More Untruth Than Truth

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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 8 was preached on Sunday 5 December 2021 and published in the Scribe magazine in June 2022.

More Untruth Than Truth

Every so often a defence tells you more than it means to. Part 8 is that moment in this series. For seven instalments Amos Omoboriowo has answered the question "did William Branham teach the truth?" by changing the subject to persecution, to fallibility, to fame, to Elijah. In Part 8 he answers it directly, and the answer is astonishing.

He sets out to explain why so many people say William Branham's teaching was confusing and unreliable, and his explanation is this: it was. William Branham, he writes, "spoke in Duality, on every issue of Truth, giving us a quote, and a counter-quote, on all Bible issues." Not occasionally. On virtually every subject. And which way did the balance fall? Amos Omoboriowo tells us plainly: "these kinds of statements of Untruth, projections that are clearly and totally Anti-Word, abound much more in his sermons than the statements of Truth."

Read that again, because it is the defence speaking, not the prosecution. The man who is being defended as God's prophet taught, by his own defender's account, more untruth than truth.

This is meant to be a solution. It is called "the Fan." But before we look at how the argument tries to turn error into a virtue, notice what has already happened. **The question was whether William Branham taught the truth. Part 8 answers: mostly not, and on purpose.**

What Part 8 concedes

Let the concessions stand in his own words, because there is no need to sharpen them.

William Branham gave "Two Opposing Statements on issues of Truth" on nearly every subject. "For Every Quote of Brother Branham, there is also a Counter-Quote; and for Every Truth of the Prophet, there is equally an opposing Untruth, on the same subject-matter of the Holy Bible." "God used the mouth of Brother Branham to feed the Wheat of God with Truth, and the same mouth was also used to feed the Tares of Satan with Untruth." The examples he gives are not trivial. On the Seventy Weeks of Daniel, Branham taught both that Israel has a full seven years of prophetic time left and that it has only three and a half, one of which Amos Omoboriowo calls "the irrefutable Truth" and the other "an Untruth." On the new birth, he taught both that it requires the infilling of the Holy Ghost and that it is received the moment one believes.

And then the summary that no critic of the movement ever needs to write, because the defender has written it: the message is "a Giant Complex Maze," "a burying ground for Non-seeds," which "you just cannot find your way through, without Apostolic spectacles."

Now set that beside the three questions this website has asked from the beginning. Was he a prophet? Was he honest? Did he preach what Paul preached? Part 8 has answered all three, and it has answered them for us. A man who says a thing and then says its opposite has not spoken as the prophets spoke. The test is not hidden or harsh. "When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken" (Deuteronomy 18:22). "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1). A message that is admittedly more untruth than truth does not pass that test. It fails it, in writing.

The God who cannot lie

The defence knows this is a problem, and so it does the only thing left to do. It moves the untruth from the man to God. Amos Omoboriowo writes that "the Lord inspired and used the same mouth to feed both the Wheat and the Tares, with their respective food, Truth and Error," and that God "inspired Brother Branham to make... Projections or Statements Leading away from the Holy Bible... thereby creating a Wind of Doctrine." When he anticipates the obvious objection, "why would God inspire His Servant to say things that are Anti-Bible," his answer is simply, "God can do whatsoever He wants... For He is Sovereign."

This is where the whole edifice runs into the character of God, and cannot pass.

God does not lie, and He cannot. "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began" (Titus 1:2). "It was impossible for God to lie" (Hebrews 6:18). To say that God authored the untruths, deliberately, as His own instrument, is to say that the God who cannot lie inspired a man to lie, on nearly every subject, to the very people He was calling to Himself. That is not a high view of God's sovereignty. It is an attack on His truthfulness, dressed as reverence.

And there is a verse that lands squarely, because Amos Omoboriowo uses the word himself. He says the Fan created "mass confusion" in the movement. But Scripture says, "God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints" (1 Corinthians 14:33). The confusion he attributes to God is the very thing God is said not to author.

