Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The Coming Sunday Laws

Cody Francis

01 Preparing for the Sunday Law

02 Facing the Sunday Law

03 Enduring the Sunday Law

04 Politicizing the Sunday Law

05 The Coming Sunday Law

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Father in heaven, we're grateful that you have given us this day.

We thank you for the privilege and opportunity to study together upcoming events.

We pray that you will give us wisdom and please help us to understand your word and to hear your voice speaking to our hearts.

All right, so we've looked at the last 4 meetings.

We've looked at the first 3 were the different decrees in the Old Testament time to the related to the children of the captivity and Babylonian captivity and how they relate to progressive developments in Sunday laws in our time.

And so we had Daniel chapter 3, we had a decree of what?

What was it prohibiting, what was it enforcing?

Then we had in Daniel chapter 6, not only was false worship being enforced, but what else was added?

So there's a progression that has taken place here.

And then we come to the decree with Esther and Mordecai and Haman.

And what is, it's a decree just requiring death for everyone, right?

And so we see from there a beginning localized prohibition or enforcement of false worship becoming more global and leading to prohibiting true worship while enforcing false worship, eventually leading to a death decree or a decree of genocide to God's people, not to a race, but to a faith group, which would be the remnant church.

Then yesterday we looked at politicizing Sunday laws and how it is, when we look at the early church and when we look at Ellen White's counsels, we see that we are to bury political questions.

We're not to speak to political questions, and that there can be a tendency at times for us to insert our own political biases into our understanding of Bible prophecy.

And that is classic what we say in theological terms, isogesis, reading into the text.

And I think we need to be very careful about political isogesis when we, and I think it can happen from any side.

And so it's not 1 side that's immune or anything like that.

And so we have to go to great controversy, we have to go to revelation and allow God's word and inspiration to inform our understanding of prophecy.

We should not try to figure out how we can squeeze current events into prophecy.

We have a bad track record of that as Adventists and it hasn't served us well.

Have you ever read Uriah Smith's book, Daniel and Revelation?

And there's a lot of good information there.

Ellen White recommends it, I recommend it.

But when you come to Daniel 11 and to Armageddon, you have a lot that is about Turkey and things like this.

And I would suggest that primarily what was happening there was he was reading, seeing what was happening in current events and trying to place it in prophecy.

Now a hundred years later, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Now there are people that will still hold to a Turkey interpretation and that's fine, you can come to your own as long as you're developing it from a biblical perspective rather than a current events perspective.

But I can go through in my lifetime and think of times when we have tried to force current events and what's going on into prophecy and it hasn't always been the most helpful.

9-11 there was, okay, how is this going to lead to the fulfillment of Revelation 13?

I'm not saying it couldn't have, but in hindsight maybe there were some developments there, maybe not, but not everything that goes on, even major events, fits into the prophetic scenario.

And More recently, we can all think of COVID and how COVID was trying to be fit into prophetic scenarios, but we shouldn't try to put a square peg in a round hole.

We need to look at what prophecy says and then allow our understanding of prophecy to determine what if the current events are fitting into that or not.

So we're gonna look at some current events today.

I believe there definitely are current events that do fit into prophecy, but I think we have to be very careful that we do not engage in inserting what is going on around us into the prophetic picture.

Even though there are ways, could COVID have become an end-time scenario?

So could have the Great Depression, so could have World War I or World War II or the Cold War or any number of things as well.

And we have to always make sure that we recognize that distinction between what could and what does fit into it.

Yeah, except even in 1888, there was no major catalyst.

There was not a COVID situation or a war or something like that, it was simply things were aligning together.

And so I think the greater alignment is not necessarily what is going on in the political or secular world, but rather what is going on in the hearts of God's people.

That that's a greater alignment if we are being prepared and ready to receive the latter rain and to give the final message or not.

I think that's a bigger thing that is hindering rather than any developments.

Because when you look at it, I believe that things very well could have transpired when you look at, and I've mentioned it before, something like 25 million signatures that were in favor of a Sunday law, about a fourth of the population was on record as being in favor of a Sunday law in 1888.

Now, if 25% of our country was in favor of something, politicians would yield almost immediately to that.

If it was across a broad spectrum of those that had actually signed up, not just in favor, but it actually sending in petitions and acting on it.

And so it's God can bring or prophecy will be fulfilled, no matter what.

And we need to recognize that we don't know what catalyst or what other things are going to bring that about specifically.

We could also look at this as distinguishing between rumors and reality in Sunday Laws.

How many of you have ever heard that we didn't really land on the moon?

And there may be some here that believe that.

How many of you have ever heard about chemtrails?

What about 5G and all of things associated with 5G?

You know, I had a first time experience last fall doing an evangelistic series where I was presenting and I mentioned something as an illustration of the sun going around the earth, and somebody called out to me to object to that.

And so I had to answer an objection that the earth was why I believe the earth was round.

And so it's, there's People that are believing all of these various things.

Generally, we refer to these type of things today as conspiracy theories.

But we'll look at that a little bit, but I do wanna ask a question.

There's plausibility but not completely provable.

So there's some plausibility but you can't quite prove it.

There's players behind the scenes with nefarious intent.

And this is not every conspiracy theory, but I just, and this is not an authoritative source.

This is kind of me put it, pulling things together.

It explains events currently taking place.

It confirms that's key in most conspiracy theories, it confirms my preexisting biases.

Majority reject this idea, only a privileged group really know what is really going on, and no amount of evidence will convince to the contrary.

And so here we have kind of the hallmarks.

Now as you look at those hallmarks, Does a Sunday Law, does it fit into that?

I would say that yes, it does fit into that, the worldly definition of a conspiracy theory.

By the way, are there things that would be termed conspiracy theories that I hope every 1 of us believes?

So for example, how many of us believe in a recent seven-day creation?

Series

The Coming Sunday Laws

05 The Coming Sunday Law

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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