The Present Truth
BelieveTheSign began as a pro-Branham site before shifting, by its own account, to a critical, evidence-based focus in the fall of 2011. The following summer, Barry Coffey of Hickory Bible Tabernacle preached a six-part series built around it. The recordings vanished from the internet for over a decade. We found them, transcribed all six, and read every word.
“God is not liable for what’s on Google. God is not subject to a search engine.”
— Barry Coffey, The Present Truth, Part 2, June 24, 2012
This site previously published an inaccurate detail about this series, later corrected on our Ministers page. Getting it right meant finding the actual recordings, not just Coffey’s own after-the-fact description of them — all six exist, and are presented here in full for the first time since 2012.
Setting the Stage: Why the Series Exists
In a 2023 sermon, more than a decade after the fact, Coffey gave his own account of how the series began — the only place in the entire corpus where he connects it to BelieveTheSign by name.
“They created the sign, the website Believe the Sign, and it was an antithetical website. It was contrary to the message, don’t do this at home, don’t go there, and it was built to discredit Brother Branham, and it was built to discredit the message, and it was terrible. It still is terrible. And so sometimes, you know, people will be confronted by things like that, and it struck the world like a wave. I knew the people who were behind it. I mean, it caused terrible disruption in lots of different families, lots of different churches, caused terrible disruption. And I remember when that came through, and I began this series called The Present Truth, and it was — the byline on the bottom says — responding to controversy with biblical truth. Because if there’s a Bible question, then there has to be a Bible answer. So we went through five services on this particular subject, The Present Truth, because I wanted to deal with some specific questions that were raised and so forth, and we did that over the five services.”
The Timeline
Coffey delivered the series across three months, alternating Sunday and Wednesday services:
Part 1 & 2: Building the Method
The opening two installments never mention a specific claim, a specific critic, or a specific piece of evidence. They build a framework instead: truth is whatever "lines up with" scripture and revelation, not whatever can be verified externally. Searching for confirmation online is treated, from the first sermon, as a category error.
“And God is not responsible for what’s on the end of a search engine.”
The same sermon includes an unusually specific personal detail — a standing, unresolved correspondence with someone Coffey never names:
“Every now and then, every couple of days I still write to that person, and I say, I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting for you to tell me what’s truer than what I’ve got. You seem to have found something that indicates that this message is booked down here, and you’re up here. If you’re up here, I don’t find anywhere in the Bible where God hides things, uh, you know, hide and seek for believers. I told this person, I said, hey, I want to know. Tell me. Every couple of days I write back and say, I’m still waiting. Still waiting. And I said, the reason you’re not writing me back is because you don’t have anything greater. All you’ve got is doubts. You got doubts about what is true. And I always encourage this person to examine the truth, examine the Bible, go back. If you’ve got any Bible questions, I’ll be glad to answer questions for you. Best of my ability.”
By the end of Part 1, the posture has hardened from methodology into open challenge:
“People say to you, Oh no, we don’t need the message, we just need the Bible. I say, bring it on. Bring it on.”
Part 2 restates the same principle even more bluntly, and — notably — turns some of the same scrutiny inward, naming specific doctrinal excesses at other Message-affiliated churches as a cause of outside skepticism:
“Now remember now, as I said on Wednesday night, God is not liable for what’s on Google. God is not subject to a search engine. He doesn’t have to come up with every and uh a right answer for every inquiry on the internet. That’s not the way God works. God is obligated to his own word, right? We we don’t need to elaborate on that. God did what the prophets said was going to happen, and that’s all God was responsible for, right? Like John the Baptist coming and Jesus being born and all the other things that happened there in the birth of Jesus, as we said on Wednesday night, they all happened, and God just stood there and said, this happened to fulfill the scripture as was spoken by Isaiah or Jeremiah. God is responsible for that and not for all the different inquiries that people make today. And I will tell you, there are no answers for many of those inquiries that are out there today. Some of them are absolutely ludicrous questions.”
“So no wonder now people would look at… us, maybe, and say, well, you know, where’s the credibility? Where is the… where’s your authority?”
Part 3: The One Specific Claim
Across all six services, there is exactly one place where Coffey engages a specific, checkable claim rather than the general idea of criticism. It happens here, in Part 3, built around a 1965 Branham Q&A about a prophecy of mass racial violence connected to Martin Luther King and the civil rights era. Coffey reads Branham’s own recorded answer aloud to the congregation — an answer in which Branham calls the statement "just my opinion," not a "thus saith the Lord" pronouncement.
“Prophets are not infallible people. Prophets are not angels, they are men.”
“He’s got no prophecy on it. He’s got no Bible on it. This is Brother Branham looking at that situation. It’s inspired of the wrong thing. And he’s correct in that.”
This is a real argument, on the movement’s own terms: if only formally-marked "thus saith the Lord" statements count as prophecy, then a claim Branham himself hedged doesn’t fail the test, because it was never entered into it. Whether that framework is itself sound — whether a religious leader gets to retroactively exempt his own predictions from scrutiny by labeling them "opinion" after the fact — is a separate question the sermon doesn’t ask.
Part 4: Dismissal as Doctrine
Where Part 3 briefly engages, Part 4 mostly doesn’t. Online criticism is addressed here almost entirely in the aggregate — "garbage," "riffraff," "lies and stories," "concoctions" — with no specific claim named or answered.
“The internet is full of garbage, and you know what? Today it’s full of garbage, and tomorrow it’s probably gonna be full of garbage again.”
The sermon then pivots to Acts 24:14, Paul’s "after the way which they call heresy, so worship I," and reframes the entire dispute as a matter of labels rather than facts:
“So now I would say this to our detractors. I would say this to our critics.”
Part 5: Turning Inward
The fifth installment all but drops the controversy. After one brief acknowledgment near the top, the sermon spends roughly an hour applying the same "fixed absolute, unmoved by outside pressure" framework to internal church discipline — specifically women’s hair length, hemlines, and sleeve length.
“There are many questions about what we believe, and there’s controversies that are associated with it that are created, and so therefore we want to respond apologetically.”
Conclusion: Closing the Case Without Making It
The final service is explicit about what it’s doing: ending the conversation, not resolving it.
“That’s why I’m bringing this to a conclusion tonight, because we will always have oppositions to what we believe. They will always be there. And I don’t want to spend my time and energy debating them.”
“God is not responsible for what you can or cannot find on Google.”
The clearest single admission in the entire series comes a few minutes later — that a specific Branham miracle claim has no evidence at all, and that this is fine:
“There were no witnesses when Brother Branham was out there and spoke squirrels into existence. There were none. Nobody was there, only Brother Branham.”
Coffey closes the series with the only line across all six sermons that comes close to naming what prompted it:
“It doesn’t matter how many websites are built against the truth of this message. It doesn’t matter how many preachers come out and say whatever they want to say.”
What He Concedes and Defends
Two moments stand out as genuine concessions elsewhere in the series (Part 3’s "prophets are not infallible," and the Conclusion’s admission of zero evidence for a specific miracle claim, both quoted above). Two more are worth adding — one a real, named doctrinal reversal, the other a real defense of a specific, checkable historical claim rather than a blanket dismissal.
“I was discussing this with somebody the other day, and we’re going to talk about this a little bit more. I used to think that when it came to the communion table, that if there was a sinner at the communion table, and you took communion at the same time, and you would fall under the likelihood that you could be weak and sickly because there was a sinner taking communion at the same time. Because Paul said, For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. And Brother Bram says, and that means many die. And I thought for a long time that that meant that if there was a sinner taking communion with me at the same time, and I was in the same line up taking communion, I could be subject to sicknesses or diseases or something, because they were taking it there. And that’s not what Paul meant at all. And I went back and researched that, and I had a couple of brothers who helped uh find things for me and ministers, and we were sitting down talking about that, and they helped us help me to understand how Brother Branham actually applied those scriptures.”
