DFO 154424/6/83

1. I WANT TO INVITE ALL YOU ARTISTS TO GET IN ON THIS GREAT FINAL MASTERPIECE-OF-HEAVEN PROJECT & SEND US SOME PICTURES! Why not? We don't have to have a contest, but from the Letters & everything you've read, we want you all to send us your pictures of Heaven! We could have a whole book full of pictures of Heaven!

2. WE'RE SENDING OUT HERE & NOW THIS APPEAL!—Not only to send in your own contributions, but if you find any samples of classical art or anything that would fit Heavenly pictures, send'm in! This is a special notice on that & we invite all you artists to send in both your own contributions of Heavenly art, & all the Heavenly art you can find in classical art pictures!

3. I AM PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN HAVING THE WHOLE FAMILY SEND IN EVERYTHING YOU CAN FIND in the way of pictures of the great masterpieces & any kind of art of the Heavenly City, & I think you're going to see how few people have ever even attempted to make any pictures of it! The few that we've found are ridiculous! It looks like old Jerusalem all lit up & floating in the sky!—So ridiculous compared to the description in the Bible! So if you run across anything in magazines or books, turn it in! Hope ran across this one picture in a magazine. It was some kind of skin cream ad, but it was a pretty picture!—And it's my idea of Heaven, all those pretty half-nude women in a garden!

4. YOU CAN USE SOME OF THAT OLD GRECIAN CLASSICAL ART FOR HEAVEN!—Gorgeous gardens‚ Grecian columns, architecture, beautiful women, handsome men! Their art was really Heavenly! I think that was the peak of man's beauty & perfection in art! In both art, philosophy, beauty & sex the Greeks had more than words for it! But you see where it got'm without the Lord—nowhere!—They rotted away!—All that beautiful concept of beauty & art & women & philosophy & everything went to ruins without the Lord!

5. IT WAS WONDERFUL PREPARATION FOR THE FIRST COMING OF THE LORD, but the only ones that lasted are the ones that received the Lord! But they did make some gorgeous beautiful buildings, statuary & pictures! And there are quite a few artists since then, the Great Masters, who have painted pictures of Grecian scenes, not by the ancient Greeks themselves, but they duplicated the idea or they've represented that period in their art.

6. I'M NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT BIBLE SCENES, WE'VE GOT ENOUGH BIBLE PICTURES! There are probably more Bible scenes in art masterpieces than anything else in the whole World, because the Church was able to afford to pay for them! It was the Churches that commissioned these pictures, even the kings & the Churches, for their temples & their churches & their church windows & their church ceilings & temples & cathedrals & basilicas‚ & they were able to afford to pay for stuff like that. So they've got that stuff galore, & a lot of it's beautiful.—Except that medieval art, I never cared for that junk! It looks like some poor juvenile drawings. But the Old Masters etc. are beautiful!

7. SO I WOULD LIKE TO SEE JUST WHAT THERE IS IN EXISTENCE! I'd like to see anything that looks like Heavenly art we could use, & I would like to see just how many artists' conceptions there were of the Heavenly City. The Seventh Day Adventists used more of those than anybody, they were great on beautiful colour slides & slide lectures etc. That's really how they made a lot of their progress!—And they had beautiful books full of beautiful colour pictures, children's books with gorgeous pictures! They probably used more beautiful, modern religious art than any other religious group, & even they had almost nothing on Heaven!—And absolutely nothing on the Heaven described in Revelation according to those actual descriptions & dimensions!

8. SO I JUST WANT TO SEE WHAT THERE IS IN EXISTENCE! I'd like to put out a request to the whole Family: Send us samples! Go to the Library! Most libraries usually have a copy machine now, so you can go there & at least send us xeroxes. Please don't go rippin'm out of the books! We've had people do that! God bless'm‚ & God help'm also! That's naughty, it's stealing & it's defacing public property & you're apt to get caught & in trouble. Anyhow, we don't want to ruin their books. Just make xerox copies & send us those copies.

9. I'D JUST LIKE TO SEE HOW MUCH ART HAS BEEN ACTUALLY ATTEMPTED ON THE HEAVENLY CITY! I've seen a lot of art in my day, & Dr. Prieger, if anybody, had more religious art than anybody, & there was almost nothing on the Heavenly City! There were a few things that looked a little bit like cities floating in the sky, only mostly they had old medieval-looking cities or the old city of Jerusalem floating in the sky with a few domes & minarets & old-fashioned art!—A city that looked like it wasn't more than about a mile square, but floating up there on a cloud in glorious shining beauty, golden, but looking nothing at all like the Bible description!

10. NOW I WANT YOU TO FIND ME ALL THE EXISTING ART WE CAN FIND OF WHAT PEOPLE HAVE PAINTED OR DRAWN AS THEIR CONCEPTION OF THE HEAVENLY CITY! I want to see what art exists in the World today of that City! And do you know what I think it's going to prove?—Just what the Lord has said, that nobody's ever really done it before!—He has reserved it for us! They've made some pitiful attempts, but they're nothing like the description in the Bible! They don't even begin to hold a candle to it!

11. I WANT TO PROVE IT! I WANT TO SEE WHAT THERE IS! Not only that, but if there's any we can use, we'll use it! Our artists are always open to files of any kinds of art that they can use. I want to see what kind of art you can collect! I want you right here & now to start collecting Heavenly art! Look in these books & collect me some xeroxes of pictures you find that you think might look like something in Heaven!

12. I'LL TELL YOU ONE GUY THAT ALWAYS JUST FASCINATED ME EVER SINCE I WAS A LITTLE KID! His pictures had the Grecian style & they had the beautiful maidens & they had that aura of Heaven‚ & that's Maxfield Parrish! He was very popular when I was a kid, or before I was born! We had a book of his pictures one time, remember? Don't tell me we left it behind! It was a beautiful big book of his pictures. Where do you think it is now? They probably sold it in that garage sale they had in Portugal. They sold everything from works of art to cars & trailers!—Ha! All those priceless objects & things that we'd collected over the years‚ we had to just dump! If that trip to South Africa didn't do us any more good than that, I think it cleaned us out of everything we didn't want to take clear to South Africa & back!—Ha!

13. BUT I WANT TO SEE WHAT THE ART OF THE AGES HAS PRODUCED ON HEAVEN OR ANY KIND OF HEAVENLY SCENES! I don't care if it was supposed to be in Dante's "Inferno", Limbo or whatever if it was beautiful! I want to see what it's produced! I mean it! I want you & the whole Family to start looking for pictures!

14. (FAMILY: DO YOU THINK THE MORMONS OR JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES WOULD HAVE ANYTHING?) The Jehovah's Witnesses, yes, because they came out of the Seventh Day Adventists & they carried a lot of that art with them, & most of it was Albert Prieger's own art! He was not only an artist in his own right of the old German classical school, but he was also familiar with all those old masterpieces & he collected them & he coloured them himself—because in those days colour photography & colour prints were rare, even when I was a kid! They only began having it when they began to have colour printing, up to that time it was too expensive & not invented yet!

15. IT'S BEEN JUST WITHIN MY LIFETIME THAT THEY FINALLY DISCOVERED HOW TO MAKE COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHS, only about 1935!—And after that‚ colour photo printing. So both colour photography & colour printing is a fairly new art, & therefore there wasn't too much of it. So Prieger had to paint all those slides himself! He got the black-&-whites & then he coloured them for slides. That's what my Grandmother did too! All those beautiful art slides that my Grandfather had that I inherited were nothing but black-&–white photography in his day. All those pictures of his trips around the World & all the places he went, it's all black-&-white photography.

16. MY GRANDMOTHER WAS QUITE AN ARTIST! She not only spoke Cantonese‚ but painted!—And she tinted those slides by hand under a magnifying glass, because they were only 3 X 4 inches! Those are collector's items, works of art! God only knows where they are now! We managed to save a few of them. I don't know whether Deb or Jeth got'm or what! But Prieger hand-painted those things in those early days for the Seventh-Day Adventists, because there was no such thing as colour photography!

17. I WANT TO SEE WHAT THE WORLD OF ART & THE MASTERS OVER THE AGES HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO CONCEPTIONS OF HEAVEN & THE HEAVENLY CITY! I want to see it! Even if you can't send me anything but black-&-white xeroxes, I want to see how much they've done on Heaven!—And I think we're going to be surprised how little they have done! And I have never in my life seen anything of the whole Heavenly City according to the dimensions & description given right in the Bible! Never! How about that? Why not?

18. YOU SAY‚ "OH DAD, YOU'RE REALLY A SUPER EGO MANIAC TO THINK THAT GOD ACTUALLY RESERVED THAT GREAT TASK JUST FOR LITTLE OLD YOU & your little old nobody artists that nobody ever heard of before you started putting them in our Magazines & Books! You don't mean to tell me He would reserve such a monstrous monumental stupendous, colossal, gigantic, breath-taking project as the Heavenly City art just for us?—After all these great masterpieces of art down through the ages, hundreds of years, thousands of years‚ & He just saved that for us? Come on, Dad!"

19. ALL RIGHT, IF ANYBODY ELSE HAS DONE IT, SHOW ME! Come on‚ trot out your samples! Show me! You prove anybody's ever done it before according to the Bible formula, Bible recipe, Bible dimensions, Bible description! Show me! I think you're going to find very little art about Heaven at all, much less the Biblical description of Heaven! But if you can find it, I want to see it! Send'm in!—And if it's pretty enough, we'll use it! PTL! But even if it's not Biblical & it's not according to what we consider a logical reasonable Biblical conception, we could still use it just to prove it!

20. BUT THAT'S MY CHALLENGE!—IF ANYBODY'S EVER DONE IT, SHOW ME! It reminds me of that joke about Dr. Irwin Moon! You remember that one at the World's Fair in Chicago? I was there when he did it!—Ha! He had his lecture every day at his exhibit. He was exhibiting these new materials for the first time in history & guess what they were?—Plastics! Chicago World's Fair, 1934! Isn't that something how the Lord gave me such wonderful opportunities to hear men like that!

21. THERE WAS A MAN WHO WAS WILLING TO RISK HIS LIFE TO PREACH THE GOSPEL! He's the guy that stood on top of that huge coil that was as big around as this table. The coil was three feet wide & about six feet high, he had to have a ladder to get up on it! He would let a million volts of electricity shoot right through his body! He'd hold a two-by-four in his hand like this‚ & it would burn a hole right through it! You could see the streak of lightning going right through it & set it on fire! Then he'd throw it down on the concrete floor of the gym or wherever it was & have'm turn it off. He'd only do it a few seconds & it was really some stunt‚ it really attracted crowds to preach the Gospel to!

22. HE WAS DEMONSTRATING PLASTICS & THE NEW PROCESSES BY WHICH THEY COMPRESSED THE VARIOUS GASES. He had this oxygen compressed to liquid in a container there‚ & he would dip a rose in it like this, hold it there just for a few moments, pull it out, & it looked just the same as ever!—Beautiful, red & lovely! Then he'd take it in his hand like that & just crush it! It would just fall all to pieces like it was made out of glass!—Frozen solid! He did all these stunts to draw a crowd, & then he'd preach'm the Gospel, right at the World's Fair! God bless Moody Bible Institute for that, at least they financed it.

23. THAT'S WHERE HE MADE THAT CRACK WHEN THE GUY CAME UP & SAID, "I'M NOT AN ATHEIST, DR. MOON, I'M JUST AN AGNOSTIC! I JUST DON'T KNOW!" Dr. Moon said, "Instead of the Greek word‚ why don't you use the Latin word, ignoramus!" Then the guy said, "Well, if you can show me God‚ I'll believe in Him! Just show me!" Dr. Moon said, "Have you got any brains in your head?" "Well, of course I've got brains in my head!" Dr. Moon said, "Show me!"—Ha!

24. SO IF THERE'S ANY EXISTING HEAVENLY ART THAT'S BETTER THAN OURS OR MORE ACCURATELY BIBLE THAN OURS, SHOW ME! PTL! I wasn't planning to give you any talk tonight, but that's not a talk‚ that's an invitation, an advertisement! Show me! PTL! Maria said, "I don't mind you having a little bit of Heaven tonight‚ as long as it's not too much!"—So let's pray! (Maria: We couldn't stand it if we had our Heaven all at once!) That's why you're getting it by installments, chapter by chapter, picture by picture! Amen! PTL! Hallelujah! TYJ! (Sings the Lord's Prayer.) I feel like singing it lately because it's to the glory of God in Heaven! Amen? (Ps.19:14; Nu.6:24-26; "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.")

25. IN Jesus' name, DO BLESS & KEEP US & GIVE US A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP‚ LORD. Thank you for the good sleep we had last night & a good day today, Lord, with so much accomplished. Thank You for these beautiful pictures! Amen! PTL! God bless you all! Thank you for your patience, but this is a little bit of Heaven for me!

26. (SINGS:)

"OH, THIS IS LIKE HEAVEN TO ME!

YES, THIS IS LIKE HEAVEN TO ME!

If Heaven is like this in our Family,

Then Heaven's like this to me!"

PTL! Line up girls! (For squeezes & kisses!) In Heaven I'll be able to do better than this! PTL! What a church! This beats handshakin' any day!—Ha! Hallelujah! If we could get some movies or videos of this, it would be a classic to go down in history! We ought to have at least one video of our lovely dining room scene with the girls at their best & me at their breasts! HAL! TYJ!—If you've got anything better'n this, show me!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family