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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Being Adventist

Mark Howard

Born Adventist or Born Again?

The Debilitating Drudgery of Adventist Doctrine

The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology

Okay, well let's dive into this afternoon.

1 more thing about this morning and this afternoon's topic.

I'm giving a bird's eye view of something.

I'm trying to touch on, this morning I wanted to get on more of an overview of the significance of Adventism, the unique contribution to the gospel picture, the great controversy scheme, that kind of thing.

And inevitably, when you try to cram that much into a small space, you can't really explain everything in the detail you'd like to.

This afternoon I'm going to be doing something somewhat similar with the last days and last day events.

I entitled this, The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology.

I mentioned to you that I am the father of 2 grown children, a daughter who is 18, a son who is 25, who have grown up in the church as a pastor's kid.

And I can tell you that even growing up in a pastor's home, when you talk about the last days, there are just, because It's not all in the home.

You go to school, you go to Adventist boarding school, and you go to this and that, and you're talking to your friends, and you hear this here, and you hear that there.

And the ideas that circulate about the last days.

In fact, I have a young man in the Lansing area who is working with the Lansing Church currently as a Bible worker, who is a theology student.

And he brought up some questions to me that I'm going to touch on this afternoon that come up when we talk about the last days and the judgment and specifically his question was about the judgment of the living.

And when he brought it up to me, I thought, are you seriously asking this question?

And maybe, I don't know, maybe you've never heard this before.

Maybe you're like, I've heard that same thing.

There's a quote that Ellen White makes that people base this on, but there's this concept, because Ellen White talks about the judgment of the dead and the judgment of the living.

And so there's a concept out there that, Because Ellen White says, we don't know how soon we're going to switch from the judgment of the dead to the judgment of the living.

And so there's a concept that says, perhaps, because in the judgment, obviously, I'm being a little facetious, you're going through the books in alphabetical order.

And so perhaps, Simano, you're good, because you're after me, because I'm an H and you're a T.

And the mindset is, perhaps your name has come up in the judgment already.

Maybe we're in the judgment of living and your name came up, and maybe you just got judged out.

Nothing you could do now would ever make a difference, you're lost.

That's a real concern and thought that some people have, and they think that somehow we taught that in Adventism.

That's a little bit of a terrifying thought.

So the terrifying tyranny of Adventist eschatology.

Before I go any further, I want to ask the Lord to bless our time as we study this afternoon.

Heavenly Father, I want to thank you so much for your goodness to us all, for your love and your mercy in giving your Son, Jesus Christ, to die, to sacrifice for our sins, and then to ascend as our high priest.

Our guarantee, our surety, the 1 we can put our full confidence in because He who has begun a good work in us will complete it unto the day of Jesus Christ.

He is the author and finisher of our faith, He tells in Your Word and we thank You for that.

Now Lord, I pray that you would send your Holy Spirit to give us understanding in spiritual things this afternoon.

And Lord, work through my thoughts and words, that they may be concise enough to give clarity and hope and inspiration to those who have come this afternoon and those who are watching online and those who are listening later through AudioVerse and other platforms.

We just thank you for hearing and answering our prayer, Lord, for we pray it in Jesus' name.

Now I have to tell you again, I mentioned it this morning for those who, well, whether you were here or not here, I'll reiterate that my mom and dad were first generation Seventh-day Adventists.

And so I grew up from, probably from my, I don't know if they came in, I think they came in right before I was born actually.

So I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist church.

My mom and dad ended up getting divorced and both remarried.

I lived with my mom and my mom and my stepdad left the Seventh-day Adventist church in my teen years.

So I grew up going to Adventist elementary school and about the time I graduated from eighth grade and was getting set to go to the Academy then We my mom left the church and we moved to a different location and I started going to public school and then was out of the church for many many years and I remember of course when you go up Adventist at least in those days and Probably any days because part of Adventism is prophecy and last days and Jesus coming and the signs of the times, There would be those periodic conversations I would have with my oldest brother.

Now, my oldest brother went to the academy, and we would go out on the weekends and hang out a lot.

And then I remember many nights where we'd come home, and we'd sit out in the car, and we would talk until the wee hours about the last days.

And you'd have these colorful, like, what's it gonna be?

And it was almost like, you know, guerrilla warfare or something, you know?

And you know, how is it gonna be in the last days?

And they're going to try to persecute us and they're trying to force us to do this.

I sure hope I make it through the time of trouble and don't get lost during the time of trouble, which is a common thing evidently I've heard from some Seventh-day Adventist, that the time of trouble, the big thing about the time of trouble, it's going to be so bad, what if I'm faithful all the way through and then I come to that point and then for some reason I do something stupid during the time of trouble?

Which is really ironic because that was a conversation I had in a thought process I had many times before I studied for myself.

And 1 thing I learned very early studying for myself was that the time of trouble comes after the close of probation.

Every case is decided when probation closes.

So if somebody was going to lose their experience and be lost, it's not going to be during the time of trouble.

I remember growing up and having these late night, you know, kind of almost Hollywood-like pictures of the last days, what they would be like.

But those were, you know, every 6 months maybe, or further apart we'd have these.

So it lingered in my mind as a young man, but I really didn't concern myself too much with spiritual things until I started coming back to church.

Now 1 of the things that as I went through some significant changes in my life and began to seek something spiritual, those concerns about the last days revived.

I always had a curiosity about the last days, what it's really going to be like, prophecy and that kind of thing.

I told you this morning I went to a church that was really down on traditional Adventist doctrine, that was really down on Ellen White.

In fact, I remember the elder of the church, I visited with the elder of the church at some point in my early experience, and I asked him, I said, do you believe that Ellen White was inspired?

And I'll never forget to this day, he looked at me and he paused and he said, I believe she was a plagiarist.

And then he said, and then he said the next sentence, I believe she was inspired.

And I could never piece that together, an inspired plagiarist.

I was a new Christian, but my point is that gives you a little bit of an idea of where the leaders in the church that I started going to felt about Ellen White and her ministry.

I didn't touch much on Ellen White this morning.

You can get it on AudioVerse on my experience with Ellen White because remember my family left the church during the Ford crisis and 1 of the big challenges with, here's the thing, you've got to understand the thought process here.

I told you Desmond Ford had a problem because he thought the sanctuary teaching robbed people of assurance.

He thought we would be more popular as a church and more accessible to people if we could just get rid of the sanctuary.

The problem is, you can't really get rid of the sanctuary when you regard somebody as a prophet of God who says that this is a God-given doctrine.

And so if you've got to get rid of the sanctuary, you've got to get rid of Ellen White.

And so during the Ford crisis, there was a lot of attacks on Ellen White.

1 specific 1 that was prominent was a man by the name of Walter Ray.

He was an Adventist pastor who wrote a book called The White Lie and oh, more stuff, of course, throughout the years.

And you've probably seen stuff on the Internet by this time.

Anyway, so I started out just being like, you know, my family left during that.

So when I came back to the Adventist Church, I wasn't like, oh, yay, Ellen White.

I just wasn't really into Ellen White, didn't have an interest in that, kind of shared that.

I mean, who wants a person who basically spells out different areas of your life that need reform anyway?

And the reality is that's the challenge a lot of people have had with Ellen White, not really grasping that it was like with every prophet of the Bible, it was just God trying to point something out through a weak messenger, as he does.

But I had a curiosity, and that curiosity was prophecy.

Series

Being Adventist

The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

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