When Numbers Become Revelation

Hello and welcome to another episode to have the William Brantley, of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship, and the author of three books, the latest is some said they blundered breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City prophets, and the international house of prayer.

Bob, it's good to be back and to talk about numbers. I made a computer programmer, leader, a CIO, I've done various different things, and numbers is a big part of what I do, and interestingly, I'm fascinated with the numerology of the things that I do based off of what I came from, which is something we're going to talk about today, but I did a deep dive into this, and I'll let you introduce what we're going to talk about, but I did a deep dive into numerology and trying to understand what was the fascination with numbers, and

this weird mess we come out of, and I'll let you introduce it, but it just was so crazy that I had to learn why. I was just asking, why is it this way? Well, for those that are tuning in with us, I've had this, I don't want to say haunting, but unresolved question for 40 years, and it stems back to what happened in our church in the 1980s. By way, a review of you haven't listened to the podcast before. I grew up in Catholic. My parents were Roman Catholic, and I lasted till I was about 11 or 12 years

old, and then ended up getting really disillusioned, and went into existentialism for a while, but then as a late teen, I had an experience that led me to trying to understand a little bit more of Jesus, and I ended up in the evangelical camp. Horoscopes, numerology, all of that kind of mysticism stuff was from that perspective wrong, like you just didn't do that stuff. So that was sort of my paradigm when we launched Kansas City Fellowship in late 82. I had some experience from the previous years in the charismatic world, and very little about paying a costalism. So in...

March of 1983, Bob Jones shows up at our church, right? And he's an odd character to me, but there are things happening that get my attention. But something, and he ends up bringing something into our congregation that I really struggled with, primarily because I was ignorant.

But even more, it was, I think this is wrong, but nobody seems to think it's wrong, and it was this. He brought two things. One, numerology. It was like everything that had numbers attached to it had some sort of hidden meaning, right?

And it was the only thing that I could, at that particular time of my life, identify it with would have been Kabbalah, which is the Jewish kind of mystic, the mystic side of Judaism, which is tied into a lot of numerologies based on the Hebrew language, right?

Then there's two sides of this. So one part of it is that everything has this hidden meaning based on numbers, like what time did this happen? What time was your dream? What time, right, everything?

You know, a lot of it was around dates, right? Numerology, or on dates, and then times. And then the other thing, which I'd like you to address if we could, is the whole thing of dream interpretation.

That got pretty wild for me, because nothing meant what it was, like everything was symbolic. And so suddenly, if I'm myself in this world where there's a whole bunch of people trying to communicate things, but nothing is what it seems.

Now, the reason why I struggle with this, and this is probably the first time I've ever shared this story, so I'm going on a little bit, and then we'll address that. I actually had a very powerful dream.

I don't remember my dreams. So when I do, they're pretty powerful, but I don't know what they mean. So I'm going to share this kind of the first time publicly, but we lived in a community of duplexes in the early eighties.

And Mike and Diane were in the same duplex that we did. And so they were L-shaped, right? So the back of the duplexes were we parked our car. So our two back doors were literally right next to each other.

So it's probably mid-1980s. And June or July, sorry, July or August, because it was so hot, we didn't have air conditioning. So the bedroom window is open. I fall asleep. Next thing I know, I'm in this dream, where it's myself, Augustina Cola, who is the guy that prophesied.

side to Mike and St. Louis about some things which are still highly debated as to what actually happened. But nonetheless, Mike had invited him back to the church and that so was Augustine, myself, and Mike.

And we are standing around a giant slab of stone. I mean, the size of what you would imagine at the bottom of the wailing wall like those 70-ton huge blocks, right? And we're standing there.

And Augustine is trying to communicate to Mike that this block, whatever is the purpose of God, right? And so we're talking about this. And then Mike decides he's going to lift it and I go, Mike, Mike, Mike, don't.

We got a team of guys here. Let me go grab everyone and we'll help you lift this. And Mike's like, no, no, no, I got it. This is mine, right? It was like he was possessive that this was his purpose, right?

And I'm like, no, we got a team of guys, right? So we had this little argument and Mike is struggling to get this thing up, right? Well, then the dream shifts. Like there's a time, you know how dreams are.

It's like there's this time goes by. And the next thing I know, Diane is calling me on the phone. That's Mike's wife, if you don't know. This calling me on the phone, crying hysterically saying, Bob, you've got to get to the office.

So I drive over to the office and she's meeting, she meets me outside at the front door and she's sobbing. And she goes, no one knows what I'm about to show you. And she takes me back into Mike's office.

And there he is underneath this 70 ton stone blue, like blue face, like it crushed him. And I and she's like, you got to help me. You got to help me. You got to help me undo all this, right?

So you got to imagine at this particular time, this is my best friend. This is a guy that I love dearly. This is Diane who I care about deeply. And it's like, you know what I mean?

This is like a massive tragedy, right? Suddenly, I get woken up out of the dream by a car door slamming. And of all the weird things, it's Mike and Augustine who have come back from some meeting and they're chatting together in that little space behind our duplexes.

