General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Yes, Creation!

Kwabena Donkor

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians

You might wonder how a pastor would be interested in this kind of a subject.

And years ago, as my son would say, back in the day, right, dad?

Back in the day, I was a geology major at UC Riverside.

And it's amazing to me, and it's amazing how the Lord leads, that years later I find myself dealing with the things that actually caused me to lose some interest and some enthusiasm about science, way back when the same issues, I'm looking at a little differently now.

And how interesting to be in a church where these sorts of things are, shall we say, critical and key.

And so it is fun to be here to talk about these things today.

I'm going to share with you first of all, when I talk to some people about, I'm going to talk about the local church, they say, well it's central to the worldwide church.

And so let's think about our mission in terms of being a local branch of a worldwide movement.

Let's take a look at a verse that Seventh-day Adventists have long identified with and understood to be their mission in this world today and I'm going to give you a little bit of a twist perhaps in ways you haven't seen this verse before.

3 angels messages of course Revelation 14, then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on earth.

The everlasting gospel, we have a tendency to correctly say it is the central theme of all Christianity.

But it goes on to say, saying with a loud voice what that everlasting gospel in our particular present truth mode, shall we say, is.

It says, saying with a loud voice, 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 waters.

Now obviously we focus a lot on fear God and give glory to him for the hour of his judgment has come.

We think about the invest of gate of judgment and we think of those kinds of things correctly as being a significant part of this message.

But I'd like to suggest to you that this judgment hour message also has some connotations as it has to do with Genesis.

And let's take a look at some of the references now in this verse.

And it says, and worship him who made heaven and earth and the sea.

Where are those phrases found in that same?

It's in the fourth commandment, those 3 phrases together.

And as Seventh-day Adventist, we rightly assume that's a reference to and an intention to, shall we say, proclaim the significance of the Fourth Commandment, the Sabbath Commandment.

Come back to God and worship Him, but understand it's in the context of a judgment hour message.

And again, our tendency is to think, well, let's just stick with investigative judgment and leave it there.

I'd like to suggest to you that there's more to a judgment hour message than simply that.

And that is a reference, shall we say, to the last phrase that you probably haven't heard talked too much about, and that is, and the springs of waters.

Worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea, and the springs of waters.

Now, what is the springs of water a reference to, and why not have something totally different, like he made the heaven and earth the sea and kitty cats or something else just to throw in there and make a nice round 4.

Why the reference to the springs of water?

The springs of water is a reference to the flood.

Now think about the springs of water, fountains of water, however you want to interpret this language, this is a reference to the flood.

And if it is a reference to the flood, it makes total sense that a judgment hour message would go forth with a loud voice about get ready to meet God, fear Him and give Him glory, get your act together, come to be reunited with and have everything made right with this God who made everything and who has previously judged things in a worldwide judgment.

And if he's done a worldwide judgment, he may well do it again.

Now think about the ramifications for this.

If we have a tendency to go with a mythical understanding of the flood, or some kind of local flood, or rising of the creek or something in Iraq or something like that.

Think about how it loses significance in terms of it being an illustration of a worldwide judgment, or a worldwide executive judgment.

In other words, God coming to step into earth's history.

The idea here is therefore take God seriously because he's done it before and he's about ready to do it again.

Now if it's a call to worship the God of Genesis, that's not just the creator but also the judge, the God who created and the God who judged, well then let's think about this.

If this is a message of the worldwide church, it should certainly be part of the work and the mission of the local church.

And some of us out there in the field have been kind of complaining and griping and trying to motivate denomination leaders to give more information because frankly I think we need to have better education on a local church level for pastors and for ministries and for lay leaders so they can share with people in the community, with other Christians, with people who are secular in mind, that there is good evidence for a God who created and a God who judged.

Now we in Moscow, Idaho, as has been mentioned, in an academic community, University of Idaho is right there.

Across the street from the University of Idaho, we had an origins seminar, a series of talks, 7 lectures.

And we were able to attract 200 people there to this series of meetings.

They stayed for all 7 lectures, most of them were visitors.

And I'd like to suggest to you that the world is very curious about the subject of origins right now.

And I don't mean just with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and all those things going on.

There's constantly being discoveries in science, new things found that are been purported to be now supportive.

This finally settles evolution, but not really if you take a look at the data.

And in the United States and in other parts of the world, there's still a significant number of people who have questions about the popular view of evolution.

Present truth in Noah's day, we might say that the gospel in Noah's day was basically something like this.

God is gonna fix what is broken in the world.

He's gonna take care of the violence that filled the world, both in the animal and in the human world.

And the good news is he's got a way out for you.

We might say, okay, in light of Revelation 14, what's the present truth for us today?

Jesus said there's some similarities as it was in the days of Noah.

To me it is prepare yourself to meet God.

Prepare yourself for a judgment that's about ready to frankly end the world.

And just like water ended the world before, God is now going to use the second cleansing agent of fire to clean the world, shall we say, and take care of what is broken.

Respond to the gospel, the good news that God is about ready to finish this planet and that's good news.

Think about all the things that we see on the news that's about ready to have you know to be a fading memory.

Oil spills, terrorism, disease, everything is about ready to go.

And that is part of the everlasting gospel or good news of this Judgment Hour message.

If you think about it, really, what we're talking about today in terms of the great worldviews that are often talked about in these discussions, 1 simply, you could really boil it down to 2 basic worldviews.

1 is that we are here from intelligent design forces, a god, whatever you want to call it, we're not here by accident, and we're not here from random forces.

The other is we are here from random forces or undirected means, and this is what we are.

We're here without purpose and without much of a future.

And really, those 2 worldviews could not possibly be more in conflict with each other.

You might see a third pair of glasses here, somewhere in the middle, of people trying to reconcile these 2 different views, to try to have a high view of popular science, a high view of scripture, put them together, and it is extremely difficult to do.

And sadly for those people, the ones that are in the middle probably catch it from both sides.

When you get a church that accepts Charles Darwin, I think about the church that my family came from and that is the Church of England.

My great-grandfather was a very active member in London, London, England back in the 1880s.

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Series

Yes, Creation!

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

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Distinct Advent Message- B1

The Remnant

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Adventism For the Last Generation

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Message of Hope

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Eugene Prewitt: Book of Revelation

Laodicea

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Classical Prophecy - The Seven Churches of Revelation

44m

Sound Doctrine