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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Advent HOPE - Adventist History Class

Tim Arakawa

The Great Advent Awakening

Norman McNulty

The Midnight Cry

The 1888 General Conference

The Health Message and Kellogg

Madison and True Education

The History of Questions On Doctrine

The Desmond Ford Apostasy

Current Events in Adventism

All right, why don't we begin with a word of prayer.

Dear Father in Heaven, we thank you so much for the many times that you have led your people throughout history.

We think especially of the history of the Adventist Church.

And now as we spend time going over various events, we ask that you would not only help us to understand our identity as Seventh-day Adventists, But that you would also help us to understand and partake of the spirit of the pioneers as well.

Well, welcome to the Adventist history class at Advent Hope.

We're happy that each 1 of you can be here and we're looking forward to studying highlights from Adventist history.

Obviously after about 165 years or so you can't cover everything But we're going to try to hit some of the main points.

Before we begin though, I just want to read you a couple of quotes to talk about a philosophy behind studying Adventist history.

And 1 of them you probably are familiar with.

It's found in Life Sketches, page 196, and it says that, does anyone know that?

We have nothing to fear for the future, except what?

As we shall forget the way the Lord has led us and His teachings in our past history.

And so we want to remember the way that the Lord has led.

We want to go over those teachings that we have learned throughout the past.

The other quotation I want to bring up is found, it's actually a manuscript release, 346.

Daniels in 1903, and she says, again and again I have been shown that the past experiences of God's people are not to be counted as dead facts.

So while we're talking here about Adventist history, these are not dead facts.

In fact, In a very real sense, each 1 of us is still part of that history and are making history each day.

We are not to treat the record of these experiences as we would treat last year's almanac.

The record is to be kept in mind for history will repeat itself.

The darkness of the mysteries of the night is to be illuminated with the light of heaven.

And so we're going to be studying Adventist history with an eye towards the future.

And we're going to want to learn the lessons so that we can put them into practice as we make Adventist history today.

A couple things about the class before we begin.

This class is just inherently kind of more lecture-based.

And so while there will be times where you might…you'll be reading Bible texts and things like that, we're not going to be taking too many questions.

We've got a lot of material to cover and very little time.

And so If you do have questions, we will have a question and answer period probably on the last Sabbath that we studied the last, our last topic.

And so maybe that afternoon we'll have a question and answer time.

Save your questions, write them down, and we can cover them during that session.

But let me just go over it with you and for our audio-verse audience.

The first topic we'll be covering this morning is called the Great Advent Awakening.

And we'll be covering basically the Millerite Movement.

However, there's so much to cover we're going to split it into 2.

And next week we'll be covering the specific part of the Millerite movement that was right before 1844, called the Seventh Month Movement and when the Midnight Cry was given.

The week after that we'll be covering what we are calling present truth, the development of the truths that the Adventist church holds now.

Many of them are distinctive and there'll be a special emphasis on the sanctuary, the spirit of prophecy and the Sabbath.

After that, we have a topic called Almost a Canaan, and it's what you could term the close calls that we as a church have had when Jesus potentially could have come.

And so there are 3 major times that that happened.

The last 1 happened in 1888, and that is so important that we're going to split that out into a second section.

So The next section after that is going to be about the 1888 General Conference.

After that, we're going to cover the health message and medical missionary work, and we'll include in there a talk about Kellogg and Battle Creek Sanitarium.

After that, we're going to cover education and Madison especially, as well as some other things.

And then we're going to move on into some more recent Adventist history.

We're going to cover what happened in the 1950s when Walter Martin approached the Adventist church with questions about our doctrines.

And after that we're going to cover what happened in the 70s and the 80s, especially dealing with what happened with Desmond Ford.

And finally, we're going to end with current events in Adventism, talking about what's happening now and perhaps even a little bit about the future.

So that's kind of the outline of what's going to happen so that you can look forward to those things.

We'll still be using our Bibles here and there to talk about some of the different things.

And this class will be primarily taught by 3 people.

That will be Norman McNulty, Adrian Zahid, and myself, Tim Arakawa.

Let's start our talk with a little bit of historical context, okay?

Because if you're familiar with the time period of the late 1700s and the early 1800s, a lot was going on during that time.

And some of those things that were happening were specifically made it conducive for the Advent movement to begin.

So the first thing that I want to talk about is the fact that in the United States at the time of William Miller, there was a tremendous amount of religious freedom.

And this was very, very important because If you think about it, there were scholars and lay people all over the world in the 1800s who were studying the second coming and they were studying the prophecies.

They were especially studying them because of the French Revolution.

The French Revolution renewed the interest in the 1260 year prophecy because they believed that that was the fulfillment.

So why didn't the Advent movement begin in Europe?

And 1 of the answers is that Europe did not have religious freedom.

In Europe you had a state religion that was pretty much in control of the way things were going to be and they dominated the religious landscape.

But in America, there is religious freedom.

Everyone had the opportunity to choose which denomination that they would worship and what their beliefs would be.

And so in America, there were a lot of mostly Protestant denominations, but there was a lot of them.

And so this provided an atmosphere that people could study.

So if you think about it, the establishment of the United States and especially its constitution which guarantees freedom of religion and the separation of church and state was critical for Adventism to begin.

Another important part of this time period was development of a lot of isms.

And if you know what I mean by isms, let's just go through a few and maybe you can think of a few as well.

Humanism came from basically the age of enlightenment where reason and rational thought was people's way of finding truth.

And so it led to the idea that humans could find truth and that humans could develop and think for themselves and find truth.

Deism is the idea that God is a very distant God.

He started things off, let it go, it rejects a personal God, it develops divine revelation, especially through scripture.

And so deism was a way of using rational thought to come into truth.

Can you think of any other isms that were happening during the 1700s, 1800s?

Spiritualism was a big part of what was happening then.

Spiritualism actually started in 1844 and continued to grow throughout the beginnings of the Advent movement and beyond.

Mormonism actually began in 1830 and was right around the same time that Adventism started, believe it or not.

There's a whole series of lectures by Dr.

Dupre about the different isms and different things that started.

Okay, so you could call it Darwinism also started.

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Series

Advent HOPE - Adventist History Class

The Great Advent Awakening

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

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The Great Second Advent Movement: A Relic of the Past or a Key to the End-time Revival

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Finishing the Work

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Bible Study on the Third Angel’s Message

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The Great Second Advent Movement: A Relic of the Past or a Key to the End-time Revival

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Sound Doctrine