Bob Barney: How I respond to people who refuse to believe in a God who allows Tragedy (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Bob Barney: How I respond to people who refuse to believe in a God who allows Tragedy

Hello, Bob Barney here with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com with another edition. And I get questions once in a while. This has happened over the years. Let me just say that I have now, way over 47 years, been a believer in God after being an atheist for a while, for a lot of part of my high school and college years.

0:26But I get questions by friends and people that I know that I understand where they come from, because I came from there. And I’m gonna devote a little bit of time today, I think, to explain. I’ve done shows before,

0:39how I came to believe what I believe, but I now wanna talk about a little bit about why or how I talk with the people I do. My friends or people who maybe even email me or mainly it’s been over the years, people that I know known before my conversion at first, but even now since my conversion some 47 years ago, a lot of

1:03people that I know in business or as friends ask, how do you believe this stuff? I mean, it doesn’t even sound like the major Christianity here. Where did you come up with this stuff? I remember a long time ago, and this was back in 1978, and I was just on the brink of accepting God. I had been through a long struggle. I started listening to Garner Ted Armstrong

1:28back in 1975 in July, and that was a long time coming because I did not want to believe what this man was saying was the real gospel. First of all, I didn’t wanna believe there was a God. I didn’t believe anymore there was a God. I didn’t believe anymore there was a God. I did when I was a child.

1:47My mother, as I think I’ve said in different programs, was very, very devout to God and to Jesus. She was raised an Episcopalian. She actually basically left her church because she didn’t like what she saw, but she never stopped reading the Bible.

2:03She never stopped thinking about it or talking about God or thanking God or bringing God into conversation. She had a lifelong faith that I wish to this day I had. When she died some five years ago, and we’re probably gonna have a tribute to her in a few days because my mom died now

2:24five years ago this month. She died at 91 years old. She lived a very good life and outlived her husband, my dad, for some 25 years. I do not want to outlive my wife by any, not even 25 days for that matter. But she did it. She was a strong woman. No one could ever take that away from her, but she was a faithful woman, no one could ever take that away from her, but she was a faithful woman, and I wish I had that faith.

2:48But anyway, about the time I was eight or 10 years old, I really started doubting the existence of God. God wasn’t answering my prayers. I saw my grandfather die, my grandmother die. Time I was 13, I think, 14, my grandfather died. And it was traumatizing to me. And my grandfather, Brant, was not a believer in God. His father, my great

3:11grandfather, a man I wish I met but never did, knew the Bible backwards and forwards and was a true believer in Jesus Christ and God the Father. He understood the Bible. Many people in the town that I came from looked up to him as one of the most well-educated persons they ever knew, even though he didn’t have a big education. He just read everything. And the superintendent of New Milford Schools, John Pettibone, and there was a school named after him, it since has been turned into a

3:43rec center or something like that. But he used to visit my great-grandfather, I was told, just to talk with him for hours on end because he just thought my grandfather was so knowledgeable about everything. Great-grandfather, I should say, not my grandfather.

4:01And Mary Weaver, the farm that I mentioned a few times, not really a lot, but I grew up off a farm that my father ran before he went to Nestle’s. And we always had my pony and then my horses down there. And we always helped raise corn. And later on, the business I have today got its start from that stand, that farm stand that we sold corn and vegetables and tomatoes to the mainly the New Yorkers around Lake Handewood all summer long and made a lot of money.

4:32It put me through college. It was how I made my money in the mid to end of the 1970s in this whole time that I was trying to find God or not trying to find God, but God was finding me, maybe. It was at that farm stand. It’s a little roadside wooden stand with, you know, fold-up windows. It looks like nothing, but it made a lot of money.

4:58People would be surprised how much money a day that thing brought in. And it was at that very farm stand in a July of 1975 that I first listened to the very first program I ever heard of Garnerted Armstrong, and I liked what I heard. He did not talk about religion, he did not talk about that he was an evangelist, he talked about world events and how the Middle East was always going to be in our future, what was happening in the 1973 war, which was quite new at that time, what that meant, why it was important to everyone in the world,

5:38and what to look forward to next. And then he was talking about a reunified Europe, and this is before anybody ever even had the idea of a EU, for example, or the United States of Europe. And I was fascinated. My studying in college, my diploma, my degree is in political science, international affairs. I also have another degree, really, in history history and another one in English, though I’m not very good at English, but it was mainly English Lit. But I was very interested in listening to this and he had a point of view that I agreed with

