What is the Atonement?

What is the Atonement? When Adam and Eve were created they were at peace with Him. But they sinned. Then God reached out and provided a means of reconciliation--a means of atonement. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible tells the story of the atonement.

After God’s people apostatized from Him, He let down a ladder to make a way of return, providing a means for their sins to be covered--to return again to oneness with Him.

12. HASTENING THE SECOND COMING AND EMBRACING THE HARVEST PRINCIPLE

Heaven has put it in our power by consecrated, Christ-reflecting lives to hasten Jesus' return. God will wait for the maturing of Christian character in a significant number of people as the chief condition determining those events, such as the latter rain, loud cry, sealing, and Sunday law, which affect the time when probation for the world shall close, and thus the time of the Second Coming.

9. JESUS CURRENTLY MAKING FINAL ATONEMENT

Jesus' atonement was promised in Eden. With His incarnation and then death as our Substitute upon the cross, His atoning work was begun. He rose from the dead and went to heaven in A.D. 31 to represent us before the Father, who received His sacrifice for us. Through that sacrifice we can be right with God as soon as we accept His gift of forgiveness and heart cleansing. In A.D. 1844 He entered the second apartment of the heavenly sanctuary, commencing the closing phase of His atonement. Today, Jesus is making the final atonement.

5. Christ’s Character Reproduced in Us

Justification is God’s way of simultaneously counting men right and making them so. In declaring a man just, God writes no fiction. The disciple experiences the process of sanctification and the character of Christ is perfectly reproduced in us. Both justification and sanctification are the work of God and are necessary and causative for salvation.

The Last Generation: in recent years we are hearing many different things about the idea of the last generation. Some see the idea as simply describing God’s gospel purpose for end-time Christians. Others attack it as an unchristian heresy.

It is fascinating that something so fundamental, something that should be clear and obvious, so indisputably true or false, could come to be so much in dispute. Is it really that difficult to understand the Bible? Are the inspired writings God has given us so plastic and malleable that they can easily be misunderstood? If the core of the message and mission of God’s church is so disputable, how can we anticipate uniting together in a faithful work and seeing Jesus win the great controversy between good and evil?

Introduction

Institutional Seventh-day Adventist presses haven’t addressed Last Generation Theology (LGT) for 20 years. But in 2018, several books from the presses including.

God’s Character and the Last Generation, eds. Jiri Moskala, Jon Peckham,

End-time Events and the Last Generation: The Explosive 50s, by George Knight

In All Humility: Saying No to Last Generation Theology, by Reinder Bruinsma

Four books were published in 2018 taking to task Adventists whose beliefs have been called "Last Generation Theology." Two of these new books are published by the Pacific Press, one by the Pacific Union, and one by Andrews University Press. You may have read the following ad copy in a recent sales catalogue advertising two of these books. The heading says, "What is Last Generation Theology." The reader is asked: