Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

Adventism: The Answer to Modern Atheism

Wes Peppers

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

04 Reasonable Evidence and Common Sense

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Father in heaven, we just kneel before You this morning with our hearts encouraged by the truth of Your Word this morning.

I hope that everyone was able to spend some time in Scripture today and kneeling before you in prayer.

And if not, there's still time to do that.

For we are told in the spirit of prophecy that no man or woman is safe for a day or an hour without prayer.

And so help us to develop that rich habit of communing with you and not allowing that communion to be broken.

To be drawn nearer and nearer to your throne.

To understand that your high priestly ministry is essential in our lives every single second of the day.

And that we can always turn to You when we have need.

We don't look to the computer or any other piece.

These are just, these are challenging times in which we're living, but You're a God who has overcome even greater challenges.

We saw from prophecy that God knew ahead of time the rise of what?

And He used the rise of atheism in attacking apostate Christianity as 1 of the greatest evidences of His existence and the validity of the Bible through the 1260 year prophecy, yes?

And that the fact that those who were trying to do away with God actually executed the will of God gives a demonstration that there is a true God in heaven, yes?

And then to answer those bold claims against that the atheists and the skeptics were making in the French Revolution, how did God respond?

He rose up the Seventh-day Adventist church who answers all of those things that led to a misunderstanding of God's character and a rejection of Him in that time.

Aren't you glad to be a part of this movement?

And then Tuesday we looked at the top 10 archaeological evidences that give credibility to the historicity of the Bible.

And then yesterday we began to look at some of the other evidences.

We kind of just had a very brief overview of atheism and agnosticism and understanding some of the dynamics of that and realizing that the science, though we can be scientific people, true science leads us closer to God because it discovers what's already there rather than thinking that we invented something, right?

And that much of the science today that is being hailed as science that's really just theory, 1 thing I didn't mention is that it's always shifting And I can't tell you how many times growing up in school, I would get my science book for the year and it would completely contradict last year's book.

But like the theories of our origins are constantly changing.

And 1 of the greatest attacks on religion and especially Christianity is you follow or claim to follow 1 what?

But hardly any 2 of you can agree on the same thing, right?

People say, well, what kind of God is going to have so many fractions?

Well, the reality is that there's just as many fractions in science.

You take 2 guys that believe the same idea and they're still going to have differences of opinions.

And so many of the arguments you'll find that are used against Christianity are true of atheism and scientific theory as we know it today, evolutionary theory, whatever, today.

And so, you know, I would have books in school where it would say, you know, so many hundreds of millions of years ago this happened and then they'd find some bone that they, I mean they were sure, I mean it wasn't stated as it's believed, it's like this is fact and then some bone would be discovered or something, some new layer would be found and then all of a sudden it's something totally different.

It's just changing with the wind every other year.

And so, if you do any kind of study in that, you find that to be true.

So, we saw some of those things and then we began to look at some of the, oh, Somebody was angry or coming in the conference center for the first time and had no idea the power of the door, right?

Anyway, so we kind of ended yesterday with talking about prophecy and the power of prophecy and how many times as Adventists we take it for what?

You say, oh yeah, I've just heard this thing before.

But to the person who hasn't heard it, it's just mind-blowing.

And as a young 22-year-old, junior, almost senior in college at a state university who was a hardcore atheist...

You can listen to my testimony online if you want to.

Typically I call it The Atheist Who Found God.

Sometimes I title it other things, but you'll find it on there.

And so I was 22 years old and I'm learning these things for the first time, and for me it's completely and utterly mind-blowing the prophecies that so many of us take for granted, even at times I've taken for granted.

So, that's where we left off and we're going to pick up there today.

I think on Tuesday there was a sister that asked me about, she said something like, I'm not seeing in my Bible where it says the walls fell flat, fell outward.

And it threw me off because I haven't thought about that in a long time, but I went back right after the class and found it.

In Joshua chapter 6, you look at the Hebrew word, the Hebrew phrase that's used to say the walls fell down.

And then also in Hebrews chapter 11, the Greek word, the word literally means, it means to fall down outward.

You can look it up in the, you can look up the phrase in Hebrew and Greek and that's what it means.

So I knew that was there, I just tried to remember, It took me a second to remember it.

I kind of mentioned this the other day, but I just wanted to come back to it real quickly.

And this first little piece we're going to go through pretty fast and then we're going to dive into some other stuff.

So I wanted to just point out some of the most incredible prophecies concerning the Messiah.

You know, the Bible predicted the place that Jesus would be born, that He would be betrayed by a friend, the amount that He would be betrayed for.

Ironically, in the book of Zechariah when it talks about that the Messiah would be betrayed by the price of a slave.

The price that is listed in the book of Zechariah was not the price of a slave in his day, it was the price of a slave in Jesus' day.

The prophecy about crucifixion, which I think I have right there, Psalm 22, they pierced my hands and my feet.

That phrase, crucifixion, the prophecy was given a thousand years before crucifixion was ever even invented by the Romans.

And so that was written about Christ a thousand years before anybody even thought about using a form of crucifixion as a form of death sentence.

The exact year that he would be baptized and crucified.

Now, this is mind-blowing because we don't really realize the impact of this.

I present this in my evangelistic meetings.

This is to me, you know, many of the evangelical and dispensational believers in prophecy and futurists and these others, they believe much of Daniel 9 to be describing who?

But when I demonstrate to them from prophecy that the whole prophecy deals with the life and ministry, death of Christ, they're blown away because it fits so much better than the Antichrist version.

I mean, the Antichrist version you have to pull from here and there and jump over here and be over here and throw a few of your own imagining ideas in there.

And it's just really just, there's no substance to it.

But the bottom line comes that Daniel predicted the baptism and death of Jesus 500 years before he was ever even born.

05 Answering the Atheist: The Top 5 Objections

Father in Heaven, we count it a joy once again to be in Your presence and to be close to us, for You to be close to us and for us to be close to You.

And as you've told us in John 17, that it's your great desire for us to be close to 1 another and close to the world in the sense that we can draw them to You.

And so, Lord, we just pray that You would help us to learn these important things, these things that are valuable to us as we interact with others who may not believe like we do, who may not believe much of anything at all.

And so, we just appeal to You, Lord, to come near.

Bless each 1 here today, those that are on their way.

And we rejoice in You and hope that we have in You.

And we ask all this, Lord, in Jesus' name, Amen.

So yesterday we were looking at a number of various things that atheists may say.

And we looked at first, before that, some of the evidence that we have for the credibility of the Bible, right?

And so We're going to continue on that track today, and I believe, hopefully, that it will be a blessing to you.

So the 1 that we ended with yesterday was the argument that is many times given that the concept of God is not supported by science.

And the truth is that science doesn't want to bring God into the equation.

Which is truly unscientific because you have to really include every possibility.

And so, there's this concept that scientific evidence goes against the existence of God.

But what it said is, if we can solve the mysteries of the universe, so to speak, and if we can explain things from a scientific view, then that does away with the concept of God.

But no Christian has ever said, I only believe in God because I see things in the world I can't explain.

But that's what many of the scientific minds or the atheistic minds, they want to make that case.

All you Christians are just weak-minded because you don't understand the laws of physics and thermodynamics, so therefore you just say that God did it.

That's what they said in the dark ages, but that's not what we say today.

And I have an entire bookshelf full of books that you can buy and I can create a list.

By the way, I do want to mention, I mentioned it yesterday, but all of the audio files will be on the campsite.

He told me that he can upload all my PowerPoints.

I do have a couple of documents that I'll put on there for you as well.

What I can do, if I have time while I'm moving, is put together a list of books that are good.

But if you go down, especially down to Andrews, which actually no, because it closed, ABC closed there, But probably in the Andrews University bookstore, there's a number of books on creation science and other things.

And you'd be blown away at how much is there and how much is available.

And so we don't have that belief anymore that we just believe in God because we can't explain certain things, right?

So macroevolution, it is stated, is evidence that the creation story is not viable and God does not exist.

Now I kind of mentioned this yesterday that even if macroevolution was true, you understand the difference between macro and microevolution.

Macro is the idea that 1 species, through billions of years of time and mutations in the genes and etc., will transition from 1 species to another.

