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What Seventh-day Adventists Believe: In a Nutshell
God's people do not yet reflect the character of Christ as they will when they have surrendered more fully to Him.
THE BIBLE is the authoritative, infallable, revelation of God's will. From its first book to its last, it presents an accurate account of creation, history, salvation, God's prophetic will, and all that has to do with His work on behalf of man. GOD is one indivisible divine being, yet consisting of three co-equal yet distinct persons, divine, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving; characterized by the highest qualities of mercy and of justice. The Bible calls this truth not the Trinity, but the godhead. THE GREAT CONTROVERSY between good and evil involves three crucial interrelationships: those between God, man, and all other intelligences. In a conflict that began in heaven, Lucifer first charged God with being arbitrary and unfair. He said that God's laws could not be obeyed. Instead of destroying Lucifer (now called Satan) and arousing a fear-oriented service throughout the angelic population of heaven, God cast him down to the earth, where unfortunately, mankind was decieved by him. He has allowed this conflict to continue for roughly 6000 years and its conclusion is now imminent. When God produces a people who show that they can love and obey Him in spite of their fallen condition, Satan's charges will be clearly demonstrated to be false. God will then be able to end Satan's existence without perpetuating a service of fear, and thus the universe will be freed forever from sin. Satan and every being that has chosen to become hardened in his evil principles will then be destroyed. But every created being that embraces the innately selfless principles built by God into this living web of creation will remain ever free to choose Him, and will for all time enjoy freely showering Him with adoration resulting from their uncoerced love! Because both God's and Satan's principles will have, at that time, been worked-out and completely demonstrated before the universe, every being will be prepared to function in the heavenly environment that will reign throughout the vast creation of God. They will be prepared to fully retain their autonomous freedom of will down through every tick of eternity--they will ever be entirely free--yet will never choose ever in the minutest way to follow the selfish ways of Satan in sinning. The universe will have thus been rendered eternally secure from the rising of sin. THE FALL OF MAN when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God so devastated their connection with Him that they became subject to death. The children to be born to them would inherit a warped, corrupted, fallen humanity subject to death. Whereas before this fall it had been easy for them to do what was right, after the fall of our race it was easy only to do what was wrong. We are born opposed to God. Without His intervention, all mankind would surely perish. MAN'S NATURE AS A WORSHIPPING BEING is such that we have an innate need to commune with God. We are made in God's image, designed to love truth, to want to be in communion with Him, and to desire what is right. Even the wicked give good gifts to their children. We innately desire the good. Unfortunately, after the fall of humankind, we are twisted and cannot reflect this image without supernatural intervention and repair of our lives from outside of ourselves. MAN'S NATURE AS A PHYSICAL BEING is not that of a mere physical shell housing an immortal soul. According to the Bible, our nature is instead, a wholistic one. God did not put a soul into man, but He joined together the breath of life and the material substance of the earth and thus man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). This Scripturally founded belief sets distinctly apart Adventists from most other Christian thinking and shows why health principles should be so important to us. It also protects us against the especially dangerous end-time deception of spiritualism, since it helps us to understand that no one who has died can return and communicate with the living. JESUS died for the human race while we were yet sinners! Our Savior is the One who took the initiative in our salvation! Because He lived out a life of perfect obedience in a human nature fully identical to our own, and combined the infinite value of His divine character, we can be changed and finally saved. SALVATION was bought for us on the cross by Christ, and is accomplished for us by God as we submit to and cooperate with Him. We receive empowerment through His Holy Spirit to live out His life of obedience. Our individuality remains our own, but we each move forward, experiencing literal change and bringing every thought into captivity to Christ. As God changes us, we never become god, nor do we acquire any personal merit or brownie points with heaven for having even the tiniest part in saving ourselves. Yet God will perfectly reproduce the character of Christ in each of us as we permit Him to. RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH as presented in the Bible means much more than is commonly understood in the larger Christian world. It is the power of God unto salvation, and