, tested, or verified. The standard of proof Francis demands from others is the very standard he exempts himself from.

The Honest Question Francis Cannot Answer.

If the Message is truly about a personal relationship with Christ and not about Branham's specific historical and prophetic claims, then why does the entire movement exist as a separate entity? If the seals are personal and the church ages are internal maps, why not teach these truths in any church? Why the separate identity? Why the distinctive name? Why the 1,100 sermons treated as "part of the Bible"?

The answer, of course, is that the Message does depend on Branham's specific claims — his prophetic authority, his unique revelation, his identity as the Malachi 4 prophet. Without those claims, there is no reason for the Message to exist as a distinct movement. Francis wants the untouchable mysticism without the testable foundations, but the movement is built on both. He cannot have it both ways. Either Branham's claims matter — in which case they must be defended — or they don't matter — in which case there is no Message, just generic Christianity with extra steps.

> Fallacy Identified: Unfalsifiable Claim / Special Pleading.

Retreating to subjective personal revelation as a defense when testable claims are challenged, while demanding evidence-based proof from critics for their positions. This is not a consistent epistemology.

Argument 44: The "Between the Lines" Revelations

THE CLAIM:

Throughout his closing arguments, Francis suggests that the Message's true value lies in its unique doctrinal revelations — teachings about the original sin (Serpent Seed), the meaning of the church ages, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, and other mysteries that are found "between the lines" of Scripture rather than explicitly stated. He implies that critics "don't get" the Message because they focus on testable historical claims rather than these deeper spiritual truths that only Message believers can perceive.

REBUTTAL:

The "Between the Lines" Admission Is Devastating. If these doctrines are "between the lines" and not explicitly stated in Scripture, Francis is inadvertently admitting they lack clear biblical support. The Bible claims to be sufficient for faith and practice: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Timothy 3:16–17). If the Bible is "thoroughly" sufficient, why do believers need Branham to unlock hidden meanings? The moment you require a 20th-century prophet to understand what Scripture "really" means, you have made that prophet functionally necessary for salvation — which is adding to the Word of God.

These "Revelations" Are Not Original to Branham.

Francis admitted in Part 2 that Branham drew heavily from Clarence Larkin, the Adventists, and other earlier writers. This is not a minor concession. Consider what it means for the "unique" doctrines Francis celebrates:

• The Church Ages framework — identifying seven historical periods corresponding to the seven churches of Revelation — was popularized by Larkin's Dispensational Truth (1918) and other dispensationalist writers decades before Branham taught it. The charts, the timelines, the messenger-to-each-age concept: none of this originated with Branham.
• The Seven Seals interpretation — Branham's framework draws extensively from existing dispensationalist and Adventist literature. The idea that the seals represent sequential historical periods was not a new revelation in 1963.
• The Serpent Seed doctrine — the teaching that Eve had sexual relations with the serpent and Cain was the offspring — predates Branham by centuries. Various gnostic groups taught versions of this, and Daniel Parker's "Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit" doctrine circulated in American frontier religion in the early 1800s.

If these teachings were borrowed from published books and existing theological traditions, in what sense are they divine revelations given uniquely to Branham? Francis wants to credit Branham with unlocking mysteries hidden since the foundation of the world — but the "mysteries" were available in any Christian bookstore.

"Between the Lines" Interpretation Has No Limiting Principle.

The moment you accept that Scripture contains hidden meanings accessible only through a special interpreter, you have abandoned any objective control on interpretation. Anyone can claim to find anything "between the lines":

• Muslims claim the Bible contains hidden prophecies of Muhammad.
• Mormons find secret references to temple ordinances and celestial marriage.
• Jehovah's Witnesses decode invisible returns of Christ in 1914.
• Kabbalah practitioners find mystical meanings in Hebrew letter arrangements.

Without objective criteria — the plain meaning of the text, the grammatical-historical method, the analogy of Scripture — "between the lines" simply means "whatever the interpreter says." This is not depth; it is interpretive anarchy dressed in spiritual language.

Two Thousand Years of Scholarship Did Not Miss the Truth.

Christians have debated the meaning of Revelation, the nature of original sin, and the shape of church history since the apostolic fathers. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Spurgeon — generations of Spirit-filled scholars studied these texts in the original languages, devoted their lives to understanding Scripture, and somehow all missed the "real" meaning until a man from Kentucky came along in the 1960s? This is an extraordinary claim. And it becomes even more extraordinary when we discover that Branham's "revelations" were largely borrowed from books published decades earlier. The Message asks us to believe that the entire church got it wrong for 1,900 years, that Branham uniquely received the truth, and that his unique truth happens to match Clarence Larkin's charts.

The "Hidden Knowledge" Pattern Is a Cult Marker.

The claim that only insiders have access to the true meaning of Scripture is textbook gnosticism — the ancient heresy that taught salvation comes through secret knowledge available only to the initiated. Historic, orthodox Christianity has always affirmed the opposite: that the essential truths of the faith are plain and accessible. The perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture is a foundational Protestant doctrine. When a movement says "you cannot understand the Bible without our founder's interpretation," that is not evidence of spiritual depth. It is a mechanism of control. It makes the founder indispensable — which is precisely the problem critics have identified.

The Serpent Seed Doctrine Specifically.

Since Francis implies this is one of the "hidden truths" the Message uniquely reveals, it deserves direct examination. The Serpent Seed doctrine teaches that Eve had sexual relations with the serpent (understood as Satan or a Satan-possessed creature) and that Cain was the offspring of this union, making Cain's descendants a satanic bloodline.

This teaching directly contradicts the plain text of Genesis 4:1: "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD." Eve credits God — not the serpent — with giving her Cain. Adam is identified as the one who "knew" her (a biblical euphemism for sexual relations). The text is explicit. The Serpent Seed doctrine requires reading against the plain meaning, not "between the lines."

====The New Testament further undermines this doctrine.==== When 1 John 3:12 says Cain "was of that wicked one," this describes spiritual allegiance, not biological paternity — the same language Jesus used when He told the Pharisees "ye are of your father the devil" (John 8:44). No one claims the Pharisees were biologically descended from Satan. The language is moral and spiritual, describing whose character and works they emulate. Reading "of that wicked one" as literal paternity contradicts both the immediate context and the parallel usage in John's Gospel. If "of that wicked one" proves Cain's biological descent from Satan, then "ye are of your father the devil" proves the Pharisees were also literally Satan's offspring — an absurdity no one accepts.

Furthermore, this doctrine has a troubling history.

Variations of it have been used throughout history to dehumanize certain groups — to claim that some people are literally descended from Satan and therefore irredeemable. While not all Message believers draw these conclusions, the doctrine's history should give pause to anyone celebrating it as recovered truth.

The Honest Summary.

Francis presents the Message's "between the lines" revelations as evidence of its unique value — truths that critics simply "don't get." But when examined:

1. The doctrines are not explicitly taught in Scripture (Francis's own framing).
2. They are not original to Branham (borrowed from earlier sources).
3. They rely on an interpretive method with no objective controls.
4. They require believing 1,900 years of Christians missed the obvious.
5. They follow the pattern of gnostic "hidden knowledge" claims.
6. In the case of Serpent Seed, they contradict the plain text of Genesis.

This is not a robust foundation for treating the Message as uniquely authoritative. It is a collection of borrowed interpretations, repackaged as divine revelation, defended by an interpretive method that cannot be falsified. The "between the lines" defense does not rescue the Message from its evidential problems — it compounds them by revealing the movement's epistemological foundations to be equally unstable.

The Seven Church Ages: A Case Study in Borrowed "Revelation"

Since Francis specifically points to the church ages as evidence of the Message's unique depth, this doctrine deserves direct examination. It serves as a perfect case study in everything wrong with the "between the lines" claim.

What Branham Taught.

Branham claimed divine revelation that the seven churches addressed in Revelation 2–3 represent seven distinct historical periods of church history, each with a divinely appointed "messenger":

• Ephesus (33–170 AD): Paul
• Smyrna (170–312 AD): Irenaeus
• Pergamos (312–606 AD): Martin of Tours
• Thyatira (606–1520 AD): Columba
• Sardis (1520–1750 AD): Martin Luther
• Philadelphia (1750–1906 AD): John Wesley
• Laodicea (1906–Present): William Branham

This framework is presented as recovered truth, hidden for centuries, revealed uniquely to Branham by divine inspiration. Francis treats it as evidence of the Message's profound insight — something critics "don't get." Let us examine what they supposedly don't get.

The Entire Framework Was Plagiarized.

This "revelation" appears almost verbatim in Clarence Larkin's Dispensational Truth, published in 1918 — decades before Branham taught it. The historical ages, the dates, the concept of sequential church periods, the charts: all of it existed in print and was widely circulated in dispensationalist circles long before Branham claimed to receive it from an angel. Francis himself admitted in Part 2 that Branham drew from Larkin. So what exactly was "revealed"? Branham read a book, repackaged its contents, and presented them as divine revelation to audiences who had never heard of Clarence Larkin. This is not prophecy. This is plagiarism dressed in a prophet's robe.

The Biblical Text Does Not Teach Historical Ages.

Revelation 2–3 addresses seven actual churches that existed in Asia Minor in the first century: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. These were real congregations with real problems that John addressed in real time. There is not a single word in the text suggesting these letters represent future historical periods. Not one verse. Not one phrase. The entire framework is imposed onto the text from outside, not derived from the text itself. This is eisegesis — reading meaning into Scripture — not exegesis. And the meaning being read in was copied from a book published in 1918.

The Dates Are Arbitrary and Self-Serving.

Why does the Ephesian age end at 170 AD? Why does Pergamos begin at 312 AD? Why does Philadelphia end precisely at 1906 — the year of the Azusa Street Revival, which Branham needed to mark the beginning of the Laodicean age so he could position himself as its messenger? These dates are not derived from any objective historical analysis. They are reverse-engineered to fit a predetermined narrative that conveniently concludes with William Branham as the final prophet. Different dispensationalist writers using the same interpretive method produced entirely different dates — because there is no actual biblical basis for any of them. The dates exist to serve the framework; the framework exists to serve Branham.

The Messenger Selections Are Absurd.

If God truly appointed one primary messenger to each church age, why these selections?

• Irenaeus for the Smyrna age — but Polycarp was the actual bishop of Smyrna and a direct disciple of the Apostle John. Why skip the obvious choice?
• Martin of Tours for the Pergamos age — a relatively obscure figure compared to Augustine, Athanasius, Jerome, or the Cappadocian Fathers, all of whom shaped Christian theology in ways Martin of Tours never did.
• Columba for the 900-year Thyatira age — an Irish monk known primarily in Celtic Christianity, chosen over Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, or dozens of other towering figures.
• Martin Luther for Sardis, the "dead" church — the man who ignited the Reformation, one of the most spiritually explosive periods in church history, is the messenger to the dead age?

The selections make no sense historically. But they make perfect sense if the goal is to avoid well-known figures whose theologies might contradict Message doctrine, while still name-dropping enough recognizable names to sound credible. The list is not a revelation of God's redemptive plan. It is a marketing document.

The Messengers Were Not Even Alive During Their Assigned Ages.

This is where the Church Ages framework collapses from merely questionable to demonstrably false. The "divinely revealed" assignments contain factual errors so glaring that any high school student with access to Wikipedia could expose them. These are not minor discrepancies. These are errors that prove the entire framework was assembled without basic fact-checking, and certainly without divine inspiration.

William Branham stated that:

And, remember, the messenger is always comes at the end of the Message. We know in the church ages there how we got that.

Remember, Paul come at the end of the age. All the messengers come at the end of the age. It's at the end time, when these things are—are brought forth.

Each messenger has had his message, and the—the message and the messenger of the age. And it is most remarkable that each messenger… We even found in the church ages (and tonight we'll go back in the Old Testament and find that it's the same thing) that God sends the messenger of that age at the end of the time; always at the end, never at the beginning. At the end!

Consider the dates carefully:

====Columba — The Messenger Who Died Before His Age Began:====

Branham assigned Columba as the messenger to the Thyatira age, which supposedly ran from 606–1520 AD. There is one small problem: Columba died in 597 AD — nine years before his "church age" even started. This is not a minor dating discrepancy. This is a dead man being appointed as the messenger to an age he never lived to see. Columba was supposedly the divinely appointed voice for a 914-year period, and he was in the grave before the first day of that period began. He came at the end of the wrong age.

How does one serve as a "messenger" to an age one never entered? Did Columba prophesy from beyond the grave? Did his writings somehow become more relevant after his death than during his life? Or is the simpler explanation that Branham (or Larkin before him) simply didn't bother to check the dates?

Martin of Tours — Born After His Age Started:

Branham assigned Martin of Tours as the messenger to the Pergamos age, which supposedly ran from 312–606 AD. Martin of Tours was born in 316 AD — four years after his church age had already begun. He died in 397 AD — 209 years before his age ended. This means Martin was alive for only 81 of the 294 years of "his" age. He missed the first four years entirely (because he hadn't been born yet) and the final 209 years (because he was dead). The "messenger" to the Pergamos age was present for only 28% of it. But Branham preached that the messenger was to come at the end of the age. What happened?

Irenaeus — Dead for Most of His Age:

Branham assigned Irenaeus as the messenger to the Smyrna age, which supposedly ran from 170–312 AD. Irenaeus was born around 130 AD and died around 202 AD. This means he was alive for only the first 32 years of the 142-year Smyrna age. He died 110 years before his age ended. The "messenger" to the Smyrna age was present for less than a quarter of it. He also did not come at the end of the age.

What This Means:

These are not esoteric dating disputes that require scholarly expertise to evaluate. These are basic, verifiable, uncontested historical facts. Columba died in 597. The Thyatira age supposedly started in 606. A dead man cannot be a messenger to an age that hasn't started yet. This is not a matter of faith versus evidence. This is a matter of arithmetic.

And yet Message believers are taught that this framework is divine revelation — "mysteries" hidden from the wise and revealed to Branham by an angel. But angels presumably know when people died. God certainly does. A framework this riddled with elementary factual errors cannot be divine revelation. It can only be human construction — and sloppy human construction at that.

The Danger of Ignoring Gross Error:

Francis and other Message apologists either do not know these facts (which raises questions about their preparation as teachers) or they know and do not address them. Either way, they are teaching people to accept as "divine revelation" a framework that falls apart under basic factual scrutiny.

This is not a minor issue. This is the pattern that makes the Message dangerous:

1. Claim divine revelation for a framework
2. Build an entire theology around that framework
3. Make loyalty to that framework a test of spiritual authenticity
4. Never examine whether the framework is actually true
5. Attack anyone who points out the problems

When Columba died nine years before his "church age" began, that is not a detail to wave away. That is proof that the framework was not divinely revealed. A God who knows the end from the beginning does not make ninth-grade history errors. A prophet receiving genuine revelation from an angel does not assign dead men to lead future ages. The only way this happens is if a human being assembled the framework without checking the facts — which is exactly what Clarence Larkin did in 1918, and exactly what Branham repeated without correction.

If the Church Ages framework is wrong — demonstrably, factually, laughably wrong — then what else in the Message is wrong? If Branham presented borrowed material containing basic errors as "divine revelation," what does that tell us about his prophetic authority? If Message teachers defend this framework without even knowing the dates are impossible, what does that tell us about the quality of Message scholarship?

These questions matter. The Church Ages doctrine is not a peripheral teaching. It is presented as one of the "deep mysteries" that proves the Message's unique access to divine truth. If the flagship doctrine is this badly broken, the entire ship is taking on water.

The Framework Is Self-Appointing Propaganda.

Notice where the framework ends: with William Branham as the messenger to the final Laodicean age. What a remarkable coincidence. A man claims to receive divine revelation about the structure of church history, and that revelation just happens to place him as the culminating figure — the last and greatest messenger before the return of Christ. Every cult leader in history has done some version of this. Joseph Smith discovered he was the prophet of the restoration. Sun Myung Moon discovered he was the Lord of the Second Advent. David Koresh discovered he was the Lamb who could open the seals. And William Branham discovered — through a framework he copied from Clarence Larkin — that he was the angel to the Laodicean church. The self-serving nature of this "revelation" should disqualify it from serious consideration. Instead, Message believers treat it as evidence of Branham's unique calling. They have been taught to see the con as proof of the prophet.

Francis's Reinterpretation Abandons Branham's Teaching.

When confronted with problems in the historical framework, Francis retreats to spiritualization: the church ages are really "the map of the development of every individual Christian." But this is not what Branham taught. Branham taught a literal historical framework with specific dates, specific messengers, and specific characteristics for each age. He wrote an entire book about it — An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages — filled with historical claims, not devotional metaphors about personal spiritual development.

The "Spiritual Map" Interpretation Is Absurd on Its Face.

Let us examine what Francis is actually claiming. He says the church ages represent stages of personal Christian growth: Ephesus is when you're excited but cooling off, Smyrna is persecution, Pergamos is compromise, Thyatira is deeper corruption, Sardis is deadness, Philadelphia is revival, and Laodicea is lukewarmness. So according to Francis, the "map" of every Christian's development is: excitement → persecution → compromise → corruption → deadness → brief revival → lukewarmness.

This is the "hidden mystery" that critics supposedly "don't get"? This is the profound revelation that justifies the Message as a distinct movement? The spiritual trajectory Francis describes is not a map of Christian growth — it is a map of Christian decline. It begins with zeal and ends with Christ standing outside the door knocking (Revelation 3:20). If this is the inevitable pattern of every believer's walk, Christianity offers no hope. The "mystery" Francis has unlocked is spiritual pessimism dressed in prophetic terminology.

The Bible Presents a Different Picture Entirely.

Scripture does not present the Christian walk as a seven-stage descent into lukewarmness requiring a complex typological framework to navigate. It presents something far simpler and far more hopeful:

• "But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18). Growth — not decline through seven stages.
• "But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day" (Proverbs 4:18). Increasing light — not a map from Ephesus enthusiasm to Laodicean lukewarmness.
• "Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6). God completing His work — not abandoning believers to a predetermined cycle of decline.
• "I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:14). Forward progress toward Christ — not lateral movement through church age typologies.

The Christian walk is simple: follow Christ. Abide in Him. Walk in the Spirit. Love God and love your neighbor. Bear fruit. Grow in grace. Press on toward the goal. None of this requires understanding Clarence Larkin's dispensational charts. None of this requires mapping your spiritual life onto a framework of seven Asian cities from the first century. None of this requires William Branham.

This Is Gnosticism Repackaged.

The claim that there are "hidden mysteries" in the church ages that reveal the "real" meaning of Christian development — mysteries accessible only to those who have "the opened book" — is textbook gnosticism. The ancient gnostics claimed that salvation came through secret knowledge (gnosis) available only to the enlightened. Francis is doing the same thing: ordinary Christians read Revelation 2-3 and see letters to churches; Message believers see "the map of the development of every individual Christian" that "neither Larkin nor Brother Branham said explicitly" because it is revealed "between the lines."

This is the definition of esoteric knowledge — hidden truth accessible only to initiates. And it directly contradicts the Protestant principle that Scripture is clear (perspicuity) in matters essential to salvation and Christian living. You do not need a decoder ring. You do not need Branham's sermons. You do not need to find meaning "between the lines." You need Christ.

Why Complicate What Christ Made Simple?

Jesus said, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:28-30).

An easy yoke. A light burden. Rest for the soul.

Now compare Francis's version: to understand your spiritual development, you must grasp the church ages framework (plagiarized from Larkin), understand the hidden mysteries "between the lines" (that neither Larkin nor Branham stated explicitly), recognize that Ephesus represents your initial zeal, Smyrna your persecution phase, Pergamos your tendency to compromise, Thyatira your deeper corruption, Sardis your spiritual deadness, Philadelphia your revival (maybe), and Laodicea your lukewarm end state — and all of this is "the map" you need to navigate your walk with God.

Is this an easy yoke? Is this a light burden? Or is this exactly what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for: binding heavy burdens, grievous to be borne, and laying them on men's shoulders?

The Christian walk is not typed by mysteries. It is not mapped by church ages. It is not decoded from Clarence Larkin's charts or Branham's sermons. The Christian walk is Christ.

"I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Not "I am the way, but you'll need a seven-stage church age map to walk it."

Not "I am the truth, but the real truth is hidden between the lines for those with revelation." Not "I am the life, but understanding your spiritual development requires a complex typological framework." Just Christ. Christ alone. Christ is sufficient.

Francis's spiritualized church ages interpretation is not profound insight that critics "don't get." It is unnecessary complexity layered onto the simple gospel, designed to make Branham's teaching feel indispensable when it is not. Strip away the church ages, the hidden mysteries, the "between the lines" revelations — and you still have Jesus. You still have the Bible. You still have the Holy Spirit. You still have everything you need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3).

The tragedy is that young people in the Message have been taught that they need all this extra machinery to walk with God. They don't. No one does. The machinery exists to make them dependent on the Message. Remove it, and they will discover what millions of Christians throughout history have known: Christ is enough.

Francis's move is telling. When the literal claims prove indefensible, make them figurative. When the historical framework collapses under scrutiny, claim it was really about internal spirituality all along. This is not faithful interpretation of Branham's teaching. It is a desperate retreat that effectively admits the original teaching cannot be defended. Francis is abandoning Branham while claiming to honor him — and hoping no one notices.

The "One Messenger Per Age" Concept Is Itself Unbiblical.

The entire framework depends on the idea that God appoints one primary messenger to carry the truth for each era of church history. Where is this taught in Scripture? Nowhere. The New Testament envisions a plurality of elders, teachers, apostles, and prophets working together — iron sharpening iron, the body functioning with many members. The "one messenger" concept is not biblical ecclesiology. It is cult architecture. It creates the expectation of a singular prophetic authority for each generation — an expectation Branham then conveniently fulfills for the final age.

The Bottom Line.

The Seven Church Ages doctrine is:

1. Plagiarized from Clarence Larkin's 1918 book
2. Imposed onto a biblical text that does not teach it
3. Built on arbitrary dates reverse-engineered to fit the narrative
4. Populated with messenger selections that defy historical logic
5. Self-servingly designed to conclude with Branham as the final prophet
6. Now being spiritualized by Francis because the literal version cannot be defended
7. Based on an unbiblical "one messenger" framework that functions as cult infrastructure

This is the "depth" Francis claims critics don't understand? This is the "between the lines" revelation that supposedly validates the Message? It is a plagiarized framework, built on arbitrary assumptions, designed to self-appoint its creator as the end-time prophet, and now being quietly reinterpreted because the original version is indefensible.

If this is the Message's strongest evidence of unique divine revelation, the Message has no evidence at all.

> Fallacy Identified: Appeal to Esoteric Knowledge / Gnosticism / Borrowed Authority / Self-Appointment.

Claiming unique access to hidden scriptural truths that are (a) not original to the claimant, (b) not clearly taught in the text, (c) accessible only to insiders, and (d) self-servingly structured to elevate the claimant — while using this claim to deflect from testable factual problems.

Argument 45: "Heroes of the Fake" — The Attack on Critics

THE CLAIM:

At [1:39:16–1:40:26], Francis contrasts modern critics unfavorably with the apostolic martyrs. He says: "Today being a Christian sounds so feeble... Back then, men were hanged upside down, beheaded, chased across continents, thrown in prison, separated from families, disappeared by governments. Today, what do we do? What is our challenge? Today, we research each other, investigate each other's faults, and fight with the sword of the internet, and make videos to shoot at each other. It's so courageous and valiant. It's just outstanding. We feel so equal to all the saints who went before us, don't we? We are the heroes of the fake." In Part 2 [2:04:06–2:04:29], he similarly attacks those who leave and speak out: they "go on YouTube and internet and sanctimoniously lecture us," becoming "the greater theologians than anybody else, historians, factcheckers," and are dismissed as "turncoats" who "tuck their tails between their legs."

REBUTTAL:

The Breathtaking Hypocrisy.

Francis delivers this attack on "internet warriors" and "video makers" — in a YouTube video. He mocks those who "research each other" and "investigate each other's faults" — while producing a three-part video series that does exactly that. He dismisses critics for "fighting with the sword of the internet" — while wielding that same sword across six hours of uploaded content. The irony is so thick it could be cut with a knife. Francis wants the internet for himself — to spread his message, to reach discouraged young people, to build his platform — but when critics use the same medium to present documented evidence, suddenly it becomes the weapon of "fake heroes." This is not a principled objection to internet discourse. It is an attempt to delegitimize one side while benefiting from the same tools.

Martyrdom Is Not an Argument.

Yes, the apostles suffered tremendously. Peter was crucified upside down. Paul was beheaded. Stephen was stoned. Their courage is beyond question. But here is what Francis fails to understand: martyrdom does not validate doctrine. Muslims have martyrs. Mormons have martyrs. Jehovah's Witnesses have died for their faith. Jim Jones's followers died at Jonestown. Heaven's Gate members died believing they would board a spaceship. Willingness to suffer does not prove you are right. It proves you are sincere — and sincerity is not the same as truth.

The apostles were martyred for testifying to what they had seen — the risen Christ. Their testimony could be evaluated: Did Jesus rise from the dead? The evidence — the empty tomb, the post-resurrection appearances, the transformation of the disciples, the explosion of the early church — could be weighed. Critics of William Branham are doing exactly what the early church invited people to do: examining the evidence. The apostles said, "We are witnesses of these things" (Acts 5:32). Branham said, "I met King George, I prophesied 'Thus Saith the Lord' about a brown bear, I declared Donny Morton would be healed." One set of claims launched a movement that conquered the Roman Empire. The other set of claims can be fact-checked — and when they are, they fail.

Research and Investigation Are Virtues, Not Vices.

Francis criticizes people who "research each other, investigate each other's faults." But what does the Bible say?

• "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
• "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1).
• "These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11).

The Bereans were commended for investigating. They didn't just accept Paul's word — they checked it against Scripture. By Francis's logic, the Bereans were "heroes of the fake," too busy researching to have real faith. But Scripture calls them "more noble." The biblical model favors examination, not blind acceptance.

The "Sword of the Internet" Is Just Access to Information.

What is the "sword of the internet," really? It is access to Branham's own recorded sermons — all 1,100+ of them, transcribed and searchable. It is access to newspaper archives from the 1930s. It is access to government records, historical photographs, and contemporaneous accounts. It is the ability to compare what Branham said in 1952 with what he said in 1963 and discover that the stories changed. The "sword of the internet" is documentation. Francis isn't upset about the medium. He's upset about the access. For decades, Message leaders controlled the information. Congregants heard what pastors told them. Branham's contradictions were scattered across hundreds of sermons that no ordinary person could cross-reference. The internet changed that. Now anyone can search. Anyone can compare. Anyone can verify. And when people verify, they find problems. The "sword of the internet" is simply the end of information asymmetry — and Francis is mourning its loss.

"Sanctimonious Lectures" vs. Six Hours of Video.

Francis accuses critics of delivering "sanctimonious lectures" on YouTube. He says this while delivering three sanctimonious lectures on YouTube totaling over six hours. He accuses critics of setting themselves up as "theologians, historians, factcheckers." He says this while positioning himself as the authoritative voice explaining what critics "don't get" about the Message. The accusation is pure projection. Francis is doing everything he accuses critics of doing — except for one thing: he refuses to engage with the actual evidence. The critics Francis mocks have produced documented research with primary sources, timestamps, and verifiable citations. Francis has produced emotional appeals, logical fallacies, and explicit refusals to examine the evidence. Who, exactly, is being sanctimonious?

The "Turncoat" Slur Reveals the Real Fear.

Francis calls those who leave "turncoats" and says they cannot be trusted because "if they betrayed their side once, they'll betray the next side they choose." This is not an argument. It is a silencing tactic. It preemptively discredits anyone who might change their mind based on evidence. The message to current believers is clear: if you leave, you will be labeled a traitor and everything you say will be dismissed. This is how high-control groups retain members — not by demonstrating truth, but by making the cost of leaving unbearable. A confident faith community welcomes examination and survives scrutiny. A fragile ideology must threaten defectors with permanent reputational destruction. Which one is the Message?

The Real Cost of Truth-Telling.

Francis asks, sarcastically, whether internet critics feel "equal to all the saints who went before us." Let us answer directly: No. No critic of Branham claims to be equal to the apostle Paul. But here is what the critics are doing: they are telling the truth at significant personal cost. Many of them have lost families. They have been shunned by lifelong friends. They have been called demon-possessed, bitter, and deceived. They have had their character attacked from pulpits. They have watched parents choose a dead prophet over living children. They are paying a real price for honesty. Dismissing documented research as the work of "fake heroes" does not address the substance of what they have found.

If there are "heroes of the fake" in this story, they are not the people doing the research.

The Question Francis Must Answer.

If the apostles' willingness to die proves they were telling the truth, then why doesn't the willingness of former Message believers to lose everything prove they are telling the truth? People who leave the Message often lose their families, their communities, their entire social world. They gain nothing — no money, no status, no following. They simply cannot in good conscience continue to defend claims they have discovered to be false. By Francis's own martyrdom logic, their sacrifice should be evidence of their sincerity. But Francis doesn't apply his own standard consistently. Apostolic suffering proves truth; critics' suffering proves nothing. This is not a principle. It is special pleading.

The Evidence Remains.

Francis dismisses the "sword of the internet" and criticizes "research" and "fact-checking." But the documented evidence exists regardless. The failed prophecies remain failed. The changed stories remain changed. The fabricated meetings remain fabricated. Dismissing the people who present the evidence does not make the evidence disappear.

The apostle Paul wrote, "We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth" (2 Corinthians 13:8). The documented evidence exists whether it is acknowledged or not. The failed prophecies remain failed. The changed stories remain changed. The fabricated meetings remain fabricated. Dismissing critics as "heroes of the fake" will not make the facts disappear.

> Fallacy Identified: Ad Hominem / Tu Quoque / Appeal to Martyrdom / Genetic Fallacy.

Attacking the character and medium of critics rather than their evidence, while using the same medium himself. Invoking apostolic martyrdom as if suffering validates doctrine, while ignoring that critics also suffer for their position. Dismissing research, investigation, and fact-checking as inherently illegitimate — in direct contradiction to Scripture's command to "prove all things."

A Note on Tone

Throughout his videos, Francis repeatedly dismisses critics with words like "stupid," "silly," "pathetic," "ignorant," and "poor thing." Rather than engaging with the documented evidence, he mocks those who present it.

This is not a substitute for argument. If the evidence is wrong, explain why. If the prophecies didn't fail, show how they were fulfilled. If the stories are consistent, demonstrate the consistency. Mockery is what you resort to when you cannot answer. The apostle Peter wrote: "Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15). Francis has given six hours of dismissal. He has not given answers.

FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS WITH PART 3

1. The Evidence Remains Unaddressed — Across Six Hours

Three videos. Over six hours of content. Francis has named the charges: "a bridge, a brown bear, and a cloud and many failed thus sayeth the Lord's." He knows what the evidence is. At no point in any of the three videos has he made a single attempt to explain any of it. He has not explained why the Municipal Bridge story changed. He has not addressed the documented fabrications about meetings with world leaders. He has not explained the brown bear prophecy — a "Thus Saith the Lord" statement that was never fulfilled before his death. He has not explained the Donny Morton healing — another "Thus Saith the Lord" declaration that ended in the child's death. He has not explained the India crusade prophecy — "tens of thousands times thousands" that never materialized. He has acknowledged the cloud is not public vindication (Part 2). But he has explained none of the actual evidence.

Instead, across three videos, he has: attacked critics' motives, speculated about AI authorship, invoked emotional experiences, posed dozens of unrelated theological questions, compared himself to people persecuted by atheists, described happy worship services, declared evidence irrelevant to faith, and warned young people that leaving leads to a "dark place." Every one of these is a way of not addressing the evidence.

2. The Epistemological Collapse Is Now Complete

In Part 1, Francis admitted he hadn't read the evidence. In Part 2, he declared faith operates "in spite of evidence." In Part 3, he declares examining evidence is something "nobody in his right mind" would do, elevates Branham's teachings to "part of the Bible," and argues the Message's survival depends on the fact that most followers will never engage with the criticism. This is a complete epistemological collapse. By Francis's own framework, there is no possible evidence that could disqualify any claim — because evidence itself is the enemy of faith, and engaging with evidence is irrational. This does not protect the Message; it makes the Message identical in epistemic structure to every false system that has ever insulated itself from correction.

3. The Anti-Intellectualism Reveals the Strategy

Francis's argument that the Message will endure because most members will never read the criticism is, perhaps unintentionally, the most honest moment in all three videos. It acknowledges that the Message's primary defense is not that the evidence has been weighed and found wanting — it is that most people will never weigh the evidence at all. This is not a defense of truth. It is a defense of information asymmetry.

4. The Appeal to Emotion — Expanded but Still Non-Unique

Francis's Part 3 contains the most detailed, passionate, and genuinely moving descriptions of worship in the entire series. The South African communities he describes are clearly beautiful, vibrant, and sincere. But as documented above, identical experiences exist in every major Christian tradition on every continent. The Holy Spirit's work is not exclusive to any one movement. The beauty of worship in Cape Town does not settle the historical question of what happened on the Municipal Bridge.

