When it comes to the Philadelphia Church of God and its proclamations, nothing should surprise us anymore. The focus is never on Jesus, but on sacred rocks, Irish dance, Gerald Flurry's visions, breaking up families and proclaiming Gerald Flurry as King.
Today they featured an article on their website that is from 2003 and written by the King himself.
It discusses the MOST IMPORTANT thing in the entire universe that PCG is to proclaim. Is it Jesus, his words and what he has accomplished, or something else? This is a Church of God after all, so forget about the focus being upon Jesus.
This focus is God's most supreme goal facing humanity today. Without this goal, humanity will never understand anything about salvation!
This must be God’s supreme goal for His Philadelphian elect today.
So what is that goal? Many of you probably already know. It is the promotion of the most god-awful book ever written. A book so bad and sooooooooo incredibly boring that most COG members have never completed it and a book that they have stuck in a box in the garage or on the top shelf of a bookcase where it will never be looked at again. Yet humanity's salvation is dependant upon this book.
The greatest single gift we can give to the world is Mystery of the Ages. Let’s think and work like God and give it to “the largest audience possible”!
Who knew that the single greatest gift to the world was a frigging book! Not Jesus. Nope! But a stupid, poorly written book. A book filled with so many doctrinal errors and outright deceptive lies that it should be dumped in the trash just like the Worldwide Church of God did in the 1990s when it hauled tens of thousands of copies of the book and other literature in the Glendale dump.
Even Bruce Lyon in Servant News panned the book.
A Mixture of Truth and Error
“All teaching came from Christ through the apostles… God’s Church today, as in the first century, receives its teachings from the living Christ, through an apostle, just as in AD 31.” (Page 350)
Considering the plain errors noted in a number of the teachings of this book and the previous book (The Incredible Human Potential), something is terribly wrong here. I’ll trust the Bible over Herbert Armstrong any day. Sure, I could go through this book and list a dozen or more good things. However, I did not come to praise this book, but to bury it.
I honestly thought we had allowed these two books, Mystery of the Ages and The Incredible Human Potential, to die natural deaths after they were both withdrawn by the WCG about 1990. They were rarely, if ever, referred to even before 1990 in my experience. I assumed that was because the numerous obvious errors were plain to many—especially to educated elders.
When books have upwards of ten percent error, then they are as much or more trouble as they are worthwhile.
In the categories of unproven statements and opinions stated as fact (many of which I believe are easily disproved), along with information that is simply erroneous, I estimate that The Incredible Human Potential is 30% or more flawed (and not just chapters 4 and 5!). I estimate that Mystery of the Ages is at least 25% flawed. I have only shown some of the problems in this book.
As a whole, these books have way too many holes!
When truth is greatly interlaced with errors, the credibility of the whole suffers and the credibility of those who promote it. Even unconverted people can often see some of the false concepts, scriptural and historical, noted above.
The mixture of good and error in these books is strongly intertwined. Several themes and concepts Mr. Armstrong weaves throughout both books are false or unsupported by the Bible (yet stated as fact).
My desire is simple: let’s get rid of obvious biblical errors and other misinformation (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and let’s not be unbiblically cult-like in any way.
God was never dependent on Herbert Armstrong. Nor does our salvation depend on Mr. Armstrong in any way; it never did.
If grossly inaccurate books are retained as beneficial and recommended, then continual and needless controversy and confusion will result. This is already the case.
Truer words could never be spoken than what Bruce Lyon stated above (highlighted in yellow).
God did not need Herbert Armstrong. He does not need Bob Thiel, Gerald Flurry, Dave Pack, Vic Kubik, Gerald Weston, Bill Watson, or any of the other splinter group leaders out there to do His supposed "work".
COG groups need to stop focusing upon "grossly inaccurate books" and grossly inaccurate teachings of people like Thiel, Pack, and Flurry. Their words are nothing more than stinking dung on a steaming pile of manure.
