Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The Sanctuary, 1844, & Why it Matters

Mark Howard

01 The Sanctuary Parable

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 so thankful for the blessing of Camp Meeting and all the wonderful messages we've heard so far and the work of Your Spirit upon our hearts and our minds.

Lord we ask today, you have promised us your spirit, the spirit of truth to lead us into truth.

We especially ask that he would be with us throughout this camp meeting week.

Guide my words, guide the hearers ears, Lord, that We may all gain the message that you have for us today.

Okay, this particular seminar, I have an outline, it has my introduction, which I'm not gonna, you'll find that I'm not gonna necessarily go in order of the notes and I don't read my notes, but I'll read things from my notes, especially when I have quotes.

I think, I don't like to read big quotes and have people just kind of have to listen without having the quote in front of them.

And there's some really important and helpful quotes that I'm going to share this week.

I want to start out by saying the name of the seminar, the Sanctuary 1844, and why does it matter or why it matters.

So if you were going to the Gardening 101 seminar, you're in the wrong room.

Or maybe you're in the right room and it was just providential.

So we're going to be talking about the subject of the sanctuary.

Now let me preface it by telling you that it was about 5 or 6 weeks ago I received a phone call from a former church member of mine, Not a former church member, they're still in the church, but in 1 of the churches I had pastored, he was in academy when I attended that church.

And this young man is now, he and his wife are about to have their first child.

He's in his late 20s or if not 30, but he's not any older than that.

And he and some of his friends in that age range, he especially expressed to me that, well, my wife and I are gonna have a child and I feel like I need to be able to teach my child the truth." But he said, I don't know how to teach this.

And specifically his question was, so he and his, a few of his guy friends started a men's Bible study in the morning where they call in a handful of guys.

They call in and they've been going over different Adventist doctrines to, you know, get a personal ownership of them, if you will.

And he had questions on the subject of the sanctuary and he asked if I would help out.

And so I was glad to be able to do that, so I've been calling into this Bible study.

The initial challenge I had is trying to explain to him that this isn't just gonna be 1 week.

And the reason I say that is because when we have an evangelistic series, we have 1 night where we go over the 2300 days, maybe.

The subject of the sanctuary is much broader than 2 nights.

And as I was thinking about it, a lot of our doctrines are, I mean, when you talk about the state of the dead, it's a doctrine.

When you talk about the Sabbath, it's a doctrine.

But when you talk about the sanctuary, it's a framework.

It's not just a slice, it's the undergirding.

And when you're talking about the sanctuary, as we're gonna look at today and throughout the week, it really is the framework of the atonement.

And so you don't just sit down and talk about the atonement 45 minutes, say there, you got that?

And I feel like we have done that so long that we have lost the significance to the point that it's almost like, well, the timeline confuses me.

I have this drawer at home and I have this screw, this tiny microscopic screw in that drawer.

I don't know where it came from, but I know it had to be important.

It fell out of something, and I know as soon as I get rid of it, I'm going to find this missing screw and I'll, oh, that's where that screw went.

I don't know if you ever have that kind of experience.

I feel like that's what we've done with the sanctuary.

It's supposed to be like this major important doctrine.

Not quite sure how it fits into everything and why it's so essential, but we're gonna hang on to it.

And I want us to have more than just hanging on to it.

And so I said, Lord, I felt in through this whole experience, I felt like I just felt impressed that I ought to volunteer, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute, to do something on the sanctuary.

And I felt like, if you know the story of William Miller, where, you know, he felt moved to preach, but he didn't want to preach.

And so he made this deal with the boy who asked him to preach, figuring, well, you know, yeah, if such and such, no, he made the deal with the Lord rather.

And he said, well, Lord, if somebody comes and invites me, because he thought nobody would ever invite him.

And within 30 minutes, there's a knock on the door.

I feel like we need something on the sanctuary But certainly there's going to be a seminar this camp meeting on the sanctuary And I went through the seminar book, you know, with that in mind, my morning prayer, I said, I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna find it and make sure it wasn't there.

And I said, okay, now, Lord, anyway, long story short, here I am.

And hopefully, hopefully this will be a blessing to us this week.

Now, it's a little bit ironic that the very first camp meeting I attended as a Seventh-day Adventist, I'll give you a little bit more of the story later this week.

I grew up in the Adventist church, but I lived with my mom and my mom and stepdad ended up leaving the Adventist Church through the Desmond Ford crisis.

You don't know what that is, you don't need to know all of it, but we will touch on some of it this week.

And so, I'd never been baptized until I was 26 years old, and the very first camp meeting I attended, my wife was pregnant with our first son.

More for her than me, I'm sure, sleeping in a tent and what have you.

But I went to a seminar, a life-changing seminar there by a pastor named David Grams, and some of you may know that name, but Pastor David Grams had a seminar in the sanctuary, and it just blew me away as a new Adventist, and that prompted a lot of personal study that has grown into...

When the Arise Institute was here in Michigan, I started teaching a sanctuary class for them.

I did 16 class hours, and I did that for several years and then I've spoken at other places because you know you speak and say, oh this guy speaks in the sanctuary, I haven't come over here and what have you.

Enough of that said, there's a lot I want to cover.

I have, hopefully you have a handout in front of you.

There is a statement in the book Great Controversy.

It's in the chapter Facing Life's Record.

I've got a rather lengthy quote here, but you'll see why.

It's in the blue there on that front page from Great Controversy 488.

It says, "...the subject of the sanctuary and the investigative judgment should be clearly understood by the people of God.

Even now, there's so much I wanna say here.

The sanctuary and the investigative judgment.

And you'll find that Ellen White and I believe the Bible authors in the New Testament don't make a whole lot out of all the detailed things in the sanctuary that we often hear about.

I'm not discounting it, but you know, you get big seminars where we'll talk about all the structure and what the gold stands for and what the silver stands for and what the curtains look.

I don't think that is the burden of the New Testament authors.

I don't think that was a burden in the spirit of prophecy.

Again, not a dismissal of those things, but she's focusing on the sanctuary and its connection with the judgment, right?

And we'll talk about that further this week.

The subject of the sanctuary and the investigative judgment should be clearly understood by the people of God.

Can everybody hear me okay without that or do I need to have the mic on?

We need to put a little more preaching voice in it because that echoing thing is driving me up a wall okay I see somebody in the back with his hand up to his ear like that okay we're gonna we're gonna try what's that I don't I'm out but I will have more tomorrow.

So, in fact, it was a trick that I did, so that now you're like, oh, I'm gonna try this seminar out.

No, you're not, you're gonna come back tomorrow to get the handout.

Okay, we'll work with that and we'll see if that that helps.

02 Doing the Math

Father in heaven, we are so thankful for the privilege we have of coming together and still having the freedom to study your word and to be guided by your spirit, the spirit of truth.

Lord, as we're studying this most important subject, we pray that the Spirit would be present to give us clarity and understanding, for we ask and pray it in Jesus' name, amen.

Ooh, 1 thing I do not want to not have is my Bible.

Now, how many of you here, I don't think I should even, I'm not gonna ask for a show of hands, okay?

But I know that a lot of Adventists, even long time Adventists have had a challenge with the 2300 day timeline.

I had somebody telling me just today, somebody who's been in the church their whole life, said yeah I just that thing with the time, the figures and all that stuff just confuses me.

It's something that I think we need to be clear on.

And I think part of it, there's a few things that complicate the 2300-day timeline.

And let me back up even further than that.

Today our primary goal is simply to work through the timeline, not to draw all the conclusions of the timeline because we don't have time for that.

If we want to make the timeline clear, I just want you to be able to say, oh, that's how we come to that conclusion of 1844, that's why, and it makes sense from scripture.

That's what I want you to leave with today.

Because other denominations do not agree with our interpretation.

In fact, I remember doing a revival series when I was pastoring the Burlington Church years ago and I remember a gentleman, he was a Lutheran, had been coming to the church and I remember him coming up to me after 1 of the meetings and he said, you know, he says, I've talked to my pastor about this but he just doesn't see that 2300 days in 1844 the same way as you guys do.

Now folks, no pun intended, but do the math with me.

If Another denomination came to the same conclusion we did.

You're gonna come to the Seventh-day Adventist church.

And we'll be clear in that, you know, so there's, you have to understand that if a person doesn't want to become an Adventist, they're predisposed not to see what may be the clearest thing to see.

You know, I'll go a little wider than that.

There's a man named Frank Turek who is a, he's not a Seventh-day Adventist, he's a Christian apologist.

He does debates on college campuses and gives reasons for the Christian faith.

And he'll have students who are questioning the Christian faith, they may be agnostic, they may be atheists, whatever, and they come up to the mic and they throw these questions at him and and it's funny that I've watched a number of his videos you can check them out on YouTube but after a while somebody's back and forth with somebody and gives him pretty good answers he'll ask him the question let me ask you he said If I gave you a clear enough answer to your questions, would you ever consider becoming a Christian?

In other words, I don't wanna be 1 of those.

So I'm saying that for your benefit to say, you'll talk to some people for other faiths and they'll say, well, I don't know, you guys are off base on 1844.

And then you're gonna be tempted to question whether we know what we're talking about as Adventists because some other person doesn't see it.

I just want you to know that sometimes the reason people don't see things isn't because it's not in Scripture.

So having said that, that'll sink in a little while.

So when it comes to the timeline, there's a couple of things that I think trip people up.

1 is the continual conversion from weeks to days to years to day for year.

There's a lot of that that goes on in calculating the timeline of the 2, 300 days.

That's 1 of the complications that I think people run into.

Another is understanding the day-for-year principle.

You know, we have questions about that, which I'll answer in a moment.

Another is the connection between Daniel 8 and 9, because not all denominations make that connection.

If they did, they'd be coming to a conclusion somewhere around 1844, and you don't find any other denominations like yeah, we studied the 2300 days We we come to the end of that in 1857 like where are those people?

That like I know what you're where you are with 1844, but we don't we don't come to the same conclusion Okay, fine.

What conclusion do you they don't even study it?

That should cause reason for pause and reflection for a Christian to say, wait, you're not even studying this?

Ah, you guys are off base, 3 angels messages, Sunday Law, all this stuff.

Great, what do you do with the 3 angels messages?

Okay, well that's because the church is going to be raptured by then, is what they say.

It's going to be a rude awakening for folks in the times coming ahead.

So what I want you to do is I want you to go to Daniel.

We're going to start in Daniel chapter 8.

We will spend more time on the context of this later in the week but like I said I want to I want to just get into the timeline.

There are some other challenges that are things that give people challenge which I'll get into in a moment, but I wanna read first of all from the book of Daniel.

There's some great context in Daniel 8 that again we're not getting into today.

Daniel 8 and we'll read verses 13 and 14.

Daniel 8, 13, Daniel says, "'Then I heard a holy 1 speaking, "'and another holy 1 said to that certain 1 "'who was speaking, how long will the vision be "'concerning the daily sacrifices "'and the transgression of desolation, "'the giving of both the sanctuary "'and the host to be trampled underfoot?' It's just summarizing what has come before in Daniel 8, which we'll look at later.

Verse 14, and he said to me, for how long?

2, 300 days, then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.

First thing I want you to note is there are 2 periods of time addressed here.

At the end of the 2, 300 days, something is going to begin called the cleansing of the sanctuary.

There is nothing that tells us how long that's gonna last.

So there's a definite period of time and an indefinite.

We're gonna be dealing primarily with the definite 2300 days.

But Daniel's, here's this time period, 2300 days.

Then it happened when I, Daniel, had seen the vision and was what?

Okay so don't feel bad if you don't understand it right away.

That suddenly there stood before me 1 having the appearance of a man, and I heard a man's voice between the banks of the Uli, which is the river there, who called and said, Gabriel, make this man understand the vision." Who is Gabriel?

If you had any question, you go to the book of Matthew and you know that Gabriel is the 1 who appeared to Joseph and Mary, okay?

Daniel later calls him the man I had seen in the vision, but we know he's an angel.

So Gabriel's an angel, and evidently a fairly High-ranking angel.

I would have to say it's the Lord giving Gabriel direction.

But regardless, make this man understand the vision.

So Daniel doesn't understand, Gabriel's told to make him understand, and if we come all the way down to the end of the chapter, in verse 27, it says, And I, Daniel, fainted, and was sick for days.

Now if somebody faints, how much are you going to explain to them after that point?

Daniel says, I fainted, was sick for certain days.

03 Type and Antitype

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the blessing of the sanctuary and what we can learn through it.

We pray, we want to also thank you Lord for the time that we have here to come together and study your word.

We pray your Holy Spirit would guide our study and give us clarity of understanding in these things.

Yesterday we went over the 2300 day timeline And I understand that it's still, there's a lot to go over in a little time.

I will pick up again on the timeline tomorrow as with a few things to make some application.

But I do wanna reiterate, and if you were not here yesterday, this won't make as much sense, but if you go into Daniel 9, and once you understand where to start that prophecy, when that going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem is, in 457, all you have to do is count forward 2300.

If you use a calculator, you're going to be off by a year because there's no such thing as a 0 year.

So Instead of going through all those little steps and changing the 62 and the 7 and adding them together in weeks to you You could quickly come to 1844 by just doing that quick math.

Okay, and And my point is in fact, I jotted down some things here Here Here are the different decrees.

I'll repeat this tomorrow, so you don't need to write it down.

But the decree of Cyrus was the first 1 made in 538 BC.

You can read about it in Ezra 1, 1 to 14.

Darius I made a decree in 520 BC, neither of those gave them the right to restore and build Jerusalem, only to build Jerusalem.

That decree of Darius was in Ezra 6, 1 to 12.

And then finally, the decree of Artaxerxes I in 457 BC.

Now he made another decree after a conflict arose and the building was halted.

If you went with the Cyrus decree, then our timeline ends in 1763 AD.

There are people who want to argue with me or with you about that, well, How do we know it's Artaxerxes the first 1?

Here's my question for them, and the burden of proof still rests on them.

Tell me what happened in 1763, 1781, or 1857.

Because when people are retaliating, it's not because they have another answer.

It's because they don't want to come to the conclusion you've come to.

And we've got to, like, we're standing on rock-solid ground with the time prophecy.

I'll get to more of the time prophecy tomorrow.

In some ways, the time prophecy is far less consequential than what it's pointing to.

So in Daniel, when you study in Daniel 9, at the end of the 2300 days, it said then the sanctuary would be cleansed.

There is nobody in Daniel's day, at least among the Hebrews, who were scratching their heads to say, what does that mean?

But today in modern Christendom, Christians don't study the sanctuary.

I was teaching a class for Arise years ago when Arise was here in Michigan.

1 of them was a retired minister from another denomination.

We were walking through some of the sanctuary things and I was specifically going through the book of Hebrews and the work of Jesus as our High Priest.

And this guy just blurts out in class, this stuff is amazing, this is incredible, this is...

And I said, hold on a minute, you're a minister, and to do this class, you're a minister from another denomination, please tell me, what did you do with these texts?

And he looked at me and he said, we didn't do anything with them.

Now, that's the reality, nobody's studying what the high priestly work of Jesus is.

If you ask another Christian, they probably have heard about Jesus as our high priest, but what does that mean?

Now, In 31 AD, Jesus was crucified and then he ascended to heaven.

Beyond 31 AD, the only way we get a glimpse into what Jesus is doing, let me just interject a couple other things here that we're going to develop.

So today in the next couple days we're going to try to bring some of the practical, what is this all doing for us today.

Now that we're looking more of the ancient system today and we're going to start to connect some dots, but then the next 2 days quite a bit more.

1 of the things, 1 of the things, there are a lot of questions that Seventh-day Adventists ask, I think in part because we don't study this as much anymore.

Well, this whole thing about the judgment in 1844, why are we still, like, why is it taking Jesus so long to judge?

And this is what the critics and former Adventists will say, it's like, you guys are off your rocker.

Well, just a quick preview, the judgment was never for God.

He does know everything, but his creatures don't.

In fact, we'll see that in the type of the sanctuary.

By the way, this is an aerial view of the earthly tabernacle.

Hopefully you will be able to make it out.

I have slides, digital slides, but the screen's further and smaller, and I thought, well, I'm hoping that everybody will at least be able to see what we go through here when we're looking at our services.

Series

The Sanctuary, 1844, & Why it Matters

04 - 1844 and the Close of Probation

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Advent HOPE - Adventist History Class

Current Events in Adventism

41m

Restoration 2005: To The Point

What I Like About Mohammad

39m

Pioneers and the Trinity

Pioneers and the Trinity- Part 3

1h 9m

The Afterlife

The Afterlife- Part 1

39m

Personal Spiritual Enrichment

Making Sense of the Former and Latter Rain

1h 25m

Restoration 2005: To The Point

What and Where is the Kingdom of God?

50m

Plenary

Unique Purpose

37m

Workshop: Biblical Examples of Conflict Resolution

The Wise

42m

Just This One Time

48m

Mark Howard: Last Generation Theology

02 The Present Truth

44m

General Sessions

In His Presence

1h 30m

Sound Doctrine