Study It Out in Your Mind

That is the pattern, and it is the only pattern I have ever followed. I did not sit down and wait to be handed a manuscript. I worked. I read the same verses fifty times. I read the commentaries for years, twenty of them on Isaiah and sixteen on Revelation, and I leaned on them hard. The conclusions in my book are not in any of those books. I did not get this from other men. I got it from the text, and from asking.

December 23, 2024

For two years before that date I had been told to keep quiet.

That is not a figure of speech. From the time I first understood that Donald Trump was somehow connected to Revelation 12, in November of 2022, I understood just as clearly that it was not mine to talk about yet. So I studied and I said nothing.

On December 23, 2024, that changed. God told me to publish this to the world.

There was no thunder and there was no messenger in the room. It was the still small voice, the same channel described in section 8, the same one the Lord says opened the Red Sea. But it was unmistakable, and it was new, because for two years the instruction had been the opposite.

What followed was a fire hose.

Almost every morning after that, at around three thirty, I went down to my computer and started dictating. No scriptures open in front of me. A notepad, a microphone, whatever was within reach that could hold what was being poured into me.

Those first weeks were unlike anything in my life. I had to struggle. I had to concentrate and exert myself mentally in a way I had never done before, just to understand what I was receiving, because I had no practice at receiving it. That is the part almost nobody asks about. It was work. Hard, exhausting, joyful work, and I look back on those mornings with more wonder than on anything else I have ever done.

I knew when it was over, too. It ended the way it started, without ceremony.

The Morning I Said I Cannot Publish That

Some days I read at a stand I built for myself, made to hold several books open at once so I can mark them up.

Around January 15, I was reading the twelfth chapter of Revelation, because that chapter is where all of this began. I had gone through it more times than I can count. And partway down the page, I understood verse ten.

Two years and two months had passed since that first impression that Trump was somehow in this chapter. Now I could see what it meant.

I jumped back from the stand. I said it out loud to an empty room. “I can’t publish that. I can’t publish that.”

I am not going to lay out what I saw in that verse here. It is in the book, and it deserves the full argument around it rather than a paragraph in a blog post.

Why I Went to My Stake President

I want to be careful about how I say this next part, because it has been misrepresented all day.

I did not walk out of that room thinking I had been deceived. The witness was clear. What stopped me was that I had read that verse one way my entire life, every commentary on my shelf read it that way, and now I was seeing something else entirely. It was new to me. It was new to everyone I knew. And it concerned a living man whose name divides every room he walks into.

Something that consequential is not a thing a man decides alone in his home office at three thirty in the morning.

So I called the stake executive secretary and made an appointment. I did not go for approval of a manuscript. I did not go for permission to publish. I went with one question, and the question was whether I was being deceived.

I walked into that office prepared to be told to drop the whole thing. If he had told me to leave it alone, I would have left it alone, and there would be no book, no website, and no post like this one. That is the difference between counseling with your priesthood leader and shopping for a rubber stamp.

He did not tell me to stop. He told me he had never heard any of it before either, and that I should follow my heart and publish it as my opinion rather than as doctrine. That is exactly what I have done every day since.

Every confirmation that came afterward came to a man who had already been willing to walk away from all of it.

Both men dismissed that visit. One told me the reference to my stake president was nothing. The other told me that what I learned came from a lying spirit rather than from God.

So I asked both of them directly whether they understood that they were placing their own judgment above a stake president's. Neither one answered me. The question is still sitting there tonight.

I have had that exchange before, with a different man who dismissed this same visit. He told me plainly that he follows the scriptures and has no need to counsel with a priesthood leader about a question like this. I do not know whether the two men I talked with today would say the same thing. I hope not.

I have thought about this encounter all evening, and it is the strangest part of the day.

A stake president has authority within his stake. That is how it works everywhere in the Church, and I have never suggested that mine has jurisdiction beyond his own. He has jurisdiction over me. When I was afraid I was being deceived, I went to the man the Church tells me to go to, before I published a word, at the moment I was least sure of myself.

If counseling with your priesthood leader when you fear deception does not count for anything, I would like to know what a member is supposed to do instead. Read the scriptures alone and trust his own conclusions? That is the exact thing I am being accused of doing.

I have written about the question I always ask before accepting anything: How to Avoid Deception

The Lying Spirit

The accusation deserves a direct answer, so here it is.

What I received were promptings. The still small voice. A whisper, the same quiet communication every member of this Church is taught to seek and expected to learn to recognize. It came many times over four years and I wrote about it plainly in the book. I have never had a vision. I have never seen an angel. I have never had a near death experience. Nothing was shown to me and no messenger stood in my room.

The charge is a statement about the condition of my heart, made by a man who has no information about the condition of my heart. He has not read the book. He does not know what happened to me in November of 2022 or anything that came after. He has a few sentences of mine from a comment thread.

Here is the difference between his position and mine. An accusation about invisible spirits cannot be tested by anybody. A scriptural argument can be tested by everybody. Every claim in that book is anchored to a verse you can open and weigh for yourself.

I keep asking for the second kind of response. In two years I have not received one.

I still cannot describe those mornings at three thirty without my eyes filling. And I am being told they came from the devil.

The Man Who Knows His Scriptures

Here is a pattern I did not expect.

The readers who accept this case are almost all serious students of scripture. They know the text cold. That is exactly why they can follow the argument.

But some of the sharpest scriptorians I know reject it before the first chapter, and I have watched what actually separates the two groups. It is not knowledge. It is Donald Trump.

One man sent me a text message so long I had to scroll for half a minute to reach the end of it. He told me I was leading people to the antichrist and that I was not following the proper spirit. This is a man whose writing I have read for years and admired. I asked him for an apology. He refused, and told me that someone needed to set me straight and it was going to be him.

He has not read the book. He was never going to.

What you already believe about that one man determines how you read every verse that follows: What You Believe Colors Everything You See

The Voices Telling Him to Turn Around

I want to be careful here, because I am not comparing myself to Moses and I have no interest in anyone thinking that I am. I have no keys, no calling, and no authority over anyone. What I am pointing at is a pattern in the record, not a status.

When Israel stood at the edge of that sea, the opposition Moses faced did not come from Pharaoh. It came from the people behind him.

“And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.”

Exodus 14:11-12

Go back. We told you this in Egypt. We were fine before you started.

They said it to his face while he was trying to tell them what the Lord had shown him. And the Lord’s answer to Moses was not to argue with them. It was to go forward.

The One Thing They Have in Common

Here is what I have noticed after two years of this.

I do not currently know of a single person who bought the book, read it, and then told me the case is wrong. Not one. Some readers are convinced. Some are unsure. Some tell me they hope it is true and are waiting to see what happens. That is a fair range of responses and I welcome every part of it.

Every person who has fought me on this has declined to read it.

That is the common denominator, and it has held without a single exception. The people most certain that I am deceived are, without fail, the people who refuse to examine the evidence they are so certain about. I have written about where that road tends to end: Another One Bites the Dust

I understand the reluctance. A long argument is a lot to sit through when you have already made up your mind, and I would have done the same thing five years ago.

When I first started sharing this, the response ran about half and half. Half of the people I talked to could see it. Half thought I had lost my mind. Today it is closer to one in three, and the number is still moving in the wrong direction.

Fewer people agree with me now than did two years ago.

But every one of them read it first. That is the only thing I have ever asked anybody to do. Read it, then show me where the scripture does not hold, and I will listen to every word you have to say.

The book is at FirstHorseman.World.