Like, and I'm sitting up in bed because it startled me so bad. I couldn't tell which was real. Like I didn't know if the dream, like what I had just experienced is real or what I was hearing, right?

It was the weirdest moment. So the reason I share all that is because it ended up happening. Mike ended up getting crushed by this thing. And so anyways, so that's why I'm very conflicted and why.

I want to have this conversation with you because I've had spiritual dreams that over decades turned out to be true. Yet at the same time, I was in the middle of so much craziness and people interpreting things and telling each other stuff that God had showed them about each other, but it was all symbolic.

So go at it, brother, I am very curious. How did that, like, where did Bob Jones get all this from? Was this a part of Pentecostalism, was this a part of Laterane? Where did this come from?

Because it really was a bit of a culture shock, a spiritual culture shock for me. I don't know if you've seen them, but I do these videos by myself where I connect the dots of many different conversations that either I've had or I've had with other people.

And interestingly, this topic and the way that you just presented it is going to be a connect the dots episode for everything that we have done so far. Okay, good. So hang on to the speedy bridges.

So there are so many very intricate, complex moving parts to this. It would take a podcast for each one of them. So if somebody is listening and I mention a name like, I'm going to mention first Christian identity and British Israelism, those two things I want you to go look up what those are.

I'm not going to go rehash things that we've talked about, however, I'm going to start by separating two things. So what you talked about was basically spiritualism, numerology, the weird realm, and you talked about the actual spiritual, the things that many Pentecostals hold dear and true to their hearts to believe that God is giving them dreams and interpretations.

I'm going to separate those two because, and I'm going to open up just a little bit. I don't do this often. I also have had dreams. Mine weren't like you where they're symbolic. Mine were very detailed and the details that I saw later were pretty accurate.

I don't talk about it at all because I don't want people to look at me and think I'm something. I'm just an average guy. This is something that happened for a specific purpose in a time in my life.

It happened. I can't do it on call. I'm not a showman who can get on stage and do what it happens. It happened for two very, very specific purposes that had not happened in the course of my life.

It might be different. Interesting. Separate that. Let's talk about weirdness. Okay. British israelism as it was starting to form into Christian identity. What's your empire do we talk in here? This is late 1800s to early 1900s.

For those who don't know, British israelism is the idea that the British Isles and the North American continent are filled with the descendants of the lost in tribes of Israel. Christian identity is whenever that concept mixed with the very racist, anti-Semitic themes and made this mess, but as it evolved, the mess grew.

So when I mention those terms, they don't seem to be relevant. However, in British Israelism, as it was starting to edge closer to Christian identity, the best book for reading about this history is Michael Barkun's religion and the racist right if you wanna go read it.

They started bringing in some very weird people with very weird ideas that were capturing itching years and one of them, well, two of them that were substantial was the first one that the great pyramid of Giza was this message written by the ancients through their hands, with God working through them, to write an ancient predictor of events that led to the end of days.

That's the best way to describe it. It was much more than that, but in its simplest forms, it was that. And there were these bozos that would go from church to church to church with models of the great pyramid, and as they're preaching, they would pull the model apart.

You can read this in the newspapers. They were showing people that if you measure this distance and they're going down to the King's Chamber, here's the timeline that associates to our history and so on and so forth.

So they were getting numbers of timelines based off of this pyramid, which is really weird. Another concept that went hand in hand with that is the zodiac. They would say that the zodiac was basically also the same thing, but written by God in the skies, the pyramid was like a Bible of sorts, a predictor of events for the future.

And now the future is here, the end of days is near, we're all gonna die, we need to look at what these are. And that sparked all kinds of weirdness because people were trying to see symbolism in the different numerologies.

The sad part of that is if you really want to understand what those things are, you have to go back to the pagan religions. And so there were Christians who are reading the ancients, not the ancient Christians, but the ancient pagans, the ancient Zeus beside and raw, all of the different gods.

And they were trying to say that within this false was elements of truth, and we're gonna bring it into our ministries today. And we're gonna start mapping these things out. Now they didn't form some sort of a consortium to say that this is exactly our strategy, but that's really what they did if you go back and see you study through it.

So for example, and I'm gonna give this example and I'll hand it back to you. I began to study this because we were fascinated with basic numbers, three's, five's, seven's, 12's. You can go down through these things and you can find...

and not just what I came out of, but almost every Pentecostal sect does this. And I started to combine that with their weird rejection of any sort of holiday or ritual that involved the same thing that was at its core root in history.

For example, you take things like Halloween. Halloween was for the ancients as it was developing. It was this change of seasons. We've been through the summer. Now we're going to go through the harvest.

We're going to celebrate the harvest. And there's a lot of weirdness that came in with this. But at its core element, it was just a transition of seasons. And so the ancients needed to know, when do I plant my crops?

When do they grow? When do I harvest them? When do we have seasons of rest? And they were looking at things like moon cycles. So they would divide the moon cycles. And this was a basic primary number.

They would look at the noonday sun. That was the brightest sun. And so you had solstice or solstice. Well, the solstice is obviously, but I'm talking about even from day to day. Interesting. The great pyramid of Giza used to have really shiny, it's claimed that it had really shiny, like mirror, like tiles over top of it.

And when the noonday sun was the hottest, this is when the deity, the god, the sun, was the strongest. And then it would go through the three phases. So threes were worshiped almost across the board.

Fives were sevens were, you've got the moon cycles, the sun cycles, the seasons, the, right down the line. You can go all the way down the line. This was not even so much a way to summon a demon, like we would say today.

This was literally to survive. You must know these things. And these are the basic numbers. We know we're going to plan our crops. We know that the solstice is going to happen. We know that we're going to harvest our crops.

It was that kind of thing. So what happened was these primary numbers became part of worship. And the way that I found this was reading earnaises against heresies. He talks about all of the ancient deities, how they were doing this, why they were doing this.

Pretty much everything that I just said, but he said what happened was the, in the Gnostic worldview, we're taking some of those elemental spirit worship, et cetera.

And they're mixing it in with Christianity. And so Christianity is being tainted by the Gnostic. And earnaises are first century or second century scholar, right? Not just scholar. He was the very first known Christian apologist, the one who defended Christianity.

If people kind of understand the context, it's like Christianity was this little Middle Eastern religion kind of isolated to Southern Israel, right, Judea. And then a little bit with Galilee. But Jerusalem was the epicenter, and then in 70 AD, when the Romans came in and destroyed Jerusalem, the Jews ended up migrating around the Mediterranean, and the reason why Paul wanted to go to Rome was at the time there were probably 50 to 60,000 Jewish people in Rome. So suddenly now, Christianity's in the middle of one of the most influential pagan cultures in the world. And so that's where you get

into all of these problems later in the New Testament. So these guys are all struggling with this. But it's clear, especially when you get into the Old Testament, that numbers seem to be important, because when you see the measurements of the temple and stuff like that, and I wonder, is that literally, I mean, of those the literal numbers, like did they build according to the numbers, or is that a story later that comes in and they're trying to use numbers to give it this sort of spiritual, because you see it, right? You see numbers as being a part of it. Then I also am aware

that in Kabbalah, they give numbers to letters, right? And so the whole, they've taken the whole of the Old Testament and given it numbers. And then they match words that have add up to the same numbers, right? And somehow or another, you know, that's supposed to reveal more of God. Now, here's what gets interesting, even in Judaism, using numbers to predict the future is out of bounds. Like, they predictiveness, using numbers to predict is considered a no-no. And yet,

you have this. Well, the way they differentiate it is, is that numbers, it's all about revealing God, getting greater understanding of the universe, right? Revelation, but they're very clear about we do not predict the future. The reason why this is so intriguing to me is because then when I was first exposed to this with Bob Jones, it was all about the future. And it was like this need that I have seen, you know, on my study of history, you know, from the beginning of time, humans have this need, right? This intrinsic need to try to mitigate disaster, or they don't

like the unexpected, right? They want four dollars. Like, they really want to know what's coming. We do not want to be surprised. So they flood to either numerology, dreams, astrology, like all of these sort of areas trying to get a hold of what might be coming so that I don't get surprised.

I mean, I see this even with all of the rapture stuff, the end times, you know, it's just, I saw even with, I even though I was never involved at IHOP, you know, is it came closer and closer to its end?

Mike became obsessed with the knowledge, right? The secret knowledge of when Jesus is coming back and when the future is, and again, you fall back in this trap, it's all about the numbers. We have the correct numbers.

What's sad to me is that no one's ever right. It's like people keep doing this, and yet we've probably had 200 years of being wrong. Like no one's got it right, you know? So I get a little bit frustrated because it's like we keep falling back in this trap, this need to know the future, and yet we're not very good at predicting it, and what's even weirder, you know, and I've said this multiple times in our podcast, the people that aren't trying, which is the people in Hollywood and the screenwriters and all that, they're doing a way better job

in terms of accuracy of the future than all the people that supposedly have the secret knowledge. And so it's like, kind of a, it's kind of, I mean, I don't wanna, you know, be disrespectful, but it's sort of comical to me, you know?

I mean, it's the guy who aren't trying. They're getting it right, and all the guys that are all making ministry or, you know, calling on their life about doing aren't doing very good job.

So let's bring in two other things we've talked about. Christian fundamentalism and the rise of spiritualism in the United States. Yeah, in New York, we talked about that in upstate New York, right, that whole.

Absolutely. Both of these had a significant impact, but I'm gonna start first with Indiana Jones. Ooh, okay. So Christianity and specifically the Bible texts that we have today, the English Bible text, is the only source of archeology where we use the names as though they are unchangeable.

Think Indiana Jones. Remember, I think it was the last crusade. They're going through, they're trying to find, they're trying to find an ancient history and locate that temple that is actually in the city of Petra.

