Why were the Visions given?
This is an essay analyzing William Branham's Seven Visions of 1933. It was written by a former message follower.
Click on the links below to go to a specific section within the essay. You are currently on the topic below that is in bold:
An Introduction to the Analysis of the Seven Visions of 1933
What were the Seven Visions?
How many Visions?
Why were the Visions given?
Why did the Visions fail to change men’s religious ideas?
A Comparison of the 1960 Sermon and the Church Age Book
A Critique of each Vision
- Mussolini
- Hitler
- Three ISMs
- Scientific progress
- Women and morals
- Powerful Woman in America
- America destroyed
The Prediction
The sequence of the visions
Two views of the Seven Visions
Summary of the discussion
Why were the Visions given?
The visions were given to William Branham by God to demonstrate that the ‘coming of the Lord’ was ‘drawing nigh’ and to provide a record of seven events that would transpire before his coming.
We can reasonably assume that the visions were also given to prove that the prophet was correct and that his teaching should be taken seriously. And they would prove that the Bible and its end-time interpretation was correct.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that if the visions were faulty in any way, then the prophet would be called into question and the other purposes would be frustrated. This possibility has to be taken seriously and cannot simply be shrugged off. If he is proven to have been in error as regards the visions then his ministry is discredited.
Imagine the situation if these visions had been well publicised in 1933. Certainly, amongst the religious community, there would have been high expectations. As the prophecies were progressively fulfilled it would have become increasingly clear to the religious organisations of the world - to Baptists, Pentecostals, Catholics, Mormons, Islamists, Buddhists, Hindus (and, incidentally, to Unbelievers) that the Bible was really true (and that therefore other holy books and beliefs were not), that an apocalypse was at hand and that the Message of the Laodicean Church Age prophet was God’s word to the age. They would have provided unequivocal proof of the Christian doctrines of salvation and of the imminence of the eschatology recorded in the Bible.
We can imagine the impact of such a sequence of events. By the end of World War II There would have been little place for contrary opinions. If the ‘Three ISMS’ prophecy had looked likely to be fulfilled it would have been very difficult to rationalise and would have required a dramatic change in the world view of 99.9% of the population of the Earth. Imagine the newspaper headlines:
- A Christian preacher by the name of William Branham predicted the future occurrence of seven events in 1933 that he said would preface what is known in Christian circles as The Rapture (the taking of believers to heaven) and the first three of these predictions have actually occurred. He predicted that Mussolini would invade Ethiopia, that a man named Hitler would start a world war and that by the end of the war the evil ideologies of Nazism and Fascism would be overtaken by the Communism of Russia (which is looking increasingly likely). Next, he predicted driverless cars! The success of these predictions has the Christian world buzzing. Could they be true and if so, then what are the implications!
During William Branham’s lifetime he, in fact, declared that no fewer than five of the visions had already been fulfilled and that therefore the astonishment of the world should have been complete.
The fulfilment of these visions ought to have triggered a revolution in the religious thinking of all men. It ought to have achieved God’s obvious goal, to attract the attention of the world and to turn them to the truth. But this did not occur during William Branham’s lifetime and has not occurred since – then why not?