Famous Does Not Equal True
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 5 was preached on Saturday 4 December 2021 and published in the Scribe magazine in April 2022.[1]
Famous Is Not the Same as True
For four messages Amos Omoboriowo cleared the ground. Part 5 is where he finally tries to build on it. Here, at last, he sets out to prove the claim the earlier parts kept promising and deferring: that William Branham is the end-time Elijah, the "Star Messenger" to the last age. This is the affirmative case, and it deserves to be met on its own terms.
Let me begin by granting what is true, because a great deal of Part 5 is true. William Branham did lead the post-World War II healing revival. He drew enormous crowds. Many witnesses, friendly and unfriendly, describe a striking gift of discernment in his healing lines. None of that is in dispute on this website, and I have no wish to take it from him.
But watch what the proof is made of. To show that Branham is the prophesied Elijah, Amos Omoboriowo offers two things: an elaborate scheme that reads the seven church ages out of the parables of Matthew 13, and a long parade of human testimonies to Branham's fame and healing power. The trouble is that the scheme is not in the Bible but in the private revelation of another man, and the testimonies prove his fame rather than the truth of his message. And both are exactly the kinds of evidence the earlier parts spent themselves calling worthless. **Famous is not the same as true, and the proof of Part 5 establishes the first while leaving the second untouched.**
A scheme Jesus did not teach, from a man's private revelation
The engine of Part 5 is the claim that the eight parables of Matthew 13 are a coded map of church history, one parable per age: the sower is the first age, the tares the second, the mustard seed the third, the leaven the Dark Ages, the treasure Martin Luther, the pearl John Wesley, and the net this present age.[2] The whole structure is then used to place William Branham in the seventh age as the fulfiller of the net.
Two problems sink this before it starts.
First, Jesus interpreted these parables himself, and not one of his interpretations is a timeline of church history. He said the sower's seed is the word and the soils are the hearts of hearers. He said of the tares, "the field is the world" (Matthew 13:38), not the church. And he said of the net, in words Amos Omoboriowo passes over, "So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire" (Matthew 13:49-50).[3] The net is the last judgment, when angels separate the wicked from the just. It is not a 1940s healing campaign. To make it one, the sermon must set aside the meaning the Lord himself gave and supply another.
Second, and more revealing, Amos Omoboriowo tells us plainly where this scheme comes from. "The revelation of the Spirit of Christ, by which these parables were opened up, came exclusively through Brother Jackson," he writes, naming Raymond Jackson as the man who "received the revelation of the First Seven Parables."[4] So the proof that William Branham is Elijah rests on a private interpretation received by Raymond Jackson, an interpretation the Bible nowhere states. For a series that has insisted from the first page that it carries "nothing but the Holy Scriptures" and rejects the "quotes of men," this is a striking foundation. The affirmative case for "only the Bible" is built on one man's revelation the Bible never gives.
The net Jesus explained, and the net he needs
The centre of the proof is the dragnet. Because a fishing net is cast by one man and drawn in by several, Amos Omoboriowo argues, the parable predicts a single "launcher" and a plurality of helpers, which he identifies as William Branham launching the healing revival and the other healing evangelists drawing it in.[5] He then declares, "you cannot argue against what God has already accomplished... you are looking at Fulfilled Scripture."[6]
But the argument turns on details the parable never mentions and ignores the meaning it does give. Jesus did not say the net is launched by a special end-time man. He said the net gathers of every kind and is sorted at the end of the world (Matthew 13:49-50). The mechanics of first-century fishing are not the point of the parable; the final separation of the righteous and the wicked is. Reading a lone "launcher" into it, and then reading William Branham into the launcher, is not interpretation. It is assignment.
And "you cannot argue with fulfilled Scripture" only sounds strong until you notice it assumes the very thing in question. Whether the parable was fulfilled by the healing revival is precisely what is being asked. To answer "it is fulfilled, therefore my reading is correct, therefore you cannot object" is to walk in a circle and call it a wall. The same is true of the demand, repeated through Part 5, that unless we supply our own end-time application of the parable we have no right to reject his.[7] We are not obliged to invent a rival scheme for a parable the Lord already explained. The absence of a competing timeline does not make his timeline true.
The testimony he said did not count
The largest single portion of Part 5 is a parade of witnesses: Wikipedia, the voice-of-healing website, Kenneth Hagin, David Harrell, James Morris, the Full Gospel Men's Voice, Ern Baxter, Gordon Lindsay. Each is quoted to establish that William Branham initiated and led the post-war healing revival and had an extraordinary gift.
Set this beside what the earlier parts said about human testimony. When former followers testified against William Branham, their witness was "carnal," "unrevelated," the word of men who "saw nothing." The sixty-seven who signed the Statement of Honesty were dismissed as apostates whose testimony proved only their blindness. Yet here, when the testimony runs the other way, it becomes vindication. Amos Omoboriowo even pauses to say "the testimony of the Word of God is incomparably greater,"[8] and then gives us page after page of the testimony of men. The standard does not stay fixed. It changes with the verdict the witness delivers.
