As we have all been watching the news about the horrific tornado devastation that ripped through over 200 miles of the midwest the other day, we cannot escape the immediate crowing by Church of God leaders about members who escaped destruction. They gloat many times over how fortunate their righteous members are as their neighbors who suffer horrendously.
Those backslapping platitudes work wonders till church members are hit with destruction or suffer along with their neighbors around them, then the tune changes rather quickly. It was Satan's punishment that God allowed in order to wake them up. Someone must have done something wrong and needs a wake-up call or worst of all, God has withdrawn his protection.
Bob Thiel and Gerald Flurry are the worst offenders of this kind of gaslighting. These two also immediately start bellowing it out as a sure sign of the end times. The malarkey gets deep with these two.
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Good happens to the good and to the bad.
Bad happens to the bad and to the good.
Time and chance happen to all.
A reading of the book of Ecclesiastes is in order for those who think otherwise.
You are right 9:28 - But, this is the Church of God we are speaking of and it is an elitist, special, set apart from all the other riff-raff of the world as God's specially chosen people. In their eyes "bad" never happens to them unless there is sin involved or there is a lesson to be learned.
Well, back during the first time that a whole lot of weird stuff seemed to be becoming compressed into our daily lives, one of the many signs that we were living in the end times was said to be "the hippies". Sometimes, after a really gloomy sabbath sermon or Friday night Bible Study, I would find myself wondering, "Gee, I wonder what the hippies have to say about that." And, there was one place to which you could most definitely go to find out what the hippies were thinking. It was the forbidden, ghastly sinful, underground FM rock radio! Thing is, the hippies always seemed to have the most interesting music! And, during one such personal foray, I ran across this little gem by some hippies who called themselves "Country Joe and the Fish".
"Hold on It's Coming"
Picked up a hitchhiker the other day,
He said he wasn't going far
He looked so strange I couldn't help myself,
I asked, "Please, tell me who you are."
He smiled politely and lit a cigarette,
The smoke seemed to cast a spell.
What happened next I don't understand,
Yet it was so strange I can hardly tell.
He said hold on, it's coming. Hold on it's coming.
He said, hold on its very near. Hold on it's near.
He said, hold on it's coming. Hold on it's coming
He said hold on its almost here. Hold on it's almost here.
My mind seemed to spin, and my hands began to tremble,
I began talking in tongues.
I looked over and his eyes seemed to glow,
It was like looking at the sun,
I told him everything in just a few moments
As if we had stopped time.
I felt the great light just as if I were floating,
It was truly blowing my mind.
He said hold on, it's coming..... (Chorus repeats)
And then, I was suddenly a child again
Holding my father's hand.
And I watched it from the beginning
As I grew from child to man
My friends all came and gathered round me once more,
We undid what was done,
And when it was over I was driving down the road
I looked around and he was gone.
He said hold on, it's coming......(chorus repeats twice, fading second time)
Comment: Amazing song, but then that era produced so much amazing music. There were numerous musical gems like this in the late 1960s and early seventies that could have easily been theme songs for the Armstrong Apocalypse. Sometimes I think that's why the splinterists' apocalypse of today seems so inauthentic, even though the bad events seem to be accumulating. No musical soundtrack on the radio to accompany it. No "Pride of Man". No "Morning Dew". No "Day After Day (It's slippin' away)" No "The End". No "Desolation Row".
How nasty and patronising and very small minded. When did God give you the power to read other human hearts?
I wouldn't give up the day job and be a counselor you'd not last long on those skills.
Humans are far more flexible in thinking than you assume. Try being a actual Christian than concentrating on acquiring power.
As of yet, Bob Thiel has not offered his standard "God is trying to get our attention" foolishness when a weather disaster occurs, especially in the US. Perhaps he has learned, probably not, that just because the ancients of the Bible didn't understand weather, he might do well to give it a try. Perhaps he doesn't want to endure yet more blowback on his archaic views.
Meanwhile, latest reports from Antarctica indicate that the Thwaites Glacier is slowly calving a mass of ice the size of Florida as it collapses. It was not too long ago that the climate change deniers used to regularly claim that the ice mass in Antarctica was actually growing as evidence that global warming did not exist. The shifting of the jetstreams and weather patterns that has resulted in a December tornado in Kentucky is part of the same phenomenon. Why are the ACOGs strangely silent about climate change? Seems odd as these events closely mirror descriptive passages in the book of Revelation.
