So if God did, in fact, send a prophet, shouldn’t we believe all that he says?
The serpent’s objective was to get Adam’s wife to doubt just one word of God’s instructions. He knew that once the seed was planted in her mind, he could have his way with her. And we all know what happened next.
Eve believed God, but instead of standing firm, she stopped for a moment to listen to the serpent’s argument. He reasoned with her, getting her to disbelieve one thing: “thou shalt surely die,” and added a little to it to make the Message more acceptable to reasoning: “thou shalt not surely die.” Then he had her under his control, and her doubt exploded into sin, death, and destruction. That old serpent’s approach in the Garden of Eden has been successful for 6,000 years, and he’s become a master at planting the seed of doubt. He learned a long time ago that he doesn’t need to tackle the entire Bible; all he needs to do is cause his victim to disbelieve one word. Then doubt has an open door to spread from Genesis to Revelation. True to form, he is doing the same thing with the Gospel today.
You’ve probably heard about the recent attacks on Brother Branham’s Message through various websites and forums. Their tactics use the vast information that is so readily available through the internet to seduce believers into doubting. What they are not saying is that there are thousands of websites, books, and other publications by atheists that use the exact same methods to discredit the Bible. It’s the old trick from the Garden that has taken on a new form.
What is the tactics of Satan? Reasoning. “It’s just reasonable.” And when you hear anything that reasons against the Word, get away from it. It’s the devil. Don’t care how old fashion it is, how strange it looks, when God said so, that settles it eternally. Get away from anything that reasons against the Word.
62-0713 FROM THAT TIME
Another fiercely contested testimony is Paul on his road to Damascus and his experience with the Lord Jesus.
In Acts 9, the men with him “stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.” In Acts 22, Paul retells the story and says the men “saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.”
This seems like a direct contradiction, but the skeptics don’t stop there. The same story is told three times, and every time the Lord’s instructions to Paul are told slightly different. Acts 9 is brief:
“Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.”
Acts 22, when Paul is talking to the Jews, he goes into a little more depth: “Arise, and go into Damascus; and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee to do.” Then, when he was speaking to Agrippa in Acts 26, he went into even more detail:
“But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.”
The critic would argue that some 30 years after the experience, when his life is on the line, Paul “embellishes” to justify his ministry, and says that Jesus, Himself, commissioned him to preach to the Gentiles, even though there was no mention of this in the previous accounts.
So which account of Paul’s experience is true? They all are. The natural eye would think that the telling of this story is different decades after it took place, so it must be false. In reality, the Book of Acts is written exactly the way God wanted it. There are many who claim to believe the Bible but are critics of Brother Branham’s Message because Brother Branham described the seven visions from 1933 or his commission from the Angel of the Lord slightly different at times. The “inconsistency” is not in the Message, but in the way they judge the Message.
Were Paul’s different testimonies false because they were told slightly different? Of course not. Further, if they judge the Message by the Bible, then they will see that it is precisely in line with the way the prophets spoke. That is why we listen to so many tapes and read the entire Bible. We don’t read Matthew, and leave out the other three Gospels, and neither do we listen to the Seven Seals and leave out Daniel’s Seventy Weeks.
We take it all because it ALL is the inspired Word of God.
Get Brother Branham's downloadable sermons at http://branham.org/en/MessageAudio
What? Who is William Branham? Here: http://branham.org/en/williambranham and http://themessage.com/messenger.
God bless you.
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