Michigan Camp Meeting 2023: The Boldness of the Cross

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Plenary

Jim Micheff

The Boldness of the Cross

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2023 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

You know what you have placed on my heart.

But Lord, We need your Holy Spirit to be here and be our teacher You promised him Jesus asked for it and you gave it He's our teacher to teach us all things that Jesus taught So Lord today tonight we want to be good students with ears to hear what the Spirit says to the church.

We want Jesus to be lifted up and magnified.

So Lord, teach us tonight and we'll give you all the honor and praise and glory.

The agonizing cry of Mary broke the thick silence.

I went to the tomb and it's empty, I tell you.

With that, Peter and John raced out the door, leaving Mary to follow at her own pace.

He looked inside, and just as Mary had said, the tomb was empty.

When Peter arrived, he pushed John aside and he went right into the tomb.

He looked around and he saw the emptiness.

And then he saw the grave clothes lying there folded neatly.

He saw the napkin that had been placed around the head of Jesus and it was right in that same spot where his head was.

And then he saw on the other side where the grave clothes had been neatly folded.

The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.

For John, the sight of the empty tomb and the neatly folded grave clothes was enough.

The Bible says he believed, even though he didn't understand any of it.

But for Peter, he just couldn't fathom such a thing.

Absorbed in his own thoughts, he headed back to where they were staying.

Yet again, Peter relived that horrible experience.

He remembered the words of Jesus during their last supper together.

This very night all of you will deny you know me.

Peter had been so sure that even if the others did that, he would never deny Jesus as his Lord and Master.

He remembered how irritated he was when Jesus told him that before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me 3 times.

But with a broken heart, he recalled hearing the rooster.

And with those degrading oaths fresh on his lips, he turned to look for Jesus.

Their eyes met, and in that instant Peter realized how well his Lord knew him and how accurately he had read his heart.

He shuddered as he remembered the picture of sorrow that crossed Jesus' face, and then he saw a hand raised to strike Jesus in the face, and instantly he knew that he had hurt Jesus more than that physical pain.

Everything else from that moment was a blur.

Running where he knew not and then realizing he had retraced the steps of Jesus back to the garden, to the very spot where he had poured out his soul in agony to his father.

With a broken heart full of guilt, he fell on his face and poured his heart out to God.

And then his mind switched to that awful picture forever etched in his mind.

As Peter and John approached the house, they could hear excited voices.

Several ladies crowded around them all talking at once.

And then they told us to go tell the disciples and especially you Peter the good news Jesus has risen Somehow the disciples just couldn't bring themselves to believe it it just seemed too good to be true a Short time later.

They heard the excited voice of Mary, He's alive!

Mary's face was radiant with joy and excitement as she burst into the room, all traces of sorrow and grief were gone.

With wonder and amazement, the disciples listened.

But it was as if these women were delusional.

Again, the disciples refused to believe the reality of their stories.

The Bible records that after this, Jesus also appeared to Peter.

Although the Bible doesn't give any details, I can imagine what that was like.

Peter pouring his heart out and confessing his sin and self-reliance, begging for forgiveness, and Jesus assuring him that he was forgiven and restored as a disciple.

Later that day, Jesus revealed himself to the other disciples and gently rebuked them for not believing in the testimony the women had given them.

Just before he ascended to heaven, he gave a standing command to every disciple of his who would ever live.

"'All authority is given to me, he said, in heaven and in earth.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you.

And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world." What is it that propelled the early church to take the gospel of the world with such boldness and power?

With their knowledge of the sanctuary and a personal experience with Jesus, they understood first-hand the significance of the cross and their need of a Savior.

With boldness they faced resistance, threatenings, and even death.

Joyfully, they gave their all in proclaiming the gospel.

In just a short time, the message of a crucified, risen, and soon-coming Savior was shared throughout the known world.

The cross is the most complete picture of God's love the universe will ever have.

God has determined that the cross will be 1 of the most important factors in awakening the moral sensibilities of men and leading them to conviction and repentance.

In Signs of the Times, December 30, 1889, we read this interesting statement, if man would contemplate the love of Christ displayed on the cross, their faith would be strengthened to appropriate the merits of his shed blood and they would be cleansed and saved from sin.

It is used to help us understand how God transforms our rebellious character into the likeness of Christ's character and how God replaces the desire to sin with the desire to obey through the power of love.

The foundational principle of the plan of salvation and redemption is through death comes life Spiritual life comes to us only by carnal death The only place in the universe where sinful man and God can meet is at Calvary.

The cross represents a choice—eternal life or eternal death.

This is why understanding the cross and salvation is so important.

We need to recognize something important about sin.

The Bible defines sin as the transgression of the law, acts of disobedience, sins, something I do.

At creation we were created in God's image.

His greatest desire was to do God's will.

When Adam chose to sin, his rebellion forever corrupted his operating system of love.

The Bible refers to that change as carnal, sinful, fallen, flesh, all referring to the marred godlike nature man was created with.

It is the carnal mind which leads us to disobey God's law.

Paul says and explains it this way, Because the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.

Stephen Bohr

Deadly Camouflage

I want to invite you to bow your heads as we pray.

Father in heaven we come before your awesome throne in the all-powerful name of Jesus because we know that when we come in the name of Jesus, you incline your ear to hear.

We ask that you will be with us as we open your holy word.

Speak to our minds and speak to our hearts and transform us through the power of your Holy Spirit we pray in the precious and holy name of Jesus Amen the book of Revelation tells us that Lucifer was successful in deceiving one-third of the angels of heaven.

So his methods of deception must have been very, very strong.

And then of course we know that Satan tempted Eve, Eve Adam, and that's why we're here today.

The big question is what methods did Satan use to deceive our progenitors?

In the present study we are going to attempt to determine Satan's methods in deception.

I want to begin by reading a statement that we find in manuscript releases volume 10 and page 162.

If the angels were deceived by Lucifer's ingenious methods of misrepresenting God, if Adam and Eve were deceived by his declaration that God was withholding from them the higher education that would make them as gods, is there not danger that men today will be deceived?

Please read the first chapter of Patriarchs and Prophets and see if the precious truths contained in this book are not given by the Lord to protect his people from deceptions that are urged upon them just now.

There's something special about studying the first chapter of Patriarchs and Prophets, which is a description of the origin of evil in heaven.

So what we want to do is go back to the Garden of Eden and examine the methods that Satan used to deceive Eve and then through Eve to tempt and lead Adam into sin.

God created Adam and Eve with every spiritual and physical blessing.

He gave them fresh air, radiant sunshine, luxuriant emerald green fields, luxuriant plants, fragrant flowers, luscious fruit, delicious sweet water, animal companions, human companions, angel companionship, and Adam and Eve had the privilege of having face-to-face communion with their Creator.

God, by giving all of this to Adam and Eve, was revealing his love to them.

It was a sign of God's unmistakable love for them, but God hoped that they would return that love, that they would reciprocate that love.

He created him with the capacity of reciprocating God's love.

God, the lover, wanted a response from Adam and Eve and of course they had to choose to respond to God's love.

Thus we find the covenant formula already in the Garden of Eden.

It is I will be their God and they shall be my people.

But God decided to place a test in the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve had to choose to show their love for God And so God placed a tree, the tree of a knowledge of good and evil in the garden to test the love and loyalty of Adam and Eve to him.

You know Jesus said, if you love me you will keep my commandments.

And so God by placing the tree in the garden was saying, if you love me you will keep my commandments.

And so God by placing the tree in the garden was saying if you love me you will not eat from the tree you will keep my command.

Let's read about that command in Genesis chapter 2 and verses 15 through 17.

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

God did not give them a long list of rules and regulations.

Just 1 prohibition for them to show their love and loyalty toward him.

If they were hungry, they could have eaten from any of the trees of the garden.

So the command was simple, clear, and easy to obey.

Now there's a very important point in the story that we find in Genesis 1 and 2.

And that is that Adam and Eve, as evidence that they loved God, were to obey God's command without explanations, or without God giving them any reasons.

Now God told them what the consequences would be if they ate from the tree, but God did not tell them what was in that specific tree, why God forbade it to them.

So God expected them to obey without any explanations.

He wanted unquestioning obedience to his command as an evidence of their love for him.

Ellen White wrote in Patriarchs and Prophets page 53 the following words, should they attempt to investigate its nature, that is the nature of the tree, they would be exposed to his wiles.

They were admonished to give careful heed to the warning that God had sent them and to be content with the instruction that he had seen fit to impart.

Don't ask me why you can't eat from this specific tree that according to Ellen White looked like just the other trees, it was just as beautiful, simply take me at my word and don't eat from the tree.

