OTS 2021 03 29 Jeff Jenkins DESCRIPT
[00:01:00] [00:00:00] Rod: I want to welcome back Pastor Jeff Jenkins to Off The Shelf. It's really good to have you back with us, Jeff!
Jeff: Thank you. It's a delight to be with you just hearing your voices. It's like old times and I'm really considered time. Very valuable.
Rod: also with us is our co-host Tim Kraus. Welcome Tim! [00:02:00]  Jeff Jenkins was a pastor in the message for about 33 and a half years. He pastored  Believers Christian Fellowship in Lima, Ohio. His dad, Lonnie Jenkins, was one of the most respected teachers in the message and passed away, I'm thinking what about eight years ago now?
Jeff: Exactly. It was. I came out of the message one year after he had passed away. So it was eight years ago.
Rod:  Jeff and I were friends back in the message. I first met Jeff at Cloverdale Bible way in the mid seventies and we hit it off right from the first time we met.
Jeff: I mean, bingo.
Rod: Jeff and I drove across the U S in his, I think it was a Mazda.
Jeff: A Mazda six.
Rod: Oh, I remember getting pulled over for speeding in, I think it was South Dakota or maybe Iowa.
Jeff: It was South Dakota. And you were driving.
Rod: I was, I walked into, I got into the police car [00:03:00] and I was being lectured about the sin of speeding by the officer. And  appreciate, I was a  pretty young guy at the time. I looked at the car, at Jeff's car, and Jeff was all the way into the back seat with his camera. And he was taking a picture of me and the police officer in the car through the rear window of the car.
And I just about lost it. I'm trying not to laugh at this police officer is lecturing me. And he says, you know if you speed, you won't get there any faster. And I'm going, I'm not sure that's how the law of physics works, but you know, I appreciate that I was speeding and I told them, yes, I realized I was speeding.
Tim:  
Did you get a ticket? 
Rod: Well, here's the thing, Tim. There was no way the officer wanted to give me a ticket because I had a British Columbia driver's license. I was driving Jeff's car, which had Washington state plates. It wasn't my car. He would have been filling out paperwork for an entire day just to process the ticket. 
He let me off with a [00:04:00] warning. 
Tim: and a lecture? It sounds like. 
Rod: Yes, and a lecture.  I was in Jeff's wedding party when he married Debbie in Salem, Oregon.
Jeff: Yeah.
 Rod: I will never forget your father-in-law passing out during the ceremony. I've never seen a pastor pass out during a marriage ceremony  but your dad took over without hardly missing a step. Although I remember that you had to get remarried after the actual ceremony because your dad was not licensed to marry anyone in Oregon and your father-in-law, who was a registered, finally came to    and remarried you or married you properly, according to state law after the ceremony.
Jeff: He married us in the girls bathroom. It was the only place that had a couch. So he was laying out flat in the girl's bathroom. So we walked in there and Debbie and I got married in the girl's bathroom.
Rod: I spoke at [00:05:00] Jeff's church at, on at least one occasion. I had a seminar I did on financial planning from a biblical perspective. A lot of water under the bridge. Jeff,
Jeff: Yes. I mean some really, really, really good memories. Ha ha!  
Rod: When I started having serious questions about the message I stopped over in Lima for the weekend. It was in early 2012. I was in Washington DC. I actually think we had a meeting with the IRS Commissioner and the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury .  I was working on some really interesting things.
I was headed down to San Antonio, Texas for meetings with the Ripley's Believe It Or Not corporate people in Austin, Texas. So I phoned Jeff and asked if it was okay if I visited for the weekend. And I remember asking Jeff and Lonnie a lot of tough questions that weekend. And the response I got was, "Those are really good questions, Rod."
Jeff: Yeah. 
Rod: But both you, Jeff, and your dad [00:06:00] admitted that you didn't have any real good answers for me.
Jeff: No, we had seen those things, but dismissed them under the mantra of  "he's vindicated and we're not", and we never delved any further. But then if it was a definite turning point, when you came in, basically solidified what I was feeling, 'cause I had just got done about eight months before preaching on the cloud in my church and how that William Branham was not there, that he was he was in Tucson, he just got back from Texas.
And yeah, that was, of course, hard for my church to grasp and I was already having some misgivings. And then when you came along it was a catalyst.
Rod: And that was my last ditch attempt to stay in the message. I thought, if you guys couldn't answer my questions... I really was already out in my head, as a conservative accountant type, I couldn't officially leave until I talked to everyone who might be able to solve my problem. And I was asked to [00:07:00] effectively leave the message church that I attended about two months later.
Jeff: Yeah.
Rod: Jeff was the first former message pastor that we interviewed on the Off The Shelf podcast. And if any of our listeners are interested in Jeff's story, you can hear it on episodes four and five of Off The Shelf. Jeff and I also had a deep in-depth discussion of the infamous cloud on episodes, 13, 14, and 15 of Off The Shelf. I want to finish my introduction by saying that Jeff Jenkins is one of the few message pastors who looked at the facts, examined all of the research and recognized the truth. While most message pastors are too afraid to actually look at the evidence, Jeff faced it head on, and at much personal cost, chose to follow the truth and chose to follow Jesus.
Jeff, I am proud to have you as a friend, I have [00:08:00] a huge amount of respect for the difficult decision you made. And I really do love you, brother Jeff. 
Jeff: Well, thank you, Rod. I appreciate those words.
Rod: Jeff, let's get into it. You left the message about seven years ago. I know that my understanding of scripture and how I look at the church and the gospel has changed dramatically since I left the message. What are the biggest changes in your thinking? You've now had a chance to process this over the last seven years.
What are the biggest changes in your thinking?
Jeff: Brother Branham had a tendency to lump everything into a we/they category. And so we're the bride, they're the foolish virgin. Or we're the bride and they're cannon fodder. Or we're the bride and they're the worldly nominal church or so on.  Brother Branham categorized the church as two different things, either the harlot system and then the mother harlot being the Catholic church.
So the Protestants were the harlot system. [00:09:00] I should say the Protestants were the harlot system, the Catholics was the mother of all harlots. And of course, taking that a revelation 17 and 18. Of course, now I look at that and I can't believe I believed that. But this is what cults and cult leaders do.
They demonize everybody else while they lift themselves up on the shoulders and the work of other great people. And they demonize those people. So my stance today, concerning other churches, is that I really don't actually anymore see churches or systems. I see individuals in churches. So I no longer see, yeah, I don't see Catholics or Protestants.
I don't see Baptists or Methodists. I have now had the opportunity to be into in many, many, many different assemblies. And in my going to them, I was touched by the sincerity, the love, the devotion, and particularly [00:10:00] the humanity.
The message  thought, and even I thought, I had a degree of humanity, but when I look back now, we were not fulfilling what Jesus said when he said, who is my neighbor?
The message people were not looking out for the poor or the needy or the underprivileged or the powerless. The message people weren't interested in that at all. They were the bride. In reality all I saw for the good last 10 years, while I was in the message, was merely church individuals, message people, switching to other message churches.
There was no outreach. There was no touching the neighborhood. There was no really, really true evangelism. So when I look now, I see probably the most amazing thing that I saw and witnessed while I've been visiting all these other churches was the [00:11:00] healthy respect that the people had for their pastor, but they didn't worship the pastor.
In the message  William Branham illegitimately... illegitimately in the message, he empowered the pastors, calling them the spiritual husband of the church, calling them " the pastors of an entire city," like Elijah was Jezebel's pastor, quote, unquote, referring to the sovereignty of the local...
The pastor is the absolute sovereign local authority of the local church. So all of this was wrong. Brother Branham empowered the pastors and then the pastors empowered him. And so it was cronyism at its best. And so now I have a great appreciation for all these churches who are struggling to figure out in the 21st century, how to witness [00:12:00] to a world that is getting darker and how to touch their lives and to do that without compromise and at the same time to be effective and salty.
And I tip my hat to them. And I'm appreciative that almost every Sunday they're doing something for somebody or some other church. And that's something we didn't do in the message. Most of the time when the message there was more infighting than there was actual unity. And I hate to say that, but it's absolutely the truth.
Rod: And of course that empowering of the pastor is not biblical. You can't find it in scripture.
Jeff: No, no.
Rod: Interesting thing you said about the poor because in Galatians chapter two, Paul says, he talks about Peter and James and John, who he called esteemed pillars of the church.
They gave Barnabas and Paul the right hand of fellowship when they recognize the grace that had been given to Paul. And they agreed [00:13:00] that Paul  should go to the Gentiles and they would continue to preach to the Jews. And then it says, read something really interesting. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I, Paul, had been eager to do all along.
Jeff: And, the context of those verses is that they were asking themselves and we were just talking about this with Tim and yourself, what do we bring over from the old Testament? And they finally said, you know what? We can't bring anything over. 
Initially they said, Don't eat things strangled. And then they said, don't eat meat that was offered to an idol. And then they finally even said, you know what? We can't even really say that you can't eat meat, that was all, that was that you can buy meat that was going to be sold at the shambles that was formerly offered to. They didn't bring anything over from the...
Rod:  I've done a lot of study, cause I remember, when I left a message and started really reading the Bible and really understanding... like I had never seen this stuff before, how come nobody preached about it? And what I was reading [00:14:00] in Acts chapter 15, for example, what you just quoted.
And they said, okay, so what laws are the Gentile churches supposed to keep? And they had these four things, don't eat roadkill, don't eat things strangled. Don't eat black pudding or blood sausage or any blood. Don't eat meat sacrificed to idols, and don't commit sexual immorality.
And those four things are actually what the Jews considered to be the Noetic covenant. So this is the laws that were given to Noah. And the reason that the apostles gave this to the Gentile churches was not to say, okay, if you do this then God will be happy. It was actually because if you did these four things, then the Jewish believers... These were the four laws that Gentiles living in the land of Israel were supposed to keep so that they would get along with the Jews and the Jews who were under the law, wouldn't get super upset with the Gentiles.
And so the reason for [00:15:00] these four things was so that the Jewish believers and the Gentile believers could co-exist reasonably peaceful.
Jeff: And so we wouldn't as Gentiles stumble the Jews and not be able to at least bring them to the concepts of Christ.
Rod: And I also  agree with you when you say that the old covenant doesn't apply at all. In Hebrews, it actually talks about the old covenant passing away. And it's under the bridge and it's old and it's now over.
We had a discussion, which I just posted on the podcast, the debate, a discussion that we had with Jesse Smith, he would say the 10 commandments, you have to obey them, but we're not under the 10 commandments. 
Now, if you look at my life and you say, well, do you steal Rod? Is it okay to steal? No, it's not okay to steal. But the reason...  and why I say the 10 commandments don't apply...  the reason that I don't steal is not because God [00:16:00] tells me, Do Not Steal. The reason I don't steal is because under the new covenant I'm told by Jesus, I have to love everybody.
Jeff: Yeah.
Rod: That love is what is required of me as a Christian.
Jeff: Yes.
Rod: When we love others... How am I going to steal from somebody I love?
Jeff: Exactly right.  We've talked about the first five are God-ward of the commandments and the last five are man-ward. And so if you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and body, and your neighbor as yourself, you will fulfill the 10 commandments. 
Tim: Yeah. It's evidence that as Christians, we find the 10 commandments just by the very statement you made, Jeff, we find them self evident. It's not important. It's not important for us to have them written down in front of us. They are self-evident because we love Jesus with all our heart.
Jeff: Exactly. Yeah. That's why you not even a government or court system can honestly mandate the 10 commandments. It takes the new birth. It takes an experience with Christ to see those things fulfilled. We have [00:17:00] to have laws, and I appreciate the fact that our systems still respect the 10 commandments to some degree, but it's gotta be Christ on the inside working out those eternal truths.
And then of course that is legitimate. That is genuine. That's not something you're putting on from the outside. It's something from the inside.
Tim: That goes back to our earlier discussion about, as an example, when the new covenant versus the new Testament came into being. Because there's a lot of confusion between those words, what's the new Testament versus the new covenant. What's the old covenant versus the old Testament.
There's a lot of confusion because if you look at the  King James version, or some of the interpretive versions, there's an interchange to some degree of the word Testament and covenant. Incorrectly, when we talk about the division of the books of the Bible, versus the difference in the relationship between God and... 
Jeff: Totally. And that's what it's going to boil down to. The law [00:18:00] separated man from God, whereas Christ caused us to rebuild relationships with God via Christ and then enhance our relationships with our wives and wives with their husbands and their children. And it literally made everything new
Rod: This is not just something that's in the message. It's something that in quite a number of evangelical churches, where they take things out of the old covenant and bring them into the new. For example, you know, a lot of people in the U S want to have that 10 commandments put in courthouses.
Why wouldn't you want the words of Jesus instead? It's this marriage that we have to the old covenant. We want laws. Laws are easier to check off.
Jeff: Yeah, they are. And what's sad about laws, and what's sad about the message, is that it makes God impersonal. So as soon as you have to dress a certain way, look a certain way. If I put a little too much mascara on, someone's [00:19:00] going to say I'm not born again. And all these externals take away the personal walk and make it into a group walk. Whether they say with their mouth, "No, I have a personal walk with Jesus." They literally don't because they're going to be examined, from the preacher on down to the janitor, as to how they look.
Rod: External holiness is holiness of the Pharisees. 
Jeff: Yes, 
Rod: It is things you can check off. It is not internal holiness, which is, I am set apart for God. Pharisees ask the question, "Am I breaking the law? Is this sin?" Whereas what we're required to ask ourselves under the new covenant is, "What does love require of me?"
Jeff: Yes. And don't you find that? What I love about that is it challenges me on a much deeper level because now it's just me and the Lord, and I'm saying, and maybe the woman would say, I'd left the message and now you know what, I'm going to go paint the town red. I'm going to do what I want to do.
I'm going to wear what I want to wear. I'm going to [00:20:00] cut my hair this way. And I'm going to wear these kinds of earrings because brother Branham said, they're the devil's hoops. And I'm going to, and I'm going to, and so they react and they, instead of responding and they go to extremes. What's interesting is this, after they simmer down, after they mellow, after they deconstruct all the falseness of what they were formerly under, they come back and they say now Lord, what would you want me to do?
And it's then it's, freedom-based, it's not, system-based.
Rod: Yeah. 
Tim: Liberty in Christ versus assembly or Liberty in Christ, as opposed to conformity to a law or written group of regulations. 
Rod: Yeah.
Jeff: And interestingly enough, as you know, when you study cults, most all cults come from the old Testament. They use priests, they use prophets, they use bishops. They use all forms of hierarchical authority to dominate the people. But they don't refer to [00:21:00] the Holy Spirit as the teacher, as the unction of the anointed one. You have to go through them to get special revelation and teaching. When the Holy Spirit is the amen in our hearts,
Tim: And doesn't that minimize Christ's sacrifice on the cross to become that perfect sacrifice for us. The thing that's always bothered me about that in terms of the message is, now we take Christ and we say it, his sacrifice to usher in a new relationship based on grace with God based on the holy spirit, based on leadership of the Holy Spirit.
It absolutely is minimized, particularly when William Branham comes out and says that the spirit of Pentecost did not work for the day today. Then if that's true, then the crucifixion of Christ didn't work for today. Right. Because that's what that is. So at the end of the day, that's the kind of scary part about, the minimums and you'll have people in the message say, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm a [00:22:00] Christian because I'm saved through the Jesus Christ.
Not, if you think you have to have the message for your day, which absolutely minimized the sacrifice of Christ on the cross so ushering in the new covenant. Right? 
Jeff: it's hyper dispensationalism. Because whenever you have to have a messenger in your day, the 21st century, to harken back to the effectiveness of the cross, then it requires that that dispenser of revelation. And then of course, you're going to have Wesley as a dispenser, and you're gonna have Martin as a dispenser and Columbia was the dispenser.
And then Paul as a dispenser. And so all of a sudden you do have mediators. You don't have Christ alone anymore. You have mediators and, that again, is taking it away from the personal walk. I need this other person in order to truly be born again. And that's also man  injected into the new birth. Anytime man is injected, it becomes fear-based. 
Tim: So your comment about group [00:23:00] salvation versus individual salvation, right? Because now we have an idea that if we... And nobody in a message church that I remember, and you guys can kick me under the table, if you remember something different. Nobody wanted to admit that they did not have the Holy Spirit. So of course they were going to behave in a way, which they were told is evidence of the Holy Spirit. 
Jeff: Correct. Because there was all these externals that evidenced that which is Pharisees, like rod said. And Jesus comes along and says, if you even have ill will in your heart and hate your brother without a cause you've committed murder. And so it was Jesus judged things on an entirely different level.
And we in the message inadvertently or deliberately through where the Brenham went back to externalism is because as Rod said, it's the checklist.  It's easy, right?
Rod: It leads to some really strange things. One of the things and I like logic. Logic actually comes from God. If you actually look at it, there are rules of [00:24:00] logic. You can't contradict, you can't believe two things at the same time that contradict, contradict each other.
So when I looked at the message logically, as I started looking at it, message believers and William Branham taught this, that each church age had its own messenger to that age.
Jeff: right.
Rod: And he also taught that in order to be saved, you had to believe the messenger's message for that age. As a result, and we know that several of the church age messengers believed and taught the classic doctrine of the Trinity.  William Branham clearly taught that the doctrine of the Trinity was satanic.
So message believers have to accept. And have to accept that because he said, thus, Saith the Lord. But as a result in some of the ages, because some of the messengers were Trinitarian, if you didn't believe that  Trinity doctrine, you were lost. So according to William Branham's logic, some Christians in the [00:25:00] past had to believe satanic doctrine or they were lost,
Jeff: Yeah,
Rod: Which is completely bizarre.
Jeff: It's literally counter-intuitive to what he taught, which I found brotherBranham's teachings to be so circular. It is literally dizzying. Isn't it?
Rod: Yeah, it really is.
Tim: Even speaking about the Trinity, he didn't teach that... he taught the Trinity for awhile. Then he did teach that the Trinity was of Satan and then he went back  to  the Trinity is okay. One of the issues with the message of William Branham is there needs to be a red letter edition to tell us which of those statements that William Branham made is the right statement because they're contradictory within three different groups. 
Jeff: And any even alludes to the Trinity in a positive way after '63, which everybody said that was a line of demarcation and anything before '63 was fallible or could be fallible except with "Thus Saith The Lord". And yet he pandered to the churches that he was in at the time.
Rod: So Jeff, what has [00:26:00] surprised you most since you left the message? You've been out now for seven years. What was something that you never expected to find out that now you're surprised is, in fact, the case.