QUESTIONS FOR FRANCIS: DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE

Video Transcript

Amen. So we greet you in the glorious name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly good to be with you in uh such times. Um so many things happening in the world. So many uh uh crazy things. It looks like people are just going insane every day and uh we're not sure what to do with them. the world, politics, religion, uh families, individuals can't can't seem to to keep their their lives in order and uh you know find true fulfillment in in a world that's so rich and so free um in all that God has created. It's just um just incredible. So we're going to read from John chapter 1 verse 1-8 and our subject discouraged with the prophet and the message part three and our title the message on trial. So John 1 verse 1-8 in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and the same was in the beginning with God and all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. Amen. The Lord add a blessing to his word and uh we trust that God would be with us this evening. All right. So um last Thursday someone told me that believe the sign had responded to my first message in the series on discouraged with the prophet and the message and they sent me a link. I was quite amazed that it was so soon and such a lot of work was put into it, critiquing the entire transcript of my words. That's commitment, especially since I wasn't even addressing them. But I got a critique anyway. Of course, how much of it was done by AI, we'll never know. The reason I say this is because as I shared with some of you in the group, a young man from the USA showed me how easily this is done using AI and he created an argument for my side which critiqued everything they say with all the same fallacies and arguments applied and spat out a whole um pages of of stuff the way I could argue back against what they have argued. It's just quite incredible what AI can do. I was so amused. I laughed at it. I realized, you know what? This could this could result in like an AI versus an AI and no Holy Spirit in there whatsoever. Of course, it's not my claim that Believe the Scion uses AI for their entire rebuttal. But at times, you can almost sense a non-human response to things like, you know, saying like, "I'm siding with the atheist." That's craziness, right? I'm siding with an atheist or I'm giving the atheist argument force. Uh it's just uh I don't know. I just can't explain some of the things that were that that would have been said in there that just um anybody who's listening to me would know that I'm not doing that. And yet they would put it in a way that looks like I am. So again, I will say I am not responding or to challenge believe the sign or seek you the truth. I have no compulsion to correct them. I hope I made it clear in the last two segments that I believe they're there for a reason. And I I don't want to correct them. I I don't want to change what they're doing. I don't want to prove or disprove anything they have in their website. I don't feel the leading of the Holy Spirit to do so. They use the word label very often and have openly said that they will be labeling me as willfully ignorant. I am not trying to label them or label anybody, but they're labeling everybody. And so they're labeling me as willfully ignorant because I have not read all their material. And I accept that as their point of view and have no reason to change my status. Being an Indian from South Africa who comes from a culture of Hinduism and a family of educated scientists and academics. I've been called all sorts of things by atheists and non-Christians throughout my school life, college years and conversations with many academics. I've been called willfully ignorant and brainwashed by by atheists and non-Christians. Do I now have to go study all of science from every accuser's perspective to give due diligence to make sure what I believe is firm and believable? Absolutely not. I have a mother who was healed from an incurable skin disease when she left Hinduism to become a Pentecostal Christian many, many years ago. There's no science or academics that will shake her faith from her experience uh with Christ. My dad was a very wise, well- read person studying to be a Hindu priest from the age of 17 and had an experience with Christ during a Pentecostal revival uh in meetings where he was going to criticize them and mock them cuz he loved to do that. Both mom and dad were individuals who were described by their Pentecostal friends back then as being young people filled with the Holy Ghost and with zeal to spread the gospel for Christ. They forsook home and city to take the gospel to rural country before they even heard the message. Dad was an anti- William Brandham Pentecostal pastor in the Assemblies of God until he was given the books to read. Once again, he studied the message books and the Bible in attempt to prove message evangelists that they were following a false prophet and to mock them only to come out believing the message. his experience in both areas where he met Christ coming out of Hinduism and then coming into the message both were true experiences right his experience was in studying the word not in miracles and stories of William Brham his experience was studying the church ages and the seals to try and prove it wrong he had already been a minister in the in the assemblies of God who was influenced by Oral Roberts and Billy Graham and studied Clarence Lockan and other ministries. So in our lives we have had real experiences with Christ in our lives uh in knowing the message in transition being in the message for many years. It has been my life's journey in my home that I can tell you we have never been and never will be a cult or embrace cultish behavior. We worshiped Christ. We worshiped only the Lord Jesus Christ. Though we are dedicated to the message, I have never seen my dad present the message with hubris or prepared brainwashing methods to convince people into the message. That's why when I speak, I don't speak for other places, other countries, for other peoples. I speak from my own experience. And um you know other churches or other message people may act differently, may manage their churches differently. uh that's not my experience. I'm speaking from my own experience and the people I have met and the people I have been in contact with for all my life and that's been for about four and a half decades. Um so that's been my experience and you know I speak from that which nobody from halfway across the world who hasn't seen my life or experienced what I have can tell me that I have been brainwashed or what I've seen and what I've heard and what I've experienced. They can't tell me that never happened. They can't tell me that what happened before me was somebody brainwashing me. I know what happened in my life, right? So, you don't get to call me a cult when you haven't even walked in my life or my shoes. My mom and dad did not control us. Mom was a stern person about behavior and dad did family altars with us every day of our lives. Teaching us the Bible, encouraging us to take notes in church, study for ourselves, you know. So, let them say what they want to say. Let them say what they will about me. I in in doing this I you know what I've seen in this is really quite eye opening. Not only do I get hit by believe the sign, but I also get friendly fire. That means uh while I'm trying to do something good for the message to help message children, I'm getting shot in the back by other message people uh using the opportunity to go online to just shame me for things that are not even true. It's amazing and it's really telling, right? So I will read as I feel inspired. I don't feel the need to go and study the websites and go through that. I already know what I believe and uh I don't need to go and prove myself and my faith wrong with anything. I don't need to do that. Nobody in his right mind will do that. So I'll read as people send me stuff. People ask me questions, people question the message, people feel confused, I'll do what I can. I'll read what they show me and I will answer. I will respond. Right? At the same time, whoever speaks to me, whether it be a person who's left the message, a person who hates the prophet, a person who who believes we are a cult, I'm going to conduct myself as a Christian. And I'm not going to uh fight with them or call them names or demonize them. No, I believe we are all Christians. I believe that Christ died to save us all. I don't demonize any Christian. I believe what I believe and I leave everything in the hands of God to do as he will with us. Right? So um no matter what they say, my experience has been absolutely true. It's what I've seen. It's what I've experienced in my life. It's been true. Every single person I have spoken to who leaves the message. So th those are the ones I have experienced. Right? So it's not a generalization. It's those who I've experienced. um that leaves a message or questions the message has only recently studied anti-brandom websites. I've seen it's been my experience in speaking with them that they have never properly studied the Bible or the message. They're just splitting out what they've read on the websites. And the reason I like I am I've got no reason to lie to you about that because if I speak to them, the only thing they spew out is what they've read in the websites. And when I question them on what the Bible means or how to explain the doctrines of the Bible, which they are claiming to defend the Bible from the prophet and and every question I ask them, they literally have no answer, which is an indication of having no faith to stand on, which tells me if they're reading the websites, believe the sign or seek you the truth or whoever, all they're getting is antibrum stuff, but they're not getting truth. truth. They don't know what they believe in. All they believe in is in Brham, false prophet, Brandham bad. That's all they're getting. And and and the reason it is dangerous is because these people are getting almost like um you know, they don't want to follow the message. They've had bad experiences. they they've been discouraged by something or or they just can't tow the line with with the message and they want to leave and all they're getting is like an affirmation from the website which tells them okay there are people who agree with you and and that's it that's all they're getting and so that's why I said my assessment is that when they leave the message they go off into a place a dark place of hate and of obsession session of trying to get more people to to leave the message and and and convince other people and speak ill of the prophet and call him names and all kinds of things and they go into this dark place where they get no fulfillment. They get no no rock to stand on and they they lose all identity. This is what I'm seeing. Their lives fall apart. Their children backslide so badly. their their homes are no longer intact. They're alone. They're isolated because there's no believe the sign here in South Africa. There's no seek the truth here. There's no established group here to to for them all to get together and and be together and and have support. They don't have that. So, they are leaving because of some reason. Maybe they're being hurt or by a church or a minister. They've been illreated. I don't know. I I'm I'm actually listening to their side and in many situations, yeah, I agree with you. You know, you're this minister didn't treat you right. This was they shouldn't have done that. But really, is that brother Brandham's fault or is that that man's fault? You know, some of these things are logical and it and it seems easier to just point the finger at the prophet and the message because the question the statement will be like, well, they are like that because of the message. No, you want them to be that way. You're speaking to me. I'm not like that. I'm right there in front of you and I'm not treating you that way. I'm speaking to you with gentleness and love and care. I'm not even arguing with you. I'm not treating you badly. I believe the message. Why am I not being to you that the way that other person was, you know, and you can't even reason with them with with even, you know, the logic and reasoning they're asking for. So my assessment is that they are leaving because of some reason of being hurt, illreated, whatever, and or not wanting to comply with what they feel is a restrictive religion. I have no reason to lie to you because I'm not interested in defending brother Branam or the message. I have always held the opinion that the word of God needs no defense. I don't believe in being a an apologist of the message or the Bible. Uh I just believe that God intended everything to be that way. If it was meant to be different, it would have been different. Uh because he knows the beginning from the ending. If he knew there were people going to come up who are going to come against it, they're not going to circumvent his way. They're not going to change his will. He obviously permitted it to be so. So who am I to stand in their way and and and cause it to fail or you know it's like oh rather not say I also know that being somebody who is fairly educated that in the realm of academics and science you can only defend the Bible up to a point and then the majority of what you believe in the Bible is just pure faith. Right? The people leaving the message have read these websites and are so often filled with hate and animosity that they don't see in them the character being displayed 10 times worse than the character they are accusing us of. Um and so again I have no reason to lie to you because this is what I I personally have experienced. Those who leave the message because of reading antibrum websites have nowhere to go. There's no coalition of antibrum people to be of support to them or they don't get together and form a church or um and even if they do it doesn't last long and they disperse because they just can't even agree with each other. They don't know how to handle the board of the church or choose a pastor or you know choose deacons because each one of them has become so intellectual in their in their knowledge of these websites and all that they have studied and of that and they become you know irritable and they just can't even get get along with other people and so that's been the problem with those and and remember I'm I'm not talking about the people who created the websites. I'm talking about the people influenced by the websites, right? And so, um, they end up going to denominational churches where it really doesn't satisfy them. They don't get fed the word. They know it. They try to find ways of defending it, but they find no solace or fulfillment there. So they turn their attention to trolling message people. This is where they're getting their dopamine hit, right? And so this is what I've seen in South Africa. I can't speak for other places. Okay. So that being said, um I want to talk about this this particular um subject of cults. All right. So for the young people, are we a cult? Okay. Uh it depends on the definition. If you go to the internet, the internet definition of a cult, uh you can literally Google it. I did. This is what it comes up with. A cult is generally defined as a social group with extreme devotion to a person, an idea or a belief system often characterized by unusual practices, insularity, and strong control over members. It can refer to both religious and non-religious movements and the term is often used poratively to describe groups seen as manipulative or dangerous. All right. So that's where um that's what the internet says. And so to basically explain that to you, a cult is a social group that gives devotion to a person, an idea or a belief system. And they have unusual practices, meaning it's not the norm of society. And um often times the system or the person who their affections are given to uh controls the members of the cult. Right? So basically a cult is something that strays or defies the status quo or defies the mainstream belief system or social norm. So here's the question. Okay. Was Jesus and his disciples a uh considered a cult in their day? Absolutely. Yes. They were considered a cult by the Jewish people and the Roman Empire. Cult is literally like the root word where culture comes from culture. And it's like uh this cult is producing a new behavior in society. They they're drifting from the social norm. They're drifting what is seen as normal to society and choosing to act another way. It's it's working against the oiled machine that the public was used to. It's working against the the belief system and it's causing problems for old establishments. So they call it a cult. Right? By every definition previously given, Jesus and his disciples were a cult to the very extent that their leader Jesus was martyed and his cult members in inverted commas lied about everything and created a new cult religion. Jewish people today still believe that. And many atheists, they look back at the history of Jesus Christ and say he was just a political uh uh uh agitator and a cult. Started his own cult and you know that's what happened. So I've been told recently that believe the sign uses a specific five marker rubric to measure the message as a cult. And this was from a book written by um some theologian in 1963 sometime where he was um s sort of judging the Jehovah's Witness 7 Adventist and um uh the moments and I think it was reviewed years later and in there has included you know Christian science or something. So I believe the science is now using that rubric or that standard of measurement that these five points, five markers to say that we are a cult. Okay. So I want to show this to you, right? I'm going to share what this what this thing is, what this rubric is. So here it is. The trait on the left, you see the the trait authority. The description is new revelations or leaders are placed above scripture. So in other words, the authority is no longer the Bible. Uh new revelations or leaders are placed above the Bible. That's what it's kind of uh implying. Christologology that is denial or distortion of Jesus full divinity and humanity. Salvation works based or non-biblical path to salvation. Trait uh description community is the trait the description strong exclusivity claiming to be the true church. Strong exclusivity claiming so in other words we are ex we are an exclusive people. We claim to be a true church and every other church is false. Uh our biblical interpretation is selective or distorted use of scripture. Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Let's go through it and understand it. Right. So this was this rubric was uh published like I said in 1963 used to brand Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons uh which were the latter-day saints, Christian Science and 7 Adventist as cults. Now we in the message are being judged by the same rubric. We can also be, you know, it's so easy to be able to fit us into this if you take just one independent message church that's like haywire and apply it to them. But we are not all like this, right? I I have never seen this in my life in the message. Never. Right? Uh and they'll they will look at me and they'll say to me, "Wow, you're so ignorant. You don't even know what's happening. I've lived in South Africa in the message all my life since I'm five years old and I have not seen this right what they're saying uh so let's talk about authority who do we see as authority in the message right we see the Holy Spirit as the authority because he is the guide who leads us into all truth we see brother Banham as the prophet to the last age bringing a message that called us out of organized religion which was which has organized religion has a track record of becoming political and compromised. So we don't ever want to be an organized religion. We do not see brother banham as above the bible but rather as part of the bible. Right? Antibranom people claim that we place the message above the bible. Maybe there are some people who do that. Uh I I think there may be I haven't really met people who in my life who do that. Um so anyway that is just how they perceive it to be because when they speak to message people and and I want to put it this way this is how they interpreted right. So if you speak to a message person and you ask them how to explain a certain scripture and they give you an interpretation of the Bible scripture based on the teachings of brother Brham then they have a problem with this antibrum people will say well that's Brham's idea right and uh this is what's so hypocritical about that right this is not uncommon uh if you're in John MacArthur's church. He's the pastor and you read your Bible and and you're in that church. If someone asks you a question, you're going to give them the interpretation of the Bible based on what John MacArthur taught you, right? It's it's not an uncommon thing. So, we don't have a problem with with people with anybody in the message when they read a scripture and they give you the explanation of scripture and it's based on what brother Bam taught. That's just how things are. It is naive to think that you come from anywhere and interpret the Bible solely by your individual mind. It's really immature to think that you just happen to have the unique ability to to interpret the Bible completely by control over your own mind. You don't. This just stupidity. You don't. You've been influenced by your past, by other people, by the things that have been taught you from school. You're not doing this by yourself, right? You don't have you you think you don't have an influence from somewhere, but you do. Um, let's put it another way. In Luther's day, all the Lutheran studied the works of Luther and the Bible. And the Lutheran church gives more authority to Luther's works than the works of other Christians around them at the time. The status quo of that time was the Roman Catholic Church. So those who came out with Luther studied the Bible according to Luther and disagreed with the Catholic Church because they saw the Bible according to Luther. Everybody knows that, right? And uh we have no problem with that. They did the right thing. In John Wesley's day, the Methodists studied the works of Wesley and the Bible together. They may have read the works of other people and heard sermons of other people. But those in Wesley's church believed that Wesley had or they gave authority to Wesley above all other people, other Christians. They studied the Bible and followed the Bible for their lives according to Wesley's interpretation of the same scripture. They did not agree with the Lutheran. They did not agree with Baptists, with other people uh different uh uh teachings on Christianity. There was a lot of disscent at the time. America itself uh formed its constitution because all the states in America were actually controlled by specific churches. It had nothing to do with race or people. Each state was act I think they had senators from from each church. The states were controlled by churches. So they couldn't let the the whole country be run by one guy from one church. They were divided by churches. Right. And um so what I'm saying to you is it's it's now such it's like a tragedy why message people would tell you what the Bible means based upon the teachings of William Brandham because they believe his message to be the truth. Does that make them a cult? Or is just that or is that consistent with everything that happened through the last 2,000 years of Christendom? I don't get it. To this day, all church denominations that have founding members give special authority to the founders of their church. They abide by the laws set out by their denomination and the teachings of their Bible schools as well. They teach against their Bible schools teach things the way their founders see it. And the Bible schools teach them not to believe things that other Bible schools teach. And the the Bible schools point them to certain teachings, certain books and stay away from those books. Right? So they that's what they teach their students that what they teach what their church teach and what their founding members stood for is the truth and deserves more authority than other preachers who are not wrong. Uh they are right in so many things but our founding members have more authority. I don't know are they all cults in in their denominations? you are signed in as a member with a membership and they don't take kindly if you being uh a member of their denomination if you leave or go to church at another denomination that preaches differently. They're they're going to come to you and ask you, listen, you stood there and took a selfie with somebody and you enjoyed their service. Let's say you from the Baptist church and you went to a Lutheran church or something like that and you having fun and you pitched up on somebody's Facebook page. The elders of the Baptist church are going to come to you and say, "Hey, listen. You're a member of our church. What are you doing there? What's going on? This is not a good look for us." Come on, people. This is this is normal. This is what what everybody does. This is not an uncommon thing. And frankly, it's hypocrisy to accuse message people of being the people who feel they are exclusive. It's just not right. Who give authority to one man. The we we at least call uh who we are the bride, the message. Lutheran are literally named after the man, right? and Calvinists and and other people they literally named they call themselves that right so this isn't an uncommon thing and the message let me say this is still young compared to Lutheranism and Methodism the message is like 60 years old these others are over a hundred years old and only now after 10020 years or more. Now these denominations, these old established denominations have been losing so many members are be dwindling. So they're opening themselves up to being liberal and accepting the words of other teachers and watching YouTube videos of other denominations and uh becoming more diverse and becoming more inclusive and all that. It's only recently, right? All the time they've been exclusive to their body of people and their denomination. Why act like this isn't so, right? So, um, christologology, I don't understand what they're saying. I mean, we absolutely do not have and never have distorted the deity of Christ. In fact, we are accused of being Jesus only. This is not a bad accusation, right? But because we do not see the trinity as three different persons, but rather as three manifestations of one person over the ages of time, which many people will say, well, that's exactly the trinity doctrine. Uh, except it's not. And we worship, we worship God through the revelation of the son of man, Jesus Christ. None of us have distorted the deity of Christ. I don't understand. Well, where in the message have we done that? Okay. How about salvation? Here's what I don't understand. How we can be called a cult when we believe salvation that by grace are you saved through faith in Jesus Christ and his death and burial and resurrection. Every single message believer believes that. We do not believe in worksbased salvation like it says in the rubric. Neither do we believe in We don't believe that you have to uh have all the cood 100% correct for you to make it in the rapture. We don't believe that you have to live such an impeccable life above mistakes. No. I mean, we literally have a prophet who tells us as long as you are in this flesh, you're never going to be perfect. You're always going to be making mistakes. We follow Romans chapter 7 where Paul says, "Who can save me from the body of this death? When I I find in me two laws that when I want to do good, evil is present." But we walk not after the flesh but after the spirit. Therefore, we don't live under condemnation. This is what we believe, right? We don't believe in worksbased uh uh uh salvation. I don't know where that comes from. Uh I know do the do the Jehovah's Witnesses do that? Do the Mormons do that? to the Seventh Day Adventist. That's what these people said, who came up with this rubric. That's what they claim about those denominations. I tell you what we do believe in. We believe in worksbased righteousness and morality. And we believe in faith-based holiness. Holiness meaning committed to the purpose of God. And we believe in having an intimate relationship with the person of the word who is Christ the lamb. That's what we believe in, right? And uh salvation has been taken care of by Christ and our faith in him. Okay. We also believe salvation is a is a process because it speaks of healing. There is salvation for my soul. I believe in Christ. I believe in the blood of the lamb. I believe in his word for my salvation but my body needs healing. My spirit, my mind needs healing. It needs saving every day. Right? Like in the the Greek word sodo mean which means healing salva salvation. I need healing every single day. It's an ongoing process of heal of salvation of the creature. But yet my soul my soul has faith in Christ. I mean nothing there has got to do with William Brandom, right? How about community? This is this is funny. Okay, you know what? Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventist, Mormons everywhere are the same people. They are they are so united. They are they are literally united. Okay, I get it why they could be called a cult. by their cult in the message. Come on, man. We have no head office. We are absolutely not even a completely united community. We report to nobody else. And I say that with humor. Just show me five message churches who who 100% agree on everything. It's so funny, right? cuz we just don't we we don't even agree on on the very words of William Brandham. How are we one community and we all get together and sing kumbaya? No, it just doesn't happen. We are completely sovereign assemblies who don't see eye to eye on even the words of William Brandham. We do not abide by the same exact dress code or the same uh uh interpretations of Cood. We are constant learning and self-correcting people and we are harder and more judgmental on ourselves and our conduct than we are on the conduct of the public. We don't concern ourselves much on judging the public because we believe that's just who they are and that's how they want to be. We don't go around trying to condemn them or change them. We don't concern ourselves with changing the public as much as we are concerned with keeping ourselves in line and making ourselves accountable to the word and our faith. We believe uh there was a true and a false church throughout all the ages of time. Right? So this idea of community where we believe we are the true church. We believe there was a true and false church throughout the ages of time. We believe from the first church age as a true church started a false church begin to grow. We we don't believe we are an exclusive. We believe there's a thing called the true and a false church, the true and a false vine. Right? So it's scriptural and uh we believe in true Lutheran and false Lutheran. True Methodists and false Methodists, those who say they are Jews and are not. Right? We believe in true Israel and false Israel. We believe in true Pentecostals and false Pentecostals. And hello, we believe in true message and false message. We don't all believe that because you follow the message and fall under this banner of William Brandham that we are exclusive or you're good to go. You're safe. You're a message believer. You're the bride just because you believe in William Brandham. No, we don't. Absolutely not. We believe that there will be a resurrection of the true church which is made up of many people who will not be people who even knew William Brandham. Those in the church ages didn't even know William Brandon. We believe they're going to be in the resurrection, right? Um, brother Brandon believed in his time that many people in the denominations that he preached in brothers from all different revival meetings and other churches. He believed there were Christians everywhere. Brother Bham did not even preach in churches. That's just the truth. Okay. We believe that so that we have been called out from the label of church. So we don't have this idea that we are a true church. We've we've been called out from that label of of church. We we we believe that the messenger said I no longer call you church. I call you bride so that you would understand. So we we believe we are a part of the mystical body called the bride. We do not define which individuals are bride or not. We don't define what is the mystical bride, who they must be, what they must act like. No, we actually believe it's a personal experience between a believer and God. Where do we get it from? From the Bible. Who are the church then? Uh we believe in a Zakius, a woman at the well, a blind Barameus, a Nicodemus, all kinds of people. They were not people from one church. It is an individual experience with Christ, a mystical body. That's what we believe. Uh so we believe that every congregation or gathering under the banner of Christ has three kinds of believers. A true believer, a false believer and a makebeliever. We do not set value in members because of that. We believe the bride is a mystical a mystical body and we do not claim that members or uh um that that members of our church have an immediate entrance into that body as other denominations do. So if you join a denomination immediately you're the body of Christ immediately you are this you are that. We don't believe that. We believe it's an individual experience that nobody but you can know. Our churches are a place where you can come and work out your salvation with fear and trembling. With some of them, it's a lot of fear and trembling and with an individual growth in the word. But we reserve the right to call you out if you step out of line with what we deem as inappropriate behavior. But we are gracious enough to every repentant soul. At least this is what we should be ideally. I believe there are places where message people take this a bit too far and think they can control the lives of other people thinking they have a right to tell people what to do with their lives. That that's not a message issue. That's a cultural issue, right? Um so I mean that's what believe the sign accused me of, you know, like uh uh guilty by association because I know brother Isaac Noriega. I'm supposed to go and correct him on stuff in his church. I don't know what happens in his church. I don't know how to I just want to ask this. I you know, it's coming to my head. Uh, does do any white people from Canada and uh, North America know what it's like to pastor a Spanish church of Latino people near the border where your people live among cartels, where kids are being kidnapped, where there's drugs in the streets. Do you know how to pastor that church? I don't. Uh, do I have the right way to handle those people, to protect the girls, to protect the boys from uh from the community? Do I I I'm just even guessing. I don't even know. I can tell you here in Africa, do you people know uh those of us who are Africans, do you know how to handle a church from South America or from the Philippines or from Australia? Do you can you can you say that all churches must be pastored the same way? There are there are churches here in Africa where there's like 10,000 13,000 20,000 people strong. You have a pastor like me who has a few people. Can I go and teach a pastor how to pastor his church who has like 20,000 people? What do I know about handling 20,000 people? Think about it. I I I hear from the brothers and you have a church of like 20,000 people or 15 10 you have like uh 25 couples having the same anniversary. You do like 25 weddings all at once once a month and you have communion once a year. Uh traditions are not the same. You can't hold everyone to the same rules. They just do things differently based on culture of that area. There's so much more I could tell you because I know I understand their culture. I look at I I talk to them. I listen to them. I listen to their problems and I don't judge them because I know my conditions here where I live is completely different. And I don't even expect them to judge me or ask me to do what they what they do in our church because we are different. And it's a cultural issue. And these people use the message the way they know to deal with people in their area. So I I don't know if they're if they have issues in their area with their cultures, with their languages, their races. That's got nothing to do with the message. It's got nothing to do with me. Why just blame everybody and and and swipe everybody with a broad brush? It doesn't make sense. So the next thing is Bible interpretation. This is such a broad definition of cults because any person who reads the Bible, Bible interpretation. All right. The to me the hubris here is outstanding. You know, the the thought that you interpret the Bible without distortion is just phenomenal hubris. I don't know what gives anybody the the uh the thinking that you can do this on your own that you have the ability and the smarts and the intellect and the reasoning power to interpret and say revelations 10:7 is this because of that and we know this because we know this where did you come from how do you know this right without the Holy Spirit revealing this to know nothing. I'm one who can tell you that. I tread carefully. I don't I don't even tell people uh you know if somebody asks me a question I say this is the way I see it. I I don't even have the hubris to say that's correct brother. You're absolutely correct. That's how it is. Who am I to say that's how it is? I I don't even have that that sense to affirm somebody's belief. Who am I to think I am above everybody to affirm what another person is saying? And yes, that's right. That's how it is. There's no other way. I would say this is the way I see it. And if and if they show me something, I will say that's amazing. I never looked at it that way before. I still do that up to this day. I've got no issue saying that I don't see it that way, but I'm I'm still learning and I and I want to know more and and um absolutely no issue. I I I can totally say I am biased. I see things from the message point of view. I am biased because I look at something the way from my experience. I can say that and therefore I want to listen to another person's point of view to challenge my view. I can do that. But to to to even think that you can interpret the Bible believing that you can do this without distorting it based upon your bias. To think you actually have no bias. Wow, that's incredible. Okay, let me just say this. When you say Bible interpretation, that's the last of the rubric, right? Um um it's so it's such a broad definition of cults because every person who reads the Bible and studies the prophecies of the Bible and attempts to make sense of them is going to interpret things differently to other people. What I'm saying is if you read the book of Revelations and I ask you what does this mean? Whatever interpretation you give me is not going to be the same as another person who reads the very same thing. Let's say there's two people who are not in the message. That person is going to think this person is distorting it. This person is going to think that person is distorting it. There are no two people who look at the same thing and read it exactly the same way. They just don't. It's just craziness to think that you can actually do that, right? Most Christians are very happy with not even studying the prophecies of the Bible. Just adearing. I've had people come from the denomination come into our church and tell me, "Hey, brother Al, you know, I've been in a message. I've been in the denomination for 15 years. All we ever heard was Psalms, Proverbs, and a few uh jokes, and some politics for about 20 minutes. We've never heard the word. We've never heard anything about church ages or seals or thunders. We had no idea. Nobody touched the book of revelations. Nobody spoke about the book of Daniel. Nothing. All we ever did was psalms and proverbs and once and Easter and Christmas. I'm not lying to you. I'm literally telling you this is what I hear from denomination denomination from people who come to us coming to the message. Right? So that's why you know when these Christians who don't study the prophecies they just adear to the basic uh of the basics of accepting Jesus and going to church as a social practice and when they are confronted with the deep things of scripture and you ask them to elaborate on their faith they're caught flatfooted they with no understanding whatsoever. The majority of denominational Christians are that way. Absolutely shallow in their faith. And this is why when the world brings in Hollywood, immorality, sin, wokeness, they just become liberal. They get swept away. Um, I think there's been a movement lately among many denominational people to to study more of the scriptures, to learn more of the Hebrew, to and I've seen it among some young people. Uh, I would say especially um in the Charlie Kirk kind of era uh because people like him really inspired these people to want to know more of of the Bible. And I I've seen that rising, but it seems like it's it's more about becoming powerful so you can debate. A lot of them just don't really get the real spirit behind it. Right now, the question is, here's the question because this is what's being applied to people and to us and calling us a cult. The question is, do all Christian denominations interpret the Bible the same way? The answer is no. So if we leave the message, who among all the denominations have not distorted Bible scriptures for their own purposes? Whom do we go to? Whom do we trust? Please tell us. Okay, I want to get to scandals. Scandals of immorality. I want to say this. As long as there are people who gather together as a group, there are going to be predators among them. So, you've got to understand this people, sociopaths and psychopaths gravitate to religious gatherings of any kind. Anybody who studied a little bit of psychology. I studied a little bit of psychology in engineering because you had to do that in like your first year um in dealing with communication skills and so on. So if you studied a little bit of it, you know that the greatest psychopaths are CEOs of companies, uh, heads of organizations and heads of religious organizations. This is simply what has been reported by people who study human behavior. Sociopaths and psychopaths naturally gravitate. They have a mind that is that is like a hunter and they can they can see prey they can see weakness in people and they move there very quickly. So because churches are filled with people who have problems who come there for help they are victims already of alcohol of of they they have they have addictive personalities they are have family problems they come from broken homes they come from poverty. These are people who come to churches who come to Christ wanting help. Psychopaths and sociopaths look at this and zero in and see people they can control. Weakwilled people, people who have suffered from Stockholm syndrome and they zero in. They go to those churches. They work their way in with swave words and and charisma and uh they gravitate very quickly to leadership because they are able to absorb uh techniques and and scripture and doctrine and and uh and use it to use charisma. This is happening everywhere in every church in every religion from the from the beginning of mankind. This has been happening. This is not exclusive to the message. Okay? There is no religious gathering immune to fornicators, adulterers, pedophiles, fraudsters, narcissists, and people with mental struggles. Churches are places where we accept people who are in need, who are desperate for help. Often these people are charlatans who are there for a free ride and to pray on unsuspecting people. This is documented in the Bible in the book of Corinthians. It is reported among you that there are these and these and these. There are people who are like this and this. From the very first church, it was pointed out by all the disciples that when these people are found, you need to bring them to correction immediately. If they're not compliant and repentant, excommunicate them to keep the congregation safe. Each church with its pastor and leadership wherever you are in the world are responsible for this. Every church has its own way of dealing with such things based upon the community. You literally have a church in a village in a rural area and all the people are part of the village and uh there are other people in that village who uh don't believe in this and are not a part of the church. Right? And yet in that village you're you're only taking your um way of dealing with a misdemeanor or a miscarriant or whoever by the culture that is adopted in the village. Right? It's independent of the message. Now so each church and each pastor are responsible for handling these sorts of people. Very often what happens is leadership positions are taken by the sociopaths and psychopaths and um they gain power very quickly and elevated to positions of authority in churches. Preachers, deacons, song leaders, elders and this has been the curse in the Christian church from the very inception through all the ages of time. Right? I mean, they were bishops, there were cardinals, they were popes, there were all kinds of leaders that were psychopaths and sociopaths. This is not a message thing like it's painted out to be. So, please don't be fooled by this rhetoric, right? Okay. Um, that being said, there must be people who have message churches who probably fit that profile. There were ministers in the past who had immoral problems. My point is this is not a message thing. This is a human thing. This happens. This is no indication that the message is false because this happens. Okay, I want to talk about the Malachi 4 and Malachi 3 debacle. I don't want to say too much about there's so much that can be said and so much already been said. What I was pointing out in our previous segments is that when John the Baptist was asked if he was Elias, he said no. And he pointed to Malachi 3:1. The question is, why didn't he identify himself as Malachi 4? What I'm saying is all these antibrandom people have absolutely no scripture that identifies John the Baptist as Malachi 4. You actually have a scripture that identifies him as Malachi 3 by his own words. And yes, Christ identified John the Baptist as Elias. All the Jews at that time knew that both Malachi 3 and Malachi 4 identified Elias. They knew that Elias would be a voice crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord. They knew that, right? Just just ask the Jews. They they they knew that. They knew what that scripture meant. So nobody in fact no not even the disciples identified John the Baptist as Malachi 4 saying that he was the voice who came and turned the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. Not one person not even Paul not even nobody nobody in scripture identified John the Baptist. In fact the disciples and Paul barely talked about John the Baptist. It was only Christ who said Elias has already come. So all the antibrand people say that because he said Elias has already come that yes he's referring to Malachi 4. Where did you get that from? Tell us where did you get them? You want evidence. You want fact. You want to be precise. You want to be 100% correct. Where does it say in the Bible that John the Baptist is Malachi 4? Because John the Baptist himself admits he's Malachi 3 and Christ calls him Elias correctly and he correctly identifies himself as Malachi 3. This is my point, right? Spin it how you want to. This is your evidence. You have no other evidence, right? Nobody did. the apostles, specifically Peter, after Acts chapter 2, when he speaks about the the the the dreadful time that is coming when the heavens will melt with fervent heat and all of that. This fire is not the fire Joel prophesied of. Peter is speaking about this post Acts 2 that this dreadful day is still to come. So, we believe now after 2,000 years of Christianity that we are now on the cusp of all prophecies in the New Testament being completely fulfilled. Um, Peter was speaking in a time where John's revelations were not even given. Right? And now after John's revelations are given, we believe based on the Bible, particularly in the book of revelations and on the words of the prophet that we are drawing to an end where man will destroy himself through World War II. That's not a fantasy to us. That's not a perhaps to us. To us, we can see the times and see it building to that. We believe the Bible to be true on this. We believe in the Armageddon that is going to come and that everything is shaping up right now to that. It's based on those things and the development of politics and world trade that we accept the ministry of brother Benham as the last part of the fulfillment of Malachi 4. What's more, this time we literally have someone identifying his ministry as that of Malachi 45 and 6. You literally have him not saying I am Malachi 3. He's literally identifying his ministry as that of Malachi 4 5 and 6. It's up to you whether you want to accept it or not. We believe it based on what we see from church history. What happened in John's day, what happened in Peter's day, what happened through the church ages, and where we are now. Where we are now looks like it's a whole lot more like stuff is going to happen. Bad things are going to happen. Things that's going to destroy the planet. That's where we that's what we are seeing, right? We are even we even have non-Christian atheists telling us nuclear warfare is most likely the thing that destroys us. Not even climate change, not even a deadly virus. No, I've spoken to to nuclear physicists. I've had discussion with educated people with doctors about this who are friends who never accept never going to accept the message. But they are my friends. I've spoken to them. They're scientists. They're geneticists. They they're people of all kinds who tell me most likely we are going to destroy ourselves by nuclear warfare. Okay. All right. So it's up to you young people feeling discouraged. It's up to you what you want to believe. Look at time. Look at where you are. Look at the conditions. Look at the events taking place around you. You need to decide. Is there an Elijah that has come or is there an Elijah you're still waiting for? Is there even an Elijah that has to come or was John the Baptist it? Your decision, right? We're not forcing you. I want to talk to you about the message. Those of you who are being discouraged by antibrandom websites, if you read these websites, you may be led to believe that thousands and thousands of message people are suffering and kept under lock and key. They're subjugated by a tyrannous dictator pastor and living a total life of misery. You might think, "Oh my goodness, things are so bad. Our people are not prospering. Our children are just pulling their hair out, gritting their teeth, and waiting to leave us and forsake the message. That's that's like the tone when you read what's happening in the in in their writings. That's like, oh my goodness, the you mean to tell me the message is so bad. There's been these guys and these people who call who immoral fellows and people are taught this and William Brandham deluted the people and look at how poor these poor message people are just dying and just falling away and leaving in the thousands. No, sorry. That's absolutely a lie. While there have been some people who have left the message, this doom and gloom is just not true. Not at all. We are generally a very very happy people both men and women both boys and girls we enjoy our worship so much. I am now 50 years old since December 2025 and in all my time I have never met a William Brennham worshipper in the message. Never. I've never come across one. Uh we I've heard of a church in India uh where they follow they believe something called Christ Branom or something uh and the the pastor of the church is the prophet. I' I've only heard that right. I've heard of some places in Africa where there's a few people and maybe some from North America who knew brother Brandham and are probably dead now. Other than that, I have also traveled abroad and fellowship with many people and have met folks from every continent. I've not yet come across someone who worships brother Brandham. It's just a broad sweeping disingenuous lie that message people worship William Brandham. We don't. On the contrary, there are thousands young people, you're discouraged. I don't know why you're discouraged. I just want to tell you there are thousands of happy people who love the message who simply cannot handle the ministries of watered down denominations around us. It never fails. When I preach at events where there are non-Christian non-denom non-Christian or or denominational Christians, if I preach at a wedding or a funeral or a function of some sort and there are people from our communities here in South Africa, there are Hindu, Muslims. I once I once preached at a wedding where there are Hindus and Muslims on one side and Catholics and Protestants on on the other side and no message believers. One person there among the group or the one of the people getting married was was a message. I preached at that. I did the wedding and uh what do you preach when you preach into a congregation of of nobody there who accepts your faith? Sorry, there there was like one family one family there who was a me and they were not even saying amen while I was preaching. So you know it was tough. Uh my point is so when I go to these places and when I'm confronted with this whole group I can take this approach where now I'm going to blast these people. I'm going to tell them about the prophet. I have never followed that approach in my entire ministry of 25 years. I have only at at any time um u mentioned the prophet if I'm preaching at a at a wedding or a function where there are only message people. But when there are all these other people, I just stick with the word and so as not to offend them, I don't even mention the prophet. Some message people say, "How could you do that? That's your that's your uh opportunity to to tell them." And no, I'm not I'm not one of those people. To me, if I'm doing a if I'm doing a wedding, I want the two people to be as happy as possible and enjoy this day. And I want them to have their families have the perfect atmosphere and ability to mesh together and give them a great uh day. I'm not interested in using their marriage or their wedding for my own agenda. Neither am I going to do that at a funeral and crush other denominations and other people. No, I want the grieving people to grieve, to have hope. I want the word to be of a strength to them and other people around them. So, here's my experience in doing that. I've had non-Christian and non-denominational people come up to me after that and tell me they have never heard preaching like this before. And they ask me, "Who are you? Where is your church?" And I even I I I because I haven't mentioned it. After the service, after the funeral, after the wedding, they come up to me and say, you know, where are you from? And then I tell them who I am and what our persuasion is. And right there, they have the right to choose because they've heard, oh yeah, they've heard of William Brandom. So right there, oh okay, now we know who you are. But what they don't realize is they have already acknowledged the word that I preached as being truthful and being effective and speaking exactly what is happening in the world today. If afterwards they then say oh okay we know which church you are you are from now on and they can choose which they which way they go. My experience in South Africa during and even after all the turmoil of aparade the message that I've seen permeated into communities to every corner of our country we have had conventions where we would travel from all ends of the country stay in each other's homes I what I'm doing right now young people is I'm telling you what the message really is not what you read in the websites I'm telling you what the message really is right. Why I'll never leave it. Why I'm so happy. Why I'm so content being a believer. Um here's my experience. We we had conventions where we would travel from all into the country, stay in each other's homes, feed one another, each other's food, have services from morning till night. We learned together. We listened to different ministries and teachings as we grew in strength. In our country, we have such a diverse country and and I want to tell you something. Wherever you're from, I'm so prejudice. I believe my country is the best in the world. I'm sorry to all you other countries. Mine is the best in the world. Uh in every aspect, we have no hurricanes, no natural disasters, no uh earthquakes, no uh tornadoes. We have the best fruit. We have the best meat. We have the best land. We have perfect four seasons. We don't have deep snow. We don't have scorching heat. We don't have deserts that kill us, you know. We have the big five in uh animals and so on. Anyway, but that's not what I want to really brag about. Our people are amazing people uh in the message uh you know, we're or rather just our people in our country. We're we're just so happy. We're we're SO HAPPY WE CAN'T EVEN run our government effectively. Our happiness just gets in our way. You know, I'm just kidding. But in a message, our people generally are just the loveliest folks you're ever going to meet. In South Africa, we have we have black, white, Indian, colored. There's there's an entire race of people called colored people. I know that in in other countries that word is a slur. It's not in our country. Um, in the message here in South Africa, we have in the Western Cape, in the Eastern Cape, in the middle, which is the free state, in northern provinces, and some other places in South Africa, we have this wonderful official race of people called colored people. I I don't there's nobody like them in the world. You You're not going to find them anywhere. They are exclusive to South Africa. They are humorous. They are jovial. They are loud. They are expressive. They will dance or sway at the faintest hint of a beat. When they sing and dance, you can never even keep up with them. Uh because they have a way beyond anything you could have imagined. Many of them speak Africans and when they pray it gives me goosebumps, you know, like it's like I love their prayers. I love their worship and their unique flavor they bring to the message. You talk about cults, you have seen these believers. I've never seen anything like I've traveled the world. I've never seen any cult who are even close to our people here. The bride of Christ is valuable because of them. They bring a completely different dimension to the message. Their race has socioeconomic problems and other cultural issues and weaknesses but the word is helping them iron out the creases. We have uh indigenous nativeborn South African people who are Kisan, Greek wa and the Inguni tribes who are Zulu, Sutu, Tossa, Tuana, Perry and so many more. The the the beautiful languages that they have. They they are just phenomenal beautiful people who cannot be put down no matter what pressures life puts on them. I've seen these people come through aparate, come to no education, absolute poverty, and be Christians, having barely any food in their tables, uh barely having jobs. I've seen these people do incredible things. They're in the church for for decades, not complaining with the harshest conditions they live under. When they sing, I feel heaven come down. They don't need musical instruments or conductors or hymn sheets. They sing with conviction, with expression, with emotions, and with revelation. When they dance, you know it's not a put on. in services after the word is is preached and they're rejoicing. You look upon a sea of white handkerchiefs being coats being spun like a helicopter blade and dancing and the little kids are dancing together in STEP AND JUST JOY OF salvation being expressed. This is not cult people. This this is not people were sad and held on and all the they're so subjugated and they're so you know brainwashed these people are just pulled along by their noses having a carrot dangle in front of them. You got to tow the line or else you won't make the rapture. No man, these people love their faith. These people, this is the message. This is the We are excited about the word. WE ARE SO HAPPY in the word. We have white people who are African speaking and English speakaking. We have Indians in the province where I live. We have other folks now who are coming from central Africa and other countries uh in the south. And all of us have a uniqueness about us that no legalist interpretations of COD can manage because God made us so different. We are shaped different. We are made different. and the message found us and introduced us to Christ. There is nothing going to take that away from us. I've seen expressions of this in other places. New Zealand, Australia, there's people in India, there's people in South America, there's people in in North America, there's people in the UK, people in Europe. I've seen people like this everywhere in every culture. They are not subjugated. They are not bored in their churches. They can sit and listen to a message for two hours. What? What are they brainwashed? You can barely get a denominational person to sit in a church for half an hour without running to the toilet like a 100 times, right? We are just people who love the word. They call our pastors cult pastors. You know, like I said before, you have creeps everywhere, right? And you have creeps who took the message because they saw it as an opportunity to gain power, recognition, and money. But all in all the decades gone after the prophet, the