The Lesson of the Bears and the Boys

My pastor's weekly newsletter this week was about the story of Elisha and the boys who taunted him and were subsequently killed by a couple of angry she-bears.  The original Hebrew, as Pastor Stephan points out, more than likely isn't talking about what we would consider children these days. The bears didn't brutalize a T-ball team. The word translated as boys in this story refers in other places to young men. The Israelites considered anyone under 30 to be not an "adult" but a young male. And we all have been treated lately to the sort of orchestrated violence young people can get up to when incited by media and ideological party leaders.

The way this story is written, the confrontation of Elijah by the youthful servants of Baal (it's likely that's who they were) suggests an imminent attack on Elisha was planned. Certainly the story was going around that Elijah was actually dead and that his going up to Heaven was a lie perpetrated by Elijah. It was in the interest of the pro-Baal party to spread this sort of gossip. Later their descendants, the pro-Sanhedrin party of Israel in Jesus' time, repeatedly attempted to stone, throw off a cliff and arrest Christ for disagreeing with their dogma. It's no surprise that their cultural ancestors (the "boys" in this story) would have been gathered to do harm to Elisha and to shut up the man who opposed them. The bears were simply God's security team protecting Elisha, whose work was not yet completed in Israel.

Jesus said we would recognize the signs of his imminent return in the same way that leaves in Spring speak of the coming Summer. One can hardly look around, watch the news, hear the taunts of today's version of those young men in the story, and not see evidence of the soon-coming Savior. The young men have gathered. Google Seventh-day Adventist and you'll see page after page of anti-Adventist web pages and entire sites dedicated to opposing Adventism. I saw one "pastor" ranting about how horrible SDAs are and how they should be knocked in the head until they come to their senses. He flat out recommends that we be prevented from buying or selling until we cease spreading our lies. It was pretty stunning hearing a self-proclaimed Christian defender saying it straight out like that.

The devil is among us like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. It is hardly surprising that the church is being attacked from without and within. Only by knowing God and Jesus whom He has sent, is there any safety in this momentous age. But God is working among all those children of His. There is a growing division in the Catholic church and among Protestants as well between progressive leadership and those who prefer to get their theology straight from the Word. Many Christian leaders wonder after the Beast, seeking to gather themselves and lead their followers to join the popular herd without challenging the traditions that Satan has worked so hard for millennia to embed in churches, the culture, the media and governments. 

At the same time, we see Christians waking up and questioning things they've long been told and which are generally believed without question. It seems the Holy Spirit is moving God's scattered flock to go back to the Bible to check out some things they've been told about God that don't jibe with the God of Love they have come to know. I recently came upon an Assemblies of God pastor who has published the Bible with the books in their original order. To my surprise, Pastor Coulter talks about the ever-burning hell idea being false doctrine. Other whole churches worldwide are accepting the Sabbath truth. Amazing Facts director, Doug Batchelor, recently was invited to preach in the largest Christian church in India (if not the world). 

We're in the sheep and goats time of history. The polarization of political parties usually leads to sharp disagreements and violence, especially if their followers suddenly begin thinking for themselves, asking awkward questions, and (to the horror of the leader class), choosing another path. The apostate church leaders, who hold to a kind of "divine right of kings" with regard to their own authority, will gather loyal followers and encourage them to taunt anyone who deviates from the accepted convoluted pack of lies Satan and his minions have for so long perpetrated on the Christian world.

And one need not study for very long before you find that what you read in Scripture is on many points at variance from what you hear from the mainstream pulpits of the land. When Bible students take a hard look at doctrines like the immortality of the soul, ever-burning hell, transfer of sanctity of the 7th day Sabbath to Sunday, and priestly authority to forgive sins, and find a different truth, it makes a lot of people who have taken the name of Christ and claim to speak for him, exceedingly angry. When you realize that the idea of an immortal soul negates John 3:16 since it means God no longer gives eternal life to those who believe in Jesus, it raises questions about all you have believed. Everyone good or bad, believer or unbeliever is by nature already immortal mainstream religion claims. So, logically, God can only burn people in the lake of fire forever, since He cannot kill an immortal soul as this doctrine claims. So logically, this means God cannot have love or mercy in this matter. He can only punish.

So that means God is NOT omnipotent at the least or, at worst, He really enjoys watching folks suffer for a lifetime of what are in most cases pretty petty sins in the vast scheme of things. God, then is pretty harsh, not the God of love at all. Then there is Hollywood theology that portrays a kind of Christian reincarnation where you die, become an angel and then get sent back to Earth to have another go at it. If you want to believe all that, then you best get folks away from the Bible. Like a retired pastor told me, "I believe in science and the Bible equally." That way it leaves room for him to believe the same stuff all the regular folk do and it becomes an easy road from there down to "Well the Bible is so full of flaws, there's no need to take any of it literally other than as occasionally good advice."

