Cults No.5 The Children of God

Now, our session this evening compels us to look at the teaching of a group of people who are known as the children of God. It's perhaps not too easy for ordinary folks to come across the particular beliefs of this group. As you will see, a lot of what they preach is hidden, purposely, deliberately, just shared with the faithful, and information is therefore not too hard to come across.

I have managed to get most of my background information, besides what I knew from personal experience, as a result of a project undertaken by some Christian friends in Holland who have produced a paper back, though I don't think it's for general distribution or on sale widely, entitled, Who are the Children of God? But another book which can be obtained, which I've mentioned before and is worth reading, deals not only with the children of God, but many of the new cults, is by Ronald Enroth and entitled, Youth Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults. Youth Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults. There's a chapter there on the children of God.

It's not terribly well documented, but there is some introduction given, and it's by means of the testimony of a lady who was in this group and got delivered from it. But that book I recommend. But as I say, there's not very much else that I can suggest if you're interested in doing further research, because, well, information is not too easily come by.

That is of a more obnoxious side of their teachings. As you will see in our study this evening, there are certain publications which they make widely available. But these, on the whole, are more respectable and tend to be a smokescreen that hides just what these folks preach, and more dreadfully, what these people, to some extent, practice.

Well, it's with great sorrow that we consider this particular cult, and our sadness is increased and, for me, hardly knows no bounds, as dissimilar from any other group we have looked at so far. I am convinced personally that there are some Bible-believing Christians who are ensnared within the cult known as the children of God. As yet, orthodox doctrine, such as the Trinity, is not denied.

I say as yet, because I think ultimately it will be. And it is possible for the children of God, or some of them, to mingle with evangelicals and feel that basically their message is the same. But they have gone one further, because their lifestyle is more in accord with the early church, for they have forsaken all and declared war on the lifestyle that is practiced in Western civilization.

In some senses, though not theologically, this group is a little akin to the moon church, the unification church, to which reference was made last time we met together for this series. Here you have amongst the children of God, as with the moonies, generally speaking, people of more tender years, who do not like the lifestyle of the West. Those who have any experience are disenchanted with the churches.

They long for community. They long to relate deeply. They do not find these particular hungers satisfied in their educational establishments, or as I say, in the churches.

They are encountered by members of this group, who immediately show an infectious love and a concern, a deep interest and involvement in them as people. Now I contend that the major part of this world is populated with lonely people. I would go so far as to say that the average church has within its membership a large number of lonely people.

They turn into church on a Sunday, and they go back to their loneliness on a Monday through to a Saturday. And I believe that the children of God at least expose this one area of weakness in evangelicalism today, and that is by and large the insularity of many evangelical Christians. There is all the difference in the world between the fellowship that we practice in the 1970s in evangelical churches on the whole, compared with that of New Testament Christianity.

So there's a desire for fellowship, for koinonia, that people have that is not satisfied in the established church, or in any other social department of life. And it's here that cults like Children of God and the Unification Church zoom in, and the prospective convert is bathed in a love that amounts to more than words. There's a literal embrace, there's an indication of a deep involvement on the part of the cultist towards the one who it is proposed to win for that sect.

Well I say the cogs, as we will call them, and the moonies show this common denominator. In another respect they are similar, for you will find them on the streets witnessing and selling their literature. Indeed, a great deal of the funding of the Children of God comes through the sale of huge quantities of literature that I will be making reference to in a moment or so.

There is, within the concept of the Children of God, also common to the Unification Church, the thrill of being part of the last chapter of God's plan in human history. The children have been raised up before that great and terrible day of the Lord. They are the new children of Israel.

They are being called out of every land, responding to the ministry of the cultists, and they are federating together in colonies around the world. Some four hundred of them apparently exist. According to their own numbering, the converts are in excess of three hundred thousand, but there are many who suggest that full-time adult members of the Children of God amount to no more than four thousand.

If that seems a small figure for us to inquire into their teaching, then let it be said that the influence and the significance and what the Children of God typify demands that in the 1970s we have some understanding of what these people are saying and what these people are doing, and some grasp of their conversion technique or their converting technique. I say this confessing my own area of fault. I wish to God that before I'd gone to the East, I had done this study on the Children of God, because on three occasions, twice directly, once indirectly in India, I came across these people, and I look back upon the pathetic attempt that I made in Bombay in Calcutta Airport and on the streets of New Delhi in trying to put across the Gospel message in a way that members of this cult who'd stopped me could understand it.

