The Misinformation Problem: When the Bible Says Something It Never Said

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, researcher and friend, John McKinnon, author of Godhead in their own words, voices of oneness preachers of the in-time message.

John is good to be back and I'm a little bit excited for this episode. I've actually wanted to do this for quite some time and this was your idea you brought it up but I have been wanting to talk about the blended scriptures that William Branham was bringing into the laterane movement because these blended scriptures became building blocks for things that we would develop into today's world and they were so far off the mark that it's blatantly obvious that he actually didn't read or understand the scriptures that he was referencing and I started thinking about this whenever I learned that some of the things that I

thought was in the Bible actually was not because they had been programmed in my head as though they were and yet at the same time there were many other people that thought this. Many people were surprised to learn that some of the passages like we mentioned today just simply aren't in the Bible but we were taught that they were biblical phrases and it reminds me of what's happening today. In today's world we have viral misinformation and it's so dramatically worse than whenever I began my career what was it 20-30 years ago. When I began my career

used to get every now and then you get an email and it would have some misinformation in it and there's a website called Snopes that you could go to back then and you could type in the headline or the title of the subject matter of the email and it would pull it up and they had researchers that would say no this is either proven true proven false or we just simply don't know but you could go and you could verify the claims. Well now with the volume of misinformation that's coming out it's impossible to realize and I was thinking this is so far

worse than back in the 40s and 50s but then I stopped and thought about this subject that we're getting into today they had the same type of misinformation it just was in a different way because they had different forms of media there was not social media like there is today but there were many many circuit writer preachers so if you take just religious misinformation look at all of the people who are bringing all of them.

all of the misinformation about what the Bible says based off of their own ideas and some of them like we'll get into today, I don't really think they even read the Bible. So we're gonna talk about something that's, it's a little bit, for me, it's a little bit a passionate discussion because this affected every aspect of my life, every single thing that I had been taught was questionable.

I'll say it like that. There were things that were true, yes, but it was questionable as to whether it was true, but the building blocks of doctrine that I had, some of them like we're gonna be discussing today was just completely blatantly false.

Just good to join you again for another segment and we're gonna continue on what we discussed the last time blending the two extremes together into a synthesis and or different contexts that are used to produce a synthesis, which is really where your goal is to take people.

Is today I wanna talk about something that comes up a lot when people do study the teachings of William Brownham, the way he would take two different scriptures and pull phrases out of each one and then blend them together into a brand new sentence that the Bible never actually says.

You know, this is not careful Bible study. It's not really exegesis. Exegesis means drawing out the meaning out of the text according to its own context is the grammar and the setting of the Bible.

But what Brownham often did is closer to the opposite. He stitched together words and created statements that support a particular idea or a direction he was taking the people. So I wanna draw a context truss between the two here.

There are ministers who are genuinely faithful to the task of interpreting scripture and they're the ones that slow down. They take time to ask the really hard questions. You know, what is the actual context of the passage?

Who was it written to? What did the words mean in their original setting? How was it, how were the words used in their original language? In the culture, how did this first fit with the rest of the chapter or the book or the whole council of God?

And they're willing to sit down with the text long enough to let it speak on its own terms. They don't rush to a conclusion, you know, just because a text sounds powerful or seems to support something they already believe.

Their goal is not to be impressive. Their goal is to be accurate. And because of that, they protect the meaning of the text and the people who are listening to them. But they're other ministers.

For whatever reason, they don't take the time. They tend to move too quickly from reading a verse and then drawing a conclusion. Sometimes it's because they already have a doctrinal point or a pattern they wanna make.

And then the text just becomes a tool to serve that point. And sometimes it's a lack of patience or maybe a lack of education with the hard work of careful study. Instead of lingering over the grammar, the context, flow of the argument, they grab maybe a striking phrase and connect it with another striking phrase from somewhere else.

And certainly they've created a teaching. It sounds biblical, but it actually hasn't been drawn, you know, carefully from the Bible. And the difference here is significant. You know, one approach makes the text supreme and submits themselves to the text.

The other makes themselves supreme and they just use the text. You know, one's willing to let Scripture correct or refine their thinking. The other's more interested in making Scripture conform or conform to what's already something they wanted to say.

You know, when a minister refuses to take the time and do the work of real interpretation exegesis, the door opens to exactly the kind of blending and shortcut methods, you know, we've been talking about here and that we're going to talk about today versus get rearranged, context, get ignored, and eventually people start trading the preacher's creative combinations as if they were the word of God itself.

And I'm going to give several examples of that as we go through in this another podcast in the ministry of William Brown. The faithful ministry requires a discipline of careful study. It requires the humility to say, I need to understand what this passage really is saying before I tell anyone what I think it means.

You know, this kind of patience doesn't always produce the most dramatic statements, but it produces something more valuable to the people. And teaching that Scripture can be trusted because, and they can be trusted as they are delivering the Scripture because it is completely derived from the text.

And that's what the contrast we're going to show today, John. And one path takes the time to listen carefully to Scripture. The other tends to speak before it has truly listened. You know, that's the exact problem.

Some people just simply do not think before they speak. And yet some of those same people have platforms where they can influence large audiences. And so what happens is people who are listening to them think they've thought these things through, especially in the cases like we're talking about today.

This is a messenger from God, we believe. So God must be speaking through him or maybe he's at least read the Bible, read and understood the Scripture. But it's very similar to what happens today.

In today's world, you have people who don't really think before they speak, but they have social media tools where they can create a meme or they can create short videos of them talking or something to that effect.

They don't actually give the whole point. And here's where it gets really, really sketchy. And it relates back to exactly what you just said. Not all misinformation is entirely false. Sometimes misinformation does have just a single thread of truth.

And so because you can connect with that single thread of truth, you start to feel like this is trustworthy. In this case, we're talking about the blending of two Bible scriptures, which I'll let you get into and discuss that more.

But think of that. People are hearing the statement and they hear the quote from the Bible. They can easily open up their Bible. Some of them may have already memorized it and they can say, yes, this is true.

I remember that past. from the Bible, but then the misinformation happens because they're hearing another passage that they can also verify and identify, but the problem is, in the way that it's presented, those two aren't connected. So think of a meme today, you've seen the political memes, I'm certain that the listeners have, where something is said in the meme that's actually true, but you find in the comment feeds, well, that's, yes, that's true, but you're totally missing this other picture, and then they'll go in and explain why the entire meme is misleading to the public. That's really what's happening here. Yes, both passages are Bible passages. We're not

arguing that, but when you combine them and you try to make the combination say something that it doesn't, that's the misinformation. So I'm going to give the first clear example of this, William Brown's mystery. I appreciate your comments, John, totally appropriate, and we're going to really dive into this and really explain it to the people so they hopefully will come away with what we're talking about. But, Bradham repeatedly says this statement in his assertions, he said it many times, he says, every person born is born in sin, shaping in iniquity, and comes to the world speaking lies. But that phrase is a combination of two different

Psalms. One is Psalms 51.5, when David said, behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin to my mother conceived me. That's David speaking personally after his sin with Bathsheba. He's confessing the depth of his own sinful nature. But let's look at Psalm 58.3, where he gets the other part of this verse from where he blends it. Psalms 58.3 says the wicked are estranged from the womb. They go astray from birth, speaking lies. So that verse is the other one is specifically talking about the wicked. It's not a universal statement about every human baby.

You know, there was a commentator, David Malik, I looked up, talked about this 58th Psalm in contrast to the 51, Psalm 51. 58 is a bold protest against unrighteous judges. It opens with an indignant expostulation of their deliberate perversion of justice while they pretend to uphold it.

It lays bear their character in those of whom they favor, as men, thoroughly, habitually, by their very nature corrupt, and finally, because they are thus beyond all hope of correction or amendment, it calls upon God to rob them of their power, and bring all their counsels to naught. From their birth, from the wicked's birth, is from the belly. The object, however, here is clearly not to insist upon the general truth of our innate depravity.

It marks a special character of wicked men, as man whose life has been one of continuous unchecked career of wickedness, bold, habitual, hardened transgressors, whose maturity and vice is what might be expected from their early depravity. So you see, If you take that psalm, you can't really blend it with what David's talking about.

David is talking from a repentant heart of what he did with Bashiba. This is the psalmist is talking about wicked men who are unjust rulers of the day and how they come forth from their mother's womb, speaking lies.

The righteous are not so, but it is true that we have spoken lies in our lifetime. There's no doubt. But these are two very different psalms. So I would say William Brannum did not take the time to thoroughly exegete these two.

He just wanted to blend them together to make a statement. It sounds good. It sounds biblical and people will repeat it today as if it were biblical as if it were a one Bible verse.

And there's where the danger comes in because if this seems innocent, but we're going to get into more and later podcast that will show where it's very dangerous to scripture and very dangerous to how you interpret who Jesus is even.

So I believe it's all my opinion is that as all was done for a purpose, you know, in his ministry. And we'll get into that more as we go along. But Brannum to born and see and shape it in an equity from one place and speaking lies from the other, turned it into a single doctrinal slogan that applies to all of us from birth.

He spoke those exact words from 1951 to 1965, about 39 times, at least that I could find. And here's what he said in 1955, he says, when you're born in this world, you're a center when you're born.

The Bible said we're born and seen and shape it in an equity, come to the world, speaking lies. Here he says in 1957, the sermon perfection and the Bible declares that we're all born and seen, shaped in an equity, come to the world, speaking lies.

So you see, if you go back and search the message in the table, you'll find he says those exact words, you know, all the time. But it's problematic to blend scriptures because you just storked our meaning.

Again, we said he takes two truths here in the scripture. Now these, this your thesis, he takes the truth, it is true. What was spoken in scripture, we are born and seen and on the other side of some point in our life, at least 99.99, 99% of us will speak a lie.

There's very few people that ever never told a lie. And so the synthesis was to combine the two into one sentence and call us all as if Psalm 58 was speaking of us. So the problem with this is not that it's innocent, but ignores context.

Psalm 51 is just a personal prayer of repentance. Psalm 58 is a strong denunciation of violent unjust people. They're not interchangeable and they're not combinable. Second, you know, it creates impression that the Bible is just a collection of loose phrases that we can rearrange however we like.

Hey, once you start doing that, the text. really stops controlling the doctrine. The teacher's desired outcome starts controlling the text and that's the most dangerous. Now, third, it can exaggerate or even distort true Christian doctrines. You know, original sin is a real biblical teaching. But saying every newborn creature comes to the world speaking lies, goes beyond what either the psalm actually claims and can lead people into an unbalanced view about infant, skilled, or human nature. The problem is simple. The Bible never puts those exact words together as one continue with truth about every person. When we glue verses together like that,

John, we're no longer letting each passage speak in its own setting. We're actually manufacturing a new statement. You know, that's just it. I started to understand that concept when I first left the movement. I started entering into new church and we covered Bible passages chapter by chapter by chapter. And we did not forget the chapter before and we often referenced the chapter after.

And by we, I mean the minister behind the pulpit. And so I started to understand that reading in context is critical because it says entirely different things than I was taught. I'll just say it like that. It would be like, if you, I don't know, if you took two different books of the Bible and you combine them like this, it would be similar to if you took Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities and Les Meserah and just took pieces of each book, little paragraphs or passages from each book and combine them to make a new book. It

becomes neither Tale of Two Cities or Les Meserah. It is a completely different book with a completely different meaning and story. You just can't do this and make it say the same thing. So what you do when you take two Bible verses and you blend them, you end up making a new book and in a fact you create a new Bible.

And sadly, because you're choosing the scriptures to make your statement or your theme, you're inventing the Bible according to your own viewpoint. So what Brannum was doing essentially was he was not trying to make his statements fit the Bible or the theme that the Bible is presenting in the context. What he was trying to do is take the Bible and make it fit his theme. And since he could not do that, there are cases like this and there's others that we can examine where he's literally taking the Bible out of context just to prove his point

rather than being aligned with Scripture. So if you think Solar Scriptura, he was the opposite. He was the anti-Solar Scriptura. And this really, for me, this creates a big problem because whenever you do this, again, these Bible verses are real, listeners hear it and not everybody makes that connection. Not everybody's critically thinking to understand, wait a minute, those two Bible verses, they don't go together at all. But that's what he was doing. And so as this became a viral thing, I'll never forget whenever this example that you just gave, come into the world speaking lies.

If you go to the Brannum organization website and you search grouped by words, speaking lies, you're gonna find that just that phrase happens 84 times from 1951 to 1965. But it's not the only time he talks about this.

In the irony is, whenever I learned that, I had already been going through his life history and finding all of the many things that he said that were blatant lies about himself, about his ministry, about his supernatural events, all of the different things that he's saying.

Yes, there were some that may have been true. Yes, there were some that were questionable, but the vast majority of them were actually lies. And then here's a man who's bringing this doctrine to support his ministry, saying that we come into the world speaking lies.

The irony was just overwhelming. So I began to look at the way that he was presenting his information and the way that he was twisting his audience so if there was an issue, then suddenly it doesn't matter because we all come into the world speaking lies.

If he gets caught in one of his myths truths, all he has to do is say, yes, but brother sister, we came into the world speaking lies. And if I'm not mistaken, I think the first year if I remember correctly was 1951, I was going through that history and you can start to see where people are starting to question his statements, the biggest of which is a man raised from the dead.

This became such a big event in here locally in Jeffersonville. He was in Canada claiming that he pulled a body out of the morgan, raised it from the dead. And the newspapers wrote to Jeffersonville, you can find all this information on my website.

And Jeffersonville news is like no way that happened. We would have heard it. And so they investigated, they found the guy and he hadn't actually died. And so this turned into this big battle.

Well, things like this were starting to stack up. And by 1951, he had to have an answer and that's when the doctrine came out. Come into the world speaking lies. So I don't know if it was a defense of his ministry.

He's not alive to ask why he did this, but what he did was so grossly an error that I have heard that same phrase from ministers today who also haven't read the Bible, to understand this is not actually a Bible verse.

They're quoting Brannum directly saying the Bible says and then they combine the two verses. So the misinformation has continued into today's world through the Brannum religions, but now compound that with everything that was built on top of Brannumism.

Every single minister and we're talking, there were hundreds, if not thousands of ministers in these revival meetings. Thousands of people potentially who take a doctrine that they think is in the Bible, but it's actually not.

It's the blend of two. And then they start building doctrines on top of it. Well, we come into the world speaking lies and then X or Y or Z. You don't know where this has ended up.

The problem. As you examine that is when you build false doctrines on top of false doctrines you end up with the stack of doctrines that turns into such error that you can't really make any sense of it at all.

John, that's just so true. When we distort scripture, it's very dangerous to mess. What do I want to get into next? Why is this method that William Branham is using so dangerous? This seems so innocent, but why is it dangerous?

Why is it actually harmful to blend scriptures? Because the two verses reside in different contexts. They're not meant to be combined. God never combined them in the Word, and though it sounds good, so we should never try to alter what God said.

So, as we said, Psalm 51, just an internal humble confession, focusing on David himself and his repentance, but Psalm 58's an external accusation focusing on wicked rulers and judges, and malicious enemies who actually practice injustice.

Psalm, the context of Psalm 51 was written after David's adultery with Mashiba. It deals with personal moral favor, failure, and is cleansing. But Psalm 58 is just a communal lament and a prayer for divine judgment against these corrupt leaders in society.

But it's problematic here to blend them because it misapplies what these verses are about it, applies both statements to all human beings. But the reality of Psalm 51 only applies to David. It's about a 58, it's about a specific condemnation of wicked.

It confuses the state of being with active choices. The blend is to suggest humans are born structurally broken and actively deceitful at the same moment. But the reality is Psalm 51 speaks about a passive state of origin, such as shape it in aiquity.

We cannot control our inherited followed nature, the original sin that was in us. But conversely, Psalm 58 speaks of some active behavior, speaking lies. That's where you made a choice to speak lies. But newborn infants are physically and cognitively incapable of speaking and formulating lies.

So the two passages really don't go together. It also invents non-existent Bible verses. And as we said, he spoke this as if the Bible said it in one sentence. People often quote, born in sin, shape it in aiquity, come to the world of speaking lies like it's a single direct quote.

But it's actually blending has created a proof text. And we're going to get into what proof text are as we go along. But that it misrepresents the actual written word. It also strips away the literary context of the whole verses.

And it does that any time you blend scriptures together that are totally unrelated. Psalm 51 is a prayer for mercy, whereas Psalm 58 is a cry for justice. So blending them into a single theological blanket statement, it erases that deeply personal repentance of Psalm 51, because it also says that you're also speaking lies for your mother's womb, it removes what David was feeling, and it also messes up the social justice outcribes Psalm 58 as to what it was speaking about.

A good Bible study, John, asks what does first mean into the original audience? How does it fit with the rest of scripture? So blending two verses into a hybrid sentence skips his questions entirely, and also these Psalms were probably written very far apart.

There's where it gets to be such a huge problem, because once the misinformation has spread, once it becomes a slogan, like this has actually become a slogan, he said it over 80 times, and I heard minister saying it repeatedly.

Once it gets to the point of making a slogan, people will attach that in their memory, and even if the person were to come out and say, I was wrong, I made a mistake, I quoted these two Bible passages, and I wasn't thinking I'd combine them, and I made the Bible say something that it didn't say.

Even if the person were to do this, it's already stuck in the heads of the people, so correcting it becomes almost impossible. Think in today's world, misinformation spreading, especially for famous figures. Take somebody like, take Garth Brooks, if he were to say something about country music, that's blatantly false, and spread it through Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and people start reading it, people will accept it, adopt it, and then suddenly this has become proven fact, just because Garth Brooks said it.

Well, that was happening in the religious realm. There were people who were leaders of these revivals, who were saying things about the Bible that was completely false. Some of them, I think they had to have known it was completely false, but it served a purpose and agenda that they were pushing, and people adopted that agenda, but the slogans that they invented like this by combining two passages and making them say something entirely different than it said, that slogan stuck in the people's heads.

So as that is spreading throughout religion, again, this creates a core foundation, a bedrock of doctrine, and Branum as the leader of the revivals, he is by almost all accounts that I have read.

He is the foremost leader who spearheaded the post-war war two healing revival. He was looked at as not just Garth Brooks, but far more fame. He would be the tailor swift of the religion.

Everybody's looking to this guy, so everybody wants to quote him, and these are quotable things once they become a slogan. This was a slogan in our religion, come into the world speaking lies, and it's such a ridiculous slogan when you think about it.

Why would you want to focus on somebody who's speaking lies, especially when the person who's saying it is also speaking lies? So for me, I had to take a step. back and I had to re-evaluate every single thing that I had learned from the man in the Bible because I found that there were many, many things that just simply were not correct.

At the same time, I'm going through that exercise. My wife is creating all of these student programs for our children and she remembered back into her days whenever we were in the movement. And she was trying to do a Bible teaching program for the students and she wanted to go through the Bible, all of the religious, all of the figures in the Bible, the famous figures, and create a program where the students could learn from not just the Bible but also William Branham.

What she came to realize is he actually didn't talk about the Bible a whole lot. Most of what he talked about was himself and so she had trouble creating that for her students. After we left, she thought back to that and thought, wait a minute.

Most of what he said, again, was about himself, but even the things that he said about the Bible, they were presented in such a way that it took them out of their context to point to himself.

And that was when it hit me. This served a purpose. This wasn't mere accident. He didn't accidentally take two verses and combine them. He had a strategy behind it. And once you identified the strategy and then started to piece together what came next, it got, my stomach was upset.

I could not believe that somebody did this. And to think that this became one of God's generals in the world today, to think that there were people who respect a man who was purposefully misusing the Bible to uplift himself, it bothered me.

And rest is history. You can see my website, my research, why I do what I do today. But this was a plague and it plagued the movement. The sad thing is it also set a precedent.

Look at the ministry today, look how they misuse scripture, look how they don't care. That's exactly the precedent it was set when William Brannum did this. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

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

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top, and as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.

On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. We just can't go creating Bible verses and trying to interpret the Bible with our own private interpretation. And because that's just disastrous. But we see it happening in the ministry that we've been talking about here. So what's a teacher though focusing on what the teacher's doing? What's he willing to create? You know, these hybrid verses. Then the authority starts to shift. So now we're getting to what's really happening here. Scriptures no longer the final rule is no longer supreme. This new combined phrase becomes a new

authority. People start quoting the blended version as if it were the Bible itself. And that's how extra biblical ideas, you know, get protection because they appear to be biblical language. It's very, very subtle. But the safe and honest way is always the same. You know, read verse in the Bible in its own context. Let the Bible speak what it actually says. So listen to what William Brennan said in 1953 in the living Jesus Christ. He said, but listen, God wants us to believe his word just like it's written there, whose forever shall take or add, add to or

take away the same shall be taken out of his part of the book of life. See? So let's just believe it the way it's written. Now I say that's great advice. And he said that many times. But if you'll know, William Brennan might have been saying one thing, but he was actually doing another. He did just the very opposite by speaking this from 1951 and 1965. And here he is in 1953 saying, we don't need to take the Bible and make it what we want it to be. We want to say it like it, say

it like the Bible says it. But we find out that the way he believed the Bible and the way he talked doctrine was sometimes much different than the scripture actually meant. Here's another one in divine healing in 1954. He said, I believe with Alma heart that from in the beginning of Genesis to a man in revelation is inspired of God is every bit the truth. There's not one word of it wrong. It's all the truth. I believe every word of it, I don't want to take away or add any. So when you when you blend two verses together, you're doing exactly that. You're

adding two scripture or you're taking away from the meaning of scripture. So I feel like he's he's actually guilty of the things he he doesn't really want to be guilty of. And maybe this is all accidental. I can't say, but I would say in some other cases, it's very intentional. He says it many times, you can go read many of his quotes about no scriptures of private interpretation. That meant who's ever will let him come? The last book in the Bible said, who's ever will let him come? And he that will take away or add to the same shall be taken out

