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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

Final Events

David Wright

01 The Point of No Return

It's a privilege to be here with you this morning.

Well, it's been an interesting week to say the least, hasn't it?

I don't know if you were watching it as it unfolded on Wednesday, or if somebody commented to you along the way, have you seen the news?

I know these pictures are not necessarily new to anyone.

Has the mob invaded the Capitol and somehow forced their way in?

And I just found myself taking screenshots along the way saying, this is crazy.

I can't believe this is actually happening.

I mean, they were just escorting them in.

The guy that was talking on this live Stream was saying, you know, typically you go through, and many of you, I know I've been in the Capitol, and like many of those things, you go through a lot of security, a lot of searching all the bags, they're just waltzing in.

Who knows what's in their backpack or what they're carrying and they just keep coming and keep coming.

And then some of these images were really startling to me.

I mean, literally hanging from the rafters right here where they do all of their legislative work, people being carried away or escorted away, guns drawn.

This individual, I guess this is Nancy Pelosi's office I've since learned.

He's gonna probably be in for a world of hurt.

And people were saying, this isn't the type of thing that happens in the United States of America.

Maybe a banana republic, but not this country.

And it seemed very odd, you know, even the poster here, Save America, this idea that this is what is required to save America.

And of course, Biden was making his appeals and so on.

And then some of these clips are interesting.

Extremists intensify calls for violence ahead of inauguration day.

And then we have Twitter bans Trump, citing risk of further incitement of violence on several major networks, and you've probably seen that too.

I have to be careful here because I don't want you to hear what I'm not saying.

Whether you agree Trump should be banned from Twitter or not, whether you think he was the 1 that incited the violence or not, I'm not wanting to wade into that this morning.

I don't feel like that's really our place or purpose here.

But I do believe it's a wake-up call to these unprecedented events and times in which we are living.

I've never seen anything quite like this before.

You know, the most powerful nation, and we can't keep people out of our legislative house.

What an embarrassment as the world looks on.

And then for the first time in the world, we have this dynamic.

I don't know if you've seen the documentary, it's called The Social Dilemma.

And if you haven't seen it, it's worth watching.

Not been put out by the church but it talks about this idea of big tech companies and social media and all of these things.

It's unprecedented how now we live in a world where freedom of speech can literally be taken from you by a big tech company because they feel like you're inciting violence or something else.

And again, I'm not making a judgment on what they've done, but the dilemma, the social dilemma is, and they have seen and they have documented in this documentary multiple times where countries, governments, leaders have been toppled and brought down at the hands of social media, if you will, as they use that as their platform to communicate and all get on the same page and ramp it up and the whole thing.

And so social media has an obligation on the 1 hand to try and keep that from happening, but then on the other hand, who's the 1 making those decisions?

There's no court, There's no judge, there's no jury, there's no elected official.

It's a few people toggling a few buttons on a computer.

And so we find ourselves in this dilemma, this day and age in which these big tech companies now are deciding who in fact has a voice or not.

For a long time, the Seventh-day Adventist church was maybe a little slow to get behind and say, okay, we need to have a Facebook page, we need to have a Twitter feed, and all these other things, and many of our church leaders are doing that now, but we live in an age where just a toggle of the switch and you are banned.

Trump has some 88 million followers or something that he can communicate with instantly or not.

And so today I'm starting a series, not because of this, it was going to happen anyway.

I was kind of waiting for the holidays and different things but I'm entitling it Final Events as we look at where are we headed.

It seems everyone's asking the questions And so for the next several weeks, I want to take some time to look at where we're headed, both from the Bible and from the spirit of prophecy.

How can we better prepare for what is breaking upon the world?

What should be our response to the things happening around us?

And you may be wondering, well, what are some of the things he's hoping to cover?

Well, I'm thinking about the end time catalyst or what triggers last day events, that's today.

What are the different stages of the Sunday law?

We're going to talk about the New World Order and how we should prepare.

What about the little time of trouble and when does that start?

How about the idea that we should flee from the cities?

Also when's the latter rain going to be poured out?

What will happen in Jacob's time of trouble?

And then lastly, the joy of the second coming.

