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The sinful inclination is to move some degree back into the world rather than “come out” completely, and to make God's law and expectations more “lenient” and publicly acceptable. Many will recall that this is what Mr. Armstrong called a “Laodicean condition” (not the era), and repeatedly warned the Church about in his last years. He said the hallmark of this condition is that, despite good “head knowledge” of right spiritual principles, the physical aspects of Christian life are more “real” than the spiritual; there is a tendency to exercise and apply spiritual principles too much according to physical considerations, desires, and appearance, especially on harder spiritual questions the Bible only answers in principle, rather than literally and specifically.
The ones primarily responsible for the state of God's Church fourteen or more years after separation from the Tkaches are the leaders the people chose in leaving the WCG. Every one of these leaders, with the support of many ministers and other men of executive Levitical office at former Church headquarters, has led his own smaller-scale rebellion against God's government and parts of His Truth. To their shame, most of God's people have followed along, though many have done so with serious reservations and/or partially unwittingly.
A pivotal question lies at the heart of the mystery of what happened in the Church after Mr. Armstrong's death: which of the doctrines and spiritual judgments Mr. Armstrong authoritatively set in the Church are erroneous?
All God's people and those who lead them today believe most of the doctrines and judgments are revealed Truth. In fact, none of the leaders of the various groups seriously disputes any of the following crucial facts: 1) Mr. Armstrong taught the original Gospel of Jesus Christ for over fifty years, when no other church in the world was doing so, and even God's true Church had not done so for many years; 2) Mr. Armstrong learned the true Gospel from Christ Himself, through His written word, in that there was no other teacher or surviving written source for Mr. Armstrong to learn the true Gospel from, even in God's Church; 3) starting literally from nothing, Mr. Armstrong proclaimed the Gospel to the world more universally and with greater power than had been done by anyone since the original apostles; 4) a number of other points of original Truth taught by Christ and the apostles, which also had been lost even by the Church over the centuries, were revealed to Mr. Armstrong and restored to the Church's understanding through him; 5) key components of Biblical end-time prophecy “shut up and sealed until the time of the end” (Dan. 12:4) were first revealed to Mr. Armstrong.
Among numerous examples of this last point are the true identity of America and Britain, and the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire in a united Germany allied with European Soviet bloc nations. It is worth remembering here that even as late as 1985 no serious commentator believed he would live to see Eastern Europe escape the Soviet Union. Some reporters at the time of German reunification actually commented on Mr. Armstrong's remarkable “prediction.”