Is Ellen White a plagiarist? a false prophet? Did she teach that we should not have the assurance of salvation? or should not even buy and ride a bike? In this video, our guest speaker, Joakim Hjortland discussed guidelines on how to understand the writings of Ellen White and how these principles answer some of the arguments thrown against Ellen White. Watch and be blessed!

<p>Is Ellen White a plagiarist? a false prophet? Did she teach that we should not have the assurance of salvation? or should not even buy and ride a bike? In this video, our guest speaker, Joakim Hjortland discussed guidelines on how to understand the writings of Ellen White and how these principles answer some of the arguments thrown against Ellen White. Watch and be blessed!</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 Defense League

Joakim Hjortland

Ellen White Under Fire

Welcome to Advent Defense League and greetings from Sweden.

I'm Joakim Jutland from Amazing Facts Center of VanLessum Europe.

And today we are going to talk about Ellen White under fire.

Ellen White under fire is a topic I'm excited about an important topic and but before we get into that let's have a word of prayer together shall we?

Dear Heavenly Father thank you for this opportunity to learn we pray that you may bless this time help us to understand how you want us to view these things we pray that it may help us closer to you and your beautiful plan for our lives this is our prayer and we pray and we thank you in the precious name of Jesus amen So I want to start off with going to an important and powerful verse, Revelation chapter 12.

You can turn with me there, if you are able to.

The context here, this chapter, fascinating chapter, it talks about God's people up through history.

Starts with describing Israel, God's people and then the church during the Dark Ages and then in the end of the chapter, so it's kind of a short overview of God's church, God's people up through history.

In the end of the chapter we have a snapshot of God's end time people, God's remnant church, God's church in the last days and it says there, Revelation chapter 12 verse 17 it says, and the dragon was enraged with the woman and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Now we're here given a few identifying characteristics of God's end-time church, of God's remnant Church.

It says they keep the commandments of God not only some of them, God's end time people will keep all the 10 commandments, all God's commandments including the precious Sabbath commandment right?

And it also says that they have the testimony of Jesus, the testimony of Jesus Christ.

According to the same author, Revelation chapter 19 verse 10, also Revelation chapter 22, parallel passage there to Revelation 19 10, it's very clear that the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy or the gift of prophecy.

So God's end time people among all these different groups and believers and even all these different denominations existing, 1 thing that will separate God's and Last Day Church from the others is that they will have the gift of prophecy.

Now we often notice these 2 things but there is 1 third characteristic that is also very interesting that we easily miss.

1 more thing we are told about God's end-time people that is interesting to notice and helpful to notice.

It says that the dragon was enraged with the woman and went to make war with the rest of her offspring.

So the dragon was enraged and this is strong language actually here he was terribly angry he was furious as some translation put it he's doing everything he can to counteract the work of God's to work against God's end time church God's end time people and he shouldn't really surprise us he has done that throughout all times now my teacher 1 of my teachers as you see here on the slide, Pastor Mark Howard, he often had this experience.

He used to be my teacher and he told us back in class, back in the day, he said that, oftentimes when you have these big evangelistic campaigns, you know, these many meetings, long evangelistic campaign, far into the series, someone comes up to him and they say something like this, Pastor Howard, I have loved your meetings, you know, we really enjoyed your meetings, you know, been learning all these things, but then I went to the internet, they say, and there I found all kind of attacks against all kind of negative things about your church.

Now, Pastor Hovart's response is an interesting 1.

What he would respond when people would say that would be something like this.

That's 1 of the identifying characteristics of God's remnant church.

And I think that's a good response, isn't it?

Because according to the text, obviously, if that's the only characteristic that fits our church, we're not really, that's not solid, right?

But if we did not have opposition, if we did not have negative things said, if we did not have criticism, we should start to wonder, is this truly the right church to be in?

So my experience is, when I have seen the criticism that we have against our church against our beliefs and in particular against Ellen White and it hasn't shaken my faith it has strengthened it it shouldn't shake it take away our faith it should actually give us confidence when we see the kind of criticism that is out there.

Now what do you think, what would you suppose would be the main focus of Satan's attacks against the Remnant Church?

Would it not make sense that he would especially attack the commandments and the Testament of Jesus, the gift of prophecy, which is the 2 things that here is described as separating God's remnant church, as identifying God's remnant church, as setting them apart.

And again it shouldn't surprise us if that was the case because all up through Bible history Satan has especially attacked the 10 Commandments and God's prophets again and again and again and again.

