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CORE Evangelism School

The Three Angel's Messages

Dee Casper

01 Wandering In The Wilderness

God and heaven, thank you for this privilege to study together, to kind of set up our class next week on the topic of the 3 Angels' Messages and what the world is so desperately needing right now.

I pray that you would bless us as we reflect upon our history and the history of the nation of Israel and what lessons we can learn from it.

All right, so what I'm going to be sharing with you is based upon some books that 1 of our students from last year, their dad, talked me into buying at GYC Northwest.

1 of them's called 40 Years in the Wilderness in Type and Anti-Type by Taylor Bunch.

And the other is called The Exodus in the Abbott Movement in Type and Anti-Type.

The Exodus and the Abbott Movement is basically an extended version of this smaller thing here, and of the 40 years in the wilderness.

And Taylor Bunch is kind of making a connection between the real issues and the parallels between the Advent movement and the Exodus and how that's relevant to us today.

I got asked to speak at this event I was telling you guys about in the wilderness last week, south of Joshua Tree out in the desert.

And the topic I was assigned to preach on was on like numbers 13 and 14.

I was like, Anil's already preached on this twice and by the time I'm going to preach Sunday morning, like I don't know if this is really, and I started reading this book, I was like, hey, Wade, can I do this instead?

And I told him what it was and he gave me the all good.

I hope that you guys will be really blessed by this.

So I want to kind of build a connection based upon what Bunch is mentioning in his books.

This is largely borrowed, these themes or these principles, but we need to hear them even today.

Basically, the Taylor Bunch was born in 1885, I believe, so he would have been a three-year-old when Minneapolis happened, the 1888 General Conference in Minneapolis, but around 1828 or so, he was doing work on this.

Daniels wrote his book, Christ Our Righteousness, which was published by, basically, A.G.

In 1924, 9 years after the death of Ellen White, the Ministerial Association Advisory Council voted to have A.G.

Daniels, former General Conference President, by the way, probably the best general conference president we ever had, arranged a compilation of Ellen White's writings on the subject of justification by faith.

And as he began his exhaustive research, he was amazed and awed with a solemn obligation resting upon him.

This is from the foreword of the 40 Years in the Wilderness book.

And this kind of gave him the settled conviction that this was something that has to be brought before the people of God and that something horrible happened in Minneapolis in our response to the 1888 message and that we're still reaping the consequences of that.

And so Bunch reads Daniel's book and kind of builds on it.

Taylor Bunch was the pastor of the South Lancaster Church, which was where we used to have our college area that no longer exists anymore, Atlantic Union College.

And then he was also the pastor of the church in Tacoma Park.

So he pastored some of our larger university congregations.

And he did a week of prayer, both week of prayers, the fall and the spring week of prayers at PUC, and there was a massive revival as a result of it.

Massive amount of conversions and revivals that was very similar to what happened in 1889 right after the General Conference session when Jones did a week of prayer at South Lancaster Academy, and Every kid was converted, Ellen White says.

Like every single soul was converted as a result of those meetings.

And so we're gonna give you guys a book club book.

It's kind of big, but you can listen through it to get through it by Ron Duffield.

And he has 2 chapters committed in that book to those 1889 revivals, and it will blow your mind.

Like literally Pentecost was happening in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the latter reign was falling already in the Advent Church and the loud cry was being given forth, miracle healings were happening, revivals, World missions was going up, education was thriving, the medical missionary work was thriving, and it was all synergizing around the preaching of this message.

And so, yeah, so we're gonna kind of walk it through some parallels of this, I think it's super important.

So we're told in the writings of the Spirit of prophecy that there are definite connections with the nation of Israel and the Advent movement.

So we're going to look through some of those today here in just a moment.

And we'll be leaning on these 2 resources from Bunch where a lot of this content came from.

I'm gonna give you these notes and the name of these books is in there, if that's what you're asking for.

