It Means Whatever I Want
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 11 was preached on Sunday 5 December 2021 and published in the Scribe magazine in July 2022.[1]
Read It in Context
Part 11 defends one verse. William Branham built a great deal on Zechariah 14:7, "at evening time it shall be light," and applied it to himself, the evening-time messenger. Our own page on that verse, titled Zechariah 14:7, said he had lifted the verse out of its setting to point to himself. Amos Omoboriowo sets out to answer us, and he tells us exactly how he will do it.
"Please come with me to the Word of God, for we are on holy ground... let us go straight there, and read it in context, just as they want us to do."[2]
That is a fair offer, and it is the right one. So let us hold him to it. Because over the next fourteen pages, Amos Omoboriowo promises to read the verse in context and then does the one thing that is the opposite of reading in context. He cuts the verse loose from everything around it. **He promised to read it in context, and then he removed it from its context.** That is the whole of Part 11, and it is worth watching closely, because it is done in the open.
What our article actually said
Let me state our argument plainly, using the words Amos Omoboriowo himself reproduces from our page, so there is no question of a strawman.
Zechariah 14 opens with the Day of the Lord. The nations gather against Jerusalem to battle, the city is taken, the houses are rifled, half the city goes into captivity (verses 1-2). The Lord goes forth to fight, His feet stand on the Mount of Olives, and the mountain splits in two (verses 3-5). Living waters flow out from Jerusalem, in summer and in winter (verse 8). The Lord becomes king over all the earth (verse 9). Our article pointed out that all of this frames verse 7, and none of it happened in William Branham's lifetime. As we asked on the page Amos Omoboriowo quotes: did the nations gather against Jerusalem for battle during Branham's ministry? Did water flow from Jerusalem to both the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean? The answer to each is no.[3] That was the argument. When the events that surround a verse have plainly not occurred, you cannot claim the verse has been fulfilled and hang a man's identity on it. That is what it means to take a verse out of its scriptural joint.
His answer: cut the verse loose
Amos Omoboriowo's reply is not to show that the surrounding events happened. He grants that they have not. His reply is to declare that the surrounding events belong to a different day altogether, so they do not need to have happened.
Verses 1 and 3-5, he says, are the Day of the Lord, still future. Verse 2 is the Battle of Armageddon, a different day again. Verses 8-9 are the Millennium. And verses 6-7, the ones Branham needed, are neither. They are the whole Grace Age, the two thousand years of the church, ending in Branham's evening-time light. His conclusion could not be more direct: "verse 6 has absolutely Nothing to do with verses 1-5... to tie it to these earlier verses, amounts to jumbling, muddling, misplacing, and misinterpreting the Word of God."[4]
How can one verse be pulled out of the middle of a chapter and reassigned to a different era from the verses on either side of it? Here is the machinery. "The prophecy of the Lord was not inspired to be written, necessarily in their chronological order of prophetic fulfilment, because God juggled the written account, so that it may take divine revelation alone to put the picture together properly."[5]
Read that again, because everything rests on it. The text is not in order. Only divine revelation can put it back in order. And the divine revelation in question is William Branham's. Once you accept that, the words on the page can no longer correct you, because any objection from the plain order of the text is answered by saying the text was scrambled on purpose. **A reading that cannot be checked against the words it claims to explain is not an interpretation. It is a key that opens any lock, which means it opens none.** We met this same device in Part 1, where every possible objection had an answer ready before it could be raised. Here it wears a different coat, but it is the same coat. It is the argument that proves anything.
The refrain he had to walk past
Now hold Amos Omoboriowo to his own promise and read the chapter in context. There is one phrase that ties Zechariah 14 together from top to bottom, and it is the very phrase that opens the verse he wants to set apart.
"In that day."
Look where it falls. "His feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives" (verse 4). "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear, nor dark" (verse 6). "And it shall be in that day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem" (verse 8). "And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one LORD" (verse 9).[6]
It is one phrase, repeated, binding the whole chapter to a single day. And here is the part Amos Omoboriowo cannot get around. He himself assigns verse 4 to the Day of the Lord, and verses 8 and 9 to the Millennium, which he says is the same Day of the Lord.[7] So in his own reading, "in that day" means the literal Day of the Lord in verse 4, and again in verse 8, and again in verse 9. Only in verses 6 and 7, sitting right between them, does the identical phrase suddenly mean a two-thousand-year age. Same words. Same chapter. One exception. And the exception lands exactly, and only, on the verse William Branham needed for himself.