And Sean Connery looks and he says, oh, this name, it didn't, it meant this to this region to this culture, but actually meant Alexander Dreda, I think is what he said, which is, you know, it's a fictional tale of Indiana Jones.

However, the concept is true. When you study an ancient culture, the ancient culture has its own language, its own way of speaking. And if you were to discover one of their books, you would try to translate and say, okay, well, this word or phrase is talking about this people or city or kingdom, et cetera.

In Christianity, if you, or a Christian archaeologist, you don't do this, which is really odd to me. It's backwards. You only look at the Bible names and you don't try to map it out and see who had what and use it as the ultimate source when you can't really do that in archaeology.

That creates problem A, because of fundamentalism, the text has to be exact. Then mix that with spiritualism. Spiritualism is basically, it's the idea that you can communicate with the dead, communicate with the spirits.

But think when the fortune tellers entered into the scene, now you've got people who are predicting futures. All of this was coming in right at the inception of what would eventually evolve into the laterane movement.

And in fact, William Brannem's mentor began his big career right here in Jeffersonville, launched William Brannem's fame by claiming to be a converted spiritualist, which was not true. Interesting. And we have evidence that they went to Camp Chesterfield, the spiritualist camp in Indiana.

Take those two concepts and now let's talk through them. In the ancient writings, and I wish I could remember the name of the book that I found this from, but in the ancient writings, it's not just the phrases or names that have to be mapped, but also the way that they communicate.

There were certain ancient races that numbers had a significant importance. If you wanted to emphasize something, you would use a number, a specific number. It wasn't that the number was accurate to us, but to them, it was of importance.

So you might use 10,000. You might, I don't know what the numbers are, but you might use a significant number. Sometimes those numbers mapped to the elemental season, spirits, et cetera. So they, for example, one of the questions, and I'm not going to say that I have an answer, one of the questions is the 365 years that's mentioned in the Bible or the 365 years that Enoch walked on Earth before he was translated.

Well, that maps out to the 365 year or a day, year cycle that we have. Was it really 365 years or was that a number of importance? That's an example question. Well, it's like the number, you know, I mean, you're probably aware of this, but it's like seven, right?

Oh, that's the number of, oh, that's God's number, right? Oh, five's the number of grace. Like where did all this come from? Right? Yeah, because it's like, you know, I'm like you, it's like, well, why?

Like we just assume, right? And then you go back, though, and you see in the Old Testament that there's a lot of numbers with about seven that are tied to God, right? So even within the Hebrews, you know, the numerology thing seems to be very prevalent.

And that's really the... theological question, which I'm not going to get into the theological question, but as it relates to the question of usage of numbers, the question becomes, did they use it because it was a number of importance, or did God really use the same numerology system that all the pagans did?

Right. That's a strange and unusual question. Right, so is it like an exclamation point trying to get the reader to pay attention because like, oh, here's that number, that, you know, that means something to the reader, right?

Because that's the thing that's all that's hard, you know, at least with me is I try to go back and go, well, why was this written and who was it written to? Like, who's the audience, right?

Because you just don't write, you write to a particular group of people whose perspective you're trying to influence. So who are those people, right? And what does this mean to them? 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.

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Let's break this down a bit further. Whenever the Christian identity and British Israelism was compounded by fundamentalism and spiritualism to form what we would have as the foundation for our weird religions, the usage of numbers and symbolism was altered.

And it was altered more of the occult direction than it was the biblical direction. So let's separate the two. The Bible does use numerologies as you described. And if you are a theologian, you don't have an issue with this.

Because in the biblical way, the biblical usage of numbers, the numbers serves the text. It's a number, and therefore it's a number. That's really all it is. An example of this, there are 12 disciples.

Well, if you look at the zodiac, there are 12 symbols. Does that mean that there's this great mystery of why 12 disciples were chosen? In the occult, you would say, yes, it maps out to the stars.

And Christian identity invented this concept that we have celestial bodies that tie back to our earthly bodies. 12 disciples would be 12 it would match the zodiac we have 12 months. Oh, it's really really weird, but in Christianity The numbers mean nothing more than the numbers. There are 12 disciples and therefore there were 12 disciples The numbers are controlled by the context of the passage nothing outside of it and All numbers in the Bible point to God's redemptive work if you study it from a Christian theology perspective There is no need for a modern prophet to unlock what these numbers mean because the numbers are simply that they're just the numbers and

That's that's one of the reasons why that passage So reading into it more like trying to look for some hidden meaning is just kind of a foolish endeavor It just doesn't it doesn't have nothing value. There's nothing there Yeah, that's why the passage it says it's of no private interpretation anybody can read it It's a number. There were 12 men. So there were 12 men, right?

But now mix the spiritualism aspect with with the numerologies that came from British is Elizabeth israelism Christian identity With fundamentalism and now you have something that's really weird and we're going to add another thing that we've talked about Within all of this weird complex mess You also had people coming out of fraternal orders that had hierarchies of levels of knowledge So when people look at free mason's yeah people like that got it. Yeah, so they look at mason's and they think oh There they occult, which is all about you know if you're mason It's math, right? So there's numbers totally involved in it guy. It makes sense. Yeah, I get it. I'm tracking with you

So if you're of that mindset it makes it makes the mason's and other groups like this even more scary Because you have taken it now. It's no longer the numbers just simply mean the numbers now the numbers have a meaning that the average person cannot know And therefore it's shrouded in mystery and read people to interpret those mysteries So the numbers basically become hidden codes and the Bible when you open it it no longer reads like you and I read it It's written as a code book of mystery. Oh, it seems to me that what you're describing here is a constant

What's the word dynamic? I see all the time in institutionalism? Which is there's this separation between the laity, you know the the peeps the normal ones and then this elite group Who always has this either special connection to God or this special insight right and it's like the demarcation line You know what I mean between the few and the many right these little group up here and it seems like that's a constant theme You know all through all these institutions whether it's politics religion Civics right there's all is the few in the Many, a few always have the secret knowledge that they know.

Now mix into this mysticism, which we've also talked about. Right. Whenever mysticism started to enter in, it's really weird. The foundation of this, Branum was the leader of the foremost leader of the post-World War II healing revival.

So all of these revivalists are coming in trying to learn more about him. And he's telling them things like this, every time I'm around a fortune teller or a mystic, they ask me, did you know that you were born under a sign?

And they would hear this, and they would think, okay, this is shrouded in mystery. This person holds the keys to unlock that mystery. What does it mean? And then he shrouds, he starts to use all of these numbers as a shroud of weirdness in his ministry.

He used 33 constantly, which would appeal to the Masons, which is kind of funny. But what it did is that gave the interpreter of the mystery special authority. And that's part of why he rose to become leader, because people didn't really understand a single thing that man was saying.

But he was telling him. He's so brilliant. That's exactly the being their movie with Peter Sellers, he's a complete idiot. He speaks in riddles, therefore, he has secret knowledge and the world leaders all end up sitting at his feet, right?

Not realizing the kinds of complete idiots. And the idiot, I'm gonna leave that. I do have questions about the man, but I'll leave that aside. But it does, I guess I'll go here because this is actually relevant.

What it did because it shrouded in mystery, you've got a special interpreter who starts speaking in symbolism. If you speak in symbolism, it's a really good parlor trick, because if your symbols are vague enough and they have basic numbers, you're gonna make it apply to pretty much anything in life.

I could say I had a dream and there were five goats and five goats did whatever. Well, the next time you see something in a set of five, you're gonna think back to what I said about the dream and you're gonna go, oh my gosh, John's goats are right here in this room.

That's how weird this gets. But what it did was it started because of the symbolism, the numerology, the spiritualism, the fortune telling, so on and so forth. It began to turn coincidences into revelation.

And when a coincidence turned into revelation, now the person who spoke the affirmation. It's affirmation and the person who spoke the numbers is now a prophet. You're right, I got it, yeah. So are you familiar, I'm trying to remember, I think it was called Portland Tabernacle or something, Iverson, there was a guy, I was at Iverson, you know what I'm talking about?

I do, it's vague in my brain, but the reason why I bring in... it up is because Bob introduced this book from these guys with that was like dream interpretation. So what's the connection with was it Portland Temple or Portland Tabernacle or something were they connected to the letter ring or did they come out of there?

Oh yeah. All of us connected. Portland. Sorry I'm being vague but it's just 40 years ago and I just remember a few names and faces. Yeah well it's widespread coast to coast but there were there were hotspots in Portland was a hotspot.

Right. Remember, Laterane was built on the idea that God was restoring these offices. Now the fivefold. Now think about this. We'll think about the fivefold. To these guys, the offices meant less than the number.

The number is five. Oh my gosh. I just found a number five in the text of the Bible. Do you know what this means? This is restoring the church today. So that church was tied in with they tied into William Brannum over they just a peripheral you know part of the letter the movement letter ring.

Did they have a direct connection there because the reason I bring it up is again I mystified because they were that book their dream interpretation book had a huge impact with all these want to be prophets in our congregation and Bob was the you know as I've always said he was the spiritual drug pusher in a sense and so he was the one that brought this thing and so that became the manual for everybody that had a dream.

They were going through that book that I thought the guy's name was Iverson or whoever it was or something. There was two guys. I think you're talking about Dick and well the other guy's name Eddie maybe I don't know but they were definitely tied to it.

You can go I remember reading that in the history and in fact I probably need to publish that on the website but these guys were they were part of part of the hotspot that was there in Portland there was a period of time whenever I was digging into Portland for a different reason and I started noticing just Laterane guy after Laterane guy after Laterane guy Iversons was definitely one of them.

Yeah because that book it was so again these are mysteries to me because it's like suddenly this is there and it's like so why are these guys suddenly the experts on dream interpretation right you know and so that that was kind of it and part of the reason why it was of here's why it was of concern to me not that God doesn't speak through dreams because he obviously does I you know I am after having been on this journey for nearly 50 years I think vast majority of dreams are just what Freud and Young said they're our own souls kind of processing through

our day or events in our lives but I think God also uses those things. I've had, you know, probably five or six of them, but I mean, we're talking over 50 years, right? What really bothered me about what was happening at the church was it was every night people were having these dreams and every one of them had some sort of great spiritual meaning.

All right, nobody wanted to go, wait a minute. This is me dealing with me. It was always, no, this is about someone else or something else and I, you know, and that book ended up being one of the things that everybody used to try to find their meaning, but it was so weird because nothing was what it was.

Like every dream wasn't really about the dream. Like the one that I shared with you, it was about the people in the dream and the people in the dream ended up being exactly what happened.

In fact, what's crazy about that whole dream that I told you about is I went to Mike and told him, you know, like it wasn't like I, you know, I'm just pulling this out now.

I mean, I warned you way back in the middle of the 1980s that if you don't, that has helped you, right? If we're not a team here, this is gonna end up crushing you.

And at 1989, about two or three years later, after I had the dream, that ended up becoming the very thing that severed our relationship because he couldn't grasp the fact that maybe God called a whole bunch of other people too, you know, it wasn't just about him, right?

So, but the thing that was really hard, what I found weird was is that just from a relational point of you, right, you're trying to build a community of people that are loving and caring, right?

Except for what starts happening is, there's no one is actually dealing in reality. And everything is symbolic. It's all about the numbers, all about the interpretation of dreams. It's so you start realizing, like, I think I'm in a group of a whole bunch of really broken people who don't really wanna deal with reality, like this is who I am, and this is what I gotta do.

But we're gonna live up here at this sort of ethereal level, right, so everything went from, you know, practical things of serving one another. Now, again, I wanna be careful here, wasn't the whole church, right?

It wasn't like the whole church, but there was a whole section of the church that really went down this road that, you know, Bob was sort of the pide-piper of it, right? And they were all following him.

But what I noticed was, whenever you, we try to have a conversation with them, you couldn't go, hey John, how are you doing today? You're like, just wanting to hear a real authentic, this sort of, where's your life at?

Everything had to be something else, like it was always, well brother, I had this dream about you, and I was like, wow, this is, you know what I mean? It was like, I felt like I was in a, you know, in, you know, like Peter Pan and never, never land, right?

It was just like this, met, this make believe world. And that really bothered me because I'm like, I don't think this is healthy. You know what I mean? It's like, I, what's underneath here, right?

It's like, there's a, these people have a need to not want to deal with the concrete facts of life. Like, you know, this is what's really going on here. And they kind of want to live in this space where, you know, that's up here, driven also by this, what I call want to be syndrome, right?

I'm so desperate to be seen as important and relevant. Therefore, I'm going to elevate myself now as somebody who's a seer, right? And I live in this world and I'm basically a Bob Jones clone, right?

I'm going to, I'm going to be like Bob. Be like Bob, right? No, don't be like Bob. You know, I have a buddy that, because there's this movie, What about Bob, right? And so I get hammered all the time about, what about Bob, you know?

It concerns me because I still see it, right? There's still this need, but I never knew where it came from. You know, I know the ancient stories, but we're in Christdom that this suddenly become acceptable, right?

Because, you know, the future stuff is outlawed in Judaism, yet they still go down that road, right? I mean, Jewish people are very prone to seers and sayances and prophets. I can tell you firsthand stories from Paul Cane about what was going on in the Hollywood and with rich people, especially who are so scared of losing their wealth, right?

They all are desperate to know the future, right? They're so afraid of losing their status and stuff that they just will pay any sort of money to know what's coming, right? So I see this and it still happens.

I mean, I have, there's cultures in America right now that are still horoscopes driven. You're signed, that's the first thing that's, well, what's your sign, right? And it's like, okay, this is fascinating to me.

Like, where does this, you know, what is this rooted in? Like, what's the why, right? Why is this so important to people? Why do we need to know? Well, I think the biggest way to bind it all together is actually through the dreams.

So while you're talking, I looked up, it is Dick Iverson. Dick Iverson, that's his name. I could not remember the first name. And I believe the book, I've not read it yet, but I believe the book is called The Holy Spirit Today.

I was looking through his list of books, but that talks about the prophecy, word of knowledge, tongues, et cetera. But there's actually a book that they put out, which is all about symbols. Like this, if you see this in your dream, it means this.

If you see this in your dream, so there's a book that was all like wildfire through our congregation that came from them. But it was specifically about dream interpretation, so that's why it was kind of curious.

Did that come out or were they ladder rain guys and that was something that was very prevalent on ladder rain? Or did this come from some other segment of the church community that I'm unaware of?

They were definitely ladder rain, but it's actually, it's more connected and interwoven picture. So picture, you've got a ball of yarn with a single string, but picture the woven end result of a sweater.

It's, you know, maybe multiple strings of yarn that come into the sweater. So I'm getting into this, I think it comes out after this episode, but I'm talking, I'm going deeper with Parham, because many people think that Seymour is the guy who really led the whole thing, spearheaded the whole thing.

