Prophecy or Divination: The Modern Obsession With Prophets - Bob Scott

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-branham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship and author of three books, the latest of which is some say they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickel, the Kansas City prophets and the international house of prayer. Bob, it's good to be back and to dive deeply into all of the critical thinking that you and I do together about prophets and ancient world,

and I don't know if you've seen it, but I've started spinning off these just little short videos talking about some of the things that you and I discuss in the ancient world and how that ties culturally to what we read in the Bible. I wasn't expecting such a positive feedback initially, but it actually took off pretty well. In my YouTube site, you'll see a playlist that has some Bible history and some cultural history, etc. But yeah, I'm excited to get back into talk all things prophetic. I actually listened or watched, I should say, the videos because you sent

me the link to it and I was like, wow, this is really fascinating. It's condensed, which is nice for people who don't have an hour or so to sit and listen and are looking for something that's a little bit shorter. Those are very informative, so I'm glad to be your muse.

I was going to say when I was running a record company, even though I was the executive, I turned out to be the band muse many times, as we were on the bus traveling and having deep conversations, I would come up with these one lines. They would just sort of come out of me.

The next thing I knew was a couple of weeks later, it was a lyric in a song.

I have a few different muses, right? So, Cynthia and I, we've been talking about some of this in Ceres Mania. Her is more from the biblical side than the cultural, I think, although we do go into cultural good bit, but to critically think about it, you have to really, really dive deeply into the ancient cultures, and they're so complex that not many people are going to, and I think that's the frustration that many people have. Whenever a minister gets up and they're talking about whatever's the passage, especially from the Old Testament, they don't dive deeply into what

that passage actually means based on the context of culture that it was written from. There are some ministers that go so far as to say that you have to ignore all the ancient culture.

You read the text from within the text, which you can't read any book like this man. That's not the way that life works. I agree. I know on previous episode episodes we've talked about the whole idea of perspective. I think everybody understands the concept because anytime you're having a discussion, I think families are interesting because you can be sitting around a table during the holidays and talk about a story from the past. The parents will have a perspective of a situation or an event that happened. The kids are looking at it going, well, that's not what we remember.

Right? And then the oldest sibling will have a very different perspective than the younger sibling. So I think it's actually critical in critical thinking to understand perspective. Who is this person? Where do they fit into the story? What's their history? What is the culture they come from?

How are they viewing this? Because that gives context. And I think we all have heard stories or heard phrases or things that were sad and we sort of go, huh? And the reason was we heard a statement, but we didn't understand the context because we came into the process late, right? And so we're listening to this statement going, huh? And without the context, the story where this statement or this fact comes from, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. And I came across that line of thought, much further in my journey than I want to admit. Because I was like many people, I was manipulated

by these guys to think that, you know, in the ancient world, you had the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys were the children of Israel, the bad guys was everyone else on the face of the planet. That's how it was taught to me. And they said, you can't read the Bible from reading the perspective of the bad guys because that's the enemy. And that's the train of thought that's sadly propagated through all of these movements. But if you're American, take the American Revolutionary War. So you've got England and you've got the people who are revolting in the United States.

You view England as the bad guy if you're an American. And at that period of time, I should say, but you can't understand the story at all without understanding what's happening in England that's creating this mess that we're in. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think it's unfortunate when people are told that the Bible is the complete story.

I mean, factually, it's probably less than point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one percent of the story, meaning that if any of you are old enough like our age group, we all remember cliff notes.

If you went to college and you didn't want to read all novel, right, for a class, you went to the store and got the cliff notes, which basically were the highlights, right? The key points in the book, you know, key phrases, key quotes, things like that.

And it was a small book of less than 50 pages versus the novel that was maybe 400 pages, right? So people don't understand that the Bible is really the cliff notes version of 6,000 years of human history.

I came across, you probably saw it too, but there was a comment that was made in one of the video feeds right after you made that statement. And I was watching it live, I didn't, it wasn't commenting, but I was watching it live.

And I saw the comments come in and they said, you can't call the Bible a cliff notes version and the thought ran through my head, have you been to a library man? That's not how libraries work.

Yeah. Yeah, and that's nothing wrong with that, but there's a reason why the Israelis are digging in their country, right? And the reason is, is there's a whole lot of the story that they are trying to uncover that's buried hundreds of feet underground, right?

And every time they, they can't come down another layer, they find another age. And what we find out is like a lot of these cities are built on top of each other. There's seven different, or eight different timelines that are all built right on top of each other.

And you keep going down, down, down, down. And every time you do, you get a bigger perspective, right? You get a bigger context to it was living here, you know? Recently, they just discovered a whole bunch of stuff in Megito, which is where we get the whole Armageddon thing with a great, you know, this supposed, you know, big battle that's going to be at the end of the age, you know, and they're discovering all kinds of things as they dig down.

So, you know, I'm one of these people who, even though I'm studious and I'm an avid researcher and I'm a history and archeology fanatic, I look at myself and say, I'm still a child in knowledge.

There is so much more understanding out there that I'm not even aware of and we have yet to discover. So I just think it's the better posture of hardest humility. and just say, you know, it's okay, we don't know.

There's a lot of things about this story that don't make sense or that there's confusion here, but it's disingenuous to say that the authors of the Bible and the people that are telling the story don't have a perspective.

That's based on culture and their understanding of religion at the time. And you see this all the way from Abraham, right, who's leaving Mesopotamia, who is in Ur, which we still today have the Temple of Ur, right?

It's still there. You know, the place where Abraham worshiped Nana, the moon God as he moves, you know, eat their West, you know, to this land of people that are settled there. And you see his understanding of God is very limited, but it's based on what he grew up with in Mesopotamia over the course of time, that revelation of who God is expands.

Right. I've put long hard thoughts into exactly that. How do we get into this mess? Because like you, whenever I hear somebody that's telling me what they know through, I love to watch documentaries and like my YouTube, I'm sitting here watching people talk about ancient world and ancient history, et cetera, and religion, politics, et cetera.

Whenever I hear somebody that comes out with this attitude that they have, they've learned all there is to learn and how they're the expert on the subject. I usually shut it off because, yes, I'll listen to the expert on the subject, but the best experts admit that, you know, this is a lifetime of learning.

That's why we're here. We're here to learn, to grow, to become better, to shift mankind in a good direction. And those are the people that I like to listen to, but you find some people that they really don't understand a lot of the things that they're talking about, and worse, because they present things as though it is the ultimate solution.

Every single person listened to them, will take the mistakes that they have and count it as fact. The other thing I like about people who are honest and open is that if they don't know something or if they're learning it, let's say this is what we know now, and we know this based on these facts.

However, those facts may change. We may learn more as time goes on, and there's so many possibilities for things to learn that we had no clue about, that, you know, in fact, I was just reading the news yesterday and came in my news feed.

They found this, I can't remember how old, thousands of years old Pyramid that's under the sea, that's basically rewriting the history in a specific region of the world, because they didn't know this existed, they did not know that.

people here were building pyramids. Well, it's sort of interesting to me because the past is buried, right? I mean, this is maybe being philosophical here. But the past is buried underground and as we keep digging, right, we're learning more about our past.

But then what's even as equally interesting to me is like the James Webb, you know, I don't even what they call that thing. You know what I'm talking about? The big satellite, you know, that's got, right?

It's fundamentally changed. Massive amounts of perspectives on the universe and what's out there, right? It's so fascinating to me because that, I don't even know how long I think that thing's been up to what a decade maybe.

Yeah, I'm not even sure. But it's like every month you hear this, oh my gosh, we just, you know, learn this and all of our theories about that are wrong. And, you know, and so there's this constant flux in the scientific world about the universe and how we got here and so I find all that fascinating.

So, you know, it's interesting. It's like we, one of the things I figured out about humanity is we're curious about our past. We want to know where we came from, right? Which is where the, you know, why the Bible becomes such a key foundation for Christians.

But then, to where we want to go today on prophecy, we want to know the future, right? So, it's like we want to know the past because we want to know who we are and where we came from and we want to know the future.

And so, one of my questions, what, so I'm trying not to be put you on the spot here. But one of the questions that has kind of been rattling around on my brain recently is why are people so consumed by prophecy?

Exactly. In other words, what drives us? The reason I'm asking is because when you get into the subject of prophecy, you're stepping on very sensitive territory here. You know, people get very emotive and emotional and highly, you get some very intense conversations.

But there's something in human soul that, well, I want to be careful here because they did a little research and found out that only 45% of our population even believes in prophecy. So, we're not talking about most people.

We're talking about less than half of the people, even believe that prophecy is a thing. But why is it a thing? What is it in human nature that we need to know? You know, I've thought long and hard on that because for me, I'm studying the cults and the history of the progression of cults.

And as far back as you go, you're going to find... A cult leader, you're going to find him turning, he or she, turning destructive, and you're going to find the thing that attracted people to them was that they claimed that they could speak from God or speak for God, one of those two.

And it goes all the way back through time. And honestly, I think that's why so many people don't believe in prophecy because here's a bad person, they're doing bad things to people, and they claim that they're speaking on behalf of God.

And you can take that all the way back literally to the Garden of Eden. People want to become more than humans. They want knowledge of good and evil, just like, you know, the serpent tipped it even at them, and they want to become more than they are.

But more than that, they want the knowledge, not just of good and evil, they want the knowledge of their future and their outcomes. And so, sadly, this movement that Brannum was just one cog in this massive larger wheel, they turned the word prophecy into what the ancient Bible, what the ancient Hebrews called divination and fortune telling.

It was predictions of the future so they could, like, peer into this crystal ball using the prophet's head so that they could see, okay, what's going to happen to us? Good or bad? And I really never thought about that until it was probably two or three years after leaving.

I was talking to some ministers and they were talking about prophecy. I think we're at lunch or something like this, and I'd never really thought about what I believed about prophecy, but they were discussing the ancient prophecies in the Old Testament in preparation for sermon, I'm sure.

But they were talking about how the prophecies, even though they did have a future aspect to them. The majority of the prophecies that we have in the Old Testament are actually more focused on things that had happened rather than things that were going to happen.

Usually, if it was a thing that was going to happen, it was because they had either kept the mosaic law and these blessings would come because they have upheld the section of the law or the curses that were coming, war, famine, drought, etc. because they had failed in the law.

So literally it was in the past you have failed or you have succeeded according to the Old Covenant, and so therefore your future isn't an unpredictable future. You know that you failed, you know that these curses are coming, and here God is declaring the curse that's coming according to the law, and during the course of that conversation it just suddenly clicked that what we believed as far as prophecy wasn't really prophecy according to the Bible, but it was prophetic according to the way that the ancient pagan religion saw prophets.

Something that people may not realize is, do a little research on the timeline of the prophetic books, right? So if you think, I mean, theoretically, you know, based on some people's beliefs, you know, there's 4,000 years that the Old Testament covers.

Now of course, if you start with creation and all that, that could be much longer. But, you know, if you just start, you know, based on certain genealogical timelines, there's at least 4,000 years there, at least, right?

But the whole prophetic focus, like all these books, are written in the last eighth of that time period,

right? It's the 500 years before Jesus. Wow, now I shouldn't say that. It's a, it's, yes. So you're talking about a time period. So what was going on? So my question always is, you know, it's like you don't see, you know, prophecies, you know, at the time of Abraham or, you know, very little at the time of Moses or even, you know, you see a little bit with Nathan, but these prophetic books that talk to the nation, right?

When do they start appearing? They start? Yes, but they're appearing at a time, when this is really interesting, whether there's great turmoil in Israel, right? Right. The 10 tribes in the North are under attack from Syria.

They're then taken into captivity and scattered all over, you know, the northern part of the Middle East. And then 150 years later, you have the Babylonians coming in and taking the last two tribes, Judah and, and, and, and Benjamin, right?

Back to Babylon. So what's happening is you suddenly now have a group of people who have been told that they are God's chosen, right? They've built this temple, they see themselves basically at the center of everything, like everything revolves around them, right?

The nations of the world, you know, are supposed to come worship at their temple, and suddenly it's all gone. So what you see happening is the prophets in many cases are trying to encourage the people, God's not done with you, this isn't over, but they're not only doing that, they're explaining why this happened, right?

So to your point, they're going back and saying, listen, you didn't obey, you know? You know, this covenant that God made with you was conditional on your behavior, and you didn't behave. And so therefore he took it away from you.

But he's going to give it back, right? And I mean, I'm oversimplifying all this just because we don't have time to get into all the details. But so much of it, right, was about explaining the past and getting people excited about the future.

So one of the things that I, you know, in my question of why, because I'm thinking even in the modern world, why people see, the people that are seem so consumed with prophecy. I think there's a couple of things here.

One is fear. Absolutely. Right? At the core of us as humans, we often feel very small and powerless when it comes to the forces of nature and creation, right? We feel like we don't have a lot of control.

And I think often people find comfort or solace in prophecy, right? It's like, I need to know. Right. And there's another aspect to this because I've thought long and hard about this as well.

Whenever Brannum started preaching prophetic in the latarane movements, in front of all of these people, some of whom read their Bibles, and I'm surprised that nobody called them out on this. He divided the seven churches of Asia Minor in the book of Revelation into seven church ages, which was dispensationalism, so that he could be the king of his dispensation.

That was the strategy. But when he did this, he said, God only sends one prophet per age. And he walks you through the timeline of the Bible. And, you know, I believe did. Even long after leaving, I never thought to question, it was that even true.

But he would say, in this age, we have me, your high priest prophet. And then he would walk you back through all of the ones. And when he's preaching the Old Testament, he's talking about the great prophet Abraham.

And there's no where, at least to my knowledge, there's no prophecy of Abraham in the Bible. And so I started scratching my head thinking about that. And then I started thinking about the fall of the temple, the Babylonian invasion.

That's the point at which I was reading, and it hit me like a brick wall. I'm reading, and it says, in the days of King Darius from prophet A, I'm reading prophet B, and it starts out in the days of King Darius.

And I'm like, wait a minute, these two prophets are in the same age. How does that work? So at my worldview just exploded at that point. I realized that he was manipulating us, but in that came an even greater understanding for me.

So you have this explosion of prophets, Zachariah. All of the people, there's a list of them actually on my website if you type in Profit and their timeline of Prophecy. There's this explosion of profits right there after the Babylon invasion, just like you said.

But think about what happened. Culturally, profits did not operate like they do today. Profits of old didn't get out on stage and say, past the tithe baskets and give me money. Oh, by the way, this prophecy that I had weeks ago, months ago, a year ago, just happened to be fulfilled.

And the audience says, well, which prophecy is that? You never told us. That's right. I never told you. I prophesied a year ago that yada yada yada, it wasn't like that in the ancient world.

They either the profits wrote it down themselves, which I think was not quite common, or they had scribes that would write it down for them onto the scrolls. And so they would carry the scrolls.

And this is literally your means to prove that God actually spoke to you because here's the thing that was written beforehand and here's what happened. This is the prophecy. But when Babylon invaded the temple and burned everything in it, brought it down to rubble, think of what was held in there, all of the prophecies.

So what we have left, and the reason it seems like an explosion, is because the people who were there after all of this was burned and destroyed, we have some of what remains of their prophecies, anything that happened before we don't.

And that's the other aspect of learning how culture works and how to apply culture to the Bible from Adam until the Babylonian invasion. I'm certain that you had a heck of a lot more prophecies and prophets, but we don't have access to that because most of it was destroyed.

Well, again, perspective is always interesting to me, because as we've been talking about, but I find it fascinating because when you read the books that are written by the priestly sect, the temple is everything, it is the center of Jewish culture.

And yet we get to a time period where somebody goes into the temple and it seems like it hasn't been used in decades and they find an old scroll and open it up and go, what's this?

And a lot of people have speculated it was Deuteronomy, which was the whole thing. But I'm just saying, it's sort of interesting because there's these little clues sometimes that are in one or two verses that if you're not looking for it, you don't see it, but you're going, wait a minute, they don't even know what this is.

Right. Like if the temple was such a big deal, right, and it was just 24 hour, seven days The week, 365 day a year, you know, functioning, you know, center of Jewish culture, why is it they don't, it's like they're going into the temple and it's all dusty and they find old scrolls that they don't even know what they mean.

I mean, that would mean these are generations, right? If you don't know what this is, this is in a couple of years. This is generations of, of we've forgotten. So I'm just saying, I think there's some things in here that we got to be really, really careful of.

Well, you know, continue on with this whole thing about prophecy. One thing that's fascinating to me is that the whole concept of prophecy as we've been talking about was a common everyday occurrence in the ancient world, right?

It's like every culture had prophets and prophetesses. Every leader had a council of people that functioned in some sort of fortelling, some sort of, you know, claiming that they're speaking on behalf of the gods.

This was common, right? What seems to have happened, because now we're down to only like 45% of the culture even in all embrace prophecy. Well, a lot of, I think, what happened was the whole, you know, what's interesting about the 1500s is we have the Reformation, right?

We have Martin Luther. There's a religious Reformation. But what comes along with the religious Reformation is this quest to discover God, right? We have all these prophecies, you know, we have these books about who God is.

But suddenly now there's a whole group of men who want to understand God through creation. So they began doing experiments and we end up having the development of science, right? We have Mendelssohn playing with plants, right?

We've got Galileo and Copernicus looking at the universe, you know, we've got, you know, later you end up with guys like Isaac Newton, just right, discovering gravity and all these things. These are all really godly, these are all men who are on a search for understanding God.

These aren't atheists, agnostics, these are not people who hate God. They actually love God with a passion. They're trying to understand Him. But what seems to have happened is, and then we talked about this even a few weeks ago about, you know, when Van Luenhoek discovered bacteria, right, in the 1500s, you know, suddenly there's this whole world that opens up to everyone that, oh my God, there's a micro-organism world of bacteria and viruses and DNA and genetic.

And all this time we thought that spirits and God and the capricious gods were controlling everything. And now we're discovering that there's this whole unseen world that's controlling things as well. Right? So we've been through this shift, right?

And so it's curious to me, because we went through this whole shift and now we're back here and we're in 2025 and there's still this fascination with the prophetic, right? So people kind of put some context to this.

Everything that's going on right now, whether it's the fall of Iop, whether it's the exposure at Morningstar, if it's daystar, like there's this lit me of ministries that have all sort of been exposed right now.

And there's this pain, there's this disillusionment, right? That's kind of entered into a certain segment of the Christian community. Well everything you're feeling right now, if you're a part of those groups or your disillusion, is exactly what the Jewish people were feeling as they were being led away in exile to Assyria and they were being led away in exile into Babylon.

And so in many ways right now we're in a cultural situation where we have a lot of Christian exiles. There's tens of thousands of people right now that feel exiled, right? They had all these prophecies about what this person, the thing that all of these ministries have in common was they had a persona, right?

They had a star. They had a personality that attracted people and the whole ministry was centered around. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

You know, you were talking earlier about the James Webb telescope and how it's mapping out things that we... never thought that we would know and understand. And it's fascinating to me in many ways, and I'm probably gonna go a million different tangents, but I was studying just the universe in general.

How vast is this? And what did we know back? What did they know back in the 50s during the Laterane versus what do we know now? And in the Laterane, there was this weird doctrine that went out that if an angel were to start flying to Mars, it would take them a million light years to get there, because they had no concept of distance.

And that people actually believe that nonsense, and now we have a rover up their own Mars, right? But whenever I started discovering what they have learned now, I was listening to, I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he was explaining, we know the distance from the earth to the moon.

We can calculate this without even going there, because we have a constant, which is the speed of light. When the light hits the moon, we know exactly how long it's gonna take to get to us.

And that is constant, it's a mathematical constant in the universe, and he went on to say something that I'd never thought about. These stars that we see in the sky, by the time the light travels at that constant from the star, which is like a sun and another galaxy, and it travels all through the galaxy and hits our eyes.

By the time it has hit our eyes, so much time has passed because of that distance, which is constant, that the star itself has probably burnt out at that point. The stars only last so long.

The gases only last so long. And I never really thought about that. The universe, as we see it, doesn't even exist when you look out there, because most of it has already died and passed.

Yeah, it's mind-boggling, and it's mind-boggling. And yet, the scientific theory, as people are trying to test and learn, and you create a theory, it's a supposition. It's not like you're saying, here's the answer.

Here's my theory, now let's go try to prove it, and you usually prove it in the opposite direction. Let's prove that my theory isn't correct. And so, this creates a huge problem in the religious world, because you have not just in the NAR today, or charismatic, laterane, Pentecostal leaders, these people who are controlling the narratives, they don't like science, because if they have made any statements that science can disprove, then now science is their enemy.

And this time and time again, throughout history, you can see this happening. But I came to understand that, like you said, many of the people who, some of them were executed for their st- their scientific theories, they were good Christian men and women, they believe that they just wanted to understand the world that we live in.

And I came to understand that even when you're reading the Bible, you're reading it through the eyes of somebody in their perspective and in their worldview, which may not at all match the worldview we have today.

And many of the things that we read to them, it might not have even been that important, that single phrase, whatever it was, it was just part of the narrative that they're trying to get you to understand a concept.

And that was really difficult for me to learn and understand because there were phrases that are meant for us to learn a concept from the Bible, but there are also phrases in the Bible that the sole purpose is to support the phrase that they want you to learn and they write it from their worldview.

That, it took me forever to understand that because we were taught this notion that every word was exactly pinned by God and 100% perfect. And the thought hit me, again, I think I was in, maybe even with the same group of ministers had this discussion during a launch, but they were talking, there's different genres in the Bible.

Some of the things in the old covenant, for example, is how not to get mold in your hut. And you can't really say that God wanted us in today's world to divinely understand how not to get mold in the hut of an ancient world, but it was for the concept of try to live clean, the greater concept.

So there's a lot to be learned if you can understand that people, as time progresses, people also progress. Well, I have all the answers for you. Really? Yeah. Beyond the curtain of time. There you go, brother.

The thing you needed now is right in here. For the audience who's in the audio only feeds, he's holding up William Brannum with this photograph that says, beyond the curtain of time, which is one of Brannum's most famous alleged visions, he apparently peered into the underworld and saw the souls before they were to make it to heaven.

You know, as you know, my favorite word is why. And you don't understand why. And so I'm very curious about the why in the human soul behind prophecy, right? I can understand a lot of it in the ancient world because people felt totally out of control, right?

That's why it's interesting because the gods are all given human attributes. And the phrase that you hear always about the gods where they were capricious. In other words, they get mad. They throw fits.

They have jealousy, right? So we gave all of the gods these human attributes. It's one of the things. I mean, I'm going to get myself into trouble here, but I might as well just go ahead and say it.

I think the Bible has a limited perspective on God. Well, you're going to kill me in the comment feeds, man. Well, and here's why I'm trying to explain this, is that you're talking about the God of creation.

You're talking about a being who's spun worlds, right? You do so much bigger than anything that a human can even imagine. The Bible is the best we can do, right? It's everything that's written is written through a human that has limitations.

There's no way that God can unload all of who He is into a human being. I mean, even in the Old Testament, when an angel showed up, everybody was peeing in their pants. They were so terrified.

Can you imagine the creator of the universe? I just, and the reason I say that is, is again, it's about having a teachable spirit and realizing that, you know what, as much as I know, I probably don't know most things.

Because I think death is going to be an absolute mind-blowing experience when we get outside of the physical world, right? Because everything we see here and know about God is all based on the physical, our physical world.

And I think once we die and get outside of this physical world, we're going to realize that we had a puny God, but He is so much greater than we could have ever imagined.

In fact, to put this in perspective, 95% of all human knowledge has happened in the last 100 years. So I mean, put that into perspective. That's something, again, people don't really, you know, get a perspective on that.

So the reason why this is all important is if you realize, I think that's part of the reason why there's less and less interest in prophecy because I think that with more knowledge of our created world, our scientific world, right?

There's been a tale off in terms, because I think in the ancient world, it's like everyone's consumed with it. It's like the norm in everybody's daily life, right, is they don't know what's going on.

Exactly. That same fear, right, that need to know what's going on has stayed even in our modern world. And I think so much of prophecy or the need that we have to hear prophecies is based on the fear of what we don't know.

This need to, you know, we don't like surprises, right? So we kind of want to know what the future is. I think that's part of it. I think another part of it. that, honestly, is faith, right?

People want to know what to believe in, right? They want to have faith for something. I think those are all really important things, but something, again, another weird dynamic I've noticed about prophecy is if you look at the scale, I mean, are you looking at the whole thing, that there's two groups of people that have way more interest in prophecy than the third group.

And it's the rich and the poor. This is, again, this is me observing, researching, looking at this in over the last few hundred years of prophecy. And what's fascinating is when you go to Africa or you go to third world countries, all of these preachers are prophesying to the poor because the poor need hope, right?

They're looking for faith, and they're so vulnerable, and it really gets me, I don't know, my dander up, is that like a really old phrase? No, because I have a passion for poor people, and the thing I hate is watching them being taken advantage of.

And you can go to Africa, I mean, I'm just not picking on Africa, but it's so prevalent there that the wealthiest preachers are all guys who stand up and claim their prophesying to the crowd, they're speaking for God.

And the poor who have nothing are all giving them what little bit they have in hopes for that miracle, right? Doesn't that remind you of the whole ladder, rain, tent, revival, right? All these poor people, right?

Giving what little bit they had in hopes that God will intervene, right? So that's half the equation. The other thing, which I learned from Paul Kane, well, I first discovered it with Nancy Reagan.

I don't know if you remember this, but Nancy Reagan used to have a seer come into the White House all the time. Wow. Go back and say it was kind of interesting. I remember it was really kind of controversial because they were supposedly this Judeo-Christian culture, but she'd have these little say-ons, right?

She'd have, what do they call those, a psychics? That's what the word I was looking for. She'd have this psychic come in, and they would do readings, right? So this is really fascinating to me.

So I asked Paul Kane about it. And he said to me, oh, Hollywood, and that whole political world, the wealthy people, they all want access to it. Oh, yeah. He goes, if I wanted to sell my soul, he goes, I could have been wealthy many times over because I had so many high-profile business people, Hollywood people, you know what I mean?