of the book of life for him. That was spoken in 1960 to whom shall we go? He also said in 1958, here you him. And the scripture is note of no private interpretation. It was wrote by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can reveal it for his head from the eyes of the wise and prudent and revealed to abes, such as we'll learn. But without even knowing it, you know, William Brannum really condemned himself because he constantly did this misrepresenting some scriptures and privately interpreted the scripture. But I hope and pray he did it in ignorance, you know, and not willfully because he even

stated as in his own ministry in 1960, June 7th, here in receiving and acting, he always questions as what does a prophet mean? It doesn't out together mean a four-seer, a fourth-teller, fourth-teller, a prophet means that that is given to him to vindicate he is an interpreter of the divine word. He said again in 1960 in July, what is a prophet? A divine interpreter had the divine interpretation. What does the prophet word prophet mean in Hebrew? A divine interpreter of the written word? The word of the Lord came to the prophet of the seer. I've told you the truth.

That was in 1961. And I want to pause right there because this is significant. Think about this. Here's a man who is by all accounts the leader of the post-war war two healing revival, who is taking Bible passages out of their context, out of what they initially meant, to combine them together, to make them say something different than they actually say for a specific agenda. And part of that agenda, as we've discussed, is to say and claim that there is a restoration of the church that is happening in the end time, even though that is not in the Bible. That's part

of this agenda. In the end time, we will restore the offices of a apostle, prophet, teacher, pastor, et cetera. He is combining these verses and he's building blocks. He's creating these building blocks of Scripture to say that the church needs restored. That's what he's doing. And then he starts to create. He takes the the fivefold ministry concept and he turns it into this pyramid of authoritarian structure and he puts the apostle at the top and the prophet below this.

And then he starts to redefine what it actually means to be a prophet. Think about that. Whenever you ask any of the followers of Brannum about prophecy, they will immediately respond, yes, but he is vindicated because of healing. And those two are completely separate things. They've done the same thing. They have combined two different meanings to make a third meaning that isn't quite correct. A prophet is vindicated by whether or not the prophecy came true or not, not by the healing. That has continued in today's world. You find apostles and prophets who are making claims that God told them something. When it fails, they just say, I apologize, I was wrong,

but it's still correct because. And then they'll go down this pathway to try to circular reasoning or whatever you want to call it. They'll try to make it sound like God was still speaking through them. And the words came out to be false. The prophecy came out to be false.

It's because the concept of what is a prophet. in the movement had been redefined and this is something that there are many things that I can say Brannum did not initiate but I will say redefining a prophet. I've not found anybody else besides Brannum who actually redefined what the prophet was. These things is said in his ministry that he's called himself a prophet or he believes him to be and then he's also now he's saying he's a divine interpreter of the word. So that's how he can make that leap and do the things he does

with Scripture. He also calls himself a private student of the word and he just got through saying which the Bible says itself is of no private interpretation but his own private interpretation led him to make statements like this in the church-age book Exposition Lettersian Church Age.

He said based on these seven visions along with rapid changes which are swept in the world in the last 50 years I predict I do not prophesy that these visions will have all come to pass by 1977. He said I maintain this prediction after 30 years because Jesus said no man can know the year week or month in which his covenant was to be completed. He did not say that. That's why he thought he could guess the year. He said so I'll repeat I sincerely believe and maintain as a private student of the word along with divine inspiration the 1977 off to terminate the world systems

and usher in the millennium. So here we go him talking about himself being a private interpreter of the word having his own private interpretation and that's what led him to believe 1977 was going to end you know the whole world systems. So a person who interprets Scripture to match their own personal desires or biases is said to practice Isa Jesus rather than it makes him an Isa-ji rather than an exa-jiit. Isa-jiit means reading personal ideas and preferences into the text rather than drawing the true meaning out of it. They're often called a scripture twister. So then they also a scripture twister as a descriptive term for someone who manipulates

or forces versus out of context to suit a personal or self-serving goal and they also use what is called proof texting by selecting isolated verses out of context to prove preconceived points and ignoring the risks of the passage. You know where in Bram also claimed he was a typologist because he had no education. So he said many times 30 times at least from 1953 to 1964 he said I'm not a theologian therefore I have to teach all that I know about the Bible from types and shadows you call me a type of a kind of typologist. So typology is a good way to go about

interpreting events but it must be kept under strict controls to avoid drifting into unrestrained and subjective allegorizing and it does create bad theology at times if you don't maintain the controls. Now I would offer the opinion that William Brownham claim and have no education and he wasn't a studied man, you know, as far as theologically, that he couldn't maintain those strict controls. So typology led him into some areas where we might shouldn't have gone. But bad typology, the dangers of it is you read imaginative connections into a text that the original authors never intended. We just saw this happen in the two Psalms that we went

over. It confuses historical types with wild allegory. It adds outside features onto a biblical symbol to prove a personal point and we'll see that as we go along too. It ignores the actual literal historical context of what the original passage was saying.

So typology is really not an alternative to exegesis. It's an outgrowth from it that you can use to support exegesis. So a strict typologist performs good exegesis when they allow the grammatical historical study to uncover the real divinely designed patterns in salvation history. But typologists fail when their enthusiasm for finding patterns overrides the actual vocabulary and grammar and context of the text. Here's probably the most important thing I'll say today, John.

You know, and this is it, William Brannum admits that he only used typology only exclusively to interpret scripture due to his lack of education. His blending of two or more scriptures together make them appear what the text is saying rather than carefully telling the people what the text is saying. It shows and this is important. It shows that he's not trying to remain faithful to the scripture, but is using the Bible. And I think in this is my opinion, he's using the Bible very carelessly and it's not going to be edifying to the people in the end. We need to compare

scripture with scripture carefully, not by cutting and pasting phrases into new sentences. When we refuse to blend versus this way, we protect the meaning of the text and the integrity of the doctrines, you know, we claim to believe. That's where this gets really, really difficult to entangle. Think about this. A doctrine itself might be true, but the particular arguments used to support that doctrine might be inaccurate. So there were people who were Bible scholars who were in these revivals. Think about this. There were people who probably knew he's taking this first out of context and this first out of context and he's combining them, but maybe they supported his

doctrine. So they knew that the building blocks he used was false, but the end result we maybe are aligned with. Maybe that was their way of thinking, but the building blocks still made their way into the ministry. So as you have building blocks of false doctrine, which this clearly was, then suddenly you have the opportunities to stack more building blocks on top of it.

And quite frankly, that's really the problem for me. You don't want to lay a false bedrock, a false doctrine, but that's what he was doing. And worse, he said it was coming directly from God as the messenger of the hour as he claimed.

So those same people who believed that the end result was true, they could ignore the two building blocks that were misused or misquoted when they were combined. But their agenda aligned with his and their belief in him as the entire messenger or the Elijah of the day, they believed this so they simply didn't care and they let it go by.

If a doctrine is truly biblical, you don't need to invent verses by combining verses to make it survive, but they were doing it and they allowed it and it set a precedent. Now ministries are claiming the wildest of things and they just loosely quote a Bible passage to believe it and people accept it because that is the pattern, that is the precedent that was said and that's the pattern that has continued to be followed.

You must have integrity in the doctrines and if your doctrine is to be built on the Bible, you need to actually go to the Bible and actually find something in context that supports what you're saying or then you have to separate it and say simply, this is my opinion.

It may not be scriptural, but it's my opinion. The problem is, as I just mentioned, he could not do this because he was claiming that his ministry, his message, was a message directly from God and in his own words, when the angel the Lord moves down, it is God's voice to you.

So people are believing that this is God's voice to them and yet it's not quite scriptural. What do you do with this? The people who knew, the people who were listening who knew that he was doing this, they simply didn't care because they were aligned in the agenda.

God, I appreciate those comments. This is a very deep subject in a way and we're using two very simple examples to illustrate the point and I've got more to show in the next episode even and it gets even more important as we go along as the doctrines get far more important to the believer.

But let me slow down on this point for just a minute because it's one of the most important safeguards that we have in biblical interpretation. The principle is simple to state here but it's very profound.

We compare scripture with scripture very carefully and we don't need to cut phrases out of different passages and paste them together to brand new sentences that the Bible never wrote and the writers never intended to write.

