My Bible Layman Background

OneCloudyDayAL.com: By Nathan E. David

Since about the age of eighteen I have found it increasingly difficult to find a chuch home that measures up to what I idealized as a child to be "that right Christian church family." I have lost count, but I certainly have visited more than fifty churches since the age of eighteen. Some of my church visits have merely been to attend church events, while yet most have been to be in attendance with regular attenders or members. I have been baptized twice, once by the Southern Baptists at the age of nine, and once by the United Pentacostals in about 1996. I have been a member or regular attender at Southern Baptist, United Pentacost, Methodist, Free Will Baptist and non-declarative interdenominational Christian churches, as well as with the Church of Christ, Assemblies of God and Churches of God. In some cases, I have either taught Sunday School or at least been invited to teach. I had to respectfully decline an offer to teach Sunday school at the Homewood Church of Christ in Homewood, Alabama USA, back in the mid-late 1990's, citing that I would not last a week in a Church of Christ. I lasted for a couple of months as a regular attender in their Wednesday night singles gatherings before I was finally told that the elders did not want me sharing my beliefs among the singles group. I shook the dust off of my feet and never looked back after I was told that.

Having been exposed to a plethora of denominational differences, including arguments for embracing all denominations as well as arguments to deny association with "formal denomination," I have learned that nearly every denomination, non-denomination, sect and even Christian related cult has some valuable thing that is to be shared, while yet I have also learned that all have some equally disturbing error in teaching that is desired by them to be shared.

What I have finally come to terms with is the simple truth that as long as churches are going to incorporate and deny Christ's Words to beware of being entangled in the world, and as long as churches are going to continue upholding meritless divisions, I will not ever find a particular church that suits me, at least not a corporate one. I often meet strangers who rise above denomination and/or divisions in the Word, and to me, a one on one chat with a sincere hearted person, regardless of religious background or denomination, is church. I guess if I had my way, I'd prefer to merely meet with believers who rise above corporate church in each others' homes. This is how the early church often met, and if you will continue reading on this web site, you will come to learn that today's churches are full of the equivalent hypocrisy as were the temples full of scribes and pharisees who called for Christ's crucifixion. You will also see that today's state of the churches is the fulfillment of prophecy.

In 1991 I was a backslidden Christian, but my father made the front page of the Birmingham News newspaper for having survived a massive heart attack that left him driving/wandering thru the busiest intersection in the area in five o'clock traffic. It was not just five o'clock traffic, but it was rush hour on the last Friday to shop before the upcoming Wednesday Christmas. My father, Oscar J. Griffith, basically, died at the wheel of his car that afternoon. His car, out of control, drifted thru at least four (or more) congested lanes of traffic, thru the intersection of Highways 31 and 150 (the Galleria intersection in Hoover, Alabama), only to rest gently against a tree without a scratch on it - a block or more away from where the heart attack occurred. A police officer who had been directing traffic in that intersection said that when he saw my father's car advancing thru the traffic out of control like that-he knew that my father was in trouble, so he jumped on his motorcycle and chased him down as his car gently rested itself against the tree.

Officers Mark Hearns, Lennie Sams Jr. and Seargent York pulled my father from his car. He was in full cardiac arrest.

Sergeant York had had basic CPR training, so the three men worked on my father until the paramedics arrived on the scene. The paramedics got my father's heart started again, so they sent him to Brookwood Hospital in Homewood, Alabama. My father survived the weekend and had open heart surgery on the following Tuesday, which was Christmas Eve. All of the staff in the hospital, including the doctors, agreed that my father's survival was a miracle, so he was twice interviewed on the highest rated local news station of the day, WBRC 6. His hospital room photo also made the front page of the Birmingham News, in which I was quoted for basically saying that I had "gotten my daddy back for Christmas" that year "following his many years of struggling with heart disease that started when I was a baby." I was 28 at the time of his miracle.

My father lived for two years following his miracle, before dying of congestive heart failure. The week that my father died, which was the week of April 29, 1994, my mother got a call from her sister. The news was bad. My mother learned that her mother had cancer of the pancreas, and was given four months to live. This was only about four days prior to my father's death that same week. In May, when Mother's Day arrived, I elected to go visit my grandmother in the nursing home and pray for her. Little did I know, my brother was also bringing my mother to the nursing home to visit her dying mother. After I left my grandmother's bed my brother and mother arrived there, and my mother also prayed for her mother at her bedside. Later, in late June, when my grandmother was supposed to be just about ready to pass, my mother got a call from her sister. The news was good. The doctors could not find a trace of my grandmother's pancreatic cancer.

