Herbert W Armstrong

   Just think before we had an opportunity to find out why we're here, we learned how to annihilate ourselves from the face of the earth. Now, that's the ultimate irony, isn't it? Mankind has arrived at the place of the acquisition of scientific and technological knowledge, a kind of knowledge how to exterminate ourselves before we have arrived at the philosophical or call it spiritual knowledge. You will as to why we're here in the first place.

   Wouldn't it be dumb if you were in a service station? You overheard the following conversation. Somebody pulls in with a screech of tires and caught the dust and says, "Fill it up." And the service station operator says, "Ok," and the following conversation takes place. "How far are you going today?" "I don't know." "Well, you, well, where are you going?" "I don't know. I haven't the faintest idea. How fast are you gonna travel?" "I don't know." "You mean, you, you don't know your destination, you don't know how much gas you need." "Exactly." "And you know what speed you're going and which direction you, you're going from here he goes." "No, I'm just driving, I'm just taking a trip." "You're taking a trip. But to, to know where that's right. I suppose there have been trips like that. As a matter of fact, practically everybody is on such trips and you stop to think about it."

   See, we're on a spaceship, spaceship earth. It's a confined, limited little orb of ours. It is taking a journey through space. It's in our corner of the solar system, our part of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, we have a life support system which looks now it's just about taking all it can from us. All the insult that we can heap upon it and still keep bounding back. We're drastically close to the limit of some of those life support systems. We're on a journey. We don't know where we're going. We don't know how we got here. We don't know how it all got started. We don't know really why we're on the journey and we don't know what its ultimate destination is. And yet before we learned these things, we have accumulated so much knowledge in other directions, we're so intelligent in how to kill one another.

   Now, when you talk about killing one another let me show you our methods. We've got methods to kill one another that would absolutely boggle the mind. It takes museums. We got whole museums that are called war museums. I've been in museums that show how we have designed and all of our history. Cudgels and bludgeons and spears, knives. I've seen some of the war clubs, the South Pacific Islanders. I've been to museums and places in Africa where I've seen all the types of spears and bows and arrows and clubs that they've used. I've seen way back in the Middle Ages, all the suits of armor and that type of thing. And some of the big museums in England and in France and Germany, we learned how to armor our horses and finally how to armor our automobiles.

   Now we've got juicy little things like laser rays and nerve gas and so-called clean bombs. First, we learned how to blast people apart. The guy that learned how to do that make dynamite won a prize, didn't he? Some kind of a Nobel Prize? I don't think it was a peace prize, but some kind of a prize for inventing dynamite. Now, we've got the multi-megaton which means explosive force and hydrogen bombs equivalent to multiple millions of tons of TNT or dynamite as we call it. So, it's an incredible age now, when you talk about the science of killing, you're talking about an enormously vast complex, highly developed technology, some of the greatest breakthrough in scientific development, discovery, which are used in the household, in transportation, in flying through the air, in communication, in miniaturization in the field of this field. This medium of television, radio, etc. are the direct result of man's timeless quest for greater and more efficient methods of killing himself. I say that if we have devoted 1/10 of the time and 1/10 of the energy and 1/10 of the money that we have as all of human beings and all of our history to researching into why we're here. I was gonna say we probably would have discovered why, but I don't, I don't think so.

   I think I better qualify that, because you see, that's a matter of revealed knowledge and we could be looking all over the world, we could be looking over the world through the institutions that dock this earth and through all of our technological and oriented scientific schools and our separate, very, very dramatically isolated and highly specialized fields of endeavor and then searching all around, through business and science, industry, government education for the answers as to why we're here and we would have never discovered it unless we would have turned around and looked right there close to home in a book that has all those answers that most of us ignore, which is called the Bible and I lost you right there, didn't I the way it goes?

