Uphill Trust and the Abuse of Authority

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, Jed Hartley, son of a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed it's good to be back and talk about trust. This is something that you know whenever I was in the cult groups and I just blindly gave my trust to anybody, shared a pool pit. I learned that trust is something entirely different than what I grew up with

and understood and now it's something that I place a lot of value on whenever I meet new people. I'm the kind of personality that I I trust you to begin with. That's just how my personality is. But then I've learned to combine that with you also must earn my trust versus when you're in the cult groups. You have automatic unwielded trust to anybody who's in the group just because you stand behind a pool pit. I no longer live this way or think this way. I don't care if you're Billy Graham. I don't care if you're Joe Smith from Joe Smith, church

out in the woods. I don't care who you are. To earn my trust you have to go through a series of phases of earning that trust and it's something that I value. I value a lot and when you sent me this video why why I trust Mike Bickel. I thought back to my journey out of the cult and how much that meant to me just learning what trust was. So today you you want to talk about this. I'm off for it. Let's let's talk about trust. Yeah well and I think that it's such a good word to hone in on

because it really is the crux of a cult defense of a cult leader is this sort of blind trust and blind faith like I I remember the story of you know the story of Thomas and doubting Thomas of Thomas says I'm not going to believe it when he hears that Jesus has resurrected he's like until I see the wound in his side and the holes in his hand I will not believe and then Jesus appears to him shows him these things and what's the verse blester those who you have seen and you believe blester those who have not seen and believe I think is I might be

paraphrasing that round, but in the world that I grew up in and the world that you very much were in, there was this sort of expectation of trust that any sort of doubting, any rational, I mean, responses of being like, I don't know if this is true, I don't know about this, questioning the behaviors or actions or the prophecies of the leadership was met with this ye of little faith. And it wasn't faith in God, it was faith within those who have taken on the mantle of God, like those within the community who have become God to the community. And it's

so interesting. So basically what the video you referenced and why I sent it to you, it's a collection of different people, the pastor who's kind of leading it is named James Crawford. He, the church, he's part of his, the Father's Heart world, all of church, I think in North Carolina, is not a big church. He's up from what I can, like I have never heard of him before. I don't imagine that he has like a very large following. These videos themselves have not been getting a whole lot of traction, but they're live sort of zoom videos where the defenders of Mike Bickel

are coming together to talk about the injustice of how Mike Bickel has been persecuted. And it's really interesting and why I wanted to talk about it on this on our podcast here is because

very rarely do you get a peak within the cult if you are not still within the cult. Once you have spoken out, once you have left the cult, once you're on the outside, you don't understand what the rhetoric is within that. Even what is being preached at the pulpit is different than what is being said behind closed doors. I've seen this sort of firsthand, even with the way that

there was like two different faces to the sort of beliefs of the international house prayer. There was what we talked about during the one thing conferences and there was sort of the hidden prophecies that were bigger and more important that were talked about behind closed doors. And you don't really get a glimpse of that. And even for me, it's at certain points, I'm talking a lot about this world that I grew up, but it can feel pretty unfamiliar to me at times. I don't know if you feel this too, John, because we're not in it anymore. It's

hard to even remember what is being said or what was said and why certain things like a lot of times I think back and I'm like, why did I even believe X, Y, or C or what was my dad telling me when this happens because like I don't even remember how they could have rationalized that. And I think it's very illuminating to have these basically we get this behind the scenes meeting that is they're just posting online onto YouTube and we get to see sort of the rhetoric that they are giving and we get to see why people who are still defending Mike Bickel are defending Mike Bickel and what

tactics are they using. And surprise, surprise, they're still using the same playbook. Everything we have been talking about, that you talk about, that has been diagnosed with brand-um and with the latter-rain movement and just cults in general. It all is just so abundantly clear in it that I almost like want to encourage people to watch some of these videos. I don't know if that I don't really know if I want to bring more attention to it but I think that because it's such a perfect example of the cult tactics that people employ to argue and to maintain trust,

I think a better word for it would be control, right? It's just trust and they're trying to make sure that Mike Bickel is still given belief and that Mike Bickel maintains this belief and the coercive tactics that they're using is just so unbelievably obvious and right in your face, it's crazy. You know, trust is something that goes uphill and when I'm saying uphill, I'm not talking about just, you know, in the cults that you or I were in, trust goes up to Mike Bickel and my case, trust goes up to the pastor then to William Brandham. I'm talking all the way up

to Jesus in an unhealthy, unnatural way for human development. Let me explain it like this, pretend you had never heard the name Jesus Christ, never heard of Christianity and you're growing up, say you're, I don't know, 10, 15 years old and somebody comes up to you off the street and says, hey, do you know Jesus and you're like, well, who's Jesus? And he begins to tell you that he's the son of God, all of these things. Well, if you weren't raised like this, your first question should be really? Why? You should think through this process. This is a normal human development process.

But because if you take mainstream Christianity, people who were raised with Christian families, Christian homes, they never really got to think through that question. And so they blindly accept something. That's less destructive than what we had.

We were told literally that you could not question. You had to blindly trust. And if you're in a mainstream church without this blind faith aspect, this non-critical thinking aspect, you go through this phase where you learn what is Christianity, you learn who is Jesus, and you learn basically God to earn your trust.

That's how it works. People do not just forfeit their trust because they are told to do so. So if you are a mainstream, non-infected by a cult person, there's this point in your life that most people go through where Jesus is earning your trust and he's showing you who he is.

Now we in the cults, we were told that we were forcibly had to believe it. No matter what, we couldn't question it. We couldn't go through normal human development. So we never developed what everybody else takes for granted.

I guess is what I'm trying to say. The reason I'm building up to this, Bob and I just had this conversation. I don't know if it comes out before or after this one. I get the question daily, why do you not talk more about Jesus in your podcasts?

See, I didn't grow up in that environment where I had this option to learn this trust, this value. And more to the point, there are many people who are listening who have been taught a different Jesus that also did not go through this.

So the name, believe it or not, the name becomes offensive to many of those people. Some of them stay remained in Christianity, but still Christianity itself. If you ask a person, are you a Christian? Well, that means a wide variety of things to a wide variety of people.

I, anymore, I've come to the point when people ask me this question, I just simply don't answer it. If you've listened to my podcast, you know that my family did go to church afterwards and whenever I'm not too triggered, I do go.

But there's this element of trust that we never were allowed to build. And what happens is when you're not allowed to build that trust and you're being told, number one, that if you question God, this God of wrath will come down and you will burn in hell for eternity because you questioned God.

In normal Christianity, you must question God to build that trust. It's part of the process. You ask a question, the question is fulfilled, then you trust it. We weren't allowed to do this, but because, here's where it applies to Mike Bickel, because of this manifested sons of God doctrine, the leadership is at the same level as the God that we can't question.

And... He is in dude with all of the power, the same elements of God that most Christians would apply to the Holy Spirit, they apply it to Mike Bickel, to William Brannum, even some of the sub-leaders in this type of environment.

And they haven't yet earned your trust. You're just having to forfeit that trust. So when I see things like this, you know, why we trust Mike Bickel, it actually makes me really angry because he never earned their trust.

And more to the point, the video itself is intended to make people forcibly trust in Mike Bickel without him having earned that trust with them. I think that so many of the things I was writing down, so many things that you were saying, not that you're not just spouting wisdom all the time, but this is, I was really latching on to several things.

Like, first of all, the trust flows uphill. I think it's such a great visualization of, it's not both ways, like it only goes up. And this is demonstrated in this video that they do, this trust in Mike Bickel.

There's this sort of undeserved unwarranted trust that Mike Bickel demands. And the people around him sort of who are protecting and preserving his image demand. But the trust does not go down where Deborah was a member of the community for literally almost her entire life.

My mom was a member of the community for literally her almost her entire life. Tammy Woods wasn't a member of the community, but was like a well-respected sort of fringe member of the community.

Alan Hood, Julie Myers, all of these people that are being attacked in this video were devout members of the sort of international house prayer community, since before the international house prayer really even began.

Without this group of people, there would be no international house prayer. They were just as formational to it and foundational to that community as Mike Bickel himself was. And yet they are given no trust, no, their testimonies are completely disregarded.

So Lisa Stribling, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but Mike's younger sister is in this video, a part of the sort of defenders of Mike Bickel. She is one of the main people who was speaking out, and we've talked about this on a previous episode, but she has spoken from the pulpit that she hasn't even listened to the accusations that were brought against Mike.

She hasn't even considered that. And again, these are people... that she knows, this is not, it would still be, even if it wasn't people that she knew, it would still be important to listen to them, you listen to victims regardless of whether you know them or not, but like these are respected members of her community who have spoken out in conjunction with each other, multiple voices, and she is not even giving them the time of day to listen to them before she goes onto another video and lambast them for being betrayers and accusers and calling them all sorts of names.

