Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Emmanuel Core Workout

Mark Howard

Sabbath Part 1a

Sabbath Part 1b

Sabbath Part 1c

Kameron DeVasher

Second Coming Part 2a

Second Coming Part 2b

Second Coming Part 2c

State of the Dead Part 3b

State of the Dead Part 3a

State of the Dead Part 3c

Spirit of Prophecy Part 4a

Spirit of Prophecy Part 4b

Spirit of Prophecy Part 4c

Jim Howard

Sanctuary Part 5a

Sanctuary Part 5b

Sanctuary Part 5c

Standards Part 6a

Standards Part 6b

Standards Part 6c

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for this beautiful, cool, rainy day.

I thank you that it's the weather that needs to drive people into seminars.

And I thank you that we're in this class today studying these important themes from your word.

Please, Lord, open our understanding as only you can through the power of your Holy Spirit.

Help us with Bible in hand to see truth plainly, and to see how it's connected, a whole system of truth, that we don't just have arbitrary belief disconnected from other belief, but there is 1 common thread from Genesis to Revelation that reveals the heart of a God who is love.

Please Lord, help us to know God through his word today and be ready as the opportunity becomes available to share our faith effectively.

All right, so first of all, we're just gonna go and remembering that we have 2 breaks and so we have 3 different sections of class time and we have 3 different sections.

We're gonna try to evenly distribute those, though I would probably say we're gonna do this 1 a little shorter, the middle 1 a little longer, and the second 1 a little shorter.

That's my guess, but we'll see how it goes.

Here, maybe we'll do 1 side and 1 side another.

I think that's very unbalanced what I just did there.

All right, but we're gonna start talking about what the Bible says about death.

And the question everybody has is what happens when I die?

Of course, we were not built, I do not believe, and so for instance, I was born on August 15, 1977.

Okay, I was alive 1 day with Elvis Presley.

And so I don't, and honestly, I don't really, I could say I don't remember anything before August 15, 1977, but I don't remember August 15, 1977.

I don't know exactly when memory started to form, but let's just for the sake of argument say it was August 15, 1977 is when my memory began, okay?

I don't know what happened before then because I wasn't there for it.

Now, I've heard other people who were alive before August 15, 1977, tell me things about gas shortages or the Vietnam War or before that, whatever was going on in society, but I wasn't there for it, I don't know.

I have no problem grasping the concept that I have a starting point.

Now, why am I talking about what's such an odd thing?

Because oftentimes when we talk about what happens when I die or what is death, we all jump to start interpreting what death is and start to conjecture or propose these ideas of what happens when I die.

And 1 thing we never seem to talk about is what it means to be alive in the first place.

We jump to what happens at the end of life without even discussing the nature of life itself.

And we're gonna discover that the answer to help, you know, resolve the mystery of death is the proper understanding of life.

Well, it may not make sense yet, but you'll see it in a minute, all right?

But Death only makes sense when you first understand life.

Okay, and everybody jumps to what happens when I die before we even talk about what does it mean to be alive in the first place?

So let's talk about what it means to be alive and back to August 15, 1977.

Now I'm not getting into the debate about prenatal, I'm saying I came out into this world, ah, breathing on my own, here I am on that date.

Now, ever since that time, I have had a day that runs into the next day, which runs into the next day, which runs into the next day, I have every expectation that this, today will lead to a tomorrow, that then will be my today, right?

And I'm gonna have another 1 after that, and another 1 after that, and to me that makes total sense.

That is my natural expectation that day will lead to day and I'll just keep having them going forward.

So in my mind, It makes sense that I had a starting point and then I just keep going.

What makes me uneasy is the idea of having an ending point.

For some reason, I have no problem with a starting point.

In fact, I'm guessing none of us have even considered not having a starting point.

It would blow my mind to try to not have a, I couldn't even wrap my mind around what it'd be like to not have a starting point.

It's the ending point that's weird and unnatural and eerie and mysterious.

It's almost like we were designed to have a beginning, but not to expect to come to an end.

I believe that every good study on death should start with a study on life.

Now I like this 1 in all the versions, it's especially clear in the King James version, or at least it speaks to the common misunderstandings when you go to the King James Version.

Is there anyone in the room who has the King James Version and would like to read Genesis chapter 2 verse 7 in your loud preachery voice?

Okay, this is a well-known passage from many Seventh-day Adventists that this is the formula for life right there at the beginning of our existence as a race of people, as an existing species at all, right?

God, And we're not even gonna get to the pieces and parts yet, but I want you to think about the elementary thing we just said.

God formed man from the dust of the ground.

So that means that before man was formed, what was he?

So the dust was a man, and the dust was thinking and feeling and breathing?

So where was the man before God formed him?

And then God did something to make it so.

And according to scripture, he took the dust of the ground and the breath of life, and animated, brought to existence this dust of the ground, right?

And it says according to scripture, and Man became a living what?

So we understand that God's formula for life, what made us happen, was God's creative power of forming a body for man and breathing into it his breath of life, animating with his own life that he has in himself.

And from that process of dust combining with his breath, brought into existence something that had not been in existence until that moment.

Namely, according to Scripture, a living what was the word?

Please notice that it does not say that God formed a body and put into it a living soul.

Because according to Scripture, you do not have a soul.

The soul is simply the combination of the material God used to form the physical body, right?

The dust of the ground, dirt, and His animating life that He can give as a gift, and blrp, that's a deep theological term, blrp, and man became where before he was not.

And thus we have the biblically correct concept that you do not have a soul, you are a soul.

Because when most people ask the question about death, they're saying, I know that my body might die, but what happens to my...

There's the misunderstanding about the nature of life that leads to the confusion about death.

Most people have this picture that we are a physical being, just kind of a host body for this other thing, a separate, some would say immortal, mystical, spiritual thing.

That if this body is degraded with age or injured in a car accident, whatever the thing is, that that other thing is impervious to the slings and arrows of this life and it has a life of its own.

That it is itself immortal and that God when making man just made a body and put an immortal soul inside of it.

It says there was a time when man wasn't, and then he was, and man became a living soul.

So with that concept, now we'll look at how the Bible talks about death, and once you have that 1 correct picture of what life is, death is so much less mysterious.

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State of the Dead Part 3a

Transcript

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Parent Conference

Sponsor

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