WILLIAM BRANHAM WAS GOD IN HUMAN FLESH (PART I)

“T.L. Osborn Was a Branham Deity Cultist”

By Akin Ojumu

Advocates of peace and unity in the Body of Christ are quick to warn us of the dangers of criticizing a man of God for their doctrinal errors and/or moral failures. Their common refrain is that since these are servants of God, they should be left to God to deal with them. According to them, when believers criticize one another, especially leaders of the faith, the house of God will be divided against itself and, in the process, the enemies of God are inadvertently given the weapon to use against the people of God.

What these ambassadors of cordiality and conviviality get wrong is the assumptions loaded into their sentimental warning. First off, preachers who propagate erroneous doctrines are servants of Satan advancing the agenda of Satan. Such people are not servants of Christ furthering the course of Christ and His Gospel.

Isaiah 8:20 (Amplified)

“Direct those people to the law and to the testimony! If their teachings are not in accord with this Word, it is because they have no dawn.”

Secondly, even if we assume that teachers of aberrant theologies are servants of Christ, still their poisonous teachings must be exposed, refuted, and repudiated. If not for anything at all, but for the sake of the soul of those who consume the poison. We cannot, in the name of a phony unity, allow the spiritually toxic message of false teachers to spread like gangrene through the Body of Christ without calling them out for the ruin they are bringing to the Body of Christ.

2 Timothy 2:15-18

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. But avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some.”

Staying silent in the face of egregious doctrinal error so as not to offend is an eternally perilous position to assume. When it comes to the matter of eternal destiny, I don’t mind ruffling feathers. If by rattling the cages I will help one soul escape spending eternity in hell, you bet that I’m going to kick the living daylight out of the cages. I will not, in the name of keeping the peace, cease to sound the alarm and call attention to the dangers of the avalanche of catastrophic false teachings that have flooded the Church.

This commentary is another exercise in sounding the alarm. I am, this time, banging the drum to warn people about T.L. Osborn. I know that many of you consider Osborn a great evangelist used mightily by God. And because of the respect and reverence he commands, you’ve added him to the honor roll as one of the God’s Generals, so-called. 

Well, here’s me taking a sharp knife and sticking it into your bubble of misplaced adulations. T.L. Osborn was anything but an evangelist of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. At best, the man was a deceived deceiver who appropriated Christian slogans and co-opted the name of Christ to spread poisonous doctrines all over the world. 

Many of you don’t want to hear me say this. There are even those who would hate my guts for daring to express such a damning rebuke of T.L. Osborn. Well, I’m sorry, I’m not sorry. While I do care what people think of me, it’s definitely not to the extent that it will stop me from saying what I know to be true. So, you giving me your corner eye is not going to stop me from telling you the truth. 

Whatever opinion I have about T.L. Osborn is not based on minutiae of unimportant doctrinally differences. The man’s errors are legendary. They are so horrendous they would preclude those who consume them from entering the kingdom of God. There’s no right-thinking, Bible-believing, theologically-sound Christian who candidly compares what T.L. Osborn preached in the name of God to the Word of God that will not reach the same conclusions about the man as I did.

There are many things that T.L. Osborn believed and taught that were outrightly false and downright heretic. This commentary will focus on T.L. Osborn’s veneration of a man who could best be described as a firehose of heresies. As the keynote speaker at the January 1966 memorial service held in the honor of William Branham, Osborn delivered a eulogy that was pure blasphemy.

With flowery languages and over-the-top idolization, T.L. Osborn glorified William Branham not only as a great man of God who exceeded Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist in stature, but as God in human flesh. In his eulogy, Osborn deified Branham as the re-incarnate Christ sent as a special sign to this generation. William Branham, says T.L. Osborn, was sent as a forerunner of Christ’s second coming the same way John the Baptist was sent as the forerunner of Christ’s first coming.

Now, you may be wondering who exactly was this William Branham upon whom the great T.L. Osborn would heap such high praise? Well, if you don’t know, I’m going to tell you exactly who Branham was.

William Branham was a heretic and false prophet who was regarded by his followers as the final prophet to the Church before the Great Day of the LORD. Branham was believed to be the anointed prophet who would restore the Church to the true apostolic faith in fulfilment of Malachi’s prophecy.

Malachi 4:5

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes.”

As one of the forerunners of the miracles, signs and wonders ministries, William Branham pioneered the staged miracles, faux signs, and false wonders that we find all over the place today. His entire ministry agenda was built on the premise of the miraculous and supernatural. Branham was the brain behind the new era of the prophetic. Yet, the man was theologically inept and doctrinally empty. He was an unabashed twister and distorter of Scriptures.

Next time, we’ll review some of William Branham’s shenanigans and the bizarre ideas that he promoted.