Who do you say the son of man is?
This article is a response to "The Unchanging God With Unchanging Ways, Part 2," preached on December 7, 2025, by Tom Rae at Cloverdale Bibleway in Surrey, British Columbia. All timestamps refer to that recording. The sermon itself begins at approximately [53:42]. Please listen to it in full before reading further. I want you to hear him for yourself. Where the auto-transcript garbles "Brother Branham" into other names, I have corrected it and marked the correction in square brackets.
Who Do You Say the Son of Man Is?
That question is Tom Rae's, not mine. He asks it at [1:25:28], and it is the right question. It is the question Jesus put to Peter, and how you answer it decides everything else.
This article is about what happens to his answer over the following forty minutes.
I want to start somewhere unusual for this website. For about four minutes in the middle of this sermon, Tom Rae does some of the best expository work I have heard from a Message pulpit. I am going to lay it out at length, because the article depends on it, and because he deserves to have it quoted properly rather than summarised by someone who disagrees with him.
The four minutes he gets right
Rae begins by making a distinction that most preachers never bother with [1:18:47]. The phrase "son of man" is used of Ezekiel, over and over, and it means something there. God addresses the prophet as a man of the dust, a man of the clay. So when Jesus takes the same phrase for himself, is he claiming no more than Ezekiel had?
Rae says no, and he takes the congregation to the right passage to prove it. Daniel 7 [1:19:18].
I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13-14)
Then he draws the conclusion [1:21:13]:
Why do you think the Pharisees ... he was making himself God by saying son of man. Not son of man prophet. They've had many prophets, and they killed the prophets. But this son of man came from heaven himself.
And at [1:22:16], on the trial before the high priest:
Why do you think the high priest, when he asked him, are you the son of man, and they tore their garments? Because he was making himself God. Can I give you flash news. He was.
He is right. This is careful, and it is correct, and it matters. When Jesus stood before Caiaphas and said "I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62), he was quoting Daniel 7 back at the men who knew exactly what Daniel 7 said. That is why the garments came off. Not a prophet claim. A claim to the everlasting dominion that Daniel saw given to one figure.
Hold that. Everything below depends on it being true.
The title starts to move
Ninety seconds later, at [1:22:40]:
Brother Branham was a son of man, anointed under a prophet's anointing.
And then, quoting William Branham [1:22:51]:
It wasn't me that spoke at the river, it was him. The son of man. I'm a son of man revealing that son of man that has come down from heaven.
Now, Tom Rae saw this coming and he tried to guard against it. Earlier, at [1:19:35], he is careful:
Brother Branham was born in sin, shaped in iniquity, coming to the world speaking lies, and he had to get born again just like you and I. But Jesus was virgin born, and being virgin born he had no sin.
I want to give that its full weight. He is not saying William Branham was God. He knows the difference and he states it plainly to his congregation.
But look at what the sermon has just done to the phrase. For four minutes he taught his people that "son of man" is not the prophet word. He built the whole section on the fact that Ezekiel's usage and Jesus' usage are different things, and that missing the difference is what put Christ on the cross. Then he takes the loaded phrase, the Daniel 7 phrase, the one that got the high priest's robes torn, and he places it on William Branham.
Norman Geisler calls this the four-term fallacy: a word carries one meaning in the first part of an argument and a different meaning in the second, and the argument travels on the switch.[1] A congregation that has just spent four minutes learning that "son of man" means deity does not reset the meter when the phrase moves to a different man.
One detail in the same verse
There is a smaller thing in the same passage worth pointing out, because it happens ninety seconds after he reads the verse.
Daniel 7:13 has two figures in it. One like the Son of man comes to the Ancient of days. Two persons, and the text is careful to separate them. One arrives, the other receives.
At [1:24:42], describing the cloud that appeared over Arizona in 1963, Rae says:
That wasn't a cloud. That was seven angels winging the great Ancient of Days, our lovely Lord Jesus.
Jesus has become the Ancient of Days. In the verse Rae had just read aloud, those are two figures standing in relation to each other, and the whole force of the passage is that the Son of man is brought near before him.
I do not think that was carelessness. It is what the Oneness view of the Godhead requires, and it is the same collapse we have written about elsewhere.[2]
Then it moves again
At [1:23:26], the dominion arrives in the pews:
Where is the son of man now? Is living in his church. Come on people, claim your rights. Dominion. Over every spirit.
By [2:00:56] it has become a formula:
The son of man that's living veiled within the people, deity in the people, again, you shall have what you ask.
And at [2:03:39], the sermon reaches its destination:
God is in me. I am born of the blessed. I am veiling God.
Go back to Daniel 7:14 and count. Dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him. Singular. One figure receives it. The whole point of the vision, and the reason Jesus reached for it at his trial, is that this is one man's inheritance and nobody else's.
Scripture says a great deal about what the believer receives in Christ, and it is not small. We are heirs, we are seated with him, we are indwelt by his Spirit. But Daniel 7 is not a passage about us. Turning "his dominion is an everlasting dominion" into "claim your rights, dominion over every spirit" moves a Christological text onto the congregation, and once it has moved, it has to be cashed out.
Which is where the trouble starts.
What it costs the people in that room
Cloverdale Bibleway keeps a board at the front of the church. On it are written the names of people's children who have left, and the congregation comes forward and adds more [1:16:00]. Tom Rae wants the names erased, one by one, as they come home. He says so several times, and at [2:29:06] he promises to bring the eraser.
I find that moving. Any parent would. Whatever else I write here, I am not going to be clever about a room full of mothers and fathers praying for their children by name.
But watch what the doctrine does to that board.
