Herbert W Armstrong

   How can we say we're really educated if we do not know what, why, and who we are? If we don't know why we're on the earth, if we don't know what is our individual purpose, if we don't know what human life is all about?

   Ironically, as I was saying, last time we have now come to the educated process, our specialized tools of scientific endeavor have now brought us to the point where we're able to exterminate ourselves before we found out what we are. Now that's dumb. I mean, this has got to go down as something that is so dumb that you can't imagine the stupidity of it.

   They keep telling us in higher education that there are no answers. Just better questions. Wouldn't that be futile? If every single time you ask somebody, he analyzes your question, you know, they do it in college classrooms all the time. They do it on talk shows. They do, I suppose they do it when they're trying to get an answer out of a witness before a judge. Uh, they want to know something. Now, that's a good question. This is the way that people when they don't know the answers scramble around.

   Now. That's a good, congratulations there. You ask a great question. I don't know what the answer is, but this is the stuff of which higher education consists. We don't even know what we are. At least we claim we don't. And yet we're able to blast ourselves off the face of the earth. And we say we can't find solutions, we can't find answers. All we can do is come up with better questions.

   The following advice was given to a college graduating class in a commercial or commencement address. It might have been commercial by a noted writer and author in New York State. It's rather typical of the spirit of modern science. Well, I'd like to give you a part of it. The author was Eli or Eli, whichever it is Weisel. He cautioned the graduates to be wary of those who pose as masters. In other words, he said, anyone who tells you he has the answers to the big questions with all apologies to your teachers do not believe them. There are no answers to true questions. There are only good questions, painful, sometimes exuberant and others.

   Whatever I have learned in my life is questioned and whatever I have tried to share with friends is questions. Now, that was cute. That was a fine statement. But I'm here to tell you that I've got some answers, some real big answers to the big questions that are asked, who are we, what are we, why are we here? You know, science can't tell you. Science can't tell you what human beings really are. They just don't know. I know because there is a missing dimension in people's knowledge. There is one source to which we must go that science has ignored. There is one place we can look for knowledge of the most basic kind. A kind of knowledge that most people completely leave out of their education and really which they're quite proud.

   People are rather proud of the fact that they have utterly no knowledge whatsoever when it comes to things metaphysical as they say, or spiritual or, uh, well, they might say philosophical. We like to use anything except the word God or Jesus Christ, his Son or the word of God, the Bible. These bother us. Why? Well, because we feel guilty, I suppose because we're creatures of conscience and deep down inside all of us know in our hearts. Uh Actually, in our hearts, we do know there is a God. Sure we do. Even the most hardened atheist knows there's a God. He's not kidding anybody except himself.

   Even his friends probably know that if he were, as I say, hanging upside down in a well or out in a, a boat in the Atlantic all by himself with not much food. It might just possibly be that you could come upon an atheist who is one of the world's greatest cynics, a very hardened man, bitter about life cynical toward humankind in general. And the idea there is no God and we're all a product of lovesick amoeba. You might see a strange sight. If that man were really in a desperate circumstance, you might catch him on his knees. You might hear him mentioning the name of God.

   Now, most of the time you only hear people mentioning the name of God in what they call polite conversation and what's polite about it? Really? When people assume that someone else likes to hear profanity, on golf courses they do, great shot George. The guy says, and the caddy too, thanks. You know, he just smacked one about 240 yards straight down there with maybe a three iron greatest shot of his life about nine out of 10 times. He hits a real bad one who gets the blame. God does. He's asking God to condemn. Rob uses the word damn. And in his order, one after another, the weather, the trees, the grass, the depth of the grass, the rough and the fairway, the green, the caddy, his club. He doesn't know what the real problem is.

   You can grab the club and shake it and say I found your problem, Hank. He'd say what, what, what, what it's a loose nut on the end of the handle here and he might get the point. People tend to blame God. He's the convenient uh personality to blame for all our difficulties.

   But they like to take the thanks and the reward and the accolades for their successes. So, people blame God for the conditions in the world and congratulate man for whatever they say is good about the world. We go around with the lower lips hanging out, cranked down like a bent window shade about ready to step on them.

