Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Prophecy's Final Countdown

Cody Francis

02 Signs and Wonders

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Father in heaven, we're grateful for the privilege that we have to study from your word now.

We ask that you will be with us and guide our thoughts and our minds as we study And we thank you in Jesus' name, amen.

As I mentioned yesterday, we were, the idea, the concept behind this seminar is looking at the major events of prophecy that we find particularly in great controversy as it illuminates the book of Revelation for us.

And we're looking at stories from the Bible that are going to illustrate these events that we find in the book Great Controversy.

We're interested in developing an Adventist eschatological understanding or an Adventist worldview of world events that are going on.

And we're going to be getting more into that, especially Thursday and Friday will be very relevant to that.

But as we look at things going on around us, there's all the time there's crazy stuff going on, isn't there?

And, I mean, you know, right now it's even more so than ever before it seems like with all, have Israel and Iran and all these different things.

And so then the question comes, well, what fits into prophecy and what doesn't?

And so we're not trying to look at what doesn't per se, what we're looking at, what we are focusing on is what are the big points that we can know from our understanding of Bible prophecy that are going to be major players.

And so we looked yesterday at fire from heaven and the idea that fire represents either judgment or God's presence.

And so it was representing what is going to be a true revival, but also a false revival.

We saw that from the book, Great Controversy.

So we're to expect there to be false revivals.

The major difference between false revivals and true revivals, there's more than 1 thing, but the major thing to look at is false revivals are feeling and emotional driven.

And true revivals are based on the Word of God and lead to a changed life, to heart searching and self-denial.

And so that's just a simple summary of distinguish them.

We're going to be looking at what I'm calling signs and wonders.

This is a phrase that is used in the Bible about 30 times, signs and wonders.

And in some places it has wonders and signs, in other places it's just wonders or just signs.

And so this is a very significant phrase in the Bible.

We're not going to be able to unpack all of the Bible verses that talk about signs and wonders.

I think we're gonna be focusing on the first time, if I'm not mistaken, where signs and wonders is used, Which is interesting when we study the Bible to kind of see where the first time something is mentioned.

So he was born as in Hungary, I believe, no, yeah, in Hungary, was a Jewish home and Eric Weiss was his name, if I'm saying that right.

And that's not the name that most people would know him by, but Eric Weiss was how he was born Jewish home, hungry.

They immigrated when he was young to the United States.

And this Jewish rabbi fell into some hard times and the kids went different ways, although they still maintain their family structure.

When Eric was 9 years old, he began trying to learn and perform the, what do you call that when you're swinging up high in the air, the trapeze.

And so I can't imagine a 9 year old doing trapeze, but I guess they've got to start somewhere.

But that wasn't, he got into the world of performance and particularly with the circus and things like this.

But he found out that he was, had a special skill at being an escape artist.

And so he began by calling himself Harry the, the hand, Handcuffed Harry.

And so he would get out of and he would go to police departments and they would handcuff him, he'd challenge him and he'd get them out and all sorts of crazy things that he was able to do.

This 1 picture, they're dropping him into a tank of water and they'd throw him into the river when he was all locked up and chained up and things like this.

And he went from being a handcuffed Harry to Harry Houdini.

And so he became well known as an escape artist and could get out of most places.

And when you read about it, sometimes it's amazing that he didn't die sooner than he did, although he did die relatively young, not from being, not from getting thrown into the water all locked up or something like that, but because someone, he had punched him in the gut because he had also a very, he claimed that nobody would hurt him basically when they punched him in the gut and he wasn't ready for it.

And a few days later his appendix ruptured and he died from that.

So there might not have been a connection but probably there was a connection.

What was interesting about Houdini though was that he was this performer and he knew how to do sleights of hand and things like this.

And during his time, which was in the early 1900s, in there, Spiritualism had grown increasingly.

And so you have in 1848, the Fox sisters were in upstate New York, which by the way, very fascinating.

A couple of years ago I gave a seminar on Mormonism, the Hill Cumorah, which is where Joseph Smith supposedly found the golden plates, and Hiram Edson's home where he saw the, where they studied the sanctuary and he came to the realization that Jesus went into the most holy place of the sanctuary, Hiram Edson's home, and where the Fox sisters lived is all in the exact, not exact, but it's all within like 5 or 10 miles from 1 another in upstate New York.

So very, very interesting that you have Mormonism, spiritualism, and Adventism, major events, major things took place all in that same area.