God's righteousness is revealed in it and thus in the very real lives of His believers. It is rooted in the saving life and death of Christ, whose offering alone merits us our redemption. Yet to be righteous by faith is more than to merely affirm a judicial act by which He sets us free from condemnation. It is not only forgiveness for sin, but reclaiming from sin. So much more than a fictional legal transaction, it is God's love effectually reaching out to transform the believer! The believer is changed, and is cleansed from all unrighteousness. He purifies himself even as Jesus is pure. Through divine-human cooperation, God is permitted to put His victories into the believer's life and that life testifies that God is just! God overcomes when He is evaluated by the universe; for in the lives of His people He presents conclusive evidence that His power to obey enables fallen mankind to keep God's commandments. Jesus becomes for the believers of God wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. The Lord is their righteousness! SANCTUARY is where God meets with His people. Literally it is a dwelling-place. The garden of Eden was the original dwelling-place--the meeting-place between God and man before sin entered His fair creation. After sin's entrance, God's alternate plan was placed in effect, and the communion between heaven and earth was maintained through prayer, prophecy, and angelic visitation. But God loved us and He couldn't remain away. To let us experience the fullness of His presence in our weakened fallen state would have vaporized us, so He led His people to create a portable sanctuary to take with them in their journey through the desert into the land of Canaan. This sanctuary was a place of reconciliation between God and man; a place where sins were forgiven and men were taught of the Messiah to come--the true lamb of God who would give His life to meet the demands of the moral law represented in the Ten Commandments. This life, offered in payment in order to redeem or "buy-back" humankind, would also enable God to pour out the healing treasures of heaven. The sanctuary involved the recording of sin and the clearing of sin with God. It had two sets of services: the daily services and the yearly service. In the daily service sins were forgiven, and their record was transfered to the sanctuary building. But once a year, the record of sins recorded there was purged in what was called the "cleansing of the sanctuary." During this service the High Priest entered the sanctuary's most revered location: the inner room called the "Most Holy Place." There, final reconciliation was made as the record of sins that had built up during the year was entirely expunged. Those not asking forgiveness for their sins during the year were permanently cut-off from the nation of Israel. This was a matter of spiritual life or death. Both of these rounds of service were full of teaching and significance for understanding salvation and God's special agenda to be fulfilled in the last days. The sanctuary which God directed Moses to build in the desert was built after the pattern of the one he was shown in vision. In other words, it was merely a copy--a pale copy--of the true sanctuary in heaven, the dwelling place of God. Daniel 8:14 indicated that the cleansing of the sanctuary that would begin at the close of the 2300 day/year prophecy. This point in prophecy arrived on schedule in 1844. When Jesus died in 31 A.D. He ascended to the heavenly sanctuary's Holy Place, to begin His ministry in the equivalent of the old daily sacrifices. During this time the "mystery of iniquity" already at work in Paul's day, would blossom into the fullness of antichrist and the "man of sin" would be revealed. The true church would be persecuted and attacked by this fallen religious body, and many of the bodies commonly regarded as "Christian" would ultimately become agencies of Satan teaching those living in the end-time to disobey His law. In the 1840's God brought to the forefront His last-day prophetic religious movement to teach full obedience in answer to the fact that the final judgment was due and that before Jesus would return all humankind would be judged. The Seventh-day Adventist church is the culmination of this movement and God's purpose is that it live and proclaim these truths of the closing hour. These truths are encapsulated in the three angel's messages. SABBATH, or rest in and with God, is not a one-day-a-week-thing, nor an irritating Jewish ritual-holiday mistakenly embraced by Sabbattarian Christians. Rather, it encompasses the entirety of the Christian experience. It embraces every day of the week and culminates in the seventh day Sabbath, observed from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night. It is a continual reminder of God's Creatorhood and our createdness; it is a continual reminder of God's desire that we commune with Him; it is a continual reminder of the fact of our redemption made available through our Lord Jesus Christ, and of our resting in His work of salvation for us. We can add nothing to that salvation, and the Sabbath reminds us also that we cannot of our own selves worship God on a day or at a time of our own devising or bring any holiness to it. It reminds us of the continuing validity