“Brother Branham took his standard from Paul’s standard, which happens to be about 2,000 years old. And even if his kids didn’t fully comply with it, he wasn’t happy with it. We just read that, right? So therefore, it seems to me like it would be appropriate not to take his kids as a standard. God bless them, no offense intended here, with all due respect. Bless their hearts, as you say in the South. But I’ll say this, they’re not my absolute, they’re not my standard. Hey, folks, Brother Branham is not my standard.”
“And when he pulled out the seventh one, there was the angel of the Lord on the picture. And he had a heart attack that night. And they sent it away, and it was tested by George Lacey, the head of the FBI in fingerprinting document, one of my critics. And Brother Bram said he went to the shell building where Mr. Lacey was, and Mr. Lacey came out in the lobby and said, Whose name is Mr. Branham? And Brother Bram stood up and he said, It’s mine. He said, Sir, I’ve been your critic. And I’ve heard people say about that light and so forth that it was psychology. But he reached out his hand and he said, Mr. Branham, the mechanical eye of that camera won’t take psychology. The light struck the lens. And he said, as far as I know, that’s the first time that a supernatural being was ever scientifically photographed in all the history of the world.”
The Steel-Man
A believer could reasonably argue: a pastor is not obligated to conduct a point-by-point rebuttal of every claim made against his church from an anonymous website, especially one aimed partly at people who have already made up their minds. Coffey does, at points, concede real ground — that prophets are fallible men, that a specific miracle claim has zero evidence, that his own movement has internal doctrinal excesses that invite outside scrutiny. He also draws a real, if narrow, distinction on the one specific claim he does engage: a hedged "opinion" is not the same thing as a formally marked prophecy, and if that’s the test the movement itself uses for prophetic failure, applying it consistently here isn’t obviously dishonest.
The Analysis
The series was framed to the congregation, from the first sermon, as a response to controversy. What it delivers, across roughly eleven hours of preaching, is one paragraph of substantive engagement with one specific claim — and that engagement leans entirely on the subject’s own hedge ("that’s just my opinion"), not on independent evidence. Everything else is architecture: an epistemology that puts revelation above verification, a rhetorical move that turns "heretic" into a compliment, and, for a full third of the material, a pivot to enforcing internal dress standards that have nothing to do with the controversy at all.
That is a coherent pastoral strategy — and a distinct one from what the series was billed as. It taught a congregation how to stop needing to check claims against evidence, rather than checking the claims. The single moment that does look like real engagement (Part 3) proves the method was available to him. That he used it once in six weeks, on the one claim with the cleanest available exit, is itself informative.
Watch the Full Series
All six services, in full, embedded directly — recovered video, not a re-upload or an excerpt. Each is also individually downloadable below, along with the audio-only version, the full transcript, and (where one survives) the slide deck used that day.
Primary Sources
- Original series index page — Hickory Bible Tabernacle’s own 2012–2013 website, archived September 26, 2013 — view on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine →
- Part 1 (June 20, 2012) — download video · download audio · download transcript
- Part 2 (June 24, 2012) — download video · download audio · download transcript
- Part 3 (July 29, 2012) — download video · download audio · download transcript · download slides
- Part 4 (August 5, 2012) — download video · download audio · download transcript · download slides
- Part 5 (August 5, 2012) — download video · download audio · download transcript · download slides
- Conclusion (September 19, 2012) — download video · download audio · download transcript · download slides
- Series cover art — download image
Glossary
- "Thus Saith the Lord"
- A formula Branham used to mark a small subset of his statements as direct, claimed divine utterances. In-Message doctrine holds only these to the Deuteronomy 18:22 test for a true prophet; everything else is treated as his own opinion, which can be wrong without threatening his prophetic status.
- Present Truth
- A phrase drawn from 2 Peter 1:12 ("established in the present truth"), used across the series as the title concept — the idea that believers must be continually re-grounded in settled doctrine against new controversy.
- Apologia
- The Greek word behind "defense" in 1 Peter 3:15, cited repeatedly across the series as the stated mission of the whole project: a reasoned verbal defense of belief.