6:17and not too many people at that time did agree with. And it was about a week or two into the program, and I’ve told this before many times, that one day he started out a program by saying, I don’t often admit to being an evangelist. And when I heard that, I was angry. I was an atheist at the time. I didn’t want to hear about God, and I certainly didn’t want to hear from any evangelists that I knew were all crooks they only wanted people’s money old lady’s money and uh… so i turned radio off

6:48and that radio was probably offer at least a good week maybe two and i didn’t listen to him he was on a station by the way just a bit uh… a while massachusetts that was a cbs affiliate station it was talk radio of the day and every fifteen minutes or some shows lasted 30 minutes,

7:05you would have Eric Severide, a CBS anchor at one time and a big-time pundit for CBS News, and all of these CBS reporters, they all had their own… It was like the original podcast of the day. And I would listen to them and I’d listen to the news. I was a news junkie, I was a historian junkie, and this Garner Chet Armstrong had come on for a half hour at 12 to 1230, I believe that was the time, and I was just amazed and intrigued for the first week or so

7:39that I listened to him until he said he was an evangelist. And I turned the radio off. And it was, I don’t know, maybe a week, maybe almost two weeks, when I’m listening to the other shows on the radio station at Chicopee Mass, that’s where it was, Chicopee, Massachusetts. And I knew Garner Ted was coming up next. Usually I changed it back to ABC rock and roll music and I decided I’ll give it a try one more time. I didn’t like what he had to say. And he didn’t sound like an evangelist. He sounded like a newscaster. He had a voice that you would

8:14assume was a newscaster. He didn’t have a twang and he never asked for any money. He never even mentioned money. And matter of fact, everything he had on his program, he said was free. All you had to do was write to him and get it. Absolutely free, and there would never be a follow-up. And at the time, I was studying Houdini, and Houdini was exposing one spiritualist quack after another in his day back in the 1920s. I was reading all about that and

8:45one of the few things, Houdini had a list of what you look for to find a charlatan and that could be in religion or it can be in spiritualism, it can be in anything, even business. And the first thing they say, do they make you pay for something that you shouldn’t have to pay for. And Gardner Ted Armstrong did not ask for any money. There was no follow-ups for any money. I got scores over the years of literature from the Worldwide Church of God at the time, and I never sent them a

9:15dime, and I never got a letter saying that other people were paying this for me and I ought to pay, you know, send in some money. Never, never got anything like that at all. But I got the Plain Truth Magazine for free. I got the, I forgot what the other one was called, The World Tomorrow or whatever it was.

9:32No, that was a radio show and a TV show. Wasn’t a, oh, the Good News. I got that for free. I got all, I still have in my library probably 60 different booklets that I never paid a dime. And I’m talking about full color brochure booklets, some of them as big as a Bible, and never paid a dime. And so I couldn’t say this

9:53guy was a charlatan because he wasn’t getting any of my money. So I started listening to him again, and he was back when I listened to him the first time, he was back talking about world affairs and I kind of liked what he had to say. I agreed with everything he had to say and I thought it was a very smart man. And so lo and behold about two or three months into listening to him I decided this guy knew what he was talking about when it came to world affairs, when it came to politics, when it came to the news, because he said he was a newscaster

10:29too. But the one thing I could not agree with is when he came to the idea of what God was, and that there was a God. I didn’t believe in God anymore. And the ironic thing about that was that the God that he was promoting was one I wouldn’t want to follow anyway. He was saying Christmas was pagan, Easter was pagan, Halloween was pagan. They were three holidays that I really liked!

10:57I had some of the best Christmases any child could ever have in the 1950s and 60s. The whole neighborhood envied the Barney family’s Christmas gifts that were given to the children by our parents. And Christmas dinner at my grandma’s, and Easter dinner, a lunch dinner at my grandmother’s

11:17with the family coming over and all having a feast there on Easter, and Thanksgiving, which we don’t have to worry about that one, do we? But Thanksgiving dinner, I’ll pick my grandma’s again, this is my same grandmother, Brant, my mother’s mother, who’s my grandfather Brant, my mother’s father, who was the atheist, unlike his grandfather. Long way around here, but I think some people might find it

11:43interesting. If you are in a position where you don’t know if you believe in God or not. I have always found with myself and with people that I know, people who have no idea if they believe in God or not are the easiest people to talk to and maybe even prove to them the existence of God the Father and God Jesus Christ, because they do not have all of these preconceived lies in their brain that they are simply not going to put away. And I find that when

