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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.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-up with Bob: May 16, 2025
Hello, this is Bob Barney with a Plain Truth Today Friday wrap-up. Fridays come really quick, but this Friday I think we have some pretty good news compared to other Fridays as of late. This Friday wrap-up show I think is going to be comprised of a lot more good news for a change. Maybe we can see a change in the direction of both the Trump administration, which I’m hoping will be the case, and we saw the stock market come back. There are some problems still there, but the removal of the big tariff against China and the 90-day pause hopefully will continue.
2:00 I believe as of Wednesday they said the stock market basically was where it was when Trump took office, so it has not grown, but it’s not continuing to shrink 5%, 8%, 10% as it was starting to with all of these trade talks and non-trade. I think it’s good news, and there was other good news.
For example, the inflation CPI index came in Tuesday, I believe it was, and it was 2.3% inflation, and everybody expected it would be 2.7% or 2.8%, maybe even 3%, and so the inflation, even with the tariff included, came down to an unexpected low level, almost to where the Fed wants to see inflation. I don’t think 2% inflation is good, but that is built into the system the way the Fed does things today. I’m not a Fed person, I don’t believe in the Fed, I think it should be abolished, but the economy is getting stronger, the price of food and stuff are still kind of high, but at the same time, the reason I believe that the CPI came to 2.3% is because, as within my business, a lot of people are selling at discount sales in order to get business, because people are still hurting for money. Which by the way is going to cost companies maybe some profit, including mine, but at the same time, if it helps the economy in the long run and people start feeling good, let’s face it, just back up, let’s face it, with the economy, a lot of the economy depends on people’s thought process.
4:23 We’ve seen the polls, the polls show that people by 66% think America was going the wrong way, and I do believe that was a self-inflicted wound by the Trump administration. I do believe that Donald Trump is not acting like he did in this first term, when he really did a miraculous improvement over the Obama economy, and a lot of small businesses, including mine, did very well during those four years. We kind of really expected that after four miserable Biden years, that it would take off right away, but the tariffs against 7 billion people around the world and all of this other nonsense that was going on was really hurting our economy. More importantly, it was hurting what people thought about the economy, and they were sitting on the sidelines, and they were not spending, so this caused, and I’m sure everybody who buys anything online gets five emails a day from everybody they ever bought to, with this sale, that sale, I know I buy from Vitacost, my vitamins and mineral supplements that I take, and every day they have a 30 to 50 percent sale on something, and I know that it’s getting into their profits, but they’re trying to keep their sales up, waiting for the public’s mood to change, where they’ll start investing into the economy again, and believing in the economy, as they did in Trump’s first administration.
6:27 Now, one of the things that caught my attention, and I have been saying this on this program for a while, but Bill O’Reilly was on Andrew Cuomo’s News Nation show last week, and Andrew Cuomo was telling him that he thinks that the Trump administration, he has surrounded himself in his cabinet with a bunch of yes people. People who really do not give him all of the facts, and they’re just trying to play up to his ego. I believe the same thing, and Bill O’Reilly had a good point, and Bill O’Reilly has been a friend of Donald Trump for 35 years, and he knows Donald Trump quite well. Also, he really respects Donald Trump, and what he said was, he did not disagree, by the way, with Cuomo’s belief that maybe some of the people around Trump were not the right choices in the first place, but he did say the one thing he knows about Donald Trump is that he will listen to anybody, so if you get to him, and you tell him what you’re thinking, Bill O’Reilly said, which I agree with, and we saw this in the first term, that Donald Trump will take all advice in, he will mull it over in his brain, and he will pick the right decision, but he needs to have more people with more experience giving him scenarios of what’s going to happen. Thinking, if you do this, this might happen, if you do this, this definitely will happen, and I think between Newt Gingrich coming out a week ago saying that Donald Trump needed to listen to more people, and he had to worry about the midterm elections, because if they lose Congress, especially the House, he’s going to be impeached again, and we’re back to 2019, and I think Donald Trump might start have listening, because he did a reversal on these tariffs.