truth is that more than 98% of message pastors and leaders have been good men, have done great work for the kingdom of Christ. Currently, I could name names. I could start in New Zealand and work from the south going up from Australia to the Philippines to uh uh Japan maybe to China to India uh over this way into uh Central Asia to Europe to Africa uh the UK down towards South America going upwards towards North America there's these all these people they are not cults they're all so different, such happy churches. They are funny, they are quirky, they are smart, they are fun-loving people at home, but when they enter the house of God, these ministers are weapons against the fifth dimension. And you can't stand with them. You can't equal them. There are some who are gentle men. Some are tough men. Some are wise men. Some are knowledgeable men. Some are quiet men. Some are loud men. Some are angry men. And some are just balanced men. All of us are facing problems of a changing world. I am one person who has literally seen in one lifetime the evolution of technology from records and reels to cassettes and VHS to CDs to DVDs and flash drives and Blu-ray to MP3 players and smart screens to all of that on a smartphone. My kids have never seen that evolution. I've seen that. This is what our message people have grew up in over the last six decades. We are adapting as best we can. Some are fast, some are slow. We are journeying on. We stop a few times every week to enjoy the word and then we journey on. We are not cults simply because these antibrand people say so or label us or brand us. They know that the vast majority of us are not. They are aware that not even 0.1% of us worships William Brandham. They know this and yet they still paint us all with this brush. Okay. Doctrines. Now I want to ask these antibrand people. Those of you who've been reading the websites and you know come against us and discouraging our our people. Okay. Now that you antibrandom people have succinctly and thoroughly proven to us that William Brandham is a false prophet and that all his doctrines are plagiarized and they're all false and they shouldn't be believed and that we the ministers are teaching people false and we are taking them to hell with us. You now have the responsibility to tell us what the truth is. Thank you for telling us what is false. Now tell us the truth. Okay, let's start in Genesis. All right. Who is the man of Genesis 1:26-27? Who is the man of Genesis 2:7? Was the serpent a snake? What was the forbidden fruit? What was the original sin? What was the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Do we have free will or not? Antibrandom people, can you tell me why did God create the devil? If everything that was created came from God and if he created the devil, does it mean evil comes from God? Please give us the answers. Did God set up Adam and Eve to sin because he has fornowledge? He knew they were going to sin. Couldn't he have saved them from making the mistake? Why did Adam and Eve both uh both who were created perfect in the image of God have a good son and an absolutely evil son who became the first liar and murderer from the beginning? Who are the sons of God that took the daughters of men? Who were the giants? Do you antibrand people believe in the Nephilim? If prophets are meant to be 100% accurate, why was God not 100% accurate when he said to Abram that his seed shall sojourney in a land that is not theirs and would come out after 400 years, but they came up after 430 years? Was God inaccurate? How about this? Please explain to us antibrand people, why did Jesus have to be born of a virgin? Why did Jesus have to die on the cross and shed blood for our sins? Wasn't there a better way? Please tell us the truth. Sure, God could make a better way, right? Than do something and bring his son down on the cross and have him mutilated before the public and make us feel so shameful and guilty. So salvation is based on us on how guilty we feel and we cry and thank him for his great sacrifice for us. Wasn't there a better way? Tell us why did he have to die on the cross? Tell us about God. Antibrandom people, now that you've left the message, you have been opened. Your mind is clear. You you see the truth. You're out from a cult. You're no longer deluded. Please tell us now that you believe in the trinity again. Is the father a separate being who has his own body? And is his son in his own body? And what is the holy spirit and where did it come into when did it come into existence? How about this? In heaven, does God sit on a literal throne of gold? Uh are there angels singing and worship him uh worshiping bowing down before him day and night according to Revelations 4? Tell us. antibrand people. Is there day and night in heaven? Because it says that in Revelations 4, they worship him day and night. Is there day and night in heaven? How about this? Are there four the four living creatures? Are there really winged creatures in heaven? Please substantiate your answer with evidence. Evidence because you love evidence. Please tell us if the church if the church ages that Brother Baron preached uh are not real. There's no such thing as church ages. Who were the angels of the churches that Jesus was writing to through John from the aisle of Patmas where he said unto the angel of the church of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamus? Who are those angels? Were they heavenly angels or were they men? If you say that if ages were mentioned then people in the apostles time would not have been bothered with the imminent coming of Christ. How about years later now 2,000 years later uh after the actual development of the Christian church that we have seen and the histories the rising and falling of systems and evolution in the church. Uh, were there no ages of the church that you can see that occurred? No specific markers of development? Have you not seen anything? If you say the way brother Brandon preached the seals was false, please antibrand people, please tell us the mystery of the seven seals and what it means to the Christian church. Please can you explain to us what the first seal is, the second seal, the third seal. Now that you have proved to us that you've become clear, you're clearheaded, you're out of the cult, you're uh uh you've been set free, please tell us what are the seals. While you're on that, tell us what is the seventh seal and tell us whether it has been opened or can you tell us the meaning of Revelations 10. Who is the mighty angel? Is it Christ? Is it Michael? Is it Gabriel? Is uh uh is it um some other angel? Is Revelations 10 still to happen? And how do you know? Please substantiate for us. In Revelations 11, please tell us who are these two witnesses? Why do they have to die and lie in the streets for 3 days? Also, when the seven trumpet blows, why is the ark of the covenant seen in heaven? Is that why the ark disappeared? Did God mysteriously take it up to heaven? Who is the woman in Revelations 12? Uh who the dragon is fighting with? While you're while you're on that, uh please explain the seven trumpets, the seven vials, the mark of the beast, the two beasts of Revelations 13, and tell us who the great multitude is in Revelation 7 who have washed their robes in the blood of the lamb. Also, who is the 144,000? Are they Jews or not? And and who are the foolish virgin also? Please explain this to us also while you're there. Tell us what Revelations 15 means. Those standing in the sea of glass mingled with the fire singing the song of Moses and of the lamb. Right. Also, what are the three unclean spirits like frogs? When you finish with that, please inform us who are the 200 million demons let loose whether this happened already and whether it's still to happen in the future. Please can you substantiate that with evidence? Please can you also describe to us what the holy city, the new Jerusalem would look like by your revelation? Will it be physically on earth somewhere? Will it be in near Jerusalem? Will it be near Egypt? Where will it be? And how big will it be? And and what will it look like? Uh so also, you know, we're concerned. Uh can you tell us what hell looks like? And uh what bodies are the people who are in hell? What bodies are they in? Are they feeling literal fire? Are they being burned? Are they being poked by demons? Um what are the children of where are the children of God who have died? Those who died in Christ, where are they? Are they with those people in hell in like in a separate place? Where are they in your perspective? Are they in heaven or are they under the ground? Are they still waiting to be resurrected? Please, can you substantiate this with evidence? What is the right way to be baptized? Antibrandom people and and and what is baptism for? Please tell us and why it is important for us to be baptized. Also, please can you tell us the right way to receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost? Cuz really crucial to us. And after we receive the Holy Ghost, do we have to speak with tongues? And uh how do you guys antibrand people, do you still speak with tongues and prophesy? Do you believe? How about this? Um, concerning behavior in church, do you believe that women should come to church in miniskirts or stilettos and their cleavages showing and uh, see-through garments and decked with jewelry? Uh, do you believe that they should be dressed in skintight clothes and pants and leading song services on stages? Uh, what is your doctrine on marriage and divorce, antibrand people? Can you people can people marry and divorce freely? What if a man has been divorced three times and feels the calling to be a minister? Would you allow it? What if a woman was has divorced her husband for no apparent reason just cuz she doesn't like him and uh now feels she has a calling to be a pastor? Would you allow that? Now that you have trapped us, you have us with a bridge, a brown bear, and a cloud and many failed thus sayeth the Lord's. Can you please tell us and guide us into the truth and we're what we're supposed to believe in after we leave William Brandom and the cult that we are trapped in? Tell us these things and how the Bible should be correctly interpreted according to your view. Please tell us how the rapture is going to take place and do you have any idea how soon it's going to be? All this will be really great and appreciated in maybe you know a new website that will really help the whole world since you guys have all the reliable facts, testimonies and the truth and all these things and hopefully you have some vindications of the Holy Spirit in your lives to verify everything that you say. We would desperately appreciate that. That being said, I have noticed something in my years as a Christian watching the church develop. All right? When people receive prophecies uh that tell them something is coming, they develop a different living mentality. For example, when Christ told the disciples, there are some here that will not see death until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom. um the this generation shall not pass. Um Matthew 24 and these things shall happen when you hear these things um run for the you know don't even come off the rooftops or stuff like that. um where the eagle where the carcass is there, the eagles will be gathered and false Christ shall rise and this and this is going to happen and and this will um the moon shall be dark and the sun and moon turn to blood and the stars hit the ground and all this and he tells them all this and these men are incentivized to have a different living mentality. They don't plan for the future. They live the most self-correcting harsh lives possible. They fast and pray. They deny themselves uh um uh luxuries. They abstain from all things uh that that they deem worldly. They don't care to plan for the future in any way. They don't care about their kids uh education. They don't care about anything else. They fast and pray more. They const they meet every night with people. I'm talking about the book of Acts here, right? And uh they sacrifice um everything to talk about the word, to discuss the word. They don't care about saving money. They use all that they have to spread the prophecy that gave them that living mentality out of concern for the souls of other people. Right? But then after a decade and another decade and another decade and those prophecies are not seeming to be met then people start to become complacent and adopt a very lacadasical lifestyle of church. This explains why after Christ, those prophecies that didn't seem to be met, uh, the disciples after Christ who were told of his in of his imminent coming, they all adopted that first behavior and were prophesying of the end of the world as if it was in their day. Right? But then when it didn't happen though the per uh uh it didn't happen they realized they had fulfilled a purpose for which they were chosen that whatever they were told incentivized them to go out and spread the gospel at breakneck speed. Right? Hundreds of years passed and people still holding on to the prophecies of Peter. still speaking as if Peter is in their day speaking about the heavens going to be melting away with fervent heat. Still some still believing that they were going to apply it to their day like Luther, like Wesley, hundreds of years pass, right? And they forget the people forget the urgency of the prophecy and choose to follow parts of the Bible that are beneficial to them. In the same way, I want you to consider this. In brother Madam's day, living in the years of the revival, the healing revival with Oral Roberts, Jack Co, Billy Graham, and others after two world wars, the great recession, uh, a great depression, nuclear nuclear bombs being invented, immorality sweeping through America, technology advancing at a rapid pace, a cold war coming in, the rise of communism, rise of fascism. It was the opinion of all the men, not just brother Brandham, of Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jack Moore, Jack Co, all those men. It was their opinion that the coming of the Lord was going to take place in their day. Go listen to them. They believed it. They preached it. A man like William Brandon then who is seeing dreams and visions seeing healing campaigns of thousands of people. Don't you think having that would be very likely that he would even predict that the closing of all things would occur in his time living in that day. You're here living in 2025. Life is good. You're living an upper middle class life. You have bread, food on your table, clothes in your back, millions in your bank account. You have all this. Your your kids are finished university. They all are living fantastic lives. You're driving around. You have two or three cars, two or three homes, holiday homes. You have all that, right? And um now being that kind of person, you don't know the panic that was in the the people in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, right? Do you consider that perhaps the Lord needed him to do exactly what he did to put a desperation into the world, the Christian church at the time? Uh because he knew God knew they were going to enter into this new world and he wanted the people to focus on the gospel of Christ while this massive spirit of success, entertainment, and advancement would move through the entire world. Did you consider that? This explains to me why our parents behaved the way they did in the message. They were not bad people. You young people, I want to you growing up right now in 2026. You're a teenager now. You have no idea what happened in the 70s when I was a baby, when I was 5 years old. You have no idea what happened in the 80s when these people just came out of that great healing revival anointing and we're living as if the rapture was going to take place the next day. I want to ask you, if you received some vision or somebody today received some vision or prophecy that the rapture is going to take place next week, would you still be living the way with the mentality that you have right now? What would you what would be your mentality? Right? This is what our parents were living with back then. They were not bad people. I remember them all. They were men who literally believed the rapture was going to take place at any moment. They preached it. They did their best to live the cleanest moral lives. They spent their money and sacrificed so much to get material printed. Bibles in different languages, messages on tape, message books in many languages, setting up printed printing presses, building churches, and so much in three to four decades. They've accomplished that. What have you accomplished? Young people, those of you in the message who are 20, 25 years old, 30 years old, what have you accomplished for the gospel as compared to what these people did at breakneck speed in under 10 years, under 20 years, right? They were not trying for world domination. They were not committing uh uh committed to creating a big denomination that sweeps the world. They literally lived every day praying, studying, preaching, and encouraging people to turn away from the distractions and worldliness and turn to Christ to live right because the time was at hand. Were they wrong? Were the apostles wrong? Or was that exactly what God intended? That's for you to decide. I just want to say, you know, today being a Christian sounds so feeble. I'm I don't know where I'm going to stand one day when I shake the Apostle Peter's hand and and I'm not even going to be able to tell him, "Sir, I worked as hard as you did." I'm going to stand there being ashamed of myself for living in, you know, a comfortable life while these men, you know, this is this the the bar is just so low right now, right? Back then, men were hanged upside down, beheaded, chased across continents, thrown in prison, separated from families, disappeared by governments. Today, what do we do? What is our challenge? Today, we research each other, investigate each other's faults, and fight with the sword of the internet, and make videos to shoot at each other. It's so courageous and valiant. It's just outstanding. We feel so equal to all the saints who went before us, don't we? We are the heroes of the fake. That's the way I see it. Let me tell you what the message really is with a few examples. In closing, the message told us that the original sin uh it told us what it is and which then tells us why we have the internal fight that exists within our beings. The original sin is the reason why Christ had to be born of a virgin and die on the cross. There are many doctrines like predestination, the godhead, adoption, demonology, dimensions, the throne of God, the timeline of events that puts the Bible into a perspective that is meaningful to us. Ultimately, the message showed us that God created man for him to dwell in man. There was a fall. Man lost that ability to be the expression of God. It now ought to take ages of law, ages of grace, and an age of love combined with two comingings of the son of man to restore us back to what Adam lost. So ultimately as believers, we see the end result being not that we are just good Christians and that we are waiting for Christ to come, but that we must become what God meant for us to be what Adam lost. And in so accepting the revelation of Christ in you becoming the bride, you also become the vehicle of salvation to the rest of the world who are righteous. Those who are righteous, those who are moral living Christians and non-Christians who will find mercy at the throne of God through your life. Let's take the church ages. These people, anti-brandom people, right? They claim he plagiarized it from Clarence Lockan. They're arguing about ages and messengers and whether it's a false doctrine, whether dates were taken from here and there. And um I don't blame them because a lot of message people just teach that theory. Message church age book theory preach that. Now this is why I'm saying that's not even the message, right? Uh when the book is open, what does the church ages mean to you and me personally? It reveals to us things that neither Lan nor brother Brandham said explicitly because something is revealed to us between the lines. There are hidden mysteries in there. Right? So that's what the message really is. These people who leave have never seen it. Right? What the thunders are? what the hidden mysteries inside the book is. Okay, let me give you an example. Okay, the church ages to most people uh Ephesus, Progamus, Thotyra, Philadelphia, Assad, Philadelphia, Leodysia, messengers for each age, right? Paul, Ireanius, Martin, Columbus, Luther, Wesley, brother Bam, church ages down pat. Each one had its own uh you know each city. This was a character of the church age. This was the messenger of the church age. This is the theory finished. That's theory. What is the church ages to you young people? When you read your church age book, when you are reading the message, when you receive the open book, what is the mystery of the church ages? It is the map of the development of every individual Christian. That's the secret. We don't just see messengers and church ages and histories. We see ourselves in the mirror. It is the development of the stature of a perfect man. It's telling you that when you come to Christ, right? When you accept Christ as your personal savior, immediately the seed of life begins. At the same time, another seed that is there that you were born with from your from your parents, another nature that's been the older person in there is fighting against you. It's telling you that as you begin, you start off excited in the word, excited about Christ, you become a new Christian, you baptize, you experience the baptism of the Holy Ghost, the burning of fire inside, the zeal, you want to go out and spread the gospel. What's going to happen is eventually you're going to cool off. Ephesus tells you you're going to get relaxed. You're going to get lacadasical. You're going to start looking around and it's your your pension, your nature of that animal nature in your body to want to organize your relationship with God. It's telling you immediately that there's there's a sense of nickelism coming in. You are naturally going to take the revelation God has given you and start and have a feeling to organize it. You feel like there's got to be an organized prayer life. There's got to be a fasting. There's got to be a tradition. There's got to be a religion. And it starts there. Ephesus tells you it starts with a saying. Then you move further and you come to Smyrna and and you're in this church, this beautiful church. And Smyrna is myrr. It's bitterness. It's there where the church starts to split. And inside you, you're feeling you're in this lovely church. And then you find, hey, what's happening? There's these people with with doctrines and people are saying things that I'm not so good with. I I don't know about this. And you you you now see a division taking place. What's happening? And this this nickelan seed starts making you want to choose a side. You don't even realize it's leading you towards a spirit of politics down the road. Now you move into Pergamus and you find it's telling you something about being thoroughly married to a doctrine. So it came from a saying to a doctrine to become a forcement and you're about ready to come to this thotiry stage of of your development where you are going to choose a political a ministry based on a political nature which comes under something that is a red horse rider which comes in the seals which there is a politic of a political nature that's going to establish this is our church this is the pastors We agree with these are the pastors they agree with. We will persecute this one. We will speak against that one. This is a map telling you exactly what's going to happen to you once you accept the the word of Christ. This is this is telling you what's going to happen. This is going to tell you you're going to go through a thousand years of dark ages, depression. Your church going to let you down. People are going to let you go down. You're going to go through such trials. You're going to go through a thotiry age where there's going to be a feminine dominating spirit that's going to oppress the very word of God that you received and it's going to try to create an organized religion. And right in there, you're going to sense within yourself the ability to be an antichrist. There's an antichrist spirit right there. And you don't know it's it's in a spirit of organized religion. Not outside, not in the Catholic church, not in other denominational churches, right there in you. This is what it's real. This is what the message really is about. It's your relationship with Christ. And it's going to it's going to take a Luther kind of ministry, a kind of reformation to pull you out of that and and bring you and separate you from that universal uh identity and start bringing you to a more individual life in Christ. And you come to a place where you start realizing, I got to take cognizance of my life. I got to start living righteously. I got to do more. I can't just piggyback on somebody. you're going to start developing this kind of Wesleyian uh attitude, this Wesian approach. You're becoming more mature. You're realizing I I can't just, you know, go on living like an infant just expecting my father to just bless me with healings and and discernments and prophecies and gifts of the spirit. I need to start working. I need to start doing things. And then you realize you're coming to this place of Leodysia where you're coming to the end where there's going to be the most massive challenge against your faith. The everything is going to break down. You're going to have family members reject you. You're going to have everything come against you. Everything prove what you have is false. You're going to come to this place where everything is going to be tested in you. your natures, your desires, your lustful natures, things that you've had hidden inside for a long time, complexes. You're going to have uh uh all kinds of teachings. You're going to have uh intellectual uh things, things in your education, things in your job, your own personal leodia is going to lay you bare. It's going to lay you flat on your back. At the same time, it's a time where the word is going to come to its absolute fullness, its richness. It's amazing. It's It's phenomenal. God is starting to reveal and pull you into a place where he wants you by yourself, not your church, not your message church, not your pastor, not your mom and dad, not anybody else. He wants you to come into your own capstone by the Holy Spirit. He wants to pull you right in behind the veil and come together in a place where it's just you and him. But you're never going to get there until you walk through your church ages. It's like coming out of Egypt and heading to your promised land and going through the wilderness and and seeing every single step and enjoying every step and appreciating every single development. That's actually the church ages. That's what they're not going to teach you. Oh yeah, by the way, and that's what the press play guys are never going to tell you either because they just don't see that. If you tell them this, they tell you saying things the prophet never said. But this is what we preach. This is what we see. If you look at the seven seals, what is the seven seals? White horse rider, red horse rider. What is the message of the seven seals? Oh, it's a white horse rider. He's got a he's got a bow. He's got no arrows. He's an impostor. He's um And look at the red horse. He's a political spirit. He has a sword and he he slays men with a sword and he he spills so much of blood and a third horse rider. He's got a balances and he's got scales and measure of wheat for a penny, measure of barley and this means that and this means that theory theory theory theory. How does this apply to me? How does this apply to you personally? What is the seals about? The seals are around a book. What is the book? Why is that book in the hand of him on the throne? Why is that book ha? Why does that book have to be brought down to you, the believer? Why does the book have to be broken? Why must those seals be broken off that and handed back to man? Those are the questions. What is the seals all about? What is the book all about? The book is the revelation of who God is manifested through Christ that is sealed by a religious spirit, a political spirit, demonic spirits of man-made reasonings and doctrines. Uh spiritual death, uh the fifth uh spirit of vengeance. Uh sixth a spirit of um turmoils and wars and all kinds of things. uh seventh seal all the the mystery of the second coming of Christ. How does it apply to you personally? You could never take the book or embrace the revelation of God manifested in man unless you break away from your religious spirit. Do you even acknowledge that you have a religious spirit? Do you think the White House writer was about somebody in history in Paul's day in the nickelan time? No. No, my friend. You have a religious spur on you right away right now because you accept it's it's the first seal that must be broken is religion. You took you even take the message and you make a religion out of it and you wrap it around the word and you think, "Ah, I have power. I have authority." You have a religious spirit on you. You're a poser. You're a faker. If you're a person who re really understands what the seals are, it's something so deep and personal to you that helps you break away your religion. If you break that away, you will pray different. You will serve God different. You will see God different. You will see humanity different. You will see the church different. You will see your brothers and sisters different. You will if you're breaking away the white horse rider from around the revelation of Christ to you personally. If you break away the red horse rider which is a political spirit which makes you choose sides which makes you follow camps which makes you side with certain people which makes you somebody who believes you need to respect a certain brother so and so as the authority of the gospel. That's a red horse rider. That's right there in your personal life. You haven't seen the revelation of the seals. If you haven't seen this, how it applies to you personally, by the time you get to the sixth seal where you're talking about your family problems like wars, rumors of wars, turbulence, um, disease, vials, trumpets, all these things, by the time you get to that and realize all those things are a seal, like how you get affected for the stupidest things in life, like sickness and disease that you don't believe Christ can heal you, like uh family problems, uh marriage Marriage issues, children issues, all those things are your own sixth seal. Things hiding away the revelation of who you are in Christ. If that's not broken to you, forget about even the seventh seal that shows you the coming of Christ in you to bring you back to what Adam lost. That's really what the seals are. You can't preach to the bride of Christ, the seven seals, without bringing it to them personally. This is what believe the sign doesn't get. This is what all those people don't get. They think we are people who just preach Brandham's message and take it and preach theory year after year after year. All we're doing is preaching his theory and repeating his words like brainwash people. No, my friends, we actually have a personal uh intimate relationship with the word beyond what you people have even heard. It's so deep that we are with Christ. We're never going back to anything else. We're never going to listen to any dril from any other place that is hybridized that's going to tell us, "Oh, God is love. You can do whatever you want to. You can come here, be whatever you want to. Don't worry about that. You can just act any you can preach like this. You can talk like that. You can have this girlfriend. You can you can be divorced. You can be married this way. It's okay with us. God is love. No. When we see what the message is, I'm sorry, my friends. There is nothing else in the world that quenches our thirst or feeds our hungry soul than this opened book. And when this book is open, you see the church ages new, the seals new, serpent seed, new, marriage and divorced new. Everything is another dimension. Everything makes you zero in on your own faults, not even other people, not even your wife or your children. You are selfexamining because that's what this book is. It's given to me. The book is coming to me. I'm eating the book. It's sweet in the mouth, bitter in my belly, not somebody else's. It's so personal. That's what the message is. All right. what I am seeing right now if I look at what they're doing these antibrand websites and whatever and and frankly I just want to say what they don't realize is probably 5% of the message will read it because the majority of the message are not intellectual people there they're absolutely not even people who will understand the language or this talk of fallacy and and uh all this stuff, the intellectualism, it's not the majority of message people are never going to understand a word that they say. They're not even going to read it. Uh and the gospel that these educated intellectual philosophers and researchers and factf finders preach and speak, the majority of the world are poor workingclass people. They don't care for your deliberation. They don't care for your pontification. They don't care for your languages. They don't care for your verbosity. They don't care for how well you can explain how William Brandham is a false prophet. They don't they're not even reading you. You're not going to give what you have to a 60-year-old woman who all she wants is God to help her. uh they're they're not interested. This is why the message resonates with more people than any intellectual arguments ever will. They don't even care. Right? The only people who are going to be attracted is the new generation who are educated in schools, who are taught um who are becoming more intellectual to their own misfortune and they're going to be the ones discouraged. And so what I'm seeing is the kind of Christianity that is being preached now by the world and people like these antibrand people. You can only follow their type of Christianity if you are middle class educated or rich. That's it. You can't. If you are lowerass, you cannot follow them, right? Because you need a certain amount of money. You need to have set yourself up nicely. You need to have a good income. You need to have a certain salary to go to this nice church with beautiful down lights and and beautiful music and software uh computers that that that project beautiful stuff, big screens. You you have to be of a certain uh class of people to keep Christianity that way. If you come from places like here in Africa where you don't have the education, you don't have the ability to afford such things. Uh you can come here and try to talk to us about doctrines and your explanations till you blew in the face. You're going to get nowhere. This is why the simple message of the prophet is going to resonate for generations with workingclass lowerass people. That's just simply the truth. They're not looking for fancy explanation. So I would encourage them become more simple. If if you really want to get to the lower class people, become more simple. Get down to to our level. Get down to grassroots level. Talk to us. Show us your inspiration. Show us your vindication by the Holy Spirit. Uh, show us the inspiration. Show us the the passion. Uh, because right now there doesn't seem to be any passion. You just speak like a whole bunch of intellectual know-it-alls. That's it. And, uh, there's there's actually no inspiration. They're not going to follow you. There's no anointing. There's they can't even sing to what you talk about. You can talk for two hours and they they're not going to say an amen because you sound like a boring professor. Your videos sound like, "Oh, well, here's the information. This is this and this is that and this isn't." That won't even last like 5 minutes. They'll be yawning and falling asleep. That's the truth. That's what we're seeing in modern day Christianity and and uh lecturing sort of of uh preaching. It's just not going to work. On the other hand, we have this sensationalism gospel that seems to attract workingclass people and poor poor people that if you produce signs, if you produce um sensationalism and some kind of anointing, then you're going to attract these people. And these people, if you try to make them understand the word and bring some teaching to them, they just can't just can't concentrate. So, there's got to be a middle of the road, right? And so, this is what I feel like is is is what's happening with the the young people today. Um so in closing young people whatever you're doing with yourselves reading becoming intellectual studying the message or studying whatever it is that you're studying you're becoming a doctor lawyer whatever whichever way you go if you think you are going to understand the gospel of Christ the the Galile Nazerite of Galilee who lived as a carpenter's son. If you think you're going to understand his message that he spoke among amongst publicans, amongst public commoners, if you think you're going to understand that through computers and Google searches and evidence and word play, you're fooling yourself. I'll tell you right now, there's no intellectualism that is going to give you the desperation for the coming of Christ. Right now, we have people trying to intellectualize the message and not getting to the open book. That's going to change people around. No, they're not going there. Then you've got other people who are trying to sensationalize things without having any substance behind them. That's not going to work either. That's why the Christian church worldwide is failing. This was prophesied to happen. It's going to happen. It's failing. The Christian church, no matter how many churches they build, no matter how many people they bring in, it is failing. It is failing because it is heading towards uh what Satan is building up in this world today. You are going to see people becoming more liberal, fall away from the original faith, going into success, going into earning more money, becoming more attractive, doing more things to get fame. That's where we're heading. That's where churches are heading. That's where you young people are heading. Uh there is nothing you can do to give you desperation if you can be honest with me and tell me you can't wait for the rapture. You you can just be honest with yourself. Tell me you wake up every day saying, "Lord, bring on that body change. Bring on that rapture. I'm I'm waiting for it. Lord, I'm I'm so desperate to be with you. I'm so desperate for that." If you can tell me that whatever you're believing, wherever you're from, that you have that and that you are living your life in that state, that motivation based on what you have by intellectualism or sensationalism, well then you're probably in the right place. You're in a good place and you have a personal relationship with God. But that those kind of models that's happening today does not produce anything of that. That's where we are saints. So I want to close with reading that scripture again. And this is going to be the last of this segment. I'm not coming back to this subject. As in the beginning, this is John 1:1-8. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. The same was in the beginning with God. We know this is Christ. We know this is the logos. And all things were made by the logos. And without the logos, the son of God was not anything made that was made in him. In that logos was life and the life was the light of men. That life would be the revelation of God to men. Right? And the light which is the revelation of God shineth in darkness. And the darkness ignorance comprehendeth it not. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. John the Baptist. The same came for a witness to bear witness of that revelation of God that all men through him through who? Through John the Baptist might believe. He was not that revelation of God but was sent to bear witness of that revelation of God. Saints, that's what we believe. Amen. That's what we believe about the prophet of this last day. We are not saying he is he is the revelation of God. We are not saying he is that person that great person. He came to bear witness of that. He came to point us to that. And that's we are people who believe that. That's what this message is. Amen. The Lord bless you saints. Until we meet again, God be with you. Take courage young people. Take courage. Those of you who are who are feeling discouraged or disappointed in some way, the message is beautiful. Message people are beautiful people all over the world. They're just wonderful, loving people who are enjoying the word and rejoicing every day. He's breaking his word open to us every single day. There's nothing but love pouring from our hearts. If you are finding yourself in a place where you are not experiencing that, I don't know something is wrong with the people, not the message. The Lord bless you. God be with you. Have a wonderful week ahead. Amen.

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