It's clearly a situation where trust, like you said, flows uphill, where it's all sort of demanded upwards and not expected downwards. And I think that irony of the, I mean, the passage that I brought up to you about the situation with Thomas, part of the irony of the first people who were bringing the testimony of Jesus' resurrection were women in the community.

They weren't like the well-respected leaders, not that they weren't well-respected within the community, but they were not the, it wasn't Peter and wasn't the disciples who had first reported that Jesus had resurrected. It was first the women, and there was this sort of trust and belief was not this sort of hierarchical situation as it is in these cult communities where we must believe the person who is more important than us.

And if I have a dream and I'm within the community and it reaffirms Michael's identity, then great, then it's condoned and it's from God. If I have a dream that is prophetic, that questions Michael, well, then I'm not hearing from God and I'm discounted and it all sort of funnels into back the dayification of the leaders within the community.

And this all leads me to sort of my second point and I think that you were getting to this too of, there's this, a tautological, or they treat it like it's tautological, like it is just given, there's no sort of evidence for why we should worship Mike Bickel, like you were saying, it's totally undeserved.

And within this, even this video, there's this cyclical nature in which they sort of are like, well, Mike Bickel is a good guy and I know he's a good guy because the Lord has spoken to him so many different times and gave him these prophetic words.

And then if you ask the question, well, why do we know, how do we know that God was speaking to him? Well, it's because Mike is a good guy and he's been doing all of these.

good things and God would only use and speak to someone who is like clearly a good person and it's just this sort of like cyclical nature of there isn't any actual evaluation of, hey, did Mike Bickle do this behavior? Throughout all of those videos, very briefly, do they even discuss the accusations that were brought against Mike? They just call them false accusations and they call them betrayal, but they don't actually talk about the substance of what Mike Bickle is being accused of. In our previous episode that we recorded about Lisa Stribling, I was hammering the point and I have hammered the point so many times on this platform and on like my Twitter and

I can't hammer enough the fact that like Mike Bickle prophesied the death of his own wife as a grooming technique to give teenagers multiple teenagers. He used this at multiple different instances for young women to tell them, I mean children, I shouldn't even say well, young women.

I mean, Tammy was 14 when this first started happening. He used it to tell children that one day they would be together, that would all open up because his wife was going to die in an earthquake in St. Louis. This is something that three different women all confirmed independently of themselves, my mother being one of them. And I also know this to be true because my dad told me one of the biggest Mike Bickle defenders. I heard the story from him before I heard it from anybody else.

And it's just this, it is insane to me that you can have this entire conversation about who Mike Bickle is, why he's being used by God, how we should trust him, and not a single person even mentions the actual accusation that has been brought against them. There totally doesn't even mention it. The one time that I heard, there was probably a lot other, there's four episodes and I didn't listen to all of them because my soul can only take too so much of that before I have to take a break and take a walk. But here's a direct quote that I had to write it down because I didn't

want a paraphrase, but this is James Crawford. And the only instance that I could kind of see them talking about Tammy Woods, they talk about Debra a lot and really discredit her and attack character and try to frame her as this betrayer and this accuser.

was bringing up things from decades ago. But in the one instance that they actually refer to the accusations brought by Tammy, who again, Tammy was the babysitter of Mike Pickle, was children, she was 14 when Mike was, and I think it was late 20s, and when Mike began a grooming relationship with her, and groomed her for several decades.

So he references grooming, James Crawford does, and he says, there was no grooming. Gruming is a derogatory term that Satan likes to put on people to make them look that much worse. That's literally his quote, he says, if anything happened in regards to Tammy, Tammy, it was a temptation, that's it.

And that's it, that's the whole quote, that's everything that he sort of references with Tammy. He says, it wasn't grooming, not because the situation didn't warrant grooming, but because according to Crawford, grooming doesn't exist.

There is no such thing as grooming. Gruming is a fictional thing made up by the liberals. He didn't say that, but I'm popping that in there. Made up by the woe or the cancel culture, and it is a derogatory term that Satan, so made up by Satan, I guess, likes to put on people to make them look that much worse.

This is where I'm baffled because someone has to stop him at that point and be like, just to clarify, so did like, abstain, not groom. Women, does grooming never exist, or does it only not exist within the context of Mike Bickle in this situation?

Is your genuine belief that there is no such thing as grooming? If someone takes a 14-year-old and isolates them from their family and develops a romantic sexual relationship with them, as a grown adult, is that fine?

