Dr. Robert Sumner passed away in December 2016. The Biblical Evangelist newspaper is no longer being published and the ministry of Biblical Evangelism has ceased operation.

The remaining inventory of his books and gospel tracts was transferred to The Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles and may be ordered here.

Incidents and Illustrations (Part 2 of 2)
Evangelist Robert L. Sumner

By the way, regarding the Elane Photography case in New Mexico that we’ve previously reported, to date, 18 other professional photographers and the attorneys general from eight states (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia) have come to her support. So have the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times. A Rasmussen poll found 85% of the American public feels a photographer has the right to refuse to take pictures that conflict with the individual’s personal religious beliefs.

STOP SMOKING AND SEE THE WORLD! The Trumpet of Truth reported the case of Benjamin H. High of Lancaster (PA) who, at age 37, determined to quit the evil tobacco habit. He had a box built into a wall of his home and daily he dropped in two quarters instead of buying cigarettes with that amount.

After 20 years he reported these results:

At the end of 10 years he took those 7,285 quarters to the bank and donated the $1,821.25 to his Neffsville Mennonite Church toward its new building. That sum paid for all of the building’s steel beams and bricks.

Since the price of a pack of cigarettes has risen, he then began dropping three quarters daily into his hidden wall bank. When the second 10-year period had expired, he took those 10,130 quarters to the bank in a wheelbarrow. He then used that $2,532.50 for a two-month trip around the world for himself and Mrs. High.

Also 20 years previously, in Christchurch, England, Mrs. Winnie Vincent quit the smelly habit and invested the money she spent for cigarettes in an insurance policy. At the end of her two decades she and her two sons were also planning a trip around the world on the $4,200 she gained.

As the Trumpet of Truth concluded: “Like I said, stop smoking and see the world!”

By the way, the price of cigarettes, compared to the above, has risen dramatically. The most expensive for a pack of Marlboro Reds is in New York, where one pack will cost you, at this writing, $14.50 (up 16% over a year ago). The cheapest is in the tobacco country of Kentucky where it will still set you back $4.96 for a single pack (up 24% over a year ago). All the other states range somewhere in between (Vermont and New Hampshire prices jumped 25% and 35% respectively, now $9.52 and $6.59 per pack).

Cancer sticks, as we called them as a kid, range in price per carton from the cheapest $47.40 to $119.00. Most smokers would burn up at least a carton a week (10 packs). Yes, quit and see the world![1] And this price doesn’t include emphysema, lung cancer or the other physical goodies that come with the tobacco habit.

WHAT WHACKOS! If this isn’t insanity, we don’t know what would be. Animal activists in Minnesota criminally went on the property of the nation’s fifth-largest mink producer, at the Myhre ranch just east of Grand Meadow. They set loose approximately 450 or so mink – just days after Wisconsin fur farm owners scrambled to retrieve their own mink with fishing nets following a similar incident there.

Owner Einar Myhre said workers, friends and fellow farmers helped rescue most of the critters, but a day or so later dozens were still missing. Each mink, as Mower County Sheriff Terese Amazi said, is worth around $100, meaning “it’s a substantial loss.” This latest release action was one of at least nine around the country of late. The Myhre operation has been in business for four generations.

So why was this an act of insanity on the part of the criminals? Because, as Myhre noted, “Very few of them will survive in the wild because they’ve never been taught … We just picked up a dead one in the road this morning that got hit.” Many of them that were retrieved will have problems because “when they have been on the ground and been in the creek, they’ll get sick and we’ll lose them.”

In short, the PETA nuts were killing off the animals they allegedly wanted to save by turning them loose in an environment they could not handle. Makes you wonder if they are really concerned for the animals or just trying to promote a cause – getting publicity for themselves – doesn’t it?

’TIS A PITY! It is official now: the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud is history. In the decades following the Civil War the two families earned quite a reputation fighting along a strip of land on the Kentucky-West Virginia border.

What caused the white flag waving? Well, it was partly the shock of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Reo Hatfield II, who grew up on the West Virginia side of the border, was surprised with the “Real McCoy Award” the following year – he had already enjoyed meeting 400 McCoys and discovered they were real folks, just like him. The McCoy award was a statue of a fireman holding a child, and the name Hatfield was on the back. The McCoys said it was for his service to the country after 9/11 (his trucking company had sent five tractor-trailer loads of humanitarian supplies to New York City after the tragedy).