I do not say this to dismiss the witnesses. I say it because the same method cannot be worthless on Tuesday and decisive on Saturday. If the sincere testimony of men who spent years close to William Branham counts for something, then it counts when they praise him and it counts when they fault him. And that turns out to matter a great deal.
What the witnesses actually said
Here is the heart of it. Every one of those testimonies establishes something no one on this website has ever denied: that William Branham was famous, that his campaigns were huge, that he had a remarkable gift of discernment. We have never disputed any of that. Our challenge has never been "was he well known" or "did he have a gift." It has been three other questions entirely: did the things he prophesied in the name of the Lord come to pass, was he honest, and did he preach the gospel Paul preached.
On those questions, the witnesses Amos Omoboriowo calls do not help him. They convict him. His own star witness, Ern Baxter, who managed the Branham campaigns and whom Part 5 leans on more than any other, said this: "Branham, as a Miracle Worker, had a real place. Branham as a Teacher was outside of his calling. The fruits of his Teaching Ministry are not good."[9] Kenneth Hagin, another witness quoted for the defence, "firmly and clearly opposed Brother Branham" on his teaching, a fact Amos Omoboriowo himself reports.[10] Even the Wikipedia entry he quotes with approval notes in the same breath that Branham's followers "have been labeled a Doomsday Cult."[11]
So the defence's own witnesses grant the exact point at issue. They praise the gift, which was never contested, and they fault the teaching, which is the whole question. Amos Omoboriowo has assembled a jury and every member has returned the verdict against the doctrine while complimenting the crowds. **When your witnesses concede the one thing in dispute, you have not proved your case. You have proved the other side's.**
The gift was never the question
There is one more claim in Part 5 that is meant to settle everything: Ern Baxter's recollection that "Branham never once made a mistake with the word of knowledge in all the years I was with him."[12] Take it at face value. Grant, for the sake of argument, that the discernment in the healing lines was exactly as reported. It still does not prove what Amos Omoboriowo needs it to prove, and Scripture is the reason.
The Bible is explicit that signs and wonders, even genuine ones, are not by themselves the test of a true prophet. Moses said so in the plainest terms: "If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass... saying, Let us go after other gods... thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet... for the Lord your God proveth you" (Deuteronomy 13:1-3).[13] A wonder that comes to pass is not a blank cheque. The Lord Jesus said the same: "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord... in thy name have we... done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you" (Matthew 7:22-23). And he warned that in the last days "false christs and false prophets" would "shew great signs and wonders" (Matthew 24:24). Power on display is never, in Scripture, the proof of a true messenger. The message is.
And notice, too, that a gift of discernment in a healing line is not the same thing as a public prophecy with a date attached. The one is a matter of impression in the moment, hard to check from the outside. The other is checkable against history: he said a thing would happen by a certain time, and either it did or it did not. It is there, in the record of his dated predictions and his accounts of his own life, that the real question lives, and it is there that Part 5 does not go. Anyone who wants to weigh it can read the record for himself.[14]
What still stands
So I thank Amos Omoboriowo for finally bringing his affirmative case, and I mean it. But when the case is examined, it proves the wrong thing. The healing revival was real. The crowds were real. By many accounts the gift was real. None of that was ever the question, and none of it answers the question.
To reach William Branham as Elijah, Part 5 must set aside the meaning Jesus gave his own parables and take up instead a scheme received privately by Raymond Jackson. To vindicate him, it must lean on the testimony of men, after four parts of calling such testimony worthless, and those very men fault the teaching while praising the gift. And to seal it, it must treat signs and wonders as proof, when Scripture says in so many words that they are not.
The question is still here, and it is the same question it has always been. Did the things William Branham spoke in the name of the Lord come to pass? Was he honest about his own life? Was his gospel the gospel of Paul? Even the witnesses Amos Omoboriowo trusts say the teaching was not good. That is not a small admission, and it is the door through which the honest reader should walk. Open the record. Lay the prophecies beside what happened. Weigh the message against the Bible, not against the size of the crowds. A true prophet has nothing to fear from that test, and neither do you.
Footnotes
- ↑ Page numbers in the footnotes are from the printed Scribe, "God Sent Vessels ... Part 5" (April 2022, Ref. 04-12-2021).
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, pp. 12-17.
- ↑ Matthew 13:49-50, KJV. Jesus' own interpretation makes the net a picture of the final judgment at the end of the world, not a mid-twentieth-century revival.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 11.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, pp. 17-18.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 27.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 25.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 28.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 36, quoting Ern Baxter's 1978 New Wine interview.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 31.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, pp. 28-29.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 5, p. 33.
- ↑ Deuteronomy 13:1-3, KJV. A sign that comes to pass does not validate a prophet whose message turns the people aside; the sign itself can be a test.
- ↑ See An Analysis of William Branham's Visions and Prophecies and Was William Branham Honest on this website, where the specific predictions and stories are set out with sources.
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See also: The Argument That Proves Anything, The Question Was Never Whether He Was Perfect, The Test He Calls a Sin, The Exception He Had to Invent, An Analysis of William Branham's Visions and Prophecies, Was William Branham Honest.