God’s Law, is it for Christians? (Transcript)

CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE PLAIN TRUTH TODAY 7:11 AM BROADCAST: God’s Law, is it for Christians?

Did Christ come as the messenger of a new covenant? Did He do away with laws? And now, Garner Ted Armstrong. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the Islamic people in the world, especially in Iraq, kept the Ten Commandments? Now think about it. It doesn’t bother you if you are a nominal Christian in the Western world of Christianity, and that’s basically the people that watch this program. that they keep Friday. 

They observe Friday. Doesn’t bother you at all. It does not interrupt your daily or your weekday work. It doesn’t fret your conscience. It doesn’t bother you at all. You don’t care. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if Saddam Hussein had taught all the people down there to keep the Ten Commandments? 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they did that in Rwanda or Zambia or Nigeria or Liberia, for that matter, where the president just was there because of a civil war that has taken who knows how many lives? You know, when you get right down to it, You would love to have all your neighbors observing the Ten Commandments. 

You would like to live in a community. Now, before you take issue with that, just wait a minute. 
What is wrong with the Ten Commandments? 

Why is there such animus against them? And I’m not just talking about atheists that want placards removed from the front, you know, the yard of a school or some of the ACLU people that want it taken off of the judge’s wall or from any kind of a government building or even for that matter, sued to have, in God we trust, taken off of our dollar bills or mention of God in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. 
I’m talking now about a religious aspect, people who do believe in God but don’t believe in God’s law, which makes no sense at all when you stop to think about it. What is so bad about the Ten Commandments? What if you had a neighbor that really believed thou shalt not steal? Wouldn’t that be nice? 

What about all the kids in the community? What about the entire neighborhood in which you live? What about the entire city, county, and state? Thou shalt not steal. Nobody stole. Nobody believed they ought to indulge in theft or armed robbery. What about thou shalt not kill? Actually, it says thou shalt do no murder. The original Hebrew word is, and it means do no murder. If the entire United States observed even one of the Ten Commandments, and I’ve gone through that many times in the past, and with a fine-tooth comb and a booklet about the Ten Commandments, it would be a far happier, more fruitful, productive, successful, tranquil nation if we observed even one out of the 10. 

The last time I heard a survey taken, the average nominal Christian, we’re talking now about church-going Christians, could only come up with 4. I know which one they missed out on, but they could come up with the 4 that have to do with interpersonal and social relations, but that was about it. I’ve got something for you I want you to get, and there are 2 tapes here as well as a brochure Was God’s law in force before Sinai? 

Now, to you who are the uninitiated, the Ten Commandments were given through Moses to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, and that’s covered in the 20th chapter of the book of Exodus and the 5th chapter of the book of Deuteronomy. 

But if God’s Ten Commandments, all of them, including the 4th one, were in effect and force before Sinai, and if it was a sin to break them, and that was known not only by all of God’s people, Israel, but by pagan kings as well, which it was, by the way, it would be quite an argument against how could it have been done away when Jesus Christ said, think not, I’m come to destroy the law. 
This was God’s law enforced before Sinai goes through the relevant scriptures and shows you that, yes, it was. 2 tapes, 2 one-hour sermons, terms of the covenant, talking about old and new covenant, and also Christ in the Old Testament.

 I’ll make a statement. I’ll bet you, and I’m not a betting man, that about, well, one out of a hundred of the Protestant pastors and Catholic priests in the pulpits all across the United States would be hard put to preach all about Jesus Christ from the Old Testament. Where would you go to look? Where would you find all about his life and the prophecies, his ministry, his miracles? 
In the Old Testament. This is a sermon Live audience, stand-up sermon given before a live audience about an hour in length about Christ in the Old Testament. Both tapes and the brochure are free of charge if you dial That’s We’ll send you both tapes and the brochure free of charge, no price whatsoever. 
And you can listen to them at your leisure and play them back and hear them several times. And if you don’t agree with them, give them to somebody else or trash them. 

Who cares? But get them anyway and find out. Now, there are some salient points I want to cover with Jesus Christ plainly said to the Pharisees, You shall see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast out. He said that not just once, but he reiterated that. And the Bible shows that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with all the other great patriarchs, including Seth, Enoch, Elijah, Noah, the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, are going to be in the kingdom of God. Now, ask this and answer this question. Did they get saved under Moses? 

Well now, let’s see. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, all of them came along long after Moses. But Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Enoch came before Moses. So how did they get into the kingdom? Or did they? 

Well, the answer is no, they didn’t. Jesus Christ came down and He said, no man has ascended into heaven but the Son of Man who came from heaven. He said, no man has ever heard God’s voice or seen His shape at any time. 

You can’t look on God’s face and live. And Jesus should have known because He was there and that’s where He came from. Now, he also says in Hebrews, the 11th chapter, that all of these, the ones that I mentioned and many, many more beside Deborah, Barak, etc., here is an entire list of the greatest heroes, the greatest martyrs, the greatest righteous men and women in all of the Bible. And it says, and I quote, these all died in faith, not having received the promise. 

It talks about how they looked for the vision of the kingdom of God, that they saw a city afar off, that they forsook all the pleasures, as it says about Moses, of Egypt for a short period of time, and for all the bitterness of his life, and of leading those recalcitrant, rebellious, murmuring people for about 40 years in the wilderness until he was so beside himself, he prayed that God would just take his life. 
I mean, he just had it. So here are all of these wonderful great patriarchs, martyrs, many of them, who were murdered mercilessly, and Jesus Christ said, you will see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast out to the super-righteous, supercilious, self-righteous Pharisees. 

The question is, how did they get saved? It says in Genesis 26 five, and this is reiterated to Isaac who is Abraham’s son, that the promise that God is now reiterating to Isaac is, quote, because that Abraham obeyed my commandments, my statutes, and my laws. Genesis 26 5. Abraham obeyed the commandments, the statutes, and the laws. 

Now Genesis comes before Exodus. And if you’re talking in terms of years, it’s many hundreds and hundreds of years before there was ever a person who was even named Judah. Has nothing to do with Jews. Remember Abraham the patriarch, then Isaac his son, Jacob his son, and then Joseph his son, who had Ephraim and Manasseh with his wife. And the 12 tribes of Israel came from Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, and one of them was named Judah. and later on a nickname was attached to him, Jew. 
So there was nobody called a Jew. There was nothing called Jewish that a lot of Christians, nominal Christians, think is really bad. And they try to just throw everything away with the idea that, well, the Old Testament is Jewish, or the old law was Jewish, or that’s Mosaic, or that’s old. It’s wonderful, you know, it’s the Old Testament. 

So you think cobwebs and musts and the old yellow pages of history, it’s old. But we believe in the New Testament. And, of course, it’s only about two thousand years old, so it could have time to gather a few cobwebs itself, couldn’t it? 
But most people, because they’ve been taught that, they’ve been brought up to believe that, they’ve casually assumed it. It’s what their parents and their peers, it’s what their son they go to meet and boys and girls have told them, it’s what the pastor told them, it’s what they had spoon-fed to them all their lives. 

Christ came to do away with the law. Now he says, and I’m reading from Matthew five and verse 17, think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. You know what that means to most people? 

Instead of fulfilling as an obligation to do and perform, it means I did not come to destroy, but to destroy. And that’s the way they read it. And that’s wrong. That is a deliberate twisting of Scripture, deliberately trying to make that thing say something it does not. And Jesus Christ of Nazareth is the one who wrote the Ten Commandments with his own finger, as you read in the first chapter of the book of John. In the beginning was the Word, the Greek word is logos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Greek for the word God is theos, and that is a plural word, just like Elohim is a plural word in Genesis make man in our image. 

There was more than one. There was the Father and the One who became the Son. He’s called the Logos or the spokesman, the executive member of the divine family called Elohim or God who said, let there be light, let the dry land appear, let the sea bring forth the creatures and let us make man in our image. 
Now, as I’ve said time and again, there are tens of thousands of pastors out there that will not believe, will not read, will not preach from, will not accept the first chapter of the gospel of John because they understand the terrible consequences. And the consequences are that they would have to admit that the God of the Old Testament who dealt with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Aaron, and all of the kings of Israel, and all the prophets, Elijah, Elisha, and all the rest of them is the being, the person who became the one we know of as Jesus Christ of Nazareth of the New Testament. And the Bible says Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever. And it says, and that’s the very one speaking who became Christ, I change not. 

