The Uniting Time and Sign – A Message Study Pt.2
REVELATION 19:7
7 Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come (This marriage of the Lamb is speaking of the secret coming of the Lord that we are in right now of Revelation 10 and 1st Thessalonians 4:16. The Lord Himself has descended to earth in the form of his revealed word for the uniting of the Bride to Christ by the word of the revelation of Himself), and his wife hath made herself ready.
**The bride has been making herself ready at this time by being clothed with the wedding dress of the message of what God has sent for this hour. This event that we are in right now is the invisible union of the marriage of the Lamb.
MATTHEW 16:1-4
1 ¶ The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven.
2 He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red.
3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? (People can study and become so educated at reading the signs of what the future weather will be.
To become a meteorologist you have to study for many years for your degrees. People will study the stock market to try to understand the signs of certain stocks going up or down so that they can invest in order to make a monetary gain. So to be able to see a sign that will show you what is going to happen in the future can give you great gain if you take advantage of that knowledge.
*There are so many professions that are involved with trying to predict the future (even just a little), because if you can know what is going to happen in the future, then you will know what to do now in order to take advantage of that future.)
4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.
The Uniting Time and Sign – A Message Study Pt.2
God’s way is to achieve great things by the most humble means possible. It is the pride of man that wants to make a big scene of what he does especially if he thinks it is great, but God is the opposite to that. So if you want to see God, then you have to look in the opposite direction of how man looks.
During this last week we have been studying a little into the message “Is This the Sign of the End, Sir?” preached December 1962.
This came about in an unusual way by an email from a brother trying to find that message – and so we began to study that Wednesday night.
Because last week’s Sunday service we began this study on the message “The Uniting Time and Sign” and then the Holy Spirit directed us during the week to the message “Is this the Sign of the End, Sir?” (both messages are to do with sign’s), – so you have to see that those things in our lives are not coincidence but that it’s the Lord directing our pathway into areas of truth because He wants to open up the secret things of His word to his bride.
**These are signs of His leadership in our lives of how He promise he would guide us in John 16:13 “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth”: So we know for sure that this is the leadership of what the Spirit of God is doing amongst us.
**God knows all the past, and all the futures of every person’s life – and that is why he is qualified to lead your life, it’s because He knows what lies ahead along the pathway of your future.
And the reason that we are not qualified to lead our own way in life is because we don’t know what lies ahead along the pathways of where our choices in life will lead us.
**We Humans will make a certain decision thinking it will lead us into green pastures and still waters, but then we end up in the opposite place, so that is why we want to follow the leadership of the Lord. And don’t forget that often God will lead you away from green pasture and into the dry deserts of the wilderness for a season in order to train you there and to reveal himself to you in a greater way.
When we look at the history of a nation of how that nation begins and how that nation ends, and then we also look at the history of a person of how a person’s life begins and what they do during their lives, and then how that person life ends. We know that all that history from a nation right down to the individual person, it is all going to work out in the great plan and purpose of God even though it an look so wrong to us.
60-1 PATMOS.VISION - CHURCH.AGE.BOOK CPT.2
John 1:48,
"Nathanael saith unto Him, Whence knowest Thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee."
There it is. When He comes, that Word will come against all nations and all men. And none will be able to stand against it. It will reveal what was in every heart as He did with Nathanael. The Word of God will show who did the will of God and who didn't. It will make known the secret works of every man and why he did them… (That is why it in not so much your mistakes, but your motive that God looks at)
…. Every secret will come out in the open and be shouted from the housetops. Oh, we will really understand history then. There won't be a mystery left from all the ages.
**So much of what we read in history and what we believe of it is from the view point of man, and no doubt there has been a lot of truth that has been faithfully told by historians, but there may also be a lot of facts that are not so true, and it can often be so hard to see the plan of God running through history especially when there are so many bad events that take place.
**And so this also applies to the history of your own life – sometimes what you thought was something bad in your life will actually working out for your spiritual advancement, but then what you thought was a good thing maybe for material gain, in reality actually worked out to be bad for you – so this is where we want to always follow the leadership of the Lord.