Worst of all, he has inverted the one passage he quotes to describe the Fan. He says the untruths created "a Wind of Doctrine," and he cites Ephesians 4. But read what Ephesians 4 actually says the ministry is for: "that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive" (Ephesians 4:14). The "wind of doctrine" is precisely what God gives ministry to protect His children from. Part 8 has taken the thing Scripture names as the danger and made it God's chosen tool. **God does not feed His children error, and the Book that says He cannot lie is the Book that calls the wind of doctrine a snare, not a gift.**

The proof-text that refutes him

To defend a God who inspires untruth, Amos Omoboriowo reaches for two passages: the lying spirit sent to Ahab in 1 Kings 22, and God answering idolaters "according to the multitude of their idols" in Ezekiel 14. He is right that these passages exist. He is wrong about what they prove, and the first one refutes him outright.

Read 1 Kings 22 to the end, as he quotes it. The lying spirit is put into the mouths of Ahab's four hundred false prophets, the men led by Zedekiah. And the true prophet, Micaiah, is the one who tells Ahab the truth, exposes the lie, and is struck and imprisoned for it. So in the very passage Amos Omoboriowo offers, the man who speaks the lie is the false prophet, and the true prophet is the one who refuses to speak it. If William Branham spoke the untruth, then by this text he is not standing where Micaiah stood. He is standing where Zedekiah stood. The passage does not put a true prophet's lie under God's blessing. It puts the lie in the false prophets and the truth in the one true man.

Ezekiel 14 and the same principle in the New Testament tell the same story, and it is a story of judgment, not of shepherding. "God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie." Why, and to whom? "Because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved... that they all might be damned who believed not the truth" (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12). God gives the reprobate over to delusion as judgment on those who have already refused the truth. He does not mix delusion into the daily bread of His own elect Bride and call it food. Amos Omoboriowo has taken God's judgment on the wicked and made it God's method with the children He loves. Those are not the same thing, and Scripture never confuses them.

Where the authority actually went

There is one more thing Part 8 gives away, quietly, and it is worth naming. If the message is admittedly a maze of truth and untruth, then the message cannot be its own guide. You need something outside it to sort the wheat statements from the chaff statements. And Amos Omoboriowo tells us what that something is: "you just cannot find your way through the Message of Elijah, without Apostolic spectacles," the interpretation supplied by Raymond Jackson.

Follow where the authority has moved. This series has insisted, on almost every page, that it carries "nothing but the Holy Scriptures." But here the final authority is not the Bible, and it is not even William Branham, whose message is admittedly unreliable on its face. The final authority is one man's reading of another man, deciding which of the prophet's contradictions to keep. That is not sola scriptura. It is a chain of men, and the Bible has become the thing you arrive at only after you have already trusted the chain. A message that needs a second prophet's glasses to be safe is not a lamp unto the feet. It is a maze with a gatekeeper.

A word on their own page

Part 8 also turns to answer this website's page for those leaving the movement, which argues that if William Branham was not the promised messenger, then the mysteries of the Bible were never lost and the church never lost the truth. Amos Omoboriowo replies that the truth was lost in the Dark Ages and restored by the Reformers, so it must have been lost.

But this simply assumes the framework in dispute. That the Reformation recovered the emphasis on justification by faith is history, and it is a good history. It is not the claim that the gospel had vanished from the earth and needed a twentieth-century man to find it again. And the falling away of 2 Thessalonians 2:3 is a specific end-time rebellion, not a proof that all truth perished and had to be restored through William Branham. The Lord Jesus said the opposite about His church: "I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18). The truth was never lost, because He promised it would not be.

What still stands

So I thank Amos Omoboriowo for Part 8, and this time I mean it with a particular gratitude, because Part 8 says out loud what the other instalments worked to avoid. It concedes that William Branham taught untruth, more untruth than truth, on virtually every subject, and it defends that by making God the author of the error.

But God is not the author of confusion, and God cannot lie. The passages offered to prove otherwise are passages of judgment on the wicked, and the clearest of them, 1 Kings 22, puts the lie in the mouth of the false prophets and the truth in the one man who would not speak it. And the message that is admittedly a maze has, in the end, quietly handed its authority to a man's spectacles rather than to the Word it claims to carry.

The good news is simpler and kinder than a maze, and it is worth ending on. Christ is the truth, not a riddle. "My sheep hear my voice," He said, "and they follow me" (John 10:27). "When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13). You do not need apostolic spectacles to read your Bible, and you do not need to survive a burying ground to be saved. Open the Book, apply the test God gave, and read the record for yourself. A true prophet leaves you standing on the Word, not lost inside a man.

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