The Sign of the Dove Between the Two Worlds
GENESIS 7:4-6
4 For yet seven days (in other words - “seven days from now”), and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. (For 120 years Noah had not known the time of when his prophecy of a cataclysmic worldwide flood would become history – but then God reveals to him the exact day (only seven days away), of when that judgment would begin)
5 ¶ And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.
6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth. (Noah has just turned six hundred years old – and so the bible doesn’t tell us these details just to fill in more pages. Six is the number of man, and it represents man’s time of suffering on earth – suffering had a beginning, and so it has to have and end, and so God is writing a mystery in the life of Noah of the time line of man’s suffering of how that there would be 6000 years upon the earth before man’s suffering would end. Every 100 years of Noah’s life represented a 1000 years of man's suffering.)
GENESIS 7:11
11 ¶ In the six hundredth year of Noah's life (God is repeating this fact of Noah’s age), in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
(The water came from below – from the fountains of the deep)
MATTHEW 24:35-37
35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. (This was the secret of what was kept from the church of the future time of when the Lord would return to earth, because this was to remain a secret until the ministry of the seventh angel appeared and all the mysteries would be made known at that time. No man would know the day and hour, but that does not say that you could not know the year or month, or even the week)
37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
This verse is also spoken by Luke’s account also…
LUKE 17:26
26 And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.
LUKE 17:30
30 Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.
It was prophesied by Jesus that there would be a repetition of the events of Noah’s day in this day.
We are witnesses to these events and to this prophecy of the Son of man ministry becoming history in our generation.
The Sign of the Dove Between the Two Worlds
Last week we spoke on the subject of Shalom, and “The Story of the End of Suffering”.
If suffering had a beginning for mankind, then suffering must also have an end for mankind.
And if there was a story connected to the beginning of man’s suffering upon the earth, then there must also be a story of how that suffering will end.
And we all know the story of how sin and suffering began – it began in Eden by when man used his human reasoning as an absolute instead of the word of God. In Man’s heart he transferred the source of his faith from the word of God to his own intellectual reasoning powers that opposed the word of God – and that was the catalyst that broke his fellowship with God and unlock the floodgates of sorry, pain and suffering, and ultimately death – but there is a people in this hour whose faith has been restored.
And so for 6000 years to date, the story of man’s history has been the story of sorrow and death, but we are promised in the scriptures (of which cannot fail) that there will be a new world of peace and eternal life and joy unspeakable.
ISAIAH 65:21-23
21 And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.
22 They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the LORD, and their offspring with them.
And so when we study this sermon “On the Wings of a Show White Dove” 28th November 1965, we see that as with Noah’s life, God used Brother Branham’s life of his suffering every seven years for 6 lots of seven (42 years) as a sign act of man’s suffering of 6000 years also, just like how Noah was 600 years old, because we see this number 6 appearing everywhere in this message.
Six doves – Six inches long (His enemy) – Six sermons left before he leaves the earth – Six lots of suffering for seven years – six days of suffering in the hospital just before his death.
ON.THE.WINGS.OF.A.SNOW.WHITE.DOVE_ SHP.LA V-7 N-5 SUNDAY_ 65-1128E
193 Well, the little animal that I saw was six inches long. The string of doves that Mom saw was six, six is incomplete. I knew that someday I'd see that seventh one. That was man, suffering; so on and on it went.
**In this message, Brother Branham is telling how that he had been looking for this seventh dove all of his life, and how that it would be a sign to him from God to mark the end of the suffering of what he had suffered with all of his life, in other words, this dove was sent to lead him into a new world of peace, (a shalom) of which all of his earthly suffering would end.
God had sent this dove right at the end of his life to lead His eagle prophet into a new world, and within one month he was in that new world.
And so this is showing something concerning us also, because it is a story connected to how man’s suffering is to end just as we read in Genesis with the story of Noah and the people who believed his message and how that antediluvian world ended. Noah and his small group of believers had lived in that world, but then they were transported into another world by their faith in the message that God had sent his prophet for that hour - it was the message that Noah had received from God that carried them over into the new world.
GENESIS 8:6-11
6 ¶ And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made:
7 And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. (different birds have different natures and characteristics that reveal spiritual and even supernatural things – they also represent the different anointing’s of people)
8 Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground;
(So we want to look at the scene here - Noah and his group of believers that had believed his message, they find themselves caught between these two worlds of the antediluvian world and the new world of the post antediluvian world.
