Above The Bible
Amos Omoboriowo wrote a 12-part series as a direct answer to the Scriptural Challenge issued on this website. He also wrote a response to our article on the Prophecies of William Branham's Death. This is our reply to his analysis. Your are in the article highlighted above. Part 10 was preached on Sunday 5 December 2021 and published in the Scribe magazine in July 2022.[1]
Above the Bible
This website has always asked three questions about William Branham. Was he a prophet? Was he honest? And did he preach what the Apostle Paul preached? Part 9 answered the second one, in the prophet's own words. Part 10 finally reaches the third. And it answers that one too, though not in the way Amos Omoboriowo intends.
He reaches the question because he decides to answer a man named Jesse Smith. Smith had put the matter as plainly as it can be put. "You believe that William Branham is not only a Prophet, but that he is Elijah of Malachi 4:5 and 6, and the Angel of Revelation 10:7. But if you believe this, you must exalt William Branham's Teachings above the Bible."[2]
Amos Omoboriowo's reply is one word. "What utter Nonsense!"[3]
Then he spends the next several pages proving Jesse Smith right.
The promise he builds everything on
The pages that follow are built on one passage, John 16:12-15, so we should read it before Amos Omoboriowo tells us what it means.
Jesus is speaking to the eleven apostles on the last night, in the upper room. "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you" (John 16:12-15).[4]
To Amos Omoboriowo, "guide you into all truth" is a door that never closes. The Spirit's leading into all truth is, he says, "ever-continuous," running down through the ages, and it reaches its climax in William Branham, who unveiled "the deep, complex, and most precious prophetic things of Jesus Christ that are concealed in the Book of Revelation." Branham, on this reading, bore "the Present Mind of Jesus Christ" and "the Present Truth," bringing "Many Revelations, Many New Truths" that the church did not have before.[5]
He is candid about the position he is rejecting, and he states it fairly. In a debate on YouTube, he says, "Rod Bergen firmly tied this promise exclusively to the giving forth of the New Testament Books... he tied it strictly to the writing of New Testament Scriptures, ending with the giving of the Book of the Apocalypse."[6]
That is my position, and he has reported it correctly. So let me defend it, because the whole of Part 10 turns on this one point.
Who was in the room
Read the passage again and ask the simplest question. Who is the "you"?
It is the eleven apostles. "I have yet many things to say unto you." The men He is speaking to are the men who could not bear those things yet, and they are the men the Spirit would later guide into all truth. This is not a promise made to the church at large across twenty centuries. It is a promise made to the apostles, in a room, on a specific night, that the Holy Spirit would bring to their remembrance the things Jesus taught and would complete their understanding so that they could hand the faith on.
And that is exactly what happened. The men in that room, and Paul with them, wrote the New Testament. The "many things" they could not yet bear became the Gospels and the Epistles. And the "things to come" that the Spirit would show them became, most fully, the Book of Revelation, given to the last of them. The promise was kept. We hold its fruit in our hands. It is called the New Testament.
Amos Omoboriowo needs the promise to remain open after the apostles died, because if it closed with them, there is no room left for William Branham to bring "New Truths." So he stretches a promise made to eleven men into a pipeline that runs for two thousand years and ends at a twentieth-century pulpit in Indiana. But the text will not stretch that far. **The Spirit was promised to the apostles to complete the record, not to a prophet in 1963 to reopen it.**
The faith was delivered once
There is a reason the New Testament writers themselves never expected more truth to arrive after them. They said so.
Jude wrote that we should "earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3). Once. Not once in the first century and again in the twentieth. The faith was delivered, complete, to the saints, and our job is to contend for it, not to wait for the next instalment.
Paul, the very apostle Part 10 will lean on so heavily in its later pages, drew the line harder than anyone. "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8-9).[7] Notice who is included. Paul himself. And an angel from heaven. The Message tells us an angel came to William Branham in a log cabin in 1946 and commissioned his ministry. Paul says that even if an angel from heaven brings you a gospel other than the one already delivered, the angel is accursed. The test is not who the messenger is, or how bright the light was. The test is whether the message matches what was already given.
