In the Philippine capital of Manila, a historic article titled “The Man Who Preaches Love,” was printed in Express magazine on April 24, 1975. It focused on God’s end-time type of Elijah and the gospel message he delivered to the world as a witness of the coming Kingdom of God.
The piece, written by P.A. Zapata, was reprinted in the June 9 edition of the Worldwide News. However, most in God’s Church today have either forgotten or never read this inspirational review of the impact of God’s Philadelphia era apostle who reached more world leaders with his good news than any other man alive. As such, we are pleased to reproduce it once more for our readers:
Dr. Hebert W. Armstrong, a world famous lecturer and educator, has always been on the go. He travels from one continent to another lecturing and preaching love among people in the hope that peace and fine feelings would reign everywhere. The black events in Vietnam, the Middle East and Cambodia have deeply pained him. “My heart bleeds for the countless people being killed there. I believe that all this could be prevented from happening if there was enough love and peace among us,” Armstrong said.
In retrospect, he added, “Men come up with some ideas on how to stop the war through ‘negotiations,’ but as you know this has proved to be of minimal success. Things haven’t gotten any better with time. And simply because the root of the conflict has not been resolved. There’s just too much hate and greed among us, and this is the unpleasant fact to face up to.”
“Would it prevent anything if people did not hate each other and were none too greedy?
“Of course, it would!” Dr. Armstrong remarked. “You can’t cure violence with violence but you can cure violence with peace, and love and understanding.
“People ought to help one another, not trying to mutilate one another, or, to say the least, not try to manipulate each other to one’s advantage. Help people; why hurt them? The thirst for personal power and self-aggrandizement are also some of the things that make the world go wrong. Why can’t we devote part of our time to thinking about the less fortunate ones, and lend them aid if we can, and stop thinking about making money all the time, about enriching ourselves?”
“We have fallen heir to these evil ways,” Dr. Armstrong said, “because it seems we have ignored, or do not call to remembrance, the teaching of God that love holds the key to man’s salvation. The Ten Commandments are merely the 10 points of the great law of love. The first four tell you how to love God; the last six how to love thy neighbor. The Bible says love is the fulfilling of the law. The commandments came from God, and God is love. He gave the commandments. Do you think God ever did anything that was not done in love?” he said.
“The whole human race still seems to be dreadfully in need of love, and perhaps that’s the trouble,” Dr. Armstrong declared. “We try to accommodate all our narrow self-interests into building a world that could insure order and avoid conflict. But our real purpose of life still has many questions and many inequities. What is happening is that we try to grab as much as we can of material things. So that the attempt to reach an agreement or accord among us has not gained a single step for as long as the way we are going [is] how to claim as much material riches as we can for ourselves. Consequently, there is conflict and havoc and more injustice.”
The elderly, silver-haired American educator has much to look back on while discoursing on the teachings and the existence of God. While still comparatively young, Armstrong realized that he had never proved whether there was a God. Since the existence of God is the very first basis for religious belief and authority, and since the inspiration of the Bible by such a God as His revelation to mankind is the secondary and companion basis for faith and practice, he realized that the place to start was to prove whether God exists and whether the Holy Bible is His revelation of knowledge and information for mankind.
By the laws of science, including the law of biogenesis, that only life can beget life, that dead matter cannot produce life, that the living cannot come from the nonliving, by these laws came proof that God exists. In the Bible he found Him quoted, saying in the first person, “I am God.” This God was quoted directly in Scriptures, proved to have been written hundreds of years before Christ, pronouncing the future fates of every major city and nation in the ancient world. Armstrong learned that these prophecies, in every instance (except in prophecies pertaining to a time yet future), had come to pass precisely as written!
It became axiomatic that nothing less than the intelligence of his mind could have produced something superior to itself, his own mind. Of necessity, the very presence of the human intellect necessitates a superior and greater intellect to have designed, devised and produced the human mind. He could not have been produced by natural causes, and resident forces, as Darwin’s theory of evolution presupposes. Unintelligence could not have produced intelligence superior to itself. Rational common sense demanded a Creator of superior mind. He had disproved the theory of evolution. He had found proof of creation, proof of the existence of God, proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible. He learned that creation is the very proof of God. Once, a heathen came along, pointing to an idol made by man’s hands out of wood, stone or marble or gold. “This idol is the real god” the heathen said. “How can you prove your God is superior to this idol that I worship?” “Why” answered Dr. Armstrong, “my God is the Creator. He created the wood, stone, marble or gold that your god is made of. Therefore my God is greater than your idol because it is only a particle of what my God made!”
Armstrong’s covetous desire for material things when he was still young also has had purifying effect upon him. At 28, a publishers’ representative business had been built in Chicago, which produced an income equivalent to some $35,000 a year measured by today’s dollar value. The flash depression of 1920 had swept all away. At age 30, discouraged, broken in spirit, he was removed from it entirely. Then, in Oregon, had come the advertising service for laundries. It was growing and multiplying rapidly. He saw visions of a personal net income mounting from $300,000 to a half million a year with expansion to national proportions. Then an action by the Laundry-owners National Association swept the laundry advertising business out from under his feet.
It seemed that he was King Midas in reverse. Every material money-making enterprise he started promised gold, but turned to nothing! Yes, God Almighty the Creator was knocking him down, again and again. He was being “softened” for the final knockout of material ambition. He saw plainly what a decision was before him. To accept the truth meant to throw in his lot for life with a class of people he had always looked on as inferior. He had come to meet some of the independent “Sabbath-keepers” down around Salem and the Willamette Valley; some of them were then, in his pride and conceit, regarded as backwoods “hillbillies”; none were of the financial and social position he had associated with. He learned that God looks on the heart, and these humble people were the real salt of the earth. But he was then still looking on the outward appearance. It meant being cut off completely and forever from all to which he had aspired. It meant a total crushing of vanity. It meant a total change of life!
In desperation, he threw himself on God’s mercy. This surrender to God, this repentance, this giving up of the world, of friends, and associates, of everything, was the most bitter pill he ever swallowed. Yet it was the only medicine in all his life that ever brought a healing. He found joy in the study of the Bible, in the discovery of new truth, heretofore hidden from his consciousness. And in surrendering to God, in complete repentance, he found “unspeakable joy in accepting Jesus Christ as personal Savior and my present High Priest.”
Indeed, what would the world be without love? How can one find a better way of life than that which God has taught us? “We want to do things in a different way than God commands. We want to live a different way than God’s law,” Armstrong said. Dr. Armstrong will preach the gospel to all he can manage to reach. He is a man who immensely enjoys his work. When he has a speaking engagement, the audience listens to his convictions. The first time he was around, the Araneta Coliseum was jam-packed to a whopping crowd of around 30,000 listeners, and the second time, the same sizable crowd came to listen to him talk. This time he is back again, and will deliver his lecture at the New Frontier theater in Cubao, Quezon City, on Saturday, April 19.
On that particular trip he spoke to around 2,500 at a personal appearance campaign. He hosted a special dinner in honor of civic and business leaders who had assisted him in hosting previous campaigns. Additionally, he addressed around 1,000 students and faculty members of Manuel Quezon University (Worldwide News, May 12, 1975).
The coverage from Express magazine was similar to other media reviews of visits from the unofficial ambassador for world peace and a testament to the favor God inspired from political, business, academic and humanitarian leaders from the Philippines.
That Elijah work continues today, prophesying again to those in this southeast Asian country who remember that gospel good news and hold fast to all truth restored (Revelation 10:11; Matthew 17:10-11). As a beacon of truth extended from God’s earthly headquarters, this work spiritually serves members in congregations, children and youth in the Creator’s education and through His more sure word of prophecy declared by His apostle from the Trumpet magazine and Key of David broadcast (2 Peter 1:19).