Today, May 29th is Pentecost (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Today, May 29th is Pentecost

Hi, it’s Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today. It’s May 29th, that is Pentecost for the Church of God. This is the real day of Pentecost, 50 days from first fruits, which was exactly 50 days ago. It also happens to be my birthday. It’s just a coincidence. I don’t think it has any special meaning to it except to me, but it is my 70th birthday, and I thought a long time ago when you’re young, you never thought you’re going to ever reach 70 years old, but I did, and so here I am trying to hang in there as long as God will allow me to. But today is Pentecost. We had a couple of shows last week explaining Pentecost. I really recommend that if you did not listen to them that you go back, and there was a Pentecost part one, and there was a Pentecost part two.

I’m just going to briefly go over this today, and I’m not going to have a very long show here because of the fact it is Pentecost. It is a day off. It is a high day according to the Bible. In the Old Testament, of course, it was called Feast of Weeks, but it became known in the Greek version of the Old Testament as Pentecost, meaning 50th. It’s 50 days from the feast of Firstfruits, which occurs right after the day after the Feast of Unleavened Bread ends. 

As we run over real briefly, in the beginning of the year, which is the spring equinox on March the 20th, is the beginning of God’s year every single year, and you count out 14 days, and that brings you to the night time of April 2nd, and that is when you eat the Passover, and then the day time of April 3rd is the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the end of Passover, and then you count out seven days, and it brings you up until the 22nd of the month of, in God’s month, the 22nd day is the Feast of Firstfruits, and it follows the day after the last day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and that day, you bring, in the Old Testament, it was the first fruits of the land. You know, you grow radishes, for example, it’d take 21 days to germinate and to bear fruit, so they were the early crops, and it symbolized, in my opinion, not biblical here, but it’s my opinion, it symbolized when Christ returned to the Father, and as you remember, after that time when they’re all together, he wouldn’t allow Mary to cling on to him, because he said, I have not yet ascended to the Father, but eight days later, and that is after the Feast of Firstfruits, he allows everybody to touch his wounds and everything else when he appears to them that Sunday evening in the upper room or wherever they were meeting. 

So, in the Old Testament, it was when you started counting, and they call it counting the Omer, when you started counting down towards the bigger day, which was the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. What happened originally during the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost? This is when Moses received the Ten Commandments written on two stone tablets by the very finger of God that we know as of Jesus Christ. Who by the way, is the God is in the Old Testament! It’s the God who became Jesus Christ. He had a pre-existence.

He didn’t start with the year zero, as I think a lot of people think, but he wrote the Ten Commandments, and then in the Old Testament prophecies, we start getting a hint to a New Testament day of Pentecost, which was when God said, I will write my laws, that’s the Ten Commandments, in their hearts and in their minds will I put them. Well, the entire Church of Israel in the Old Testament did not have the Holy Spirit. In fact, the apostles, as long as they were disciples of Jesus, walking the countryside, performing miracles as they were allowed to do, they themselves did not at that time have the Holy Spirit. They did not get the Holy Spirit until the day of Pentecost, after Christ was crucified and resurrected from the dead, and 40 days later went back to heaven where he came from. And so the Old Testament Church had to have the law on stone because it was not within them. In order to have the law within you, you have to have the Holy Spirit.

And this is why they questioned him to ad nauseum over many doctrines that he was trying to tell them, because again, they could not understand the concepts, because they did not have the Holy Spirit. On the day of Pentecost, however, they received the Holy Spirit. And you’ll notice Peter no longer sounds like the person that he was when Jesus said, for example, get behind me, Satan, when Jesus says, I will never allow you to die without me being there, and all of this stuff. And Jesus said, you will three times deny me. And when push came to shove after Jesus is on the cross, and Peter ran away, he actually denied knowing Christ three times, as was predicted. This happened because he did not have the Holy Spirit. He had man’s spirit, and man’s spirit is weak. It’s carnal, it’s weak, and it really has a hard time taking to torture. But when you have the Holy Spirit, God gives you the power you need at the time. And so what do you see after the day of Pentecost happened, when everyone gets the Holy Spirit? They all start being martyrs. They are bold. They go right back to the temple.

They get whipped like Peter and John, and they go right back there the next day after they’re told not to do so. This is what happens when you get the Holy Spirit. You get power. You get power from above and power to understand. No longer is Peter doubtful about things like he was when he was a disciple with the Holy Spirit. Now he’s a leader. Now he’s not the Pope, but he is a leader, as is John, as is Paul, as is a lot of the people mentioned in after the book of Acts. These people, because of the Holy Spirit, had the law now within them. The law is no longer on stone. It is spiritual within those believers that have the Holy Spirit. And that’s the New Testament version of Pentecost. And the prophet Joel predicted that day when old men would see visions and young men and women would dream dreams, and it was all a foreshadow of the Holy Spirit that was going to be given to everyone who believes in Jesus Christ and accepts his death, number one, and admits he’s God, number two, and obeys him, number three. You have to obey Jesus in order to be a true Christian. You get the Holy Spirit and you now are no longer, and this explains what Paul’s trying to say, once you have the Holy Spirit of God and you are now a new creature, you’re now a zygote, you’re now impregnated in the mother church, and you’re like a fetus in the womb waiting for the resurrection of your dead body, which will happen after Christ returns to earth and not before. And what you will see is that you will have a whole different attitude, and the law no longer is on stone.

It’s something you don’t read. It’s all of a sudden something that’s within you. You know now when you’re guilty. You know when you do wrong. It’s the knowledge of good and evil, of doing right and wrong in this particular case that’s now shared with you because of the Holy Spirit. And so when you break God’s commandments, you are broken, and that’s what it means. And so today is, like I said, today is Pentecost. It is now a memorial holiday. It is now longer. People are still not all waiting for the Holy Spirit today, but the fulfillment today is like how we follow July 4th. When we have a July 4th celebration with fireworks, and we remember the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we don’t all go and wait for it to be signed again. No, it has become a memorial holiday, and that is what Pentecost became after Pentecost Day, 50 days, I don’t know what exact date.

Oh, it would be May 29th, 30 AD. What am I saying? May 29th, 30 AD, when the Pentecost, Day of Pentecost arrived, the Holy Spirit arrived. From that day on, all future Pentecost’s were memorial Pentecost’s, like we’re following today, to remember what happened on the Day of Pentecost. So that’s a very important concept, and I hope, like I said, you go back, and you listen to my Pentecost 1 and 2 and understand this plan of God more succinctly. I want to say something right now about the Holy Days. I’ve said this in the other one on Pentecost 1 and 2, and I say this all the time. There is a reason we’re supposed to follow the Sabbath day and not Sunday. There is a reason we’re supposed to follow God’s holidays, as mentioned in the Bible, and not Christian holidays, or we call Christian holidays, which are nothing merely but pagan holidays with Christian names sometimes put on it. Like, for example, yes, Christ is in Christmas, even though it’s really Saturnina, but when we get to Easter, for example, we don’t even try to pretend the churches don’t. They call it Easter, which is the English version of the word Astarte, and that’s a holiday that the ancient Babylonians followed some thousand years before Christ walked this earth as a human being, and we don’t even try to put Christ in that one. What do rabbits and colored Easter eggs have to do with Jesus Christ? And if you can put an explanation or a question to that, then you understand why you’re not supposed to follow it. What are you supposed to do? Put up a green Christmas tree, an evergreen, and put balls on it. What do you think those balls represent? Well, they represent what you think they represent, and all of the silver and gold and decadent and all. You can go to Jeremiah, by the way. You just go to a search engine, and you put in Jeremiah Christmas tree.

You’re going to find the right place to go to, and you’re going to read about an ancient pagan Christmas celebration where you go out into the forest, and you cut down a tree, and you deck it – that’s the word – you deck it with silver and gold, and you fasten it so it doesn’t fall over. Does that sound familiar? Well, it sounded familiar to the pagan Babylonians some 3,000 years ago, so you should have a problem when you’re trying to put Christ in a holiday. He never was there in the first place. Christ is seen in the holidays that are mentioned in the Bible. The same Bible that I read is the same Bible you’re reading. There may be different little interpretation differences by what language they’re using, but they have the same message, and the message is Christ is in all of these holidays – Passover, Pentecost, Feast of Weeks, which is Pentecost, and, of course, the Feast of Tabernacles. They are the three holidays, by the way, which are called the great holidays of travel that the Bible mentions three times a year. This is not including the Day of Atonement or the First Fruits or other holidays that are in God’s holiday plan, but three times a year, three weeks’ vacation a year, God really intends you to have. You’re supposed to have the week off of Passover. You’re supposed to have the week off of Pentecost, which is in May, and you’re supposed to have the week off in October – basically October, September 30th through October 7th – for the Feast of Tabernacles, and that is the three holidays that you have following God’s way, and you already have a three-week holiday built into your work schedule, and plus you have two days off a year following the Sabbath days. God was a pretty good employer if you worked for him, and we all work for him if we realize it or not the minute we become a Christian, and God takes care of us, and God wants to show us his plan with these holidays, and Pentecost today is that one. A brief note about myself.

I put up a story. I believe it’s going up tonight. I’m not sure, but I think we have it scheduled for tonight, is how I came to believe what I do. You know, I grew up in an Episcopalian church. My mother was a very avid churchgoer, very religious, and very faithful to her idea of God at the time. My father believed in God, but he didn’t go to church except for Christmas and Easter time. He wasn’t a church person. He grew up in a depression. He had a great faith in a God. I don’t think he understood what God was about or did he care to. He had the belief that many people have, especially that went through the depression, if I live a good life, God, if it’s real, will take care of me, and that was my dad until the very end of his life, when he started to understand the real plain truth about the gospel, but my mom was a strong Episcopalian. I grew up in that church.

I was a strong believer in God as a young child because of my mother, and that belief went away. That belief went away because of schooling and science, and I was what I thought to be a man of science or a student of science, and I thought I disproved everything about the Bible. I thought I disproved the existence of God, and I believed that evolution was the key to understanding what we are, how we got here, and what our future is, and I was totally shocked.

This story tonight, I’m not going to get into it right now, but I think it’s going on tonight. I was truly shocked when I was a freshman in college biology when I read a book or a pamphlet by Garner Ted Armstrong in the Worldwide Church of God, which I was not a member of. I didn’t even know much about him. I was listening to him on the radio. There were times I shut him off because when I found out he was evangelist, I felt betrayed because I couldn’t stand religion, especially evangelist, but I read this pamphlet called A Theory for the Birds, and it went through showing all the flaws in evolution, and I remember I was very good friends with my biology professor at the University of Connecticut, Waterbury Branch, by the way, and I took him the booklet, and I asked him these questions, and to my surprise, he didn’t have the answers. In fact, he got very angry that I would even question the existence of a God and compare it to biology’s evolution, and then I realized really quickly when he basically ended a friendship with me that evolution was as much as a fake religion as what I considered all Christianity, Judaism, Muslims to be, and then I started a search to find out what was the truth, and I have news for you. I pretty quickly found out what the truth was, and I didn’t like it, and I spent the next three years trying to deny that truth. I did not want to be the odd man out, and if you listen to me, you can see today I am the odd man out. As I tell my editor, I’m never going to have a big audience because I’m telling people what they really do not want to hear.

I don’t feel bad. They don’t want to listen to God either, and God’s a lot bigger and more powerful than me, and if they don’t want to listen to God, why do you think they want to listen to me? Because they’re not going to, but I have a job to do. I have a promise to the living God that I would give His message unadulterated. No one’s going to pay for it, and no one’s going to send me money to do it. I will be beholden to no one but God. When God wants me off doing what I’m doing here, then I’ll be off, and then it’s up to God to do the next step, but until then, I’m going to do these shows.

I’m going to continue with The Plain Truth, free of charge, no advertising except for my paint company, but that goes to say it is paying for a lot of this, and I hope I can get to a few people who will listen like I did. I was one of maybe a few people back in 1974 and 5 when I started listening to Garner Ted Armstrong and trying to prove him wrong, by the way, trying to prove that he was nothing more than a charlatan and trying to prove that all the things people said about him had to be true, and that means his message was false. You know, a person’s personality, what a person does, does not necessarily mean what they’re telling you is not the truth or not. You have to remember that. King David, for example. So, you don’t always measure up to the plate, but God still might have a message for you. I don’t measure up to the plate. Don’t ever follow me. Don’t ever think I’m something that I’m not because I’m just like you, but I also, like you, were searching for the plain truth, and I found it, and once you find it, you can’t leave it.

There are times in my life, depressed times, that I just told God, be away from me. I don’t want anything to do with you, and I would walk away, and I would think that I’m going back to my old way, and that was usually in the evening time. By the next morning, I was stronger in God than ever, and I think a lot of people listening to me have the same experience.

Once you know the truth, you cannot deny it. So, happy Pentecost, everybody, and happy birthday to myself, and we’ll be back tomorrow. We have more programming on theplaintruth.com. God bless all of you. Goodbye.