Almost-Arrested Elisha, Elijah, Amos, Joshua, Prophet, Mayan Authority, Bitter Bob listed the contents of his latest sermon that he put up online. These are the topics he talks about in one single sermon that he expects his couple hundred people to listen to on what he calls "the sabbath." Since he continually breaks it, I don't know why he bothers wasting so much time "preparing" his sermons.
After he waves his bible at you and flails his hands about he gets to his topics this week in Part 11 of an ongoing series:
Destruction of the temple
The beginning of sorrows
Ecumenical/interfaith movements,
Earthquakes
Famines
Pestilence
Persecution
Preach the gospel to the world
Holy place of Matthew 24
How to not get pregnant in the end times
Jesus expects people to keep sabbath in the end times
Sequence leading to tribulation
Why others are wrong (Bob is incapable of being wrong so everyone else is)
Scriptures relating to return of Jesus
Then he says this:
Dr. Thiel also reads each and every verse in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.
Are people too stupid to know how to read? Why in the world would anyone sit there and listen to the false prophet read the entire chapter?
Why would anyone sit there and listen to all of these topics in ONE sermon? Don't forget his has been pulling this crap every single week! Talk about attention deficit disorder! While he does mention the name Jesus he doesn't talk about any of the concepts the most inconvenient dude tried to get across. It's easier to bastardized the law, make dumb false prophecies and try to prove he is somehow "doubly blessed."
Put the over-stuffed Bible down and say what you need to say in 15-20 minutes and then sit down!
Put the over-stuffed Bible down and say what you need to say in 15-20 minutes and then sit down!
Salvation is not what he Bobby is interested in. He is interested in gaining a following and show the offending Rod Meredith that he too can be the little train who could.
ReplyDeleteIts a mental disorder.
Oh stop being so hard on "doublely blessed" Bob.Give him a break.Perhaps a leg or a arm will do.Or maybe his tongue.Besides he has a lot to say,and 15-20 minutes is no where enough time.The tongue is such a small vessel,and look what comes forth from it.And it lives in such a big head.Bob we know you read this blog,so I am sure you will discern the last few sentences are about you.Thank you for keeping us entertained.
ReplyDeleteThe hour and fifteen minute sermon, or more, (Don Ward's sermon below also fit this format) is a bad habit and violates every rule of what the human attention span can take. In reality it is about 20 minutes, on topic and sit down. Mainline churches know this but then again they never had to feel they had to make the 50, 75, 100 or 200 mile round trip to church worth it. With a radio, magazine and not in your own hometown really format, church was a chore just to get to because being the "one true church" gave one the impetus to make herculean efforts.
ReplyDeleteThe moment Joe Tkach made WCG into a church just like any other, it was doomed to crash as THE one question they could never answer was "Well if my local Sunday church or the church I attended before I came to WCG is fine, why would I go out of my way anymore to go to church out of town?" Which was a good question and not only did Tkach shrink the church, he destroyed it even in it's reformed self.
Bob is probably one of the most scattered and poor speakers in the COG pantheon of gurus. Dave Pack, while I have been assured is "brilliant and highly intelligent" , and he is neither, is distracting in his blustering authoritarian demeanor , robotic gestures and above all, using other people's material as if it was his own original thinking as he did in his entire 12 part debacle on Creationism.
While Dave's gestures are robotic and distracting, Bob's are flailing, stilted and distracting in the extreme. The actual information these men feel compelled to disseminate is magical thinking and bogus which I suppose is a good point to make as well.
You can't screw around in this day and age with grand pronouncements relying on one's personality to draw followers. Any 15 year old kid can check you out during the sermon to see if what you just said is either what the bible actually means or some "fact" you gave is actually true.
I called out a minister once for using America's oldest urban legend about a man swallowed by a whale in the 1700's and then cut out a couple days later alive. It was and is a palpable lie and rubbish but is used to this day to justify the veracity of the story of Jonah. When I pointed out he needed to drop the story as if it was true, he told me the debunking information was on the "Secular Webb" and he would have none of it. He got his truth from the "Religious Web" or maybe the tangled one.
Time is short. He needs to throw as many tokens of "virtue-signalling" he can in order to gather the lost flock.
ReplyDeleteDBP
Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character used to quip that "A good man knows his limitations."
ReplyDeleteWhen a man does not know his limitations, people watching him become embarrassed on his behalf. Bob Thiel's presentations are like some of the things an enemy would post on You Tube to deliberately embarrass him. How can he not realize this while he is posting them himself? They don't seem to be improving with time, either.
Picking on poor Bob again. Why? Because he's there, lots of things in the world to consider and comment on.
ReplyDeleteWhere do I begin? Years ago I told Bob that no one (meaning him and the COGs) correctly understands the Temple system and how it was set up. To keep this short and simple, he just demonstrated that my statement is still correct.
Since you mentioned Jonah . . . A Jewish commentary says that Jonah did die in the fish. Jonah 2:6 " . . brought my life up from the pit" the word pit is sheol, the place where the righteous dead go. Jonah died in the whale, as Jesus did, and spent three days in the tomb (dead). This makes more sense when you consider Jesus saying that like Jonah he would die, spend three night in the tomb.
ReplyDeleteMiguel, you made my day. Bob is the gift that keeps on giving.