No explanations, no reason given, but yes, the consequences if they ate from the tree.

Furthermore, we find in the Genesis story that God defined what is good and what is evil.

God was the arbiter, if you please, of good and evil.

The standard of right and wrong was not internal but external.

In other words, God defined what was good and what was evil.

This is totally contrary to postmodern thinking, where the idea that you can define good and evil is not given objectively by God, but comes subjectively from your own heart.

So we're going to find that Satan was the first postmodern, if you please, in the history of this world.

Actually Satan had already used this argument in heaven.

The argument that the definition of right and wrong does not come from outside in an objective source from God but comes from inside that you define good and evil yourself.

He used the same argument for the angels in heaven.

He, that is Lucifer in heaven, reiterated his claim that angels needed no control but should be left to follow their own will which would ever guide them right.

He denounced the divine statutes as a restriction of their liberty and declared that it was his purpose to secure the abolition of law that freed from this restraint the hosts of heaven might enter upon a more exalted, more glorious state of existence.

Angels don't need an external source of right and wrong.

Their own will will always lead them to what is right.

Now God had warned Adam and Eve that a powerful angel had fallen from heaven and that he was going to come to the garden to try and convince them to eat from the forbidden tree.

Now, Eve thought, well, if this angel comes from heaven and tries to convince me to eat from this tree, immediately I'm going to know that this is the angel that God spoke to us about.

And so Satan could not appear as an angel of light.

Let me ask you, can Satan transform himself into an angel of light?

The Bible says yes, but if he came as an angel, Eve would detect him immediately.

Patriarchs and Prophets page 53 Ellen White wrote, Had she been addressed, had Eve been addressed, by a being like the angels, her fears would have been excited.

But she had no thought that the fascinating serpent could become the medium of the fallen foe.

He hid himself by using a serpent because he knew that Eve was expecting an angel.

Now we're going to find in our study that Satan used 5 methods to lead Eve into sin and then through Eve, Adam.

The first thing that Satan did was to perform a counterfeit miracle.

Is Satan going to use miracles at the end of time to deceive the world?

Yes, signs and wonders were told in Matthew chapter 24 to deceive if possible even whom?

You say what was the counterfeit miracle that he performed in the Garden of Eden.

Well let's read Genesis chapter 3 and verse 1.

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman, let's stop there for a moment.

I assure you that if you went to a serpentarium and you were looking into a cage where there was an anaconda and the anaconda lifted its head and said good afternoon, you would be out of there in a hurry.

The Certainty of God’s Promises

Father in heaven, we thank you for this wonderful day of camp meeting that you have given us.

How wonderful it is for your family to get together to sing praises to your name, to hear your voice through preaching, and to speak with you through prayer.

We ask that as we open your word that your Holy Spirit will be with us, that you will enlighten our minds, that you will soften our hearts, and you will empower us to give a good witness that we are followers of Jesus.

We thank you for the privilege of prayer and for hearing us for we ask it in Jesus name, Amen.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus had many theological battles with the Pharisees, but he also had battles with the Sadducees who sought to entrap Jesus in apparently insolvable dilemmas.

Once the Apostle Paul was speaking in a certain place to a group that had Sadducees and Pharisees and when the Apostle Paul spoke about the resurrection there was dissension between these 2 Jewish sects.

Let's read about it in Acts chapter 23 and verses 7 through 9.

It says, And when he had said this, when he had spoken about the resurrection, a dissension arose between the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the assembly was divided.

For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection and no angel or spirit, but the Pharisees confess both." It's kind of like the churches today.

See, Adventists have controversy with Sunday keepers because we keep the Sabbath.

You know Adventists believe that the dead know nothing whereas many churches believe that the dead know everything and so in the times of Christ these Jewish sects they were all Jews but they had different belief systems.

Ellen White confirmed what Acts 23 tells us about the Sadducees and the resurrection.

In Desire of Ages page 603 she wrote, the Sadducees denied the existence of angels, the resurrection of the dead, and the doctrine of a future life with its rewards and punishments.

Now why did the Sadducees deny the resurrection?

Why did they teach that there was no resurrection?

The first reason is that according to them a resurrection would be contrary to observable scientific principles.

It's the same argument that is used by liberal Christian theologians today which they call the principle of analogy and that is that if we don't see resurrections from the dead today they did not exist in the past either.

For the Sadducees it was impossible for a body that had been decomposed and it was in the tomb to reintegrate it and resurrected from the dead.

So basically they said resurrections are contrary to science.

Ellen White wrote in Desire of Ages page 537 and 538 about this objection to the resurrection.

She stated they did not believe in a resurrection of the dead.

Producing so-called science, they had reasoned that it would be an impossibility for a dead body to be brought to life.

So because of so-called science, the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead but there was a second reason.

The second reason is that the Sadducees only accepted as fully inspired the 5 books of Moses and they could not find the doctrine of the resurrection in the first 5 books of the Bible and so they said if it's not in the first 5 books of the Bible which we accept as fully inspired we cannot accept the doctrine of the resurrection.

Sproul wrote the following words about this, the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead for we do not find the resurrection taught explicitly in the first 5 books of the Bible.

So the Sadducees rejected the resurrection, first because they considered it unscientific and secondly because they could not find it in the Pentateuch in the first 5 books of the Bible known as the Law of Moses.

And so these Sadducees came to Jesus once and they wanted to ridicule his belief in the resurrection and they presented an absurd, preposterous, and hypothetical case of 7 brothers who married the same woman.

After telling the story, they asked Jesus whose wife this woman would be in the resurrection because she had 7 husbands.

And by the way, they used the writings of Moses to defend their view of what is known as leperate marriage.

If a brother died and did not leave a posterity, it was according to Moses that his brother had to marry his wife and give him posterity.

Let's read the passage about the encounter with the Sadducees with Jesus.

Luke 20 verses 27 to 33, this is the scenario that they present to Jesus Luke 20 27 to 33 then some of the Sadducees who deny that there is a resurrection came to him and asked him saying teacher Moses wrote what do they use as their authority?

Yes, and by the way the reference, Bible reference, is Deuteronomy 25 and verse 5.

This is the text that they're referring to.

So once again then some of the Sadducees who deny that there is a resurrection came to him and asked him saying, Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man's brother dies having a wife and he dies without children his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.

Now there were 7 brothers and the first took a wife and died without children and the second took her second took her as wife and he died childless then the third took her and in like manner the 7 also and they left no children and died last of all the woman died also therefore in the resurrection whose wife does she become They want to put Jesus between a rock and a hard place, but they don't understand whom they're dealing with now Jesus responds in 2 points those 2 points are not mentioned in the gospel of Luke but they're mentioned in the gospel of Matthew so save your place there and let's go to Matthew chapter 22 and verse 29.

Matthew 22 and verse 29 gives us the 2 reasons and then Jesus is going to add a third reason.

It says in Matthew 22 verse 29, Jesus answered and said to them, You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God.

Jesus is saying, You think that Moses did not mention the resurrection?

Well, you are mistaken, because Moses did refer to the resurrection of the dead.

You don't even understand the scriptures that you profess to believe in.

And then, Jesus says, "...nor the power of God." In other words, you limit the power of God by saying that God isn't powerful enough to resurrect the dead, but God is Almighty, he can reintegrate the dead, and he can resurrect them from the dead, so you ignore the scriptures, you are mistaken also because you deny the power of God.

But then Jesus gave a third reason, and in this third reason he says your example is irrelevant, because in the kingdom come there is not going to be any marriage.

This woman is not going to be married to any of the 7 brothers.

Let's read the response of Jesus in Luke 20 beginning with verse 33.

Luke 20 and verse 33 and we'll read through verse 38.

Jesus answered and said to them, the sons of this age, what did Jesus mean when he said this age?

Those who live in the present time right?

The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are counted worthy to attain that age, that is the age to come after the resurrection and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage nor can they die anymore for they are equal to the angels, and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection." So he's saying, folks, your example is irrelevant, because in the life to come, there is not going to be any marriage.

And let me just interject here that marriage was established by God for this world, for a specific purpose.

You see in the other worlds there is not procreation, only in this world.

Ellen White has several statements where she says that the purpose of procreation was to replace the vacancies that were left by Satan and his angels in heaven when they fell but when Jesus comes that purpose will have been fulfilled and so there will be no marriage in the kingdom come Ellen White makes that absolutely clear she said there will be no marriages in the kingdom come.

But now Jesus transitions, he said you don't understand the scriptures, you deny the power of God, your example is irrelevant because there's not going to be any marriage in the kingdom come and then Jesus now speaks about their misunderstanding of the writings of Moses.

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