Yeah, 40 Years in the Wilderness in Type and Anti-Type and The Exodus and Advent Movement in Type and Anti-Type.

This bigger book is basically the content he was sharing in those week of prayers at PUC that led to this massive revival.

All 3 of these quotes are from the fifth volume of the Testimonies.

Again, I'll give you my manuscript so you can have it.

It's not really a very good-looking manuscript, but the content's good.

But fifth volume of the Testimonies, page 75.

Ellen White says this, I have been shown that the spirit of the world is fast leavening the church.

You are following the same path as did ancient Israel.

This is the same falling away from your holy calling as God's peculiar people.

So she's giving a stern warning that was similar to the issues that happened with the nation of Israel.

This is 5th volume of the Testimonies, page 94.

"...the sin of ancient Israel was in disregarding the will of God and following their own way according to the leadings of unsanctified hearts.

Modern Israel are fast following in their footsteps and the displeasure of the Lord is surely resting upon them." Strong stuff.

Fifth volume of the Testimonies, page 456.

The same disobedience and failure which were seen in the Jewish church have characterized in a greater degree the people who have had this great light from heaven in the last message of warning.

Shall we let the history of Israel be repeated in our own experience?

Okay, so she's giving solemn charges here.

The Apostle Paul makes the same connection that she just made.

1 Corinthians chapter 10 beginning in verse 1.

Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea." Who's he talking about?

All ate, verse 3, the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.

But with most of them God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.

Now these things became our examples to the intent that we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted.

And do not become idolaters, as were some of them.

As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did.

Now, all these things happened to them as examples, And they were written for whose admonition?

For our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.

This is the context of a verse you quote all the time.

And we skip the context and jump straight to verse 12.

Therefore, let him who thinks he stands take heed.

So we are given a solid and strong admonition.

Do not think you've got it all together because you can fall just like the nation of Israel fell.

02 The Everlasting Gospel

Like to give us some kind of bigger picture stuff.

I'm not saying I do, but we skip a lot of stuff that I think is super, super important, so I'd like to highlight some of those in our time together.

And yeah, basically Revelation chapter 12 reveals who the remnant is.

Revelation 14 communicates the message of the remnant, okay?

So Revelation chapter 12 helps us to identify who the remnant is.

Revelation 14 communicates the message of the remnant.

Okay, so Revelation chapter 12 helps us to identify who the remnant is.

Revelation 14 helps us to understand their message, okay, the call that they're given, and we believe that the Advent movement fits that aspect of this.

So let's pray and we'll start with the first angel's message and the everlasting gospel.

God I thank you for this privilege to study together, to grow together.

We pray for your hand of blessing to be upon us, that you would speak to us and inspire us and bless us.

All right, so we're told in First Selected Messages 372, because I want to give kind of the backdrop for the 3 angels' messages and some of the issues, and we'll jump into the everlasting gospel.

So in Ella White's day, when Jones and Wagner were preaching what they were preaching, and she was starting to preach what she was preaching, some of the people would come up to Ellen White and say, like, you know, what's the big deal with all this, like, gospel stuff?

Like, you know, like, we need to be preaching, this isn't the third angel's message, and what they're really saying is, we need to be preaching present truth.

And this happens even in our own movement, especially amongst present truthers, right?

What we need to do is give them the meat.

You ever heard anybody say anything or apply something like this that everybody knows the gospel, need to give them the meat?

So when people say that, what the implication is is that the gospel is not like the heart of nourishment.

But Ellen White says that the message of Christ our righteousness was meat in due season.

And so this is what, so this is, this is basically what people were saying in her day.

That all the stuff that Jones and Wagner are talking about and the righteousness of Christ, That's not present truth.

We can't get distracted from what's most important, is what they were saying.

So she says, Some of our brethren have expressed fears that we shall dwell too much upon the subject of justification by faith.

