The COG Marine

Here is an excerpt from an article on the Painful Truth web site about "Image First".  Sadly this is not an isolated case in the Church of God.  This kind of behavior happened all the time and still does today in the various splinter groups.

Michael

Michael stood alone in the middle of the foyer of the Seattle Masonic Hall, people swirling around and past him without interacting with him, a solitary island in the midst of a sea of people. I noticed he was new and that apparently, no one was interested in getting to know him. It made me feel sad. I went over and introduced myself to him and began learning about him. Over the next few weeks and months, I had him over to dinner with my family several times and we even went and worked out together at the gym. I learned about this “good guy” and he had a lot of depth that most people would not expect.

Michael shared with me his story about how he entered into the Marines at the age of 30. It was a matter of honor that his mates referred to him as “the Old Man” because they respected the fact that he stayed in there with them even though they were mostly a decade younger than he. He wanted to be a Marine. His father was a Marine.

Before the Passover I had broken my toes and at the Passover Service it was Michael who was to wash my feet. He looked me in the eye and said, “I ain’t gonna mess with no broken toes,” whereupon he washed my one foot without the broken toes. I washed his feet.

It was during the Days of Unleavened Bread that he showed up in our apartment complex in the parking lot. My wife and I looked at each other in dismay at him on the heavy duty motorcycle he had ridden on. He was all excited about it. He was a sincere believer who was going to take his brother out in the woods and talk to him about his new faith. We didn’t say anything and hoped for the best.

It was shortly after this that we learned that he was on his way on his motorcycle to prepare to go out to the woods when he got clipped on his head with the mirror of a semi. It removed the top of his head and he ended up in a coma in the hospital. His face had not been affected so it looked like he was in a peaceful sleep.

Each day for nearly 40 days, I would go down to the hospital after work in the afternoon and would sit with him and talk to him because I had heard that those in a coma often heard those talking to him. I would describe the Spring afternoon and the sun shining. At the last, I was not able to get to the hospital and he had changed doctors. He died shortly afterward from the trauma. I believe it was about 40 days.

What I did not know is that Michael had shared our friendship with his family: His dad, mom, sisters and brothers. I was the only one from the church in to see him at the hospital. I had talked with his family when they were there and we got to know one another as best strangers could under such circumstances.

Because Michael was a Marine as was his father, he was given a funeral with full honors with Marines in dress uniforms giving the gun salute with rifles.

Afterward, I prepared an obituary for the Worldwide News. I learned that I had to give it to the minister. It was a paragraph and told part of his story of being in the Marine Corps.

It turns out that I gave it to Dennis Luker after services on the Sabbath. He told me that he had met the family and when they told him about me, he said to them, “Oh, he’s so quiet!”. This produced laughter from Michael’s family and they instantly knew that Dennis Luker knew neither Michael nor me. He was attempting to cash in on an opportunity by pretending to be someone and something he wasn’t and got caught at it.

Eventually, the obituary made it to the Worldwide News. It was a sentence long. It was a brief sentence at that. Michael _____ died…. That was about it. Name, no rank, no serial number. It was crisply impersonally efficient.

During my brief discussion with Dennis Luker, he did something odd: He stroked my stomach as if it were a bowling ball. It was weird and creepy. Very weird and creepy. Very very weird and creepy. I just stood there and allowed him to do it. After all, this was God’s Evangelist of the Worldwide Church of God — the very Work of God. Many of us had been conditioned to be subjected to authority without question — to accept what was truly unacceptable, because the Very God of the Universe would support them even if they were wrong.

I vaguely felt as if I had been raped.

You can read the rest of the article by Douglas Becker here:  Image

E. W King: I Was Right AGAIN! My Prediction of a Female Leader Dying Has Come True!

Newsflash! So that E. W. King can be 100% accurate in his prophecies, God caused Margaret Thatcher to die in order to fulfill his prediction! 



E. W. King is boasting today that another of his predictions have come true!  He writes:

Towards the end of last year God was giving me special insight regarding a specific sign. This sign had to do with an event which was to occur that would point toward the setting up of the final “Abomination of Desolation”. Though all this agrees, in order, with what the Bible teaches I agree that this insight was specific to me. That is, it just confirms what the Bible already teaches regarding what must come first, before the beginning of the Great Tribulation. What must come first is the setting up of the “Abomination of Desolation”. Through a series of visions I saw that the death of a women leader was soon to take place. I spoke of this at the beginning of this year and also sent a special message to a California congregation [in Santa Cruz] of the “remnant” just this year during the Feast of Unleavened Bread [2013]. In this message I was even more specific.

I had seen a British flag and was told that this female leader was one of the last great leaders of latter-day Ephraim. People who read my posted message on “Church of God ~ Speaking to the Remnant” official website read what I stated:

“The death of an important female leader is coming soon!” [Stated at the beginning of 2013 by Mr. E.W.King] Also read: “The Marker”

E. W. King: God Has Given Me Special Discernment

When have we ever not hear that some splinter group leader in the Church of God has been given special discernment?  Flurry says it, Pack says it, Weinland says it, Thiel says it, Malm says it....  on and on the list could go.  Every single COG leader thinks they posses something special that the common folk have never possessed.

King is making it known that he has special knowledge and discernment.

I believe that God has given me “special spiritual discernment” [1 Corinthians 12:10] in these last days. I have been able to put probable outcomes of political events together from God’s word and the special insight that He sometimes gives me. When I get these revelations I post them as “Prophetic Forecasts”. This does not make me a prophet, I am not a prophet. It does mean that God can give a person special revelations without the person having to be a prophet. I believe that we will see more of this kind of activity in these last days as God continues to direct His last day REMNANT people.

King also writes:

God can and does still speak to His people today through the process of “revelation”. We know that the prophecy found in Joel 2:28-32 had a “typical” fulfillment in Acts 2:1-21. This prophecy talks of the out pore of the Holy Spirit. When one reads this prophecy one finds that it was only partially [or typically] fulfilled on Pentecost of 31AD. This means that in these last days people can begin to receive visions and dreams, ‘special revelation’ which will help guide the Church of God in these last days! [We are seeing the anti-typical fulfillment of Joel 2:28-32]

David Barrett and Fortean Times On: Coping Strategies For Failed Prophets

A reader here sent me this link to a recent series of articles in Fortean Magazine that collects some of the worlds strangest news stories and strange phenomenon.  This issue contains articles on the failure of false doomsday prophets.  The article discusses the Worldwide Church of God under Herbert W. Armstrong with all of his failed prophecies and Ron Weinland with his latest epic failures.

The article is Apocalypse NOT on page 35.

A few of David Barrett's comments are as follows:

"There is a long tradition of Christan groups being disappointed by the non-arrival of Jesus on the date they foretold.  William Miller in 1843 and 1844 ("the Great Disappointment"), the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1874, 1914, 1925 and 1975 and the Worldwide Church of God in 1975 are perhaps better known.  Worldwide founder Herbert W. Armstrong's booklet 1975 in Prophecy, first published in 1956, oddly became unavailable from the mid-Seventies!  More recently, we had Harold Camping offering first May 21 and then October 21, 2011 as the End of Days, and Ron Weinland, leader of a small offshoot from the Worldwide Church, who set the date of 27 May 2012."

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"Both the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Worldwide Church of God lost some members, who were disappointed by Jesus's non-arrival and disillusioned by the fallibility )or worse, the falsehoods) of their Churches' leaders.  But, in fact, comparatively few left either religion, because, as Gordon Melton argues, "within religious groups, prophecy seldom fails."  Over the centuries, religious groups have developed a number of coping techniques to deal with the disconfirmation of their deeply held beliefs (see table below).  One of the simplest and most common is: "We miscalculated; come back next year" - which is broadly what William Miller's followers said in 19843 and Harold Camping said in 2011.  More subtle coping strategies are: "It occurred, but on an invisible plane" (which adds another layer of belief but has the twin advantages that believers can still claim it was right, and that they can't be proven wrong); "The Lord was merciful and stayed his hand" (which emphasises God's love and restraint and the niceness of the prophet who must have persuaded God); and "Your faith wasn't strong enough" (which shifts the blame to the religion's members).  Two others are a flat denial: "We never claimed that anyway" (millennial religions have a long history of rewriting history) and, very occasionally, an honest "We were mistaken" or "Our enthusiasm got the better of us" - which is what the Jehovah's Witnesses eventually said

David Barret then goes into a case study of Ron Weinland.

"The failure of any of his specific prophecies for 2008 to occur didn't faze him, despite his having written: "If the things written in the book do not shortly come to pass, then what is written here is false, and I am false".  Instead, he castigates those who criticise him: "Foolishly there are those whoa re more quick to find fault by saying we are wrong or that I am a false prophet since physical destruction did not come at a time I had previously stated." Weinland used versions of two of the common coping strategies for failed prophets."

David goes on to name a few of Ron's epic failures and then wryly notes how the judge who sentenced Ron to prison "did his homework" when he sentenced Ron to a prophetic 3 1/2 years in prison.

Other articles are : 

If at First Your Doomsday Fails - Try, Try Again... by Kevin Whitesides
Don't Get Fooled Again by Peter Brookesmith
Downwind of the Apocalypse  by Richard Stanley