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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.
Hi, I’m Bob Barney. Welcome to The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place to go to find out what’s going on in today’s news and what God has to do with it.
Today I’m going to shed some light on an increasingly concerning phenomena that has
been pretty much going on now for some 75-80 years, but it’s getting more and more radical
as the days go on, and that’s concerning a topic of so-called born-again Christians that think they
are in the end time, that Jesus is returning any moment, and they fall victim to what I call cult
behavior.
Now, I’ve got to be careful when I say that because a lot of people think that what I
believe is a cult, but what I believe and what I propound on this program can be easily ascertained
by reading the Bible. We follow what the Bible says, and oftentimes what the Bible says in modern
society, people might think is cultist. But, you know, I don’t ask anybody to, you know,
give up their brain and follow something I say blindly.
In fact, I want you to prove everything yourself. I want you to research yourself. I want you to read the Bible yourself.But on the other hand, I do have a problem with a lot of people who want to give themselves over to a cult-like being a leader instead of their leader being Jesus Christ. As more and more people search for hope and spiritual answers, certain groups have found ways to exploit this behavior and the vulnerability by manipulating people who are in weak state. A lot of people, they have personal tragedies in their life, and they become quite weak, and many times they have come out of some sort of a religious background, and they start searching within that background for answers to change around their life, which has turned upside down on them.
And too often, instead of going to God and going to the Bible, they like to go to a person, and that’s where the problems begin. In this report, I’d like to walk you through some signs of high control groups, the psychological damage that they cause to their people, and what you need to know to protect yourself or someone that you really care about. Let’s understand exactly what we mean, by the way, with these religious cults. These are cults that I’m talking about today that are talking about the end time as it’s going to happen maybe tomorrow, maybe next Friday. Some of them, and I’ve laughed over the years, some of them have said, March 27th, 2026, Jesus is returning to this earth. Now, if you send me some money, or if you follow my cause, or somehow if I gain control of your mind, you can be a part of this second coming, because it’s going to come secretly.
And this is the kind of stuff that people fall victim to. I don’t know why they would fall victim to. I’ve been depressed in my life when I was searching myself some 45, 46 years ago, but I surely never gave my mind over to any individual. And the people that I listened to, I will freely admit on this program, I listened to people like Garner Ted Armstrong, but I also listened to people like Billy Graham. I listened to other scholars at the time. I read everything I could read, and I made up my mind with using my mind. And I think one of the statements I’ve always made that’s kind of caused me some trouble with religious-type folk is that I don’t think God expects you to check in your brain that he gave to you upon your birth and your growing up. I don’t expect God plans that you should give up your brain and just mindlessly follow after a doctrine that is simply out there and that you cannot really prove. And then they come to you, of course you can’t prove it because you’ve got to be a member of this group and have this special spiritual understanding in order to understand the real meaning of why we know what we’re doing.
And this leader over here is God’s anointed one on earth. And we had a little bit of that, and I want to tell you the truth right now, and this is going to offend some people because I know some people from the old worldwide Church of God listened to me, but that was the biggest problem I heard with Gunnar Tess’s father, Herbert Armstrong. He was God’s only apostle. He wasn’t even an apostle of God. He was a minister of God, and I believe he had some plain truth to him. I believe he had some facts. But at the same time, his arrogance led to, in my opinion, his downfall and the downfall of his church, not Christ’s church, his church that he was finding, because it was more about him than it was about the gospel of Jesus Christ. There’s an old country and western song, I think it was the Oak Ridge Boys, I think that’s who it was, no one wants to play rhythm guitar behind Jesus because everyone wants to be the lead singer of the band. And that’s the problem that I have had over the last 45 years of seeing many churches come and go.
I’ve never joined any of them. And I was baptized in the church that Gunnar Tess Armstrong was a leader of at the time in 1979. I believe that was the Church of God International, but at the same time, I never really joined that church. And I used to write articles for Gunnar Tess when he was a part of that organization, but I never was a formal member. I didn’t go to the church services. I didn’t get on a member list or anywhere, because I saw right from the beginning that many of the people who were a part of that church and every other church I’ve seen, so-called Sabbatarian, Herbert Armstrong, Worldwide Church of God break-offs, they all have some good messages, and they all have some good doctrine, but every one of them is trying to make a church, and every one of them is trying to make, in a way, a cult. They want you to believe that they are the only people that understand the truth. And if you don’t join that group of theirs, you are simply going to be left behind. And unfortunately, there are a lot of weak people who believe that nonsense, and I’m just sorry to say that right now.
I’ve often said to people that these occult leaders that gain control of weak people’s minds, they often really hide
behind traditional Christianity sometimes, or maybe off-street Christianity as well. I can think of
the Mormons, for example, as having many cult spin-offs, and although they use God and Christian
values and faith in the Bible as a starting point, they are really tactfully psychologists,
and they use psychological tactics to control their members. They know exactly what they’re
doing, and this tactic includes, and I studied this in college under political propaganda
and propaganda research that I did, include isolation, guilt, financial exploitation,
and sometimes outright abuse in order to gain control over someone’s will. And I’m going to show you some warning signs you’ve got to think about.
You have to see if these people really are promoting what Jesus Christ said about himself and about the message that he brought, and are they giving that gospel? Already by the time of Paul, when he was talking and writing letters to the different churches in his ministry, he was warning about a different gospel than the one that they had before. In 1 Timothy chapter 4, we read, Now the Holy Spirit plainly tells us that in the last times some will turn away from the true faith. They will follow deceptive spirits and teachings that come from demons. These people are hypocrites and liars, and their consciences are dead. They will all say it’s wrong to be married or wrong to go eat certain foods, but God created these foods to be eaten. This is not talking about clean and unclean foods, just to let you know. He’s just talking about you have to worry about another gospel being taught about than the ones they brought you, and he says so more explicitly here, and we read that in 2 Corinthians chapter 11. Please be patient with me, Paul’s saying. I am speaking like a fool. I know that you are being patient with me. God wants to keep you for himself, and that is what I want to do too. I have brought you to Christ like a pure bride who marries one husband. I want you to be pure and to belong to him. Remember how a snake deceived Eve. Because he was clever, she believed his lies. I’m afraid the same thing is going to happen to you. False teachers may make you believe wrong things.
Then you will no longer love Christ in a pure and honest way. You are ready to listen to any false teacher who comes among you. They tell you about a different Jesus than the Jesus we taught you about.They may want you to receive some different spirit than the spirit that you received from us. They might tell you about a different kind of good news, or a different gospel, remember the word gospel means good news, than the good news that we brought to you. You may seem to accept all of this.Those teachers call themselves very special apostles. Remember what I just said about calling yourself apostles when you’re not. But I think that as I am as special as they are, perhaps I do not speak as well as they speak, but I know I am speaking about which is the truth. And that you can read the entire chapter in 2 Corinthians chapter 11, 1 through 15, just showing you, and I’ll be right back after this brief word, about the false gospel that had already started under the apostle Paul’s time. Hi, Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. This is the place to go to to find out what’s happening in today’s news, and what it may mean for you, your family, and your future, according to the Bible, and the God who wrote that Bible. That’s theplaintruth.com. Please go there every day. Thank you. So we’re back talking about another gospel, a cult-like group of people that more and more are trying to predict the end of the world. I had close people to me that started falling into victims, falling into be victims of these types of people.
They’re saying that this is going to happen, and the minute Donald Trump was elected the second time, crisis coming within the year. One thing after another, they’re predicting the end time, but they forget what Jesus said. No one knows the hour, not even the Son of Man, when all of these things were to occur, meaning the second coming or the beginning of the millennium. And Jesus even plainly said in Matthew that not even he knew at that time when the second coming would happen timewise. Only the Father, he said, knew this. So we think we are above Jesus Christ, and we’re going to sit there and mathematically calculate when Christ is going to return. And the problem with these holy rollers is that oftentimes they just gloss over the plain facts that things have to happen that Christ said had to happen before he can return. And if those things have not yet happened, Christ is not going to return. If you’re going to listen to this program thinking I’m going to give you a date, or I’m going to say you’re living in the end times, well, you are living in the end times, but you want to know what? John, in his writings, said they were living in the end times. So every time since Christ’s death is the end times. But is this the time of the tribulation? Is the tribulation right around the corner? Well, it could be somewhat into the future, but many things have to happen first. And the one thing I always say to look for is this.You have to look for a temple in Jerusalem. Now, I know a lot of the offshoots of the Armstrong churches, as well as many of the Baptists and many of the Catholics, for example, do not literally believe there is going to be a temple at the time of the Antichrist when he arises out of Europe or wherever these people think he’s going to arise out of. But that is not what is plainly said in the Bible.