And the Bible closes with a warning against exactly the thing Amos Omoboriowo is defending. "If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book" (Revelation 22:18).[8]
So when Jesse Smith said that making Branham the Elijah who brings new truth means exalting his teaching above the Bible, he was not talking nonsense. He was reading his New Testament. A "new truth" that the apostles did not deliver is, by definition, a truth that stands over their finished work, correcting it, completing it, sitting above it. That is what "above the Bible" means. Amos Omoboriowo calls the charge nonsense on page 3 and then, for the next several pages, describes a man doing precisely that.
"Progressive" is not the same as "endless"
Amos Omoboriowo's best argument deserves a fair answer, because it is the one many sincere people in the Message find persuasive. He appeals to Proverbs 4:18: "But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day."[9] Revelation is progressive, he says. The light grows. God unveils His mind in seasons. Surely, then, He can unveil more through Branham.
Two things need to be said, gently and clearly.
First, look at where the verse ends. "More and more unto the perfect day." The path brightens, yes, but it is going somewhere. It arrives. The light does not increase forever with no destination. And for the church, the destination arrived: the perfect day of the completed New Testament, the faith once delivered. A verse about light growing toward full day is not a promise that new prophets will keep adding to Scripture until the Lord returns.
Second, there is a difference the Message consistently blurs, and everything hangs on it. There is a difference between illumination and revelation. Illumination is the Holy Spirit helping you understand the Word that is already written. That never stops, and it is a wonderful thing. You can read Romans today and see more in it than you saw last year. Revelation, in the sense Branham claimed it, is the giving of new content that was not in the Word before. The Spirit still illuminates the finished Bible for every believer. He does not add to it. When Amos Omoboriowo says the Spirit led Branham into truths "I did not know, for I just had No clue about them," he is describing men being taught the Scriptures, which is illumination, and calling it the arrival of new revelation, which is a different claim entirely.[10] **The Spirit opening your eyes to what Paul already wrote is not the same as Branham writing something Paul never did.** The first is the birthright of every Christian. The second is what Jude, Paul, and John warned against.
The tell: when he reaches for the Book of Acts
Watch what Amos Omoboriowo does next, because it gives the whole game away.
To defend Branham against the charge that his stories contradict each other, a charge Part 9 had already conceded, Amos Omoboriowo turns to Scripture and argues that the Bible has contradictions too. He lays Acts 9:7 beside Acts 22:9. In the first, the men with Saul "stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man." In the second, Paul says "they that were with me saw indeed the light... but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me."[11] Heard a voice. Heard not the voice. He then says the Spirit deliberately left "seeming contradictions" in the inspired record "for the sake of the Unbelievers," so that scoffers "would knock its divine inspiration" and "hang themselves."[12] His point lands like a challenge: if you reject William Branham for inconsistencies, will you now throw out the Book of Acts, and call Luke uninspired?
Now, his own resolution of the Acts passage is actually the right one, and it is worth saying so. The men heard the sound but did not understand the words. In the original Greek, the word for "hear" carries both senses, to hear a noise and to understand a message, and the two verses are using it in its two senses. The men heard the sound of a voice; they did not make out what it said. There is no contradiction in Acts at all. It is a difficulty that dissolves the moment you look at it closely.
But that is exactly why the argument fails, and fails twice over.
First, it defeats itself. Amos Omoboriowo shows that the Acts "contradiction" is not a real contradiction, just a difficulty that resolves cleanly. Then he offers it as a parallel to Branham's contradictions. But Part 9 already conceded that Branham's were the real kind. His own witness, Gram Snellie, said Branham "exaggerated the numbers so badly," a hundred people become five thousand. His own critic showed, and he agreed, that Branham "gives different accounts as to what happened to the man" in a story he told repeatedly.[13] A sound that some men could not make out is not the same as a crowd that grew from one hundred to five thousand in the retelling. His parallel proves the opposite of what he wants. Acts holds together under examination. The stories he is defending do not.
Second, and this is the heart of it, the argument only works if you already assume the thing in dispute. Comparing Branham's sermons to the Book of Acts assumes that Branham's sermons carry the same inspired authority as the Book of Acts. That is precisely what is being questioned. You cannot answer "is this man's word inspired like Scripture?" by saying "well, Scripture has features like his word does." That assumes your conclusion. And notice what the move requires him to do. To defend William Branham, Amos Omoboriowo has to set Branham's sermons on the same shelf as Luke's Gospel and treat them by the same rules. **He said on page 3 that Branham's teaching is not above the Bible. By page 8 he is defending it as though it were the Bible.** That is Jesse Smith's charge, demonstrated by the very man who called it nonsense.
The weaknesses argument, one more time
Much of the rest of Part 10 runs an argument we have answered twice already, so I will not answer it a third time at length. You cannot use Branham's weaknesses to reject him, Amos Omoboriowo says, any more than you could use the weaknesses of Noah, Lot, Moses, John the Baptist, or Paul to reject them. He extends it to Branham going to hospitals, to lost healings, to Paul's eye trouble and Timothy's stomach.[14]
The answer is the same as it was in Part 2 and Part 9, and it is short. No one at this website has ever said William Branham should be rejected because he was an imperfect man. Every servant of God in Scripture was flawed, and we have never claimed otherwise. Noah's drunkenness and Moses' temper were failures of conduct. They were not false claims about what God had said and done. Our questions were never about whether Branham was perfect. They were whether he was a true prophet, whether he was honest, and whether he preached what Paul preached. Moses' temper does not touch any of those questions. A failed prophecy, an embellished testimony, and a doctrine of new revelation beyond the apostles touch all three. The list of flawed saints is a real biblical truth aimed at a target no one is standing on. We covered this fully at The Question Was Never Whether He Was Perfect, and I will leave it there.
What still stands
So I thank Amos Omoboriowo for Part 10, and I mean it, because he has done us the service of answering our third question out loud. Did William Branham preach what Paul preached?
Part 10 says no, and says it proudly. It says Branham brought "New Truths," a "Present Truth," an unveiling the apostles did not give us. That is not preaching what Paul preached. That is preaching more than Paul preached, and Paul himself told us what to do with more. "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed."
Jesse Smith was right, and the proof is in the sermon that set out to refute him. When you make one man the channel of ongoing revelation, you have placed his word beside Scripture, and then, when his stories need defending, above it. Amos Omoboriowo could not defend Branham without reaching for the Book of Acts and asking us to treat a preacher's sermons by the rules we reserve for the inspired Word. That reach is the whole argument, laid bare.
The good news is simpler and steadier than any of this. The faith was delivered once, and it is enough. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God... that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Timothy 3:16-17). You do not need a new voice, a new truth, or a new prophet to reopen a book God has closed. You need the Spirit who inspired it to open your eyes to what is already there, and He will, freely, for anyone who asks. That is not "above the Bible." That is the Bible, and Christ in the middle of it, which is all any of us ever needed.
Footnotes
- ↑ Page numbers in the footnotes are from the printed Scribe, "God Sent Vessels ... Part 10" (July 2022, Ref. 05-12-2021, preached 5 December 2021).
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, p. 3, quoting Jesse Smith.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, p. 3.
- ↑ John 16:12-15, KJV.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, pp. 4-5.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, pp. 4-5.
- ↑ Galatians 1:8-9, KJV.
- ↑ Revelation 22:18-19, KJV.
- ↑ Proverbs 4:18, KJV.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, pp. 9-10.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, pp. 7-8, quoting Acts 9:7 and Acts 22:9.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, pp. 7-8.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 9, pp. 15-17. See One of My Weaknesses.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 10, pp. 5-6, 10-14.