Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

End-time Finance

Alistair Huong

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

06 Occupy Till He Comes: What to Do Now?

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 thank you for bringing us safely back together again this afternoon.

As the rain falls outside, we pray that the Holy Spirit may fall upon our hearts.

May we receive your word, help us to think clearly, rationally, and with the illumination of your Holy Spirit.

And we pray above all that we might help hasten your return through our life, through our lives, through our witness, through our managing of the resources that you have placed into our care.

So guide us now this next hour as we continue our study.

So this is my last chance to plug my blog, savingthecrumbs.com, and also audiverse.org, where you can find other resources, not just my seminars, but thousands of other spiritual media available there that you can find for free.

Now we're going to pick up right where we left off yesterday.

Yesterday, we concluded by looking at some economic signs of the times.

We talked about globalization or globalism as a precursor to the universal Sunday Law, how the powers, economic as well as political powers around the world will coalesce around Babylon and they will coordinatedly enforce a Sunday Law around the world.

And we talked about how natural disasters, we know this is going to be the case, that there will be natural disasters, how it creates and foments turmoil that leads to economic and political consequences.

And then we talked about inflation, how Ellen White describes the condition before the end is a period of time in which the prices of goods and services, particularly of food, is rising rapidly.

And then we talked about severe wealth inequality, which leads to social unrest, and also how there is an ideological underpinning that somehow is entangled with this type of class warfare.

Now, I also need to make 1 quick clarification.

Yesterday, after the presentation, 1 of our audience members here came up and mentioned something that I thought was very important that I want to clarify.

Yesterday's presentation, I believe, may have left you with the impression that the final economic collapse, which we read about in Revelation 18, occurs immediately after the passing of the Sunday Law, almost as if 1 happens 1 day and then the next day everything collapses.

Well, that's not my intent because you remember the day before that we talked about the Sunday law timeline where we broke it down into a mild and a severe phase of the Sunday law.

And so the financial collapse, the final economic collapse is when the 7 last plagues begin to fall upon Babylon.

That's at the tail end, alright, of the Sunday Law process.

And so, when the Sunday Law initially is passed, there is yet a period of quote-unquote peace, at least of relative quiet, before things ratchet up.

And so I wanted to make that clarification.

National apostasy does indeed follow, or sorry, national ruin, excuse me, that's what I meant to say, follows national apostasy, which is the Sunday Law, but it may not occur immediately in succession.

Still the mild and severe phases of the Sunday Law occurring before the final judgments.

The Sunday Law merely is the point of no return, right?

That's what I discussed, I think, 2 days ago.

So I just want to make that clarification.

If you missed those presentations and you have no clue what I'm talking about, you can review the recordings that are available online at the Michigan Conference YouTube channel already.

So the topic of the day, Occupy Till I Come.

Jesus said those words, but what was the context around which he gave that statement?

This is found in Luke 19, verse 11 to 13.

It says, and as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable because he was nigh to Jerusalem and because, notice carefully why he's telling them this parable, because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear.

Does that sound like some good Adventists in the audience that day?

They were looking at this and they said, oh Wow, then the coming of the kingdom of God must be just around the corner.

And almost as a counterbalance to the tendency for us humans to overreact, Jesus then tells this parable.

He said, therefore, a certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and to return.

And he called his 10 servants and delivered them 10 pounds and said unto them, Occupy till I come.

So the context of the statement when Jesus said, occupy till I come, was specifically spoken to a group of people who were feeling their blood pressure rise and their pulse rate quicken because they thought the kingdom of God is right here.

But Jesus sort of had to tap the brakes a little bit to bring them down to reality, not completely to get them off, you know, to no longer look for the kingdom of God coming, but to give them a balanced perspective, if you will, to temper the overreaction that might have occurred.

So we talked about all of these signs of the times, we talked about the Sunday Law, and of course, there seems to be a lot of signs swirling around us.

But yet, as a counterbalance to a tendency to perhaps get, let our emotions get the best of us, we need to remember Jesus' counsel to occupy till I come.

So another statement to this regard in Evangelism, page 221, Ellen White writes this, "...you will not be able to say that he will come in 1, 2, or 5 years.

Neither are you to put off His coming by stating that it may not be for 10 or 20 years.

We are not to know the definite time either for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit or for the coming of Christ." So you Notice the balance here.

Jesus is coming soon, but we need to also be cognizant not to be time-setters and not to base our life behaviors and decisions on perhaps human devisings and human interpretations of what may or may not occur.

So I want to share with you this exchange.

This is found on Last Day Events page 42 between a brother in the church with Sister White.

Let's see what their conversation looked like.