**So there has been a great sign of a gentile prophet in this generation, and this sign was to proceed the great event of the prophecy of the marriage of the Lamb that is now becoming history in the lives of a people that are the receivers of the truth of what God has sent in this generation under a prophet’s third pull ministry, but it is happening in such a humble and in an invisible way that all but the ones who are directly involved with it will compliantly miss seeing it so that even the history of this great even will not even be recorded by recognised historical writers. It is a total secret event.
*So if you are looking for a public performance of this great event, then you will never see it, because the marriage ceremony event of Christ and His bride is completely invisible in this hour.
REVELATION 19:7 (Opening scripture)
7 Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.
We are being made ready by the truth of the message of the hour that we have been laying in the presence of that truth for many years.
So what does that actually looks like in your everyday life?
**It is taking place in your life in such a humble way that even we ourselves often wonder if it is really happening like what we saw in the little room of the tent vision of how the effect of the third pull ministry on the people would not be a public show. And even the people themselves that it happened to did not really know what had happened to them.
**So the tent vision was given to the Prophet to help us understand the experience that we are going though now under the third pull ministry of this end time hour.
**So God has sent a sign of the “end Sirs” by the coming of Malachi 4 and the opening of the seven seals, and so we have seen this sign in our generation of a prophet like Jonah who was sent by God to a wicked and adulterous gentile generation in this day.
MATTHEW 16:4 opening scripture…
4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed. (The sign of the prophet Jonas was the sign of the resurrection, and this message has also brought about a resurrection in this day – Jonah was a prophet to a gentile people)
And so this gentile prophet in our day is a major sign from God of pending judgement to this end time generation – but the world have completely missed seeing this great end time sign, but there has been a certain elected group of people who have recognised that sign.
*Remember that we are studying this message of the Uniting Time and Sign.
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37 These signs given, by the Lord, is given only to believers. The unbelievers never see it. They go right over the top of them, and they don't see it.
What follows this sign is a uniting, and because we recognise the sign, then we are able by the instruction of the sign to prepare and make ourselves ready by laying ourselves in the presence of the SON light of the word of this hour. The Lamb’s wife has made herself ready by a message that God has sent to her.
***And so by laying in the presence of the SON light of the word, it causes the spirit of the truth of that word to get into your spirit and to become united with your own spirit – that is the uniting time that follows this great sign, that is what the marriage of the Lamb looks like in your everyday life, it is the Holy Spirit leading you into the truth of this hour.
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97 We see nations uniting, we see the world uniting, we see communism uniting, we see the churches uniting; and we see God uniting Hisself with His Bride, until He and the Church is the same thing; like the family, together. Right! Uniting themselves together; God uniting! Why? Never before, since the early church age, was the Pillar of Fire ever among the people. Never before, since the early church age, did they ever see the things that we are seeing today. And this was only made possible when God sent the Seven Seals and give us a sign by It, and sent seven Angels down out of Heaven; and come to bring back that scattered Word in them denominations, and tie it back into the Word of God again, to bring down His Holy Spirit.
**So we have been basking under this third pull ministry of the little room of the tent vision experience for many years now, and the revelation of it still continues to become greater and greater in our lives as the word of this hour becomes clearer and clearer to us.
**So as we pick up from last week - in this message “The Uniting Time and Sign”, he begins this message by starting out with what we would consider as “small talk”, and the Holy Spirit is letting us see something of Brother Branham’s personal mind struggles of how he was concerned within himself (because of his complex makeup), and he was worried that he could end up an old crabby and complaining man because of all the disappointments of life that keeps accumulating the longer you live, and so he was fearful of that characteristic developing in his life as he got older because he knew that the way the tree leans is the way the tree usually falls.
**And so because of how the Lord had made him to be so exact in his nature, he had to make a constant effort not to go down that pathway in his own personality, and this was just one of the tensions that was constantly in his life.
