Pseudo-Scripture (Part 1 of The Plain Truth of the WCG Logo)

Let’s take a close look at the Worldwide Church of God logo for a quick minute.

I want to show you something

[I know it's hard to read, but when this was made, high res didn't even exist .]

    The scroll at the bottom of the shield reads

The lion shall dwell with the lamb and a little child shall lead them in the world tomorrow

and beneath it is another smaller scroll presumably attributing the quoted text above.

Isaiah 11:6

        When I was a kid, I knew this logo inside and out. It was all over my home, on everything at church, it came in our mailbox at least once a week. In the fall, you could see it on bright green stickers affixed to the bumpers of cars and campers making their way to “feast sites” across America. Not to mention jackets, hats, T-shirts, notebooks, pens, and all the regular tchotchkes of the time.

    I could draw it with my eyes closed. The circle, the shield, lion, kid, lamb, and Isaiah 11:6 quoted on the scroll at the bottom.

With so many of us looking at that logo for all those years, you’d think we might have noticed at some point that it wasn’t really what it was pretending to be.

So, what’s wrong with it?

Have you heard of this thing called the Mandela Effect?

        In a nutshell, the Mandela Effect is a flaw in the way our human brains record and store memories. The repeated process of remembering and storing information for later retrieval often dilutes the degree of accuracy in our memories, but not the confidence we have in how accurate those memories are. The end result being that all people have memories that we are very confident about but shouldn’t be.

Would it freak you out if I told you that the bible verse on the logo is wrong?

The Bible doesn’t say "And the lion shall lay down with the lamb and a little child will lead them."

    NOWHERE, IN ANY VERSION OF THE BIBLE, will you find a lion laying down, or doing anything else for that matter, with a lamb. It simply is not there, and it never has been.

Cute little baby cows? Yes.

Lambs? No.

Find it hard to believe? 

    You're not alone. There are people thoroughly convinced that the bibles they read when they were younger contained the wording ‘the lion shall lay down with the lamb’ but the liberals/space aliens/ghosts (or whomever fits the narrative) have somehow had the Bible changed for the sake of diversity.

 Not sure what it really says? You can go look up Isaiah 11:6 HERE in any version of the Bible you choose.

        Okay then, where did this” lions laying with lambs” line really come from, and why do so many people think it's written in the Bible?

That’s a great question!

To find the answer, we need to look back a couple hundred years to the late18th century and find a guy with a head so full of knowledge, local people nicknamed him “*Doctor Voluminous.”  The rest of the world, however, knows him as John Gill. He was an English Baptist, a theologian, a staunch Calvinist, and quite possibly the most beloved prig the world has ever seen.

*[Is it just me, or doesn’t it seem like a uber-genius nicknamed “Dr. Voluminous is just one secret lair and a couple of henchmen away from being the coolest supervillain of all time?]

 

    Simply put, John Gill’s life’s work is the soil in which all aspects of modern western Christianity are rooted. I could write for days on how much influence Gill's work has had on both sectarian and secular aspects of the modern western world. Suffice to say, John was a genius in every sense of the word, and he applied that mighty brain of his to writing a nine-volume exposition of the entire Bible.

 Cover to freakin' cover. 

From 1746 to 1763, John Gill painstakingly wrote out, with a feather quill, a detailed and cross-referenced explanation of meaning and significance for each of the 31,102 verses of the 1,189 chapters that make up the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible.  

SEVENTEEN YEARS!

I don't care if you're Atheist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Jedi – you’ve got to admire the guy's dedication and passion for his work.

All that being said though…

 it's totally 100% John Gill’s fault that so many people have a false memory about the lion and lamb being in a biblical scripture somewhere.

"Doctor Voluminous"

            By writing exposition that made the Bible vastly easier to understand, in a time when, for most people, even just the ability to read was a total non-starter, John Gill's book became a literal godsend to clergy of the country sides. It was much easier for common people to learn the gospel from Gill’s books rather than the actual bible (about half of which were still in Latin at the time). So, for a generation or two, John Gill’s words were the only scripture they knew.

But here’s my favorite part of the whole story...

 Even John Gill, the guy who coined the phrase, didn’t put those words with Isaiah 11:6!   They were from the 7^th verse of chapter 9.

Try as I might, I just can’t find a way to articulate the magnitude of FUBAR in the history of this pseudo-scripture.

    So instead of trying to quantify the chaos, I’m just gonna give you the original quote from John Gill’s exposition of Isaiah 9:7

“…nor will there ever be any more discord between Jew and Gentile, the lion and the lamb shall lie down together; there will be no more war among the nations, after the battle of Armageddon […] and all this will issue in eternal peace in the world to come.”

Okay, now raise your hand if you started to read those words with Armstrong’s voice in your head about halfway through. It reads EXCACTLY like an Armstrong sermon. All he did was replace “to come” with “tomorrow.” Listening back to Armstrong's recordings and comparing them with Gill's work, you can see how much of  Herbert's message was just a bunch of other people's writings, modified to fit together and then dressed up with the same  talking points and catch phrases to keep everything 'on brand.'

So ‘The Plain Truth’ of Herbert’s central message, as it turns out, is just a duplicitous jumbled mess of plagiarized misattributed pseudo-scripture wrapped in horror stories about the end of the world, that was used to abuse, manipulate, terrify, guilt, and cajole thousands upon thousands of people for fun and profit.

There, eight inches in front of all of our noses the whole time, was a warning flag letting us know that biblical accuracy isn't important to this organization. Not just off by a word or two, or a smaller part of a larger scripture. No. Two thirds of it were written by John Gill and Herbert Armstrong. The degree of accuracy for Herbert's version of Isaiah 11:6 is a measly 17%.

Meanwhile, here are thousands of people in hundreds of congregations around the world taking copious notes for every sermon, thumbing through dog eared well worn bibles full of underlined passages, attending weekly bible study, diligently completing Herbert's useless biblical correspondence course, and doing their own mandatory individual study of the scriptures. The logo and the bible are each a part of their daily lives and yet...  either they don't notice, or they just don't care.

Go figure.

(*To Be Continued)

Coming Soon 

Nothing is Hidden, Except to Be Revealed: Part 2 – Art Herbstory

In which we will see what art history can reveal about the WCG logo, learn more about Herbert’s suspected “secret identity” (with help from his ridiculous flow chart) … and maybe also enjoy a bit of mildly inappropriate or downright crude humor.