The Prediction
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
The prediction
| Church Age Book statement of the vision |
|---|
| The Laodicean Age began around the turn of the Twentieth Century, perhaps 1906. How long will it last? As a servant of God who has had multitudes of visions, of which NONE has ever failed, let me predict (I did not say prophesy, but predict) that this age will end around 1977. If you will pardon a personal note here, I base this prediction on seven major continuous visions that came to me one Sunday morning in June, 1933. The Lord Jesus spoke to me and said that the coming of the Lord was drawing nigh, but that before He came, seven major events would transpire. |
The problem of the failure of the 1977 deadline is solved, in the eyes of many, by claiming, as William Branham himself was at pains to point out, that it was not a prophecy but ‘just a prediction’.
This explanation is not reasonable because there are three patterns of behaviour that turn it into a full-blown prophecy.
Firstly, he reiterated the ‘1977 date’ 10 times in six sermons which of itself gave the notion currency. After all, if it was ‘just a prediction’ then why repeat it. The more he repeated the claim the less it was viewed as just his idea and the more it was seen as a prophecy. There were few people in the early 1970s who regarded it as an expendable comment – most were convinced that it was a genuine prophecy and that the end of the world was at hand.
And then one needs to think about his position. He claimed, and people believed him, to be a prophet and as such he acquired a duty of care as regards what he said. It would have been naïve of him to expect that listeners would treat what he said about the future in the same way that they treated what their neighbour said.
To caution the people over treating his words as prophetic when he insisted that they weren’t was to deny the very basis on which he had a following. He claimed greatness and therefore needed to act appropriately. In fact, if this was just his idea about such an incredibly important matter (the coming of the Lord) then why say it at all!
Secondly there is the comment that he made in the message ‘The Seventieth week of Daniel’:
- And here comes around and shows, and then I predicted... I never said the Lord told me that, but standing that morning in the church, I said, "The way progress..." I got back to one end of the wall and run to the other end of the wall, and I said, "The way progress is going on, I'll predict that the time (I don't know why I'm saying it.) — but I predict that that'll all happen between right now, 1933, and 1977
He is talking about the 1933 meeting. He is claiming that he made a statement and didn’t know why he was making it. This implies that he was constrained by God to say it, and this is the way that it was interpreted. He claims an anointing ‘and here [he] comes around and shows’ (i.e. God shows), ‘I got back to one end of the wall and run to the other end of the wall, and I said . . .’, that is, he was under another spiritual influence.
There could be no other interpretation: he was telling the congregation that he was under the anointing of the Holy Spirit when he said that all of the visions would be fulfilled by 1977.
Thirdly, the next statement:
- And not knowing it, God knows my heart, I never knowed it until yesterday, that 1977 is the jubilee, and exactly the same amount of time run out that He give with Israel and everything at the end. So, we're at... And here we are at the end of the age, at the coming in of the seventieth week. We don't know what time that the church will be gone. Oh, my. What can we do, friends? Where are we at?
Here, a prophet is interpreting the scripture and placing 1977 as the end of the time that God gave to the gentiles – the same length of time that he gave to the Jews. This statement has the same character as Peter’s on the day of Pentecost ‘This is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel’ – illuminating the scripture via a revelation of something that was not known. He is claiming that the scripture is supporting his 1977 date.
These three observations turn the prediction into a prophecy. There is no question that the 1977 date was a part of the 1933 vision statement, that it was a prophecy (but he hedged his bets) and that the prophecy has failed.