The Plain Truth is so Happy That You Have Been Enjoying Bob’s Broadcasts.
2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
Hello, Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and today’s show is a tribute to my brother, my oldest brother, Vic Barney, who I found out, I think it was Thursday now, the same day I found out that I had a very good MRI, that I didn’t have any problems with cancer or anything like that, but then I come home to find out that my oldest brother, Vic Barney, like I said, a fellow believer, passed away two weeks ago. I didn’t know that. He lives in Florida. His wife had died three years earlier, I should say, and he had serious dementia in his last seven, eight years of life. He was 77 years old, and this is like a kind of a tribute to my brother. He was my oldest brother. I’m the youngest of three boys. We’re like bonanzas. There were three boys and no girls in my family other than my mother, and we were a very, very close-knit family.My brothers and I were very close. We were four years apart, basically in age, and it’s a very somber time for me because I have very good memories of my brother.
My brother was a Vietnam vet. He knew he was going to be drafted back when they had the lottery, if you want to call it that. He drew a very low number, knew he would be drafted, and he decided to join the Air Force, hoping that that would keep him alive. Vietnam was a very hard time. My brother did want to serve. He didn’t run to Canada as others did. He did want to serve.
He was a patriot, and he was a good guy, and he was a mentor to me. He was a lot different than I was. He was a very handsome man. Many times, if you see a picture of him when he was 20, he looked like a young William Shatner, and when he was 30, he looked like a 30-year-old William Shatner, and when he was 50, he looked like a 50-year-old William Shatner. Vic was a very good-looking guy, and he never had problems with women wanting to hang around him. He was the exact opposite of me, who didn’t have his looks, and I was a lot more shy. Vic was not shy at all. I have some pretty good memories of him and some I might share here with you, but he always inspired me.
I really didn’t get to know him because he was away from home a lot until he came back from Vietnam, and he had a very serious car accident.Here he goes to Korea when the Pueblo was taken, and we were so worried that he was going to be involved in maybe a nuclear world war in 1968 when the Pueblo was taken in Korea, off the waters of Korea, and then he was thinking, he was told if he had signed up for Korea, he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam. He signed up then for Germany, and his orders came through, and he was going to go to Da Nang, Vietnam, where he spent 13 months there, and we had a lot of pictures, V8-type pictures he would send back, and you could see B-52s carpet bombing the mountains around Da Nang, and he had some really pretty interesting stories about them being shelled that night and things like that, but he was always somebody that was very self-assured, very outgoing, very easygoing, and he had a very serious car accident. He wasn’t a driver, but it was his car when he came back from Vietnam.
He got Homestead Air Force Base as his final tour. We actually, in 1970, my parents and I and my brother Billy, he’s the middle brother, went down to visit him. We were camping at the time, and we were at first camping in the Everglades National Park, and that was kind of an experience when the old black man that was like the groundskeeper told us it was a six-and-a-half foot rattlesnake out by where we were camping just the week before, and about three days of camping in the Everglades, we decided we were going to go to Bayfront State Park, which was right on the Atlantic Ocean near Homestead, and we visited Vic there, but that winter, it was about 10 days before Christmas, and at the time, we did, as a family, have very good Christmases, and we celebrated Christmas.
I did not have the knowledge yet in 1971 that I got in 1976 and 77 when I started my journey to what I believe in today, but he had a very serious car accident, and he was very fortunate. God was watching him for sure because the driver of his car was drunk, and they were all in the Air Force together, and they hit into a cement telephone pole, and the light fixture fell through the back window of that Volkswagen and broke my brother’s neck, but the accident happened right in front of Broward County Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, and the neurosurgeon who was the head neurosurgeon for that medical center was the same guy who was assigned to be the neurosurgeon if anything happened to President Richard Nixon. Remember, he had a winter White House in Key Biscayne, and it was the same guy, and he was one of the top 10 in the nation neurosurgeons, and Vic, who was in a coma for seven days, we didn’t know if he was going to live or die.He was actually in the hospital for four days, AWOL. Everybody didn’t know where he was, and we were notified. My parents were notified only three days before Christmas.
They never had flown before, and they got on an airplane, and they flew to Fort Lauderdale, and they stayed next to him for a long time until he recovered. He always had some issues after that accident, anger issues and things like that, and I always thought that might have led to his dementia, but before that, he had always a very outgoing personality. I remember, because I was the one that was the youngest, everywhere I went, even the female teachers would say, oh, you’re Vic’s younger brother, and everybody liked my brother Vic, and there’s some very funny stories.He could be arrogant, but he was arrogant in a good way back then. He was very self-assured, and that’s always something that people kind of cling to when someone is self-assured, and in 1972, we started spending a lot more time together because he was home after the service, and he was still recovering from his injuries, and we ran a farm stand together. I started running a farm stand.
It put me through high school and college. It paid for all my college, and in 1975, the first year I listened to Garner Ted Armstrong, by the way, at that farm stand, and I’ve told that story before, that he became my partner because he was going to the University of Bridgeport. I was going to the University of Connecticut for political science.His major was psychology, and he graduated as a psychologist. Geraldo Rivera was the keynote speaker at the University of Bridgeport when he graduated, and he started working for the state of New York for some 22 years as a psychologist at different mental institutions before they were shut down. Ironically, it was the same Geraldo Rivera that got them all shut down with his famous report when he was working for ABC, different story, but Vic was the first person, when I was starting to find the truth about the real Sabbath day and really what the Bible was about, and I had thought I had disproved God, and I had disproved the Bible.I’ve told that story before, but it turned out I had disproved religions because they were not following the Bible. I’ll never forget a statement that George Harrison said, who was this guy, you know, the Beatle guy that was into Eastern religions, but he sponsored the movie by Monty Python, The Life of Brian, and he said after he saw the script, he said, you know, I don’t think Jesus was that bad of a guy. Matter of fact, I think he was a great guy.
It’s a shame that nobody in religion ever followed what he said to do, and I thought even at the time that was quite a correct statement, because what I had learned was all these so-called Christian religions simply did not preach the same gospel that Jesus Christ preached or the apostles after him preached. They preached another gospel, one that Paul warned us against, of Sunday keeping and Christmas and Easter and all the things that Jesus Christ simply did not stand for, and so the very first time I went to a Church of God international meeting in Connecticut, Vic was the person who came along with me. He was studying along with me, and we came to a similar conclusion back then, and we became very, very, very close, and I just don’t know how long I’m going to talk today. It bothers me. It bothers me because I really looked up to my brother, and the death took me quite by surprise. He was 77 years old, and the preliminary, I can’t even say the word right now, I’m tongue-tied, report is that he probably died of a heart attack or a stroke. Heart problems do run in our family. That’s why I’m trying to do this exercise program and trying to stay as healthy as I can as I turn 70, and I’ve lost a lot of weight, but it looks like he probably died of a heart attack. He was in very advanced stages of dementia at the time, and like I said, his wife, who was really taking care of him, died three years earlier in 2022.
Her son and her son’s ex-wife, who always adored Vic, decided that they would take him into their house, or I should re-say this, not her son, but the divorced wife who had remarried took Vic into her house because she just thought he was a great guy, and he was very kind to everybody, and he was, and she took care of him for the last three years, and that’s how we found out finally, belatedly, unfortunately, that he had passed away on November 6th of this year, and I started thinking it was a shock. It was a shock Friday night or Thursday night, whenever it was. I can’t even remember the day.I think my wife probably took it as hard, if not harder than I did. I understand death. It’s the last enemy that we have.
I don’t look forward to anybody’s death, and I don’t look forward to my death because I understand what death is, and unfortunately, so many Christians, or maybe fortunate for their own mind, but the common Christian notion that you go to heaven or hell when you die, I know is not true. I know it’s not biblical, and I know that’s not what the apostles taught or what Jesus taught, and we can go through that at different times. I had a show just last week about the immortality of the soul, which you don’t have.That’s the first lie of the Bible, but I understand it is the final enemy that we have to conquer, and it has never been conquered except by one person who ever walked this earth, and that’s Jesus Christ. He is the first born to be born again into spirit from the physical body that died on a cross some 2,000 years ago, and so I understand that Vic is in a grave, and he’s going to remain in the grave, and hopefully, I will see him again when Christ returns and raises the dead at his return and starts his millennium, and if we are Christians and we have followed Christ faithfully and his word faithfully, we will be a part of that first resurrection when we are resurrected from a mortal dead body lying in the ground somewhere into a spiritual body much like Christ because we are to become gods like God the Father and Jesus Christ. People don’t realize this.
They think when you die, you go to heaven, and you’re like an angel, like highway to heaven, and you whiff around on clouds, and you look down at your loved ones, and you watch them suffer and die and get on drugs or get divorced or go through lousy times, something that I don’t think anybody really thinks about that they would want to really witness that, and you don’t witness that. You’re in a grave. You’re in a grave, and you’re asleep, and it is exactly what Jesus said about the state of the dead and is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 about the state of the dead.You are asleep until the last trumpet sound just before Christ comes back to this earth and raises the dead in Christ first to meet with him in the sky, and we come down with Christ, conquer the world from the evil Antichrist, and put everything in order, and the millennium begins for a thousand years, and we reign with Christ for a thousand years, and that’s when I will hopefully see my brother Vic again. I hope I make it, and I will then see a lot of my family that has passed away like my mom and my dad, and it’s very sad times when your loved ones pass away when you know the plain truth about what death really is and why we are so fortunate that Christ came, suffered, died for us, and was resurrected from the dead into spiritual life as an example of what’s going to happen to us upon our death and resurrection.
This is the whole plan of God that the holy days show when you follow the true holy days, and it is something that no matter how much you know this, the thought that you’re going to die and you’re going to sit and rot in a ground for a while, for a long time maybe, you know, Abraham’s been in that ground for some 3,500 years, think about that, still waiting for his resurrection.He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s asleep, but they say, I’ve been told that it’s like when you go under anesthesia when you’re going to have an operation. It might take nine hours, but you go to sleep, and you wake up like instantly.You don’t even know you were asleep. You just lose consciousness, and then you awaken again, and they claim, and I hope it’s true, that when you die, you wake up instantly in your mind. Thousands of years go by, but you don’t know of that time passage.
That is the news of God. I’ll be right back to talk more about Vic after this word.
Hi, Bob Barney with the Plain Truth that is always trying to explain to our audience the plain truth of God’s message and what God has to do with today’s news. The plain truth is a news site. We’re not a religion. We don’t take tithes. We don’t accept any money. We don’t take even advertising, but the plain truth tries to explain God’s message in today’s world for people can understand plainly what the gospel of Jesus Christ is all about. That’s theplaintruth.com. Go there, and you see for the first time maybe in your life what God has planned for you, your family, and your loved ones. It is a lot more wonderful than the churches you’ve gone to try to tell you. I’m back talking about my brother, Vic Barney. He’s named after my father.
My father was Victor L. Barney Sr., and Vic was Victor L. Barney Jr., born in 1948 and died November 6th in 2025. I have so many memories of Vic that I’d like to just share a few of them with you. Like I said, we ran a vegetable market together for five years. I helped put him through University of Bridgeport with the stand that I was running earlier by myself, but my family was a close family. We did not fight amongst ourselves, and when we did, we always reunited really quickly. We were very close, and we were very much defenders of each other, and Vic was the first person of my family. Later, my brother Billy, and then Billy was able to get my mother and my father to understand the Bible themselves, and they started understanding the Word of God, and when they died, and my mother was always very believer in God and Christianity and Jesus, but she herself had rejected religion a lot longer ago than I even realized, but she knew there was a God, and she was very happy before she died, and she lived to be 91 years old. She was very happy before she died to understand the truth of God’s message and the gospel. Vic became a very strong believer, like the rest of my family did, and understood the real truth of God’s message, and we had many, many good years together.
He married Dolores, was his wife. He married in 1977, I believe it was, and of course, Tammy and I married in December of 1981. Our anniversary is coming up next month in December 17th, in which we’ll have a special show about that because I married the love of my life, the love that I wanted three years before she knew I wanted her, I guess, but we got together, and we’ve been together ever since, and I hope to have many more years with her, many more than maybe the 77 years that God allotted for my brother Vic, but one of the funny stories I’ll tell you about Vic, as I said, he kind of was a ladies’ man.Girls liked him. He had an attitude, but he did not mind showing off, but he also did not mind standing out in the crowd, even if it was bad, and the one funny story I will tell you was there was he had a very good friend who became an FBI person, and actually, he was quite far up the ladder in the FBI and was the agent who actually arrested John Gotti back in the 1980s, and when they were in high school together, he wanted to dance with this girl. They went to a dance, and he wanted to ask this girl to dance, but he was afraid to, and Vic said, go and ask her, and he goes, no, I’m afraid she’s going to tell me no, and he was more like me.
This guy, Dave was his name, was more like me than Vic was, so Vic said, well, I’ll fix you up with her, so he walks up to this girl, and he says, hey, you want to dance? And she goes, no. He goes, hey, I’m telling you, you want to dance with me or not? And she goes, no, get away from me. He goes, hey, you better take your chance, because you’ll never get another one, and she tells him off and says, get lost, and he walks over to Dave, and he goes, now you go ask her to dance, because she’s not going to tell any other guy this evening that she won’t dance with him, just to shove it up my rear, and exactly what happened, Dave went and asked her out to dance, and she danced with him all night long, and they actually dated for a while, and that was the thing my brother could do.He had no problem being the odd man out in a crowd. He was very self-assured, and I always looked up to him. I always looked up to him, and I’m going to miss him a lot.We have many, many good memories together after he was married to Dolores. He lived in Connecticut for a while, but most of the time, he lived in Westchester, New York, where he was a psychologist for the state of New York, and then moved to North Carolina, I think around 1991 or 2, and worked for the state of North Carolina, around Wilmington, North Carolina, where he mainly dealt with the children of the soldiers at Camp Lejeune that there was a lot of problems back then, and he was a social worker, psychologist for the state of North Carolina. He retired into Florida, Fort Myers area, Florida.