12:18you get a hold of a Bible Baptist or you get a hold of a Presbyterian or a Catholic or a Pentecostalist. These people are pretty much into their religion as was taught to them and they will not question it. Even the ones that become an atheist, Catholics especially, that become atheists because they hate the Catholic doctrine in a way Catholics taught them in schools and stuff and they hated the nuns, they still would not ever accept that Christianity was anything different than the Catholic

12:50Church. No, they didn’t believe in Christianity, but if there was a Christianity, it was the one of the Catholic Church. And these are the hardest people to get to, in my opinion. And I have about 45 years of talking to people. So many times over the years, I’ve had customers of mine who get to know what I believe. I do not, by the way, I’m not somebody that goes out

13:10and tells everybody what I believe. I don’t go into a store and say, do you know Jesus? I know a lot of people do and they’re moved to do so, and I don’t have a problem with those people. I think they’re wasting their time. for the most part, this is not what Jesus did, by the way. It seemed to me when you read the Gospels, Jesus didn’t even want to admit what he was or did anything to get anybody. They just followed him because of the miracles and the free food. But he wasn’t going around

13:33calling for altar calls and knocking on people’s doors and saying, have you heard my Gospel? No, that’s not what he did. Matter of fact, he kind of lived his own private life talking to his disciples, whom he saw as the only church, dated truth, that then people followed him. And then he would talk to whoever asked him a question, no matter who they were, if they wanted to hear the answer or not.

13:56Well, that’s what I have done over the years. I don’t go and broadcast to my customers, my friends, or anything necessarily what I believe. They all find out what I believe when I say, no, I don’t eat pork. Why don’t you eat pork? Because the Bible tells me not to eat pork. Oh, you believe in the Bible?

14:11Yes, I do. And then people will start asking me questions and I will answer them honestly. And what I have found over the years is most and things like that. First of all, what do you mean? You’re a Christian and you don’t follow Christmas? I mean, Christmas is all about Christ, isn’t it? No, it’s nothing about Christ, and things like that. But those kind of questions and answers that come to me, they’re pretty easy to go through. The really hard ones, and I had a very good friend in North Carolina.

14:46I’ll just call his name Ronnie. That’s his first name, but I won’t give his last name. He has since passed away about 10 years ago now. It was very sad because we were very, he was a customer of mine and we were very dear friends. My family, my wife and children and his family,

15:01especially his wife, were very close. I looked at them like relatives for, and I really did. And he was a very, very good man. And, but he was not a believer. They had a, I don’t know the whole story. I never delved into it, but I know they had a daughter who was killed or died when she was like 19 or 20 years old, many years earlier in their life. It brought them into some real despair and they made it through it.

15:30They were still together. They were, looked like a good marriage to me, not my business. But anyway, I never forget a conversation we had, and this is at least 32 years ago. We were sitting in his living room,

15:45we were staying there. You know, I was a traveling salesman at the time, selling paint, and I had a big territory. I had a territory half of Florida from Orlando South, Daytona South, Tampa South of all Florida. Then I had North Carolina, believe it or not, and Virginia.

16:02So I would spend a week in North Carolina, fly home, spend a week in Florida. Then I’d spend a week in Virginia, and fly home and have a week in Florida. I did that for four years. My wife hardly ever saw me.

16:15But anyway, we were sitting on his couch in his living room one night, and he was just telling me there was no way there could be a God. And I said, why is that? He said, and he mentioned about his daughter.

16:30He also mentioned about people starving to death in Africa, tragedies that happen to good people, like this last thing that happened in this Texas flood where innocent children are wiped away. Or one of the things that really bothered me was the floods last year with Helene,

16:46when that little boy, who Jesus Christ was his superstar, prayed, died, was swept away from that rooftop, pulled out of his mother’s arms by a wave on that river that overflowed, and as she lost his grasp and she saw him going away to die, he was praying to Jesus to save him and his mother.

17:10And God did not do so. And it bothered me. And it bothered me then. It bothered me for so long I couldn’t talk about it on this show, and it still bothers me. But you wanna know what?

17:20My answer to Ron, Ronnie, is gonna stay the same as my answer about that little boy. Because I said to Ronnie, you know, when a deer is out in a lot eating some grass and he sees a mountain lion, a deer would make a bad mistake by saying,

17:39I don’t believe that a mountain lion exists. Well, why? Because something that would tear apart a little baby deer and eat it, I don’t wanna believe anything like that. Well, if you have that idea about the mountain lion,

17:54if you were that deer, you’re gonna get eaten and killed. Killed and eaten, I guess in that order. And the same thing with God. I said to Ronnie, you know, who says that God has to be a good guy? Maybe, just possibly, he’s an evil S.O.B. That does not stop his existence. So either God is a good God,

18:16as the Bible suggests, but let’s say that God is what the devil calls God, some evil person, and the devil’s trying to get us convinced in this world that God is evil. Does that make the existence of God go away because we will not accept that a God can be evil? Well, the devil is evil and he’s a God. He is of the God, not of the God kind, but the Hebrew calls them gods, you know, the fake gods, not a real God, not the family of God the Father and Jesus Christ. I should make that clear. I

18:49don’t want to confuse people in this diatribe of mine about believing in God or not. And that is what I have told everybody. You can first of all start out with, is there evidence of a God? And there’s all kinds of evidence. Won’t get into it here. I have other shows about it. We have all over the Plain Truth. You can get anything you want. That everything proves the existence of a God. The law of entropy proves the existence of a God. The point there, therefore, is there is a God. If you want to believe it or not, if you want to say,

19:21I can’t believe in God because of all these tragedies and no God would allow tragedies, well that is human thinking. Humans allow tragedy. Are you going to say, I don’t believe there was an Adolf Hitler because no man could be that evil, or I don’t believe that Putin can be this evil as he is, or Hamas who beat and raped all these women they captured and beat them to death and took their babies and put them in ovens and baked them to death? You don’t think

19:50that’s evil? Does that mean they don’t exist? Well, God exists and that’s what I tell everybody. God, you can prove the existence of God. The next thing you have to do is prove whether it’s the God of the Bible or not, or is it another God? Is it the God of the Muslims? Is it the God of the Hindus? Is it the devil? Is the devil the real God, as the Satanists believe? Then once you start studying the Bible and you read it and believe what the Bible tells you, the Bible proves

20:21itself through what? Well, it proves itself through fulfilled prophecy. The Bible predicted many things would happen in the past that did happen afterwards. I always give the example of Alexander the Great when he was ready to destroy the temple in Jerusalem, being given the scroll of Daniel where he is mentioned some, I don’t know, a hundred years before or more than Alexander, where he predicted the rise of Alexander from

20:51the place he would come from, Greece. And Alexander was so moved by reading not only the prophecy that he would come, but how he would die, when he would die, and he would die, and what would happen to his kingdom, also there. He was so moved, he left the temple alone. He understood the existence of that God, and so did I.

21:15Over the years, answered prayer. When you desperately pray to God, and something, a miracle happens. And it’s happened to me. It’s not often, I don’t have miracles every day. There’s a lot of things I ask for, a lot of things I cry over that

21:30don’t happen, don’t come true. But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. It just means he doesn’t want to listen to that prayer. That’s all it means. Maybe for my own good. Maybe not. Maybe for God’s own good. Because ultimately, it’s God’s purpose that has to be done down here, and it’s not necessarily our own purpose. So when people come to me and say, how do you believe in a God that killed women and children in the Old Testament? And I say, well, I can believe in that God because He has the power, or I should say they, God the Father and God Christ Jesus, has the power

22:07to bring every single dead person back to life again. You don’t have that power. No one born of a woman has that power. That is why we are not to murder people. But God can take away the life of any person that God wills because God knows that God can bring them back.

22:29God is love. God does not intend to fail. I learned that so many years ago, that God is going to cause pain and suffering and death to many people who will not listen to him and most of the world will not listen to him

22:46But at the same time God wants everyone to come to him and to them and to worship them and understand that their goodness depends on God and That they can have eternal life if they just listen and obey. Over the weekend, we played the Book of Amos, and in the Book of Amos, you saw how it’s a warning

23:11for the United States of America today, how people think they’re religious when they are not. They honor God with their lips, but their minds and hearts are so far away from the real God that it hurts. I tell people that if you believe in God or not, God exists.

23:31Just like if that deer believes in the mountain lion or not, that mountain lion exists. If you end up believing in God, then it’s your job to figure out just exactly who that God is. What is God? Is God a Trinity as the Catholics and a lot of, I would say 90% of all Christians believe? Or is God what the Bible claims God is? Two supernatural spiritual beings, the Father and the Son, comprised of the Holy Spirit. and man is made in the image of those two gods,

24:07and are male and female comprised of blood. The blood is the physical form of the Holy Spirit, and God the Father and Christ are the spiritual form of the mother and the father, the husband and the wife. It doesn’t make Jesus effeminate, it doesn’t make them queers, it doesn’t do all the stuff that, you know, sick people try to make out of the Gospels, but it does give us an example that the family unit is the basic unit of the God family,

24:42and we are, if we want to be, a part of that God family. And that’s the good news. And when you get to believe that, you understand that you can prove it. And once you prove, you don’t have to have blind faith, which goes away when disasters and tragedy strikes

25:00and people in despair walk away from God. You can know these two facts, and this is the end of the show. Fact number one, that if God wills it, God will answer your prayer and get you out of a problem, and if it’s a life-threatening problem, it will become a miracle in your life to strengthen you. Rule number two, if God, for God’s own purpose and reason, decides

25:27not to listen to your prayer or not to listen to someone else’s prayer that is very godly and allows them to suffer and die in the most horrible way, that does not disprove the existence of that God. It just proves that God’s will is somewhere else and somewhere else must mean something better for that person, believe it or not, down the road. Because there is a life that follows this life.

25:55And that life is eternal life, immortal life. No angel is immortal. You can read in the Bible, the devil’s gonna be destroyed. No angel has immortality. The Bible is clear. God alone is immortal. But when you are born again from the ground, when Christ returns,

• 26:13when all the people hear the voice of Christ that are Christians, they are going to be turned into immortal God Spirit, Holy Spirit. That’s what you become. And then you have no pain, no fear of death, you are like God because you are God, you are the children of the Godhead. That’s the good news that Christ came to bring to all of us, to deliver,
• 26:38and to die for our sins so we can be made ready for when that day happens. And I wanna do another show maybe this week or next week with some other questions that people have asked me over the years, not in emails lately. I’ve asked people to send emails
• 26:55and you can do that to theplaintruthtodayataol.com. That comes right to me. But other people over the years, many people had gotcha questions that they thought were gotcha questions, and I can answer most of those. Anyone I’ve ever heard anyway I’ve answered.
• 27:11Somebody might stump me someday, but I haven’t been stumped so far. I got this pretty well. I’ll put a lot of thought into this, not because I wanted to believe in the God that I believe in today, because brother, sister, I did not want to believe what I believe today. I fought it for four years. I did not want to believe in a God that was going to take me away from family, friends, school chums, and life in general, where I would be an outcast. I would look like a pimple on a nose and everyone would look at me as some kind of a weirdo. I did not want to believe in that God.
• 27:51I did not want to give up eating pork. I did not want to give up eating king crab legs, which were my favorite meal. Haven’t had them in 47 years, 46 years now. So I did not want this God, but it’s the real God. I proved it, and I can prove it to you if you wanna listen, and you can prove it to yourself
• 28:13if you start talking to God. That’s the key, start talking to God. Eventually, it might not happen right away, but eventually God’s gonna start talking back and it’ll scare the bejesus out of you. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today.
• 28:27And I do wanna say one thing before we go. We didn’t have any commercials in between. Theplaintruth.com is the one place to go to to get the news that means something to you. That’s what I liked when I used to listen to Garner Ted Armstrong.
• 28:40I heard news that meant something to me, that meant something to my future, that meant something to me immediately. And that’s what the plain truth is trying to do today. We are a news site. We are not a religion. We are not a church. I am not an evangelist like Governor Ted Armstrong was. So if you don’t like evangelists, you don’t have to turn me off for a week or two. I’m a newsman. I’m a newsman whose real profession right now is in the paint business, because that’s
• 29:09what my wife and I do, and that’s what pays for this program. But like Garner did, you’re never going to get a bill from me when anything that we ever do, when you listen to these broadcasts, or if you get anything that someday, you know, we are gonna have literature and stuff and maybe even a magazine or something someday You’re never gonna get a bill for it I can guarantee you that right now if Tamko paint my wife and I business named after her can’t afford to do it Then it won’t get done that simple until tomorrow Bob Barney for the plain truth
• 29:40Calm and the plain truth today broadcast what you’re listening to Calm and the plain truth today broadcast what you’re listening to Goodbye

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