ASI Southern Union 2013: For Such a Time...

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ASI Southern Union

ASI Southern Union 2013 Seminars

Norman McNulty

Releasing the Four Winds and the Sealing of the 144,000

The first presentation is entitled The Holding of the 4 Winds and the sealing of the 144, 000.

And I'm going to start with a familiar passage, probably a couple of familiar passages from the pen of Ellen White.

The first 1 is from Testimonies, Volume 9, page 11.

The fast-fulfilling signs of the times declare that the coming of Christ is near at hand.

The days in which we live are solemn and important.

The Spirit of God is gradually but surely being withdrawn from the earth.

Plagues and judgments are already falling upon the despisers of the grace of God.

The calamities by land and sea, the unsettled state of society, the alarms of war are portentous.

They forecast approaching events of the greatest magnitude.

Continuing, the agencies of evil are combining their forces and consolidating.

They are strengthening for the last great crisis.

Great changes are soon to take place in our world and the final movements will be rapid ones.

You know, sometimes we have this mentality that, oh, you know, I've heard my whole life that Jesus is coming and let's have a theme about for such a time as this and we say it with our lips that we believe that Jesus is coming soon.

But if you're honest with yourself in your heart, do you really think that the final movements which will be rapid are just around the corner.

And the reason I ask you that question is because sometimes you can tell if you're living your life that way or if you're thinking that way in your mind based on how you live your life, based on the choices that you're making, where do you invest your resources, where do you invest your time, what is the most important thing for you in your life, are you living your life with the thought in mind that great changes are soon to take place in our world and the final movements will be rapid ones.

Another familiar statement from Testimonies, Volume 8, page 28.

Transgression has almost reached its limit.

Confusion fills the world and a great terror is soon to come upon human beings.

We who know the truth should be preparing for what is soon to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise.

Who should be preparing for what is to break upon the world?

Now, I dare say that if the final movements were to kick in sometime soon, it might just come as an overwhelming surprise for many Seventh-day Adventists.

And you know, that should not be the case.

But here's the thing, if we as Seventh-day Adventists are not preparing, if we're not studying, if we don't understand what the end time roadmap looks like, we're going to be shocked out of our minds when that time comes.

Oh, I heard it in Bible class when I was growing up, but I never really thought it would happen in my lifetime.

Listen, we who know the truth should be preparing for what is soon to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise.

And Ellen White says basically the same thing in Prophets and Kings, page 626.

Christians should be preparing for what is soon to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise, and this preparation they should make by diligently studying the Word of God and striving to conform their lives to its precepts.

So how do we prepare for this overwhelming surprise?

Listen, it's too late in earth's history to be wasting our time worrying about what Hollywood is doing or what's happening in the entertainment world or anything else.

We should know what the Word of God says for this time.

Now, with those introductory comments from Ellen and I, I want to point out what the Bible says about the time that we are living in.

And as I said, what we are going to do in this first presentation is we are going to look at where we are in Earth's history based on what the seals say in Revelation chapter 6 and a little bit of chapter 7.

Now I'm assuming that those of you who are sitting here in the audience today are seasoned students of prophecy as long time Seventh-day Adventists, so I'm not going to take a significant amount of time to go through each of the seals.

I'm assuming that you already know this, so I'm just going to give you a brief rundown.

Now, I will say this, if you've never studied the seals and if you don't know what they're talking about, it's time to get into the Word of God and study that, amen?

Alright, now look, when you come to the seals, you start off with 4 horses, you have the white horse, the red horse, the black horse, and the pale horse.

Those are synonymous with the first 4 seals.

And we understand that historically the white horse represents the pure church, the apostolic church, which was from the time of the ascension of Christ from 31 AD to 100 AD.

Then we shift to the red horse by verse 4 of chapter 6, And this red horse describes the persecuted Christian church from about the time period of 100 AD to 313 AD and that culminated with a final 10 years of persecution under the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

After the red horse you have the black horse.

