PCG: Christ has built this Work around MOA and if you build your life around this book; if you strive to live the truth of this book, God will bless you…!

 

One of the things that Herbert Armstrong taught was that we were not to idolize people and things, like so many in the world, did and do. That teaching also had little meaning to many in the leadership of the church and with certain members. HWA himself was idolized, the campuses were idolized, ministers were idolized and especially books were idolized. The church was always great at never doing what it actually preached, so it should be no surprise that the Philadephia Church of God, who has made a business out of idolatry, is idolizing a dirty old rock and one of the most boring books ever published by the church as two of the most important things necessary for salvation.

A reader here referred me to Exit and Support Network's article about a sermon that Brad Macdonald gave in May of 2020.

In that article are the following comments from a sermon summary of things Macdonald said:

BM: [Referring to to a quiz he gave about MOA which was] “to get us thinking about how “relevant that book is; to get us thinking about how “timeless” that book is.” 

 

BM: “I have probably read MOA ten times” and “I am reading it again.”3 

[Referring to MOA] “Isn’t that book incredible?” “There’s always more we can learn from and about MOA”; “I want us to consider…our loyalty to this book.”

Imagine your life as a human being so worthless that if you do not read MOA then there is no plan for you in the world tomorrow! This is what he is really saying below. Sickening! 

He referred many times to a Pentecost sermon that HWA gave on May 26, 1985 (“Why Firstfruits?) where he rebuked the members and said if they weren’t qualifying to be a teacher, “You are wasting your time”; “You don’t belong in the church.” 

 

MOA THE MAIN TEXTBOOK IN THE WORLD TOMORROW 

 

BM: “The Bible is the main text book of the world tomorrow and then right after the Bible, as we know, is Mystery of the Ages. … How deeply do you love that textbook? MOA.” 

 

[He said in The New Throne of David booklet (p. 52) GF said] “We are getting ready to fill the earth with the truth taught from MOA. … After the Bible, this will be the main text book in the world tomorrow. It is the instruction manual God will use to teach all mankind. This will be the number one book that all mankind will study after the Bible.”

BM: “How much does MOA shape our opinions?” … “how much MOA makes it into our conversations, our term papers, and how much is MOA forming the way we think?” 

 

[In The New Throne of David GF said] “Habakkuk 2:11 is the single greatest new revelation that God has given the PCG so far.” (p. 48) “This beam [in Habakkuk 2:11] is MOA. … MOA connects everything.” (p. 45)

Did you know that your marriage and your very life depend upon MOA? 

BM: [The truth in MOA] “holds this church together”; “holds our congregations together”; “holds our marriages together”; “holds our families together and MOA will *hold your life together.* And it will hold your brain and your mind together.” … “If your brain is coming apart, if you’re are struggling with God’s existence [mentions several chapters in MOA] … If you feel like with all this knowledge, you don’t know what is right and wrong, then you need to go back to MOA. The answers are in that book. And MOA will connect it all.”

The only thing this much devotion to the book will accomplish is to send one to a mental institution! It will NEVER give you answers to anything and certainly will NOT connect you to God! 

MOA is a book that holds your very life together! It holds your brain together! Your entire personal life is dependent upon this book. Not the Bible mind you, not even the life and teachings of Jesus can accomplish what this book will do for you! This very book explains the Bible for you! 

“Now you need more than that. You need to be humble, you need to be objective, you need to be prepared to listen to what God inspires through that book. But that book holds our brains together. That book holds our life together spiritually. That book as it explains the Bible.”

[At this point BM says that he] “doesn’t want to marginalize the Bible at all.”

BM: “So far we have considered MOA as this depository of divine revelation. The most important; the most fundamental knowledge that man can have.”

MOA is the very CENTERPIECE of the PCG (that and the court case) and their very existence revolves around it.

BM: “But there is another dimension to MOA that we really need to consider and that GF teaches us about in The New Throne of David.” [Reads a quote from p. 44 of TNTOD where GF says]” I have come to realize that the beam in this verse [Habakkuk 2:11] is more than just MOA. That book is the centerpiece, but the beam includes everything that happened with that book–all the history of the court case, including all the other writings we obtained in it.” 

 

BM: “The beam is also the story of MOA, the way MOA came about, and then what happened with MOA in the years afterward.” [He called MOA “revealed knowledge.”] 

 

BM: “The history of MOA really is the history of the PCG.” 

 

BM: “From the beginning the PCG Work has revolved about MOA.” 

 

BM: “MOA is at the core of our existence, and it’s the reason we still thrive today.” 

 

BM: “The further we get from when MOA was first published, the more attention God gives us. … The more emphasis God puts on it.”

Jesus, that always inconvenient dude pushed to the back burner is pushed even further back with the following:

BM: “Our spiritual lives really need to revolve around MOA, as MOA is revealing the Bible.” 

Jesus be damned! The book is so important that you cannot understand the Bible without MOA.  

BM: “The Bible is the #1 textbook, but we really do need MOA to understand it.”

Nothing Jesus ever did, said, or accomplished is as important as this stupid book! It is appalling the depths of theological depravity the COG will allow itself to sink to in order to stroke the egos of degenerate splinter cult leaders! 

Macdonald then tells one of the biggest lies ever! Jesus came to earth to save the Mystery of the Ages from the Glendale garbage dump where 10's of thousands of copies were already buried (I know this to be a fact as I was one of the people who helped load the stake bed trucks up with literature to haul to the dump)!

BM: [Reads: Amos 9:1] “Christ had to come to this earth and he had to personally intervene with the affairs of this church because MOA was in real trouble. Because MOA would go extinct and the fight for this book and over the truth in this book, the fight was so intense that Jesus Christ Himself had to come down and intervene.”

Church sells Armstrong's works
 

He doesn't mention the $3,000,000.00+ that they had to dish out to the Worldwide Church of God after they LOST the lawsuit for those books (See: WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD v. PHILADELPHIA CHURCH OF GOD INC). Money was the deal maker, not some stupid creature that the PCG calls "christ". 

BM: “Great things happen when we build our lives, collectively and individually, around MOA.”

That dang Jesus dude, he had to go and influence people into thinking he was more important than Mystery of the Ages! 

The blasphemies continue from Macdonald

BM: [Voice gets loud] “Christ has built this Work around MOA and if you build your life around this book; if you strive to live the truth of thisbook, God will bless you the same way. He really will.” 

Build your life around a damn book and ignore Jesus, that guy you are supposed to be following. The degenerate state of affairs in the Church of God continues to sink to even lower depths of spiritual depravity.  Do that and the magical god of Armstrongism will bless you! 

BM: “And if you throw your heart into this Work that distributes this book, then He will give you the physical and the spiritual blessings, just as He has this Work.”

Dave Pack Gets Taken Down Another Notch By Paulogia…For the 3rd Time

 

Paulogia has put out his 3rd video on Dave Pack

 

Part 2

Part 1

A Brief Meditation on the Transcendence of God

 A Brief Meditation on the Transcendence of God

In the early Nineties, a fellow member of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) told me that there were people he encountered at the recent Feast of Tabernacles who were alarmed at a new booklet titled “God is …” They felt the booklet foreshadowed disaster.  I had read the booklet and felt like the controversy was a tempest in a teapot.  But maybe this was a small sign of the times.  A year or so later, I checked out some tapes from the little library maintained by the local WCG congregation about the Doctrine of God.  The tapes were of a series of WCG Bible Studies given in Pasadena by Kyriacos Stavrinides.   I heard the tapes in early 1994 and they were revolutionary.  Stavrinides described the God as understood in the Christian movement, to my great wonderment, and that God was much different from the God of the WCG.  It seemed it was not a tempest in a teapot.  I thought it was going to be a watershed.  But that issue was eclipsed by many other issues and I do not know of any discussion of the Doctrine of God happening thereafter among the followers of Herbert W. Armstrong. Recalling this led me to this brief meditation.

It is natural for man to seek to understand God by use of analogies.   We compare God to a created being because we are created beings and that is what we understand.  This works well, within limits, because we are in the image of God to some degree.  But it is an error to believe that God is just like us only more powerful.  Here is a vignette of issues.  God is not alive.  Nor is he dead.  Humans can be alive or dead. God cannot be either.  He is existence itself.  He transcends the categories of life and death.  God is not limited by neurology.  He does not hear or see or smell or taste or feel.  Those are properties of the created human body.  He experiences things at a level that transcends our senses.  God does not have a body or internal parts.  If he had a beating heart that sustained his life, who would have made it for him – some superior God?  God is not dependent on anything – including internal parts. Even in the Christian movement, God is spoken of as omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient as if these words described transcendence.  Yet these are just human characteristics with Omni- added as a prefix to expand the scope of these words.  God is not just omnipresent – which means present everywhere.  God is not a “where” being.  He is not restricted by the concept of location.  God is also not restricted by time.  He is not a “when” being as we are.   God is not just omnipotent.  The human idea of being powerful involves something being stronger than something else.  The word contains an implicit idea of comparison.  God owns everything absolutely and does not need power to stake his claim.  God is not just omniscient.  He does not just know everything about every field of study.  He creates knowledge.  He transcends knowing.   God is timeless, location-less, limit-less.  This must be stated apophatically because we do not have the words.  All our words are rooted in humanness with its limitations.  It is a grave error to believe that the anthropomorphisms of an ancient Semitic tribal people, their particular analogies, tell us what God is in his essence.  They also thought that the sky was like a blue ceiling.  God gave us the ability not to understand his transcendence fully but to acknowledge it. 

So if you do not acknowledge God’s transcendence where does it take you?  Popular atheists like Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens argue from the perspective that God is like a demiurge from Gnosticism.  Non-transcendent but immanent demiurges do not create but fabricate using already existing materials and forces.  They do not create Ex Nihilo.  You never hear atheists arguing about how “being” originates.  They always start their debate with being, dimensions, stable forces, and objects presumed.  Atheists ignore the highway and just futz around in the weeds on the shoulder because that is all the farther science will take them. 

Or you end up making the mistake that Herman Hoeh and Rod Meredith made.  They believed that the Ten Commandments were God’s eternal spiritual law.  And so these Commandments and the statutes, laws, and judgments in the Mosaic legislation that expanded and refined the Ten Commandments just had to be in the New Covenant.  But why would the law of God from eternity, that reflected the nature of God himself, speak of adultery?  (God is sibi ipse ex, a law unto himself.)  What would that mean back before there were human beings and sex?   Humans and sex are not eternal – they were both created.  When this issue is raised you often get the answer that the law concerning adultery is really about loyalty or integrity or some other fundamental ethic.  This just proves that the law concerning adultery is really based on something more fundamental.   It is painfully obvious that The Ten Commandments are an instantiation of God’s eternal spiritual law specifically tailored for humanity.  They are not that law itself.  And God can put into effect or turn off instantiations as he sees fit.   God may have put into effect a collection of laws that govern the angelic realm that we cannot imagine.   All instantiations (Abrahamic, Mosaic, New Covenant, Angelic) are derived from his eternal spiritual law that pre-existed the Cosmos. 

Considering what is at stake, God’s transcendence is well worth thinking about. 

Submitted by Neo