<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

Total Christ Involvement

Today, I want to talk about that more sure word of prophecy.

And you may, if you were not here last night and didn't get a card, we talked last night about the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And then we said we'd talk about the most amazing prophecy.

So if you'd like a card like that, just raise up your hand and we'll get you 1 because you can, it kind of has notes if you want to follow along on it.

And of course, you know, the angels were very interested in the prophecies and it says the angels desired to look into things.

They're always looking at prophecy and they were there from the very beginning.

In heaven when there was a fall from heaven, the angels were there.

When there was a fall on earth, the angels were there.

And they also saw the plan of salvation that was being promised.

And so they wondered about it, and they thought about it, and all through the Old Testament, you see the angels just showing up and every single time they saw another confirmation they knew it was a more sure word of prophecy, amen.

And you can see, wait a minute, they wondered where Jesus went for 9 months.

Plan of salvation is continuing on unabated, and the answers that everyone hopes for are being given through a more sure word of prophecy.

So we're gonna look at this prophecy today, this particular prophecy.

And you know, it's wonderful to be a part of a school that has a motto, to heal a hurting world.

And that's really what the Christmas message is about, to heal a hurting world.

And we have an acronym that is in our internal documents at the university called HEAL, and that actually stands for 4 different things.

Health and wellness, evangelism, and discipleship, academic excellence, and labor that comes from a heart of love.

And that first 1, health and wellness, says that we want to be rooted in biblically consistent science.

Is the Advent movement rooted in biblically consistent science that is evidence-based?

I hope after today's message you will see it as rooted in biblically consistent science that is prophetically and evidence-based, especially at this time of year when we need a word from the Lord that he's active.

Now, Having said that, I mentioned last night that a Christmas baby, someone who was born on Christmas Day, was a very famous individual.

And when he was born, he was so small he could fit in a court jar.

And when he was born, they thought he was going to die, the 2 nurses taking care of him.

And they didn't really rush back to the house because they thought he was going to be dead by the time we get back.

But his father had died before he was born.

And he didn't really get along so well with his mother.

In fact, the people in the school were so happy he left and went to Cambridge, because they never could get a good grade when he was there.

And he spent the next years at Cambridge actually doing what I would term biblically consistent science.

As a matter of fact, his resume is still quite impressive.

He invented the reflecting telescope, proposed a new theory of light and color, he discovered calculus, he developed 3 laws of motion, He devised the law of universal gravitation.

But all of this was driven, oh, by the way, he probably wrote what some have said is the single greatest work in the history of science.

And all of that, however, was driven by religion.

His writings on religious topics was estimated to exceed 4 million words.

And when these words were discovered, some people in the modern era said, man, I wish we would have known about this before because we wouldn't have believed so much in Isaac Newton, but it's too late.

I have a fundamental belief, he said in the Bible, as the word of God written by men who were inspired, and I study the Bible daily.

So even though he was in an academic setting, in fact, perhaps a bit more rigorous than Weimar University, I would say probably quite a bit more, Every single day he studied the scriptures.

He didn't say something's more important than that, no.

Every single day he studied the scriptures.

And 1 of the things he liked the most was the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation.

We studied that in our religion and health class, which the nurses take, and actually everybody should take, but we're working on it.

And Daniel chapter 1, of course, is seen today as the world's first clinical trial.

And this experiment was conducted by King Nebuchadnezzar, a resourceful military leader.

And it actually studied the Daniel diet versus the Burger King or Dairy Queen diet, the diet of the king or queen.

And it discovered that it was actually the best.

This probably was 1 of the first times that an open, uncontrolled human experiment guided a decision about public health.

And so, even today, those that study the history of science say the book of Daniel is a scientific treatise.

It lays the foundation, the paradigm for scientific thought.

And even today, there's replica studies being done out of the Universities of Nashville that use that same setup that you see in Daniel 1, and you see evidence that it still works.

Now, Isaac Newton, for all of his study of the sciences, he studied more of the prophecies, and this is what he said.

About the time of the end, the body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the prophecies." What?

At the end of time, there'll be a group of people that study the prophecies, and they also, if they were like him, would be biblically consistent and scientifically rigorous.

He said this is gonna happen at the time of the end.

And by the way, he kinda knew when the time of the end was.

In fact, he studied another prophecy, Daniel 8, 14, unto 2, 300 days, then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.

And in case you don't know it, it's that prophecy on that card that I gave you that we're going to look at today.

And He tried to figure out when the time of the end was because so many people were talking about the time of the end being right then.

He says, wait a minute, let me study it out.

He thought the time of the end would be somewhere around 2060, based on his calculations.

But it's interesting when he studied the 2300 days, when he started the prophecy.

With Ezra's return, they became a city by the government of their own.

Now, The years of this Artaxerxes was in the year 457 or 458 BC.

This is the same date that Seventh-day Adventists classically have used to start this prophecy of the 2300-day prophecy.

And By the way, William Miller, an Advent believer, who dated this prophecy first, in the modern era, about 100 years after Newton, actually was so into Isaac Newton that he named 1 of his children Isaac Newton Miller.

Miller started the prophecy with the same date as Newton, the 2300 day prophecy.

So let's update ourselves a little bit now.

If I was talking to Sir Isaac Newton, and he was able to be alive again today, I think he would be most fascinated of all the religions in the world by the Seventh-day Adventist religion, because it's the 1 that really studies the prophecies like he did.

And if I was to update him in 2015 that a prominent Adventist physician, Ben Carson, had put the spotlight on the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and if he was watching the BBC and the CNN and Fox or whatever he would watch.

Ben Carson says America is close to the biblical end of days.

And Ben Carson, perhaps more than any Adventist recently, put the spotlight on the prophetic teachings of the Advent movement.

And so I want to study that prophecy where Ben Carson was pointing to when he talked about the end of days, and where Isaac Newton would have agreed with him.

Before we get into it, though, let's just ask the Lord to bless us once again.

Father in heaven, Lord, bless us today as we think about this Christmas prophecy brought to you by this Christmas scientist, Isaac Newton, or studied by this Christmas scientist, Isaac Newton, give us some messages for this time of celebration, remembrance of the Lord's birth, in Christ's name, amen.

So let's look at this 2300 year prophecy and its 5 key dates.

The 5 key dates, 457, where Isaac Newton and William Miller would have started it, and then 27, 31, 34, and 1844.

Back to Menu

Total Christ Involvement

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine