Pentecost 8/3/32/120

 

Dear Friends,

Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, is finally here. At 9 a.m. on the First Day of the week, exactly 50 days from the time and day that we kept the Wave Sheaf Offering, we commence the service for Pentecost.

This Feast represents the Wheat harvest, which is symbolic of the harvest of the elect of the First Resurrection. This is our feast and it is representative of our calling. It is also an offering Feast and one of the three times each year where offerings are to be made. There are a number of papers surrounding this feast and coordinators are to appraise their members of the details.
Ruth (No. 27)
The Leaven of Pentecost (No. 65)
The Ascents of Moses (No. 70)
The Old and the New Leaven (No. 106a)
Pentecost at Sinai (No. 115)
The Holy Spirit (No. 117)
The Omer Count to Pentecost (No. 173)
The Golden Calf (No. 222)
God's Feasts as they relate to the Creation (No. 227)

This year at this Pentecost we are all aware of the extraordinary activities of the Holy Spirit. Over the year since our last Pentecost, our Father, Eloah, the One True God has added untold thousands to our body. They are still being interviewed and inducted and we still have no real idea of the sheer magnitude of what God has done and is doing or how long it will continue.

It will be some months before the secretaries are able to sort it all out and there appears to be no sign of the growth slowing down. In fact, it seems to be increasing exponentially.

Our web access reached a new peak of over 236,000 paper downloads per week this May. The web site measurement at Quantcast.com records only html, as we have explained, which is the lesser of the forms: ftp, audio and html. It always peaks in May and has done so since the web started in January 1996. We have approximately doubled each year from peak to peak. That has never been the practice with our people, however. That appears to have changed dramatically.

As you are all aware we do not number Israel and we regard it as a sin. David lost 70,000 for committing that sin and so did the WCG at its demise in 1995. They lost 70,000 of their baptized membership over a very short period. They actually had lost two thirds of their baptized membership or some 200,000 over an extended period since 1965 or so; however, the 70,000 went in a very short time. They simply went home.

By 1995 the WCG had split into multiple fragments all squabbling over the tithe-paying sheep and not taking the opportunity to correct one iota of their erroneous doctrine. They were theologically incoherent and remained so, attacking one another over administration. We have watched the libel and defamation go on now unabated for years.

One woman, recently approaching us from one of the offshoots, expressed dismay that the Churches of God never have anything good to say about one another. One of the churches told me that we would find nothing they had to say about CCG encouraging, or words to that effect. I replied that we would find it disconcerting if they did have something positive to say about us.

The One True God deals with all things and brings matters to fruition in His own time through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Not one sheep given by God to Christ will be lost. Christ said so. He lost no one when he was on earth and he will lose none, ever. We have waited patiently for years for God to act. Sometimes we thought it appeared that He was about to act but they were merely attempts by the adversary to disrupt us. Always the attacks worked to consolidate and protect us.

God decided to act as He always does, not by might nor by power, but by His Spirit.

Over the last few years He made us aware of what had been done in the Churches of God around the world. From last Pentecost God started to put His sheep back together but in areas that were poor and scattered. The brethren had been scattered by stupidity and sin in all of the offshoots. Those errors were particularly evident in Africa – in Kenya and Tanzania. The churches had been scattered by the baptism and appointment of polygamist ministers. These practices occurred in three of the major offshoots. Another church came to be called the “Church of Prostitutes” by the brethren because they gave women to men and men to women as they joined the church. That church does not even allow divorce and remarriage in its doctrines in the US. The church became a standing joke, as did they all. God would not leave them in that way and nor would He allow the brethren to be destroyed. He chose to act in His own good time and restored the brethren and used them as a nucleus to call untold thousands into the Church of God, and He used weakness and poverty to do it. I am aware of the details and I am satisfied that most of the called brethren in those areas are now in CCG and are being added to daily.

He turned the inherent racism of the Church of God in the 20th century on its head and used the weak to confound the mighty.

From this Pentecost, the Churches of God will continue to expand and be developed. If CCG is not the largest church of all the Churches of God in the twenty-first century already, it soon will be. We neither know nor care what our numbers are but we know that we are in the untold thousands and we are reaching areas of this planet that have not heard the Gospel of the Kingdom of God for a thousand years or more. We have little strength and we have few funds, but God is using us mightily.

The reason we were kept within very strict financial limitations is so that not one minister of the Churches of God could say that they could not have done what we have done, given their financial resources and people. They were given fourteen years or two Sabbath cycles to do that. They did not do that, nor did they give their talent to assist those who were doing so.

The time is now complete. God has now started to act and He is now calling people in Africa and throughout the world.

We are all sinners and I the most miserable of all, perhaps. However, we are not to remain that way and we are to overcome. Let no one think of themselves as better than another and let them boast in Christ and pray for one another.

Work diligently in the faith. Hopefully we are able to complete the written work now underway. Also we have much to do in all forms of the media.

There is so much to do and so much to teach to so many people. Please pray that we are given the resources to do the job properly.

Have a great Feast and use these two days to develop your bonds with each other and to assist each other to learn. Do not go to the Feast empty handed, as God will hold anyone who does accountable. The new ones are to pay attention to what they are taught and learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. Some are brand new to the faith and are just coming to grips with the Sabbath issue.

Now you brethren will understand why we have been given such grounding and preparation time.

Rejoice in all that you have been given to do. Our meat is to do the will of Him who sent us and to finish His work.
Our task is to prepare for the Witnesses and the Messiah and the First Resurrection. Do not fail. The Second Resurrection is a poor second to those that have been called to the glory of God.

Wade Cox
Coordinator General