The Question Was Never Perfection
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 2 was preached on Sunday 28 November 2021 and published in the Scribe magazine in March 2022.[1]
The Question Was Never Whether He Was Perfect
In Part 1, Amos Omoboriowo compared William Branham to John the Baptist and to Christ, and left the actual evidence untouched. Part 2 adds two new arguments. I want to take both of them seriously, because they are the real engine of his defence, and because a lot of sincere people find them persuasive.
The first is what he calls "The Present Truth." God, he says, is always sending a fresh messenger with fresh revelation for each hour, so to say that God has stopped sending such men is unbelief. The second is what he calls "Vessels of Clay." Every man God sends is fallible, so you must look at the message he bears and not at his human failures.
Both arguments are built with care. Both are also aimed at a target no one on this website ever set up.
We have never said William Branham was false because he was imperfect. We have never asked for an angel. Our challenge asked three plain questions:
- Was he a prophet?
- Was he honest?
- Did he preach what Paul preached?
Those are questions about whether his prophecies came to pass and whether his stories were true. Part 2 spends its whole second half proving that godly men can have personal weaknesses, which we happily grant, while the real question goes untouched. And the first half rests on turning a single verse to mean the opposite of what it says. The question was never whether William Branham was perfect. It was whether he was accurate.
"The Present Truth" is not what Peter said
Amos Omoboriowo builds his entire first argument on one phrase from Peter. "Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth" (2 Peter 1:12). From those three words, "the present truth," he draws a doctrine of continuing new revelation delivered through a fresh messenger in every age. He writes, "FOR THERE IS A PRESENT TRUTH, AND THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN 'THE PRESENT TRUTH' OF CHRIST."[2]
But watch what Peter is actually doing. He is not promising his readers something new. He is reminding them of something they already have. "Though ye know them," he says, "and be established in the present truth." You do not tell people you are reminding them of what they already know and are already established in, and mean by it a revelation that has not arrived yet.
The Greek settles it. The words rendered "present truth" are tē parousē alētheia. Parousē is a participle of the verb pareimi, "to be present," "to be at hand." The phrase means "the truth that is present with you," the truth already delivered and already possessed.[3] Older commentators put it simply: the truth which is with you, which you have received.
The rest of the letter closes the door completely. In the same chapter Peter grounds his readers not in a coming messenger but in what has already been given, the eyewitness apostolic testimony and the "more sure word of prophecy" of Scripture (2 Peter 1:16-21). In the very next chapter he warns them against exactly the kind of men who arrive claiming fresh truth, "who privily shall bring in damnable heresies" (2 Peter 2:1). Peter's "present truth" is the guardrail against novelty, not a license for it. When Peter says "the present truth," he means the truth you already hold, and his whole letter is a plea to hold it fast.
John 16 and Hebrews 1 say the opposite of what he needs
Two more passages carry the weight of the "continuing revelation" argument, and both, read in place, point the other way.
John 16:12-13
Amos Omoboriowo quotes,
"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," and reads it as a pipeline of fresh revelation reaching down the ages to a present-day messenger."[4]
But notice who "you" is. Jesus is speaking in the upper room to his apostles, the men who would receive the finished revelation and write the New Testament. The promise is that the Spirit would lead them into all truth, and he did. The passage describes the completion of the apostolic word, not its perpetual reopening.
Hebrews 1:1-2
He leans on this text too, and here the reversal is plainest. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son."[5] The writer of Hebrews is drawing a contrast, and the whole point of the contrast is finality. The old way was piecemeal, many prophets, many methods, over many years. The new and last way is the Son, God's complete and superior word. Amos Omoboriowo reads a passage about the finality of the Son as a warrant for a continuing succession of prophet-like messengers. The text is saying the opposite. Hebrews 1 does not open a line of new messengers. It announces the last word, and it is a Person, not a prophet.
The "Vessels of Clay" argument answers a charge no one made
Thia is the heart of Part 2, and this is what the whole message misses.
Amos Omoboriowo spends page after page establishing that the men God sends are fallible:
- Noah got drunk and lay naked in his tent (Genesis 9:20-21).
- Moses lost his temper, struck the rock, and forfeited the Promised Land (Numbers 20:7-12).
- Aaron made the golden calf (Exodus 32).
- Elijah "was a man subject to like passions as we are" (James 5:17).
From this he concludes that we must look only at "the divine revelation the man bears," and that Branham's critics have "stumbled on this serious stone of offence."[6]
I want to be completely fair to him, so let me state his point at its strongest. He is right that every servant of God in Scripture was a sinner saved by grace. He is right that no man but Christ is infallible. He is right that it would be foolish to reject a true prophet merely because he had personal failings. On all of that, we agree.
But look at what he has done. He has answered a charge we never brought.
We have never written that William Branham is false because he was a sinner, or because he had a temper, or a weakness, or a bad day.
Search this website. You will not find it.
Everyone is a vessel of clay. That was never the question. Our charge is different, and it is specific. We have documented that William Branham prophesied things that did not come to pass, and that he told stories about his own life and ministry that did not happen. That is not a charge about his character. It is a charge about his accuracy and his honesty.
And now watch the gallery of prophets Amos Omoboriowo has assembled, because it turns on him.
- Noah got drunk, but Noah never gave a false prophecy.
- Moses lost his temper, but every word Moses prophesied came to pass.
- Elijah was a man of like passions, but the drought he announced came, and the rain he announced came.