Is that just a temptation? What are we even talking about anymore? Are you defending? Are you granting that behavior happens? And saying it just doesn't matter? But of course, the conversation just breezes through, and no one says anything about it.

And it's one of these really discouraging and bleak representations of the illogical moral depravity of co-communities, where someone could say something as heinous as that, and then just keep going. and think that they are in the right, you know, how do you listen to that and you not look around and say, are we, are we the bad guys here? Is this, uh, maybe, maybe this isn't, maybe this isn't the side that I want to be on and I, I have grace for people seen that after the facts because I, I do think that there will be people who are defending Mike Bickle who later. I don't,

I think I have more grace for young people because, you know, you haven't had enough lived experiences and I've been there where you're dependent, like I defended my father in a lot of times where I shouldn't and people can change and see the sort of error of their ways. My mom herself, like, was really defending a lot of this cool community until she got older and realized suddenly it sort of broke. So I, I understand that people can have the veil over their eyes where they just don't see the gravity that's right in front of them. But, um, I mean, that's just a level of

corruption and manipulation and moral bankruptcy. Um, that's is quite terrifying. You know, what you're describing a lot of people who are on the outside looking in would say, well, this is circular reasoning. They trust Mike because they trust Mike and, but it goes far beyond that. Some countries are moving towards the direction of saying that the cult mindset can also be treated as a mental health disorder, a psychological disorder. And truly, I believe that it should because it goes so far beyond this mentality that one of the definitions of insanity, the joke is that if you try the same thing and expect a different result and keep trying the same

thing, you're right. You must be insane. Well, here's a person who, I mean, look how many examples we have, all of these victims coming forward. And they're asking to trust that he's not going to do it again. That's really, if you understand the reasoning behind this trust, Mike Bickel video, it's really saying in this part, anger's me so much. It is literally saying, trust your daughters, they're going to be okay if we bring them back. Trust that your daughters are going to be safe with Mike Bickel. Trust that your daughters are going to put their full trust and confidence in

him. And he's going to, by the grace of God, never do this thing again. That's really what this comes down to. But in the cult mindset, the trust, as I said, it's never earned. And so I was talking about the example of Christianity before. I'm going to do that again because people who are in the cults, even many who escape the cults, they don't understand this difference. It takes them years to develop it. Yeah. But that same type of mentality I was in a group that was very controlling, very manipulative, very much like what you

came out of, because you literally came out of Brannemism 2.0. I heard often these sermons that we trust the Bible because we trust the Bible. And that doesn't work, man. If you are developing human being, that's not why you trust the Bible.

Trust is something that you have to eventually learn and develop. I left this and I go to churches that are so far beyond this mentality that you trust for the sake of trusting. They're talking about all of the history behind it, why the statements are trusted, the development of the church outside of, you know, a lot of this is Catholic church history, believe it or not, in the cults and sadly, this has went far beyond the cults into some extent in the mainstream.

They totally discredit any Catholic church history, not realizing that all churches came from this development of Catholic church. But I have gone to really solid Christian churches that are teaching church history as the reason why we trust the Bible.

And they walk you through that process and they're very open about things like we come to this passage, don't understand it, I can't verify it by history. And they separate that into a different category than the trust.

This is a category of the unknown. We don't know, we don't understand it. We might believe it because of the other things we trust, but we're not forced to trust it. That's what I'm saying.

In the cults, you're taught every verse, every line, every single bit. We trust it in the same way because it says so. It's always because it said so. Well, again, in manifested sons of God, the prophet, the Apostle, whoever is the manifested son of God, leader, that same aspect is applied to them.

We trust it because he said so. He says, I'm not going to do this again to another girl. We trust it because he said so. Why would we not, brothers and sisters? He said so, so it must be true.

Well, that reasoning, it goes beyond circular reasoning, it actually edges in towards insanity. That's why a lot of the, like I said, a lot of the countries are now starting to say that the cult mindset is a form of mental health disorder.

Yeah, and I think it certainly exploits that sort of need that people have for the repetition of just, I have this particular belief, someone's going to repeat that belief to me despite the evidence of it clearly being not true.

So I want to believe in my pickle, I have formed my life around believing that he is a good guy. I've seen people do this with my dad, too, of because my dad, prophet.

side to all of these different individuals. And they form their life around, like it becomes a cornerstone thing for them, where I moved to Indianapolis because Bob Hartley gave me a dream about this and it was really hard for my family and my children suffer because we had to take them out of school and whatnot.

