The Futility of Keeping Sabbath In the North or South Pole Regions

The Chief Pharisee of the law, James Malm has laid down the decree about Sabbath Keeping for those living in far-flung places of the Northern or Southern pole areas are to start Sabbath at 6:00 pm regardless of whether or not the sun has actually set.  Just more legalistic lunacy from the Pharisaical right of the COG.

The Weekly Sabbath begins when the sun sets locally.  Persons living north or south of 55 degrees may observe the Sabbath from 18:00 hours [this is the average sunset time at Jerusalem], and all of the brethren in any such location should observe the Sabbath at the same time by common accord.  When Christ comes he will decide on this matter. 

Malm's stance and the SDA church stance is based upon late 1700's and early 1800's information and not on a single thing from the time of the Israelites when they started keeping Sabbath AFTER their captivity.  Just another reason the Sabbath command was for those ONLY in the  Middle East and not anywhere else in the world.

Contrast Pharisee Malm's comment above with this truth: 

CAN YOU KEEP THE SABBATH AT THE NORTH POLE?

Imagine you are trying to keep the Jewish Sabbath above the Arctic Circle! The Arctic night “Sabbath” eventually arrives. Suddenly you are not allowed to light a fire in your dwelling place because the sun went down but didn’t come back up. Your heater goes out. You honor God’s “law” by not re-lighting it. The next morning you are found frozen to death, and you go down in history as a noble Christian Jewish Sabbath-keeper who would rather die than break the Jewish Sabbath. Perhaps you miraculously survive the Polar Winter “Sabbath without a fire. You can’t work for the oil company that hired you until the sun comes up (making it “Saturday” morning) and goes back down again, creating a Saturday night. Eventually, however, the sun does come back up, stays up for a day, and goes back down. The Arctic stretch of extended non-Sabbath is finally over. You can go to work now. Sabbath-keeping is conventional for a while, but eventually the sun comes up and won’t go down! Now you have to contend with the extended Arctic stretch of non-Sabbath time. Because the sun won’t go down, Sabbath won’t “start” on Friday night. You have to go to work every day because the Sabbath won’t start since there is no sundown on Friday night.

Actually, there are more variations of this Arctic Sabbath nonsense. In the Arctic fall, If the Sun fails to set on a Friday night, you have “endless” work days. If the Sun fails to set on a Saturday night in the Arctic fall, you have an “endless” Sabbath. We will leave it up to your imagination to figure out what happens in the Arctic spring depending on which day the sun rises for the first time of the season. Please review the dual requirements of the Sabbath commandment. Both requirements apply to Jews. Christians who keep the Jewish Sabbath seem to forget the six-day requirement since it works against the ill-contrived idea that Adam and Eve qualified to rest on the 7^th day of Creation along with God. God had worked for six days prior, but Adam and Eve had existed only about one day:

Exodus 20:8 (NIV): “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

If you manage to die of over-work during this stretch of non-Sabbath time, you go down in history as the Sabbath-keeping Christian who would rather die than break the Jewish Sabbath. Is it illogical to think that God would impose a moral law on His earthlings that could not be kept anywhere in the solar system. The sins of fornication and adultery can be committed on Planet Earth or in a space ship on its way to Mars, but the Sabbath can’t be kept anywhere but in a climate like Palestine in the Mid-East. The Adventist prophetess, Ellen G. White, “solves” this problem by mandating that people should not live in parts of the Earth where the Sabbath cannot be kept. Try presenting the Gospel to a Polar-living Eskimo while at the same time telling him that he has to move to a different part of the world in order to keep “God’s Law.”

"In the countries where there is no sunset for months and again no sunrise for months the period of time will be calculated by the records kept. But God has a world large enough and proper and right for the human beings He has created to inhabit it without finding homes in those lands so objectionable in very many, many ways" (Ellen G. White, Letter #167, 23 March, 1900).

For the above reference, follow this link: www.gospeloutreach.net/chap09.html

God gave the Sabbath to Israel only. The Nation of Israel is located in a mild climate where the sun does rise and set every 24 hours for the entire year and where the temperatures are moderate enough to get through a  cold winter night simply by piling on the blankets.

If you lived in the Arctic Circle as so many people do now, would you be condemned to Hell and receive the Mark of the Beast because you COULD NOT keep the Sabbath right no matter how hard you tried? Would God have to give you a special dispensation to break His law so you wouldn’t end up with the Mark of the Beast?

On top of all this, Sabbath-keepers at the North Pole cannot keep the Sabbath according to a fixed calendar or the lunar calendar. During the Arctic winter, the moon’s position remains very close to the sun after it goes down. Here is what happens according to astronomer, Laura Spitler:

While the Moon does rise during the summer at the North Pole, since the Sun is always up, you generally can't see it, so I'll focus on the movement of the Moon during the winter.

The daily movement from Earth's rotation causes the Moon to circle once around the sky. If you spent the entire day staring at it, you'd have to turn around exactly once. This movement is also the same that the Sun makes during the summer . . .

The second movement caused by the Moon's orbit around the Earth is analogous to the movement of the Sun over the course of a year only it repeats over the course of a lunar month. Near the new Moon phase, the Moon is near the Sun and therefore never rises during the winter. As the Moon approaches full, it will start to pop up above the horizon. Eventually near the full Moon phase it will be high enough in the sky to stay up all day and circle like the Sun. . . The elevation of the circle will rise as the Moon becomes completely full and then start to decrease until it begins to dip below the horizon. Eventually the Moon will stop rising at all as it gets close enough to the new phase. The cycle then repeats.

Follow this link to the above reference: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=777

It appears that even our lunar Sabbath brethren can’t keep the Sabbath “right” above the Arctic Circle. Will they go to Hell because they can’t keep it right? Does God have to give them a special dispensation that would go something like, “Well, my lunar Sabbath-keepers have such a good heart and they really want to do what’s right, but in this case they can’t. I’m going to let them into Heaven anyway.”  from Lying for God

"We Can't Get There From Here..."

COG History: Lake Tahoe and the "Godders"

There is a great article up in a Trukee/Lake Tahoe newspaper about the Worldwide Church of God's Lake Tahoe feast site:

When Worldwide Church of God invaded North Lake Tahoe!: A boon to local business, this church gathering had some skeletons in its closet (Moonshineink)

In the fall of 1961 the Radio Church of God held its first Feast of Tabernacles at the Blythe Arena in Squaw Valley (home of the Winter Olympics skating events just a year earlier.)

The week long gathering brought up to 10,000 church members to Squaw Valley every fall, until the Blythe Arena collapsed in the early 1980s. While North Tahoe folks saw the annual visits of the Radio Church of God (later changed to the Worldwide Church of God) as a much needed boom to the slow fall economy, it turns out the church was an unorthodox and controversial organization, with many ex-members referring to it as a cult.  

Rod Stollery, who in 1961 helped his parents put out the then fledging Tahoe City World, remembers the church’s first visit to the area. “The merchants weren’t expecting much business from them,” said Stollery. When the owners of the Alpine Liquor and Sporting Goods left town for what they thought would be a slow week, Stollery took over the shop. “We were quickly inundated by church members who were fond of liquor. We sold out in two days and had to have a truckload sent up from the valley … needless to say, the event was an economical godsend to the area.”

The event would be front page news in the Tahoe City World every year, and a full page spread inside welcomed the church to town with a map showing church members Tahoe’s recreational opportunities. The paper was also full of ads from local businesses welcoming church members to Tahoe City’s finest dining and shopping establishments.

Cheryl Bechdolt Balbuena back then was a waitress in her family business, The Tahoe Inn (At the current location of Blue Agave). It was an inn, bar, and had two restaurants. “We were crazy slammed for ten days. The girl church members always wore modest dresses and no makeup, and the men wore sports jackets and ties. They were nice, but kept to themselves. And were really bad tippers, sometimes they didn’t tip at all.” In fact, the slogan around the restaurant was “Oh, no, The Godders are coming. We are going to work and not get paid,” said Balbuena. (“The Godders” was the universal locals’ term for the members of the Radio/Worldwide Church of God). 

The story ends with this:

While the goals of the Worldwide Church of God were certainly controversial, many long time Tahoe locals still fondly remember how the “Godders” helped North Tahoe businesses get through the deadly quiet days of fall.

Read story here.

Fred Coulter Church Spin-off Says Only Those 17 And Older Are Allowed To Read Site

The Christian Biblical Church of God is headed up by Fred Coulter, a failed former Worldwide Church of God minister who, at one point in time claimed, that by feeling the bumps on people heads he could determine their character and mental abilities.

Coulter sets himself up as the ultimate authority on Greek and has worked overtime in reorganizing the Bible into the "correct order" he believes it had originally been intended.  He then published his new bible, which was printed in China for an incredibly low price, to his members and the gullible public an inflated high price. Not only did Coulter reorganize the location of biblical books, but his real intent was to discredit New testament verses that started that the Old Covenant was no longer.  One reviewer wrote:

However, it became clear that this reordering of books was not the intent and purpose of this new translation. Soon into my survey I began to note a pattern of what appear to be intentional errors in translation. I suspect that these errors are not honest changes of text based on an academic application of understanding of ancient languages, but instead an attempt to re-address doctrines of the New Testament. All of the errors tend to be those passages in the New Testament which revoke the legal authority of the Old Testament. 

If there is one thing that infuriates the die-hard legalists in the church is the claim that the Old Covenant has been done away with, which essentially means the 600 some laws of the OT are not enforced upon grace filled Christians.

Coulter is also the one who got many of the conspiracy nuts in the church all frothing at the mouth that the church was being taken over by Masons, Jesuits and Jews that were supposedly also practicing witches. This was all done in the mid-1970's before he was disfellowshipped in 1979.  Coulter was actually disfellowshipped and excommunicated THREE times!  The third time was Rod Meredith did it in 2008 when he discovered LCG members were listening to Fred teachings and he publicly disfellowshipped him, even though Coulter was NOT an LCG member and never had been (see below).

Coulter is like many of the other COG's who demands that his followers tithe.  He has had several groups of people leave over the years when they discovered though well thought out study, that the Bible does not require tithing in the New Covenant.

All of that brings us to today.  In February 2018, Coulter's UK office manager resigned and passed the keys, office and money over to a David Sheridan. Coulter claimed this was not his idea and does not recognize Sheridan to UK office manager.  Coulter also demanded the money be returned.  Sheridan has refused and now the CBCG in the UK has rebranded itself as The Christian Biblical Church of God Endinburgh Scotland.  They even have a new web site found here.

They make this claim on their page:

We at cbcgedinburgh.co.uk are not responsible for their content or any sites they operate or provide links to nor do we give our complete endorsement, you must be your own judge.

Which translates that they are not responsible for the errors on Fred Coulter's main web site which has recently charged its name to Truth of God.

The new CBCGES is also age restricted.  No one under 17 is allowed to visit or read their page.  One has to wonder WHY anyone under 17 would even WANT to read their page!

When our Website is running,  only persons who are at least 17yrs years of age are invited to use it !!!

They also assume no responsibility of anyone damaged or hurt by reading their site:

cbcgedinburgh.co.uk accept no liability arising out of your usage of our Website or any cbg.org or linked Websites.

As the years go by, I never cease to be amazed at the sheer lunacy that comes out of the Church of God any more.  For a group of people who claim to be the "true believers", never has there been a group of people more screwed up than what the Church of God has become.  Every day brings something new.

Read more about Fred Coulter and the Christian Biblical Church of God here:

Beware of Fred Coulter!

Christian Biblical Church of God--An Ungodly Experience Nobody Should Have To Endure

Is Fred Coulter's Christian Biblical Church of God Imploding?

Fred Coulter, 'Zionist Jews' and the 'Synagogue of Satan'

Living Church of God's Rod Meredith disfellowships Fred Coulter a third time

From the Presiding Plonker

Fred Coulter Demonizes The Journal

SaveSave

What We WIsh Jesus Would Have Actually Done on the First Visit

We always hear about the many amazing things that Jesus of Nazareth apparently did, but nobody ever asks about the things that Jesus supposedly COULD have done, being omnipotent, but either didn't bother to do or didn't think were all that important.