Personal
from Herbert W. Armstrong
Family life in the Western world is crumbling. WHY? Where is it all leading?
The VERY foundation of any stable civilization is a solid FAMILY STRUCTURE. Today’s civilization, with its foundation disintegrating, is itself on the way out!
WHY? The modern world has adopted what it calls “the new morality,” which in truth means gross IMMORALITY! Mated with it has come “women’s liberation.” Women have been emancipated from the HOME! Women have their own incomes and a new spirit of independence.
Nothing in this material world is as important as a happy home life with father, mother and well-taught happy children–a close-knit FAMILY.
WHY?
It strikes at the very heart and core of humanity’s future and eternity and the Gospel that Jesus Christ proclaimed.
His Gospel was the good news of the coming Kingdom of God. That Gospel, suppressed from the world for 1,900 years, reveals that God’s Church is the affianced Bride of Christ–to marry Him at His glorious imminent return, establishing the world-ruling Kingdom of God. What has that to do with established FAMILY LIFE?
By approximately the middle of the first century, Christ’s GOSPEL MESSAGE was suppressed–not proclaimed to the world until the middle of the present 20th century!
And what was that Gospel message? It was the news of the coming Kingdom of God. And what is the Kingdom of God? It is the divine FAMILY OF GOD, ruling all earth’s nations with the government of God.
WHO and WHAT is GOD?
God is NOT a “Trinity.” Yet it is true God is more than one personage. Actually God is a family name.
In the very first verse in the Bible, Genesis 1:1, the English translation is, “In the beginning GOD created the heavens and the earth.”
Moses originally wrote those words in Hebrew. The Hebrew for God is Elohim, a plural noun, such as the words family, church, group. ONE Church with many members– yet “from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies” (Ephesians 4:16).
Not many independent Christians, each going his own way as he feels is right in God’s eyes–but ONE BODY, not only JOINED TOGETHER, but fitly joined together, all speaking the same thing (I Corinthians 1:10) and that “same thing” the Word of God–God’s TRUTH as revealed in His Word.
A FAMILY is made up of more than one person, yet only one family. And GOD’S family on earth is not split up and divided, for “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” It is COMPACTED together (Ephesians 4:16), and the word compacted means as closely bound together as if GLUED together–definitely not made up of independent Christians.
And so, in truth, God is not merely ONE PERSONAGE or even limited to a “Trinity,” but is a FAMILY.
And God is a KINGDOM–that is, the supreme divine FAMILY that RULES the UNIVERSE! The whole Gospel, which Jesus Christ brought from God for mankind, is the GOOD NEWS of the coming KINGDOM OF GOD.
And the united, closely knit together family of Christians –the Church–will, at the coming of Christ and the time of the resurrection, become the KINGDOM OF GOD!
The Kingdom of God starts with a FAMILY relationship– first the physical human families, second, the ONE compacted together CHURCH and, finally, when the Church is changed to immortality, the GOD FAMILY–which is the KINGDOM OF GOD!
There is but the ONE GOD, even though that GOD is composed of more than ONE PERSONAGE! But those personages are closely COMPACTED together. Jesus said that He and God the Father are ONE. They are 100 percent IN HARMONY. So must the CHURCH be!
Elohim is the divine FAMILY–only ONE family, and therefore ONE GOD!
When Jesus was born human, of the virgin Mary, He became the Son of God. He was “Immanuel”–God with us–God in mortal human flesh to make it possible for the rest of us humans to be born into the GOD Family!
In Genesis 1:26, Elohim said, “Let Us”–not let me –“make man in OUR IMAGE …”–in God’s likeness as to form and shape, although man is made from the dust of the ground, mortal, and God is wholly SPIRIT, not matter or flesh.
So the eternal Father is GOD–a divine personage. And Jesus is a different person and is GOD! They are two separate and individual persons (Revelation 4:2, 5:1). The Father is divine supreme HEAD of the GOD FAMILY. He is the LAWGIVER, Christ is the administrator–He does the work by the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Word or Spokesman–He speaks and it is done.
But when Jesus was begotten in the womb of the virgin Mary, He was NOT, as all other humans, begotten by a human father, but by GOD the divine Father, by the power of God’s Spirit, which emanates from His very person. When Jesus became adult, He set us the example of praying to His FATHER in heaven. He had become the Son of God. And so we have the divine Family relationship– Father and Son. That is a FAMILY relationship!
But humans, if called by God the Father, made physically in the likeness of God, may receive the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, thus being begotten, but not yet born of God. Though not yet born of God, we do become the begotten children of God (Romans 8:14-17).
The Church of God is the affianced Bride of Christ, to MARRY Christ at His coming in glory, when the Church will be changed from physical mortal flesh to immortal SPIRIT.
The Church will, then, become the actual born INHERITORS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD, the DIVINE Family!
The Kingdom of God will then become the GOD FAMILY, ruling the UNIVERSE!
Did you ever come to realize that this FAMILY relationship is given to no other beings God ever created, but to us as humans? Angels do not reproduce children, have no FAMILY relationship. Animals, birds, fish have no close and lifelong family relationship as do humans.
Satan is subtly DESTROYING the human FAMILY relationship. He is doing it through the women’s liberation movement and through the new-morality attitude toward sex.
The number of men who have become perverted in their minds as homosexuals and the smaller number of women lesbians tend to reduce the number of families and to destroy a God-blessed family relationship. The divorce rate is also gradually tending to destroy the human family relationship.
Satan is doing everything in his power to destroy GOD’S Church and GOD’S way of life–the way of His law, His government!
And this world is heading at accelerating speed into the final CRISIS–the END of this evil world and the DAWN of a peaceful and happy WORLD TOMORROW, ruled by the Kingdom of God.
Then human mortals still living will be ruled by the Kingdom of God. Satan will be gone from earth.
And, in that happy WORLD TOMORROW, mortal humans, taught and ruled by the GOD FAMILY, will learn the joys and blessings of a healthy home-and-family relationship, with spiritual salvation and eternal life to look forward to.
Jesus taught us to pray: “Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”(Matthew 6:10)!