But I hope and pray, she says, that none will be needlessly alarmed, for there is no danger in presenting this doctrine as it is set forth in the scriptures if there had not been a remissness in the past to properly instruct the people of God there would not now be a necessity of calling special attention to it." So she's literally saying if we had not been so derelict in our duties, if we had not been so hesitant or ignorant of the importance of the gospel and everything that we believe, we wouldn't have to make an even greater emphasis because it would have been a steady emphasis from the beginning.

So she's never saying that we should have been preaching the gospel less, right, or whatever.

What she's saying is we're bringing even more prominently before the people because we have not been prominently bringing it before the people to date." Okay, she continues, "...the exceeding great and precious promises given us in the Holy Scriptures have been lost sight of to a great extent, just as the enemy of all righteousness designed that they should be.

He has cast his own dark shadow between us and our God that we may not see the true character of God." Is he succeeding in that still today?

We have people within our own midst who still do not truly understand the heart and character of God.

And that's because Satan wants that to be the case.

The Lord has proclaimed himself to be merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth.

She's quoting Exodus chapter 33 when Moses says, show me your glory and he says, the Lord, the Lord gracious, long-suffering and abundant in truth.

That this idea that God was revealing his true character to Moses, right?

And then we get into the quote that maybe you've heard before.

Several have written to me inquiring if the message of justification by faith is a third angel's message.

In short, today some people may say, is this even present truth, right?

And she says, and I have answered, it is the third angel's message in verity.

And I believe that if someone had asked her, Is the message of justification by faith the first angel's message?

I believe the gospel message is found in all 3 of these.

The first, second, and third angel's message is not just the third angel's message.

So from the pen of inspiration it's very clear that we should see that the third angel's message is absolutely centered in that message of justification by faith of the righteousness of Christ and it should be throughout it.

And so we have in the 3 angels messages the 2 bookends.

So, you've got a dead marker, That's what we've got.

You know, when I was in high school, it's because the cap's broken, it's leaking.

Carroll, our math teacher, would pick up a cup or a marker out of the cup and he would realize, oh, this marker doesn't work.

And he'd put the lid on it and put it back in the cup.

He'd pick that same marker up out of the cup.

Some kind of this weighted thing that goes on the 2 ends, right?

Maybe you got like gargoyles or apples or angels or whatever, you know, those little thingies.

And in between, these are the books, right?

So we've got the first angel's message, the second angel's message, and the third angel's message.

But there are 2 bookends on either side of the 3 angels' messages that are talking about the very same thing.

Before the first angel's message, it's the everlasting gospel.

Then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people 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 that all that right.

So the everlasting gospel is the first bookend and then the second bookend at the end is the faith of Jesus.

And the point is, the bookends on both sides of the 3 angels' messages are the gospel.

Now, it begins with the gospel and it ends with the gospel, and I'm not a doctor, but I'm just guessing here that if it starts with the gospel and it ends with the gospel, then everything you see in the middle should also be highlighted in the gospel.

Did you know the message of righteousness by faith is also found as the 2 bookends surrounding the 10 commandments?

So I'm gonna turn to Exodus chapter 20 in verse 1.

If you were to say, how does the 10 Commandments begin?

Most people would say, you should have no other gods before me or whatever, but that's not how it begins.

And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

So the first message, the first parenthesis on the beginning of the 10 Commandments is this idea that God is our deliverer.

Most of us know the 10 Commandments, we've heard those before, but Exodus 20 doesn't end with the 10 Commandments.

Maybe you got a little subheading in your Bible.

What's the subheading that shows up right after the 10 Commandments?

03 Fear God And Give Glory To Him

So we've covered the everlasting gospel, not exhaustively, right?

In fact, the everlasting gospel and the faith of Jesus have overlap, and we'll close with that.

We'll close with the other bookend with the faith of Jesus.

But what I want to cover now is this idea of fear, God, and give glory to Him because 1 of the things that we can struggle with or wrestle with is unhealthy views of what this is.

