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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dave Fiedler - Adventism: Past and Future

Dave Fiedler

Consecration and Fanaticism

The Alpha and Omega of Apostasy

Medical Ministry

The Making of None Effect

Okay, well if you look at the first slide, this is something that...

It just sounds boring And you know, there are poor misguided underprivileged souls Who think that Adventist history is actually boring and the fact is?

I am not interested in history for the sake of history.

There are all sorts of little isolated tidbits of history and there might be interesting, you know, some particular individuals life story from, you know, wherever, whenever.

But you know, I just don't have enough time in my life to deal with all of that.

And so I go looking for history that has some value to it.

Remember his famous comment, history is bunk?

I Kind of agree with him, you know, despite the fact that I teach this stuff Well, then I went and I wrote a book and Adventist history right there in this in the subtitle, you know, and I tried to dress it up, but it still sounds kind of boring, you know.

In some small circles of Adventist society, I've come to be known as kind of an Adventist history guy, you know, and that's fine.

But it's boring and it doesn't really strike the core of why I have any interest in it in the first place.

I am really only interested in history as a way to understand at least the present and hopefully the future.

Futury is probably not going to make the cut into the dictionary anytime soon.

And I got to thinking about it and it just didn't seem like it was appropriate for a university audience.

And so I came up with a an alternate title.

If it makes you feel better, we can go with this.

And that's more or less, you know, accurate if you can decipher it all, you know.

What I want to look at this weekend, just select selected episodes from Adventist history.

There's a bit of a chronological flow to them, but they're somewhat disjointed.

I just picked the ones that I liked, actually.

Ones that, to my mind at least, hold greater than average merit as an avenue of trying to understand not just the future but specifically the closing events of Adventism I Really worry when we lose sight of the concept of closing events, you know, it's it's like I Don't want to I don't want to die before the jobs done You know, we've got to have a we've got to have a closer on this operation, you know, so that's what I'm after To begin with though, I like to start off with this quote.

The Lord directed Moses to recount to the children of Israel his dealings with them and their deliverance from Egypt, and their wonderful preservation in the wilderness.

He was the call to mind, their unbelief and murmuring when brought into trial, and the Lord's great mercy and loving kindness which had never forsaken them." It's an interesting balance there.

This would stimulate their faith and strengthen their courage.

You know, I have my little problems with some presentations on Adventist history.

There are some presentations which are focused so solely on the unbelief and the murmuring that if I shared that perspective, I might also share the conclusion of some of these dear souls that the church is hopelessly lost and wandering around forever and ever and ever and ever in the wilderness of sin.

And some people have ended up with that conclusion.

And then there are others that focus so much on the Lord's great mercy and loving kindness that it just seems to me that they're missing the opportunity to learn something.

I'd like to try and strike the balance and actually stimulate faith and strengthen courage.

While they, the Israelites, would be led to realize their own sin and weakness, they would realize also that God was their righteousness and strength.

It is just as essential that the people of God in this day should bear in mind how and when they have been tested and where their faith has failed.

You know this is this is not quite your you know power of positive thinking and just you know everything's wonderful have a happy day approach.

Where they have imperiled His, that would be God's cause by their unbelief and also by their self-confidence.

God's mercy, His sustaining providence, His never-to-be-forgotten deliverances are to be recounted step by step.

As God's people thus review the past, they should see that the Lord is ever repeating his dealings.

That gives me hope that there's value in history.

Have you ever had a teacher that never reviewed anything before the test?

It's like, you know, they lecture 1 day on something totally new and they test you on it the next day and move on to another totally new topic.

Now maybe that's the way they do mid-school.

I haven't gone through mid-school, so I don't know how that works.

Most of us like, well I won't say like, but most of us do a little better with our learning if you have a little repetition to it.

Now what to me that means is that if I can if I can submit my mind to the Lord's leading, probably more than anything else, I should be able to find episodes in church history, specifically Adventist history, that foreshadow events to come.

That's the premise I'm working from here.

If I'm wrong on the premise, then I hope you enjoy the stories but That's the premise.

I'm working from I I really believe that God is working with this church heading in a certain direction and You know, it's like the children of Israel you go round and round, you know, it's really easy And I'm not trying to do this in any sort of a dogmatic or whatever sort of a way.

But you know, it's not hard to construct pretty close to 40 year cycles through Adventist history.

You know, 1844, you can toss in 1856, 57 as a interesting opportunity, but you can jump straight up to 1888, 1927-1928, there was a bit of a revival there again on the subject of righteousness by faith.

Jump from 28 to the late 60s, early 70s, there was a sort of a revival.

I don't know how many of you would have been around to remember that.

But you know, there was sort of a revival.

And you know, if you go from the late 60s, 40 years, it starts to get interesting.

I'm not saying that the Lord works, you know, in some sort of a rigidly mathematical manner, but it's interesting.

And I do believe that He's taking us around and around and around.

And, you know, if we can't look at our past and see some similarities of this occasion to this occasion to this occasion, I think it means we're missing the lesson.

Well, the most famous statement probably within Adventism on Adventist history comes from Life Sketches, page 196, the nothing to fear.

You know, we have nothing to fear for the future.

Except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us and his teaching in our past history.

When Ellen White wrote that, was it like 2 sentences later, she says, having traveled over every step of the way You know she lived through it I Didn't wasn't my fault.

If I'm going to get anything out of those years, I think I'm going to have to learn about them.

Just kind of the hard cold facts, As near as I've got it figured.

We're going to sort of start at the beginning here.

William Miller sort of started this whole Adventist thing in certain ways.

Of course, hey, I'm not saying that it was all brand-new doctrine.

It's amazing how little Miller actually contributed to theology that sprang out the whole Adventist church.

Basically Miller did 1 thing effectively.

If you want to kill the Adventist Church immediately, split Daniel 8 and Daniel 9.

And we can all be Baptists or whatever else.

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Series

Dave Fiedler - Adventism: Past and Future

Consecration and Fanaticism

Transcript

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