The Battle of the Prophets: From Ancient Oracles to Modern Fortune Tellers

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 being some said they blundered breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City Profits, and the International House of Prayer. Bob, it's good to be back and to talk all things, battle of the gods and battle of the prophets.

This is going to be a fun episode for me because you and I have talked offline. We kind of share some of the same feeling and perspective on this, but growing up I didn't, and many of the people who were influenced in the religion I escaped didn't, and then after I left the cult and I started just experiencing Christianity in general, it's weird because you get this strange blend of people who are really affected by the foundational doctrines of this mass, and so they are still of that same mindset, and then you get other people who have a much broader worldview. I'll just say

it like that, and they understand a bit more about prophets and their relationship to God and all of this, but I wanted to have the conversation with you. It was your idea, but when I had the conversation about the what is a prophet? Whenever they use this term and they throw it out like it's free pancakes in a pancake place in the NAR, you get a prophet and you get a prophet and you get a prophet. What is a prophet? Is it a gimmick or is it something real? Well, in order to have the discussion, I think we got to contextualize it by talking about the concept of perspective,

and that's one of my favorite words is perspective. It's a word I discovered in doing conflict resolution, racial reconciliation, marriage counseling, because everyone knows that when you have conflict, what you really have is a collision of perspectives, right? Things, people's worldviews.

So, just for people to get a little history lesson, the idea of perspective, For humans actually kind of came into the forefront in the 1400s and where you see it is art, right? If you look back before the renaissance Every painting every image is too dimensional, right?

Right, it's just you see this flat like you whether it's cave paintings Whether it's the hieroglyphs in Egypt even the early renaissance everybody's flat. They're too dimensional, right? They have heightened and with Well in 1415 there was this guy Philippi Brunicelli who is staining at the Florence Cathedral looking out the door At the Baptist Street, which is sick-sided, right?

And he's looking at this thing and he was the first person that actually drew an image that had depth to it Right, it had it had depth to it He developed he and this is where the whole concept of perspective after 1415 you see all the art changes Suddenly images are painted with depth to them. So we get the third third dimension The reason this is important is because when you're studying history, right when you're studying the Bible You need perspective. There's depth to it. And so for me An order for me to get Perspective on the Bible. I actually have to go outside the Bible

It's interesting you say that because I had that conversation just recently with somebody else and it's scared so many people They're like no, you can't understand the Bible outside of the Bible So let's talk about that a little bit more. Well again People see the Bible Often as a religious book, right?

But it's and and and I'm not debating that but a great deal of it is historical, right? It's it's a history book. It's it and so a lot of the things that Especially when you get into the whole prophetic thing. There's history behind this, right?

Israel is And this may surprise people to really understand this But for the greater part of the History of the Hebrew people. They're tribal, right? They're 12 individual tribes that come together Around the time of David right through Saul and David, but they will only last as a 12 tribe unify nation for about 70 years Say you know David's grandson splits the whole thing back up again Right, and there's a whole reason why that happens that we can go into and another other time But this little group of people is sitting in the middle of three ancient civilizations

Right So, down in the south is Egypt, up in the north is Assyria, and to their east is Babylon. These are massive civilizations with ancient texts, massive architectural buildings, like all of this stuff.

And these Hebrew people only actually become something around 1000 BC. There is no Hebrew language even before 1000 BC. So, the reason why this is all important is it becomes sometimes we focus so much just on, you know, this little tribal group of people.

And we don't really understand the bigger picture. So, just to share with you, one of my, let's see if we can see this. This is one of my favorite books, up on the way.

This is one of my favorite books. And the reason why this is so fascinating to me is what this book does, it goes through every year or at least in the beginning decades or centuries of human history and tells you what was happening at the same time.

It gives you context, like, where do the Hebrew people, where does all of those things fit into a much larger picture here? And what Treasure did is went back and went, okay, what's happening at the same time?

The reason this is important is because if you don't understand what's happening all around at the same time, you actually lose context of what's going on, right? And the full story behind the biblical narrative, and you what, lose perspective.

Right. So, here's where this circles back to what we want to talk about, prophets, right? Almost everybody that I talk to in the religious world kind gets this idea that prophets are a biblical thing.

Right. In other words, the whole context for prophets is, you say prophets and they'll pull out all these biblical names or these books, right? But most, I don't think understand, is prophets were everywhere and way predate the Bible or the, well, I shouldn't say, predate the Bible because then you're getting into Genesis, but predate the Hebrew people as it were.

The recorded history, right? Yeah. So, when we talk about prophets, like north of Israel is a Syria, right? Well, you know how, you know, God sends Jonah up to a Syria, right? You didn't want to go? You know why he didn't want to go?

Because Syria... Is the epicenter at that time of prophets right if you go back and look at and this is what people don't Understand if you don't read history if you don't study archaeology, right? If you don't study anthropology you get this really The storted perspective of what's going on? But yeah, Jeremiah doesn't want to go to Nineveh because a series got all these prophets which Are very famous like we still we know their names. We have their prophecies, right? We have all of that stuff, right? Yeah You know then later we get in to the Greeks, right?

and We have cities that have temples with prophetesses in them right and the most famous of course is Delphi Right, right where we have these young girls, right? Who are you know I think the two most famous ones are pithia and civil right who are there and every king Every Greek king every general before he went out to battle Goes to Delphi to meet with the oracles, right? Who end up Prophecying right oh King, you know do you're gonna win King. Don't do that, right? So The problem is I think you know the story here is the archaeologist figure out

Years later that they're sitting on top of a methane. Yes And so basically all these prophetesses were high, you know

Now the reason why this is important is if you go back and you study Some of the historical writings of prophet prophets right many of them were considered hysterical Yeah, let me read something to you This is Philly, Ovent, Alexandra. This was probably he was just right around the time of Jesus He was a Jewish philosopher and this was his description of a prophet a Prophet possessed by God will suddenly appear and give prophetic oracles Nothing of what he said will be his own for he is that He is that for he that is truly under the control of divine inspiration has no power of apprehension when he speaks

But serves as a channel for the insistent words of Another's prompting for prophets are interpreters of God who make full use of their organs of speech and set forth his will, right? So he's trying to describe this But what you find is these school of prophets in every culture That are basically out of control Yeah, I know this can itself funny, right?

because when we think of profits, we read these books, right? But these guys were ecstatic, right? They, you know, they went into what they looked like trances or they, you know, they went into, you know, these seizures or all these kind of things and gave a lot of these utterances.

So, you know, people knew like, oh my God, you know, it's the profits. So there's those guys, but then what people have to understand is that every ancient culture had a cabinet like the president does, right?

He has a group of counselors. Well, profits were always sitting right next to the king, right? Every time a king wanted to make a decision, he had his astrologers, right? They were looking at the stars.

He's got the guys that are cutting open animals, looking at intros and then he's got the profits, right? And they're all speaking. That's what Joseph ended up dealing with when he went down to Egypt, right?

He was, he was basically taking on a group of cabinet members who all had these different roles, right? And so he's taking them on. So what ends up being the real battle here in the ancient world?

And this is what people have to grasp. Is that every culture believed that they were birthed

by the hand of the gods? So the whole concept and the Old Testament that were gods chosen is not unique in the ancient world, right? So this is one of the things where I get a little bit nervous when everybody talks about how chosen someone is, right?

Because everybody believed that, right? The Assyrians believed they were, you know, they were birthed by the gods. The Egyptians did, the Babylonians did. So the whole ancient world is really humans thinking that they're acting on the, the behest of the gods, right?

And every battle was who's God is more dominant, right? Who's God is more true, right? Right. So when people talk about false profits, this gets really interesting, right? A false profit was anybody who didn't speak from your perspective?

In the Old Testament, I grant you it as much that way. What's interesting is the way that we've been taught in the cult mindset, and even that has entered into the mainstream churches to some extent, it's a very black or white perspective.

They're either a profit and they're from Yahweh or they're a profit who is from a different God and therefore every single thing they say is false. But you find these passages that kind of contradict that in the Old Testament when it talks about fear not the profit.

they're prophesying against you because their prophecies are coming from their own mouths. So if you read that without any critical thought, you think, oh, well, they're not from Yahweh. The prophecy is false, so we don't believe that they're actually a prophet.

But that's not what it says, man. On the flip side of that is there are prophets from other nations who were having actual visions that, you know, we're telling some things. And here's a thing to understand, I've mentioned this before, but church and state was one and the same.

You believed that you were a part of the deity, the deity was your city, it was your entire worldview. And the prophets were appointed as political leaders of that of the ancient world. And if one of them had prophecies that failed, in many cases, they were just executed.

So the fact that any of them exists who have been in writing tells you that to some extent, if they're if they're marked in history, they must have had a few that happened correctly, right?

But to everything that you've said, so to understand the Bible, you have to understand that the world existed, that the Bible was written for. In other words, we have all of these warring nations that are mentioned in the Bible.

But to understand what it's talking about, you have to understand what was actually going on, what was the culture, what was the political scene. And you have to also understand that the way that I'm going to say this, I'm going to anger a whole bunch of people.

So I'm cautious with my words. The way that people believe the Bible is a way in which they believe many of them that the entire history is written in there and nothing exists outside of that history.

But there are gaps in history because there are gaps in which there were books that were destroyed. For example, when Babylonian invasion happened, there was quite a bit that was lost. There are also histories that we don't, in the way in which we would write a history book today, it's not the same as the ancient world would write a history book.

So you end up with weird things. If you try to think of the Old Testament historical records, like the Books of Kings and et cetera, you try to think of those in today's term if you were to get a textbook that's history.

We have weird things like Moses writing about his own death, which isn't quite possible, right? Whenever you think of these things, that's not how they viewed it. So there's gaps in history. It's a complex thing to understand.

But let's put it in perspective for what you're talking about. Based on the ancient worldview, our gods are superior to your gods, right? So you have a whole culture. people who have got this temple that they've built, right, that's all them built, for their God. Right. And the Babylonians come along and they conquer these people and they destroy the temple. Yes. And burn. So what's their perspective? Their perspective is that Baal, the Babylonian God, is actually more powerful than Galway, the Hebrew God. Exactly. Right.

This is what modern people don't quite grasp what's going on. You have this whole group of people now who are being taken basically on a recruiting trip because they're all smart back to Babylon who are utterly disillusioned. They're utterly confused because their whole world view is that our God, Yahweh, is superior to your God, Baal. And suddenly now that didn't play out. Right.

Right. So reason this is important is because the reason why we have the Old Testament is actually because of how the Assyrians and therefore ran into taking the northern ten tribes was different than the southern tribes. The Assyrians took the ten tribes in the north 150 years earlier but they scattered them across their empire. So it's probably very likely that the whole modern world of Islam is actually if you go look at the DNA is actually rooted the ten tribes were absorbed into those people groups. But Nebuchadnezzar did was put all the Jewish people in one city. He kept them together. Right. So what you have now is you have a whole

group of exiles. Right. Immigrants basically are not really immigrants because they are basically you know property now because you know they've been conquered. We're in this city who are so utterly disillusioned because their God just lost. Right. And so what begins to happen is there's two groups of people that try to pull this together. It's not any different than when African slaves came to America. Right. And try to hang on to the stories of Africa. Right. Or any other immigrant population. So what happens is the scribes and teachers began to reassemble these ancient texts. Right. You know that's why you know the second most sacred book and Judaism is the Talmud.

But people don't actually call it by its full name which is the Babylonian Talmud. Right. Because the scribes and teachers they're you know they're putting this book together while they're in exile. But this is where then all these prophets step in right. You know the minor prophets all these people.

What are they saying? They keep telling these people their prophesy. and you're special. God loves you, right? He's gonna restore you back to the late, right? All these kind of things, right there. They're prophesying hope to this whole group of people.

So you can understand why then when's a rubble and everybody go back to, you know, to rebuild this temple, it's such a big deal. Because this is really a battle whose God's bigger. Right? Exactly.

So that's what's hard for the modern world to understand. They don't realize that everybody in the ancient world had a perspective. And the perspective was everything happens because of a God or a spirit.

Yes. Everything. Like there's nothing that happens in humanity without these two invisible forces behind it, right? Right. And if you don't understand that perspective, you don't understand a lot of what's going on with these prophets, right?

So the whole idea behind prophets is I'm not really a uniquely Hebrew thing. It's not even a uniquely Christian thing. Right. You know, and it gets interesting too because I have had conversations with men who and women, and I'm being cautious of my words here, but men and women who didn't fully understand their Bibles as they were trying to answer questions as I was trying to form my non-cult worldview.

Because I knew most of the things that were saying on here. I had studied the prophets of Delphi. In fact, there's a great documentary I saw, I think it's a national geographic, where they actually went in and they showed you the methane gas.

They showed how it's come out. They found it, it's crazy, man. And they were explaining the psychological effects of having been exposed to methane gas for so long. And lo and behold, as I'm studying, I find this other, I came across weird things in my research, but I came across this other study of what was actually in the incense burned in the temples of Yali, right?

And they'll never prove it either way. So I'm not gonna actually say what this research stated, but the effect it had was much the same. You began to understand that not everything is as black or white as we think it is.

And there is a reason why Jesus said that the entire law on the prophets, which is this entire set of books we're talking about, is just summed up in love God and love your neighbor.

It's not that it was meant to be read by, the Old Testament speaks of the lawyers that are re-evaluating these old books and they're trying to nitpick and find little phrases that they can create a new rule or new custom that's based off of this.

And Jesus said, this is in vain. I just literally preserved this for you to mean that you should love God and love your neighbor as yourself. It's... that simple. But you have to understand that profits in the way that it's being taught today is quite off of the mark. Like you said, there are profits in other cultures. In fact, it was part of the culture. You almost had no culture if you did not have your set of profits that worked as along with your bishops, right? And like you said, they would prophesy before you went into battle, you would go see, what's the outcome? Is it good or bad? Should we

invade? Should we not? The same thing happened in judges, I think it's even judges won. The profit said, you're going to go down into the Canaanites and you're going to invade and conquer and take over completely. They go out and read the high priest's breastplate, right? Right? Right. So the Jewish high priests were doing the same thing, right? They're doing the same thing, right?

Thumbs up or comes down, right? If you continue reading down in judges one, after the prophecy that says, you'll go down, you'll come back victorious, the passage states, but they had chariots made of iron and therefore they won. So the same thing, whenever you have a conversation today with somebody who's talking about the ancient world, the ancient profits, and they're explaining the difference, they usually say the outcomes of Yahweh's profits were 100% always on the mark, and that's how you know that the false god bail or whatever is the false god, but they don't know the text. That's not

exactly what's going on here. It is a little bit more complicated than that. Well, not the shift here, but one of the things that I think is important to discuss is I think the whole idea of, I'm not even sure how I want to say this, but the charismatic Pentecostal world has created this perspective that profit is all about revelatory predicting the future. Yes. Right. The same thing is fortune telling, which was punishable by death. Right. So something, and again, I don't, I can't speak about other cultures on this issue, but it's very clear if you take the full body of work

that's considered prophetic of the Old Testament, right? Probably one percent of it is about prognostication. Yes. The vast majority of it is what I call plumbline holding.

And what I mean by that is everybody that's ever seen a brick layer knows in the old days you used to have a plumbob, right? You'd hold it up, right? And so almost if you go back and you look through and you read all of these prophecies, but it's basic, what they're doing, is they're standing up and saying, here's God's morals, values, and ethics.

And here's where you are, and you're way off the reservation here, and if you don't turn around and get your stuff together, right, there's terrible consequences ahead, right? Usually the futuristic prophecies were about what bad is going to happen because you did these things wrong.

Yes, right? In other words, it was basically saying, here's what God wants, here's his morals, ethics, and values, you're dishonest, you're liars, you're manipulators, you're immoral, you're all these kinds of things, and you've got to do what the modern New Testament repent, right?

You need to change your way, change your direction is really what it means. Like you need to change your direction, because if you don't, you're going to end up in trouble. What seems to have happened in my, from my perspective, in the charismatic world, is we've made the one percent, the 99 percent.

Exactly. It's like we flipped the script as it were. So the reason why that's as important to me is because once you get, if my perspective is accurate, then you begin to realize that it's very possible that there's more prophets outside the church than inside the church.

Yeah. And I'll give you two examples. For our generation, probably the most prophetic, if you want to use the word plumbline prophet, right? In the arts and entertainment world was Bob Dylan.

Whose songs are so many of them were based on Amos, right? Some of the, right? But Bob Dylan in the 60s and even to this day kind of holds up this plumbline, right? And says, hey, right?

Another one that I remember in high school was Alexander Solz and Eatson, right? Who stood in the Ivy League schools and warned America that if you don't change direction, here's where you're going to end up.

And he was absolutely right, right? So when it comes to even where humanity's headed, right?

In terms of whether it's technology or whatever, there's more accurate movies and books, right? That come out of Hollywood than anything that comes out of the church. Yeah. And I know that's going to be hard for a lot of people to hear because we sort of, we're an arrogant.

I mean, I'm sorry to say, but we sort of are really arrogant about what we think we know. But when you actually go and look, at it, right? It's also elementary, right? We've got guys that are doing movies and predicting things, right? You know, that are, you know, years out of their time. I mean, I mean, this is crazy. I don't want to say he was a prophet, but Leonardo da Vinci is 500 years ahead of the rest of humanity in what he sees, right? He's so far ahead of the curve. And I don't know if

people, it, no, it's like, it's like, he's almost like an alien or something. Like, what did you come from? Right? It's like his brain, right? Is just, wow, but there's all kinds of people like that.

I know Tesla's a hot name right now, but I don't know if people understand that Tesla dreamed almost everything that he developed, right? He saw it, right? And so that's why I just think there's this interesting balance between there's a revelatory side of this dynamic of being prophetic, right?