1 brother said to me, Sister White, do you think the Lord will come in 10 years?

Maybe even here at camp meeting We've talked about, we may have said, I don't really know if the Lord is gonna tarry longer than 10 years.

I don't know if my daughter is gonna be able to go to college and get married and such and such things, right?

We have these conversations because we long to see that day.

What difference does it make to you whether he shall come in 2, 4, or 10 years?

Why said he, I think I would do differently in some things than I do now, or than I now do if I knew the Lord was to come in 10 years?

I would sell my property and begin to search the word of God and try to warn the people and get them to prepare for his coming and I would plead with God that I might be ready to meet him.

How do you think this conversation is going so far?

"'Then said I, ' this is Sister White speaking, "'If you knew that the Lord was not coming for 20 years, you would live differently?" He said, I think I would.

And here's where Sister White gives the rebuke.

How Selfish was the expression that he would live a different life if he knew his Lord was to come in 10 years.

This is a lesson for us that we shall walk with God every day and we are not safe unless we are waiting and watching.

Is there a lesson to be learned in this conversation between this unfortunately misguided brother and sister White?

The lesson for us today is how are we arranging our lives in light of the nearness or potential delay of the second coming?

Are we making decisions differently based on what we project might happen in the end times or the nearness or the distance of the second coming.

The principle she's saying is we should live and act and make our decisions according to the same principles no matter when Jesus is coming back.

And not base our actions on the nearness or the delay of his coming.

And I think it's easy for us sometimes as emotional creatures to see the news, right?

Especially after a year of lockdowns and COVID and pandemics and economic crises and unrest in our cities and things of this nature, It's easy to panic, but that's not God's way.

A couple more statements to buttress this point.

Mind, character, and personality, volume 2, page 470, says this.

Don't make a time of trouble before it comes.

You will get to it soon enough, brethren.

We are to think of today, and if we do well, the duties of today, we will be ready for the duties of tomorrow, okay?

The duties of today, keep that word in mind.

We're gonna see it again right here in Selected Messages, Volume 3, page 383.

Many will look away from present duties, present comfort and blessings, and be borrowing trouble in regard to the future crisis.

Borrowing, We talked about getting into debt.

Now, this is 1 debt I don't want to get into, borrowing trouble, right?

This will be making a time of trouble beforehand, and we will receive no grace for any such anticipated troubles.

Jesus will be an ever-present help in every time of need.

Are we catching the essence of what Sister White is talking about?

To be ready for the time of trouble ahead of us, the best way is to be faithful to the duties today.

To live in accordance to the principles, to be faithful to what we are already shown, the principles that are already revealed, and not run before God looking for something else to protect ourselves for the time of trouble ahead.

05 Weeping Merchants: The Final Economic Collapse

Father in heaven, we thank you for bringing us safely together again this afternoon.

How quickly this week has gone, the blessings that we have received.

We are thankful for your presence on this campground.

And we pray once more for the Holy Spirit to be our teacher and our guide this hour as we contemplate prophecy and its relevance and application to some of the more financial aspects of our lives.

I pray you will open our eyes and help us to be faithful to obey and to be faithful until you come.

Alright, we're into our second half of the week and we are going to be taking a dive into prophecy again this afternoon.

And if you haven't noticed, yesterday the title of the message was, When Do We Sell Everything?

Today, the question is about the final economic crisis.

These topics really came out of frequently asked questions that I would receive in the course of doing financial seminars and counseling and talking with people.

So today, we're gonna be answering another question, at least studying to try to find the answer.

What is this whole thing about the economic collapse that we keep hearing about?

But before we go any further, I have to make my little plug.

You can find more information about personal finance there and also audio verse.

Yesterday I mentioned the last day events explained series by Dr.

I think it's still relevant to mention that in case you want to get an overview on last day events.

But when it comes to economic and end-time prognostications, it seems that there is frequently an association or an assumption that the end of time is going to come alongside or is synonymous with some sort of market crisis.

Am I off base in saying that this is kind of like the unspoken feeling we all have?

It's like whenever the stock market crashes, right?

And every time that there are gyrations in the economy, and certainly COVID-19 is 1 of the biggest ones in recent memory, again, there's this automatic, almost knee-jerk reaction, like we're coming up on the end of time and prophetically there's got to be some relationship right?

So I don't want to just go off of these gut feelings.

I don't want to just go off of what is you know perhaps a common narrative that is just accepted.

I want to actually know what the Bible says.

But before we go there, I do want to take a look at a little bit of market data because as I just mentioned, every time that there is a stock market crash, there is someone heralding the end of the world and it doesn't have to even be in the church.