There's kind of mixed varying views of what fear, God, and give glory to Him means, So I want to kind of talk about that to kind of clarify the difference between abject fear and the fear of God.

So let's pray and then we'll go into this.

God in heaven, thank you for this opportunity to study together, to grow together.

We pray for your hand of blessing to be with us and that you would give us a wisdom that exceeds our own.

All right, a previous version of me made these slides and I'm trying to figure out what he was thinking.

So I taught this class last year, and each 1 of these modules took nearly an hour.

But for some of them, there's like 10 slides.

How many rabbits did I chase to make 10 slides last an hour?

I'm going to use a separate set of slides for this.

There's No Thief Like Fear, that's what it's called.

You know you're getting old when you talk to technology.

I will say, GYC no longer has an age threshold.

I was dreading the moment I'd have to hit that drop-down box.

I did a 5K for the NAD, it's like a health whatever thing, and there were like different check boxes, and there was like 25 to like 35, and there was like 36 to like 50.

I was like, hey, I feel attacked right now.

Like 36 and 50 are not on the same plane.

Like those are 2 totally different worlds and I cried in the fetal position the rest of the day.

All right, so why I'm passionate about this topic.

There are many people who are believing present truth and are scared to death.

They don't really believe that God loves them, that God accepts them, that they're going to be good enough.

The judgment itself horrifies them, which is ironic because John says in 1 John that we can stand with boldness in the judgment.

So how can John say that whenever most of us are like just hoping we squeak out a good enough-ness verdict at the end of the day.

But we're told this in 2 Timothy 1 and verse 7.

Again, we're dealing with the topic of fear.

2 Timothy 1 and verse 7, we're told that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." Now, it's been helpful for me to kind of think through what's being said here, because what's basically being said is that fear robs us of love, of power, sorry.

The ability to love God and be loved by God, and fear robs us of the ability to be loved by others and to love others, right?

Because I don't want to get hurt again, so we harden ourselves.

We keep people at a distance because we're afraid of getting hurt again, right?

Our self-protective tendencies can come from this a lot of the time.

So if I were to write a DSV, a D-standard version, this is how 2nd Timothy chapter 1 and verse 7 would read.

If God has not given us a spirit of power and love in a sound mind, a spirit of fear, sorry, but of power, love, and a sound mind, what it implies is that fear robs us of power.

It robs us the ability to love God and others and be loved by God and others, and to be able to think and make decisions with a sound mind.

Fear alters the way that we do the very essentials of life.

Just from the very get-go, this is concerning if we don't understand this.

So then that kind of leads to some further questions.

Some examples of this, I'll summarize them for time's sake.

People, the Gadarenes, whenever Jesus cast the demons out of the demoniac, they're so freaked out by this guy who was naked, living in tombs, and cutting himself, being seated and clothed in his right mind, that they literally tell Jesus to get out of town because they're scared.

They don't know what to do with it, so they send him away.

Basically, the entire life of King Saul, from his first fall onward, is full of him making bad decisions out of fear.

Elijah running from God in his call right before God provided, right after he called down fire from heaven.

Peter denying Jesus, we talked about that as well.

And so, if God hasn't given us a spirit of fear and doesn't want us to have that type of experience, what's the solution?

Well, we're told in 1 John chapter 4, beginning of verse 16, that we have known and believed the love that God has for us.

I will read this verse a million times this year.

That we have known and believed the love that God has for us.

Not that we intellectually agree to the plausibility that God might love us, but that we experientially know and fully believe the love that God has for us.

Then it says, God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.

And love has been perfected among us in this, that We may have boldness in the day of judgment.

So when we truly know and believe the love that God has for us, we're no longer going to be afraid of the judgment.

We can have boldness in the judgment, not in our works, our righteousness, but in the righteousness of Christ and his love and assurance towards us.

That's what gives us boldness in the midst of the judgment.

Because as he is, so are we in this world.

We are clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

Verse 18, there is how much fear in love?

There's no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

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The Three Angel's Messages

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