by Herbert W. Armstrong

PASADENA – I think you ought to know how Ambassador College came to be founded and what is back of it. Now we are getting things back on the track. Everything had gotten off the track. This college was started for a definite purpose, and it was started to be God’s college.

To understand you have to go back to the very beginning. Too many of us want to look at the picture as it is today and we get all muddled up because we don’t know what led to it. We don’t know what came before and so our thinking gets muddled.

You have to go back to the fact that there had been angels on the earth – a super archangel Lucifer, a cherub, was placed on the throne to rule with the government of God. Now they were put here to finish the creation of the earth. God creates everything in duality and in dual stages. First the main basis of the earth was created, and it was all perfect. But it was not finished. There was more to be added yet and God intended those angels to work in the materials on this earth.

Now they had to have team work. They had worked together, so God gave them His government to govern them in His way. And His way is based on love. Now love is first to God, in realizing that He is our maker, He is the supreme power, that He is the great giver, that He is one who first loved us and wants everything that is good for us. And therefore we must obey Him because He only wants what is good for us, and He knows better than we do what is good for us. So we must obey, we must worship Him and no other because that is for our good, not just for His good.

Then this Lucifer rejected God’s government and turned the opposite way – the way of vanity, exalting himself instead of God, the way of hostility against God, resentment, embitterment, feeling that God had not given him a square deal – and he began to work on his angels and to tell them that God is holding the whole universe and He’s only given us this little earth. God hasn’t been fair and so we had better get jealous, we’d better get envious and get into a spirit of competition, strife, rebellion – instead of construction and adding and being part of the creation.

Well, they were entirely disqualified and chaos came to this earth. Chaos came to the entire universe.

There is no evidence in the Bible or otherwise that there ever was any life put on those other planets. Our moon is the same way. When they got there they found it… was in a state that would not contain life.

These angels flubbed it. They were tried and found wanting. And now God has set out to reproduce Himself – that is, He created man in His own image. But He created man out of matter so if we start off and make the mistake that these angels did and go the wrong way, we can repent and God can grant us repentance and God can bring us back.

Jesus Christ was the Word who was with God, has always existed. He was not the son of God. He was without father, without mother, without beginning of days or end of life. He has always existed. Your mind can’t quite grasp that – don’t try. I don’t care whether you are a freshman student or whether you are seasoned ministers from the field. You can’t grasp that. No mind can. Always we think that there had to be a time when it began. There was a time when matter began, when there was no matter, and then a time when God produced matter.

God created the first man. But the first man had to undergo a test. He had the potential of becoming the king over the earth and replacing the discredited Lucifer. God talked to him first as He had talked to Lucifer and the angels first before He sent them there. God had explained all about His law, about His way and how love and giving and outgoing and producing… is the right way and not the incoming way of just greed and vanity and lust and envy, jealousy, competition, strife, hate, revenge, all that sort of thing. That is what Lucifer and the angels turned to.

Now there were two trees in the Garden of Eden… I think the trees were literally there, but that doesn’t make any difference, they represented something they were symbolic. And the tree of Life was symbolic of Adam receiving the Holy Spirit of God, which would have impregnated him as a begotten Son of God. And then in due time God would have changed him from matter into spirit and from mortality into immortality and everlasting life.

He could not take of the Tree of Life until after he had come to know about what the angels had done and had rejected that way and turned to God’s way. He had to qualify by overcoming Satan. When Jesus Christ (the second Adam) came, He couldn’t just start out because He Himself was holy, He had to meet and overcome and conquer Satan. And He did. And if we are ever going to rule with Him in this time now, we have to overcome Satan, to sit with Him on His throne.

Now after Christ comes Satan will be put away and it will be an altogether new ball game. You’ve got to remember it is different now. Satan is still here. God left Satan there because Adam had to overcome that. He had to be aware of that way and turn from it and turn to the way of God.

Satan was very clever so he got to Adam through his wife Eve. So when Eve reached out and took to herself the knowledge of good and evil, that is determining what is right and what is wrong. That is God’s prerogative. They took a prerogative of God, to make themselves God. Satan’s idea was to kick God out and to replace God.

Adam then followed Eve. Adam said, in effect: “God, I will decide for myself what is right and wrong. I’m not going to listen to you telling me what to do and what not to do. Your way is the way of love. Your law – that is the way of right. I’m going to reject that way and decide for myself what is right.”

God then, in effect, said, “Adam, you have made the decision for yourself and for the family that will come from you [which means the whole world; we have all come out of Adam].” And He said, “Therefore, you have decided, and I am sentencing you to 6,000 years of being cut off from me.”

Now get that because that is important. God says: “I am cutting the world off from me, but I am going to dip into that world and I’m going to call some few that I need for special performance to provide and build ahead for my Kingdom, which is going to follow after this 6,000 years. But I am only going to call because I have some special performance that I want them to perform.”

It isn’t a case that just anybody can be saved who wants to. Jesus Christ came 4,000 years later saying, “No man can come to me except the Father who has sent me, draw him.”

You know, the churches have a song “Whosoever Will, May Come.” Did you ever see that in the Bible? Well, it’s in there. But it’s only in one place and that is the fourth verse from the last verse in the whole Bible in the 22nd chapter of Revelation, speaking of a time to come when Satan will be here no more, when God will be calling everybody. But that is not true today. Whosoever will cannot come unless God calls him. They just simply can’t. I have wondered why people who come to hear the truth and they hear the truth and they don’t get it. Their minds are blinded.

God made man with a spirit. He made man out of matter. He made animals out of matter. He put a brain in man. He put a brain in animals. But you take the brain out of animals, especially the larger animals who have brains about the size of a man, like, for example, an elephant or a whale or a dolphin. If you take them out and look at them physically they are exactly the same with such a slight difference – well, maybe 1 or 2 or 3 percent difference – -but when man has a mind with maybe a few thousand percent greater output, you can’t account for that on physical grounds. You have to account for it by the fact that there is a nonphysical component in with the human brain that does not exist in the animal brain. And that nonphysical human component is a Spirit.

There was one spirit put in man. But man needed another spirit – the Holy Spirit of God – that was on the Tree of Life. But when Adam chose the other tree God sent him out and shut him up from the Tree of Life lest he go back and take of it and live forever. In other words, he and his family after him are shut off lest they go back and take of it and in their sins, live forever. Now the angels have to live forever. They are perverted. They are in outer darkness. They are in a condition of hopeless despair, of frustration and they will be for ever and ever. Now they knew that, they knew they were immortal and when they made that decision it was all on them and there is no way they can be changed. Spirit does not change.

Again, I say, God creates in dual stages. When He created angels their creation was not complete until character had been decided, and that had to come from experience and by their own decision. God showed them the right way but they had to decide whether to go that way. But He had equipped them with minds to reason, to think and to decide whether they wanted to go that way or to think of other ways. And that is what they made the mistake of doing. And nobody is responsible for that except themselves.

Man was shut off from the Holy Spirit of God. Now here is the important point that comes down to Ambassador College. That mind of man is confined to the physical, the material. That one spirit in man imparts the power of intellect to the brain. The spirit does not see; it does not hear. It does not receive knowledge of itself.

The brain sees through the eye. The brain hears through the ear. And that is all physical and the only thing you can see is the physical. The only thing you can hear are physical vibrations or sounds. The only thing you can smell, taste or feel are physical things. Spirit is something you can’t. They say matter is anything that occupies space and has weight. Spirit does not and it is invisible to our eyes. Without the Spirit of God, man could not know anything of the things of God. He was cut off from spiritual knowledge. In other words, he was only half there. His creation was only half complete.

Man’s creation is in a dual stage. Adam was the first stage of that creation – the physical stage. It is the material for God to build the second stage, which is the spiritual stage. The first Adam cut himself off from the Holy Spirit of God and the result is that man has quite a great mind, but it is confined to the physical and the material. It is cut off from the spiritual – and so our greatest minds get to thinking – -but here is a creation and they have had to think: How come? How did this creation get here without the preexistence of a Creator who designed it and who produced it? So they came up with the theory of evolution. Now that shuts God out.

Higher education is based 100 percent on the carnality of that one spirit that is only half there and it cuts the greatest knowledge of spiritual things and the things of God. I have said a few times that the greatest minds and the highest educated people on earth are the most ignorant. And that is true because their education is all confined to the physical, and being that they misconstrue so many things, and it is so filled with error and with false hypotheses that they don’t realize it themselves, but in their egotism they think they are highly educated.

God said, “You go build your own system of education, you go and build your own governments, you go and build your own religions and formulate your own [out of your imagination] gods.” And that is what man has done. He said, “Go and devise and build your own civilization.” That is what you and I are living in and, consequently, these people know more than others in this physical, material realm so it goes to their heads, and they think they are really the intelligencia and they are the great.

I knew we needed a different kind of college. I knew that the universities and colleges in this country had gone in to crass materialism, and naturally they had minds that could not be opened to the spiritual because they didn’t have the Spirit of God.

Now this year, I have had to start all over with one freshman class, like we did in 1947 – one freshman class. Now we’re going to teach you things that God revealed. And if God has not opened your mind to understand it, I can’t help that. That’s what we’re going to teach and hope that it will make sense to you.

Now we’re having to start all over again. God is back in this college. And it is not like other colleges. And the way of life on this college is different and going to be different.

We haven’t been able to do it all at once. And some of you students have come in from high schools and from other places and you still want to go along with this world. You have come to a college that is not of this world and is not going to be of this world. And we’re going to as far as possible enforce God’s way in this college. Now we’re not going to go down to the place where you have to get permission to go to the prayer room and someone keeps tab on how many minutes you spend in the prayer room, and where you have to get permission if you need to go to the toilet. But this is going to be God’s college. We’ve had to start it with the one freshman class only.

The only reason I needed a college is that here God had called me into His Work. And I was holding evangelistic campaigns up around in Oregon and Washington six nights a week and very often for six whole weeks in a campaign. And there were converts. And I baptized people. So I tried to form them into little churches, but there was no minister. And not one of those churches ever lasted past about six weeks. And most of them didn’t last that long. And I came to see we had to have a school to train not only ministers, but also to have an educated personnel for all the administrative jobs that are coming along in a fast-growing Work that has now grown worldwide – a great worldwide Work.

You are the pioneer students. And a whole lot of what goes on from here depends on how well you students do this year. If you still love the world, if you still love Satan’s way, if you still want to go that way, you would probably get expelled before the year is out. And I mean business. On the other hand, we’re not going to rule with such an iron fist that we try to legislate character into you. You have to develop your own character.

Now then, here’s what I want and what we will have unless you students want to go ahead in the wrong way.

Ambassador College started in 1947 with one class – the freshman class. In 1948, we added another freshman class but the freshman class of 1947 now became a sophomore class. The next year we added another freshman class. Now we had three. And the first students now became juniors. And then the next year they became seniors. Then we added more.

I hope that next year we can add another class and you who are now freshmen will then be sophomores. The next year I hope we can add another freshman class and we’ll have then three classes just like we started out. And I hope we go on till this is a four-year college once again. But it will be 100 percent God’s college.

Now let me give you just a little outline of what I hope we will be able to have. We need a speech course and one in journalism. We need a course in home ec or domestic science. And we need a course in history, especially connected with biblical history and with the prophecies of the Bible. We need one in international relations.

Then we need one on practical psychology, but that’s totally different from the psychology they’re teaching in this world’s universities.

Then I want a course on a survey of the arts. But that’s looking at it from God’s point of view and what are the arts in the world and how much of it is right in God’s sight and what is not. Then we ought to have something on health, diet and nutrition.

I want to start a chorale once again and a music department. We had a fine music department and I worked with that music department all through these years. Then we need basics in business and law… and physical education. We don’t have that this year. Foreign languages – I don’t think we will go to the place of trying to have a major in Spanish or French or German, which will be the three languages that we probably shall teach, as we have in the past. We’re coming to the place that we might even give consideration to Japanese too.

Then natural science in an elementary way. I said I wanted science taught such as physics and geology and the basic sciences like that, as far as a layman ought to know to be a well-educated person. And something on family relations. Well, those are some of the courses that I am hoping to add. That is what I am outlining for the future.

Now you’re on trial, just as man has been on trial, just as angels were, to see if the college can go on. You will have to be the backbone. If we’re going to have a college next year, you have got to take the new freshmen in line and bring them our way instead of going out that other way. Ambassador College will never go Satan’s way again, I promise you that.

Now I don’t get to talk to you too often. I’m going to try to manage to get here for these forums once in a while this year. These forums were founded for something where I could talk to the students to try to keep this God’s type of college. And I have done that.