That is not reading a verse in context. Reading in context is what lets verse 8 tell you what "in that day" means in verse 6, because it is the same day. What Amos Omoboriowo has done is the reverse. He has isolated one verse from the refrain that governs it so that it can mean something the refrain will not allow.
And verse 7 says so itself. "But it shall be one day which shall be known to the LORD, not day, nor night" (Zechariah 14:7).[8] One day. A single, particular day, so unlike ordinary days that it cannot be sorted into day or night, a day when the expected evening darkness gives way to light. That is the Day of the Lord the whole chapter describes. It is not a label for twenty centuries of church history.
The rule he broke while quoting it
There is one more thing in Part 11 that should not pass unnoticed, because Amos Omoboriowo says it against us, and it lands on him.
To rebuke this website for daring to read Zechariah 14, he reaches for a verse. "No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation" (2 Peter 1:20).[9] He means it as a wall around the prophets, a warning that men like us have no business handling them.
But look at what he has just built. The text of Zechariah, he told us, was deliberately scrambled by God, and only one man's revelation can reassemble it. There is no purer example of private interpretation than that. A reading that no one can reach from the words on the page, that depends entirely on the special revelation of one prophet, is private interpretation in the fullest sense of the phrase. **He condemned private interpretation with one breath and performed it with the next.**
In fairness, Peter is not actually talking about how we should interpret Scripture in that verse. He is talking about where prophecy came from in the first place: not from the prophet's own mind, but from the Holy Spirit, for "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Peter 1:21). The verse is about the divine origin of the Word, not a padlock on the reader. But take it even the way Amos Omoboriowo takes it, as a rule against private interpretation, and his own method is the thing it forbids.
"Just as they want us to do"
So let us come back to where he began. He promised, "let us go straight there, and read it in context, just as they want us to do." We do want that. It is the whole of our case. Read Zechariah 14 straight through, and let each verse sit under the phrase that governs it, and you will find one day, the Day of the Lord, when the nations gather, the Mount of Olives splits, the living waters flow, and the Lord becomes king over all the earth. On that day, and it is still ahead of us, the evening will end in light.
Amos Omoboriowo could not defend Branham's use of the verse while keeping that promise. To make verse 7 point to a man who lived from 1909 to 1965, he had to cut it out of the day it belongs to, and he could only justify the cut by appealing to a private revelation that the text itself, read in order, will not support. The charge our article made was that William Branham took the verse "out of its proper scriptural joint" to point to himself. Part 11 does not refute that charge. Part 11 is that charge, carried out in detail, over fourteen pages, by a man who told us at the start he was about to do the opposite.
What still stands
I want to end gently, because I know this verse is dear to many who read it in the evening-light hope, and there is something worth honouring there. The song Amos Omoboriowo quotes at the close, "It shall be light in the evening time," has comforted a great many people, and the longing in it, that after a long and darkening day the light of Christ would break through, is a good and biblical longing. No one needs to sneer at that.
But there is a difference between drawing comfort from an image and claiming that a specific prophecy was literally "fulfilled as we speak," one that "cannot be taken to the future on any account."[10] The first is devotion, and it is welcome. The second is a claim about the text that anyone can test, and the text does not carry it. Zechariah saw one day, still coming, and it is a greater day than a single man's ministry. When it arrives, the Mount of Olives will split under the feet of the Lord, the living waters will flow, and at evening time there will be light, and the light will be Christ Himself, king over all the earth.
So take Amos Omoboriowo's invitation, and mean it. Come with him to the Word of God. Read Zechariah 14 in context, all of it, in the order it stands. You will not need a private revelation to understand it, and you will not find a twentieth-century prophet in verse 7. You will find the Day of the Lord, and you will find the Lord. That is enough. It always was.
Footnotes
- ↑ Page numbers in the footnotes are from the printed Scribe, "God Sent Vessels ... Part 11" (July 2022, Ref. 05-12-2021, preached 5 December 2021).
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, p. 4.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, pp. 2-3, reproducing our Zechariah 14:7 article.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, pp. 6-7.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, p. 5.
- ↑ Zechariah 14:4, 6, 8, 9, KJV. The same refrain also opens verses 13, 20, and 21.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, p. 15, where he ties verses 8-9 to "the Day of the Lord" and "the Millennium."
- ↑ Zechariah 14:7, KJV.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, p. 7, quoting 2 Peter 1:20.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 11, pp. 14, 17.