Half a verse
This article is a response to the second session of a Church Age Book curriculum taught by Trevor Emond on October 28, 2018, covering Lessons 3 and 4.[1] . All timestamps refer to that recording. The teaching begins at approximately [24:00].
Half a Verse
About forty minutes into this lesson, Trevor Emond does something I want to thank him for.
He stops teaching the Church Age Book and gives his congregation a Message evangelistic tool. He calls it, in the third person, "Brother Trevor's preferred method for showing someone scripturally why he believes in a prophet" [41:00]. Then he walks the room through it, step by step, in the order they should use it on you.
That is a gift to anyone who wants to have an honest conversation with the Message. Nobody has to guess at the argument or build a version of it that no one holds. It comes from the man who teaches it, in the words he wants his people to use.
So let us take it seriously and check it.
What he gets right
Three things first, because they are true. We have never said that the Message contains no truth. So let's look at some things that are true.
The seven churches were real churches. He is emphatic about this at [34:05]: "these were seven local physical churches that were there in what's known as modern day Turkey." He points them to a map, notes that the whole region would fit inside Indiana, and mentions that the map took him three and a half hours to draw. Plenty of preachers in and out of the Message treat Revelation 2 and 3 as pure symbol. He does not.
He also asks a question at [35:44] that deserves a better answer than the one he gives it: were these the only churches in Asia? No. What about Antioch? Why these seven? I will come back to this issue.
And on Malachi, he is right about something most people get wrong [41:19]:
None of us just memorize Malachi chapter 4 verse 5 and leave off verse 6, because verse 6 tells why and what that messenger to come was going to do.
He calls it a personal pet peeve. He is correct. Verse 6 is where the argument lives, and anyone who quotes verse 5 alone has stopped reading too early.
Very well. Let's read verse 6.
The argument, in his order
Stripped to its bones, the method runs like this.
- Malachi 4:5 promises an Elijah before "the great and dreadful day of the Lord."
- That day is the second coming, so this Elijah is an end-time figure.
- John the Baptist fulfilled only the first half of Malachi 4:6, turning the fathers' hearts to the children. The second half is unfulfilled.
- Revelation 2 and 3 give us seven angels, one per church, and the seventh is Laodicea.
- Revelation 10:7 says the seventh angel reveals the mysteries.
- Therefore the Elijah, the seventh church age angel, and the angel of Revelation 10:7 are one man.
- William Branham revealed mysteries, and a voice at the Ohio River in 1933 told him his message would forerun the second coming as John the Baptist foreran the first.
Every step has a difficulty. Two of them can be checked in the time it takes to read a verse.
"The great and dreadful day"
The chain begins here, at [48:20]. The day cannot be the first coming, because the first coming was not dreadful. So there must be an Elijah at the end.
The word is the difficulty. The Hebrew is yare', and it carries the sense of awe, of inspiring reverence, of astonishment. Modern translations render it accordingly:
… before the great and awesome Day of the Lord. (HCSB, ESV)
More decisive is the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles quoted:
… before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes …
Great and glorious. Read that way, the verse says nothing about dread, and the reason for splitting the prophecy between two Elijahs disappears.
If that seems like special pleading, Scripture settles it internally. Joel 2:31 uses the same Hebrew word, and the KJV renders it "the great and the terrible day of the Lord." Peter quotes that verse in Acts 2:20, and the KJV translates the same phrase as "that great and notable day of the Lord."
Notable. The King James translators themselves rendered the word as something other than dreadful when the New Testament quoted it.
Half a verse
Now the critical issue at [44:22]:
Did John the Baptist do both of those? No. He turned the hearts of the fathers to the children, and it stops there. And it doesn't say, and the children back to their fathers. So truly Elias has come, John the Baptist came in the spirit and power of Elijah, and he did the first part of this.
The whole edifice rests on half a verse being left over. And Trevor Emond builds a small theology of authorship on it [48:03]:
He can separate a comma and say that's John the Baptist, and everything after that, that's William Branham.
Turn to Luke 1:17, which he had the congregation read fifteen minutes earlier [43:35]. The angel tells Zacharias what his son will do:
… to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
There are two clauses there, not one. Luke gives the first clause of Malachi 4:6 exactly, and then renders the second as "the disobedient to the wisdom of the just."
That is the second half, applied to John.
The reading behind it makes sense once you see it. The fathers are the patriarchs, and the children are the disobedient of Israel. The patriarchs look down on their descendants and are displeased. John's work turns things so that the fathers can look on Israel with favour again, and so that the disobedient accept the wisdom of the just. The result is stated in the same sentence: a people prepared for the Lord.
The Septuagint of Malachi 4:6 confirms it from the other direction:
… who shall turn again the heart of the father to the son, and the heart of a man to his neighbour …
Father to son. Man to neighbour. No leftover clause for anybody.
There is no half-verse waiting for a second Elijah. Luke used it up in the sentence Trevor Emond read to his congregation.
The verse that was not read
A second problem sits alongside it, and it concerns a verse that never gets read.
At [43:04] Emond raises the obvious objection himself. Somebody will say that Jesus already identified John as Elijah. He grants it: "sure, that's true, that's true, he did come. But how did he come, and what did he do?"
He never quotes the verse. Matthew 11:14:
And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.
Which was for to come. Jesus is not saying John resembled Elijah. He is saying John is the Elijah of the prophecy, the one who was to come. And there is only one prophecy of a coming Elijah in Malachi, and it is in chapter 4.
William Branham handled this passage by attributing John to Malachi 3 and reserving Malachi 4 for himself.[2] But Malachi 3 does not mention Elijah at all. The only Elijah in the book is in chapter 4, so if Jesus called John the Elijah who was to come, he was pointing at chapter 4.
Matthew 17:11 is usually raised next, where Jesus says "Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things." The future tense looks promising until you notice that Jesus is quoting the Septuagint of Malachi 4:5, where the verb is future. He is citing the prophecy in its own words. And he finishes the thought two verses later:
But I say unto you, That Elias is come already … Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist. (Matthew 17:12-13)
Counting to seven
The second chain is the one I would most like a reader to check personally, because it takes about ninety seconds and it happens in front of the congregation as a participation exercise.
From [49:19] to [50:34], Emond walks the room through Revelation 2 and 3, and has them count aloud:
Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus. How many angels have we read about? One … Unto the angel of the church in Smyrna. Which angel is this? Second angel … Unto the angel of the church in Pergamos. Which angel? Third angel …
And so on to Laodicea, "the seventh angel." Then, at [50:47], he turns them to Revelation 10:7, reads "in the days of the voice of the seventh angel," and lets the coincidence land.
Open your Bible to Revelation 2 and 3 and look for the numbers.
They are not there. The text says "unto the angel of the church of Ephesus," "unto the angel of the church in Smyrna," and so on through all seven. Not one of them is numbered. There is no first angel, no fourth angel, and no seventh angel anywhere in those two chapters.
The numbering was supplied by the teacher, chanted back by the congregation, and then matched to a number that appears somewhere else.
And Revelation does number angels when it means to. Turn to chapter 8:
And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets. (Revelation 8:2)
Then: the first angel sounded (8:7), the second angel sounded (8:8), the third (8:10), the fourth (8:12), the fifth (9:1), the sixth (9:13). Six numbered angels, in order, sounding trumpets.
Those are the angels the seventh of Revelation 10:7 belongs among. They are numbered one through six, with a seventh still to come. The church angels of chapters 2 and 3 are numbered nowhere at all.
The book knows how to number angels. It numbers the trumpet angels. It never numbers the church angels.
He has not sounded yet
One more thing finishes the matter.
The Greek behind "when he shall begin to sound" in Revelation 10:7 is ὅταν μέλλῃ σαλπίζειν, and it means "when he is about to sound." The same construction appears at Revelation 3:2 and 10:4, where the KJV itself renders it "about to."
So in Revelation 10:7 the seventh angel has not blown his trumpet. He is lifting it.
He sounds it in Revelation 11:15, after the ministry of the two witnesses in Revelation 11:3-12. Since the two witnesses have not yet appeared, this angel has not yet sounded, and no man who died in 1965 can be him.[3]
William Branham was aware of the difficulty. His answer was that the passage refers to "the message angel, not the trumpet angel." The Greek does not support the distinction, and the same word angelos is used of all of them.
And the identification is not original. Charles Taze Russell claimed Revelation 10:7 for himself, tied to Revelation 3:14, before Branham did.
Five comings, or six
A smaller point, but it shows the method.
At [44:48] Emond counts the appearances of the spirit of Elijah: Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, then the coming one, then one of the two witnesses of Revelation 11. He arrives at four and does something remarkable [45:04]:
And that's four comings. But five is the more scriptural number here. So there's five comings of Elijah.
The number four was inconvenient, so the count became five, and the extra slot is the one Branham occupies.
Set aside whether numerology can settle a question of fact. On Branham's own arithmetic, an appearance has been missed. Elijah appears in the New Testament twice, not once. He is on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses, and Peter offers to build him a tabernacle (Matthew 17:4).
Count that and the five slots are filled without a Gentile Elijah. It also creates a second problem, because Moses was on that mountain too. If Elijah comes five times, Moses comes three, and the Message expects two.
The Pentecost he wants us restored to
Trevor Emond fills in the missing half-verse this way [46:14]:
Their version of Christianity is different, and now they have to be turned back to the heart of their fathers that were back at Pentecost. Amen. Because that Pentecost, that's where we need to be.
That is a lovely thought, and I would happily be turned back to Pentecost.
The difficulty is that William Branham taught that the Word that fell at Pentecost will not work in this day. He was explicit that each age has its own portion and that the previous one no longer serves.
So the second half of Malachi 4:6, which exists to justify a modern Elijah, restores the church to something the same prophet said had stopped working. Either Pentecost is where we need to be, in which case the Message adds nothing we could not get from Acts, or it is not, in which case the restoration is to a place we are not supposed to go.
Lesson four, and a rule worth keeping
The second half of the evening turns to doctrine and creeds, and Trevor Emond lays down a principle I would put on the wall:
Doctrine can't be based upon some experience. Doctrine is based on God's word, not on experience. [1:18:00]
He is right, and he holds it firmly. He is scathing about people who build teaching out of a personal moment, and his illustration is funny and exactly on target: a man decides that because Peter was crucified upside down, everyone should pray standing on their heads.
Now hold that rule beside the argument he taught an hour earlier.
The chain from Malachi to Revelation 10:7 does not by itself name anybody. It gets to a slot. What fills the slot, at [51:50], is an event:
In 1933, as he was baptizing in the Ohio River, a pillar of fire came down and a whirlwind, and it spoke and said as John the Baptist … so will your message forerun the second coming.
An experience. A voice, a light, and a witness claim.
I am not mocking that. What happened at the Ohio River, and what the photograph taken in Houston in 1950 actually shows, we have written about at length elsewhere and will not repeat here.[4] The point for this article is narrower. Trevor Emond told his congregation that doctrine may not be built on experience, in the same evening that he taught them an argument whose final step is an experience.
And he had made the rule sharper than that. The example he chose, moments before, was the boy in Heaven Is for Real, who reported an out-of-body visit to heaven [1:17:59]:
Didn't little Colton Burpo have an experience? He had an out-of-body experience, and you want me to base my doctrine on that, that Jesus has a little throne? You can forget it. Because doctrine is based on God's word, not on experience. People can have experiences of everything.
A boy's vision cannot establish doctrine. A man's vision at a river can establish an entire movement. The rule was stated correctly and applied to everyone except the one person it would have cost something to apply it to.
The creed he calls a doctrine of a devil
One more thing from lesson four, offered gently, because it is the kind of error anybody can make.
Working through the Apostles' Creed, Emond reaches "the holy catholic church, the communion of saints" [1:16:31] and says it three times over: "this is a doctrine of a devil ... hear that backbone, hear that teeth ... don't be deceived by this" [1:16:53]. His objection, given a moment later, is prayer to the dead.
The word "catholic" in that creed means universal. It is not a reference to Rome, and the creed predates the Roman Catholic Church as a distinct body. Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists recite that line every Sunday, and every one of them means the whole church of Jesus Christ in every place.
"The communion of saints" means the fellowship of all believers, living and departed, in Christ. It is not a claim that anyone talks to the dead.
A lesson on the importance of sound doctrine has ruled the most widely used doctrinal summary in Christian history a doctrine of a devil, on the basis of two words whose meaning Trevor misread. This is precisely what happens when a movement stops reading the people who came before it and is ignorant of actual church history.
Conclusion
Late in the session, Trevor Emond says something I have thought about since [55:07]:
These people that leave the message, and then they have to just chuck out all their understanding of the book of Revelations, like, I don't even know. I just can't even imagine how to unsee any of this.
I understand that better than he might think. When a system explains everything, stepping outside it feels like being asked to go blind.
But look at what the seeing consists of here.
A translation that the King James translators themselves rendered differently when the New Testament quoted it.
A leftover half-verse that Luke had already used up, in the passage read aloud that same evening, and a sentence of Jesus about John that never got read at all.
Seven angels counted into existence by a congregation, out of two chapters that number none of them, and matched to a trumpet angel who has not sounded yet.
And a sound rule about experience, stated firmly, that is then ignored when it comes to the voice at the river.
Which brings me back to the question Trevor asked earlier in the evening and left standing. Why these seven churches, and not Antioch? Because Ephesus was losing its first love, Smyrna was about to go to prison, Pergamos had lost Antipas, and Laodicea was rich and blind and had Jesus outside the door knocking. Seven real congregations with seven real problems that every church since has recognized in itself. That is why they were chosen, and it is why those two chapters have been preached for two thousand years to people who never heard of a church age.
You do not have to unsee anything. You only have to read what the text plainly states without reading anything into it.
Footnotes
- ↑ https://www.messageteacher.com/cab-curriculum-videos/cab-lesson-4/
- ↑ Under the Halo, chapter 16, "Gentile Elijah?" The chapter was contributed by Benjamin Mubanga of Zambia.
- ↑ Under the Halo, chapter 15, "The Angel of Revelation 10:7." Contributed by Rakesh Chettri of India.
- ↑ See Was William Branham Honest and The Cloud.