Those who love power have a tendency to become cruel and desperate as that power slips through their fingers. See Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of the world's despotic rulers for examples. The death toll in the 20th century alone is in the hundreds of millions. We are seeing that now as the venom against God's children gets more and more poisonous. Remember, we are up against the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. It's good to remember that God will send along bears to protect His servants when He needs to.

Yours in Christ,
Tom King
© 2024

Elemental Spiritual Forces Threaten

 

In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns against "hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world." When we rely on these beliefs, cooked up out of our own fears, desires and prejudices instead of upon Christ as revealed through the scriptures, we set ourselves up to eventually create our own versions of a religion, one without any reliance on objective truth, but instead upon something they like to call "my truth."

I think this was the thing also that Ellen White warned us about when she cautioned against the rising influence of spiritualism. Here Paul warned us particularly against "elemental spiritual forces". The spiritualism we've been warned against is more than just some ghosts knocking on walls while little girls hold seances. Spiritualism, while it does range from Ouija boards to communicating with the dead, spiritualism as a whole believes that we have immortal souls that know more than we are aware of. and deceptive philosophy. Satan seeks to confuse us. Encyclopedia Britannica defines spiritualism as philosophy that embraces ideas including "the immortality of the soul, or the immateriality of the intellect and will. Less obviously, it includes belief in such ideas as finite cosmic forces or a universal mind, provided that they transcend the limits of gross Materialistic interpretation. Spiritualism as such says nothing about matter, the nature of a supreme being or a universal force, or the precise nature of spiritual reality itself." This leaves all kind of room for the "spiritual" man to find his own truth within himself. As a result, the spiritualist does not have to submit himself to any external law, truth or instruction that does not emanate from within himself. This allows one to toss aside any uncomfortable restriction on one's behavior that doesn't feel compatible with your own truth which you have discovered within yourself. It also allow you to jettison any commandments or Biblical advice you don't particularly feel comfortable with.

This current so-called spiritual movement tends to rejects "religion" in favor of being "spiritual" not religious. It has many of the trappings of Lucifer's plan for ruling as the Prince of this world. If it doesn't reject religion outright, it seeks to water it down to allow room for "spiritual" Christians (if they still retain the Christian identity at all), to believe whatever suits them. It's frequently called "my truth" by people who say they are "spiritual not religious." Spiritualism doesn't necessarily achieve this level of self-enlightenment all at once, but it certainly trends that way if taken to its logical ends.

Satan keeps coming back to the same plan with the same beliefs about obedience to self and to heavy handed government and it always results in a whole lot of death. God tends to get left out or gets used as an impersonal rubber stamp for whatever the ruling class is up to. Marxism is just the latest Satanic deceptive philosophy to be embraced by the powerful special (rich) folk of the world. Before we had "I'm spiritual" we had the divine right of kings, emperors, caliphs, etc..We peons knew our place and deferred to the special ruling class and were proud to do so. We were mightily deceived to accept our low station with a kind of pride. A few special powerful leaders always make the decisions and discipline the collective, the masses, the proletariat, peons, the workers, the plebs, the rabble, the great unwashed, riffraff, Labor, the proles or, my favorite, the hoi poloi and usually they discipline harshly.

Recent attempts to blend Marx's philosophy with spiritualism as its being worked out in contemporary philosophy, dwell on the problems of labor, the unconscious, artificial intelligence, and depression. By summoning up the idea of an immortal soul, Marxist/spiritualist apologists conceive of a kind of secret human being that dwells inside the body of any species (a Buddhist/Hindu idea) and thus is detached from “man” in its traditional sense. This allows us to disengage the human body from "spirit". No longer is the soul to be attached to individual humans, the body isn't absolutely necessary since the soul exists as this impersonal essence defined by an ambiguous concept of labor (regular raggedy folks). This convoluted philosophy supposes that this soul or essence is both alienated from things like religion and emancipated from reliance on anything outside the self like instruction from some arbitrary "God". Marxism it is posited, provides a way to achieve an Earthly Utopia without having to bother God for instruction about how to do that. Friedrich Nietzsche a cheerful Marxist and inspiration for the German Nazis, went so far as to proclaim "God is dead." What he meant was that we no longer need God because we are spiritual beings and everything we need is in our own immortal essence. It also allowed the Nazis to decide that murdering 15 million people didn't make much difference as their essences would simply go elsewhere so they wouldn't interfere with the establishment of the Third Reich's plans for an Aryan Utopia.

This kind of philosophy supports Satan's contention at the beginning of the Great Controversy that he had a better idea for how to govern humans so that he keeps all that free choice controlled. If we are paying attention it's not hard to spot cloven hoofprints all over this sort of spiritual Marxism. And always it winds up that a whole bunch of uncooperative human weeds need to be pulled up and incinerated.

Not religion but politics and progressive spiritualism is the hallmark of Satan's plans for ruling the Earth. Even religion, when co-opted for Satan's purpose, is at its heart political and involves a tyrannical powerful ruler or ruling class lording over the people who are assumed to be incapable (too stupid) to manage their own affairs. Sadly, many who claim to have once been among God's chosen people find themselves drifting away from the church. By adopting a more convenient sort of religion,  their advanced spiritual philosophy allows them to set themselves up in these last days as arbiters of their own more comfortable truth. But don't call this belief system a religion even though it is. That would hurt their feelings.

And since these spiritualists no longer need organized religion, spiritualism provides them an alternative to "assembling themselves together" in congregations of believers. The spiritual often prefer instead, things like going out into nature and being spiritual; getting in touch with the elemental spiritual forces that come from their own understanding rather than the Word of God. Or they can gather in chat rooms with other enlightened spiritual folk and discuss how this ever-shifting philosophy so admirably adapts itself to whatever new notion springs up among them.

 The deception is pernicious, pervasive and deadly. It allows the spiritual person to join a herd of fellow humans who are okay with infanticide, sexual perversion, and rejection of inconvenient Biblical commandments. "We don't do commandments anymore. What's the point?

Accordingly, we no longer need to be saved by God's grace, but are emancipated from all that by our own righteousness and superior philosophy." It soon follows, as one retired pastor told me that the spiritual man holds science and scripture as equals. The trouble is, that increasingly for my spiritual friends, science begins to weigh more heavily on their personal truth scales, especially the "science" that justifies the whole reliance on "my truth" rather than upon God's truth.

It explains why in the last days many of the brightest lights among us will go out; the victims of their own brilliance unsupported by a reliance upon God's Word. Beware for the devil our adversary prowls among us seeking whom he may devour.

(c) 2024 by Tom King

 

 

No Wonder Adventists Back Then Were Spooked

Rev.Samuel Walter Gamble known
for research in the ancient
literature, enabling him to
reproduce the long lost Hebrew
calendar, upon which he bases
arguments to prove that
Sunday and not Saturday was
the "ancient and true Sabbath."
            - Who's Who circa 1920
 

I found a book published in 1900 and now residing in the Library of Congress by Samuel Walter Gamble, field secretary of the American Sabbath Union (later the Lord's Day Alliance) that purports to prove that the Sabbath is really actually on Sunday. It comes up near the top of the list when you do a search in Google images for the word "sabbath".This poor man, a valiant defender of laws making working on Sunday a crime in the United States, spent 18 years trying to prove his case by studying ancient calendars. He based his research on the assumption that God's people couldn't count to 7, and that God basically gave the Hebrews the wrong date for Sabbath when he gave them the 10 commandments.

He further assumes that despite the Biblical genealogies that go all the way back to creation, that the true Sabbath was "lost" after the flood and no one kept it. Also, because the seventh-day Sabbath couldn't occur on the same date every month, Gamble believes that the Jews and the string of God's followers chronicled in scripture all the way back to Adam, couldn't possibly have counted up to 7 days in order to keep the same Sabbath every week. They could only have done that if the Sabbath was on a fixed date, he says. Thus the Sabbath wandered around all over the calendar and can't be assumed to have occurred every seventh day.

Odd that Gamble seemed unaware that Sunday comes on different dates every month nowadays, but he'd rather we not look too closely at that. Flaws in the argument notwithstanding, Gamble and the American Sabbath Union prevailed in inspiring some pretty strict Sunday laws for some time, toughening up, if not national, then state Sunday laws. They were

Wilbur F Crafts
ASU Founder

 especially successful in the South. It should be noted that more than one Adventist farmer did jail time for working his fields on Sunday around that time, despite having rested the previous day and having attended church services that Saturday. Mr. Gamble heartily approved of this level of enforcement. Aggressive Adventist activists opposed ASU founder Wilbur F. Craft's efforts to promote the Blair Amendment (a national Sunday law) and the Breckinridge Bill (limited to Washington DC). Prominent SDA preacher A.T. Jones and Wilbur Craft got into a series of running conflicts that led in part to both men leaving their respective organizations.

Gamble says that Jesus fixed the problem of everyone worshiping on the wrong day by rising on the first day which was "really" the seventh day and that (reading the mind of Jesus who never said any such thing) Christ intended for the Sabbath to be on the first day of the week all along. He closes his eyes to the fact that Christ, Himself, kept the so-called Jewish Sabbath during his ministry and his apostles did the same afterward during theirs. Also, it's significant that after his crucifixion, Jesus rested in the grave from his labors from Friday to Sunday, only rising from the dead after the hours of the Sabbath had passed. The Sabbath, He had said, was made for man, but apparently Jesus kept it holy Himself.