Where you kind of see. And then there's the pump line dynamic, right? Here's God's morals, ethics and values. And this is, right? Which gets back to what you talked about. There's no greater love than laying your life down to, you know, for your brother. I think Jesus greatest prophetic messages, if you want to change the world, get rid of your selfishness and self-centeredness and learn to serve other people. Absolutely. Right? It's so basic and simple, right? But again, where are the prophets bringing us back to Jesus prophetic message? Because that's, you know, Jesus spent very little time talking about the future and almost all about the motives of the

human heart. Yeah. Right? Almost everything he does is a conflict with religious leaders exposing their hypocrisy. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition 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

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On behalf of William Brownham historical research, we want to thank you for your support. The fascinating part of all of this is whenever I began to study the culture surrounding what happened in the mid-1900s, as you're talking about prophecy and the fortune-telling style that it has grown into, I didn't fully understand how important that was to really dig into until I was probably out of the religion for maybe seven years, because I still had one of the things that this movement did is it combined the two.

It combined what is fortune-telling with what is prophecy, made them one and the same, and then created this weird package where if you are a quote unquote prophet and you predict something that happens in the future and it happens you, the prophet, the human being, get all of the glory.

Because, oh wow, this guy said this thing and look, it happened, right? And I began to understand that that is flawed. The all the glory should be given to God if you're in a Christian religion.

So I began to study what happened outside of the movement, kind of like we talked about with the ancient world. And in the early 1900s, there was this weird fascination with spiritualism, which also included fortune-telling.

Massive, massive fascination. Sherlock Holmes, the author, Sir Conan Doyle came to the United States because there was actually more money in the fortune-telling than there was in writing his books. Well, who do you think, right?

Try to impose the spiritualists, right? Yeah. So, brannemism got weird. When I began studying, I talk about the clan and the white supremacy, Christian identity, all of that a lot, but I don't talk as much about the spiritualist side because I don't yet think people can grasp what it is I'm saying.

Whenever brannem's mentor came into this area that I live in and started this whole thing that ironically exploded into what became my hop KC, Charismatics, all of this, he came posing as a quote unquote converted spiritualist.

And he started saying that he was a spiritualist and he was going to expose all of their methods. And then he began doing some many of the same things as spiritualists were doing. And I have evidence that suggests very strongly that he and William Brannem went to Indiana's Camp Chesterfield, which was one of the largest spiritualist camps in the nation.

Spiritualism in Indiana, this was a hotbed for spiritualists. And spiritualists, as I am going to continue to repeat, had fortune-telling, which is producing the future, right? So it became deeply embedded into the laterane movement that prophecy meant predicting the future.

And people did not really take the time to study the Bible enough to know is that actually a prophet, or is that the bad guys? You find out if you read the Old Testament, it is the bad guys.

But spiritualism entered into this thing, created this mess. And I get branded as a cessationist often because whenever I point out the flaws with what they're calling the spiritual gifts, it's not that I'm a cessationist.

It's that what has been elevated, like you said, as to the 1% going up to the 99%. Not only does it distract from the God and put emphasis on the human beings, there's another significant problem with it.

If you are of that mindset, you have to also eliminate very important structures of the Bible, one of them being the covenants, because the way the old covenant worked, the way that Moses was given the law and the tablets, the way it worked is, if Israel did the things that God required, the prophets would predict the blessings to come.

And it wasn't a prediction of the future. It was literally God speaking through the mouth of a prophet, saying, because you Israel have done exactly according to what I said, I'm going to be, I'm going to let your land be fruitful.

You're going to have a blessing of crops. So even though it was in the future, the 1% future prophecy wasn't a prediction or a fortune telling. It was literally God said, because you did this, now you get this.

And on the flip side, if they turned into idolatry or they broke the covenants, then God would speak through the mouth and say, okay, Israel, because you did this bad thing that I told you not to do, now here are the consequences.

So it wasn't really what they call prophecy today in these big movements. It doesn't even remotely match what is prophecy in the Bible, not at all. They're literally trying to randomly throw out things that they think will happen.

And if it does happen, they say, look, I'm a prophet. I did it. And if it doesn't happen, they don't really take the other side of the equation is if the prophet prophecy fails, you know it came from their mouths and not from God.

Well, I think of the whole thing about a little love and love, right? That whole concept, so much of what I see that is prophetic is men and women who kind of understand, how do you want to say this?

The dynamics behind the scene, meaning that when you're driven by selfish ambition, right? This is what James 316 talks about. When you're driven by selfish ambition, you're going to end up with evil and chaos, right?

So a lot of the plum line, in my view, was people understanding from God's perspective, if you are driven by selfishness, if you're driven... by greed, if you're driven by your ego, if you don't stay faith, if you don't have integrity, right?

If these things get into your culture, this is where you're gonna end up. I don't know if many people realize this, but there's whole times where no one's at the temple. Like people have long, like the culture in Israel became so corrupt, right?

They're over at all the other temples. Right? My friend, Dr. Israel Stockman, who was Israel's leading anthropologist, took me on a tour of Israel. And you can't believe how many Jewish homes had not only, you know, were Jewish and worshipping Yahweh, but had ashrif statues.

Yes. Right? Like they were covering their bases in the ancient world, you know? So one thing I wanna say, just to make everybody understand where I'm coming from here. I am passionate about the prophetic.

My issue isn't about trying to take down the prophetic. My issue is, God, we need men and women who have this kind of calling, this kind of desperate for the survival of our nations, of humanity.

We need something. But what we have to me is kindergarten level. Like it's like somehow or nothing. And here's why I think this has happened. I'll give you what I think is the love and that's love and modern prophecy.

And you know what it is? Narcissism. Absolutely. We are culturally in a very dangerous place because narcissism, self-centeredness, is become the norm in everything, right? And all of what I have seen that's just broke my heart is this constant world of prophecy being used to feed our narcissism.

One of the reasons why I became so disillusioned at KCF was I saw this leaven, this seed,

this bad seed get into our culture, right? And what I'm talking about is narcissism. So what you had was you had a whole culture where these prophetic people were feeding Mike's narcissism basically telling everyone that he's special, right?

He's different. He's at a different level. Mike's got this unique calling. If you follow Mike, if you give Mike your money, you all can participate in Mike's great destiny. were, right? They were feeding that. Then all the prophecies, you know, I sat in meetings.

This is, this is the God honest truth. I sat in meetings where people were like Paul, Kener, like, can you guys just get past the message here so we can get to the good stuff?

Everybody was sitting, I'm telling you the truth. You know, I read in meetings where I could feel 5,000 people going, God, give me a prophecy. No, it's terrible. You know who you are out there listening to this because you know exactly what I'm talking about, right? It's like, see me, pick me, you know, like pick me, pick me, right? Because we're so desperate for some prophetic guy to tell us we're special, right? You know what I mean? Because it all became about me.

And so what really shocked me was on X, there's a couple people that just in the last couple days, if I posted this picture of Mike wearing this crown or something, this band, right? Like he's like chronic him or something. And all these people are praying for him. And I'm going, oh my God, this was the very thing I was trying to stop, right? And I was a combisimal failure, right? I could not stop the train. And why? Because so many people were so desperate to get words from God, right? That I just got run over. And what ended up happening is that's the reason I think we

went off the rails, right? Because it was like, we lost the narrative here. The narrative is about, you know, and I'm going to, this is funny that I'm going to quote Bob Jones, you know, after everything that he did to me and all that. But there's a story he told, whether it's true or not, I don't know, but the essence of it is so beautiful. And he basically says he died and he went to heaven and he's standing in line and he's at the judgment seat. And there's some little old lady that's in front of him. And he's terrified because he thinks God's going to tell the whole world,

all of us are everybody standing there, all of his sins, right? And the lady walks up to this light, like there's no fate. There's this light. And he goes out of the light comes this voice. And he says, and he says to her, step forward, I want to see if you bear the image of my son.

Wow. I'm telling I could cry like that. You know, again, whether it was a real revelation or not, but the essence of it to me is so Jesus, right? Yeah, right? It's about who you are, your character, your love for one another, right? We are so off the, you know, I mean, we're off into Disneyland when it comes to this whole prophetic thing, all these little prophetic characters out there, I just think the thing's a mess.

And so when you hear my heart, you have to understand what's driving it and what's driving it, is this almost desperate hunger for something at a different level, something that literally can change cultures, that can change nations.

In my first book, I have this statement, which is this, transformation of the soul is the soul of transformation. That was Jesus' worldview. If I can change, if I can root out selfishness and self-interness from humans, I can change nations.

You know, I've never been called to be a preacher, never wanted to. So what I'm about to do is a little bit out of my element, but I'm going to come the closest that I come to preaching.

Because everything that we have said in this podcast, we're, I know we're going to get some fallout, people are going to send us some hate mail. Usually when you and I do one, I get some really interesting hate mail, but everything that we have said is biblical, and it summed up in this one single verse.

Jesus said the same rain that falls on the just, also falls on the unjust. And if you understand what he is really saying there, you really have to take a step back and rethink the way that you view the world and its history.

But more than that, Jesus actually summed up the New Apostolic Reformation. I don't know if you know this or not, but there is a Bible passage summing it up. And it not only does it relate to everything that we have said right here, it is one of the most bastardized, taken out of context and reversed passages in the entire New Testament.

Because people who are in this movement and its predecessors, they can't accept what Jesus said. So in essence, their entire movement is against the words of Jesus. But Jesus said in Luke 16, he is angry that they have turned the religious system into something that did not serve the purpose of loving God and loving your neighbor.

And he tells the Pharisees, he says, the Pharisees who loved money heard all of this and they were sneering at Jesus. And Jesus said, you're the ones who justify yourself in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts.

What people value highly is detestable in God's sight. I've heard sermons preached on that phrase, but then they don't read the next one. And the next very next words out of his mouth while speaking to the Pharisees, he says, the law and the prophets were proclaimed until John.

Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of heaven is preached and everyone is for- their way into it. It's easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pin to drop out of the law. Here's where it gets interesting. I have heard sermons on the first sentence that I read. I have also heard sentences on the last one from people who want to put people back under their law. They say that Jesus said, if and then you know, he said, it's easier for heaven and earth to disappear than not to obey

this law is how they read it and preach it. That's not at all what he said. He's describing everything that we talked about. They were in the old covenant. The old covenant was now transitioning into the new covenant. The prophets of the old covenant whose one job was to proclaim what happened as an outcome of their actions. Were they good actions? Do they get the blessings?

Were they bad actions? Do they get the curses? That whole system existed under the old covenant. And Jesus said that it's easier for heaven and earth to disappear than one stroke out of that.

That was a complete bundled up system. But he said that system was proclaimed until John. And since then, the new covenant, basically, he's saying, now we have the gospel, then we had the law and the prophets. And so you hear the people who are cessationists, strong cessationists, they'll say things like that sentence means that there's not ever another prophet. But that's not what he said. Then on the flip side, you get the people who are hard core. Our fortune tellers are biblical. But it ignores that sentence the way that they're preaching it completely ignores it. So if you take that passage and you can read the whole chapter,

it gets it in context, it sums up the New Apostolic Reformation, the charismatic movement, the movements before it, and the movements that will come after it because they don't grasp the fact that Jesus is telling us that's what the way it was. Now we have a new way after John.

Well, as you know, I'm somebody that is very visual and parabolic meaning that I see a lot of things and other things. So in my view, from my perspective, what Jesus is doing is a little bit like the Wizard of Oz. And what I mean by that is that I think Jesus sees Judaism in the first century as the Tin Man. Right. And what he's trying to do is he's basically saying, you guys have lost my father's heart. You've taken the guts out of this thing and what you've got is a Tin Man. And so in the way that the Tin Man is trying to get to the wizard,

basically to the father, right, because he wants a heart. Right. He wants a heart. And I think that's where you get into so much of Jesus' teachings, because it's focusing on the heart, the motives of the heart. Everything that he does, even some of his offense, you know, it's like, you know, when he heals the guy on the Sabbath, you know, it's like, why would he do that? Right? Because he's trying to show the poor people something. And the reason is you've got all the people in the hood who've been told that if you come up here, I know

you're poor, but if you'll just sacrifice it, dove and give us a little bit of your money, we'll talk to God on your behalf. Because we care about you, right? That's what the system is telling the poor people, right? So what does Jesus do? He heals the guy in the hood.

And what happens? Everybody in the hood is going to have a block party, right? They're all celebrating their buddy gets help. And what does the system do? What does the Tin Man do? It comes running off on the mountain, telling everybody, you broke the law, right? Well, you can imagine what people are doing. They're sitting there going, are you freaking kidding me? Right? Are you freaking kidding me? Like, our buddy who can't walk is walking and you're so preoccupied because we broke the rules. Yeah. Your dumb rules, right? So all Jesus had do was just healed the guy and suddenly

he's got this lesson, right? For a whole group of people who are suddenly realizing these religious leaders don't give a damn about you. Yeah. Not really, right? Think about the parallels today. The New Apostolic Reformation, I've actually studied some of the sermons and heard them say similar things. They they try to lock the miracles of what they call the signs and wonders.

They try to lock it down into the movement and say that it doesn't exist out of this. Kind of like the prophets. The prophets don't exist out of this. They're creating a fantasy fictional world is what they're doing. And if there's a like if if the same scenario would have happened today and you know, the New Apostolic Reformation is attacking the different churches that believe whatever is the political thing of the day that they want to condemn. Well, if a miracle happens in that church, they reject it. And they say that's not of God because God exists only in our

movement. And it's exactly the same thing that's going on with the Pharisees. Well, as we've talked in a previous session of our previous discussion, I again am of the perspective that most Christian leaders have a puny God, right? To your point, it's like they can only see him operating in this little context here in our little movement, right? Again, are you freaking kidding me?

Like the God of creation somehow is limited to your little movement, right? Like he's limited to who are institutional structures and hierarchies, are you kidding me? Right? It's like, what kind of God do you serve?

Yeah. It's like, well, we have a restaurant called Jack in the Box. You know, now we have a God in the Box, right? It's like, let's go order off the menu that God in the Box, right?

Yeah. You know, it's insane sometimes. I think what happens to us, and it happens in all kinds of situations, is you can get so embedded into something that you lose your perspective and what's observed becomes normal.

Right. Right, because you don't step back. I mean, that's why I love perspective, because it's basically the birds I view, right? It's like instead of staring this thing right in my face where I can only see this, you step back and you just see the bigger picture.

I look at God over thousands of years of human history. I look at God at all these different things, you know? It's like, you know, you can still today go to Iraq and see the temple in Err, where Abraham is going and giving offerings to Nana to the moon God.

Yeah. Right? Oh, wait a minute. You mean telling me that God spoke to a guy that went to a pagan temple, he was worshiping a moon God? Yeah. He didn't go through the structure, you know what I mean?

Yeah. You see what I mean? It's like, I mean, and that's, you know, I think for both of us, is you get into human history and you end up, even I used to love the story, the A&E series biography, because you go in there and you see all these stories of humans who've had all these incredible experiences.

Now, they don't always say publicly, it's God, because it's, you know, that just wouldn't fly in their particular sector, but you can see the hand of God moving all over the place. That's what I say.

I mean, if you don't believe that Leonardo da Vinci had some sort of divinity, you know, some sort of divine interaction, Arab, that's just nuts. Like, the guy is centuries ahead, right? But there's all kinds of people like that, and they're not in church.

Yeah. Yeah. They weren't the Pope, right? They weren't Billy Graham, right? They were, you know, they're people outside the box. And so I think, frankly, almost all the prophetic people that are, in my view, genuinely prophetic, are typically all outside the box.

I mean, we could get into the whole psychology, and I mean, we could take this next, we can develop it further, but a lot of people that, are on this world. Is there are people that know things that aren't not naturally, right?

But every one of them have something in common in the year. They're culturally, that's the word. They have a difficult time fitting into normal humanity. Exactly. They're not the most popular person in the world.

They're not running for president. They weren't class president, right? They were the fringe person. And that's one common theme all the way through this history of people that have these sort of knowing gifts.

They all are outside the box. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I'm trying not to laugh. I'm holding it in because I am now picturing the very first email that I'm going to get as hate mail from this episode is Abraham and the Moon God.

But it just goes to show that the way that this religion has warped people's minds, everybody has a history and people change. And when you think in this black and white realm where it's always on or always off, you don't allow for God to work in the individual.

So I encourage anybody to go study the history of Abraham, his family, and the Moon God because he came from a city that worshiped the Moon God. That's where he came from. That's where he started.

And so this is important. And the reason why I'm emphasizing it is this because people totally miss the importance and significance of Abraham being taken to the altar to be sacrificed. So he came from a culture.

And Isaac. Isaac, I'm sorry. He came from a culture where human sacrifice was common place, right? That's right. And God gave an example and said, basically, look, I could make you do this, but I'm not.

There's a better way. And then the whole entire history, and except for when they fell into idolatry, the whole entire history of the Israelites did not have the human sacrifice. So this was a significant change in the worldview.

So much so that actually if you study the works of Eusebius, the father of church history, he actually writes about how significant of a shift in world culture this was. So I encourage some of the doctors.

I was going to say Dr. Stockman explained to me when we were doing Israel that the difference between the Israeli sacrifices and the pagan sacrifices that in the pagan sacrifices, the sacrifice or the priest was on the altar.

Yes. In the Hebrew way of doing it, the priest was never allowed on the altar. Right. So it's these little nuances that if, unless you study anthropology or archaeology, you don't really understand the difference.

Yeah. And if you don't understand how the... and culture's work, you wouldn't understand why that the Israelites believe that God loved the smell of burning flesh. That's an actual phrase from the Bible, right?

Exactly. In today's world, you would not think that, but anyway, I could go on... That's the stinkyest religion around it. Yeah. I could go on and on, but this has been fun. I'm glad we did it, and hopefully give somebody a little bit to think about, because the world view that is being created right now by these movements matches the Pharisees, not the children of God, so.

Yeah, I was going to say, don't freak out about our dialogue, because we're turning over rocks and we're examining things, but at the bottom of this, or if you could take something away, it's the understanding that God is way bigger than what we think, and it's involved in way more than we give him credit for.

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 William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.