Their failings were moral. None of them ever stood up and foretold a thing that failed. So the very men he parades to excuse William Branham prove the point against him, because the one thing none of them did is the one thing at issue. A prophet's weaknesses are one question. A prophet's false predictions are another. Part 2 answers the first and never touches the second.
The test he keeps stepping around
Scripture does not leave us to guess how to weigh a prophet. It gives a test, and the test is not about the man's character at all. It is about whether his word comes true.
"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, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously" (Deuteronomy 18:22).
The measure God himself sets is not the prophet's temper or his sobriety. It is the accuracy of what he said in God's name.
This is the test believethesign.com applied. It is the test Amos Omoboriowo does not apply anywhere in Part 2. He has built an elaborate and heartfelt doctrine to place a prophet's failures off-limits, and I understand why it moves people. But the failures were never the point. The prophecies are the point, and the prophecies are the one file he will not open. Anyone who sincerely wants to weigh this can read the record for himself.[7] Do not take my word for it. Take Moses' word for it, in Deuteronomy 18, and check.
Borrowed authority: a dream, a stack of quotes, and a "Chief Apostle"
Part 2 tells us, more than once, that it comes with "Nothing but the Holy Scriptures." I want to hold that promise up against three things in the same message.
First, the sermon opens not with Scripture but with a dream. A brother dreamed he saw Amos Omoboriowo "preaching with an AK-47 Rifle hanging menacingly across his chest," with an unnamed man beside him. Amos tells his church that the man was "the Angel of the Lord, the Angel behind my Ministry," and that "we are now living in the reality of that dream."[8] Whatever one makes of the dream, it is not Scripture, and it is used to authorize the ministry that the rest of the message is defending. A defence that promises the Bible alone should not open by resting its own authority on a private dream.
Second, having said he will not hand us "Any Quotes of Brother Branham," he adds in the same breath that he "will also use the quotes of Brother Branham, as well as the quotes of other men," and he does.[9] He quotes William Branham's sermon "Spirit Of Truth" as support,[10] and he quotes Raymond Jackson's "The Great Mystery" at length to establish that "those who refuse to accept any more light cannot possibly be part of the End Time Bride of Christ."[11] The Bible-alone claim and the appeal to human authority sit on the same page.
Third, to build an ongoing office of authoritative messengers, he appeals to Paul's phrase "the very chiefest apostles" (2 Corinthians 11:5; 12:11) and reads it as Scripture naming a "Chief Apostle."[12] But that is not what Paul meant, and the Greek makes it painfully obvious. The words are tōn hyperlian apostolōn, "the super-apostles," and Paul is being bitterly sarcastic. He is talking about the self-important intruders at Corinth, the men he calls outright, eight verses later, "false apostles, deceitful workers" (2 Corinthians 11:13).[13] The verse offered to crown a chief apostle is Paul mocking men who exalted themselves over the church. It proves the reverse of what it is quoted for.
The circle, and the one thing that breaks it
Underneath both of Part 2's arguments is the same thing we saw in Part 1. Everything depends on assuming, in advance, that William Branham is the sent vessel of the hour. Grant that, and the "present truth" argument makes rejecting him a rejection of God, and Amos Omoboriowo reaches for John 13:20 to say exactly that: "to reject whomsoever Christ sends, is to reject Jesus Christ himself."[14]
But John 13:20 speaks of the ones Christ actually sent. It cannot tell you whether any particular man was sent. That is the very question in dispute, and you cannot settle it by quoting a verse that assumes it already answered. Round and round the argument goes, and it never once steps outside the circle to do the thing that would settle it.
There is a way out, and Scripture has been holding it open the whole time. Weigh the prophet by his word. Open the prophecies. Lay them beside what actually happened. Apply Deuteronomy 18. That is not persecution, and it is not the envy of small men, whatever Part 2 says about our motives. It is the plain test God gave his people so they would not be deceived, and it is offered to you in love.
I will say again what I said before, and I mean it kindly. Read it for yourself. Not what William Branham's defenders say about the prophecies, and not only what his critics say. Read the prophecies themselves, and see whether they came to pass. A true prophet has nothing to fear from that test. Neither do you.
Footnotes
- ↑ Page numbers in the footnotes refer to the printed Scribe, "God Sent Vessels Of Truth, Vessels Of Clay ... Part 2" (March 2022, Ref. 28-11-2021).
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, pp. 3-4.
- ↑ 2 Peter 1:12, tē parousē alētheia. Parousē is the dative feminine participle of pareimi, "to be present, at hand." Text and parsing at https://biblehub.com/text/2_peter/1-12.htm
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, p. 4.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, pp. 8, and the surrounding argument pp. 6-8.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, pp. 33-40. The "stone of offence" language is on pp. 34 and 40, the latter naming "Rod and Jeremy Bergen, with their Flipped BelieveTheSign.com."
- ↑ See An Analysis of William Branham's Visions and Prophecies and Was William Branham Honest on this website, where the specific prophecies and stories are set out with sources.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, p. 2.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, p. 12.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, p. 12, quoting William Branham, "Spirit Of Truth," 18 January 1963.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, pp. 15-16, quoting Raymond Jackson, "The Great Mystery, Part 1," May 2004.
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, pp. 12-13.
- ↑ 2 Corinthians 11:5, tōn hyperlian apostolōn, an ironic label ("super-apostles") for the intruders Paul calls pseudapostoloi, "false apostles," in 11:13. See https://biblehub.com/interlinear/2_corinthians/11-5.htm
- ↑ God Sent Vessels, Part 2, p. 36.
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See also: The Argument That Proves Anything, An Analysis of William Branham's Visions and Prophecies, Was William Branham Honest.