On January 4, 1963, the time finally came for Brother Branham to move to Arizona – the place that he had loved so much since his boyhood. Nevertheless, this was different. In 1927, as an eighteenyear-old, Brother Branham had gone to Arizona to fulfill a personal dream and to escape from the squalor and poverty of his home. It seems that he was also trying to run away from God. But 35 years later, he went according to a vision. Together with his family, he went to fulfill the will of God. Later on, almost at the end of his life, Brother Branham told us that he often wondered why he had to go to the “backside of the desert,” as he called it. But Brother Branham found an answer in the lives of Moses and the Apostle Paul. Both were led into the desert to meet God and receive a deeper revelation of God’s Word and will. In the desert, Brother Branham received “the Sword of the King.”

“And I had my hands out, and all at once something hit my hand. I don’t know. I can’t say. Did I go to sleep? I don’t know. Did I go into a trance? I don’t know. Was it a vision? I can’t tell you. Only thing I can say is when I … Just the same thing like them Angels was. And it struck my hand, and I looked, and it was a sword, and it had pearl handles, real pretty; and had a guard over it with gold, and the blade looked like, something like a chrome, like silver, only it was real shiny. And it was so feather-edge sharp. Oh, my. And I thought, ‘Isn’t that the prettiest thing?’ just fit my hand.

I thought, ‘That’s awful pretty.’ But I said, ‘Hey, I’m always ‘fraid of them things’–a sword. And I thought, ‘What will I do with that?’ And just then a voice shook down through there that rocked the rocks, said, ‘It’s the Sword of the King.’ And then I come out of it. ‘The Sword of the King …’Now, if it said, ‘a Sword of a King …’ but it said, ‘The Sword of the King,’ and there’s only one ‘the King,’ and that’s God.

And He has one Sword; that’s His Word, what I live by. That, so help me, God, standing over His holy desk here with this holy Word laying here, It’s the Word. Amen.” The Seventh Seal, March 24, 1963