SWYC 2011: Lest We Forget

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GYC Southwest

Adventist History

Dave Fiedler

From Minneapolis On

Father, we thank you for this Sabbath day.

We thank you for the privilege we have of gathering and spending some time.

And Lord, I just pray that you would make this time beneficial, that you would oversee all that's said and done and grant your spirit's guidance and leading here.

And may we gain something of a practical, valuable nature, something that we can put into useful work for you, we pray.

My thought for this first meeting was to just kind of cover a little more informally than maybe I do in a lot of other meetings, just some of the history from what I'm calling it is from Minneapolis on, okay?

I don't know how many of you are specifically here because you were intrigued with the 1888 aspect.

I'm a flexible guy and if you raise up, raise another question or something, that's fine too.

I'm used to teaching class rather than preaching sermons, so hands in the audience are a good thing, that's fine.

But I'd like to try and just kind of paint maybe a big picture of the whole 1888 message sweep of events over the last 100 plus years.

And I have the advantage of some people in the audience that probably know details that I will mess up and please correct me.

Because like I say, this is not something I'm working off of heavily researched notes, but I wanted to just try to get a general picture out there of the way I view it at least, and maybe it'll be helpful and useful to you.

Does anybody know, Can we just pull those plugs?

I keep thinking I'm gonna get a wave in my back or something, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I think they're both playing and the woofer kicks in every now and then.

It's been too long since I've been to the ocean, obviously.

Okay, let's start over again, kind of, for audio versus sake here.

I wanted to do sort of an informal review of the history from Minneapolis on, trying to just follow the idea of the 1888 message and kind of how it's tied in and how it's played a role in Adventist history for the last, what is it, I figured out this morning, 123 years or something like that, whatever it's been.

I'm sure we have people here with varying levels of familiarity with this topic.

So suffice it to say early on here that that we're talking about Ellett Joseph Wagner and Alonzo Thaddeus, no Trevier's, Alonzo Trevier Jones and the 1888 Minneapolis General Conference.

There are a lot of historical accounts available just in fairly recent years, actually.

I, what, I first heard about this probably, say, in the 70s, the first time I heard anything about 1888.

And there wasn't that much information out there.

Most of the materials that have been published have been published since then in a lot of ways.

So it's been an interesting development of things.

Probably the thing that drives the discussion was the statement that I had up on the screen this morning, that...

Yeah, okay, I'm getting confused which presentation is which, okay.

Now I'll be addressing that again this evening, so I don't wanna steal all my thunder here on that, But that clearly puts the 1888 situation into a category by itself.

I mean, how could you say that something that led up to at least the beginning of the loud cry, you know, that's important.

And yet, There's quite a bit of history where we tended to just ignore it.

Let's see if I can kind of go through quickly speaking the turn of events.

By about 1890, I think it was, Elder Wagner had been requested to go to England.

1891, Ellen White was requested to go to Australia.

And that pretty effectively broke up, so to speak, the trio of Jones, Wagner, and White that had been traveling around and preaching this message.

Jones, of course, was still in the United States.

And probably partially because of that, when it comes to materials, contemporary materials from the times, we have more from him, I would say, than we do from the others.

Although, of course, Ellen White, there's a ton of it that came out in the 1888 materials, you know, but in just the explicit materials on the 1888 message, you go through Jones's General Conference series, what, He had 1 in 1893 and 1895.

You can get a few other things that were published here and there.

There was a series that was done in Ottawa, Kansas that Some friendly non-adventist reporter took down verbatim, you know, and you can read through that 1.

And I was just like, so we, I think it's safe to say we have more explicit material on the subject from Jones than we do from the other 2.

But things were never quite the same after the trio kind of split apart.

Jones and Wagner received a lot of opposition.

1 of the toughest things to deal with is opposition from your own side, so to speak, your own brothers and sisters, as it were.

