Foreword~

Back to The Bible's Difficult Scriptures Explained!

How this book came to exist involves some interesting history, inspiring to me, and worth hearing before studying its contents.

Also included is an extensive Introduction that follows explaining how to study the Bible, and exactly what Bible study is—what one is actually doing when he opens and reads the Word of God. This special Introduction must be carefully read in its entirety, even studied, before continuing so that the reader is prepared for and can really benefit from the scriptural explanations that follow.

In late 1977, after I had been in Christ’s ministry for some years, my father asked if I would write an explanation of all the Bible’s difficult scriptures for him. Of course, this was a daunting task, and I realized that he had no idea what he was asking. Recognizing that it would take a staggering number of hours to complete the task properly, I put it off for awhile. But he persisted, and I finally decided to take on the task. The original project was completed just in time to present him as a Father’s Day gift in 1978. I did not even have enough time to proofread it once before giving it to him, so it was very raw and sometimes unclear or even technically incorrect. They were certainly incomplete. (I still have the original typed pages, containing 137 scriptural explanations.)

My father died in the faith in 1995—and I inherited his extra-wide-margin Bible. I sat down to page through it and found that he had shrunk and pasted all of my (less than complete) explanations into the margin beside the passages to which they pertained. I could only imagine the even greater number of hours that my father had spent doing this, while benefiting from what I had written. I am sure you can imagine what a treasure his Bible has become to me!

In a way, this longer book is dedicated to my father, who was an extraordinarily diligent Bible student until the day of his death. Some day, I will tell him what became of his present and thank him for requesting it because this is why you are able to read it now. May this material inspire and help you with the precious and marvelous truth of God as much as it did him.

Through the years, the first primitive version of the paper that I gave my father became a tool for elders, deacons, sermonette men and other leaders in each of my pastorates. Many found it extremely helpful in their personal Bible study and in speaking before the Church.

Another small part of the book’s history is that, in late 1999, a man “appropriated” my original work, claimed it as his own, verbatim, and put it on his website. This original version may still be “floating” somewhere on the Internet.

In May 1999, I was led to establish The Restored Church of God. I soon realized the need to create an extensive Leadership Development Program (LDP) for our ministers, elders, deacons and various others. By late 2000, I had significantly improved the original text given to my father and, by early 2001, sent it to all who were part of our LDP. It first became a booklet available to the public in the summer of 2002.

Special Training This volume now contains a comprehensive list of virtually all of the Bible’s most difficult scriptures. The correct explanation of their meaning was taught to me primarily during my years as a student at Ambassador College (from 1967-1971) in Pasadena, California, one of three colleges sponsored by the Worldwide Church of God (in which I spent 22 years in the ministry). Understanding their meaning was part of the curriculum. Students were expected to be able to explain them to any who would ask their true meaning. Some understanding of these explanations was refined later, through additional teaching of the Church as it grew in understanding and as a result of additional personal research.

In our early pre-ministerial training, we were taught that the apostle Paul instructed Titus to “ordain elders” after giving him the spiritual qualifications of those to be selected (Tit. 1:5-9). The final qualification in the list of requirements to be in the true ministry of Jesus Christ is that a man must “hold fast the faithful word as he has been taught.” And obviously, the teaching that he is to hold to must come through the faithful government of God within the true Church of God (Matt. 16:18), the only one headed by the living Christ (Col. 1:18; Eph. 1:22-23). History has shown that even many of those who were taught the correct meaning of true doctrine—God’s true ministers through the ages—including the many passages that support the Bible’s doctrines, ultimately will not hold them without compromise.

This compilation contains the correct understanding—the true meanings—of these “difficult” scriptures that were taught to me and to all of God’s ministers by Herbert W. Armstrong and the then faithful faculty that he appointed. These explanations are a part of the extraordinary doctrinal understanding that was restored to God’s Church in the twentieth century through Mr. Armstrong (Matt. 17:11; Mal. 4:5-6). I now teach them to you, hoping that they will benefit you as much as they have the many thousands who learned them before you—and as they did my father.

A word of caution: The Introduction that follows is truly vital to comprehend, and thus longer than would normally be necessary. It is actually the equivalent of a lengthy article or even a small booklet. There is a reason for this.

You simply cannot skip over it and hope to understand the explanations that follow!