Ern Baxter: Difference between revisions

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-'''DISCLAIMER'''<br><font size='-1'>The person featured in this article was a witness to William Branham's healing ministry.  However, this person does not necessarily agree with the doctrines taught by William Branham.  This testimony is therefore independent evidence that the healing and prophetic ministry of William Branham was genuine.</font>
+'''DISCLAIMER'''<br><font size='-1'>The person featured in this article was a witness to William Branham's healing ministry.  This testimony is independent evidence that the healing and prophetic ministry of William Branham was genuine.</font>
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 :Yes, you could see it.  Then this gave way to the straight oral word where he would give accurate details concerning the person.  He never missed, and this made a tremendous impact.
-:...Many of the subsequent healers receive their initiative from him.  He was relieved the fountainhead of the healing revival of the 50's and 60's. Many of the men who began to hold healing meeting subsequent to Branham's had short-lived ministries.  Many of them couldn't handle what the ministry and its consequent recognition did to them personally
+:Branham also probably introduced deliverance in its form at that time. He cast out spirits. This made the large congregations very sensitive to the presence of demonic powers. There was a lot of primitiveness about it. For instance, he would insist the audience bow their heads during exorcism lest the spirits get in another person! The whole ministry was so new and so powerful that, when I met him in 1947, his mail was enormous.
+:Many of the subsequent healers receive their initiative from him.  He was relieved the fountainhead of the healing revival of the 50's and 60's. Many of the men who began to hold healing meeting subsequent to Branham's had short-lived ministries.  Many of them couldn't handle what the ministry and its consequent recognition did to them personally
 :The prominence and visibility it created was unbelievable.  Many people did not know healing or anything supernatural existed.  The ministry reached out and touched people in the denominations.  It was very effective that way.  People, of course, care about their bodies, so they came - some hundreds and others thousands of miles.  It was hard to handle the adulation and the praise.  It was almost like Barnabas and Paul's experience when they were considered "gods from heaven".
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 :Well, to try to remember or to pick out a few outstanding supernatural occurrences with Branham is somewhat difficult because it was just a parade of the supernatural.  On one occasion, we were down in the southern states, and a big auditorium meeting.  The first or second night there, Brother Branham came to a certain man in the healing line.  He looked at him and said, "Sir, I see you have come into this line tonight to trick me.  In fact, I see you last night in a room sitting around a table with four other ministers.  You are a minister of such and such a denomination." He pointed up to the balcony and said, "Those four men sitting up, there are your friends, and you plotted last night how to trick me.  I was going to tell you what was wrong with you, and you were going to deny it." They just turned around and fled the building.
-:...Once in Des Moines, Iowa, a missionary from the South Seas who had just flown home because of a very serious ailment was standing in front of him. Branham started out by saying, "Oh, you're a missionary.  You just flew in today," and then he named the place the man had come from. At that, the entire crowd went into jubilation.
+:I was with him in South Africa at a time when a large number of religious people rejected the ministry of healing, creating real pressures. There was a man in the meeting who was interested. He was of a denomination that was coming down on us very heavily. On the way home from the meeting, this man felt a hand on the back of his shirt. He turned around and there was no one there. But when he got home, he took off his shirt and found a handprint there - just as if a hot iron had left its imprint on his shirt. The shirt was shown in the next day’s newspaper.
+:Once in Des Moines, Iowa, a missionary from the South Seas who had just flown home because of a very serious ailment was standing in front of him. Branham started out by saying, "Oh, you're a missionary.  You just flew in today," and then he named the place the man had come from. At that, the entire crowd went into jubilation.
 '''Had Branham had any contact with any of the earlier men, like Smith Wigglesworth, or the Jeffreys?  Would that have been the inspiration for his ministry?'''
-:...He was a relatively illiterate man, and so had not read widely.  He was a great hunter.  His abilities were in the realm of natural and intuitive abilities.  I questioned him about many people.  He didn't know Dr. Charles Price, who had had quite a healing ministry back in the 1920's - 30's, or any others whom I mentioned.
+:I was very careful to check that out at the time. Branham had no direct link with pentecostalism in terms of his gift. In his home there had been no deep spiritual life, but he told me stories that indicated this gift was with him as a child. (He made some very significant prophecies, for instance, concerning the collapse of a bridge in his area of Ohio.) He once said to me, “If anybody ever writes my biography, you’re the only one I’ve ever told everything to.” He and I had many sessions that were hours long. During one of these, he told me he didn’t believe that tongues was the evidence of the baptism. So I asked him about speaking in tongues, and he said that he had gone to a pentecostal mission and had told God, “These are apparently the only people that will accept my gift - let me talk in tongues so I’ll be acceptable.” And he said God let him talk in tongues, but he never talked in tongues again. That seemed to be his introduction to the pentecostals, and they apparently accepted him because of it. Few people would know that story, but I mention it because as his gift became more apparent as he grew older, he saw that the pentecostal people were probably the only ones who would receive it.
+:He was a relatively illiterate man, and so had not read widely.  He was a great hunter.  His abilities were in the realm of natural and intuitive abilities.  I questioned him about many people.  He didn't know Dr. Charles Price, who had had quite a healing ministry back in the 1920's - 30's, or any others whom I mentioned.
 :I do not see any inspiration for his ministry coming from any of these earlier men, certainly not in the realm of his word of knowledge.  Concerning whatever God may have done in the spirit, I have no knowledge.  But in the realm of his word of knowledge, there were no apparent human models he could have patterned himself on.  He just seemed to break from a whole new source.  He was missionary Baptist, so his tradition would not link him into historic Pentecostalism.
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 :We had a great personal friendship.  We hunted together and walked great deal.  Branham was a very simple man.  He had maintained and checked the lines for the power company in his area and walking in the outdoors was his life.  So we walked and talked together.  We were great friends.
+'''What brought about the end of that era of the healing revival and what prompted the decline of William Branham’s ministry and others like him?'''
+:Well, the healing movement began with such a spectacular display that the men involved in it faced major unprecedented problems. Men were suddenly ushered into very prominent, eye-catching, supernatural ministries. Many of them couldn’t handle it personally. One of the sad aspects of the healing movement is the personal shipwrecks and breakdowns. I think the healing movement began to subside because of the way it was mishandled.
+:Men could not handle the pressures and personal temptations. In addition a number of extraneous elements came in, such as exaggeration, false reports, misrepresentation. Right at the beginning of the healing movement, I saw this starting to emerge. The healers could not meet together in any meaningful way. They would have a conference together, but it was not meaningful. They began to publish competitive exaggerated statistics on tent size, numbers, results and other things.
+:At that time Gordon Lindsay, who was still relating to Branham, started the Voice of Healing Magazine. Because I was prominently involved with Branham, I was asked to contribute. I wrote an article out of my conviction and concern entitled, “The Curse of Carnal Comparisons,” in which I pointed out that there was a good deal of Corinthianism already in the healing movement. And that if something was not done by the healers to remedy it, this movement would self-destruct.
+:As a result of that article I was persona non grata from there on as far as the healers were concerned, so I confined myself to Branham. Tragically, as these men violated the principles of plurality, each of them had his turn at the pinnacle of fame, but most of them were easily picked off by the enemy. Satan’s aim is good.
+:I remember in the beginning of the healing movement, simply to report a healing would produce great jubilation and praise from congregations. However, the cynicism became so deep that the people’s confidence was diminished. Even to this day, people are affected. People began to circulate healing testimonies which, when they were checked out by reputable journalists and reporters, even those who were friendly to the movement, were found to be false. The percentage of healings that stood up after investigation was embarrassingly low. As a result, disillusionment set in, and the healing movement as it was known in the beginning declined in momentum until today you can’t say it really amounts to anything as a movement.
+'''What brought William Branham’s ministry to a close?'''
+:I believe there’s a Bible principle involved. No matter who we are, if we don’t relate to the principles of truth, we pay for it. We either fall on it and break in repentance, or it falls on us and breaks us in judgment.
+:The measure of faith Paul talks about in Romans 12 where he says, “to each man is given a measure of faith . . . he that prophesieth, let him prophecy according to the measure of faith,” indicates that we all have been given a grace gift. But we must walk within the confines of our gift. For instance, if a miracle worker, who may be used mightily in working miiracles, steps over the boundaries of that gift and presumes, to be a teacher when God has not called him to teach, then he is violating the rule of walking within his grace.
+:Branham saw himself as a teacher of some kind of “in” truth. To me, some of it was quite esoteric. I became aware early in his ministry that there was a mixture. I urged him not to say some things in public. As long as we worked together he refrained. One of the reasons for my leaving him was that he was starting to say some seriously wrong things. When that, coupled with other circumstances, eventually became unbearable, I resigned.
+:I think there can be a lesson in this. Branham, as a miracle worker, had a real place. Branham as a teacher was outside of his calling. The fruits of his teaching ministry are not good.
+'''What do you think is one of the main things that we can learn from the healing revival and the ministry of Branham and others?'''
+:That’s an excellent question. I think we need to learn out of it the absolutely mandatory nature of the principle of plurality. No man, no matter how gifted, can afford to violate plurality and walk alone.
+:Number two, I would say it points up the great necessity of staying in your calling or gift, and not making use of whatever accrues to you from that gift to get into other areas.  I think it also points up the need of having responsible community to receive the fruits of this kind of evangelistic ministry. If the converts are not brought into a New Testament biblical community or church, they become followers of a man who cannot develop them into maturity.
+:I believe these principles are very basic. In addition, man does not live by miracles alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Miracles and signs arid wonders are not food. They are signs to tell you where the food is. If you try to live on the signs, you get unbalanced nutrition.
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