This is when corruption enters into the church and historically we place that between 313 to 538 AD.

This correlates with the third church in Revelation where you see the doctrine of Balaam entering into the church, you see the doctrine of the Nicolaitans coming into the church, you see that Satan's seat dwells there.

And then finally the fourth horse or the pale horse, sickly or blighted in color is what pale means, is the apostate Christian church from 538 to about 1374.

And the reason why I place it till about 1374 is that around 1374, That is when John Wycliffe, the great reformer, the morning star of the Reformation, comes along and brings light to a darkened world.

And then you come to the fifth seal in Revelation chapter 6 verse 10, And here you see the souls crying under the altar figuratively speaking saying, how long Lord till you judge and avenge our blood?

And white robes are given to them, they're told that they should rest for a little season.

Okay, that's a brief rundown, that should be Pretty simple review.

This is where things become much more interesting for the time that we are living in once we get to the beginning of the sixth seal.

Because when you study the seals, you find that we are living at the end of the sixth seal.

And I'm going to point you to some clear historical events that have happened during the time of the sixth seal just to remind us that we really are living at the end of the world.

We're not living 500 years ago where in the 1500s or the 1600s you could say, yeah, Jesus probably isn't coming for a few hundred more years.

Now, let's look, starting in verse 12 of Revelation chapter 6.

And here we read, And I beheld, when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake.

This was the great Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755 that was felt throughout all of Europe.

It destroyed the city of Lisbon with a tidal wave and with fire, and it was felt as far away as North America.

So the sixth seal begins in history in 1755, which is about 250 years ago now.

So there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.

Now this becomes interesting because there were people who were alive in 1780 who lived to see the falling of the stars, which is the next sign foretold, in 1833.

And so those who lived between the time period of 1780 to the time period of 1833 realized these are the signs that were foretold that showed that Jesus would be coming very soon.

And in fact you see the falling of the stars in verse 13, which happened on November 13, 1833.

The Lisbon earthquake, the dark day, the falling of the stars, they're mentioned here in Revelation chapter 6.

How relevant are they for signs of the times describing the coming of Jesus and the clouds of heaven?

Well they're so important that they are mentioned 3 times in the Gospels, spoken by Jesus Himself, and then a fourth time they show up here in the book of Revelation, and they are identified in Revelation as the opening of the sixth seal which proceeds, or precedes the second coming of Jesus Christ.

You see this in Matthew 24, 29, Mark 13, 24 and 25, and Luke chapter 21, verse 25.

Jesus mentioned these signs 1700 years before they even happened, 1700 to 1800 years before they happened.

And so they happen at the beginning of the sixth seal, and then you come to the end of verse 13, and then when you come to verse 14, after the falling of the stars is mentioned, notice what is mentioned next in verse 14.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us in a hiatus from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?" So the question is, what is the very next thing mentioned during the time of the sixth seal, but after the falling of the stars in 1833.

This is the coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.

So between the Lisbon earthquake and the dark day you have 25 years.

From the dark day to the falling of the stars, you have 53 years.

And then after 1833, then the second coming is mentioned.

Chester Clark

The Certainty of 1844

Adventism began as a movement that came from study of the scriptures.

And it became a movement of people known as people of the book.

And I think that we want to sort of recapture this morning a little bit of the certainty which the Millerites had and early Adventists had in their message.

Now, will it be a problem if I'm not standing behind the microphone?

Adventism is a Bible-based movement, a Bible-based message.

And, you know, as we think about especially 1844, and as we think about the message that is somewhat unique to Adventists, today we have questions that are raised.

And not only the message of the timing of 1844, but what happened in 1844 and why that's relevant today.

So in my 2 seminars today, we're going to be looking at the certainty of 1844.

First of all, just trying to capture in a brief period of time, as well as we can, trying to capture why the Millerites were so certain about their time in 1844 and what that certainty means for us today.

In the second seminar, we're going to be looking at how, what happened in 1844 and what is continuing to happen in the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary is relevant to our daily lives today.

And so we're going to get started and just do a little bit of a review.

I know some of you, maybe all of you, are familiar with the basics of Bible prophecy, but sometimes we have to go back to the basics to really affirm the principles that give us the certainty when we get into some of the more involved portions.

I'd like to just start by pointing out the fact Millerites were careful Bible students.

The Millerites were ones who were individuals who very intently, very intensely studied the Bible.

And if you look at what they were, what the impact of their decisions would be, you can understand why they were so careful.

These were people who were making decisions that were very radical decisions.

By the time they expected Jesus to come in 1844, Many of them had sold their farms and were living with family or friends.

They had given all of their savings or retirement to the work of printing literature and spreading the message to the world.

So they had a vested interest in being careful Bible students.

This wasn't something that they could just flippantly engage in, because this was something that very clearly impacted their lives.

It's also interesting for us to note that not a single error in their calculations was discovered by their opponents.

Each time they revised their understandings of the prophecies or the scriptures, whether it was, you know, from the, between the spring of 1843 to the spring of 1844, they first thought that the Second Coming would happen to the fall of 1844 to further refining it to the 22nd of October 1844.

Each time they adjusted or changed their understandings, those adjustments or changes were not due to their critics pointing out the faults in their study, but actually themselves studying the matters more closely and coming to a closer understanding, a clearer understanding.

And so this is something that's very interesting as we look at their, at the history, as we look at their writings, we find that each time they introduced new ideas, it wasn't because they had been caught red-handed, you might say, with an error in their accounting.

Let's just go back, let's go back to the very beginning of Bible prophecy, end-time Bible prophecy, symbolic Bible prophecy, and that's Daniel 2.

And we're going to look at a number of things here, beginning with Daniel 2, And we're going to try to just go through an overview of Daniel chapter 2.

I know you're familiar with it, no doubt.

But I think it will help you as we look at some of the principles of biblical interpretation that the Millerites, William Miller and his followers were using.

We remember that Daniel 2 is the first, or Daniel, is the first book dedicated to end-time prophecy.

And I would suggest that it gives us a rubric or the principles of interpretation for understanding the rest.

You know, some people like to jump right into the book of Revelation.

And if you turn on your television today and scan some of the religious channels, you'll see that there are many different ideas about the Book of Revelation and some of those prophecies.

And the problem is that jumping right into the Book of Revelation, or even if we were to use this morning as an example, jumping right into Daniel 8 and 9, would sort of be like skipping your first few grades of elementary school math.

If you were to try to go right into algebra or right into calculus without having taken any of the prerequisite courses, How much sense do you think those algebraic problems or the calculus problems would make to you?

And so, Daniel 2 is, in a way, you could call it the ABCs of biblical interpretation.

It's like the first grade, and it tells us how we can understand prophecy.

And what you see is as we go through the book of Daniel, we're going to see that there's a progression in complexity in the prophecies.

There's also a progression in the amount of, or maybe I should say a regression in the amount of explanation given at times, until the point when you come to the book of Revelation, there's no more, no longer an interpretation given.

You just have the prophecies, and you're expected to learn the principles that were demonstrated in the book of Daniel in order to interpret it.

So here in the book of Daniel we are blessed with this 1 fact and that is that in each chapter the interpretive principles are right there with the prophecy so that we can, we don't have to do a lot of interpreting.

It's interpreted for us, but what we can do is we can learn the principles of interpretation by comparing the prophecy and the way the prophecy is given with the interpretation and the way the interpretation is given.

So we remember that this was a dream given to Nebuchadnezzar as well as to Daniel.

We can consider it the ABCs of interpretation.

And once again here we remember that Daniel is given the dream and the interpretation and given that to be able to explain it to Nebuchadnezzar and to be able to share with him the meaning of the dream.