I now wish with hindsight that I had gone to their headquarters in Bombay and endeavoured to speak to the leader or leaders of the colony there if they would have engaged in discussion with me. The Children of God, I say, are scattered around the world, and I make no apology in concluding that their motivating power is satanic and that they are by and large deluded, yet within that delusion there are some people who do know and sincerely love the Lord Jesus, but they have been hooked into a system which will be to their spiritual disadvantage. Unlike the Moonies, the founder of this group was an American, David Brandt, and his particular denomination, David Brandt-Berg, his particular denomination was the Christian Missionary Alliance.

I'm not, incidentally, going to be following through the pattern of the notes this evening, I shall break away, but you can keep those as a reminder. The cult that he founded is a relatively new one, it hardly spans twenty years. Berg was a pastor in the same denomination as A. W. Tozer, he was a minister of a church in Arizona.

He fell foul of the oversight of the church, quit the pastorate and moved to California. There for a while he had contact with a Pentecostal pastor, fell out with him, and in about 1968 he more or less climbed onto the back of what was then known in the States as the Jesus Movement. He assembled in California a group of people, largely his own family and one or two other sympathizers, and he set himself up as a new prophet king.

He adopted the biblical name of Moses and wedded that to his natural Christian name David. So he is known as Moses David, or more commonly amongst the children of God, Mo. The influence that this man has is just unbelievable.

Initially he started with his handful of followers going around the States proclaiming doom. Judgment was rife. God was going to pour out His wrath on America.

So much was this message broadcasted that they became dubbed as the children of doom. But later on, Berg was to take the title children of God as a description for his followers. He ran up against the media in America and against many parents.

He got himself involved in litigation which might have cost him to the tune of one million dollars, so he left the States in the early seventies. And he is now a somewhat shadowy figure. It's not easy to work out his whereabouts at the moment.

Possibly he's in Europe. He controls the cog machine like some operator of a marionette. He pulls the strings and though the children of God will tell you that Brother Mo is just like the rest of us, that is not true.

As witnessed the testimony in the book that I quoted of one girl who was happily emancipated from the children of God. He looks upon himself as being God's prophet for the latter part of the twentieth century. He is the Moses and he is to lead people out of the system, the system being that to which you and I belong, Western society.

And as they are led out of the system, as they break the bondage of Egypt and go into the promised land, so through the teaching of Brother Moses, new wine will be poured into them. The Bible is acknowledged also to be the Word of God, but the Bible is, as you have often found in studies in other cults, poured through a sieve. The sieve of another revelation and that revelation is Mo's letters which are distributed in their tens of thousands around the world.

Mo himself, for his lifestyle, well, it's not easy, as I say, just to identify where he's living at the moment. He's had one wife and then he entered into an adulterous relationship with his secretary, Maria, but he seems to be a very promiscuous person. And according to an article in Time magazine, I believe this came out last year, he has something that amounts to a harem.

He believes himself and his followers to be liberated from the law. In as much as Christ Jesus has fulfilled the law, there is a sort of antinomianism, that means an anti-law attitude in the children of God, particularly practiced by those in leadership, which gives Mo the authority along with his colleagues to do things that we would consider to be anti-biblical and indeed a disgrace to the name of Jesus Christ. He is not averse to suggesting that Jesus could have had sexual relationships and have been completely sinless in so doing with several of the women whose names are mentioned in the New Testament.

I referred to the fact that Mo manipulates the cogs around the world. He does this through his letters. Now these letters are somewhat hard to come by, not the popular version that I made reference to ten minutes back, but those letters that are designated specifically for people who are in positions of authority in the organization.

So his letters are released under certain titles or with certain qualifications, GP for instance, public distribution, DFO, disciples and friends only are to read these, DO, disciples only, LTA, leaders can read to all in the colonies, LT, leaders only. And it's particularly within these private and semi-private letters that the obnoxious anti-biblical teaching and ethics of Mo comes out. And because there's a sort of semi-privacy within the organization, it's possible for some to come across just the ordinary letters to be hoodwinked into thinking that the children of God is not such a dangerous organization after all.

And in the interests of religious freedom in the United Kingdom and in the United States to suggest that the organization should continue to exist unimpeded. Notwithstanding incidentally that Berg's first wife, Mother Eve, is wanted in this country by the police and that Mo himself has fallen foul of the authorities in the USA. But there are nonetheless still some businessmen who are looked upon as being kings who will help the king, Mo himself, with finances who believe that the COG is a sort of good philanthropic, philanthropic, wholesome organization.

Well then, I make reference to these letters because, as I say, they're very hard to come across, but in this private publication that I managed to obtain from these folks in Holland, I have been able to get extracts from the private and semi-private letters that float around the 400 or so colonies in the Children of God movement around the world. Now though I could quote from these letters to you, and though God willing this tape will be played in many other places, if it ever falls into the hands of the children of God, the tape I mean, then alas, it will do little if any good. Because the children of God have been brainwashed into thinking that people like myself are part of Egypt, part of what they refer to as the systemites, who would be mouthpieces of Satan, who would manipulate what Mo has to say, and although I were to confront several of the children of God with statements of Mo, and if I were to relate those statements to the Bible and show that the Bible contradicts what they have to say, they would still nonetheless fail to appreciate any contradiction whatsoever, and they would suggest that because I am outside the cogs, I can't possibly understand what Mo is saying.

Which means to say this, that when you're dealing with a member of the cogs, you can't use a logical, rational, or biblical argument. It's hard for people to understand this sophisticated form of brainwashing that does go on in religious groups throughout the world, and is practiced, as I showed you last time, amongst the unification church members and here with the cogs. Well, with all this in mind, let me talk to you a little bit more and open up the subject of Mo's letters.

They have a double importance, really. They are to be read by the faithful. Not only read, they are to be memorized, at least in part, by cogs.

They recognize that what Mo says comes as a direct revelation from God, and as a result of this, what he says is to be put into practice under the jurisdiction of the leaders of the colonies, generally known as archdeacons, if you please. So, not only do these letters have an importance for the children of God themselves, but the general release letters become the main source of funding the cog movement. You may have found people selling these letters on the streets here in Worthing.

Certainly, you can find them in London. They have a commune, incidentally, in Bromley. One journalist in the United States of America worked out that there's a particular colony that gets rid of 40,000 Mo letters a week, charging 10 cents per letter, which means that they get $4,000 into their group per week, which amounts to $200,000 a year, and the journalist Reilly remarks, that's a lot of untaxable spare change, and only God, and maybe Moses David, knows where it goes.

In New Delhi, when I was accosted by this rather personable young fellow, I noticed that he got a lady friend at the side of him whose smile and look in her eyes seemed to suggest to me that it was more than just my friendship she was asking for. Soliciting in all its diabolical fashions is known in some areas of the world to be practiced by the children of God. I was asked by the man in Delhi if I would make a contribution for an organization that existed throughout India to help release people who were on drugs, or to help them to minister to prisoners in Indian jails.

That was an illustration of what is known as spoiling Egypt. If I had been naive and wealthy enough to have dipped into my pocket and pulled out a thousand rupees and given it to them, the money would have been used for the cogs in India. It is right to spoil Egypt, because you remember there is an expression used in the AV, which incidentally is the only version of the Bible Mo allows the children of God to read.

There is a reference to the ethnic children of Israel spoiling Egypt before leaving for the promised land. They got from the Egyptians gold and silver, which one could argue were legitimately theirs inasmuch as they hadn't been paid for the service that they had rendered Pharaoh during the time of their imprisonment, their slavery. Well, this is perverted and made an excuse by the cogs to spoil Egypt today.

So some dear lady might be walking down, say, Montague Street down there in the precinct and be accosted by two young folks who would ask for a donation. What for, my dear? Well, because we want to help young folks like ourselves who are hooked on drugs. You know what the drug problem is like in this country? Yes, I do.

And if the lady has a tender heart, she sees these smiling, wholesome young people, then the possibility is she will give quite a donation. There is evidence in this book and in the other book that large sums of money is being taken by members of the public, Hadut, Egyptians, spoilt by the cogs. One of the things that comes through in Mo's letters that gives fire, that gives fuel to the organization, is its messianic expectation.

I've put down in your notes, though there's no need to turn to them at this moment, its eschatology. And that word eschatology is a technical word which refers to the return of Jesus. Now this, to some extent, I've already spelt out what it all means according to Mo's letters.

He, the new Moses, has been raised up to bring together the children of Israel in the 1960s, the 1970s. He has prophesied that certain things are going to happen quite quickly in history, that is quickly, relatively speaking. He has said that the Antichrist will rise at the end of the 1980s, that Israel will be fully restored, and here he's speaking of the children of God, by 1985, and the return of Christ will be in 1993.

He's also saying that the Church will go through the Tribulation, and then the idea of the Church being raptured before the Tribulation is a lie, though Mo himself preserves his own safety during the Tribulation, because he's going to get raptured, and some of us would suggest the sooner the better. So here are these people around the world, these new tribes, if you like, these new colonists spreading the Gospel, this additional revelation that God has given His man for the 1970s. They are preparing themselves for the invasion of Communism into the Western world.