So anyway, the Fox sisters, they were performing seances and things like this with the wrappings and so spiritualism was growing and becoming a very big thing.

And they were doing different signs that they would do, they would claim to be able to foretell various things to communicate with the dead and all sorts of these type of things.

And so you see spiritualism, spiritualism's influence as an overt spiritualistic movement growing all during the 1900s.

And there are still spiritualist churches that are out there.

I could tell you, not that I've gone to them, but whenever I drive by 1 I'm like, oh that's interesting, that's a spiritualist church.

And so still they exist, but Houdini came to believe that much of what they were doing, spiritualists were doing, was a hoax.

And so he set about to debunk a number of what, a number of the things that they were doing.

So from the 1910s, 1920s, he was majorly challenging the spiritualists in that what they were doing was really not true, was really not reality.

Of course, we know biblically that they were not communicating with the dead, that that is a deception, that's not according to the Bible.

But he was claiming that it was all slight of hand and cold reading and various things, warm reading I should say, various things like that.

And so what you find is spiritualism as a blatant movement or as an overt movement began to decline in its influence after Houdini was doing these debunking things like this.

And so, and it's continued to do that overtly.

Now, spiritualism, as we're going to see, has taken on a different form, but the idea that it was all a trickery began to grow.

Now thinking of that, I want to look at what the Bible says about signs and wonders, And I want to go specifically to a story in the Old Testament.

God does work signs and wonders, doesn't he?

Are we thankful when God works signs and wonders?

We all, you know, you read a story or you experience something that is a miracle and you're grateful for it.

You know, just a few weeks ago I was doing an Evangelistic series in a little church and everything had been working fine and I think it was, I don't remember for sure, but I think it was the Mark of the Beast or 1844, something like that, where I had a lot of visual displays and where it's much more helpful if you are able to utilize some of the graphic displays that you have.

And no matter what I did, the projector wouldn't seem to work, it wouldn't connect to my computer.

Now I don't know if anybody else has ever had a problem like that before, but I worked on it for like half an hour and it got to be 5 minutes to when we were going to begin.

We're just going to go forward in preaching.

So we prayed and after we prayed, it worked.

And so, you know, you're grateful for that because that's a, it might be a small miracle, but it's still a miracle, isn't it?

And so we appreciate miracles and God works through signs and wonders.

Exodus chapter 7, and I want to begin in verse, actually we'll start in verse 3.

This is what God says He's going to do here as they come to Pharaoh as they begin to, God begins to deliver his people from Egyptian bondage.

And I will harden Pharaoh's heart and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.

But Pharaoh will not heed you, so that I may lay my hand on Egypt and bring my armies and my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them.

So notice verse 3, he says he's going to multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.

You know, God was leading out his people.

God was bringing, now of course God has always had a people, but he was bringing out a nation.

He was bringing out his own special people, a church if you will in our modern terminology.

Didn't call it that, but Acts calls it the church in the wilderness.

01 Fire from Heaven

Father in heaven, we're grateful that you have given us this opportunity and this privilege to come and to study your word.

We pray that you will be with us now as we look at prophecies in our time.

And we just pray that you will guide and lead and direct our minds.

All right, so I kinda wanna just, as we begin, I kinda wanna look at or kinda think about why it is, and you can kind of see the methodology for this seminar.

Probably about a year ago, somewhere around there, I started studying in a different way than I had before because I was really interested in 1 particular aspect and I've read Great Controversy through multiple times, well I don't know how many times, but I've read Great Controversy through, but I started going through looking at the book Great Controversy trying to understand what are the main events that are listed and delineated out in the book Great Controversy.

And so I wanted to develop a framework of understanding prophecy from an Adventist perspective and I determined that Great Controversy would be our best source for that.

Of course we have the Bible, and we're going to be looking at the Bible, and we're going to be studying from the Bible.

But I began looking at, and just trying to figure out, what are the big pictures, what are the big rocks in the jar of final events from the book Great Controversy.

And the reason that I did this is because I've heard lots of different ideas presented by Adventists that have lots of mergers of other systems of theology or systems of understanding in them.

And I don't want to have a worldview based on Adventist eschatology or Adventist understanding of last-day events.

And let me tell you what I mean when I say that.

So I have been increasingly concerned as I have heard some Adventist talking about and when they talk about prophecy they are merging evangelical futurism or rapture theory understanding of prophecy in with Adventism.

Then there's the politicization of Adventist theology where people will take a Republican worldview or a Democrat worldview and merge that into an Adventist understanding of prophecy.