I have evidence where Seymour is calling Parham, the father of the movement. He was, his new breed of religion was called the apostolic faith. We have the apostolic networks and the new apostolic reformation.

I mean, everything points back to that word apostolic because that's, that was his religion. Within his sect of Paramites in Zion City, you had John G. Lake was a Paramite. He moved to Portland, Oregon.

Oh, so that's where the Portland, oh, God, I never, I didn't know that. I mean, Gordon Lindsay also was raised in Zion City. He trained, he trained under Parham, I think he was baptized by Parham.

And he and Lake toured all through the United States for the assemblies of God. Not even makes more sense to me why Portland is such an important piece in this whole charismatic, lateral ring thing.

Well, thank you for connecting those dots. I did not put that together. Makes sense now. So you've got the Paramites who are breeding in Portland and spreading that all throughout the city. Right. Right.

And now let's bring it to a head. When Pentecostalism was rebirthed, they took the passage of the new, from the New Testament, talking about the day of Pentecost and it took Joel too. And that was really the foundational text for Azusa Street and everything that came.

That died out, but remember one of the phrases from the day of Pentecost, your young men will see visions, your young men will dream dreams, your men will see visions. Well, what happens when that's not happening?

Everybody has dreams, but what if the dreams don't really mean anything? What if they are just processing? When Pentecostalism died out, one of the issues was, well, we didn't fulfill that. We didn't have all of the young men dreaming dreams and the old men prophesying.

So in Sharon orphanage, in North Battleford, they gather at a bunch of students in the orphanage and they try to create, it's so weird, it's almost like one of the exfiles or some sci-fi movie, but with religion instead of...

sci-fi brainwashing. They tried to enact a summoning of God by training young men to do this. So the dreams and interpretations were something they were just feasting on day and night and day and night. And when you do that, you start to see things that aren't really there, especially in the symbolic realm. So when later reign broke out as a movement, that was one of its key significant points. We have to focus on the young people. We've have to get these people to start dreaming the dreams, right? Right. When it died down and finally fizzled out, later reign was really,

if you look at what happened with Paul Kane, Bob Jones, all of those guys who were starting IHOP KC eventually, it looks like they were trying to do the same thing with the prayerhouse.

They're trying to basically create another share and orphanage, create another attempt at summoning God. And summoning God goes back to the spiritual aside, not to the Christianity side. You don't summon God. Well, I remember, I mean, and I know this firsthand, so I can affirm this for you, but I mean, Paul, in particular, the reason why he was so intrigued with us was that he felt like what later reign failed, right? And so it was like, you know, to your point, it was about, you know, he kept looking for young people, right? And it was all about a group of young guys,

because when we met him, we were in our 20s, right? And it was like, you young guys, and you're the future and all of like I was kind of, I don't want to say it was creepy, but it was a little unnerving because he was so obsessed with us and our potential, right? And it was, and it was like and then in hindsight, now I realize he was trying to bring a lot of the later reign stuff into our world because he wanted to revive that to your point, right? It was like he was hoping

that now I'm sure part of it was selfish, meaning that he felt like his legacy failed, right? Because he was a part of all that, and so he was thinking this was, you know, a resurrection in a way, or my second chance at this or whatever, because he put so much into our meeting to, you know, Joel's army, gosh, that was everything, Joel's army, Joel's army, Joel's army, you know, that we were Joel's army and this thing. So that's kind of what you're sharing actually helps clarify to me where all that energy was coming from and why, you know, what his, because again,

what was his percent, how is he looking at us, right? I know how we were looking at him. We're kind of like an awe of some of the dynamics that we're going on, but he was looking at us as, as Redux, or redo, who are a mulligan, like it's like we could go, like you always could go, always tell him he goes, you could do what we failed.

Like we failed and you guys could, you know, so in some ways I'm glad he was dead before Mike ended up crashing and burning because that would have killed him. Cause he had, he put all of his, he put his whole pot on Mike.

Like Mike was that guy, right? That was gonna bring the second wave of latter reign. So that makes a lot of sense to me what you're saying. You know, it kind of clarifies a few things.

There's one more piece to this too. And you mentioned Paul Cane and it really needs, this really needs to be understood. I don't think many people do. When you look at Paul Cane and you look at the evil that he had within him and then you see it's a movement filled with young men and women, but he's focusing apparently on the young men.

You immediately connect those dots in the way that, well, he had, he had a hidden agenda and that was the young men, but it really wasn't that. He came from the same gospel, quote unquote pseudo gospel that I came from.

And in that gospel, it contained all of these elements that I'm talking about and they had been trained that the gospel was such that this is the end of days. We must find these hidden mysteries.

We must scramble to find these hidden mysteries. We must have prophets and apostles to give us these mysteries so that we can take younger people who are moldable, mold them into this in time army and then Jesus can return, not Jesus will return but he can return when we do this.

So it wasn't, it was a level beyond even summoning God. We have to prepare the thing that God can come in with and that's this army. That's what they tried to do in Latter-Rain.