I know the ever-Trumpers out there say, oh, he won, did a great thing, you know, China capitulated. Well, I have sources, and I know China did not capitulate. They both were hurting, and they both capitulated, and Donald Trump rightly so put that 90-day pause, and that set the economy on fire. Now, it did make some other things happen, like the price of oil went up slightly, but the truth is the numbers are going to turn around once this tariff situation is put to bed. You only can pick on one country at a time, not the whole world at a time, as Warren Buffett said in his final speech at his convention that he has for Berkshire Hathaway. But I think Donald Trump’s new approach reminds me a lot of his 2017 approach.
8:02 Now, saying that, I think we’re on the right track, and I think if he keeps going on this track, he can certainly turn around some things. However, there are some enemies he’s building within his own MAGA-movement that he needs to take seriously, because I agree with these people, and I usually agree with them, by the way. I’m not a big Ben Shapiro fan, and I’m not definitely a Laura Loomer fan, but both of them came out against him accepting this jet, this 747 Gilt Golden Jet from Qatar. This is a country in the Middle East that has funded terrorism. They helped fund the 9-11 attack on us, and they fund Hamas, they fund every terrorist organization there is with their money.
Saudi Arabia may do so underhandedly, but they do not do so publicly as Qatar. I think, as Ben Shapiro mentioned, and Laura Loomer, who has Trump’s ear, said this is bad optics when all of a sudden, you’ve given the Democrats this corruption thing that I talked about last week. I put some posts up on the Message Board as well, that you cannot have, especially Donald Trump, cannot have any appearance of corruption, and when he was going to take the jet, that’s one thing, and then he said he’s going to have the government donate it to his library, and he was going to use it after the fact; then they also gave his Trump coin money, and things like that. It looks, it has the appearance of corruption, and he needs to listen to the people that are on his side, and I know they’re going to be ripped apart by those ever-Trumpers out there for daring to go against Donald Trump, but there are too many people who’s going to use this as a basis to undermine Donald Trump’s policies that he’s trying to maybe change and do right, so he needs to turn down anything from governments, Middle Eastern especially governments, that have been financing terrorism.
19:59 Also, the Syria announcement Tuesday also kind of disturbed me, only because he’s going to take away all the sanctions on Syria to try to help that country rebuild. The problem is the Syrian government that is in control today also are former terrorists, and they are actively killing Christians in Syria, and Christians are being butchered all over Africa and the Middle East right now. We don’t need to be supporting a nation that is doing so, even though they say they are not doing so. They are purging the country of Muslims who disagree with them, who followed the old regime, as well as many Christians, and this is what’s happening.
Now, maybe Donald Trump’s going to put some strings on this sanction lifting and say that if you continue killing Christians or killing your opponents, we will put 10 times more restrictions on you and sanctions, and that would be smart politics on his part if he’s going to carry a stick and an apple at the same time. You’re going to have the apple or I’m wacky with this stick, and that would be good diplomacy, and I hope that’s the case.
11:58 Also, I think it’s pretty good news when he came out and said, Russia better do something. We are giving you help out of this war. We’re giving you good offices from our American administration, and you better do something because you do not want us as an enemy, and right now what you’re doing could turn us into an enemy, and again, that is what Putin and any dictator is going to respond to, pressure, strength, and a promise of retaliation. It doesn’t have to be military retaliation. We don’t have to bomb Russia. We can sanction their oil. We can sanction all kinds of things that make Putin his money. Remember, Vladimir Putin is like a mafia boss. He’s like a big godfather over Russia, and he’s all about himself. He doesn’t care about the Ukrainian people, and he doesn’t care about the Russian people. He doesn’t care about Donald Trump. He’s not anybody’s friend, but at the same time, despots do understand power politics, and they know when they have to fold on their cards when they have a losing hand, and right now if Trump plays it right, and he seems to be, finally, I don’t think he did it at first, but he seems to be following good diplomacy by saying to Russia, you better be honest, and you better come to this table, this peace table, and do something that is constructive, or you will find a different Donald Trump than I’ve been to you, and that was great policy on his part.
So I conclude this segment of the program by just saying that I do believe that Donald Trump is like the old Donald Trump more and more, and I believe if he can continue on a stable path where people can understand what he’s saying and follow what he’s doing, and it doesn’t change back and forth, back and forth, that we could be on the right path again like we were in 2017.
I’ve told you this before, I supported Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, I’m still an election denier, and I supported him in 2024, I said he was the last hope for America, and I think God saved his life, but at the same time, as I pointed out with the King Saul of the Bible, God can change on you if you change on God. If you embarrass God in your actions, and I think that someone is getting to Donald Trump, I don’t know who, but they are getting him to listen to policies that make sound sense, and that’s this segment, and I think this news is a heck of a lot better than we’ve been having on Friday wrap-ups for the last, I don’t know, seven weeks.
So God bless Donald Trump, and let’s see if he can keep this momentum going and do good negotiations for this country. I’ll be back after a brief message.
13:23 This is Bob Barney again for The Plain Truth Today, that’s brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one site you go to to find out what is tomorrow’s news, not just yesterday’s news, theplaintruthtoday.com, every day, 7-11 a.m., noon, and 7-11 p.m., Monday through Friday, and special programming on the weekends. Go to theplaintruthtoday.com by going to theplaintruth.com. That’s kind of confusing, but I’m sorry, that’s the way it works.
14:43 Well, we’re back for the Friday wrap-up, Bob Barney here, and I want to get into the next subject, one of the subjects I played a lot last week and this week, of course, is the new pope that took office last week, and I gave a warning that I think this pope might be better than what I was afraid is going to come, but he is going to be a liberal, and he’s going to be an anti-Trump, anti-American type liberal, just like Pope Francis was before him. Unlike Pope Francis, however, this guy has got the media on his side, he’s got the world on his side, and he’s going to make a very good false prophet for the Antichrist someday, though I do not believe this is the pope that’s going to be around during the Antichrist times. I still believe that will be a third world pope who will actually be a full-blown communist and a very, how should I say, godless person, because the final false prophet pope that’s going to give power to the Antichrist in the beast of Northern or Central Europe, maybe Italy, but definitely Central Europe, is going to be someone who does not believe in God. He’s going to say he is God, and sit eventually in a temple that is to be rebuilt in Jerusalem, and so we’ve got to keep our eyes on what this pope does. He’s already singled his mistrust of the Trump administration and as well as the American country as a whole.
But we’ll leave that segment again behind here, and I will say keep watching what happens in Europe, generally, and keep watching what happens with the Catholic Church in Rome, and you will know already, if you follow ThePlainTruth.com, you will know the future of the papacy and of Europe. Truth is, it’s not very good if you’re a Christian, a real Christian, or if you’re someone who loves freedom and democracy and peace, because ultimately most of the wars fought in the last thousand years or more were inspired by a false Christian church out of Rome, and that’s The Plain Truth.
16:23 Another story we’ve been following with The Plain Truth over the last 18 months or so, since the Hamas attack on Israeli citizens in Gaza, back in October of 23, I guess it would be now, that the final American hostage was released as Trump landed in the Middle East, or right before he landed in the Middle East, and that may be a sign again where great diplomacy on the part of Donald Trump and his administration now. Maybe they got their act together, is forcing the terrorists of this world to reconsider holding Americans hostage. I believe, as Teddy Roosevelt did earlier when Americans were held hostage in Libya back in 1905 or whatever it was, that if you hold an American hostage, you are at war with the United States government, and we should do everything we can do to punish you for your inhumane actions against citizens of the United States.
I am a MAGA person still, make America great, I’m not necessarily a member of the ever-Trumpers, but I do believe that the world has to know that the United States will protect its citizens at any cost, therefore will annihilate any country or any peoples who want to harm Americans and American citizens, and that message has to be strongly given. I’m glad because last week I was upset that it seemed like Trump made a red line and that red line was never ever talked about again and nothing ever happened. Maybe good quiet diplomacy worked, working with some of the Saudi Arabian partners and other people like Dubai, the good people in the Middle East who really are not Muslim terrorists and do not support Muslim terrorism, as does Qatar and I think that he has the ability, he has already done it with the Abraham Accords back in 2018. He has the ability to bring some kind of a peaceful solution to the Middle East, at least for the time being.
17:23 Remember my first article ever in theplaintruth.com was why there will always be war and trouble in the Middle East as long as you are alive until Jesus Christ returns because the Bible says so. Whenever you want to look at the future, one thing you should always remember, what the Bible predicts in the end time will happen, and it will happen, and there is no way you’re going to stop it from happening, and so there is never going to be peace in the Middle East until Jesus Christ returns to this earth and forces peace on everyone.
I played a show from Garner Ted Armstrong, who’s been dead now for 22 years, but it was a very, very good show when he was pointing out about the return of Jesus Christ and what it really means for all of mankind. It means world peace, it means world suffering will end, but it will not come by an election, it will not become because people want him. They are going to be forced, literally forced, into a peaceful relationship with their neighbors, if they like it or not, or they will be destroyed, and that is the promise that the Bible gives you concerning what’s going to happen in the Middle East when Christ returns. He is going to return because he said so, and you can always take whatever the Bible says is an absolute prophecy for the future to the bank. And I know not too many programs who call themselves news programs want to tell you that, but I will tell you that.
I believe in the Bible, every word of the Bible.
19:45 I believe in what God says is going to happen, is going to happen. Faith is knowing that God will do what he says he will do, and it will come to pass. So if you want to know tomorrow’s headlines, read the Bible, read the prophecies of the Bible which have not yet occurred, and you know what’s going to happen in the future. You don’t know the day and the date, but you know what to look for. One of the things I want to wrap up this show about before we get into the Saturday and Sunday programming is this thing about the earthquakes, the fires, the potential tidal waves, volcanoes going around the world. There is a message here coming from God, and we have to take that message seriously.
I’ll be right back to explain more of that after this brief word about The Plain Truth.
Theplaintruth.com is the one place to go to find out what is in the news, and if there’s anything in the Bible that is talking about in the news today. Today’s headlines really were written, many of them, two, three thousand years ago, and you can know what tomorrow is going to bring, at least in general terms, by going to theplaintruth.com every day. We have your help today. We have a message board, and we have these podcasts. Thank you.
22:14 Well, this weekend, of course, tomorrow is the Sabbath day, and we always have a special program on the Sabbath day, and then on the Sabbath evening, Saturday evening, we always have either a book reading, a short story, or sometimes a video. Once in a while, we even have a long movie, but usually nobody wants to watch a long movie on their phone unless they know how to cast the YouTube video onto their TV from their phone, and many people, younger people, know how to do that all the time, but some of us older folks have a little harder time figuring out how to do that, so I don’t usually do that many movies, but tomorrow night, we’re going to have a great short 28, I think it is, minute video, and we’re going to talk about that for the rest of this program after I go over tomorrow’s program and tonight’s program. I think tonight we have something on hemorrhoids in the Bible. Yes, it’s mentioned, and tomorrow morning, we’ll have our regular Bible study in the morning at 7 11, but 7 11 p.m. is when we have a story about the bronze snake, the story of Moses and the people leaving Egypt, and when the people rebelled against God, God sent vipers, pit vipers, that’s like rattlesnakes or cotton mouse in this country, but in Africa, in the Middle East, they have these vipers. They look like a rattlesnake, but they don’t have rattles, but their bite is very nasty, and they bring a lot of deaths to this day into the region because they can just show up in the middle of the night and get into your bed sacks and everything else. Well, anyway, God was mad at the people, so he sent vipers amongst all the Israelites while they were wandering for 40 years in the desert of the Sinai wilderness, and the people would have died if God did not give them a way to save themselves from these nasty venomous pit vipers, the bites they got received, and so he instructed Moses to take a pole and on the pole fashion a bronze snake-like serpent on it, and if the people would just look at that pole with the serpent, it almost reminds you of looking at maybe the symbol for a medical doctor, you know, they have the pole and they have the snake wrapped around the pole.
24:34 Well, that’s really what this thing looked like, and the people would look at that and they would be healed of their snake bite, miraculously, and what does that have to do with Jesus Christ? Well, first of all, the God who did all of this was Jesus Christ, number one, but number two, that story is a foreshadow of a story that Jesus tells Nicodemus in the third chapter of John, because everything in the Old Testament, all the holy days were supposed to follow, and all of the stories that you read about has a New Testament and actually even a post-New Testament, a millennial symbolism to it. And what does the vipers biting the people represent? It represents the people constantly sinning against God, like we do to this day.
I’m a sinner, you’re a sinner, everybody’s a sinner but Jesus Christ, who walked this earth almost 2,000 years ago and then today is in heaven waiting for His return.
And so the viper bites represented the disobedience to God, the punishment from God for sin. But when he gave the example of a pole with a snake wrapped around it, cast in bronze, and the people only had to look upon it to be saved by their faith, it worked. And Jesus, when he’s telling Nicodemus about what it really means to be born again, and unfortunately most Christians today think they’re born again when they don’t have a clue what it really means, Nicodemus, it was just stymied by the whole thing. But he ends that conversation, and this movie takes the Old Testament story, and I’m going to explain that to you in a minute, and he goes into the New Testament story when Jesus mentions, like the serpent that was lifted up on a pole for the people could be saved, the Son of Man will have to be lifted up on a pole and crucified to take away the sins of the world. The bronze serpent that the people looked on took away the sins of the Israelites at the time. Jesus, of course, the creator of heaven and earth, the creator of mankind in his own image, and the Father’s as well, his death on that pole, being raised up on that pole, took away everybody’s sin, who just all you have to do is ask for it.
26:34 It’s that simple. If you ask for it, you’ll get it. If you don’t ask for it, you may not get it.You probably won’t, but maybe the next time around, at the Great General Resurrection, when people are judged by what they did, maybe there’s a hope, and I’m not going to say there is or there’s not, but the Bible is clear that every time you read something in the Old Testament, there is usually a New Testament symbolic principle involved. Jesus is the tabernacle, by the way. Just go to a search engine and write, Jesus is the tabernacle. You’ll probably come to quite a few Plain Truth articles, to be frank, but you’ll see many articles comparing everything that they had to do at the tabernacle represented something about Jesus Christ. It’s just an amazing parallel. It’s why we don’t want to follow Easter, and we don’t want to follow Christmas, which are not found in the Bible. We don’t want to follow these pagan holidays that mean nothing about the worshiping of Jesus Christ and God the Father. When you follow the Old Testament holidays, there’s symbolic meaning to the New Testament story and to your life today. You can’t understand what Jesus did for you unless you fully understand God’s plan as revealed by his holidays.
The very next holiday coming, probably going to do a show on it next week, is Pentecost, which is 50 days after the first fruits that happened about right now, about 40-some days ago, I guess 38 days ago, and we’re counting down to Pentecost. Pentecost is really when the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, and then in the New Testament Church, the Holy Spirit, which is God’s law, is being written in your heart. The Holy Spirit is ten commandments in spiritual form being planted into your brain and heart and being, and that happened on one, Pentecost, the same time the law came, the Holy Spirit came to make you have the ability to follow the law. You can’t understand the Bible, God’s plan, and the ultimate salvation that’s awaiting you unless you understand both Old and New Testament and God’s holidays.
28:23 So that’s going to be tomorrow night, and it’s a phenomenal, moving, little short video, movie, and Sunday we’ll have our Sunday 7-11 a.m. show, and we’ll be back here Monday morning again with three shows a day, Monday through Friday, 7-11 a.m., p.m., and noontime with other fast-breaking news stories and what it could mean to you and your family and to, and what God may have to do with it or don’t have to do with it. Sometimes, you know, God is not in every little thing we do, but He’s in the macro, what we do, the big, the big scene, He’s there, and He’s getting to you, and He’s trying to, He’s trying to get you to see His way. God wants to be believed, and He wants to be loved.
Is that so hard?
Well, this is Bob Barney. I hope you have a safe and a wonderful weekend, and I hope you do follow the Sabbath day. It’s commanded by God to do so. It’s made for you. You’re not made for it. It’s not a burden. It’s not a burden at all.
It’s a joy.
30:01 Until Monday, Bob Barney saying, God bless you all. Thank you for listening. Bye-bye.