and obligation of God's moral boundaries as represented in His law. It is a reminder of the climax crowning creation's six days: heaven's ultimate purpose to fully reunite us with our loving Maker. THREE-ANGEL MESSAGES in Revelation chapter 14, along with a fourth angel message occurring in Revelation's chapter 18, constitute an extraordinary message to be presented in the last days. These messages are often collectively called the "three angel's messages." The first and third angel in particular teach obedience to God's law in the last-day time frame of the messages. The second and fourth angels condemn religious bodies that have rejected the light that heaven sent to them in the first and third angel messages. These messages indicate the predominately fallen and Babylonized state of Christianity in our time, and culminate in God's present call to the remainder of His people to come immediately out of these apostate bodies (Revelation 18:4), and into fellowship with His commandment keeping followers. Judgment of man and an uncompromising entire obedience to our God is emphasized throughout the angel messages. CHURCH is the Bible's name for the "ekklesia," those who are "called out" of darkness and into the light of Jesus Christ. The church exists on multiple levels. In one sense, it is all of the sincere followers of Christ irregardless of their affiliation to this religious body or that one. In another sense, it is those who have followed all the light that God has sent them, and have responded by following Him fully. Thus, God can identify His people as the commandment-keepers of Revelation 12:17 and 14:12, and still call others out of Babylon in Revelation 18. Many of the bodies which are considered today by the world to be legitimate expressions of Christianity have been entirely rejected by God and are presently using their resources to advocate many teachings that cannot be substantiated by Scripture. Such bodies are actually misrepresenting God, and are not endorsed by Him as having any spiritual legitimacy. CHRISTIAN LIFESTYLE means little today in many denominations. But it has always been an important indicator helping identify those who follow the Living God. Today proper Christian lifestyle finds its expression in abstinance from alchohol, tobacco, caffienated drinks, and other unnaturally stimulating drugs and intoxicants. Christians forgo the use of jewelry, and dress modestly. They do not eat the foods identified by their God in the Bible as unclean, and in response to the principle of treating our bodies as temples for the Holy Spirit's indwelling, they advocate that our our diet be made as healthy as possible. Hence, the Seventh-day Adventist church recommends the adoption of a vegetarian lifestyle. An appropriate vegetarian diet is both healthful and environmentally friendly, and also represents the wisest stewardship of the earthly environment entrusted to humankind. GOD'S CHARACTER HAS BEEN FALSIFIED, or misrepresented by many unscriptural teachings that are common throughout Christianity. Among these is the teaching of hell as a place of never-ending torment. While the Bible clearly teaches that an awful experience of painful suffering occurs for the lost as a result of their choice to become permanently hardened in rebellion, it does not teach that somehow these individuals suffer for all time. Their suffering will ultimately end and sin and sinners will be no more. HOLY SPIRIT and OBEDIENCE go together, for the Holy Spirit is given to those who obey God. No one can obey Him without the power of the Holy Spirit. In order to obey Him while living in the fallen human nature we are born into, the presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit are necessary. THE SECOND COMING is the imminent and glorious physical, audible, personal return of Christ to earth to reclaim His people as His own. The followers of Jesus living at that time will be changed in a flash to an incorruptable state of being, while those who have chosen to maintain allegiance only to themselves will at that time be cut down by the fullness of Christ's unveiled glory. SPIRITUAL GIFTS are given to Christ's followers to build up the church and bring it to a ripeness and a maturity of faith that will enable God to demonstrate what His grace can do for those who are fully submitted to Him. Every believer receives from God spiritual gifts as the Holy Spirit gives them out. These gifts are given according to need and acording to heaven's sovereign choice. These gifts include prophecy. Seventh-day Adventists who have evaluated her writings, have come to believe that the gift of prophecy is manifested in the life and teachings of Ellen G. White. These writings include over 100 volumes covering a diverse range of Christian subjects. Her favorite topic was the life and teachings of Jesus and His soon return in glory. Her writings are just as fully inspired as the Bible, yet are no addition to it. The Bible alone composes the Canon of Scripture and is the acid test and rule of faith against which every teaching must be compared for verification. A church without the gift of prophecy is like a body missing an important member. God's last-day church has been granted this precious gift. |
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