Armstrongism’s Pharisaic Gatekeepers: When the Law Becomes the God
As Bereans Did has another excellent article up about the law and the church. One notable quote is this:
The Pharisees had an easy method for testing Him, and that was that the real Messiah to come surely would validate them as the guardians of the law; that the real Messiah would not allow Himself to be put to death by them or the Roman occupation. So all they had to do to prove or disprove Him was to charge Him with sin, condemn Him according to the law, and see what happens. If He dies, they were right. If He didn’t, they could always claim they were following the law to the letter. He broke the law; He sinned, and they acted accordingly, as they were commanded in the law.Consider this carefully. It was their interpretation of the law that was the final arbiter of their decision process; not God who performed miraculous healing through the Holy Spirit that only could be attributed to God. They attributed those things to the devil anyway, even raising the dead.The law was their de facto god… their graven images of stone that they never questioned as actually being treated by them as another god they obeyed in the hope of being blessed as a result. Appease the law and receive blessings. Ignore the law and the law would curse them.
The Pharisees didn’t merely keep the law—they positioned themselves as its exclusive guardians and final interpreters. Sounds familiar? That's Armstrongism today in the Churches of God landscape. They are the gatekeepers of the law and its modern day arbitors. Salvation is not assured unless you follow the strict law keeping of the church. Break the Sabbath - lake of fire. Eat pork or shellfish - lake of fire. Smoke cigarets - lake of fire. Leave the church - the deepest pits of the lake of fire that there is. Salvation does not exist outside of the strict lawkeeping of the church.
The Pharisees thought the real Messiah, they assumed, would validate them. He would submit to their authority, honor their rulings, and never allow Himself to be condemned under the very system they administered. So they tested Him the only way that mattered to them: charge Him with law-breaking, condemn Him according to their reading of Scripture, and watch what happens. If He dies, they were right. If He doesn’t, they could still claim they were simply being faithful stewards of the law.
Their interpretation was the final arbiter. The miracles—healings, raisings of the dead, works that could only come from God—were irrelevant. Those could be reassigned to the devil. What could not be questioned was the law as they understood it. The law had become their de facto god: a set of stone tablets they never examined for the possibility that they had turned it into another idol. Appease it and you receive blessing. Ignore it and it curses you. Transactional, mechanical, and utterly self-justifying.
Armstrongism runs the identical playbook, only with different letterhead.
Herbert Armstrong, Crackpot Bob, David Pack, Gerald Flurry, and the various lesser prophets who still orbit the system all function as self-appointed guardians of “the law.” Not the law as fulfilled in Christ, but the law as they have reconstructed it—Sabbath, holy days, tithing, clean and unclean, physical circumcision of the heart via calendar observance, and the rest of the package. The true church, they insist, will validate them. The real end-time work will recognize their authority, their interpretations, their organizational structure, and their financial requirements. Anyone who rejects those things is not merely mistaken; they are law-breakers, and therefore outside the covenant of blessing.
Watch how the test works in practice. Bring evidence of the finished work of Christ, the indwelling Spirit, the New Covenant reality that the law was a tutor until faith came (Galatians 3:24–25), or the plain statement that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4). The response is not engagement with the text. It is the Pharisaic move: charge the person with sin according to their reading of the law, declare them disqualified, and wait. If the person continues to reject their system, they were right—the individual is simply not “called.” If the person dies without submitting, the system is vindicated. The interpretation of the law remains the final arbiter.
Miracles, changed lives, the actual fruit of the Spirit, and the historical record of failed prophecies are all secondary. Those can be reassigned. The 1975 collapse can be redefined. Pack’s successive failed dates can be spiritualized. Thiel’s shifting timelines and African scandals can be minimized or blamed on others. What cannot be questioned is the law as the gatekeepers define it. Keep the Sabbath correctly (as they define “correctly”), send the tithe to the right address, avoid the right meats, and you remain eligible for blessing. Fail any of those and the curse of the law is still hanging over your head—New Covenant or no New Covenant.
This is exactly the idolatry the quote describes. The law has become the graven image. It is not examined as something that was always meant to point beyond itself to the One who fulfilled it. It is treated as the active agent of blessing and cursing. Appease the system and God is obligated to bless. Ignore the system and God is obligated to curse. The finished work of Christ is reduced to an entry ticket that still requires ongoing law-performance to remain valid. The Spirit’s work is subordinated to the calendar and the offering envelope.
The New Covenant answer is not complicated, even if it is offensive to the gatekeepers.
The law was never the final arbiter. Christ was. He did not come to validate the Pharisees’ guardianship; He came to fulfill the law and the prophets so that righteousness could be given apart from law-keeping (Romans 3:21–22). He was put to death under their condemnation and rose anyway—precisely the outcome their test said could not happen if He were genuine. The resurrection did not confirm their authority. It exposed it.
Under the New Covenant the believer is not under law but under grace (Romans 6:14). The law still reveals sin; it does not produce righteousness. The righteousness that counts is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. The curses of the law were exhausted on the cross (Galatians 3:13). There is no remaining transactional relationship in which Sabbath-keeping, tithing percentages, or clean-meat observance function as the mechanism of blessing. Those things may be observed by someone who is free; they are not the means by which anyone is kept free.
Armstrongism cannot accept this because it would collapse the gatekeeper role. If the law is no longer the active agent of blessing and cursing for the believer, then the people who claim exclusive interpretive authority over that law lose their power. So they keep the Pharisees’ method alive: charge the New Covenant teaching with antinomianism, condemn it according to their reading of selected Old Testament texts, and declare that anyone who dies outside their system has simply proven the system correct. The miracles of grace, the fruit of the Spirit, and the plain reading of the apostolic letters are reassigned to “another spirit” or “lawlessness.”
The law was their god. It remains the functional god of every Armstrongist system that still treats law-performance as the condition of ongoing acceptance. The quote you sent is not merely historical commentary. It is a diagnosis of a living problem. The stone tablets are still being polished, still being appealed to as the final standard, and still being used to determine who is in and who is out—while the One who fulfilled them is reduced to a supporting character in someone else’s legal system.
Paul does not stop at calling the law a temporary guardian. He goes further and names the condition of everyone still under its jurisdiction:
For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” (Galatians 3:10)
The tutor was never a gentle schoolmaster handing out participation trophies. He was the enforcer of a standard no one could meet. Fail in one point and the whole arrangement collapses into curse (James 2:10, which Paul has already quoted in spirit). The law does not grade on a curve. It does not accept “mostly faithful.” It demands perfect, continuous obedience or it pronounces the sentence. That is why Paul says the law was never given to impart life; it was given to shut every mouth and place the entire world under the judgment of God (Romans 3:19; Galatians 3:21–22).
Armstrongism’s gatekeepers still collect the tuition as if the curse has not been paid.
They warn members that missing a Sabbath, sending the tithe to the wrong address, eating the wrong meat, or failing to observe a holy day correctly places them back under the very curse Paul says was exhausted at the cross. They treat the finished work of Christ as an entry fee that still requires ongoing law-performance to remain in good standing. In practice this means the curse is still active, still hanging over the believer’s head, still administered by the same self-appointed guardians who claim exclusive authority to interpret the statutes. The cross is acknowledged. The curse is simply relocated to anyone who refuses their reading of the law.
Paul’s next sentence removes the entire mechanism:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.” (Galatians 3:13)
The curse did not evaporate because people started trying harder. It was transferred. Christ became the cursed one so that those who trust Him would never again stand under that sentence. The law’s demand for perfect obedience was met in Him. Its penalty was executed on Him. The tutor’s authority to threaten the heir with the curse ended the moment the heir was declared free.
Yet the systems that still function as gatekeepers of the law continue to issue the threat. Keep the calendar correctly or the blessing is withdrawn. Send the money to the approved address or the curse returns. Submit to the leadership’s interpretation or you have placed yourself back under the very condemnation from which Christ redeemed you. This is not fidelity to Paul. It is the reimposition of the curse the apostle said had already been removed.
Any organization that still treats law-performance as the condition of ongoing acceptance is not merely misunderstanding the tutor’s temporary role. It is actively reintroducing the curse Paul declared finished. The guardians are still collecting payment on a debt that was canceled at the cross. They are still threatening the heirs with the very sentence the Heir already bore. The law has not merely outlived its usefulness as a guardian. In their hands it has been restored as an active instrument of condemnation long after the one who became a curse for us removed its power to condemn.
Their interpretation was the final arbiter. The miracles—healings, raisings of the dead, works that could only come from God—were irrelevant. Those could be reassigned to the devil. What could not be questioned was the law as they understood it. The law had become their de facto god: a set of stone tablets they never examined for the possibility that they had turned it into another idol. Appease it and you receive blessing. Ignore it and it curses you. Transactional, mechanical, and utterly self-justifying.
Armstrongism runs the identical playbook, only with different letterhead.
Herbert Armstrong, Crackpot Bob, David Pack, Gerald Flurry, and the various lesser prophets who still orbit the system all function as self-appointed guardians of “the law.” Not the law as fulfilled in Christ, but the law as they have reconstructed it—Sabbath, holy days, tithing, clean and unclean, physical circumcision of the heart via calendar observance, and the rest of the package. The true church, they insist, will validate them. The real end-time work will recognize their authority, their interpretations, their organizational structure, and their financial requirements. Anyone who rejects those things is not merely mistaken; they are law-breakers, and therefore outside the covenant of blessing.
Watch how the test works in practice. Bring evidence of the finished work of Christ, the indwelling Spirit, the New Covenant reality that the law was a tutor until faith came (Galatians 3:24–25), or the plain statement that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4). The response is not engagement with the text. It is the Pharisaic move: charge the person with sin according to their reading of the law, declare them disqualified, and wait. If the person continues to reject their system, they were right—the individual is simply not “called.” If the person dies without submitting, the system is vindicated. The interpretation of the law remains the final arbiter.
Miracles, changed lives, the actual fruit of the Spirit, and the historical record of failed prophecies are all secondary. Those can be reassigned. The 1975 collapse can be redefined. Pack’s successive failed dates can be spiritualized. Thiel’s shifting timelines and African scandals can be minimized or blamed on others. What cannot be questioned is the law as the gatekeepers define it. Keep the Sabbath correctly (as they define “correctly”), send the tithe to the right address, avoid the right meats, and you remain eligible for blessing. Fail any of those and the curse of the law is still hanging over your head—New Covenant or no New Covenant.
This is exactly the idolatry the quote describes. The law has become the graven image. It is not examined as something that was always meant to point beyond itself to the One who fulfilled it. It is treated as the active agent of blessing and cursing. Appease the system and God is obligated to bless. Ignore the system and God is obligated to curse. The finished work of Christ is reduced to an entry ticket that still requires ongoing law-performance to remain valid. The Spirit’s work is subordinated to the calendar and the offering envelope.
The New Covenant answer is not complicated, even if it is offensive to the gatekeepers.
The law was never the final arbiter. Christ was. He did not come to validate the Pharisees’ guardianship; He came to fulfill the law and the prophets so that righteousness could be given apart from law-keeping (Romans 3:21–22). He was put to death under their condemnation and rose anyway—precisely the outcome their test said could not happen if He were genuine. The resurrection did not confirm their authority. It exposed it.
Under the New Covenant the believer is not under law but under grace (Romans 6:14). The law still reveals sin; it does not produce righteousness. The righteousness that counts is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. The curses of the law were exhausted on the cross (Galatians 3:13). There is no remaining transactional relationship in which Sabbath-keeping, tithing percentages, or clean-meat observance function as the mechanism of blessing. Those things may be observed by someone who is free; they are not the means by which anyone is kept free.
Armstrongism cannot accept this because it would collapse the gatekeeper role. If the law is no longer the active agent of blessing and cursing for the believer, then the people who claim exclusive interpretive authority over that law lose their power. So they keep the Pharisees’ method alive: charge the New Covenant teaching with antinomianism, condemn it according to their reading of selected Old Testament texts, and declare that anyone who dies outside their system has simply proven the system correct. The miracles of grace, the fruit of the Spirit, and the plain reading of the apostolic letters are reassigned to “another spirit” or “lawlessness.”
The law was their god. It remains the functional god of every Armstrongist system that still treats law-performance as the condition of ongoing acceptance. The quote you sent is not merely historical commentary. It is a diagnosis of a living problem. The stone tablets are still being polished, still being appealed to as the final standard, and still being used to determine who is in and who is out—while the One who fulfilled them is reduced to a supporting character in someone else’s legal system.
Paul does not stop at calling the law a temporary guardian. He goes further and names the condition of everyone still under its jurisdiction:
For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” (Galatians 3:10)
The tutor was never a gentle schoolmaster handing out participation trophies. He was the enforcer of a standard no one could meet. Fail in one point and the whole arrangement collapses into curse (James 2:10, which Paul has already quoted in spirit). The law does not grade on a curve. It does not accept “mostly faithful.” It demands perfect, continuous obedience or it pronounces the sentence. That is why Paul says the law was never given to impart life; it was given to shut every mouth and place the entire world under the judgment of God (Romans 3:19; Galatians 3:21–22).
Armstrongism’s gatekeepers still collect the tuition as if the curse has not been paid.
They warn members that missing a Sabbath, sending the tithe to the wrong address, eating the wrong meat, or failing to observe a holy day correctly places them back under the very curse Paul says was exhausted at the cross. They treat the finished work of Christ as an entry fee that still requires ongoing law-performance to remain in good standing. In practice this means the curse is still active, still hanging over the believer’s head, still administered by the same self-appointed guardians who claim exclusive authority to interpret the statutes. The cross is acknowledged. The curse is simply relocated to anyone who refuses their reading of the law.
Paul’s next sentence removes the entire mechanism:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.” (Galatians 3:13)
The curse did not evaporate because people started trying harder. It was transferred. Christ became the cursed one so that those who trust Him would never again stand under that sentence. The law’s demand for perfect obedience was met in Him. Its penalty was executed on Him. The tutor’s authority to threaten the heir with the curse ended the moment the heir was declared free.
Yet the systems that still function as gatekeepers of the law continue to issue the threat. Keep the calendar correctly or the blessing is withdrawn. Send the money to the approved address or the curse returns. Submit to the leadership’s interpretation or you have placed yourself back under the very condemnation from which Christ redeemed you. This is not fidelity to Paul. It is the reimposition of the curse the apostle said had already been removed.
Any organization that still treats law-performance as the condition of ongoing acceptance is not merely misunderstanding the tutor’s temporary role. It is actively reintroducing the curse Paul declared finished. The guardians are still collecting payment on a debt that was canceled at the cross. They are still threatening the heirs with the very sentence the Heir already bore. The law has not merely outlived its usefulness as a guardian. In their hands it has been restored as an active instrument of condemnation long after the one who became a curse for us removed its power to condemn.
Silent Pilgrim
Banned by HWA and As Bereans Did are both anti-COG blogs being run by UCG Ministry.
ReplyDeleteDisgraceful.
Why should UCG members send tithes and offerings into a church who are allowing this to go on. When the culprits have repeatedly being named on the UCG member surveys.
Yes, and the election was stolen, and your neighbors and the people at your place of employment will all soon become homosexuals, and minorities will start riots in the street for no reason at all, and the Chinese are right now cooking up new batches of virus for which we will invent blood clot producing vaccines!
DeleteAs John Lennon once sayg, "Just gimme some truth!".
Your crap isn't gaining any traction here, 1:56. You are just an annoying little gnat that somehow keeps buzzing in our ears, just as pathentic as Bob Thiel or Sam Kitchen. Personally? I've come to believe that YOU are the disgruntled UCG minister! Why are you behaving like this? Don't you believe in the Lake if Fire?
DeleteYour accusation of conspiracy theories is a sign of desperation.
Do you really think people don't recognise you in your never ending articles ?
Well do you?
Do you think people are intimidated by your power? By your lousy manipulating ? Well do you?
It's all so 1980's. Many see the real you. There is such a thing as the gift of discernment and many can discern you.
You nut jobs claiming everyone here are UCG ministers are nuttier than a fruitcake.
DeleteNo-one writes "everyone here" the key ones who run this blog are, not every commentator.
DeleteConspiracy theories? Armstrongism is the conspiracy theory that Simon Magus hijacked and perverted the teachings of Jesus Christ, and that the real truth remained largely hidden until Herbie Pervie restored it for the end times starting in the early 1930s.
Delete5:16 Learn how to spell.
DeleteYour tithes to the church keep this blog running!
ReplyDeleteThis post requires 26 paragraphs to tell us what the apostle Paul does in one verse. "The law is good WHEN used lawfully" (1 Timothy 1:8). Not good when misused!
ReplyDeleteBP8 5:32 True like David wrote so long ago: “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law? They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood” (Ps 94:20-21).
DeleteTheir HWAistic model prophecy is law also.
ReplyDeleteThank you SP for this. The Law was but a tutor to bring us to Christ and now that He has come we have no need of the Law, as is written. Like many others, we kept the Law, imperfectly, but sincerely; and it created much stress for many. Emotional and mental anxiety and all that came with it. Trying to keep a perfect Law as imperfect human beings. This was not the life that Jesus came to give us. He wanted us to have life more abundantly, free from the shackles of law keeping. Of all the dos and don’ts. No, is not a license to sin, as Armstrongites would contend. But salvation and with its attendant grace frees us from fear. We are saved by grace, have been called with a holy calling, not according to works but by His grace and purpose in Jesus before time began. What liberty we have in Him. I can’t help but feel the new covenant is a threat to Armstrongism, and to embrace it would mean the end for them and the revenue/ income and control they assert that comes from their adherence to Law keeping, in lieu of the liberty we have in Christ. Cheers.
ReplyDeleteArmstrongism's British Israelism shackles its members inside an Old Covenant tribe of Israel religion where they must work for the Law, they must give the Ezekiel warning message, they must give a third tithe. None of those things provide the fruits or gifts of the Holy Spirit, something offered in the NC.
DeleteAt the start of this century, there were so many splinter groups. Oh and they were "keeping the law" but with that many mantle grabbers, did they have the spirit?
It's Nisan 14-20, Pentecost, FOT - 3 feasts/"chag", and 3 annual sabbaths in Tishri....all fixed times/"moed"....
ReplyDeleteSP is on firm Scriptural ground. Jesus of Nazareth FULFILLED the Law. He also made clear that the foundation of God's Law is LOVE. He said that TWO commandments comprehended the entire Law: Love for God and Love for each other. God expects us to believe that Christ fulfilled the Law, and that his sacrifice reconciled us to Almighty God and made us righteous before him.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing of Love about you. Your name for starters is totally false, your a female not a double named man. You lied about knowing Tom Justus, you lie about everything. What is holy about lying?
DeleteAll Israel was to help the poor, and a tithe (NOT 3rd!) every 3rd year was for the Levites (2% of the population), alien, fatherless, widow........
ReplyDelete