Michigan Camp Meeting 2019: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior

David Shin

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior - Part 1: Back to the Father’s House

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior - Part 3: Sanctified in the Holy Place

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior - Part 4: Glorified in the Most Holy Place

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior - Part 5: Sanctuary Under Siege

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior - Part 2: Justified in the Courtyard

And I want to begin by turning our attention to a photograph that I have on the screen.

It is of the Rosetta Stone that is currently at the British Museum in London.

It weighs about 1, 700 pounds and on it is described or inscribed the royal decree made by Potomac V, who lived about 200 years before the time of Christ.

And this is a significant discovery made by Napoleon and it was significant because it had the decree that was made by Potomac V in 3 different languages.

It was in the language of Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

For centuries, scholars had been trying to crack Egyptian hieroglyphics.

They could not understand and come up with a code to decipher what the Egyptians were trying to portray.

The significance of the Rosetta Stone was that the same decree was in 3 different languages.

A gentleman by the name of Jean-Francois Champollion used the Rosetta Stone and cracked the Egyptian hieroglyphic code and soon after published the Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary.

The Rosetta Stone became a significant landmark discovery that opened an understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics that had prior to that period been undiscoverable.

And as we had noted in our earlier presentations or presentation yesterday, we noted that the sanctuary is the map.

It is the key that unlocks the work and ministry of Jesus Christ at the cross and as our High Priest in heaven.

And Psalm 77, 13 says, your way, O God, is in the sanctuary.

Your way, O God, is in the sanctuary." And as we discussed yesterday, Jesus fulfilled the role on planet earth as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Here it is in John 1, verse 29, the next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

This introduction by John the Baptist is impossible to decipher without the sanctuary key.

You can't understand what John is saying in John 1 verse 29 apart from the sanctuary code or apart from the sanctuary key.

And then in the New Testament, in the book of Hebrews, the Bible says that Jesus has ascended into heaven as our high priest, and this is found in Hebrews chapter 8.

Now, this is the main point of the things we are saying, we have such a high priest who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty where?

In heaven, a minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord erected and not man." So, John used the sanctuary as the interpretive key, as the hermeneutical code or the key to understand Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

And here, after the cross, Paul uses the sanctuary as the hermeneutical lens, the key to understanding Jesus after the cross, as our high priest in heaven.

And this, as we noted yesterday, is what many Protestants today have rejected, the idea of a heavenly sanctuary and Jesus ministering on our behalf there.

Now this is a pivotal quote for Seventh-day Adventists and is found in the book Great Controversy, page 423.

The subject of the sanctuary was the key which unlocked the mystery of the disappointment of 1844.

It opened to view a complete system of truth, connected and harmonious, showing that God's hand had directed the great Advent movement and revealing present duty as it brought to light the position and work of his people.

Here Ellen White is stating that the Seventh-day Adventist church continues to use the sanctuary as the hermeneutical key, the reference point for understanding the work and ministry of Jesus Christ after 1844.

John used the sanctuary as the interpretive key for understanding Jesus at the cross as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Paul uses the sanctuary key as the hermeneutical code or code breaker to understanding Jesus after the cross, And the significant contribution of Seventh-day Adventists is using the sanctuary for understanding Jesus and His work in the heavenly sanctuary on our behalf from 1844 to this present day.

Now on Friday, we'll be going through some of the detractors to the sanctuary doctrine and how it seems like in every generation the sanctuary comes under attack.

Ellen White says in the book Great controversy that the sanctuary is the central pillar of the Adventist faith.

Now, there are several Adventist pillars.

Sabbath, Second Coming, State of the Dead.

She states that the sanctuary is the central pillar.

Now if you have an edifice or a structure and you remove the central pillar, the entire theological structure crumbles.

And this is why I believe it seems like in every generation, it seems that the sanctuary comes under attack.

1 of my professors in college was a colleague of Desmond Ford, and he said that Desmond Ford had a photographic memory.

It was back in the days before CD-ROM, and he said it was faster to go to Desmond Ford for an Ellen White quote than going to the E.G.

He could tell you the page number her quotation was on.

Desmond Ford got his training at an evangelical university, and friends, we need to support higher education but also recognize that we need to filter everything through the Word of God, and he had adopted an evangelical paradigm that could not come to grips with the notion of a cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary.

The evangelical mindset is that once saved, you are always saved.

The Protestants, for the most part, camp out in the courtyard.

They don't believe in moving into the holy place, much less a most holy place experience.

And so Desmond Ford's framework, his theological structure, was courtyard-centered, and he could not accept the idea of an investigative judgment.

He said that the heavenly sanctuary did not exist, it was heavenly geography, and in 1979-1980 we had a great falling out in our church.

We had a meeting with church leaders at Glacier View and a great many members and pastors in the Seventh-day Adventist church ended up leaving for another denomination.

If you throw out the sanctuary, we have no reason to exist.