Therefore are you sons of Jacob not consumed because he promised eternal inheritance and possession of the sons of Jacob whose name is changed to become Israel. Now let’s look at the Ten Commandments from the other point of view for a moment from a standpoint of your neighbors, I started out to say at the beginning. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had a neighbor that would never covet? Never covet your house, your property, your yard, your car, your brand new Lexus, whatever you’ve got. Wouldn’t covet your wife, wouldn’t covet your bank account, your job. 
Just wouldn’t sit around being lustful and covetous and greedy about what you’ve got. Now, by extension, wouldn’t it be wonderful, especially people that are pretty well-heeled, that worry about their 1000000, if no one coveted what anybody else had? 

But, you know, lust and covetousness is exactly what sells. I mean, that’s what marketing is all about. They don’t sell you a car. They sell you the lust for the car. They don’t show you a cutaway of the engine. They don’t tell you exactly how much gas mileage it gets. They don’t tell you about the repairs. They don’t tell you all of the ins and outs of the vehicle. They show just little flashes. It’s going around some gal in maybe a leopard leotard slithering over the hood or whatever. young kids. I mean, it’s just going crazy and you can’t follow. And where are those places, by the way, where they drive with this brand new car, where there’s a huge road and a cloud of dust behind the car and it’s out there somewhere in the American West, I guess, and there is not another human being or another car in sight? When, in fact, you’re probably looking at the bumper of about a hundred thousand cars ahead of you stuck somewhere on a freeway in one of the big cities with your new little sports model that you can’t get around the other traffic. 

All right. But the point is that marketing is to sell the desire. We have people where I live, and they say the word save down here, it’s spelled S-I-V-E, save. And so they say the more you spend, the more you save. And they say come down and buy an automobile and save.
 Now, I think when I save, I don’t spend. But they say, the more you spend, the more you save. That doesn’t make sense to me, but that is a marketing technique, just like the 99 99. That extra penny, I don’t know why they do that. And why do people fall for it?

 Just round it out. 
That’s, you know, it’s 30 dollars. It’s not 29 99. What’s a penny? I mean, when both people drop, they won’t even bend over to pick it up anymore. Because I understand a penny isn’t worth the copper that it takes to make it. All right, if people didn’t covet, we would go broke. Coveting is what it’s all about, but God’s Word says you shouldn’t covet what another has. 
When I come back, we’ll talk a little more along this line about some of the Ten Commandments that you wish your neighbors would observe. Take a look at this and I’ll be right back. The New Covenant. Does it do away with God’s law? 

Why did Christ come as the messenger of the New Covenant? Did He do away with the Ten Commandments? 
Is a covenant a law? 

Does accepting Jesus as Savior fulfill all of God’s requirements? 
Get the answers to these and many other important questions by requesting the tape, Terms of the Covenant. You’ll also receive this eye-opening new brochure entitled, Was God’s Law in Force Before Sinai? Both are yours free if you call, Think of some of the other Ten Commandments of God. Honor thy father and thy mother. Now look at the recipient of the commandment rather than the person who is supposed to obey it. 

That sounds like it’s aimed at children. And you and I are all children of parents, no matter, in my case, whether you’re past 70 or not. It says, honor thy father and thy mother. That sounds like a command, you shall honor your father and your mother. But look at the receiving end of that commandment. Parents who say, my son and my daughter honor me. They show me respect and love and honor. They’re solicitors of my well-being. and they’re wonderful children. It is absolutely fabulous for parents to have honor coming toward them from their children. But parents, in order to be honored, need to be honorable. They need to act honorably. They need to act and to comport themselves in such a way that they earn that respect and love, and they also need to exercise parental control and discipline as their children are growing up. Because, you know, every little baby’s an anarchist. 

A little baby doesn’t have any political leanings at all, but he will do anything and everything that you wouldn’t ever want to do in public, right? You know that. And so that’s why you’ve got to clean him up and civilize him, because a child, boy or girl, is going to, you know, I don’t get it clinical here, but they’re going to do it. And they’ll do it right in front of other people with all the incumbent olfactory noises and odors. So there you are. You’ve got to teach and train a child to become acceptable to other people for your own sake and for their sake. 

I mean, how do you want the little kid to go around embarrassed to death because toddling off to school, he’s still a bedwetter. And a lot of them still are, you know. So it’s something that parents need to understand. 
Here’s a commandment of God that has to do with a family. Honor your father and your mother that the Bible says is the first commandment with promise. And it goes on to say, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 

So honoring a father and a mother does what? Does away with fratricide. does away with all kinds of family bickering, does away with divorce, desertion, abandonment, does away with all kinds of other aberrant behavior, so that the roles, I don’t like that word, but they use roles, role models. 
We’re not playing a role, we’re living life, but they use that, that the respective roles for father and mother are exactly as God defines. So look at the other end of the Ten Commandments for a change. Not just the fact that individuals are told to obey them for their very great blessing and their good, but for those who receive the blessing because they are being obeyed by others. And that’s the way every single one of them work when you stop to think about it. 
I want to take you to Exodus the 16th chapter while I’ve got time because here again we’re dealing with a scripture which comes along to reiterate about something that happened before the law was given at Mount Sinai. 

Now here the Israelites are being told about going out and gathering twice as much manna on Friday so that they don’t go out and gather and go to the work to gather it all over wherever it was raining down from heaven on the Sabbath. And it says, He said to them, This is that which the eternal has said, Tomorrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the eternal. 
Oh, It doesn’t say unto the Jews. It says unto the eternal. That’s why it says in Mark, Mark and Mark, Jesus Christ is Lord also of the Sabbath day. The Sabbath was made for man, it says in that passage, and not man for the Sabbath. It doesn’t say the Sabbath was made for the Jews. It says the Sabbath was made for man, and the Sabbath was made when man was made. 

Now, bake that which you will bake today, and seethe that which you will seethe, and that which remains over lay up for you to be kept until the morning. And they laid it up till the morning, as Moses bade, and it did not stink, neither was there any worm therein. 
And Moses said, Eat that today, for today is a sabbath unto the eternal. Today you shall not find it in the field. 6 days you shall gather it, but on the 7th day, which is the sabbath, the only day that God ever dignified with a name. The rest of the days are just numbered in God’s word. Tuesday is not the day of tus or theus. Wednesday is not the day of Woden. 

You know, when I was a little kid, they always had to tell me in school, no Teddy, no Teddy. They called me Teddy then. Said, it’s not W-E-N-D-S-D-A-Y, it’s W-D-E-D-N-E-S-D-A, Wednesday. You pronounce it Wednesday, just like they pronounce Brett Favre, how they get that out of F-A-V-R-E, I’ll never know. It’s Favre, but they pronounce it Favre. But then some people can’t say nuclear either, so that’s neither here nor there. All right. There is no such thing as the day of Thor, Thursday, or the day of Freya, Friday, or the day of Saturn, Saturday, or the day of the sun, upon which most people think they worship God. No, those names are pagan. just like our months are absolutely pagan. Janus and the februa, the little switch that they used to strike the girls and so on, actually had to do with pagan worship. 
You can look into all that. You know about Mars and you know about March then and about May and why there are June brides because Juno was the goddess of love and fertility. 

And you know that Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar gave their names to a couple of our months. Well, enough of that. Those that are numbered, by the way, are numbered wrong. September is not the 7th month. July is, but Sept means seven and Oct means eight and October is not the 8th month. All right, and December is the 12th month, not the 10th, but enough of that.
Our days and our months are absolutely pagan, but the weekly cycle is not and it’s never been broken since God set it in motion at creation. 6 days shall you gather it, verse 26 of Exodus 16, 4 chapters before Exodus 20, which is the Sabbath, the 7th day which is the Sabbath, in it there shall be no, or none rather. And it came to pass that some of the people went out, you always got people like that, on the 7th day to gather and they found none. 

Now look at this scripture in Exodus sixteen and verse 28. And the eternal said unto Moses, How long refuse you to keep my commandments and my laws?
 What is that doing in the Bible? Exodus, chapter sixteen and verse 28. And what is it in Genesis 265 where Abraham is said to have obeyed the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments of God as well as his laws? And what about the case where Abraham was about to have his wife taken away from him by a pagan king named Abimelech? And when Sarah, who was really a relative of Abraham and a distant half-sister, was said to be his sister, then the pagan king takes her, puts her in the harem and is a preparatory period of time, apparently, and some time goes by. 
So all the wives in the nation were not fertile and weren’t having children. He began to clue into why that was, came to Abraham and said, how is it that you almost caused me to commit this great sin? Well, I John 3, 4 is the only scripture in the Word of God that says sin is and tells you what sin is. And it says sin is the transgression of the law, I John 3, 4. 

Romans 4, 15 says where there is no law, there is no transgression. So in order to have sin, there had to be a law that defines sin. It says in Genesis, the men of Sodom were sinners exceedingly before the eternal. So sin was characterized, law breaking, the breaking of God’s Ten Commandments, long before Sinai. And you’ll get all of that when you get the brochure and the tapes. See, he said, for the Eternal is giving you the Sabbath, therefore he gives you on the 6th day the bread of 2 days. 
Abide you every man in his place, and no man go out of his place on the 7th day. So the people rested on the 7th day. Now, another important point. In the millennial reign of Jesus Christ, the Ten Commandments are going to be in full force and effect. 
The Sabbath is going to be in full force and effect. 

It said they will come, all flesh will come to worship before me from one Sabbath to the other. 
Now here’s another scripture in Zechariah, in verse 4. talking about the second coming of Christ, the establishment of the kingdom of God. And his feet shall stand in that day on the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east. 
And the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west. And there shall be a very great valley, and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south. It then describes a huge, big artesian well. It will come out from beneath the descending throne of God and living water, defined in the last several chapters of Ezekiel, going out east and west to revivify the horrible death and the destruction, the blood that is in the lakes, rivers and streams. And that’s quite a huge story in the Bible. And it goes on to say, in that day, verse living waters, and that’s dual because it’s really waters that give life as well as God’s Holy Spirit, shall go out from Jerusalem, half of them toward the former sea and half of them toward the hinder sea. 
The former meaning the Mediterranean, the hinder meaning the Dead Sea. And in winter shall it be. And the eternal shall be king over all the earth. In that day shall there be one eternal, one Lord, and his name one. 

Now, This shall be the plague, verse 12, wherewith the eternal will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem. Their flesh will consume away where they stand upon their feet. That is the kind of weaponry that God is going to use at the time of the interference of God in human affairs and the second coming of Christ when he destroys the armies of the beast power. And it says their eyes will consume away in their holes and their tongue consume away in their mouth. Just destroy them. and a bunch of bones simply sink to the ground in their uniforms, the flesh is gone. 

That sounds almost like a neutron bomb or some kind of a, well it’s ex-spiritual, supernatural, but it’s an incredible weapon that God is going to use. Now, it goes on to say this, verse 16, It shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations that came up against Jerusalem, now this is the time after the second Coming of Christ, it is Christ putting down the armies that still will try to defy God at that time, shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Eternal of Hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. And it shall be that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the king, the eternal of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain. And if the family of Egypt go not up and come not that have no rain, there shall be the plague to add to that. 
Wherewith the eternal will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles. So here we are. The Sabbath was known, revealed, and the people were told to keep it before Sinai. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob kept God’s laws. That included the 4th Commandment. 

They knew the Ten Commandments. During their hundreds of years of captivity, the laws of God became lost to the minds of the Israelites who were in Egypt in slavery. And they had to be reiterated and to re-educated and be re-taught those commands even prior to the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. 
All the decalogue did was to codify what already existed and had existed from creation when the Sabbath was made holy and sanctified. It was codified on the most permanent writing materials known to man, solid stone. But it didn’t bring the law into existence any more than Jesus Christ coming along, abrogated or destroyed the law. So the law was in full force before Sinai. 
It was known and observed by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the great patriarchs and Jesus Christ said they are going to be in the kingdom of God and they predated Moses. 
So how did they get saved? 

They were righteous men and women and God says they’re going to be in his kingdom. 
You’ve got to deal with that because that’s what the Bible says. Take a look at this and I’ll be right back. Terms of the Covenant. 

You’ll also receive this eye-opening new brochure entitled, Was God’s Law in Force Before Sinai? 
Both are yours free if you call Well, I could talk to you about this subject for at least another hour or 2 or 3, but I’ll tell you what, there are at least 2 hours worth of this same type of subject in these 2 tapes and also in this brochure, Was God’s Law Enforced Before Sinai? Terms of the Covenant and Christ in the Old Testament, all of them free of charge and no price if you will dial, or you can write to me, Armstrong Box, Tyler, Texas, And I’ll see you here in one week.