That all wanted access to this secret knowledge. And that opened my eyes to a whole nother world, right? where this ties back in, of course, is you get into Amy Simple McPherson. You see what I'm talking about, right in the middle of this very interesting time, she's there, and she's the biggest drama queen there is.

As a matter of fact, just for the fun of it, you see that clarinet sitting behind me? It was played at Angles Temple. Oh, wow. But, you know, who owned it? Nelly Quinn, Anthony Quinn's mom, and she played in the orchestra.

They're at the temple. And so, Anthony Quinn grew up there. Like, he was a part of the orchestra when it, like, he started playing real young, but their whole family was involved with her thing.

And then he gave it to Paul, and Paul gave it to me, as a thank you for helping him move back in the 1980s. But I've actually gone and done some research on it, and it's got a serial number that's so old that it pre-dates 1910.

He tried to claim that it was played at Azusa Street. I am not convinced of that at this point, because there's no records. It's got a number on it that's basically B189, which is just really early.

You know, it's a, it's a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, it's basically a, it's, uh, out of Paris. It's wood. It's like, uh, ebony. I let John Wimber play it, and he couldn't play it because he said the fingering on it is so old.

I guess clarinets have gone through three different renditions, and this, and this one's the second rendition. All these Hollywood people, prophecy, you know, that whole world. And so I'm just fascinated by how you have these two sides of the economic, you know, spectrum, the wealthy and the poor who have, um, an above average interest in prophecy.

Going back to another thing you said. So, and also because you've already blown up the comment feeds with all, you know, people who will hate you for whatever, whatever it was that you said before, I'm gonna blow it up even further because I have a Catholic friend.

And I can just say that and everybody's gonna drop off right now. They won't continue listening because this movement was so anti-Catholic, it's unbelievable. But after it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that there are good Christian people in Catholic churches and they believe differently than us, I'm not in agreement with the Catholic church in many ways as my friend is not.

But here's where it gets really interesting. So the NAR today, they have merged this political union and alliance that's much like we had with the Catholic church where the priests were in bed with the government.

And they were, like the dynamic that you just described, keeping the poor people poor. They were introducing a lot of legalistic man-made rules and dogmas to establish this and maintain it. Martin Luther came and he basically said, no, we're not doing this.

It's biscriptural loan, biscriptural loan. And his position was not to exclude everybody from looking outside of scripture and looking at culture and science and understanding. It was literally, these guys have bad doctrine that's not in the Bible, we don't want it, we just want the doctrines that are in the Bible.

And I started the Protestant Reformation. Well, I was having a conversation with my Catholic friend and he said, John, a thing for you to understand as you're going through your development, he understands like I do that it's a lifetime of learning.

He said, that Reformation, while it may have been good, there are extremes with it. So people today have taken the solar scripture extreme that that literally meant that you have to learn scripture, biscripture, only biscripture, understand it only by scripture and you can't look outside the Bible.

And that's turned into Christian extremism. What's interesting, and he didn't say this, but I'm gonna say it, what's interesting is as it has progressed towards that Christian extremism, it has digressed back to very similar to what Martin Luther stood against in the world today.

You have these political leaders who are in, Nancy Reagan may have had her mystics, but look at what we have today. You've got these NAR guys that are just right in bed with the political elite.

You've got a whole political structure called the family. I think it's called the Fellowship International. That's in connecting politicians to religious leaders and helping cover up a wide array of sins, just like the Catholic church had.

So we basically have digressed back to what Martin Luther stood against when we created a Protestant Reformation. And where that gets interesting and ties to this whole conversation we're having about prophecy. Those specific leaders do not want people to go outside of that Christian solar scripture extremism because anything that they find as the world progresses and knowledge progresses that defies what they have said about this concept that they're teaching, it disproves them and it makes their whole establishment fall and crumble.

So they will cut you off if you try to go outside of just simply look at the Bible, only look at the Bible, put these blinders on your eyes where you can't see anything else.

And oh, by the way, I'm going to, just like the Pope, I'm going to dictate what you read from it. Well, to contextualize my comments about the Bible and I've shared this before. It's 15...

centuries. After the last book in the Bible is written before humanity, even as aware that there's a microorganism world. And so that's my point. My point is, is nobody in the Bible has a revelation of the creator and this whole segment of his creation, right?

Which controls so much of our modern world. They don't know anything about this. They don't know, right? And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not me slamming them. It's just putting contextualizing this to realize where it, you know, there's a, there's a certain aspects of this that we've, you know, that humanity's understanding of our creator and who he is and what he's done is way beyond any of the Bible authors. It's not good or bad. It just is. And so you just have to factor that in there. I mean, if you think about how much

in our modern world now, sentence around the unseen world of microorganisms, DNA, genetics, right? It's just every day you're reading about it. I mean, our whole medical structure, right? Psychology, all of it is all based on something that didn't even begin to be discovered until 15 centuries after the Bibles last words were written. So that's my point is is and, and what happens in another 1500 years? What will our, what will humanity understand then?

You know what I mean about our creator and we've got a chance to get off our little planet and go out there into this universe, you know, that the futurist all dream about. So I just, I just think we have to, you know, to realize that God is, you know, the God that Abraham understood, or I should say, Abraham's understanding of God was significantly less than maybe a King David's version of him, right? Because the understanding of God grew over time and that's my point in all this. So I want to be careful here because I don't want people to misinterpret my

comments. Well, definitely they will, but there's a lot to think about here and there's a lot to really, it's not a concept that you're going to learn immediately if you've been manipulated by one of these groups. It took me seven, eight years before I could even think that way because they have so indoctrinated you with this fear of critical thought and to apply critical thought to the Bible, especially. It's a, for a lot of people that have been in these religions and are escaping.

It's the situation where you're literally looking between heaven than in hell, and you're walking down that tightrope between the two. So a lot of things, I've got two concerns. One, I still see this on social media where we've got ministries right now that are positioning their, you know, their ministry, the public's perception of them as being someone who speaks, who God speaks to, especially, and they have special inside information.

So even with everything that's gone on, that's still there. And that concerns me because I think for both of us, what we've seen is hundreds of years of people being manipulated by that, right?

You know, people standing up saying, I have this special revelation, you know, follow me, support me. I will lead you to the promised land. I have understanding others don't, right? And they build a whole ministry and money making operation based on their secret knowledge.

And this isn't new. It started, you know, as we've talked a few weeks back about the whole time period between when Jesus left and, you know, the council of an I see it where you have all these people all claiming that they have inside information and they know, you know, who God is and what God's saying.

So that's one whole aspect of this thing. I just, you know, I'm just, I'm just concerned, you know, and I think, I think this whole prophetic thing is upside down. It should be a tool to serve others.

And it's become a sensational media manipulation. You see what I mean? And it's interesting because every time I hear it, it always focuses on reinforcing how special that person is.

You see, and the reason why this is important to me because motive, what's underneath this thing, I think is important. And whenever I see, you know, guy standing on a stage who are using prophecy, right, to reinforce their special place and God's purpose, I just get a yuck inside, like there's something inside of me that goes, this is illegal.

This is, this is manipulative. This is using a gift in the wrong way, right? It's all about me, right? It's all about turning the attention to me. I don't want to say too much, but I think Paul said we all can prophesy.

And so I believe I can. But when I do it, I do. that when no one's around, one-on-one, with people, I think I've shared this with you before, I've stood in the grocery store.

I'm checking out. I suddenly get this thing, this download in my spirit about the cashier, you know? And you say something as sweet as, I know things are tough right now at home, but God's got your back on this.

He's gonna get you through all this. And then you see the tears coming down, right? Just me and her,

you know, this word of life for that moment and gone. And that woman, you know, has now got something to hang on to to get her through. I think that's what it's about. It's about encouragement and exhortation.

And it really needs to be done more on a personal level and an encouraging way versus standing on a stage and going, yeah, look at me, look at me, it's all about me, you know?

Put your money in the plate. Well, your way is a lot better than mine, man. Usually when I prophesy, it's about the Kansas City Chiefs and as happened in the last Super Bowl, I totally, totally missed it.

But so much to think about. Thank you so much for doing this. You know, I just, like I've said to you before, you know, there's, you know, disillusionment, it's a hard thing to walk through, but sometimes it brings us back to gut check time and we can kind of look at all this stuff and go, what is this really?

Yeah. And I think right now there's a lot of hurting people out there and I hope we can, we're encouraging the people. That's really what I hope to take away is from our, our dialogues, even though we sort of get into some kind of wild stuff.

Yeah, I hope so too. I think there are people that will understand what we're saying. There will be people who don't, but that usually happens in my podcast. So I'm okay with it. But yeah, so this, this is fun.

A lot to think about, hopefully people can reflect and maybe grow a little bit on the inside. Thank you for doing this. But you've enjoyed our show and you want more information. You can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Branum.org. From more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. Available on Amazon, Kindle and Audible.