They are preparing themselves for the great catastrophe of the Tribulation, and this helps them to be fired and enthused in their evangelism. They believe ultimately when Jesus returns that the children of God shall rule the world. They will be vice-regents with Jesus Christ Himself.

And really, the program becomes quite intoxicating. It may seem a little bit trite as I'm explaining it this evening, because time is at a premium, but start to study the eschatology. Try to imagine yourself for a moment as a member of the children of God.

You have come face-to-face with the truth that God has given a new Messiah, a new Moses into the world in the 1960s, the 1970s, and you have been privileged to hear what He has to say. And in this tremendous program that God has in store, you have a vital part to play. Well, the whole thing is entrancing, and nobody speaks of anything else but this, back in the colony, in the commune where you live.

You get it day and night, and you're hook, line, and sinker, drawn into this system of belief. This then is what Mo has to say in his letters about eschatology. But there are certain other things that Mo has to say in his letters which are even more inaccurate and more unpleasant.

The sexual teaching of Mo is degrading, disgusting. Mo is a man who is obviously obsessed by sex. What he has to say is so contrary to the New Testament that it is fantastic that he can make any appeal to be rehearsing the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He takes such a concept, for instance, of the Bride of Christ, almost to defend polygamy. He looks at such a parable as the parable of the ten virgins to support the notion of having more than one partner. Long-term marital union is not practiced within the cogs.

They have marriage, but they also have swapping of partners. All this Mo sets out in letters with the rather unfortunate titles of revolutionary sex and fair sex and come on Ma, burn your bra and certain other degrading pieces of literature. He refers to the biblical term planting seed as insemination, fruit are children, self-denial is giving your body to another in need.

So he can write in a booklet, Flirty Little Fishy, that girls can offer their bodies in the name of Jesus as a demonstration of the love of God to society at large. Now this does not mean to say that every colony of the cogs around the world actually practices this. If this were the case and all that Mo had to say was literally adopted by all the groups, then the children of God as an organization would fizzle out because anarchy has the seeds of its own destruction and Mo's letters contain anarchy.

But you see, this is where the subtlety of it all comes in. Mo's letters are interpreted by the bishops or the archdeacons within the organization and some of the sexual license is not allowed all the way down the ranks. You've got to be in it a bit before you can get some of the benefits.

Mo criticizes and condemns the Evangelical Church as completely misunderstanding the wholesome teaching of Jesus and the New Testament on sex. He fails to comprehend the beauty and the refinement of the total biblical revelation on its teaching on this issue. Mo is a man obsessed by sex with a theology that wouldn't even do justice to Playboy or some of the other quasi-pornographic magazines today.

But all this becomes even more unfortunate when you consider the children because Mo teaches that the family unit as you and I understand it is a vestige of capitalism, private property, one wife and I have a special affinity to my children. No, says brother Moses, the children belong to us all. So can you imagine the heartache of a mother being moved to the next colony with the child that she bore and the one that she's just left under the care of lady children of gods who have not yet, quote, married, unquote.

Years ago Berg consulted with a medium and it becomes more and more obvious to me when I read his notes, when I read extracts from his booklet, that he is taken over from time to time by an evil spirit. This is not just logical deduction on my part. He does make reference to this in one of his letters when he speaks of a person by the name of Abraham, H-I-M at the end.

This was a gypsy king who lived some 700 years ago apparently in Bulgaria. He had a lifestyle which is a reflection of the one that Moe adopts, an ethics that also are broadcasted in Moe's letters. Moe says that, and Maria, his mistress secretary, underlines this in one of her writings, that Abraham was sent by Jesus, if you please, to Moe and he is their sort of hotline, their telephone to Jesus.

The Lord Jesus Christ reveals to Moses these additional teachings through this medium. As a result of this, if you study the communes and the lifestyle of some of the communes around the world, you will find that they are infiltrated, if that's the right word, by a type of black magic. There is adherence to this.

So what you begin to get is a far, far cry from the teaching of the New Testament. But for the person who has been first introduced to the Bible through the cogs, he has no understanding of this, you see, because he alights upon that part of the Bible which accords with Moe's teaching. And as we know, the authorised version can sometimes, in its archaic though beautiful language, be used by Moe to suggest things which we who are familiar with its language know full well.

It is not advocative. Take Abraham sending Sarah, for instance, down into Egypt and Sarah falling into almost a marital relationship with one of the kings there. Now this is completely manoeuvred by Moe in his letters to suggest that seduction on the part of some of the girls in the cog organisation has biblical warrant.

