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Martin Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church

Norman McNulty

A Most Precious Message

You know, I did something that I rarely do, and that is at the last minute the Lord impressed upon me to change the sermon that I had thought I was going to give.

And so the title for the message today is A Most Precious Message, and before we get into the sermon I'm just going to ask the Lord to guide us today, but again it's great to be with you here in Centerville.

We always enjoy coming and trust that the Lord has a blessing in store for us today.

Father in heaven, thank you for bringing us here to worship you today.

I pray that you would guide us as we reflect on that which has happened before and that which is coming soon.

I pray that we would be in tune with you and that you would give me the right words to speak so that we would receive the blessings and the admonitions that you would have for us today, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

You know, it has been said that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat those mistakes.

Today I want to look at, from a Adventist and historical perspective, the history of 1888.

James White was obviously 1 of the giants of the pioneers who helped, by God's grace, to start the Adventist faith, and he worked himself to death.

At the time of his death, the Lord told Ellen White that he would raise up other messengers to carry on the work that James had left aside at his death.

It wouldn't be long before that promise became apparent for those who were paying attention.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church had formally organized in 1863 in Battle Creek, Michigan.

John Harvey Kellogg formed the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

He was called the Lord's Physician by Ellen White.

There were a lot of things that were happening in those 25 years from 1863 to 1888, but a lot of pieces were being put into place to see the return of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.

Yet Seventh-day Adventists were struggling with an understanding of the gospel of righteousness by faith.

Sermons were preached on the law that reached a point that Ellen White called them as dry as the hills of Gilboa.

Now, you may wonder what it means for something to be as dry as the hills of Gilboa.

Now you don't have to necessarily know exactly, but here's the point.

Gilboa was the mountain where King Saul was killed in battle.

And after his death, David cursed the hills of Gilboa, saying, you mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew nor rain upon you, neither fields of choice fruits.

For there the shield of the mighty was vilely cast away, the shield of Saul anointed with oil." And so after Saul's death, Gilboa became a wasteland, a desert land.

And so you didn't have to know that history to know that if something's as dry as the hills of Gilboa, that must be pretty dry.

Well, the reason why it was dry is because Gilboa became a wasteland after the death of Saul.

And Ellen White said that Adventist sermons in the 1880s were as dry as the hills of Gilboa because they preached the law but they did not lift up Christ.

Now it should be said of us today that when you come and hear a message at church that Christ is lifted up.

There's many things in scripture that we talk about.

There are many truths to discuss, but Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

And if Jesus is not exalted within the truth that is proclaimed, We are not presenting that truth as it should be preached.

So 25 years after the formal organization of God's end-time remnant church, God was bringing his church to a climax.

Yet there were storm clouds that were brewing in the church and in the world.

In the church, you had the president of the General Conference, G.I.

Butler, write a series of articles in the Review and Herald where he claimed that there were degrees of inspiration in scripture.

You may not know that, but that's an interesting part of history.

And 3 years after he wrote those articles, he used the principles of those articles to say that Ellen White must not be inspired because he disagreed with that which she was saying about him.

And then we had storm clouds brewing on the world scene.

Some of you may have heard of the Blair Bill of 1888.

Blair of New Hampshire proposed a bill on the floor of the United States Senate which read, A bill to secure to the people the enjoyment of the first day of the week, commonly known as the Lord's Day, as a day of rest, and to promote its observance as a day of religious worship.

Now I'll say this, There are Seventh-day Adventists who don't study much prophecy, but if you hear a bill that says that, what are you thinking?

We know what Revelation 13 says about the 2 beasts that will work together and about an image to the beast being formed, the image being the union of church and state, and the mark of the beast is enforced Sunday worship, Seventh-day Adventists know that.

And so there's this bill being discussed.

And yet, very fascinatingly, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher by the name of A.T.

Jones came to the United States Senate and successfully argued against this bill.

And the crafters of the bill were even trying to accommodate Jews in Seventh-day Adventists and saying, well, we'll make accommodation for Seventh-day Adventists and give you an exception to this law.

And what Jones brilliantly argued was that if you give us an exception to that which is already a natural right, you're taking our rights away from us anyway.

We don't need an exception to preserve that which already exists.

So the stage was set for the Holy Spirit to be poured out at the General Conference session later that year in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

And this is where we're going to go to our scripture reading for today in Galatians chapter 3, because in Galatians chapter 3 we see a passage of scripture that came into an area of dispute among church leaders and believers, members.

Galatians chapter 3 verses 23 through 26.

Here we read, but before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up under the faith, which should afterwards be revealed.

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us into Christ, that we might be justified by faith, but after that faith has come we are no longer under a schoolmaster, for you are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." Now This passage of Scripture became a point of dispute because some of the key leaders of the church, Uriah Smith, the gentleman who wrote the book Daniel and the Revelation, the book that we still often use today, very excellent book on Daniel and Revelation, G.

Butler, the president of the General Conference, and then several other key leaders, they came to an understanding that the law being discussed in this passage was the ceremonial law, yet Jones and Wagner, A.T.

Wagner, who was a physician in California, who was now writing for the Signs of the Times, came to an understanding that this law was actually not the ceremonial law, but the moral law.

Now, let me give you a little bit of a final answer.

You know what the Lord revealed to Ellen White sometime after 1888?

The law here is both the ceremonial and the moral law.

And you know what happened to Seventh-day Adventists?

They fought like cats and dogs to try to define which was the correct answer when they were both right.

But what can sometimes happen when we get into debates on theology is we can take things to an extreme and make claims that are not actually true.

What happened was Smith and Butler and others said, if you say that the law is the 10 commandments, you are setting people up to receive the mark of the beast.

Because if we say that the law is the 10 Commandments, then we are no longer under that law and therefore the law will be done away with and there's no point in being a Seventh-day Adventist faith anymore because we uplift the law of God.

The law is not done away with, it's just simply no longer the shadow that we are under, because Christ is the embodiment of the law.

When Jesus revealed himself on this earth, he was a personification of every commandment in the 10 Commandments.

So that before he came, you have the 10 Commandments spelled out, you shall not do this, you shall not do that.

When Jesus comes, those things become obvious.

When you spend time with Jesus, when you spend time in His Word, when you study His life in the Gospels, and when you see His teachings, and you get to know Jesus, you don't need the 10 Commandments to say, don't do that, because you know him.

And when you know him, it's obvious that you don't go out and kill somebody.

Yes, you remember the day that he has called us to remember.

And so there was this big fight that was happening.

And so Wagner was writing articles about the Law and Galatians and the Covenants, and then you had competing articles being written in the Review and Herald.

So there was all this controversy and dissension leading up to the General Conference.

And I'm not going to get into every last detail, but those were some of the things that were happening.

Then, right before the general conference session, there was a minister's meeting.

And at the minister's meeting, they had some debates about a variety of ideas, 1 of which was what constitute the 10 horns of Daniel 7?

Now, how many of you enjoy studying the 10 horns of Daniel 7?

But should we be fighting over the 10 horns of Daniel 7?

There was a fight over who the tenth horn was.

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A Most Precious Message

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