The Brown Bear Vision: Difference between revisions

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April 1, 1962, in the sermon "Wisdom versus Faith":  

People who believe that William Branham is a true prophet explain away this vision in the following ways.   

#Some claim that he will rise from the dead to fulfill this vision.   

There are a few problems with these explanations:

William Branham died in 1965, and a large stone pyramid now sits on top of his grave in Indiana. He is not raising from the dead just to travel to British Columbia to shoot a bear.   

''“God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon”'' the people of Nineveh (Jonah 3:10) because they repented.  Applying this scripture to William Branham’s life might make sense in the context of the vision of the destruction of Los Angeles (although there was no mass-repentance in L.A. as there was in Nineveh).  However, this scripture does not work in the context of the hunting vision, as it would mean that the brown bear repented of its evil ways.   

Years before the Jonah went to Nineveh, the prophet Jeremiah said that God would withhold his judgement to a Nation that would repent.  ''"The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it."''  (Jeremiah 18:7-8)  There is no scriptural precident that says God will relent of a vision that involves the destruction of a brown bear.   

A minister who accompanied William Branham on several of his hunting trips stated publicly that William Branham discussed his disobedience and the resultant failure of this vision in this quote:

So what will you do with this failed vision?  Will you succumb to [[Cognitive Dissonance|cognitive dissonance]] and trivialize an obvious wrong?

People are sometimes confused by the story about the vision of William Branham shooting a grizzly bear with that of him shooting a brown bear.  William Branham told the vision of shooting a grizzly bear several times.  The first time that he tells the story of this vision was on October 1, 1961, five months after he had shot the grizzly bear.   

:''About two months ago, or hardly that long, I was woke up one morning. I believe, I'm not sure... I told it to most of the church. There's many here has heard me tell this before it come to pass. And in the--a vision I saw, that I'd saw a great animal, looked like a deer. And it had great high horns. And it was... I had to go around a side shale, like this, to get to it. And it was a very famous animal. It was a great trophy animal. And there was a man that I saw that had on a green checkered shirt. And then on the road, after I'd got the animal, I'd heard a--a voice say that, "Those horns are forty-two inches high." That's about this high. And it was a mammoth animal. And on the road back, I saw a great huge silver-tip grizzly bear.  Now, that's the famous bear. There's four in the grizzly family. One is the silver-tip, which is the famous. Next is called, the native name, kadish, which is a black with a round ear; the second. Third is the regular grizzly, which is between black and brown, a huge bear. And the next is the Kodiak, which is only found on Kodiak Island and--and western Alaska; he's great, mammoth, biggest of all bears, but he's a grizzly. But the silver-tip is black, and the white is on--the silver is on the end of the tip of the hair. He's the famous one, very high-strung, ill-tempered bear. I shot the bear with a heart shot, killed him.''<ref>William Branham, October 1, 1961, ''It becometh us to fulfill all righteousness''</ref>

In May 1961, on a hunting trip in Northern British Columbia, William Branham shot a silver-tip grizzly bear which he stated he prophesied in advance, although this prophecy was not recorded on tape.