Microevolution is simply environmental adaptation.

In other words, if you have a herd of deer in Alaska and they're surviving winters, what kind of fur are they going to have?

And very short seasons of shedded hair where their hair is thinner.

You take that herd of deer and you move them down to Florida, over the course of a couple generations, what's going to happen to their hair most permanently?

Because they're going to adapt to their environment.

Every 1 of you, every summer, has an element of adaptation.

When you go out into the sun, what happens to your skin?

It gets sunburned and then you get a tan, right?

But Microevolution is not the changing of 1 species to another.

So I had this girl 1 time who came to this little...

We were at this county fair and we had like the 8 laws of health booths and all that.

And she's just like, oh man, this is just so great.

And she's getting her blood pressure checked and all this kind of thing.

And she comes all the way around to my booth.

And she goes up and she looks at me and she smiles and then she looks up above my head when it says, trust in God, and she's like...

She looks at me and she goes, I don't believe in God.

And I think it's amusing because many times people will say to me, I'm an atheist, as if I'm supposed to go, oh wow, oh, 0, man, I'm so afraid.

And I won't for the sake of time tell you the whole conversation, but I ended up asking her a lot of questions that she couldn't answer.

And then what she thought was her scientific reasoning for why God didn't exist just kind of melted before her eyes.

And she said, well, You've given me a lot of things to think about today." I said, well, good.

And then I said, tell me about your life.

I said, no, I'm actually very interested.

And as it turns out, her parents were like these really hypocritical Christians.

And her dad was abusive, not like sexually, but like verbally and just nasty with her and all this growing up.

And it turns out that she hated God because of the way her parents treated her, but she masked it behind what?

And she said, here's all the reasons why I don't believe in God.

Well, 1 of the questions I like to ask people is, I'll say to them, can you name for me any species of animal, either in the fossil record or on the earth today, that you can point to and say, this species transitioned from 1 to another.

And that's why the theory of macroevolution is still a theory.

Because the truth is, you have a bunch of people with educated minds who say we think this is what happened.

You can't point to the fossil record and find a transition of species, nor can you point to anything today.

And there's some little fish in a cave somewhere that they think over generations they went blind.

I forget all the story, but the bottom line is that all the changes that were made and there were some changes, they were still at the end of the day, fish.

Emmanuel Core Workout

Kameron DeVasher

State of the Dead Part 3a

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for this beautiful, cool, rainy day.

I thank you that it's the weather that needs to drive people into seminars.

And I thank you that we're in this class today studying these important themes from your word.

Please, Lord, open our understanding as only you can through the power of your Holy Spirit.

Help us with Bible in hand to see truth plainly, and to see how it's connected, a whole system of truth, that we don't just have arbitrary belief disconnected from other belief, but there is 1 common thread from Genesis to Revelation that reveals the heart of a God who is love.

Please Lord, help us to know God through his word today and be ready as the opportunity becomes available to share our faith effectively.

All right, so first of all, we're just gonna go and remembering that we have 2 breaks and so we have 3 different sections of class time and we have 3 different sections.

We're gonna try to evenly distribute those, though I would probably say we're gonna do this 1 a little shorter, the middle 1 a little longer, and the second 1 a little shorter.

That's my guess, but we'll see how it goes.

Here, maybe we'll do 1 side and 1 side another.

I think that's very unbalanced what I just did there.

All right, but we're gonna start talking about what the Bible says about death.

And the question everybody has is what happens when I die?

Of course, we were not built, I do not believe, and so for instance, I was born on August 15, 1977.

Okay, I was alive 1 day with Elvis Presley.

And so I don't, and honestly, I don't really, I could say I don't remember anything before August 15, 1977, but I don't remember August 15, 1977.

I don't know exactly when memory started to form, but let's just for the sake of argument say it was August 15, 1977 is when my memory began, okay?

I don't know what happened before then because I wasn't there for it.

Now, I've heard other people who were alive before August 15, 1977, tell me things about gas shortages or the Vietnam War or before that, whatever was going on in society, but I wasn't there for it, I don't know.

I have no problem grasping the concept that I have a starting point.

Now, why am I talking about what's such an odd thing?

Because oftentimes when we talk about what happens when I die or what is death, we all jump to start interpreting what death is and start to conjecture or propose these ideas of what happens when I die.

And 1 thing we never seem to talk about is what it means to be alive in the first place.

We jump to what happens at the end of life without even discussing the nature of life itself.

And we're gonna discover that the answer to help, you know, resolve the mystery of death is the proper understanding of life.

Well, it may not make sense yet, but you'll see it in a minute, all right?

But Death only makes sense when you first understand life.

Okay, and everybody jumps to what happens when I die before we even talk about what does it mean to be alive in the first place?

So let's talk about what it means to be alive and back to August 15, 1977.

Now I'm not getting into the debate about prenatal, I'm saying I came out into this world, ah, breathing on my own, here I am on that date.

Now, ever since that time, I have had a day that runs into the next day, which runs into the next day, which runs into the next day, I have every expectation that this, today will lead to a tomorrow, that then will be my today, right?

And I'm gonna have another 1 after that, and another 1 after that, and to me that makes total sense.

That is my natural expectation that day will lead to day and I'll just keep having them going forward.

So in my mind, It makes sense that I had a starting point and then I just keep going.

What makes me uneasy is the idea of having an ending point.

For some reason, I have no problem with a starting point.

In fact, I'm guessing none of us have even considered not having a starting point.

It would blow my mind to try to not have a, I couldn't even wrap my mind around what it'd be like to not have a starting point.

It's the ending point that's weird and unnatural and eerie and mysterious.

It's almost like we were designed to have a beginning, but not to expect to come to an end.

I believe that every good study on death should start with a study on life.

Now I like this 1 in all the versions, it's especially clear in the King James version, or at least it speaks to the common misunderstandings when you go to the King James Version.

Is there anyone in the room who has the King James Version and would like to read Genesis chapter 2 verse 7 in your loud preachery voice?

Okay, this is a well-known passage from many Seventh-day Adventists that this is the formula for life right there at the beginning of our existence as a race of people, as an existing species at all, right?

God, And we're not even gonna get to the pieces and parts yet, but I want you to think about the elementary thing we just said.

God formed man from the dust of the ground.

So that means that before man was formed, what was he?

So the dust was a man, and the dust was thinking and feeling and breathing?

So where was the man before God formed him?

And then God did something to make it so.

And according to scripture, he took the dust of the ground and the breath of life, and animated, brought to existence this dust of the ground, right?

And it says according to scripture, and Man became a living what?

So we understand that God's formula for life, what made us happen, was God's creative power of forming a body for man and breathing into it his breath of life, animating with his own life that he has in himself.

And from that process of dust combining with his breath, brought into existence something that had not been in existence until that moment.

Namely, according to Scripture, a living what was the word?

Please notice that it does not say that God formed a body and put into it a living soul.

Because according to Scripture, you do not have a soul.

The soul is simply the combination of the material God used to form the physical body, right?

The dust of the ground, dirt, and His animating life that He can give as a gift, and blrp, that's a deep theological term, blrp, and man became where before he was not.

And thus we have the biblically correct concept that you do not have a soul, you are a soul.

Because when most people ask the question about death, they're saying, I know that my body might die, but what happens to my...

There's the misunderstanding about the nature of life that leads to the confusion about death.

Most people have this picture that we are a physical being, just kind of a host body for this other thing, a separate, some would say immortal, mystical, spiritual thing.

That if this body is degraded with age or injured in a car accident, whatever the thing is, that that other thing is impervious to the slings and arrows of this life and it has a life of its own.

That it is itself immortal and that God when making man just made a body and put an immortal soul inside of it.

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All Teachings

04 Reasonable Evidence and Common Sense

1h 2m

05 Answering the Atheist: The Top 5 Objections

1h 8m

State of the Dead Part 3a

44m

State of the Dead Part 3b

1h 16m

State of the Dead Part 3c

23m

09 Interconnectedness

27m

The Process

41m

Awe

51m

The Uphill Struggles of Success

43m

Starting a Business

35m

Starting a YouTube Ministry

40m

Process of Progress

49m

Sound Doctrine