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9 And I... one of my main things that's always hurt me through my life, has been a nervous condition. That when I get so worn, then I get real weary. I get... kind of feel like nobody cares for you, you know, and--and you're all... You have it, too. And I just happen to have a real overdose of it, you know, and it gets real bad sometime, and I can't hardly... It's tension, and that's what does it. And I get to a spot then that many times, especially with so many of those visions, you see, it just gets me. I look at a person, I think, "This is a vision. No, no, no, it isn't. Yes! Is it not?" You see? And you just don't realize what a price goes with that. So then--so then you--you wonder. Then you get to thinking, "Well, you're..." Then you get off your side and say, "Well, now, what--what have I done? Here I am, I'm--I'm fifty years old and I've done nothing for the Lord; and I--I'm getting old And what's...? Oh, my." Then you just get the... what we used to call "the blues." Some of you brethren about my age remember what they used to call "have the blues." Pop used to talk about it and I wondered what he meant, and I sure know now what he meant. So then, you get to feeling that way, which is none of it true; it's just you, you know it. See, you know it, it's just you doing that.
In our modern language we would call this depression – back in the earlier days they called it “the Blues”.
**So here is a man that struggled with a tendency to criticise and complain, and then on top of that he also suffered from bad and prolonged periods of depression. And yet God had made him to be that way because this is what it was going to take in order for the greatest revelation of this age to be received by this man – he could only receive it by being under these conditions of tension, so God knows what he is doing. That is the same reason why God left certain struggles and weaknesses with the apostle Paul
**Last week we spoke about the little room of the tent vision, and how the angel said to the prophet that “I will meet you in there”, and that the reason of the little room was so that it would be hidden from the public’s view making it something that would be private between the angel of the Lord and the individual person, and this would be the third and greatest pull of his ministry of where the entire secret of the entire bible would be opened up to him from the time of the opening of the seven seals in March 1963, to the end of his ministry in December 1965.
*And so we know full well that this period of his ministry was not a public show as it was with the first two pulls, nor is the third pull of the revealing of the revelation of this hour to be a public show in the continuation our own lives either of the opening of the word to us also in this hour, because this is the secret coming of the Lord to His elected bride of what he spoke of as a thief in the night time of the Laodicean age – it is the revealing of Christ to you personally in an invisible union, and this is the great marriage of the Lamb event of the uniting that follows the sign.
Is this the Sign of the End, Sir?
***And so what did the “I will meet you in their” actually look like in the reality of Brother Branham’s everyday life? Because what it looked like for him in his life must also be what it will also look like in our lives also – and so this is what God is letting us see by the opening statements of this message.
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12 And I... just little messages, as I pick up a little something on my heart, then I--I--I feel like I want to express it to you, you see, and we can fellowship around it. Now, I've got quite a few of them, five or six that just come to me in the last few days. And I went, couple days here, squirrel hunting out here. And I get in the woods, and take me a pencil and paper. See? Now at about time it gets good and daylight, I back up against a tree somewhere. If I don't go to sleep, I start to pray, and then the Lord will give me something. I start writing down little notes of it, you see. You know what I mean; when you get to yourself, and then you... Then here I come in, write it all off on a tablet of paper. And then when I'm called on, I run out and get my tablet and go to looking through it and see what I can start, you see. That's what happened just now.
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17 Some people tries to introduce Christianity, that "you're free from worry. You're..." No, you're not. "You're free from tension." Oh, no! You add tension when you become a Christian, because you was kind of a slop--go, happy-go-lucky, whatever it was out there, not caring what you did.
18 But when you've become a real Christian, every moment you're wondering, "Am I pleasing my Lord? If I could hear from Him!" It puts you on tension, puts you on guard. That's what makes you what you are. So after all, tension is a blessing. It's just the way you're looking at it. It's just the way you're looking at it. See? If you just look the other side, there's--there's... No matter how thin you slice anything, you still got two sides to it, you see. So you want to see both sides.
19 So tension... I think, "Oh my, it's... What's this tension? If I could've been born without this tension." Well, if I wouldn't have had this tension, I wouldn't have been what I am. I wouldn't have been a Christian, perhaps. It was this tension that drove me to Jesus Christ. See? So, it's been a blessing thing to me.
20 So then as Paul said, as though when he had a tension or something or another, he had consulted the Lord to--to take it away from him three times. And the Lord said, "Saul... My Paul, My grace is sufficient."
21 He said, "Then, I'll glory in my infirmities. Then when I'm weak, I'm strong." See? As long as it's to the will of God, all right.
