One of the more extremist Armstrong Churches of God, the Philadelphia Church of God, acknowledges that this time of the year can be very discouraging to church members.
Spring Holy Days: Appreciating God’s Goodness
This can be a discouraging time of year—unless we have the right focus.
The church has had a horrible reputation of grinding people down into worthless worms and maggots this time of year as they are berated as worthless sinners that killed Jesus. This sends members into a week-long frenzy of beating themselves up over their sins, especially the sins that the PCG leaders and ministers claim they have committed.
Then they show up at Passover services, in great solemnity, as ministers break the matzos with microphones amplifying the cracking and breaking of the bread. Members are supposed to sit there and ponder those sounds as if they were at the foot of the cross striking Jesus or thrusting the sword into his side.
Throughout church history, the Eucharist, communion, the Last Supper or the Lord's Supper has been the various names given to this event. Many look at it as the Love Feast or a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared before the origins of the world that will be celebrated in the Kingdom of God.
This heavenly banquet concept was something that Tkach Sr. recognized and told members in Pasadena that they needed to stop coming to the service with a sense of dejection and instead come to it with joy. They were to look at it with the joy of participating in the great heavenly banquet to come.
ACOG members get depressed this time of year because their church leaders browbeat them continually down as they degenerate them as much as possible Then, they are supposed to leave the Passover service exhilarated that all of the past sins of the last year have been wiped away. For many, this is an exhilarating feeling, but it never lasts long. All they have to do is wait until the first day of Unleavened Bread to be knocked down again during the sermon for failing to put sin out of their lives. Then, they happen to find a cookie or bread crumbs in some strange place and the helplessness begins all over.
Because the ACOG places all of its trust in physical things and in the law, it fails to recognize the one they claim to celebrate at Passover. Instead, they spend the night torturing and killing him in some gymnasium or Masonic Lodge.
Flurry says this in his article:
Yes, when Christ came to this Earth, His life was at stake. He could, indeed, sin. Christ’s life was the greatest risk in the history of man. But He took it because He wanted people like Abraham in His Family—people who would go out and sacrifice their own son if necessary, knowing that God would resurrect him to fulfill a promise (Hebrews 11:17-19). Abraham had that kind of faith and trust in God, and God returned that love many times over. All people who can repent like you, Abraham—I will give my life for them. I know that if I don’t make it, nobody else will. But I’m going to do this so we can build the Family of God. That’s the cost it took for us to receive God’s Holy Spirit.Because Flurry refuses to know the Christ he claims to follow, he says that his Jesus could have indeed sinned. That is typical Armstrongite bad theology. Many Christians feel otherwise about that. Consider this:
"We must strongly affirm the reality of Christ’s temptations, but we must not make his temptations the same as ours in every respect. Why? Because, as much as Jesus is like us, he is also utterly unique, and his temptations reflect this fact. For example, Jesus was tempted to turn rocks into bread, a temptation that normal humans do not face. He was tempted to use his divine prerogatives instead of walking the path of obedience, and he chose to live in dependence upon the Father in order to become our merciful and faithful High Priest (Heb. 2:17–18). In addition, he faced temptation in Gethsemane, but not by anything within himself, since he was perfectly holy and righteous. Unlike us in our fallen condition, in Christ there was no predisposition to sin and no love of it. The temptation he faced was unique to him as the Son, and it was unique to him as our sin-bearer. He rightly and legitimately recoiled at the prospect of losing his communion with his Father for a time; as a man, he rightly wanted to avoid death in this way for many reasons. We must never deny that Christ’s temptations were real, indeed more real than we could ever imagine or experience, but we must also affirm that they were utterly unique to him. (3) God cannot be tempted with evil, and God cannot sin (see, e.g., James 1:13).
"But there is more to the identity of Jesus than this, especially when we think of the who of the incarnation. Jesus is not merely another Adam or even a greater, Spirit-empowered one. He is the last Adam, the head of the new creation, the divine Son incarnate, and as the Son, it is impossible for him to sin and to yield to temptation, because God cannot sin. Behind this assertion is the fact that sin is an act of the person, not of the nature, and that in the case of Christ, he is the eternal Son. As Macleod rightly reminds us, “If he sinned, God sinned. At this level, the impeccability of Christ is absolute. It rests not upon his unique endowment with the Spirit nor upon the indefectibility of God’s redemptive purpose, but upon the fact that he is who he is.” " Could Christ have sinned?Flurry continues with this absurd statement that once again lays a heavy burden on members backs.
If Christ had failed, God the Father would have been sitting in solitary confinement for the rest of eternity! That’s the kind of sacrifice these Gods made for us. We can forget that in our callous, carnal thinking. But God the Father and Christ did it—and they did it for you. They want you to be aware of that. Not out of their vanity, but so that you will recognize that repentance must be toward God! We must understand repentance if we are to enter the God Family."All PCG members must always hold in the back of their mind that their sins that they continue to commit are still to killing their "jesus" to this day. They must always hold in the back of their minds that the "jesus" they claim to follow just might have screwed up and sinned, prohibiting them from ever become gods like their version of "God the Father" is.
So yes, I do agree with Gerald Flurry. This IS a depressing and discouraging time of year for so many Armstrong Church of God members.