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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Norman McNulty

Purging the Filth in the Remnant

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for bringing us here today on the Sabbath day.

We thank you for the opportunity we have to open up the Word of God and to look into the truths of Scripture and to see where we are in earth's history and to see the instruction that God has given to us to prepare us to stand when Jesus comes.

And I pray that you would give me the right words to share with this group this morning, that what I say would be just as you would have me to say it and that it would be an encouragement And also a warning as well.

Amen You know, I would submit to you today that more than every once in a while it's important for God's people living in the last days to hear a message of warning.

And I believe today is going to be more of a warning message.

And certainly we will put Christ at the center of that message, but when you take the Bible in totality, there are more than 1 type of message that God sends to His people, and warning messages are among the type of messages that God sends to His church.

I want to start with a quote from Testimonies, Volume 8, page 28.

It's a very familiar statement, We who know the truth should be preparing for what is soon to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise." And then a very similar statement, Prophets in Kings 626, Christians should be preparing for what is soon to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise.

And my question to you today is, are you preparing for an overwhelming surprise or is it business as usual?

We should be preparing for what is to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise, and this preparation they should make by diligently studying the word of God and striving to conform their lives to its precepts." So, how do we prepare for this crisis?

All right, and continuing, The tremendous issues of eternity demand of us something besides an imaginary religion, a religion of words and forms where truth is kept in the outer court.

God calls for a revival and a reformation.

The words of the Bible and the Bible alone should be heard from the pulpit.

Revival and Reformation, the Bible and the Bible alone.

And that's what we're going to do this morning.

We're talking about the element of surprise.

It's in Middle Tennessee, but we live about an hour away from a famous Civil War battlefield called Shiloh.

And in the story of Shiloh, General Ulysses S.

He and his army were waiting for another general, Don Carlos Buell, to come over from Nashville to reinforce them, and then they were going to march from Shiloh down to Corinth, Mississippi, about 25 miles away, to attack the Confederate Army.

They did not expect, they did not anticipate that the Confederate army would attack them first.

So they were biding their time, waiting for reinforcements to show up, and the Confederates wisely saw that if they waited for a battle when the Union had their entire forces all together, their chances of winning the battle would be diminished.

So, they marched from Corinth to Shiloh and brought a surprise attack on the Union army.

Now, here's the thing, It should have taken 1 day for the Confederates to march from Corinth to Shiloh.

Bad rain hit and it took them 3 days instead of 1 day to march that distance.

That gave the Union army plenty of time to be prepared.

But with that extra time, they were still unprepared when the attack came.

They were sitting around in their tents, eating breakfast, doing whatever, and they had to scramble into position for that battle.

And if they had been prepared, lives would have been saved.

They would have been better prepared for that battle.

And fortunately, for the Union's sake, even though the first day didn't go so well for them, the second day they got those reinforcements from Nashville and they pushed the Confederates back.

But I found in that story a useful illustration.

Sometimes we as God's people are waiting for reinforcements.

We're just waiting for God to do something more in our lives.

When we get more of what we're looking for, when God does more, when we have more education, when we finish our degree, when we do this, when we do that, then we'll go out and we'll fight for the Lord.

And the devil looks at us and he says, if I wait until they are more prepared, they will be able to fight off my attack, so I need to strike now.

And we as God's people need to wake up to the reality that now more than ever is not the time to be sitting back thinking that we're not in a battle, because right now is the battle.

An overwhelming surprise is about to hit the church.

Now, what I'm going to do very briefly is give you a simple outline of the Book of Daniel, and then we're going to 0 in on what I believe is this final conflict, this final battle that is coming to God's last day church.

Now, I'm assuming that most of you here have studied the book of Daniel.

Now is a good time to start studying the book of Daniel because Daniel is a great book to study, to understand what's happening in the time that we're living in Earth's history.

And so I'm just going to give you a brief outline, and I'm not going to talk about everything here, but there's 4 major visions, right?

Daniel 2, Daniel 7, Daniel 8, and then the final 1, Daniel 10 through 12, which is primarily Daniel 11.

The same sequence of kingdoms are found in all of them, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, pagan and papal.

Babylon is missing in Daniel 8 and Daniel 11.

We're not going to talk much about that, but what I want to 0 in on is that At the end of these kingdoms you see that a stone strikes the image God sets up as kingdom.

At the end of the kingdoms in Daniel 7 you see that the judgment sits.

At the end of Daniel 8, at the end of the kingdoms, the sanctuary is cleansed.

At the end of Daniel 11, Michael stands up, probation closes.

Now, when you look at the time frame for each of these events, we don't know when the stone is going to strike the image.

But we do know that the judgment began in 1844 based on our understanding of the 2300-day prophecy in Daniel 8, And we also don't know when Michael is going to stand up.

1 of the things that you see, though, as a focus in each of these chapters is God's people.

It's not just talking about beasts and horns.

Sometimes we spend so much time talking about beasts and horns that we lose sight of the big picture, namely the element of time.

And then we also see that when God subsets His kingdom in Daniel 2, He gives this kingdom to the saints.

Same thing in Daniel 7.27, as a result of the judgment, the kingdom is given to the saints.

In Daniel 8, the cleansing of the sanctuary relates to the cleansing of sin from the lives of God's people, and when Michael stands up he stands for those who are found written in the book.

It's a book about preparation, of standing to meet Jesus when he comes in the clouds.

And we see that those who are prepared are going to receive God's kingdom.

Now, what do we need to focus in on as we look at these prophecies that point to the last days, that point to the end of Earth's history?

Well, I want to just point out a few verses from the book of Daniel.

Daniel chapter 7, verse 25, specifically talks about the length of time that God's people are persecuted.

You see a persecuting power, this is the little horn power of papal Rome that speaks great words against the Most High.

He thinks to change times and laws, and he wears out the saints or persecutes them for 1260 years.

So, there's a period of persecution for 1260 years.

From history we understand that's 538 to 1798.

Belisarius drives out barbaric tribes from the city of Rome, putting in the decree by Justinian that gives the Bishop of Rome power over the state.

1798 you have Pius VI taken captive by Berthier, the General of Napoleon, thus ending papal Rome's control over the state.

During those 1260 years there's persecution.

Now, let me just show you briefly, and I'm just flying through some of these points that should basically be reviewed.

Daniel 11, 33 and 35 speak of a period of persecution.

We see that God's people fall by the sword, by flame, by captivity, and by spoil for many days, and we see that this persecution lasts, in verse 35, till the time of the end.

According to Daniel 7, the 1260 years is the end of the persecution.

We see from history that that persecution ends in 1798, and Daniel 1135 tells us that the time of the end begins when the persecution finishes.

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Purging the Filth in the Remnant

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