We have numerous examples in Adventist history of good people doing good things who have fallen by the wayside, largely it would appear, as a result of not being able to relate and to deal with the opposition that came from those who should have been supporting them.

Jones and Wagner are probably the most obvious examples.

Sweeping with a fairly broad brush here, a lot of folks at the time were focused on the law in Galatians.

There was a theological distinction between the way these guys saw it and the way those guys saw it.

And there was a great deal of concern over that.

Ellen White, however, would write and say, as to the law in Galatians, I have no burden and never have had.

Well, if everybody else thought their argument was over the law in Galatians, and Ellen White didn't think that was an important issue, what was it that she was writing about saying it was so good.

I mean, it wasn't their position on the law in Galatians.

So what did she see in 1888 that was so commendable?

She said that Elder Wagner's sermons presented the matchless charms of Christ.

And when you put that together with the statement that I used, first 1 this morning, It's been Satan's determined purpose to cause men to look to man and expect great things from man and not look to Jesus in whom our hopes of eternal life are centered.

I think that there is more serious reality to the idea that the key attraction was simply the matchless charms of Christ.

Ellen White was often very deliberate in her use of language.

And when you stop and think about it, what is she saying when she says, the matchless charms of Christ?

I can react to, just from my personality, I can react to that, the use of, her use of the word charms, and I can, I, my gut level's almost an, oh, some sort of emotional, vague something, oh, he's a nice guy?

I'm not sure that's what she had in mind.

The matchless qualities of Christ, the matchless abilities of Christ.

Jesus does for us things that no 1 else can do.

If you want divine strength, if you want divine wisdom, it's going to come from him.

It's not going to come from brother so and so or elder so and so or whoever.

Jones and Wagner presented a dependence on Christ and I would say that they felt that dependence themselves.

Now the thing that is troublesome, so to speak, is when you have somebody who's depending on God, It's pretty well going to mean that they're not going to depend on me.

Looking to Man

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer as we begin again.

We pray that you would be with us as we spend some time looking into 1 of the problem areas, some of the challenges, help us to grasp not just the problem, but the answer, the solution as well, we pray.

Okay, I wanted to spend some time on the general topic that I alluded to in the last session as well as this morning of the tendency of people to look to other people.

That's not something that I think has gone away.

The 1888 message was supposed to counteract that.

And it would be nice to say that it was like 1 of those diseases where you give them 1 shot and the problem is solved.

But I'm thinking it's more something like a nutritional deficiency.

You need to keep constantly eating the right stuff to solve the problem.

When Ellen White wrote this, Talking about looking, the devil has been trying to get man to look to man.

It's real easy for people to take that comment and adopt a very independent attitude.

I think virtually everyone who's ever studied the Spirit of Prophecy and had a streak of independence in them has been attracted to that statement.

You like the idea of something that gives you a little leeway, so to speak.

I'm going to, well, it's a contact lens is what it is.

Yeah, AudioVerse can edit that out too, hopefully.

There comes a point where it's easier to read the book without the contacts in.

So I think it's about 50, but it happens.

What are we talking about with this tendency of man to look to man and where does that crop up and how does it develop and what's it all about?

That's kind of the gist of what I'd like to look at here.

This is an issue which came up long before 1888.

Ellen White in volume 2 of the Testimonies, early on in Volume 2, she wrote an interesting thing where she said, people are always writing to me and asking me or asking my husband, shall we do this, shall we do that, shall we engage in this enterprise, Shall I wear this, shall I wear that?

And she said, I refuse to be conscience for you.

If your experience is founded on us, speaking of herself and her husband, you have no experience.

All who relied on others to direct them, quoting now, walking by others' light, living on others' experience, feeling as others feel, acting as others act, would fail of everlasting life unless they became sensible of their wavering character and corrected it.

James White was in many ways the acknowledged leader administratively of the church.

James was incredibly smart and he had the advantage of being married to someone who had a very close connection to the Lord and occasionally received inside information.

James saved every 1 of our institutions at 1 time or another.

They'd make this mistake and he'd run back to Battle Creek and he'd save the day, so to speak.

If he had a failing, it was that he tended to work too much and did not ever successfully cultivate a protege, somebody coming along behind him.

Some wise soul someplace made a comment 1 time, he said, No man's life work is complete until he has trained his successor.

So if you're doing something important, and you haven't trained someone to continue it on, you're not done.

James' career was interrupted by a series of strokes.

When he could no longer serve as General Conference President, George Butler served for a period of time.

Putting my explanation onto things here, and I hope it's reasonably close to accurate.

Butler saw James perhaps at his administrative worst.

After the strokes, James had a hard time being patient with his brethren.

You work in the Review and Herald office and you make a mistake and James jumps all over you, what are you gonna do?

You can't say too much, he might fire you.

And so, what happened is that The workers tended to withdraw.

I'm already putting in way too much overtime here anyhow, because this was a job that required some self-sacrifice, right?

Uriah Smith actually quit 1 time, went down to Battle Creek, got a job carving engravings for the local newspaper.

Paid twice as much as he'd gotten for being the editor of the review.

So there was some self-sacrifice involved.

And as they pulled back, James pressed ahead because he kept seeing work that wasn't being done.

This is maybe the image of administration that George Butler retained in his memory.

And when George became President, and these guys out in the West Coast started acting up.

Well, he figured it was time for the President to act like a President.

And that's why he was so perplexed when Ellen White didn't support him in that.

She wrote back and she said, "'Your position as President is the very reason "'you should show greater restraint and control "'and more carefully manifest the patient spirit of Jesus.

"'Makes it all the more important that you get it right.

We had a hard time relating that, and I think most of us would probably, too.

But what it means is that you lead by example.

As I mentioned in the last session there, Jones and Wagner were reproved.

Butler and Smith took those letters and used them for their side of things, and they were reproved.

And coming out of that whole thing, as I said, when I read through the 1888 materials volumes, over and over and over again, what I'm finding, what I'm seeing, not to the exclusion of all else, but what I'm seeing are these comments of how we aren't working together, and we aren't allowing people to develop their own personal working relationship with Christ.

Men will never develop wisdom in management, either in business matters or in spiritual things if they are educated to depend upon other men's brains to think and plan for them.

This is almost everything here from the 1888 materials.

The Lord has presented before me that men in responsible positions are standing directly in the way of the workings of God upon his people Because they think that the work must be done the blessing must come in a certain way which they have marked out and they will not recognize that which comes in any other way.

Ooh, that would be easy to find out if we looked that up.

It would be early on, because it's on page 113 in the 1888 material, so it's probably either actually before or right around 1888, I'd guess.

God has appointed channels of light, but these are not necessarily through the minds of any particular man or set of men.

When all shall take their appointed places in God's work and not allow others to mold them at will, then 1 great advance will have been made toward letting the light shine upon the world." Now, notice that, That's an unusual statement.

Costly Words

We thank you for the occasion here, the conference.

Bless as we look at a specific period in history and help us to look with charity upon all and yet to learn lessons that will be useful to us in the future we ask in Jesus name.

Title this 1 costly words and the value of understanding.

And the idea here is that sometimes we open our mouths and say things that end up costing us.

Sometimes they just cost a lot of time trying to explain why you didn't really mean what it sounded like you said, something like that, right?

Sometimes you say the wrong thing it can cost you friends.

We're going to look at 2 occasions today in which individuals acting in the capacity of profit said or wrote words which cost a lot actually.

The first 1 comes from the life of Jesus.

And time, money, and friends were small issues in comparison to what these words cost Jesus.

He said, so the Jews answered, well this is John reporting this, so the Jews answered and said to Jesus, what sign do you show to us since you do these things?

Jesus answered and said to them, destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up.

Then the Jews said, it's taken 46 years to build this temple and will you raise it up in 3 days?

