This isn't something that I think many people would find space to brag about. However, this IS a COG we are speaking of:
Greetings from Charlotte,
Many of you have wondered how our members fared when a series of tornados cut paths across six states last Sabbath. Two towns hit hardest were Mayfield and Dawson Springs, Kentucky. Mayfield is a town of about 10,000 residents and is not close to any congregation, but we have one recently baptized member there. Mr. Darrell Lovelady wrote this encouraging news: “She is well. No damage to her property. She has water; however, her biggest issue is no power, which impacts heating and freezer. She said she doesn’t have any immediate needs.” In checking further, I found that we have 54 Tomorrow’s World magazine subscribers in Mayfield (population 10,000) and 39 in Dawson Springs (population 2,600). Figuring conservatively with two people per household, that means as many as one in 30 residents in Dawson Springs is acquainted with our magazine. Please keep in your prayers all those in the areas affected by the tornados. On another note, Rodger Bardo, our minister for Southern California, and his lovely wife Betty are celebrating 50 years together in marriage this Sabbath. Congratulations!—Gerald Weston
27 comments:
Only a COG leader would use the misery of others to highlight how important their magazines are (which no one, not even members read).
I doubt that this is true. When talking to friends or acquaintances about growing up in Worldwide, I have only met a couple that knew what it was and I have never met anyone that had heard of HWA. So much for being the end time Elijah. I guess that they are so starved for attention that Weston is agreeing with the old adage that any publicity is good publicity.
Somehow church literature is more important in most COG organizations than The Bible. If they are familiar with their Bible they will probably not join most of them.
Words inspired by Jesus Christ I'm sure. Did you notice the concern and love expressed towards those who suffered lose? No, instead his focus was on the self, or in this case, his church. Another example of no love in the Loveless Church of God.
4.10 AM
It takes thought and effort to read the bible. So members just read the easy to understand church literature instead.
It's subcontracting a personal responsibility to the corporate church. And those in power always slant doctrines in their favour.
In the ten years that I attended services, I only heard one message, a sermonette encouraging members to daily study their bibles. And the reasons given lacked punch. It's as if the presenter wasn't studying his Bible himself.
I wonder how much money or aid Gerald authorized LCG to send to those devastated by the deadly tornadoes. Hundreds lost everything, no food, no power, no heat. I wonder if Gerald had food, shelter, and clothing this past week.
Jim-AZ
I don't see this Splinterist preacher in the cited text actally making an invidious comparison between his followers and others in the outcome of this disaster. I do think that there are many of his followers, because of years of indoctrination, who believe that ones relationship with God is purely transactional (or Deuternomic) who then automatically followed a calculus that made such comparisons. Just WCG experience. Their calculus then blows out the side when one of their members suffers adversity - that outcome is not accommodated in the transactional model. Or they lapse into crass judgmentalism to preserve the integrity of the transactional model. They need to read the non-transactional book of Job.
Further, my guess is that there is no viable theodicy anywhere in Splinterdom. This is a problem. I doubt that the term "theodicy" is even to be found in Splinterdom. I do not intend that to be a harsh criticism. Theodicy is a difficult and controversial topic for anyone who claims to follow Jesus. But the challenge should not be shirked. No doubt many genuine Christians lost their homes in the tornadoes. At least one church was demolished. How does a Christian explain that? I, of course, have a theory but it is only one theory among many. This is a non-trivial issue.
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Within hours several church pastors called on their congregations to start providing hot meals for those affected by the storms. On Sunday one church pastor cut his message short so that he and his congregation could go serve the community. One church pastor said his message was “Love God, love people”. They were collecting food and clothing for all those in need.
Those “worldly” churches seemed to be doing what Jesus said a Christian would do. Instead of church services, several churches prepared hot meals and opened their doors to people of all faiths.
I wonder if any LCG churches opened their doors to the public with prepared hot meals and a heated place to rest.
Jim-AZ
Next , they will proclaim that those magazines that got BLOWN AWAY in the tornado , and sent all over the region is an effective form of distribution for their magazine, and a "spreading of the Gospel".
Of the two people who live in Nanoville USA, one gets the magazine. That is 50%! The gospel is going to the WHOLE WORLD in POWER! What an amazing work God is doing through us! Your tithes are not in vain.
“I doubt that the term "theodicy" is even to be found in Splinterdom”.
Mercy and Justice
Ro 3:25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— (NIV).
“Although the problem in theodicy may not be as obvious to the modern mind as it was to Paul, yet to pass over wrong is as much an act of injustice on the part of a judge as to condemn the innocent...” (F.F. Bruce, Romans, TNTC, p.113).
2Sa 13:22b ... Absalom hated Amnon, because he had forced his sister Tamar.
2Sa 13:28 ... Smite Amnon; then kill him, fear not: have not I [Absalom] commanded you?...
2Sa 14:32 And Absalom answered Joab ... let me see the king's face; and if there be any iniquity in me, let him kill me.
2Sa 14:33 ... and when he had called for Absalom, he came to the king, and bowed himself on his face to the ground before the king: and the king kissed Absalom.
“The cost of David’s mercy was high. He did let Absalom return to Jerusalem ... He took the cost upon himself. And he paid it to the full.... mercy on Amnon cost David not only the loss of Amnon’s life, it also cost him his relationship with Absalom. Rather than losing one son, he lost two.
“Ironically, it was Absalom himself, the one to whom mercy was granted, who turned on David and made him pay by taking the throne and even his concubines and forcing David into humiliating exile...
“As great and wise a king as David was, he was faced with serious tensions between two sides of love, justice and mercy, tensions that he was unable to resolve. Because Absalom had no lasting acceptance of the pardon than his father granted him, as shown by his rebellious actions, this pardon did not help the young prince in the long run. Pardon without genuine reformation is a waste. Although Absalom was pardoned, he remained a murderer and died a murder’s death.
“To save his son, David was willing to pay with even more than his kingdom. When Absalom died, David cried: “Would I have died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Sam 18:33).
“In the story of 2 Samuel, the dynamics of mercy and justice mirror the interactions involved in God’s salvation of human beings. As David was to Absalom, God is to us: our parent, king and judge. Like Absalom we have sinned. Like David, God forgives us because He loves us (Ps 103:3-4)... as judge, God is like David in that He is morally responsible for His judgments, including forgiveness of guilty people.
“God must deal with the cost of mercy and there is nobody to bear it but Himself. He has born it in His sanctuary and through the sacrifice of Christ, who endured far greater suffering and humiliation than David did when he fled from Absalom” (Roy E. Gane, Altar Call, pp.230-237).
Mt 20:28 the Son of man came ... to give his life a ransom for many.
Lev 17:11For the life of the flesh is in the blood and I have assigned it to you on the altar to ransom [kapper] your lives, for the blood that ransoms [kapper] by means of life. (Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, AB, Vol.2, 1295].
Jesus Christ’s “death ransoms the sinful, but it also propitiates the wrath of God” (Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, Leviticus, AOTC, p.310).
“Having paid the ransom for our condemned lives (Matt 20:28) that we could never pay (compare Ps 49:7-8), God is just when He justifies those who have faith in Jesus Christ (Rom 3:26). By paying the terrible full cost of mercy, the sacrifice of Christ provides a lasting solution to human sin by maintaining full justice as the same time as providing for full mercy. Righteousness and salvation are intertwined, reflecting harmonious balance between mercy and justice in the character of God..” (Roy E. Gane, Altar Call, p.237).
Fairness of God (part 1)
Lev 18:28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you
“Was God fair to judge the Canaanites in this way? On the one hand, is the catalogue of their wickedness any worse than many other societies, ancient or modern, upon whom God has neither rained the fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah, nor inflicted invading armies as the arm of his judgment? Why them and not others? And on the other hand, was it fair to inflict the Israelites on that particular generation of Canaanites, when presumably at least the previous one was not necessarily more righteousness or less deserving of punishment?
Eze 18:2 What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge?
“These are awkward questions, but they do point to the problem of any kind of fairness within history in a fallen world. John Goldingay, in an interesting discussion of precisely this matter [“Justice and Salvation”], points out that it may be thought equally unfair that the Israelite generation of the exile were punished in that way when previous generations in Judah were just as wicked - a point the exiles themselves did not hesitate to hurl in the Lord’s face, posing a major pastoral and evangelistic challenge of theodicy for Ezekiel (see Ezek. 18). But, in its historical manifestation, God’s judgment has to fall sometime. And some people will be ‘there’ at that time. Others will not. If that is not ‘fair’, it seems also to be unavoidable - unless God were to suspend all demonstrations of his justice within history. This is one reason why the Bible increasingly points towards the final ‘reckoning’ when God will act to put things right ultimately, so that justice prevails and reigns throughout the cosmos, in a way that will be universally fair (something that cannot be achieved with in the limitations of history and the ambiguities of all historical events. In the meantime - within the provisional and penultimate events of history - God ‘harnesses unfairness’ (Goldingay’s phrase) within the accomplishment of his wider, longer-term purpose of salvation for the world.
“To Goldingay’s interesting discussion I would add a further reflection on what might be called the intrinsic and extrinsic nature of ‘fairness.’ If I am punished for what I have manifestly done wrong, that is intrinsically fair. I cannot complain it is unfair as far as I am concerned. However, if others are not punished for the same thing, I feel that is unfair, extrinsically. My punishment is fair. Their impurity seems unfair. The Bible clearly affirms that the punishment of the Canaanites at the time of the conquest was intrinsically fair and just - as far as they were concerned. God acted with moral justification (according to the witness of the Bible). It does not directly address the question of any apparent unfairness if other nations further afield were left unpunished in the same way. What it does do, however, is to affirm that in the end God remains the ultimate judge of all humanity - nations and individuals. So whatever may or may not happen within the flow of history, nothing will get swept under the carpet and escape the just verdict of ‘the judge of all the earth’ who will surely, as Abraham affirmed, ‘do justice’; that is deliver and execute his own just verdict (Gen 18:25).
Fairness of God (part 2)
“It might be worth observing the curious fact that we do not usually reflect on fairness and unfairness in relation to God’s blessings, even though they are apparently as randomly and unfairly distributed as his punishments - in this life. We are not so inclined to respond with “That’s not fair’ when we enjoy gifts and blessings that others do not. On the other hand, we are inclined to protest if others receive what we consider unwarranted bounty at God’s hand, if we only got what is ‘fair’ - as Jesus exposed so tremendously in the parable of the workers in the vineyard and the ‘unfair’ generosity of the owner. All in all, then, we might we wise to be cautious in our assessment of what is fair or unfair in God’s dealings with humanity in history, recognizing the ambiguity of the terms, and our own rather warped and flawed perspectives” (Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, pp.477-78).
The LCG magazine numbers are vanity metrics. After I left LCG due to the gross immorality of one of their council of elders covering for an acting child molester, they sent me their boring magazine for years after. They probably still send it to my old address. Spamming the world with low quality magazines containing repetitive, low quality content aren’t doing any sort of work.
Speaking as a fool in that I would be assuming that God actually had anything to do with LCG, isn't one in thirty a sufficient number for God to have spared the entire area in which they live the displeasure of a tornado in their back yards? Aren't God's people supposed to be a blessing to all their neighbors in that way? Seems like I recall one of the old holy men of OT times having a "peradventure" negotiation with God on behalf of the people in his community, a discussion that would be indicative of God's policy on visiting disasters upon given areas.
You can learn all you need to know about this god's sense of fairness from the book of Job. He teams up with his frenemy Satan to torture Job, his most righteous worshiper. He destroys his livestock, his real estate, and his ten children. When Job refuses to curse his god, Satan gets permission to strike him with boils. Naturally, Job wants to know "Why me?
Some of his friends come over and berate him about his unrighteousness for hours on end while he sits in the dirt in physical and emotional agony. His god does not intervene for what seems like days. Finally he loses patience, shape-shifts to a talking tornado, and roars at Job to forget about understanding why anything is the way it is. He is nothing but a maggot. No mere maggot could possibly understand how and why the world works the way it does even if it was explained to him. What he has to to do is shut up and obey. Quit asking why. Just take things like they come.
Only when Job submits to the cruel injustice of it all does his god relent and restore everything, including ten replacement children. Wow. As if ten new kids could ever make up for his grief over the ten dead ones. It's as if this god cannot recognize that parents love their children as individuals. They are not fungible, like stored grain or money in the bank.
The central lesson is that the highest good a righteous maggot can ever attain is abject subjection to authority.
The lesson is corroborated in other scriptures. This god baits a tree with enticing fruit and orders the first two humans not to eat it, even though he must have known they would never be able to resist. They would give him an excuse to condemn them to death. He flies into such a petulant but colossal rage at humanity's failure to live up to his hopes that he flushes practically everything away in a global flood. He gives one of his righteous prophets a son, then demands that the slit the boy's throat and burn him on an altar. He waits till the grief-stricken man and his terrorized son are at the point of throat-slitting to reveal it was all merely a prank, ha ha.
If I could believe in such a god as this, I would refuse to worship him. Since nobody has tried to force me to, I don't have to refuse. I just don't bother.
So Jehovah blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning......42:12. I'll wager Job's 7 sons and 3 daughters did NOT die (cf 19:17), only the "young men".
God is not going to live with evil forever. Period. It h'aint gonna happen.
"as many as 30 are aquainted with the magazine"? Does this mean only one or two? Does aquainted mean they read it, like it or use it to line a bird cage?
Retired Prof
You've twisted everything. For instance you left out that what God asked of Abraham was a type of God the Father sacrificing His own son.
Your post is a justification for your failure as a Christian.
Shortly many will be in Gods kingdom, while you will be dead and buried for the next one thousand years. Which assumes you didn't get baptised. Perhaps you should have a long, hard look at yourself.
Oooooooohhhhh! You've got all of us just quaking in our boots, 6:14! Should we turn ourselves in to Flurry or Pack?
Even if your fantasies turn out to be real, what's so bad about eternal death??? Couple minutes of searing pain, and then you are gone and won't even remember it.
Anon Dec. 19 at 6:14 AM, I am not a failure as a Christian for the same reason I am not a failure as a ballet dancer. I never became one.
I have no evidence for my opinion, but I expect to be dead and buried for good, not just for a thousand years. If the time before my birth is any guide, the time after my death will cause me no distress at all, even though I will not be roistering and joking with my friends any more. As Shakespeare's Mercutio said, "I shall be a grave man."
Since many people who read this blog prefer that commenters support their opinions with Scripture, here is a good verse: Ecclesiastes 3:19:
"For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity."
Well, I guess there are those who like as they were for zillions of years before they were conceived. Retired prof: to be fair you will be resurrected so that your final death will be the second death - Rev 20:14, not the first death.
12.15 PM
So you buried your pounds in the ground, and hence are no failure. Christ called such people wicked. Like a seed, you were programmed to become a certain something, and you have failed miserably.
You don't understand Ecclesiastes. It was written from the perspective of life without salvation.
12.06 PM
"What's so bad about eternal death?"
That's bravado macho-man talk. My bible tells me that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth rather than indifference or rejoicing.
The bible doesn't say that people will be alive when thrown into the furnace on judgement day. People assume that. It only says that about the false prophet and beast leader.
Dec. 19 at 2:32, you've given another example of your god's pervasive sadism. If he needs me dead, and I've already died, the only sensible thing to do would be to merely let me lie there. The only reason for the wasteful extra steps of waking me up and killing me again is the pleasure of seeing me weep and gnash my teeth when he passes judgement then writhe and scream in agony when he carries it out.
How in hell can you worship this god? I mean, he's not quite so bad as the Baptist god, who will prolong my agony for eternity, but still.
12.33 AM
It's a common question of why waked up people, only to thrown them into the lake of fire. The reason is the same reason we have funerals. And no, funerals are not wasteful. Rather they are a expression of the preciousness of human life.
Prof, you are a most miserable old man.
Anon, Saturday, December 18, 2021 at 4:20:00 PM PST, said:
"...So Jehovah blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning......42:12. I'll wager Job's 7 sons and 3 daughters did NOT die (cf 19:17), only the "young men".
God is not going to live with evil forever. Period. It h'aint gonna happen..."
******
Job 19:17 says: "breath is strange to my wife, though I intreated for the children’s [sake] of mine own body."
Not sure what cf 19:17 means; however, we have the following 2 verses regarding the children of Job and his wife:
Job 1:18 While he [was] yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters [were] eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house:
:19 And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
It appears that if that one who escaped alone is not one of the daughters that all of their daughters also died.
John
Is that all you can think about; YOUR magazine???? SERIOUSLY?????
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