Herbert W Armstrong

   And greeting friends around the world. Has God changed? Have his moral standards changed? Does he punish for the same abominations and crimes today as he did in ages past?

   You know, a lot of people look into the Old Testament, and they see the prophecies of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and others. They think of an aged old white-haired patriarch standing in a flowing robe on a rain-splattered craggy cliff somewhere with lightning and thunder crashing around, shrieking, and probably a high-pitched voice about the terrible goings-on in the wild, wild Sodom-like environment down below.

   A lot of people think that these messengers of divine wrath bore tidings of great national calamities of great personal calamities to come upon people because of their sins. You look in the Old Testament. You see a lot of curses upon people for breaking laws. You're looking at the Old Testament even before the giving the 10 commandments; you find out people who broke the Sabbath law by going out and gathering firewood on that day of the week when they were told instead to gather twice as much on Friday to last them through the Sabbath were killed for taking the pain to do it.

   Now, has God changed today? You know, the United States of America is the most religious nation in the world. If you care to research the statistics, you'll find that the Americans, about 94% of them profess belief in some divine being, some universal spirit, or some God compared to only 89% in Canada, 88% in Italy, and 78% in Western Europe and only 38% in Japan.

   And there are an awful lot of Americans who claim to have had a born-again experience. As a matter of fact, you ought to write for the Plain Truth magazine. Get an article coming along very quickly on, Mr. President, Just what do you mean Born Again?

   You know, for the first time in my experience, we've got a man who says he's been born again in the White House now that's going some, you know, we've had a Catholic years ago. It would have been thought that it was impossible to have a Catholic for a president.

   I understand that we have had people very high in other church organizations, one of which is quite oft persecuted. I don't know why, but I guess people just can't stand their doctrines. They surely can't say anything about their morals or their way of living. But the, the Mormon church has had a member right on the cabinet very high in the Mormon Church.

   Some people were worried about the eventuality of such an individual becoming a president, I guess. And people are very concerned about the religion of the president of the United States, which is a country definitely committed to the separation of church and state.

   But you know, there are millions now, a third of the adults in the United States of America in an interview. Now this is a Gallup survey based on personal interviews and about a good representative cross-section of Americans of voting age, half of all Protestants and a third of all Americans say the same thing Jimmy Carter does. They have been born again.

   You ought to write for the current number of the Plain Truth magazine and find out just what in the world born again really means. But now, since we are so religious in the United States and since the Bible is a book that talks about great curses and condemnation for sins. Since we have a president in the White House who is very conscious of what the word sin means. I still ask the question. Has God changed his values? Have the moral standards of the creator changed? Does he now not punish for the same abominations with the same kind of punishment in today's world as he did in the ancient world? It says in the Bible. God used to kill people for breaking his laws.

   Now, you know, you got to say that stern swift justice. There's a great big argument going on all the time here. Hither and thither and yon about capital punishment; one condemned murderer keeps begging people to kill him. And the law is just so absolutely reluctant. They just don't want to do it to him. I guess finally, a man is going to get his way.

   There are other people in other states that also say the same thing. They know they've been convicted of murder. They know that the penalty is death, and they just like to get it over with instead of having all these reprieves and all these appeals and being taken down to death row and living there a year or two and then back somewhere else and then the death row again, I'm adding that tears them up pretty heavily.

   But you know, there still is such a thing as the maximum penalty for crime, even among civil governments over in some of the Arab states, a person steals something and they probably lop off his hand and hang it up by the thumb right alongside the shanks of lamb in the meat market. And here people walk along and say a human hand because it used to belong to a thief. And I don't know, I've never seen any Arabs without both hands. Well, maybe that's just a commentary that needn't be made but, you know, by the time you see a person walking around with only one left, I imagine that's the end of his stealing days; the poor guy would probably sit there and starve to death before he risk losing the other one.

   Now, there were stern, swift punishments that were meted out under the laws of God as administered in the nation of Israel under a system. First of judges and later of kings and those laws were based upon the 10 commandments and based upon the statutes and judgments that were added, the civil codes that regulated conduct, whether landmarks, inheritances, marriage, family affairs, cattle, the crops that were raised, various things with regard to families, whether incest was a crime or a sin, whether rape was a crime or a sin. And it was all spelled out in very great detail.

   Then, in addition to these statutes, there were the judgments which were just like today in the judiciary field where a judge renders an oral or a written decision based upon an already written statute, a law. Now those laws were administered sometimes very swiftly and efficiently and a lot of people would think quite brutally. The only commentary you can make is that just like many Arab countries today.

   And I'm not speaking of a nation such as Lebanon and when it's locked in the grips of civil war, I'm talking perhaps about, let's say the city of Cairo, the right now today, some of the major capital cities of Arab nations are safer places for you to be. You can walk freely around the city of Cairo at night among teeming mobs of very poverty-stricken and often illiterate people and you won't have your wallet lifted or your throat cut or your wife raped or your automobile stolen. There are areas in the big cities in the United States and this includes all the way from the eastern seaboard, clear down to some of the southern cities.

   Like I remember one time we were riding in a cab on the way to a campaign or someplace in Nashville, Tennessee. That's right. The cradle of country western music. And here it came over the call from the office to the cab driver that he was to go to such and such a place, not our cab, but another one we overheard it and our cab driver turned around and said, he Watts says he won't take that call. And sure enough, he didn't; he wouldn't even go in there because there was a certain section of that city where even the taxi cabs were afraid to go with their doors locked.

   Now, you know, you climb in a cab, and it says the driver only has a maximum of $5 in change. That's because so many taxicab drivers have been mugged and robbed. I remember the little old guy in New York City that talked about the hundreds of dollars that had cost him to have this fantastic set of bridge work. And some dirty crook came along and slugged him in the face with a blackjack and broken it all to shivering's, and so he had to go get another one made, and you know what he said from then on here, he was talking to us like this, you know why? Because he left his bridge work at home. He says I gotta eat with that thing. So he says, I don't even wear it on the job anymore. I just kind of whistle at people. You know, the poor guy had been robbed so often he had to leave his bridge work at home to keep it from getting broken.

   Now, the last program I said that when we break God's laws, it says in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 28 verse 16 (Deuteronomy 28:16), cursed shall you be in the city. I asked the question, have God's moral standards changed. Has God changed? Are the infractions for breaking his laws the same today? The answer is yes. But I remind you that God never administered those laws in each case directly and some exceptional cases he did. But he left it up to the nation of Israel to institute a certain procedure of the apprehension of criminals and the administering of stern and swift justice, which was spelled out by God's divine laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

   Now that wasn't consistent on down through every single age, certain kings of Israel by their own example. And by laws that they passed by their own rule, allowed people to get away with things that under a different king would have cost them their lives. It was absolutely a capital crime breaking of several of the 10 commandments to worship before the feet of a leering idol, for example. But King Manasseh came along and had them doing worse than some of the kings that were thrown out of the land and all their citizens killed that were thrown out of the country to allow Israel to come into the promised land in the first place. Here was the king of Israel supposedly to administer the laws of God. The kind of justice that God said would keep the country free of crime that would protect them, give them good crops, long lives, healthy babies, an absence of disease that would give them protection from their enemies because God would fight their battles.

   They would be a fantastic country on high, the greatest country on the face of the earth that they would keep the laws that would produce those results along came a king and he overthrew. Now, God didn't interfere because God had already revealed a principle and that's found in the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy. He in several occasions down through history has told people choose, as Elijah said, choose you this day whom you shall serve. By the time Samuel was crying out to God because they wanted a king that they could look at and parade before them and they wanted people running up and down and funny-looking uniforms, wearing lions heads and bull's horns on their heads. And we still do it today except now we have peak caps and fruit salad.

   But men want to dress up like animals call themselves after animals. We have all kinds of clubs and they're mostly called like animals, even as football, basketball, baseball, and other teams are called after the names of animals. We've really come uptown from the days of Nimrod haven't we? They used to have the Babylonian Lions and probably the Persian Eebexes or something. I once heard of a basketball team called the Jackrabbits for pity's sake. Can you imagine the cheerleaders saying? Give me a J, give me an A and so on all the way through Jackrabbit.

   How, how in the world do you get stirred up about anyway? But we like to call ourselves after the names of animals. And so these people wanted a great military organization, a great king. They wanted the, the pomp and the ceremony that came with marshal bands and the stamp of marching feet. They wanted to go out to war, they wanted a king and God told Samuel, let them have what they want and while you're about it, tell them what kind of a king you're gonna have.

   Ok, people listen to what kind of a king you're gonna have. You're gonna have the kind of a guy that just about the time you get married and you set up your little white cottage with the ivy-covered picket fence and settle down with your beautiful young bride. Go about the business of raising a family. He's gonna come along and grab you and throw you in the army, and he's gonna take away most of your property, and he's gonna tax the daylights out of you until you'll be spending probably 30, 40, 50% of all that you produce on the whims and the fancies of that king. Now, he's gonna live pretty high. He'll have a band good table in front of him all the time and he won't have to necessarily go out there and lose his life. No, he can direct the army from a comfortable place on the hill and send your sons out there to fight his battles for him. He's gonna tax you. He's gonna take away your property and he is going to do all kinds of things. So you go right ahead and let them have what they apparently really want. That's what God told Samuel.

   And you know, God turned his back on people every time they turned their back on Him. If people said, get out of here, God, we don't want your law, we don't want your justice and we don't want the blessings that come with the obedience to your laws. And God says fine and here help yourself to some curses. The last time I showed that these same principles do apply today. But the difference is that, that ultimate penalty, which is death, the wages of sin is still death is not being imposed now by a civil government. And so a lot of people seem to assume it's never going to be imposed at all because there is no king, no president, no governor or ruler of any sort on the face of this earth today who literally governs his people by the 10 commandments of God and imposes the same penalty for sin that God would have imposed, Anciently.

   People begin to assume God's moral standards have changed that it no longer is going to get you death for committing sin. Now, in human governments, we tend to categorize sin. We have it on a scale of 1 to 100 or so. And apparently a lot of people now think that the very worst sin is. Well, I don't know what some people think. I guess some people don't even think the worst sin is murder. Usually always, most human societies tend to say that that is the absolute worst sin and all the other aberrant behavior that might go with it such as torture and so on. Next to that, I guess most people would say rape and kidnapping. And so it goes and then right behind that come other assorted crimes of violence such as assault and arson, muggings, beatings, that type of thing where you either inflict injury and pain upon a human being or you destroy his property. And so we have these ascending and descending scales, we have what is called a misdemeanor and then we have a felony and so on. We have larceny and grand larceny establishing certain monetary amounts as to what the crime apparently is worth.

   Now, today, we find that there is just a tiny percentage of people ever, ever caught or apprehended in the commission of a crime that out of that tiny percent and even most crime goes unreported according to most police departments. So out of all the total of crime, what you hear, which is an absolute unbelievable national disgrace only represents 50% of what really is going on and all of that, which is 100% of all crime reported. Only a tiny little fraction ever apprehended out of those apprehended. Only a tiny little fraction ever get into the courts out of those that get into the courts. Only a tiny little fraction are ever convicted. Out of those that are convicted. Only a tiny little fraction ever go to jail out of those who go to jail. Only a tiny little fraction ever pay the ultimate penalty.

   Now, if you were to look at that in terms of how many people actually pay the full penalty for a crime as opposed to the amount of crime being committed, I'm not really sure I can even tell you it's anywhere near as good as one out of 100 because I don't believe it is. Now I ask the question, have God's moral standards changed? Oh, no, no. God says I change not. Therefore, are you sons of Jacob? Not consumed? Now, we don't understand what he means by that until you understand that God swore by himself because of the obedience of one man, Abraham, that our peoples in the so-called great Christian nations on this earth would be guaranteed great national inheritance, that we would be guaranteed the lands in the countries wherein we live and the bounty and the abundance of the great nations of the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Northwestern Europe to a large degree of New Zealand of South Africa. That happens to be a fact that you can prove if you want to write for the book, call The United States and the British Commonwealth in Prophecy. What does prophecy say about our nations?

   Now, the fact that we have those blessings is only because of what one man did. It is definitely not because of what we are doing. God in his own mind would far rather take them away from us. But he says I change not. I promised Abraham, I guaranteed it. I said it would be secure under his seed. And it's only because of the fact that I God says, do not change that you guys haven't been wiped out because he's trying to tell us that if I changed in what I promised not that he'll ever change his laws. But if he had decided, well, even though I promised Abraham, I'd keep those nations intact for those generations to come, the progeny of all the children of Abraham. Those people are so rotten, so corrupt, so backward and upside down, so rebellious, so abominable in my sight, I'm just gonna wipe them out.

   Instead, God's word says I change not. And by the way, that's how come you people are still alive down there now? Because we get away with it. We like to think it's legal. It reminds me of why most people hurts. You know, a guy that takes the name of God in his mouth and continually is using the name of Christ, the name of Jesus, the name of God as if it is a curse word is a cowardly individual who in the first place is so limited in his education that he doesn't have a suitable vocabulary with which to describe his feelings and has to fall back on these cursing words all the time. And secondly, I say he's a coward because he must continually by this cursing buttress up the feeling of guilt that he's got kind of continually saying to himself as long as I get away with it. There is no God around that deserves my worship or my obedience. No God around that I need to fear. He is almost saying to himself, I'm bigger than God. I can use God's name and get away with it. Therefore, since I get away with it, there must not be a God. Sure, he just kidding himself. He doesn't know what God said in the Bible.

   Let them alone. I gave them up to laws, statutes and commandments that were not good of their own devising according to men's ordinances, I gave them over, he said, to do whatever they want to do. And as he says in the first chapter of the book of Romans to reap the natural result of what their own actions are going to bring about. Now, when God says that there are blessings for obedience, it doesn't necessarily mean that it takes a divine miracle to give you that blessing. If you obey laws that regulate such a thing as soil. Now, let's just talk about that for a moment because a lot of people, what do you mean obey laws that regulate the soil? Well, it just so happens that you did not create the soil and I didn't and science didn't, science didn't create gravity. So let's not give science all the credit for everything that is exists that works and moves everything that functions, everything that is produced and for life itself because that is a lot of bushwa, the soil that very narrow, little tiny portion of an inch at the top of the soil that is dirt or earth that we call the humus is where life, your life really basically resides. It, it's where we come from and it's where we go back to. According to the Bible, you are the soil.

   Now, the soil is just like a fantastic piece of machinery, except in this case, it is a dramatic living organism that is much more interdependent and interwoven and like a system of symbiosis where many different organisms be they bacteria at the very lowest level, if you can call it that, I don't know why though, because they're fantastically complex. I don't think there's anything low about bacteria and their ability to break down and to convert various vegetable materials into minerals and things that are utilized by other things such as the roots of various growing things.

   You think of the insects and a little higher up. You think of the green growing plants of the sun, absorbing the rays of the sun into those leaves of the oxygen that is produced by those plants of the carbon dioxide that is given off by human beings and animals and the unbelievable chain that any forest or any grasslands area that the soil itself represents. Now, there are laws that regulate that soil. Mostly most farmers break those laws and they think they're getting away with it.

   So here we are a nation of disease, a nation of unbelievable arthritis. I understood the other day, I read about a 17-year-old boy that dropped dead of a heart attack because of pain, suffered from a baseball, hitting him on the cap of the knee and had a history at age 17 of heart trouble. Now you can read all the stories you want to about vitamin E and vitamin A and when you get right down to it, where are those vitamins found? Well, the one basic staple of life is just a perfect grain of wheat. The way it comes right out of the ear of wheat before somebody gets a hold of it and takes the oil out of it and the wheat germ out of it breaks it all apart, preserves only the white flower and so on.

   But unfortunately, you can't really even say that because today man does something to it before that grain of wheat is produced. What does he do? Well, he destroys that symbiosis in the soil by killing all the green things, all the insects and all the bacteria and what he's got left is just like a handful of ground-up metal. Let's say it's just so much dirt, but it's utterly lifeless now because he has done that with his sprays with his monoculture, with his heavy fertilization with his pesticides and herbicides and his artificial fertilizers.

   Of course, because he's got dead soil and not living soil. Then he has got to put back in there something to cause these plants to grow because the normal bacterial action of breaking down other vegetable material and providing humus upon which the plant must feed are just not there. So he's got to dump on all sorts of like and ammonia and all kinds of, of artificially produced chemicals, forcing these plants to grow, the plants do what they're told and they grow, they're far more susceptible to disease.

   Monoculture is depleting even what is remaining of any nutrients that are in that dirt, that soil. And so we come up with an inferior crop. Well, we say it's superior because we can increase the yield. I remember giving a, a telecast on the subject of the so-called green revolution of how the hogs wouldn't even eat the wheat that had been produced in Vietnam because it was unpalatable and gooey and I heard of some people in Vietnam actually taking that wheat and using it as an aggregate for mud like mortar to build houses out of because it was so unpalatable to the human as well as to animals.

   Well, be that as it may, it's merely only one analogy, one way to represent the manner in which we break laws. And we think because we don't immediately see a penalty that there is no penalty. I'd like to ask, is there any kind of a national penalty being reaped today? Because of people who are basically overfed and undernourished? Is there any penalty being reaped today by the soft foods in Americans' teeth? In our health? Is there any penalty being reaped today by the flaccid flabby, chalky white, overweight, fat being carried by millions upon millions of Americans who couldn't even hurry across the street when the light changes to red? Are we afflicted with heart disease more than any other country? Answers, Yes.

   Now, the Bible said that if we break God's laws, we would be cursed with all of these very things. He said we'd be cursed in the cities and we are. But he also said this. He said that we would be smitten with madness. That's insanity with blindness. And we are with heart disease that we would not prosper in our ways. We would carry much seed into the field and gather but little in when harvest time comes. And it says in verse 43 the stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high and you shall come down very low. Those prophecies are beginning to occur to our peoples today.

   The cities, the cities in which you live, most of you listening are under some sort of a curse. Take a look at the elderly, for example, are the cities a curse and a burden to them where so many of them live, most of them are afraid to go out. And if when they do go out, they listen anxiously for the sound of footsteps near, a little old lady walking along the streets of Pasadena is just about fair game for some brutal young thug probably no more than 13 to 14 years of age. That hasn't got any more sensitivity about human pain than an animal and will come along and knock her to the ground.

   And now, now days, instead of just grabbing her purse and running, most of these young thugs aren't happy with that. They got to step on her face, kick her in the teeth, break something. You know, judges have been known to sit on the bench listening to the details of a grisly crime with tears in their eyes when the young rotten thug who perpetrated that crime is standing right in front of them with a sneer on his face. Now that happens increasingly because we're breaking God's laws about marriage because of broken homes and illegitimate births because of divorce and because of various situations which put these kids right out on the street without a strong father figure without a strong home.

   And so we wonder why child and youth crime is going out of all proportion to population. We wonder why there are 30,000 children in the Los Angeles area reported here recently that are being sexually exploited by a lot of rotten queers. Well, because we're breaking the laws that would protect us from that kind of thing that would preserve the home just as much as many farmers break laws that have to do with the living soil. It's going to give them the good crop they really want and artificially producing it and we end up weak and flaccid and flabby and unhealthy as a result of the prepared prepackage, died preserved and, and artificially colored foods that we eat instead of the natural foods that we ought to get. By the same token, there is a direct cause and effect relationship between the disintegration of the home and the family and crime on the streets. God is not the person that's causing those kids to beat those little ladies up, but that's a consequence if you go back and try to find out where that kid come from. Who was his dad? Where is his mother? What kind of education did they have? Are they still together? What kind of values did they have? What kind of, of moral commitment do they make to each other? To the home, the institutions of this society, you'll get your answer because there is a direct cause and effect relationship.

   No, God has not changed his moral standards. They are absolutely identical as they have always been. But because God is presently, for the time being, keeping hands off, allowing a man to take his name in vain and curse him, allowing a person to commit a crime. A lot of people are continually buttressing up their doubts and convincing themselves since God doesn't slap them down right now, he never will. That's a deadly mistake.

   You ought to write for the Plain Truth magazine. Get that article about, Just what do you mean, Mr. President, Born Again, and also this book that I announced last time on, The Modern Romans, a booklet showing exactly how we are going the way of ancient Rome, the decline of Western civilization, pick up the telephone and dial a toll-free number. 800-423-4444. That's 800-423-4444. It's absolutely free of charge at no price, or you can write to me, Garner Ted Armstrong, Pasadena, California. The only address you need until next time, Garner Ted Armstrong saying goodbye friends.

   You have heard the World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong, sponsored by the Worldwide Church of God. For literature offered on this program, send your requests along with the call letters of this station to Garner Ted Armstrong Pasadena, California 91123. Or you may dial this toll-free number 800-423-4444.