GYC SE 2012: Ultimate Purpose

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: The Purpose of the Sanctuary

Norman McNulty

The Sanctuary Message and Adventism

Alright, well it's 2 o'clock, so we should go ahead and get started so we can get through everything.

So, I'm going to have a word of prayer and then we'll get into our presentation.

Father in heaven, We thank you for this Sabbath.

We thank you for this weekend conference talking about our ultimate purpose.

And I thank you that we can spend this afternoon studying the sanctuary message.

Be with me as I speak and be with each 1 of us as we listen.

May you impress upon our hearts and minds the truths that we need to know and understand for our time.

All right, well my name is Norman McNulty and I live about 3 hours west of here in a town called Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.

And I graduated from Southern Adventist University in the year 2000, so I graduated 12 years ago.

And when I was a student, I remember coming to meetings like this in the afternoon.

So it's kind of neat to come back and experience it from the other side, if you will.

And I'm excited about this afternoon's presentation.

We're going to be doing the sanctuary and unfortunately the titles didn't get into the program but let me tell you what our titles are.

First of all the theme for the this afternoon is the purpose of the sanctuary and so the overall theme we're going to find how there is purpose for our lives as Seventh-day Adventists in the sanctuary message.

If you want to know what your ultimate purpose is, be a Seventh-day Adventist and understand the sanctuary message.

And then, so what we're going to do in the first presentation, the title for that is The Sanctuary Message and Adventism.

We're going to see how the sanctuary message is in essence Adventism.

In our second presentation, and I suspect some of you will want to be here for the second 1, we are going to go through the Desmond Ford controversy.

The title is The Sanctuary Message and the Desmond Ford Attack.

Okay, some of you may not have, but he laid a very vicious attack against our sanctuary doctrine and we're going to see what he said and what the Bible really says.

And then in the last presentation, the title is The Sanctuary Message in the Last Generation.

What we're going to do is we're going to look in the book of Hebrews and we're going to see the theme of the sanctuary message in the book of Hebrews and we're going to connect what Jesus has done and is doing and how that Connects to God's people living in the last generation of Earth's history.

So let's go ahead and get into our presentation for our first part this afternoon.

And I'm going to start off by reading a few quotes from Ellen White, from the Spirit of Prophecy, to help us to understand just how important the sanctuary message is.

And this first quote is found in early writings, page 63.

I think this is a familiar quote, but this will set the stage for everything else we're going to talk about.

Ellen White says, there are many precious truths contained in the word of God, but it is present truth that the flock needs now.

And then she goes on to say, I have seen the danger of the messengers running off from the important points of present truth to dwell upon subjects that are not calculated to unite the flock and sanctify the soul.

Satan will here take every possible advantage to injure the cause." So far she said we need present truth and Satan wants our messengers to talk about anything but present truth.

So we want to know what present truth is, right?

Ellen White says, but such subjects as the sanctuary in connection with the 2300 days, the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus are perfectly calculated to explain the past Advent movement and show what our present position is, establish the faith of the doubting, and give certainty to the glorious future.

These I have frequently seen were the principal subjects on which the messengers should dwell." So Ellen White says she frequently saw from God that we should dwell on the sanctuary in connection with the 2300 days, the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.

And the question is why are we as a church not talking about these messages very often?

It's because Satan is trying to distract the messengers from giving the message.

He knows that the sanctuary message in connection with the 2300 days, and by the way, not the 2520, the sanctuary message in connection with the 2300 days is perfectly united, or calculated to unite our flock and to explain our message.

So the first point I'm gonna put up here on the board, why are we talking about the sanctuary?

Well, number 1, because it is present truth.

And we are told that we should frequently focus on this message.

So the first quote that we've seen is that the sanctuary message is present truth for our time.

So if it's present truth for our time, we should be studying it, right?

It's also found in Review and Herald, November 27, 1883.

And here Ellen White says, in his word, God has revealed saving truths.

As a people, we should be earnest students of prophecy.

We should be earnest students of prophecy.

You know the last thing we need are lazy Adventists.

So here we see that we should be earnest students of prophecy.

Where are the earnest students of prophecy in our church?

I know there's some, but there should be way more than what we have.

As a people we should be earnest students of prophecy.

We should not rest until we become intelligent in regard to the subject of the sanctuary.

So Ellen White says we should not rest, we should be earnest students of prophecy and we should not rest until we become intelligent in regard to the subject of the sanctuary.

I mean the sanctuary message, it's present truth and it's something that we need to be intelligent about.

And then she goes on to say, which is brought out in the visions of Daniel and John.

This subject sheds great light on our present position and work and gives us unmistakable proof that God has led in our past experience.

It explains our disappointment in 1844, showing us that the sanctuary to be cleansed was not the earth as we had supposed, but that Christ then entered into the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary and is there performing the closing work of his priestly office in fulfillment of the words of the angel of the prophet Daniel unto 2003 hundred days, then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." And I might say, and we're going to talk about Daniel 8.14, we're going to get into that, but Daniel 8.14 is the verse in scripture that set the Advent movement in motion.

That verse, the sanctuary being cleansed, that is what set our movement in motion.

Now I love this next paragraph in this quote.

And so she's going on talking about the sanctuary.

She says, Our faith, in reference to the messages of the first, second, and third angels, was correct.

So she connects the 3 Angels' messages to the sanctuary.

The great waymarks we have passed are immovable.

Although the hosts of hell may try to tear them from their foundation and triumph in the thought that they have succeeded, yet they do not succeed, these pillars of truth stand firm as the eternal hills unmoved by all the efforts of men combined with those of Satan and his host." Did you hear that?

Ellen White is saying that you can have all of hell coming against the 3 angels' messages, coming against the sanctuary message, and no matter what, this truth stands firm.

So point number 2, and we'll move over to this board.

Number 1, we see that the sanctuary is present truth.

And number 2, we see that it is an eternal pillar of truth.

So based on these 2 quotes already, you've got to see that what we're studying is absolutely essential.

It's a crucial doctrine that we as Seventh-day Adventists need to understand.

Now another familiar quote, Great Controversy, pages 488-489, All who have received the light upon these subjects are to bear testimony of the great truths which God has committed to them.

The sanctuary in heaven is the very center of Christ's work in behalf of men.

It concerns every soul living upon the earth.

It opens the view of the plan of redemption, bringing us down to the very close of time and revealing the triumphant issue of the contest between righteousness and sin.

It is of the utmost importance that all should thoroughly investigate these subjects and be able to give an answer to everyone that asketh them, a reason of the hope that is in them." So of how much importance?

And then she says, this is the key point, the intercession of Christ in man's behalf in the sanctuary above is as essential to the plan of salvation as was his death upon the cross.

The sanctuary is as essential as the cross.

So it's as essential to the plan of salvation as the cross.

We have a present truth message that our messengers should frequently dwell upon.

The Sanctuary Message and Desmond Ford’s Attack

All right, well welcome back and welcome to those of you who were not here the first hour.

And let's have a word of prayer and then we will get into our next presentation.

Father in heaven, we thank you for this privilege we have of studying this sanctuary message.

And as we get into an area of history not that long ago, I pray that it would help us to understand how Satan has tried to attack this message, but yet you have been more powerful and will ultimately prevail So be with me in a special way as we go through this next hour and be with each 1 of us as we listen I pray in Jesus name.

Amen Okay For those of you who weren't here in the first hour, I'll just do a quick summary of what we saw.

We read 4 quotes from the Spirit of Prophecy.

The first 1, Ellen White says, the sanctuary in connection with the 2300 days is present truth message for our time.

We should frequently dwell upon the message.

There's another quote, which I'm gonna come back to later, where she describes this message as an eternal pillar of truth.

Great Controversy 489, she says that the sanctuary message is as essential to the plan of salvation as was Christ's death on the cross.

And she says when we understand this message properly in Testimonies 575, we will prepare people to stand in the day of God and our efforts will be successful.

And then we went through some of the history and 2300 days and all of that.

So I'm gonna leave that up on the board for now.

Now we are going to go into our next presentation.

And you know, as someone who studies our message and as I present this message I find for some odd well it's not a strange reason to me, but whenever you talk about history where there was apostasy, that gets a lot more interest than if you just give a straightforward Bible study on the sanctuary doctrine itself.

But there's a reason why I'm talking about this, it's not to get more interest, it's to show, the first presentation shows the sanctuary message is the substance and essence of Adventism and now we're going to see that Satan hates this message and he's attacked it and we're going to see how he's attacked it.

And so the first presentation was entitled The Sanctuary Message and Adventism.

This message is entitled The Sanctuary Message and Desmond Ford's Attack.

Now I'm going to read a quote from Councils to Writers and editors, page 40, which you've probably heard before, which sets the stage for what we're going to talk about.

If other means fail, heresies will come in among them which will sift them, separating the chaff from the wheat.

The Lord calls upon all who would believe his word, or who believe his word, to awake out of sleep, which tells me that we as a church were sound asleep when the Desmond Ford crisis hit.

If we had been awake and doing the work we were supposed to be doing, the Lord would have had to allow this heresy to come into our church.

Precious light has come appropriate for this time.

It is Bible truth showing the perils that are right upon us.

This light should lead us to a diligent study of the scriptures and a most critical examination of the positions which we hold.

So let me just say this again, if we had not been asleep as a people the Desmond Ford heresy never would have needed to come in but here's what happened.

We as God's people were in 1979 and I could say that 1979 in many ways looks like 2012.

I would say that the men in the Seventh-day Adventist Church had a better understanding of what their favorite baseball and football teams needed to do to win the playoffs and What players they needed to get so that they could have the best successful season possible and the women probably had a better understanding of the latest fashions hitting Hollywood and the movies and their favorite movie stars and this and that and whatever, and few precious few Adventists could give you a meaningful study on the Sanctuary Doctrine.

I go around to a few places and there's a lot of ignorance to our message.

And so now we're gonna see when there's ignorance to the message, you can have a smooth-tongued theologian with a terminal degree in theology who sounds like he knows way more than you ever have and he will make you convinced that what you thought you believed never was true because you never studied.

And then he dictates the terms of your study So that now you don't really know what you believed in the first place.

And when we should have been studying we were caught up with the cares of this life.

I'm going to now look at the perspective, I'm going to read a perspective from an eyewitness who was there and this comes from a paper entitled 1844, Embattled Yet Enduring.

It was written by a pastor by the name of Kevin Paulson.

Some of you may know Kevin Paulson and it's at a website greatcontroversy.org and it was written August 12, 2006.

For those of you who would like the reference.

I'm gonna use it a little bit for our presentation this afternoon, but if you want more detail, I would encourage you to go back and look at it.

And the first thing, well, I'm just gonna read it straight through and then we'll talk about it.

But this is a very fascinating eyewitness account.

On the fall quarter events calendar, we noted a scheduled meeting of the Association of Adventist Forms, and this is when he got to school at Pacific Union College.

And Desmond Ford was the featured speaker.

His title, The Investigative Judgment, Theological milestone or historical necessity?

The words, the very words ring uneasy bells in the minds of the faithful.

The meeting was scheduled for October 27, 1979.

So we're talking nearly 33 years ago to the day just 2 weeks short of 33 years since this happened Now for those of you who are college kids that seems like a long time ago But in the history of Adventism, it's pretty recent Yeah, mine too.

I guess I would have been 2 years and 3 months old yeah so I was 2 years old when this happened it was October 27 1979 and I imagine it was probably a day somewhat like today.

Word seemed to have gotten around that Ford was about to make a major statement.

Devotees of his theology gathered to the PUC campus from far and near.

1 reported to me much later that the evening before, Ford had stated to her, what I say tomorrow will be heard around the world.

And guess what, we're talking about it 33 years later.

That same evening I spoke on the telephone with Dr.

Herbert Douglas, then serving as senior book editor at the Pacific Press.

He was certain Ford would be extremely subtle in his assertions and would need, in Douglas' words, to be smoked out of his lair.

He believed utterly out of the question that Ford would join Robert Brinsmead in directly attacking the historic SDA sanctuary doctrine.

I then told Douglas I would call him the following evening after Ford's presentation but only if something dramatic occurred.

He seemed quite sure I would not be calling him.

At 3.30 the following afternoon, 2 friends and I knelt for prayer in my dormitory room prior to leaving for the meeting site.

Somehow we too sensed something serious was about to happen.

As we approached Paulin Hall where the meeting was to occur, we saw the doors open and a crowd start pouring out.

Running ahead, I learned that due to overflow numbers, the meeting was being relocated to Irwin Hall, PUC's historic building, which then overlooked the lower expanse of classrooms, walkways, and the college church complex.

My friends and I turned around and hurried up the long stone staircase, anxious to find good seats.

At 1 point I asked, with a hint of sarcasm, what are we running for, so we can hear the investigative judgment thrown away?

My negative premonitions were growing stronger.

Ford began his discourse with his own testimony, describing doubts he had held for decades about the harmony of the Adventist sanctuary doctrine with the Book of Hebrews.

He went on to discount the validity of the year-day principle, denied any linguistic connection between Daniel 8, 14 and the depiction in Leviticus 16 of the ancient cleansing of the sanctuary, and declared that the book of Hebrews places Christ in the most holy place, not in 1844, but immediately at his ascension.

The crowd loved every word, greeting Ford's message with enthusiastic applause.

At least 1 retired North American Division president was there rising to his feet during the question period with a choked voice and a breaking heart.

A group of us gathered in the back after the meeting hardly believing what we had just heard.

Upon returning to my dorm room I called Herbert Douglas again as I had promised to do and the advent of Ford's message was newsworthy.

By the time I finished, his sorrow was palpable.

Tapes of the meeting belted the world in days.

Soon the General Conference intervened, arranging with Pacific Union College that Ford be given a six-month leave of absence, during which time he would prepare a defense of his views, which would then be examined by a committee of persons from varied backgrounds.

Ford's manuscript titled Daniel 814, The Day of Atonement and the Investigative Judgment, totaled 991 pages and was eventually published in book form.

An abbreviated version of the manuscript was also published in Spectrum magazine.

A group of 114 scholars, pastors, and church administrators, soon to be called the Sanctuary Review Committee, met to consider Ford's case at the Glacier View Ranch near Ward, Colorado, the week of August 10-15, 1980.

Less than a month later, following unsuccessful efforts by church leaders to urge Ford's reconsideration of his stand, the General Conference recommended to the Australasian Division that Ford's ministerial credentials be removed.

The years that followed would see scores of pastors and a number of congregations exit the ministry as well as the denomination.

And the controversy thus ignited continues to this day.

Ford began, oh sorry I already read that, so And then he goes on to say, it is an epic the church dare not forget and 1 whose unfinished business remains essential to the task of contemporary Adventism.

The Sanctuary Message and the Last Generation

I've enjoyed this afternoon with you and I'm excited about our last presentation, which to me is the best 1, at least as far as what I enjoy talking about.

Whether or not you enjoy it the best is your response, but it's for me the most enjoyable.

And for those of you who came in late, again, my name is Norman McNulty, and I graduated from Southern Adventist University in 2000 with a biochemistry degree.

Graduated from Loma Linda in 2004 from medical school and I did a residency in neurology and did a fellowship in EMG and EEG and that kind of thing for a year.