The Bible tells you plainly in Revelation chapter 11, it’s talking about the two witnesses which have to appear as well before the tribulation can begin. But I was given a read like a measuring rod and was told, go and measure the temple of God and the altar and the worshipers. But to exclude the outer court, do not measure it because it has been given over to the Gentiles and they will trample on the Holy City for 42 months
.And I will appoint my two witnesses and they will prophesy for 1260 days, which is, by the way, proof of the calendar that we promote. 42 months is 1260 days and it’s three and a half years. There’s not a 13th month over in that time.It’s exactly 42 months is 1260 days. And they will be clothed in sackcloth. They are the two olive trees and the two lampstands and they stand before the Lord of the earth.If anyone tries to harm them, then fire comes out of their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. They have power to shut up the heavens so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying.And they will have power to turn the waters into blood as Noah was, I’m sorry, Noah, as Moses and Aaron was able to do. And they will have power to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want, again, like Moses and Aaron. Now, when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up out of the abyss will attack them, overpower them and kill them.And we’ll stop right there and just point out to you right now, there is going to have to be a new temple built in Jerusalem. My opinion doesn’t say so, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. It’s going to be on that temple mount.And that might mean that something has to happen to that mosque up there before they build a temple, and that mosque is still there.
So there has to be another kind of war, and maybe somebody decides to destroy that mosque, and maybe somebody starts to build a temple. We’re years away from all of that happening, at least four, five, ten years away, if not more, because it takes a while even to build a temple.And then it’s got to be trampled by the Gentiles for 42 months. So as you can see, there has to be a temple in Jerusalem, and they have to be following the Old Testament, so-called. And you can see this again in Daniel 12, when the angel replies to Daniel, to go your own way, because the words are rolled up and sealed up, meaning the meaning was at that time not given to the people to understand.Many will be purified, many will be made spotless and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand this, but those who are wise will understand.
Now listen to this.This is, again, end-time prophecy, before the return of Jesus Christ, before the time of the tribulation, before the time of the great revealing of the Antichrist. From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished, and the abomination that causes desolation, and go to Matthew 24, and Jesus talks about this very time, the abomination that causes desolation, as spoken by the prophet Daniel, as Jesus said, first letter, first person, I’m saying, red-letter Bible quote here, from the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished, and the abomination that causes desolation is set up,there will be 1290 days, that’s 30 days, that’s one month after the 1260 days of the two witnesses. So one month after the end of the two witnesses’ testimony is when this is happening, blessed is the one who can wait and reaches the end of 1335 days, which is 45 days or a month and a half even after that, that obviously Christ is reigning on this earth.
So you can see, there is no abomination to desolation because there is no temple, and that has to happen inside the temple. This is what Jesus said to look for, this is what we are supposed to look for, but unfortunately, too many people start listening to a man. It’s usually a man, by the way.Sometimes there are some women, and you see that more in the Bible, in the New Testament, of pagan women influencing churchgoers very poorly, but most of the time today is some cult leader man who’s got people mesmerized and hooliganized, and they give everything over to this leader because they give more to him, and they worship him in spite or instead of worshiping God, and we see this a lot when people give over their minds, that they give it over to a person and not to God. It’s okay to give your mind over to God, but it’s not okay to give your mind over to any person, including the one speaking to you right now. And so it is very important to realize as we go into the second break that I want to talk to right now, that if you are following after a person’s doctrine, and you are just spewing doctrine that you cannot prove in the Bible, and I don’t mean here a little and there a little.
That is one of the things that Herbert Armstrong used, in my opinion, to confuse people, where he said, in order to understand the Bible, you don’t take it as a whole, you got to take a little here and a little there, and well, if you take a little of the Bible here and a little of the Bible there, you know what happens? Well, the next line of that in Isaiah, for they to do a little here and a little there, so that they will fall backwards, meaning they will be defeated by following a little here, a little there. When you take a little here and a little there, you could take, you shall not surely die, that’s proof of the immortal soul. If you don’t mention to the person listening to you, that was Satan the devil saying that, and not God, then you can understand why taking a little here and a little there can be very confusing and very deceiving and dangerous to the people following that principle, and that is the first sign that you’re following a man and you’re not following God in the Bible. The Bible is very easy to understand. My brother-in-law, Joe Kovacs, wrote a very good book, The Divine Secret, and one of the things that I believe that Joe tries to point out, which I disagree with, by the way, humbly speaking, because I think Joe has spirit of God equal to mine or anybody else’s, but he tries to make it like it’s a mystery that basically is sealed, and it’s not. It’s very easy to understand.
It’s not hard. The Bible is not something that’s many layers deep. It is many layers deep, but I got news for you. That is because God is a great author, you know, a great author, you know, every single word has a place for it, and so you can find a meaning. There’s a spiritual meaning. There’s a symbolic meaning. There’s a physical meaning, and they go on down and down and down, but that’s not what Jesus Christ said. He didn’t say read the Bible and try to find all this hidden knowledge that you need a scholar to help you understand or some book to help you understand it. No, he said you have to approach this like a little child. I’ll be right back to explain that. Hi, Bob Barney again for the PlainTruth.com. This is the website to go to about your health today. You can find out what you should be doing for your diet, what you should be eating, exercising, what you should be avoiding, as well as the Plain Truth’s message board where you can talk about any topic you want to. Anybody can write on the message board.
You can either be registered and write without being approved, or you can write anonymously but have to be approved. That’s on the PlainTruth.com. Go there every day.You’ll be happy that you did. So Jesus Christ said, and I guess a lot of people don’t want to read this, but in order to really find the real God, you have to come to God like a child. You have to have a childlike faith.Well, children cannot read War and Peace, and children cannot understand the symbolism, for example, of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man in the Sea, and there’s a lot of Christian symbolism in the book Old Man in the Sea, and there are courses, and I’ve taken several courses on Hemingway in college. There are entire months devoted just to that one book of Hemingway’s Old Man in the Sea, and all of the religious symbolism, and how it came really from. It’s an old man rewriting his short story, The Big Two-Hearted River, that he wrote as a young man with all kinds of hope, and by the time he’s old, he rewrites that as this old man in the sea, the same plot linewith a different twist, and that is the symbolism that everybody that goes to college that studiesHemingway realizes he’s really big in Christian symbolism.
Well, Jesus Christ said don’t get into that. Jesus Christ really said you have to just faithfully believe in him. Now, he’s not saying you need to give over your mind to some other cult, or some other leader, or give over your mind even to God, though that’s not necessarily wrong. God gave you a brain, and Jesus Christ, when he’s talking to people, if you ever read, if you just read the four Gospels, and mainly concentrated on the red letters in those four Gospels, and realize when Jesus talked to the Sadducees, and the Pharisees, and whoever else he was talking to, he talked to them on their level based upon their knowledge, and he was able to convince the Sadducees. You know, the Sadducees for example, only accepted the first five books of the Bible called the Torah. They did not accept in the prophets or the writings.
They did not believe the Psalms were divinely inspired. They did not believe Isaiah was inspired, or Jeremiah, or Daniel, or any of the minor prophets. They didn’t read that. They only accepted the first five books of Moses as being inspired scripture. Many people do not know that. That is why when Jesus is talking to the Sadducees, he doesn’t quote Isaiah. He doesn’t quote the Proverbs or the Psalms. He quotes their own Torah to prove they are wrong. And this is the case where the Sadducees come to Jesus with a question about a woman who married seven brothers, and each one died, and she had to marry the next, but none of them had a child by her, and they said, in the resurrection, because they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, because they didn’t think you could find any mention of the resurrection in the first five books of the Bible, and Jesus was going to prove them wrong, but Jesus did not talk about the resurrection of the dead that you find in Psalms, for example, or that you find in Isaiah, forexample. That’s not what he did. No, he took the book of the law.
He took the Torah. He took the Genesis, and he said, God appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and later on, when he appeared to Moses, he said, when Moses was asking for his name, I am the God of Abraham. I am the God of Jacob, and I am the God of Isaac. And Jesus said, notice he was talking in the present tense, because in God’s mind, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, although they’re in a ground sleeping, waiting for the resurrection of the dead, they are still alive to God, because God knows he is bringing them back to life. And Jesus said, you ignorantly think there is no resurrection, because you do not understand the scriptures, and he wasn’t talking about any other scriptures, but what they accepted. So, when he talked to the Pharisees who accepted the entire Old Testament as we have today, then he would use more scriptures to prove them wrong. That is the idea of using your brain to explain yourself that God gave you. Jesus Christ did not say, just worship me based on faith. No, he said, understand and believe me by the miracles that I do. If you can’t believe and have faith in me, at least believe in the miracles you see me doing, because Jesus came to show people intellectually, as well as simplistically like a child, if a child saw a person do a miracle, walk on water, and feed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and two fish, that child would say it was a miracle. So, that’s not making that child not using their noggin that God gave them.
No, not in any way. That means the child simply believes what he sees, and that is part of the thing, the brain that God gave him. So, it’s exactly what I’m saying. God does not expect you to follow blindly in something you can’t easily prove to yourself. And what Jesus was saying was, look at the miracles I’m doing. If you can’t believe me and who I say I am, at least look at the miracles. And many people did say,who could do the miracles he did unless God was with him? So, people didn’t know it. So, all I’m trying to say is, this time and age that we’re in, and we’re in a very bad time right now, be careful of who you listen to and who you decide to quote and unquote follow, because if you follow anyone other than Jesus Christ, then you may be in trouble.
Paul even says that. He said, some say they follow Paul. Some say they follow Peter. Some say they follow Apollos. But I say, follow me as I follow Jesus Christ. Do not follow me in any other way. And oftentimes, Paul would even say when he’s making a decision, this is not the spirit talking. This is my own logic talking. Paul was very honest with his beliefs and how he came to what he believed, and also what he thinks you should do. He told you when it was Scripture and when it was his opinion. That is what I’m trying to do today. I’m not trying to make a cult. I’m not trying to make anybody think they need to follow anything I have to say. All I want to do is wake people up, have them smell the roses, have them open up their Bible, start reading it, and believe what it says. And don’t go to some holy roller and say, this says this, and the guy goes, oh, it’s not what he means. By gosh, it’s not what he means.
No, this is what he means. And you go, oh, I understand now. That’s not what God wants you to do. God wants you to believe the words that are printing on the paper. They’re very simple to understand. Get an easy-to-read Bible if you have to. But they’re very simple to understand. God wants to make it simple for you. He’s trying to make the road as simple and level as possible, and we keep throwing dirt and mountains in the way, and God is very upset about that. So all I can say at the end of this program, before we close up, please understand that the real gospel, the true gospel of God is found only in the pages of your Bible, and no person that you’re ever going to deal with has got the secret, the secret that you’ve got to follow them in order to be saved. Because if that’s what you think, you’re following a cult, and that is not going to end up well for you. Well, thank you for joining me. I am Bob Barney, and this is The Plain Truth today. It’s brought to you by theplaintruth.com. Please stay safe, stay informed, and keep seeking the plain truth. And go to The Plain Truth every day, theplaintruth.com. There are many divisions of that, of theplaintruth.com, as I said in one of the commercials.
You have the message board, where anybody can leave any subject they want, as long as it’s not pornography. There’s also Your Health Today, where you can see what you should do to make your health better, and that of your family. There’s also the podcast, where you listen to my versions of things, my ideas, as well. We put up other points of view, and a lot of it is more about politics, and world events, and the economy, and it’s not what people would say is religious, because this is not a religious site. Theplaintruth.com is a news site, but unlike other news sites, we believe that God is in control of this news cycle, and every news cycle. The greatest newscaster to ever walk the face of this earth was the person we know as Jesus Christ, the God, the Lord God of the Old Testament. Again, Bob Barney, theplaintruth.com, Plain Truth Today, saying thank you for listening. Bye-bye.