Battle for God’s Truth
My father has made bold claims before. One of the boldest actually had to do with a significant lawsuit and Bible prophecy.
I wrote about this in my book Raising the Ruins, which is the history of how the Philadelphia Church of God, publisher of the Trumpet, began publishing Herbert W. Armstrong’s book Mystery of the Ages. This was a bold move, because the church Mr. Armstrong had founded, the Worldwide Church of God, held the copyright, was using it to destroy and censor everything Mr. Armstrong had taught, and was much larger and wealthier than the pcg. My father made that move anyway. He believed God inspired Mystery of the Ages and would work miracles to get it back into print!
The Worldwide Church of God sued us. We kept printing. We even began printing Mr. Armstrong’s other major books: The Incredible Human Potential, The Missing Dimension in Sex and others, promoting and advertising them and distributing them (for free, as all our literature and Mr. Armstrong’s literature is free and always has been).
We won in district court. Worldwide appealed. The case dragged on for six years! Then California’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against us: The Philadelphia Church of God could not print Mystery of the Ages and must pay damages to the Worldwide Church of God. We appealed to the Supreme Court, but it declined to review the case.
It looked like there was no way to get Mystery of the Ages to the world. It looked like Worldwide would not only censor that wonderful book but take thousands or perhaps millions of dollars away from the only Church trying to spread its message!
Ralph Helge, a member of and lawyer for the wcg, wrote to a former pcg member that my father had “exhausted all legal remedies available to him. Any attempt of [the Philadelphia Church of God] to acquire any court ordered right to print [Mystery of the Ages] is over, done, finished. Legally there is no place else for him to go on this issue. I don’t know how else I can say it. [The Philadelphia Church of God’s] only ‘right’ is to stand before the bar of justice and have damages assessed against them and attorney’s fees for the wrong that it has committed.”
We did have some other legal options, but the situation did look pretty bad for us!
Yet even in this situation, my father was adamant that “one way or the other, God will provide a way for us to mail that book again.” He said that Habakkuk 3:2 and other scriptures were prophecies that God would “revive thy work in the midst of the years.” Just a month after Helge’s victorious-sounding letter, the Worldwide Church of God abruptly and inexplicably contacted us to sell us copyrights to Mystery of the Ages and 18 other books and booklets by Mr. Armstrong!
To many members and former members of the Worldwide Church of God, this was a stunning reversal. But we expected it! Because my father expected it. And he expected it because a miraculous copyright victory was absolutely necessary to fulfill Bible prophecy!
The United States of America may soon experience its own miraculous victory as God intervenes and fulfills the prophecies He has recorded. We expect it, based on Bible prophecy.