Backing up a few years, my father's miracle redirected my life and set me to seeking the God of my parents and family. At some point a few months after my father's miracle, I was reading my Bible at work on my break when I read a verse about the number 666. The verse stuck out in my head, because it referred to the number of the beast as "the number of his name," and I knew from having wrestled with United Pentacost doctrines that the word name, in Greek, is "onoma," which also means "authority."

I thus embarked on researching the UN Resolution 666, which led me to believe things about the UN and ICRC. My research eventually evolved into a small book (or booklet) which had been available for free online reading on FreeGroups.net, but since it had errors and was in a difficult to edit .JPG format, I had to request the site administrator to delete it from the library. I had submitted corrections for the work, but the site administrator informed me by email that updating the work would require intensive HTML re-coding, so it was a no go. My new blog on the same subject, "One Cloudy Day" has almost everything in it that is in my booklet, but the blog is actually more inclusive in that it shares new teachings from verses that I only recently have come to understand from God's Word. My understanding comes from intense study, prayer, and the grace of our Lord.

Everything in my original research (the booklet) was documented via secular sources and the Bible. I have learned over the years that allowing seminary fed teachers to influence my views on the Revelation can only lead me astray (yet I have seen some good writings in the Broadman's Bible Commentaries that are dead on with what I believe about the seven heads of the beast (hence that they are a symbol of the mind of the beast etc)). I do not believe that this is the commonly taught perspective of the Southern Baptist seminary, but the Broadman Layman's collection is from a Baptist press. I disagree with the Baptists on a few points, such as their error about the rapture being pre-tribulation, and about the consumption of blood via blood transfusions (see also "Dare To Be A Radical Christian Believer," and "False Doctrines That Are Not Of God.")

Since the Revelation says in the last few verses of chapter 22 that one cannot deviate from the correct teaching by so much as a single word, particularly when it comes to the Revelation, I consider teaching errors in the rapture doctrine to be a serious issue.

I likewise believe that consumption of blood is a slap in the Son of Man's face, since Leviticus 17 clearly states that blood was to be given for our attonement. That passage from Leviticus even goes so far as to state that blood spilled in a hunt is to be buried. Blood is sacred to God, and thus it should not be handed carelessly, nor blood itself esteemed litely. The early church was taught to abstain from blood, as is stated twice in Acts 15. As I have already stated on this personal biography page, even non-mainstream churches that often are considered cults sometimes have some valuable thing to be shared. As far as I know, only the Jehovah's Witnesses (who, as I understand it, do not even believe that Christ was also God incarnate) and the Church of Christ Science (who I vehemently reject as panthiestic and in denial of much of Christ's teaching) are the only two Christian affiliated denominations who correctly reject blood transfusions, albeit the Church of Christ Science rejects ALL forms of modern medicine, which goes against Christ's Words that "the sick need a physician."

I exclusively use the King James Version of the Bible, for the most part. I have found that even a Bible published by Billy Graham uses the word "statue" for the word "image" in Revelation 13, so I try to avoid most other versions of the Bible. When God made man in His image, he did not make a bunch of pigeon perches, as some would have us to believe. I also recently went to the local public library do some printing of blogs, and while there a nice young lady and I had a chat about the rapture. When she whipped out her Bible to look up II Thessalonians 2:7, I was shocked to see that the pronoun "he" had been omitted. I immediately told her that she needed to toss that Bible! By removing the gender specific pronouns, one might NEVER understand that verse. See my blog titled, "The Rapture and What the Bible REALLY SAYS ABOUT IT!"

I do not have the gift of tongues, but I do sometimes receive "Words of Knowledge." I often feel that I have the gift of prophecy, since I have been able to understand the prophecies better than any mainstream church that I have ever attended. I have been received by several people as a prophet, but I let them speak for me. I only share God's Word as well as I can understand it, and sometimes that takes my having to realize errors in my own teaching, errors which I then have to go back and correct.

I can only account for two experiences of "Words of Knowledge" having actually inclusively influenced my documented Bible study. Only one page of my work has been inclusively influenced by what I believe to be a "Word of Knowledge," and it is as follows:

One day while correcting errors in my research, (before it took on the format of an actual booklet), I received what I believe was a Word of Knowledge. At the time I had many errors in the booklet, and God knew that I wanted to maintain the integrity of His Word in anything that I published. The Word of Knowledge that I received was when I was trying to ascertain what in the world the "image of the beast" could possibly be, in Revelation 13. The one phrase that I heard during that sitting was, "It's the coalition." As I pondered what I'd heard, it hit me that Generals Swartzcoff and Colon Powell had been granted hours of international air time to broadcast their "Airshow Over Iraq" in recent years, and that the coalition had been "given life" (or empowered) during the Persian Gulf War. As a tear ran from my eye (that I simply could not hold back, as it almost does now), I immediately documented that I believe the "image of the beast" to be the UN coalition.