   It says in the book of Daniel, a prophecy for our day that the prophecies of the Bible were to be closed and sealed until a time of the end. It said because many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased, knowledge shall be increased. That was the hallmark of our time, a time when knowledge would be increased when a knowledge explosion would be with it. But at the same time, it says over in Hosea, the same Bible, the next book to it, a prophet who lived back during that day. And his verse six, chapter four says (Hosea 4:6), my people are destroyed, and really it's a being destroyed. My people are being destroyed for lack of knowledge. On the one hand, knowledge shall increase and people are being destroyed for a lack of knowledge. And it must have to do with the quality of knowledge, the kind of knowledge, because you have rejected knowledge I will also reject you that you shall be no priest to me. He said, seeing you have forgotten the law of your God. I will also forget your children. Now, is that a true statement of us? Have we as people in America and Canada forgotten the law of God. Let's see what's number four quick 7, 6? You know, there are 10 of them, the 10 suggestions, people like to talk about, they're not suggesting their commands, but we don't even know them, let alone follow them, believe them, obey them, live them.

   Jesus Christ came to magnify that law that tells how to love God and how to love neighbor. But more than that, it reveals to us in action, the answers to the really feudal questions, the way people ask them of who are we? What are we, why are we on the earth? And where are we going? What is this trip all about? Is this trip necessary this journey we're taking. If we look to that source of knowledge, the missing dimension in knowledge and education, we would find the answers. But we don't like to look to that source. We just like to ignore it. We're somehow, we have a kind of an anti-supernaturalistic bias that makes us turn the other way.

   Criminals are made, not born, cynics are made, not born, murderers, rapists, arsonists, burglars, arch war criminals. You can talk as I was saying last time, people like Mussolini and Hitler told Tojo World War II, you can talk to people now who are figures in the public eye, all of whom were little babies at one time. Somewhere along the line, we through all of our time-honored institutions, our traditional ceremonies, our languages, our creeds, our slogans, our educative process, the experience that comes to us through a ready-made world that is out there when we're born into it and begin to grow up. The world the young people are rejecting. There's so much about it that needs to be rejected. Gradually, we come to be what we say is educated somehow, somewhere along the line, we lose a lot because before this educative process takes place as little kids, little babies as I was talking about last time, we don't even know the meaning of words like racism, bigotry, hatred.

   We don't even know why people have those attitudes as little, tiny kids. Somewhere along the line, it all gets taught to us and this educative process of the inclusion of more and more knowledge into our minds. As the Bible said we'd be living in a time of increased knowledge. But somehow it leads us away from what we didn't know and teaches us things we had no business knowing. It teaches us hundreds of real interesting little ways of how to hate of how to be spiteful, how to be hateful as a personality, how to be cutting, how to be blase and don't care, how to be chic and up to the moment, how to be filled with vanity where it just reeks out of our pores, how to treat one another with contempt, how to make sure we make someone else's life as miserable as possible if we think they don't like me and I hate them because of it. Somewhere along the line, we get educated to become a part of this world, the way it thinks, the way it reasons. It's philosophical concept.

   Education has been defined as that attempt by the adult or the older generation to insert into the minds of the youth. It that is the adult generation's concept, art, literature, music, language, history, its philosophical ideal, its values and in the so doing and all of our different races, nations and languages, we managed to so divide ourselves, we managed to so deeply inextricably plunge ourselves into a morass of so many social, racial, political and linguistic and religious ills, inequality, ironic disparities and ridiculous contradictions that it seems like we'll never find our way out of a mess. So, is our educative process really paying off? Is it right education to say we've come in all of these centuries now of human experience to the place where we have the ability to blast ourselves off the face of the earth before we ever discovered why we were put here in the first place?

   Why were you born to become a farmer trying to feed the population bomb? To become an entertainer to give people a fleeting moment of laughter? To be a millionaire with big houses and fancy cars and ulcers? To live out your last days at the end of a plastic tube in a hospital? To be the last to die in a war you don't understand? Is that all that is to human existence just putting in your time on a troubled planet? No, there's a great purpose for your life. A reason you draw breath and you need to know what it is. Read the free booklet. Why were you BORN? This knowledge gives reason to life adds meaning to all you do. For a true added dimension to your life, be sure to read, Why were you BORN? Send your request to Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney, New South Wales. That's Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney, New South Wales.

   When did you first begin to hate, do you remember? When did you first begin to feel inferior? What was the first time you remember having any attitudes of racism of tribalism of the group instinct? When was the very first time you began to look at another group of people, a whole race of people maybe who belonged to a different school, who would have a different age, who belonged to some other group with which you identified? When was the very first time in your recollection, you felt either inferior to or hostile toward or superior toward or angry toward that group of people?

   Now, ethnic jokes can be very funny if they don't have a hidden dagger in them. If all we're doing is noticing different characteristics, international racial characteristics of people. There was a time when a good ethnic joke about the Irishman or the Jewish person or the black or the white or the imperturbable British or the other races of the world, or the American, the gum chewing sports shirted tourist type and so on. Could be in the right way, a way of laughing at ourselves the way Will Rogers made us do. The kind of harmless humor that still had a point to it, which didn't have any knife in there, didn't have any undertones of racism. Somewhere along the way, the adult generation has done, has perpetuated the doing of a terrific job in teaching hatred, animosity, antagonism, resentment, jealousy, greed, intolerance and inserting this into the minds and the attitudes of youth.

   Now, a magical thing began to happen back in the fifties and especially in the mid-sixties, a youth became alienated from its elders. The older generation, they began to accuse the older generation of having created a world which was unacceptable to the youth. They said, look at you with your hangups, look at you with all of your ulcers. Here you are hacking away with a cough. You're smoking maybe two packs a day. And because I'm hooked up on a couple of tokes on a reef, as they say, I'm maybe a little bit of smack here and there maybe once every few weeks to get a little high. Yet you're boozing up and going to bed delirious with alcohol every single night. And you're trying to tell me how to live. So gradually the philosophical difference between the youth and the adult generation became apparent. Then the hippie movement and all of this and then the clans and we heard about the pigsty of some of these areas. Oh, the vibes in that kitchen, they'd say they began to learn that color and light and heat and even energy travels in ways. So, they talked about vibrations. And finally, you know, everything's got a vibe, it's a good or a bad vibe. And some of these experimental farms cropped up around the country.

   Well, eventually certain numbers, not all of the youngsters began to recoil from that and to turn away from that. And along came the Jesus people movement and there was then Buddhism and there are the heroes of Muhammad and some of the other oriental religions, even from India, kids are shaving their heads wearing robes, tinkling bells and passing out literature on the street corner with all the verbs of them and the vigor of ancient old fire eating prophets who was standing there preaching about going to hell. And you can see the satanist to Jesus people play in Frisbee together in the park these days. They can even get along.

   And what I see in that is something rather sad. On the one hand, with this white emotion, a desire, a willingness and eagerness even to question time honored tradition. A desire to get at the bottom of origin, to say, what is this life all about? A very good attitude in one sense of saying, look, here's dad who was going up and down the freeway, getting a pot before his time his hairistinean is falling out. He can't even sleep at night without all sort of artificial sleep inducers. He's getting into arguments all the time with mom. We can't live in a home. It's got to be like a motel where you hang your hat. It's just kind of a house. There's no of here, even if they lived in a home with both parents, which is getting to be rather uncommon these days, they look at what they call the rat race. The man in the gray flannel suit, the endless stream of tired people in the grocery stores, the restaurants and the movie theaters of society.

   And they say, I don't want this, so far so good. They came to the point a lot of us should have come to of saying there's so much in society that is so futile. If this is life, struggling fighting, clambering, clawing over each other in this competitive world of dog-eat-dog competition and getting old before your day. So little, little artificial playthings and toys. This isn't what I want, so far so good. And right at that juncture, if somebody could have told the kid the truth, oh, the changes that could have been made. But unfortunately, there are enough leftists and ultra liberalists. There are enough anti supernaturalistic no God, believers in conscienceless human behavior, animalistic indulgence in one's own mindless passions.

   There are enough preachers of licentiousness in the world to say, enjoy yourself anything you do to one another with one another. As long as it doesn't, quote, hurt anybody, no matter how many times you get a case of some horrible disease that even science can't identify as yet, no matter what it does to your body, your mind, your future, no matter what it does to your kids. As long as nobody gets hurt, they say, go ahead, live it up, have a ball. So, what they did is go back into something so ancient. They were lying there at the trough at Roman orgies, way back at the time of Christ stuffing themselves.

   And pardon me for saying it to the point, they were ready to vomit and did artificially and then rinse out their mouth and go back to eating again. Now this is history. You can read of people who were so lost in a desire to satiate the senses of living sensually doing whatever is pleasing to oneself, believing whatever is pleasing, which is the very essence of German rationalism. I didn't say that so much, but I should say progressive education.

   Were you at your grandmother's last night or were you not at your grandmother's last night? Which is the most pleasing to you no matter what is reality. What's the most pleasing to believe you were there? And you know what? You remember it because you had a flat tire on the way home, but it's not pleasing because somebody saw you with this gal you got in too late, anyhow. What's the most pleasing thing to believe? So, you believe the most pleasing thing? This is in the guise of education these days. No, the kids began to see something. A lot of people ought to see, the society is wrong.

   Now, since society is founded on lies, why don't we discover what is the truth? Why supplant one lie or a whole series of them with other lies that are just about as bad. Why reject the establishment and turn around and accept the establishment, Christ? Why claim that the establishment is wrong in its war mongering, its defense industry. It's wrong in its government. It's language, it's religion, it's wrong in its social structure. It's wrong in everything, but it's not made a mistake in one direction only. That's the traditional mainstream concept of Jesus. You suppose young people might finally tumble to the idea that society was wrong in that too?

   I'm not saying that they've looked into this book, this Bible and found out all about the Bible and then decided that uh they couldn't accept it. I'm saying that there are lots of people standing in pulpits that are virtual biblical illiterates and there are millions of people sitting in pews and going through the motions that haven't even studied this book. They don't know much about it, haven't bothered to read it, let alone study it, mark it up a little bit and check it, research it and prove it. God says, prove me now here with.

   So here we are, we've come to the place of the increase of knowledge to the point of being able to obliterate ourselves. And we haven't yet gotten around to finding out why we're here. Don't you think just before we go, it would be good to find out why we were here in the first place?

   Can you imagine the confusion you would cause and the blank looks you would get if you were to step up to the ticket count of an international airline and request a ticket to the Kingdom of God?

   The Kingdom of God has been the subject of widespread misunderstanding for thousands of years. No other Bible reference is used as often and misunderstood as completely as the Kingdom of God. What do you mean Kingdom of God? Is a free booklet that answers the numerous questions behind this important subject. It shows the direct relationship between the Kingdom of God and world ruling government. No international airline can sell you a ticket to the Kingdom of God, but you can learn what it is, where it will be, and how you can get there by requesting and reading the free booklet. What do you mean Kingdom of God? Be sure to request. What do you mean Kingdom of God? Send your request to Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney, New South Wales.

   I don't know what kind of an education Adolf Hitler had. All I know is the end result of all that became a part of his education. What he accumulated as he might call knowledge during the course of his life. The result was millions upon millions of human beings dead and they're still dead. And the result was millions of others whose minds and lives were absolutely shattered. The result was incalculable, billions of loss.

   The result also was pushing the world a giant step closer to the potential for human extermination because born directly out of German, as well as American research during World War II is the present day space race, arms race, the nuclear age in which we live. The nuclear weapon, even though Japan figured of course in it and wasn't dropped until the last moments of the war against Japan after Germany had already surrendered.

   Nevertheless, as I said earlier, man's quest for knowledge, especially in how to kill each other has been a very diligent search. We've extended some of our best energies in learning how to better kill one another. So, the upshot of whatever it was that Hitler learns from the time he was a little tiny baby gooing at his mother until the time that he became a political figure in Germany, the alliance of Mussolini and later on with Japan that plunged the world into World War II. These ideological differences between governments and their foreign policies, their domestic policies, but especially this thing of trade that I talked about a good deal and how we're now in a bizarre repetition except in reverse of that right now today.

   So, whatever it was. The final accumulation of a concept in one man's mind has preached to a lot of cohorts whose names are familiar to you. You remember some of the top echelon Nazis of World War II, their doctrine of racism, the idea of a superior master race, Hitler seeing himself as virtually a messiah to lead the whole world into a 1000-year German reich. To bring about a virtual millennium German style. So, everybody could live at peace except peace for them meant the extermination, genocide of one race.

   And maybe a lot of others too, who knows what worked in the back of that demented mind that there was a time when he gurgled at his mother when she kissed him on his little feet, probably with that funny looking little mustache. There was a time as an adult, even Eva Brown thought he was cute. Who knows? But look what kind of a man he became. Now, society is filled with would be Hitlers, they're Hitlers in lots of homes. There are Hitlers in organizations, there are Hitlers that are bosses over other people. That same idea of totish egotism of a desire for self-aggrandizement and self-assertiveness, that innate vanity, that innate, fantastic misappraisal of one's own self is in the heart of practically every human being to a greater or lesser degree. It just comes out in different ways.

   Somewhere along the line in the accumulation of knowledge, whatever his education amounted to, Hitler became a separate personality, a separate man with separate ideals that were to one day plunge the entire world into the holocaust of World War II. So, the Bible says that we would be living in a time of increased knowledge and we are, but it says we are being destroyed for lack of knowledge. That's ironic. It must be the quality of knowledge. It must have to do with what kind of knowledge. And that's where we missed the boat because the word of God challenges us when it says, "Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I will forget your seed, your children for generation after generation."

   The Bible is the book that shows us why we're on this earth. Why we were born, why we as little tiny children have innate desires, innate appetites drives which don't really display themselves at that early age, but later on are going to crop up in all of our different social structures. Knowledge increases today, it's exploding today, we're in a knowledge explosion. And as we explode in knowledge, we're about to explode ourselves off the face of the earth. Because of our advances in science, the matchless minds that have gradually accumulated enough knowledge that they have given us bequeathed to us the weapons by which we can now destroy ourselves before we've had the wit or the wisdom to turn around and find out why we were on this earth in the first place.

   Next time I want to show you what is the missing dimension in education, what education could really be like if that missing dimension were inserted into it, were put into it so that it permeated education. There is a vast missing dimension. A missing link you can call it that in education if it were there. And if every child all over the world were taught that missing dimension, we'd have a virtual millennia like utopian wonderful world right here and now. But because that is not taught, it's been left out of our knowledge. There's a great missing gap in our knowledge. We live in a world that we do. The problems are here one day, they will exterminate us unless we get rid of the problems first.

   Now you want to write for the Plain Truth magazine, the book which we told you about. But the Plain Truth I want to talk about just for a moment. It will be hard-hitting magazine articles straight out of the Bible on more religious subjects, but also articles on the economy, on politics, on the weather, on pollution articles every single month along these and other lines and giving you the solution from the point of view of the Word of God, the Plain Truth magazine, free of charge, no price and be sure to request the booklet, Just what do you mean the Kingdom of God? You heard me say that the Kingdom of God is not being proclaimed today. People don't seem to know what it was. Here's the proof. I don't ask you to believe me because you hear me say it, believe it because you prove it to yourself is the Kingdom of God something within you. Maybe somewhere along your religious experience, you've heard someone say that, maybe you even thought it was in the Bible. Did Jesus actually say to a group of carnal minded Pharisees the Kingdom of God is within you? There's a scripture in the Bible which people seem to think says that, you read of that in this booklet.

   Can the Kingdom of God be a nation on this earth? Take a look at Great Britain no longer great. Can anyone who formerly espoused the idea that the British Empire was virtually the kingdom of God on earth still believe in that today. Did Hitler believe that he was a would-be messiah and ushering in a kind of a German millennium, a kingdom of God with Hitler himself at the obvious helm. What does that make out of him? Some kind of a would-be Messiah, no doubt. Well, the Kingdom of God has been grossly misunderstood this booklet shows you that it is an actual kingdom with a King with a territory with subjects and with laws by which those subjects are ruled. And in each case is not some philosophy or theory of man. It is no idea of ours. It is rather one biblical scripture after another that shows you in plain layman's language straight from the shoulder. Plain talk. Exactly, what is the Kingdom of God? Is it heaven? Here really is the entire epitome all wrapped up in a nutshell of what is the promise Jesus Christ of Nazareth gives to humankind. He came talking about the Kingdom of God. He talked about a great wedding supper. He gave many analogies, many examples of what he meant by the Kingdom of God. This booklet goes through the scriptures on that subject and shows you as no other booklet we have exactly what is the Kingdom of God? It is free of charge. There is no price for it. Just what do you mean the Kingdom of God?