A.T. Jones - Minister
and SDA Activist

Gamble has no problem with Roman Emperor Constantine, himself a major sun-worshiper, changing the Sabbath to "the venerable day of the sun" (Constantine's own words) in order to make the Pagans more comfortable joining the Catholic and coincidentally Roman State Church. The Vatican quickly held a counsel that accepted the change in order to ingratiate itself with the emperor and to pack the cathedral pews a little tighter with new pagan converts and their money. Apparently, that was not problematic for Gamble.

The author, an ASU officer at the time, was busily trying to shore up the nation's restrictive national Sunday laws. As part of his argument for tougher Sunday laws, Gamble claimed that if Seventh-Day Adventists were to succeed in getting the national Sunday laws of the day repealed, that all workers would suddenly be required to work 7 day weeks. Without the force of a national law requiring all workers to rest on Sunday, Gamble warned Congress that America's churches would be soon abandoned.He also claimed, again without evidence, that it had been "proved" that workers only live 12 years when working 7 days a week and that therefore Adventists would be responsible for the mass slaughter of millions of working fathers far earlier than what God intended.

Talk about logical gymnastics trying to prove that a largely Catholic Christian tradition, established on the Roman Church's own hook without scriptural authority was correct. He would have us believe that the ten commandments are flawed or at least the 4th one is. Given that, apparently, God didn't even know when Sabbath was supposed to be, then Gamble believes that the unbroken keeping of the 7th day Sabbath by Jews is, according to Gamble, impossible and irrelevant anyway. How could anyone have been expected to keep the 7th day Sabbath if it changed dates every month instead of being only on fixed calendar dates.

He went on to claim that the worst of it was that if the Sunday Laws were repealed millions would no longer come to his revival meetings and be saved.

 

And this silly book is enshrined in the Library of Congress, digitized and published online. Interestingly, Gamble acknowledges a debt to the Reverend D.M. Canright. Canright picked up the title "Reverend" when he left the SDA church to become a Baptist preacher. He left because, as he put it to a colleague, "I could be a great and popular preacher if this (SDA) message were not so unpopular." Coincidentally, Canright left shortly after Ellen White told him he was too long-winded and should pare his Sabbath sermons down from 2-3 hours to 20 or 30 minutes.

Gamble could have benefited from the same counsel. It seems this convoluted and often incomprehensible book was designed deliberately in order to encourage people to try to read it and then to give up in confusion. Nobody wants to admit they can't understand what the man is trying to say. So, many readers, looking for some comforting argument that means they don't have to make any big and uncomfortable life changes, decide that this guy must know what he's talking about.

Little hint: he doesn't.

(C) 2024 by Tom King

Angels Dressed as Soldiers

 

These guys look like they're ready to suit up and drop onto the battlefield.

Angels are described in the book Early Writings thus. "The company of guardian angels around them had been doubled, and they were clothed with an armor from their head to their feet." Not exactly the effeminate angels of Renaissance Christian art. Angels as described in the Old Testament could appear as nonthreatening, but usually they had to reassure those to whom they appeared, saying, "Fear not!"

And angels pop up all over the place in scripture and in stories throughout Christian history. I have seen the working of angels, but they remained out of my sight. A friend at camp almost ran over me and a canoe load of kids with a motorboat he was unfamiliar with. I watched in shock as the boat did an impossible 180 degree turn as the boat, bow high was coming down on us. It turned so fast the spring loaded ladder on the back of the boat knifed through the air where my head had been a second before. I felt it brush my hair as I was looking over the side watching the boat's propeller pass underneath the canoe. The way Jack (the boat driver) and I figured it, his angel got on one end of the boat and mine got on the other and spun it around. Whatever they did, that boat was moving fast and it suddenly disobeyed the laws of physics. And I'd just missed by a fraction of an inch, being knocked off the canoe on top of a spinning propeller. Jack and I spent the next hour in a lengthy prayer of thanksgiving.

A missionary friend of mine told a story about a South American Adventist school where angels did make themselves visible to the enemy. Local communist guerrillas decided the school was counter-revolutionary and must be eliminated. The principle did not know anything about it. He went to the store in town one morning for supplies. When he went up to the counter the store proprietor seemed shocked to see him.  

"Where did you get the soldiers?" the man asked as he rang up the supplies.

"What soldiers?" asked the principal.

"The ones that were standing guard around the school last night!" The store owner proceeded to tell him why he'd asked.  The guerrillas it seems had chosen the previous night to attack the school. Of course, word got around the close-knit community and everyone expected to hear bad news about the school in the morning. The attack never happened. Word came back that when the guerrillas reached the school, they found it surrounded by tough-looking heavily armed soldiers. The guerrillas quickly decided that in the interest of their personal survival, attacking the school was a very bad idea.

The principal was shocked himself; he'd never seen any soldiers at the school that night. Certainly no one from the government or the military had offered to help or had even warned him of the attack. He returned to the school with a glad heart and brought together the children and the teachers to pray and give thanks for the angel "soldiers" who had camped round about them that they might fear no evil.

We shall see greater miracles than these in the coming days. We are told that we often entertain angels unaware. Angels have often stood guard over us to save us from dangers of which we were not even aware. I've had more than my share of what had to be angelic intervention over my life. I once got smacked in the chest by a 3 foot wide boulder from above while rock climbing along the Trinity River. Had to have had help hanging on to the tree root I found myself dangling from when my head cleared. God only knows what other stupid things my guardian angel has saved me from.

 In these last days we may go about God's work without fear. Whatever happens, we may be assured of God's deliverance no matter what. Some of us may sleep, but we all shall be changed in the moment in the twinkling of an eye. Knowing God sees the end from the beginning and makes sure that whatever happens we will surely be going home with Him, we may face whatever the armies of evil throw at us with confidence.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

 

© 2023 by Tom King

 

 

What About the 60 Million?

I keep getting crosswise of some of my brethren with some of the things I believe about God. My walk with him leads me to believe even more strongly in His mercy. For instance, I believe God will give to saved parents, the babies that were lost to abortion here on Earth. God says he formed us in the womb and knew us before we were even born. Our God is a jealous God, not willing that any should be lost. Therefore, I believe that all aborted babies will be taken home to be with us in Heaven. Me I want the angels to round up at least six or so that we can raise in a loving home, enough that we can have our own flag football team or extra crew for the schooner my kids and I are going to build in the New Earth.

Stephen responded to my assertion that aborted babies would not be lost with this: "This is unconditional immortality which is not a teaching of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and leads to spiritism."

 

So let me ask, "How do you explain our teaching that babies like the ones spoken of in the passage below from Ellen White will be restored to their mothers' arms at the Second Coming and even the motherless babies will be taken by Jesus to the tree of life?". After all, this baby clearly has not reached the age of accountability. Is there some kind of free pass for these babies if their parents belong to the right church. How is that fair to those who never had any chance to decide whether or not to follow Christ?

I have real trouble, Stephen, believing that God is that hard-hearted. We also believe (along with notable Protestant theologians like John Wesley) that many will be saved who never heard the name of Christ but were seeking Him without knowing His name:. 

 

Among the heathen are those who worship God ignorantly, those to whom the light is never brought by human instrumentality, yet they will not perish. Though ignorant of the written law of God, they have heard His voice speaking to them in nature, and have done the things that the law required. Their works are evidence that the Holy Spirit has touched their hearts, and they are recognized as the children of God.” - Ellen G. White

 

Strict conditional  salvation is almost as heartless as the doctrine of an ever-burning hell. God is love and He knows His children. He knows our frame, He knows we are dust, according to Psalm 103:14. God does not wish that any should perish, but that ALL should have eternal life (Matthew 18:14, ). That the God of infinite love, who carefully formed each of those fearfully and wonderfully made, but aborted babies in their mothers' womb and knew what they would one day be, will not finish His work, especially when there would be millions of us willing to raise those perfect babies in a perfect world. For that matter, I believe God will give me my dog back if I ask Him. Would a Father deny his child something that would only do him or her good. Would he not do ultimate good for the lost children who were victims of the holocaust of the unborn? Sixty million dead masterpieces created by God in sixty million wombs will not be wasted I believe.

 

I do not hold to the brand of religion that treats salvation as some kind of magical incantation. Many Christians (or Hindus, pagans or Buddhists for that matter) believe that you have to say the right words and perform the right rituals to get into Paradise. I met a Church of Christ pastor once who told me that because the preacher didn't say "In Jesus' name," but said "In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit," my baptism was no good. I disagreed. I asked him, "Do you think God doesn't know who his son is?"

 

My acquaintance with God tells me He does what He does, not through magic and incantation. He does what He does because his nature is supernatural or above our 3 dimensional plane of existence. He exists outside of time and is the Alpha and Omega, or as scripture says He lives in the present, the past and the future all at once. God knows who will be safe to take to heaven and the new Earth because He sees tomorrow the way we see today. It's not magic and definitely doesn't require incantations, waving magic wands or giving special powers to people the church hierarchy deigns to "ordain". He picks folks He knows, like Deborah, Gideon, Joseph, David and Simon Peter who can do the job He has for them to do. 

 

People keep trying to stuff God into a conceptual box so they can (a) understand Him with their limited intelligence and in a way that they approve of His actions and (b) figure out how to game the system so God is somehow forced take them to heaven. These folk lack faith. They don't quite trust God to make good decisions, or at least decisions they approve of, unless they have some leverage. Ah, but if we say the right words and perform the correct rituals, He will be forced to let us into Paradise, won't He?

 

Well, no! Remember Christ's description of the judgment - all those folks complaining that they did miracles, preached to the masses, built Crystal Cathedrals and God told them flat out, rituals and incantations and successful fund-raising and all, "I never knew you." God just doesn't fit in those kinds of boxes nor have those kinds of limitations. A lot of that kind of thinking is left over from the long discredited Last Generation Theology - an Adventist theologian's answer to an ever-burning hell for scaring people into the pews and into line with the "authorities". At the core of Adventism, is a kinder gentler, more forgiving picture of the character of God than many strong-willed Christians are quite comfortable with.

 

Timothy objected: "This is the unconditional love and nature of God. If there is a first life, then there is a soul, and the second life depends on our submission and accountability. A baby in the womb is life and has no accountability. 

 

I think God is quite able to raise up murdered children freed from the stain of sin. Adam and Eve,had they not been tempted could have lived eternally. Why not an unstained infant? If a child is knit together by God in the womb and another person ends the life that God has carefully created the child is unstained; murdered before the child has even been able to commit his first sin. Why would anyone think God would not object to having His babies killed without having had a chance to experience His love and choose life. 

 

Stephen objected. "You did not limit it to babes as in the picture. You included the unborn. There is no such teaching in Adventism."

 

Again I think such an idea is woven into the very Scriptures. An unborn child is a baby and a human. At least that's what God says about it. The idea that a fetus is a "clump of cells" is a progressive fiction and for that matter downright satanic. God sees the end from the beginning and knows the choices the little human being would have made. I firmly believe that God does not just toss out 60 million human beings that Satan killed before they had a chance to know Him. I'm sure there are "progressives" out there who would cheerfully stand beside the lake of fire with a pitchfork, shoveling babies into the flames. They are collectivists and think everybody ought to share in the same fate. I cannot imagine the God of infinite love being that cruel. You may face eternal death (Ecclesiastes 9:5) for your own sins, but innocent babies should not be lumped in that "collective".

 

Our founding fathers didn't have millions of abortions in their day; scarcely a handful. Ellen G White also said we'd discover new truth in the years to come. I think what is unique about our church is we really do believe God is loving and merciful. Unborn children are no less His children than the Hottentots who have never heard Jesus' name. I think we are learning more about Him as the years go by. When somebody puts forth beliefs about God's character that paint Him as harsh and unkind, it doesn't sit right because the God you know isn't merciless. Now if you choose to reject Him okay. You get removed from the universe permanently as you expected. But the innocent who were made by God, knit together in the womb by God Himself, have been murdered before they can make any such choice. You wanna tell me God abandons His handiwork because the devil decided to kill it before it was finished?

 

I don't think so! What kept me out of the church till I was 17 was the harsh picture of God that the Last Generation theology proponents were peddling. Then I met the actual Jesus and rejected the "only if you are a rigid, strong-willed Christian capable of Earthly perfection." bunk they were peddling. You can't tell me God will abandon 60 million plus innocent children as well. And they ARE innocent. And they are children. That settles it for me!

 

The idea that an unborn child is not a "soul" until he draws his first breath outside the mother's womb is messed up. God breathed into Adam and he became a living soul. He was a fully formed adult at the time. The idea that a "fetus" hasn't drawn breath and hasn't a soul, reveals a profound lack of knowledge of biology. When a baby is formed in the womb (knit together by God no less), he or she is ALREADY BREATHING. Its mother breathes and imparts oxygen and food to the child through the umbilical cord, an incredible design by God to see that the "clump of cells" gets oxygen and food. So, in essence, the child is breathing from the moment God begins to form it in the womb. 

 

God is merciful and he knows us from the moment of conception. Salvation is not a crap shoot where you win if the roll of the dice is in your favor. God is, as I said, not willing that any should die, but that all should be saved. Why do you think he waited until now, when there are more people alive than have lived and died throughout the whole history of the world, to finish the Gospel commission and come in the clouds? He waited for telecommunications, transportation, the Internet, rockets and satellites to allow the Gospel to reach every kindred tongue and people, that He might take home the absolute most numbers of people He can without their seeing death. God hates death. He longs for that moment, that twinkling of an eye when he changes us, gives us immortality and takes us home. There are, we are told, going to be more people on the Sea of Glass to celebrate God's triumph than we can number. God is not exclusive. He is inclusive. He wants every person in His kingdom who is safe to turn loose in the universe with both eternal life and free will (intact so that we may reflect His image). 

 

I find nothing in this that conflicts with the picture of a loving merciful God who would give His son to make sure we have the greatest chance of sharing eternity with Him. He's our Father and what Father is going to abandon more than 60 million babies aborted or miscarried? Are you prepared to tell a mom who miscarries that God doesn't care about her lost baby and won't give it back to her in heaven? Not this father! One of the founders of our church described little babies in heaven being restored to parents. I'm a parent and I will gladly take a whole flock of those babies.Sometimes I think that pernicious doctrine that infants lost cannot be saved comes from cranky old Christians that don't like the idea of being bothered by a lot of rambunctious infants and toddlers running around and walking on their grass. 

 

This I know. Jesus loves us, child, adult or old person, rich or poor, red, and yellow, black or white and carried every one of us in his heart when he went to the cross. I will not cheapen his sacrifice by telling people that Jesus won't accept anyone who doesn't say that canned phrase about "accepting Jesus" or isn't baptized with the correct words by the properly credentialed church official. God is love. PERIOD!!!! You cannot convince me otherwise. I know him too well!

 

So people with mental disabilities get the lake of fire too? Downs Syndrome? Autism? So, give me a list of people who will be excluded from heaven by God who gave his only begotten son, because they are mentally impaired or didn't manage to get born. I have no doubt that women who have lost babies prior to that age of "accountability" will get her babies back. My infant brother will be restored to my mother's arms. And I will get my football team of unwanted "clumps of cells".

 

The only thing I've found that shows the Old Testament God as particularly harsh penalty-wise, was his response to the pagan practice of sacrificing babies to Molech. The Israelites got up to that sort of thing on the ancient hilltop shrines and grove temples. God REALLY REALLY hated infanticide and I don't think he blamed the babies for it. I sure wouldn't want to be the people who did that stuff when I stand in the judgment.

 

That misconception of God as an angry god, comes from his harsh "fatherly" punishment of the Israelites and pagans for their evil practices. The Aztecs used to slaughter and butcher more than 26,000 captives annually. The Canaanites, Israelites among them, ran up similar annual numbers and you don't want to know what horrors were perpetrated in those pagan temples and groves. The Mexican pyramids have special channels to capture the blood runoff. Canaanite, Greek, Roman, Druidic and Egyptian temples were worse than today's serial killer lairs. They believed that the more the victims screamed, the better the harvest would be. The pagans murdered hundreds of thousands to make the crops grow - the victims' crime being that they were still virgins. 

 

Hey, if you slaughter tens of thousands of my children, I'm going to be pretty angry with you too and for good reason. I'd probably go medieval on you with an "automatic" weapon if you were murdering my babies. Nowadays, we only need protest the slaughter and we get treated like criminals for speaking out about it. 

 

I suspect God is pretty angry with us for the 60 million we've allowed to be slaughtered because Margaret Sanger and her ilk thought people of color were human weeds that needed to be plucked up from among us (her words spoken to a KKK women's group back in the 20s). I don't much blame God for allowing that batch of willful sinners back in ancient Israel to be punished. The interesting thing is that God didn't rain down fire indiscriminately on folks to stop it. He simply backed off and let evil people destroy other evil people as evil people are wont to do. Seems He is doing the same with us. We've already ginned ourselves up a nice plague to thin the numbers. What are we going to do next? A nice nuclear war with Russia? A newer more deadly strain of CoVid? We could have that soon. A university lab in Boston has already combined original Covid and the Omega variant and created a Covid strain with an 80% kill rate in rats. We're still sending money to research labs in China and they certainly don't like us. Even our progressives don't get a pass from them. 

 

God will shorten the time to Christ's coming else no flesh would be saved. The wages of sin is death. God doesn't have to hand you a paycheck. The devil auto-deposits it in your account. Forgive the length of this post, though. It's a subject that riles me up! Too many people have joined with Satan to harm the innocent and the faithful. Knowing God for more than 50 years, I believe God will make all things new and right and just - not the social justice being peddled by today's unchurched, but justice actual and true given us by our Father in Heaven.

© 2022 by Tom King

 

Forbearance and Unity

Ted Wilson Wrestles With the Unity Backlash from the Women's Ordination Vote

In the wake of the kerfuffle over the 2015 San Antonio General Conference and subsequent measures to "promote unity" by the General Conference administration, GC vice president Tom Lemon, chair of the Unity Oversight Committee, made remarks about the issue. Lemon spoke about the different entities he'd met with since the last Annual Council—in North America and elsewhere. In all these meetings, he said, he didn’t find "one person who gave any hint… [of] rebellion." The attitude was "we are children of God, and we are in this thing together…." "I heard an understanding of mission and commitment to mission that would warm your hearts." Lemon saw no evidence of the rebellion, which evidently GC president Ted Wilson fears. As a result, it appears that Lemon resigned as director of the church's Unity Committee apparently under duress, although any information as to why he resigned was not forthcoming. This sort of thing does not increase confidence in President Wilson out here in the hinterlands. His reelection to a third term in 2022 was unusual as GC presidents for generations have limited their terms to two, further creating concerns that the Wilson was setting up a dynasty in Silver Springs, especially those who remember how difficult it was to dislodge his father Neal Wilson. Messenger to Adventism, Ellen G White weighed in on the matter of controversial decisions being made at the GC in response to discontent in the field over the 1888 General Conference.