But it was good because God had ordained it. And then, oh no, Bob Hartley's son is suddenly speaking out and telling me that he did all of these things that were abusive, manipulative, and that a lot of these prophecies weren't genuine and they were fabricated, if not all of the prophecies were fabricated.

And I do think that this is sort of a mental health thing at times and I, more on like a spectrum of mental health because there's two different things. There's a fracturing of your psyche that can go on there where you say, I made this huge decision based off of what is now being told to me was direct deception.

It wasn't actually the voice of God. You can rationalize it and you can take it. You can sort of be like, okay, well, I can remove myself from this, say God's still doing good things with me and my family, even though this was correct.

Like you can come to terms with it in whatever way that you can want to come to terms with it or you can blame the messenger. You can say, Jed is inspired by Satan and that Bob Hartley was telling the truth

and if there's leaders in your community who are reaffirming that and saying that, you can avoid mental fracturing. You can avoid that discomfort of being like, oh, I was deceived or oh, I believe something wrong or oh, I have to adjust this cornerstone belief that I have built all of these other beliefs on.

Instead of having to do it any of that, I can just listen to these leaders tell me that this is not true. Despite all of this contrary evidence and I'm not even going to listen to Jed or any of this because I just wanna believe that God is who I thought Cobb was and that Bob Hartley is who I thought Bob Hartley was.

And my pickle is who I thought my pickle was. And if I have to question any of that, I have to question who I am. So therefore I don't question any of it. And I stay locked in to the world that I've sort of collectively built with some of these cold leaders.

And which is why I think that it's an incredible amount of bravery for people like Deborah and Tammy and my mom and even Alan and Michael Sullivan and some of these people who... really were their careers, more than just their personal beliefs.

Their careers were built into this sort of cult world and they had to look at it and say, okay, we've reached the breaking point. We have to say, no, this isn't that what happened to me was wrong or what happened to these women in my community was wrong.

And I think that it takes a lot of courage. There's a lot of questions of like, oh, maybe you should have realized that sooner. But hindsight is 2020 and when it breaks breaks. And so I think that that's very commendable of the individuals who have the sort of courage to do it.

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It's so heartbreaking to see that people can have a whole church service built around tearing down Debra and Tammy and my mom and Julie Meyers and Alan Hood and the other individuals who have sort of spoken out against Mike.

It's just so irreverent, that was the word that I was looking for. You use the sort of church platform and you use the voice of God to do heinous things. It's the same as like using the voice of God or using prophecy to sexually exploit vulnerable individuals.

There's a certain, not just abuse, but irreverence with it because you are so disrespecting that which ought to be holy. And I think it's very similar to when you use your platform and you get together in a group of people in this sort of church way to from the pulpit or from your platform as small as it may be to speak against victims of abuse who have like spoken up.

There is a huge irreverence. What's that? And frankly, zero fear of God in genuine, you know, like in actuality, because you know, you can't reality exist independent of whatever you say your beliefs are.

Like whatever you believe about Mike Bickle, it is the case what was happening and you're not gonna be able to go to God and be like, oh, well, Mike is a good guy. Like all of these tactics only work in cult communities that are not gonna work if you have to actually deal with reality.

But one thing, this is sort of disconnected, but one thing that I was thinking about while you were talking,

those kind of germane to some of the things that you're saying is,

we're taught to not question God, right? That's the, you don't ever question God, you don't question the Bible, you trust the Bible, you trust God. But the problem that we clearly have is that the portrayal and picture of God that is being represented to us by our leaders is not the same as God.

And in this manifest son of God, sort of offshoot communities and the latter reign or New Apostolic Reformation where there's sort of a oneness between the Holy Spirit and the prophets where they are speaking from the mouth of God.

This distinction becomes dissolved where I'm not questioning God, I'm questioning you. I'm questioning this person who says, I heard from God, X, Y, and C. And it's like, well, I don't think that that's true.

Oh, you're questioning God. No, I'm questioning you. I'm questioning whether or not you were telling the truth, whether you were inspired by God, whether you are just using God to anoint your lips and then like you're using the seal of a deity to anoint your message that is clearly fabricated and false.

And I think that the problem that we have, one of the, I think very huge problems that we have in Western Christianity and why we can have massive cults like the latter reign movement where it's not just sort of small insulated things but why cults so thrive in this panacostal community is because unlike other religious communities that I have personally witnessed, the panacostal community has this already gray line between the voice of God and the voice of men.

And that is dissolving, ever dissolving. And you see it all the time. So if you're listening to James Crawford, he does this all the time where he says he, one of the things that he was doing, he called out Julie Myers, who is really a great person, and I like, it's hard because like I also know these people, and I grew up with these people, the ones who are speaking out against Mike, and while they all have their flaws and issues, there are also just people that I know and care about and have seen like I know Julie Myers's son,

and I play chess with him almost every week, and this man who I've never heard of before, James Crawford is absolutely ripping into Julie Myers and calling her a hypocrite and a betrayer because she was one of the ones who spoke up against Mike.

And he defends himself. You can see him even register that he's going really hot with it, that he's being very verbally abusive towards this woman. And he's like, now you might be thinking that I'm being too intense and these words are too intense.

And he says, I'm not saying this, God is. God spoke to me and told me that Julie Myers was a hypocrite and a betrayer. He legitimately says, this is not my words. This is God's words.

And you see that sort of complete elimination of the separation between the person and the deity where he just becomes God in that moment. And it's totally accepted on this video chat that someone is just being like, oh, this isn't my words.

This is the Lord speaking to you. Like how irreverent is that? Talk about taking the name of the Lord in vain. It's like you're actually using it for your own vanity and for your own vain purposes.

So this is, I'm just saying God told me this. Instead of saying this is my opinion or my belief, this is the word of the Lord. And in these extreme instances, we can kind of see it and we can be like, oh man, something's off.

But I do think that this is symptomatic of the world that I grew up in in general where people would just say this all the time. I even myself, I got into this pattern of every time I felt like I would read my Bible and I'd feel inspired instead of being saying it just like that.

Like I read this passage and I felt inspired about this. I'd be like, oh, God spoke to me yesterday. God spoke to, I opened up my Bible and I read this passage and God spoke to me and it becomes very casual.

And in some respects, it isn't dangerous when isn't... is dangerous when people like me say that because I'm not important, like I'm not a leader and figure, so it's not a thus-safe Lord. I don't have a whole lot of like social control that overlaps with this, but when someone who does have social control and nefarious purposes uses that sort of technique, it becomes one of the most horrific things that I have ever seen in my life, where it suddenly becomes the sexual, the abusive, the manipulative tactics and desires of the leader become deified through this process

of eliminating the sort of veil between heaven and earth. And it has become so normalized in even the greater panacostal community that in these cult communities, you can have someone say something like this and everyone just goes past it.

No one raises their hand and say, hey, I agree with you, but maybe let's not say that God said that. Maybe this is our opinion, no one's sort of even qualifying it because it is so, everyone's jumped the shark.

It's so past the point of being able to criticize it and being if someone did speak up, well, now you're speaking up against God. And now it's this, now it's this, you become the eye of the sort of attack comes back over on you and no one wants that.

So. This is a conversation much bigger than this podcast, but it reminds me of, when I first came out of the cult and I had started a little blog or something, some guy contacted me on the blog and he wanted to send me his book and he wanted me to read, in fact, I think I've got it back there.

But he was set, hard set on making the argument that this book of the Bible was written by so and so. And I'm like, well, what good does that do me? I, the Bible, you know, the books say who they're written by, don't they?

And I came to realize as I entered into the phase of studying Christian apologetics and Christian authorship and Bible canonization, the question is much more gray than we were taught in the cults. The example of this, the easiest example, the Judaism and we in the cults believe that the entire Old Testament was written, or the Pentecostal was written by Moses.

Well, if this is true, then Moses wrote about his own death. How does that work? Right, right. That doesn't work, right? Right. But where it hit me the most was in the manifested sons of God, framework that Brannum laid, which was combined also with dispensationalism.

He would say thing. He wanted to be the, ultimate profit. So he would say things like, God only sent one profit for an age, one single profit. And when I discovered, I was reading the Bible over and over, I've mentioned this a few times. Well, I started taking notes of different things. And one of the things was I wanted to align it up with culture and history. And I'm taking note of whenever the profit is speaking about a specific king or kingdom or civilization, I wanted to know what it is. I'm taking notes and lo and behold, as I'm reading through the prophets and they're

saying, in the days of King Darius, and then another prophet says, in the days of King Darius, one like, wait a minute, those have to be in the same age because they're talking about the same king. This guy lined me. But then you get to the book of Isaiah. And it's a little bit problematic because there are actually three different life spans in the book of Isaiah.