The very term spoiling Egypt he interprets along the line that I have suggested and to someone who has got no knowledge of the Old or the New Testament but comes to the book through the cog organisation, it becomes quite understandable to us who look on and have had the full truth of the Gospel preached to us, it becomes understandable to us to realise how folks who have just got little bits all sewn together without the whole sweep of the Word of God ever being taken into sight, into perspective, how they can believe that what Moe is teaching has the Bible to support it. You get some of the intimate language, the bride of Christ and union with Christ and divine seed. All these things have beautiful theological and spiritual connotations and I must confess up to reading this muck that Moe turns out, it had never occurred to me in all the years I've been a Christian that these things could possibly be interpreted in the way that he interprets them.

But you see I've been a Christian a long time and I was brought up to know the Bible's stories way back in my Christian family background. But these folks who are drawn into the cog machine, they don't know. Their first encounter with the Bible is through the adherence of the sect and if you allow that in your thinking then you can begin to understand why they don't immediately see that all that is taught within the Bible contradicts what Moe is saying.

It's a question of the sieve again you see, the Bible poured through the letters of Moses. When a prospective convert is accosted on the street, he will be taken off to one of the meetings of the children of God, maybe taken off to one of the colonies and the same pattern is followed as we saw when we were dealing with the Unification Church, something that I've referred to at the beginning of our study this evening. They're taken into a very, very warm and a very, very loving atmosphere.

They are introduced gradually to the teachings of Moe. The girl who writes her testimony in this book accords with that girl whose story was reported in the Daily Mail, the girl who was hooked by the moon as you remember, inasmuch as she said she was never left on her own. These people just bombarded her with this new teaching and there was such fellowship and such freedom, never had she been loved like that before.

People put their arms around her, they hugged her and it all seemed to be very genuine and doubtless on the part of many it was genuine, a genuine expression of love that they felt for this individual. But Moe, satanically controlled, can use even this desire for love and the way that it's satisfied in his organization in the infancy stages so that the convert is sucked further and further into the system. And when you've been a member of the children of God for three months or a year, two years or three years, it's almost impossible to break out.

Now that's something that you and I find it very, very difficult to appreciate. Let's take these two on the streets of New Delhi. The girl was obviously a newcomer to the setup but not the fellow.

I don't know how long he'd been a member of the cogs and as I say I didn't know at that time all about this stuff that I have been reading up. But you imagine the difficulty that it would have been for him to have responded to what I was telling him as an evangelical Christian who has been seeped in the Old and the New Testament from infancy. He would have to say that his colony and the lifestyle that he's adopted during the years that he became a cog was completely wrong, that dear brother Moses, this man of God with these new revelations is nothing else but a false messiah deluded by Satan.

He would have to leave the security of the colony having known one colony or two colonies or perhaps half a dozen colonies and go back into the system which he found to be repugnant even before he was a cog. You see, these members of the Children of God organisation, they know that Jesus spoke about forsaking all, forsaking the world and they do forsake all. If you become a member of Mo's organisation, eventually you sign a revolutionary statement in which you ascribe, you assign all your assets to Mo and the cogs.

So, you've got nothing. Jesus said that if a man would become my disciple, he must deny himself, he must take up his cross and he must follow me. But nowhere did the member of the cogs ever find that sort of discipleship before he was drawn into the group.

And let's face it, and here I say is another area where the cogs cause us to examine ourselves as twentieth century evangelicals. There are very few local church fellowships who really know what it is to forsake all. Very few Christians, and I'm not claiming myself as an exception, who know what it is to handle their house and their car and their bank balance and all the material advantages that they have as though they really belong to the Lord.

Where do you take him? He's got nowhere else to go. He owns nothing. There's nowhere that he belongs to because he's lost his home, he's lost his family.

For him to leave the cogs, he has to make another step of renunciation that is more difficult for him than the first step that he made to go into the cogs in the first instance. So what does the children of God sect compel us to do as evangelicals today? Two or three things of which I've touched on in part already. It compels us to examine the New Testament not so much as to its theology, but as to the responsibility that it teaches one brother ought to have towards another brother.

I wish to God I could say as a pastor of the tabernacle that no one could come in this church and ever go away feeling lonely. I wish to God that I could say that if one dozen cogs from the colony in Bromley were one out of the machine, out of the system and brought down to Worthing, that I could distribute them amongst our members who would give them a home. I would be hard-pressed to do that.

I feel that the children of God organization compels us once again to look into our own lifestyle and the way that we handle material things. I think that the cogs compel us once again to try to go back by the aid of the Spirit of God to develop that same sensitivity as Jesus had when he wept over the city of Jerusalem because I believe that people will only be one out of this system by prayer and by love.