They had been witnesses to all the wickedness of the antediluvian world that had now come under judgement, and they were yet to see the new world of where all the evil of that previous world had passed away, but right now they are positioned in-between those two worlds.
God had sent a prophet, and He had condemned that generation for 120 years, and they had completely rejected his message, and when you reject a prophet of God and his message, then sin and death and judgement and destruction will be the result of that rejection, and so the end of the world as they knew it had finally come for them, and so Noah and his group were living at a time of when the old world was under judgement and in the process of passing away in order to give way to a new world that would be birthed out of that old one, but it would require a dove with a sign from above in its mouth of a message that would lead them into that new world.
**They needed this dove to bring them the evidence of life from that new world by the way of its mouth. This little dove knew the way to that new world because it had been there before and had brought the evidence of that new world back to them, and so it was qualified and able to lead Noah and his group into that new world – the dove leading the eagle prophet into the new world is showing us that we are soon to follow with him.)
9 But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.
(God is showing us something with Brother Branham of how that in his own personal journey of when his mortal life on earth was soon about to end and he was about to go into a new world, and so he was between two worlds just was we read here of how Noah and his group was, and right at this time God sent him a dove, and that dove was a sign that he would soon be crossing over, and God had sent this dove to lead him over into that new world, and this is what he speak about in the message “On the Wings of a Snow White Dove” 28th November 1965 – because by the afternoon of the 24th of December, he is over and in that new world)
10 And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark;
11 And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off (Notice again how that this was an evidence of life from that new world being carried to Noah and his group by the mouth of this dove, because in this hour we are in the days of the voice that proceeds from the mouth of a prophet at the evening time, we are under the leadership of the Dove – all of this is not just made up coincidences, this is showing us that we have also received the evidence from that new world that we are going to, and in this evening time it has come to us by the mouth of a prophetic ministry): so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
**When we try to understand this idea of this sign of a dove appearing to a people who are living in between two worlds, we must understand that this is the scripture, and so this must become a part of our story in this hour, because as it was in Noah’s day, so it would repeat itself again at the time of when the Son of Man would be revealed in the last days at the evening time age, and so if we are told here in Genesis that a dove appeared to Noah and his group just before they were about to go into the new world, then we must look for that same dove to appear to us also.
And so when we begin to study this in the message of the hour, we see how that Brother Branham relates the experience of his grandmother of when she was about to cross over into the new world, that a dove appeared just before she left this world to go into the next world.
ON.THE.WINGS.OF.A.SNOW.WHITE.DOVE_ SHP.LA V-7 N-5 SUNDAY_ 65-1128E
60 There's... A dove has a great strange thing in our family. One day when my grandmother... She come from up here in Kentucky, off the Cherokee reservation. She was dying, a little woman, and she was... They had... I think they call it scrofula or something, she was dying. And grandfather knelt down by the side of the bed; while Mama, Aunt Birtie, Aunt Howlie, all of them knelt around the bed; Uncle Charlie, (little bitty, four-year-old boy) the baby; Mama, the oldest, being about twelve years old. And she had combed her black hair out on the bed, and she started singing, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee," when she was dying. Grandpa, at that time, wasn't a Christian. I baptized him at eighty-seven years old, in the Name of Jesus Christ, at the foot of the river there where the Angel of the Lord appeared.
61 But while she was singing this song, with her feeble little hands up in the air, a dove flew in the door; come around, set down on the top of the bed, started cooing. God took her soul.
So he is telling us this story because he has also just had a dove appear to him, and it was a sign in his family just before they would cross over – we know this to be true because we now know that he is taken off the scene shortly after this dove appeared.
John the Baptist was the same – he also sees the dove at the end of his ministry, not to long before he leaves this world to goes into the new world.
*So God is showing us something for this hour of how that before we can leave the old world and go into the new world, we must also receive the visitation of this seventh dove into our lives- the message of what that dove carried in its mouth, because as it was in the days of Noah, it requires this seventh dove to lead us into the new world – it is the dove that leads the eagle age into the new world, and so we must look for this dove also, for it to lead us to a faith that we have never known before – a rapturing faith.