And then my wife and I went to Trinidad for 2 years as missionaries.

Had a great experience in ministry down there for 2 years in the Caribbean.

And we just got back to Tennessee in March of this year and I have a practice over in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.

So we're not too far from here, about 3 hours away, and it's nice to come back to Southern, and as I said at the very first presentation that I gave, when I was a college student, I would come to Sabbath afternoon meetings like this, like there's the Adventist Theological Society and some other things like that back in my day.

I don't know what they do now but I always enjoyed the Sabbath afternoon meetings and in fact I remember there was 1 theology major who was who gave a whole several week presentation on the sanctuary dealing with the Desmond Ford issues and that was way back then.

So I've always had an interest in these things and when I went out to medical school I figured you know if I can devote my mind to studying science really hard, if I take even just a little bit of time to also study the Bible that would be a really nice combination to have.

And so that's what I did when I was out of medical school and in residency as well.

After I finished medical school, I spent a lot of time studying the Bible, studying our message, and trying to learn these things so that I could share it with others in a way that hopefully makes sense.

So this is sort of what I do on the side, but I enjoy it.

Why don't we have a word of prayer and we'll get into our last presentation for the afternoon.

Father in Heaven, we thank you for the opportunity we've had this afternoon to study the sanctuary doctrine and now as we get into some of the passages from the book of Hebrews I pray that it will be clear and that it will inspire us to be part of a special group of people living in the last days of Earth's history.

So the first hour, sanctuary message in Adventism.

Second hour, the sanctuary message in Desmond Forth Attack.

This hour, the sanctuary message in the last generation.

Okay, how many of you have studied the book of Hebrews?

That's okay, Although a year from now that wouldn't be okay.

You know, we as God's people should study and know what we believe.

And the book of Hebrews is actually a very systematic book.

There are some books in the Bible that are not so systematic like 1st Corinthians is more like selected messages, but if you look at Romans, Hebrews, Daniel, Revelation, those books are very systematic.

They follow a clear theme and there's a clear intent that the author has.

And Paul has a very clear purpose for writing the book of Hebrews.

He wrote it in about 66 AD, about 4 years before Jerusalem was destroyed.

And he was concerned because the Jewish Christians were hanging on to the Jewish rites and ceremonies even though Christ had done away with them and in 4 years their city was going to be destroyed and Paul wanted to make sure that they realized that their hope was not in Jerusalem, their hope was in the New Jerusalem.

And so that was 1 of the first reasons he wrote the book and he also showed them that the sanctuary is now in heaven it's not on earth.

The sanctuary service here on this earth that had its purpose but when Jesus died on the cross all of that transferred to the sanctuary in heaven and Jesus is our high priest not the the Levitical priest here on this earth it's Jesus in heaven and that's where you're to look so that that's really what Paul was trying to get out but he gets into some very specific issues What I'm going to do just to start off is to show you how Paul develops some very key points in the book of Hebrews.

Hebrews chapter 1, Paul sets out to prove that Jesus is God.

And the way he proves that Jesus is God is he quotes God the Father and in verse 8 God the Father says to the Son, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever." So on the basis of the Word of God the Father, God the Father says, Jesus the Son is God and your throne is forever and ever.

So if you want to have a divine stamp of approval saying that Jesus really is God?

Hebrews 1 tells us, based on scripture, that God the Father says to the Son, you are God.

Hebrews 2 shows that Jesus truly was a man.

Starting in verse 14, for as much then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same.

How many more adjectives did Paul need to use?

He also himself likewise took part of the same.

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GYC SE 2012 Seminar: The Purpose of the Sanctuary

The Sanctuary Message and Desmond Ford’s Attack

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The Sanctuary Message and Adventism

55m

The Sanctuary Message and Desmond Ford’s Attack

59m

The Sanctuary Message and the Last Generation

49m

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