If you just pay attention to CNBC or Bloomberg magazine or just some YouTube guy talking about finance, there's going to be someone saying, this is the big 1, this is the final crash, and civilization as we know it is going to be over.

So on the screen there, you see a 90 year stock market chart.

And I need to make this disclaimer, this chart is what's called a logarithmic graph.

Meaning as you go higher in the graph, it is an exponential graph.

So it looks like a straight line, but if it were on a linear graph, it would be actually a hockey stick growing exponentially.

But anyway, that's the only way to make it look reasonable on a small screen.

But I have circled on the screen 3 of the biggest market collapses that we've had in the last 90 years.

The first 1 on the far left is of course the Great Depression in 1929.

The next 1 is 2008, the housing crisis in 2008, and then the COVID crash last year in 2020.

Is it just my eyes or does it look like the stock market has just gone up the whole 90 years?

Now I'm not here making any type of financial, giving financial advice or investment advice.

No, that's not what I'm talking about at all.

What I'm trying to say is that 100% of end-time prognosticators predicting the end of the world based on market movements have been wrong.

And that's including, you gotta remember, these 90 years.

We had all of, not only these catastrophic financial crises, we had 2 world wars and many other wars, right?

The Cold War and Vietnam and Korean War, Gulf War.

And yet through it all, and of course we had presidents of both parties back and forth and every time there's an election, somebody says, this is gonna be the end of the republic and this is just how it goes, but yet the market has just continued to march in 1 direction and it's been up.

Very Simply, the stock market is a terrible predictor of the end of the world.

30 plus crashes since 1900, 0 of them have corresponded with the end of time.

And you know, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Sooner or later, someone's going to be right, and it will be the last 1.

But the point I'm trying to say here is that it is a extremely difficult dilemma.

It's a double dilemma, actually, to try to base our prophetic interpretation or predictions on market movements.

There's a saying that goes something like this it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future and is doubly difficult to predict which is the final market crash because not only do you have to predict when the next crash is, you have to be able to predict that that next 1 will be the last 1.

There's got to be 2 steps here And just think about it.

We have Wall Street and all of the financial centers in the whole world controlling trillions of, hundreds of trillions of dollars, and every single 1 of those firms and banks and investment firms and houses, they all would like to be able to predict when the next market crash is gonna be, don't you think?

There are hundreds of trillions of dollars at stake here and nobody is able to do it.

Even the acclaimed investor, Warren Buffett himself, will tell you, He has no idea what the market is going to do in the future.

And he's 1 of the greatest investors of all time.

And so, why, this is the question, why of all people on the face of the planet do Seventh Day Adventists fall for the CNBC talking head wannabe financial profits?

Why do we actually pay any attention to these people on network TV or wherever else on YouTube and social media trying to make their financial predictions.

We have something far more reliable than financial prognosticators, economists, or stock analysts.

We have the Bible, and this is an important principle to remember when it comes to the end times.

And I might add, this is not just for the economic news, it might even apply to maybe even some of the other current events that are going on in our day, we ought to remember to filter the news through the Bible and not the Bible through the news.

This is a hermeneutical principle, a principle of sound prophetic interpretation.

The Bible is the standard by which we measure everything else.

So now, having given you that little preamble, what does the Bible have to say about end time economics?

So we're going to look at 3 points at the onset here.

And the first thing the Bible tells us is that there will be economic activity until the very end.

Jesus himself says in Luke 17 verse 28 to 30, Likewise, also as it was in the days of Lot, they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded.

That sounds like economic activity to me.

But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

There will be some level of economic activity in the world when Jesus comes.

Now, the next statement comes from last day of Ed's and I must confess, I hesitated to include this statement and I think you'll know why because I don't fully I cannot say with certainty that I fully understand what this is referring to but I think it gives us enough to go off of for the purpose of our presentation it says Christ declared last day events page 76 Christ declared that when he comes some of His waiting people will be engaged in business transactions.

Some will be sowing in the field, others reaping and gathering in the harvest, and others grinding at the mill.

It is not God's will that is elect shall abandon life's duties and responsibilities and give themselves up to idle contemplation living in a religious stream." We talked about it yesterday how there's a time when the Saints are to let loose all of their assets and So how does that harmonize with this idea of engaging business transactions?

The best I can come up with at this point is that it doesn't necessarily mean engagement with the worldwide financial markets.

Business transactions is talking about agricultural type work.

There might be some, you know, transactions between people who are waiting for the Lord to come during that time, perhaps.

But the point of this statement is the point that I'm trying to make here is that there will be some form of economic activity until the very end.

So if we are expecting some sort of nuclear holocaust, some wasteland dystopian future where it's just like desert, right?

Or the whole planet's going to look like the surface of Mars before Jesus comes, that's not biblical, right?

If that's what we think, we've probably been watching too many science fiction movies.

But the Bible says there will be economic activity until the very end.

However, point number 2, this is related to our topic yesterday, there will be worldwide economic sanctions placed on those who refuse the mark of the beast.

04 No Buying or Selling: When Do We Sell Everything?

Father in heaven, we thank you for bringing us safely together again this afternoon as we open your word, as we seek for wisdom from on high.

We pray for that wisdom that you have promised and that you will guide us and lead us into all truth.

May the Holy Spirit be here in our midst to teach us, to guide us, and may we be faithful to what we learn.

So for those of you who have been with us through the first half of this week, you know that we have been going through personal finance topics and We have primarily been dealing with more of the nuts and bolts issues of money management yesterday we went through debt and things of that nature, but starting today and for the remainder of our time together this week, we're going to be shifting gears a little bit and looking at prophecy, particularly end-time prophecy and some commonly asked questions associated with it.

So it's still going to be practical, I hope, in that it is not merely theory, but actual things that are actionable, hopefully, at the end of the day.

And today, our topic is the question, when do we sell everything at the end times?

Tomorrow, we are going to talk about the final economic collapse.

And then the last day together, Friday, we're going to tie everything together and ask the question, so what do we do about it?

And we are going to sprinkle in some of that throughout as you'll see in this presentation today.

We know that in prophecy there is going to be a time in which those people who do not receive the mark of the beast will not be able to buy or sell and so there is an instinctive reaction whenever things go awry in the world whenever there is some sort of calamity or major world event or market turmoil that the question arises again particularly for the Bible students and the prophetic prophecy students among us when is the time that we ought to discard all of our earthly belongings and I will say in the past year I have received this question probably more than in any previous time.

With COVID and the economy and the shutdown and the global nature of it, it is only natural, I believe, for people to start wondering about these bigger things and bigger questions and these bigger issues.

And so we're going to try to address this question head on today, and by the end of today hopefully there will be at least some clarity of a framework in which to analyze and to think about these things.

I am making an assumption about our audience today, and that is that our audience has the basic knowledge about the end-time prophecies.

So I'm talking Revelation chapter 13, chapter 14, the 7 last plagues, close of probation, mark of the beast, Sunday law, those types of things merely because we would not make any progress otherwise.

And so if you are lost at any point or you feel like there are gaps of missing information, this would be a great impetus for you to go back and read the book Great Controversy.

That would be a great resource to review on some of these things.

And also talk with your pastor if there's a bible work at your church.

I'm guessing there are probably some seminar class here that's talking about these things.

Or, and I'm gonna just make the plug right now, on Audioverse there is a series called Last day events explained by Dr.

Norman McNulty, who has been a speaker here at the Michigan Conference Camp Meeting, I believe, that goes into much more detail, explaining in an easy to, you know, a very accessible way the last day events and the timelines and things of that nature.

So that's also a great resource if you need more information.

And also savingthecrumbs.com, I've mentioned it every day.

It's my personal finance blog, so there's other information there for you to peruse as well.

So let's dive right in, and let's start in early writings, page 56.

Before infuriated mobs, and at that time, their possessions cannot be disposed of to advance the cause of present truth." So I'm gonna be pausing throughout these statements to discuss as we go along.

So first of all, we're talking about the time of trouble now.

This is the great time of trouble at the very end of time, after the close of probation.

This is the time of trouble spoken of in Daniel chapter 12, when Michael shall stand up, there shall be a time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation.

There have been many times, in quotes, times of trouble throughout history.

Times of persecution, times of, you know, travail and difficulty for God's people.

But this is not talking about those times of trouble and persecution this time about the great final time of trouble And it says that at that time, the saints will find that their possessions cannot be disposed of.

And this is really the key point that I want to bring out in this sentence.

And that is to advance the cause of present truth.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

06 Occupy Till He Comes: What to Do Now?

59m

05 Weeping Merchants: The Final Economic Collapse

58m

04 No Buying or Selling: When Do We Sell Everything?

57m

03 Slaves with Smallpox: Practical Tips on Dealing with Debt

54m

02 Gather Up the Fragments: The Secret to Prosperity

52m

01 Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Redefining Wealth and Prosperity

50m

Sabbath Part 1c

39m

Sabbath Part 1b

1h 8m

Sabbath Part 1a

37m

The Hour

2h 8m

Hold Fast What You Have

2h 14m

Finding Rest in Family Ties

1h 28m

Sound Doctrine