I think they moved there around the year 2000, and they lived there ever since, and in about 2015 or 2016, and I noticed a difference in Vic. I noticed that he would start repeating himself constantly, the same things over and over and over again, and about a year or two later, D, that was his wife’s nickname, told us in a phone conversation that he was diagnosed with dementia. They took his car away from him because he would get lost.He would drive to the store, not remember how to get home, and we went and visited him in 2018 and again in 2019, and I think the last time we saw him was actually 2020, and things happened where we couldn’t even get back to Florida, some illnesses in our situation, and matter of fact, this time we’re going to go to Florida in December will be the first time in three years we’ve been to Florida, and I have a place, a business, a warehouse in Florida that I haven’t seen in three years, so I’m looking forward to this trip, but we saw when we saw him that he recognized me, and he recognized Tammy, my wife, and he knew D, and he knew everything going on, but he would just always keep repeating the same things over and over and over again, and I guess after 2021, it got much worse, and after 2022, it probably got even worse after D died, and she was about 10 years older than him, so she lived a good ripe old age herself. I believe she was about 88 years old or 89 when she died, but it’s very sad for me. I do want to take a time and have a show as a tribute to my brother, my older brother, who was a warrior for Christ, and I have to admit, I feel great about it.
I feel great to know that I think he has made it into the first resurrection, and I hope that I can make it in the first resurrection. I surely hope Tammy and us and Vic and D and all of my family who started to believe the right gospel of Christ will be there together during this millennium and have no more pain, no more death, no more worry, happiness. That is the promise that Jesus Christ gave us with his life and with his death and with his message of the true gospel of Jesus Christ, which is not a gospel about Jesus Christ, not when he was born or even how he died as much as what his message was, and his message was he was coming back again and bringing a government with him.
He was not a religious type person, believe it or not, even though he was God. He was a leader. He was going to be the king of kings and lord of lords upon his return to this earth and reign for a thousand years and bring a government with him, not a religion, but a government of his laws.It was Jesus Christ who wrote the Ten Commandments with his own finger for Moses. It was Jesus Christ who appeared in the burning bush to Moses. It wasn’t God the Father.We had shows about this in the past. God the Father has never appeared to any person at all in this entire lifespan of mankind on this earth. Every time someone talked to God or saw God, it was Jesus Christ who they were talking with and seeing, and that’s who Moses’ God was, and that was the best friend that Abraham had.When God says Abraham was my friend, the God speaking here was none other than Jesus Christ. And so all I can say for my brother Vic is I love you with all my heart, and I will miss you. I will miss the conversations we used to have together about God, about the Bible, about what we think could happen, what we think the future would be, many, many conversations over the years, many great times over the years.I will sorely miss him. That’s all I want to say. Vic Barney, God bless you, and may God resurrect you the first time around.
May I be around to see you. Well, that’s the show for today. It’s going to be not quite 30 minutes, about 27 minutes in general.A tribute to my brother Vic, and maybe some people won’t want to listen to this, that’s fine, but I owe it to my brother to do a show about him. And I did one about my mom, and I’ve done one about my dad because I came from a very good, tight-knit family. I was not a rebellious teenager in the 1960s and 70s like so many of my generation were.
I saw my dad as a hero, and I saw my mom as the perfect mother, and I saw my brothers, my brother Vic and my next oldest brother Bill, as my best friends. And we accomplished a lot together, and we all came to this belief together. And I’m so, so overjoyed about knowing that.And I just wish I could have more time with him. I wish that the awful disease called dementia did not happen to him because it took away from us a great mind. He was a great psychologist.He understood psychology and people. He understood things that so many people in this world do not understand. I learned a lot from him, and I’m sure he would say the same about me.And until we meet again, Vic, God bless you very much. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. Signing off, and just want to say to everybody out there, there is an answer to your problems. There is an answer to everybody’s dilemma, to your unbelief, or if you don’t believe in God, it’s because you do not understand God yet.And the Bible is the place you’re going to understand it, and hopefully by theplaintruth.com and these broadcasts and some of the videos we play, maybe many people will come to see the real God, the real Jesus, and the real future that they have together.
God bless you all. Until tomorrow, Bob Barney, bye-bye.