“In no conference should propositions be rushed through without time being taken by the brethren to weigh carefully all sides of the question. Because the president of a conference suggested certain plans, it has sometimes been considered unnecessary to consult the Lord about them. Thus propositions have been accepted that were not for the spiritual benefit of the believers and that involved far more than was apparent at the first casual consideration…. Many, very many matters have been taken up and carried by vote, that have involved far more than was anticipated and far more than those who voted would have been willing to assent to had they taken time to consider the question from all sides” ( EGW 9T, p. 278, italics supplied).

Unfortunately, what appears to be the defining issue of the present administration thus far has been the General Conference president’s failure to report the findings of the Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) to the 2015 General Conference Session after paying hundreds of thousands of dollars of tithe funds on the project that was to solve the issue once and for all. But the findings of the carefully selected committee were out of harmony with his ideas on the topic. A large majority of the Glacier View gathering of the best SDA theologians in the world had said that Scripture did not forbid the ordination of women. Wilson and those who supported him did not agree and Wilson did not allow the study report  to be presented at the San Antonio session before the divisive vote was taken. He failed to mention that a super majority (62 for and 32 opposed) of the TOSC and nearly all of the concurrent world division reports favored permitting divisions the option of ordaining women. One result has been ongoing turbulence in the denomination and the three-year search for the proper way to punish noncompliance. 

Ellen White noted that “the very beginning of the great apostasy was in seeking to supplement the authority of God with that of the church” (GC pp. 289-290).  We need to pray for our church, its General Conference president, and the members of the General Conference Executive Committee that they might think twice (or a dozen times) before voting into policy “laws” that will take all of us down a well-beaten historical road; a road that has always led Christianity to some very unchristian practices done in the name of Christ. Many incarnations of Christ's church have confused spiritual unity with ecclesiastical compliance. May God help His church!

Sister Ellen became troublesome to the GC following the 1888 General Conference and was invited to go to Australia for much of a decade. Mrs. White made the most of the "opportunity" and left the church administration to work out its issues with God's guidance. When she returned to America, she championed the creation of union conferences to decentralize church authority. She counseled that shifting decision-making authority further afield would make the work out in the field more effective and responsive to issues that sometimes occurred half a world away from Battle Creek, the GC headquarters at the time. The creation of union conferences helped loosen the authoritarian grip of the leadership. And once God burned down the press building in Battle Creek, the GC admin decided God was displeased. As a result the General Conference moved from what had become an Adventist quagmire to Silver Spring.

Recently, a new issue as flammable as the Righteousness by Faith controversy post 1888, has risen. Much heated rhetoric over women's ordination has been delivered from pulpits, discussed in the aisles of our churches after services, in church-sponsored conferences, over church potluck tables, and in magazines and publications approved, disapproved or tolerated by the General Conference. Prominent Adventist theologians have weighed in on both sides of the issue. Seemingly harsh actions that have been taken at the General Conference have troubled the saints in North America. Enforcement committees have been proposed by the GC Executive Committee that seem to have the power to disband whole unions or local conferences that do not hew to the theological positions of the General Conference executives. The GC position is that the matter was settled in San Antonio. Other SDA leaders have questioned the San Antonio actions as the product of a flawed and even manipulative process. Some folk charged with examining the issue, like Tom Lemon, have found themselves removed for not vigorously supporting decisions originating in Silver Springs.

We stand on the precipice of momentous events in Earth's history. Of course the devil is going to seek to divide us. We see it happening in the secular world as the political prophecies of Revelation are working themselves out on the nightly news. Is squabbling over issues of whether authority should reside in Silver Springs or in the congregations of the saints something inspired by God or by some force outside the church seeking to divide us when we should be working tirelessly side by side to reach the world. Should we be putting bureaucratic burdens upon the army of the Lord. Ought we instead to use every tool in our arsenal, every resource available to us to complete the Gospel commission? Certainly, establishing a veritable Adventist FBI to root out heresy as defined by church managers won't unite the church. A Unity Conference didn't do much to put the GCs fears to rest either.

Ellen White, during a similar upheaval in our history said, "The church may pass resolution upon resolution to put down all disagreement of opinions, but we cannot force the mind and the will, and thus root out disagreement. These resolutions may conceal the discord, but they cannot quench it and establish perfect agreement. Nothing can perfect unity in the church but the spirit of Christ-like forbearance” (EGW, Ms 24, 1892, italics supplied).

At a time, when we are currently the fastest growing denomination in the United States if not the world, it probably delights Satan to stir up division in our midst. Lucifer is a master at using authority to overturn our actual agreements among the brethren. Then he tries to convince us that we who run roughshod over our brethren are thereby more sanctified than those they suppress. My prayer is that we may resist the devil when it becomes evident that he is among us, that he may flee from us. In this way we may truly have Christian unity, not just submission to human authority. In God's church, it is He who is our Lord, who is our direct guide and savior.

© 2022 by Tom King