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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jonathan Zirkle

The Great Apostasy

Well, I want to thank you for having me here today.

The title of my talk today is The Great Apostasy.

And I just want to give you a little background as to why I'm presenting this today.

I had the opportunity, boy it's amazing how time flies, I guess it was only a year ago, that I went on the great controversy tour with the Dombsties.

And in this tour you go to, you start in Rome, and you go through Italy up into a little bit of Switzerland and into Germany, And you get to see sites of the Reformation, the early church, just sites about the great controversy.

And just a little plug for what's going to be happening this afternoon is this afternoon I will be showing the pictures that I took on that and telling a little bit about that tour.

But today, I'd like to talk to you about the Great Apostasy.

The Great Apostasy is what really sets us up for the Reformation.

And so that's what I'll be speaking to you about today.

I know it's a beautiful day, and you'll be tempted to be outside.

I know I would be too, but I hope that you'd be blessed if you would come to that.

So anyway, before I begin, let's start with a word of prayer.

Dear Lord, I would just ask that you would be with us here today.

Lord, please let these be your words and not my own.

It's an older house and I have a problem.

If any of you are homeowners, you've probably experienced this problem.

And let me tell you something, rats are a real problem.

I've done a good job of keeping them out of the house, but I have a garage.

And once in a while, the rats will get into the garage and I have to do something about it.

In this particular situation, what happens is the rats come into the garage, and the garage has 2 rooms, and there's the main garage, and that's the 1 they figure out how to get into, and I can never figure out how they always find a new way in.

And then the room right next to it is where I keep my dog food.

And what the rats do is they smell the dog food.

And they come to the door, what they've done most recently is so disturbing to me because they come to the door and they've actually chewed a hole through the door so that they can come underneath the door and come get the dog food.

Well, I had to put a piece of metal over that so I could stop that.

You know, my house is my sanctuary and I don't want rats in my house.

You know, God has a house too, and he has a sanctuary, and he doesn't want rats in his sanctuary.

It was built, the first time Moses built it was approximately 3, 500 years ago.

3, 500 years ago and we're still talking about it today.

He hates it so much that he burned it once and then he burned it again.

And so today I'm talking about rats coming into the sanctuary.

I love the sanctuary because in the sanctuary you see the entire plan of salvation.

Here's a diagram of the sanctuary, And what I'd kind of like to do, hopefully you guys can recognize this, this is the entranceway and on into the sanctuary.

What does the altar of sacrifice represent?

Moving up, we come to the table of showbread.

What does the table of showbread represent?

Moving along, we come to the candlestick.

Holy Spirit witnessing, witnessing to people, converting them, converting ourselves.

And here we come up here, altar of incense.

And then moving up here into the most holy place, we have Ark of the Covenant.

And really the key things in the Ark of the Covenant is God's throne and God's law.

Here is where we have the plan of salvation.

He will send the rats into our lives, into our church, to destroy it.

I'd like to talk to you about a time when the Bible said that this would happen.

If you could, turn in your Bibles to 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2.

I want to read a little passage out of there.

2 Thessalonians chapter 2, and we're going to read verses 3 and 4.

Paul is talking about what has to happen before Christ's soon return.

This is the early church, and people are really looking for Christ coming back.

He promised to come back, and Paul now is going to tell us some things that have to happen before Christ's return.

He says, "...let no man deceive you by any means, for that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God." This is the text that we get the whole idea of the great apostasy.

He's saying that there's going to be a time where there's going to be a falling away.

It's going to be a falling away from the truth.

It's going to be a falling away from the plan of salvation that God set forth.

It's going to be a falling away from the sanctuary and this man of sin is going to is going to arise and he's going to place himself in the sanctuary.

It says here he's he's going to sit in the temple of God.

If I could take you now to another verse, 1 John 2, verse 18.

This is John writing, and he's writing, we believe these epistles were all written towards the very end of his life.

He's writing this just before he writes the book of Revelation.

So This is probably sometime around AD 90.

And he's also going to be talking about the same subject.

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The Great Apostasy

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