In later prophecies it is assumed that we remember the principles and symbols taught.

And that's just the way Bible prophecy works.

Now I want to real briefly look at the 3 major schools of thought on prophetic interpretation, just so you have a little bit of a context of where we are coming from as Adventists and as Historicists.

As Adventists and as Historicists, we look at prophecy through the lens of what we call historicism.

These are the prophetic principles of interpretation which we use.

And I'm just going to highlight or contrast 2 or 3 of the qualities of these schools of thought and so you can see how they differ, especially as it relates to the way we interpret the book of Daniel.

So in historicism, the understanding of prophecy, the lens through which we look at prophecy, is that prophecy covers the entire period, approximately from the time of the prophet down to the time of the end.

And what this means is the prophet is writing, and instead of God simply giving him a vision or her a vision that begins at some unspecified date in the future, the vision of the prophet gets or receives or sees, the vision begins with approximately their time period.

A time that they can easily sort of relate with and begin to describe.

And so when we look at Daniel chapter 2, for example, what do we have?

We have the head of gold representing who?

He's speaking first person present tense to, I'm sorry, second person present tense to the king of Babylon who was living and contemporaneously alive with Daniel.

The vision or the dream in this case was beginning with the present time.

That means that no matter when we are living, obviously after the time of Daniel and before the Second Coming, no matter when we are living, we can find ourselves in that stream of time.

How do we find ourselves in that prophecy?

We simply look through the interpretations and we begin to figure out what's already been fulfilled.

And this is why, maybe 1 reason why it's called historicism is because it requires the study of history in order to understand where we are in the prophecy today.

It does not mean, historicism does not mean that all prophecy has already been fulfilled in the past.

That is a misunderstanding even among Adventists that I sometimes hear today.

And they say, well, you know, we believe there's still important prophecies for the future.

Historicism simply means that we have to study history to find where we are in this continuum of time that will extend all the way down to the Second Coming.

Another principle of historicism is the day-year principle, or I think that as our pioneers usually called it the year-day principle.

This is a principle that simply says that in symbolic Bible prophecies, a day is equal to a literal year.

This is a principle, we'll talk more about this in a little while.

It's a principle that is very important for our understanding and we could spend a whole hour simply looking at the evidence from scripture for the year day principle.

Now many of us today simply know 1 or 2 verses, but there's actually several in-depth studies that have been done by Avnist scholars that would show from dozens of different instances the day-year principle.

And it's a very important principle in the study of prophecy from historicism's perspective.

Another principle of historicism, another major tenet of historicism, is the Antichrist had its beginnings in Paul's day, we read in 2 Thessalonians, the man of sin is, or the spirit of iniquity is already at work, right?

And it's going to be destroyed the second coming, we read in 2 Thessalonians 2, 7, and 8.

And this is something that the early historicists, well, I guess the earliest historicists would be the early Christians or anyone who read the book of Daniel.

But in modern times, it's really the reformers who began to interpret Bible prophecy with the concept through the lens of historicism.

And this was obviously 1 of the clear conclusions they came to.

From their understanding of historicist prophecy, they concluded that the Antichrist was present in their day, and it was identifiable in their day.

And if it was, then they ought to find out what it was, and of course you know they concluded what they believed it was.

So if we were to graphically illustrate historicism, it would be something like this.

The prophecy is given as a unbroken timeline from approximately the time of the prophet down until the time of the end, Second Coming, or even after the Second Coming when we talk about the Book of Revelation.

And the day in which we're living is sometime in that stream of time.

We can find ourselves there by simply comparing history with the prophecy and deciding where in that stream of time we are.

The Final Controversy Between Christ and Satan

Okay, so this message is entitled, The Final Conflict Between Christ and Satan.

You can see some of the challenges that have come into God's church from the last presentation that we talked about.