But John says he was speaking of the temple of his body.

Ellen White offers some insight into Jesus' reasons for making this kind of cryptic remark.

I mean, if I heard Jesus say that, I don't think I would have understood it.

So it's kind of a, you know, 1 of those veiled type of remarks, and that's exactly what was intended to be.

Now It says, Christ did not design that his words should be understood by the unbelieving Jews, nor even by his disciples at this time.

He knew that they would be misconstrued by his enemies and would be turned against him.

At his trial they would be brought as an accusation and on Calvary They would be flung at him as a taunt." Just a side note.

What was the mechanism by which he knew stuff like this?

Did he know that from reading something in the Psalms that I've never put together?

Or was that direct inspiration like he'd had a vision that told him, this is what's going to happen.

This is what you say, this is what's going to happen.

But to explain these words now would give his disciples a knowledge of his sufferings and bring upon them a sorrow which as yet they were not able to bear.

And an explanation would prematurely disclose to the Jews the result of their prejudice and unbelief.

Already they had entered upon a path that they would steadily pursue until he should be led as a lamb to the slaughter." And so Jesus made the comment knowing all that and offered no explanation.

And just the words sort of hung in the air for about 3 years.

But 3 years later The chief priests, the elders, and all the council sought false testimony against Jesus to put him to death, but found none.

I mean, it's 1 thing to go looking for evidence and not find any, But to go looking for false testimony?

You can't get anybody to even lie about this guy.

That to me says something about the level of support that Jesus really did have among most of the people.

Even though many false witnesses came forward, they found none.

But at last, 2 false witnesses came forward and said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and build it in 3 days.

Well, that's the way Matthew recorded it.

Now the chief priests and all the council sought testimony against Jesus to put him to death, but found none.

For many bore false witness against him, but their testimonies did not agree.

I mean, come on, if you're making up a lie, get 2 people to make up the same lie.

But hey, it was late at night, they're holding the trial in an illegal time of day.

It's just amazing the mockery of justice that went on here.

Then some rose up and bore false witness against him saying, We heard him say, I will destroy this temple made with hands, and within 3 days I will build another made without hands.

But not even then did their testimony agree.

Well, Ellen White has some comments on that.

She says, early in his ministry Christ had said, Destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up.

What is the subject of the first clause there?

Yes, Jesus was saying you destroy this temple.

You will destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up.

So he didn't claim he was going to destroy the temple at all.

He was saying they would, but you know, that's fine.

In the figurative language of prophecy, he had thus foretold his own death and resurrection.

These words the Jews had understood in a literal sense, as referring to the temple at Jerusalem, of all that Christ had said, the priests could find nothing to use against him save this.

By misstating these words, they hoped to gain an advantage.

Out of everything Jesus had said in 3 and a half years of public ministry, that's the only thing they could find.

It says something about his ability to control his tongue.

The Romans had engaged in rebuilding and embellishing the temple and they took great pride in it.

Any contempt shown to it would be sure to excite their indignation.

Here Romans and Jews, Pharisees and Sadducees could meet, for all held the temple in great veneration.

On this 0.2 witnesses were found whose testimony was not so contradictory as that of the others had been.

1 of them, who had been bribed to accuse Jesus, declared, this fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and to build it in 3 days.

If they had been reported exactly as he spoke them, they would not have secured his condemnation, even by the Sanhedrin.

Had Jesus been a mere man, as the Jews claimed, his declaration would only have indicated an unreasonable boastful spirit, but could not have been construed into blasphemy.

Even as misrepresented by the false witnesses, his words contained nothing which would be regarded by the Romans as a crime worthy of death.

Patiently, Jesus listened to the conflicting testimonies.

Maybe it's that trait right there, it's why they didn't have much to fault him on after 3 and a half years.

At last his accusers were entangled, confused, and maddened.

It seemed that their plottings were to fail.