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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Mark Howard

Sons of God

Heavenly Father, again we thank you for the privilege we have of being here.

During the hours of your Sabbath, we just ask your Holy Spirit would give us a level of alertness that we may retain, that we may hear, that we may learn, that we may retain the things that we study this evening.

Oh, Father, we wanna be ready when Jesus comes.

More than that, we wanna be the means of glorifying you in your Holy name.

So Father, as you hear our prayer in Jesus name, make haste to deliver.

This morning, for those who are here, I started by throwing out that polarizing question.

All the discussions that have gone on in Adventism and the way that word comes across today.

You know, it gets people's attention, like it or not.

And people will come up afterwards and they'll say things like, man, I heard that.

But I'll tell you something that is unique to Seventh-day Adventism, And I don't want you to miss what I'm about to say.

We're going to be looking at the scripture here this evening.

You know, when I use a word like perfect, we can read a lot of things into that.

We're going to look at scripture tonight in a passage where the Apostle John basically tells us We don't know we don't have a concept what it would look like for us to be perfect.

Okay, we're gonna look at that in scripture There's a lot that can be read into it.

There's a lot that people debate into it And so I can't subscribe to any and every view out there, but I will say this.

The concept of the cleansing of the sanctuary, the concept of the finishing of the mystery, you know, whatever we're looking at, whatever terminology that we're using, implies, no no no, it more than implies that Jesus' purpose is going to be completed in His people before He comes.

He cannot return until that purpose is completed.

Jones was 1 of 2 gentlemen who according to Ellen White, the Lord used to bring the message of righteousness by faith more prominently before our church.

Both Wagner and Jones believed and taught that the last generation would be perfect before Jesus returned.

It's not the part, you're not going to hear that from everybody who claims to be promoting it today, but A.T.

The preaching of the gospel is essential.

This gospel must be preached in all the world as a witness, and then the end shall come.

But he says we can preach that message for 10, 000 years, And unless God has a people who are ready to meet him at that time, we can preach that message 10, 000 years and the end will never come.

What's fascinating to me and tragic at the same time is that A.T.

Jones addressed the General Conference session in the year 1903.

I don't know what he titled his sermon then, it's been reprinted recently under the title, What it Means to be a Church Member.

In it he talks about the cleansing of the sanctuary and the work that Jesus is doing in the lives of his people.

And it's in that sermon that he makes the point that I just quoted.

We can preach that thing for another 10, 000 years and the Lord won't come unless he has a people who are ready to meet him.

That if we, and I'm paraphrasing now, if we take God seriously, then he can come in this generation.

Obviously he didn't come in that generation.

To add insult to injury, in the book Education by Ellen White, published in 1905.

She said that the highest calling, this is in a chapter called The Life Work, I've assigned it while I've been here before, if you haven't read it in a while, read it again, it's a good 1.

Education, The Life Work, And she says the highest calling that anyone can have, and I think she targets especially the youth, as she's talking about this, is to preach the gospel to the world in this generation.

Now, again, the tragic part of it is, I believe it.

I believe Ellen White was right in 1903 and in 1905, and here we sit.

Here we sit, And what's worse is we blame it on God.

God forbid we say anything about hastening the coming of Jesus and putting it on us.

And Ellen White makes a statement that I can't give you the page number in the book Evangelism, which says, we may have to remain in this world many more years because of our insubordination to God, but Let us not add sin to our sin by charging God with the results of our own wrong course of action.

We're here because we're not ready and he's merciful.

And that's what scripture says, God's long suffering.

Now I'm going to tell you here this evening, as sure as I'm standing here, He can come in this generation.

The belief of the early Adventists was that the cleansing of the sanctuary simply taught that Jesus was going to purify his people so that his character would be reflected in them, and when that was finished, he would come to claim them as his own.

A theologian in the mid-1900s, a prominent leading theologian in the Adventist Church by the name of M.L.

Andreasen wrote a chapter on it in his book, The Sanctuary Service.

That book incidentally was called by the late Dr.

Harding was a phenomenal writer in the sanctuary, that Andreas' book was the best all-around overall book you could get on the sanctuary and read on the sanctuary.

There's a chapter in that book called The Last Generation.

And he talked about that concept that Jesus would have a final generation who would reflect his image fully.

It became known, or later on, the viewpoint became dubbed, Last Generation Theology.

Now I can't expound on every aspect of what Andreasen thought about last generation theology, but I'm bringing that up even here and now because what we're going to be looking at tonight, if you share it with some people, they'll say, oh, that's last generation theology.

Something I didn't tell you earlier is, oftentimes before somebody marginalizes an idea, they label the idea.

Well, they said this and this oh those guys are Adventist regressionists Have and I'm making that term up.

I don't maybe it's out there, but I mean I'm just for a safe it So you label it?

Oh those guys are Adventist regressionists?

Yeah, I mean the reality is they make up any and here's something a friend of mine brought this point up that I think is very true, unfortunately, that if you throw a statistic on it, it sounds more credible.

Yeah, you know, the reality is they only make up 5 to 7 percent of the church.

And studies show that nearly 85% of Adventist regressionists come from male dominant homes.

Now, that's the kind of thing, so what happens, I made all that up, but what happens is when you hear that, now you just came out of a sermon, you thought it was great, but by the time you hear that you start thinking, I don't want to be associated with that, right?

All the language is trying to give credibility and downplay what you heard without ever refuting the truth of what you heard.

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