The Absolute He Would Not Apply

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In 2012, we turned the Believethesign website from a site that promoted William Branham into one that examined him honestly. Barry Coffey responded that year from the pulpit at Hickory Bible Tabernacle with a six-part series called The Present Truth.

If you want to listen to all or part of the entire series, please click here. All of the timestamps in our article refer to the part of the series being examined. You are currently in the part of the series that is highlighted:

• Part 1 - The Test That Fails Its Maker
• Part 2 - The Photograph That Proves Too Much
• Part 3 - The Absolute He Would Not Apply
• Part 4 - What Heresy Actually Means
• Part 5 - The Dress Code He Condemned
• Part 6 - The Defense That Says "Stop Looking"

The Absolute He Would Not Apply

A Response to Barry Coffey's "The Present Truth," Part 3

Something changed in the third sermon. I want to begin by thanking Barry Coffey for it.

In Parts 1 and 2, he told his congregation to trust the message by breaking into the spirit rather than checking the facts. In Part 3, preached on the morning of July 29, 2012, he does something I did not expect. He hands his people a standard. A fixed, external, unbending standard against which every claim must be measured. He calls it an absolute, and he says plainly what it is: the Bible.

I agree with him completely. That is not a debating trick. It is the whole point of this response. Because once you accept the standard Barry Coffey lays down in this sermon, you cannot keep the message. He built the test. He simply would not apply it to the one place it was needed.

Let's look at the evidence. All of it, measured against his absolute.

What Barry Coffey Argued

The sermon opens on the familiar ground of Parts 1 and 2: the vertical duty of personal salvation, the horizontal duty of defending what you believe, and the word apologia, a reasoned defense (1 Peter 3:15). If you want the response to how he handles those verses, I worked through it in my answers to Part 1 and [The Photograph That Proves Too Much|Part 2]].

But the heart of Part 3 is new, and it is important. Coffey argues that you cannot reason with anyone unless you both stand on an absolute, a final standard "not liable to modification," "free from qualification, condition, exception, or restriction" (57:03). He names it: "the Bible is an absolute, isn't it? God's word is an absolute" (57:28). Everything, he says, must come back to it. Not experience, which can deceive. Not the testimony of people we trust, because "you can also be told a lie by somebody, even if you trust them" (1:00:47). Only the Word.

Then he goes to where many Message ministers go, but most don't actually believe. He tells his congregation that the prophet himself is under that absolute:

• "Everything that a prophet says is not thus saith the Lord" (1:38:49). He says it three times.
• "Prophets are not infallible people. Prophets are not angels, they are men" (1:39:54).
• On how to test Branham's own words: "How do we know then that what Brother Branham said was not just himself? ... we bring it back to the Word of God ... if it's not scriptural, you have a right to lay it aside" (1:40:15).

He even quotes Branham calling one of his own statements "just as unscriptural as it can be" (1:30:55). And he praises Branham for once hearing a supernatural sound in a 1958 meeting and, instead of announcing it as God, stopping to check it against Scripture first: "I begin to check it with the word" (1:23:01).

This is exactly right. Every word of it. So let us do what he asks.

The Standard He Asked For Is the Standard We Asked For

For years, the response to this website has been that we are carnal for checking facts, or, as Coffey said in Parts 1 and 2, that we should break into the spirit rather than search the record. Part 3 quietly abandons that. Coffey now says the opposite: bring every claim back to a fixed standard, test it, and lay aside whatever fails.

That is all Believethesign has ever asked. Not that anyone abandon faith. Not that anyone doubt that God works. Only that the claims made about William Branham be measured against a standard that does not bend to protect them. Coffey has now named that standard from his own pulpit and told his people to use it.

So the disagreement between us is smaller than it looked three sermons ago. We agree on the absolute. We agree that the prophet is under it. We agree that a claim which fails the Word must be laid aside. The only question left is whether Barry Coffey will follow his own instruction to the places it actually leads.

He does not. And watching where he stops is the most revealing thing in the sermon.

The Prophet Is Under the Absolute, Except When He Isn't

Here is the contradiction at the center of Part 3.

Coffey says Branham was fallible, a man and not an angel, whose words must be checked against Scripture and laid aside if they fail. In the same sermon, he calls him "a vindicated prophet ... not just by my opinion, but God vindicated him over and over" whose vindication settles the matter (1:29:30).

Both cannot be true. Either Branham's claims are subject to the absolute, or they are above it. If they are subject to it, then the test applies, and we will see in a moment what the test does to them. If they are above it, then Coffey has thrown away his own sermon, because an absolute that exempts the one claim under dispute is not an absolute at all. It is a shield.

Coffey wants the Bible to be the final authority for everyone in the room except the prophet whose claims are the actual point of contention. But you do not get to name a standard and then carve out the single exception that the standard exists to test. That is not how an absolute works. He said so himself: "free from qualification, condition, exception, or restriction."

Applying the Test: The Prophet's Own "Thus Saith the Lord"

Coffey gives us the perfect worked example, and he chose it himself.

He raises the claim that Branham predicted a million people would be killed in the racial unrest of the 1950s and 60s. And he shows, fairly, that Branham distinguished this from a divine word. Branham said, "that wasn't thus saith the Lord ... that's just my opinion ... I don't know how it's going to come out" (1:43:19). Coffey's point is that Branham was humble enough to separate his opinions from God's words, and that this is a mark of honesty.

I accept the distinction. It is a good one. So let's use it.

If Branham's opinions are one thing and his "Thus Saith the Lord" is another, then the fair test is simple: what happened when Branham did say "Thus Saith the Lord"? Coffey's own absolute, and the test of Deuteronomy 18 that Branham applied to himself, says a word spoken in the name of the Lord that fails to come to pass did not come from God. One failure is enough. Branham used the phrase "Thus Saith the Lord" more than sixteen hundred times.

Consider three.

Donny Morton

Branham pronounced the boy Donny Morton healed and said, more than once, that it was "Thus Saith the Lord." The boy was not healed. After a series of brain operations, Donny Morton died in November 1951. His sister, Denelda Morton Clayton, confirmed decades later that the healing Branham described, the boy running to his father and wearing the new shoes, never happened. That is not an opinion Branham floated. It is a divine word he declared, and it fell to the ground.

Franklin Roosevelt

Branham said President Franklin D. Roosevelt would cause the whole world to go to war. If you know anything about history, this prophecy is obviously false. Lee Vayle realized this and completely deleted it from the Church Age Book.

Vision of the Brown Bear

In 1962, William Branham announced — on tape, publicly, in front of his congregation — that he was going to shoot a massive brown bear on his next hunting trip. It wasn’t a casual remark. He called it “Thus Saith The Lord.”

He never shot the bear. He died in December 1965 with that vision still unfulfilled.

These are not his opinions and we have more examples of where his "Thus Saith The Lord" failed. By his own careful distinction, the one Coffey praises him for, these are the claims that carry the full weight of a word from God. And they failed. Under Coffey's absolute, applied evenly, the conclusion is not in doubt. I did not set this test. Branham set it for himself, and Barry Coffey re-affirmed it in this very sermon.

The Method He Praised Is the Method He Condemns in Us

There is a moment in Part 3 where Coffey tells a story I want to hold up, because it is the whole argument in miniature.

In 1958, Branham was on a platform before a service and heard a sound like a rushing wind move through the building. Coffey admires what Branham did next. He did not shout that it was God. He stopped. "I begin to check it with the word," Branham said, turning to John 12 to see whether the event matched Scripture before he would accept it (1:23:01). Coffey draws the lesson out plainly: "When something happens, it's not necessarily always of God. It's got to line up with the word, and what you got a responsibility to do is check it with the word" (1:23:13).

That is exactly what this website does. That is exactly what I asked Barry Coffey to do in Part 2 with the Houston photograph, and in Part 1 with the Arizona cloud. Check it with the word. Check it with the record. Do not accept a supernatural claim simply because it is impressive or because a trusted man made it.

Coffey commends the method when Branham uses it on a sound in a building. He condemns the method when we use it on the photograph, the cloud, and the failed prophecies. But it is the same method. The only thing that changes is the subject. When Branham checks a claim, it is spiritual discernment. When we check a claim, it is carnal skepticism and "garbage on the internet." It cannot be both. If checking a supernatural event against the standard was right for Branham in 1958, it is right for us now.

Two Moments Coffey Did Not See

Twice more, Part 3 makes an argument that turns and points back at the one making it.

The first is the story of Yoism. Coffey describes, with real scorn, an internet religion whose followers edit their own beliefs like a Wikipedia page, adding what they like and removing what they don't. "Can you imagine what it would be like if we treated the Bible that way?" he asks (1:09:23). It is a fair thing to mock.

But look at what fills the rest of his own sermon. Coffey spends long stretches describing Message ministers doing precisely that with Branham. One keeps the quotes he likes and decides the prophet "wasn't inspired when he said" the ones he doesn't. Others take the "no communion in the future home" teaching and drop communion. Others take "now we're in the millennium" and teach that we are in the millennium. And Coffey himself, in this sermon, is promoting the "Branham was fallible" quotes to the front and quietly setting the "infallible prophet" claims to the back, because the website has made the infallibility claim indefensible. Someone is running the message like a Wikipedia page, editing the canon to fit the moment. It is not the skeptics. It is the movement.

The second is smaller, and it is where I want to end, because it is the honest heart of this whole exchange. Twice in Part 3, Coffey quotes Branham's own standing invitation: if the prophet ever said anything unscriptural, "you owe it to me to come to me about it. Because it has to be right here first" (1:19:18). Branham said it. Coffey repeated it, with approval, from his pulpit.

We came. We brought the Bible and we brought the record, exactly as Branham asked. We laid the failed prophecies and the false photograph story next to the Word and the facts, right here first. And the answer was not "let us check it together against the absolute." The answer was a six-part sermon series telling the congregation not to look.

Scripture, Handled Rightly

Three points of Scripture in Part 3 need a closer look, and one of them is the key to the whole sermon.

"Cunningly devised fables" and "present truth" (2 Peter 1:16, 1:12).

Coffey warns his people, rightly, not to follow "cunningly devised fables" or the personalities who say "I rode on the horse with him" or "I was up there when he was seeing the angels" (1:48:33). But read what Peter offers as the alternative to fables in the very next breath. Not "break into the spirit." Eyewitness verification: "we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (1:16), and "a more sure word of prophecy" (1:19), a word that is confirmed and can be relied upon.

Peter's guard against fables is checkable testimony. The Houston photograph, the seven angels, the cloud, these are the very kind of unverifiable stories Peter is warning about, and Coffey is defending them while quoting the passage that condemns them.

"No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation" (2 Peter 1:20).

Coffey says our job is not to interpret the Word: "your job, my job is not to interpret God's word. I believe that's the job of the Holy Spirit" (1:27:44). But this collapses his own sermon. He has spent an hour and a half demanding that his people give a reasoned defense of what they believe, from the Bible. You cannot give a reasoned defense of a book you are forbidden to interpret. And the verse does not say what he needs it to say. Peter is describing where prophecy came from, that it did not originate in the prophet's own imagination but from God, not forbidding believers from understanding their Bibles. The Bereans interpreted, and were called noble for it.

"My sheep hear my voice" (John 10).

Coffey uses this to mean that real believers will recognize and accept the message, and that those who don't reveal themselves as not truly sheep. But in context Jesus is describing those who follow Him, the shepherd, not offering a test to sort message-believers from skeptics. Used the way Coffey uses it, it becomes unanswerable in the worst sense: anyone who examines the message and walks away is simply defined as never having been a sheep. That is not discernment. It is a way to make the claim impossible to question.

An Honest Invitation

I meant the thanks I began with. Part 3 is the sermon where Barry Coffey and I agree on the thing that matters most. There is an absolute. It is the Word of God. Every claim, including the claims of a prophet, must be brought back to it and laid aside if it fails.

I only ask that we finish the sentence. An absolute that everyone must bow to except the one man whose claims are in question is not an absolute. It is special pleading dressed in the language of Scripture. If the Bible is truly the standard, then the failed prophecies fail, the false photograph story falls, and "Thus Saith the Lord" that did not come to pass cannot be excused as we would excuse a passing opinion.

The people who believe the message are not fools and they are not my enemies. They have simply been asked to hold two things that cannot both be held: that the Bible judges everything, and that the prophet is beyond judgment. Part 3 puts those two things side by side on the same morning. I am only pointing at the seam.

There is a greater than William Branham, and Barry Coffey said it himself: a true gift points not to the messenger but to Jesus Christ. On that, we agree entirely.

So point there.

Point to the Christ whose word was foretold before it came, whose tomb was found empty in front of witnesses, and who never once said "Thus Saith the Lord" over a thing that failed. Bring it all back to Him. That is the absolute. Let it be the absolute for everyone.

Come and reason. Three responses down. Three to go.

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