And if you've been an Adventist for long, you recognize these terms, but if you're like me, at times they all get a little bit jumbled together.

And if you weren't just studying it yesterday, you get confused as to where that all fits in the lineup.

And so we're going to be taking some considerable time looking at these various topics and final events.

Sometimes as a pastor it's hard to figure out where this all fits in.

I've been in churches before where they say, pastor, we don't want to hear about all of this stuff that's largely in spirit of prophecy and prophecy and time charts and all the rest.

We want it to be seeker-sensitive to anyone who comes.

If you go to a Baptist church, you expect to hear a Baptist sermon.

If you go to a Catholic church, you expect the mass to be as follows.

And so when you come to an Adventist church, I'm expecting that you wanna hear an Adventist sermon.

There may be some things in here that are new to you and you say, I've never heard that before.

But I'm gonna be making some assumptions that you're starting from a certain baseline.

And so a big part of that is going to be, we're gonna be using not just the Bible, but the spirit of prophecy.

We are a people that live by the book, right?

But we have to be careful in not throwing out Spirit of Prophecy because it's this book that tells us God's end time people are going to have the gift of prophecy.

So if we're gonna be people by the book, we need to follow what the book says in regards to prophecy.

But at the same time, it's important for all of us to understand that all of our Doctrines, all of our teaching comes from scripture, but just as God has sent his prophet all the way through something major that's been impending, he's done the same for this period of time, and we'd be foolish, I believe, to disregard it.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that our focus here is not gonna be on doom and gloom, but on Jesus.

We do need to be informed about what's going to happen in the future, but an understanding of the crisis without an understanding of the Christ does not enable you to go through the crisis.

An understanding of the pain without an understanding of the promises only leaves you to struggle.

An understanding of doom without an understanding of deliverance only leaves you depressed.

So we not only want to face what is coming, but face it confidently and courageously in Jesus Christ.

02 The Siege of the Modern World

Today we're continuing our series on final events and we're looking at what the Bible and the spirit of prophecy have to say in regards to the times in which we're living.

How can we be prepared for what is breaking on the world?

And what should be our response to those things?

And there's several things that we're going to be looking at.

Last week was the end time prophetic catalyst.

Then today, the abomination of desolation.

We're gonna try and unpack that a little bit more.

Then the next time, I'll be preaching on the 4 stages of the Sunday Law, and then we have the New World Order, the Little Time of Trouble, the Latter Rain, and Loud Cry, the Death Decree, Jacob's time of trouble, God's people delivered, and then the second coming.

But what we looked at last time was what will be the catalyst for in time events, what will be the trigger.

And we saw how the midnight cry is synonymous with The loud cry, which is also synonymous with the siege of Jerusalem, the abomination of desolation which we're going to go into a little more depth today.

But all of that is talking and referring to the National Sunday Law.

And that when the National Sunday Law breaks, It will be like dominoes and the final events will be very rapid and will go very quickly.

In fact, we had a discussion last Saturday afternoon, well how quickly do you think quickly will be?

I do think of how Jesus was talking about the siege of Jerusalem and said, pray that it not be in the winter or on the Sabbath.

He doesn't say pray that it's not going to be through multiple winters, but just winters.

That would almost lead me to believe we're going to be looking at less than a year of time.

And those things are going to happen so quickly that if God didn't cut it short in righteousness, all would perish.

And so I do think those last dominoes will fall very, very quickly.

We also talked about all these things that we see around us, that you see around the dial there, whether there be natural disasters, wars, pandemics, lawlessness, riots, you name it, are all moving the needle a little bit closer to the national Sunday law.

And that's kind of the finger, if you will, that starts those last dominoes that I think will go very, very quickly.

And so today's piece, part 2, we are looking at, or it's entitled, The Siege of the Modern World.

It was a Russian leased vessel and it was traveling from Georgia to Mozambique, a place I wouldn't mind being on this cold January day.

However by some turn of events the ship was abandoned, The cargo was offloaded and put into a port warehouse in Beirut, Lebanon.

It's a little north of the Holy Land on the Mediterranean Sea.

