We Create an Atmosphere
This article is a response to the sixth session of a Church Age Book curriculum taught by Trevor Emond on December 23, 2018, covering Lesson 10.[1] All timestamps refer to that recording. The teaching begins at approximately [25:24].
We Create an Atmosphere
This lesson contains some good pastoral preaching, and it also contains one of the most revealing sentences.
The text is Revelation 1:10: I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. The class is still in chapter one of the Church Age Book, working phrase by phrase toward the ages themselves.
Rest
Start with what is good, because there is a lot of it.
Emond spends twenty minutes on rest, and he gets it right. He takes Hebrews 4:11, labour to enter into that rest, and draws the conclusion that most preaching never reaches [1:14:18]:
That's the only thing the Christian does. The only work that we do is just whatever work it takes to get into his rest.
Then, at [1:16:06], to people who have been straining:
Stop trying so hard. The yoke is easy. The burden is light.
And he applies it to his own movement, at [1:15:53], with a candour I did not expect:
Those gruff message believers I was talking about, they haven't ceased yet. They're still trying to do it on their own.
He knows the type. He has met people worn thin by trying to be sufficiently in the Message, and he tells them to stop. That is a good pastor talking, and any Christian anywhere could sit under that section and be helped by it.
Hold onto it, because the lesson then explains how the rest is obtained.
The ball game
From [50:11], Emond builds an extended comparison between getting in the Spirit and being a sports fan. It is funny, it is well observed, and the congregation clearly enjoys it.
How do fans get in the spirit? They think about the team constantly. They read the statistics. They talk about it with friends. They emulate the players. They look forward to the event, they dress for it, and then they go to where it is happening. And when they are all in the building together, something takes over that would never take over in a living room.
His application is direct. Do the same with church. Prepare on your knees instead of in the mirror. Learn the material well enough to anticipate where the preacher is going. Come expecting something.
Much of that is sound advice. Attentive, prepared worshippers are better worshippers.
Then, at [49:52], comes the sentence:
Because Brother Branham says we're little messiahs. We're little creators. What do we create? We create an atmosphere.
Follow the chain
Set the pieces of this lesson in order, using Emond's own words.
Revelation, he says, is the thing you need above everything, and the need for it can never be overemphasized [43:23]. How do you get it? [43:05] "In the Spirit. That's so much better. How's these revelations going to ever come to you? In the Spirit."
How do you get in the Spirit? By atmosphere. At [48:29], describing what the gifts in the body do: "It creates an atmosphere where it's so much easier to get in the spirit."
Who creates the atmosphere? We do. We are little creators.
So the sequence runs: we build the atmosphere, the atmosphere produces the state, the state produces the revelation, and the revelation confirms the teaching.
Every step of that is inside the room.
Emond describes the mechanism in the ball game without appearing to notice what he has described. The fan gets excited because he has spent hours on the statistics, because the crowd is roaring, and because he has come expecting it. Nobody thinks the roar of the crowd proves the team is good. It proves the crowd is a crowd.
He even supplies the experiment. At [1:35:36] the visiting pastor makes the point for him: a sports fan sitting at home does not stomp and shout, but put the same man in the stadium and he behaves differently. "Why didn't they do that when they was at home? Because there's an atmosphere that's being created."
That is a description of crowd effect, offered as an explanation of spiritual experience, in a lesson whose purpose is to teach people how to receive revelation.
A feeling that a congregation manufactures cannot then be used to verify what the congregation was told.
I do not think any of this is cynical. Trevor Emond plainly loves his people and loves the services. But he has explained the machinery in public, and it is worth a Message reader noticing that the machinery would work identically in a room where the doctrine was false.
"I see it and not everyone else"
A second thing slips out in the same stretch, quickly and almost in passing [1:11:34]:
I see it and not everyone else. Oh, yes! What? That's pleasure to me.
He is talking about his study of the seven trumpets, and about the thrill of seeing something others do not.
I recognise that feeling and I am not going to pretend I have never had it. But it is a dangerous thing to name as a pleasure, because it makes being right about a doctrine into a private enjoyment, and it attaches the enjoyment to other people not sharing it. In Seal Not the Sayings we looked at the same teacher telling his congregation they are "a special class of people," stopping twice to manage their discomfort, and then repeating it to God in the closing prayer. This is the same instinct, said more casually.
The Lord's day
Now the exegesis, because the whole lesson hangs on a short phrase
At [1:12:44] Emond gives the Branham reading:
What had happened was that John was caught up in the spirit and transported into the Lord's day which is yet to come. The Bible speaks of the day of the Lord which is to be in the future and John is now seeing the things of that future day.
And at [1:16:48] he identifies it: "That's the day he wants to take us to, the Lord's day, that thousand year millennial reign."
So John, in Revelation 1:10, was transported forward into the Millennium.
Notice first that Emond himself senses a problem. At [1:13:39] he says he is going to explain "the difference between the day of the Lord and the Lord's day," and then, in the same breath, treats them as the same thing and never returns to the distinction.
He was right to hesitate. The two phrases are different in Greek, and the difference is not subtle.
The day of the Lord, everywhere it appears, is a noun with a genitive: hēmera kyriou, the day belonging to the Lord. That is the construction in Acts 2:20, in 1 Thessalonians 5:2, in 2 Peter 3:10.
Revelation 1:10 does not use it. John writes en tē kyriakē hēmera, where kyriakē is an adjective meaning "lordly" or "belonging to the Lord."
That adjective appears exactly twice in the New Testament. The other occurrence is 1 Corinthians 11:20, where Paul writes of the kyriakon deipnon, the Lord's Supper. Nobody has ever suggested Paul meant a meal in the Millennium. He meant the meal that belongs to the Lord, eaten by Christians, in the present.
Same adjective. Same sense. A thing belonging to the Lord and observed by his people.
What the earliest Christians called it
The usage settles quickly after John, and by writers close enough to him to matter.
The Didache, which most scholars date to the late first or early second century, instructs Christians to gather on the kyriakē to break bread and give thanks. That is a weekly assembly, not a future age.
Ignatius of Antioch, writing about AD 107, contrasts sabbatizing with living "according to the Lord's day," and he means the day Christians met.
Within a decade or two of Revelation being written, the phrase John used was the ordinary Christian name for Sunday. That is what it meant to the people who first read the letter.
Both of those sources should be familiar to this class. They are the same early witnesses who record baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, two centuries before Nicaea, which we set out in Everybody Confused Yet?.
The contradiction inside the section
One more difficulty, and this one is internal.
At [1:14:57] Emond reads Branham on the rest:
There is your rest, that is your Sabbath. It is not a day nor a year, but the eternity of being filled and blessed in the Holy Spirit.
Not a day nor a year.
Two minutes later, at [1:16:51], the Lord's day is "that thousand year millennial reign."
A thousand years is a period of time. The lesson has said the rest is not a period of time and then identified it with one.
Emond then pushes the other way, and pushes well [1:15:15]:
Did you know that today was part of eternity? Don't wait. Oh, I gotta wait for Jesus to come. No, you don't have to wait for Jesus to come to have this.
He is right, and it is the better instinct. The rest of Hebrews 4 is available now. But that is precisely the reading he has just rejected, because a "Lord's day" that has not yet arrived is a day you have to wait for.
Grandma
The last thing in this lesson is the one I have thought about most, and I want to handle it gently, because it involves a child.
At [1:20:24] Emond tells the congregation about a conversation with his daughter. His mother died in 2000. His father remarried, and the new wife is, in his own words, "a nice Christian lady." She is the only grandmother on that side his daughter has known.
Then this [1:20:38]:
But when we start preaching on the Holy Spirit, we start preaching on the Holy Spirit's going to bring you to this message, and if you don't have the Holy Spirit you're not taking a rapture, you know, that begins to ... and children are pretty bright, actually. And it's like, okay, well that means grandma ain't taking a rapture.
The child did the arithmetic correctly. She was taught that the Holy Spirit brings you to the Message, that grandma is not in the Message, and that people without the Holy Spirit are left behind. She reached the only conclusion available and took it to her father.
His answer is the kindest one the system permits [1:21:31]:
We serve a righteous and loving God, and we can trust a righteous God. We can trust him that he's going to do the right thing.
That is true, and I would say it to anybody. But look at what it is doing. It is not answering the question. It is asking a child to hold the doctrine and her grandmother in her head at the same time and trust that God will sort it out.
He adds something else worth noticing [1:21:50]: you can "beat them over the head with a Bible and a message book" and work and lose sleep, and it will not help. Rest instead.
So the doctrine creates the fear, and then the answer to the fear is to stop trying and rest in God's righteousness. That is a good answer. It is also the answer that would be available if the doctrine were simply not true.
A Christian woman who reads her Bible, prays, and loves Jesus is not left behind because she rejects William Branham. The question that troubled that little girl has an answer, and the answer is that her grandmother is going IF her faith is in Christ alone.
Conclusion
Trevor Emond told his class at [32:39] that they are working toward the church ages, which begin in chapter two of the book. They will get there in a few weeks.
When they do, they will be given dates. Those dates came from Clarence Larkin, a Baptist writer who died in 1924, and the list of messengers came from Charles Taze Russell.[2] None of that will be mentioned in the lesson, because Branham mentioned Larkin three times in his entire ministry and never during this material.
Which brings the two halves of this evening together.
The class has been taught to build an atmosphere, to enter a state, and to receive revelation in it, and to treat what arrives that way as the thing that confirms the teaching. That is a closed loop, and no fact can get inside it. The dates cannot be checked against Larkin, because checking is not how the material is received.
Meanwhile, a short phrase in Revelation 1:10 has been made to carry a millennium, when the same adjective in 1 Corinthians means the communion .
And a child has worked out for herself that her grandmother is not going.
Trevor Emond is right that there is rest, and right that we should stop trying so hard. The rest was never conditional on being in the Message, which is why his own answer to his daughter worked.
Footnotes
- ↑ https://www.messageteacher.com/cab-curriculum-videos/cab-lesson-10/
- ↑ Under the Halo, chapter 12, "The Seven Church Ages."