In fact Stephen put it like this, which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?

Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?

I like how Jude Lake put it in the very first paragraph of his book Ellen White Under Fire.

He said this, Never before has criticism of the Seventh-day Adventist Church been more accessible to the average church member and the general public.

Scores of websites and blogs denouncing the church and its doctrines are available at the simple click of a mouse.

He continues From bizarre personal attacks to more sophisticated criticism, opponents of the Seventh-day Adventist Church relentlessly pound its teaching on the worldwide Web.

It's no exaggeration to say that the war on Adventism is a global war.

And then he finishes off the paragraph by saying this, the major target of all this criticism is Ellen White.

Now what we are going to do today, the rest of the time here, I was basically well it's so much you could talk about, you could spend many hours on this topic.

So what I decided to do, I was thinking of doing it differently first, but I decided to basically, what I want to share with you now is to share briefly, we could have spent much time on each of these points, but I want to share briefly 10 general principles that are relevant when it comes to criticism against Ellen White that are very helpful.

10 general principles and basically pretty much all the criticisms you could say is covered with these 10 principles.

Some statements of this you know that is criticized some of the criticism some of the statements that they bring forth from Ellen White that they quote from Ellen White they are seemingly contradictory or hard to understand.

Some of the statements are seemingly contradictory with other statements she makes or with scripture, with the Bible.

It's seemingly contradicting the Bible or they are hard to understand.

Now we find the same thing all throughout the Bible, don't we?

You can find, it's not hard to find Bible verses that seemingly contradicts other Bible verses, right?

Even within the same book or by the same author, it's not hard to find statements from Paul somewhere that seemingly contradict things he says other places, right?

And so we should not be surprised if the same would happen with a modern-day prophet.

Now, Peter said something very interesting about Paul in 2nd Peter 3 16 he said as also in all his epistles speaking in them of these things talking about Paul here in which are some things hard to understand which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction as they do also the rest of the scriptures." Now I also like how the message translation puts it, the same verse here, so I'll read that 1 also.

Some things Paul writes are difficult to understand.

Irresponsible people who don't know what they are talking about twist them every which way.

They do it to the rest of the Scriptures too, destroying themselves as they do it.

There are some things in the Bible obviously some things from Paul that are hard to understand that seemingly contradicts other things.

Again we should not we should expect the same to be the case and some of the criticism some of the things they bring the critics bring forth is basically just that.

It's seemingly contradictory, but it's, there are good answers.

It's hard to understand maybe, but, but it's a good explanation to it.

So it kind of on a building on or continuing on from, from that note, some criticism is a result of twisting things that Ellen White said, that she said.

Now I recently read an interesting little story, Jake Tapper from CNN, He said the following on the air.

He said that he talked about the terrorist attack in New York City and he said, the Arabic chant, Allah who Akbar God is great.

He said, sometimes he said under the most beautiful of circumstances and too often we hear of it being said in moments like this.

You know, he's talking about this terrorist attack and he said this phrase, Allah Akbar, sometimes he says it on these beautiful occasions, but too often we hear in moments like this.

Now, when Fox News described this, they said this about Jake Tapper.

They said that Jake Tapper from CNN says that, go back to the other slide, Jake Tapper says, Allahu Akbar is beautiful right after New York City terror attack.

So completely out of context, they make it sound really bad.

So obviously, Jake Tapper was not so happy.

So his response to that was the following.

He tweeted the following Fox News is lying.

I said it can be said at beautiful moments, wedding, birth, and too often at times like this horrific terrorist attacks.

So they really took it out of context and made it sound like he almost supported, you know, he thought it was beautiful, he almost supported this terrorist attack, far from what he did.

Fox News deleted the tweet, but they kept a story about this on their website.

And also they talked about this, they repeated this on the air later on.

So it's easy to misquote people, isn't it?

It's easy to twist what people say to make it sound the opposite of what they actually said or what they actually thought about the situation, right?

Do you know how much Ellen White wrote in total?

She wrote actually approximately 100, 000 pages approximately 25 million words.

She's the most prolific female author in the entire history of literature and in other words she wrote approximately 30 times as much as the Bible.

Now if you write that much 26 books or if you count the compilations more than a hundred books You could make anyone that writes that much sound bad if you take it out of context and you twist what you say, can't you?

Back to Menu

Ellen White Under Fire

Transcript

Description

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine