GYC SE 2008: One

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GYC Southeast

Alan Parker - Truth or Hoax: Validity of Ellen White

Alan Parker

Did Ellen White Have the Gift of Prophecy?

Father God, we want to thank you that we're able to come into your presence.

We thank you, Lord, that you have given an incredible gift to our church.

We pray that you'll help us to understand what that gift means.

Help us to see that we have an adequate defense for our faith.

We pray now Lord that you will give us understanding of your will for our lives, for we ask this in Jesus name, amen.

Alright, the question we're asking is, Ellen, why did she have the gift of prophecy?

And if there's any technical person who can help me try and get that projector working, we'll do that.

So I'm just going to go ahead because I don't see the connection.

Does God work with his people in a special way when there are unique events?

Do we have any example from scripture of where God particularly stepped in and sent a special message before particular periods of time.

Where would we go in scripture to find this basic concept?

God reveals himself before a dramatic deliverance of his people.

Before there's a flood coming, he specifically reveals himself to Noah before the flood comes.

John the Baptist, before Jesus comes, God reveals Himself to John, there's a special message.

So what we have is, throughout periods of time, we have Elijah, we have Elisha, before there's a judgment from God, or before there's a deliverance of God's people, God specifically reveals Himself through a prophet.

So it would not be unusual if at the end of time, as we transition to what in Daniel is called the time of the end, if we would have a prophet that God reveals Himself to.

The question we're going to be asking is, was Ellen White that prophet?

If someone would like to read that for us, nice, loud and clear.

Alright, so God will do nothing unless He reveals His secrets unto His servants who are the prophets.

So the clear principle of scripture is this, before God undertakes a major event, He will reveal it to His servants, the prophets.

We believe we live in the time of the end.

Before the time of the end, we will clearly have a description of, or a revelation of God to his prophets.

I mean, how many of you think that everybody is a prophet?

There are people who believe that there are lots of prophets.

They seem to be modern prophets everywhere.

Well, some people say that the gift of prophecy ended with the apostles that the last time the gift of prophecy was used was actually with the apostles.

You believe that the gift of prophecy has continued.

Is there a biblical basis for this understanding that while not everybody is a prophet, that the gift of prophecy would continue in God's church to the end of time.

Is there a good biblical basis for that understanding?

Ephesians 4 verse 8 clearly identifies that this gift of prophecy would continue in the church right up until the end of time.

So, let's see if we can find that in Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 8.

All right, let's get somebody to read that for us when he ascended up on high he led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men all right so let's just pause right there it says he led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men so we have to ask what were these gifts what are the gifts that he gave and and in numbers or some of them what do we have just just bound some of them back to me gift of apostles right So we know the word apostle simply means 1 who is sent and people are still sent today although we don't have the unique 12 apostles that we had back then.

And then he gave some prophets and some evangelists.

At least a few still work for Amazing Facts.

So we have all of these different gifts and he's given this to various people and how long would these gifts remain in the church?

How long are they going to be in the church?

It says here for the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry for the edifying of the body of Christ till we all come into the unity of the faith.

Do you think we still need teachers and pastors and evangelists?

Do you think we still need the gift of prophecy?

So what we've discovered, first of all, is that the gift of prophecy is something that continues to be needed until the end of time and it says until we come to a perfect man and to the measure of the statue of the fullness of christ what what does that mean what is the purpose of the gift of prophecy?

What is the purpose of all of these gifts?

Till we reach perfection, what is perfection?

So that's a great definition of perfection you should keep in case anyone ever asks you what does it mean to be perfect to be like Christ alright Acts chapter 2 verse 17 do we see a clear understanding that the gift of prophecy would be occurring at the end of time now, Peter believed that this was occurring in his day but that was just a partial fulfillment and we'll discover why.

Acts chapter 2 and verse 17 Jason, you want to read that for me?

So when we discover Pentecost, was the Holy Spirit poured out?

Do we have evidence that at that time the things were happening, there were dreams, there were visions, there were prophecies.

Do we have that happening right after Pentecost?

We actually, we have prophecies taking place, but it is not yet the final fulfillment.

Because it says it shall come to pass when?

It says it will come to pass in the last days.

Now, we know that this refers to the very last days, to the end of time.

Did Peter think he was living in the last days?

So he believed that this had come to pass right in his time.

That's going to be important for when we look at Ellen White later.

Was Ellen White a Hoax?

Father, we want to thank you that you have given an incredible gift to us as a church.

Lord, help us to understand the challenges, but to see that you're bigger than those challenges.

Father, we pray that you will give us special understanding and wisdom this afternoon, and may we sense that our feet need to be on solid ground.

Alright, how many of you have come across this concept that Ellen White is a hoax?

By the way, we're going to have music next door, so every now and again we just break into song and we'll join them.

Any of you, How many of you have come across that concept?

I worked for Amazing Facts for a number of years.

And I evangelists would always complain that they would present stirring messages from the Bible people would accept the messages and then they would go and look up these websites and there'd be all these Questionable things and they and the people that were coming to the seminars instead of embracing these truths would end up getting disappointed and skeptical and leaving this message.

So that's why we have to deal with the issues that are out there.

And so we want to be able to have a response.

How are we going to deal with these kinds of issues?

How are we going to deal with the challenges?

You know, maybe she was sincere about it but she didn't have 2 plus 2 didn't equal 4 so that's 1 option.

Second option is she was fraudulent, it was all a carefully concealed hoax, she knew what she was doing but she was a liar and she wasn't true about it.

Or the third option is that Ellen White was who she claimed to be, a messenger of God, someone who received messages from God and communicated them.

So this afternoon we want to take a look and examine the evidence.

Or was she who she claimed to be a messenger from God?

By the way, that little breakdown is very similar to C.S.

Lewis's grappling with, is Jesus the Son of God?

So I've just used the same format to look at Ellen White.

I'd like to begin with a quotation and it's taken from Testimonies for the Church, Volume 3 and this is something that she said many think of virtue a mark of intelligence in them to be unbelieving and to question and quibble especially when you're in an academic environment people like to say you know I what do you think of this and they break it down they can give you every criticism How many of you have ever taken the pastor to lunch but he wasn't present?

We take him to lunch and we pull apart his sermon and we dissect it and really pull it apart.

Well, sometimes people do that with the bible and they do that with messages from god many think it a virtue even a mark of intelligence to be unbelieving and to question and to quibble those who desire to doubt will have how much room?

Plenty of room God does not propose to remove all occasion for unbelief.

So, He gives evidence which must be carefully investigated with a humble mind and a teachable spirit and all should decide from the what?

You get into a courtroom, they put the evidence before you and you now have to make a decision.

Can you always prove if a person is innocent or guilty no but what do you go by the weight of the evidence the weight of the evidence god therefore gives sufficient evidence for the candid mind to believe but he who turns from the weight of the evidence because there are a few things which he cannot make plain to his finite understanding will be left in the cold chilling atmosphere of unbelief and questioning doubts and will make a shipwreck of his faith.

How many of you know of people who've done that?

People who just started with a few doubts and next thing they were overcome by their doubts they made a shipwreck of their faith.

In fact, let's be honest, there are moments in our lives when we've gone through that.

You start thinking about, does God really exist?

You start dwelling on those doubts and it sends you into depression and soon you don't know whether God exists or not.

If you start taking these steps down this path, you could make a shipwreck of your faith.

So when we come to doubts, when we come to questions, where should we begin?

Yeah, but how are we going to approach the Word of God?

With prayer, which means you are going to nurture your faith.

If you really want to shipwreck your faith in anything, then go with a real critical attitude.

Go with, I've got a lot of doubts, I'm going to try and examine this and break it apart and break it down.

If you want to build up your faith, you have to go with faith.

So we begin with faith and that's how I want to deal with these challenges from a faith perspective.

So I'm going to be clear to you right off the bat that I believe that Ellen White was a messenger of God.

I believe that she had messages, she received messages from God, and she shared those with the church.

Do you all understand what the word plagiarism means?

It means did she copy from others and the thoughts weren't her own, they were actually someone else's.

Was a head injury the cause of her visions?

Was controversial information hidden or deleted from her visions?

So, these are the challenges that we want to have a look at this afternoon and to see how does Ellen White measure up against these charges.

Because if it's true that Ellen White was a fake and a hoax, and that Ellen white was actually copying information from others and she was just writing it down and she didn't have any visions from God then I would say let's throw out Ellen White.

If she was a hoax let's throw her out, let's not bother with her.

So we have to instead examine the information and say hey is there more to the story?

So the first question I'm going to begin with and go back to what I dealt with this morning.

You know, was she, you know, I, Have you ever had somebody who fakes something?

You know, like they get all sick and they're not really sick.

You know, you got an exam that day and you feel the headache coming on.

You know, I feel I'm gonna be sick tomorrow, I'm just kind of warning you in advance kind of thing.

Men are like this when they get sick anyway.

Strange Statements of Ellen White Explained

In this next section, what we're going to be doing, yeah, let's try and get everybody in where we can.

And we may have to, we're not going to be using the the PowerPoints, so we'll, thank you.

We're sending around From the last presentation I did, if you want the PowerPoints, I can send those to you.

The 1 has some graphic images on it that I probably can't send that out.

But the others, the 1 I just gave, I can send that 1 to you.

So, challenges in Ellen White's writings, so you can have that information if you'd like it.

All right, in this 1 it's going to be a little more interactive.

We're going to try and deal with the questions that are out there.

I'm going to share with you some really useful information.

Some things are not up to date in here, so I'll just add to it.

But Messenger of the Lord by Herbert Douglas has a very useful section, sections at the end.

The first parts deal with the great ministry of Ellen White and what she was like, but in the last section he deals with the criticisms.

And so if you've had some issues I'd encourage you to get this book.

You also can find some information available online at ellen-white.com.

Ellenwhitedefend.org, who's Judd Lake, who's from Southern Adventist University, has some great historical information from people who lived during Alan White's own time and their materials.

So there's a lot of things that he's written, that he's got up on his website.

And then the Alan White estate itself has some great information.

I would really go there first, if I was looking for information, before you go to places like Ellen White Exposed, because they have a tendency of messing with your mind.

And the agenda says we're going to try and push a certain way of thinking.

And so I would encourage you to go there first before you go to the other sites first before you go to the skeptical sites.

If you want to back up, I can put the room here.

Okay, so there's a few extra chairs out here.

All right, someone coming in the back there?

Alright, let's begin with a word of prayer.

Father God, we want to thank you that you have provided a way for us to make sense of the difficulties.

Help us to take into account the context of what is written and to be able to understand it to the best of our ability.

Alright, this is going to be interactive, so if you have a question, I'd like you to say your question, then I'm going to repeat it for the sake of the recorder.

And if you don't have any questions, I'll jump into some of the information I have.

This is kind of risky, because I don't know what you're going to ask.

And I probably do know most of what you're going to ask.

But if I don't, then maybe someone else in the audience will.

But I don't know that I have the answers, that I have the right questions, so we're going to open it up to whatever questions you have and we'll trust that the Lord leads us.

Okay, where do we Adventists get the basis or once a prophet has been proven false or has falsely prophesied that they're now a false prophet from then on?

Okay, where do Adventists get the basis for their idea that once a prophet has falsely prophesied something that they're not a prophet from then on.

Well I don't know that Adventists do actually say that.

What Adventists say is that if people say something and it doesn't come to pass according to the Bible and we looked at that this morning in Jeremiah and Deuteronomy has the same thing.

If a prophet says something it doesn't come to pass, your tendency is to say, this is not likely to be a prophet from the Lord.

So what Adventists are more likely to say is there are at least 4 main tests, and we looked at 6 tests this morning by which you'd have to judge a prophet.

The second part is in 1 Kings chapter 13 where you have the example of the lying prophet.

That it looks like a prophet comes along and deliberately lies.

Well, first of all, it's a unique situation.

We obviously should be careful about drawing general principles from a unique situation.

Second thing, we just read several other places in the last seminar where prophecies were made but they were conditional and so they didn't come to pass.

But where you've got this unique kind of situation where the guy lies and then the other prophet loses his life, I mean it's just 1 of those strange things that show that people weren't really listening to the Lord.

So, is there a question that arises out of that?

Yeah, I really think that the second prophet was not acting under direction of the Lord at all, And the first prophet, the challenge that he has, he did not live up to the word of the Lord that he was given.

And the second prophet, to me, he was a heretic.

Well, he actually became a true prophet by what he did.

Right, But I think God used a donkey too, but you know.

The guy lied and look what happened, somebody lost their life, you know.

Even if he was kind enough to go and pick up his body.

At the very end of the last session You had that sentence up there, people use the whole lot, very well known in heaven, the lesser light to the greater light.

People don't read the whole context to get what the meaning is, and they just take the sentence and run with it.

What was more the clear meaning of that, the lesser light to the greater light kind of thing?

Really, the original context, in terms of Ellen White thinking, the question is what about this phrase, the lesser light to the greater light?

The original context actually comes from Revelation chapter 12.

Revelation chapter 12 refers to this woman standing on the moon and the moon is of course a reflection of the sun so the moon reflects the sun so what is it that the woman is standing on What is it that reflects the Son?

And what is the lesser light that reflects the greater light?

So, within Ellen White's original understanding, all prophecy was a reflection of Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the greater light, he is the son of righteousness, and the Bible that the woman stands on, that's the church, the church stands on the Bible, and the Bible reflects the greater light, Jesus Christ.

So if you take that within that context, then Ellen White's understanding of the lesser light pointing to the greater light was that she was a lesser light pointing to Jesus Christ.

Now she did that by pointing people back to the Bible.

She pointed people back to the Bible, but really she was pointing to Jesus Christ.

Series

Alan Parker - Truth or Hoax: Validity of Ellen White

Did Ellen White Have the Gift of Prophecy?

Transcript

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