Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The Future of Adventism: Will Our Biblical Foundation Give Way to Culture?

Jim Howard

1. The Future of Adventist Biblical Interpretation

Father in heaven, we're grateful for this privilege that we have to meet together here at Camp Meeting.

We have the promise that when we gather here for Camp Meeting, that Lord Jesus, you are here to meet with us.

And we pray that you would give us of the Holy Spirit today.

We need to be braced for whatever lies ahead, whether it's the challenges in our own personal hearts and lives, or whether it's the challenges facing the church today.

In either case, we believe that You are on the throne and we can trust You to see us safely into port.

So please, Lord, guide this ship and bless this meeting as we spend this time together.

Alright, so let me give you a little introduction to the series.

Today, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is at a crossroads.

And I believe that we're living in what I would refer to as a defining moment in the history of the Seventh-day Adventist church.

I believe that we've come face to face with an issue that is destined to determine the future of the church.

Is the Bible fully authoritative or do we need to look beyond the Bible for views of what's right and wrong because parts of it were negatively influenced by the culture of the writers.

This is a huge issue facing the church and that's what I'm going to talk about today, the future of Adventist biblical interpretation.

Now tomorrow we're going to talk about an equally important topic.

Many have adopted an evangelical view of the gospel that has actually hindered our understanding and our preaching of the full message of righteousness by faith.

Maybe it was unintentional, but many have divorced sanctification from justification and in so doing what has happened is we have basically considered certain vital Adventist teachings, such as the cleansing of the sanctuary and the judgment, as being incompatible with the gospel.

So tomorrow we're going to talk about the future of the everlasting gospel in the Adventist church.

Then, in some areas of the church, Adventist views of what the Bible teaches on health and Christian standards have been reexamined in the light of changing society, what society believes is right and wrong.

You know, society has a lot of strength because you see something enough on the news, you hear it with people that you work with, it begins to kind of have this effect, and it's had that effect on the church.

As the culture goes, the church generally follows.

And you need to look no further than the current wave of support for gay and transgender lifestyles for an example of this.

It's not something that the church is immune to and it's certainly something that is beginning to see cracks in the armor in the Seventh-day Adventist church.

So have we been too literal in our reading of the Bible?

Not progressive enough in our views of what constitutes a biblical lifestyle?

Wednesday we'll look at the future of Adventist lifestyle.

Now many people today are embarrassed to hear the Seventh-day Adventist Church referred to as the remnant church.

They wonder what makes us think we're so special.

But maybe many have never seen the powerful biblical evidence of the distinct end-time mission and message of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I think that many people in the Seventh-day Adventist Church who hold that view simply have not seen what they need to see.

Thursday we're going to talk about the future of Adventist identity.

And then for many, Adventist evangelism needs a total overhaul.

They believe what we did in the past doesn't work anymore.

It's centered on beasts instead of being centered on Christ.

It arrogantly condemns other faith groups.

We need to start standing up for social causes.

Is this the future of Adventist evangelism?

Has our evangelism been self-centered instead of Christ-centered?

Have our typical evangelistic meeting formats lost their relevance in today's age.

On Friday, we're going to talk about the future of Adventist evangelism.

Today we're going to talk about the future of Adventist biblical interpretation.

Now I mentioned in the beginning that we're at a defining moment in the history of the church.

We've come face to face with this issue that's destined to determine the future of Adventism.

And some of you probably thought that I was going to mention, when I said the issue, women's ordination.

Some of you probably thought I was going to talk about LGBT.

Perhaps others thought I was going to speak about the doctrine of the Godhead or about justification by faith.

And all of you would have been partially right.

But underneath each of these issues, our faithfulness to God at the end of time will be determined by how we interpret the Bible.

We call the study of how we interpret literary texts, such as the Bible, or how we understand its meaning, we call this hermeneutics.

Now if you want to understand how Hebrew or Greek scholars view this, you've come to the wrong seminar.

I'm friends with a few of those guys at the GC, but their knowledge has not rubbed off on me just yet.

I'm still holding off that maybe osmosis will happen and I'll just become this incredible scholar from just hanging around them.

But the good news is this, the Bible wasn't primarily written for scholars.

The Bible was written for common folks like you and me.

And the other good news, or it could be bad news, you know, depending on how you look at it, is that the number 1 rule for understanding the Bible is being willing to follow it.

But let's not kid ourselves, how we interpret the Bible is a vital factor that's going to determine much about the future of the church.

I'm going to give a basic study in how to interpret the Bible, which admittedly might sound kind of boring, But so that you see how important of an issue it is, I'm then going to show you how you apply that, the implications of how we interpret the Bible, on a few controversial topics.

Let's start with the groundwork with a little study on how to interpret the Bible.

Now I'm going to give you a little bit of a disclaimer to start.

Back when I was serving as a local church pastor, I would do a series on this that would be maybe 4 or 5 sermons, and I'm not going to be able to do that.

It won't be comprehensive, it won't be overly technical, which probably suits you just fine, and just be aware that this is going to be a basic summary of the fundamental principles here, so don't tag me out if I don't cover all the bases, okay?

All right, let's talk about some principles.

You'll need to go to the T books just before Hebrews, the 5 books that start with the letter T, and you'll find 1 Timothy, chapter 2, and verse 15.

You were thinking, that's a beautiful verse.

I've never seen it brought out like that before.

2 Timothy 2.15, be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, doing what?

You see, there's a right way and there's a wrong way to divide the truth, to interpret the Bible, okay?

The Apostle Peter wrote about the Apostle Paul and said he wrote some things that are hard to understand and there are people who have twisted it to their own destruction.

So people have actually, with the Bible, found their way down the road to destruction.

So this is critical to our salvation and to our mission as a church.

If you go past Hebrews to your right and past James and 1 Peter, you're going to come to 2 Peter 1.

Mark Howard

2. The Future of the Everlasting Gospel

Father in heaven, I do thank you so much for a new day of life.

Lord, I thank you for the privilege we have of knowing you and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Father, I thank you for the Holy Spirit that you have sent, the Spirit of truth to give us understanding in the truth.

And now, Father, I pray the Spirit would guide our understanding.

You know I came across a statement recently, I mean came across, I've read it before but it didn't impact me the same way, in Desire of Ages.

Ellen White says, she comments on when the Bible calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Truth.

She makes this statement, there is comfort in truth, but there is no comfort in error.

That's why the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter.

Now, that's important because what that means is, in the words of Jesus, we can know the truth.

The way things are today, we're getting to the point where we just really can't know.

I mean, you read the Bible your way and I read it my way and you interpret your way and I interpret my way and who really knows?" And we have almost made things so ambiguous that truth, you can't even know truth.

And I remembered a story about Abraham Lincoln.

He was debating with another man and the guy was being contentious with him.

And so Lincoln said, let me ask you this question, how many legs does a cow have?

The man was frustrated and he's like, well, 4 legs of course.

And Lincoln said, well, what if you counted his tail as a leg?

And Lincoln said, that's where you're wrong.

Calling his tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

A lot of things today that people are calling truth, but that doesn't make it truth.

Now today, our topic is, this week it's the future of Adventism.

Today the subject is the everlasting gospel.

I want you to turn with me to the book of Revelation 14.

I just want you to note the language here in Revelation 14 in verse 6.

The Bible says in verse 6, Then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the what?

The everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation, tribe, tongue and people, saying with a loud voice, pardon me, fear God and give glory to him for the hour of his judgment has come and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water." And that first angel is a call back to worship God according to truth.

And I'm trying to figure out where to put all my stuff.

But the Bible uses that language, the everlasting gospel.

And I guess it should be common sense to us as Seventh-day Adventists, but maybe you're not aware of this, that there are people who believe that some of us are saved different ways than other people are saved.

There are Christians who believe that the Jews were saved by law-keeping, but we in the Christian dispensation are saved by grace, which is ridiculous because nobody can ever be saved by keeping the law.

There's 1 gospel, there's 1 name given under heaven by which must be saved and that's the name of Jesus Christ in Acts 4.12.

It's the 1 way, the only way anybody has ever been able to be saved.

We didn't tell you that earlier because some of you maybe who ditched history in high school may have ditched today, but you're here now.

I'm going to give you a little history lesson because what I want to touch on in The issue of the gospel and giving way to culture is something that has been under attack for decades in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I'm going to share with you some of that history today.

In 1977, as the, how many of you know what I mean when I say the Ford crisis?

Desmond Ford was an Australian theologian and Maybe I should have shared, Jim didn't share yesterday, but we had grown up, our family grew up in the Adventist church.

My parents were first generation Seventh-day Adventist, but they ended up leaving the church.

So I just spoke at a youth camp meeting in Carolina And I told the kids I was a, what did I call myself?

A second generation, first generation Adventist.

Because my mom and dad were the first ones to come into the church, but then they left the church.

And they were out of the church when we came back into the church.

So, and I praise the Lord that my mom is back in the church as well, my dad's in the church.

But there was that time of the Desmond Ford crisis that our family left the Adventist church.

And we were out of church and out of Christianity for, in my life, for about 11 years before the Lord started moving to bring me back into the faith.

It was during that period of time that a lot of Seventh-day Adventists were challenging their faith, and it was during the height of that, well, it was heightening, that a man, an Anglican minister by the name of Jeffrey Paxton released his book, The Shaking of Adventism.

Now, I want to note something from Paxton's book.

There's the book by Paxton, very interesting read.

But he says something that I think is 1 of the most profound things that's been written that I think more Adventists need to understand.

And unfortunately, I wanted to pretty my slides up a little bit more, and I, with all the other things I'm doing, and biting off more than I can chew in all reality, at least I have something up there so I'm not just endlessly reading and you have nothing to follow along with.

He says, what is it that Adventism believes it has to offer the world?

What is the contribution which for 1 reason or another it feels it is particularly equipped to make?

Now most people would say, oh, it's just Advent, the State of the Dead, and some of these things.

Now I want you to notice what he goes on to say.

For the Adventists, there can be but 1 answer, the gospel.

Now don't miss what he's saying, even from the onset.

What is it that the Adventists contribute to Christianity or that they can say they contribute different from the rest of Christianity?

I'm telling you right now, some of you right now might be unsettled and say, hey, does the conference know he's even saying what he just said?

That the Adventist gospel is different from the gospels of the rest of the Christian world.

And so I alluded to this in the morning meetings.

For those who weren't there, even those who were, let me clarify something.

I don't want to say other churches aren't preaching the gospel, but I'm going to say they're preaching an incomplete gospel because The gospel is a remedy for sin and sin is transgression of the law.

And when you get rid of the law, what's the remedy for?

And so it's really hard to grasp the significance of a saving medicine for a disease that doesn't exist.

For the evidence there can be but 1 answer, the gospel.

He sees it as destined to climax in what is called the loud cry, a climactic gospel proclamation attended by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in latter reign power.

All will have forced upon them a decision for or against Christ.

After such a confrontation the Lord will come again." Notwithstanding the correctness or otherwise of this claim, He's an Anglican, he doesn't believe that.

But he's saying, so whether you agree with the Adventists or not, he says, this claim is nothing short of astounding.

The Adventists believe that his movement and no other movement is God's chosen remnant, especially commissioned by God to give the message of the Gospels and so usher in the return of Christ." That is a powerful statement.

And that's what he's saying, hey, what a claim.

In fact, Paxson's saying, if only I could believe that claim, which he didn't.

He says, at this point, an evangelical church man must pause and confess his shame.

3. The Future of Adventist Lifestyle

Heavenly Father, we're grateful for the blessings of the day, for your mercies that are new each day, and Lord, we just pray that the Holy Spirit would be present in this place.

We claim the promise that when we gather together for the camp meeting, Jesus is there.

And Lord, we need an awakening in our own hearts and clarity for how we can better trust you for the future.

So please guide our meeting, Speak to our hearts, and may we know when we leave this place that we've been in the presence of Jesus.

Alright, this is installment number 3 of the future of Adventism.

And 2 days ago, I shared the first installment, which was the future of Adventist biblical interpretation.

And I just want to do just a brief review here.

And I also want to say that as we go through this particular topic that if you're wanting to know where it's headed, it's going to be somewhat of a part 2 of what Pastor Howard did yesterday.

Because the foundations of what we're going to be talking about today, which is the future of Adventist lifestyle, has everything to do with how we understand the gospel as Seventh-day Adventists.

So we're going to talk a little bit more about that and maybe at the end we'll be able to see how that applies to our lifestyle understandings of Seventh-day Adventists.