You have conspiratorial views that get merged into an Adventist understanding of Bible prophecy.

And so what you have that takes, and I'm not saying that it's all the time, but what you have a lot of time that takes place is this weird Frankenstein, if you will, of theology of where we're trying to merge Adventism with other things out there in the world.

And to me, that is a fundamental problem.

We need to look and say, okay, What is, let's look at the Bible, let's look at great controversy, and let's allow ourselves to develop a prophetic understanding from those sources, rather than taking whatever, whoever's talking on YouTube or whatever source and try to merge that in.

And so because of this merger that I've seen, and I gave several different examples, we could give other examples of these different world views that people try to bring into and try to merge with Adventism and it still sounds Adventist, but yet you can understand that, wait a minute, this part that they're presenting actually comes from another world view, not from a biblical Adventist understanding of Bible prophecy.

And so in my mind, I was trying to silence those views in my mind and go to great controversy and look and say, okay, what are the big rocks here?

What are the big pictures that we get from great controversy and from the Bible to help us to understand?

And I'm not going to look at every aspect, but we are gonna try to cover what I consider to be the major things that great controversy brings out, and then we're going to look at it from a biblical, a story in the Bible that illustrates last day events.

So we're not sequentially going through Revelation, we're not sequentially going through Daniel, it would be good to do that, but we are looking at and saying, okay, these are things that we are told are major events and major aspects of prophecy, let's try to understand this component more.

And so that's kind of what we're looking at.

So today we're looking at fire from heaven, tomorrow we're looking at signs and Wonders, which as I studied on that, I think we need to be studying and talking a lot more about what we're talking about tomorrow with signs and wonders.

It's a major thing in great controversy and we don't hear very much about it in the world today.

And so we're looking at that and then we're looking at wrestling with God, so that's more going to be a personal experience in great controversy.

Then we'll be developing some stories Thursday and Friday, Christer Barabbas and Prophecy Countdown, where we look at kind of in sequence and build some, see how the statements in great controversy are parallel with these biblical stories.

But today we're looking at fire from heaven.

Now, how many of you are thankful for fire that we have?

Okay now how many I'm curious how many of you hear heat with wood or at least heat partially with wood?

Now you're very that's it's very real in your mind at that point that if you don't have a fire, you're suffering pretty bad, aren't you?

I, in fact, I don't believe, when we look at it, I don't believe that it would be possible to even live in Michigan without some type of fire.

Of course there's a fireplace, but if you have a propane or a natural gas heater, is that a fire source as well?

If you have electric heat, does most electric heat come from fire?

It does, either a coal plant, or I know the word diversifying and things like this, so with solar and wind, that's not necessarily from internal combustion, but it is still a, most of it comes from a internal combustion, from some fire.

And then you think about, what about our transportation?

Most of us, I'm not saying everybody, I'm sure there may be a few electric cars out there, but most of us still have gasoline cars, right?

And so if we have a gasoline car, what is propelling that car?

And then you think of, well, what about cooking?

So cooking, and most, whether it's electric or whether it's gas, it still usually comes from a source of fire.

Very little of our heat or energy still, and it's becoming more, but still very little comes from something that's not fire.

In fact, I would say, as I already said, without fire I'm not sure we could survive in Michigan.

You may be able to survive on the equator where there's enough warmth and you can eat bananas and you don't have to cook anything or whatever.

But let me ask you, is fire also dangerous?

Just last week or something, there was smoke everywhere in Michigan and a lot of the, I don't know where else it was, but it was definitely here, From fires where?

Now that's a long way, and it wasn't, so I had to, I was curious, because I don't necessarily, we don't watch or listen to news or something like that, so I had to look up and see where these fires were coming from.

It seemed like it was way, ways away that was blowing, the smoke was blowing in.

Was the Wisconsin, I don't remember how to say it exactly, Pesceta Fire, something like that.

And it was, but what was fascinating to me, I was familiar with the Great Chicago Fire.

On the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, there were a number of fires in Michigan and in Wisconsin.

And because it was a very dry, hot summer with winds blowing, and this Wisconsin fire destroyed entire towns.

So they think that there might have been 2, 000 people, 1, 500 to 2, 000, that died in those fires and towns that totally got burned off the map.

But even that is nothing compared to, I was unaware of, about 20 years ago there was a fire in the outback of Australia, 40 million acres burned.

Now, 40 million acres, I have a hard time putting my mind around what 40 million acres is.

Where I grew up, where my parents still live, they have 40 acres, and that's a quarter of a mile by a quarter of a mile.

So I can grasp that, but we're talking about 40 million.

Well, the land surface of Michigan is less than 40 million acres.

And so it would be larger than the entire state of Michigan.

You go to the Siberian taiga and there was something like 50 million acres burned there 4 or 5 years ago.

And so fire is essential but fire is absolutely dangerous as well.

House fires, they tell us, can, and if it's a really serious fire, it can double in size every 30 seconds.

So in 2 and a half minutes a house can be completely engulfed in fire.

And I would suggest that when we look at fire from heaven, it's something that is essential, but is dangerous as well.

Well, first of all, when we look in the Bible, fire can represent God's judgment.

So we have Sodom and Gomorrah where fire fell from heaven and that was God's judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, right?

Yeah, and so we have God's judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, fire falling from heaven.

Was that the only time fire fell from heaven?

Yes, that that's different than the judgment.

So, All right, that was proving God was God.

03 Wrestling with God

Father in heaven, we thank you that you have blessed us with this day.

We thank you for the privilege to come and to study from your Word.

We ask that you will guide us in our study now, that your presence will be with us.

All right, so we're looking at major components in our understanding of eschatology or last-day events.

And as I mentioned, I'm wanting to look at what does, what does the Bible and spirit of prophecy tell us are the major things and as we study that.

Because there's all sorts of things that compete for our attention.

I've had many people tell me as I've been doing, as I've done giving Bible studies and things like that, people tell me, oh, well, you know, there's a red heifer that's been born in Israel now and it doesn't have 1 white hair on it and this is a sign of the end.

And, or, oh, whatever's going on over in Israel, that's a sign of the end and, you know, there's stuff going on.

Obviously we know Israel and Iran right now.

Now the Bible does say that there will be wars and rumors of wars.

And so in a broad sense, the national strifes, whether they're Ukraine and Russia or the unheard of strifes that take place in Africa and other places, those are all indicative of the times in which we live.

But we don't see, or at least I don't see, these things coming into a major focus in inspiration.

So I believe we need to focus on what is an inspiration.

And so We looked at true and false revival our first day, fire from heaven, and then yesterday we looked at signs and wonders and how, once again, there's true and false and how God will work and is working through signs and wonders, but how in the last days there's going to be a high degree of signs and wonders that will be performed by the devil and his agents, and we need to discern between them.

Now Today we're looking at something a little bit different.

We're also, we're going to look at a Bible story and see how it, what it teaches us about last day events as well.

But it's more in the area of, instead of what's out in the world, what's more inside, more of our preparation.

And then tomorrow we're going to be looking at specifically things, final events in prophecy and then Friday as well.

We'll kind of put together a timeline on Friday from inspiration and from a biblical story.

But I want to begin to go in, begin with in Revelation chapter 13 and verse 10.

Now actually, let's, yeah, let's go to Revelation 13 10 to begin with.

We don't normally read this verse or focus on this verse, but it is an interesting component in this verse.

We read, he who leads into captivity shall go into captivity.

He who kills with the sword must be killed with the sword.

Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

So notice here we have a description of God's people.

And what is the description of God's people here in Revelation 13 10.

Okay, so they have the patience here and it says here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

So Here in Revelation 13 verse 10, they have patience or endurance and faith.

Now let's go over to Revelation chapter 14 and this is the 1 we're much more familiar with.

Revelation chapter 14 and verse 12 and Let's read this.

Patients of the saints, here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.

Now what is the similarity and the difference between these 2 verses.

Okay, patience and faith are both there, aren't they?

So we have the patience of the saints in both Revelation 13, 10 and 14, 12, and we have faith in Revelation 1310 and in Revelation 1412.

They keep the commandments of God as well.

And so in Revelation 1310, we have patience and faith.

Revelation 14, 12, we have patience and commandments and faith.

Now that's interesting because when we look in Revelation 13, 10, it's talking about God's people during the dark ages.

And the understanding of the commandments was lost sight of during the dark ages, and it was to be restored in the last days, which we find in Revelation 14, 12, where we have the commandments being restored.

During the dark ages, did they need patience and faith?

And in our time, do we need patience and faith as well?

Absolutely, we need patience and faith and we need the commandments of God as well, right?

And so we have all 3 of those components for God's last day people is remnant church and we see that in Revelation 12, 17 as well.

But in both of these components there's a need for patience or endurance.

Series

Prophecy's Final Countdown

05 Prophecy Countdown

Transcript

Parent Series

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