Part of the cargo was 2, 750 tons, not pounds, but tons of ammonia nitrate used most commonly for fertilizer.

That's where the contents sat for the next 7 years.

Until On August 4 of last year, a fire started in the port warehouse at about 6 p.m.

That was followed by a few small explosions, but things soon went out of control, and when it reached the abandoned stockpile of ammunition nitrate, a huge explosion was felt more than 100 miles away.

In a matter of seconds, about 5, 000 people were injured, and 154 people were presumed dead.

You see, when you mix ammonium nitrate with some type of detonation, the result is explosive.

Friends, I want to propose to you this morning that there are some things that should never be mixed.

And when they are, the consequences can be devastating.

The Bible speaks of not mixing the sacred with the common.

The sacred, well that's God, that's his holy word.

The things pertaining to and connected with God.

And so we read in Ezekiel 22 verse 26, sadly this is Ezekiel talking about Israel's wicked leaders, but what's the charge here?

It says, her priests have violated my law and profaned my holy things.

They've not distinguished between the holy and the unholy, nor have they known the difference between the unclean and the clean.

Here we get the idea that they are mixing.

The line of demarcation has been blurred.

And so we have holy and unholy, clean and unclean, secular and common.

But when you mix the 2 together, I believe it has a devastating result.

When I think of abomination, I think of Belshazzar in Daniel chapter 5.

He had the golden vessels that they had taken from the temple of the house of God in Jerusalem.

And so these holy vessels, these cups and different things, and he filled them with fermented wine and praised the gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone." Friends, this was an abomination.

In that story, the hand begins to write on the wall.

I think of Aaron, succumbed to the pressures of the people in Exodus chapter 32.

They constructed, or he constructed a golden calf, probably had some assistance, and he said, this is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Here they're claiming to worship the true God, but they're doing it in their own old heathen ways, on their own terms, with loud music, heavy beats, suggestive dancing, and sexual favors.

They were mixing the sacred with the common, and this, again, was an abomination.

And so today, how are we doing at keeping the 2 separate?

You know, it used to be that most people would respect sacred things.

Even if they didn't agree with them, I'll respect them.

In fact, it seems the further you can push the envelope, and they have pushed the envelope in virtually every way, and so now the last thing that they're pushing towards is combining the sacred with the common in ways that are so detestable that we ask is there anything sacred anymore?

This would be what I would consider sacred music.

I could put any number of pictures of choirs or what have you.

It's reverent, it's uplifting, it's praising the Lord.

This we could say very easily is common or secular, but when you combine the 2, here's a Christian rock band called Skillet, the Unleashed tour.

And this headline is from just this year.

We are in war, skillet rocker John Cooper is on a mission to combat chaos and defend biblical truth.

Or how about these pictures, I don't wanna leave on the screen very long.

5 rock legends you probably didn't know are Christians.

Does he look like a Christian there in the middle?

And how about this rock star here on either side, really 1 is supposed to be depicted of Jesus with a nail print in his hands and the guitar.

The other is trying to obviously be like Jesus, but he's all covered in tattoos with skulls on his shoulder.

Matthew 7, 16, Jesus said on the Sermon on the Mount, you shall know them by their fruits.

And so again, abomination is this combining of the sacred with the common.

And I don't know about you, but it's 1 thing for things to be common, but I get highly bothered and agitated when people mix the sacred with the common.

There's certain curse words that I can tolerate in certain settings and let go, and there's others I have a much harder time letting go.

And so in today's piece, the abomination of desolation, what is that referring to exactly?

And we touched on it last time, but we're gonna go a little bit more in depth this morning.

And we'll find here that 3 times in the Gospels, Jesus speaks of the abomination of desolation.

We're going to do some Bible study this morning.

And we wanna look at these 3 times in the Gospels to begin our study.

And so the first 1, if you have your Bible, turn to the Gospel of Matthew.

It's a well-known passage when the disciples are asking what the end of time will look like.

And so we pick up here in Matthew chapter 24 verse 14 and we read, and this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations and then the end will come, verse 15.

03 Critical Phase 2 of the National Sunday Law

So we're continuing this morning with our series on final events, and we've been looking at what the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy have to say about a little bit about what we're seeing, but what we can expect.

Largely people are asking questions in these lines and in these veins, and so we want to see what the Bible has to say, so we can be informed in what's going on.

So we started with the title along the lines of what is the end-time prophetic catalyst or the point of no return, if you will.

And we saw how that was the Sunday law and how all of these things that we see happening all around us are moving that needle, pushing that needle closer and closer and closer, if you will, to the national Sunday law.

And how I believe when the National Sunday Law breaks, things will happen very, very quickly, even though there's still pieces to happen, I think those are going to happen in really rapid succession until Jesus comes.

And we talked about the parable of the 10 virgins and how all 10 were asleep to the fact of when Jesus would come and knock on the door that midnight cry, that loud cry.

In fact we looked at a lot of those different elements even the abomination of desolation all pointing to the National Sunday Law.

On the second sermon, we talked more specifically about this abomination of desolation and what it is.

And without getting into that topic all over again, we saw that there's an initial application of the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

There's also a second application of the union of church and state, and those dates there for that.

But the end time application of the abomination of desolation we saw also is pointing towards this National Sunday Law.

And so today in the third part, we're going to look at the 4 stages of this Sunday law as it were.

And then we have other things that we have yet to cover.

And so even after today, you may still have some questions.

We'll talk about the New world order, the little time of trouble, we're touching on it barely today.

Louder rain, the loud cry, which we've talked about, but we'll try and flesh that out a little bit more.

The death decree, we're going to talk about that some today, but we'll flesh that out some more.

Jacob's time of trouble, God's people delivered, that's the best news of all.

And the second coming, Maybe that's the best news of all, but both of those really going hand in hand.

And so for part 3, I've entitled it the critical phase 2 of the National Sunday Law.

And let's just pray and ask the Lord to be with us.

Dear Heavenly Father, we pray as we delve into these rather heady topics, if you will, that we won't get stuck in the weeds, but that you'll help us to understand that your Holy Spirit will impart wisdom and understanding to us for these last days we find ourselves.

Revelation 13, 12, and it says, "'And he, the beast from the earth, "'exercises all the authority of the first beast, "'the beast from the sea.'" and so we have the beast from the earth which we know historically to be the United States, exercised all the authority of the first beast which we know to be the papacy in his presence and caused the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast whose deadly wound was healed.

We have plenty of times where we have talked about and identified these beasts before, and if you don't understand that or don't see that, we'd love to have that study with you, but again, I'm making some assumptions here that you have studied some of these things already.

But this is what causes us to really look at the political scene and see what do we see happening in the United States and with the papacy and these 2 coming together to form a national Sunday law.

And so here, this is our current president.

This picture wasn't taken when he was president.

I don't believe he's met with the Pope since he's been inaugurated to my understanding, but he's met the Pope several times before, And so I'm not necessarily picking on this president.

We could go back a number of presidents, many, many, that have met with the Pope before.

But you always hear, especially in Adventist circles, what the papacy is doing, what the United States is doing, the government, and how these 2 are coming together.

Has anybody heard those types of things before?

But we do know that according to Revelation 13, that this union will take place, and that they will set up an image to the beast.

And that image we know will be honoring Sunday as Sabbath, which is not the biblical Sabbath.

I also hear not only that it's our current president, but that our current president happens to be Catholic.

And maybe there's a little bit of a buzz that you've heard about that.

Only the second Catholic president that we've had in our history, which is rather something as well, I think there was a real fear there when you consider how our country was established to put somebody that claims Catholicism in that role.

So first time in US history do we have all 3 this time, a Catholic president, a Catholic speaker of the house, and a Catholic majority on the Supreme court.

In fact, if we were to circle the individuals that claim Catholicism on the Supreme Court, we have 6 out of the 9.

That's an easy majority, and those are all of our largest branches of government, if you will.

And so some are saying, hey, this looks like it's poised for something to happen.

I've heard others say, well, you know, a third of Biden's cabinet is also Catholic.

And so here is the cabinet that he's at least hoping to have.

Series

Final Events

10 The Joyful Advent of Our Lord

Transcript

Parent Series

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