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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Eric Nelson

Simeon and the 144,000

Dear Jesus, I ask that the presence of the Holy Spirit will be here today in a powerful way, help us to understand the Bible better, to have a greater understanding of what it means to live at this time in Earth's history.

In light of the Sabbath school lesson this morning, I have a question for you.

Do you really believe that Jesus is coming soon?

Okay, so if I wanted to preach a sermon about why Jesus is coming soon, it wouldn't be too hard to convince you, would it?

Because I don't want to preach that sermon this morning.

Do you understand what I like to call Bible repeats?

That is how the New Testament, specifically Revelation, uses imagery from the Old Testament to explain end-time events.

In our Youth Sabbath School class a couple weeks ago, we studied Daniel chapter 3.

Now in Daniel chapter 3, I don't know if we should put our youth Sava school class on the, put the spotlight on them right now.

Nebuchadnezzar, the most powerful king in the world, he does what?

It's a worldwide decree, all nations, kindreds, tongues, people are there.

And this story is associated with number 6-6, Daniel chapter 3 verse 1, the dimensions of the image.

13, and the most, 1 of the most powerful world powers at the end of time does What?

Sets up an image, tells the world to worship the image.

Is this a small decree or is this a worldwide decree?

And this is associated with the famous number 666.

So the Bible tends to use imagery of what has been to explain what will be.

1 Corinthians 10 verse 11, referring to what happened to the children of Israel, says, these things happened to them for examples for us upon whom the ends of the world have come." So you've all said you believe Jesus is coming soon.

I want to study a Bible repeat this morning that we don't tend to study quite as often.

I've never heard a sermon about it, in fact, but it has to do with the end time.

Rachel and I and Dan and Becky went on a camping trip several months ago, and while we were camping we sang our opening hymn for this morning, hymn number 204, and I find that hymn fascinating.

In our hymnal, is it in the Christmas section?

In all other hymnals that I know of, the Baptist hymnal and Presbyterian and Methodist, it's in the Christmas section for obvious reasons.

And as I thought about that, there's a lot of similarities between the time when Christ came the first time and the time that he came the second time.

1 of the boring parts of the sermon was a list of all those, so I won't go through it at great detail.

It took me about 20 minutes, so there's 20 minutes of the sermon that we'll skip.

I'll tell you briefly so you can study this on your own.

The political environment at the time of Christ's first coming, who was in power?

This is very similar to what Revelation says will happen at the end of time.

Study the events surrounding the civil strife that was going on at this time, the calls for peace and safety that ended up Caesar Augustus set up something called the Pax Romana.

Well, that's what historians call it in retrospect.

And the events surrounding that are very similar to what will happen at the end of time.

Study what Jesus said in Matthew 19 about the social environment of his day.

It's very similar to what's happening around us today.

The church schools of Christ's day are very similar to the church schools of today.

The secular schools in Christ's day teach the, taught the same philosophy that secular schools are teaching today, based on the same philosophies.

I'm a medical student, so I thought about the medical environment.

You can ask me about this afterwards if you think it's a stretch, but the same kinds of diseases that Jesus spent most of his time healing are the same kind of diseases that most doctors spend most of their time on.

But of course, most of the parallels are in the area of religion.

And I could spend a long time here, but I'll try to control myself.

Specifically, there was confusion about the coming of the Messiah.

Is there a lot of confusion today about the coming of the Messiah?

Yes, there's a lot of misunderstanding of Bible prophecy at both of these times in world history.

We could go on and on about the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the parallels that we see today.

We have some people who deny the Bible authority.

They believe in a naturalistic type of religion, a deistic type of religion.

On the other hand, which may be more of a danger for you and I, we may be more like the Pharisees, we add our own ideas to the Bible.

I want to go exactly by what the Bible says.

I don't want to add or take away from it.

Some wise person once said, those who don't learn from history are what?

So in the first century BC, did the remnant people of God, the majority of them, did they recognize the coming of the Messiah?

Could the same thing happen to you and I if we don't learn lessons from them?

I don't want to study about how the Jews missed it.

I want to study someone who did recognize the coming of the Messiah.

And we could study the shepherds, the wise men, John the Baptist, Mary, Joseph.

I want to study someone this morning with you who is very similar to most of us here.

I've been a Christian for my entire life basically.

I know that God doesn't have grandchildren, but my parents were Christians, my grandparents were Christians, and I think that's the case for many of us here.

So I want to study someone who recognized the coming of Christ, who understood his mission in coming, and who was a long-term member of God's remnant church, very long-term member of God's remnant church.

We want to study the life of Simeon and we'll set spend a little bit of time looking at Anna.

The reason that I think this is very important to us is that, believe it or not, Simeon is a type of the 144, 000.

Well, we won't study that, but briefly, the 144, 000 are those who are alive when Jesus comes who are translated without seeing death.

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Simeon and the 144,000

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