In 2003 Reo wrote a formal document that said: “We, the descendants of William Anderson Hatfield and Randolph McCoy, as well as the descendants of other ancillary participants in the historic feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans from 1865 to 1890, do hereby and formally declare an official end to all hostilities, implied, inferred and real, between the families, now and forevermore.”

His declaration, which has more than 60 Hatfield/McCoy descendent signers, closes: “We ask by God’s grace and love that we be forever as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom in America.”

Hatfield said he wrote the truce “to let the world know that when a foe attacks the United States, even the greatest known feuding family would come together to fight anybody who attacks our freedoms.”

The war is over! Let freedom ring throughout the Kentucky/West Virginia border. Glory!

DEATH IN THE POT! You hate it when someone poisons the pot (II Kings 8:38-40) out of which you formerly ate. Way back yonder we dined spiritually at the table of the Bethesda Baptist Church in Brownsburg (IN) and we were saddened to read that a new cult has sprung up in that fair city.

According to the Hendricks County Flyer, a group calling itself “Open Table United Church of the Christ” had started meeting in the local Hampton Inn on Sunday afternoons. The Rev. Richard Clough is the pastor.

We checked out its web and found they boasted, “Our Bibles will have no back covers, figuratively speaking.” Meaning what? “We believe that God is still speaking new words of life and wisdom,” hence adding to that blessed book. And what does God say? He warns, “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book” (Revelation 22:18, emphasis added). Wow! I wouldn’t want that, would you? Thank God, I have a back cover on my Bible.

In a press release, Rev. Clough boasted, “One of the church’s frequently used phrases is from a quote attributed to Gracie Allen: ‘Never put a period where God has placed a comma.’”

Frankly we prefer the words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, in the Bible, “Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar” (Proverbs 30:5, 6, emphasis added).

Only liars add to the Bible.

This new cult in our beloved former city makes a big deal out of wickedness, hence the “Open Table” in its name. By this Clough says, “Open Table places an emphasis on following Jesus and downplays creed and doctrine.” But ‘following Jesus’ and ‘downplaying doctrine’ is an oxymoron. Jesus did not downplay doctrine and if you follow Him you won’t either!

For example, Matthew 7:28, 29 say, “And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (emphasis added). And later in the same Gospel, “Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And when the multitude heard this, they were astonished at his doctrine (Matthew 22:29-33, emphasis added). Those are merely samples of what we could give.

Perhaps Clough and his flock fail to understand that the word doctrine in the Greek is didachē and simply means ‘teaching.’ To say you are downplaying doctrine is to admit you are downplaying teaching. But perhaps there is more truth to that admission than Clough intended.

The ‘open table’ is also designed, he says, to imply you are welcome no matter how wicked and immoral you are, and he especially emphasized welcome for Sodomites. We think every church ought to welcome everyone to attend and hear the Word of God, but Clough apparently means welcoming them in their sin! And he made the silly mistake of saying God ‘made’ Sodomites that way. Never, never, never.

Jesus never welcomed anyone in his or her sin! Never!

Clough also loves to talk about the ‘roots’ of his church, by which he apparently goes back to the Congregationalists, claiming their achievements for his own church. What a disgrace to the old-timers in that group like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Grandison Finney. They would totally repudiate Clough and his Open Table.

WHO IS TOBY KEITH? He is a country singer who just may be the biggest promoter of booze in the secular music world. Here are some of his numbers from his album “Hope on the Rocks”: Here is one: “I Like Girls That Drink Beer.” Then there is “Beers Ago” and “Haven’t Had A Drink All Day.” His song, “Scat Cat,” is about a family of moonshiners and he croons, “Daddy makes the whiskey, and mama says the prayers.”

His song “Get Got” is filled with advice from an older man to a younger one. He suggests, for example, “Always drink upstream from your cattle,” and, “Don’t mix your whiskey with decision … Ask forgiveness not permission.”

Do you suppose Toby could make up and sing a song based on Proverbs 20:1, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” While we won’t quote it all here, Proverbs 23:29-35 would be good to work in as well. It starts, “Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine” (Vss. 29, 30). He could use verse 31 for the chorus, “At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.” Perhaps he could work in liquor’s slavery of booze (it is called alcoholism) somewhere with the final words of the passage, “I will seek it yet again.”

Something tells me old Toby wouldn’t care much for my suggestion.

He probably wouldn’t like my application, either, which would include, “Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken …” (Habakkuk 2:15). And there is a facing of God – complete with accounting – after this life is over.

