Upcoming Announcements Mr. Pack will be posting two or three more “Friday Announcements” in the coming weeks. These will explain in detail additional expansive elements of the Haggai/Zechariah prophecy. They will open your eyes to things that God has long intended to do in His end-time Work that no one ever understood before, and you will see that His Word is
plain!
The first will be this Friday, and will cover interesting points and scriptures everyone should keep in mind now. The next one or two will bring clarity to certain questions about “dates,” and how brethren should now view the “when” of the prophecy’s fulfillment."
Personally, my sense is that this is actually Dave writing the announcements and shifting them from a first person view to the third. I could be wrong but this is the same way Bible Scholars endeavor to discover who actually wrote or who did not write books in the Bible attributed to specific persons.
For example, most ministers assume and are taught that the Apostle Paul wrote Hebrews. No real scholar believes this for very good reasons. While there are many technical reasons, one of the more obvious ones is that in Paul's genuine writings he refers to himself very very often. In Hebrews, this is just not the style and people don't change their styles. I might say something anonymously in a posting but those who know me can easily say, "that's Dennis." I can write something as "M.T.Hall" yet it takes not genius to see, "that's Dennis". :)
From:http://www.judaismvschristianity.com/paulthe.htm
"I wanna talk about
me!"
No other epistle author in the Bible wrote like Paul. This would
be true on a number of levels, but one aspect is of particular interest when we
are considering how Paul views himself. He had a way of drawing attention to
himself with his usage of personal pronouns. When it comes to how often he uses
words like, "I", "me", "my", or "mine", the overall rate in his
epistles is almost three times that of his next closest rival. There are a
number of reasons why many scholars today believe Paul was not the author of the
book of Hebrews. One obvious reason is, in the other epistles credited to him,
Paul doesn't hesitate to identify himself along with his supposed credentials.
The author of Hebrews is strangely silent on these matters. Many scholars
believe Barnabas was the author of Hebrews, but I think Apollos is a far better
candidate... but that's a different subject. The point is, no one knows for
sure. But Paul certainly couldn't be in the running as the author of Hebrews
when one also considers the statistical rate of the personal pronoun usage. The
author of Hebrews refers to himself only 9 times, which is approximately 1.3
personal pronouns per thousand words. To help put this in perspective, let's
compare the book of Hebrews to the book of Romans. They are both relatively
large books of similar length, divided into 13 and 16 chapters respectively. Yet
in only the first half of the first chapter of Romans, which is 16 verses worth,
Paul uses twice as many personal pronouns as the author of Hebrews uses
in his entire book! In the book of Romans, Paul
refers to himself 103 times, which is rate of about 18.2 per thousand! That is
13x greater than Hebrews. In 1 Corinthians, Paul refers to himself 175 times, in
2Corinthians 103 times again, and in the relatively short book of Galatians, he
refers to himself 69 times which is a rate of 25 personal pronouns per 1000
words!"
In most professional ministries you simply do not employ this style of speaking when teaching about the Gospel, Jesus and all associated (balanced and genuinely Biblical) topics. Paul had a bad habit of saying he would boast in Christ and then boast in himself. It's why scholars get suspicious of Paul when he says, "I lie not..." They think he must be lying.
Anyway...this switch form the first person to the third person is interesting. Dave's "authorized biography" also gives the impression it is written by another about Dave's life. Even Herbert Armstrong wrote his autobiography in the first person. Dave chose not to.
Why do people speak in the third person anyway? I'd feel awkward if I said, "Mr Diehl believes that Dave writes everything on his site and no one touches it," if it was me telling you this. Maybe it's just me. But why the third person?
From Esquire:
Why the F%$# Do People Refer to Themselves in the Third Person?
Esquire magazine is going to discuss the proper use of the third person, and Esquire magazine doesn't think you're going to have a problem with that.
Major Human Flaw: Some people refer to themselves in the third person.
Response No. 1, by Elsa Ronningstam, associate clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and author of
Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality: Referring to yourself in the third person creates distance between "I" and "he."
So if you have an exaggerated view of how great you are, you could be using this distance to make yourself even bigger. Or, if you've achieved major success suddenly, using the third person could be a way to adjust to the bigger role that's been assigned to you. It's a way to enlarge yourself to fit that role.
Response No. 2, by Mike Birbiglia, stand-up comedian who currently stars in the off-Broadway show
Sleepwalk with Me: People love to rip those who refer to themselves in the third person, but they don't understand the power that comes with it.
The third person is how you indicate that the topic is not open for debate. You are speaking about facts that just so happen to include you. Like when Alonzo Mourning says, "Alonzo Mourning has to make the best business decisions for Alonzo Mourning," everyone steps back a little, and somebody hands him $15 million a year for seven years. But that same sentence in the first person would have sounded like, "I just enjoy playing basketball with my friends and all the free Gatorade." See the difference? ....
Speaking in the third person rather than the first is an odd habit. It has deep roots in a kind of distancing oneself from what one says . If I say "I did a really stupid thing..." that sounds like I am involved with it and both accept and take responsibility for it. If I say "Mr Diehl did a really stupid thing..." it sounds like I want to admit it but I don't wish to be associated with it or take responsibility for it. It's somewhat like saying that I am not the author of a prophecy or a prophet but I am just telling you God's prophecy. This way, if it goes wrong, I can remind you it's not me that came up with this stuff. If it goes well, I will reap some form of power or credibility from the weak minded for it however, but if it goes sour, not to worry. God has given us more time and there are new things to reveal that we never before could have understood.
Why do I care about this? I care because these types of personalities hurt people to the core in the name of religion which is supposed to free .Thirty Five years on in life, I still am cleaning up after Dave Pack and his Trail of Tears. I don't kid myself either. Dave Pack and his Restored Church of God reminds me all to well of the kind of theological mistakes I made as a kid that resulted in me ending up in the ministry of Church that was a doomed personality cult. I did not recognize this as a kid and young minister. Once deeply embedded in it, I just wanted to encourage my churches with the hope given in scripture and help them get through the stinky stuff of real life. I could not have cared less about "HQ" after just a few short years. It was like the question in Fiddler on the Roof. "Is there a proper blessing for the Czar," the peasants asked the Rabbi. "Yes...May God bless and keep the Czar....far away from us!"
These types major in the minors as if the minors mattered and get folk off the track of a genuine and encouraging spirituality. Aside from the FACT that Dave Pack's view of himself as being spoken of by the very minor prophet Haggai is pure fantasy and a gross misapplication of scripture, this kind of egoism can lead to disaster for all concerned as I suspect it will again.