Well if the Prophets Flurry, Pack, Weinland and Thiel, would have very specifically forecasted the exact day, place and magnitude of these tornadoes a couple of months ago, then perhaps we should take notice.
However, as always, such was not the case.
No, he did a few days ago.
Armstrongism has a theodicy that is based on the Deuteronomic principle. This principle is the idea that all dealings with God are transactional. They are of the logical form:
If you do A, then I will do B.
Or
If you are obedient, then I will keep the weather from harming you.
Transactionalism is not isolated to Armstrongism but occurs here and there in various other denominations - particularly among evangelicals- based on my reading and interactions with people. It is the theme of the book of Deuteronomy.
While the Deuternomic approach has its place, it is not the comprehensive picture. The book of Job, in the same canon with Deuteronomy, offers a counterpoint to the Deuteronomic approach. Job fulfilled the sufficient conditions called for by the Deuteronomic principle and got whacked anyway. Job said he did not do anything wrong and God later corroborated this and was angry at "Job's friends" who tried to condemn Job. Like Job's friends, some WCG ministers have tried to posit that Job was full of arrogance. I have heard this from the pulpit. They have to find something to make the Deuteromic model work because Armstrongism is driven by a committment to the Law of Moses. The book of Job essentially undercuts any judgmental statements about who was punished and who was not punished by natrual disasters. People should be thankful to God and happy if they escaped and should be sympathetic to those who did not instead of using the disaster as underpinning for denominational self-congratulation.
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Job apparently did not perceive as to Who God is, as unfortunately many today do not "know" the God of heaven and even think He doesn't exist. This God created the 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your body (if you're an adult). He can hear, or for better of the correct English word, process, a billion prayers at once.
Job did, after his ordeal, "see" (v 42:5), perceived Who God was. Humans, by contrast, are almost imperceptible.
One person's statement of thankfulness and gratitude to God is another person's "gloating."
There indeed are many people hurting in the Heartland. To me, finger-pointing posts like this don't seem to help.
"There indeed are many people hurting in the Heartland. To me, finger-pointing posts like this don't seem to help."
The only people pointing fingers have been COG leaders and ministers who claim their members are protected while those outside the group are not. That kind of hypocritical finer pointing by self-righteous COG ministers is disgusting.
The gen pop of the tornado area aren't even aware of Banned. Most of the USA knows nothing of the miniscule cult which is claiming that they received protection. We may be offending the ministers who made the claim and who become aware of the critiques we offer them, but that's kind of the whole purpose of our little blogging community here. So, actually, we really are helping.
In the aftermath of Katrina, Dave Pack instructed everyone not to waste their money (assuming they still had some) on New Orleans needy. His rationale (outside of getting more money for himself) was that God used the hurricane to punish the wicked Louisianans, so sending them any form of aid was working against God.
There was a time when Bob Thiel made the call (after the catastrophe) on whether it was punishment or natural disaster (time and chance but avoid saying climate change).
No matter what happens, it is proof of protection for God's people.
If your neighbor's house got blown away, but not yours, you were protected.
If your house got blown away, but not you, you were protected.
If you suffered injury but didn't die, you were protected.
If you died but didn't lose your salvation, you were protected.
If you lost your salvation, you perish, and are protected from living in misery forever, a victim of your own bad attitude.
No matter what happens, it is proof of protection for God's people.
If your neighbor's house got blown away, but not yours, you were protected.
If your house got blown away, but not you, you were protected.
If you suffered injury but didn't die, you were protected.
If you died but didn't lose your salvation, you were protected.
If you lost your salvation, you perish, and are protected from living in misery forever, a victim of your own bad attitude.
This God created the 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your body.
He also created paper shredders for the book of Job.
There indeed are many people hurting in the Heartland.
They ran out of bear meat in Alaska?
Seems like Job's false accusers ranted on for most of the book. So the main lesson of the book of Job is that most of what people say is worthless hot air. If the hot air were left out, the book could have been condensed into three chapters. But then nobody would get the point about all the hot air. (Not that they actually got it anyway, because they never get the point of anything, but at least God tried, just to cover his own ass).
"God is trying to get our attention"
If God were trying to get anybody's attention he would have got it. He can't be trying very hard.
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