And like you said, it did fail. But what he's looking at more to the point is the young men. Now the problem that exists, which is compounded to that, when you have this type of quote unquote gospel, it's not the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It's not the gospel that Jesus sent it. Jesus came to earth, he died, he went to heaven and he's coming back to meet his people, his bride. It's more that we must make it happen.

So there's two separate gospels. In the make it happen, you have this collection of young people that you're trying to mold into this army. When you have people who have psychological problems leading them, now you have this bedrock of people to pray upon.

And that's really where the praying, the praying on people comes from. It's the system that's causing it. Not so much, and you've said this before, the individuals sometimes are good people but they have a problem and they're in a system that enables that problem.

And that's really the root of this. Well, it might put an alcoholic in a bar, you know, to your point. So what's interesting, So I'll share this side of it.

One of my struggles with IHOP was that this whole ladder rain, Joel's army thing was so prevalent in the 1980s and that the whole Bob Jones thing that this end time revival was eminent, right?

So you had a school called Dominion. You had hundreds of kids in our church who were all being told they were Joel's army, they were gonna lead an end time revival. It was all eminent, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

I spent most of the 1990s doing the same thing I've been doing for the last two years with the IHOP kids, which is dealing with all the disillusionment. This is the dark side. This is the other side of this roller coaster.

When I mean by that, it's like one of those rides you go on and it's just literally up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, right? And then you get on the other side and you come down really fast.

That was the 1990s for all of Joel's army at Kansas City Fellowship. I mean, kids, you know, while they weren't kids at this point, they were in their 20s or 30s, losing their faith.

So angry at Mike, like really angry, right? So it's like here you put all this time and energy into creating Joel's army and what you end up producing is a lot of very disillusioned and angry people.

So that was my experience. So when I saw Mike leave Metro to start IHOP, there was this underlying theme, you know what it was? They failed. You, right? He did that whole thing, right?

He never really taught, I mean, there's only a few hints publicly that are on tape, but there's this underlying thing. So now you got another generation of Joel's army who's gonna do with the previous generation failed to do.

Where the die hearts now, right? Where the ones are gonna take it to the end, right? And so I watched all this and so here I am and people are wondering, why are you not involved?

Well, you know, why did you stay on the other side of IHOP, oh, one? I have a strange relationship with Mike. And number two, this is deja vu for me. Like I'm sitting there, you know, trying not to be the old crusty, you know, old guy, even though I wasn't old, but I would have been appeared to these kids as that going, oh my God, I've already seen this movie.

I know exactly where this is gonna end up. Ben, they're done that, right? You're in that age group where you're like, oh, here we go again. And you just watch this thing. And so for me, watching IHOP, was just me watching a previous movie I had watched, same thing.

Same, I mean, it was identical, that you're to everything was identical. Same thing, right? Which the IHAP kids, of course, don't have any context for. So, the KCF kids, who are all in their 40s and 50s, are watching the IHAP kids going, feeling sorry for them going, we're so sorry, we know where you're gonna end up, right?

And it's just painful for them to watch. And now here we are, you know, 2024, 25, now into 26. And then we got the same story. So this is part of why I want to have this conversation because it's like, okay, this stuff all looks so yummy.

You know, it's kind of like going to Baskin Robbins, 33 flavors, right? It's like, ooh, this is so fun, it's so stimulating. And look at, you know, and so it's just, you know, for somebody who's craving relevance, craving, you know, you know, wanting to know the future, all these kind of weaknesses we have as human beings, this stuff is like kids in a candy store.

And it's so, it never ends good. Yeah, my favorite line from Battlestar Galactica, this has all happened before and it will all happen again. Well, then for people like us that are history buffs, right?

It's like, you know, I try to explain this to people. I've got another situation that I'm dealing with where, you know, it's like they feel like, it's like their grievance is based on history for the last 150 years.

And I'm like, do not understand, like, you're not unique. Like, you think you're the only ones that have ever had this problem. This is not unique. I could just go back, like, increasing, like, step back, quit framing everything in this little segment of time, go back and look at 6,000 years of human history and you realize, everybody's been through this already, right?

Been there, done that. And it's like these same things. And I think it's because human nature is human nature. And we have the same fears as our forefathers, right? We want to know the future.

We don't want to be surprised. We don't want to, you know, we don't want the un, you know, because we don't like it, you know. So fear, I think fear, this is, I mean, this is me kind of breaking it down to the core level here.

But I think fear is one of the things that drives all this, right? I think pride is another thing that kind of drives it, right? I want to be special. I want to be elite, right?

I think there's some root human frailties that are what drive all this. And why we keep getting sucked into this. Absolutely. Well, hopefully this connecting dots has brought some of this together. There's so many more moving parts, but for a sake of time, that's about all I.

cover. So thanks for doing this. All right, bye. 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, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. And for more about Mike Pickle and IHOPKC, you can read some said they blundered breaking my decades of silence on Mike Pickle, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer.

You can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. You can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR.