The Uniting Time and Sign – A Message Study
PSALM 86:1-12
1 ¶ A Prayer of David. Bow down thine ear, O LORD, hear me: for I am poor and needy.
2 Preserve my soul; for I am holy: O thou my God, save thy servant that trusteth in thee.
3 Be merciful unto me, O Lord: for I cry unto thee daily.
4 Rejoice the soul of thy servant: for unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.
5 For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee. (David certainly knew something about the character of God)
6 Give ear, O LORD, unto my prayer; and attend to the voice of my supplications.
7 In the day of my trouble I will call upon thee: for thou wilt answer me. (Trouble comes at different times for different people – but look at David’s confidence of the Lord’s help)
8 ¶ Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord; neither are there any works like unto thy works. (There are many gods that people form in their minds, and then they worship those imaginary gods – but we want to have the true God in our thoughts)
9 All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name. (That will be in the millennium)
10 For thou art great, and doest wondrous things: thou art God alone.
11 Teach me thy way, O LORD (God’s ways of dealing with us can be hard to understand if we don’t really believe that He is working all the negative things in our lives out for our good in the end - in other words, it takes certain bad things to happen to us in our lives in order for everything to work out well at the end – and so the sooner we understand that God is working all things for our good, the more at peace we will be when it looks like everything is going wrong in our lives); I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name.
12 I will praise thee, O Lord my God, with all my heart: and I will glorify thy name for evermore.
MATTHEW 16:1-4
1 ¶ The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven.
2 He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red.
3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? (Cleaver people that can read the signs of what the future weather will be, but theycannot see or understand the sign of the messiah right amongst them)
4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.
The Uniting Time and Sign – A Message Study
We want to take this message of “The Uniting Time and Sign” that Brother Branham preached in Jeffersonville at the Branham Tabernacle on the Sunday morning of 18th of August 1963, and we want to study it in a little more depth than if we just quickly read it through or just casually listened to the tape.
*I felt the presence of the Lord when I was listening to this message during the week – there was a great spirit of clarity that came over me that I believe was the spirit of the great teacher himself.
So we want understand the deeper thoughts of the message of what God is trying to show us in this day concerning the uniting of the bride to Christ – that is the main event of this hour.
*A woman doesn’t usually get married without her knowing that she is married and to whom she is married too.
**We have been talking in previous services about the marriage of the Lamb event that is taking place right now at this time just before we are taken up off the earth in the rapturing of the bride.
REVELATION 19:7
7 Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.
We are being made ready by the word of truth of the message of the hour, and we have been laying in the presence of that truth for many years.
And we’ve been talking about what that actually looks like in your everyday life in its reality form.
*And so we found out that this marriage of the Lamb of the invisible union of the bride to Christ is taking place in such a humble way that even we ourselves wonder if it is really happening like what we saw in the little room of the tent vision of how the effect of the third pull ministry on the people would firstly not be a public show, and secondly, that even the people that were being ministered to under the third pull ministry of the prophet would not really know what was really happening to them – they couldn’t explain it.
BEING.LED.OF.THE.HOLY.SPIRIT_ MINNEAPOLIS.MN SUNDAY_ 56-0219
E-22 … and He said, "I will meet you in there."...
So then I said, "I don't understand why in there."
E-23 He said, "Watch." And this woman when she come out of there on the ambulance stretcher, she was pushing the stretcher out the other side. (Notice how it is symbolised here in the vision as a healing ministry of a bodily healing, but being a symbolic vision it is also showing us the body change at the end of this age under the third pull ministry of the prophet – that is the ultimate healing, because under the first and second pull ministry, the healing was only temporal, those people still eventually died at the end of their lives, but there is promised an eternal healing of a glorified body at the end of the third pull for the people that go through that little room experience – that is the experience that as message believers under the third pull of this message we have been going through for many years now)
And she said... The lady asked her with the--the... Said, "What--what happened?"
She said, "I don't know. It just happened." She said, "I've been in this stretcher." Said, "I've been down in bed for years." And here come the man out packing his crutches. And they asked him what, said he didn't know.
***That is why I think personally that in this age God is doing such a secret work in the hearts of His elect, that it has become so hard for people to explain the experience of this age because it is so different to any other age.
It is like Mary trying to explain how she got pregnant without knowing a man, (that would be really hard to explain) because for Mary, no other age or woman in the bible had ever had that happen before, it was a first of any previous age, and she couldn’t explain it.
***Mary herself was under a third pull ministry of the word being opened to her (for her age) by an angel’s message to her, but yet she couldn’t explain the experience of how it actually happened when it did happen – she brought forth a new body by an experience that she couldn’t explain and by an experience where there was no sensation attached to it.
MATTHEW 16:4 opening scripture…
4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.
Jonah was a prophet to a gentile kingdom and people who were under the threat of a cataclysmic judgement from God because of their increasing and compounding wickedness.
And we have also seen a gentile prophet come to a wicked and adulterous generation in this day – and so this gentile prophet in our day is a major sign from God of pending judgement to this end time generation, but only an elected people can recognise this – the rest of the world cannot see this great end time sign.
THE.UNITING.TIME.AND.SIGN_ JEFF.IN V-6 N-10 SUNDAY_ 63-0818
37 These signs given, by the Lord, is given only to believers. The unbelievers never see it. They go right over the top of them, and they don't see it.
*I told the youth at our youth meeting a couple of weeks back – You don’t want to just quickly listen through a message of the prophet of God, because it is so easy to miss catching what the spirit is trying to reveal of the truth that is laying in the message.
So that is why you want to sometimes go slower and stop and ponder what is being said by God to His elected bride in this generation, and let the spirit of the real meaning and truth of the word of this hour soak down into your own spirit and unite with your spirit – this is really what is going on in the little room of the tent vission, because this is what eternal life really is, it is when the spirit of the truth of the word gets into your spirit and becomes united with your own spirit – God’s thoughts and your thought becoming one and the same understanding.
*And so we want to study this message “The Uniting Time and Sign” because this is about the marriage of the Lamb and how it is manifested in your own life in this hour.
*We know that this message was preached in August 1963 around 5 months after the opening of the seven seals in Brother Branham’s own church in Jeffersonville of where he felt the full liberty to speak the full revelation of what God was opening to him under his third pull ministry of the revealing of the mystery truths of the entire bible.
**We know that the 7 seals series that he preached in March 1963 continued to open to him in an unfolding manner right up until the last message he preached in December 1965, and this is very important for us to understand, because we couldn’t have gone on to understand the full opening of the word of this hour based only on the seven seals series that he preached in March 1963, but brother Branham would tell us many times that it was since the opening of the seven seals that the bible had become a new book – so the third pull of Brother Branham’s ministry was to be an unfolding ministry that included all the sermons that he preached from the opening of the seven seals in 1963, to the end of his ministry in 1965.
THE.UNITING.TIME.AND.SIGN_ JEFF.IN V-6 N-10 SUNDAY_ 63-0818
97 We see nations uniting, we see the world uniting, we see communism uniting, we see the churches uniting; and we see God uniting Hisself with His Bride, until He and the Church is the same thing; like the family, together. Right! Uniting themselves together; God uniting! Why? Never before, since the early church age, was the Pillar of Fire ever among the people. Never before, since the early church age, did they ever see the things that we are seeing today. And this was only made possible when God sent the Seven Seals and give us a sign by It, and sent seven Angels down out of Heaven; and come to bring back that scattered Word in them denominations, and tie it back into the Word of God again, to bring down His Holy Spirit.
*He is speaking of the Holy Spirit in word revelation form, and not in an anointing form as it was in the Pentecostal age just passed.
So what does that little room experience look like for each of us in our own personal experience of the tent vision prophecy?
*We have been under this third pull ministry of the prophet’s message for many years now, and it is still going on in our lives right now as the word of this hour become clearer and clearer to us.
*The word of what was opened to Brother Branham between 1963 and 1965 is now being understood by an elected people in the same way and in the same clarity that it was revealed to him.
So in this message “The Uniting Time and Sign”, he begins this message by what we would consider some “small talk” of how that he had been off praying and waiting on the Lord, and then coming down the road he had turned on his radio to listen to a coloured minister called Brother Smith.
And then he speaks of a Sister Weaver’s funeral that he helped brother Neville with the service, and then he tells of his family of how he had just taken them back to Arizona so his children could get to school but that he was in Jeffersonville to try to relax a little and go hunting with some of the brethren that coming week because he had a big trip of meetings coming up.
**And so if we are not aware that God is actually in this small talk, then we will miss seeing something of what God is trying to show us of the life of this man, and of how the word would continue to open to him while all these busy things of his natural life were going on. We sometimes forget that he was just a human like we are.
Let’s take a closer look at some of this small talk.
THE.UNITING.TIME.AND.SIGN_ JEFF.IN V-6 N-10 SUNDAY_ 63-0818
8 And I don't try to... I do not try to--to say too much about it on, you know, around people complaining. Because, I think, one of the horriblest things is to see a--a man or a woman that's constantly complaining. I've always thought, "God, keep me from it." (Notice how he is letting us see something of his personal mind struggles, because he knew that he had a personal weakness and leaning towards criticising and complaining, and he knew that as you get older, that the way a tree leans it usually falls, and so he had this constant concern of himself because of his makeup that he would end up an old crabby and complaining man, and so he had to make a constant effort not to be like that, and so that was one of the tensions that was constantly in his life) See, that--that weakens faith all the time, you know. You just--you just... if you--if you... I know as they get older, each one of us, we're going to get something happen and something happen (The problems of life will just keep piling up and accumulating the longer you live – the knowledge and memories of all the past troubles and trials of life keep stacking up higher in your memory). And I know those little things are going to keep accumulating, that's as you get older, they just got to. But I think one of the most horrible things, is for Satan to crown some person's life: a crabbed old man or an old woman, you see. I--I hope that I don't get to that place. (Notice how Satan wants to crown a person’s life with a character that is not the character of Christ, while God wants to crown your life with his own character – and so this is where all the fight is going on in your life between these two opposing characters) I hope that I can bear it, my burdens, and--and get to a spot to where... I want my life crowned with the Glory of God: His longsuffering, gentleness, peace, meekness, and filled with the Holy Spirit.
So Brother Branham had a tendency in his nature to lean towards being a complainer, and so he was fearful of that characteristic developing more in his life as he got older along with all the accumulation of the trials and struggles of his life, and so he was constantly fighting against the way that his natural sticky human nature wanted to lean.
**So at the beginning of this message he is opening up to us about some of his internal struggles, because as we study more into this message we realise that this is what God was actually wanting us to see this part of him as a normal human being with normal struggles because this is the condition of his life that he was in of when God cause him to be united with the word for this hour. ***God is showing us something of how this uniting with the word of this day will look like in our own lives and amidst all the struggles of our own life battles.
To be continued - the Lord willing...