GYC 2025: Seeing the Invisible

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Ellen White? Why Should I Care?

Mark Howard

01 Is Ellen White Even Biblical?

02 How Inspiration Works

03 How to Avoid Misreading Ellen White

04 Was Ellen White a Plagiarist?

05 Why I Believe In Ellen White

Gracious Father in heaven, we are so thankful for your many blessings, Lord.

We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit and through the Holy Spirit, the spiritual gifts that function in the church to help us finish the work you've given us to do, to help us to grow up into Christ's likeness and to hasten your soon return.

We ask, Lord, now, as we are gathered here, that the Spirit of God who inspired the prophets would help us to better understand the prophetic ministry.

We Thank you for hearing and answering our prayer for we prayed in Jesus name.

Amen Again, we are the seminar is on the gift of prophecy Ellen White Why should I care if you were heading somewhere else evidently the Lord felt you needed to be here Anyway in our last presentation we talked about the biblical foundation for the gift of prophecy.

First thing that we covered is that prophets are primarily spokespersons for God.

A lot of people say, oh, prophet, there's somebody who tells the future.

But the greatest of the prophets, according to Jesus, was John the Baptist, and he didn't foretell the future.

They were mouthpieces for God More specifically Jesus Christ is the voice speaking through the prophets We looked at the biblical foundation for that in our last session together.

We learned that prophets will function in the church until the end along with the other spiritual gifts according to Ephesians chapter 4.

We learned that prophets, the role of the prophets was always to point people back to the scripture, not to establish a new rule of faith.

And then finally, the Bible is a compilation of the prophetic writings.

Prophets wrote the scripture under the inspiration of the Spirit of God.

And that's what we're going to be talking about in this session.

I will say for those just coming in that the reason that especially the last presentation and this 1 aren't so important is they lay the biblical and theological framework for understanding Ellen White.

So when I do seminars like this, a lot of people want me to, oh just tell me what, explain this to me, explain why Ellen White said this, and what did she talk about bicycles, and why was it, and they don't understand the foundation of anything and you've got to understand how inspiration works you've got to understand how the biblical prophets operated to begin to start a place how do you test a prophet if you don't even know what a prophet is how do you test a prophet from biblical standards if you don't know how prophets functioned or how long they were to function and what have you.

So that presentation and this 1 are dealing with those kinds of things.

Now the inspiration process is as follows And I call it the inspiration process.

It's more than inspiration, which you'll see in a minute.

You start, obviously, with God, who communicates with the Prophet by a process we call, at least theologically, revelation.

Once the prophet has the message, the prophet has to communicate that message to the people of God.

And he does that by what we call inspiration.

We're not done yet because spiritual things are spiritually understood.

So if you're going to understand spiritual things you have to be helped by God and so God helps the recipient of the inspired message to understand and apply it through the process through what we call illumination.

And so all of this is it works together in conveying these messages.

What we are specifically focusing on is how God communicates through the prophet to the people through inspiration we're talking about inspiration and how inspiration works now I shared with the last group a little bit.

I'll be sharing more of this, my personal journey tomorrow morning.

But my parents left the Adventist Church in part over Illinois.

And so when when through a series of miraculous circumstances, the Lord brought me back into the church in my mid-twenties, I was 15 years old when, when we left, I had questions about Ellen White.

And I had to find out for myself biblically whether or not it was true or whether I should believe and how should I.

And it's those kinds of things that have led me to doing seminars like this.

Well, while I was in that journey and I was studying to understand, I was attending a Seventh-day Adventist church that was pretty down on Ellen White.

And I remember having a meeting with the head elder of that church and I asked him, do you believe in Ellen White?

And he said to me, and I'll never forget, I don't know what he said in the whole, but this first 2 sentences he said to me, he looked at me and he said, I believe she was a plagiarist.

And then the next sentence, I believe she was inspired.

And that just led me to, can a plagiarist be inspired?

Can an inspired prophet be a plagiarist and so how does inspiration work how does inspiration work there are 3 common views of inspiration now there are more than 3 but I'm just boiling it down here to 3 common views.

The first view is sometimes called the verbal or mechanical view.

This says that when God communicates the message or helps the prophet to communicate the message to the people.

So, Jeremiah is writing out whatever, in this case we're going to talk about Ellen White, communicating, she received a vision, she's going to communicate it.

The verbal mechanical view says that God dictates the message word for word.

God gives every word and so every word that is written is inspired.

The second view is the thought or plenary.

Now plenary means whole And I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute.

The thought view is that God gives the prophet thoughts and lets the prophet put it, guides the prophet, I should say, into using their own words to convey the thoughts.

And I'll explain more of that as we go as well.

And then finally there's the neo-orthodox or the encounter view.

These were the terms that the late Roger Kuhn...

Oh by the way let me just pause here to say this.

So Roger Kuhn, the late Roger Kuhn, was a theologian and he taught the spirit of prophecy.

Larry, was it at Andrews or was it trying to remember the seminary and other places?

And if you print them out, it's like this thick.

In the resources that I shared with you in the link, there's a folder that says Resources.

And in that Resources folder, you have Dr.

Kuhn's outlines on his Illinois classes that alone is worth the price of admission.

Okay so there you have it I'm gonna refer to that But Dr.

Kuhn had talked about the Neo-Orthodox encounter.

This view was that was a view it was it was a higher critical view that said that instead of God communicating a thought through the prophet, the prophet had an experience and shared the experience on what the prophet said may or may not have come from God.

Some of it may have come from God or none of it may come from God.

This is why this is the kind of view of inspiration.

How many of you are aware that there are biblical scholars who don't believe that the flood ever happened.

That creation didn't take place in the 6 days the Bible said.

Now if you read the Bible you could be like well how isn't the Bible playing that it happened?

When Moses wrote Genesis he had an encounter an experience and in his experience he imagined a six-day creation it didn't really happen but that's how he imagined it and so the neo with the neo-orthodox or encounter view the prophets message comes from an encounter What that does is it basically takes scripture and makes scripture uninspired, or at least portions uninspired.

And so now all of a sudden you're picking and choosing and we'll get into that in a minute.

So you've got these 3 common views of interpretation.

Now Seventh-day Adventists have held the view of thought inspiration as it seems to be the most in harmony with scripture.

We should probably look up 2nd Timothy 3 16 which is the inspiration verse.

In fact it's the only place this word is used in the New Testament.

You are probably familiar with the verse.

The Bible says all scripture, how much scripture?

All scripture is given by inspiration of God.

The word there is theopneustos in the Greek, it literally means God breathed.

Again, it's the only place it appears in the New Testament, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness.

If something isn't reliable or trustworthy, are you going to allow it to correct your course?

The idea that Paul's conveying is because all scripture is inspired, I can allow it to correct me.

Now this concept, again, he says all scripture is inspired, that kind of rules out the neo-orthodox unless you believe that what Paul said wasn't inspired and you get into some but you've got the verbal and the mechanical view of inspiration well why would Seventh-day Adventist not hold with a verbal view well there's lots of reasons but I'll give you a very plain example, and that is the 4 Gospels.

If God dictated every word, why do you have to say it 4 times with 4 different people in 4 different ways and different orders and everything else?

I mean, that gives you right off the bat, it gives you a sense of the fact that the prophets had the story that they were telling, but they told it from their own perspective and in their own words.

And the reality is, in fact, I mean, if you have a trial and you're trying to, you know, come to an understanding of the truth and meet out justice, is it better to have 1 credible witness or 4?

The more witnesses you have, why is it better to have more witnesses?

What if every, let me ask you this, What if every witness got up and told the exact same thing word for word?

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Series

Ellen White? Why Should I Care?

02 How Inspiration Works

Transcript

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Recorded

Parts

01 Is Ellen White Even Biblical?

1h

02 How Inspiration Works

52m

03 How to Avoid Misreading Ellen White

43m

04 Was Ellen White a Plagiarist?

54m

05 Why I Believe In Ellen White

45m

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