This presentation looks at three “Times of Trouble” found in Scripture: Jacob’s night of wrestling, Christ’s temptations in the wilderness, and the Saint’s Time of Trouble in the last days to understand what the Devil’s strategy will be and how we can be prepared to withstand it.

<p>This presentation looks at three “Times of Trouble” found in Scripture: Jacob’s night of wrestling, Christ’s temptations in the wilderness, and the Saint’s Time of Trouble in the last days to understand what the Devil’s strategy will be and how we can be prepared to withstand it.</p>

<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>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Preparing for the Time of Trouble

Alistair Huong

Wrestling in the Wilderness

Father in heaven, we thank you for this time we can spend together and contemplating your word to study together.

And as we open the Bible now, we pray for your Holy Spirit to be our teacher and our guide.

And as we prepare to enter the Sabbath, we pray for the special blessing that you have in store for us on this special day.

And we invite the Holy Spirit to speak to us now and teach us and lead us into all truth we ask.

We are going to have some slides on the screen.

I'm not going to have all of the Bible verses on there.

So I hope you have your Bible whether in physical form or digital form.

We are going to have to turn in there together.

And so the first of the 3 times of troubles that we're going to be looking at is found in Genesis chapter 32 and this is Jacob's night of wrestling.

Then Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.

Now when he saw that he did not prevail against him.

He touched the socket of his hip and the socket of Jacob's hip was out of joint as he wrestled with him and he said let me go for the day breaks but he said I will not let you go unless you bless me and he said to him what is your name he said Jacob he said your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.

Jacob that night wrestling with the angel, But how did he get in that situation?

You remember that Jacob was a bit of a liar.

He coveted Esau's birthright, the spiritual blessing that came along with it, but he took matters into his own hands.

He conspired with his mother, deceived his blind father Isaac, and stole the birthright.

Esau got extremely angry with his brother and vowed to take his life.

And even though he was his mother's favorite son, he had to run to Uncle Laban's place to hide out, and he never saw his mother again.

Now Jacob, of course, became a very wealthy man.

He worked for Laban, became very prosperous, but he, being the trickster, got tricked himself.

He was in love with Rachel, but instead he was given Leah.

And now with many children, heavy laden with goods and wealth and flocks and cattle and servants, God had told Jacob to return back to Canaan.

It was time for him to receive the covenant promise that God had given to the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac, and now to Jacob.

And now he's journeying back and he sends messengers ahead to scout the way and they come scurrying back and say, your brother Esau is coming to meet you.

Jacob's heart sank within him, realizing his brother had not forgotten his vow to those many years before.

And so he separates the family, he divides the flocks, sends them in 2 different directions.

He sends servants ahead with gifts and heavy laden in like waves of appeasement type things.

And he's trying to make as much preparation as he can, humanly speaking, but he realized there was something else he had to do.

And so he sends everyone away and that night in the desert alone, that's where we find him prostrate on the desert floor looking for forgiveness looking for deliverance from the God who once before had met him, you remember, on a similar night when he was running for his life.

Remember what he saw in his dream that night as a young man?

It was a ladder that connected heaven and earth representing Jesus and the voice of God speaking to him saying, I haven't left you yet.

And Jacob was looking for that reassurance this night, when all of a sudden, a strong hand grabs him by his shoulder and flings him to the desert floor.

He must be thinking, 1 of Esau's scouts have found me and he's going to end me right here.

And so he turns, squares up against his mystery assailant and he fights.

And it says they wrestled until the breaking of the day.

He starts praying at midnight, say, and the breaking of the day is like 6 hours worth of wrestling.

With almost superhuman effort, he is fighting for his life with this mystery wrestler in the wilderness.

He doesn't know who this person is until this wrestling match ends with 1 touch of a finger on his hip.

And instantly, with searing pain, his hip is dislocated.

And Jacob collapses in a heap on the desert floor.

I can only imagine the searing pain shooting up and down his body.

He's been wrestling all night, sweat pouring down his face now matted with the desert sand and maybe tears being oozed out because of the sharp pain he feels in his body.

But you got to understand something else that's happening.

All night while he's wrestling he's been praying to God, deliver me Lord, save me, have mercy upon me a sinner I have confessed before and I continue to humble myself before you.

He's turning to God, wrestling in his heart, while also physically wrestling against this guy who he thinks is trying to kill him.

