BOB BARNEY: How I came to Believe What I do Today (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 BROADCAST: BOB BARNEY: How I came to Believe What I do Today

Hi, this is Bob Barney for theplaintruthtoday.com and in a recent broadcast I mentioned briefly how I came to believe what I do today and that I did not do so willingly. I had grown up in a Christian household, an Episcopalian Christian household. My father generally believed in the God, but he was like most people today. He really didn’t believe in any religion per se. He just knew there had to be some being that was probably the God of the Bible, but didn’t know, didn’t really go to church every week. He would go on Christmas and Easter time and that was about it.

My mother, on the other hand, was very religious and she believed in God devotedly and she went to church and I would go with her as a young child every single Sunday. She had a brain and she realized most of the stuff being taught at the Episcopalian church was kind of nonsense and she would reject a lot of it, which I today look back and find that fascinating. But I believed sincerely in God as a young man, as much as anybody could ever have believed in God. I prayed to God constantly. I prayed to God all kinds of prayers for the health of my parents, for the health of my brothers, for my grandmother when she lay dying without legs from diabetes. I watched her as a five-year-old kid, just turned six I guess, die in our living room with a bed set up for her, screaming and crying in pain from diabetes and losing her legs. And I prayed for her and honestly believed God could do something and God didn’t. And then school, I was very good in school and I loved the sciences and I loved history and I loved all of the social sciences, I guess you could say. And I first was introduced to evolution, which made total sense to me, that there really isn’t a God, that we are really the God.

We created God in our mind and that we really came from lower animal forms. And I read the books that you all read, everybody’s listening to me right now, has gone through evolution. And I saw the progression of, you know, the fish turn into the reptile, turn into the bird, turn into the mammal, you name it, and turn into an ape and then becoming a man. And I believed it. I believed it for many, many years. I would say from ninth grade until my sophomore year of college, I knew evolution was scientific fact. I wanted to be a scientist, in fact, because I thought science, I grew up in the age of the astronauts and the moon landing and going into outer space and I was just captivated by watching all this stuff. And I thought science had all the answers. And then back in 1975, 74, 75, in the summer, I started listening to a man named Garner Ted Armstrong, long since dead, but a very smart man. I met him and of the people I’ve ever met, and I met some pretty famous people, he’s still probably the smartest man I’ve ever known in my life. Just absolute off the cuff brains, the man was a genius. He was familiar with every subject and so familiar with it knowledgeably. He had the knowledge to be able to talk in most subjects quite well. And I started listening to him because he kind of challenged everything I thought I knew about the Bible. And I knew Sunday worship was found in the Bible. It turned out I was wrong there. I knew you went to heaven or hell if you were according to the Bible, if you were a sinner or a saint, I was wrong there. And I kept being coming wrong with everything I thought I knew. And I was starting to be very angry with the guy, but I was intrigued with his intelligence. Then he comes to the thing about evolution and that kept my interest. And he delved into, which I won’t get into here, he delved into certain scientific laws that actually disprove evolution.

Law of entropy, law of thermodynamics, the law that life can only come from a preexistent life, and that life only gives birth to life of the same species. An ox, I’m sorry, a cow and a horse cannot mate because they’re in different species. A dog and a cat cannot mate because they’re within different species. Their sperm will not activate the egg. Dogs within a subspecies can intermate and have offspring. That’s how you come with designer dogs and horses and whatnot. But life not only comes from life, but it has to come from the same life. And then the question is, well, if one day a frog became a lizard on land, he evolved into it, what did he mate with? Because if he mated with another frog, it wouldn’t take. So it had to have two frogs had to evolve into two separate lizards, one male, one female at the same exact time in the same exact pond. Now that got my interest. And more and more stuff he talked about got my interest. And I didn’t have the answers. And I don’t like not having answers. I’ll admit it right now. I’m a control freak. So I went to one of my best friends who was a college professor. I really looked up to him. His name was, well, I won’t give his name. But anyway, he’s probably wrong about that. But I really liked him. And we were friends. We were good friends. And I started asking him the questions that was presented to me in a booklet called The Theory for the Birds. And to my surprise, to my amazement, he actually got mad. He didn’t give me answers to these things. He just acted like I did some unpardonable sin, asking such stupid questions. Why are they stupid if you don’t have an answer? And it became so heated between us that our friendship actually ended.

And I still believe in evolution. But I didn’t believe in his evolution anymore, because it didn’t make sense. And it really broke down to this one thing. And I have to admit, it changed my life forever about science and about modern education. I said to him, well, you don’t have any answers to this. I thought evolution had answers. But it is a theory and not fact. And he looked at me with this smirky, scowl face and said, where did your God come from? And I said, well, I guess they would say he’s always been here. And he says, well, doesn’t that sound like a real fairy tale to you that he’s always been here? And I said, yes, it does. Where did the hydrogen atom that began all this come from? Well, it’s always been here. There’s always been the elements. So we can believe, Mr. Avatably, I’ll give you his name, we can believe that a hydrogen atom has always been here, but we can’t believe that a God has always been here. So you want to worship a hydrogen atom and some guy wants to worship a God, what makes more sense? He got so mad, never talked to me again. He talked to me in school when it came to our studies. He didn’t flunk me, I still got good grades, but we never were friends again. And then I realized at the ripe old age of 21 that I had been living a lie, that what I thought was real was a lie. What I thought was in the Bible was not there. What I thought Christianity was about was not there.

Who I thought the God of the Old Testament was, was not the one. What I thought evolution and science was all about was based on a lie. And that you come to the conclusion that almost everything you were taught was really based on a lie. And then when you start reading the Bible, reluctantly trying to prove everything wrong in the Bible, and you see that the great liar is Satan the devil, who deceives the whole world. It doesn’t say he deceives the Buddhist over here, or he deceives only the Muslims. No, the Bible says the devil who deceiveth the entire world. That means Christians. That means you and I. That means your parents, my parents, and me, and my children. We’re deceived in this world. This world is an illusion of the devil, and the Bible says so. And the Bible clearly points out that the devil is the God of this world, and the laws of this world are based on the devil’s laws, which is lawlessness, meaning no law. And that the only thing our forefathers did for us, because they were God-fearing men, look up the signers of the Declaration, and I believe more than half of them were ministers. You look up our forefathers, they understood who America was. They understood who lost Israel was. They knew everything that we have lost today, and they tried to base our government on a government of God that you would find in the Bible. In fact, one of the founding fathers, Madison, said that our form of government can only survive when you have a moral Christian nation. That is what our forefathers believed. They knew that they didn’t give us some holy constitution that by itself is the reason that we are the nation we are today. They understood plainly who the cause of the blessings of this nation was, and who was behind it. And they knew it was the God of the Bible, and they knew that God was Jesus and the Father. Oh yeah, we get to talk about Thomas Jefferson, who was a deist, and this one, but they all still believed in the Bible.

Thomas Jefferson wrote a Bible. He kind of wanted to leave out things he didn’t like, but he believed in the Bible, and he believed in Christ. Isaac Newton understood the Bible probably better than anyone, and understood the idea of the Trinity was a deception of Satan, and that there was God the Father and Christ, and the two were one being. How he came to that as one being, I don’t agree with, but some of the passages kind of agree with that. I mean, Christ is called the everlasting Father in Isaiah, even though it’s still Christ. The two make up the Godhead, the God family, but it is confusing even to me 44 years later, 45 years later. But going back to where I came to, so in 1976 and 1977, I graduated from college in 1977 with a degree in political science. I was lost. I wanted to be a politician, and I was one in Connecticut for a while. I won’t go into that, but I was kind of lost because I realized that everything that I thought was accurate was not accurate. I believe the TV shows, many of them had good morals by the way, many of them had good messages, but I believe that the TV shows that, you know, the police are good, your politicians are basically honest, the judges are fair, the government given to us by our forefathers is what made us perfect. It’s all a lie. We are, the country we are today and the blessings we have today come from a promise that God gave to Abraham, his best friend, still the only person that I know of in the Old Testament who God calls his friend. Not even Moses and David got that. So, I struggled for three years, almost four years, from 1976 to 1979, rejecting that God existed, reading every day, hoping that I could prove God wrong, knowing that I would find flaws that I could say, ha ha, I caught it, I knew it was a scam, but I couldn’t. I had a teacher who was a very good friend of mine, we became friends after I left high school and even after college and she became a television personality for the news. And I remember being at her house one night, this would be I guess 1978, before I admitted there was a God, and I was telling her all the things that confused me. And she sat down with me and said, Bob, you believe this? And by the way, I don’t believe it, but you do make rational sense what you believe.

You say you don’t believe it, but you believe it. And what you believe makes rational sense. Don’t think you’re going to convert me, but you better admit that you do believe it. And I said, no, no, I don’t believe it. And I said that for probably another six, seven months. And without getting into particulars, God rebuilt me, broke me down and reformed me. And I remember the day, or was it the evening, when I first talked to God, knowing God was real. And it wasn’t what you think. I said to God, leave me alone. I don’t want to not fit. Leave me alone. Thank God He did not leave me alone. And my study continues to this day. I make every kind of mistake to this day. I sin to this day. I’m no better than you are listening to me to this day. But I believe. I know what is in that book is real. When you read the original intent of the words, it’s real. It’s the only book, someone said, where the author is in love with the reader. God loves his creation. He wants to save us from ourselves, and we are the obstacle. We want to put our false religion in front of God. We want to put our false laws in front of God. We want to put our false ideology in front of God. But we do not want to believe in the real God, because it forces us to die and to be reborn. Not born again, by the way, just means resurrection from the dead. That’s all born again means. Jesus was born again from the grave, by the way. Born again is not a religious experience. But being killed, your old self dying, and baptism becoming a new self, a new being in Christ, is true. It changes you. And once you know the truth, you cannot reject it. There has been many times in my life when I wanted to run away from what I believe. Miserable times in my life. And I wanted to reject it. But God gave me a brain, and he’s proven himself to me with science, with common sense, with history, with fulfilled prophecy, with his words coming true. I can’t reject it. There are times I hate what I believe.

Does that fool you? Does that surprise you? Does that make you wonder? Because it was told to me a long time ago by someone who knew, if God is calling you, you’re in trouble. Because God is not easy on the ones he loves. And he calls. Because you’re not being called for your salvation. God doesn’t really give a who about calling people for their own salvation. He’s trying to save his entire creation, and you’re just a tool. And you’re a tool that makes it happen by obeying God and bringing his word to the people. Not looking for glory for yourself, not looking for money, but getting people to trust in the Lord God who created them, who loves them, and died for them. I hope you want to join and become a fellow crusader for Christ. And if you do, don’t do it on a whim. Prove it. Go to your Bible and prove it. Prove me right, prove me wrong. Prove God. And if you can prove it, you can never lose it. You only can lose your faith when it came to you easily and quickly. I hope that you go to theplaintruth.com every day and you listen to these broadcasts on theplaintruthtoday.com, which you can all get from the main page. You go to our message board, you can leave stories of interest and health articles or things going on in the world. Also, we have Your Health Today that talks about illness and disease. And sometimes there are remedies that modern medicine is not going to tell you about. When they want to push a drug on you and there’s something better than the drug they want to push on you, oftentimes you’re not going to know about it. But you will learn about things you never heard of on theplaintruth.com’s Your Health Today section. We try to give you the news that you don’t get anywhere else. And I can frankly say there are other sites, other news sites that have a lot of the stuff we do, but no one has our perspective. Because our perspective is based on God’s Word. I’m not a religion. I’m not an evangelist. I’m a newscaster. But ultimately, the ultimate newscaster is God, Jesus Christ. He was a newscaster some 2,000 years ago. He gave the good news. Gospel is just Old English for good news. He’s a newscaster. I’m a newscaster. I’m not trying to form a church. Don’t send me any money. You got money to give? Find a Christian family that needs help and help them. Or a Christian organization that does things in the name of Christ and follows Christ’s Word and give it to them. Don’t give it to me.

I do hope you listen to me and I hope you try to prove me right or wrong. And I do really hope more than anything you start reading the Bible and believe the words that are there. Because those words are written by the gods that created you and created this universe and love you and want you to be their children. I say their, because there is two gods. There’s two beings, God the Father and God Christ. And the two make up the God family. They’re made out of Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit’s not part of a trinity. It’s Father and Son made of Holy Spirit. Like we’re male and female made up of blood. Again, this is Bob Barney. Thank you for listening and I hope you tune in again sometime in the future. Bye-bye.