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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jonathan Zirkle

Nothing New Under the Sun

So the title of my presentation is Nothing New Under the Sun.

And the great wise man Solomon made this observation in the book of Ecclesiastes.

He said, the thing that hath been is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done.

You know, when I was younger I didn't believe this.

I felt like, man, we're living in the 20th century and look at, and now the 21st century, and look at all the innovations and everything that's happened.

But as I've grown older and I've studied more and more, I've started to see the wisdom in this and I've started to see that certainly in all spiritual matters, Solomon was correct.

I wanna remind us a little bit about what we spoke about this morning.

We read in Revelation 16, verses 13 and 14.

We read this passage, it says, I saw 3 unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.

For they are the spirits of devil's working miracles." Now we talked about this and we also talked about this in terms of the idea that this is the counterfeit 3 Angels Message.

And if we remember what the 3 Angels Message is about, we can kind of summarize it this way.

Give glory to God for he is the creator, and come out of her my people.

As we looked at this this morning, we saw that there's these 3 unclean spirits.

If they're going to be the counterfeit, they're going to be talking about the opposite.

And the opposite would be evolution, and it would also be an ecumenical drawing everyone together.

Also if you look at this passage, you can see you have the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet.

And so you're looking for this, if you've studied Revelation, you'll know that the dragon represents paganism, or Satan.

And The false prophet represents apostate Protestantism So whatever we're looking for it should come out of the mouth of these 3 systems All right.

I've got plenty of water here So as we as we went through the presentation we saw these men and I just want to remind you just a little bit of the high points.

I won't read you everything that they had to say, but this is Jürgen Moltmann.

He's a big leader in the emergent church movement, and when I say leader, he's a theological leader.

He's 1 of their theologians that they look to.

He had this to say, the atheism that wants to be free, that wants to free men and women from superstition and idolatry, and the Christianity that wants to lead them out of inward and outward slavery into the liberty of the coming kingdom of God, they can work together.

And he said this, which of them will prove to be stronger in the long run is something we may confidently leave to the future.

So this is a guy who's really confused about atheism and Christianity and the fact that they really don't get along.

We also saw that this guy was a follower of Hegel and Hegel's theory was that, well we'll see his in a second because I think I've got a slide on that.

So here we have something out of the pagan tradition.

And he said, are the mystics and the sages insane?

Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they?

Maybe just maybe an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity a total embrace in the entire cosmos a cosmic consciousness And then we looked at Teal hard to Shardan a Jesuit theologian probably from what I can tell he looks to be about the third most important theologian in the Catholic Church at this time after Augustine and more.

He said this, the cosmic body of Christ extends throughout the universe and comprises all things that attain their fulfillment in Christ, so that the body of Christ is the 1 single thing that is being made in creation.

And then we saw, now looking at the actual emergent leaders, we saw this guy, Brian McLaren.

Brian McLaren is 1 of the favorites of Adventism as far as the emergent church movement is concerned and he's spoken on our campuses.

He's someone that some of the Adventists look up to and he says this, I felt that every tree, every blade of grass, and every pool of water become especially eloquent with God's grandeur.

Somehow they seemed to become transparent or perhaps translucent is a better word, because each thing in its particularity was still utterly visible and unspeakably important.

These specific concrete things became translucent in the sense that a powerful, indescribable, invisible light seemed to shine through.

It was with exuberant joy of simply seeing these masterpieces of God's creation and knowing myself to be among them.

It was to be 1 of them and to feel and know that we, all of these creatures, molecules, and phenomena were together known and loved by God who embraced us all in the ultimate, capital W, put it in quotes, we.

So he's talking about God here, a pantheistic God.

We saw this great chain of being, and when you look at this, this is an excellent summary of emergent theology, It's just the theory of evolution applied beyond the human life that we see here all the way into full spirituality.

And so you start with the Big Bang, you move up to the origin of life, higher life forms, primitive man, spiritual man, all the way to God.

And we saw how all 3 of these movements were preaching the same theology.

We looked at this image, which I think is very, very important and a very good illustration of what's going on in the movement and what they believe.

They believe that all of the religions here have an exoteric or an outward front, and that would be the official part of the religion, that's the part that you and I know when we look him up on Wikipedia, when we go meet somebody and we talk about their religion, that's gonna be the exoteric.

But then they look towards, the emergents look towards an esoteric tradition.

And the esoteric tradition is 1 that's based on mysticism or meditation.

Meditation is 1 of the primary things, but other mysticism would work.

And they say that every religious tradition has 1 and it's true.

If you look at all of these religious traditions they all do have 1.

Christianity is special though because Christianity, its mystical experience is a heretical or an apostate experience because Christ came and he said, I do nothing.

He says, I do nothing but I reveal it through the prophets beforehand.

And Christianity and true Christianity is an open religion and it doesn't have an esoteric component.

And what's interesting about this is that they believe that it all leads to 1 central unifying truth.

Spirit of Prophecy said this, we have nothing to fear for the future except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us in his teaching in our past history.

We have seen these issues enter into the church before And so right now I want to look at a piece of our history.

I want to look at John Harvey Kellogg and the Alpha of Apostasy.

Speaking about Kellogg and what our church went through, Ellen White said this, "'Be not deceived, many will depart from the faith, "'giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils.

"'We have now before us the alpha of this danger, "'the omega will be of a most startling nature.

And when she was talking about the alpha, she was talking about John Harvey Kellogg.

So John Harvey Kellogg, here's a picture of him as a young man.

There's an interesting story about how he was dedicated to the Lord.

He had been out with his friends and they were playing and 1 of his friends had a compound fracture.

Compound fractures just give me the heebie-jeebies.

There's a reason why I didn't go into medicine.

And anyway, they took his friend to the physician and the physician reset the bone.

And you also have to remember, this is back, you know, in the 1830s, I think, something like that.

Maybe 40s, no, no, no, this will be later, but it's still before the Civil War.

Well, the young John Harvey went to his mother and told her all about it and said, mother, I do not want to be a doctor.

And his mother took him by the arm, put her arm around his shoulders, and they talked about it, and they knelt down and prayed.

And his mother dedicated him to the Lord that day.

And the young John Harvey Kellogg said that from that day forward he was always thinking of a way that he could serve the Lord.

Well, in 1855, this is the year before the Kelloggs went to Battle Creek, James and Ellen White relocated to Battle Creek and they started the steam press.

This is the first time that the Adventists have really settled down in 1 place.

Before this, if you look at our history, they are always kind of moving around from place to place.

The next year, the Kelloggs moved to Battle Creek, and I have a picture, I counted the number of people in this picture, that's the size of their family.

And when they went to Battle Creek, They started a broom factory.

While that's the size of their family and that's a contemporaneous picture, that's not them and that's not their broom factory.

But I thought it would be a good illustration.

In 1864, the young John Harvey Kellogg went to work at the Steam Press.

Now he was a special employee, he was different than the other people that worked there.

The thing that made him different was he liked to read everything that they printed.

And he was known for just being this real voracious reader, interested in everything.

And they could start to see that he was a man of real talent.

In 1866, the Whites start the Western Health Reform Institute.

James White had always had kind of poor health, struggled with it a lot, and so they started this, and this is a picture of it.

She didn't use that term the same way we use it today.

For her, non-denominational meant that this institute was there to serve the public.

It was to serve everyone no matter what denomination they were.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

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