So modern scholars, some of them, not all, some of them believe it was written in three different periods by three different people, but it was called the book of Isaiah. Fast forward to the years after Christianity. There were several numerous books that started to be claimed as Bible canon or claimed by apostles, et cetera. And they had to be this process to weed them out through what is called Bible canonization, if you're familiar with this history. But what was happening is people wanted the readers to believe the authority of their words. And so they would attribute it to an apostle that wasn't the writer. And

they say, this is the book of Peter. This is the gospel of Peter. Well, Peter didn't write the gospel of Peter. And you can find articles and this is a fascinating study. I actually recommend people go down that path where I'm headed with this is this. The movement has taught people, whenever you have an argument, rather than be being prepared to defend your argument, you throw it into the spiritual realm and you say, God told me. And pretty much if I have somebody who is making, trying to make an argument to me and they say, the Lord spoke to me and said, that's the point at which I ignored what

they say. Because it is never, ever true. It just never true. But people use that argument. The other thing that they do, which I noticed this in the video you shared, they try to take whoever they're defending. And they try to take specific Bible verses and ignore a vast majority of the Bible verses. And usually they try to compare the figure being defended to a biblical figure. In this case, there was a statement, he's kind of like King David. And it's like King David and Saul. They're going through this argument trying to say that this predator is like King David. And that doesn't work.

man, King David was not a predator. That is not how this works. But what they try to do is they try to throw it into the comparison between the biblical figure because it throws the whole argument into the spiritual realm. Oh my gosh, he's another King David. I can't argue with King David.

Yeah. That's what they try to do, right? So you can't go down that pathway. Whether they, whether they want you to or not, it just, it doesn't work. But what it does, and it is effective, this is the reason why they do it, if you can make that argument, it demonizes instantly every single critic. Yeah. So every critic becomes a devil who's fighting against a battle against God. And you know, they'll use prophecy or these dreams, claims as unquestionable proof when anybody who does question that they're questioning God because that prophecy, that vision, this voice that I heard, they're speaking against that voice, not me. I'm just the person

who's relaying God's voice to you in doing so. They're trying to say that they're a prophet and I cry foul. This isn't the case. Yeah. And it becomes, it becomes this really corrupt way in which even in defending these accusations, they become more holy. This is, this is one of the, I can't remember who it was, but someone came into one of the videos and she was like,

I've been thinking about how this just more proofs that Michael Bickel is being used by God, because what prophet of God was an attack in the Bible? And it's this idea that even their failures, or not even failures is the wrong word, even their abusive behaviors are more testament of their deity because of course, well like these attacks that are bringing brought against them become, it all just reaffirms their belief. I remember talking with someone very early on this where we kind of, it was very early where a lot of the false prophecies of Michael and my dad and the other Kansas City prophets were being sort of publicly for the first

time dismantled because there really wasn't a space to do that until after the sort of fall of Michael where it was like, okay, let's look at all of these other clearly false prophecies that probably should have been dressed way long ago, but now there's finally a way to do that. And there's a space for that. And I remember someone being like, granting, this is a Michael defender, they were like, granting the fact that one of the prophecies that we were talking about, I think it was the prophecy about Pat Bickel, Mike Bickel's brother, who was supposed

to walk again. He was paraplegic. He was going to walk again and revival was going to come to Kansas City and it never happened. And that was supposed to be in conjunction with the chiefs winning the Super Bowl and all that sort of stuff.

I've talked about this several times on previous episodes, but when we were sort of going through and being like, Hey, this is what they said here's this, you don't have to take my word for it.

Here's literally audio of them saying it here, old transcripts. This is what the prophecy was. It clearly is not that anymore. This is the sort of manipulation that has happened during this time to go from A to B.

I remember someone being like, well, isn't the fact that they got one wrong? More indication that God was actually using them and to use them when they got it right. And it was this really weird conversation because I was like, what the hell are you talking about?

And it made so much, I could tell it made so much sense the person I was talking to. But I was like, I don't even, even in me representing it back. I'm trying to do them justice and not be disingenuous about how I represent it back.

It was like the fact that they failed was more testimony that they were right in other instances. And I was like, no, no, that's not how that works. That's not, no, no, failure is indication of failure.

That's what that is about and manipulation and the fact that, I mean, it would be one thing if they had gotten it wrong and then made a big deal of it themselves. And we're like, oh, this is the one, I mean, maybe then you could say, hey, okay, this is the one where we got it wrong.

