Herbert W Armstrong

   Has anything ever been so misunderstood as the gospel of Jesus Christ? People simply do not understand it. It was not a tawdry sentimental message, saying sweetly, 'May this message be a blessing to your hearts.' It was a hard-hitting message telling people what was wrong and what is causing all of the troubles in the world.

   Do you know that Jesus Christ came into the same world that you and I live in today? Of course, two changes have happened to this world in these 1950 years. The world has progressed into awesome progress so far as technological, mechanical, and industrial production is concerned and dealing with matter, dealing with things that come out of the ground. But, when it comes to man, dealing with man, our troubles have escalated, and we're living in a world of appalling evils and appalling troubles today, everywhere on the face of the earth. Never has the world been in such trouble as it's in today, in every part of the world.

   Jesus' message was a very practical message. It was a message showing how we could have utopia here on earth, how we can have peace, why we don't have it, and why we have the troubles. We can have more progress than we have industrially and mechanically and materially. We could have even more. But we don't need to have the troubles. We don't need to have the evils that are besetting us and all of the unhappiness, the sickness, the diseases, everything that is wrong in this world.

   When Jesus preached, people were astonished at His doctrine. You read that in Matthew seven verse 28. When He finished speaking, people had never heard anything like it before. It was different than anything that other speakers were saying, different than anything, any religion that they had heard preached, and people have not heard it since.

   You know that that gospel was suppressed within 22 years and was not proclaimed worldwide, not proclaimed to the world for 1900 years until 1953 on the most powerful radio station in the world, Radio Luxembourg in Europe. When I began to proclaim that gospel to Europe after it had been proclaimed coast to coast all over the United States and Canada, it was suppressed. It had not been proclaimed. But now God's time has come for that same gospel, the same gospel that Jesus Christ proclaimed, to once again be proclaimed into all of the world.

   We read in Matthew 24 where Jesus had been at the temple in Jerusalem. And His disciples had been pointing out to Him the buildings of the temple. And He had said to them that not one stone would be left upon another until they would all be thrown down, that the temple was going to be destroyed. So, as He sat a little later up on the Mount of Olives, they came to Him and they asked Him two questions, 'When shall these things be?' And it actually did happen in 70 A.D. And something else, 'What will be the sign of Your coming and the end of the age, the end of the world?'

   And Jesus answered and said, 'Take heed that no man deceive you.' He was speaking to them at that time, 1950 years ago. 'Take heed that no man deceive you, for many shall come in My name saying that I am Christ and shall deceive the many.' Many would come in His name. You can search the Bible everywhere. In the Bible, when people came in the name of Christ, they came professing to be the ministers of Christ, to be representing Jesus, not saying that they themselves were Christ, but representing Jesus and saying that Jesus is the Christ. And He said they would be deceiving the many.

   And I want to tell you that that has happened over the past 1900 years. And so, coming down to verse 14, He said, 'And this gospel of the Kingdom.' That was the gospel He was proclaiming. 'This gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and then shall the end, the end of this world, the end of this age come.'

   That time has come, and the time has come for that same message to be proclaimed once again to the world. Now, just what was that message? You turn to Mark, the very first chapter, to verse 14 (Mark 1:14). 'Now, after that, John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel.' What gospel? 'The gospel of the Kingdom of God, the gospel of the Kingdom of God,' and saying, 'That time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye and believe the gospel.' How can they believe the Gospel if they haven't heard it? My friends, and for 1900 years, that gospel was not proclaimed. They proclaimed a message of man, man's gospel about Christ.

   Now, Jesus Christ was the messenger that God sent with the message bringing that gospel. You'll read in Malachi, the third chapter that there was one to come preparing the way before him. Now, you also will read that John, the Baptist prepared the way before his first coming. But in Malachi where it said that a messenger would prepare the way before his coming, it was referring to the second coming.

   You go on and read in verse 2, 3, 4, 5 (Malachi 3:2-5). And it is talking about the things that Jesus Christ would do at his second coming, things he did not do at all when he came 1950 years ago. And so once again, the time has come for that gospel to go and to be preached in all the world and to be preached to Kings, to be preached to Rulers, to be preached in the top places all around the world.

   Now I speak to Kings, I speak to Prime Ministers, Presidents, Rulers all over the world and I speak to business men's groups, to clubs, to top people and governments in different places in the world.

   Now, just recently, for example, I was in Manila in the Philippines and speaking to the Rotary Club. I would like to show you what I was saying to them and the message as it was going out to the businessmen there.

   This afternoon gives me great honor and pleasure to introduce to you a man of peace and a man of God known to diplomatic rules all over the world as the unofficial Ambassador for World Peace and as a builder of bridges between peoples everywhere. Our guest of honor, fellow Italians and friends this afternoon, he said to be the man who has met more world leaders in their private offices than any man alive today. He's work as Pastor General of his church as chairman of the Ambassador College and the Ambassador Foundation as editor in chief of The Plain Truth magazine as a TV, and radio broadcaster all over the world.

   I now ask each and every one of you to welcome and to listen to the message of peace given to us this afternoon by none other than Doctor Herbert W. Armstrong.

   Mr. speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, it certainly is a pleasure to be here at the Rotary Club. I spoke at a Rotary Club here a year ago and I've spoken to many Rotary Clubs around the world. You have a wonderful slogan. He profits most who serves best. I notice however, that the incentive is on profit and serving as a means to the end. And perhaps it should be the other way around. You might think about that.

   They call me in some quarters, an Ambassador for peace for world peace. If there were peace in the world, I wouldn't need to be an Ambassador for peace, but we have no peace. We have nothing but troubles. Yes, it's true. I talked to many Kings, Prime Ministers, Presidents and even Emperors of nations and they have their problems. I've just come over two days ago from Bangkok and I went up into his mountain palace to see the King of Thailand. I've seen him now four times. The first time I saw him, he appealed to me for help. He had problems, he had troubles, the troubles, then I was able to help him.

   But everywhere I go, I find that heads of nations have problems that are completely over their heads and beyond their human ability to solve this whole world is in trouble and we're approaching a final grand smash climax. And I ask you to open your ears. You better listen to this because we're all asleep. We're going along just supposing that everybody is so kind and so good that they won't use the nuclear weapons and other weapons that have now been invented that can blast all humanity off the face of this planet. You need to remember that no weapon of destruction has ever been invented that man has not used and he will use it.

   The life of every one of us is at sake. And we just go ahead with our minds on our daily pleasures on our daily interests, our daily business and we just suppose it isn't going to happen here. But I need to warn you that you're living in a very troubled world. This is a world that can't get along with itself. And so, we have wars, Germany started a war, they brought Italy in with it later, Russia that involved Britain and other European nations and then the United States and it involved Japan that began to involve you right here in the Philippines and we all got involved and you never know what is going to strike next. But next time it will be far worse, it will be far worse. And we need to understand there's a cause for every effect. If conditions in the world are bad, something had to cause it.

   But look at the paradox that we're living in. You're living in a world of awesome progress. We talk about the great progress. Look at the inventions we have today, the inventions of television, the inventions of the jet planes and transportation. We fly men to the moon and back, we send unmanned spacecraft to bring us back photographs close up right on the very surface of the planet Mars. We're doing wonderful things, and yet we're living in a world of appalling evils and troubles, full of suffering, full of anguish. Nobody seems to be happy. People are discontented. There's nothing but disturbances everywhere.

   Do you ever stop to wonder why? There has to be a cause for every effect. And I'm here to tell you the cause. Usually, we're so preoccupied with our routine, our business, our pleasures, whatever, we don't stop to think about the conditions of mankind and the world that we live in, but they're going to reach out and affect every one of us.

   I want to tell you how it all started. There are two kinds of knowledge. One kind of knowledge is dealing with matter, dealing with things, dealing with the earth and the things that come out of the earth. That is the kind of knowledge that man can acquire by himself. Man was created with a mind and with the ability to deal with matter and with things.

   There's another kind of knowledge that is spiritual knowledge, and that has to do with dealing with people and dealing with our maker and creator. Now, people in the first place would rather forget all about the creator. They don't want anything to do with him. They want to thumb their noses at him and they say, "Almighty God, keep your nose out of my life and out of my affairs. I don't need you." Well, that's what the first man said.

   But man was created with equipment and ability to acquire certain knowledge by himself, the knowledge to deal with things. He can make a table like this, a microphone like this that will expand my voice so that you can hear it. But man was not made with a knowledge to have a relationship with his maker or to deal with even his own children and his neighbors. He was offered that knowledge. Man was not made with life. He was offered life, but that life would have come through the spirit of God, which would have revealed to him spiritual knowledge to get along with God and to get along with his neighbors so he could have lived in peace. But he spurned that. He rejected that. He made the decision.

   So, man built his own society. Man built his own religions, and all the religions are man-built. They didn't come from God. It's time you wake up and realize that, and the whole world has been deceived. Man has built his own economic system. It's far, far from God's type of system. Man has built his own social system. We have our own educational system, and it's entirely materialistic. But in the colleges and universities, as I say, we teach law, we teach sociology, we teach psychology, and they don't even know of what the human mind is composed.

   I'm here to try to wake you up. I am a voice in the wilderness of religious confusion, of economic confusion, of educational materialism, of social confusion and unhappiness. Trying to cry out for the one cure that there is, and that cure is going to come to us in time.

   Now, a man made his choice, and he's built his own civilization. We all were born into this world. We grew up accepting what was stuffed in our minds in the kind of education and school system that we have had. And people today continue to reject the revelation of our own Maker. We're ashamed even of our Maker who designed the human mind and the human body. Why should we be ashamed of One who is greater than us and who is love and has loved us enough to give His own Son to die for us to pay the penalty of our wrongs, our evils, our transgressions of our hurting one another.

   But let me tell you something. He isn't going to forgive those things until we come to realize how wrong we've been until we change our minds, until we turn the other way and begin to live the way of the life of God.

   Now, what is God's way of life? It's the way God Himself lives. You'll read in the first chapter of John in your Bible (John 1:1): "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And in Him is life, LIFE." You don't have life in you. If you've been believing you have an immortal soul, someone's been kidding you and deceiving you. You don't have a temporary existence, and eternal life comes only as the gift of God. Now, I speak on the authority of that God, and I am His messenger here to give you that message; you take it or leave it. I'm not here to try to convince you of anything. I'm just telling you.

   Now, God Almighty, the Creator, is working out a purpose here below. He has a master plan for working out that purpose, and that master plan is taking 7,000 years. We're about at the end of the first 6,000 years, and in this 6,000 years, it has been the purpose of God to let man go the way he's going, live the way he wanted to live, just with what knowledge is acquirable by his own efforts, rejecting revealed knowledge, and to show him where it leads until he gets a stomach so full of it that he doesn't want it anymore and doesn't want to live this way any longer. We haven't come to that place yet. You people haven't come to that place. You still like this world pretty well.

   But we're going to come to the place where no human being would be left to life. If God Almighty didn't intervene, it's going to get that bad, and conditions are worsening day by day and year by year right now. And when it does get to that place, God is going to send Jesus Christ back to this earth again, as a King of kings and the Lord of lords, and He's going to take over every government. But there is going to be a world tomorrow, and people are going to be forced finally to be happy and to find peace and joy and happiness. But it won't come the way we think we want to live. We're going to have to come to a different way of living. It's the way we've been living that has caused us all of these troubles, and it's time we wake up. Why don't the preachers preach that kind of thing? They don't; they ignore it.

   The law of God is a law of love, loving God first of all and loving your neighbor as yourself. People don't; there are two ways of life. One is give, and the other is get. I said that when I was here last year. The way of love is the way of give, of share, of serve, of help. The way of get is "I'm bigger than you are, and I want to get for myself because I'm more important than you are. So, I want to take away from you whatever you have." But I can only tell you that changing our way of life, and we're going to have to be compelled to do that because people don't want to do it. It is the only thing that's going to bring us peace. We can't just pray for peace and we sit here and go on living the way we do, and God is just going to give us peace. Oh, no, He isn't going to do it that way. We're going to have to stop causing all of the troubles.

   So, I'm here to tell you, I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm not here to get any members. I don't seek members. I don't seek money. I'm here to give, not to get. I've given you a message that's worth millions of dollars to you, or pesos, or whatever you want to call it. But you can spurn it and treat it like an old sow would treat pearls and diamonds - trample it in the mud and go for the sloop. What you do with it is up to you. I've done my duty when I tell you that's all I'm here for. And let me tell you, peace is coming, and we're all going to cooperate one with another, and we're going to have a happy world. We're going to get out of competition and strife, and we're going to get into the way of cooperation and serving and helping and sharing and the way of love instead of the way of competition and hate and get; we're going to start giving. Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for listening.

   And that was my address before the Rotary Club in Manila, the Philippines, in the spring of 1982. And now, before closing, I want to offer you a free booklet: "What is the True Gospel?" For 1,900 years, that gospel was not proclaimed. What is that gospel? I have a booklet, "What is the True Gospel?"

   Now, there's no cost, no charge, no request for money, no follow-up. I'd just like to give you this booklet. And also, I would like to send you a year's subscription to the most enlivening, the most interesting magazine, a magazine of understanding, the most interesting mass circulation magazine in the world, The Plain Truth, a magazine now with a circulation of more than 4 1/2 million subscribers and going on toward 5 million now. And coming up month by month, it starts in with an editorial written by me, "Utopia Nearer Than You Think." Then, here's an article about "The Surging Red Tide In Central America". The Plain Truth will keep you up on world events and how they're fulfilling biblical prophecy and the real meaning of them.

   Then, there's an article that I wrote 55 years ago, seven years before The Plain Truth even started, "What's Wrong With The Younger Generation?" You'll get a real chuckle out of that article. Here's a story on "Will You Ever Get Out of Debt?" Well, that's the cover story. That's the main cover story of this issue. Here's another article on Britain today, "The Slow, Soft Slide Downhill." What is happening to Britain? Here's one about "Teaching Your Children The True Moral Standards", wouldn't you want to read all about these things in The Plain Truth magazine? There is no subscription price. We have nothing to sell. There's no follow-up, and we'd like to send you a year's subscription.

   Now just send your request to me, Herbert W Armstrong Pasadena, California. That's all the address you need. Just Herbert W Armstrong Pasadena, California 91123. Or you call toll-free, call, toll-free 800-423-4444. Now that's 800-423-4444. And if the lines are busy, please try again, we're getting more and more lines in all of the time so that you'll be able to get right through as soon as possible. Now, in California, Alaska or Hawaii, however, call, collect, we'll pay for the call, call, collect area code 213, area code 213-577-5555. That's 213-577-5555. And so, until next time, this is Herbert W Armstrong, goodbye friends.

   For the free literature offered on this program, write Herbert W Armstrong Pasadena California 91123 in Canada Box 44, Vancouver BC or in the Continental United States. You may call this toll-free number 800-423-4444. In California, Alaska and Hawaii call collect 213-577-5555. If the lines are busy, please try again. The preceding program and all literature were produced by the Worldwide Church of God.