And then in an instant, this person that he's been wrestling touches him and with supernatural power dislocates him with no effort at all.

The God to whom I've been praying to for deliverance has been the God who's been trying to kill me.

God came down personally to kick me while I was down.

It appears to Jacob that God had turned against him.

But in a moment like that, there was no time for Jacob to spend a thoughtful hour contemplating what to do next.

There was no time to review his prayer journal, to see all of the lessons he's learned in the past walking with God.

There was no time to have a prayer service with his brethren at church.

What I call a church board meeting or committee meeting.

The muscle memory of faith to react in a split second because this, the God to whom he's been praying is turning to walk away.

With an arm of faith that has been trained through years of practice and walking and experience with God, he extends his hand by instinct to grab a hold of God and say, I will not let you go until you bless me.

He recognized that though God might have turned against him, even though it appears as God has turned against him, he was still the source of his salvation.

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.

And Jacob, all of a sudden, was no longer named Jacob.

God says your name will now be Israel because you have struggled with God, you have wrestled with God and with men, and have prevailed.

Now I want to look at 1 statement here, we're going to come back to this later in the presentation, but this is insightful.

Those who live in the last days must pass through an experience similar to that of Jacob.

Foes will be all around them ready to condemn and destroy.

Alarm and despair will seize them for it appears to them as to Jacob in his distress that God himself has become an avenging enemy.

That's a fearful thought Because we've always heard, if God be for us, who can be against us?

But you realize the inverse of that, right?

And that's what it appears to Jacob as well as to those who go through the time of Jacob's trouble.

But the rest of the passage says this, You see for Jacob, salvation that the promises given for just such a time may be seen in their preciousness and relied upon with unwavering trust here faith is proved you see for Jacob the test was to trust in God though the evidence suggested that he had become the enemy.

He had to trust God despite the evidences of his senses, despite the internal evidence of his sin and his unworthiness of the love and mercy of God as well as the outward evidence that it appears as though God was out to get him.

He still had to trust that was the test for Jacob.

Keeping Up with God

Father in heaven, we thank you that we are able to gather together on your Sabbath day, that we still have the peace in this world in which we can gather to worship.

And Lord, as we open your word, we pray for your Holy Spirit to be our teacher and our guide.

May Jesus be lifted up and may we be changed into his image because of the words that we hear today from your throne.

And we ask and pray these things in Jesus' name.

I have 2 girls, an eight-year-old and a three-year-old.

And 1 of our favorite games that we like to play is Red Light, Green Light.

How many of you have ever played that game?

Somebody stands far away, and the kids are lined up waiting with eager anticipation for the instruction.

Green light and everyone starts sprinting, red light, everyone stops.

And of course, The fun part is when you try to confuse them, and you trip them up, you change the cadence, you make them start and stop very quickly, and it becomes a great way to entertain the children, get their energy out, and have fun together.

But really, the game is teaching a lesson, isn't it?

Pay attention to instruction and prompt obedience.

This red light, green light game, I think, is an excellent illustration of what sometimes a Christian life is like.

The Christian walk, what it means to follow Jesus, is essentially understanding his instruction and obeying promptly.

And to stop and wait when he says to wait.

So we're going to take a look at that by initially starting off with a quick survey of a number of Bible stories.

I think are familiar to all of us to understand to see this in action in the Bible.

So let's take a look first in Genesis chapter 12.

The Lord said, now the Lord has said to Abram, get out of your country from your family and from your father's house to a land that I will show you.

So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him.

Well, I'm going to make you a great nation.

God was asking Abraham to leave his family, leave his friends, leave his comfort, comfortable home, to become a nomadic person traveling around to who knows where.

And as part of the promise, there is something implied.

In order for Abraham and his wife Sarai to be the parents, for him to be the father of a great nation, it implies that they, the 2 of them must therefore have what?

They leave, many years go by, Abraham is super old.

But it seems like they have to take matters into their own hands.

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had born him no children.

And she had an Egyptian maid servant whose name was Hagar.

So Sarai said to Abram, see now the Lord has restrained me from bearing children.

Way to place the blame on God there, Sarah.

He said, you will be the father of a great nation.

But then Abram and Sarai, they said, no, we're gonna help God out.

So they take matters in their own hands and they run the red light of God's divine instruction.

And now Abram goes into Hagar and Ishmael is born.

And the consequence of that 1 decision reverberates throughout history to this very day.

If we get this wrong, if we go when God says stop and we stop when God says go.

Let's take a look at another story in Numbers 13.

The 12 spies have surveyed the land of Canaan.

They've come back bearing heavy laden with the fruit of the land.

Clusters of grape that takes 2 men to carry, along with the figs and pomegranates and all of the things.

The land is lush and flowing with milk and honey.

It is as God has promised, except 10 of the spies added the evil report, Faithless report.

And Caleb, recognizing that this is a green light moment.

God had given them everything they need to take the land and he says, I got to do something.

And we read in verse 30 of Numbers 13, Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, Let us go up at once and take possession for we are well able to overcome it.

And how was Caleb rewarded for his courage and his promptness of action and his decisiveness for God?

The children of Israel wanted to stone him.

They would rather take the word of the 10 faithless spies over the 2 faithful spies and unless God intervened they would have had their way.

And so God says, oh you don't want to go in?

And he says, all of you rebellious and stiff-necked people, you're going to go back 40 years into wilderness and all of you people above an age of 20, you're never going to see the promised land.

And all of a sudden, people are weeping and wailing.

The Crowning Act: Satan’s Personation of Christ and Counterfeit Second Coming

The topic, as you see on the screen, is the crowning act, Satan's personation of Christ, and counterfeit second coming.

I have noticed, since I am at AudioVerse, I hear a lot of things and I get a lot of reactions from various presenters.

This particular topic, for some reason, I don't fully understand.

It engenders a lot of very passionate responses.

People have very strongly held opinions about this particular idea.

And so I guess I mentioned that just to preempt any type of heated reaction.

This might not be from this audience, but this is going on AudioVerse.

So for the sake of those listening on AudioVerse, there might be something here that you may disagree with.

But I do not present it in any way to be critical, and certainly not in a manner that is to be presented as this is the 1 and only way to view the evidence.

I actually think this is 1 of those topics, like so many in prophecy, that there is room for variance in views and opinions.

I am merely here to share what I believe the weight of evidence suggests in scripture and for us to study together for edification.

So that's just to share a little bit about where I'm coming from.

Now this idea of Satan's personation of Christ is actually unique to Seventh-day Adventists in that while it is alluded to in Scripture, most of the detail that we have comes from the spirit of prophecy.

And so a great deal of what we'll be looking at together this afternoon will be the spirit of prophecy.

And I make no apologies that I believe that Sister White is inspired messenger of the Lord, and that her messages are in fact inspired.

And so, with that, with that kind of preamble out of the way, let's go ahead and pray as we begin.

Father in heaven, we come before you today, asking for your Holy Spirit to be here in our midst.

And we do pray that you might help to refocus our attention this Sabbath afternoon now on your word, and that the Spirit might be here to guide us and to teach us in what we are about to study.

And I pray that we might come at it with the right spirit and that we will come away edified and more prepared for the times ahead as we are facing a time of trouble such as not since the nation.

So Lord, we invite your presence now to be with us and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

So we're going to look at the crowning act And we're primarily going to try to understand 2 main things.

But to begin, we need to go back to do a little bit of a review on some of the final events and the timeline associated with it.

The Sunday Law occurs in stages, and this is going to be review, hopefully, for most of us, but this is an important foundation for what we're going to be discussing this afternoon.

The Sunday Law is not 1 monolithic singular event.

In prophecy, the Sunday Law is explained very clearly to come in stages and it actually occurs in 4 stages.

The first stage is that it will be a law that simply causes us to refrain from working on Sunday.

And I have all the references on the screen for you to check me out later and to review.

And this is a period of time in which Ellen White actually gives counsel that we should comply with the law as far as is possible.

Use the day for missionary labor is what she says.

But the Sunday law doesn't stay in this mild phase.

And the next stage is that there is a law that requires us to honor Sunday while still permitting worship on Sabbath and then the third stage now no longer can we worship on Sabbath we must only worship on Sunday you see the progression of the intensity of the Sunday Law.

And some people group number 2 and number 3, the second and third stages together, and you can see the references there, GC page 607, 608.

I can understand why some may group them together, but in this presentation, we're splitting it into 2.

And then the final stage of the Sunday law is the death decree and the death decree is very clearly identified in Revelation chapter 13 but there are other statements there but the the death decree itself can be further subdivided into 2 phases as well.

The death decree initially is a law that is issued, but the law is issued with a effective date in the future.

And the great controversy is very clear about this.

So there are 2 phases to the death decree.

When the law is issued and then the law will have an effective date in the future in which the executions can actually take place.

This is very similar to what happened, you remember, in the story of Esther, right?

The law was enacted but there was a period of time before it was actually to be enacted and during that time was an Esther was able to mount a rescue for her people and the effective date of the death decree more or less aligns with the second coming so this these stages of the Sunday Law take us right down to the second coming of Jesus because you remember the statements from the Great Controversy.

It is at midnight when God's people are about to be killed.

All the enemies gather around them that God's people are delivered.

There's a whole chapter about this called God's people delivered in the great controversy.

So the stages of the Sunday law, it progresses from a mild phase, gradually becoming more and more severe until the death decree.

And even the death decree, there is a future effective date from the time that the law is enacted.

Why do I go through all this trouble to explain all of this?

Well it's gonna become clear in just a moment but just looking at the general progression of things we understand that the final movements will be rapid once.

When we just look at the stages of the Sunday law, these things cannot happen in a day or even a week.

We're talking at least on the order of months, if not perhaps years.

And so this is important because the, of course we can't set any times to this, but to get a sense for the end time events and how long these things take to play out is important when we think about some of the other topics later regarding when the personation of Christ takes place.

Now if you want more information, I'm going to promote AudioVerse here 1 more time, and also Dr.

Norman McNulty, a good friend of Avin Hope, a former leader, He'll actually be here in a few weeks.

I understand He has a presentation on audio verse called the 4 stages of the Sunday law And So don't just take my word for it.

You can listen to his presentation, check us out, look at the Spirit of Prophecy, study the quotes that I have on the slides for yourself.

Let's add a little bit of more nuance to this.

In this second phase, second and third phase of the Sunday Law, this is where the Sunday Law goes from being a national Sunday Law, which is only here in the United States, that's actually how it begins, it becomes a universal Sunday Law, which means it is enacted globally.

And this is also the time where there will be no buying or selling.

And after that, there is going to be The close of probation.

And the close of probation, we talked a little bit in a previous session here this weekend, is when Michael stands up in Daniel chapter 12 verse 1, which is representing the end of the investigative judgment.

The heavenly sanctuary is the work is completed.

Jesus puts off his mediatorial work and he puts on his kingly garments and he gets ready to come back to take his people home and also during this time when the God's people are sealed the 4 winds spoken of in Revelation chapter 7.

And that means the restraining power of the Holy Spirit on the wicked is fully removed at this time.

And it is also during this time that the 7 lax plagues which are filled up with the wrath of God begins to be poured out.

All of these things begin at the close of probation.

And how do I know that the death decree comes after the close of probation?

Well, it's because it is after the close of probation, after the saints are sealed, after the winds are let loose, after the Holy Spirit is withdrawn, that Satan has full sway over the wicked and it is at that time that the wicked finally come to the point where saying we would rather commit genocide on a whole group of people to preserve the peace and the prosperity that we so desperately want, rather than look for some other alternative solution.

And so the death decree comes as a result of the Holy Spirit fully being withdrawn from the wicked.

And that is also when the 7 last plagues begin to fall.

So the judgments of God are falling on the earth and that further entrenches the wicked where they say enough is enough.

We have to enact a law, a global decree that those who refuse to receive the mark of the beast must be killed.

And it is when the law, the death decree is issued that that is the trigger for the beginning of the time of Jacob's trouble.

So this is just giving you a flow of the last day events.

Series

Preparing for the Time of Trouble

Wrestling in the Wilderness

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Unlocking Prophecy

10- The Beast’s Greatest Conspiracy

1h 8m

It's Time Someone Finally Told You the Truth About...

The Human Nature of Christ - Part 2

51m

Angel of the Covenant, Part 2

57m

Final Events

08 God’s Faithfulness Through the 7 Last Plagues

1h 13m

Mindful of God

36m

And. Worship. Him.

37m

Unlocking Prophecy

18- The Best is Yet to Come!

59m

Being Adventist

The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology

1h 7m

Eugene Prewitt: The Spirit of Prophecy

The Faithful Testimony of Jesus and Sources of Unbelief

38m

Morning Devotional: It's War Time

It’s Wartime - Part 5: The Weapons of Our Warfare

54m

Alistair Huong: Examining Our Motives

When Men Have Labor Pains

36m

Letting God out of the Box

54m

Sound Doctrine