Prophecy of the India Trip
Was William Branham's prophecy relating to his trip to India fulfilled?
The Prophecy
William Branham prophesied of a great campaign in India, saying:
- Mark my word; write it in the pages of your Bible, for it's THUS SAITH THE LORD, "Remember, when we land in India, you're going to hear of tens of thousands times thousands being saved." The Holy Spirit has said it; I've wrote it here in my Bible; it's wrote in tens of thousands of Bibles right here, like the resurrection of the little boy. By a vision that He said, "There's three hundred thousand of them in there." And you see if that isn't right. There's how the Gospel's going to be preached just overnight. She'll just sweep like that from place to place.[1]
It appears that William Branham first thought that his prophecy about a trip to South Africa was initially about India but he later admitted that the vision had not been fulfilled. He died with the vision unfulfilled.
Was it fulfilled?
As many of his other prophecies, this one did not come to pass quite as he predicted. Mr. Branham did go to India in September 1954, but the results fell far short of fulfilling this prophecy. Mr. Branham had to leave India after having been rescued by the militia from an angry mob. He tells of this:
- When I held my hand there, and when the prayer, of course wasn't interpreted, when I dropped my hands, the man looked. He let out a scream. He grabbed me around the waist. He grabbed the mayor of the city and begin hugging him and kissing him. He was just--could see as good as any man setting in here. I'm telling you: a frantic, a scream went from those people, and the whole thing went into a turmoil. Two or three hours later, they got me through the crowd with a army there trying to push them back. I had no pockets in my coats. My shoes was gone. They'd pulled every clothes off of me, nearly stripping me, screaming and crying. And the next day with sorrow. I had to leave India with a promise that I'd be back again.[2]
William Branham placed the blame for his lack of success in India on himself :
- And when... I had been very much constrained to go to--to India. And yet, as many of you might know, the Indian trip wasn't the success that it should've been, because I failed to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, and never recognized it after He give me a vision to go to Africa first and then to India.[3]
When speaking of how many were actually saved in his India campaign, he said:
- And yet, in the midst of five hundred thousand people that I was speaking to at Bombay, the Lord Jesus Christ and Christianity triumphed over everyone of them and put every witch doctor and holy man and everything else to shame. And there's no way of telling how many came to the Lord Jesus. We had no cooperation amongst the churches and just dropped in for three days, and there was no way of telling how many was saved.[4]
Mr. Branham never achieved the results in India that were prophesied when he said, "THUS SAITH THE LORD, 'Remember, when we land in India, you're going to hear of tens of thousands times thousands being saved.' The Holy Spirit has said it . . . "