22 Now, I consulted Him one time when it used to bother me so bad, it scared me. And He told me, about eight or ten years ago, He said, "It'll never scare you again." And it never has did it. No, sir; don't--don't worry about it. I just feel it, but I know it's there; but I just go on because it don't scare me no more, so thankful for that. Now, He could have said, "It won't be no more," just as well as that "You won't be scared no more."
23 So it's His will that it happened, so I just embrace it and say, "Thank You, Lord, I'll walk that way."
**He realised that God could have taken it all away, but he left it there for a purpose that was necessary for him to be able to receive the revelation of this age, and so he embraced it and thanked the Lord just like Paul did with his weaknesses.
**The message that we have received in this day had to first come to the prophet of God before it could come us via his voice, but we notice that it came to him under the conditions of him being under stress and tension.
**And so when we look at his life and the conditions that he was under at the time when the revelation of the word came to him, it was under the conditions of the pressures and the frustrations of life.
***We often think that if only our lives could be free from the pressure of the age, like if we could maybe live in a monastery and study the bible and the message all day and pray and meditate like the monks, then we would be far more spiritual, but God doesn’t do his training with us like that, He has allowed us to be in an environment and atmosphere of pressure and difficulty and uncertainty in order to reveal himself to us and to be united with us.
*** - Ruth was in the field gleaning for her very existence with the pressure of her own survival while she was going through the process of redemption and coming into unity with Boaz.
- Abraham and Sarah were living under the pressure of old age with the promise of God still unfulfilled.
- Abigail was under the pressure of a rich and arrogant husband when she came into union with her future husband David.
- Mary and Joseph were under the pressure of a tax law and of having to travel for days on end while Mary was about to be deliver of her baby.
- And we in this hour are under all these same pressures at this time of the uniting of Christ and His bride in a marriage of the lamb.
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40 Oh, my! No wonder they came, "Where is He? Where is He that's born King of the Jews? We've saw His Star in the East, and have come to worship Him. Where is He?" They knowed that that infant Messiah was laying somewhere, because God gave them a sign of the time, that God and man were uniting together. What a unity, when God united Himself in a human body! The principle, the greatest of all the unitings that ever was done, was when God united with man; and left His--His great strain of being God and stretched forth His tent and took in humanity, and become one of them through...?... unity. That what? That brought peace between God and man forever; how thankful we are.
God and man came together under the conditions of a fallen and troubled world – a world full of stress and flusterations.
So another thing we notice about the people in the Tent vision (in this non-public show event that took place in the little room behind closed doors), was that these people were under the conditions of sickness and troubles, again showing us the conditions of what the third pull operates under is during a time of when the elect of God are under conditions of weakness and stress.
**And so that is why that in this message of the uniting time and sign, it starts out by showing us how that brother Branham’s life was under all these pressures and upsets and tensions, and yet how that under those conditions he is developed by God into such a relationship of unity with God that God was able to trust him with the power of the spoken word to even speak things into existence in a creative power like what God did himself when he created the world at the beginning.
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41 And signs was not sent... Now just think, every man, and all the astronomers; people them days, their clocks was the stars. There was a watchman went on top of--of the tower, and he would get up there and watch. And he seen when certain stars was in a certain constellations, as they were passing, he knowed what time it was. Remember in the Scripture, "What time is it watchman?" And the watchman come back and told him in what hour it was. See, they kept time by the stars.
42 Now, isn't it strange that these stars were exactly in line for three men and nobody else saw it? See? Just exactly in line. Now, you can be so in line with the Scripture. See? When those stars become in unity, united themselves together in this constellation, three men were also united at the same time. And you can be so united with God, in His Word, until these things become realities, and you can see them and know that they are true. See? The sign of the time! You might look right over top of it, say, "Ah, nonsense!"
43 But to you it isn't nonsense. To you, you're united with the Word, and here It is. Then it's--it's absolutely right, Brother Pat, when--when--when--when you see this sign unite with the believer. And that's who I'm addressing this to, is the believer, for the unbeliever never see it. And what a rebuke it would be if He was on earth today; to many of our clergy today, who cannot read this sign; the signs that we're reading daily here at the tabernacle, and seeing the things. And others are reading it and seeing the handwriting on the wall, and yet many just ignore it, and don't even see it at all. It's nothing to them at all; they don't notice it.
To be continued - the Lord willing...