The other Word Of Knowledge that is incorporated into my book is in the title. As I began the quest of trying to format my research into chapters for a book, I tried to think of a title for it. At that point I heard the Words, "One Cloudy Day," which again brought a tear to my eye-after reading Psalm 18. To me, even these smallest of testimonies move me to tears, because they are 100% true. I just love Psalm 18:7-11. Jesus did indeed ride that cross like a cherub!

While not included in my research, I have, two or more times, received Words of Knowledge about my work while or after working on it:

Since my obtained copy of the first Nobel Peace Prize was poorly Xerox'd I mistook the halbert pictured on the peace prize to be a bullhorn. It hadn't dawned on me, at the time, that bullhorns (as I know them) did not even exist back when the Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded. One day when correcting errors in my book, I read where I called the item in the lion's hands a bullhorn, and all of he sudden I heard the Words, "You know that's not right." The next time I visited my brother, who is a great scholar, I showed him the Nobel Peace Prize photocopy that I had, and he said, "That's not a bullhorn. That's a halbert." Without further delay, I looked up Halbert in my mother's huge "Book of Essential Knowledge," and I immediately made the appropriate correction in my work.

Further, in the fall of 2008 I sensed that God was angry with me about something. I started re-reading in my booklet one day when all of the sudden I realized that I had not ever removed a few sentences that contradicted some understandings covered in the book in other places. My error was that I was sharing two different ideas on the same doctrine, something which surely must have disturbed my readers. After blotting out and correcting the .JPG pages and then forwarding the corrections to the FreeGroups owner (this back in about 2003 when the site administrator was willing to correct the online work), I received a Word of Knowledge, "You got it."

WOW?

This will be the most unbelievable thing you have ever read on this site, probably. This next bit of fact even comes hard for me to accept. But that I have lived this experience, I, myself, probably would not believe it. If you read my blog about the anti-Christ movement, then you will probably come away feeling as strongly as I do that the anti-Christ is the Red Cross. Well, back in November of 1990 I was unemployed and very backslid. I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper for a weekend computer operator, so I applied and got the job. I took a job working for the Red Cross. During my training my supervisor liked my work, so the Red Cross revised my position to give me full time hours with full benefits. (My supervisor, Yvonne Colburn, to this day, was one of the best supervisors I have ever worked for.) What is so hard to believe is what my job wound up being in my working for the anti-Christ.

Here I was, working for the anti-Christ, but unaware that the Red Cross, (and I too, at the time), was the anti-Christ. My number one most important job in working for the Red Cross in Birmingham, Alabama USA was to prepare a daily blood collections report for the administrators upstairs. The report for which I was responsible, was the daily collections report for all of the blood that was collected for the entire Alabama and Gulf Coast regions of the Red Cross, USA. Here I was, a backslid Christian, working for (and as, at the time) the anti-Christ, and fulfilling the exact same role for them that Judas Iscariot filled when he walked with the early church. In the summer of 1992, when I began researching the United Nations' Resolution 666, I had no idea that the Red Cross would be found at the very heart of the whole international political movement. The first thing I saw, however, when I obtained a copy of the resolution, was that the Red Cross was the empowered entity in the resolution, that no other agency had been listed by name in the resolution. Within hours I was betraying the mock church, just as Judas betrayed Christ, only my work was not a betrayal but a revelation!

I never realized that I'd been the Judas Iscariot of the Red Cross, until one day in about 1996 or 1997, when I stumbled on two verses in the Book of Acts that instruct us to abstain from blood. As I pondered the notion of abstaining from blood, I then thought about what my job had been at the Red Cross, and then tears came.

Please remember; although, per my request, my online book has been removed for a slight errant teaching from II Thes 2:7, my current online blog on this site, "One Cloudy Day" actually covers just about every word of my booklet, yet it also covers Revelation 17 almost entirely, as well as several other areas of research. I also am able to incorporate live links into my blogs that I could not include with the online booklet, such as links to the IMF report on SDR's, the Red Cross site, the UN site, and others. I certainly hope that you will read this slightly lengthy blog as well!

God Bless you and happy reading! You have found a precious pearl!