And this is why we got it wrong. And this is why we're going to change our process so that we don't get in the wrong in the future. I understand how that could be this sort of like ownership process in which you could have more trust because it's like, oh, they got it wrong.

But then there's this system around to make sure that when they get it wrong, that it's filtered out and people take accountability for it and all these different things. But there was no accountability.

There was none of that process. So they got it wrong and then they hit it and now it's coming to light. And it's only coming to light because people are criticizing them. And Mike Bickle is not saying that he got any of this wrong.

Mike Bickle is not being like, oh, this is a good point. Mike Bickle is still digging into his heels and saying, there are demonic attacks against me and against the prophetic movement and against the...

and times prayer movement. So talking with that person, I was just like, I can kind of see how you twist your logic to be like, oh, this is actually a good thing, but it is, it was one of those extreme instances where I'm like, I don't know what to do at this point.

Like, this is just slapping you in the face with the truth here and you're going, ah, yes. So therefore he is a good guy. I remember, I remember when I was a, I was probably like six or seven years old, and I had been told all my life at six or seven, like most kids or a lot of kids that Santa Claus was real.

And I loved Santa Claus, I loved the lore of Santa Claus. I remember my parents sat me down when I was probably like seven, and they had a book for me where it talks about St. Nicholas and it, and it basically the whole book is about the myth of Santa Claus and how it was created and why it was created and everything.

And I'm sitting there and I'm listening to it and I don't remember like tuning out. I remember like listening to it. This is one of my earlier very salient memories, but I remember just listening to the whole book and having fun thinking that this was just a good Christmas story.

At the very end, I remember my older sister was like, so Santa Claus is not real. And I remember, no, I remember saying, no, this book proofs that he is real. This whole book that was given to me to literally tell me Santa Claus is not real, it's all fiction.

I like read through the entire thing and at the end of it, I like believed that Santa Claus more than when we began the book. And I remember that moment of just being like genuinely confused.

I remember seeing both my sister and my mom, my sister who's just like a year and a half older than me, but was smarter than me and always enjoyed being smarter than me and her just being like fed up with my dumbness in that and my mom being like genuinely concerned of like, we just led you through why this is not the case.

And so I had to reread the book and then I was like, oh, and it took me a little while, but I remember that being this sort of experience of being like, you are telling me everything logically to restructuring and tell me that this belief that I have is not true and just the conversation around it somehow becomes in my own head more reaffirming of the actual belief.

And I think that we've been seeing some of those experiences except I was a six-year-old, these are grown-ass people who are being confronted with. very intense moral truth that's not just like fun Santa Claus stuff. This is you know, consequential stuff that deals with people's abuse and it's just nothing you can say to certain individuals will convince them otherwise. And it's both, I both have sympathy for the people who are being taken for a ride and have maybe some mental health or find this sense of mental stability in believing things that are clearly not true to sort of reaffirm their position.

So I do, I do as always have like empathy and sympathy for the people who are being in this community at the same time. The corruption of those who are speaking out to reaffirm these and trying to deceive people is just it's just genuinely like horrific. And I wish that there was more accountability for these sort of defenders of Mike Bickel. I mean fortunately, they're I don't think that they're going to have very big platforms. I don't think their platform is going to get any bigger. I think that they're just kind of screaming into the void

here. And fortunately, I think that some of these cults are communities are being dismantled because at this point the lie is just too big and you can't prop it up unless you're within that very small isolated community. You just can't prop this up anymore. But it is it is just definitely like discouraging and bleak that there are still expressed efforts to prop up the trust of Mike Bickel. There's a statement made which is it's weird reading through this. It's just like the sermons that I grew up with where they're befitting some guy that's an indefensible

right. They're making some statement to the effect that this is like the compared to Noah's Ark. Yeah. And anybody who's criticizing their outside the Ark, my brothers and sisters, we're in the Ark. And in a weird twisted disgusting sort of way, your example of Santa Claus, it would be like if Santa Claus is Jeff Jeffery Epstein. Right.

Ark is the Epstein Island. That's really what this is. Yeah. But when you're in that cult mindset, you can't see it like that. You're truly seeing this is Noah's Ark and everybody who's outside of the cult. They're either with us or against us. I don't care if this is Jeffery Epstein that I'm going to, you know. Yeah. But anyway, I could go on a rant for that and I will save that one for maybe I won't go there. Yeah. But anyway, thanks for doing this. My pleasure.

Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at www.William-branam.org For 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.

Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. Weaponized Religion