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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Karl Tsatalbasidis

Rediscovering Adventism’s Golden Shields

The title of the message this afternoon is Rediscovering Adventism's Golden Shields.

And just before we begin, I just want to ask you to, if you would, just to bow your heads in prayer.

And I'm going to kneel asking the Lord to really bless our time together.

Dear Father in Heaven, Lord, what a privilege it has been to be here with you and with your people on this your holy Sabbath day and Lord we just so look forward to the time when sin and death and suffering will be at an end and we can gather around the throne of grace, and we can worship you in spirit and in truth, and learn from you, and share our testimonies with 1 another.

But Lord, we're still here, and we're desperately in need of your saving grace.

May we see Christ in all of his glory and his beauty and the power and the grace and the forgiveness that he has to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, to represent you in all that we say and do, and to become a part of the solution in first having ourselves transformed and then going out to a world and sharing what you've done for us and hastening your return.

Father you've enriched us so much as a church and we pray that we would rediscover that which has been given to us and use it as a template to create unity and mission and evangelism so that we can usher in your return by your grace in Christ's name we pray.

We spent some time last night in 1 Kings chapter 12 talking about Jeroboam and just a few words about Rehoboam here.

And I'm going to use this story to kind of illustrate what I think has been lost in Adventism.

And so we pick it up in 1 Kings chapter 14 and verse 25 through 28.

And it came to pass in the fifth year of King Rehoboam that Shishak, king of Egypt, came up against Jerusalem.

And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house.

He even took away all, and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made.

And King Rehoboam made in their stead brazen shields and committed them unto the hands of the chief of the guard which kept the door of the king's house.

And it was so when the king went into the house of the Lord that the guard bare them and brought them back into the guard chamber." And then it begins to talk about that regal formula for every 1 of the kings, who was his mother, you know, his ancestry, and then the things that he did, whether it was in line with the the will of God and the commandments of God or no.

And so each king was summarized in just a few words as they related to the will of God and the commandments of God.

But here you find Jer- Rehoboam, I should say, not really learning the lessons from Solomon, his father, and quickly moving in the opposite direction.

And so God then, withholding his protection, the king of Egypt, Shishak comes in, and these bronze shields that Solomon had made along with a whole bunch of other things are now captured.

So I guess instead of thinking and reflecting on the causes for why this happened, they said, you know, we need to replace these.

And they replaced them with something that looks like gold, but is it?

And so they didn't reflect, he didn't reflect on the causes for why this was happening and then deal with it from that perspective.

We can be dealing with all of these symptoms instead of trying to get to the root of the issue.

And if we have interpersonal problems, maybe I'm the problem and I need to go to Christ and I need to make it right with him and I need to make it right with somebody else.

But doctrinally, you know, what is the root of all that is happening?

See, I came in, I had to kind of work, not that I've worked everything out, but I mean, I came in, I was raised Greek Orthodox, which is very nominal.

And by the time I went through all the philosophy classes at York University, and then with Hume, the skeptic, I mean, I was an agnostic.

And here, my wife, she wasn't my wife at the time, she's trying to share with me these little Bible texts and all this stuff.

I'm getting the philosophical tools out and just like harpooning them, or at least I thought I was.

But the Holy Spirit is like, Do you really know what you're doing?

Have you really investigated these things?

You're having a conversation with yourself, but at the time you're like, what am I doing?

And you realize it's the Holy Spirit working on you.

And then I finally came to a decision where I said, okay, God, if there is a God, you know, reveal yourself.

If you pray that prayer, you know, the Lord's like, okay, I'm gonna drop the clutch now, and you know, we're moving forward.

But the weight of evidence is very decisive for me.

And each and every 1 of us has to work these things out.

And so instead of kind of reasoning from cause to effect, Rehoboam just said, hey, you know, we need to fix this and here's a quick fix.

I know it's not gold, but in time people will forget.

And I think in time that's what happened, that's what has happened with us.

We have forgotten the vision that is given to us, our message, our mission, that has been totally replaced by something else.

And so this is kind of what I'd like to talk about.

We've lost our golden shields and I'm going to refer to those shields as the pillars, the Adventist pillars, the biblical Adventist pillars that have been given to us, those have been lost and they've been replaced.

They've been replaced by philosophy, by culture, by science, by experience.

And those are the things that we now use in order to process many of the things, many of the issues that our church is facing instead of using those pillars.

That's in reality what is what is taking place and the shifts are evident.

Elder Wilson in his State of the Church mentioned 4 things that he was very concerned about in this address in 2013, an urgent prophetic call, a message from the General Conference President.

And he mentioned, number 1, the loss of Seventh-day Adventist identity among some of our pastors and church members, the growing tide of worldliness in many of our churches, the danger of disunity, a spiritual complacency and apathy that leads to a lack of involvement in the mission of the church.

Now before I go on, the best part of this presentation is that it's not really mine.

I get to be a fly on the wall at Andrews University's, it's called the Adventist Sola Scriptura Research Group.

So I am working with 1 of the seminary professors and employing his methodology in the dissertation.

And so he asked me to be a part of it and I'm a visitor and I get to be a part of it.

We just actually had a meeting last, last week.

And so 1 of the professors gave this presentation and I tell you what all the light bulbs went off in my mind as I heard this.

This is my interpretation of his presentation.

So I'm reworking it and giving it to you because I thought it was just such a brilliant analysis of the crises that have to take in place and how each and every 1 of those crises has been related to the pillars and that relationship.

So anyway, Elder Wilson has pointed out these 4 things, and then he gets to the cause of it.

And just like it says in the subtitle there, the cause of the division is the neutralization of the Bible as God's Word.

Too many of our pastors and members either have failed to recognize or have forgotten the divine prophetic calling God has given us as a church.

There's a growing tendency to minimize our differences with other denominations.

In some Seventh-day Adventist churches, the messages from the pulpit are a little different than the typical Protestant church.

Much of this, here's where he's nailing down the cause, much of this comes from the neutralization of the Bible as God's Word.

So you go back to those 4 points and he mentions a loss of identity, worldliness, disunity, spiritual complacency, and the cause he's saying is the neutralization of the Bible as God's Word.

He continues, It's so important that we base our beliefs on the Word of God using the historical biblical method of studying the scriptures and approaching prophetic understanding from the historicist's perspective.

God's Word must be foundational to our belief, faith, and practical living.

The Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth if we will study, pray, and listen to God's voice.

This will help us strongly establish our Seventh-day Adventist identity.

And I agree that the cause of this is the neutralization of God's word, the misunderstanding of God's word, the misapplication of God's word.

This is really at the root of the problem.

So the goal of this presentation this afternoon is to identify the biblical Adventist pillars, to take a brief overview of various crises in the history of Adventism, to see how each crisis affects the pillars, and also to see the emerging church and how they affect the pillars.

Well, I think that was more or less brought out in the presentations this morning and last night.

And so that's the goal of the presentation here this afternoon.

So we are going to look at the eschatological beginnings of the Adventist Church, 1950 to 1888, discovering the vision, the pillars.

Ellen White had these words to say, and I'll give you the source.

She states, The passing of time in 1844 was a period of great events, opening to our astonished eyes the cleansing of the sanctuary transpiring in heaven, and having decided relation to God's people upon earth." Now that, I mean, that may not be a revolutionary statement to you, but for those of us that have had the chance to study philosophy, it is revolutionary because heaven is a timeless static place that has no causal effect on anything that has on earth.

I mean, and here this discovery of the sanctuary and the cleansing of the sanctuary is something that connects the entire universe with what is happening here today.

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Rediscovering Adventism’s Golden Shields

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