Having established deity in the believer, Rae gives the instruction at [2:02:52]:
Now you say to that person you wrote down, I claim you ... Satan, take your hands off of God's property.
And at [2:00:36] he explains the mechanism:
I happen to believe that if you say it in faith that God's going to do it. But if you say it just hope so, it'll just be a hope result.
Now read that as a parent whose son has not come home in six years. If saying it in faith gets it done, and you have been saying it for six years, then something has gone wrong at your end. The doctrine has no other place to put the failure. Your faith was the variable, so your faith is the answer.
The same reasoning turns up at [1:27:34]:
If your sons can't get victory over cigarettes then you're letting a demon in your home. And why aren't you taking authority over that demon?
That is said to somebody in that building, about a real teenager, in front of the neighbours.
There is a better answer available, and it costs the parent nothing. Paul prayed three times about the thorn and it did not go [2 Corinthians 12:8]. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane that the cup would pass, and it did not pass. Neither of them lacked faith. Sometimes the answer is no, and sometimes it is not yet, and the person praying has done nothing wrong. A doctrine that cannot say that to a grieving parent is a doctrine that will eventually break them.
"Without this message you don't have this"
There is one more claim in this sermon that has to be dealt with, because everything above rests on it. At [1:10:52], Rae reports an objection he apparently hears from his own people:
I get so often people, once in a while, Brother Tommy, talk about the message ... thousands and thousands of denominations have this Bible and they live like devils. But this message, but this message makes this Bible come alive. Without this message you don't have this.
He then anticipates the pushback out loud [1:11:22]: "That is too strong, Brother Tom." And instead of softening it, he presses:
That's been sitting in every pastor's study, every pulpit that's being preached this morning, and they don't have a clue what's going on.
Two observations, and I will keep them short.
The first is that the claim is asserted and never argued. Not once in this sermon does he take a passage, show that the plain reading fails, and then show the Message supplying what was missing. The claim simply stands there.
The second is that his own sermon contradicts it. At [54:22] he read Matthew 12 aloud from that same Bible, to a congregation following along in their own copies, and everyone in the building understood it. If the Bible were dead without the Message, that reading would have been noise.
I would put one more thing beside it. At [2:06:41], near the end, Tom Rae says this:
If you think you can be satisfied by any one of us preachers, you are highly mistaken. You haven't read your Bible enough. It's not the people, it's him. It's the person, Christ, is the one that changes us.
That is a fine sentence and I would be glad to have written it. It also cannot live in the same sermon as "without this message you don't have this." Read your Bible more, he says, in a service where he has already told them the Bible does not come alive without something else.
A greater than Sheba
Which brings us back to his text, and to the question in the title of this article.
Early in the sermon, at [1:11:38], Rae works from Matthew 12 to an invitation:
He gave us a greater than Solomon. So then if there's a greater than Solomon, there must be a greater than Sheba. There must be. I would just like to know, are we a part of the greater than Queen of Sheba here?
I understand the appeal of that. The Queen of Sheba is a wonderful figure, and being told you are her successor is a warm thing to hear on a Sunday morning.
But go back and read what Jesus is doing with her.
The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here. (Matthew 12:42)
She is not there as an encouragement. She is there as a witness for the prosecution.
Look at who Jesus is talking to. Scribes and Pharisees, verse 38, who have just asked him for a sign. These are the religious insiders. They have the scriptures, they have the traditions, they have the teachers, and the greater than Solomon is standing in the room with them asking for nothing but faith. And Jesus says: a pagan queen who had none of that, who heard a rumour at the far end of the world and got on a camel, will stand up at the judgment and condemn you.
The men of Nineveh do the same thing, one verse earlier. They had one sentence of preaching from a runaway prophet who did not want to be there, and they repented. Jesus holds them up against people with everything.
Notice what the passage is for. It is a warning, and it is aimed precisely at the group in the room who are most certain they are the ones with the light.
So when Tom Rae asks his congregation whether they are the greater than Sheba, the text answers him, and the answer is uncomfortable. In Matthew 12, Sheba is the outsider. She is the woman with almost nothing who travelled anyway. The people holding the full revelation, the complete system, the thing that makes the Bible come alive, are the other party in the comparison.
The Queen of the South did not have a prophet. She had a rumour, and she went.
Conclusion
I have left a good deal of this sermon alone. There is more to say about the Abraham Accords and the Nobel Peace Prize being read as prophecy, about Jonah's disobedience being turned into God's plan by way of Psalm 37:23, and about a passage near the end concerning a book some of you may have heard about. Those will keep.
This is the shape of what one sermon does.
It establishes, correctly and well, that "son of man" in the mouth of Jesus is a claim to deity, and that the men who missed it crucified him.
It then places that title on William Branham.
It then distributes the dominion of Daniel 7 across a congregation, until a man can stand in a pulpit and say "I am veiling God."
And it hands people a formula for their missing children that will, in time, tell every one of them that the failure was theirs.
Tom Rae asked the right question. Who do you say the son of man is?
The answer Daniel gave, and the answer Jesus gave under oath to the high priest, is that there is exactly one. He came with the clouds of heaven, he was brought near before the Ancient of Days, and he was given a dominion that does not pass away and a kingdom that cannot be destroyed.
He is not a prophet from Jeffersonville. He does not need a message to make him come alive in the book you already own.
He is here, and he is enough, and you can go to him the way the Queen of the South did. On very little light, with a long way to travel, and nothing in your hands.
Footnotes
- ↑ Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, Come, Let Us Reason: An Introduction to Logical Thinking, chapter 6.
- ↑ See The Godhead and The Cloud.