One Of My Weaknesses Is...

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

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One of My Weaknesses

Part 9 works through two more of what Amos Omoboriowo calls the great problems with William Branham's ministry: the idolatry of his followers, and the fact that he was a man with weaknesses. Along the way it does something the whole series has circled and avoided. It answers the second of the three questions this website has always asked. Was William Branham honest?

The answer arrives quietly, in a story Amos Omoboriowo tells to William Branham's credit. He recounts a moment, passed down through Raymond Jackson, when a man told Branham that the Lord had said to him, "You exaggerate." And William Branham replied, "That is true, brother, please pray for me. That is one of my weaknesses."

Amos Omoboriowo means this as a point in Branham's favour, an example of humility. And there is humility in it. But read what has just been conceded. The prophet whose entire case rests on his own accounts of visions, voices, and miracles has admitted, in his own words, that exaggeration was one of his weaknesses. **The question was whether William Branham was honest about what God did. Part 9 answers, in the prophet's own voice: not always.**

What "one of my weaknesses" actually is

Amos Omoboriowo does not leave it at one admission. He stacks several, all offered as candid honesty about a flawed man.

He cites an eyewitness of the foundational 1933 event at the Ohio River, a man named Gram Snellie, who said, "Bill exaggerated the numbers so badly. There were no five thousand people there. Bruce, I was there that day. If we had a hundred people, we had a crowd." He acknowledges a critic's finding, which he calls "valid," that there are "many contradictions found in these William Branham's sermons," where Branham "gives different accounts as to what happened to the man" in a story he told repeatedly. He concedes, again, that Branham "gave a personal prediction relating to 1977, in which he declared that the world would end by 1977," and that "this prediction failed woefully." And he sums up: "one of the weaknesses of Brother Branham was exaggeration, embellishing things... obviously just to impress the people."

Now watch where he files all of this. He puts it in the same drawer as Noah's drunkenness and Moses' temper: a "human weakness," the plight of every "vessel of clay." "We all have our weaknesses," he says, "we are not going to kill the man for that."

But exaggeration is not a temper, and embellishing the record is not a bad day. A short fuse is a flaw in a man's conduct. Habitually enlarging the numbers, embellishing the events, and telling the same story in contradictory ways is a flaw in a man's truthfulness, and specifically in his truthfulness about what he claims God did. Scripture does not treat that as a forgivable passion incidental to the message. It treats it as sin. "Lie not one to another" (Colossians 3:9). "Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour" (Ephesians 4:25). "A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape" (Proverbs 19:5). Our second question was never "did he have a flaw." Every man has flaws. Our second question was, "was he honest?" And a habit of embellishing the record is exactly, precisely, the thing that question is about. Part 9 has answered it, and answered it against the prophet.

Why this undoes the case

Here is the part that should not be missed, because it reaches back and touches everything the earlier instalments built.

The affirmative case for William Branham, laid out across Parts 5 through 7, rests almost entirely on his own accounts of his own experiences. The light and the voice at the Ohio River in 1933. The angel in the log cabin in 1946. The visions, the commissions, the words only he heard. None of these can be checked by anyone else. They stand or fall on the trustworthiness of the man telling them.

And Part 9 has now conceded, on the testimony of Amos Omoboriowo's own eyewitness, that the man telling them embellished. The very 1933 event that anchors the "he is Elijah" claim is the event Gram Snellie says was exaggerated "so badly," from a hundred people to five thousand. The stories Branham told repeatedly are the stories a critic showed, and Amos Omoboriowo agreed, were given in "different accounts."

You cannot have it both ways. If the storyteller embellished the size of the crowd he could see, and gave contradictory versions of events other people witnessed, then his account of the voice from heaven that only he heard cannot simply be taken on his word. Part 9 hands us, in the name of defending him, the very reason the earlier parts fail: a case built on one man's self-report is only as sound as the man's honesty, and Part 9 has told us his honesty had a known and admitted leak. **The defence has undermined its own foundation, because the stories the case rests on come from the mouth it concedes embellished.**

Nehushtan: his own example points the other way

Before the honesty admission, Part 9 spends its longest section on the idolatry in the movement, and here too Amos Omoboriowo is candid. He grants that some followers made William Branham "Lord," baptized in his name, married couples with his recorded voice years after his death, and waited at his grave for him to rise. He says plainly that this is "exactly how cults behave." His defence is that you cannot judge the prophet by his followers, and he reaches for Moses and the golden calf, and for the brazen serpent Moses made.

But look at what he does with the brazen serpent, because it turns in his hand. He quotes 2 Kings 18:4, where Hezekiah, a godly king, "brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan," a mere thing. That is the biblical response to a relic that has become an idol. You do not keep defending the relic. You break its hold and call the people back to God, and Scripture records it as an act of righteousness. Hezekiah is the hero of that verse precisely because he removed the object people were worshipping.

So Amos Omoboriowo's own proof-text commends the very thing this website is doing. When a man has been lifted into the place of God, the faithful response is to say, plainly, he is Nehushtan, a man and not the Lord, and to point people past him to Christ. That is not blighting a prophet. That is Hezekiah's work.

And the idolatry is not a stray accident that landed on an innocent message. A system that makes one man's every statement "Thus saith the Lord," that makes receiving his message the boundary of the Bride, and that teaches only he can interpret the Bible, as the earlier instalments do, grows idolaters the way a vine grows grapes. Part 9 laments the fruit while the rest of the series waters the root.

A fortress with no door

Step back and set the four "problems" of Parts 8 and 9 side by side, because together they reveal the shape of the whole defence.

Do not judge him by his failed predictions; those were only personal (Part 6). Do not judge him by his contradictions; those are the Fan, God's own design (Part 8). Do not judge him by his exaggerations; those are just a human weakness (Part 9). Do not judge him by his followers; they are a mixed multitude (Part 9). And do not judge his message at all without "apostolic spectacles," the interpretation of another man (Part 8).

Every road to a verdict has been closed. Every piece of evidence has been ruled inadmissible before it can be weighed. But that is not how Scripture treats the testing of a prophet. Scripture commands the test, and it never tells us the evidence is off-limits: "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1); "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21); "if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken" (Deuteronomy 18:22). A claim that has an answer ready to disqualify every possible objection is not a strong faith. It is a fortress with no door. And the warnings Part 9 repeats, the unpardonable sin and the strange signs God commanded Ezekiel, do not open that door. They stand guard over it.

What still stands

So I thank Amos Omoboriowo for Part 9, and once more I mean it, because Part 9 answered a question the series worked hard to avoid. Was William Branham honest? By his own admission, and by his defender's own witnesses, not consistently. He exaggerated. He embellished. He told the same story in different ways. And the year he named for the end of the world came and went.

That is not a small thing, and it is not unkind to say so, because a prophet's testimony about what God did is worth exactly as much as the honesty of the man who gives it. When the man concedes he embellished, the testimonies lose the one thing that made them evidence.

The good news, again, is kinder and cleaner than any of this. We serve a God "that cannot lie" (Titus 1:2), a God who "is not a man, that he should lie" (Numbers 23:19). You honour Him, not offend Him, when you ask whether the stories are true, because He is the God of truth and He has told you to try the spirits. And when a man has been lifted into His place, the faithful and loving thing is Hezekiah's thing: to call it Nehushtan, gently, and to point past the man to Christ, who alone is worthy of the trust. Open the record. Weigh the accounts against each other and against the Word. You will not be sinning by looking. You will be doing what Scripture asks.

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