MORE OF THE ABOVE – JASON DOESN’T BLAME HIMSELF! Speaking of the slavery of alcohol, an ex-cop in Oregon is suing his police department because he was a drunk and his superiors didn’t try to cure his ‘disease!’ Jason Servo has filed a suit against the Gresham (OR) police department for six million big ones because he was a drunk and got fired for driving his unmarked police car while under the influence! Does he have a case? Shyster lawyers can make a case out of such harmless things as reading the Bible!

One of his attorneys, Shawn Kollie (who hopes to share in Jason’s potential million dollar jackpot) put it like this: “Just as with any type of disability or disease, they should have made some kind of effort to accommodate that, or some kind of effort to work with him, and not simply sever all ties.”

We are not sure how the department was responsible for his ‘disease.’ Did they provide the germs (alcohol) for him? Did they make him drink? Oh, did we mention that the officer who arrested Jason for DUI, a Clackamas County sheriff’s deputy, testified that Servo “was probably one of the top 10 most intoxicated people he had arrested in almost 15 years of drunken-driving investigations.”

As for alcohol being a disease, it is the only sickness we know where the germs are sold legally with the stamp of government approval on the bottle/can!

THE 'HEARERS' DIDN'T 'LISTEN!' With the invention of rock 'n' roll we started warning kids what that kind of music could do in a loss of their hearing. If any kid paid attention it would surprise us. Now, belatedly and too late, many of the rockers themselves are agreeing. The Epoch Times, a West Coast paper, carried an article by Mj Desousa, "Musicians Sound Warning About Loud Music."

The rockers quoted agree that hindsight has shown them they should have worn ear plugs (or something) while performing, rehearsing and recording.

The five musicians making their confessions were Pete Townshend of The Who; will.i.am, one of the founders of the Black Eyed Peas; Bryan Adams a British musician/photographer, who now works with the Hear the World Foundation to create public awareness of the problem; Chris Martin, the Coldplay lead singer who at the tender age of 36 has had a hearing problem for about a decade; and Grimes, a 25-year-old Canadian girl who has already had to cancel tours in Canada and Europe because she is coping with hearing loss.

With both musicians and fans, the hearing is always the first to go – and it is such an avoidable loss!

Kids, if you won’t listen to this old man, listen to the rockers.

‘POT PRINCESS’ CAUSES DEADLY CRASH! Twenty-year-old Kayla Mendoza uses that moniker on her Twitter account and it might just be the nicest thing on it. According to the Miami New Times, Kayla tweeted on her account, 2 drunk 2 Care, and just a short time later caused an automobile accident that killed two women in the other car. Kayla herself ended up in the hospital in critical condition.

Gary Catronio, father of one of the victims, upset when his daughter missed her 2 a.m. curfew with no explanation, used the tracking app linked to her phone and learned that she was stopped on the Expressway at 2:11 a.m. He and some other family members drove to the scene immediately and discovered a small army of police already there. It was a sad enlightenment for him and the others with him when he learned of the 1:45 a.m. fatal crash.

Hopefully, the ‘Princess’ will be able to quit all her drugs habits while she does a long, long stretch in the slammer! But with today’s courts, who knows? She may get off with ‘probation.’

A SWEET CONVERSION STORY! A group of men sat around discussing things when one of them, in the macho spirit men sometimes display, sneered that he didn’t pay much attention to ‘little things.’

One of the men immediately spoke up and said, “It was a little thing – a pair of socks – that changed the entire course of my life.”

The others were immediately attentive at such a strange declaration, of course, so the speaker related the story. It seems he and some other men were set to take a trip on a canal boat. Then, a day or so before they were to leave, he was chopping firewood. The ax slipped, hit and cut his foot, and the cheap homemade socks he was wearing had a blue dye in them. Infection set in and he was forced to say home while his friends merrily went on the trip they had all long planned.

During the time they were enjoying themselves an evangelist came to the community to conduct meetings. The speaker said that since he was bored and didn’t have anything else to do, he started attending the services. God spoke to his heart; he fell under deep conviction, eventually surrendering to Christ. He was born again and his entire life was completely changed, he told the men.

Like any new convert, since old things had passed away and all things had became new, he changed plans for his education so he could better serve the Lord. He sincerely wanted to make the most of his life to please God.

Who was that man? James Abram Garfield, who became the 20th president of the United States of America. He was born on November 17, 1809, and died on September 8, 1881. Garfield went to Heaven as a result of being felled at Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac train station by assassin Charles Guiteau’s bullet, only four months into his presidency. While he was shot at 9:30 in the morning of July 2, 1881, he lived 11 weeks, succumbing on September 19. Perhaps in today’s medical environment he would have survived.