Satan Tries To Wreck Havoc In The Last Remaining True Church

It's another day in COGland and Satan, that big bad old meanie, is getting blamed for persecuting the one and only remaining true Church of God. The last remaining church that is spoken of in scripture and preordained at the creation of the world to carry out an end-time work is being persecuted, just as scripture says. Even worse, its self-appointed prophet, divinely set apart at creation, and doubly blessed leader is suffering intense persecution that no COG has ever experienced in 2,000 years! Oh, the horrors!

Satan is such a devious little squirt that he inspired the web hosting company that the Great Bwana to Africa and the only doubly-blessed prophet to ever lead a Church of God uses to blacklist him!

The Great Bwana starts off by mentioning the show "Blacklist" and how it deals with a "blacklist" of criminals that the FBI tracks down and usually eliminates. Satan is soooooooooooooooooo angry at the amazing work that Bwana Bob is doing that he is seeking to find any means he can to stop Bwana Bob from fulfilling his self-appointed mission. The Great Bwana now claims his web hosting company placed his videos and sermons on a blacklist, all thanks to Satan!

Of course, our resident crackpot prophet claims that this action is mentioned in scripture, specifically about his end-time "work" being inhibited from preaching some kind of a "gospel".

Being on a computerized “blacklist” can eliminate access to information, including biblical truth. Opposers of Jesus used the Satanic tactic of ‘guilt by association,’ which Jesus denounced and added something:

34 The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ 35 But wisdom is justified by all her children. (Luke 7:34-35) 

 

Being put on a real ‘blacklist’ or even being lumped in with those who are disreputable highly impacts those who do not possess godly wisdom.

How dare Satan lump him in with other disreputable people and churches!  How dare he!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not only that, someone out in cyberspace accused Bwana Bob of spamming people! 

Why mention that here? 

 

Because of an incident this week. 

 

Let’s begin with some background. 

 

In July 2020, the Continuing Church of God announced that we had another URL and website: https://cg7.org 

Because Bwana Bob has no legitimate reason to exist and because his church is not known by anyone in the world, he sought to align himself as close as he could with the Church of God 7th Day. People looking for the real site will also be forwarded on to the personality cult of Bwama Bob and assume they were being led to the truth.

The purpose of the site was to have free information that keepers of the seventh-day Sabbath might be interested in. 

 

Until a couple of days ago, all seemed fine. 

 

Yet, on Sunday, January 30, 2022, we received an urgent email from the legal department from our web hosting company that a web monitoring site placed that URL on its “blacklist” and we had to agree to make various ‘corrections.’ We were told that if those were not made to the web monitoring site’s satisfaction, the cg7.org site would be removed from our hosting company. But, the hosting company stated that instead of immediately removing the cg7.org website, since we had been reliable long-term customers they could give us 72 hours to try to get off the blacklist. 

 

So, I prayed about it and then contacted the web monitoring site to try to find out what was happening and to ask for details. 

 

The web monitoring site responded by stating there was an allegation about something to do with spamming. Yet, it was a false allegation as that was not anything that we ever did.

So where do you think this led the mind of the Great Bwana to wander off to? Satan! Big old meanie!

We had done nothing wrong, but were facing removal because of falsehoods. The fact that the web monitoring company representative stated he was “mystified” this matter got this far suggested Satanic involvement. 

 

The Apostle Paul wrote:

12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12) 

 

When facing the powers of darkness, the Apostle Paul wrote for Christians to do the following:

13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. 

 

14 Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. (Ephesians 6:13-17)

This was a sure sign of the "famine of the word"!!!!! Ghastly days, times are rough!

The Great Bwana says:

So, I strove to do the above and we won– this time. 

 

The timing of all of this was very interesting as we had began to embark on a potentially large expansion for the https://cg7.org URL, which is our Church of God 7th Day Sabbath Observing Christians website. 

Even this past Friday, I had someone else working with me on that project. Then, Sunday, the cg7.org site was facing elimination–a limited type of “famine of the word’ (cf. Amos 8:11-12).

Someone needs to contact the legal department of the real Church of God 7th Day and let them know a silly little upstart of Armstrongism is appropriating their name in order to divert potential contacts that think they are contacting the real COG7 to end up contacting a crackpot splinter cult of Armsgtrongism! 

This was another censatorial type of persecution we have faced.

 

 

The Mispaired Dancers: The Archaeological Challenge to Biblical Literalism

 

The Mispaired Dancers:

The Archaeological Challenge to Biblical Literalism

By NeoTherm

 

Archaeology and Biblical Literalism are an unlikely pairing. This came to mind recently when I read about the founding of the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology. This opinion piece centers on the discord there must be, in some respects, between these two disciplines, one scientific and the other hermeneutical, when they are joined in a single scientific endeavor.  Archaeology discovers and interprets and Biblical Literalism has an interpretative agenda of its own. The idea that, armed with the hermeneutic of Biblical literalism, you can sort through some habitation layers and find nice affirmations of the Old Testament is ingenuous. The ill-conceived notion that artifacts are just lying there waiting to be unearthed and to be placed in evidence, like pre-formed puzzle pieces, supporting the OT's literal veracity is boundlessly optimistic. This is because there is a high interpretative hurdle that must also be jumped in order to obtain the prize of credibility. The meaning of an excavated discovery does not fall solely within the domain of Biblical Literalism but must also be subject to peer review by other archaeologists and other schools of Biblical interpretation. 

There is another overarching problem. The idea that archaeological discoveries in habitation layers around Palestine will resolve the overall issues of Biblical archaeology is untenable.  There are some really profound issues in Biblical archaeology for Biblical literalists. This designation “literalist” includes almost all fundamentalists and atheists. Atheists always choose to be literalists because it is an easy but sophomoric advantage in debates about Biblical accuracy. A few outstanding issues at the uneasy boundary of conflict between archaeology and Biblical Literalism:

1.     There is no evidence of a global flood.

 

An enormously catastrophic flood that would have resulted in the globe being covered by waters that rose to heights that exceed the elevation of Mt. Everest (greater than 29,032 feet) would have had enormous geological consequences.  Scientists have found no such consequences.  And according to literalists it happened only a few thousand years ago.  There is good reason to believe that the flood was a local event (Carol A. Hill, “The Noachian Flood: Universal or Local?” in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, September 2002).  A minister in the WCG once stated to me that the Grand Canyon was carved out by the receding waters of the Noachian Flood. I suggest looking at this article:

 

Flood Geology and the Grand Canyon: What Does the Evidence Really Say?

 

2.     Nobody knows where Mt. Sinai is. 

 

I always thought that Mt. Sinai was a known peak somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula.  After all I had seen the Cecil B. DeMille movie when I was a kid. But, alas, which peak might be the actual Mt. Sinai is still unknown. There are a number of candidates. Each peak has proponents. Each peak has issues. A good summary statement:

 

“It is the most important mountain in Jewish history. It is central to our religion and it is the birthplace of one of the founding documents of world civilization. It is our rock and our salvation - but where is it? … We Jews received the Ten Commandments at the top of Mount Sinai, but where was that mountain? The location of Har Sinai is still unknown.” -- Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg, The Jerusalem Post  

 

3.     Nobody knows how the logistics of the Red Sea crossing would have worked.  

 

First, logistics: 

“They had to get across the Red Sea at night. Now, if they went on a narrow path, double file, the line would be 800 miles long and would require 35 days and nights to get through. So, there had to be a space in the Red Sea, 3 miles wide so that they could walk 5,000 abreast to get over in one night.”   -- Dr. Danny Kellum, Headmaster of Donelson Christian Academy

 

Next, historicity:  

“Modern historians are puzzled that no ancient source, including the Egyptians ones, even hint at an event of this scope… Maybe the Egyptians left no record because they were too embarrassed… And even if Egypt did keep this public embarrassment under wraps, we would have expected nearby nations to have jumped all over it… But nothing.” -- Peter Enns in his book “The Bible Tells Me So … Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It,” pp. 116-117.

 

For further development of this topic, see the video series beginning with: Pete Ruins Exodus (Part 1)

 

4.     There is no archaeological evidence of the destruction of the Canaanite cities that matches the account in Joshua.

 

“The story of the conquest in Joshua does not accord, either in its general outlook or its specific details, with the archaeological data.  These data suggest that instead of a violent entry into a populated land, the first Israelites settled in a mostly empty part of the region, the central hill country … The story of the conquest and settlement as it now appears in the book of Joshua is a literary, ideological construct, the result of many editions, revisions, and additions, reflecting changing concepts of the fulfillment of the divine promise of the land over a long period of time.” – Jewish Study Bible, 2^nd Edition, p. 439.

I would imagine that the typical Armstrongist sitting in Sabbath services does not know that the above issues are without plausible resolution at this time. I would bet that most of them presume they can find Mt. Sinai on a map in Jamieson-Fausset-Brown. I used to be that way. And finding a reference on a pottery shard to "Hezekiah" in a habitation layer in or near Jerusalem contributes only very, very little to the resolution of this larger picture of lacking evidence supporting major Biblical events. I have used only summary statements to support each of the numbered topics above for this brief article. There is an extensive and accessible literature on each topic.  

What I am not saying is that these are reasons to believe that the Bible cannot be trusted and needs to be discarded. That is the impoverished viewpoint of atheism. These findings from archaeology are not an attack on faith but an attack on Biblical Literalism. Faith should never be assaulted by science but this requires a hermeneutic other than Biblical Literalism.  

I believe in a version of each of the numbered topics above. I believe there was a large local flood that affected many Middle Eastern nations. I am not concerned about where Sinai is – the theological content of the Old Testament is not contingent on geology. The exodus of Israelites from Egypt may have been smaller and less complex than scripture suggests. Once again the moral values asserted by the exodus text are undiminished by its literary nature. And as for Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, maybe it wasn’t as violent as the scripture suggests. Maybe the Israelites segued in and the Canaanites segued out. After all, the Canaanites are still a nation near present day Israel. There is a firmly established genetic connection between the Canaanites, the Phoenicians and the modern Lebanese. This was recently reaffirmed by scientists at the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute when they sequenced the entire genomes of four 4,000-year-old Canaanites that were present during the Bronze Age and compared the results to modern populations. And the modern Lebanese are genetically closely related to the Jews.  The conquest of Canaan was more like your unwanted cousins showing up on your doorstep to stay.  Archaeology reveals the actual events to be less dramatic than the literary versions. But miraculousness is not scalable but binary. A thousand people fleeing Egypt may just as much involve the miraculous suspension of the laws of the Cosmos as two million fleeing. Overall, it is as Dr. Peter Enns stated, “God let his children tell the story.”

What I am saying is that archaeology does not support the literalist interpretation of the numbered Biblical events listed above. But this does not diminish the theological content of the Biblical accounts of these events. And it is likely that these accounts were based on some actual historical happenings. But the actual historical events based on archaeology do not agree with the literalist interpretations. The Biblical accounts are then more literary than literal. The accounts emphasize relevancy rather than accuracy or historicity. And that is a workable hermeneutic. The imperative concern is not in finding artifacts that support the literal interpretation of the OT. It is in recognizing that a different approach to Biblical interpretation is required and that the OT has been under human curation for millennia and bears the evidence of it. I believe that in the Old Testament spiritual principle and theology have been conserved but material detail and univocality have suffered. And this is the demanding scientific and historiographic context in which any archaeological organization embracing Biblical literalism must be prepared to function.

 

Commercial Break: If the First Century Church Preached the Good News Like Dr. Bob

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