ReplyDeleteIt never happened Steve. The story is a reaction and rebuttal to Ezra's reforms and requiring Israelite men to put away foreign wives. This was considered cruel by the authors. Ezra 9:1-15, Putting Away the Foreign Wives
ReplyDeleteJonah 3:1-4:11, Jonah and the Whale (10/1/2009)
There is no whale in "Jonah and the Whale." There is a "great fish," but the fish is not particularly important. What is important, and what rarely gets any press at all, is a plant. The plant, Jonah's reaction to the plant, and God's reaction to Jonah's reaction, is the whole point of the story.
Jonah was the most reluctant of prophets. He didn't want to preach to the Gentile city of Nineveh. Why? Because he figured they would probably repent, and then God would forgive them. And they did repent! And God did forgive them! Jonah was extremely put out about the whole thing.
So there he was, pouting in the hot sun, and God sent a plant to give him some shade. Jonah was comfortable and happy – he loved that plant. The next day, God sent a worm to kill the plant, and naturally Jonah was devastated and wept over the poor plant. God said, "This plant grew up in one night and disappeared the next; you didn't do anything for it and you didn't make it grow – yet you feel sorry for it! How much more, then, should I have pity on Nineveh, that great city. After all, it has more than 120,000 innocent children in it, as well as many animals!"
As I said yesterday, some scholars believe that "Jonah and the Plant" is a reaction to Ezra's marriage reforms. Others don't. If Ruth and Jonah already existed prior to the marriage reforms, then shame on Ezra! He should have known that God loves even Gentiles. If the books came into existence because of the marriage reforms, they were a step forward in understanding God's love for all of us. Personally, I think Ezra was doing the best he could with what he had, and that these two books came along afterward to question – politely – whether he had gone a little overboard."
The story of Ruth , also perhaps written as a reaction to Ezra's overly zealous "reforms" makes the same point about the worth of foreign women.
"The major point of the story comes right at the end, however, in vs. 17: "Obed became the father of Jesse, who was the father of David." This is what makes it sound like a reaction to Ezra. Ruth was a foreign woman, and she was a perfect Jewess and the great-grandmother of King David!"
http://www.daily-bible-study-tips.com/Bible-Stories-for-Grownups/Ruth-Jonah-and-Divorce.htm
We see this as well with the placing of four "fallen" women in the geneology of Jesus in the NT, Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba and Rahab. This was to send the message to the reader that God can work through women of any state so get off Mary's back about the birth circumstances of Jesus which were, in reality, considered less than legitimate. NT Pharisees noted of Jesus in John, "We weren't born of fornication." In the same context, Jesus protecting the women taken in adultery was a statement of "Leave Mary alone."
"Last but not least, we must note that these four women plus Bathsheba were women of "shame": if she was not unattractive, then she was indeed a widowed wallflower (Tamar); another was the mother of Boaz, who was a Canaanite prostitute (Rahab); another widow was a cursed Moabite (Deut 23:3) that had married Boaz (Ruth); one was an adulteress (Bathsheba); and finally the last was a woman of abject penury and of no account (Mary). In other words, Jesus was not a man with a distinguished racial pedigree to his name."
http://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/5023/why-does-matthew-include-these-women-in-jesus-genealogy
The author who made Jesus use the Jonah story as a resurrection type missed the original point of the story. IMHO
In short, the story of Jonah was piece of protest literature written to shame Ezra for this particular reform and not unlike this Blog in relation to the antics of the Apostles, Prophets and Presiding types in the Churches of God.
ReplyDeleteActually the author of Matthew was using the story of jonah to retell and remodle Jonah into a Jesus resurrection story as he did 8 times in using the OT to tell Jesus birth story "according to the scriptures " and not as an eyewitness to anything. Matthew used the style of Midrash which makes a scripture mean what it never originally meant but was acceptable as a story telling tool.
ReplyDeleteAmen n of to work☺
BOB THIEL INSTRUCTS US---
ReplyDelete"How to not get pregnant in the end times"
Wouldn't that be the same way you don't get pregnant at any other time too?? DUH!
So, Midrash was the proof-texting of Matthew's day? Is Luke also using Midrash in Luke 24:25-31, which has Jesus expounding on the passages in the Old Testament, explaining to the disciples which ones refer to him? I like that principle, and find within it a better model than the Jewish "midrash" model. Midrash sounds like an abdominal outbreak of herpes zoster.
ReplyDeleteIt's the same model in Luke as Matthew. Notice the author of Luke does not actually tell you which dcriptures jesus was using. Psalm 22 is the one used to put words in jesus mouth no obe actually heard, to tell the story
ReplyDeleteWhy, whenever the writting style of Midrash, unheard of by most yet is how we get the story of Jesus, is mentioned, do we get stupid references to rashes?
ReplyDeleteIf you understood it you'd understand the differences between actual history and what it means to say " according to the scriptures" or "and thus it was fulfilled.". Jesus was born according to the scriptures Matthew hijacked from the OT because no one had a clue about his actual birth date or circumstances. Its why the OT scriptures seem to be prophecy fulfilled
People will seek out complementary and alternative medicines and quackery if they have had a bad experience with conventional medicine. Those who have been burnt by a cult like the WCG might turn their back on Scripture and God altogether. They can then be as flawed in their critical thinking and reasoning as the so-called ministers in the WCG. So, perhaps both parties are guilty of some confirmation bias, accepting whatever "evidence" there is to support their views, either those of the cult or atheism. Can anyone be really totally objective in what we believe?
ReplyDeleteSteve wrote: Can anyone be really totally objective in what we believe?
ReplyDeleteAs to christanity, yes. Its based on astrology.
While still also being another human being stuck on the 3rd rock from the same star, Archeo-astronomy can better explain the most common thread that seems to be shared through most religions, including astrology.
ReplyDelete;P