   Why does God allow war? You know, if there is a God, why doesn't he stop all of this? This is insanity. If he stopped that, he would have to put you. The chances are and me too at a different time in my life and everybody else in a straitjacket, but our minds don't let us reason this way. We say, why does God allow a little baby to die or because God allows parents to have free moral agency because God is not interfering in this world now, at our invitation, we have asked him, humankind has asked him people's way back in the Bible. You read of it. It's the development of all of history. Clear back in the Old Testament of your Bible have asked him. They begged him. They've said, please stay out of our lives. Don't talk to us. They said to Moses, don't let God talk to us anymore. We're scared of his voice. We don't care if you stutter, you get Aaron to do your talk, you talk to us, but don't let God talk to us anymore. Now, God's been cooperating with you. He really has. When you stop to think about it, people don't want God poking his nose into their business. Now, they might think that the preacher is doing that and I could agree with them on that. I don't think anybody really enjoys the spectacle of somebody wearing a dress when he's maybe 40. And you think a man walking up to your door with his collar on backwards and coming with a little book in his hand to talk about your personal problems when you'd rather be out in the garden in the yard or maybe drinking a beer in front of the television set. I've known the people who, when they knew the visiting program was on the way, that's the gestapo for the church in this case that they pull the shades down, turn the lights out and peek out just like the gestapo was coming to arrest them. And you can know why in every case, we kind of laugh at these mistakes of the past. We say, well, you see, I was trying to kick the smoking habit and I was just frantically pulling the chain trying to get rid of the cigarettes when the doorbell rung and I knew that they were there. Uh Well, anyhow, God hasn't been doing that to you. Maybe you think he has, but you've confused the preacher with God, but, uh, God himself hasn't, you can't point to a time in your life where you just know that God looked down and singled you out and made your life miserable and just dogged your heels until he got you to admit that he was there and that you weren't doing right according to his law and that he was gonna change your attitude and change your mind. You can't cite a single case. That's why I take issue with all this, won't you come business of uh the professional fire and brimstone type scaring the daylights out of people. Or else using every kind of paraphernalia and set possible mood setting music and like to get people into a certain mood and there are some fabulous speakers doing that to get people into a certain mood and make them come across with a certain confession or an admission publicly which magically answers all their problems.

   Now, what we need are answers to these questions. We go around with a lip out saying, why does God allow wars? Why does God allow the innocent to suffer? Why does God do this? And why does God do that? Then when something happens, constructive, we say right on man, man did it. I did it, he did it or they did it never God did it. Isn't that a little irrational? I'll show you that that's a little irrational because the answers to every one of those questions are available to you and I have no special corner on that information whatsoever.

   Tide's coming in almost reaches that sandcastle. Hm. Some little kids sure spent a lot of time with that. Too bad they never last. Yeah. A lot of things are like that. Kids are grown now and soon they'll be gone. Well, life's been pretty good, summer home, yacht, vacation when I want. But Sandy and I are getting any younger. Mhm. Is this all there is?

   All of us at one time or another must wonder what's life all about? One of the keys to fulfillment in life is a sense of purpose. The free booklet. Why were you BORN? Gives the true answer to this age-old question and reason to human existence. Why were you BORN? Send for your free copy, dial this toll-free number 800-423-4444. That's 800-423-4444.

   Educators admit the big questions are just not being answered. We go around asking them almost endlessly if there is a God. Why does he allow the innocent to suffer? Why are there things like mosquitoes and thorns and thunderstorms, typhoons, too many deserts and not enough good food. Not enough good times, a life that is too short and over with before you really get old enough and have the smart to enjoy it, as they say, he is too old and too late smart.

   You know, is the one thing I've seen here and there says in the thick American but accented by the German language, we ought to have answers to these things of who am I? And what am I? And why am I? And where am I going? What's the end of my life? What really happens when the man is preaching a funeral and they're lowering the coffin into the ground? Is it the end of it all? Or is it that there's something thereafter? But it's just that we have such ego that we can't imagine it, it all stops right then and there. We've never gotten answers to these because we have been told that the big questions just really don't count.

   This was in a major magazine about God in the colleges a few years ago. And it said, and I quote, although the colleges pride themselves on the awakening of young minds on the asking of the big questions of life. Who and what man is? Whence does he come? Where is he going? Is there a God et cetera? It is soon clear to college students that the big questions don't count either in academic standing or in later life or in research grants. In the first place, the standing assumption is that ultimate questions are in principle unanswerable and hence not worth asking seriously. This assumption may not discourage freshmen but over about a four-year period of a smorgasbord of this and that and the other kind of a sampling of, of various things of biology and chemistry and physics. And uh well, the various abstracts and specializations of these subjects like zoology and, and the like paleontology. So on, uh people learn that the big questions don't count that it's actually better not to ask them that. It's embarrassing. The professor is probably the type who is appealing to the liberal minded. He's gonna say something catty or something rather snide or sharp. You'll get embarrassed you say. But is there a God? Try it sometime. I dare you, in a college classroom on philosophy. You're talking about philosophical things. You're dealing with the nature of man. Say, professor, he'll say yes you may. No, that wasn't what I had in mind. What I wanted to. Professor I wanted to know. Is there a God? Watch the other kids, you know, turn around, look at this creep. It'll be incredible. I da I, I just, I dare you. I was gonna say it would be an interesting try, you know, try it. Interesting thing to try. I've heard of things like that happening is the reason I pass it on to you because college classrooms can be very vicious places. Uh, people don't go there trying to find the magical X by the paragraph that answers all these big questions we asked and pretty soon they're, they're kind of defeated in their search. They're just told don't ask the big questions because you're either gonna get put down. They don't count anyway. And there are no answers for them. Well, I say there are answers.

   Your Bible said you would be living in a time characterized by the ability of humankind to annihilate himself. Jesus said so, he said in Matthew 24 verses 21 and two (Matthew 24:21-22), that except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved alive. As Moffett version adds, no human beings left alive on the earth. At the same time, a prophet named Daniel was told, he couldn't understand the many symbolisms that he saw. He was told. No, go your way, Daniel and close up, seal up the book. It is not yet. You can't know it, it's hidden, it's concealed until the time of the end because many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased and we're in the midst of a knowledge explosion, knowledge shall be increased.

   Yet at the same time, ironically over in the fourth chapter about the sixth verse of Hosea (Hosea 4:6), one of the so-called minor prophets, a smaller prophetic book in the Old Testament. It says my people, speaking actually of our peoples, if we could believe that and realize it, my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge, lack of knowledge. Well, then here on the one hand is a great deal of knowledge, an outpouring of knowledge such as never before and the specialized sciences why wouldn't anymore be able to tell you how to work some of these computers or how they work than anything. They could take me into a telephone company and show me all the switchboards and all the wires and everything. I'd be lost. There are things in specialized fields that I just absolutely have a tiny smattering and that's all where I don't know much more about it.

   But, you know, the problem is with most of us, we let our minds stagnate. We learned a certain few things, a lot of that largely interpreted. Certainly history is interpreted a little bit of household science, general science and biology. And maybe we flunked plain geometry. We tried a little bit of business math. We finally got through high school talking out the average person or maybe a year or two of college.

   And now it's becoming more and more commonplace for people to even graduate from college. And college has largely become a kind of a senior high school in many ways and not really even looked upon in the way that it was back in the twenties and thirties. As far as what a college education provides now, you almost have to have a college education where commonly then you had to have a high school education to get a good job. But by the time you're through with your education, you sort of retire from accumulating knowledge and much of the knowledge you accumulated may have been partial knowledge or miss knowledge and largely interpreted.

   So here you are x number of years later as maybe a senior citizen or a middle aged type, you've already been rearing a family, you've got a job, but you've been completely dis attached. In the meantime, the world passed you by. All these specialized fields have been developing fantastically burgeoning knowledge exploding and going on in this and that and the other technical direction, the outpouring of books, the press is rolling away.

   There are so many books and journals and even specialized fields that the doctors, the scientists, the lawyers, the people in those fields can't even keep abreast of what is in their own field of what's available. They had to go back to school about three out of five years and couldn't even practice if they just tried to keep abreast of what's becoming available because it's a cumulative, you know, it's something like 90% of all scientists who have ever lived are alive right now today gives you some kind of an idea of the accumulation of knowledge.

   So here we are with this outpouring of knowledge and at the same time, less ability to solve our problems, bigger problems that seem to be more insurmountable than ever before and less knowledge about origins about the big values. Who am I? What am I? And even being brainwashed and told by some people, we shouldn't even ask those questions.

   What an irony then on the one hand, a knowledge explosion. On the other hand, a troubles explosion. Could there be some relationship? Is there some connection here? Is it miss knowledge? Is it that we have certain carnal physical material knowledge going off in a certain direction and omitting some very important knowledge in another direction? The answer is a resounding yes.

   We have cast to the ground and ignored the most important knowledge of all revealed knowledge, knowledge that would tell us exactly what we are and why we're on the earth and why we draw breath, I can give it to you in a nutshell. We are creatures created in the form, the shape and the similitude of a divine, all wise God.

   We have been made separate just as separate as any animal is separate from him, except that he has given us a mind with the spirit of man in that mind and that brain to give us what we call mind as completely differentiated from animal brain and instinct. He has made us in his own image only physically, but his creation spiritually is still going on.

   People think creation, even people who believe in God think creation was a finished work. It is not, it was only begun. It is now in a process. God is reproducing himself. You were put on this earth to become a member of his family. Now there you heard it. People are going to accuse me of never delivering, never giving him the solutions never coming across with the answers.

   You're a free moral agent because God wants to build in you character and character requires free choice. You've got to have the ability to make the wrong decision, have the wisdom because you turn to him for it to see what is the right decision. Have the courage because you got to turn to him for it to make that right decision. And then having the self-governing willpower because he has to even give you that to force yourself to abide by that right decision.

   And so, to overcome your own carnal nature and to grow to become a perfected son of his. It's a process. The Bible talks about it. That's what repentance is all about. That's what the New Testament is all about. That's why Jesus says to him that overcome, will I grant to sit with me in my throne. That's why he said to him that overcomes, overcomes himself, the world around him. And a very real Satan that the Bible describes, overcomes to him will I give power over the nations.

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   The irony of this tremendous knowledge explosion and at the same time, the lack of the right kind of knowledge was pretty well explained by a Professor Emeritus here some time ago who said, we know how to make a man, an outstanding scientist, but we don't know how to make a man a saint. Well, that's putting it one way. This was the word uh the statement by Dr. Benjamin E. Mays who was uh president now President Emeritus of Morehouse College of Atlanta, Georgia, which is a co-educational black institution now, maybe by now it's integrated, I don't know, at a conference University of Michigan, he made this statement.

   We know more than we have ever known. Just as I've been saying, we have more educated people than at any other time in history. We have more people with college degrees. Yet our humanity is a diseased humanity. It isn't knowledge we need, knowledge we have, he added humanity is in need of something spiritual. Well, it's not just in need of something spiritual, it's in need of God Almighty of his Son Jesus Christ and of the truth from his word.

   And let me tell you that the Bible is scientific, that every single study, if we were honest in our pursuit of knowledge that included the Bible in it, and it permeated the, the, the study where you were looking at things as if from the point of view of the Bible, you could put together, for example, the Bible and geology.

   If you were to harmonize geology and the Scriptures, you would find that the geologic record that you see under your feet, the very mountains, the thrusts and the horse vessel faults and all the geosynclines and isolines and the folds and upthrusts, all the earthquake action and the magma intrusions and volcanoes.

   Everything that you see with your eye that makes the crust of this earth and the continental shelves and the depths of the oceans are all explained in the Bible. Exactly how it got that way, don't you think it makes a lot more sense to understand the forces and the energies and more than that, why the world was prepared the way it was?

   Why it is that our land masses are just where they are the oceans with just the right depth, the ocean currents coming by to make what would otherwise be a completely inhospitable part of the world incapable of supporting man a beautiful area. Why the mountain heights are just like they are. Why aren't they 75,000 ft? You ever think of that?

   Why isn't the world almost straight up and down? Why isn't the world absolutely as flat as a cue ball? Why isn't the world different? Why is it exactly the angle that it is? So our seasons operate, why does it wobble like that as it rotates around? Why does it have that yearly trip around the sun to give us these seasons?

   Why does the moon go around once a month and cause the tides? Why is it just the distance it is from the moon or otherwise the tides would sweep over the entirety of the continents, destroying everything on it. You know, twice a day, we'd have an avalanche of water. Why is the whole thing arranged exactly as it is old people say that's an accident?

   That chance that just happened? Thanks B to the hydrogen atom spelled with a capital H the so-called God of the dogmatism of evolution and science. Oh But what a fantastic study geology really is when you have in your mind that missing dimension that God Almighty created and that there really was a flood.

   I know I've picked up where? Well, I think graft the lights. Ammonites are the types of, of uh former sea life fossilized forms on 10,000 ft mountain plateaus in Colorado. You know, science admits that something like 90% of all the rocks on the face of the earth were water born, water deposited, water carried water formed.

   In other words, sedimentary and that even the other rocks like granitic rocks such as many of the big mountain ranges consist of where you see all the the tormented, twisted uh folds and so on. You can see in the Swiss Alps, in the Rockies and et cetera.

   Once this was sedimentary water deposited. Now, through the action of the moving the crust of the earth and faulting and so on, they become all twisted and sometimes overlaid or overthrust and so on. And you see vast mountain peaks, doesn't it make it far more interesting and exciting? If you understand how it got that way, the forces the energies that caused it and more than that why that the creator was going about the business of building the most beautiful place for you to live and work and eat and sleep and breathe and hope and dream in that any mind, any 10 billion human minds could ever imagine.

   How could a human mind imagine if you were going to create something a creation as unbelievable as ours is? How could he create a Switzerland, New Zealand? How could he bring about the American and the Canadian Rockies? How could he give us things like that? You know, a human mind playing in the mud making mud pies. What a bumbling wretched mess he'd make of it.

   When you understand, when you study zoology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, even mathematics. Every science there is if it's a, a true science and a specialized science, not some speculative mindless thing that goes under the masquerade of science and you have the dimension of the understanding there is a God. And you admit this into your knowledge, it's a part of your mind, your mind is approaching the subject from that point of view. Then you really got knowledge.

   You know, David once said that God's laws had made him more intelligent, smarter. He didn't put it that way. That's a vernacular than his teachers. He knew more than his own teachers. You know, that's why even a little child, a young boy, a young girl, 6, 8 or 10, who knows there is a God can say things filled with more wisdom than some of the greatest leaders of human nations who do not admit God into their knowledge. It's just a fact that's the way it is.

   It's about time. We began to admit there is a missing dimension in knowledge. You ought to write for this booklet. Why were you BORN? This booklet gives you emphatic answers one way or the other. You can expect surprises because it proves there is a great purpose being worked out. It shows you the tremendous difference between animal instinct and human mind. It shows you the difference between brain and mind and it shows you surprisingly enough that creation is a process that is not right now, complete.

   It begins, believe it or not clear back in the very first verses of the Bible in the book of Genesis. And it embodies the entire story of what the Bible is all about, this booklet, Why were you BORN? It shows you the real story of the Garden of Eden. Is that only tradition? Is it myth or was it the first scientific experiment? Was it mankind trying to determine by their own research by their own exploration and experimentation? What was right and what was wrong? As opposed to knowledge that was revealed.

   The booklet deals with that and what is the missing dimension in all knowledge today? Believe it or not. It is revelation from God. It shows you what is the cause of all evil that we are God's workmanship and the purpose in our living. And most importantly that Jesus Christ of Nazareth is alive today. The whole story begins and ends in the life of Jesus Christ. It shows you why humans suffer, it shows you why God allows it and it shows you what we shall be like the whole fantastic, incredible potential of your own human life. Whether you're, as you say, an everyday housewife, whether you're a factory worker, a truck driver, a person on relief or a pensioner, whether you're in a hospital, whether you're in a mental institution or whether you're in jail.

   The title of the booklet is, Why were you BORN?