But just a little bit back 2 days ago, because at the heart of every 1 of these topics, the reason we started with biblical interpretation is because everything that we are challenged with seems to have at its core how we interpret the Bible.

And we talked when I was here with you on Monday about how errors of many of the evangelical churches, errors about the Sabbath, about death, about hell, they're all accepted because of an unbiblical hermeneutic.

They have a different way of getting to their understandings.

We also looked at a couple of areas of recent study in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, such as creation versus evolution, such as the question of women's ordination.

And I don't know if you're aware, but at the last GC session there were a number of fundamental beliefs that received some slight modification and 1 of those was number 6 on creation.

There were some delegates from areas of the world church that perhaps have embraced a more progressive hermeneutic that really pushed back against the changes that were being suggested to be more specific about the timing of the creation account.

They felt that we needed to leave the timing, leave room for interpretation.

I'm going to share with you just what Fundamental Belief number 6 says now about the timing of creation.

It says, God has revealed in Scripture the authentic and historical account of His creative activity.

He created the universe and in a recent six-day creation, so they don't like the word recent, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.

Thus he established the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of the work he performed and completed during 6 literal days, 6 literal days, that together with the Sabbath constituted the same unit of time that we call a week today.

So it's trying to be as specific as possible that when we read about the week of creation, we're talking about the same units of time, not thousands or millions of years within day 1.

Now to me, the issue of creation is about as clear as it gets in the Bible.

So why wouldn't someone just believe what it says?

The only reason I can give is the pressure to harmonize with popular science and culture.

When culture becomes convinced of something, and this is something I want us to think about, when everyone begins to speak with essentially 1 opinion and 1 voice, it can be pretty hard to hold on to the Bible.

To believe in creation is to ignore the overwhelming evidence, they would say.

To believe in complementary roles for men and women while maintaining equality between all is just a smooth talking form of misogyny and oppression of women.

To believe that homosexual practice is sinful behavior is to selfishly deny others the opportunity to love someone like you do and has pushed innocent people to want to end their own lives.

You understand that everything in culture eventually brings itself into 1 opinion and 1 voice.

It's going to be in opposition to the Bible.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't like being considered ignorant and discriminatory and hateful.

As my brother, I didn't take many sides when we were younger.

That's the pressure that is on biblical interpretation.

It has slain the faithfulness of many Christian denominations.

And it's slain the faithfulness of many a Christian.

Nothing leads to a wrong method of biblical interpretation like the pressure of culture.

Whether historical critical, or allegorical, or proof texting methods, you remember we looked at all of those if you were here on Monday, all false methods of hermeneutics that quite frankly are all the same to me.

They're just 1 method that I like to call the whatever it takes hermeneutic.

Whatever it takes to come to the conclusion that I want or to avoid the conclusion that I don't want.

Now the Seventh-day Adventist Church doesn't believe in creeds.

If you ever look at the Seventh-day Adventist Church manual, right before the Seventh-day Adventist beliefs are listed, it makes it very clear that Seventh-day Adventists do not believe in creeds.

So if sound Bible study leads us to a fuller or even a different understanding than we have historically held on any point, we should be willing to go wherever the Lord leads us.

That's how we feel and have always believed at Seventh-day Adventist.

Now when it comes to controversial issues like women's ordination, which we touched on on Monday, it's not that we shouldn't be willing to see things differently.

We most certainly should be willing to always sit down and discuss the Bible and be open to changing our viewpoint if the Bible evidence takes us there.

But we should never make a change in practice unless and until we have an interpretation that meets the same quality standard as the rest of our biblical beliefs.

It can't be based on speculations, it can't be based on suggestions, it can't be based on historical reconstructions that are a little bit questionable, And it can't ignore biblical precedent.

You see, 1 of the things that happens when you study with people, and many of you who have studied, given Bible studies understand this, you can study with someone on, say, the topic of what happens when you die or the topic of hell.

And someone can go to absent from the body and they can go to the rich man and Lazarus and they can say it clearly states.

But the problem is they do not carry the burden to deal with or reckon with the great body of text that we would consider the weight of evidence in Scripture.

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Series

The Future of Adventism: Will Our Biblical Foundation Give Way to Culture?

4. The Future of Adventist Identity

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