And we spent some time going through the history of the seals and how it brings us down to the very end of the world, to the second coming of Jesus.

And now we are going to spend some time looking at what Christ is doing and what Satan is doing to prepare a people at the end of time.

Christ is working to prepare a people, Satan is working to tear that people down, and so that's what we're going to be looking at.

And specifically we are going to look at the end of the 7 trumpets, and we're going to tie that in to the end of Daniel chapter 11.

So those of you who get excited when you hear Daniel 11 brought up, we're going to look at Daniel 11 just a little bit today.

And I even have a whiteboard up and I'll be honest with you, I thought I was going to be in a small seminar room so I was a little bit surprised when I heard I was going to be out here.

I'm happy to be out here with you, but that means that the white board may not serve its function very well, but we'll still get through it no problem.

When you look at the big picture of Revelation, you see that there are 7 churches, 7 seals, and then 7 trumpets.

When you come to the end of the 7 churches, you find the Laodicean church, which is in a lukewarm condition, and Jesus is saying, you need to let me come in.

When you let me come in, you will overcome as I overcame.

So there's this question mark kind of hanging out there, what is going to happen to God's last day church?

They are the church of the judgment hour.

They are being judged and Christ is saying, I'm giving you a faithful and true testimony that you are in a terrible condition, wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked, and if you don't have Christ's righteousness, you're in bad shape for the judgment.

So Christ is saying, you need to let me come in so you can have my righteousness.

And that's been a problem with Adventism.

We just want an outward covering without a heart change.

So there's this question mark that is left, what's going to happen to God's people in his last day church?

Then you come to the 7 seals, which we just looked at, And somehow from God's last day church, the 144, 000 become sealed.

They wake up, they start doing the medical missionary work that God has given them to do.

They bring a deeper message and a better understanding of the Sabbath to the world, and the Sabbath, which is the seal of God, then is properly understood so God can have a people who are sealed.

And The 7 trumpets are probably the least studied in the book of Revelation and perhaps the least understood.

We're not going to go into detail on the trumpets.

But when you look from a historicist's perspective, the first 4 trumpets would be God's judgments on Western Rome for the persecution of God's people.

The fifth and sixth trumpets are God's persecution through the Ottoman Turks on Eastern Rome for the persecution of the saints, and the reason why I know that is because Ellen White in Great Controversy, page 334, identifies the time prophecy of 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month and 1 year as a fulfillment of what the Ottoman Turks did to the Eastern Roman Empire.

That's all I'm going to say about the first 6 trumpets.

What we want to focus in on is what happens during the sounding of the seventh trumpet, and there's actually an interlude, just as there was an interlude between the sixth seal and the seventh seal, which ushers in the second coming, the silence in heaven for half an hour.

In the trumpets, between the sixth and the seventh trumpet, you have Revelation chapter 10 and Revelation chapter 11, the first 14 verses.

Now, when you look at Revelation chapter 10 and Revelation chapter 11, what are these 2 chapters talking about?

You're Seventh-day Adventist, you should know this, amen?

This is the mighty angel who comes down from heaven, Jesus Christ, who raises up a new movement, the Second Advent Movement, around the time of 1840 at the end of the sixth trumpet, he has a book open in his hand, what book has been unsealed for that time?

The book of Daniel, specifically the prophecy of the 2300 days, which points you to 1844.

Jesus is pointing us to the book of Daniel, saying that the time prophecies of the book of Daniel are what give the feel power to raise up this second advent movement.

So Revelation chapter 10 is talking about the rising up of the second advent movement.

It talks about, rise and measure the temple of God, but the courtyard which was without, measure it not.

It's given to the Gentiles to trodden the people of God or the city of God underfoot for 1260 years.

And then you have the 2 witnesses, the Old and the New Testament, clothed in sackcloth and ashes as the papal church suppresses the scripture from the people during those 1260 years, and at the very end of the 1260 years, right towards the very end, the French Revolution takes place.

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