And there's a real difference between those two approaches and when the New Testament writers wrote or quote the Old Testament or one apostle echoes another, they're still respecting that original context and meaning and in Paul's case sometimes he's expounding the meaning because we know he was the apostle that wrote most of the New Testament and God gave him those revelations but that that's showing how God's revelation holds together to a unified whole. That's legitimate and it's necessary. The whole Bible is one coherent story. And so we get, let the clearer passage of Shed light on the harder ones. We let

the overall teaching of scripture guide of understanding of any single verse. But that's very different from what happens when someone takes the sentence from Psalm 51 and half a sentence from Psalm 58 and wells them to a new doctrinal slogan. You know, at that point when no longer comparing scripture with scripture, we're creating a third text a hybrid, if you will, and then treating that hybrid as if it carries the authority of the original. And once you start doing that, several things are put at risk here. First, you put at risk the actual meaning of the text of scripture. Every verse in the Bible

was written by a specific author to a specific audience in a specific situation using specific words. When we rearrange those words, we silence the original voices. David's confession in Psalm 51 is no longer allowed to be David's confession. The father's declaration over his son is no longer allowed to stand as the father spoke it. We've decided we can improve upon the wording of the Holy Spirit even inspired. Second, the integrity of the doctrines we claim to believe is put in jeopardy. I'll be hitting on this one in the next episode, but it's a major issue in the message. Sound doctrine is supposed to arise from the text,

not the other way around. When we manufacture new sentences, we open the door for doctrine to start driving the interpretation instead of the interpretation of scripture driving our doctrine. And that's how sincere people end up defending ideas like they've defended the message that feel very biblical because they use biblical words. Yet those ideas cannot actually be found in any single passage or in the careful synthesis of passages. That's why the church has historically insisted on the analogy of scripture that scripture has to interpret scripture because it's a protection. It keeps us from turning the Bible and just to a collection of inspirational fragments

that we can reassemble however we like. It forces us to stay true to scripture, stay under the authority of what God said. Rather than we can make him appear to say something different by clever combination of scriptures. So we refuse the shortcut of blending verses into new sentences. We're doing something deeply constructive here. We're protecting the meaning of the text. We're saying in effect the Bible is already sufficient. Clear enough is clarity. We do not need to help it along by trying to rewrite it, trying to help God interpret it.

You know, that's not a small commitment and it takes effort. It's one of the main ways we keep our teaching tethered to the word of God rather than the teacher's creative rearrangements of it.

So John, I believe that shows the direction we're going here, and I've got a few more segments to do where William Brannum blended scriptures together, or even changed the meaning entirety of scripture. And it means so much to our salvation and how you teach salvation.

It means so much to how we teach the Lord Jesus Christ and his deity that I just got to get into it the next time. But of course, as he declared himself a prophet, as a divine student of the word, private student of the word, a divine interpreter of the word, he felt he had this authority.

As the prophet or the divine interpreter, to change the word as he wanted to. So I think believers in the message, they really need to step back now. Take a hard look at where they have been led to.

And in fact, the blending of scriptures has produced something unheard of, you know, if they find out that it's unheard of in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and then how we view ourselves as Christians.

As believers, maybe on the edge of a precipice here, they've gone out on a limb that goes nowhere, and they've lost sight of the gospel prowl preached. They may have been able to ride the coattails of William Brannum up to this point, but now they're at a crossroads, they're at a decision point.

So I really believe us the word that they've been given, the word they've been given in the message will not work in this day, rather than the other way around the way William Brann stated it, that the word of the apostles is what will not work in this day.

You know, this is where blending scriptures and changing the meaning leads you to. It's not a good situation to be in, John, and I want to go into that more detail next time. Absolutely.

You know, if more people realize that this is how all of this mess that you see today actually began by somebody who, in his own words, he said, I don't know the book real well, but I know the author.

And yet he proceeded to be a Bible teacher. People were being taught by somebody who openly admitted that they did not know the Bible. And yet they believed him to be the messenger of God, and they believed that his voice was God's voice to them.

Well, when you do this, you're taking God's voice, saying something that isn't biblical and creating a new Bible. And in effect, that's what I would say happened here. They did create a new Bible.

And Brannum was bringing a message to the people, but it wasn't really God's message. And I think that's the thing that really needs to sink in because there are ministries today, we've, we mentioned one in previous episodes where they're claiming this God was so indwelling into William Brannum that even a halo came above his head.

That's what Benny Han says. Others say similar things. They really believe that this was God's message because so many ministries, so many organizations, so many empires were built on top of it. And when you have something that's built on top of false doctrine, can you really say that it is a Bible-based movement?

I don't know that I... say that. Now knowing the way that he taught the Bible, I can't say that I was in a Bible-based movement. I was in a messenger-based movement. I was in a Brannum-based movement. But it wasn't really a Bible-based movement. We focused all of our intention on William Brannum and his message of the in-time hour. And that message of the in-time hour didn't quite align with the Bible, so he had to invent Bible verses to make it fit. For me, that's a problem. So 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-brannum.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.