So it's important for us to have a solid understanding of the sanctuary message, knowing that it is our identity that drives our mission.

1 of my professors at the seminary, Fernando Canelli, Emeritus Professor of Theology.

He states this, leaders, administrators, pastors, and scholars should be going back to Scripture and using the sanctuary doctrine as the hermeneutical key to understand the complete and harmonious system of biblical truth.

This is a challenge for our church today because we have inadvertently used a different lens for understanding the gospel.

And I like to use the analogy of glasses.

I have glasses, and unbeknownst to us, when we read scripture, we are not only receiving information from the text, but we are also projecting information onto the text.

It used to be assumed from an enlightenment paradigm that we were coming to things objectively, like we were film and the text would project onto us and we would be able to arrive at objective truth.

But the reality is that when we read Scripture, not only is the text projecting onto us, but we are projecting onto the text presuppositions, biases, assumptions, and culture, which skew our understanding.

Case in point, in American politics today, and I'm not going to go into that rabbit hole, but you can look at the same thing, the same data, the same quote-unquote empirical evidence, and you have individuals arriving at diametrically opposite conclusions.

Presuppositions are powerful things, and all of us approach the text with biases.

By the grace of God, we need to surrender those biases to the great I Am, and through reading Scripture, our presuppositions become more honed and refined.

We need to let go of what I think the text should say and bow to Scripture and take off our shoes from our far feet because we are on holy ground.

It is a frame of reference that we need to use to understand the work and the ministry of Jesus Christ.

And if we are not using the sanctuary, if we're using a popular teacher, even in Adventism today, we are replacing the sanctuary hermeneutic for something else.

Now it used to be that as Seventh-day Adventists we were known as people of the book, we were known as bookworms.

1 Seventh-day Adventist scholar said, now we have become tapeworms, back in the day of cassettes.

Now I'm not saying that we should not listen to Seventh-day Adventist ministers, but that should not be a replacement for your own personal study of the Word of God.

And we live in the age of the Adventist celebrity.

There's nothing wrong with watching individuals, and I praise the Lord for Seventh-day Adventist media, but we cannot base our eternal salvation on some man's interpretation of Scripture.

And it's time that we read the Bible more than we read books about the Bible.

And in the end, we're told that many bright lights will go out, and all Satan has to do is lead some prominent charismatic preacher or teacher or theologian astray, knowing that the masses will follow him or her blindly.

The sanctuary is the most critical interpretive key that we can use, and here we have on the screen a bird's-eye view of the Mosaic Sanctuary.

Yesterday we said that the whole purpose of the sanctuary is to move us from outside of the sanctuary into the courtyard, into the holy place, and into the most holy place.

We said yesterday that Adam and Eve, before the fall, were in a face-to-face relationship with God.

God would walk in the evening in the cool of the day, have a conversation with them after the fall.

And when you look on the screen, you will see that God wants to move us from right to left, from the courtyard experience to the holy place experience to the most holy place experience and in Revelation chapter 22, the Bible says that we will be able to see the face of God.

In other words, God has been successful in his plan of restoration.

Now 1 of my favorite books is the book Education.

If you want an inspiring read, I want to encourage you to read especially the first few chapters, read the entire book, but the first few chapters lays the framework of Ellen White's understanding and philosophy of Seventh-day Adventist education.

Seventh-day Adventist education was to be the head and not the tail.

If we would have followed Ellen White's vision of Seventh-day Adventist education, the world would be coming to us and us not to the world.

You just look at Madison College and how prominent individuals from all over the world went to Madison to see what they were doing there.

And God is calling us back to the ideal of what Seventh-day Adventist education is to be.

I want to read this quotation from the book Education, page 15 and 16.

To restore in man the image of his maker, to bring him back to the perfection in which he was created, to promote the development of body, mind, and soul that the divine purpose in His creation might be realized, this was to be the work of redemption." She also says that in the highest sense, the work of Education and the work of redemption are 1.

In other words, education should be salvific.

Education should lead our young people not out of the church, but into the church.

Education should lead our children and our youth to accept Jesus as Savior and Lord.

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Series

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior

Sanctuary, Salvation, & Our Savior - Part 2: Justified in the Courtyard

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

The Struggle to Surrender

23m

Lessons from the Life of Paul

I Keep Under my Body

36m

Don’t Miss Your Flight

45m

The 7 Phases of Surrender

45m

The Power of Temperance

1h 6m

Is God Enough

57m

Sanctuary, Salvation & Our Savior

Sanctuary, Salvation & Our Savior: Back to the Father’s House

28m

Plenary

Pentecost Repeated

55m

Posh Pigs and Precious Prodigals

44m

Becoming Useful for God

53m

Sanctuary, Salvation & Our Savior

Sanctuary, Salvation and Our Savior: Glorified in the Most Holy Place

33m

The Truth About the Final Generation (It’s Not What You Think)

29m

Sound Doctrine