Adventists have been preaching that Jesus is coming soon for generations, but has it all been a lie? Why hasn’t Jesus returned yet? What’s keeping Him?

<p>Adventists have been preaching that Jesus is coming soon for generations, but has it all been a lie? Why hasn’t Jesus returned yet? What’s keeping Him?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Collegedale Korean SDA Church

Alistair Huong

Is God Late?

Father in heaven, thank you so much for bringing us safely to this place for the Sabbath hours, these sacred hours that you have demarcated, reserved for us to meet with you.

We're taking you up on that offer now, and so we invite you to come.

May the message today be communicated in such a way through the miraculous agency of your spirit to pinpoint exactly what we need to hear.

We ask these things now in Jesus' name, amen.

How many of us here today believe that Jesus is coming soon?

We are in a Seventh-day Adventist Church, right?

So it only makes sense that we raise our hands to that question.

If we had gone back to when our parents were our age and you stepped into an Adventist church and you asked that same question, what do you suppose the reaction would be?

What if we rewind time all the way back to the early 1840s, over 160, 70 years ago.

If we ask that same question, how many of us believe that Jesus is coming soon, Not only back then, not only would they raise their hands, they would jump to their feet, they would shout hallelujah because to them Jesus was coming very, very soon.

Asking the same question, soliciting the same response.

But has it ever crossed your mind, that question, Why hasn't Jesus come yet?

Even the skeptics are stepping up to the plate and saying you Adventists Haven't learned your lesson yet all things continues since the beginning and we say, ah, but look at the signs.

Wars, rumors of wars, famines, pestilences, the love of many waxing cold, earthquakes in diverse places, all of these signs, we hear them, right?

Every evangelistic meeting we go to, we hear them.

Every set of Bible study lessons is either number 1 or 2 The signs of the times Jesus is coming soon.

We pound this drum But haven't there been wars all through human history?

Haven't there been famines all through history?

The plague, illnesses, natural disasters, earthquakes, signs in the heavens?

Do Seventh-day Adventists simply believe this as a form of tradition or as some would say, we've been brainwashed into a system of religious control, where we conjure up this manufactured sense of urgency in order to control our young people to make them do what we want them to.

Because if we believe that we are Seventh-day Adventists, believing for the advent of Jesus, but yet that very foundation of our faith is all but a fancy fairy tale, a fable that has no grounding, why?

You know, the danger is that this type of thinking I have seen leads to 2 extremes.

There are those who fall into the ditch of icy indifference.

The Bible says there is a servant, actually you can read about it in Matthew chapter, end of Matthew chapter 24, a servant, he calls himself a servant, He goes to church, he calls himself a believer of Jesus Christ, but he says in his heart, my Lord delays his coming.

So can it be that some of us internally, even if we don't say it out loud, internally we think, oh, time is just going to continue.

We might even secretly think, oh, Lord, really, I really don't want you to come back until I finish school.

You know, like, let me get married first.

He's not really gonna come back soon, right?

We think this, and it shows through our actions, right?

The priorities in our lives are such that, oh, maybe it's not so important to spend time with Jesus when there's that new movie coming out or the new game that I pre-ordered.

That's 1 extreme, but then there's the other extreme, which I call the fires of fanaticism.

So we say, oh, Jesus isn't coming yet, so we look for conspiracies around every corner.

Under every leaf, every rock, there is some secret society, and we try to conjure up this sense of excitement, like, no, the end really is coming.

You wouldn't believe what I read on the internet.

You wouldn't believe what happened in the White House the other night, secret closed door meetings that the Illuminati is in charge of.

The fires of fanaticism and the icy indifference of Laodiceanism, so often we fall into either of these 2 ditches because internally we're trying to wrestle with this idea.

If we've been preaching that Jesus is coming soon for generations now and he still hasn't come, We preach the signs, they've all been fulfilled.

We need to see what the Bible has to say.

This is our natural reaction and the only answer is if we turn to the Word of God.

What does Jesus actually tell us about this dilemma?

We look at the world around us, we see the unrest in Syria, the Middle East, the flooding in Louisiana, we see Zika virus coming right here to Hamilton County, Tennessee.

We think the world is about to come to an end.

Surely Jesus must be coming soon, but notice what Jesus says.

Matthew chapter 24, chapter 24 and 25, his apocalyptic predictions about the end of time, Jesus talking to his disciples.

Jesus says, and you will hear of wars and rumors of wars.

We've heard this preached as a sign of the time as long as we've been alive.

But notice what he says next, what Jesus says next.

See that you are not troubled for all these things must come to pass but the end is what?

Jesus says oh yeah you're gonna see signs, rumors, wars and rumors of wars, but hold your horses.

Verse 7, for nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.

And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.

Surely when these things happen, the end must be around the corner, even at the door, right?

Have these Adventist evangelists been misleading us all this time?

We read these verses and every time we say, see, Jesus is coming soon, but Jesus says, these are the beginning of sorrows.

You're driving down the interstate and you want to go to New York City.

When you start driving towards New York from here in Chattanooga, you're not going to see New York on any of the signs along the road.

You're going to probably see Knoxville or maybe Roanoke or Washington, D.C.

But once you get close to New York, maybe a couple hundred miles out, you begin to see on that road sign, New York City, however many miles are left.

And as you get closer to your destination, what happens to the frequency that you see those signs telling you where New York is?

And then you begin to see the mileage start ticking down.

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Is God Late?

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