Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2011

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Forward to Zion

Roy Gane

Answers to Objections Regarding 1844

Father in heaven, we're gonna talk today about the most embattled of all Seventh-day Adventist beliefs.

The idea that you are engaged in a special Judgment ministry at the end of time, just before your second coming, in the heavenly sanctuary with your headquarters and the Holy of Holies since the date 1844.

Please help us to understand in a way that we can explain to others.

May we understand the importance of this, knowing that we live in a special time just before the end.

I want to start with a quotation that I quoted from Philip Yancey, his wonderful book, The Jesus I Never Knew.

Have you seen that book, Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew?

And he writes in this, this is an evangelical author, and he writes this, so many times in the course of writing this book, I have felt like 1 of those disciples peering intently at a blank blue sky.

I look for some sign of Jesus, some visual clue.

He's talking about the ascension of Christ, right?

Like the disciples' eyes, mine ache for a pure glimpse of the 1 who ascended.

I have concluded, in fact, that the ascension represents my greatest struggle of faith.

It challenges me more than the problem of pain, more than the difficulty of harmonizing science and the Bible, more than belief in the resurrection and other miracles.

Now that's a pretty amazing statement because he's written 1 of the main books on the problem of pain.

Science in the Bible is a huge issue as you know right now.

Miracles and resurrection, but his greatest struggle is with the ascension of Christ.

The reason is because what's Jesus been doing for 2, 000 years since he left us?

It reminds me of a song that they used to sing back in the 60s.

I won't sing the whole song mercifully, but it goes, Why did you leave me here all alone?

Why has Jesus left us here all alone, all this time?

Well, I would submit to you, brothers and sisters, that the Bible in the book of Hebrews and other books and the book of Revelation and the book of Daniel, putting it together, tells us what Jesus is doing during this time.

He's been working for the salvation of human beings, and we know where he is right now and what phase of ministry he's involved with because Adventists have uniquely put together the prophetic time prophecies with the sanctuary understanding of the Bible.

They other Christians, many of them, realize that yes, Jesus has been ministering in a heavenly temple in the book of Hebrews, but they have never put that with Daniel and Revelation, and they've never figured out the time prophecies the way William Miller and his associates did.

Now you see what happened back there in 1844 was pretty much the death of the historicist approach to looking at the time prophecies of Daniel.

Before that, the reformers were historicists.

They didn't know all the details, but they were getting pretty close.

And William Miller and his associates refined things and refined them.

The problem was, as you know, that they made just 1 major mistake, and that was the nature of the event in 1844.

They said that Jesus was going to come because that's the cleansing referred to in Daniel 8.14.

And that's just not in the Bible, it never was.

But God allowed them to go through this great disappointment.

By the way, October 22 was not the great disappointment.

October 22 was the great appointment, okay?

I was ordained October 23, right after 9-11.

So hopefully my ministry has not been a great disappointment.

In any case, the idea that we have now is we know, Now that we understand the nature of the event, which is in harmony with Hebrews and Revelation and also Daniel, we realize the nature of the event and the timing was right.

Now, when the event didn't seem to happen and nobody could see anything happen, They said, ah, the whole system of interpretation is wrong.

And most churches today accept preterism.

Now, preterism puts everything back in the past.

The Little Horn was Antiochus Epiphanes and all this stuff is back then, so therefore we don't have to worry about that.

If you go to a library and you get a scholarly commentary that is not by an Adventist, it's invariably Preterist.

That it's all in the past and that now we don't have to worry about the Little Horn because he's gone, he's gone long ago.

Folks, that was a view that is very ancient, but it was revived and pushed during the Counter-Reformation.

The reformers knew who the Little Horn was.

They knew who the Antichrist was, the same thing as the Little Horn.

I've been to Germany, to Wittenberg, to the museums of Luther there, and I've seen their publications and that kind of thing, And they knew who that power was.

But in the big counter-reformation push, they adopted 2 different views.

1 is preterism, the idea that it's in the past, not now, Of course.

And the other is that it's all in the future.

We don't know who the Antichrist is yet, the little horn, because he's way off in the future, and that has been adopted by evangelical futurist dispensationalists.

The left behind people are all futurists.

They think it's all in the future with the rapture and the time of trouble, the trouble time and so on that they speak of.

Now you won't find a serious scholarly commentary on Daniel with that approach because it's not a scholarly approach.

It won't stand up to even minimal standards of scholarship, so you can't even find that kind of book.

And we saw an example of that recently, right, with the Rapture Finger guy, with all these complicated things, claimed to figure it out and claimed it was biblical.

Well, just because you take things and you put together your own mishmash from things that are in the Bible doesn't mean it's biblical.

You have to follow the biblical principles of the way it's to be understood.

Now, Seventh-day Adventists have been historicists, okay, so it's neither in the past or in the future, but rather, we simply take the prophecies of Daniel the way they are, namely, Daniel is prophesying from his day with a sweep of history going through everything right to the time of the end, okay?

The others have historical approaches too, and they overlap to some extent, but we just take it right on through naturally, and that's a biblical approach.

If you just simply read the text without preconceived notions, you're gonna be reading it in a historicist way.

There are others who wanna make it all abstract.

We don't know what this means, it has to do with, or this has to do with this or that conceptual notion or worldview, and it becomes very, very abstract.

And then there's another approach that I would call hystericism.

Okay, Yeah, I think you've seen a bit of that lately.

In any case, what I like to do is when I start, I want to make you aware of this going on, but what we're gonna do here is ignore all of those.

We're not gonna say I'm Seventh-day Adventist, therefore I'm historicist, therefore I must read the text in this way.

Now, we're just going to get into the text and let the text guide us how we're going to read it.

But just, you don't need to worry about that.

By the way, I'll mention this, that the approach of the Counter-Reformation, The reformers, as I said, identified who that power was that was existing in that time as the little horn that was oppressing God's people and was vaunting itself up by counterfeit worship and all of the rest.

But the counter-reformation, by going with futurism that way and preterism that way, you notice that the same power adopted both preterism and futurism simultaneously, which is a very interesting thing because they're mutually exclusive.

You can't have 1, I mean, if one's right, then the other's wrong and vice versa.

They adopted both of them simultaneously because they didn't care which way it went.

But what we're going to do is just start with Daniel.

And the first question we need to answer, though, is, this is the overall question, Did the pre-advent judgment really begin in 1844?

Answers to Objections Regarding 1844

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